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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Anne and Charlotte stood in the open front doorway of the parsonage, looking across the gravestones to the church. Rain splashed on the walkway at the bottom of the steps, raising waves of mist that swept across the pavement. Their father had told them to stay in the house and keep an eye on Branwell, but they had both put on coats and boots.

“He’s got his pistol,” said Charlotte, “and Emily and Mr. Curzon will be back before dusk.”

“But there’s nothing he can do,” said Anne. “Why must he wait in the church rather than here?” She looked up at the dark sky, then said, “I’m getting an umbrella.”

“He won’t be pleased if you disobey him.”

“I don’t care. He’ll freeze in that drafty church. I’m going to bring him a pot of tea, at least.”

“Well—I’ll do it. You can stay here and—”

Anne caught her sister’s arm, for a carriage had rolled into sight from the direction of Main Street, and through the waving curtains of rain she could see two men, no, four, climbing out of it and hurrying to the church.

“You saw that?” Anne said. “One of them had a bag or case. It’s the head for the monster!”

Not pausing to hear what Charlotte might say, Anne turned and ran back down the hall to the kitchen, where she hurriedly snatched up two makeshift dioscuris Tabby had made by tying pairs of knives together with twine.

Back at the front door, she shoved one of the bound double-hilts into Charlotte’s hands, and patted her coat pocket to be sure she still had the dried fingers Emily had given her this morning.

A moment later she was tapping down the steps to the walkway, with Charlotte close behind. They were both drenched by the time they had splashed through puddles to the side door of the church, and Anne pushed her sopping hair back from her forehead and yanked open the door.

She heard her father’s shout—“Anne! Charlotte! Go back to the house!”—before her eyes had adjusted to the dimness; the sisters didn’t move, and a few seconds later she could see their father on the raised altar floor to the right, facing the four men she had seen get out of the carriage. Then she noticed that her father held his pistol raised, pointing it at the men.

She flexed her hand on the twined-together hilts of the two knives and took a step into the church—and then was shoved forward and fell into one of the pews. She heard Charlotte tumble into the next pew, and the clatter of Charlotte’s paired knives falling to the stone floor.

Anne rolled over and sat up, and glimpsed Branwell’s back as he hurried up the side aisle in the direction of the altar.

“Branwell,” she gasped, “wait, we’ve got—”

But the words stopped in her throat when he cast a glance back at her; by his expression, and his gait as he hurried away toward the altar, she knew that it wasn’t her brother, though it was his body. The bandage on his head was more darkly blotted than it had been last night, and he had at some point changed from his pajamas into boots and woolen trousers and a heavy coat.

A stony boom shook the floor.

Anne stood up and sidled quickly between the pews toward the four intruders in the center aisle, holding her paired blades out in front of her. Charlotte was right beside her in the next pew.

The four strangers had scuffed around at the sisters’ entrance, and Anne could see them clearly now in the gray light from the open door behind her. One of them, carrying a big leather satchel, was about thirty years old, with fair hair, and wore a clergyman’s collar on a black shirt; two appeared to be hired laborers; but it was the fourth, a chubby young man wearing spectacles and a top hat, that made Anne gasp. Six months ago he had burst into the parsonage kitchen with Mrs. Flensing; and he was almost certainly the one who had killed the woman later that night.

He drew a pistol from under his coat and pointed it at the two sisters standing in the narrow gaps between the pews.

The young clergyman flapped his hands, then turned toward the altar and called, “Brontë! Drop your weapon or Mr. Saltmeric will be compelled to shoot these women!”

“They’re his daughters,” said Saltmeric. His hand holding the pistol was shaking.

“Your daughters,” amplified the clergyman.

Anne looked toward the altar. Her father was lowering his own pistol. Branwell, his body at any rate, had climbed up into the pulpit, and now looked down from a good six feet above everyone else.

Branwell spread his arms and began calling out syllables in a language Anne didn’t recognize.

Again something heavy seemed to strike the floor, and the four intruders scrambled toward the altar, looking back over their shoulders in obvious alarm.

Branwell was pronouncing the alien words louder now, drawing echoes from the beams that spanned the high ceiling vault, and Anne heard a prolonged sliding sound, as if the heavy baptismal font were being steadily moved across the floor—and she knew it must be the new stone John Brown had cut, shifting off of the old, cracked stone where it had been laid two days ago.

