Chapter 9
They went upstream with the river on their right. For a little while there was a path, a hard dirt track that wandered through
hummocks of close-cropped grass. Then they were climbing for higher ground and there was hardly any path at all. They worked
their way up through a curious stand of ancient gnarled trees, like passing through a bewitched forest. The gathering night
smelled strongly of leaf mold and wet earth, and they emerged from the trees into a clearing, a sort of landing on the side
of the hill. In the center of the clearing was a jagged tooth of granite, spotted with lichens and moss. As they approached
it, in the dimness, Colin could see it was inscribed: someone had chiseled Pictish lettering into it a thousand years ago,
little whirlpool symbols and dashes with lines through them.
“Ogham inscriptions,” Arthur said. “The written language of the Celtic holy men.”
“Follow Finger round,” Stu Finger said. “And round again. ’Tis an old tradition what does no harm to no one.
It throws off any ghosts’d follow you.” Their guide touched one dirty fingertip to the leaning stone and began to circle it.
He cast a knowing look over one shoulder, eyes glimmering to either side of his bony nose.
“Now where we go, you may hear sounds like voices, heh heh, but they are the red-throated divers down south, toward the Crowdy Reservoir. The sound carries out here. It’s a funny thing, yes.
Wery funny! Pay it no mind. And when we go down the hole, you may see shapes in the dark, like the shadows of men, but if they disturb you, look away and think of ’em no more.
Watch the tussocks ahead, gennlemen. The briars out here, they grabbet you.
They grabbet and they like to keeps what they grab. ”
Colin did as Arthur had already done, touched a fingertip to the stone and began to circle it, his knee sore, throbbing whenever
he put weight on his left foot. He went around once and again and as he circled it that second time he felt a wave of lightheadedness
roll over him. The world seemed to bulge, like a soap bubble expanding from a bubble wand as it filled with a child’s breath. It was such a queer sensation, he almost
needed to sit down. On his third circuit, he dropped his hand at the sight of a gate. There was an old leaning wooden frame
and a white stone lintel set across the path; the original gate was long rotted away and had been replaced by a rusting blue
car door, with loops of copper wire for hinges. But the gate hadn’t been there the first time he went around the stone, or
the second, he was almost sure of it. Finger was already shuffling across that pale stone lintel, without a look back.
Arthur had paused, and before Colin could follow Finger through the open gate, Arthur grabbed his arm.
“Now,” he whispered, and offered Colin the Surrealist’s Glass.
Colin lifted it to one eye, and what he saw so shocked him he almost cried out.
Through the Surrealist’s Glass he saw not a dilapidated wooden gate with a car door for an entrance, but a twelve-foot-high
arch of alabaster stone, with ogham inscriptions scratched into it. It looked as new as the day it had been planted in the
earth, perhaps a millennium ago. The tunnel of briars on the other side was a dark and thorny passageway, as much of a cave
as anything Finger had promised to lead them to.
But it was Stu Finger himself who startled Colin most. Seen through the glass, he was almost seven feet tall, his right shoulder higher than the other, his features grotesque and malformed.
He was hairless, his skull a bumpy, bulging ridge.
He wore a tunic, not an army jacket, and the much-patched canvas pants of a court jester.
He had a great gaping slot for a mouth, and a pair of curved, yellowing tusks, half a foot long each, rose from among his lower teeth.
His hands, big as hubcaps, were knuckly, callused, with horny fingernails that looked sharp enough to carve a person open.
Worst of all, though, was his skin: the kind of purply-gray skin one associated with millipedes and other things found under rocks.
Finger cast a look back over his raised shoulder, to see if they were following, and Colin lowered the glass.
He panted. And swallowed. And gave Arthur an uncertain grin as he handed back the monocle. He was suddenly conscious of having
no spit. He wondered, not for the first time, what talisman Arthur kept that he believed would keep Finger under their power—a
ring that could call down a lightning bolt, perhaps, or some splinter of Christ’s cross, worn on a loop of twine, hidden inside
his shirt. He wished now he had compelled Arthur to tell him what he had brought for their protection. The not-knowing was
almost as frightening as what he had just glimpsed through the Surrealist’s Glass.
“Does he know we know?” Colin asked quietly.
