CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Emily’s father pushed his chair back from the dining room table and shifted around to look out the window toward the dark churchyard. He had not spoken while Emily told him and her sisters about today’s hike with Curzon to the capriciously appearing temple in the north moors—which necessitated telling him about their previous visit last year.
For many seconds after she had finished, he didn’t speak. Then, “I told you to stay at home today,” he said quietly. “When you disobey me, you do it in . . . epic fashion.” Without turning back to face his daughters, he raised a hand. “But it was I who put the idea into your head—I should never have told you what I did in Chester forty-some years ago, after stepping off the boat from Ireland. I hope,” he added in a whisper, “I have not damned us both.”
“You didn’t prompt me,” Emily told him. “I didn’t even know it was Minerva until after the first visit.”
Still looking away from them, Patrick clenched his hand in a fist. “But she knew you—marked you today!—because of me.”
“And gave me an answer.”
Emily had returned to the parsonage a couple of hours after sunset. Curzon had said good night at the kitchen door, saying that he wouldn’t intrude on her talk with her family, and her father had insisted that she have a restorative bowl of hot porridge and a cup of tea before joining him and her sisters in the parlor. Branwell had been on his way upstairs to bed, and was irritable when Emily stopped him long enough to look at his left wrist; and he had been surprised, as she had not been, to notice a fresh cut on his old scar.
Anne had a cut on her left forefinger, and had thought she must have cut herself while peeling potatoes that afternoon.
“An answer!” said Charlotte now. “A curse, I call it.”
She was sitting beside Anne at the dining table, and Emily reclined on the green leather couch against the far wall, near the fire in the fireplace. In spite of her assurances to everyone, Emily was in fact very tired, and her legs and shoulder ached.
Patrick shook his head and finally turned to face Emily. “It is not an acceptable answer. If I’d known you were—so unwisely!—resolved on consulting her, I’d have insisted on coming along—yes, despite the grave sin of it. I might have reasoned with her.”
Thunder rumbled remotely out in the night.
Emily’s breath caught, and she blinked to hold back exhaustion-readied tears. In the face of this threat against his children, she thought, he forgets that he’s seventy years old, and frail—and he has no conception of the entity Curzon and I encountered. He should have wound the clock and gone to bed an hour ago.
Anne too seemed affected, and she took a deep breath and let it out, as if to level her voice, before she said, “A negating fire, a cleansing fire, you said. In the fairy cave, I imagine, to stop payment on the blood we left there, and even eradicate any atoms of it that might still cling to that stone.” She sucked her cut finger.
“And then nobody will have any proprietary claim on us,” Emily said, “before or after our deaths.”
Charlotte opened her mouth to say something, but Anne lowered her hand and sat back, and Charlotte paused. Anne said, “Forfeit privilege. That’s clear enough. But what do you suppose your goddess meant by ‘a sacrifice from the harvest they’re now relinquishing’?”
Yes, thought Emily, forfeit privilege is obvious. In these seventeen years since Anne, Branwell, and I made ourselves conspicuous to hungry ghosts, we’ve had at the same time our unnatural dispensation from the consequence of it, in return for Welsh having a claim on the three of us. And our aim now, having accepted those seventeen years, is to default on that unwitting bargain. As to the harvest . . .
In these stolen years we’ve written novels, poems . . .
“Consider Cain and Abel,” she said.
Patrick was frowning. “This makes no sense at all. You girls have nothing.”
Charlotte had been rapidly switching her gaze among her sisters and her father, and now she burst out, “And three deaths? Have you all somehow forgotten that part of the . . . pagan oracle’s message?”
Patrick shook his head, muttering under his breath.
Emily had been waiting for Charlotte or her father to finally address that conspicuous point. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “And it must follow, as the night the day,” she said. “Our special protection will be gone, and our special vulnerability will remain.”
She looked down at her scraped hands to avoid meeting anyone’s eye. Anne and Charlotte had told her what Curzon had said to them last night: Once you’ve been opened to their attentions, it’s not just the ones who shamble up to you in churchyards and startle you by emptying your lungs in an instant—subtler ones attach to you, and take your breath and vitality by degrees.
