Kill the Dead(8)

“What do you say, Parl Dro?” the boy in the apron asked.

“I say there’s a ghost at the leaning house,” Dro said, virtually what he had said at the start, but a little eddy of satisfaction drifted up. The musician, instrument across his back now, was filtering through the throng like a curl of colour-stained steam.

“What’ll you do?”

“Oh, I think I’ll go to bed. That is, if you have a room here I can use.”

Confounded, the crowd muttered. They had expected him to leap at once out through the door again, no doubt.

“But aren’t you going to call on Ciddey Soban?”

“Apparently not,” he told them. He rose, paying no heed to the blazing chord that was struck in his crippled leg. The musician had halted, about a foot away, moulded exactly between two burly labourers, just as if he had grown there from a tiny seed planted in the floor. He was only an inch or two shorter than Dro, but lightly built as a reed.

Dro regarded the boy in the apron. “The room?”

“I’ll show you. What about Cilny deadalive?”

“What about her?”

There were angry murmurs now. As he began to walk through, Dro felt the new hardening and congealing of the press around the table, not wanting to let him go this casually after he had worked them to such a pitch. Even in the thick of that, however, Dro was entirely conscious of the featherweight grip that delicately flickered out the coin bag from the inner pocket of his mantle. Dro did not glance the musician’s way. A pickpocket’s skill was not one he necessarily despised, nor did he necessarily grudge its reward.

The boy led Dro to the stair.

“Straight up. Door to the left. Aren’t you going to do anything about Cilny? You’re supposed to be a legend.”

The crowd surged sulkily, not looking at Dro, like a woman who thought herself slighted. The musician was tuning the instrument again, leaning on a table, engrossed, dull gold hair falling in his eyes, innocent.

The elderly boy assumed a sneer as he watched Dro begin the lame man’s crow-like hopping up the stair.

“Well, what a disappointment you turned out to be.”

Dro paused on the landing and turned on the boy the most dazzling and friendly smile he was ever likely to have received. The Ghost-Killer seemed to be waiting again. Unnerved, the boy jeered: “A real disappointment. I hope I never have to see a worse one.”

“Keep away from mirrors,” said Dro, “and you won’t.”

He stepped through the left-hand sinister door.

CHAPTER TWO

An hour before dawn, Parl Dro was on a narrow wooden bridge above a savage river. Swollen by melted upland snow, the water crashed about the piled stone pylons of the bridge, snapping its jaws hungrily at those who passed over. But there was something on the bridge that was worse than the river. It had been a man once. Now it was a fleshless, long-nailed shape, solidified by years of post-mortem manifestation, capable of appearing solid and real as the river below. More real, actually, than the bridge, whose timbers were in parts rotted away. Hate had kept it there, a hatred of all who remained alive after it had died.

There had been a conflict of wills since moonrise, a battle that had kept the ghost to one end of the bridge, Parl Dro at the other. Only very gradually had each been able to beat a way through the other’s aphysical defences. Only very gradually had each been able to draw nearer to the other and thus to the ultimate fight which would decide between them. Dro was certain that the psychic link was to be found somewhere at the centre of the bridge, the spot at which the ghost generally laid hold of those who came there, biting at them with its long teeth from which the gums had shrivelled away, clawing the organs out of their bodies. For hours, since moonrise, Parl Dro had been wrenching his way toward that area, while trying simultaneously to hold the ghost off from it. The ghost roared and sizzled its rage and sick hurt as it fought him. The man, drenched in sweat and psychosomatically bruised as if from a physical beating, fought back. It had been like climbing a vertical precipice while in the crisis of an unremitting fever. Now, he was a mere three inches from the tilted plank where he had reasoned the link must be.

To summon the final strength to rip the plank away and come at that link, brought a new dimension of horror and strain, which sent a whirling piercing nausea through him, body and soul. Nevertheless, he felt his hand grab hold of the wood, the muscles of arm and shoulder activated as if by remote and magical control. He tore up the plank, and his fingers thrust through the soft rot beneath and touched the single bone embedded there. It had belonged to the ghost, when the ghost had been a man, mislaid on the bridge when the ghost had violently died there. Through the concrete essence of that bone, the ghost, unwilling to depart, had kept its hideous link with the condition of life. A hundred persons had since died because of it. It had exulted in their screams of terror and agony. It would have killed the rest of the world if it could. Now it was as approximate to extinction, or at least to metamorphosis, as Parl Dro’s two hands were approximate to each other. For one hand now held the bone, and the other the small but lethal vise which would crush that bone into a thousand meaningless splinters.