“Is this the place…?” Facing the back gate of the estate’s cracked border wall, Kieli hunched her shoulders against a chill that had nothing to do with the evening breeze. On the other side of the gate an old mansion stood against the sky, where sunset’s copper glow was beginning to melt into blue-gray. She’d been told the mansion belonged to a distinguished family that brought wealth to the town, but it looked awfully run-down for such an important estate. The border wall and the walls of the mansion itself were riddled with fine webs of cracks and liverwort. There wasn’t a single plant in the garden that you’d expect to find in a place like this. Even the iron gate before Kieli’s eyes was so completely covered in rust that she was afraid if she touched it, it would come loose and just fall down. According to what she’d heard from the doorman this morning, about a decade ago—in other words, not long after the newest family head had assumed that position—there had been a natural disaster. An earthquake had opened up a fissure at the northern end of town, and several mansions like this one had been destroyed. That was exactly where they were right now: the northern outskirts. Of all the grand homes, this one alone had miraculously escaped destruction, and the female head of the family still lived here to this day. But apparently there wasn’t a single other occupied house anywhere nearby. Still, Kieli’s impression was the opposite of what she’d heard: vague though the feeling was, she thought this was the house where she couldn’t sense a living presence. The sight of it made her flinch more than a little, but she gulped and pulled herself back together. “Did Harvey really get carried off by that woman?” “Yep,” the beast answered lightly, and jumped easily to the top of the wall. It balanced all four limbs adroitly on the narrow surface and began to walk back and forth along it, perhaps scoping out the interior of the estate. “Climb on up.” It said this as if it were the easiest thing in the world to do. Kieli gave the animal a slightly envious look as she nodded. They’d circled the whole estate, following along the wall; the front gate was far too tall for either of them to imagine Kieli climbing. This servants’ gate in the rear seemed surmountable, but certainly not easily. It was like when the creature had brought her an arm it had torn off of someone: it meant no offense, but the way it showed her consideration left something to be desired. Was that because it was an animal? The moment Kieli placed a foot on the rusty gate, it screeched loudly. White-knuckled with fear, she did her best not to make any noise as she scrambled up; when she reached the top she straddled the gate and surveyed the grounds inside. On the other side of a barren, empty space Kieli wasn’t sure she could properly call a “garden” stood the crack-riddled walls of the estate. They had a really creepy air about them. All the visible windows were dark gray. Scraps of once-white curtains hung in a few of them, but no light was on in any of the rooms. Kieli started to wonder whether Harvey was really in this place after all. She swung both legs over the gate and jumped down into the estate grounds. She was just pulling her bag back up to her shoulder and pondering her next move when suddenly a voice behind her asked, “Who are you?” Kieli’s heart leapt to her throat. She hadn’t sensed anyone there at all. She turned around stiffly, trying to get her heartbeat back under control, and discovered a long-haired woman in a beautiful dress that looked out of place in the wild garden. Out of the corner of her eye, Kieli glanced up to the top of the wall, thinking, She found us right away!, but the black animal had already disappeared into hiding, abandoning Kieli to her fate. Traitor… All of a sudden coming face-to-face with the mistress of the manor like this had her feeling rattled, but she held her head high, told herself she’d come here for an honorable, aboveboard purpose (though technically, scaling the gate and sneaking in kind of tossed the “aboveboard” thing out the window), and stated her business. “Um, I heard that Harvey—I mean, the man I was with yesterday—was here.” “Oh, you,” said the lady, sounding as if she had only just now remembered Kieli’s face. Evidently she really hadn’t taken any notice of Kieli at the time. “Did you come to bring him back with you?” “Yes…I did,” Kieli confirmed cautiously, disconcerted. The lady tilted her head for a moment as if she was pondering this, but then she offered Kieli a gentle smile and said, “Yes, he’s here. Come in.” She started walking, leading the way back toward the mansion. It was such an unexpectedly normal welcome that it temporarily knocked the wind out of Kieli’s sails, but then she snapped out of it with a start and began jogging after the lady in the dress. The mansion was as devoid of light as it had seemed from the outside. The air inside was chilly, and in it she caught a faint smell like spoiled food. The lady of the house lit a candlestick to light the way and led Kieli down a gloomy corridor. The feeble candle flame made the walls and ceiling flicker into view around her in a way that made it hard to judge their distance from her, making her feel even more uneasy being here all alone. The clacking of the lady’s high-heeled shoes and the rustling of her skirts; the clomping of Kieli’s boots and the rhythmic thumping of her bag—the sounds of their progress through the deathly quiet mansion