Unseaming (16 page)

“Lead into gold?” the prosecutor sneered. Old Hag Bremen trembled with rage, but Jacobs interrupted when she tried to speak.

“Woman,” he said—he couldn’t bring himself to call her “lady”—“I don’t know how you did it. How you fooled the lab tests. But I don’t believe this story you’re spinning, not for a minute. Your house is not made of gingerbread. You’re not a witch, or an alchemist, or whatever it is you pretend to be. If I have my say, you won’t have your lab back, and mine is the only say that matters.”

She snarled. “You think you understand, but you don’t, not one bit.”

“I don’t need to understand.” He stood up, and glared down at her. He wasn’t a tall man, but for all his visitor’s fearsomeness, he loomed over her by a head. “Get out.”

But she wasn’t looking at him. Eyes focused somewhere distant, she muttered his name, then repeated it.

“Don’t do that,” he said.

“I’ll call the musicians. They were with my family in the Old Country. They’re in the other Old Country now. But there’s still a way that they can hear me. It may be the death of me, but they’ll come.”

“Get out.”

“The story they tell about the musicians is all fiction, Mr. Jacobs. The real robbers never left our house alive.”

“Get out!”

Jacobs had taken to wearing a shoulder-holstered pistol beneath his jacket as soon as he’d learned of that particular affectation of Southern prosecutors. He pushed back the flap of the blue suitcoat he wore and put his hand on the pistol’s cold grip, making sure the old hag could see it. “Go!”

The hag stared, long enough that he prepared to shout again, his agitation and, yes, fear, building as each second passed. But when he opened his mouth, she turned and left without another word.

He heard no more from her, until the discovery of her death.

* * *

Jacobs sat in the passenger seat, and another deputy rode in the back, as the sheriff drove over steepening hills and through switchback turns toward the Bremen farm.

The old hag’s body had been removed, and still lay in the city morgue an hour south, unclaimed by any family, as she had none. Now that the house could be endured without wearing a mask, two deputies had gone to inspect the place with gloved hands in search of any evidence of foul play.

Jacobs had ordered the sheriff not to send any more men than those two, not even to secure the scene with yellow tape. “If we do that someone’s sure to notice, and then they’ll call the press. We don’t need any reporters asking about this right now.”

Most of the ride unfolded in awkward silence. As he turned onto the final stretch of road before the house, the sheriff looked at Jacobs sidelong. “What if it’s a murder, son? You can’t sit on that. You can’t keep people from finding out.”

Jacobs clenched his jaw. “Then we control what they find out. Every word of it.”

Besides, murder seemed unlikely. From the descriptions of the condition of the old woman’s body, it sounded as if she had been savaged by animals, perhaps wild dogs, or a bear. Bears were such a common problem that one had actually wandered down the main street of the county seat and through the automatic doors into the hospital, where a game warden had to put it out of its beastly misery.

The sheriff barked into his radio as they pulled off the road and parked, asking the men for their locations. No answer came, causing the sheriff to grumble about outdated equipment. It wasn’t at all uncommon for firefighters or deputies to respond to calls in the county’s far corners and discover their radios no longer worked over long ranges.

The trio hiked toward the house through the woods, but as they came within short range, the sheriff still couldn’t raise a response from his men—not even as the log buildings came in view. The sheriff drew his revolver, and the deputy cocked his rifle.

Jacobs drew the pistol from beneath his coat. The sheriff glanced at him sidelong again, his voice shaded with contempt. “You sure you know how to use that?”

“Yes,” Jacobs snapped.

“I just don’t want you to shoot me by mistake,” the sheriff said, with an emphasis on “mistake” that Jacobs didn’t like at all. Before he could reply, the sheriff walked to the main part of the house, the building that held the bedrooms, where the old woman’s body had lain. He shouted the names of his men, but again, no answer. He gestured to his deputy, who circled around to the back. The sheriff stepped onto the front stoop and tried the door, which opened with a loud wooden groan. Silent as a puma, the sheriff slipped into the darkness within. Jacobs followed, not so silently.

Though the foyer was dark, beams of light sliced through the rooms beyond, piercing through holes in the chinking and gaps between the roof boards. The foyer let out into a sitting room where chairs stood sentry that had once been ornate and grandiose, but now were splintered and mildewed, feather down bleeding out through rips in the stained cushions. The sheriff stood at the door to a different room, sweeping the floor with a small flashlight. He gave a sharp intake of breath, and ducked inside.

Jacobs came in behind, and stopped short. But for the nameplate and badge that glinted in the flashlight beam, there would have been no easy way to recognize the torn body on the floor. Dark stains spattered the walls. There was no doubt what the stains were.

“Animals,” Jacobs said.

The sheriff aimed his flashlight in Jacobs’ face. “More men here, and this wouldn’t have happened,” he said, his voice like red hot iron. “We’ll have to get at least a mile away before we’re in range to call for backup.” When the prosecutor didn’t answer, the sheriff pushed past him, shouting the name of the other missing man.

“Sheriff!” called the deputy from outside. “There’s blood. Leads up to the barn!”

* * *

The ugliest rooster Jacobs had ever seen squawked and scurried from the barn door as the men swung it open. It had no comb and no feathers on its head and neck, and bare pins jutted out here and there like spines from the salt-and-pepper plumage along its flanks. It squawked a second time as the men came inside, and flapped up to land on a beam above the door.