Then with a loud grinding an uneven gray rectangular shape rose up from the central aisle a few yards in front of Anne, leaning away from her at first but moving toward vertical; and she saw on its surface the grooves that were ogham writing.

It was half of the split ledger stone, exposed again and being lifted aside by a force beneath it.

Anne reeled back as a gust of cold air, reeking of tar and stagnant water, stung her eyes and tossed her wet hair.

The near half of the stone fell outward, cracking the pew ends in front of her—and she gasped as a big dirt-caked animal climbed out of the hole where the stone had lain for more than a hundred and fifty years.

Muscles flexed under tight expanses of matted gray pelt; she saw forelegs like oak limbs, claws breaking the stone blocks at the edge of the hole—and, as the thing rose into view, bristling fur along the ridge of the spine, and ribs as thick as her wrists pressing out against mottled hide—but from where she stood she could see no head above the wide shoulders that swung from side to side.

Beyond it, on the altar floor, Anne’s father raised his pistol and fired it at the creature; the shot had no effect, and the fair-haired clergyman turned and punched her father in the face. He fell away toward the back wall, and Anne lost sight of him.

At a shouted command from Branwell, the young clergyman unstrapped the leather satchel and reached into it with both shaking hands; and what he was holding when the satchel fell away was a big animal’s hairless head, bigger than his own, with a bulging cranium, blinking white eyes, and a short snout over a slack mouth studded with fangs.

It was shaking violently in his hands. “She’s resisting!” he cried. “She doesn’t want to leave it!”

“Force it!” shouted Branwell.

The beast from under the stone stood with its forelegs on the church floor; it rocked its torso back, and a booming cry rang out of its open throat.

Anne made herself look away from the monster and the clergyman to Saltmeric. He was shuffling backward, staring wide-eyed at the thing standing in the hole in the center aisle, until his heels hit the raised altar floor and he sat down. The two common-looking men who had accompanied the intruders were now on their knees beside the altar, apparently praying.

The gun dropped from Saltmeric’s limp fingers, and Anne began nimbly leaping over the pews toward the altar.


Evan Saltmeric stared in horror at the thing that was half of his two-person god. Reverend Farfleece, holding the awful head, turned to look back at him and croaked, “Help me, damn you!”—but Saltmeric frantically pushed himself backward across the altar floor, for seen through the oiled spectacles Farfleece’s face was sunken and withered, scored with unthinkable old sins.

Farfleece spat and turned back to face the monster. He was raising the naked, twitching head up toward the beast, and the beast’s forelegs lifted to take it; the big paws ended in blunt fingers, which closed around the head. The head’s mouth was opening and closing rapidly now—clearly the ghost of the woman whom Saltmeric had murdered was experiencing as much terror as it was capable of.

The beast’s clutching fingers lifted the head, and its thick forelegs bent out to the sides as the handlike paws turned it to face forward and set it on its shoulders. The jaws still opened and closed spasmodically, though more slowly.

Saltmeric saw that one of the Brontë sisters had scrambled over the pews and now stood on a wooden bench only a few yards from the now-intact wolf thing. In her left hand she held up what appeared to be two black sticks—and then she jerked her hand down.

And the monster pitched heavily forward onto Reverend Farfleece, crushing him beneath its chest. Its newly attached head lifted on its corded bull neck—the eyes had turned glittering black, and through the spectacles Saltmeric saw Mrs. Flensing’s ghost vomited out of its mouth. The thistledown ghost rolled across the floor and then scuttled away toward the door to the sacristy, its bag head bobbing. Saltmeric stepped to the side, horrified at the idea of catching its imbecilic attention.

The Brontë girl leaped over the last pew—Saltmeric saw that in her right hand she held some sort of dioscuri—and she hurried to where her father lay against the wall. The other Brontë sister, carrying a similar knife, was running up the side aisle.

The Brontë lad, clearly possessed now by the other half of the god, had come clattering down the pulpit steps, and he ran to the creature that still stood in the pit. It flexed its shoulders and lifted its torso off of the limp, shrunken form of Farfleece; and it extended a big paw to touch the young man’s bandaged head.

