Chapter 3: Denouement
A Faustus '47 tale
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Chapter 3: Denouement
Caldwell snapped the journal shut and frantically stuffed it back into his jacket pocket before grabbing the Sten in front of him. Merida’s muffled shrieking was a sharp-pitched counterpoint to the doleful dirge being chanted by the two Germans, and the baleful blue glow of the copper wires lit the scene from below in some macabre parody of an underwater world - like some vast aquarium, Caldwell thought, where some lurking prehistoric predator was about to rise to devour a hapless morsel. His fingers closed on the cold metal of the Sten, and he had the weapon drawn into his shoulder an instant later, fingers scrabbling stiffly for the trigger. Moisture gleamed along the barrel as he sighted at the necromancer, and then the trigger pulled back far enough to release the bolt.
The Sten had not been designed as an elegant weapon. It was an ugly thing, vicious, with sharp edges and unfinished burrs. It felt angry, and desperate, when you held it. It was a makeshift, do-it-yourself weapon copied from a prewar design which had, in turn, been copied from a German design from the previous war - and every effort made to lighten and simplify it had come at a cost. It could be assembled in any machine garage by a half-competent mechanic, using the most simple of diagrams, and only the barrel required a measure of machining. It was a crude weapon, born from feverish expedience and desperation, and symbolised everything about the European resistance that Caldwell had come to experience over the past seven years.
The first shot was low, smashing into the casket’s lid in a puff of water and chipped stone. The second shot, already higher, struck the necromancer just about his belt, in a spot that Caldwell subconsciously already knew was a simple in/out penetration before he saw the man stagger. The third shot continued the upwards climb to the left, going wide and drilling a hole in the man’s spread-out leather coat under his right arm.
The fourth shot jammed, even as the roaring of the gun echoed around the clearing. Tombstones and weeping statues that had moments before been lit up by the flash of the muzzle, now fell into darkness again, and their after-images haunted Caldwell’s sight as he swore at the obstinate gun and hauled at the cocking lever to clear the bolt.
Voices raised in alarm from the waiting footmen, and the first of them had barely managed a step before Wicker’s rifle thundered from the other side of the clearing. Caldwell caught a glimpse of the snarling Scot as the first footmen fell, and then the staccato roar of the Enfield mingled with the snap and bark of the footmen as they scattered and returned fire.
Caldwell had a moment’s warning, the hair on the back of his neck suddenly rising like needles, and he flung himself sideways without a further thought. Something wild and eldritch, raging with bone-curdling cold, slammed into the tombstone he had been laying behind moments before, and the entire slab went flying backwards into the darkness. The darkness seemed to intensify and blacken beyond human sight, and Caldwell felt shards of ice and shattered tombstone raining across his back as he frantically crawled away.
Someone was shouting, in German, and Caldwell cast a frantic eye back at the clearing just in time to see the chaplain collapse. The night and the gleaming blue wires made colour tricky, so that the blood that boiled from his nose and mouth appeared like a foaming wash of black ink as he fell backwards, away from the casket. The necromancer was still chanting, gauntlet raised in Caldwell’s direction and his right hand clapped to his wounded side. The blue light from the wires swirled around him like a host of angry fireflies, drawn to something at the back of the gauntlet mechanism where it was strapped to his shoulder, and when the light around him suddenly flickered out, Caldwell threw himself sideways in anticipation.
The second eldritch blast annihilated a line of fencing where Caldwell had been moments before, taking the discarded Sten with it, and molten cast iron fragments went spinning through the gloom in bright comet trails of reds and oranges. The same feeling of cold, and wrongness, accompanied the blast, and in an instant Caldwell knew what he had to do.
Hunched behind one of the larger tombstones, with an armless angel stretching out above him, Caldwell dug the journal out of his pocket again, and used bleeding fingers to find his cigarette lighter in one of his breast pockets. The flame seemed woefully insufficient in the darkness, and his scalp crawled at the thought of one of the footmen seeing his light and firing at it - but as he frantically pawed through the pages, the section he needed sprang into view. Caldwell mumbled through the words on the page, feeling that odd sucking pressure building behind his eyeballs, and then touched his bleeding finger to the sigil at the bottom of the page just as he finished the last word.
“Whatdoyouwantwhatdoyouwant,” Wicker’s voice boiled through his mind, and Caldwell shuddered at the raging swirl of emotions that accompanied it. Images flashed through his mind - hands gripping a rifle, tombstones flashing by, a lurch and a tumble that turned into a prone firing position, the sight of a helmet flying off a head as a bullet punctured it - and he had to steel himself and force his own thoughts through the jumble by main force of will.
