The Iron Thorn

24 The Graveyard Below

DEAN TOOK OFF to the parlor to fiddle with the hi-fi when we reached Graystone, and I went back to the library. I didn’t have any desire to read more of the journals, or converse with my father, but I felt restless and itchy in my skin, and books always had the virtue of calming me. They promised an escape for a few hours if nothing else, a brief forgetfulness of what I’d agreed to do for the Folk.

If Tremaine didn’t simply drag me into the Thorn Land and cause me to disappear surely as my father and Conrad had vanished when I, inevitably, failed to grasp control of my Weird.

“You look so sad.”

I turned from my perusal of my father’s history books to find Cal, hands shoved in his pockets and rumpled. He looked so usual I almost burst into tears. I’d lose all that, in a little less than a week. Whether from the Folk or the Proctors or the necrovirus when it came to life in my blood at the turning of my year, it didn’t matter. My life, the one that had Cal in it, was over.

“I’m fine.” I tried a game smile. Cal shook his head.

“You’re a good liar for a girl, but not that good. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing anyone can fix.” I pulled down one of the books. A History of Rational Thought. It had been heavily annotated, and rested in my hands as thick and weighty as my mind and body felt.

“Did Dean do something to make you this way? I’ll pound his face in.” Cal started for the door. “He may be big and carry that switchblade—”

“Cal, stop.” I put the book down on the desk and went to him. “It’s not Dean. It’s me. I thought … I thought I’d found something special in the library above, and then you and I had that awful fight …” I pressed my fingers against my temples, dug in my nails. Used the pain to stave off tears. “Cal, I think I was wrong about coming here. You should go back to Lovecraft. You should get on with your life.”

I expected another lecture on my relative madness, or for Cal to simply bolt like a dog freed from a kennel, back into the waiting arms of the School and the Proctors.

Instead, he nearly smothered me when he threw his arms around my frame. “I could never leave you,” he said. “Never.”

I returned his embrace, tight and hard as I could. To touch someone else with no expectation of a result, or to worry about hiding my true nature, felt like all of my burdens, for just a moment, dropped off my shoulders.

I clung to Cal until he gently let go and smoothed my ruffled hair behind my ears. “Now, it can’t be all bad. Let’s get out of this stuffy old room and you can tell me about it.”

“I wish that it weren’t,” I sighed. “Truly.”

“Come on.” Cal punched me lightly on the shoulder. “Day’s still young and there’s lots of grounds to explore yet. We can be adventurers for an hour or two and I bet you forget all about what’s bugging you.”

Even after my walk with Dean, I felt relieved at something other than my father and brother and our fate as a family to occupy my thoughts. I got my cape and Cal his coat, and we took the kitchen door, but instead of turning to the orchard, Cal chose the boxwood path that curved around the west wing of the mansion. The maze was largely dead, the walls a phantom suggestion of the winding paths that once grew on the spot.

Beyond the boxwood there was a long lawn sloping down to a pond and a few tumbledown stone structures surrounded by an iron fence.

“That’s the cemetery I told you about,” Cal said. “It’s boss. Want to see?”

“I suppose,” I said. I didn’t take the same delight that Cal did in boneyards. The dead didn’t bother much. Live people were utterly worse.

“No iron rods in the ground that I saw,” Cal said. “Hasn’t been swept for ghouls and … you know. Walkers.”

I rolled my eyes at him. “Cal, the necrovirus can’t make corpses walk. That’s a myth.”

“You don’t know that.” He shuddered. “I’ve seen lots this past week that people back home call myths.”

We crossed the lawn, agreement to visit the cemetery unspoken. “You know what Conrad used to say when things went wrong?” I asked Cal. “I’d be sad or angry, and he’d pick out whatever was bothering me, and he’d fix all the broken pieces and say, ‘There. All the stars in the sky where they’re supposed to be.’ ”

“I wish that were still true.” Cal stopped at the cemetery fence.

“Me too.” But it wasn’t, so I nudged him on the elbow because I was, all at once, fully sick of moping around. Conrad wouldn’t give up and knuckle under to his fate with the Folk.

Conrad would master his Weird, and he’d fight. And I was his sister, and in his stead the least I could do was pick up the sword. “Come on,” I told Cal. “Let’s take a look at the dear departed Graysons.”

The gate groaned when I pushed it open, and my feet sank into soft piles of rotted leaves that had gathered autumn upon countless autumn without disturbance.

I brushed the vegetation away from the nearest headstone. Wind and water had nearly obliterated the words carved into the bone-white limestone, and all I could see were the dates of birth and death, 1914–1932.

“Not much older than us,” I said to Cal. I wondered if this Grayson had died of natural causes, or if something with teeth had come out of the mists. What was the life expectancy of my family? Not long, according to my father’s book.