The Brontë girl beside her father wailed and threw her knife, and Saltmeric couldn’t tell which figure she meant to hit. As it happened, the spinning blades glanced off her brother’s shoulder, and in a moment Saltmeric could see blood on the slashed shirt.

The young man gave his sister a cold, contemptuous glance, then stepped to the flank of the beast and swung a leg over its spine. He hiked himself up until he was straddling the big werewolf god and clutching its coarse fur. The creature crouched—and then sprang entirely out of the hole and right over the pews to the side aisle, slamming into the wall and knocking the other Brontë sister sprawling. In two bounds it and its rider had reached the open side door; the rider ducked, and then they had disappeared outside.

The two acolytes Farfleece had brought along from London, who had proved useless in the big reality of this event, cast stricken glances at Saltmeric and the Brontë girl on the altar, then ran away down the side aisle. They edged cautiously around the other Brontë girl and, after peering fearfully around the doorframe, ran off toward Main Street.

Saltmeric stood up and hurried to where old Reverend Brontë was propped against the back wall. Saltmeric had lost his hat at some point, and he pushed the oiled spectacles up into his hair.

“Anne,” the old man said, “where’s Charlotte?”

“Here,” said the other Brontë sister, limping up onto the altar floor. She scowled uncertainly at Saltmeric. “What do you intend? You were going to shoot us.”

Saltmeric didn’t trust himself to speak, and could only shake his head.

The one called Charlotte was still holding what seemed to be a makeshift dioscuri, its blades pointed in his direction. She panted, “Do you mean us further harm?”

“No, I never—” Saltmeric shook his head and turned to Anne. “That horrible creature—I believe you made it fall, onto Farfleece! How—”

“Welsh has Branwell’s body,” interrupted old Patrick Brontë hastily. “He’s gone to redeem your promissory notes, and—ahh!—unite completely with his restored sister at that”—he paused to cough, then went on breathlessly—“at that primordial pagan church.” He managed to stand up, and even in the dim light through the stained glass windows Saltmeric could see that the skin around one of the old man’s eyes was discolored and swelling.

Saltmeric spoke quickly. “This wasn’t something I ever wanted.” His coat hung heavily on his shoulders, but he shivered at Charlotte’s stare as if he were naked. “Knowingly sought. God help me.”

Charlotte didn’t lower her bound-together knives.

“Can we—” said Brontë. He coughed and went on, “I heard a carriage outside—it’s no use on the moors, but we can free the horses. I can ride to Ponden Kirk—and stop them.”

Saltmeric struggled to keep incredulity and pity from showing in his strained face.

“Papa,” said Charlotte, at last looking away from Saltmeric, “there won’t be saddles, and—”

“There’ll be the saddle strap of the harness. I can hang on.”

“And,” said Anne, panting and clearly struggling to keep her voice level, “even in this weather over bad terrain, that demon—did you see it?—can surely cover the three miles to Ponden Kirk in the time it would take you to ride a mile. You should be in bed, you’re hurt.”

Saltmeric recalled a magical grove, a mundus loci, that Mrs. Flensing had once described to him, with arches that opened onto places of power.

“I—” he began.

His throat closed against what he was about to say. The action he was about to propose horrified him.

The old man and his daughters looked at him warily.

“I was told,” Saltmeric said, forcing out the words, “that there’s a druidic standing stone very near here, called Boggarts Green . . . ?”

“A mile west,” said old Brontë, with obvious disapproval.

“West—of course. Then I . . . believe . . . I know a way to get to Ponden Kirk more quickly.”

The younger daughter, Anne, stepped up to him and stared into his face; he looked away and she slapped him.

“Look at me,” she said. Her voice was steady. When he met her eyes, she went on, “What’s your name?”

“Evan Saltmeric, Miss,” he answered humbly.

“Evan Saltmeric, do you renounce Satan and all his works?”

“I—What? That’s what they say in baptism, isn’t it?” She raised her hand again and he went on quickly, “I don’t know about Satan, ma’am. But I renounce,” he said with a wave out toward Farfleece’s body and the hole in the floor, “I really do, all this damnable business.”

“And your part in it? I pulled the monster down onto your Farfleece by waving two severed fingers of the woman you murdered last year.”

