The man facing him was almost his double—the white streak in the auburn hair proclaimed them of the same blood, if any proof were needed. The stranger’s eyes were dark and wild, his mouth petulant yet oddly firm.
“Yes—I! I, your elder brother, whom you thought dead these many years. But I am not dead—or, perhaps, I am no longer dead—and I have come back—aye, come back from ways that are best left untraveled—to claim what is truly mine.”
The young man’s eyebrows raised. “I see. Well, obviously all this is yours—if you can prove that you are who you say you are.”
“Proof? I need no proof. I claim birth-right, and blood-right—and death-right!” So saying, he pulled both the swords down from above the fireplace, and passed one, hilt first, to his younger brother. “Now guard you, my brother—and may the best man win.”
Steel flashed in the firelight and kissed and clashed and kissed again in an intricate dance of thrust and parry. At times it seemed no more than a dainty minuet, or a courtly and deliberate ritual, while at other times it seemed pure savagery, a wildness that moved faster than the eye could easily follow. Around and around the room they went, and up the steps to the mezzanine, and down the steps to the main hall. They swung from drapes and from chandeliers. They leapt up on tables and down again.
The older brother obviously was more experienced, and, perhaps, was a better swordsman, but the younger man was fresher and he fought like a man possessed, forcing his opponent back and back and back to the roaring fire itself. The older brother reached out with his left hand and grasped the poker. He swung it wildly at the younger, who ducked, and, in one elegant motion, ran his brother through.
“I am done for. I am a dead man.”
The younger brother nodded his ink-stained face.
“Perhaps it is better this way. Truly, I did not want the house, or the lands. All I wanted, I think, was peace.” He lay there, bleeding crimson onto the gray flagstone. “Brother? Take my hand.”
The young man knelt, and clasped a hand that already, it seemed to him, was becoming cold.
“Before I go into that night where none can follow, there are things I must tell you. Firstly, with my death, I truly believe the curse is lifted from our line. The second…” His breath now came in a bubbling wheeze, and he was having difficulty speaking. “The second…is…the…the thing in the abyss…beware the cellars…the rats…the—it follows!”
And with this his head lolled on the stone, and his eyes rolled back and saw nothing, ever again.
Outside the house, the raven cawed thrice. Inside, strange music had begun to skirl up from the crypt, signifying that, for some, the wake had already started.
The younger brother, once more, he hoped, the rightful possessor of his title, picked up a bell and rang for a servant. Toombes the butler was there in the doorway before the last ring had died away.
“Remove this,” said the young man. “But treat it well. He died to redeem himself. Perhaps to redeem us both.”
Toombes said nothing, merely nodded to show that he had understood.
The young man walked out of the drawing room. He entered the Hall of Mirrors—a hall from which all the mirrors had carefully been removed, leaving irregularly shaped patches on the paneled walls—and, believing himself alone, he began to muse aloud.
“This is precisely what I was talking about,” he said. “Had such a thing happened in one of my tales—and such things happen all the time—I would have felt myself constrained to guy it unmercifully.” He slammed a fist against a wall, where once a hexagonal mirror had hung. “What is wrong with me? Wherefore this flaw?”
Strange scuttling things gibbered and cheetled in the black drapes at the end of the room, and high in the gloomy oak beams, and behind the wainscoting, but they made no answer. He had expected none.
He walked up the grand staircase and along a darkened hall, to enter his study. Someone, he suspected, had been tampering with his papers. He suspected that he would find out who later that evening, after the Gathering.
He sat down at his desk, dipped his quill pen once more, and continued to write.
VI.
Outside the room the ghoul-lords howled with frustration and hunger, and they threw themselves against the door in their ravenous fury, but the locks were stout, and Amelia had every hope that they would hold.
What had the woodcutter said to her? His words came back to her then, in her time of need, as if he were standing close to her, his manly frame mere inches from her feminine curves, the very scent of his honest laboring body surrounding her like the headiest perfume, and she heard his words as if he were, that moment, whispering them in her ear. “I was not always in the state you see me in now, lassie,” he had told her. “Once I had another name, and a destiny unconnected to the hewing of cords of firewood from fallen trees. But know you this—in the escritoire there is a secret compartment, or so my great-uncle claimed, when he was in his cups….”
The escritoire! Of course!
She rushed to the old writing desk. At first she could find no trace of a secret compartment. She pulled out the drawers, one after another, and then perceived that one of them was much shorter than the rest, which seeing she forced her white hand into the space where formerly the drawer had been, and found, at the back, a button. Frantically, she pressed it. Something opened, and she put her hand on a tightly rolled paper scroll.
Amelia withdrew her hand. The scroll was tied with a dusty black ribbon, and with fumbling fingers she untied the knot and opened the paper. Then she read, trying to make sense of the antiquated handwriting, of the ancient words. As she did so, a ghastly pallor suffused her handsome face, and even her violet eyes seemed clouded and distracted.
The knockings and the scratchings redoubled. In but a short time they would burst through, she had no doubt. No door could hold them forever. They would burst through, and she would be their prey. Unless, unless…
“Stop!” she called, her voice trembling. “I abjure you, every one of you, and thee most of all, O Prince of Carrion. In the name of the ancient compact between thy people and mine.”
The sounds stopped. It seemed to the girl that there was shock in that silence. Finally, a cracked voice said, “The compact?” and a dozen voices, as ghastly again, whispered “The compact,” in a susurrus of unearthly sound.
“Aye!” called Amelia Earnshawe, her voice no longer unsteady. “The compact.”
For the scroll, the long-hidden scroll, had been the compact—the dread agreement between the Lords of the House and the denizens of the crypt in ages past. It had described and enumerated the nightmarish rituals that had chained them one to another over the centuries—rituals of blood, and of salt, and more.
“If you have read the compact,” said a deep voice from beyond the door, “then you know what we need, Hubert Earn-shawe’s daughter.”
“Brides,” she said, simply.
“The brides!” came the whisper from beyond the door, and it redoubled and resounded until it seemed to her that the very house itself throbbed and echoed to the beat of those words—two syllables invested with longing, and with love, and with hunger.
Amelia bit her lip. “Aye. The brides. I will bring thee brides. I shall bring brides for all.”
She spoke quietly, but they heard her, for there was only silence, a deep and velvet silence, on the other side of the door.
And then one ghoul voice hissed, “Yes, and do you think we could get her to throw in a side order of those little bread roll things?”