By the Light of His Lantern Page 28

  “Let me untie you…”

  “They’re tight,” Lewis whispered. “You might not be able.”

  He rolled onto his belly. Her hands pinched and fidgeted with the ropes, but nothing loosened.

  “Guess what?” he breathed. “There’s a way out.” She said nothing, fingers still toying with the knots. “He’s taking me there now. Except… I won’t want to be with him when we get there…”

  It was true, now he thought of it. There was a way out, but he needed this man to show him how. Until then, he was as aimless as before.

  “Wait,” he said. “Don’t untie me.”

  “I don’t think I can, anyway…”

  “I need to stay with him. It’s the only way.”

  “Huh?”

  “I won’t learn the way out of this place if I don’t go with him. He’s the only one who knows…”

  She didn’t say anything at first. He turned his head, brushed his chin over the dirt, trying to listen in a different direction, wondering if she was still there.

  “You—”

  “Lewis,” she said. “He can see me.”

  A tentative growl behind them sent the hairs on Lewis’s neck on end. Footsteps, so close, crept behind them slowly, heavy and full.

  “That’s right, little girl,” he said. “I can see lots of things.”

  She stood, stepped back.

  “It’s okay,” Lewis said. “It’s okay. Run. Run!”

  She did as he told her.

  The man’s voice, a thundery whisper: “Shoo, fly…” he said. “You don’t belong here…”

  He grabbed Lewis by the feet. The efforts of his escape cost him a fresh layer of skin from his back as he was dragged defenselessly back to the wagon.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The wagon was freshly dampened when he was thrown back inside. And he wasn’t alone this time. Assumingly, the woman from the tent shared his quarters now. When Lewis heard the man eating as they traveled, it was no longer a question as to what he ate.

  “You said I was your ticket out of here. How is that?”

  “I told you before. You are a very special man.”

  “Special how?”

  The man laughed, followed by a low, exasperated whistle. “You do not like surprises, do you? Well I cannot blame you.”

  “I haven’t yet met a surprise that I liked in this place.”

  This got a loud, hardy snort from the man.

  “No, I am sure you have not!” The man lifted something, inhaled the air around whatever it was, and then stripped its flesh away, chewed what sounded like pure gristle. Lewis ached with discomfort. The man spoke with his mouth full. “It is not often you come across a man such as yourself. Not in this place… Most who are condemned are condemned with deliberate haste. But you… whoever sent you here… has not made their mind up about you. Yet.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked. He believed he knew the answer, brimmed with colorful surety at what the man would tell him next.

  “Somehow, the lid is not yet nailed to your coffin.” He tossed the scraps of his meal over his shoulder, slopped them next to Lewis’s feet. It was wet and cold.

  “I’m alive…” he said under his breath, mouthed it, so low it was hardly a sound. He spoke louder: “Getting out of here, though… all there are, are rumors. How do you know?”

  “Mmmmmm…” the man growled, agreeably. “Sometimes not even I know how I came to know the things I do.”

  He waited for more to follow but the man said nothing.

  “You spoke my name the first time we met. How did you know that?”

  “Ah,” he began, the pitch of his voice rising like someone who can’t contain their punchline. He took a moment to swallow his delight. “I have read your book.”

  Lewis wasn’t sure he heard right.

  “My book?”

  “Fascinating things in there. Sad things. You are a sad person, are you not? Most people here are.” The man clicked his teeth with his tongue, spat something out. “Horrible how that little girl died.”

  Lewis’s stomach went cold. He sat himself up, leaned into the corner of the wagon. He searched the dark for those ember eyes but they weren’t there.

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “It’s all here, in your book.”

  Lewis gritted his teeth. “What book?”

  “This one here.” His voice was nearly choked with laughter. “Here, give it a read.”

  Something landed at Lewis’s side. The man was only barely able to hold in his amusement, audibly trembling with the effort. Lewis awkwardly turned away from it, to feel with his bound hands. It was a book, all right.

  “What is this?” he asked, although it felt more than familiar.

  “Your book. Found it. Days ago.”

  “What do you mean it’s my book?”

  “I mean it is a book, all about you.”

  “That doesn’t—”

  Like a match in his hollow head, it ignited. He remembered, or at least he felt confident he did. When he’d last flipped through its pages he’d seen her face there, inked fresh like a tattoo.

  “I was hungry, as I often am. And here you were, a fresh morsel creeping huddled through the woods so lost, jumping at every imagined sound. But there was something different about you. I could sense it. I could smell it. It dug my appetite deeper, I was starving for it, like nothing I have hungered for before. There had to be something special about you, I knew from the first I saw you.”

  “So you followed me.”

  The man’s grin was so broad, Lewis could hear his lips slide over his teeth in the pitch black.

  “The Historic Inn tells stories both old and new.”

  That was it. The book which had taunted him, that he had thrown across the room, had remained filled with his life even after he left. It made sense now, how the man knew his name, and how he was able to track him to Mercy’s Shore. Knowing this, in its own small way, took some mystery out of the man, some of the danger. He still wasn’t human, of course—something else entirely—but he wasn’t an all-knowing demigod, either. Lewis held the book, blind to its contents, and was curious what all it said about him. It wasn’t the thickest book…

  “And it told you… I was alive? Outside this place?”

