The Land's Whisper (28 page)

Brenol wrestled desperately with extended
arms and body in a twist while Crayton sought with greedy hands.
His grip was tight and vicious and became firmer with each
resisting motion. Brenol gagged as he inhaled the sharp odors of
the man and felt the press of his perspiration-drenched shirt.
Crayton’s nostrils flared, and his eyes glinted in satisfied
exertion.

Brenol yelped in sudden pain, the bones of
his leg burning as they bent abnormally under Crayton’s hand. The
boy reacted with a remarkably swift and powerful kick, booting
Crayton firmly in the chest before hastily yanking his leg back.
Somehow, Brenol was rewarded with a free limb, but without its
accompanying boot.

Crayton hardly paused as he flung the
unwanted article behind him into the trees, lunging yet again to
grapple for possession of the squirming boy. Brenol’s hands dug
desperately through the mulch until they wrapped around something
hard. A stone. His mind was blank as he swung the cold rock. The
weight drove his fist into a powerful blow, cuffing the temple of
that terrible skull. Crayton howled, and Brenol flashed his fist
forward again until the man released him, as soft as a sigh.

Keeping hold of the stone, he leaned over
the figure. The pungent smell of onion was still hot on Crayton’s
lips, but the man was unconscious. Brenol let the bloodied rock
fall in a thud, and ran—single booted—from the scene.

~

The house was almost invisible. Brenol
nearly passed it without a second glance. It had the quality of a
prism rainbow: there only when light fell from a certain angle. The
place was as dilapidated as the shed, but the stench of sweat and
excrement strongly suggested it housed more permanent residents.
The reek was what had halted Brenol’s steps long enough for him to
dart his dark eyes through the trees. Just as his lips were drawing
back in revulsion, he spied the house.

Bending the rules,
he thought
grimly.

He stretched his shirt up and bent his chin
down into it, hoping to fashion a breathing mask of sorts, but
eventually abandoned the hopeless scheme and inhaled the pungent
air through clenched teeth.

This guy is a disease.

He swung his legs up onto the porch in the
awkward gait of the singly shod, and rushed upon the door that lay
half open. It was a mistake that nearly cost him dearly. In a leap,
he danced his way around dozens of needles—identical to the barbs
of the pit— that protruded from the floor, slicked with
narcotic.

Brenol cursed at the rashness of his
actions. He had sped into a house where anyone could have been
waiting. He internally berated himself toward better caution. He
breathed again, yet relief was far from present.

He barely glanced about before his breath
caught in his throat. Along one wall was a collection of
grotesquely mounted heads. There were fourteen altogether, and
every last one was human.

Brenol had seen taxidermy once when he was
small. He had gone with his mother to measure a suit for a wealthy
man in the area.
Felint Chestnut.
The name alone was enough
to prickle the hair on his arms to a stand. He had never wanted to
see the eerie live-death again.

But here he was with something even more
nightmarish.

The shock of the intelligent mounted in this
manner was more than disturbing. It was soul-lurching. The men’s
features had been formed in idiotic expressions, the creator
apparently taking some element of demented pleasure in
demonstrating his superiority, even in death. Their eyes were all
yellow, the same golden hue of Crayton’s. While mesmerized by the
nefarious scene, Brenol forced his vision aside as he sensed his
stomach starting to turn.

It was then that he saw the fifteenth head,
forgotten on the floor. This one was a fleshy woman, with
attractive features that somehow coexisted with a serpentine
cunning that startled even in death. She did not have the golden
eyes of the rest, just an ordinary brown to match her ordinary
locks. The head was also less carefully mounted than the rest—just
awkwardly affixed to wood, with features unchanged. Smudges that
could have been excrement marred both cheek and neck. It were as
though an evil toddler had taken over the house of horror: lacking
brains, but full of learned hatred.

Brenol’s mind tingled as he remembered the
inane humming.
Fingers had to have learned all this from
someone,
he thought as he abandoned the heads to his search.
But who is the mastermind? Crayton?
Yet that image did not
seem to fit either.

Whoever was the boss must be gone,
he
thought.
This place is too nasty for anyone with a mind.

