The Dark Yule Page 4

  “Carter was a clever man. Far more broad-minded than most humans, really. And a splendid dreamer of course.” Solar flicked his tongue over his nose—a gesture not dissimilar to the way I’ve seen certain dramatic humans kiss the tips of their fingers. “But he’s either dead, or so far gone into another dimension that he may as well be.”

  The mention of ghouls had reminded me of Tilly’s suggestion. “Have you ever talked to a ghoul?”

  That face again. “Carrion-eating monkey dogs aren’t my idea of good companions.” Solar paused, and pondered for a moment. The leaping flames cast strange shadows across his handsome, whiskered face. “In point of fact, I have, though.”

  “How did it go?”

  Solar’s ear swiveled backwards and forwards, as though he were listening to his own memories. “It must have been several decades ago, as Earthers reckon it. I was heading North, when I came across a whole pack of those little brown what-d’you-call…”

  Solar’s voice faded, and the entire image of the inn flickered and blinked. In seconds I could hear him no longer, though I could still see his massive frame silhouetted against the fire. What I could hear, though, was this:

  …sick of your shit! Like I don’t have enough going on, and then you… Morwen’s voice faded away, then came crackling back with new ferocity. Just, fuck you!

  “I have to go,” I tried to tell Solar…

  …but I was already gone.

  Blinking, I sat up in my cozy basket of blankets, and nearly bumped my head against the underside of the end table.

  The yelling was becoming progressively louder. As usual I couldn’t understand anything Her Husband said, but Morwen’s meaning shone through her replies, as clear as a cat’s angry yowl.

  … and the sitter quit, and then you come in here and…I don’t care! I’m sick of putting up with your bullshit! Oh, really, why not?! Let’s go ahead and talk about it. Yeah, let’s just set everything on fire!

  I slunk out from under the table and into the kitchen. Her Husband was against the counter, gripping its edge so hard his knuckles were white. Morwen faced him, her arms folded against her swollen belly. Tears were trickling down her face, but her chin was lifted fiercely. My baby sat in his high chair, preoccupied in his effort to pick up a piece of cereal, and therefore not paying any attention. Thank the stars for the myopia of the young.

  Her Husband snapped something sharp, and I watched in astonishment as the words rippled through the air. I could actually see them as a red, winding current of anger, drifting like smoke. As I stared, the counter under his hand jumped sideways a smidge. It wasn’t much, but it unbalanced him, and he had to catch himself. This provoked another angry outburst, and more crimson words that hung heavily between them.

  They weren’t reaching Morwen, though. The air around her vibrated, buzzing bee-like against her skin. The sound clearly irritated her; she constantly shifted her stance and shook her head, as if attempting to get water out of her ears. However, she did not appear conscious either of her discomfort, or of its source. She spat back at Her Husband, and the awful buzzing increased, until I could feel it in my own teeth. I noted with alarm that a darkness was sliding over her skin, a shadow that was not her own.

  Needless to say, this was all highly irregular. I’d witnessed several fights between Morwen and Her Husband before, and they did not typically involve anything like That Which Cannot Be Seen. Really, I wasn’t sure how they could not notice what was happening, but it seemed obvious that they were blind and deaf to their dilemma.

  I had to attract their notice. Normally I would do this by darting like an idiot from the doorway directly over Her Husband’s foot, which would provoke a startled yelp, a curse, and a reproving comment from Morwen. Given the tension in the atmosphere, that did not seem like the wisest course. They needed refocusing, not further angering.

  In the brief silence, my baby banged his fist gleefully against his tray—which gave me an idea. I slunk around the edges of the kitchen until I was directly behind him in his high chair.

  “Sorry about this, little one,” I told him. He wasn’t listening, of course.

  Her Husband spoke again. The red mist in the air was hard to breathe, I could tell, because his chest rose and fell with increasing rapidity. Meanwhile, the buzzing around Morwen intensified yet again, becoming almost the shrill whine of a mosquito, and blurring the air around her so that I could hardly see her face.