“Dynamite. Casket. Merida. Wait.” Each sending was a herculean effort, Caldwell feeling iron weights across his chest as he forced the words through the aether, and he had to gasp for air the moment he released the invocation. Flakes of ice floated out of the air around him, settling on his hair and shoulders before melting into icy rivulets against the fevered heat rising from his body.
Behind him, in the clearing, someone laughed, a deep guttural sound, and Caldwell risked a frantic peep around the tombstone while hiding the journal inside his pocket again. The necromancer was standing over the twitching chaplain, looking straight at Caldwell and shaking his head.
No, said that gesture. No, you are not getting away from me.
The necromancer bent down and hauled the still-twitching chaplain onto the casket lid in one smooth motion, seemingly unbothered by the wound in his side, and splayed the man into a cross shape. Blood was leaking from the chaplain’s every orifice now, staining his uniform in dark patches, and ran in thick rivulets down the outside of the casket. At the side, arm still bound to the copper septagram, Merida was still shrieking, rocking back and forth, as her forearm continued its transformation into a withered, blackened claw.
With the chaplain positioned on the casket lid, the necromancer set off towards Caldwell - and the professor ran.
Afterwards, Caldwell could never figure out how he managed it. It was a period of no more than five minutes, during which he tried to lead the necromancer away from the casket - but to his memory, it was a blur of shadows and fear and a feeling that his chest was going to burst. He caromed off tombstones and statues, stony faces suddenly leering in the dark, and fired his revolver back at the pursuing shape, but… the details were just not there. Sheer terror flooded his mind in a wash of black nothingness. He only knew that he ran, and that the darkness followed.
Caldwell came to his senses when the revolver’s hammer suddenly clicked down on an empty chamber. He was somewhere to the south-west of the Breton district, and the sudden onrush of sensation - cold, fatigue, sharp-edged terror inching towards hysteria - came crashing into his mind like a hammer to the forehead. His hands were skinned and raw from countless falls, and his trousers had ripped open over the one knee, where another patch of now-bleeding skin mixed with dirt and gravel from the cemetery ground.
Tucking the revolver back into his belt with suddenly numb fingers, Caldwell took a moment to get his bearings. His arms shook as he wiped his hands across his face, clearing mud and sweat while depositing streaks of his own blood in turn.
Wicker’s shooting was coming from over… there, which meant the cemetery wall was somewhere on his right…
A voice called out nearby, in German, and Caldwell froze. The fatigue boiled off him in an instant.
The voice called out again, this time closer, and Caldwell heard the crunch of footsteps. A shape twitched between the tombstones to his left, and the professor slowly sank down onto his haunches.
Where were his spare bullets? Cold fingers slowly patted around the outside of his belt, feeling for the canvas pouch. He found nothing except a frayed segment of strap.
Damnations! The pouch must have come off sometime during his mad scramble to get away…
The voice called out for the third time, and this time Caldwell could see the necromancer clearly. A faint blue glow trailed the German as he moved between the tombs, disappearing from sight the one moment to appear elsewhere the next. Caldwell found the knife sheath on his belt, mercifully still intact, and slowly drew out the stubby little bayonet.
“I know you are here, little mouse,” came the voice again, this time in English. “I can taste your spells. You are still very new to this.”
Something scuffled on the gravel, and there was a clatter and muttered curse in German. There was a ragged note in the voice when it continued.
“You are meddling with things you do not understand. Give yourself up. Stop this nonsense.” The shape drew closer, something Caldwell sensed even though he could not see the other man, and the knife in his hand started to tremble from his frantic grip. “Give yourself up, and I will teach you the meaning of these things you are playing with.”
The shots coming from the direction of the casket finally ceased, and Caldwell could almost feel his ears twitching at the sudden silence. The necromancer must have sensed it too, for the footsteps stopped.
“Your friends are dead. I can see their spirits departing. You do not wish to join them, I can promise you that.” The footsteps sounded like they were right on the other side of the mausoleum wall that Caldwell was pressed up against. Cold stone at his back warred with the sweat dripping down his neck. “Come, give yourself up. You do not…”
The rest of the words were drowned out by the roar of detonating dynamite, and the area behind them, higher up in the cemetery, lit up with the sudden flash of light. Caldwell’s ears rang from the blast, and he almost stabbed himself in the face in his rush to clap his hands over his ears. A giant bell was tolling in his head, stabbing each eardrum with a needle with each pulse of his heart, and the bayonet clattered to his feet, unnecessary and unheard.