“Consumption,” said Charlotte, nodding angrily, “by subtle ghosts!”
“By degrees,” Emily reminded her, “and there’ll be ways to stave them off.”
“For how long?” demanded Charlotte. “A year?”
“Oh,” said Emily with a brittle smile, “longer than that, I should say. Twice that, perhaps.”
“I should have tied the three of you to your beds on that terrible day!” Charlotte shifted in her chair. “When are you going out there tomorrow with your friend?”
“Not a friend, precisely. Early morning. We should all get some sleep tonight.”
“I should go there with you.”
“You and Anne stay here with Papa. And Branwell.”
“No,” said their father, pushing back his chair. “I can’t permit it. None of you will stir from this house until after—”
Emily forced herself to sit up. “Oh, Papa, after what? After Welsh has evicted Branwell out of his whole body, not just his left hand? After Alcuin Curzon has probably killed himself trying to prevent Welsh’s other half from rising restored from its broken tomb, and the twin devils merge at last?”
Their father had started to get up out of his chair, but now slumped back into it. “John Brown cut a fresh stone today, with the ogham lines copied, and laid it over the old broken one.” His voice was weak, almost petulant. “The old one kept the monster down for a century and a half . . .”
Tabby had walked down the hall from the kitchen and now she stepped into the parlor and set the refilled teapot on the table. “It’s got a head now, though,” she said.
“Ahead of what?” said Patrick.
Then it took half an hour, during which Tabby had to go back to the kitchen twice to refill the teapot, for the sisters to fully explain to their father about the skull Emily had destroyed last year, and the fresh head that Mrs. Flensing had brought and that had been carried away by her accomplice . . . after the accomplice had killed Mrs. Flensing and probably put her ghost into it as a placeholder.
“The head may be in Haworth by tomorrow evening,” Emily said.
Their father had stared into the fire throughout the account, and now looked up. “Placeholder for . . . ?”
“The twin’s own spirit,” said Anne, “presently trapped headless under the stone.”
“It needs a compatible head,” said Emily, “and Mrs. Flensing found a fresh one somewhere.”
“To hear such sentences in my parlor,” said Patrick. shaking his head. “Devils’ heads, goddesses in pagan temples!” He stared at each of his daughters in turn. “You never thought to . . . trouble me, with any of this?”
“No,” said Emily flatly.
“You were blind,” said Charlotte.
“And then in Manchester for a month,” said Anne.
“And old.” He shrugged, and resumed getting to his feet—in order to kneel. “Tomorrow night will evidently be contentious,” he said. “We to our prayers, now, and then to our beds.”
The three sisters pushed back their own chairs, and Emily was determined to kneel for as long as Patrick wanted to pray, without giving any sign of the aches in her knees.
“And pray that we’ll all be kneeling here again tomorrow night,” she said.
Even in her dream, Emily recognized her father’s dawn gunshot, and she clung to the sound as she clawed her way up out of the dream to wakefulness.
In the dream she had again found herself in the churchyard at night, swaying in spotty moonlight to the vagaries of the wind and watching a shadowed figure walk slowly toward her from the ruined parsonage. She had implicitly known that in her present ghost form she was immune to injury except by fire, and so she had watched the approaching stranger with just wary curiosity.
A broad hat shaded the approaching face, and she wondered who it could be. One-eyed Curzon, saying goodbye?—regretfully? Herself, resenting her ghost lingering this way?
But when the hat was swept off, it was Branwell’s face staring at her no-doubt indistinct form. The mouth opened above the still-sparse chin beard, and a voice that was not Branwell’s said, “You are all my herd now.”
He looked past her and nodded, and the wind obligingly turned Emily around. Behind her she could make out five rippling forms made of smoke and cobwebs, slowly waving jointless arms like seaweed under water, and she knew they were her mother and her four sisters—Elizabeth, Maria, Charlotte, and Anne—frail ghosts like herself, out here in the night. A tangled thing like a broken dried nettle was huddled against the wall behind them, and she knew it was the ghost of their father, trying to hide from their sight.
