The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [118]
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.
The Arcane Payment
BACK IN GRAYSTONE, in my room, I slept away the pain and creeping fatigue that overtook me on the walk from the graveyard.
When I woke, I found myself covered and with plumped pillows behind my head. My ceiling was stained with the same alien world map, the blankets were the same itchy wool. My shoes were missing, but otherwise I was just as I’d been before the ghouls.
“Cal?” I’d had dreams, dark and dripping blood. The ghouls could hurt Cal. If I wasn’t there, wasn’t able to pull him free from their jaws, they’d take him to their nest, consume him, turn his face