Darkwalker

CHAPTER 11

“The place has been abandoned for years,” Crears explained, twisting in his saddle to speak over his shoulder. “The crop came up blighted one season, and the owner just left it. The fields have lain fallow ever since. It’s a sore point with the local farmers.”

Understandably so, Lenoir thought as they approached along the wagon road that separated one property from another. It was as though the road were a boundary between two worlds, one bright and young and alive, the other dull and overcome with decay. To their left, emerald green fields were lined with bushes as neatly ordered as military ranks. Yet only a few feet away, the neighboring property was overgrown with thistles and clover. A wide, ugly trench had been dug between the road and the abandoned farm, a crude attempt by the neighbors to keep the weeds from invading their land.

It only grew worse the closer they got to the farm buildings. A pair of old fruit wagons sat at the head of the drive, one of them pitched forward like a wounded animal on its knees. It had been stripped of its front wheels, some opportunistic neighbor having salvaged them.

Crears was right to bring them here. It was the perfect place to keep someone against his will. No one would happen upon the site, and there was nothing within earshot. Even if the boy managed to escape, he would probably be too disoriented to get far. Lenoir only hoped that the three of them would be able to manage whomever they found here. Crears had sent one of his watchmen to round up as many others as he could, but that would take time, and they dared not wait. Every minute that passed was another risk taken, for there was no telling what the kidnapper intended.

They dismounted about halfway up the drive, tying their horses to a fence post that did not look up to the task. Lenoir had brought a sword, plus a brace of flintlocks that Crears had loaned him. The sergeant and the constable were similarly armed, though Kody preferred a crossbow to a pistol. He insisted that he could load it faster and that it aimed truer, and Lenoir did not argue, for he had never seen Kody miss a shot.

There was no evidence of the place being occupied. They could not see any horses, and there was no sign of life from the barn. The farmhouse itself was in ruins. The western half of it had collapsed, leaving a wreckage of rotting wood overgrown with ivy, and what was left standing had a precipitous lean, as though it could go at any moment. It appeared to consist of two rooms, probably the main room and a single remaining bedroom. Someone had boarded up one side of the larger room where the wall had caved in, but it was shoddily done and probably offered only the barest protection from the elements.

Lenoir, Kody, and Crears circled around the house. A path led from the back down to the river. It looked to have been recently trod. Lenoir made a mental note of it, but first they needed to investigate the house. Crears stationed himself at the back door and drew his pistols, while Kody and Lenoir made their way around to the front. They paused before the door. It had been painted once, but that was clearly long ago; only a few chips of white still speckled the shaggy gray wood, and shadows were visible between the shrunken slats. Lenoir could probably have shouldered his way past the door, but there was no telling what awaited them on the other side. They readied their weapons. Kody towered behind Lenoir, leveling his crossbow just above the inspector’s shoulder. Lenoir raised his pistol. Then he gave a short nod, and Kody pivoted and kicked the door off its hinges.

There was a flurry of movement in front of Lenoir’s face. He leapt back and bumped into Kody, but the burly sergeant held his ground as he fired the crossbow. The spring snapped to and a loud thud sounded against the far wall, and then all was silent. As their eyes adjusted to the gloomy interior, Lenoir spied a small shape pinned against the wall at eye height. A quail twitched in its death throes, its breast blasted through by Kody’s bolt.

“Nice shot,” said Lenoir.

They stepped over the threshold, the shadows of the interior parting to reveal their contents. Dust swarmed angrily in the beam of light streaming through the open doorway. It lit upon a rotting wooden floor and naked walls, and for a moment Lenoir thought the room was empty. Then he saw the boy—gagged and blindfolded, bound to a chair. He knew immediately it was the wrong boy, for his hair was yellow like his mother’s. His head sagged, and for a moment Lenoir feared he was dead. But as Lenoir moved toward him, the boy’s head rose. There was something strange about the way he moved, an eerie calm that drew Lenoir up short.