She knew then to look up, and a ragged curl of captive smoke fluttering in the branches was Alcuin Curzon.
She looked again at Branwell’s face. With both hands, his left as deft as his right, he lifted a dog collar that she recognized as Keeper’s, and extended it toward the space below her wobbling head.
Then from one of the gaping windows of the ruined parsonage she heard the muted crack of a gunshot, and knew what it was. She flexed her leg to run, and it was a real leg, not the lint-and-dandelion-seed leg of a ghost; she focused her mind on the memory of that real gunshot and with real hands thrust blankets down, as if climbing out of a hole. She forced away the dream vision, and after a few moments of struggle she was sitting up in her bed in her little room. Muted dawn light let her see the drawings on the walls.
She was panting, and flexed her hands in front of her face to reassure herself that she still had a body. For a while, she thought; long enough, God willing.
She stood up and put on her robe. As she left her room and started down the hall toward the stairs, she heard quiet sobbing from behind Branwell’s door. She paused, then knocked.
“Go away,” came his voice, so she opened the door and stepped in.
He had his back to her, standing at the window and looking out over the bleak moors. His room was colder than hers.
He took a deep breath. “Only Emily,” he said, “would just come in anyway.”
“You’d want me to.”
He shrugged. “I think today I disappear into him.”
“No,” she said. “Today I free us. Stop payment on our blood.” She found matches on his bedside table and lit the candle that stood there.
He turned around, and in spite of the misery in his wasted face she was glad to see his own self in his naked eyes. “It can’t be done.”
“I think it can. I’ve had expert advice.” She cocked her head. “You can be free, escape possession. And when we die we won’t be part of his ghost herd.”
He shuddered, then crossed to the bed and sat down. “I was dreaming of that, moments ago; Papa’s gunshot woke me. I was in Welsh, mute, helpless. He walked down the steps from this house, and the ghost of you met him—”
“And the house was in ruins, by moonlight.”
He looked up at her, squinting without his spectacles. “You dreamed it too? Just now?” When she nodded, he said in a hollow voice, “It was a prophecy.”
“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.
A moment later the crack of the gunshot shook the air, and a spray of glass and oil rained down into the defile. Curzon tossed the burning wood-wool bundle at the clustered werewolves, grabbed Keeper’s collar, and scrambled back.
With a loud whoosh a burst of heat swept up over Emily, and she slid back down the slope. Her hat was gone, and she let go of the spent pistol to beat at her smoldering hair.
The werewolves were on fire. A couple that were fully engulfed in flames tried to climb the slope but fell back, and another ran toward Keeper but dropped and slid inert on the stones when Emily lunged at it from the side and drove her dioscuri into its neck. She burned her hand as she bent to tug the hilt free of the thing’s flaming hide.
Keeper leaped past her to fasten his teeth in the throat of a burning werewolf that had got Curzon’s arm in its jaws, and when the thing released him to turn on Keeper, Curzon stabbed it in the chest. All three collapsed, but Curzon and Keeper scrambled to their feet.
Curzon hurried to one of the blazing werewolves that was rolling on the gravel, and he crouched beside it, holding one hand in front of his face; when the rolling torch that was its head presented its throat, he stabbed it deeply and then hopped back, slapping his burning sleeve against his thigh.
He glanced at the other one, then shook his head and bent to pick up a melon-sized rock, which he raised and then flung down onto the thing’s grimacing head. The head imploded.
“It can’t heal from that,” he muttered breathlessly, turning away from the gory, flaming mess.
The one he had blinded with a slash of the dioscuri had loped partway back along the ravine and collapsed, now entirely on fire. Curzon stepped over several burning or furred and bloodied bodies and plodded to where the thing lay clawing the gravel. He dispatched it with another big stone and made his way back to where Emily and Keeper stood.
Emily pointed at his arm, where the coat had been torn away and his shirt was blotted with blood.
“I heal fast, remember?” he said.
“But you’ve been bitten—”
He closed his eye for a moment, then stared at her. “Emily. I’m one already.”
“Oh. Yes.”
“Well done, here.”