Brenol blinked with intentional exaggeration
to focus himself and set to pillaging the place. The cottage was
full of inconsistencies. There were aspects that showed meticulous
organization and intelligence: medicine cabinet with bottles lined
and labeled, notebooks with smooth, neat cursive writing, an odd
set of tools with jars of sand, rock, and soil, a measuring
station. These were clean and precisely cared for, and they
contrasted sharply with the backdrop of litter and sewage: dirty
pots, cans, dishware in heaps upon the counters and floors, fecal
matter in corners, soiled linens tossed to the side, fish bones,
sticks, socks, dirt, grime, rotting fruit.

He scoured hastily for several more minutes
yet found nothing that could be of use. His impatience and
frustration strangled him.
No time. Darse doesn’t have time.
Again, he thought of the ax outside, and again dismissed it. It was
far too heavy for him to effectively wield against a grown man.

What then? What?

Screams landed flatly upon the house, and
his panic crested. Brenol scooped up a dirty rag, wrapped four of
the longest needles in it, and raced toward the barn. Crayton’s
unmoving frame filled the path while wails wafted through the air
like song. Brenol paused, weighing the risk and time. The man was
leashed, but he did not care to find out how long that tether was.
He pressed his lips together in decision, removed a single needle
and knelt to the crumpled man. The metal felt cool in his hot hand.
It slid into the flesh of Crayton’s extended arm like a fork into a
cooked potato. The man did not even stir.

Brenol glanced around with a faint hope of
eyeing his lost boot, but surrendered the article to the need for
haste. He left the needle embedded in skin and moved toward the now
terrifyingly silent barn.

Why so quiet?
His flesh crawled in
angst, but his head pulsed in a quick throb. Only a moment elapsed
before his ears pricked to the blood-curdling hum of Fingers.
Brenol lowered himself behind a bush and peered out from between
the fronds. Fingers emerged from the barn, flushed and chuckling,
his fingers drumming upon his chest. His fat face beamed, but his
eyes spoke more than all else: delighted, stimulated, sated, evil.
No remorse rested there, only mirth. Darse, and any creature
mounted on his wall, were—and always would be—his play things.

All of Brenol’s emotions flared, but he
choked them in, for there simply was no time to sift through and
make sense of them. Brenol had to do something—anything—before
Fingers discovered Crayton, armed himself, caught Brenol, returned
to the shed…

The youth wrestled off his single boot in
the hopes of restoring agility. He dropped it silently in a tuft of
grass and crept forward with heart thundering and palms sweating.
The dirt felt cool beneath his toes, and he realized he and Darse
now shared this vulnerable bareness. The knowledge was but a drop
in his ocean of terror; he brushed it aside.

Fingers hummed while replacing the board
with a soft thud. Brenol crept closer to the exposed back, gripping
a needle in each hand, just an arm’s length now from the stench and
sound. He drew his right hand behind his ear and lunged, plunging
the barb deeply into the fleshy shoulder, and immediately leaped
out of reach. Fingers spun around to face his opponent, and his
eyes bounced from fury to confused delight.

“Another pet!” He grinned and held out both
hands to Brenol, as though offering a comforting embrace. “Another
pet!” he repeated, and his smooth baby face locked into a toothy
grin.

Brenol waited tensely.

As though all sense had been delayed until
that moment, the man let out a tiny howl. He wagged his arms in
desperation toward his back but was unable to reach the protruding
needle. Brenol watched in intrigued horror.

Fingers could not determine which item
needed to be addressed first: Brenol or his discomfort. He pouted
his lips out in indignation. “What it that? Bad pet!”

He floundered around, alternating his
attempts to remove the embedded barb and to sneak up on Brenol. The
man could accomplish neither. Brenol dodged him nimbly, thankful he
had removed his boot. Within a minute, the drug began to take
effect, Fingers’s movements becoming exaggerated and his speech
heavily slurred. Even his piano hands had lost their pep, the fluid
motions turning spastic, and then still.

