Earth- Giants, Golems, & Gargoyles, page 17
In her mind, Jogoth screamed and screamed and screamed.
Troll Seal
Rose Strickman
THE HOUSE WAS older than Janet remembered.
Shady and secretive beneath the spreading branches of the oak trees blazing with autumn colour, it seemed rooted in the earth. The wind sighed through the branches, a peaceful sound, and sent leaves skittering across the flagstone path. The grind of the highway was muffled and distant.
Janet made sure the key the lawyer had given her was safely in her pocket before grabbing her purse and slamming the car door behind her. Stopping only to get her bag and violin case from the trunk, she headed toward the front door, framed by vines crawling toward the sloping roof.
The path cut through a lush garden. Autumn flowers bloomed, and the lawn grew thick and verdant. Here and there, ceramic statuary poked from the foliage: strange gargoyles, earth-coloured. A dragon. A squat goblin. Abstract shapes that seemed to suggest mushrooms and toadstools.
Janet negotiated the lock, holding her purse awkwardly to her side, and opened the door to a rush of slightly stale air; no one had lived in this house for three months now, since Aunt Vera died. She stood in the doorway, blinking against the dimness.
She’d only been to this house once before, as a small child. What she saw now confirmed her dim memories: a cosy entryway, with hooks for coats and cubbies for shoes. There was even an old plaid coat hanging from a hook. Janet sighed as she hung up her purse and put away her shoes; the lawyer hadn’t been kidding about her inheriting the house and everything it contains. Clearly, she would have to sort through all of Vera’s things herself.
This was confirmed as she toured the rest of the cottage. The kitchen cabinets opened onto disorganized hodgepodges of equipment and utensils; Janet sniffed at the chaos. She’d have to clear that up, no question. The living room was in a similar state, with brightly coloured cushions thrown around and books lying on the coffee table. There was a music stand in the corner, but any hope that Vera had played was dashed when she saw it held nothing but a mass of dusty playbills and newspapers. She placed her violin case nearby anyway.
She opened the door to the bedroom a little tentatively, absurdly nervous: this was where Vera had died. Thank God, someone had stripped the bed. The bare mattress stood out in stark contrast to the rest of the room, which was in disarray, with books and clothes lying in heaps.
Janet delicately removed a lacy negligee from a sculpture. It was another ceramic statue, a pot-bellied gargoyle. Vera had been a real artist, Janet thought: she’d captured the creature’s bright eyes and the sharpness of its long teeth perfectly.
“Well, I hope you’re a friendly monster,” she told the gargoyle, patting it on the head. She rotated around, sighing. “Got to clean this place up.”
She began organizing the chaos, heaping all the clothes together in one pile, stacking the books in another, and shoving loose pens into a jam jar on the desk. As she did so, she uncovered more sculptures, similar to the first: each made of clay, about a foot high, depicting a different gargoyle or monster. There were long limbs, claws, horns, and sharp teeth, but also roly-poly bellies and friendly smiles. Four sculptures, each positioned in one of the four corners of the room.
“Well, you must be glad to be getting a dust,” Janet said to the last one, wiping it with a pair of shorts. “I wonder if there are any more of you . . . ?”
She set off, back into the house, searching. Indeed there were more: foot-high ceramic sculptures, all of them earth- and clay-coloured, tucked discreetly—almost secretively—into corners and behind furniture. Each depicted a unique creature, obviously dreamed up from Vera’s active imagination. There were bat wings, crocodile tails, shark teeth, and insect eyes, all lurking in the shadows. Nevertheless, each had a surprisingly benign expression.
“I wonder why she made so many?” Janet wondered aloud. She glanced at the side door to the converted porch, and, after a moment’s hesitation, stepped through to Vera’s old studio.
Vera McMahon had been a ceramics artist of some renown and her studio reflected that. There was a potter’s wheel, a great oven, racks for drying sculptures, and tools lined up on the workbench. But the oven was cold, the loaves of clay gone dry; no one had worked here since Vera’s sudden death three months ago.
