XXV

Caff's ears rang in echo of sustained gunfire. A sort of tinny-hiss remnant of what had just fallen quiet. Gunsmoke filled his nose with a dry, acrid burn that he could also taste upon his tongue. He beheld a scene of massacre unlike any other: one that he had created. In the small space between the ruin of two houses, nearly too thin and short to be called an alley, was a firewood stack of the once-again dead. Choked with corpses it was. Near filled to brimming with them. They had just kept coming down that little alley, mindlessly climbing over the ones that'd gone before. Nausea sloshed in his belly, threatening escape at a hat's drop. He locked his jaw in a grind of teeth and pale-pressed lips.

An effort of will had his attention leaving that horrid scene to take stock of himself. He ached, as was now custom, all over. A heated bloom in his wrist from working the lever-actioned rifle joined the brigade. The reckoning the Widow had promise lay in wait. He could feel its loom, cold air ahead of a storm. Wouldn't be long. To take his mind off that he counted his ammunition. Not one round left for the rifle. It was a club with a trigger now. Of his pistol, four bullets remained. He opened its cylinder and let the empty brass fall in a tinkling rain. Six empty chambers became two, filled by trembling fingers as the roar in his blood died down. The cylinder closed with a satisfying clunk and he slid his pistol back into its holster.

He had spent too much. Been forced to, in fairness, but still. They could not afford another such engagement as this had been. If they were to rely on firepower alone, they would surely lose and die. Since that would not do, they would have to get real creative, should such numbers come again. He liked to believe he could think quickly and knew for a fact that Jennie could. Probably they could find a way. Hopefully they could find a way.

Best not have it come to that. Best to have it done, Talmadge in custody or a coffin before he could throw any more hideous surprises their way. A shuddering breath drew his attention to Jennie, who was not looking well. Now that the fighting was done her composure seemed to hang by threads. She was gray in the face and glassy-wide in her eyes. A shake had taken up in her finger, spreading to her hands, and she fumbled her pistol as she went to open its cylinder. The weapon fell to the ground and she hissed frustration out her nose. Her lips were pressed into a thin, bloodless line as she bent to retrieve it.

Shock, or near-to it. A tremor wracked her body and she went to her knees, puking bile and breakfast onto the ink-black gravegrass. Another tremor heaved its way up through her shoulders, her neck, and another splash of bile followed. When it was done, she wiped her mouth and muttered, “Ah, hell.”

He kept his quiet. She would not appreciate any effort he made at soothing her raw nerves. Likely, any fumbling attempt he made would only make things worse. She had her pride, after all, as did everyone. Instead, he wondered at why he was not on his knees beside her. He could not lay his strange stability at the Widow's feet. Not with any confidence, at least. Jennie's mood and his shared a foundation of disgust and revulsion, only his had remained that while hers had gone on to become more. Jennie rose unsteadily to her feet, breathing hard and face a-shine with sweat. He put those thoughts away and asked, “You okay?”

“Just about,” she lied. She marshaled herself, squaring her shouulders and taking several slow, deep breaths. Some color returned to her face as she uprooted that shiver in her hands and did away with it. Then, in an effort at dry observation, said, “That went well.”

He agreed with a grunt and a nod, “About as well as it could.” Then, he asked, “How much ammo you got?” Jennie took a quick inventory of her stock and found it to be in as poor a condition as his own. She bared her teeth and clicked her tongue.

“One slug left for the 'gauge,” she patted the sling by which it hung from her shoulder. She jerked her chin at her puke-stained pistol, having left it where it had fallen. “That's empty. You?”

“About the same,” he answered, and gave her the specifics. Once he was done, she gave him a doubt-filled look. “I know,” he told it, “I do, just...what choice do we have, really? I ain't got much time. Even if I did, you think he'll let us be?”

“Could turn back,” she offered. With a gesture to the corpse-choked alley, she continued, “Maybe we did enough here to buy that time we need. Maybe – maybe deputizing Elijah wouldn't be the worst idea.”

Caff agreed. It was also too late for that. “I'm not inclined to gamble on this. This has to get done, and we're here.”

Jennie huffed and spat to the side. “Yeah,” she agreed sourly. “we are here.”