Saltmeric forced himself not to look away from her eyes, though his face was hot. “I do renounce it,” he said huskily.

“You’ll doubtless find your own penance,” she said, stepping back.

I fear I will, thought Saltmeric. Abruptly he recalled something Mrs. Flensing had told him about entry into the mundus loci: it required a certain sort of escort. “Er—I’ll need those fingers.”

Charlotte whispered some objection, but Anne said, “I dropped them over there,” and hurried down to the nave floor; she looked around, and peered for a moment into the big hole in the central aisle, then bent and picked up the two black sticks Saltmeric had seen her holding earlier.

In a moment she was beside him again; she handed him the dried fingers and stepped back, wiping her hand on her coat. “You can get me to Ponden Kirk quickly?”

“It has to be me,” said her father as Saltmeric nodded. “I brought Welsh to England,” her father went on, “and it’s me, if anyone, who can dispatch him.”

“Hurry, then,” said Saltmeric, tucking the fingers into his shirt pocket and walking quickly away toward the open side door. He could hear old Brontë shuffling along right behind him.

“Papa!” cried both of his daughters in unison, starting after the two of them. In moments they were all outside in the cold rainy wind.

The carriage and two horses still stood in the lane beside the church, and old Brontë hobbled toward it. “I can unbuckle the harnesses,” he said.

But Saltmeric held out a hand toward Charlotte, and after a brief hesitation she gave him her twined-together knives.

Saltmeric hurried past Patrick and simply sawed through all the straps that held the traces onto the horses. He tucked the knives carefully into his coat pocket.

Brontë’s white hair clung in wet strands to his forehead. “Get me up,” he said, and Saltmeric bent and wove his fingers together to give the old man a stirrup. As Anne and Charlotte both protested, Brontë set a boot in Saltmeric’s hands, and Saltmeric heaved him up onto the horse’s back. The old man quickly took hold of the saddle strap.

Saltmeric crossed to the other horse and gripped the saddle-strap and the curved wooden hames at the top of the harness, and jumped, pulling himself up. He managed to get one leg over the horse’s rump, and then he was straddling the horse, clinging to the wet saddle strap and wondering how long he could ride this way without falling off.

He looked down at Anne. “Pray for me,” he said. He slid the oiled speactacles back down onto his nose and pulled the two dried black fingers from his shirt pocket. He took a deep breath, then held them up and beckoned with them. “Mrs. Flensing,” he called through the rain. “You know me. Come.”

Brontë and his daughters blinked at him in surprise, then quickly looked around at the paved walk and the churchyard; but they weren’t wearing spectacles smeared with illuminating oil, and so they didn’t see the indistinct form that appeared from around the far corner of the church and hobbled clumsily but quickly to his horse.

He squinted through the spectacles at the horse’s head; the ghost was now tangled in the bit and harness. He put the fingers back in his shirt pocket.

A hand like a cluster of withered ferns rose from in front of the horse’s head, followed by a frail membranous bag that rippled under the impacts of raindrops. Another feathery hand appeared, and on this hand two grotesquely long fingers trembled in the wind. In the front of the bag a hole opened and closed several times, and he realized that Mrs. Flensing’s ghost was trying to speak.

What could she be trying to say to him, her murderer?

You’ll doubtless find your own penance, Anne had said.

“Wait,” he groaned to the ghost.

He pulled the long reins out from under his leg, and wished he had thought to cut them short. Forcing himself to look away from the ghost, he blinked through the rain at the old man mounted beside him.

“Lead the way,” he said to Patrick, and flapped the clumsy reins.

The two horses trotted away from the church, past the low wall beyond which stood the clustered gravestones of the churchyard. Saltmeric glanced that way, and was surprised to see no ghosts bobbing among the trees; though the hands of Mrs. Flensing’s recently freed ghost still clung to the horse’s bridle, and the wobbly head was still visble between the unsuspecting horse’s ears.

They passed the parsonage, and Saltmeric cursed and released the saddle strap with one hand to snatch the oiled and water-beaded spectacles off his face; he shoved them into his shirt pocket beside the dried fingers, and again gripped the strap with both hands. Unable to see Mrs. Flensing’s ghost now, he squinted at the landscape ahead. After a hundred yards the path they were on was an agitated serpentine pond that spread out over flattened grass on either side. Landmarks had to be difficult to make out, and one of old Brontë’s eyes was swollen shut.

