XIV. Mother
Woodward Cambridge had ordered what few men he had left in his castle militia to assist with the wreck of the Barony. It lay broken on the rocks, a child's forgotten toy, while the lake crashed and churned.
The recovery of its passengers had been difficult to watch. Not because of the weather--Cambridge did not set foot beyond Coldfrock Castle's barbican throughout the entire operation. And not because of the wreck itself--the Barony was an old ship and did not surrender easily to mishaps small or large. No, the difficulty had come with the sight of his men, trudging under the rainy skies, looking for all the world like beaten animals forsaking a feast they had once vowed to die for.
It seemed to serve as the final rail-switch for the rerouting of his plans. And now, thinking back on the scene from his usual east tower brooding place, he at last had to admit—in utter finality—that unleashing the dambuhala was stupid. A costly, terrible mistake.
"Sir?"
Rain from the dying storm trespassed the window, slapping his face. He turned and, of course, there stood O'Connor, looking impeccable as always. His posture was straight. His hands were behind his back. He was a soldier. A soldier of gleaning--be it of information or artifacts or simple clean clothes--but still a soldier. Maybe even the last, best one in all the region.
"The prisoners are secure in the dungeon," he went on when Cambridge nodded. "Mrs. Semeska wishes to begin questioning the girl straight away."
This last declaration was funny. "Questioning?" the castle lord almost smiled. "Goodness, no, O'Connor. My sister knows everything about Ingrid already. Don't forget they lived with each other for sixteen years."
"Yes, sir. But the whereabouts of her mother are still in doubt."
"And would Ingrid be able to help with that?" Cambridge's brow wrinkled; he was still amused, and wanted to thank the composed servant for the fact. "Really, O'Connor, your optimism can be naive at times. Much like my own."
"Much like your own indeed," came a third, more formidable voice from the corridor.
An instant later Nancy Semeska was standing in the arched doorway. She side-stepped O'Connor, giving her brother a look that could teach the rain outside a few things about coldness.
"Nancy!" Cambridge beamed, feigning pleasure at her appearance. He reached to take her hand; the gesture was not returned. "Are you and Randy all right?"
"No thanks to the crew you put on board. Imbeciles, the lot of them."
"Did Captain Tullis really...erm..."
"Die?" Nancy gave a lunatic nod through the bangs of her hair. "Oh most assuredly, Woodward! Yes indeed! Pitched over the side like the piece of refuse he was!"
Cambridge took a moment to dismiss O'Connor just in case the fireworks got out of hand. "Coldfrock Lake hasn't seen a storm like this in...maybe forever," he then explained. "No one was prepared for it." His mind scrambled for something else to say that would placate her. "That is something I'd like to do with the region once I'm in control: organize a team of weather watchers."
His cheeks flushed with embarrassment. Even off the top of his head the idea was ridiculous.
Nancy smirked. "Ingenious, Woodward, I love it. Maybe we can bring Dick Goddard over from the progressive to give bulletins."
"Who?"
"Never mind." Her face became serious again. "I thought I'd drop in to inform you that Ingrid is secure in the dungeon, along with the Bremman boy."
"Thank you. But O'Connor has already told me as much."
"Good for him. Did he also tell you she is pregnant?"
Cambridge took a moment to let this new piece of information sink in. "No," he muttered. Then: "Are you sure?"
"Oh yes. I noticed it while placing the natatakot spell on her."
"Natatakot?"
"Night terrors. Every night for seven nights. That should make Lisa cry a few tears later on."
He winced before she'd even finished speaking. "Goodness, Nancy."
"Oh listen to my brother's sweet sympathy. Spare it for the parents of your dead virgins.”
"They died quick. And what about the baby?"
"What about the baby?"
"Is it healthy?"
The question seemed to irritate her. "I don't know. Does it matter?"
"No," he had to confess. "I suppose it caught me off guard. Ingrid's only sixteen after all."
"So what happens from here, Woodward?" Nancy demanded.
Her straightforwardness disarmed him even further. What indeed? There were no easy answers. "We proceed with the plan as intended," he carried off.
It didn't convince his sibling in the slightest. "That can't be. Most of your army have been slaughtered along with the townsfolk they were assigned to corral."
"Ah. But the dambuhala are still on the loose."
"They are, yes. And if you don't put them back there won't be anyone in the region left to govern when the storm settles. Or haven't you considered that?"
"I have," Cambridge replied, returning to his favorite chair by the window. "I have also considered that Lisa Felton remains an active component in our...little dilemma. Once she is out of the way--"
"Lisa Felton is weak! She conjures Halloween ornaments! I'll kill her myself," she thundered.
"Do you know where she is?" Cambridge said.
"She'll turn up. And when she does"--the woman snapped her fingers--"it'll be for the last time."
