Chapter Sixteen #3
The gate under the lych-roof was jammed permanently ajar.
He slipped through the gap. Tracked through the long, damp grass around the gravestones.
Up on a corner of the tower, a fanged gargoyle twisted to watch his approach.
It winked at him. He made the porch, set amidships along the body of the church.
The great oak door, like the gate, was ajar.
The same soft blue glow, spilling out through the gap, brighter here in the gloom under the porch.
Shadows, shifting across the spill. Scuffle-scrape of something large moving within.
Duncan grimaced.
He booted the big oak door wider open. Edged cautiously inside.
Cleared the nave, left and right, with the McCulloch.
No obvious threats. Just pews sunk in soft blue gloom, visibly dust coated but otherwise neatly arranged.
Pervasive smell of damp—there were cracks in the cream plastered walls, blue light spilling out.
Here and there, chunks of plaster had fallen away.
Detritus crunched under his feet as he moved up the aisle toward the base of the tower.
There, things like bell ropes hung down twitching, as if in a fitful draft.
But there was no draft.
The church seemed to sigh and suck in upon itself.
The bell ropes twisted gropingly about, tentacular, finally, in eerie unison, raised and pointed their ends toward him.
Jet, unblinking eyes like the spider’s at each rope end—did he really see that?
Or was it the Fae heart’s blood he’d ingested, surging and suggesting, still in his veins?
Higher up in the tower space, something bulky rasped and moved about. Duncan eased to a wary halt.
Close enough, lad.
“I’ve come to toll the bell,” he called out.
Long silence. Duncan grimaced again. He shouldered the McCulloch for a moment, hefted Stordalen’s head carefully to get the weight, then heaved it down the aisle.
It made a low arc into the tower space, hit the floor there with a dull thump.
The bell rope appendages recoiled upward.
Wet, throaty whispers and scraping echoed in the tower.
Duncan cleared his throat, pitched his voice louder, quelling fear and doubt, driving them out the way he had in the duel last night.
“Do you hear me? I have come to sound farewell to Stordalen of the Final Isles! That’s his fucking head, by the way. Stordalen of the Final Isles, cut down by mortal hands. By my hands! Let the bell toll for him, and let the whole fucking Forest hear it!”
For a long moment, he was afraid it wouldn’t work, that the whispered tales among the woodsmen had gotten it wrong, or at least left out some vital detail.
Some piece of intricate spell-craft, some ritual step.
But then, the bell-rope appendages drooped down once more, lowering themselves, lengthening themselves, like threads of drool from some immense predator’s jaw.
They touched the severed head tentatively, as if it might be hot.
They walked their tentacle ends over it, prodded and pushed it, finally took it and turned it over like some interesting pebble picked up off the beach.
The rasping sounds grew more definite, louder.
Something immense sagged down into view.
Duncan stared, tried to make sense, finally just gagged and backed up one instinctive step before he could stop himself.
A gibbering litany dinned in his head, none of it right.
—drowned, swallowed, shrouded, sunken, BURIED…
In the trenches, he’d seen whole bodies immured.
Artillery hurled and buried its victims with the coarse, good-humored abandon of a school bully stuffing heads down a latrine.
They ended up everywhere, might crop up anywhere and—as a drawling American medic he’d met put it—any which way up.
Then, shoring up a captured trench, extending, digging in after a successful advance—these things had to be done in haste and without regard to niceties like disposal of the incidental dead.
The results were like horrors from some overly imaginative alcoholic’s DT dream—disembodied arms and legs protruding stiffly out of trench walls, getting in the way, sunken, skullish faces emerging from the dirt like revenants, a general stink that soldiers masked with cigarette and pipe smoke as best they could.
You got used to these things. The sights and stenches grew mundane.
One sweltering summer morning after a dawn assault, Duncan watched one of his corporals, a noted company wit, hang up his water canteen on the booted foot of a corpse sticking out of the recently rebuilt revetment.
He’d laughed, and so had most of his men.
—not like this…
Whatever lived in the tower was mostly amorphous, had the wet gleam of internal tissue all over, punctured here and there with what might have been protruding bone, and there were human limbs and faces embedded in it, and they were alive.
Mouths worked, eyes implored. Expressions of anguish, yearning out from the mass of tissue, embedded, pressed, crushed together.
A congregation, praying unanswered down the years since the Forest came.
Fingers flexed and gestured, muscles stood proud like ropes.
Arms twitched, reached fitfully out. Begging, perhaps, for the same end as the station master.
The thing, the congregation, lowered itself to within a couple of feet of the stone floor.
It swung there, massive, the way that corporal’s canteen had swung from the dead man’s foot.
It confronted Duncan like the enormity of every single day of slaughter he’d ever lived through made flesh.
The thing’s nearest arms took hold of a back row pew, grasped and worked the wood until it creaked with the force of their grip.
The pew shifted, grating, on the stone floor.
Higher up, on the knobbed and crusted top of the main mass, thick, tentacular limbs—brutally muscular versions of their underslung bell-rope cousins—webbed back up the tower beyond view, held the creature suspended.
It made a soft, lowing, hooting sound that stung tears into Duncan’s eyes. It held up Stordalen’s head in its tentacles like a question it seemed to think he could answer.
Shaken, shaking, Duncan stood his ground. He lifted the McCulloch in warning.
“Just ring the fucking bell,” he snarled.
And fled.