She nodded. Her hand stung and the smell of burning fur and flesh had her panting through her open mouth. These dead things, she thought, were men; one was probably Adam Wright, whom I’ve seen any number of times in church. He might be the one I killed to save Keeper. And Wright had a daughter, a stout girl who briefly attended the church school—might she be among these?
All Emily felt . . . as when the Minerva effigy had touched her hand last year . . . was a bleak sense of rightness, balance.
A flash of lightning was followed a second later by the rolling boom of thunder, and immediately rain began pattering on her head and the rocks and the smoldering corpses.
She slid the dioscuri carefully into her coat pocket, then looked at the slope on the north side. “We’ve got to recross Dean Beck and find my poor strayed ghosts.”
Two horses were placing their hooves carefully on the crosswise cobblestones of Main Street’s steep ascent, and the carriage’s lowered drag-staff clicked like a slow metronome as it slid into place on the uphill side of each rain-wet stone. The roof of the clarence carriage had begun to leak, and Evan Saltmeric slid lower in the rear-facing seat to put on his top hat. Across from him sat Reverend Farfleece, with his chin resting on the abominable leather valise in his lap; the clergyman was unshaven, and his straw-colored hair hung in limp strands on his forehead. Seated next to each of them was a junior member of the Oblique order, men chosen for this expedition because of their rough-and-tumble appearances rather than for any piety.
Saltmeric was wearing a pair of spectacles, the lenses of which were flat glass smeared with the illuminating oil. When he glanced out the rain-streaked carriage window he saw a few hurrying cloaked figures, far too solid to be ghosts.
“Relevant activity?” asked Farfleece.
Saltmeric shrugged. “Just the living, as far as I can tell.”
“There should be a good contingent of the departed. Keep your eyes peeled.”
Saltmeric shuddered. He had heard the expression before, but today it made him think of the head in the valise. He recalled that its eyes looked like peeled hard-boiled eggs.
He wished he were anywhere else on Earth than here.
This was the fourth carriage they had engaged in the eighteen hours since they had left London, and it too now reeked of sweat and damp clothing and the sweet-pork smell from the leather valise.
The valise creaked, and when Saltmeric looked at it he saw it flex between Farfleece’s pale hands. The two lay members of the faith glanced at it and then at each other.
“Do you think she’s . . . aware?” Saltmeric asked. Aware of me, he thought, here?
Farfleece shook his head. “Unattached to a sustaining body, I shouldn’t imagine so.”
Saltmeric looked away, remembering the night he had rolled the horrible head out of the valise after the fight in the curate’s kitchen last year, and then rolling it back into the valise after killing Mrs. Flensing and catching her ghost in it. If she were sentient in the thing now, was she aware that it was Evan Saltmeric who was responsible for her lamentable present state? Did she guess that she was shortly to be evicted from even this grotesque object into bodiless wandering ghosthood?
All this effort so that the two persons of the Obliques’ biune god could be united at last, after having been separated and killed in the last century—the female god confined headless under the stone in the Haworth church, the male half only recently able to possess a living body.
And Reverend Farfleece didn’t seem pleased by the prospect of the imminent apotheosis. It was one thing to look forward to the advent of a god who would change the world, but quite another to face the prospect of that upheaval happening today, within the hour.
Saltmeric looked down at his own right hand, and once again remembered pushing the double-bladed knife into Mrs. Flensing’s throat. He wished he were Catholic, so that he could go to Confession; or Jewish, to have his sins forgiven at Yom Kippur.
“Where is the church?” Farfleece asked.
“Just at the top of this street,” said Saltmeric, “where it levels out.”
“I suppose,” said Farfleece a bit shamefacedly, “the report of the stone cracking two days ago is reliable?”
“Our local man Wright swears to it.”
“Not just a crack from . . . shifting temperature?”
“Split right down the center, he wrote.”
“Ah. Then,” Farfleece said hollowly, sitting back, “the glorious day does appear to be upon us.”
Evan Saltmeric sat back too, as water dripped on the brim of his hat and the drag-staff on the rear axle clicked like a tightening ratchet on the paving stones.