My Brother's Keeper, page 28
“A false one, Branwell. Trust me.”
For a moment he just stared at her, clearly considering the idea that her confidence might somehow be justified; then he looked away. “But we’ll still die, you know. The little ghosts, the ones that are just smoke and vapor—we unthinkingly cough them away now, but they’ll get into us, without his conferred immunity. They’ll kill us.”
“Gradually,” she said. “By degrees.”
“Sooner than later.”
“Probably. So?”
For several seconds neither of them spoke.
Finally Branwell managed a laugh. Quietly he said, “In the dream he was able to work my left hand. I would like to get it back again, for myself, if only for a while.”
“Your soul too. And not just for a while.”
“Well yes, that too.”
“You can have it back—but it calls for a sacrifice from each of us that were there, that day.”
“What do we have? No money—blood, again?”
“A sacrifice from a harvest we took, but now decline to pay for. Seventeen years of harvests.” He gave her a blank, slack-jawed look, and she went on, “My first novel is out of my hands, but my second is half-written. Anne’s novel is unavailable too, but she has a lot of poetry.” She spread her hands and forced her voice to be level. “We’ll burn it.”
“Are you—hah!—asking me to burn what I’ve been writing? Along with your—”
“You stay here. I’ll take it all out there. Today.”
“Your first novel, your second novel—you and Anne—little tales of Glass Town and Gondal? I’m writing a real novel! It’s all very well for you two to burn your . . . your efforts, but I can’t possibly—”
“Whatever their value, we owe a sacrifice from that harvest.”
He glanced toward his desk, then back at his sister. “Who says so?”
Minerva, thought Emily; who received me because our father asked for her cyclopes-made armor when he arrived on these shores at the age of twenty-five. Emily imagined trying to explain this to Branwell, then just said, “I say so.”
Branwell wiped his right hand across his mouth. “Truly, Emily?”
She nodded. “For your soul.”
He stood up quickly and crossed to the desk. “So I must cease to be,” he said as he yanked open the top drawer, “and, with me, what my pen has gleaned from my teeming brain—no high-piled books to hold their full-ripened grain . . .”
Emily recognized the Keats sonnet that he was mangling, and mentally supplied the last words of it: love and fame to nothingness do sink.
“For us all, Branwell,” she said.
He lifted out a stack of handwritten pages and divided it in two. He handed her the top half. “There.”
She looked at the pages still on the desk. “Just half? This is Cain’s sacrifice.”
“Do you see that?” he said, touching a spot on the top page that was so densely scribbled that a hole had been scraped right through the paper. “My very best writing is there.”
“This won’t earn us much mercy, afterward.”
He slammed the drawer. “Where’s this first novel of yours, that it can’t be added to the pyre?”
“Submitted to a publisher. I wonder if you believe me when I say that if I had it here, I would sacrifice it, to save us.”
“Oh,” he said miserably, “I believe you, of course.” He walked back to the bed and sat down. “What was its title?”
“Wuthering Heights.”
“Huh. Terrible title. Well, you sacrificed it by posting it to a publisher, didn’t you?—who will surely burn it himself.”
“Not unlikely.” She held up the pages he had given her. “Thanks for this.”
He looked away and waved his right hand in dismissal.
Emily carried the pages downstairs and set about making breakfast for the family.
An hour after dawn, Emily and Keeper were standing at the top of the steps outside the parsonage front door. The sky was gray, and a gusty cold wind shook the bare branches in the churchyard, and she couldn’t help glancing to the side to be sure the house’s windows still had glass in them.
She wore boots and a wool skirt and coat and hat. In one coat pocket was the pistol her father had bought for her, and in the other was a bulky, string-tied bundle of manuscript pages.
Anne was staying home with Branwell, Charlotte, Tabby, and their father. Emily hoped to return by noon, but she knew that there was practically no sort of catastrophe that she could rule out; so for lack of any better help, she had given Anne the two dried sticks that were Mrs. Flensing’s fingers.