Arthur gave his head a little shake and proceeded through the dilapidated gate. Colin hustled after him, ducking through that
narrow opening in the thorns.
The roof of the tunnel through the briars seemed low, so low Colin kept ducking, although he knew it had to be higher than
it seemed—Finger made his way through with no trouble at all and had been huge when seen through the glass. Colin stayed close to Arthur, was aware that with each step they moved deeper into the landscape
of fairy tale. In fairy tales, it was unwise to be separated from your companions in the deep, dark forest.
Something began screaming, and Colin stopped. That scream—a high-pitched wail—broke off, started again, broke off once more,
then disintegrated into a nasty chuckle. A bird, maybe. The red-throated divers in the Crowdy Reservoir, perhaps. But it had
sounded for all the world like an insane child, wailing in delight.
The tunnel widened as the briars thinned away, then ended completely.
They had reached flat ground, scattered with boulders.
One boulder in particular loomed over all: a black dragon’s egg of a stone, the ground crumbling away under one curve, leaving a dark space beneath.
Finger was already on his back, wiggling into the gap.
The narrow black Cheshire Cat’s grin opening under the boulder could not have been more than a foot high.
“We’re going in there?” Colin asked.
“This is a bad moment to tell me you’re claustrophobic,” Arthur said, slipping off his backpack. They would have to pull their
gear behind them.
Colin tucked his flashlight into his backpack, while Arthur kept his firmly in his right hand. Arthur knelt and slid into
the gap feetfirst, wiggling through, dragging his backpack behind him. He had to tip his head back to get under the rock—Colin
thought of a man baring his throat for the knife. Then he was gone. His backpack went after him, sucked through the hole with
a whisper and slap of nylon.
Colin did as Arthur and Finger had done. As he wiggled his stomach under the boulder, he wondered how much it weighed. Two,
three tons? More than a pickup truck. He imagined a grinding of earth and the stone suddenly shifting, dropping on his midsection
and squeezing his guts out of his own mouth and asshole like toothpaste. The thought made him breathless with exhilaration.
He dropped. Not far. His feet scraped smooth, damp stone as he hung by the one hand gripping his backpack, now stuck in the
crevasse above. His left arm was stretched high over his head, the toes of his sneakers barely touching the floor.
Arthur clicked on his flashlight and a disc of brightness slid up an earthen wall, thick worms of roots poking from it, and,
amid the dirt, a bit of ancient fresco, a faded painted medieval face peering out from the filth. Colin could see Arthur but
not Finger and was wondering where their guide had gone when there was a scrape in the dirt behind him, and a snort of laughter,
and Colin was whopped from behind, a blow across the kidneys that sent him swinging like a pinata. The backpack above abruptly
slipped free and he dropped to the ground on his bad knee. Pain lanced up the thigh and he cried out—a shameful moment of
weakness.
Arthur spun, and as he did he punched the button on the side of his flashlight, cycling the bulb up to the highest setting. A beam of pure sunshine stabbed into Colin’s face, blinding him for an instant. The light bobbed past him, and Finger screamed.
“Oh, the bastard! The pestilent bastard, he brought a bad light to hurt us! Who made such a bad light as this and how does it come to be in Stu Finger’s hole, to
blind and hurt and punish? Who fashioned this nasty lance of light to sting poor Stu Finger?”
“I couldn’t tell you who made it or by what sorcery. I bought it in a Homebase,” Arthur said, keeping the beam of light between
them and Finger. “This is a Cree hi-thrower, a high-intensity discharge lamp. The hippies use them to grow pot in their basements
because it so closely mimics sunlight. You don’t like sunlight, do you, Finger?”
“This lying nig-nog! There’s no electric torch can throw a light like that,” Finger said to himself. “His black mouth tells
blacker lies.”
Colin touched his back and felt blood. He saw Finger cowering against a back wall . . . with a shillelagh in one hand, a deformed
club bigger than a baseball bat, with what looked like nails and bits of broken glass superglued to the business end. Finger
must have whacked Colin with it, and he thought Finger had been stepping forward to sink it into his head when Arthur came
around with the light.
“The fuck?” he snapped at the troll.
“Are they lies?” Arthur said calmly. “Let’s find out.” And he flicked the spot of light toward Finger’s face.