The size of the man seemed to be preventing
the soporific from fully taking him, so Brenol darted forward to
plunge in a second needle. In his rush, a burr drove up into the
ball of his leading foot. He overcompensated with a jump from the
other and crashed down upon knees in a smarting slide. The needle
in his hand sank into his own right thigh. Brenol cried out in both
pain and alarm, extracting the needle with a whimper.

It tingled and stung, and in a blink he felt
the area growing numb. He cursed himself, leaped up in
haste—ignoring the burr and its sting—and drove both the removed
and final barb into Fingers’s back. The man flinched and flopped
like a beached whale, and his mouth began to foam. Brenol did not
stay to watch further.

With panicked hands he clumsily handled the
barn door’s board and shouted to Darse. He could hardly formulate
the words with his tripping tongue, but knew he must somehow tell
Darse about Fingers and Crayton before the drugs stole him.

Please be alive. Oh, please.

He flung the door wide and found his friend
upon the floor. Darse lay just as broken as he had several hours
previously, crumpled and grim, but now he peered up with startled
golden eyes. Brenol gaped but set to work on his bonds, fumbling as
the narcotic took effect, and babbled his story out as best he
could. The room began to slide in streaks, and sounds elongated.
Within another minute, he collapsed in a thud beside Darse.

~

The moment was pregnant with peril, and
Darse felt incapable of juggling all the complexities of the
situation.
Three asleep, and small Bren likely for the longest.
No antidote, no med kit.
The stranger—Crayton
—
Brenol had
spoken of alarmed him more than anything, for he was out of sight
and unknown.

What do I do? I can barely move.

He groaned but refused to allow his vision
to drop down to the jutting bone that would surely paralyze his
heart.

What do I do?

His hands groped his temples, yet it was no
use. His mind was frozen in the terror he had just endured. From
the fingers. From the razing cream…

I can’t think about it. No! I must get out.
We must get out. Think, Darse! Think!

He reexamined the contents of Brenol’s pack.
Still no miracles.

He sat, listening to both the soft breathing
of Brenol and the husky wheeze of the man outside. He took a
breath—a deep one. And another. And as it usually did, his reason
cleared, and he saw what lay before him. He allowed his mind to
play against itself, like a child learning
dukla,
knowing
the choice would surface.

I could bind them.

But if there’s another who returns? They all
go free…

And even if they managed to escape
somehow?

I don’t even know if there is a jail
here.

In the end, Darse could only see two
options: kill the two, or escape effectively. He did not know if he
had it in him to do either.

He peered across to the copper head. The
thought of anything happening to him—or any other Brenol—curdled
his stomach. He did not know the entirety of this situation, but it
was plain neither Crayton nor Fingers meant well. He could not
leave these men to continue their activities… If Brenol were
captured again simply because he had been too scared to stop them,
Darse knew he would never forgive himself. This—his love for
Brenol—alone drove his will into steel.

Darse grit his teeth and began to scoot
forward, his body crying out in revolt with every fraction of
movement.

~

Scenery, thoughts, time—they were a blur to
Darse. The only reality he experienced was the imminent need to
prevent the two villains from waking. The thought of inflicting
death upon either was harrowing, but his options were few.

He scooted by Fingers, guessing that the
other would wake first since he had been drugged earlier. Fingers
could wait.

Or am I simply trying to postpone the
inevitable?

Regardless,
he told himself,
he
will get his turn.
The thought sobered and sickened him; Darse
did not find pleasure in killing, despite what had happened in the
shed.

In the shed…

He dragged his sorry body forward across the
soil in a crawl, but soon recognized it would be impossible to go
much farther. Already he groaned and fought back the sickening
waves of nausea from the intensity of the pain. His rib throbbed
mercilessly, but that could be endured. It was his leg. Even
glancing at it intensified the unbearable surge that blossomed from
the white bone.

Darse’s leg seized suddenly, and the agony
threatened to steal his consciousness. He sucked in deep gulps of
air until his vision cleared and his jaw unlocked. He glanced
around for sticks in reaching distance, but found none that would
suffice for a splint. He spied some loose branches ahead, and he
scooted forward with sharp breaths. He was repaid with several good
and solid poles, one of which could be used as a cane.