Kody elbowed past and knelt before the child. He removed the blindfold first. He reached for the boy’s bonds next, then changed his mind and pulled the gag from his mouth. The boy said nothing. He made no move, not even to wet his cracking lips. He simply watched Kody, his face impassive, as though he were not interested in what the sergeant was doing.

Crears was just coming around the front when Lenoir found the bedroom door. It was off to the right, closed. His heart surging with hope, Lenoir burst through.

The room was barren. At least, it appeared to be. “Get out of the doorway, Crears! You’re blocking the light!”

The constable complied, but Lenoir already knew it was useless. Zach was not there. Lenoir got down on his hands and knees, searching for anything that might be a clue. There was a dark stain on the floor next to the door, and Lenoir sniffed at it, fearing the scent of blood. What he smelled was not blood, however, but urine.

“He was here,” Lenoir said as Crears entered the room. “I think he—”

Lenoir was drowned out by a scream. There was a crashing sound from the room next door, and Kody swore loudly. Lenoir and Crears rushed back into the main room to find a bizarre sight: Kody was tussling with the boy, who was shouting and tearing at the sergeant with all his strength.

“What are you doing, Kody?” Crears cried. “You’re hurting him!”

“What do you want me to do, let him claw my eyes out?” Kody was trying to restrain the boy’s wrists. “Calm down! It’s all right, you’re safe now! Stop it!”

Despite his size, he was having trouble keeping the boy in check. The attack was so vicious, so frenzied, that for a brief moment Lenoir even thought the sergeant might be overcome. Then Kody seized the boy by the shoulders and spun him around, clasping him in a bear hug that pinned his arms at his sides. The boy continued to struggle, spitting and shrieking like a fiend, but the sergeant held him fast.

“What’s the matter with him?” Kody growled. He had a gash on his right cheek, shallow but bleeding.

Crears knelt before the boy, just out of range of his flailing legs. “Mika! Mika, it’s me, Constable Crears! You remember me, don’t you?”

But Mika did not seem to remember the constable. His eyes rolled back and he screamed again, as though something before him were too horrible to look at.

“They must have done something to scare the wits out of him,” Crears said.

“I think it is worse than that, Constable,” said Lenoir grimly. “Look at him—the boy is mad.” Mika had begun to tear at the bottom of his shirt, as though he would rip it from his body.

“Take him outside, Sergeant,” Lenoir ordered. “Try to keep him calm until the watchmen arrive. We can’t bring him with us like this.”

Crears looked disturbed as he watched Kody drag the boy out of the farmhouse, and when he spoke again, his voice was distracted. “There’s a path out back. Looks to have been used recently.”

“I saw it.”

“I’ll stay here and help with Mika.” Lenoir started to protest, but changed his mind and merely nodded. As constable of Berryvine, Crears would consider the boy his responsibility. Lenoir did not envy him that, nor did he envy him the task of delivering the news of Mika’s condition to the family.

The path behind the house led between a jumble of rosebushes that might once have been beautiful, but were now little more than a thicket of thorns. They had obviously been pruned at one time, and still retained some hint of their former shapes. The riot of growth that had since burst forth gave them the look of cages that could barely contain the wild creatures within, stray limbs reaching out between bars to claw at Lenoir’s cloak as he passed.

The sound of the river wandered up the path to meet him. He could already smell the clay that lined its banks, and the damp air grew chilly as he made his way toward the water. A tentative chorus of frogs had just begun, only to fall silent as Lenoir drew near. Here the path descended steeply before disappearing behind the trunk of an enormous willow tree. Beyond it, the river was slowly disgorging a ribbon of mist that retained its shape, as though a great snake were sloughing its silvery skin. The opposite bank was all but obscured. Lenoir could sense the trees looming behind the veil, but the only evidence of their presence was the occasional disembodied branch materializing and then dissolving in the roiling fog. Their unseen closeness made him feel as though he were being watched.