echoed eerily off the walls. Unable to stand the silence anymore, she addressed the back in front of her. “Um…” Facing forward and continuing to walk, the lady said without warning, “Say, would you give him to me?” This stunning question came casually, in the same offhand manner someone might say Can I have your doll?, and Kieli’s feet stopped in place without her conscious order. “Huh?” she squeaked. The candle’s circle of light and the dress she was following pulled farther away into the darkness, so she hurried to catch back up, flustered. “Um, what do you mean by that?” “You should. He’s my brother.” “B-bro-ther…?” Kieli asked falteringly, the word so alien that her tongue fumbled it. The lady calmly kept walking, paying it no mind. “I knew it from the moment I saw him. I’m positive he’s my brother reincarnated. So give him to me. You don’t mind, do you?” “Wait, but Harvey’s not a thing. It’s not an issue of ‘giving’ or ‘not giving’…” The lady whirled abruptly around to face her for the first time. “You’re saying no?” she asked, tilting her head to the side adorably. Her confusion was plain. Kieli lost her nerve for a moment at that, and fell silent. Then: “I-I’m saying no…” The moment Kieli answered, she was shoved hard in the shoulders. “Huh?!” Taken off guard, she stumbled into a door in the wall—which promptly opened, sending her sprawling shoulders-first into the dark room beyond. She heard the sound of the door closing behind her and sat up in alarm. “What— Please, let me out! Let me out!” She felt around for the knob and seized it, rattling it back and forth, but the door didn’t budge. “No, no, you mustn’t get in my way…” came the lady’s voice from just beyond the door. It lilted like an innocent child’s voice singing a song, interrupted by giggles. “You mustn’t get in my way…because if you do, I’ll have to kill you…” Kieli had the sudden illusion that the thick iron door rippled like a thin piece of cloth for just a moment. It felt as if someone’s slightly foul-smelling sigh washed across her face. She took a step back from the door, shuddering. High-heeled footsteps and the sound of swishing skirts withdrew into the distance. Kieli was pinned in place for a time with her eyes glued to the closed door, unable to move, but when the sound of footsteps disappeared she was released from her paralysis, and she tore her gaze away from the door to look around her. The only thing visible was one dim, lonely ray of twilight shining down on the far corner of the room, hardly enough to see anything but itself by. From the way sound echoed she could guess that it wasn’t a very large space, but other than that, she couldn’t tell anything about her surroundings. There seemed to be a window where the light was leaking in, but it was high up on the wall, and when she peered closely at it, she saw that some unknown party had nailed a board over it to block access. When she started to feel around her for anything she might be able to use to escape, Kieli realized with terror that a whitish, humanlike form was lying at her feet. She looked downward and inspected it carefully: there at the bottom of the darkness, a facedown figure in a pinafore like a maid’s—she thought it was a woman, but the head was so thoroughly crushed in that there was no way to tell from the face. Some kind of mushy substance lay scattered on the floor around it. “What’s wrong?” said a voice out of nowhere. The lady of the house stood in the center of the room, bathed in a ring of pale light. How long had she been there? Her long hair was disheveled, both her face and the dress she was wearing were greasy with the blood of her victim, and she was brandishing with both hands a great ax dripping with gore. “Brother, what’s wrong? Why are you looking at me like that…?” she asked in confusion, tilting her blood-soaked face to the side endearingly. “You’re blaming me…? It wasn’t my fault; it was hers. After all, she was about to toss out my ring right along with the laundry. I know she meant to take the ring. She wanted to get in our way. I just know it.” As she calmly explained this, she walked closer, dragging the bloody ax behind her. Shnnk. Shnnk. With each step came the heavy sound of it scraping along the floor. Kieli backed away in horror, but after only a few steps her shoulders hit the wall. That dream— This is what that dream was about. As she realized this, something made a creaking sound overhead. The lady’s form blurred sideways and dissolved into static as though the noise had erased it, and at her departure the darkness around Kieli softened slightly. Kieli’s eyes traced the wall upward. Her chills hadn’t disappeared yet. When her gaze reached the window, she saw that the boards nailed over it had been snapped apart from the outside, and the color of the night outside was streaming in. It was still brighter than the room, if not by much. A long, thin black face suddenly popped up against the backdrop of the twilit sky, one amber eye gleaming eerily, and she’d opened her mouth to scream before she realized. “Oh!” An amber right eye and a dark brown left eye: it was the black beast. Relieved, Kieli ran up to the wall below the window. “I was afraid you’d run away…” “I found him. That way, over there,” the animal said cheerfully, indifferent to Kieli’s emotional state. It indicated with its eye for Kieli to come outside. Which was all well and good, but the window was high out of Kieli’s reach. The animal didn’t quite seem to understand