He called to Brontë, who was riding ahead, “You know the way?”

Brontë just dug his heels into his horse’s flank, and soon both horses were galloping through the puddles, and Saltmeric gritted his teeth and hung on as water and mud splashed up in his face from the tossing hooves of the horse ahead.

After about a mile Brontë reined in his horse. He swung a leg over the horse’s shoulders and dropped to the mud, then turned impatiently to Saltmeric. An ancient stone stood tall in a little lake on the north side of the road.

Saltmeric slid off his own horse. He raised a hand toward Brontë, who was gesturing impatiently at the stone, and walked around to the horse’s head. He pulled the spectacles out of his pocket and fitted them on his face.

Viewed through the wet, oiled lenses, Mrs. Flensing’s ghost looked like a crushed wasp’s nest tangled in a handful of bracken; but it was flexing as if with rapid breath, and tendrils of it curled and uncurled in the rain.

“Screw your courage to the sticking point!” shouted Brontë.

Find your own penance, Saltmeric thought, and reached out with both hands, took hold of the thing, and tugged.

And it sprang free, and attached itself like a clinging spiderweb to his face. The spectacles weren’t being pressed against his nose, but the wrinkled mushroom head was blocking his view, and he exhaled as if he’d been punched in the stomach—and he couldn’t draw in another breath.

He clawed the head down so that he could see the tall stone, though his lungs were jerking uselessly; and he blundered around the far side of the stone, hoping he accurately recalled Mrs. Flensing’s long-ago description of this mundus loci.

He took two running steps—

—and it was as if he had crossed through an unseen gate into a big enclosed arboretum. His boots were scuffing on the willow-bordered path Mrs. Flensing had told him about. He clawed the ghost off his face and threw it into the shadows between the hanging fronds beside the path, and then for several seconds he just stood bent forward with his hands on his knees, gasping and blinking around at his impossible surroundings.

The air was warmer, and the rain and its constant drumming were gone. The path was dry, and dimly lit by such moonlight as made its way through leafy boughs far overhead. He had successfully found the mundus loci, but the unnatural stillness of the place only increased his anxiety. He took off the distorting eyeglasses and tucked them back into his pocket, half-hoping that he might be facing the stormy moor again, but the willows and the path were still visible in front of him.

And Patrick Brontë was right behind him. The old man sniffed at the stagnant water reek, and his unswollen eye was narrowed disapprovingly. “This is a devils’ place,” he said.

“And you pursue devils,” Saltmeric panted. He looked back, past Brontë, and his face chilled to see the path and the willows extending many yards behind them, with no gap. “I think we need to hurry.”

He led the way along the curving path, eyeing the deeply shadowed areas behind the willows, where unimaginable inhabitants of this region shifted and rattled. He looked back—Brontë was following him, hastily unwinding the long scarf from around his neck. After several more paces the old man pulled it free, and dropped it on the path.

“I think I can no longer clutch my shroud,” he muttered.

Soon Saltmeric saw firelight reflected on the willow leaves ahead of them, and he ran forward in the brightening glow until he stepped around a cluster of trees and stood at the edge of the broad clearing Mrs. Flensing had described. Brontë stepped up beside him, and gasped.

The clearing was roughly forty yards wide, lit by flaring upright torches around the perimeter. The sky was now entirely hidden by the spreading leafy branches of the enormous oak tree whose massive trunk filled the center of the clearing and hid the far side of it. In fact the trunk gave the impression of an arboreal castle, with its many open arches, its panels of carving, and the tiers of balconies that receded out of sight overhead.

Clusters of shrunken old men and women sat against the trunk between the arches, apparently asleep, the colored ribbons on their wrists and ankles trailing across the packed dirt; but they leaped to their feet when Saltmeric and Brontë stepped out into the clearing.

“I saw a parson twelve feet high!” said one of them shrilly. “A juggler who can dent the sky!” added another.