  “Your death is not yet written. Not in this world or the last. I knew that was what I smelled on you. The others… they bring their death with them like rot in their shoes. If you could read it now, I imagine this very wagon ride is being described in the most poetic prose, up to this very moment.”

  “That doesn’t explain how you know the way out of here.”

  “I have…” He mulled his thoughts over, aggressive in his search, picking the right words. “… a knowing… in me. I exist as part of this world, and there are things about it I have always known. I do not know where I learned them. Only that I know them. It is the dark. It is me, as much as I am it. It knows me, and I know it. I’ve only been waiting for someone to come along who could be used as I need them to be used.”

  Someone still alive, he meant. It was hard to believe in all the time the curse existed that he was the first not to be killed upon being sent into it. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was only the first this man had found in time.

  Lewis set the book down.

  “What will happen?” he asked, uncertain. “How will you… use me…”

  “If all goes well,” the man started, “you and I will be very much alike when this is over.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The wagon stopped. The man jumped down from the bench, footsteps trudging away through… sand? The sound of waves was evident. They’d returned to the ocean. Lewis listened intently. The soft roar of the sea did nothing to ease his anxiety. Not far off, something was dragged through the sand. A wooden boat, he thought. Then the footsteps returned.

  “You know where we are?” the man asked, a guessing game.

  “The ocean.”

  “That
is right! Would you like to know what we are doing here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hmmm,” the man said. “That is all right. I will tell you. You see, normally if you were to head in that direction, out there, you would find nothing. You could row a boat for miles and miles until eventually the ocean took you, one way or another.”

  “So you brought me here to take me miles and miles into nothing.”

  “Of course not, Lewis. You are different, remember? You are special.”

  The wagon leaned as the man climbed up and reached in. His clawed hands took hold of Lewis’s feet and dragged him. He pulled him upright, carried him from the wagon like a toddler from their car seat, and then stood him on his feet in the sand, hands on his shoulders, facing the sound of the lapping waves.

  “A man, special as yourself, will find something else. The waves are not endless. This world does in fact have edges. There is an exit, but you must have the key to unlock it.” The man bent, beard against the side of Lewis’s face with the smell of an old, damp washcloth. His breath, just as unpleasant, tickled the inside of Lewis’s ear. “Death has yet to seal you in this place. It is open to you.”

  “And you think you’ll be able to come with me…”

  “I know it.” The man took a deep breath of the ocean air, held it, and released it with satisfaction. “I am no sailor, but I feel it does not matter. The exit will bring us to it, draw us in on its current. We need only row.”

  He pushed Lewis over into the sand. Lewis lay, fatigued and blinking sand from his eyes as the footsteps trailed off. The man dragged the boat some more, closer to the water.

  Caw, said the bird, presumably from on top of the wagon. Lewis had forgotten it was there, it’d been so quiet. It barked, little chirpy sounds in its throat. Something had its attention. It cawed again. The man stopped what he was doing. The boat dropped in the sand. Silence. Lewis squirmed, turned his head this way and that, trying to hear what they heard.

  “Stay away from us, I’m warning you,” the man said.

  Scampering through the sand, someone arrived at Lewis’s shoulder, kicked more sand into his eyes as they dropped to their knees beside him. Without warning, they brought a stone down upon his forehead. His vision exploded with stars, the first he’d ever seen in this place. He let out a grunt, dazed and spinning.

  “Now you know where,” she whispered. She struck him a second time with the stone. He felt his own blood spatter his face, his lips, as the crack in his skull was made deeper. The bird shrieked, took flight, airborne. “You know there’s another boat.”

  Before she could strike him again the bird was on her. They tussled on top of him. Her hand smushed against his face as she braced herself, batting with her other hand at the creature Lewis could hear clawing trenches in her flesh. She cried out, bird beak chomping. Lewis, in his bloodstained stupor, saw the brightly burning eyes drawing near in the background. He wished there was something he could do besides lay helpless. He rolled from side to side, strained his limbs against their restraints. Naked, the ropes only dug into his flesh like razor wire. Blood pooled into his eyes. The dizziness expanded into something else. He was falling in place. The only thing anchoring him on the beach was the sound of all their voices, the bird pleating and beating its wings, the sound of her sliding in the sand, her tiny breaths, the sound of heavy boots kicking toward them, next to them.

  She never landed a third blow, but the first two were enough. Their voices slowly diminished, farther and farther away around the bend of a dark tunnel somewhere, echoing and swollen. He wanted to tell her to run, get away, far, far away, but his tongue was dead in his mouth. He was going back, he knew. Back to the start of his journey, as naked and empty-handed as he was then.

  In the final seconds before he was washed away he listened as she was lifted, screaming, in the grips of those ember-eyes. Once more he left her in the wake of all his troubles.