that, however. She turned and looked around the room again, but it seemed to be an unused storeroom or something; all she saw were a few odds and ends piled up in one corner. Nothing that she could use to stand on. When she looked up at the window through her lashes and made a display of her distress, the animal appeared to notice for the first time that Kieli couldn’t climb up. It blinked both eyes. Then it scrunched its long nose as if in deep thought, and after an amazingly sulky-looking grimace, it grumbled, “Dammit, I can’t believe this,” drew its head back outside, and thrust its rear end through the window frame instead. That long, thin tail just like a mountain lion’s on a body that was otherwise pure dog dangled down to her. Kieli gratefully took hold of the end of it to use as a rope. When she gripped it tight and pulled, she heard a strangled groan overhead. Kieli climbed up the wall with her feet, using the tail as a handhold, and let out a little sigh of relief once she’d gotten her upper body onto the window frame and dragged up her shoulder bag after her. The tail fled from her the moment she let go. When she looked down from her position half-in and half-out of the window, she saw the animal’s back; it was scratching its claws against the ground for some reason, writhing. “I’m sorry; did it hurt?” she whispered. But the animal shook its head without looking up. Apparently pain wasn’t the issue. Maybe it had tickled. Kieli transferred her gaze to the wall below the window. There was a little mountain of loosely heaped fossil fuel like brown coal at the bottom, maybe for heating. She thought she could probably slither down from here onto it. “That way. You can see it from up there.” The animal lifted its head unsteadily, as if exhausted, and pointed with its nose toward a point off in the darkness. Across an open space that she guessed was the courtyard, though it was as barren and empty of plant life as the back garden had been, Kieli could see a smallish building that must be some sort of detached cottage. A faint light bled from one of its windows. So, one of the building’s rooms was apparently occupied. The lighted window seemed almost as small as a postage stamp from this distance, but when she squinted she could make out a redhead sitting against the wall inside. “There he is…!” You got “hit by a car and kidnapped”? What are you, a little kid? Honestly… She was heaving a half-worried, half-exasperated sigh when the hem of a long dress appeared from the side of the room, and someone came to stand in front of Harvey. It was the lady. Kieli’s heart gasped, and then she froze up completely. Within the square of the window, the lady drew up her skirts and knelt on the floor before Harvey. Her two white hands reached out to palm Harvey’s cheeks, and her face drew in close— Wh-wh-what is she…? But before Kieli could see what happened next, a great shadow loomed in front of her, cutting off her line of sight. The chauffeur that had been with the lady when they’d met her yesterday was standing beneath the window, brandishing a large ax with both hands. Kieli jumped down onto the coal pile just in time. The very same moment she slid down to the ground, there was a great metallic clang as the thick wedged blade slammed into the window frame with enough force to send vibrations through the air that Kieli could feel. The rust on the window frame exploded into fine mineral dust that filled the air. The animal launched itself off the ground and sank its teeth into the chauffeur’s neck, but the chauffeur didn’t seem to think anything more of it than Kieli would of a fly buzzing in her ear. He just shook it off harshly and lifted the ax to swing at Kieli again. He’s not hurt—? “He’s only a moving corpse,” the animal explained as it landed lightly on the ground next to her. It continued to expound, though Kieli was fairly certain they didn’t have the time: “The woman’s been dead a long time. You noticed her smell, right?” Kieli was in no state to answer. She rolled out of the path of the chauffeur’s blade with no room to spare and scurried away on all fours as fast as she could. A great crash of impact sounded behind her, followed by a clanging roar that reverberated in her ears until she couldn’t hear anything else. The ax flew out of the chauffeur’s hand and came careening toward her, turning end over end and grazing past her dangerously closely before it lodged itself in the ground. Only the first gasp of the scream made it past her throat. She felt all the blood drain from her face, and all of her strength went with it, sending her crumpling to the ground. She couldn’t make her legs stand up again. When she turned her head nervously to check behind her, she found the chauffeur buried under the collapsed coal pile, kicking his legs up and down like a mechanical toy. Harvey didn’t hold back at all. He used all the force he could muster to kick the woman bringing her face close to his. It sent her flying. Reeling, she fell against the table behind her, knocking the candleholder onto the floor. The candle flame that had been illuminating the room went out, and the faint twilight beaming in through the window became the only thing to see by. That suited Harvey fine, since low light was easier on his eyesight these days. The woman sank to hands and knees on the floor as if grief-stricken. Eventually she lifted her head and gave him an almost offended look. “Brother, why are you treating me so coldly?” “Don’t give me that ‘why.’ Take this off.” When he yanked at the manacle around his left hand, it was promptly yanked right back with a jangle of the heavy chain. The other end of the chain was tied to a round metal fitting in the wall, meaning Harvey couldn’t move away from said wall. “What? No, I can’t do that!” said the woman who’d shackled him and confined him here, without a trace of shame. “If I take it off, you’ll run away! Didn’t you say you loved me, Brother? And yet you ran away and left me…I’m never letting you go again.” She crawled toward him, her long hair trailing along the floor. Harvey shuddered at the sight. “Stay away from me!” He made to pull away from her, but his back was against the wall, so he tried to scoot sideways—but she cut off his path by putting a hand to the wall beside his head. Somebody help me! he cried in his mind. It sounded pretty close to a whine, actually. Harvey remembered hearing something about the younger sister taking over the family because her brother had left; he didn’t particularly sympathize with this brother or anything, but he could sort of see why. Anyone exposed to this girl’s nutty expressions of love would probably want to run away. The fact that she even had manacles and chains and iron rings in the first place already put her squarely in the “freak” category. “Where’s your ring, Brother? Those matching rings are our treasures! I know you have it on you somewhere. I could tell right away.” Mumbling nonsense, she put one hand down the collar of his shirt and started fishing around. The sensation of cold fingers slipping underneath his clothes sent goose bumps rippling over his skin. “Hey, stop it!” “Come on, where are you hiding it? Over here?” This time, Harvey’s cry wasn’t just in his mind. “Wah!” He kicked her off again with all his might. He plastered himself to the wall, breathing hard. Now he really did feel in danger, at least of a certain sort, and he was starting to get chills. He seriously wanted to get out of here pronto. “Oh, Brother, what am I going to do with you…?” Harvey was sure he’d kicked the woman hard in the stomach, but she sat right back up again without seeming hurt, and started crawling back toward him, undeterred. He made a last-ditch attempt to pull his left hand free from the manacle. All he got for his trouble, though, was a shower of rust falling down on his head. The chain and the ring in the wall were both corroded, but not so much so that he could break them just by yanking on them. Just as the woman’s arms were twining around his neck again, a metallic vibration like the gong of a great bell echoed somewhere nearby. “…Goodness, what could that noise be?” Harvey directed a silent thanks to whatever it was for at least distracting her attention temporarily. It had sounded as if it was coming from outside. The courtyard, maybe? After a few seconds’ pause, there was another noise like a pile of heavy luggage falling over. “Perhaps it’s another intruder…? Wait just a minute, Brother. I’ll be right back. Job? Job, where are you?” Evidently the unfamiliar word was the name of that hulking chauffeur with the superhuman strength. Harvey watched her disappear out the door calling for her driver, grumbling at the back of her retreating dress that she didn’t have to ever come back for all he cared. Once he felt her presence exit the hall, he heaved a deep sigh all the way from the bottom of his lungs. Give me a break… He slumped back heavily against the wall and let his head droop. The chain prevented him from lowering his left arm; the ring above him creaked and rained another scattering of rust on him. He was in what seemed like the parlor of a detached cottage. The hallway light seeping in through the doorway and the faint light from the window dimly illuminated the room. In its center stood a table and a chair that were pointlessly large and expensive-looking, but apparently very old too; the ornamental carvings on the legs were worn almost completely away. There was an equally expensive-looking fireplace on the far wall, but it was covered in a thick layer of dust and fossil-fuel ash, and showed no signs of being in use. It was plain that there had been no living residents here for a long time. At any rate, he wanted to escape now, while he had the chance, but…Harvey cast a hooded glance at the radio set neatly on the table. “Do something, already.” “To think you had such a beautiful younger sister, Master! I’m afraid I’m a little disappointed in you. I never took you for the kind of man who’d just run away and leave his own sister like that.” “……” The Corporal had been out to lunch all day, so he was no help at all. Whose side was he on, anyway? He’d been jangling the manacle for a while now, more to vent his feelings than out of any attempt at escape, and his next tug wore through the skin of his hand, making blood well up there. The bruise he’d noticed on his wrist this afternoon hadn’t quite healed yet, either. Harvey had remembered a little while ago that it was from when that woman had grabbed his hand yesterday. He’d also noticed a ring set with a blackish stone on her left ring finger. The stone’s pull was faint due to its small size, but he could sense a fossil-resource-based magnetic field from it very like the one he’d felt at the park in Westerbury. Harvey guessed that stone was somehow providing the energy to keep that corpse in the condition it had been in at the time of its death. Still, while he’d known that crystallized fossil