Cal rattled the door of the single mausoleum, tilted to one side like the earth was a deck of a ship, and peered through the gap.

“Cal, don’t,” I said. “That’s grim.”

“It’s open,” he said, sticking his head inside despite my look of disapproval. “Oh, lighten up, Aoife. There’s no pine boxes in here, just one of those whaddyacallits. The Greek things.”

“Sarcophagus?” I rose and joined him at the narrow door.

“You always aced Greek,” Cal said. “I don’t understand what an engineer needs a dead language for.”

“Archimedes was Greek,” I pointed out. Cal ducked into the crypt and poked around behind the stone coffin. It was carved with mythological scenes, a weeping willow bending over a river, while a hooded figure poled the water. It looked similar to the Star Sister’s illuminations of the path to R’lyeh, their eternal land in the stars, but there were no spaceways or starships, just the boatman, the river and his burden of souls.

The stony waves on the river rippled before my eyes, and a throb went through my forehead, through my bones, through the healing shoggoth bite in my shoulder. I felt as if I’d tilted along with the sarcophagus and was falling, my mind compressing like it had when the owl attacked me in the library. The warning that something had made the world not right.

Not here, I thought, my heartbeat turning frantic. Not again. An attack of the Weird I couldn’t control wasn’t worse than no Weird at all. Who knew what would happen in this crypt, what traps existed? I could bring the whole thing down on me and Cal.

“There are stairs back here!” Cal’s shout yanked me back to the present, and the awful pressure on my bones and my brain faded away.

“Really?” I skirted the sarcophagus widely as I could, brushing against the stones of the crypt and trying to act as if I were merely scared of ghosts.

“They go way down.” Cal lowered himself into the small passageway. “Looks like the bootlegger tunnels, maybe. This could be where they stored the hooch.”

“They’d bury it in coffins during Prohibition,” I agreed. “But we shouldn’t, Cal.” The tomb felt too close, too cold. It reminded me too much of a madhouse cell.

“Oh, don’t be a goose,” he said, wriggling into the passage. “It’s daytime.” His head disappeared, and I looked back at the daylight in the door, which seemed impossibly far.

“Not underground, it’s not.”

Cal’s shout echoed from somewhere that sounded miles below. “Come on! It’s crazy down here, just like The Mummy or something!”

I huffed out a sigh. Cal was such a boy—show him something shiny, ancient or hidden and all rational thought flew out of his head. “Now who’s being a goose? Cal, come back here!”

No reply floated back to me, and I could hear Cal scuffling away in the passage below, lost to my shouting range.

I sat down and scooted until I could crouch and stand, descending the stairs after him. The passage was narrow, but light trickled in from somewhere above, and air breathed over my face as I wound deeper, down into the earth.

“Cal!” I caught up with him at a turn in the passage, where the earthen tunnel met a stone main, some long-forgotten artery for water running from the north, where the cider house sat, to the south, where at one time a dairy or barn would have had a cistern.

The water was gone now and only dust and the skeletons of rats and unlucky birds remained. I rubbed my arms, my gooseflesh not born from the cold air.

“This is great!” Cal’s face was flushed even in the low light. All of the lumpy planes of his face stood out in sharp relief, and his long slumped frame filled the low space of the tunnel. Cal cupped his hands and bellowed down the passage. “Hello!”

“This isn’t great, it’s silly,” I groused. Making Cal think the tunnel wasn’t a grand adventure was the quickest way to get him back aboveground. “There’s nothing down here and it’s filthy and it smells funny. It’s just an old hole.”

“You have no imagination,” said Cal. “It could be bootlegger tunnels, or smugglers.…” He took another twitchy, excited step and jerked his head at me. “Just come! I want to see where this goes.”

“Cal, no,” I said. “All of Graystone is rigged to its clockwork. You don’t know what we could be walking into …”

Before I could finish, Cal’s foot depressed an iron plate concealed by a gap in the stone flags that made up the floor. A great hand rattled the ground under our feet, tired gears shrieked and at the far end of the tunnel, where shadows congregated, an iron gate rolled back.

“… down here,” I finished, half expecting iron teeth to flash from some hidden place and finish us off. My heartbeat redoubled.

“Neat,” Cal breathed. “Did you see that? It’s a secret tunnel!”

“It was aces,” I said, copying Dean’s most drawn-out drawl of boredom so Cal wouldn’t hear my voice shake. “You found a hole inside a bigger hole. You’re my hero.”

“You know, Aoife, that Dean has given you a regular snippy mouth,” Cal grumbled. “Time was you’d have thought this was fantastic.”