Janet stood in the doorway, a leaden weight of depression falling on her. She’d enjoyed exploring, but the sight of the studio—so alien, so utterly useless to her—brought home the fact that she couldn’t stay here. And if she couldn’t stay, she’d have to go back, back to the city, back to the memories—
Janet closed her eyes tight. Stop. Don’t think that. She took three deep breaths before opening them again. She had the autumn, anyway. She had the house to clean up, the estate to organize. She’d set up an office here and, perhaps, after three months, memory’s razor edge would be blunted and she’d be ready to go home.
Smiling grimly—the fact that she looked forward to settling a deceased relative’s estate proved that things were definitely bad—she turned and headed back to the kitchen.
There was a small, white-painted door she hadn’t noticed before. Opening it, she found a flight of unfinished stairs leading down. She switched on the light and headed into the basement.
It was surprisingly bare down here, with none of the usual detritus of basements: no cardboard boxes, no dusty old furniture shoved out of the way, not even a laundry. Just more of the sculptures: four gargoyles positioned around the oddest discovery yet.
Janet blinked down at the vast, round ceramic tile, set in the floor like a plug. At least four feet across, it depicted, in intricate, upraised detail, a monster.
Not a friendly, fat-bellied monster like the gargoyles, but a true beast. Its hulk and proportions suggested great height; its apish arms bulged with muscles. Its flesh was half furred, half scaled; claws adorned its hands and feet, and malicious eyes blazed above a mouth crowded with fangs.
Janet shivered, irrationally glad that the monster was depicted as being behind bars, inside a cage. The imprisoned beast was surrounded by three concentric circles of flowers and vines, each a different species. The fourth, outermost circle depicted a continuous, unbroken chain.
“Okay, creepy . . .” This seemed so different from the rest of Vera’s artworks. Far more malevolent. And—now that she looked around—it seemed to her that the gargoyles here in the basement were a bit more ferocious than those upstairs: none of them had any friendly smiles. Each stood crouched, ready to spring if the monster escaped . . .
Janet shook her head with a little laugh. If the monster escaped! It was just a ceramic tile. She was letting the creepy basement get to her. It was time to go back upstairs, finish unpacking.
It was a relief to return to the sunny kitchen and close the door behind her. Janet moved around, unpacking, but did not quite avoid looking at the basement door.
ON JANET’S THIRD morning in the house, Stephen arrived.
It was such a glorious day that Janet took her laptop outside, to sit on the front porch while the world brightened around her. This was the way to work, she thought contentedly: laptop on her knee, tea at her side. The sun burned off the last phantasmal mists of night, and the dew sparkled on the flowers. She would really have to see about taking care of this garden—it seemed such a shame to let it go to waste . . .
As though her thoughts conjured it, a pickup truck rumbled up to stop by the front gate. Janet tensed as the door opened and a man got out.
“Hello there!” He waved cheerfully from the gate. “You must be Vera’s niece. Mind if I come in?”
“Um, hi.” Janet moved her laptop onto the table and stood up. “I’m Janet McMahon. Who are . . . ?”
“I’m Stephen Young. I was Vera’s gardener—took care of it after she passed, too.” His smile faded. “I—I didn’t think before I came today, though. Should I come back later . . . ?”
“No, no, that’s fine,” Janet said, although part of her did wish to send him away from her peaceful solitude. “Go ahead.”
She stood back nervously as Stephen saluted jauntily and went to the shed, getting out garden tools with the ease of long familiarity. “I’m sorry,” she said at last, “I—I kind of thought Aunt Vera did her own gardening.”
“Vera?” Stephen laughed. “No, no, she never did. She was an artist, not a gardener. But she liked a nice garden. She used to sit right in that chair, watching.” He nodded at her vacated seat.
“I was working,” Janet offered. “I’m an accountant.”
“Oh? Do you enjoy that?”
Janet had to laugh. “It’s got its good points. I . . . used to compose music too, but just as a hobby. How ’bout you? Do you do other people’s gardens?”