  Unsheathing my claws, I sank them into the baby’s dangling, sock-covered foot. Not too deep, of course, but enough to make him yelp, and then to bawl: big, hearty, attention-getting sobs.

  By the time Her Husband and Morwen looked, I was crouched beneath the chair with my front paws tucked innocently under my chest. Not that they had eyes for me, anyway—they were focused entirely upon their howling offspring.

  Her Husband said something to Morwen, and for once I understood its thrust: Look, you’ve upset our son! He moved toward the high chair with his arms outstretched, stepping away from the blood-red, smoke-like aura of his anger. Morwen, for her part, burst into tears, turned, and fled up the stairs…leaving behind the dark vibration.

  Both the red mist and the black buzz hung in the air, each with an empty, person-shaped space in their middles. Then, the entire kitchen flickered. The counter jumped back into its original place—I know, because I was watching it carefully—and all trace of strange phenomena disappeared. It was just a kitchen again.

  Her Husband was lifting my baby out of his high chair. Balancing the boy on his hip, he began to sway back and forth, patting my baby on his back and making soothing sounds. Satisfied that my baby was taken care of, I crept out from under the chair and dashed up the stairs after Morwen.

  She wasn’t in her bedroom. Up the bare wooden stairs I bounded, and into the small attic with its steeply-angled roof and ticklish scent of dust.

  Morwen sat on the floor, her back resting against her desk, her bare feet smudging the scarcely-there remains of the chalk circle. Her arms were wrapped around her belly, and the baby within. Though the black buzz had remained downstairs, she sobbed noisily, with such effort that she had to pause now and then to cough and gasp.

  I rubbed lovingly against her legs and got a smack and a “Shoo!” for my pains. I didn’t take it personally. Whether cat or human, one should not hold the irrational behavior of a pregnant female against her: they are beholden to deep, primal instincts, not the conventions of civilization. So I sat nearby and curled my tail around my legs, blinking in a friendly fashion at my distraught friend.

  “We could curse him,” I reminded her cheerfully. “That botanica two towns over sells everything we need for hotfoot powder. He’d be gone in a flash.”

  Morwen, of course, neither understood nor responded. I hadn’t really been serious about it anyway. Deeply as I disliked Her Husband, I’d seen firsthand how happy he made Morwen—or, at least, how happy he usually made her. Today was obviously the exception. Given what I’d witnessed, however, I suspected he was not personally to blame.

  Eventually Morwen wiped her eyes and beckoned to me, as I’d known she would. With a hearty purr I strode forward and stroked my cheek against her damp fingers.

  “It’s not your fault,” I told her, as she leaned forward to pick me up. She deposited me in her lap and I settled down between her crossed legs, resting my chin upon her belly. From there I could look directly upward into Morwen’s red, swollen eyes, and purr both to her, and to the little one within her, whose rapid heartbeat I could just barely discern.

  “There’s something wrong with this town,” I explained between purrs. Morwen was looking at me, but her gaze was unfocused, and I knew she was neither truly seeing nor hearing. I told her anyway, hoping that some dribble of meaning might leak through the barrier between us. “There’s something wrong with Kingsport right now. Time and space are out of joint, and nobody is sure why. You can’t see it or feel it yourselves, but it’s true.”

  Morwen sighed
and fondled my ears. I went on. “You have to look, Morwen,” I urged her. “You have to See That Which Cannot Be Seen. You have the power, I know you do, if you’d only try. If you don’t, this is just going to happen again. And what if I’m not there to stop it? I can’t be around all the time.”

  Her fingers dropped from my ears to my chin. My purr deepened when she found the itchy spot that exists under every cat’s jaw. “I’m serious, Morwen,” I insisted, even as my eyes drifted shut. “I’m going to do what I can, but it may not be enough. You need to wake up, Morwen.” A thought occurred to me. I opened my eyes wide, as wide as they would go, and made direct eye contact. “You need to wake up, Morwen,” I told her, as clearly as I possibly could. “Wake up. See what’s happening, what’s really happening, not just what you think you should see. Wake up so you can protect your babies.”

