The House of Dead Maids (12 page)

One by one, villagers took turns with the shovel, ignoring the groans and mindless babble, the splashing and slithering. Gray-haired matrons and slender girls took up the spade. Boys dropped dirt in by cupped handfuls. Slowly and methodically, they went about the work of filling in the hole in which their fellow creatures lay. I cannot describe the horror of their indifference.

Afraid of losing my reason, I stopped my ears and shut my eyes. The single thought consuming my energies was a frantic resolve to quit this place,
a resolve so powerful that my muscles tightened and my legs shook with the desire to run. Himself would assert his right as master, claiming he had been on the Master’s Seat before he was christened, but he was young, and my word would count against his. I would lie—I would have to lie—there was no help for it. And then we would be free.

The odd boulder named the Master’s Seat took hold of my imagination then. I glanced towards it, and it seemed to move ominously in the torchlight. Then I noticed a pale object lying across one stone armrest, and I swayed on my feet while the torches and villagers melted together into a bright red haze.

The pale object was Rogue. Himself had left his pirate behind when I had pulled him down that morning. The boy could prove he had sat on the heathen rock before he was christened. He could prove his claim as master.

I felt a terror so intense that I thought I would die of it, and yet my mind was clear. In that instant, I held as certain things I had not even guessed before. The dead maids were no friends to me. They had not come to warn me of danger. They had gathered before the sacrifice to gloat over me, the newest member of their sisterhood of death. I was the old
maid now, trapped and shackled just as Miss Winter had been. I would idle out my meaningless years, choosing others to die in my place, until my bones took their turn at the bottom of the pit.

I must escape. We must escape together, the boy and I. But Arnby stood by us with a hand upon my shoulder, and the crowd pressed in all around.

Then a roar burst from the pit, and grimy hands clutched the edge of the shovel. Mr. Ketch had heaved himself upright. His face wore a slimy mask of dark mud, and his bloodshot eyes bulged from their sockets. He glared at us without the least flicker of intelligence: he was stark staring mad.

The old woman holding the spade struck out instinctively and gave Mr. Ketch a blow to the head. Arnby moved quickly to take the tool from her.

“No blood!” he commanded. “We’ll have to stake him down. You and you, fetch rope and stakes. You two, jump in with him. Wrestle him down, no fisticuffs now, the blood needs to stay in the body.”

As soon as Arnby moved from my side, I said in my charge’s ear, “Let’s play hide-and-seek to vex the old man and pay him back for locking us up.”

I pulled the boy through the ring of villagers, who had no thought to spare for us in the excitement
of Mr. Ketch’s resurrection. We hurried around the back of the crowd, heading for the stairs. But once there, I dragged Himself to a stop.

“What ails you?” he whispered.

“Can you not see them?” I asked.

The dead maids crowded the stairs from top to bottom. Their gray faces were blank, and their motionless forms bespoke no eagerness by natural means, yet a powerful feeling rolled through me from them, a single horrid sensation of greed. One spirit ruled all their shapes; their own spirits were gone. Only the shadow remained in possession of their empty husks.

“Over here,” I said to Himself and, holding hands, we darted through the nearest archway into the open cellars beneath the house. The many torches of the villagers standing by the pit illuminated the gravelly space, and each squat square pillar cast a dozen shifting shadows, until the ground fairly seethed with flickering forms.

I hurried towards the tunnel we had passed through that afternoon, but now it was Himself’s turn to stop. “So many!” he whispered in consternation.

I saw no figures in the dark opening before us,
but I could feel the presence of the dead masters. I could feel their passion and violence, the evil and gloomy despair, and the mindless force living through them that yearned for the sacrifice as a starving man yearns for food. Necessity made me brutal, however. We must get through. “You wanted to take them on,” I reminded the little boy. “Don’t be a coward now.”

He bared his small teeth, but then gave a shudder. “Not all at once,” he groaned.