resources could affect the dead, he hadn’t thought they were powerful enough to animate corpses. The woman must be sensing the “core” buried in his heart, and that was why she thought Harvey had the matching ring…That thought made him feel even more endangered, in several senses. Then he picked up a faint squeak, not with his ears but by a crawling on the surface of his skin. Someone was coming toward him from the hallway. Reflex put him instantly on high alert, breath silent and all senses attuned to the slightest movement. After he spent a while staring at the doorway by the light from the window, a dark figure appeared within the door frame, backlit by the dull hallway light. Shnnk, shnnk… A heavy sound like grinding stone scraped along the floor in time with the approaching footsteps. The light coming from the window hit the end of the rod-shaped thing the figure brandished with both hands, illuminating the contours of a thick wedged blade. The blade bore down unhesitatingly straight toward his head— A dull clang sounded just above the crown of his head and, since he was leaning that head against the wall at the time, the impact sent his brain bouncing in his skull. After a split second’s pause that felt like time had stopped, fragments of the concrete wall began raining down on him. When he looked up, still unconsciously holding his breath, the thick blade of the ax was sticking out perpendicular to the wall directly below the ring where the chain had been attached. A beat later, the severed end of the chain belatedly slid down the wall and hit him on the head, too. “Are you okay?” the figure in front of him said in a girl’s voice. “Yeah…but warn me next time you do that,” Harvey griped, shaking the bits of chain and rust out of his hair. Then he tried to stand up, but his legs felt weirdly nerveless, and he had to cling to the wall for support. “Oh, sorry,” the black-haired girl replied in a calm voice as she braced one foot against the wall and violently yanked the ax free. I felt malice for a second just now…What was that? “Eh, whatever. Let’s just get out of here. Corporal, we’re going home.” “Going home? But isn’t this your estate, Master?” “I’m not the kind of guy who’s into getting chained up in his own house.” Just talking to the radio was exhausting. He grabbed its strap roughly, and the manacle and strap of chain still dangling from his wrist made an annoying creaking sound. Kieli hefted the ax she’d pulled from the wall. “Want me to break it off?” “…Nah,” Harvey declined. “I’ll do it myself later.” He kind of got the feeling if he let her do it he’d lose his hand in the process. Kieli dropped the ax to the floor with a clang, looking vaguely disappointed…He was starting to get the distinct sense that the malice he’d felt a little while ago had been real after all. Why’s she in such a bad mood? “Harvey, back a few minutes ago…did you really do it?” “Do what?” he asked, falling back on his old habit of answering a question with a question in the face of her glare. “…Nothing.” Kieli turned away from him, looking miffed for some reason. Harvey saw a figure move behind her. “Kieli!” In the same moment that he automatically reached out and pushed her aside, the woman in the dress swung the ax down from overhead. A dull sound, accompanied by a heavy shock, jolted the bone of his arm. As Kieli stumbled from the push, the thick, darkly gleaming blade arced down toward Harvey’s arm right before her eyes. She tried and failed to scream. It felt as if her heart would stop. Gong… Instead of his arm, the manacle circling his wrist broke in two and fell to the floor with a thunk. The lady of the house hmphed irritably. “Honestly, Brother…I really don’t know what to do with you,” she mourned in low tones, shifting the ax back to an attack stance with more strength than her slender arms seemed capable of. She took a step forward. “I see you want to run off with some other girl again. Didn’t I tell you I wouldn’t let you get away?” “Drop the ‘again’; you’ll make me look bad,” Harvey retorted, taking Kieli’s hand and guiding her behind his back. She could feel a tiny bit of his own numbness through the hand he held. His wrist had been badly scraped up to begin with; now it was darkening rapidly even as she watched, standing out clearly against the rest of his skin. The sight made Kieli shudder. If he’d been hit even slightly higher or lower, he really would have lost his hand. And of course there was no manacle to shield him against the next blow. She was biting her lip at the awful situation when a black shadow leaped into her field of vision and pounced. Out of the young lady’s mouth came a husky scream like an old woman’s. Her arm flailed, swinging the ax around wildly, and attached to that arm was the black animal, biting in hard. “Him!” Harvey shouted in surprise. Did they know each other? The ax clattered to the ground and slid spinning across the floor, and the animal slid equally neatly to rest on all fours. There was a baffling KKCHK sound, and the white, pole-shaped object in the animal’s mouth broke in half—the lady’s torn-off arm. The animal dug right into the arm and began eating noisily. The sound of bones being crushed, the sound of flesh being chewed, the sound of dripping blood: the discordant trio echoed eerily in the dimness until Kieli thought she would vomit. The ring the lady had worn on her left hand slipped out of the side of its mouth and fell to the floor with a terribly light, soft sound in contrast