“Let’s take that with us,” I said. “I think it is the source of her power.”
He shook his head and pointed up again but I was already approaching the lantern. The truth was, I had enough self-control to try to leave this place, and to try to leave the Hag, but I didn’t want to leave the light in the lantern. I realized that I couldn’t leave it behind.
Accordingly, I laid hands on it and it shocked me. There was a silent blue flash. It wasn’t an electrical shock, not exactly, but every nerve in my hands was jolted with sensation. There are many things that stimulate human nerves: pressure, heat, cold, and the pain of severing or crushing damage. Picking up the lantern was like experiencing all of these rolled into one.
But I lifted it anyway, and I held on. I could not drop it and chance shattering the artifact, it was much too lovely for that. So I held on, howling, raving, for how long I’m not sure. It seemed like an eternity, but was probably less than a minute. I opened my squinched eyes again when the pain subsided and saw the Captain had not moved. He still floated there at the ruined stone walls, watching me warily.
I turned and moved slowly back to him, carrying the lantern. It was surprisingly heavy and dense. It was like carrying a cannonball. There would be no swimming to the surface with this thing in my arms.
I would have to leave the lake the way I came in. I would have to walk out.
Thirty-Two
We made it about as far as the fallen barn with the dead trees standing guard around it before my breath potion began to run out. It started as an odd tickle in my chest, which rapidly changed into a wild burning. It was a horrible sensation, worse than just drowning, because I already had drown, sometime ago when I’d sucked in that first lungful of murky water. I scrambled wildly, digging in my pockets. I never dropped the lantern, however, I never even considered it. I strained to hold it with my left hand while my right searched for the last potion frantically.
For one horrible moment I was sure that I’d lost it along the way. I couldn’t believe I’d been such a fool as to just shove the very breath of life into an open-topped coat pocket, and then proceeded to battle a dozen horrors and trust to luck I wouldn’t lose anything. Then I found it.
I used my teeth to tear open the rubber stopper that topped the bottle and sucked out the contents. It’s hard to drink something underwater while you are drowning and suddenly becoming increasingly aware that your lungs are already full of water, but somehow I managed to get most of it down. I almost puked, but fought it down savagely. I had to hold on to every drop.
Over the next minute or so the world almost went black. I just stood there, on the muddy bottom of the lake, head bent, waiting for death or life, not knowing which would occur first.
I held up the lantern still, never did the thought of letting it go cross my mind. It warmed my hand now rather than burned it. Strangely, it felt less heavy, rather than more, as I died. I had to wonder, vaguely, as my mind faded toward oblivion, if it had become lighter or I had become stronger. I felt there, in my hand, a new, strange, twisting sensation that I could not identify. At that point, I believe I lost consciousness, at least for a moment.
The Captain was poking my cheek and lifting my chin when my eyes snapped open. He recoiled and I grinned at him. “I live,” I burbled. I found I still stood, and the lantern was still warming my left hand, feeling lighter than ever.
We came up onto the shoreline and I shivered in the cold night winds. Nothing makes a man quite as cold as sopping wet clothes and stiff wind. The only warmth I had was from the lantern, and I clutched at it, hugging it to my chest.
“Can you breathe?” asked the Captain, looking at me strangely.
I shook my head, and sicked up a great gout of water. It was only the beginning. It was a while before I could choke and cough wretchedly, I had to build up to that. First, I simply fountained lake water. The only thing that helped, besides the warmth of the lantern in my hand, was that I still didn’t really need to breathe. I’ve heard you can drown in a teaspoon of water, but I must have unloaded a half-gallon or more onto the sands before I was done.
The Captain waited until I was simply trembling and gasping, and then asked, “Put that thing down, would you?”
I shook my head.
“Why not?” he asked quietly.
I stopped, I didn’t know why not, but I didn’t want to do it.
“I think you are going to have to,” he said.
I felt a flash of anger, my lip twitched up in a snarl, but I quieted when I followed his pointing finger.
The things on the beach had finally noticed us, and they were humping in our direction. There was a pretty big pack of them.
“Put down that stone and get out your sword, boy,” he hissed, “They’ll take that thing back to the witch if they beat us, you know.”
I realized he was right and I put the lantern down on the sands in a spot that looked soft and was devoid of rocks that might mar the polished surfaces. I threw my soaking coat over it, mostly to get rid of the cumbersome garment, but partly to hide it. The dripping coat didn’t completely cover it, and beams of colored light still shined out onto the beach in trickles and shafts. I wiped spittle from my face and lowered my head determinedly. We walked confidently down the beach to meet the pack of shambling things.
There were two of us, this time, and we were mentally prepared and methodical. The fight went on for perhaps two full minutes. It took several more to fully dismember the flopping corpses.
When it was over, we were both winded, but relatively unharmed. They had come at us strung out, in ones or twos, and we had cut them down as they reached us. We had started the fight with our pistols empty of bullets and full of water, so we had stuck to blades, he to his combat knife and me my saber.
“What the hell?” he said to me, staring, when we had finished.
I followed his gaze, and sickness waved over me again. He was gazing and pointing to my left hand. It looked very different. It was gray now, the skin had changed to the color of a bloated corpse. I looked at leathery fingers with black claws like thick pencil graphite where my nails should have been. There were only three fingers.
I yanked up my sleeve to see how far the horror had gone. It ended at my wrist where it turned back into normal, slightly hairy skin. I flexed the hand and it clutched at the air in accordance with my thoughts. To me, it looked like the claw of a predatory reptile. Perhaps that of a dinosaur.
I looked at the Captain and blinked. My face worked but I couldn’t speak for a second. I knew, right then, what had happened to Doctor Wilton. I knew how she had felt to discover her hoof.
“It must have been the lantern,” I croaked out.
He nodded grimly.
I staggered back toward the spot on the beach where we had left it. I was glad, even after everything, to see that it was still there and still safe. I was glad too, that I’d only been holding it with one hand when I’d been weak, when my body had been shutting down and dying. It had made its move then, and had shifted me.
We headed up the beach, weary. The Captain trudged beside me. He put his arm around my shoulders and leaned on me for support, as if exhausted. He was a friend, and I suspected nothing.
But my changed hand knew the truth. It gripped his wrist even as his knife rose to pierce my breast. I looked at him and the look of dark determination on his face changed to surprise. He looked at the claw on his wrist and then, finally, for the first time since I’d met him, I saw fear in his face. I shoved him away, and my new hand seemed strong because it left purpling bruises where it had touched him.