  Chapter Ten

  Unexpected Bad

  Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, her largest pair of sunglasses eclipsing the upper half of her face below her sports visor. To any passersby, even someone who might know her, she looked like nothing more than your average soccer mom. The hard-driven, little red car she was parked in—she’d borrowed Lara’s—told a slightly different story, but nonetheless she was disguised.

  The parking lot was small and mostly empty. To avoid attention she parked across the street at the convenience store there. From there she saw everything she needed. The bar entrance and the few vehicles parked outside. Rosaline’s purple car was there.

  Now she waited, windows rolled down to let out the heat, phone in her lap, cold bottled water purchased from the very same convenience store in the sticky drink holder.

  Her phone buzzed. It was Beth. She answered, shaking with nerves.

  “We already have a problem,” Beth said, the usual sarcasm in her voice.

  “What? Don’t say that.”

  “I’m here, a couple houses down. Husband’s work truck is here. I tried to call the number but it goes straight to voicemail.”

  The fact their plan could be so easily interrupted not only frustrated Catherine, but caused her to question its soundness. They’d taken almost no precaution, whatever precautions there were to take, and their plan relied on everything going just as they wanted, which, of course, doesn’t account for people behaving like people. Unpredictably.

  Catherine considered. Beth could leave a voicemail, she thought, and then they could simply wait throughout the day to have their call returned. Then, once the husband was on his way, they could both drive to their respective positions—Catherine at the bar, Beth at their home—and start from there. But that relied on their call being returned.

  “Should we leave a voicemail, wait until he calls back?”

  “I have a different idea,” Beth said. Catherine listened, both eager and trepid. “I knock on the door and ask to use the phone. I’ll tell him my car broke down or something.”

  Catherine’s chest was rioting. “What? You can’t do that. That’s… We can’t just make things up as we go.”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  “What if he recognizes you? You’re one of her clients.”

  “I’ve never met the husband.”

  “And what do you expect to happen if he lets you use the phone? What if he just hands you a cell phone and lets you make the call on the front porch? This isn’t an idea, Beth, it’s… it’s nothing.”

  “Do you want to wait all day for him to check his voicemail? Chances are he doesn’t even take work on weekends. He makes his own hours after all. Guy doesn’t want to work weekends.”

  “You can’t just knock on the door and show your face to the family we’re stealing from.”

  “We’re not really stealing anything. I’m taking pictures. And it’ll be fine.”

  “How will you take pictures, or even get ahold of the book when you’re just there to make a phone call? No, none of this is smart. He can’t be there. This wasn’t the plan.”

  “We have to try something.”

  “What are the chances he lets you use the phone and isn’t in the room while you do it? Assuming you even get inside to use a phone. He’s going to hand you a cell phone. People don’t use landlines anymore.”

  “We still have a landline…”

  There was silence on the other end. Their plan was falling through, which wasn’t a big surprise. There wasn’t much to support it to begin with.

  “I won’t ask to use the phone, then. I’ll ask for help with my car.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I’ll tell him my car won’t start. Battery is dead.”

  “So then what? He follows you out to your car to give you a jump?”

  More silence. “Yes, actually. And while he’s doing that, I’ll ask if I can use the bathroom.”

  The more they talked it through the more ridiculous it sounded. Catherine wasn’t sure why Beth seemed so d
esperate to get it done as soon as possible.

  “It’s not going to work, Beth. It’s fine. We can think of something else. Plan something else. It’s not like…” She paused, tasted the words before she spoke them. “It’s not like we need to do this today.”

  She was meant to return to work the next day. Life was meant to continue. And it would. Hers wouldn’t, not exactly. But life would. She would just have to hold onto him a little longer, until a better plan occurred to her…

  “If not today, Catherine, then when? That guy isn’t looking too good, did you notice? I know you’re doing your best, but that might not be good enough. Not for him. And if not for him, not for you either. My plan sounds stupid as shit, I know, but it’s a plan. I can improvise. You know I want to get you out of this situation you’re in. Sooner rather than later. If you wait too much longer, who’s to say he isn’t going to die anyway.”

  And wouldn’t that be a relief, Catherine thought. She hated herself for thinking it. Things were easier when you just let them happen. Let the world wash over you. Roll over you, more like. She would hate herself a lot more if she actually let that happen.

  “Okay,” she said. Relented. “Do what you think is best.”

  Even she could hear the defeat in her voice. When Beth responded, her voice carried an acute awareness of that defeat.

  “We have to try.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m going to hang up now. Whatever happens, I’ll call you. All right?”

  “All right.”

  “You okay?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Okay. Wish me luck.”

  “Don’t do anything too outrageous.”

  “Of course not. I’ll call you soon. Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  She dropped the phone in her lap. The bar across the street was exactly as it had been at the start of the phone call. No new patrons had arrived. No one had left. She sat and watched, eyes glazed over as she barely processed what she was looking at. The physical world before her was lost to the thoughts stampeding around inside her mind. She saw Beth, playing it up as a ditzy woman in need of rescue. Maybe she’d even remove her wedding band before she went to the door. Who knew. Beth was funny like that. Crazy like that.