“Dean didn’t need to say a thing to make me not want to be crammed under the ground,” I snapped. “I don’t like it down here, Cal. It could be dangerous.”

“I’ll protect you,” he dismissed me, pulling back his lips so that his teeth gleamed in a bony smile. “Don’t be scared, Aoife.”

“Dean says—” I started, but before I could finish telling Cal that fear kept people alive, my shoulder began to throb anew. After my experience with the thing at the window I knew what was coming. From the dark of the newly opened tunnel, I heard the scrabble of clawed feet over rock. The snuffle of nostrils taking the air. The grind of teeth on bone.

“Cal?” My voice came out high and paper thin, with good reason I thought. Those sounds were from something alive. “Am I hearing things, or is there something in there?”

Cal’s expression had gone from delight to terror in the space of a candle flame flickering. “I think we should go,” he said finally, foot jostling foot as he tried to back away and succeeded only in stumbling. “Right now.”

I tried to move with him, but hot steam pain from the bite in my shoulder seared through all parts of me. This was worse than the owl. This was worse than anything.

Cal grabbed for my hand, and his touch was like plunging my fingers into liquid nitrogen. I screamed and doubled over, bruising my knees on the tunnel floor as I batted him away frantically, only wanting the pain to cease.

From my vantage I watched pieces of the darkness ahead break free from the tunnel mouth and crawl along the walls, growing limbs and teeth and tails. Hides gleamed like oil-stained water and high-pitched cackling like nails on glass filled the air.

I knew that sound. And nothing I knew about it was going to help us stay alive.

“Aoife!” Cal had me up and moving away from the shadow hounds, like a puppet on a string, and then his foot caught in a crack and we both went down again.

I landed hard on my wounded shoulder and screamed, and the cry that answered me ripped from no human throat. It echoed off the tunnel, a howl of hunger and delight.

The howling was younger than what Dean and I had heard on the roof, but the things coming for us were ghouls just the same. Pups, a flock of them, trapped and starved by Graystone’s defenses.

We weren’t getting out of the tunnel in less than a dozen pieces.

“I’m sorry,” Cal choked. “Aoife, I’m so sorry, I should have known.…”

Dizzy with agony, my skull pulsing like it would burst, all I could do was watch as the ghouls bounded toward us, clinging to the stones of the ceiling as easily as if it were the floor. They were the size of hunting dogs and bore whiplash tails, teeth like straight razors hanging over bloody cut lips, and blue tongues lolling with black spittle. Their eyes glowed yellow, like the Proctor’s ravens, but aether and gears wasn’t powering these devils. Only hunger drove them, and only flesh would sate it.

Cal was screaming, yelling something over and over, but through the agony that my body had been consumed by, I couldn’t understand his pleadings.

The leader of the ghouls landed in front of me, dropping from the tunnel roof, twisting his horrible glistening body in midair. He was stocky, with a smushed face like a Chinese dog, and stood on his hind legs while he scented, deep and drafty. His mouth opened in a grin and he gibbered to his fellows.

“This one tastes like fresh meat. Whiter’n a dead thing, her skin.”

I choked in terror, tears of pain dribbling down my face. The ghoul’s speech sounded like that of the drunkards on the last jitney to Uptown in the evenings, but to hear speech coming from that razor-tipped mouth stirred a bleak horror in me greater than any viral creature I’d yet witnessed. The ghouls weren’t mindless, like the shoggoth. I knew from endless lanternreels and lectures that they were intelligent pack hunters, and they’d brought us to bay.

“Let me taste her, Tanner.” A thin one with a spotty hide slid forward. “Been so long in a cage. So long since we had anything live.”

“Get off, you.” The one named Tanner swatted at the upstart with a paw the size of a dinner plate. “You can have the chitterlings that smell like death. The soft one’s meat is for me.”

I couldn’t hold my vision steady any longer, and I ground the heel of my palm into my forehead in an attempt to drive out the pain. Beyond the scraping of the ghoul’s guttural snarls there was something in my head, something cold and swelling to bursting. Black whirlpools formed in front of my eyes and my breath caught.

Perhaps I would faint, and wake up with the wandering things in the mists, the corpse-drinkers. Perhaps I’d wake up in the star-home of R’lyeh, with the Great Old Ones.

Either way, the cold knowledge that I was about to perish cut through the pain in my head, and on its heels came the desperate thrashing desire to stay alive.

I heard a slow ticking, the clockwork of my heartbeat. It quickened even as everything around me went fuzzy, loose and slow from pain and panic.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tock.

Everything went very still, hard and cold inside of me. This wasn’t like the owl in the library, a sudden burst of Weird ripped free by the root, leaving a bleeding hole. I died for a split second, and in that time something living in me silently until that moment uncoiled, wrapped itself around my mind and squeezed.