“Yeah. I’m sort of an odd jobs man: roof repair here, house painting there. I get by.”
Janet sat down again. “How well did you know my aunt?”
“About as well as anyone did.” He shrugged. “She was pretty private. But I knew her going on thirty years—ever since she moved in. She was nice. Bit odd sometimes, but nice.”
“Odd?”
“Well, you know: artist. She had the whole creative genius thing going on. You should’ve seen some of the stuff she came up with.” He chuckled.
“I have. The house is full of gargoyles.”
“Oh, yeah—Vera called those the guardians.” Stephen began rooting around the rosebushes, looking for weeds. “Said they were there to keep the house safe. She sold a lot of them, too.”
Janet thought of the four gargoyles in the basement, all facing the huge tile. “Did she ever show you the basement?”
Was it just her, or did Stephen pause just slightly? “Why do you ask?”
“Well, there was something a bit weird down there . . .” Briefly, she described the tile.
Stephen listened and, when she was finished, said, “Huh!”
“What do you mean?”
“I saw that tile once.” Stephen returned to weeding, a bit more vigorously than before. “Must’ve been about a year after she moved in. I was in the house for some reason, and she had it in her studio. A big ceramic plaque with a monster in a cage. Vera said it was a . . .” He broke off.
“What?”
“She said it was a troll seal. Something meant to keep a troll imprisoned underground.” Stephen looked up with an apologetic smile. “Like I said, your aunt could be a bit odd.”
Janet thought of the monster, caged in ceramic. The troll. “Odd. Right.”
THAT NIGHT, JANET dreamed.
She dreamed she was back with Neal, and a bittersweet joy soaked the dream. She had Neal back—they were laughing and happy together, but even dreaming, she knew her happiness would end when she woke alone—
And then she did.
She lay in the utter dark of the rural night. A dry sob rose up her throat. She was in her dead aunt’s house and Neal was gone forever.
She couldn’t stay in bed. An urge she couldn’t quite identify drove her to her feet and through the house.
The living room, illuminated by the lamp’s golden glow, was still a mess, but it was an organized mess now: one of neatly labelled boxes and bags, full of things Janet was either going to keep, sell, or donate. She opened her violin case and removed the instrument and bow.
It felt good to hold her violin again. After Neal’s death, she’d spent hours playing: long, melancholy tunes that filled her apartment like sobs and sighs. But she hadn’t been able to compose anything. Every time she’d tried setting her pencil to the music paper, the pain had spiked, driving back any inspiration.
But now the night was a sea of solitude around her island of light, and the urge was rising again.
She went to fetch paper and pencil. Adjusting the music stand, she wrote out a few notes of the tune taking shape in her head. Experimentally, she played them. No—something slower, a more minor key. Yes. That was it.
Her pencil scratched out the revised chord.
“HELLO, MS. JANET!” Stephen peered at her through the morning sunlight. “You sleep okay?”
“Fine.” Janet fought down a yawn. She’d composed for hours, the tune practically writing itself, and only staggered back to bed as the sun came up. Now she was bleary and heavy-eyed. Still, she felt more cheerful than she had in a long time, in an exhausted way. She was composing music again. Progress.
“You should head into town.” Stephen loaded compost into his wheelbarrow. “Can’t be good for you, locked up in that house all the time.”
“I’ve only been here a few days.”
“Yeah, but you don’t want to become a recluse. We’re having the farmer’s market tomorrow—you should come!”
“Oh, yeah? Will you be there?”
“Probably. Just as a shopper, though.” He dug his shovel into the compost heap. “I used to be a vendor,” he said reflectively. “Years ago. I had my own plot of land. I grew organic berries.”
“Why’d you stop?” Janet leaned against the porch rail.
“Something went wrong with my land.” Stephen shrugged. “All my bushes died, one by one. The soil went strange—sort of chalky and nasty. I called in the experts, but they couldn’t explain it. Then your aunt came around.”
Janet blinked. “My aunt?”
“Vera had some sculptures she said I should bury in my land. Weird little golem things. She said—” He broke off.