Finger reeled backward with a howl, retreating from the light instinctively, and Colin looked past the man at the wall of
the cave and went breathless. Finger’s shadow was that of the troll, not the man. Colin could see, quite clearly, the enormous,
lumpish shape of the head, the hooks of the tusks, and the great blunt hands, printed on the stone in darkness. The Finger
that threw the shadow was still a scrawny man with pale hair . . . although to Colin’s eyes his gaunt, filthy face was suddenly
less convincing. It was less a man’s face, more an artful rubber mask of a man’s face, starting to come loose around the eyes
and mouth.
Some perverse streak of curiosity must’ve got the better of the old troll.
Having instinctively dodged the hi-thrower beam, he hesitantly lifted one hand and reached toward the glare.
Finger’s hand slipped into the light . .
. and Colin saw the tips of the fingers suddenly shift from pink human flesh to a cancer-bruise purple to gray.
Skin crackled, and what looked like a powdery ash started to spill from his hand, floating in the air.
Finger screamed in pain and fear and yanked his hand back and clutched it to his chest.
“Stone!” Finger screamed. “He mean to make a stone of us! He lured us down here to make it our grave and Stu Finger to be
his own headstone!”
“Enough!” Arthur cried, with a sharpness that Colin had not imagined he possessed. It was not the voice of the frightened
and hopeless boy who had suffered at Jayne Nighswander’s hands, but of an old schoolmaster who has seen enough foolishness
to last a lifetime, and it came to Colin that he hardly knew this Arthur at all. “If I wanted to make a rock out of you, I’d’ve
done it by now. The only one who meant to make this a grave was you, Svangur the Sly. I ought to cook your hands to stone right now for taking that club to Colin. But you might need them to
lead us to your hoard. You have things that I want. Give them to me and you’ll live out the night.”
“This was your talisman?” Colin asked. Pain pulsed in his back, and the left knee was stiffening up on him. His aches were bad—but
the breathless thrill of fear in his chest was worse because it was so unfamiliar to him. “A flashlight? I thought you had, I don’t know, a cloak of invisibility or something.”
“I do have a cloak of invisibility,” Arthur murmured. “It’s called academia.”
Finger moaned. “He wants the goodies! He’ll take all our favorite things and leave us with nothing! Our favorite thigh bone.
Our best piece of rope. The Jenna Jameson videos. He doesn’t even want them, he just doesn’t want us to have them!” He sounded close to angry tears. “He’ll take it and make a big stupid rock of
us anyway.”
“No. I will deal fairly with you. Not that you deserve it. You’ve killed children, Finger, and left their mothers ruined with
grief. You’ve stolen everything you own, and you murdered to take it.”
“Mr. Finger hasn’t killed anyone in a really, really long time!” Stu Finger cried.
“What’s a long time?” Colin asked.
The troll held up seven fingers. “Nine years! Nine big fat ones!”
Arthur laughed without humor.
Stu Finger sucked the gray, cracked tips of his fingers. Colin thought they were already beginning to deepen in color, returning
to flesh.
“What does he want? The blood of a saint, to heal his sick black heart? The hairy monk’s robe that will let him walk through
fire?”
That seemed to check Arthur, cause him to consider for a moment. Colin thought Finger had admitted to possessing a few items
Arthur had not at all expected to find down here.
“I came for a sword. One that will cut through a dragon’s hide and is made of something more than steel. The Sword of Strange
Hangings it was known as once.”
Finger’s eyes widened with fascination. “Take it and kill Stu Finger with it?”
“I don’t need a sword to kill you. I aim to sink it into something quite a bit larger than you.”
“If you want a blade to cut through a dreadful wurm, then you have problems bigger than poor Svangur, heh heh. If you’ve got
problems with an ancient wurm, you best take that sword and fall on it. End your suffering. You have no chance of getting
it into a great snake.”
“You let me worry about that. Do we have a deal?”
Finger chewed the yellow shiv of his thumbnail and muttered to himself. “Turn down your light? So it won’t accidentally shine
on poor Stu Finger and turn his cock harder than it’s ever been, heh heh? Come along, gennlemen. Don’t dawdle. Don’t fall
behind. Stay close to me and Finger will show you how deep this old hole goes.”