I was frantic with fear, and for an instant I thought of leaving him behind. But I couldn’t do that to the motherless child. I knelt before him and drew him close.

“I’ll help you,” I promised. “Wrap your arms tight around me. Then it’ll be just as you said—we won’t be scared, and we’ll take on these ghouls together.”

He nodded and threw his arms around my neck.

Half carrying, half dragging him, I stumbled into the passageway crowded with black-hearted spirits. Fiery eyes seemed to glitter in the gloom, and puffs of wind whispered and plucked at me from all directions, tugging at Himself as though they would have me drop him. The air grew thick with a foul stench,
until I thought I should suffocate, and sparks showered behind my eyelids from the effort of carrying on. But I held fast to my charge and drew courage from his trust in me. They should not have him while I could prevent them.

Then a breeze flowed over us, cool and sweet. We were outside, on the path to the village, and the moonlit night stretched high over our heads and touched the distant hills. I set my charge on his feet, and we ran down the path together. We raced through the silent village and reached the boats pulled up on the shingle, with the water purling quietly a few feet away.

I unhooked the canvas cover from Arnby’s boat and pushed it back. “Hide,” I said to Himself. “Arnby will never think to look for us here. He’ll be so angry to know that we chose his own boat.”

Himself dove under the canvas, and I set my weight against the bow, but my size was against me. The boat didn’t stir.

Now I heard footsteps crunching on the shingle. I huddled against the boat and screwed my eyes shut, praying for this one kindness, that the steps would pass me by. But they came up to the boat and stopped. Only the sounds of night and water remained. After a long moment of waiting, I could
endure no more. I peeked through my hands to see who it was.

Mrs. Sexton stood gazing down at me, her pipe between her teeth. She had no need to ask what I was doing.

I got to my feet, miserable, crushed with disappointment, spreading my hands in a hopeless gesture. “I can’t launch the boat,” I said.

For a few seconds, she considered me. Then she bent, set her shoulder to the bow, and pushed with such force that the gravel screeched beneath the hull. She scooped me up and flung me, and I landed in loose canvas folds. The boat swayed and rocked with my weight.

I sat up. The bank was slipping by with alarming speed. Mrs. Sexton was already lost in the darkness. Only I thought I saw, as I gazed astern, a curling wisp of pipe smoke shimmering in the moonlight as it mounted up to the star-filled heavens.

Himself’s head popped up, and he rapidly unhooked the rest of the canvas and stowed it in the bottom of the boat. “Don’t sit at your ease,” he ordered. “Take an oar! We’ll pull for the bank yonder.”

I took both oars from him. “We’ll stay here where the water is swiftest.”

“You’re a fool, and you shouldn’t have brought
us here,” he said angrily. “We can’t row against this current. I want to go home. I want to sleep in Master Jack’s bed tonight and laugh at him when he haunts me.”

“What a ghastly notion!” I exclaimed. “An idea unbecoming in a Christian. We shan’t go back to that place, tonight or any night. We’re free of it forever.”

“Free! I don’t want to be free of it, and it shan’t be free of me. I own it now that Master Jack is in the ground. I inherited it, just as you said.”

“A grave and two piles of bones, and ghouls and demons by the dozen,” I said. “That’s a fine inheritance!”

“My house and my land, and my luck,” he retorted. “And you are my maid—you have to do as I bid you. Pull for the bank, or we’ll lose the way. Streams like ours are flowing together, and we’ll have trouble following the proper one back.”

He peered worriedly at the dark water, measuring the distance to the shore. His anxiety gave me comfort: boats he might know, but he plainly could not swim.

“I quit your employment,” I said. “I’m not your maid anymore. The honor is scarcely worth the promise of a living grave at the end. But never fear,
I mean to be a good friend to you, and that’s why we’re not going back.”

“Then who wants you for a friend?” howled the little wretch. “What good is a friend who won’t follow orders? Run away, then, you coward, if that’s what you want, but leave me on the bank yonder.”