At the foot of the path, the tracks Lenoir was following turned over themselves, creating a muddy mess. They drew right up to the river’s edge: dimpled bootheels filled with water pointing in different directions. He had to squat to examine them, for the willow tree at the river’s edge cast a thick cloak of shadow over the ground. Now that he was closer, he saw that the prints had not been made as recently as he thought, for the peaks of the tracks were rounded, not sharp-edged as they would have been if the footprints were fresh. It looked as though someone had come down to the river to draw water, or perhaps to wash something. Lenoir spied a mark that might have been someone setting a jug down in the mud.

Beside him, the willow tree leaned far out over the water, the shaggy tips of its bottommost branches grazing the surface. It looked as though the tree might eventually topple over; so acute was its angle that the roots farthest from the river had begun to tear up through the ground. They were thick, as big around as a man’s thigh, and knotted over one another like a nest of vipers.

That was why it took Lenoir so long to notice the body.

He started back up the path and might have walked right by had he not spied a flash of metal out of the corner of his eye. Peering through the gloom, he saw what had caught his eye: a buckle, attached to a boot. What he had taken for one of the roots was actually a man’s leg, crooked at the knee so that the rest of the body lay concealed behind the mound.

Drawing a flintlock, Lenoir approached cautiously. The leg made no movement, and from the angle of it Lenoir was quite sure that its owner was not merely resting in the lee of the willow tree. His suspicions were confirmed when he walked around the mound of roots and found the wide, vacant eyes of a corpse staring back at him.

The particulars of the scene rushed into his brain, registering themselves one at a time: male; Adal; twenty-five to thirty years old; dead less than twenty-four hours. Lenoir holstered his pistol and approached, cocking his head to reconcile his view with the crumpled form before him. The man was on his back, his body draped across the tangle of roots so that his feet were higher than his head. One leg dangled over the top of the roots—the leg Lenoir had spotted from the path—and the other was splayed at an unnatural angle. The corpse’s head lolled back, openmouthed, hanging over the edge of a root. Neck broken, Lenoir gauged, almost as though the victim had fallen from the tree.

He gazed up at the branches above and immediately spied a green scar where the bark had been worn away. It looked as though someone had tried to hang the man. A lynching, perhaps?

Lenoir knelt over the body and moved the man’s collar to take a look at his neck. He had expected to find rope burns, but what he saw there instead caused him to cry out and stumble backward onto his rump.

Impossible!

He scrambled to his feet, but then his body failed him, refusing to obey his command to flee. Instead he stood rooted to the spot, staring. His mind buzzed uselessly. He could not be sure how long he stood there. A minute? An hour? Whatever the case, he was thoroughly lost in his own world when he heard the voice.

“What’s this?”

Lenoir jolted so badly that his knees nearly gave way. Even so, he had never been so glad to see Kody. The sergeant, for his part, appeared not to notice Lenoir’s state of shock, his gaze fixed instead on the corpse lying broken among the roots. He knelt before the body for a closer look. “Neck snapped, looks like, as though he fell out of the tree. . . .”

Lenoir scarcely heard him. There was a strange roaring in his ears, a sound distantly and unpleasantly familiar, like a bad dream. A dream about a night spent huddled in the shadows, listening to the blood rushing through his veins, praying for daylight. Nowhere to hide, no one to come to his aid . . . and then the burning on his arm, the burning and the chill, the horrible sense that the warmth of his life was being sucked out through his flesh. . . .

“That’s odd,” Kody said. He pulled back the man’s collar just as Lenoir had done. “Have you ever seen marks like this, Inspector?”

Lenoir could not answer him. Kody waited for a response; when none was forthcoming, he frowned and turned back to the corpse. “It looks like his neck has been . . . I don’t know. The skin is gray, as if he’s been dead for weeks, but the rest of him looks . . . Well, I’d say he’s only been dead a few hours.”

Lenoir understood the sergeant’s confusion. He understood that it should not be possible for some of the body’s flesh to be necrotic while the rest was not. Not unless the man had had some sort of terrible infection. . . . Lenoir experienced a brief twinge of hope at this thought, but it disappeared immediately. There was no infection, he knew. There was only one possibility.

Like judgment, like death, the green-eyed man had caught up with him at last.