The sheriff asked, “You see any livestock when you came here last?”

The deputy shook his head.

The inside of the barn was in ruins, though apparently, incredibly, still in use. Much of the roof had collapsed, leaving old, rotten timbers strewn everywhere. The far end of the barn was a pile of rubble, but the near end still held its shape, though it looked as if a push with a finger could send it tumbling. A trough lay capsized in the straw on the ground, its wood splintered. To either side, stalls that once housed horses leaned askew.

But one was occupied. A wiry-haired old donkey stood in one of the stalls, its hindquarters to the men. It turned its long head to watch the strangers with one black-pearl eye.

“Well look at you,” the deputy said, stepping toward the donkey. “Handsome feller. That crazy old woman was really off her rocker to keep you in this place.”

The sheriff shushed him, whispering, “You hear that?”

Jacobs listened, and realized he heard music, thin notes that conformed to no melody. At first, given how they overlapped without rhythm, he thought they might be from a wind chime, but the sound was too continuous, too full of purpose, and somehow beautiful despite its chaos. And the sound, inside the decades-decayed barn, was also somehow frightening.

The trio advanced with the sheriff in the lead. The deputy edged toward the donkey, intending to approach it gently and lead it out. The rooster squawked again, startling them all. For a moment, Jacobs pondered shooting it. It held its ugly head sideways to glare down at them all with one baleful round eye.

The music didn’t get any louder. Jacobs looked right and left, up and down, but couldn’t pinpoint its source.

“There, there. Easy,” said the deputy as he put a hand on the donkey’s flank, running his palm across fur bristly as a wire brush.

Standing before a precariously balanced pile of timbers, the sheriff shined his flashlight over a suspicious-looking mound of straw packed underneath the boards.

The donkey shifted on its hooves at the deputy’s touch, but made no noise. Puzzled, the deputy squinted into the stall, and noticed something lying by the beast’s front hooves, clothed in dun and dark brown, the same colors as his own uniform. As the deputy realized what the shape on the floor must be, the donkey kicked him with bone-breaking force.

Neither Jacobs nor the sheriff saw what happened, though both heard a crunch, then a loud crash. They turned to see the deputy lying on his back atop a pile of broken wood, across the barn from the donkey’s stall. Then a deafening rumble filled the barn that resolved into a deepest-basso growl. The straw pile under the strewn timber erupted.

A jet black mastiff lunged at the sheriff, its mouth distended to reveal teeth like white daggers, its shoulders higher than the lawman’s waist.

But Jacobs was distracted by the rooster flapping past him, its talons nearly tangling in his hair. He stared at it in amazement, for its flight was no longer ungainly. Its long wings swooped in a manner impossible for such a bird. As Jacobs stared, he thought for a moment that he saw a completely different form flicker through the air, long sleek legs drawing up, muscled back rippling, a flash of something celestial and malevolent.

The rooster alighted, and the deputy screamed as it pecked his face.

The sheriff shouted too, firing his revolver point blank into the mastiff’s muzzle, the gunpowder flashes leaving spots in Jacobs’ eyes.

The prosecutor held out his pistol, wavering back and forth between the other two men, stymied as to what to do. Then he noticed the donkey. During the distractions, it had silently sidled up next to him, its huge shaggy head longer than one of his shins.

It was smiling at him. Its lips were stretched along its heavy muzzle in a manner that seemed impossible, showing teeth that seemed too large and too numerous, as if a human smile had been carved in some atrocious way into its countenance. The single black eye that met Jacobs’ wide-eyed stare sparkled with mirth.

The beast stretched its neck as if it intended to nuzzle. Then it bit down on his arm, and bit through it. The hand holding the gun dropped away to land in the straw.

As Jacobs reeled backward in pain and shock, a piercing yowl shredded the air, and a dark shape sprang from the rafters. The last thing the prosecutor saw was the blood-flecked donkey’s face, still regarding him with one mirthful eye, mouth still stretched in an unnatural, elongated grin. Then a hissing black thing with green eyes and needle claws landed on his shoulders, and the claws took his sight away forever.

With a wail, Jacobs fell.

As his life ebbed away, the bird stopped its attack on the prone deputy, and leapt, wings flapping in great sweeps, to the rafters where the cat had hidden. It opened its beak, and the sheriff distinctly heard words, bellowed loud as a vengeful angel’s trumpet:

BRING THE ROGUE TO ME.

The dog stopped growling and stood on its hind legs, as did the donkey, as did the cat.

The sheriff saw four figures, like men, but still beast-like—creatures out of Faerie, or Hell—each baring teeth in unnaturally elongated smiles. The strange music that had tickled the ear so maddeningly when he first came into the barn grew louder, and the air grew darker around the beings as they began to dance. The dance could have been a simple folk jig, but the smiles of the things performing it charged each motion with stomach-churning menace. Each raised their arms and turned, and as they did so, they vanished, taking the music with them.

The sheriff, heart pounding, rushed to the stall where the donkey had stood, to discover the musicians had also taken Edward Jacobs’ body.

* * *

After that, the robbers never dared approach the house again. But the house suited the four musicians of Bremen so well that they did not care to leave it anymore.