to the heavy cacophony filling the air. “Ah!” The lady instantly lunged for it and scooped it up with her remaining hand. But in just a matter of seconds, though Kieli didn’t know what had happened, the lady had transformed into a wretched shadow of herself. Her waist-length hair turned cobweb-gray, her plump cheeks grew hollow and sunken, and her skin shriveled and cracked like one more wall of the estate. Yet the lady paid no attention to these changes as she gripped the ring and gazed fondly at it, as if she had eyes for nothing else. And right there in her hands, the stone set in it cracked to pieces. Just like that. The lady stared at the tiny fragments that were left of it, her withered cheeks stiff with shock. And then right afterward, the wrist of the hand in which she held the stone began to crumble away. The disintegration swiftly spread from her wrist up to her elbow, pieces audibly crumbling away like a dried-up twig. “N-no…No!” As Kieli looked on in dumb amazement at the lady waving the remains of her arm about and screaming, behind that lady, with no warning whatsoever, the fireplace collapsed, sending up a thick cloud of ash. Cracks and rust began radiating out from the wall to the floor and ceiling, as if their change were triggered by hers. “Uh-oh. Broken, huh?” The animal dropped the half-eaten arm on the floor with an air of regret, and clicked its tongue (the animal! clicked its tongue!). “Everybody get moving. It’s time to run.” It turned around on its four legs and bolted for the exit, so in her stunned state Kieli automatically followed suit. “Harvey, quick!” When she looked over her shoulder to urge him after her, he turned to face her too, looking startled, but then his face suddenly jolted as he was yanked backward. The lady was hanging on to the strap of the radio Harvey held. “Gah, let me go!” it shouted, its voice overlain with violent crackles of static. “Corporal!” Kieli frantically snatched the radio out of the lady’s hand. “Wait, Brother. Help me!” The radio stolen from her, the lady grasped Harvey’s coat instead, and tried to pull him down to the floor with her. Her voice was completely the hoarse one of an old woman now. The flesh of the thin arm tugging at his coat dried to dirt before their eyes and dropped away to expose white bones. “Why? Why are you leaving me behind again…?! Please, please don’t leave me…!” Her sobbing voice lost its tone, steadily unraveling into something that wasn’t a voice at all. Seeing the barest moment of what looked like hesitation on Harvey’s face, Kieli determinedly reached out with both hands and shoved the lady across the room. “Don’t touch him!” she shouted. Then, surprised by her own words and the voice in which she’d said them, she froze in place. Harvey, on the other hand, seemed to snap back to his senses at her cry; he tugged her by the hand and started dragging her forward, and so she started running. Looking back one more time, she saw the lady stretching her hand pleadingly after them from where she’d collapsed on her stomach in the hallway. She’d raised her head, and Kieli could see that the flesh of her face had turned to dust too, and was falling off in great clumps. Eyeballs that looked like cloudy marbles now dropped out of their sockets and rolled along the floor. She looked as if she was trying to say something, but her voice wasn’t there anymore; soon she was just a skeleton, just bones collapsing to the floor. Only her long white hair and the dress she’d been wearing were left. When they came out of the cottage, the curtain of night had already descended completely over the outside world. Kieli glanced at that place by the wall as they ran through the courtyard and saw the chauffeur lying there. He’d managed to scramble out from under the pile of fuel just in time to turn into an unmoving white skeleton. Then they were out of the courtyard; they could see the servants’ gate across the back garden now. The animal running ahead of them launched itself to the peak of the gate in one jump and transferred itself to the top of the wall, turning back to them as if to urge them on. “Climb.” Kieli scaled the gate first with Harvey’s help. When she landed on the ground on the other side, Harvey tossed the radio over to her. It sailed up in a high arc and then down again, shrieking all the while. While Kieli was hastily moving to catch it, Harvey put one foot to the gate himself and climbed straight to the top in one go. But when he tried to jump down— “…Huh?” He abruptly lost his balance and fell in an unnatural, shoulder-first pose. Startled, Kieli ran over to him clutching the radio. “Harvey?!” “I’m—fine.” The look on Harvey’s face told her he didn’t know why he’d fallen either. He braced his hand against the ground and tried to get back up. Kieli lent him her hand and pulled him upright, then more or less dragged him after her until she stumbled too a little ways from the gate, and the two of them fell on top of each other with a thud, the radio sandwiched between them. Panting, Kieli sat up and turned around, still on the ground. When she looked up at the mansion on the other side of the gate, she saw that the extraordinary decay had spread all the way to its outer walls. Thin cracks covered the whole building until there were more cracks than there was wall. The progression of the bizarre phenomenon had stopped just at the point where it looked as if even the tiniest breath of pressure could make the entire thing dissolve into