Solomon Kane (19 page)

“They are my flock and I am their shepherd,” Father Michael said, and his voice swelled with a distorted pride.
“I pray with them each night,” he assured Kane, “and hear them raise their voices to God.”

In that moment Kane saw that the priest was far worse than stubborn – that he had lost his mind. “I keep them,” Father Michael said. “I care for them.” He reached out his hands as though in benediction, but the gesture might have been emulating the talons that reached up from the crypt. His proud smile grew lopsided, and he giggled again. Barely audibly he said “I feed them.”

“Feed them?” Kane’s soul revolted at the thought. He leaned forward to thrust the torch lower and search the crowded gloom. The hands clawed at the light as if they sought to tear it to shreds, the gaping mouths snarled and bared their bloodstained fangs. He could see nothing of their food – nothing but the pallid bodies pressed together close as maggots in a container of bait. “What do you feed them?” he demanded.

“Flesh,” Father Michael said, and rushed at him.

Before Kane could retreat from the opening, the priest’s hands slammed against his back. There was more strength in his wiry frame than Kane would have expected, and he must have been husbanding it for that moment. Kane teetered on the edge and almost regained his balance. Then his foot skidded on a slippery tile, and he fell into the midst of the creatures that were slavering for him.

He was still gripping the torch. At the last moment the inhuman throng backed away from the light, tumbling over one another in their haste. Kane struck the earth floor with an impact that hammered all the breath out of him and jarred the torch from his grasp. As he glared about him at the ghoulish horde, Father Michael called down to him. He was still secure in his priesthood; he might almost have been preaching a sermon. “I deliver you unto Satan’s creatures for the destruction of your
flesh, that your spirit may be saved. May God have mercy on your soul,” he intoned and shut the trapdoor with a slam that laid low the flame of the torch.

I
t was harvest time, and Meredith had never seen the like. The sun was huge and golden, exactly the colour of the haystacks that stood all about the fields. They resembled monuments to fruitfulness, and their scent filled the mellow air, making her head swim. Her senses felt renewed, and she was a child again, playing hide and seek with a girl whose delighted laughter she could hear somewhere among the stacks. Meredith would have liked to stand inhaling the autumnal scent while the gentle colours of the landscape settled like balm on her eyes, but she was not alone, and so she ran to find her playmate.

The bales receded into mist and distance. There seemed to be no end to them, and no sign of the other girl. The fields were unfenced, and so Meredith had no idea what boundaries she might be crossing, unless there was just a single field so vast that she would never find its limit before nightfall. Only the laughter of her unseen playmate led her onwards, past rank after rank of hulking bales that had begun to darken and drip with mist. The stubbled earth had grown dank too, and toadstools sprouted where the hay had been cut down. Had a mocking note crept into the girlish laughter? Meredith ran in the direction where it seemed to be, but was rewarded only by the harsh call of a crow that flapped up from behind a haystack. The bird must have been pecking at a mass of
fungus, which looked unpleasantly suggestive of a supine body discoloured by corruption. Meredith hurried past the prone shape and then had to swing around, because the shrill laughter was now at her back. She saw a figure dodge behind a shaggy bale, but when she ran to pounce on it she found that it was another crow, which pranced away from her with an arrogant nonchalance suggesting that it and its fellows owned the land. Then it turned its cruel beak towards Meredith and fixed her with its utterly black gaze, and emitted its call. But the sound that emerged from the gaping beak was not the harsh cry of its species. It was a little girl’s laughter.

In a moment it was answered from all around Meredith, and the members of the chorus strutted from behind the haystacks. They were crows, a dozen of them. Their black eyes were as emotionless as bits of coal, and yet their childish laughter sounded gleeful. They hopped forward, flapping their wings as though to drive Meredith to her fate, and she whirled around in search of a way of escape. Just one avenue was unguarded by any of the monstrous flock. She dashed along it, between the towering hulks of vegetation that looked grey with rot as well as with the mist that was closing in. The mist had engulfed the sun and blurred the haystacks ahead; the massive squarish shapes might have been composed of grey stone. She glanced fearfully about, and saw that she was indeed surrounded by the ancient stones of a pagan site, unless the place was devoted to some older magic. As the megaliths loomed above her, black shapes hopped and flapped between them, and she heard hoofbeats galloping to encircle her. In a moment the rider emerged from the mist. At the sight of his mask she cried out and awoke.

The smell of hay was still in her nostrils. She was lying in the barn, covered with a ragged mass of straw.
However feverish her dream might have been, she was no longer shivering, even if her limbs ached with a reminiscence of the chill. The rush-light was almost spent, but it showed her that she was alone on the floor of the barn. She had no means of judging how much time had passed since the boy Thomas had brought her food and a change of clothes. She was fighting off the dread that the nightmare had left behind, and wondering how soon Thomas might be able to sneak her away from the farm, when she heard a little girl’s muffled laughter.

For a dreadful moment Meredith thought the dream was real, and then she grasped that the sound of laughter had been the germ of the dream. Was the girl Thomas’s sister? She might come into the barn, and Meredith was looking for a place to hide when she heard a man’s voice just outside the door. “Is she in here?”

The voice sounded rough with anxiety. The man must be searching for the little girl, and the nightmare had left Meredith so dazed that she only just refrained from calling out that the child was not in the barn. In any case he was bound to look in there, and Meredith was burrowing under the straw when Thomas spoke. “Father, why do we need to do this?”

“Why do you think, boy?” Even now Meredith thought they were talking about the boy’s sister until the man said harshly “If Malachi’s soldiers find we’ve been sheltering her they’ll burn us out.” Emotion weighed his voice down, so that Meredith barely heard him add “Or worse.”