I could perhaps have done it and kept the boat afloat, but I remembered that masters and maids came in a set. If Himself went back to be master, they might hunt me down. Besides, he was too young to understand what was best for him.

“Never mind that,” I said. “We’ll find a properly run house, and we’ll live happier there than at Seldom House, though we might be bootblacks. And we’ll see you instructed, too, and lose your heathen ways. You’ll see—you’ll thank me in time.”

“Thank you? I’ll curse you every day, you damned lying slut!” he cried. “I don’t want to be a bootblack! And you may take your heaven back and keep it for yourself, and I hope you rot in hell with it! I don’t want heaven! I want to go home!”

He burst into furious tears then, and went on blaspheming like a lost soul. I tried to soothe him, but he was inconsolable at his imagined loss. At length, the unnatural whelp sobbed himself to sleep.

That night was an experience for which I scarcely
have words, so far removed was it from the rest of my existence. After our harrowing escape, I had no fear to spare for the stream’s perils, and I listened with the greatest contentment to the quiet slap of water on rocks, the running whisper of the current, and the taps and creaks and croaks that rose with the mist around me. Overhead swung the glittering stars, and the bright moon shone down and lit the curling ripples on the water. At no time in my life have I been in greater danger from the elements, and yet if I learned that heaven is such as that night was, I should deem it a joy worth the dying.

Morning broke, clear and chilly, over a broad river, down the center of which our frail craft rode. Dawn dyed the surface of the water rose-red, and then the rising sun turned it into a burnished mirror, while fingers of mist shone like spun gold. Himself awoke and gazed morosely over the expanse of flat water. He did not return my greeting.

“Look there, a steeple in the distance,” I told him. “We’re coming to a town, and then we’ll have a bite to eat; that’ll cheer you up.”

The little fellow did stand in need of cheering; it was strange to see him sitting so still. “I miss Rogue,” he muttered, wiping his eyes.

“You left your pirate on that pagan rock of
theirs, that Master’s Seat,” I said. “I saw him last night, but I couldn’t fetch him down.”

Himself turned to me. “Then Arnby knows,” he said. “He knows I sat in his seat and I’m master after all.”

“He’ll reach that conclusion, I suppose,” I said reluctantly.

“Then he’ll not name a new master,” he said, growing animated. “He’ll search for me. He’ll wait till I come home.”

“Home—that dismal hole?” I exclaimed. “You’ll not go there again.”

“And you’ll not tell me what to do,” he rejoined. “Masters don’t take orders from maids.”

“I only meant that it isn’t a suitable home for you,” I explained. “And Arnby is no friend to you, master or not. He locked you up, and he would have killed you last night. He doesn’t want what’s best for you.”

“He wants what’s best for my land, and so do I,” he said. “I’ll grow bigger and stronger, and then I’ll find my way home. But you needn’t worry for your precious skin. I won’t take you with me. I’ll find a girl who’s fit to be maid.”

“You’re all kindness,” I retorted, stung at his ingratitude. “What a fortunate young lady she’ll be.”

“She must sing,” he declared. “And she must look better than
you
. I’ll not share my grave with a slattern.”

“You wicked imp!” I cried. “This is the reward for my charity! Yesterday you begged me not to leave you.”

“Yesterday I didn’t know you were false,” he said with such a miserable expression that it touched my heart, no matter how foolish I thought him. “You tricked me with your hide-and-seek game. But you didn’t mean to help me, you meant to help yourself. You knew what
I
wanted.”

We reached the town, the name of which I took care not to learn. A boat hauling coal lay at anchor there, preparing to cast off, and the boatmen, seeing us adrift, snared our craft with hooks and brought us on board. When I learned they were headed downstream, we did not go ashore; instead, I offered to knit stockings for every man of the crew in exchange for our food and passage.

Thus we came safe out of that accursed country, with not a footprint left behind to tell of our passing, nor a scent for the bloodhound to catch.