sand and come washing down to the ground. “…What the hell was that…?” “What was it…?” “Dunno…” After that one round of empty conversation, they all just stared up at the gate together, unable to snap out of their stupor for a while. A lady that had aged and withered as if decades of time had passed at the speed of light, and an estate that had moldered just like its mistress. What the heck had just happened…? Whatever it was, Kieli didn’t sense that ominous stench she’d picked up from the lady coming from this estate anymore. The only thing drifting vaguely through the air now was loneliness. Unrequited, distorted emotions—not regrets or grudges or anything like that; just a young loneliness like a little girl crying over being abandoned without even knowing why. It tinged the air around them, and then, little by little, it vanished. The black animal jumped down from the wall and landed soundlessly by them. It merely stood there on its four legs, not taking any sort of offensive stance as far as she could see, but Harvey gave it an openly hostile look and moved Kieli behind him. Apparently he really did know something about it. Was this animal an Undying too, like Kieli had imagined? (Of a different breed, of course.) “You’re the voice that talked to me at the train station, aren’t you? You watched me a few times after that, too. What’s your game?” Harvey said in a harsh voice, his tone a full two steps lower than usual. The animal made a sort of shrug, and spoke in human language with its animal mouth. “It’d been so long since I’d seen an original Undying that I got interested, so I was observing you, that’s all. I don’t mean you any harm. So what’s your problem? How about you stop automatically reacting with hostility to everything?” Its intonation was kind of wonky, maybe because its vocal cords were built differently from a human’s, but if Kieli went just by its wording and the actual quality of its voice, it reminded her of a streetwise boy. But the human expressions it formed with its long, doglike face were frankly pretty grotesque. It had a very low adorableness factor, as a dog. Asking someone not to automatically be on guard was an impossible request. Harvey just kept glaring at it, his attitude fixed at “hostile.” Kieli wavered a little, but in the end she timidly tugged on Harvey’s sleeve. “Um, he did technically save us,” she ventured. Harvey darted a sidelong glance at her and blinked. “…Uh-huh. Yeah,” he agreed. He didn’t look completely convinced, but maybe he’d accepted that she had a good point, because he visibly dialed down his hostility. The animal twisted the corners of its mouth up to make a smile. The closely packed sawlike teeth and the four sharp canines peeked out from its greenish mouth. “Okay then, let’s say it’s technically nice to meet you. I’m—” Bang! A sort of dull explosion rattled her eardrums, cutting off its voice. A gunshot—? The animal’s body was blasted to one side, the grin still on its face. Letting out a raspy shriek, Kieli instantly started running over to it. “Kieli, wait—” She shook off the hand Harvey tried to stop her with and got down on her knees beside the fallen animal. Then she leaned protectively over it and took stock. There was a hole right where its hind leg met its torso; blood was welling up from it before her eyes. With no real idea what to do, Kieli just covered the wound with both hands and tried to stanch the bleeding. She could see the flickering white rays of flashlights across the dark road. She could hear voices talking to one another: “That way.” “There it is.” “It has friends!” Narrowing her eyes against the light behind them, she saw that a group of about ten men had appeared from around the corner of the estate’s outer wall. They were armed with what looked like shotguns, but judging by how they talked and the fact that they were all dressed differently, they weren’t Church Soldiers. Did that mean they were local men? It didn’t take long for things to click: they were out looking for the animal that had bitten off that man’s arm this afternoon. “You’re a real fool,” said a boyish, streetwise voice with wholly inappropriate calm. Boyish, and yet at the same time the little muffled laugh it gave deep in its throat was like an old man’s. It shifted Kieli off of itself and stood up as if nothing had happened. A viscous liquid that looked like coal tar oozed out of the gaping gunshot wound in its hind leg and started covering the opening. “Core” blood. It really is an Undying— “You could’ve just pretended I was attacking you. I can’t believe you actually declared yourself on my side instead…Ah, well, I’ve gotten real fond of you. Your name’s Kieli, right?” Fangs dripping with saliva peeked out of its smiling mouth. Its dark brown left eye blended into the darkness; only its amber right eye caught the light and reflected it thickly back. As it ambled around to face off against the men with shotguns, it told her, “My name is .” One part of the sentence, in which it must have said its name, sounded more doglike than human, and Kieli couldn’t make it out. “In today’s language, it means ‘Mane,’” Mane supplied, the stiff hair around his neck bristling, and growled like a cat. The skin of his wounded hind leg started to rapidly tear away from where it connected to his torso, and from beneath the mucous membrane swarmed by coal tar appeared a new leg that took the place of the old—a fat leg with hooklike talons, that looked as though it belonged to a giant bird