"I should have sent that ogre to her house, not yours."
"You always over-think everything."
Cambridge didn’t need to consider this; she was right. "Okay," he allowed. "No more thinking. Let's just kill them all: Lisa, Ingrid..." He hesitated. "And who is the boyfriend again?"
"Scott."
"Yes, him too. And the dambuhala will be expelled back to their own region."
"I want to let Ingrid suffer with the natatakot--her and her baby. Aside from that, playtime is over."
Cambridge had gone back to looking at the lake. "Very well."
"Right. I'm off, then."
"Where to?" he tossed over his shoulder.
The voice that answered was serious as the grave. "To the dungeon, of course. To kill Scott Bremman."
***
Ingrid awoke on her back.
A faint orange glow flickered on the stones. Stones? she wondered. Her hand reached to brush the rough-hewn confines of whatever bed she lay in. It was stone, all right: cold, dry stone. On the left was a wall, also made of stone. On the right, candles glowed in a narrow corridor. By their light Ingrid could make out an entire column of other stone beds, three tiers high. She seemed to be on the middle tier of her own column, which provided a good view of what lay across the way. Too good of a view. Nobody else in the room was alive. They were all skeletons--skeletons asleep in their beds.
I'm in a niche, she thought with dawning misery.
Just then something moaned. Ingrid sat up a little and looked toward its source. From one of the middle tier beds, a blackened corpse was also sitting up, with its crooked white eyes glaring in her direction.
"You died," it moaned. "You died with a hole in your head.”
The corpse swung its legs over the ledge to drop from the niche. Ingrid also wanted to drop--drop and run. But she couldn't quite find enough nerve.
"You died," the corpse repeated, rising to its full height. Its face, now level with the Ingrid’s, began to float forward. A beaten jack-o-lantern could not have been less symmetrical. Its eyes bulged in one direction; its smile twisted in another.
The niche was not narrow enough to keep the corpse out. It leaned forward to grab Ingrid. Icy cold hands invaded her body. She screamed and cowered against the wall. Nothing doing. The dead thing, whatever it was, meant to have her. It even told her as much while it clawed at her face.
"Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!"
"Ingrid!"
"Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!"
"Ingrid wake up!"
Her eyes flew open to a labyrinth of dancing shadows. Shackles were locked around her wrists, and someone with long black hair was shaking her violently.
"No!" Ingrid shrieked. "No please! Please stop oh god help meeeee!"
"Ingrid baby wake up! It's all right! It's me! It's your mother!"
The thrashing stopped. Though her back was still tingling, Ingrid forced herself to look at the speaker.
No, the darkness tried to say. No, it's still me.
But that voice was weaker by the moment. Not so the other. It told her again to wake up, that she was going to be all right. Ingrid listened. Her head throbbed, her legs were stiff, and her wrists felt like they were bleeding...but she listened. Not only to the voice of the speaker, which was female, but to that speaker's eyes as well. Her eyes, which shined not with a vicious hunger, but with a warm, protecting love Ingrid had all but given up on.
"Mom?" Ingrid moaned.
Lisa Felton burst into tears as she embraced her. "It's me, baby. I'm here. I've found you."
***
Scott Bremman felt like nobody would ever find him.
The pain in his arm had given way to a pounding, pulsing agony, which in turn had brought about a fever, headache and chills. One of the wall torches had gone out, and the neighboring rats were growing more courageous by the minute. Every so often the need arose to scare one off with his leg. Consciousness ebbed. The metal bars seemed to move of their own accord, squirming like snakes in a basket. He tried calling to Varion, but got only vague groans by way of response. So he let his head loll, trying not to look at anything in particular. It worked for short periods of time--until another rat passed too close for comfort, or a distant scream rang from one of the other cells.
And then--at long last!--respite.
A woman appeared on the other side of the bars, tall and lean, her hair flowing. There came the sound of a key in a lock. The bars opened.
"Scott?" the woman called.
His heart sank a little. Something in the way she spoke sounded off. A warble on a record that bent the music. But he was too sick and too desperate to consider what it might mean.
"Here," he grunted.
And death turned its head to look at him. "There you are," Nancy Semeska cooed from the shadows. "I was afraid I'd gotten lost."
Scott squinted at her. It was as if Medusa had come into the cell--her hair, like the bars, writhed to and fro; her eyes were a shiny green.
"I'm here to kill you," she told him, just in case the fact wasn't obvious enough already. A rope with a noose hung from her shoulder.
"Uh," Scott got out.
His cognizance could not seem to get a foothold. Nancy knelt and slipped the noose around his neck. It was wet; it gave off a smell as it scratched his skin. She then stood on tiptoe and found something on the ceiling (did it matter what?) to drape the opposite end around.
