Falling Idols (8 page)

Sadly, though, there were more immediate and pressing matters to be concerned with.

“What of the Germans’ reinforcements?” she asked. “They
will
come, you know. Later today, tomorrow. How do you propose to explain where the first have gone?”

“It’s not our duty to explain anything a German decides to do,” he said. “We take the bodies and we bury them, or hide them beneath haystacks, or haul them by ox-cart to the lake and weight them with stones and sink them to the bottom. We clean up their blood. And they remain the secret of this village. For as long as it takes.” He shook his head. “They were here, and they left. That is all we know.”

Giselle tried to keep from shivering. Dawn was cold, but this priest’s heart was colder still. How gentle he’d seemed, for years, while concealing the scheming heart of a murderer.

She was about to leave his table when she heard a scraping outside the door. Heavy feet upon flagstones, unsteady, and then the door swung open.

He filled the doorway, Nomad did, then entered with the slow and painful gait of one who ignores wounds. She sought his eyes, and when their gazes met, the yellow smoldering fury in them seemed to soften, and she knew him capable of tears he would never allow. He had purpose, and now, at least, she was not it.

He strode past her, and after a brief pause to glance about the cottage, continued to the bookcase where Father Guillaume’s dusty and cherished volumes sat like wise old friends. One arm swung up, to add something to their company.

“For the love of God!” Father Guillaume screamed. “You brought that here?
Here?
”

Giselle shut her eyes, quickly, grateful she could, so she didn’t have to see those of Lieutenant Streckenbach staring dimly from across the room. His mouth hung frozen half-open in perpetual surprise, and by now the skin of the head was waxy and pale.

“I thought you would be pleased,” explained Nomad, in loss and sorrow and the pain of lifetimes of broken promises.

He shuffled a few more steps to sag to the floor, before the hearth, and when Giselle moved to help him he seemed to plead with his eyes,
No, I am beyond your help forever
, and she could only gaze upon him in tears. His rude clothing was splotched with blood, surely not all his own, but then, surely some of it had to be. How many wounds could such a formidable body withstand? How many bullets, how many blows, how many piercing slivers from the heart of a grenade?

From the floor, he looked over to Father Guillaume, who sat in his chair, shocked into silence by a revulsion beyond even his own comprehension. Had Judas looked this way, Giselle wondered, in realizing the enormity of his crime?

“I
have
a soul,” said Nomad, in blood and quiet dignity, and she then wondered how long he had been outside to listen. “I do. I can feel it, and I know that is what it is, because nothing else could ache so deeply. Though I may not have been born with a soul, I know that I have built one of my own over time. With every year I live … with every deed, with every sorrow and indignity and wound I suffer, with every humiliation and hour of loneliness … I know I build that soul a little more. These things that tear human hearts to pieces? These are my bricks, and my mortar.”

Father Guillaume managed to find his voice after all. “You take much for granted.”

Nomad seemed almost to laugh. “And you do not?”

And thus Giselle wondered: Did she, as well?

For a while Nomad turned his head to gaze into the fireplace, where the fresh log was beginning to blaze anew. “I planned once to kill myself. On the frozen north seas, I left my creator behind in the bed where he died, and I told the captain of that vessel that my only intention was to then build my own funeral pyre, and climb atop it, and let the winds take my ashes to the sea. What a fine dream that was…

“But as I made my way south again, another dream took hold, and on that day when snow and ice were behind me, and wood to burn before me, I knew I could not. Because of my incomplete soul.”

He stood, a long and painful process, and left the comforts of the hearth.

“Every day I build that soul a little more. And whether it takes another year, or ten, or a thousand, only then will I consent to die. So that I can stand whole before whatever God there may be … and demand of Him one thing: ‘
Why?
’”

Giselle bit her lip and drew blood. Better this pain than that of having nothing to say to him, no balm to soothe either an anguished brow or soul. With eyes shut, she felt his vast presence pass her side, then pause, as a huge, callused palm caressed her cheek with such tenderness it belied the fury of the night.

“I remember something from a poem,” he said. “A poem about love, and simple pleasures. I remember but a few words … ’a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thee.’ I once dared hope that even these simple things would not be beyond me, if only for a day.” He withdrew his hand and reserved his last baleful look for Father Guillaume. “Only poets tell no lies.”

Giselle lowered her head to the tabletop as she listened to the thud of the door and the scrape of his unsteady feet across flagstones as he was lost to the mist, the smoke, and the everlasting dawn.

A spellbound wretch

In his futile gropings,

In order to flee a serpent-filled place,

Looking for light and a key;

One damned descending without lamp,

On the edge of an abyss whose stench

Betrays the wet depths

Of endless stairways with no rail…

— Baudelaire

It is true that our conjurings have wreaked much havoc upon the autumnal hills surrounding Arkham, yet I hope to show by this testimony that fault lies not with us alone, but with malefactors who hungered for profit at the expense of learning.

