American Craftsmen (12 page)

“Some people I used to work with have gone bad. Best just to avoid them. Here are the other things you’ll need.” I handed her a fake passport, some pesos, and a Luxembourg bank account number (which, if I didn’t make it, would give her enough money for an ordinary life), all mundanely arranged for me by Roman.

“You were just a captain,” said Scherie, “but you’re able to arrange this kind of travel?”

“My family has a history of being prepared to move.” True since the time Thomas Morton had fled to Maine, but not an answer, so I accompanied my words with a silent, craft-laden mantra for her not to question, just to
accept and get ready
.

She nodded slowly, all acceptance again. Then, one hand clenching into a fist, she frowned. Her brow furrowed, and she turned her face as if looking at the wall for a memory, like she had forgotten something at the supermarket.

“Scherie?”

“I know this may sound crazy.” She turned to face me, to look me directly in the eye. “But all these plots and secrets, they’re just the tip of the iceberg, aren’t they?” She waved the passport and pesos at my face. “Here I am, about to do something absolutely crazy because you say it’ll be OK. So what I want to know is, are you and your family something special? Do you have some kind of mental power?”

“Like magic?” I smiled. I would do what every Morton did to protect himself and those he cared about. I kept my breathing regular, my face relaxed, my pulse normal—the biofeedback of the lie. “There’s nothing magic about me. Must be you.”

I delivered the line perfectly, without any tell that a mundane would recognize.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m just new at all this.” Yet, even as Scherie apologized, I sensed that she was less scared for me, and a little scared of me. Lies, like magic, always cost something. “So how do I get out during the party?”

I said, “I have a story to tell you.”

*   *   *

“You wondered about my family. My first American ancestor was Thomas Morton. He came to Massachusetts right after the Pilgrims. He and the Puritans didn’t get along. He fled to Maine. He had children. One of them, Jonathan, came to Providence to build this place.”

I could have easily gone on with a full family history, craft and all. But what she knew might still matter. So I told her the craft-free version—a difficult lie, because the Mortons lived in craft. The secret and true history of the rise and fall of the Left Hand went like this:

The eldest of Jonathan’s sons left the House of Morton to commence the orthodox family line’s tradition of military service. The Morton estate in Providence came into the hands of the second eldest son and his descendants, and fell on strange times. This Left-Hand branch of the Mortons inbred for craft with their cousins, but craft didn’t work like Mendel’s peas, so their descendants were no more magical than their free-range relations. Instead, they became a sad bunch of neurasthenic recessives and outright psychotics.

Not inbreeding, but the incestuous combination of energies for a bloody purpose made the Left Hand powerful. They fought mortality, and lost horribly. They searched for transdimensional monsters, but only made monsters of themselves. They conducted experiments that fed on flesh and blood. Travelers disappeared; the neighbors grew suspicious, then hostile.

The Left-Hand Mortons reified their justified paranoia in the very bones of the House. They built sturdy new walls to deflect sudden attacks by angry citizens. In Reformation style, they built “priest” holes that a craftsman could hide in for days. They also built the underground rooms of the subbasement to hide and contain their more extreme experiments.

Finally, as the Civil War drew within farsight, the orthodox Mortons determined to put their House and cousins in order. The family patriarch, Ezekiel, paid a call on the twins Roderick and Madeline, last leaders of the Left Hand. Ezekiel would make no moral arguments; rather, he would urge them to return to the hidden productive life of craft service to Family and country, lest the government break its covenant and hunt all the Mortons down.

Neither Ezekiel the man nor his spirit was ever heard from again.

That began the war against the Left Hand. Ezekiel’s grandson, the young Joshua, took the family mantle and called upon the other Families to aid him in putting down his twisted cousins. The Left Hand executed a preemptive strike of terror against their likely enemies, killing and disabling many. The Families united in wrath. Some hunted the Left-Hand rogues across the country. Most laid a quiet siege to the House, camping in revival-style tents on the grounds.