He did not know what to say and so said nothing. He thought back to before the alley, when they had stood surrounded by all those corpses. Back-to-back they had been, shoulders together, bracing each other's spines. There had been a moment where they had not been. In that moment, she had thought he abandoned her. That he was capable of it, that he was willing to do it. He was not. He would not ever be. She had thought he was, and that had been pain of a different kind. A kind he had not felt in years.

To be fair, he would have held such a notion were their positions changed. In a situation like that it was a sensible thing to fear. It was a sensible and hideously ugly thing to choose. Hell, he had already proven himself capable of thinking worse of her in a raw moment. He cleared his throat. There was an ache in his heart, an echo of its breaking just now and years ago. It made him feel sort of vulnerable. Doubting. Made him ask, “You still with me?”

Jennie's answer was not immediate. That feeling throbbed and, just for a moment, he forgot about the ticking clock. The idea of losing her good regard, her faith, her loyalty was one that allowed no others to be contemplated. It demanded attention, which he gave. He hung in the quiet moments before she spoke, full of both dread and anticipation. She searched his face, eyes inscrutable. Then she said, “'Course I am.”

He hadn't stopped breathing in those moments. It felt like he had. Like there had been a great, stony weight on his chest that her answer lifted from him. He believed her. It was a strange and inappropriate thing to feel a smile tugging at his lips, with the alley of death behind them and whatever lay ahead. He couldn't help it. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

She looked at his small, relieved smile and shook her head. “Fool,” she opined, and maybe it was with fondness. Or it was not. She sighed and shouldered her twelve-gauge, turning to face the Talmadge House looming in the distance. “C'mon,” she said. “time's flyin'.”

- - -

The House stood larger than its frame. Up close, it had an opulent and imperial perch in the lee of steep hil, from which generations of Talmadge could lord themselves over all who lived in the shadow of their great House. Its ruin was haunting. Empty frames of windows, lined with teeth of broken glass, glinted cold in the dim sunlight. Pillars of ivy-clung wood were hollowed out, eaten through by plant and time. White paint peeled away in curls, stained yellow. Cold, soot-stained, and crumbling chimneys reached feebly for older, warmer days.

There was a wrongness to this place. A should-not-be. The air was colder, the sunlight dimmer, than it had any right to be. He had felt such a thing before, in the empty marble of Elijah's mausoleum. It had already been dark and cold, so he could not have seen then how large an effect the wrongness had. He had already seen the shadow, oily and shifting, after there had been light. Now, though, now they were obvious and everywhere. Through a second-story window he saw one. Oozing across the ceiling and dripping down the stained wall. Fat drops of shade falling without a sound. Beneath the ground-floor porch, behind what remained of a wooden lattice, something curled. The more he looked, the more he saw. This, just from the outside. Inside would be worse.

Should-not-be.

It had terrified him once. He felt it now, too. Pressing in, unbidden, from the outside. Jennie, shoulder-to beside him, gave a full-bodied shiver and held her ground. The only warmth he felt was her. The only warmth she felt was him. It bolstered their will. It gave them strength, reminded them of what they had already done. Ruby: fallen, risen, and fallen again. The sidewinder: outrun, outfought, chased away. The corpse-thing: purged in flame. They had done these things. He had done these things. What this place wanted of him, he would not give. It wanted his flight.

Here he stood. Here they stood. They would not be leaving. Not without the master of this House. The stairs leading to the ornate front doors were framed in wrought-iron rails. The rails were rusted, the stairs splintered, and the doors closed. A metal knocker hung by a single hinge, shaped like the head of a horse. He tapped the heel of his boot on the bottom step, sounding its ability to hold weight. That sharp tap-tap broke the heavy silence that had fallen. “Think it'll hold?” Jennie asked. Her grip on her twelve-gauge was white-knuckle tight, for all that her voice was steady.

He stepped up, leaving the warm press of Jennie at his side. The stair groaned and cracked beneath his weight. He waited for it to break. When it did not, he answered, “Just about.” He put his foot up another step and reached out his free hand. With the other, he held his pistol tightly. She put her hand in his and came to join him on the step, at which point he moved up. In this way they moved up the front steps: slow, careful, and together.