Now a figure in a long coat was striding up the walk from around the corner of the church, and Emily could see the eyepatch under the brim of his hat. Curzon held a stout walking stick, and vertical straps on this shoulders, and his somewhat forward-leaning posture, told her that he was carrying a heavy rucksack.
Emily sighed—then took from her shirt pocket Branwell’s old pair of spectacles, which she had smeared with Mrs. Flensing’s “Gehenna mud” oil. She put them on and looked at the churchyard.
Yes, there they were—shapes like diaphanous garments with limbs moved by the wind, and bag heads bobbing as if in imbecilic mutual agreement.
Curzon nodded to her as he got closer, walking past the little garden between the parsonage and the churchyard. He stopped at the foot of the steps and patted one of the shoulder straps.
“I brought four gallon jugs of lamp oil and a bundle of wood-wool,” he said, then turned his head to look at her with his one eye. “Suddenly you need spectacles?”
“Yes.” She walked carefully down the steps, blinking behind the smeared lenses. “I’ll pick up fuel now, before we start out.”
“I said I’ve got a lot of lamp oil.”
“I need more.”
He shifted and looked around. “What, tree branches? Dead leaves? Everything’s damp.”
She didn’t answer, but walked to the western end of the churchyard wall and leaned over it. After a few seconds the ghosts were aware of her proximity, and began drifting toward her. Keeper growled, but she hushed him and rubbed his furry head.
Curzon walked up to the two of them. “We should get moving,” he said, looking away toward the road that led west onto the moors. His expression was bleak.
“In a minute.”
The ghosts were closer now, and mouths began opening in the fronts of their heads. Emily leaned forward and opened her own mouth. One of the dim figures slid ahead of the others—could it be the ghost of someone she had known?—and Emily exhaled involuntarily.
Another was crowding up behind the first one, and Emily had no sooner caught her breath than it was snatched from her again. She stepped back, and Keeper tugged her a yard farther away from them.
She was panting. “That’ll do for a lure.” Through the spectacle earpieces she could detect a faint buzzing, as though the ghosts were singing.
Curzon caught her shoulder. “What the hell? Did you just—those things take more than your breath, you know! They sustain themselves with scraps of your vitality!”
He and Keeper led her away, but she looked back over her shoulder and saw that many of the ghosts were now eeling over the low wall and out of the churchyard.
“We shouldn’t walk too fast,” she said.
“You can see them?” asked Curzon. “Is it those spectacles?”
Emily nodded. “The lenses are smeared with an oil that Mrs. Flensing gave to Branwell. It lets you see . . . more.” Half a dozen of the ghosts—no, a dozen, easily—were following them on the road that led west, but not quickly. Emily reached up and touched the frame of one of the lenses. “Would you like to try it?”
“My one eye is fully occupied as it is. You can be the occult monitor.” He peered at her as they trudged along. “Are you deliberately drawing them along with us? Why?”
She sighed, reflecting that it was a breath that the ghosts wouldn’t get. “Through your bird bones, Minerva told us that there must be a sacrifice borne by the dead. There they are.”
“Ah!” Curzon was visibly relieved. “I confess I feared it might work out to be one of us.”
And you wouldn’t have let it be me, she thought. “And,” she added quickly, tapping the pocket of her coat, “the sacrifice is here.”
Wind shook the heather on the hillsides, and Emily held onto her hat, but when she looked back she saw that the clustered figures from the churchyard were still following.
With a note of melancholy that surprised her, she said, “They’re flammable, poor things.”
Keeper wanted to hurry, and though Curzon now knew the reason for their slow pace, he was looking worriedly at the darkening sky: but Emily made sure they didn’t get so far ahead of the ghosts that the things might lose their perception of her. Curzon shifted the straps of his rucksack.
