Chapter 22
Whyborne
I cried out at the touch of Waite’s hand. For an instant, the horrible thought flashed through my mind that he was somehow still alive, despite embalming and interment.
But the flesh that closed around my wrist felt like clay: cold and malleable. Waite’s eyelids slid open, revealing sunken orbs, the corneas soft and wrinkled.
I tried to wrench free, but Waite’s grip was like iron. Griffin shouted my name and strove to peel the grasping fingers loose. Then Waite lifted his other hand, forcing Griffin to jerk back or risk being seized as well.
“Out of the way!” Hattie exclaimed. A knife flashed in the lantern light, neatly severing the hand that clung to my wrist. Thank heavens, its grip loosened, and I shook it off.
All around, the wooden coffins in the niches began to rattle, nails tearing free of rotted wood. The scrape of stone on stone announced the shifting of the sarcophagus lid. I snatched up the lantern before it could be hurled off. The last thing we needed was to be left in darkness.
We stumbled back toward the doors. “I thought Hattie destroyed the curse!” I exclaimed, as the first of the historic dead clambered free from its coffin. Little was left save for tendon and dried muscle stretched over bone, clothed in the tatters of attire popular eighty years ago.
“She did!” Griffin’s face was white. “There was no trace of magic—and now it’s everywhere! In all of the corpses.”
“Someone cast a spell,” Hattie said grimly. She buried her knife in the skull of a corpse trying to emerge from a coffin, and it collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
There came the crack of a rifle from outside. “Whyborne!” Christine bellowed. “You best come out here.”
Blast it. No wonder she and Iskander hadn’t responded to our shouting.
Christine stood with her back to the doors, her rifle raised. Iskander was poised at her side, his knives at the ready. Though the dense fog limited our vision, shapes moved within it. The doors of some of the mausoleums around us had begun to shake, and I heard the snap of rusted chains.
“I can’t tell how many are out there—the arcane line is too bright,” Griffin said. He’d drawn his sword cane; he and Hattie stood beside each other in the doorway, cutting down the Waites as they came.
And the damned fog prevented the rest of us from seeing anything. Well. At least that I could do something about.
This was no time for subtlety. Though I couldn’t see the arcane line, I felt it in my bones. I drew from it, the scars of my arm aching with the sudden flush of power, and called the wind.
The roar of the trees of the Draakenwood heralded its approach. I heard branches snapping, trees groaning—and then the wind was on us, snatching away hats and forcing us to brace ourselves against its force. It shredded the fog, reducing the heavy blanket to mere wisps in a matter of seconds, and revealing our surroundings.
The earth above the oldest graves, those forming the spokes of the wheel around Blackbyrne’s monument, heaved. Even as I watched, the first skeletal hands broke through, the dead clawing their way free.
The doors to the Marsh mausoleum burst open. Corpses clad in shrouds or fragments of clothing stumbled out, reaching for us.
Christine fired again, and one collapsed. “It’s like the fane in Egypt,” she said. “Do you recall, Whyborne?”
She was right. When we’d reached the Fane of Nyarlathotep, the dead interred in mastabas all around the lightless pyramid had come forth to attack both us and the ghūls.
“And like then, there are too many to fight,” Griffin said. Leaving Hattie to dispatch the last two Waites, he drew his revolver and calmly shot one of the restless dead who had clawed its way from an earthen grave. “We need to find a gap in their ranks and run. Whyborne, is there anything you can do?”
At the fane, I’d managed to set one of them on fire—but it had been a resin-soaked mummy. These corpses wouldn’t burn so easily.
I still clutched one of the lanterns in my hand. I doused the light, ignoring Christine’s outraged protest—and flung it with all my strength at the nearest shambling corpse. The glass shattered, and oil spilled onto its lower legs.
I bent the world to my will, setting the spark to the glistening oil. Fueled by the power of the arcane line, the corpse went up like a torch.
Horribly, it began to flail, stumbling in circles. Was it the natural consequence of fire eating through tendons, shrinking already-dried muscle...or did some semblance of life still cling to the thing?
“Whyborne—my sword cane!” Griffin called.
I tore my gaze away from the burning corpse. I set fire in the sword cane, and the blade was instantly wreathed with flames. Griffin shoved it deep into the heart of one of the Marsh dead, and it collapsed with a sizzle of burning flesh.
Hattie whooped. “Come on, Iskander!”
She sprang to meet the advancing dead, and Iskander followed on her heels. They fell in back to back, knives flashing. It was clear even to me that their training had been the same. They moved together in a deadly dance, sharp blades sending hands, arms, and even heads flying from any of the dead who ventured near.
Christine fired again and again. So far as I could tell, none of the graves farther into the cemetery were giving up their dead. We could flee down the hill, as soon as we broke through the line of animated corpses around us. It would only take a few more to form a gap.
A mausoleum door behind me burst open, the heavy stone door nearly striking my back. I spun with a shout...then froze.
WHYBORNE was inscribed above the door. And the corpse now stumbling toward me belonged to my sister Guinevere.
~ * ~
Every muscle froze. I felt as though I’d been gut-punched, all the air knocked from my lungs.
Time had not been kind to what little remained of Guinevere. Still, I recognized her in an instant, despite the darkened flesh, the gleam of bone and teeth through a rotted cheek. The winding sheet she’d been wrapped in hung in decayed tatters, trailing behind her like some parody of a bridal train. Her dark hair peeled away from her skull in clumps, and her eyes were nothing more than empty sockets.
And yet she looked at me. Saw me.
We were never close in life, but she’d been my sister. Was my sister, still. Bad enough to have her cruelly murdered, but this—this mockery, this enslavement, this magic animating her remains piled horror onto horror.
She stretched out her hands to me. I could still make out the slashes on her fingers, where she’d tried to hold off the knife Stanford had plunged into her chest.
Bile coated my throat, but the rest of me went numb. She was getting closer and closer, her ragged fingers twisting into claws. I had to do something...but I couldn’t.
“Ival!” Griffin called from behind me. “Close your eyes.”
I obeyed him as though our nerves were wired together. I heard the hiss of magical flames on the sword cane’s blade, smelled the unspeakable stench of burning rot. There came a wet thump from just in front of me.
Griffin’s hand closed on my shoulder, forcibly turning me away. “Come on, my dear. We have our chance to flee. Can you run?”
I opened my eyes. The corpse I’d set alight had collapsed, and Iskander and Hattie had widened the gap, even as more dead lurched from the oldest graves. “Yes,” I managed to say. “I-I can.”
“Then for God’s sake do it!” Christine exclaimed. She shot one last corpse, then lowered her rifle and sprinted for the opening in their ranks. Hattie followed on her heels, and Griffin and I fell in behind them. Iskander brought up the rear.
We ran blindly down the hill, making for the cemetery wall. Thank heavens these other graves remained quiescent around us. As we ran, the sound of laughter echoed from behind us.
From the direction of the Draakenwood.
Griffin cursed, but kept running, as did the rest of us. But as we ran, I wondered who had watched us from the wood...and why their laugh sounded so damnably familiar.