Then they stood before the front doors: horse-head knocker hanging by a single, rusted hinge. The round knobs were also shaped into the head of a horse. The presumed expense of this place would, in any other time or place, boggle his mind. Here and now it just added to the sense of should-not-be. Each horse's mouth was open, like they were screaming. Once heard, that sound would never be forgotten. It drifted from the depths of his memory and put a shiver down his spine.

The doors remained closed, and would stay so until he opened them. The decision would not be made for him. The choice would not be taken from him. It would be of his own will that this happened, and even after everything that gave him pause. This was the lair of the beast, after all. He could not say how, but he knew that Artemus Talmadge was somewhere within. Neither did he know why he hesitated. “Caff?” Jennie quietly asked. “You with me?”

He cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he answered, “I – yeah.” He freed his hand from the comfort of her grasp and reached out to touch the cold, rusted metal doorknob. Flakes of rust stuck to his palm and fingers as he turned it, then pushed. He was not gentle. The door swung inward fast, old hinges squealing in protest, and revealed the front hall of this once-opulent House.

His first steps inside sounded unnaturally loud, ringing out before being swallowed by the three stories of heavy silence within. He had never seen so high a ceiling. It had holes, caused by falling brick from the chimneys or time's decay, through which that same cold, dim light fell. That light was caught by a pair of large, crystal chandeliers that shone distant starlight in the gloom. A third lay fallen from its high heaven, teardrop ornaments in a halo around its shattered form. The only thing all of this light accomplished was to make the shadows seem deeper, darker, than they ought. As if it were too weak to truly push them back.

They were everywhere. In the balconies ringing each of the floors above, beneath the spiraling staircase leading up to them, and in every distant corner and niche. A belt of oily shade wrapped around the fallen, shattered crystal oozed and shone like oil in the light. Another clung to the undersill of a broken window as if to hide from what little light it let in. Or maybe it lay in wait for the absence of light, so it could be free. A sinister notion. He saw them beneath the cloth-covered furniture and beneath almost every visible sconce. Everywhere.

A cold certainty seeped into him. Talmadge was here. Somewhere in this festering abomination of a House, he awaited them. Caff was equally certain he knew they were coming, and had since before all the gunfire. He would not underestimate what Artemus Talmadge knew or was capable of. That seemed a great way to end up hurt – which had already happened – or dead, which would not. He had promised. Jennie came to stand beside him. The effect of this House on her was clear, as was her refusal to give it ground. She stood firm, shoulder-to with him, with a stubborn set to her jaw.

Ahead of them a wide, long carpet of what was once red velvet led to a spiral staircase. The carpet had gone brown and insect-eaten. The stairs seemed to be intact enough to climb. At each floor a semicircle of a balcony served as a landing, hemmed in by a wooden rail. Doors by the dozen leading to rooms and halls beyond, all of which he had no interest or eagerness to visit. Maybe they'd have to, in the search, but he would deal with that at such a time and not a moment sooner. “You hear that?” Jennie whispered, drawing him from his thoughts.

“Hear what?” he hissed back. Then he did. It started quiet, so quiet he marveled at her hearing it at all. A murmur of susurrating sound, silks sliding and twisting and entwining. He thought of serpents, of the sidewinder, as the sound grew. Like whispers now, growing louder.

“That,” Jennie answered. It was the shadows. They were moving. Not in their usual unnatural manner, not in that undulating drip of fat drops, but swiftly. River-like. They flowed towards each other, eddying around any light and through any furniture that stood in their way. On the furniture, they left behind a greasy-looking smear that began to hiss and eat into what it covered. The whispers that were a murmur became a roar, a near-deafening shout as the twisting river rushed to and up the spiraling stairs, twisting around and around and around. It swallowed the staircase whole. Wind buffeted them, stirring the thick layer of dust into clouds and spinning up small whirlwinds.

He reached for her in the same moment that she reached for him. For the same reason, he imagined: comfort. The presence and strength given by the knowledge that they were not alone. On and on the river raged upwards, seemingly without end. Another sound built beneath the roar. It was the splintering, cracking thunder of timbers breaking. When the river receded, when the last tendrils of shadow flowed away, it revealed the ruin of that spiral staircase. It was completely, utterly destroyed.

A deafened silence fell. The sound of their breathing, fast and shallow, was muted. Their only way up, to where he was now certain Artemus Talmade awaited, was destroyed. Caff did not know what to do. At least, not yet.