  Morwen frowned at me, and for a hopeful second, I believed I’d gotten through. Then her eyes unfocused again. I sighed and settled down into a steady purr, matching my rhythms to the wee heartbeat that fluttered against my chest.

  She was never going to see.

  5

  Hideous

  That night, I circled the bedrooms three times, checking to be sure that my baby, Morwen, and Her Husband were all asleep, and that nothing lingered in the house to disturb their slumber. I also freshened a few sigils I’d carved in the baseboards, ones that Her Husband had previously varnished over. Claws thus sharpened, I finally felt safe in leaving the house for my nightly rounds. With luck I could do a spot of hunting, too. Morwen had bought the shrimp-flavored kibble again—my least favorite—so my diet required supplementation.

  The grass was frosty and cold on my paws, and I could smell snow in the air. Heavy clouds hung low, reflecting the city’s lights and turning the whole sky a luminous rose-gray. Pretty though the sight was, it was far from ideal hunting light. I reached the row of tall pines that bordered my yard, resigned to a depressing dinner of flavorless crunchies, when I suddenly scented blood.

  I slunk around one broad trunk, and beheld a dim white figure crouched, half-hidden, behind the next tree in the row. At the same time, her scent reached me, as did a heavier whiff of the meaty aroma. I straightened up and trotted forward.

  “How did you get that?” I asked Dot admiringly.

  Dot’s back arched and she jumped, startled by the sound of my voice. I laughed as her fur settled back into position. She glared at me over her shoulder, one paw still on the dove she’d been devouring. There was a small gray feather dangling out of the corner of her mouth, making her adorably squashed face even more comical than usual.

  “It flew right into me,” she said. “Like it didn’t see me. Even in this light.”

  “Huh. Doves don’t usually do that,” I said.

  “Nothing has been right today.”

  “You noticed?”

  She dipped her head sagely, and the feather drifted off, to rest in the snow. “You can have some,” she added generously.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Morwen’s been budgeting again.”

  Dot shuddered delicately and moved aside, so that I could join her at the unexpected feast. She’d been working at the back, and a whole swath of good, red meat was exposed. I thrust my face in and chewed, working a bit of muscle around until it tore free and I could resurface to swallow. Then it was Dot’s turn. As we ate, it began to snow—big, white, drifting flakes that soon hid the bloody smears left by the downed bird.

  “So what’s happening?” Dot asked at last. She was gnawing on the bird’s head, and I could hear the skull crunch between her teeth. “What’s making it all weird?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “According to Tilly, the night-gaunts Libby and I have been seeing are just symptoms, not the cause.”

  Dot paused in her loud munching, her already large green eyes growing rounder. “Libby saw a night-gaunt?” she asked in surprise.

  “Two,” I told her. “Around his house.”

  Dot resumed chewing, and I watched upper vertebrae disappear between her lips. She swallowed, hard. “I saw something else,” she volunteered.

  “You have blood on your cheeks,” I interrupted. Leaning forward, I started to lick one side clean, pressing firmly on her fluffy fur with every stroke of my tongue. I knew white was a bitch to maintain—I’d had a white coat myself several lives ago. As I proceeded, her purr rumbled faintly in her chest.

  “Well, I didn’t see,” Dot clarified drowsily, lulled half-asleep by the feast and the grooming. “I smelled.”

  I paused, and spoke without thinking. “Fish. You smelled something fishy, but it wasn’t fish. It was something else.”

  Dot opened her eyes, cocking her head in curiosity. “How did you know?”

  I didn’t answer. I’d felt it in my gut, that was how—deep down, by the base of the spine, far from my chattering consciousness. That was where intuition lived, and right now it twisted my stomach into foreboding knots.

  The air suddenly hung heavy with potential, and even the small, squeaking and fluttering things of the night paused in their various flights. The universe was listening. Things were happening. The tiny individual pieces of a cosmos-wide puzzle were gently snapping themselves into place.

  I’d encountered this sensation before. It’s good news when you’re the one casting spells in the attic, twirling the delicate threads of reality around your claws. It’s bad news when you’re at the other end of those threads, and someone is yanking your life askew.