Saltmeric noted that the little people, even the ones in tattered dresses and bonnets, all seemed to have knives in knitted sheaths hung on ribbons around their scrawny necks. He nodded to them cautiously as he led Brontë across the rippled dirt of the clearing, and halted a couple of yards short of the curved rough wall of the tree’s trunk. The little people scuttled away to either side.

From where Saltmeric was standing he could see three broad arches in the trunk, one directly ahead and two at oblique angles. The one in front of them was the opening of a tunnel that appeared to extend much farther than the diameter of the tree, or the clearing, and Saltmeric believed the spot of light at the far end of it was bright daylight; curls of aromatic smoke drifted from the arch to his left, and the one on his right echoed with distant laughter.

He turned to the nearest of the diminutive dwellers in this mundus loci and asked, “Which arch leads to Ponden Kirk?”

The little man goggled at him without speaking, and Brontë said, “The big black stone church with the fairy cave at its base.”

“Ah, that’s between God’s windward and His lee,” the little man said as he scuttled away in a flurry of ribbons. Another piped up, “And what might you have brought us for a fee?”

From the cluster of little people came a cry, “The stolen children pine for bones to chew,” followed by, “And surely these could spare us one or two.”

Several of them were touching the knives that hung around their necks.

Saltmeric was sweating—Mrs. Flensing hadn’t mentioned paying these creatures a fee for passage, much less that it would involve surrendering one’s bones!

He stared at the wrinkled little people, and for just a moment they seemed indeed to be children; sunken-eyed and hollow-cheeked, but not one of them more than ten years old. He blinked, and they were again all hunched and old.

It was clear that Brontë too had seen the momentary vision, for he stepped back, his fist pressed against his mouth. “The children who disappear at night,” he whispered. “We never find bodies!”

Saltmeric’s ears seemed to ring, and he peered more closely at the once-again aged little figures. These, he thought, at the center of Mrs. Flensing and Farfleece’s whirlpool!

He pulled Mrs. Flensing’s fingers from his shirt pocket—and as his fingers brushed the spectacles he felt the lens frames vibrate, as if to an unheard scream. But he held out the two blackened sticks on his palm.

“A werewolf’s fingers,” he said gruffly.

“Ah!” breathed several of the little people, and one of them, wearing a tattered frock, stepped up and gingerly poked the fingers. “Two of them!” she said wonderingly. “The roots will get no blood tonight, alas—but for these holy bones we’ll let you pass.”

Many of them were still touching their knives.

“Here,” said Saltmeric, tossing one of the fingers to the last speaker. “I’ll give you the other when you’ve shown us the Ponden Kirk arch.”

The little people excitedly led Saltmeric and Brontë around the trunk of the tree. The fouled air was beginning to make Saltmeric dizzy, and for several moments it seemed as if he and the old curate were simply lifting and dropping their feet in place while the vast tree itself rotated.

At last their diminutive escorts paused before an arch on the other side of the trunk. Peering around the edge, Saltmeric could see a bundle of straw on a stone block, and a crude stone wall a couple of yards beyond it with a doorway opening on a gray sky. A cold wind buffeted his face when he stepped into the arch.

He tossed the second finger to his escorts, who fell to squabbling over it.

Patrick Brontë had already stepped through the arch and was hurrying to the open doorway. Saltmeric hesitated; it looked as if he had fulfilled his promise to the old man. But he was sure that retracing his steps would not lead him to any way back to the Boggarts Green stone . . . though he might find Mrs. Flensing’s ghost along the dim path, waiting for him.

And he found that he couldn’t leave old Brontë alone to face whatever waited beyond that doorway.

He swore and stepped forward into the cold wind.

He was standing in a low, stone-walled room with a dripping thatched roof. The bundle of straw moved, doubtless because of the wind; but out through the doorway he saw Brontë hurrying through rain toward the weedy edge of a precipice.

“Wait!” called Saltmeric, and he hurried out through the doorway onto an uneven surface of mud and rocks under a charcoal sky. Brontë had paused, and Saltmeric looked back—the two of them had emerged from some pre-Roman stone structure, possibly a Celtic temple. The back wall had a narrow opening in it, but there was no sign of the arch or the remembered clearing.

He shrugged, and plodded through the mud to stand beside Brontë in the rainy wind at the edge of the precipice.


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