“What?” He didn’t reply. “Come on, what?”
“You’ve got to remember,” he mumbled, “your aunt was a very unusual person. Intelligent and nice, but . . . Anyway, she said a gremlin was burrowing around under my property. Ruining the soil. That was bad enough, she said, but then it attracted worse things.”
Janet thought of the basement. “Like trolls?”
“Yeah, maybe.” Stephen dug in with more vigour. “Well, I told her it was nonsense. But soon after that, I woke up in the middle of the night. Something was screaming. It was my dog, Christy. Something had torn her to pieces.”
Janet felt a dark shiver. “That’s awful.”
“Yeah. Must’ve been a bear or something. Anyway, that was the last straw. I got rid of my plot—got stiffed for it, too—and haven’t tried farming since.”
“Sorry to hear that.” Janet paused. “Did you ever find out what really happened?”
Stephen shook his head. “Never did. The land recovered, though, with no one farming it.” He laughed. “Maybe the gremlin went away!”
“Yeah.” Janet’s laughter felt false and flat. “Maybe.”
JANET HAD ACCOUNTANCY work to do that day, and then she had to meet with the lawyer before dropping off donations, so she had no time to compose more music. The tune was running through her head, though, and she woke early the next day to take up her violin. She wrote notes, tried them out, and replaced them. Slowly, the tune grew.
It was a relief to get out of bed and work on the composition. She’d had a fitful sleep. She kept swimming up from dreams of whispering voices, rising from underground. She couldn’t make out what the voices were saying, but they sounded malevolent. Janet pushed the nightmares aside. They were just dreams. She wrote another note, in minor key. This was turning into a slow, sad song, almost a dirge.
By the time she finished the day’s composition, the sun was high and hot and dreams of dark voices seemed foolish. She remembered Stephen mentioning the farmer’s market. Well, why not?
The little town on the river buzzed with activity; she had a hard time finding a parking place. She had to traverse most of the town to get to the market, but it was worth it: a riot of colour and happy activity. She shopped the stalls and ate at one of the food trucks, tucked underneath a tree. She left the market only to purchase blank music paper at a nearby art supply store. By the time Janet got back to the car, darkness was beginning to gather in the sky, filling the spaces under the trees and between the buildings.
Janet drove home through the twilight, pausing only when her headlights swept over a deer, crossing the road. Janet slowed and stopped; she and the doe stared at one another a moment before the animal slipped gracefully into the brush.
Still marvelling over the encounter, Janet arrived back at the house, groping her way to the front door and switching on the light in the entryway. It had been quite a day, she thought, hanging up her purse and hauling the bags into the kitchen. Still, she didn’t feel so tired . . . perhaps there was time for more composition. She’d already had dinner in town, after all.
She started to head for the living room.
Don’t.
She paused. What had that been? That soft, scratchy . . . voice?
Don’t finish the spell.
The hairs on her neck stood up. “Who’s there?”
Only silence answered her. Overhead, the kitchen light shone prosaically. Even the gargoyle in the corner looked almost ordinary.
Janet frowned at it. What was it doing here in the kitchen? She could have sworn that gargoyle—a cross between a bat and an alligator—had been in the hallway before.
She bent down to pick it up—and hesitated, pulled back by a sudden, irrational reluctance. What if she felt skin and scales instead of clay? What if it moved—?
She growled at herself. “Don’t be an idiot.” She picked up the gargoyle, and it felt like regular glazed ceramic, its hollow body giving a little scraping ring as she lifted it.
She placed it by the bench in the entryway. It looked so familiar there—so right—that she was almost convinced it had been there before. But then how had it gotten into the kitchen . . . ?
She pinched her eyes shut. “God,” she grumbled. “Got to get to bed.” She was going as mad as her aunt . . .
She headed to the bedroom, resolutely not checking to make sure the gargoyle hadn’t moved.
THE NEXT DAY was grey, cloudy, and cold. In that dim light, the gargoyles squatted like toadstools.