"Does everybody in your family have a breathing fetish?" Scott said, or thought, or dreamed. It was impossible to tell which. His whole body felt frozen and on fire at the same time.
Nancy pulled the rope.
The noose went tight, cutting off the quavering breath he'd been in the middle of taking. The dislocated shoulder screamed as his entire body was lifted off the ground. He began to beat the noose with his one good arm, legs kicking for purchase. This brought a laugh from the executioner. She pulled harder on the rope’s gristly fabric, rocking on her heels. The effect of her actions was not without paradox. In the process of dying, Scott had become more alert than he'd been since his deposit into the dungeon. A myriad of things hitherto unnoticed came into focus. The torches looked brighter and warmer. In the cell across the way, a pair of boots could be seen, toes pointed upward. Those boots, Scott somehow understood, belonged to Lon Kolk. Nor was his the sole corpse in the vicinity. Indeed, the dead were everywhere underfoot. Skeleton bones, gone brown after years of exposure to sooty torchlight, lay amidst fresher, more stubborn atrocities. Skulls with skin still clinging to their features, and dark hair flowing from their scalps, lay in defiance of time atop the dustier remains of their brethren.
Somehow, Scott managed to smile. Who could have guessed that expiration carried with it such sentience? Now even that was slipping away. Receding beneath a garden of blooming black roses.
"Too bad, Prince Charming," an echoing voice from Nancy lamented. "Too bad."
At that moment one of the skulls turned to look at her. It gave a screech and launched itself from the floor, striking Nancy hard enough to make her drop the rope. Stunned, she staggered backward. A second skull struck her legs while she was still off balance. Screaming with rage, Nancy fell to the dirt on her butt.
"WHO?" Scott heard her demand. "WHO?"
Clarity came back by degrees. Coughing and gasping, Scott lifted his head. More of the skulls had bore down on Nancy; she was flat on her back, kicking like a baby in a tantrum. Behind her, standing at the bars, was another woman--an hallucination. She had to be an hallucination. Why? Because Scott thought he recognized this newcomer, just a tiny bit. And there was no way it could be true. But then, who had come for him the last time he'd been locked behind a row of bars? Who had liberated him in the company of flying, shrieking skulls trailing hair gnarled and dead as autumn foliage?
The woman stepped into the cell, knelt next to Nancy, and whispered. The tantrum abruptly stopped; Nancy went still. Everything else--the skulls, the rats--did the same. The cell became motionless as a photograph.
Now what?
Scott waited. His savior stood up. The beads in her hair clicked as she turned her head and made a gesture towards the corridor. A second, shorter figure appeared. Its features were impossible to discern, but that didn't matter. Not with the identity of its summoner already so obvious.
"Lisa," Scott called, with as much breath as he could.
She heard him. Waving the pouting jennies away, Lisa Felton rushed to where he was and put her hands on his face.
"Can you sit up?" she asked.
"If I go slow. I think my arm's broken."
She nodded, and was reaching to lift him when two small, bare feet appeared from the darkness.
"Mom?" a soft voice, like raindrops a breezy summer night, spoke. "Let me."
Lisa moved. A haggard, dirty face appeared in her stead, framed by tufts of tangled brown hair sticking every which way. Never in his life had Scott been so happy to see such a mess. Ignoring the pain, he reached and fell into Ingrid's arms.
"Hey," she whispered, rocking him gently, "hey now. It's okay. I've got you. It's okay, sweetheart."
Strangely, that was just how things felt. The dungeon, Lon Kolk, Dixon Anderson...all of it had gone away. Ingrid, the love of his life, was all that mattered. He would not let her go again.
"What happened, honey?" he asked. "We went to sleep in that house, and when I woke up…"
"I know, I know. It was my fault. I shouldn't have wandered off."
"It wasn't your fault." The patently ridiculous self-accusation made him want to laugh. "Just...stay with me from now on. Forever, please. I don't even know who I am without you."
"I'll stay with you for as long as you can tolerate me, Scott."
"Then the rest of my life should be perfect.”
Lisa interrupted them at this point. "I'm sure whatever you two are whispering to each other is very nice," she said, "and I'm glad you're together again. But we don't have time on our side. The sleeping hex I put on Nancy will be brief. And her son could show at any second."
Scott felt Ingrid shiver.
"Keep Randy away from me," she said. "I don't care how, just...keep him away."
Lisa was able to reset his shoulder using the same healing incantation that, as was explained to him during the process, she had used to take away Ingrid's headache and clear her lungs. Ingrid then told him of the night terror spell Nancy had cursed her with, about which nothing could be done.
"She needs to ride it out," Lisa said. "It lasts about seven days. During that time she is not, for any reason, to sleep alone. Not even for five minutes." Her voice rose. "Are you hearing me?" she demanded.
Scott nodded. "Yes. Absolutely."