Page 4 of Bloody Bargain
Considering the night before, the weather was a gentle balm. My hair whipped about my face as I walked the twenty yards or so to the back of the cottage. The crow lay dead beneath the cracked window, one of its wings skyward in farewell.
“Sorry,” I murmured, watching it for any twitch that might suggest it was still alive. It had been my saving companion the night before. If it was alive, it wouldn’t sit well with me to not try to return the favor. But the only twitch it gave was its bent wing feathers in the stir of air, so I walked by.
I stopped several feet before the shed door, rocking in my frigid boots with uncertainty. The door wasn’t just bolted shut. It was shackled and covered in nails, all hastily pounded in and bent to hell. There was no rhyme or reason to the abuse of the wood, and trails of rust dripped from each wound like old sap from a tapped tree.
I considered it for a long minute, maybe longer. I held my breath for several beats, listening. Why? I’m not sure.
I looked up at the too-heavy roof again. The walls all around the corner closest to me had splintered away at an angle. Not a single plank held it aloft.
There was no reason for this detail to give me pause. It could be a well with a roof, walled off to keep animals away. Maybe the support beams were in good condition so the walls didn’t matter.
I leaned into the door to listen inside. Not a whisper of movement. No trickle of water.
Straightening, I examined the door. Three locks fought for space with a variety of rusty chains. I unlocked two with the same key, the chainlinks falling into the mud with a metallic slither that pierced my ears. The third was too rusted to budge, but the chain slack enough that I could slide inside.
The door was so rotted that I could have pried the lock out of the wood, but it was better not to disturb things. Even if Matthew hadn’t been real when I met him, he’d been real at some point. Real forsomeone,I should say. And that someone would eventually come looking.
So I pulled on the door to widen the gap, sucked in my stomach, and slid into the darkness as the splinters pulled on my wool sweater like little claws.
Vertigo gripped me the moment I was through. I swayed on my feet, squinting into the blackness as the world spun like a turntable. I felt heavier, my boots pressing down on the stone slab like I was wearing fifty pounds on my shoulders.
And it wastoodark. The walls were falling apart, separating from the roof. It was a grey morning, but some light should have diffused through the cracks. I peered into the void. It couldn’t have been more than eight feet deep, but my eyes fell into it for miles. The sensation of falling forward caught me off guard and I reached back for the door instinctively.
Angry nails scraped across my hand, burning my palm and drawing blood. I hissed, swearing under my breath as I pressed the thin wounds to my thigh. At least my tetanus shot was up to date. But why, oh, why hadn’t I brought my pocket flashlight?
I was still cursing myself, toeing the door open so I could go grab it, when something shuffled. A chain creaked. I froze with my back to the void, fingers curled carefully around the lip of the door. My heart rose into my throat, my temples, pounding in my palm where my blood beaded up like little red pick stitches.
“Who’s there?” I croaked. My voice fell like an anvil in the dead air of the shed. Nothing responded.
But I trusted my instincts. Fierce knots clenched my abdomen as the hairs on the back of my neck rose in alarm. I pushed back out into the open air, adrenaline suffusing my blood with heat and nervous energy. Even my nose wasn’t cold anymore.
I turned as soon as I was clear of the door and stared at that sliver of darkness beyond it, expecting something to curl around the edge in pursuit. My knife was already in my hand, not extended like an idiot, but held in a sure grip against my thigh. When nothing happened, my eyes fell to that rusted lock and the eye bolt holding it to the door.
My old life had taught me that hesitating was deadly. So I didn’t wait anymore. For anything.
I bludgeoned the eye bolt with the hilt of my knife, then wriggled it back and forth, pushing the door with my boot as I pulled on the rusted lock. It came loose with a grunt and I tossed the mass of black iron to the mud as the door yawned open.
A bone white corpse hung from the ceiling by the same type of iron chains that had barred the door, suspended arms black with decomposition that veined all the way into his chest. The man was naked save a scrap of thick, ratty cloth draped across his hips. Brackish lichen broke the skin like he was covered in bruised barnacles. It reminded me of chickens with scaly leg mites, the way the skin was raised and separating over the dead man’s bones. His head hung limp between his shoulder blades, a black mass of hair brushing the stone floor like mangled tree roots. He was suspended too high for his knees to touch the ground so that they hung a foot in the air. Dried blood painted the floor, smeared in grotesque circles by the tops of his raw feet.
This wasn’t a tool shed or well. This was a torture chamber.
I stared at the scene with wide, horror-stricken eyes, panting as if I might start running for my life at any moment. The man was dead.
But I’d heard his chain move.
I took a deep breath of clean, cold air and swallowed hard. There was no cloying, sweet scent of decay. I stepped into the shed, my shadow crossing over his bowed head.
The dead man’s head lolled to the side. His eye slit open like a scalpel’s incision, so narrow but so sharp. He looked at me and there was no question.
He wasn’t human, not in the slightest.
My fist tightened on the hilt of my knife. His breath shuddered, shallow and in agony. His eye rolled as he closed it and dropped his face back beneath the veil of his matted black hair. He sounded resigned. Thankful.
“Parakaló,”he breathed, barely above a murmur.“W’da ib ek.”His voice was paper, lips as deeply cracked as a desert lake bed. He was begging me to end it.
I hitched my brow in confusion, massaging the hilt of my knife as I stared at the back of his neck. His vertebrae were pronounced under his starving flesh. I fixated on the spot I’d need, chewing my lip.
I knelt down on one knee, peering into the shadows of his face. His eye opened again, stark white against the darkness. A sliver of life that I didn’t know how to define.