Through my student years I had lived quite peaceably in my tiny garret, under the rafters of a Georgian house that squatted atop the hummock of Howard’s Hill like a troglodyte upon a chamber pot. My northern window commanded a view so splendid that during those hours I was not immersing myself in dog-eared sheafs teeming with the unsettling lore of the region’s hillfolk, whose family trees did so scarcely deviate beyond their mouldering trunks that both their eyes often made homes within the same socket, I would find myself brooding for hours over a cityscape bristling with eldritch spires and cruel gambrels, and cramped with slouching hovels and streets whose spectral denizens scurried from shadow to shadow … until I had utterly lost track of whatever thoughts filled my head when I’d first sat down for a quick breath of fresh air.

In time I realized that my reveries were not unnoticed, and I, the watcher in the window, had become the watched. The man who was to lead me to insanity’s brink made frequent trips through the street below, pushing his wheeled cart like a raw-boned, ill-suited Sisyphus, a peddler of crustaceans of decidedly peculiar anatomies. His passing stares grew more bold, lingering day by day until I called down to him, demanding to know that which he found so fascinating. Imagine, then, my vexation to hear him call back that he thought I would make a fine apprentice crab-monger, as I appeared to have ample time on my hands and, as I’d yet to tumble from my window, sufficient dexterity to suit the demands of the cart. My hasty refusal was as swiftly regretted, when examination of my wallet reminded me that I had never worked a day in my scholarly life and, more mysteriously, could not account for the origins of those few meager dollars I did possess.

When finally I caught up to him, he, with a temper as crusty as the shells of his wares, docked me a day’s wages for insolence.

How much better for me — for Arkham itself — had I given in to my umbrage, taking my solipsistic leave then and there. How much better for him — o damnable geezer! — had talk of my australopithic studies not awakened within him the curiosities of his ancestral hills, whose netherbowers sang of mysteries beyond space and time. How much better for you, my reader, if I just cut to the chase.

Knowledge of Arkham’s variegated streets was written deep within my mentor’s pickled brain, taking us along skewed lanes rarely traversed by those free of portentous motive. How I now wish that we had never disturbed the dust of the curio shop where we uncovered our prize whose cost has proved beyond reckoning: a lone — and curiously slim — volume of the dreaded
Necronomicon
, penned by that mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, at great personal peril and many a rumored grumpy night.

I console myself that our experiments might not have been performed with such urgency had the shopkeeper been more nimble of finger, but his delays returned us outside only after our cart had somehow overturned, sending our renegade crustaceans scuttling through the streets and back to the inky waters of Innsmouth they called home.

Lest the ravages of our imminent destitution overtake us, we fled to the hills outside of Arkham, where yodeled those cyclopean families beneath a gibbous moon, and where the inhuman ears of things ancient even by saurian standards listened with a gnashing of antediluvian teeth. By the baleful light of our fire, we called on the Great Old Ones, our barbarous words the keys to dimensional doors better left unjiggled.

Hideous to behold, their vast, terrible majesties inspired in me a polysyllabic glossolalia. They capered beyond our protective circle, their stertorous ruckus sufficient to shake every rafter within miles, until we could no longer bear the din of all the adjectives they demanded.

“The banishings!” I screamed. “Send them back!”

He shook his hoary head. “In a paowerful pickle now, we be! Thar’s no banishments t’be fount, nowhere! I calc’late they was never here, whatall!”

He blew the dust from the leather binding, and like chilled penguins did we shudder at the words revealed:

Reader’s Digest Condensed Edition
.

The kid — who couldn’t have been ten years old — was lean, mean, and fast. Accent on the fast. Leo swore that the kid must have been some hybrid form of city life, a mutant cross between human and cheetah, particularly adept at quick getaways. Leo saw a chainlink fence stretching across the width of the alley up ahead, and he figured if the kid could climb half as well as he ran, this two-block chase had been a colossal waste of time, energy, and lungpower.

His chest was beginning to burn out with thick, dull fire when the boy slipped. Wet garbage, probably, rotting underfoot. Too dark to see for sure, but no matter. The kid suddenly went sliding on one foot like an out-of-control skater, a greasy skidmark streaking behind him. His other leg flailed as uselessly as his arms, and in the light bleeding in from the streetlamps not yet shot out, Leo could see the kid’s toes bursting from the end of that extended sneaker. Finally the kid pinwheeled into the fence as if to shear through. It rattled him more than he rattled it, and sent him tottering backward.

By then, Leo had him by the shoulders.

“Leggo me, motherfucker,” the cheetah-boy said. Clenched teeth a downturned crescent against the black of his skin. The two-block wind-tunnel treatment had done little to wash the smell of gasoline from his clothes.

“What the hell were you trying to pull back there?” Leo said between wheezes.

“Who, me?”

Leo tightened his grip as the kid began to squirm, trying for a crotch kick that Leo barely dodged. “Why the hell would you want to burn down a building in your own neighborhood?”

The kid cursed. Repeated his demand for release. Called him every dirty name for a white man Leo had ever heard. Came up with a few more Leo hadn’t known about. Kid belonged in a chainmail bag with twenty milligrams of Valium shot in his rump.

He was just about to say
Hell with it
and turn the boy loose when the moon broke through the overhanging stack of charcoal clouds. Illuminating the green paint smeared along the inside of Leo’s forearm.

“Hey,” said the kid, and he stopped squirming. “You the painter, right?”