“She lost her family,” Thomas pleaded.

“So did we,” his father said.

The words reawakened Meredith’s grief, but she had no time to yield to it. She rose swiftly to her feet, wavering a little as her head swam, and stared about the barn. Could she hide in the hayloft? She was making for the ladder
that led up to it when she froze like an animal that has sighted the hunter. The little girl whose gleeful laughter she had heard was seated on the edge of the hayloft, swinging her legs. She was the witch who had marked Meredith’s palm.

She gave Meredith a grin that seemed almost conspiratorial. Grotesquely, she looked no worse than childishly mischievous. Her eyes gleamed at Meredith and then turned towards the ladder, and Meredith knew there was no refuge up above. She glanced desperately about and saw a pitchfork leaning against a wall. Outside the man was saying “I’ll not lose anything more just to save a stranger. Show her to me.”

Meredith darted to grab the pitchfork. She was afraid that the witch would be effortlessly swifter, but the shaft was not snatched from her grasp. She swung it in front of her with both hands as she turned to confront the witch. But the loft was deserted, and the only movement to be seen was a solitary wisp of straw floating down from the loft. Meredith might have wondered if the apparition had been a last trace of her dream, but she had no more time for thoughts, because the latch of the barn door had been lifted with a clank like the fall of a trap. “Find her for me, boy, or I will,” the man said.

As the left half of the door creaked open Meredith dodged behind a ragged bale of hay. The flame of the rush-light was flattened by a draught, and all the shadows bowed low as if deferring to the man in the doorway. Meredith did her utmost to keep herself and the pitchfork still. “Go on, boy. Do what you must,” his father said under his breath.

There was a stubborn silence before Thomas lurched into view, obviously having been pushed. He trudged to the straw where Meredith had slept and began to spread
it apart with both hands. Though he must have been able to see at once that she was no longer there, he continued to sift the straw. He might have been playing a joyless game, delaying the moment when he would be forced to find her. His antics gave her time to steal around the bale of hay, but it was no use; if she retreated his father would see her, and if she stayed where she was the boy would. Eventually he stood up, and she thought he meant to tell his father that she was nowhere to be found, but he could not avoid seeing her now. As he met her eyes his mouth worked, and he muttered a phrase low enough for a private prayer. “What are you saying, boy?” his father urged.

Thomas gave her a stricken look, but she could not find an expression in response. “She’s here,” he said with a defiance that might have been aimed at Meredith as much as at his father.

His father tramped to scowl at her. He was a brawny red-faced man with thinning hair and too many wrinkles around his eyes. He looked haunted by memories and starved of sleep, but grimly determined. As he paced towards Meredith she backed away, raising the pitchfork, and glanced accusingly at Thomas. “You betrayed me,” she told him.

The boy’s lip trembled. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“Leave him be, girl,” the man said, “and put that down. There’s nowhere you can hide.”

“Just let me go,” Meredith said and gripped the pitchfork harder. “Nobody will know I hid here. Let me go now and nobody will see.”

“I cannot.” The farmer shook his slow head as though her suggestion were a burden he had to dislodge. “Malachi’s creatures are everywhere now,” he said. “Anybody who denies them will be killed. We have to
show our loyalty.”

Perhaps Meredith glimpsed regret in his eyes, but it was quickly suppressed. “By sacrificing me?” she protested in rage that felt close to grief.

“If need be,” the man said and lunged heavily at her.

Meredith stood her ground, because there was no way out other than the door beyond him. She jabbed the pitchfork at him, and he made to knock it aside with one muscular arm. He seemed almost amused by the sight of her presuming to take him on. His reaction enraged her, and she darted forward, thrusting the pitchfork at him with all her strength. The tines penetrated his shoulder, and she felt them dig deep into flesh until he recoiled, yelling as much in outraged surprise as pain. Meredith held onto the pitchfork, and his retreat pulled it out of his shoulder. As he stood in the middle of the barn, recovering from the assault or from the shock of it, Meredith sprinted to the door.

It was not just capture that she was desperate to escape; it was Thomas’s reaction. His cry of dismay had been louder than his father’s yell, and she had glimpsed the boy’s distraught look. Meredith had become indistinguishable in his eyes from the evil that had invaded his life – that had snatched away his family. Captain Kane had assured her that there was no evil in her, but he and his faith had deserted her. As she clutched at the latch she might have been seeking to flee her own self. She threw the door wide, to be confronted by the figure that was waiting in the dark.

His gaze was as cold as the expression of his lipless mask. His minions were massed behind him in the farmyard, cutting off even the slimmest chance of escape. All the same, Meredith jerked up the pitchfork and drove it with the last of her strength into his chest. She felt the
tines pierce leather and flesh, but the only response he granted her was a thin chill laugh, hardly more than a mocking whisper. He dragged the pitchfork out of his body and wrenched the shaft from Meredith’s hand.

For a moment she thought he was about to turn the weapon against her. A quick death seemed almost welcome; it would return her to her family, at any rate. Instead he flung the pitchfork in the mud and fastened his gaze on her like a predator inspecting a victim. As she attacked him she had heard Thomas cry out once more, and his father’s groan of pain or apprehension. Perhaps at least she could save them as she had been unable to save Samuel and her family. “They did not know I was here,” she said as steadily as she could. She was praying that the masked figure would believe her as its head leaned down towards her. For another moment the eyes held her with their unreadable gaze, and then a black-gloved hand came down like a mallet on her skull.