It saddened Emily to think of how soon they would arrive at Ponden Kirk, even at this pace, and she gently touched the bulky bundle in her left coat pocket. So many of Anne’s best poems, she thought, and half of poor Branwell’s novel, which must have cost him dearly, whatever its quality. And my incomplete second novel, which draws so heavily on the terrible events of this past year! I hadn’t yet decided how it would end—perhaps by nightfall I’ll know what sort of ending would have been fitting.
Curzon must have seen her touch her pocket, and caught her momentarily unguarded expression.
“I won’t ask,” he said gently, “what the nature of the sacrifice is.”
“Certainly not.”
Looking left and right through the spectacles as they walked, Emily could see dim figures making their awkward ways down the nearest hillsides. Keeper saw them too, and growled.
She clicked her tongue, meaning stay.
“More of them?” asked Curzon, hefting his stick.
“Yes. A gathering of the clans, it seems.”
“Perhaps they sense that you bring a . . . an ending.”
She looked up at Curzon’s stony dark profile. He could have left Haworth last night, she thought. He stayed, and set out on this journey today believing that his life might be claimed to fulfill the goddess’s condtions; to help kill the blight on the land—to save my family—to save me.
“Manuscripts,” she said.
“Ah,” he said, understanding her. “Ambitious?”
“Yes . . . whatever their quality.”
“I’m sorry.” He kept his eye on the irregular horizon ahead of them. “It’s no use, of course, to say that you can write more.”
“None,” she agreed.
She couldn’t tell whether it was herself or Keeper who led the way in a detour across a stretch of heath to stay well clear of the standing stone that was Boggarts Green. She couldn’t help but glance at it, and it seemed taller now than she recalled it being.
For an hour they hiked westward, along ancient sheep-paths and across the slopes of hills, avoiding crests and ridges. Viewed through the oiled lenses, the empty moors on this cloudy day looked not much different than usual, though Emily did see ancient-looking low stone walls crossing a couple of hillsides that she knew had none, and a cluster of rabbits that weren’t there when she raised the spectacles, and several bare hilltops where she remembered trees.
She might have called for a rest, but Curzon was marching steadily along, and she estimated that the four gallons of lamp oil he was carrying must weigh twenty-five or thirty pounds. When their course did take them over the shoulder of a hill, all three of them looked around, but the only variations in the miles of natural landscape were occasional far-off standing stones silhouetted against the low gray sky.
At one such high place Keeper stopped and stiffened, looking north. Curzon and Emily halted to squint in that direction.
“Damn my eye,” muttered Curzon. The chilly wind tossed his black hair around his face and he brushed it aside impatiently. “What’s out there?”
From where they stood, Emily could see beyond the nearest rise to a ridge a couple of miles farther away; and half a dozen dots were moving down the slope of the ridge at what must have been a good speed. She lifted the spectacles—but the things were still visible.
“Six or so,” she said, “maybe two miles away—like big dogs, running.”
“Find us a ravine,” Curzon said, “deep and narrow. At their hunting pace on this terrain it should take them at least five minutes to get here.”
Emily thought quickly. Dean Beck was not far south of where they stood, and she was sure she recalled a cleft overhung with alders just beyond it.
“This way,” she said. She pocketed the blurry spectacles and began running down the rock-strewn slope away from the approaching creatures—which, she insisted to herself, were probably, actually, werewolves. Curzon was right behind her, and Keeper was leaping over rocks at her left, and she didn’t look back to see what her ghosts were doing.
She ignored the mounting aches in her knees, and even leaped right over a low dry-stone wall alongside Keeper, while Curzon had to pause to swing his legs over it. Of course he was burdened by his heavy rucksack, but on this cold overcast day Emily could once again almost hear the wild atonal music of the moors, high-pitched now with mortal peril, and she was nearly dancing as she ran.
They splashed across the six feet of rushing water that was Dean Beck, and she called, “Running water—will it stop them?”
“Just—a leap, to them,” Curzon panted. He glanced back. “Where’s this damned ravine?”
“There,” she said, pointing to the cluster of alders that marked the cleft she remembered.