My Weird blossomed again and I allowed it to spread all through me like molten ore. I felt the iron of the gate mesh with the iron in my blood, the clockwork of the mechanism turning wheels and gears inside my head. It didn’t feel like madness or pain, or anything like the necrovirus that had gripped me after the shoggoth bite.

It felt like I had put on clockwork wings and learned how to make them fly.

And then I could see again. My breath scraped in and out, my lungs burning like I’d dunked my head in a swimming pool. The pain was gone and in its place was a pinpoint of cold, tingling sensation that I recognized from stepping through the hexenring. Enchantment was riding my blood, and my Weird was demanding to be set free.

The ghouls snarled at me, their hungry mouths inches from my flesh.

I was freezing, and under my fingertips I felt iron, even though I wasn’t touching anything but air. I breathed in and out, and I could feel the parts of Graystone protecting the tunnel respond.

The gate snapped shut behind the ghouls, rusted mechanism shrieking protest at the speed.

Tanner, the enormous ghoul, levered his heavy head around like a wrecking ball. “What’s going on? My blood’s burning!”

It wasn’t enough. The creatures were still in the tunnel with me and Cal and could still harm us. I reached out, pushing the spear of the Weird out from my mind, and found gear wheels and metal teeth lying in wait all around us. I tugged at them, feeling the resultant stab of agony through my chest and heart. With a rumble and a groan, Graystone’s majestic machine woke from its slumber.

A spring snapped, and the echo filled my skull.

I was the machine. The machine was me.

Rusted spikes shot from the floor and walls, in and out, random grids covered in old blood but still sharp.

Tanner’s foot exploded as iron bored a hole in his flesh. The ghouls howled and screamed, as their blue blood spattered the stones and coated the spikes.

“What’s happening?” Cal shouted, covering his ears as a ghoul fell, screaming, between us. Cal watched it convulse in horror, his mouth hanging open and his face ashen.

The machine was in my blood, its gears turning brilliant in my brain. My fear had vanished, and all that fed my impulses was the Weird.

I could feel all of Graystone, a great pulsing, shuddering, breathing thing with its heart of steam. I knew that what I asked of it, the house would give.

I demanded the death of the ghouls, and the house gifted me with a sacrifice. I didn’t move, didn’t let go of Cal, until the last howl of despair had ceased and the last droplet of brackish blood had spattered the stones.

Cal and I managed to get to our feet. He was quaking like he was made of paper, but I pulled him to me and together we limped back to the stairway to the light. My knees were skinned and bleeding, and my shoulder, where the shoggoth bit me, was an agony of flame, but I felt light. Free. Floating. The Weird whispered, curled and fell back to sleep inside me, leaving me wrung out, as if I’d just run until exhaustion.

“Why are you smiling?” Cal demanded. He’d clearly been too panicked to suss what was really going on, and for that I was relieved. I didn’t properly understand it yet. I’d be hopeless at explaining.

Cal panted as we stumbled up the stairs and into the crisp autumn air. “We could have died, you realize.” Elated as I felt, Cal looked proportionately haggard. His skin almost seemed to droop over the bones of his face and he was sweating through his coat, damp wool under my hand as I leaned on him for support.

“We didn’t,” I said. “They didn’t get us, Cal. We’re alive.” A small laugh escaped me, pure adrenaline given voice. I’d survived. I’d saved myself and Cal. “I did it, Cal,” I whispered. “I found it.”

“Alive. Great,” Cal said flatly. “What are you on about?”

“Cheer up, Cal!” I demanded, punching him in the shoulder. “Not even a pack of hungry ghouls can stop me! Think of what you’ll have to tell the guys now.”

“Crazy girl,” Cal said, but without malice. He slumped against the sarcophagus, breathing heavily, shaking. I rubbed his back and patted his neck with my handkerchief until he stopped sweating and quivering. After a moment, color began to return to his face and he lost the morbid walking-corpse pallor, the dark veins no longer standing out under his sagging skin. Once he looked like my friend again, I got us up.

“Let’s go back to the house. I don’t know about you, but I feel like my head might wobble off.” The overwhelming sensory push of the Weird was wearing off, and I could feel my hands and knees beginning to shake like they hadn’t before. It seemed the harder I pushed, the more of a toll it took. But I could figure it out. I could figure all of it out, because I was alive.

“You don’t look so hot,” Cal agreed. “Come on. Let me help you before you fall down.”

“I’m not crazy yet,” I said, and breathed deep of the day. I had found my Weird. I had Cal back. I wasn’t crazy and I might not turn crazy, either. For just a moment, as Cal and I walked arm in arm to Graystone, it was enough.