of prey. Did he have the traits of all kinds of different animals—? The animal kicked powerfully off the ground with his three beast legs and his new bird leg, and went straight for the group of men. A tremor ran through the crowd even as they aimed their shotguns. Kieli just gaped after Mane for a moment, but then Harvey grabbed her arm and forcibly dragged her to her feet. “Time to run, Kieli.” “But…” She started running down the road with him in the opposite direction from the encirclement, darting worried glances behind her all the while. Without slowing his pace, Harvey turned his head and shouted an order over his shoulder to Mane: “Don’t kill them!” Mane, who’d already sprung at the crowd, ducked his head as if to say Good grief. When he returned his gaze forward, he gave a little “Huh?” that sounded like a tire going flat, and before Kieli could process it he abruptly fell flat on his face. He’d shoved Kieli away just before he went down, so her legs got all tangled up and she fell down on her butt in the opposite direction. She picked herself up immediately and crawled over to Harvey, who was still lying where he’d fallen. She peered into his face. “What’s wrong…?!” “Sorry—my foot just—slipped,” Harvey said, as if it were no big deal, but he was curling his body protectively around his stomach with his hand over a spot on his side, and it didn’t look as if he could get up. He gave a strange, hitching cough, and spit up a glob of something from deep in this throat that was covered in black blood. Kieli’d thought that fall from the gate was strange—he must have been sick ever since then; she just knew it. “No! Harvey!” She threw her arms around him; he shoved her off with an elbow in an I’m fine sort of way—bringing his hand into her field of vision. When she saw the condition it was in, she doubted her own eyes. The flesh there was sunken so that the joints and blood vessels stood out strikingly; it was as if it wasn’t Harvey’s hand at all, and yet those were definitely the bones of Harvey’s hand, and she could see where it connected to Harvey’s body near his shirtsleeve. It’s just like how that lady changed…! “No! What…what is this? Why?!” Kieli was reaching out to cling to him, scared to death, when someone behind her yanked her shoulder bag hard, tearing her away from him. The townspeople had caught up to them. They bore down on each of them separately to subdue them, cutting off Kieli’s view, and the sight of Harvey was swallowed up by the crowd in no time. “Corporal!” She clutched at the radio just as it was about to get taken away from her in the confusion, wrapped both arms around it, and held on for dear life as she scanned the throng for Harvey. She caught sight of a red head of hair through the crowd in time to see a man raise up his shotgun and strike that red head with it. Harvey fell facefirst to the ground; the man straddled him and jammed the mouth of the shotgun between his ribs. Harvey showed no signs of getting up. “No!” Kieli’s own shriek was accompanied by a scream from behind her. Mane’s teeth were sunk deep into the arm of the man who’d been holding Kieli. “Harvey! Don’t help me. Help Harvey, quick!” she called at the top of her lungs, pointing toward Harvey even as she stumbled and fell. Mane alighted on the ground next to her and cocked his head to the side. “Can I kill? It’d be a pain to save him without killing anybody, and it’s pretty hard to do.” “Yes! You can kill!” The next second, Mane was descending on the man holding a gun to Harvey in one leap, baring his sawlike teeth and sinking them into the man’s head. Harvey had just found the strength to lift his upper body; the man’s skull was crushed in right before his eyes, spattering what looked like bits of brain all round. While the other men screamed in terror and the crowd began to scatter every which way, Kieli sank nervelessly to her knees where she stood, staring at the almost headless corpse. Still lying weakly on the ground in front of the body, Harvey stiffly turned his head and looked at Kieli. Something sticky clung to his cheeks, and he looked as though he might cry. Oh, I was wrong, Kieli realized in that moment. That wasn’t the lady. In that dream, the one holding the ax and staring at the corpse… …was me. An area on the left side of his torso was mummified the same way as his left hand: the flesh was shrunken as if all the moisture had evaporated away at once, and his ribs stood out clearly underneath his too-taut skin. That was where that woman had clung to him before she’d turned into a skeleton, Harvey remembered. He didn’t like to look at it, so he smoothed his shirt back down to cover it again. Then he had another fit of coughing. “Geez, you’re a mess,” said the black beast that spoke in human words, the unidentifiable creature that’d said that his name meant “Mane” (so Harvey’d decided to go ahead and call him that). His boyish voice didn’t sound particularly upset about it. “The stone’s power must’ve sucked those parts into itself.” “Will he…get better?” Kieli asked uneasily. She’d been watching silently by his side. “It doesn’t look fatal…but I can’t say for sure whether it’ll heal or not.” The beast blinked his dark brown eye and his amber eye, and glanced sidelong at Kieli while deftly turning just one eye to meet Harvey’s. “See, this isn’t an injury or something; it’s his true form,” he said, and shrugged in a strangely human way, regarding them with a strangely human expression.
Chapter 89
41 min read