  Dot did not seem conscious of the night’s enchantment; perhaps it was all in my head. Even so, that moment offered the nudge I’d needed. Whoever was stirring the pot in Kingsport, I fully intended to shove my own ladle in.

  “Will you dream with me?” I asked Dot.

  She was chewing the bloodied fur between her toes, and shot me a dubious look over her extended claws. “What, now? Here?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s cold,” she complained.

  “It’s important.”

  “You think everything’s important,” she grumbled, already getting to her feet.

  We slunk beneath the low-hanging branches and discovered, at the base of the tree, a little snow-free hollow within a thick bed of fallen needles. It was a bit prickly, but when we curled up together it was warm, and the fir’s heady aroma lulled us into a deep winter’s sleep.

  * * *

  Together we traversed the formless forest that bounded the deeper dreamlands, but this time we did not enter the sunset city of the cats, nor any of the better-traveled realms. Instead I led Dot to a different place, one I hadn’t visited in years.

  We leapt up a long, spiraling staircase, and emerged at ground level, under a dim, foggy sun. The ground was wet and cold, and the coarse grass dampened our bellies with dew. Somehow everything contrived to smell of frog, though there wasn’t a single frog in sight.

  We’d arrived amidst the ruins of an ancient settlement; here and there in the mist the tumbled remains of stone buildings were just visible. The best-preserved, a half-collapsed gray temple, still stood guard over the rest. One column slanted sideways across its entrance, propping up the leaning remains of the walls, and from this dangled thick clumps of swamp moss, an emerald curtain concealing the mysteries.

  Under this column and through this moss I slunk, shaking the wet off my paws at every step. The temple was as deserted as I’d recalled, and appeared not to have changed at all in the intervening years—though the passage of time is always uncertain in the dreamlands. By local standards it might have been mere weeks since my last visit. It might also have been several hundred years.

  At any rate, there was the divining pool, built upon a star-shaped platform at the exact center of the room. The steps leading up to it were broken, but I simply jumped to the wide ledge that surrounded the sacred waters, and peered within.

  Though the ceiling was open above me, the pool did not reflect the gray sky, or the sun that struggled to shine between heavy clouds
. The waters were black, save for the occasional faint twinkle far, far down in their depths. Was it a star? The slight glow of a tiny, phosphorescent fish? I certainly didn’t know. I didn’t even know how far down the water went, and whether this was a shallow, black-painted pool, or a well of unimaginable proportions.

  Curling my tail around my paws, I studied my own reflection, which was eerily clear in the dark surface. I was aware of Dot taking a seat beside me, but I stayed focused upon my reflection; curiously, though she was right beside me, I could not see hers.

  “Spirits of the temple and of prophecy,” I intoned, underlying my words with my throatiest purr. “I command you, by the One and the Many, and by the barbarous names of old. By the gods and spirits of the one hundred and eight realms, by the white light and the red, I conjure you to obey me. Nor will you find my words without value, my promises unkept, or my offerings unworthy of your great and particular powers.” I paused and considered the phrasing of my question. “How do I discover what’s amiss in Kingsport? And how can I best protect my friends and family, both human and feline, in the days to come?” Leaning forward, I awaited the response.

  There were shadows in the pool, and strange, gleaming reflections upon its surface. I let my gaze soften, so that my own reflected face appeared blurred and hazy.

  The vision I saw could have been in the pool, or in my own mind—or perhaps both. It was snowing rather heavily; enormous, fluffy flakes continually crossed my line of sight. Vividly I perceived a granite tombstone to my left, and a broken stone cross not far from me, perhaps ten body-lengths ahead. There hung a foul reek of ghoul in the air—half dog, half rot. I glimpsed motion far away: a white shape loped up a tombstone-strewn hill, and disappeared into the woods beyond.

  With a blink, the mirage vanished. I shook my head, trying to get the cobwebs out of my brain, and turned to Dot, who was thoroughly licking her fluffy white tail.

  “How long was I out?” I asked.