He sensed more than heard the motion on the other side of the tomb, and when he finally looked up, the necromancer was gone. He thought he spotted a dark shape moving towards the site of the explosion, where a column of flames was licking up into the sky, but the darkness and dancing shadows made it hard to be certain. Things were falling from the sky, bouncing and spinning as they struck tombs below.
Caldwell scrambled around him to find the bayonet, and barely had it back in his hands when another dark shape materialised next to him. He swore and stumbled backwards, slashing wildly at the shape, and ended up flat on his backside in the dark.
“What the fook are you doing, man,” came Wicker’s indignant hiss, and Caldwell almost burst out in manic laughter. The tension welled up and out of him like a spring. “Stop messing around and help me carry her!”
Wicker’s outline grew clearer, and Caldwell realised that he had Merida with him, bundled up under one arm like a wayward - albeit unconscious, in this case - toddler. The woman’s weight seemed to go unnoticed to the Scot, who had his rifle in the other hand. The dynamite satchel, now empty, flapped under his one arm.
“You scared the soul out of me, damnit!” Caldwell fumbled the bayonet back into its sheath, then helped to take Merida’s weight into his arms and across his shoulder. “She’s freezing cold, we need to get her back to shelter.”
“Leave it to me,” the Scot growled, once Merida was in Caldwell’s arms, and immediately started off towards some point only he could see. Caldwell struggled with the limp, wet shape in his arms, mildly embarrassed at the feminine form that was being manhandled so roughly, and finally relented and just hauled her up over his shoulders. The position, as undignified as it was, thankfully kept her blackened, shrunken forearm out of his sight, which was something he really did not want to contemplate at that point in the dark.
With Wicker a barely glimpsed shadow ahead, Caldwell tottered off after him, one arm wrapped around Merida’s legs and the other probing ahead to catch the obstacles that once again leapt and snagged at him as he moved. The route back seemed to take an age, with the flaming pyre behind them somehow not abating at all, and only once they had left the Breton district and descended into the lower part of the sprawling cemetery did the last glimmers finally fade behind them.
From there to the cemetery wall was a stumbling, halting procession, with his limp cargo almost dropping on two occasions, until Wicker finally caught him at the gap they had crossed through hours before. Strong hands effortlessly picked up the limp agent and moved her through the tumbled stones of the gap, leaving Caldwell to huff and pant his way across in the darkness. At least it was easier this time around without the Sten banging around his neck.
“We rest when we are back at the packs,” came Wicker’s response, even before Caldwell could open his mouth. The Scot was a darker outline in the midnight ink of the forest, with only a glimmer where his eyes were meant to be. Whatever iron constitution he had, showed no sign of the battle and escape they had just been through.
“Damn your highland legs,” Caldwell muttered, and was thankful when the other man slung the unconscious agent over his shoulder. “Let me just wrap her arm before we move on.”
Wicker gave a wordless mutter, but waited - impatiently - as Caldwell dug through his pockets to find a bandage. Working in the dark, and without knowing if the wound was like any other burn wound - which would crack and weep the moment the skin was distressed - he clumsily wrapped the bandage around as much of her forearm as he could, before bundling the last bit around the withered remnants of her fingers. The skin felt dry and leathery when he touched it, and bile rose in his throat when the one finger accidentally bent back at an unnatural angle during the bandaging process.
With the bandage tied off, the two men set off again, heading back the way they had come earlier that night. Caldwell had to trot to keep up, for the dark shape ahead of him threatened to disappear into the darkness the moment he blinked or looked away for an instant. Wet branches slapped and tore at him as they moved, all thoughts of stealth abandoned now, and it was a good twenty minutes or more before Wicker finally began to slow down to a more manageable pace.
“How do you… keep this up…” Caldwell panted, tugging at his collar where a mixture of sweat and frigid night air was clashing in a damp, sticky mess. “My lungs feel… like fire…”
“I think of what happens if we stop, and then I don’t feel like stopping any more,” Wicker growled in return, hefting Merida on his shoulder. Caldwell could not imagine the strain on the man’s back and spine. “That monster in black has our trail now. If he comes looking, he will find us.”
The thought gave Caldwell only a moment of pause.
“I can fix that… when we are at the packs,” the professor laboured, patting at his chest and feeling the journal’s bulky shape under his tunic. “There is something in the… journal that can help.”
The dark forest watched mutely as the two men, and their cargo, moved through it.
In the journal, on one of the grubby pages, a blood-lined thumbprint twitched and hissed to itself, leaving only the echoes of cobwebs in Caldwell’s mind as the night drew on.
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