Fortunately, it was a siege
of
the House and not
against
it. The House revolted from the Left Hand’s control and let in the orthodox Mortons and the other Families. They found Roderick lying in a deep craft-enhanced trance far beneath the House in the subbasement. His half-alive body oozed with strange decay, and he could not be roused from his sepulchral bed. With no gentler feeling than disgust, Joshua and his ally Abram Endicott hacked Roderick to pieces.

They searched for Madeline, Roderick’s partner in love and madness. In the family crypt, they found her. Her lost fingernails and battered hands indicated that she had struggled to escape her coffin. In some inexplicable “experiment,” Roderick had buried his sister alive.

Concerned that the Left Hand might have some further design, Joshua commanded the House to contain their spirits.

Secret exits had been a Left-Hand obsession, though now even their ghosts couldn’t leave the House. One avenue of escape went underground, and could be reached only through the evil subbasement where the House kept the Left-Hand ghosts. The other old Morton dead had faded, going wherever spirits go when they tire of playing their unchanging themes, leaving behind the thrumming remnants of their energy in the House. But in the subbasement, more than the energy of the Left-Hand Mortons survived. Their will survived. As in life, their revenants had incestuously combined into something powerful, and fearful, and hungry.

*   *   *

“It’s time to show you the way out,” I said. “It’s the subbasement.” I took her by the hand in a gentle but unbreakable grip. There was no other way. To secure their help, I would have to present Scherie to the Left Hand.
Guess who’s coming to dinner.

CHAPTER

EIGHT

As we walked to the cellar, Scherie tried to make conversation about my edited version of the Morton story. “So, the crazy, inbred Mortons built the subbasement?”

“Right, so you might see things that are a bit strange down there.”

“If you’re trying to scare me off from this,” said Scherie, “it won’t work.”

“Just stay with me and you’ll be fine.” As I spoke, I didn’t dare look at her. I no longer trusted my ability to deceive her.

In the cellar, I picked up a flashlight. I brought Scherie to a door, hidden as much by the accumulation of dust in its cracks as by design.

“Don’t send me down here for a bottle of wine!” Scherie laughed nervously. I smiled, weakly. As I feared, she was picking up on the vibe too quickly.

With more effort than I expected, I opened the door. We passed through the archway behind it and descended carefully down wrought iron steps that shook under our weight. Down, down, down we went, past three landings. At the bottom, I scanned my light across a long, high-vaulted hallway, a dark subterranean demi-cathedral to a science gone awry. I led the way. On each side of the passage was a line of matching doors.

“Why is this one bricked up?” Scherie pointed to an obvious break in the symmetry of rooms, the undeniable appearance of a frame around the bricks where a door would have been.

“You’re the one who mentioned the wine,” I said.

She might find some of the other props familiar as well. A mummified black cat that still twitched with a desire for vengeance, the skeleton of a demented great ape that had hunted human prey, a heart in a box that had beaten far longer than its owner had lived. The modern Mortons had let such nasty things remain rather than attempt to remove them. “As booby-trapped as Eva Braun’s brassiere,” Grandpa had warned. Susurrant dry voices like spectral carnival touts urged me to
come and see
,
come and see
.

A hand on my arm. “Do you hear something?” asked Scherie.

“What? No, just the draft. This way.” This wasn’t a tour.

“When I was a little girl, I…” But Scherie left the thought hanging like an icicle. I took her down another flight of stairs, these of cracked stone, to the smooth marble floor at the center of the subbasement. The room was a mini-Pantheon, lit by a pale glow from an oculus in the domed ceiling, a Roman temple-cum-catacomb. Shrines to the chthonic deities of the Left Hand lined the walls at regular intervals, their strange radial asymmetries echoing the architecture. Unlike any other Mortons, the Left Hand were semitheists. They hoped for examples of immortality, and worshipped dark mirrors of their own souls.

Scherie slowed, looked. “Did they pray to these things?”

“Pay no attention to them,” I said. They liked the attention.

“But this feels so damned wrong…”

“Not another word,” I hissed, gripping her by the wrist.

Moving to our left, we reached a heavy curtain of dark velvet a quarter of the way around the center. Scherie froze. “I don’t want to go in there.”