Half a minute later they had thrashed between the branches and were sliding down the sloping wall of the ravine; it was about fifteen feet wide, and when they were standing among the rocks at the bottom, the top edge was a foot higher than Cruzon’s head.
He quickly led the way along the ravine’s stony floor for ten yards, then shouldered out of his rucksack and lifted out two heavy glass jugs and shoved them into Emily’s hands. He took out two more, along with a bundle of straw-colored wood-wool; he uncorked one of the jugs and splashed aromatic lamp oil onto one end of the wood-wool bundle, then recorked the jug and began crawling back up the slope with both the jugs, to the exposed tree roots at the top edge.
Over his shoulder he called, “Get those up here!”
Emily sat down with her back to the slope and pushed her way up with the heels of her boots. Keeper, unburdened, was already at the crest.
Curzon had wedged his two jugs into spaces between arching roots and the soil. He quickly reached down and took the two Emily was holding and worked them too in under more of the finger-like roots.
He slid back to the floor of the defile and carried his rucksack and the bundle of wood-wool several yards farther along the ravine, and Emily and Keeper were soon beside him.
Curzon crouched and dug into his rucksack. He laid beside the wood-wool a flint stone and a short steel bar curled at one end, and finally he pulled out two flintlock pistols.
Emily tugged her own pistol from her coat pocket.
Curzon gave her a tense grin and pulled aside his coat to show two hilts standing up from sheaths on his belt. He glanced at her pistol. “Lead and church-bell rust?”
She nodded and waved toward the pair of pistols he had laid on the rucksack. “Silver?”
“Plain lead. It can slow them down. Here,” he added, drawing one of the double-bladed knives from its sheath and handing it to her. He raised his head. “They’ll call when they’re upon us.”
You know them, Emily thought. She looked back down the defile to the scraped area where they had descended the slope. That’s where they’ll appear, she told herself.
With Keeper and Curzon standing strong on either side of her, and a knife in one hand and a pistol in the other, her rapid heartbeat seemed to strike in time to the nearly audible wild music of the moors.
Then, also seeming to be in time with it, came the sudden close ululation of the werewolves—they must have been nearly at the edge of the ravine. Curzon dropped to his knees and struck a spray of sparks onto the wood-wool.
Emily heard claws drumming on dirt, and then two of the things slid heavily down into the defile.
For a frozen moment their panting bulks seemed to fill the space between the slanting ravine walls—canine forms like big bullmastiffs, with glittering black eyes set wide above blunt snouts, black lips drawn back to expose long fangs, muscles rippling under patchy fur, and a harsh metallic smell that even on the cold wind was stronger here than it had been in the parsonage kitchen last year.
The werewolves wailed and sprang forward across the loose stones.
Still on his knees, Curzon snatched up his pistols and fired both of them into the wide, bristling faces; then he had dropped the pistols and was on his feet with a dioscuri knife in one hand and the smoldering bundle of wood-wool in the other.
The two werewolves were momentarily slowed, shaking strings of blood from their ripped faces, and Emily saw several more leap down into the defile behind them in a cascade of dirt and gravel, but Curzon pushed her raised pistol aside.
“Up the slope!” he shouted. “Shoot the oil jugs!”
She didn’t pause to nod, but turned and scrambled up the ravine slope, holding her pistol high and digging the points of the dioscuri into the soil to pull herself up. When she was crouched just below the edge of the ravine, she couldn’t help but glance back and down.
In the narrow defile below, the werewolves were only able to advance two at a time, and Curzon had evidently killed one with his double-bladed knife and blinded another, and for the moment the ones who might leap over their toppled fellows were recoiling from the lunges and sweeps of Curzon’s paired blades. Keeper was beside Curzon, furiously snapping at thrusting heads and paws.
Emily quickly scanned the glass jugs wedged under roots along the ravine edge, then hiked herself a foot farther up the slope so that they were lined up one behind the other in her view. She raised her pistol, aimed at the closest jug, and pulled the trigger.