“But I need to show you,” I said. Ungently, I pulled her in through the curtain into the room where Roderick had met his end.

“Hey!” Scherie cried, but did not try to flee. Silence. The room was an ossuary. Columns of long bone obscenely fused into ornate marble pillars, bejeweled skulls formed a decorative frieze encircling the space. I gave the baroque terrors little notice; my attention went to the left (always to the left). There, in raw primitive contrast, stood a grotesque altar of carved stone stolen from some pre-Mayan ruin.

You could sacrifice her to us
, whispered the Left-Hand spirits dwelling in the altar. They were still hungry for the blood and flesh they had sought in life.
We could use this body.

It didn’t work last time
, I thought.

The blood magic will defer your death
. The horror was that the evil things spoke the truth. An Alcestis-style replacement strategy would work for a time. The Left-Hand Mortons would have made such a sacrifice, and had made it, over and over again.

Do it.
The alien idea had gnawed into me since the night before.
Why not? You’ve let civilians die before, for the sake of the mission or to protect the craft. You could make it quick, and painless. You could …

Do it.

I drew the knife from my belt, and raised it above my head. Scherie gasped. Lightning quick, I brought the knife down.

I cut my own hand. A few drops of blood fell to the ground. Some instinct at my core told me the words.
My blood, not hers.

“You cut yourself!” said Scherie, with no sense of her own peril.

Hers!
said the Left Hand.

Mine,
I thought.
And our enemy’s blood yet to come. I and the House bind you. Scherie gets out of here. And you pursue our enemy to her end.

For what?
said the Left Hand.

“For letting you go,” I said, conceding merely the inevitable.

Now!
said the Left Hand.

“Later,” I said.

I could only measure the strength of the voices’ compulsion as their spell let go its grip. Shit, they had powerful bad magic down here. But I had fought their temptations since childhood. As many screw-ups as I’d made, I’d never done anything deliberately evil. I believed in karmic return. I had never hurt someone I cared about for personal gain. And I cared more for Scherie than I wanted to think about.

I silently tugged at Scherie to leave the room. “Letting me go later?” she said, misunderstanding. “What kind of ritual was that?”

“Just something for luck,” I said.

I would keep Scherie safe, and allow her to escape, whatever the cost to myself and the Families. With that decision, the voices of the altar faded to the indistinct rustle of vermin.

We climbed another stone stairway, and entered a dark space. I scanned my flashlight across the chamber. Cold slabs and silent effigies—we were in the family mausoleum. “Could you make this any creepier?” whispered Scherie. I didn’t answer.

Here lay the Right-Hand Mortons who, unlike my father, followed the family tradition of home burial. Grandpa’s bones lay within the wall to my right. Except for Grandpa, these ancestors were past conversation; either their energies were well-absorbed into the structure of the House, or they were simply uninterested.

I pointed to the low-lintel exit. “That’s your way out.” Scherie moved toward it. “Not now,” I said.

“Will it open?” asked Scherie.

“It’ll open; I guarantee it,” I said. “We’ve gone under and beyond their likely circle of surveillance. You’ll need a change of clothes, though, just in case.”

“How about a caterer’s uniform? My family’s restaurant has some.”

“Yes, perfect.”

“Will you go this way too?” she asked.

“Probably. I’m not sure yet.” I didn’t want to risk her waiting for me here if I wasn’t coming. “I may have to improvise.” Or fight and die. “Let’s get back.”

Without thinking, I reached out a hand to guide her, though she already knew the way. My grip, unlike before, was unrushed and gentle, and I could appreciate how comfortable it was to touch her. Captain Dale Morton, supernaturally trained killer, had become a little boy holding hands with his crush.

Stupid. Every second from now on, I had to be searching for threats. Even thinking of romance could get us both killed.

We moved quickly back the way we’d come. I kept up a mantra against the subbasement voices.
Soon. Soon.
My deal with these demons was worth it. They were the perfect guardians against anyone following our escape path. From now on, others could worry about their containment.