My Black Beast (6 page)

The walk was quiet as things with Marka so
often were. She’d spoken on her own a pair of times now. Lowell had
tried not to overreact to it but he could see her start to shake
any time she made a sound. If she meant to put on a brave face, he
would as well. He decided to lose himself in the architecture
around him. It was like a trip to some forgotten Swiss city or
something. Even the smaller, less impressive houses had pillars and
ornate statues. Each of the statues was of a different person,
dressed all in different ways. Some smiling, some well-dressed,
some children, some older. Lowell though they might be family
members or remembrances of people who’d passed on. None of the
statue people wore the cloak that Marka had on, though many of the
statues of older people had indentions in a familiar style but
unique patterns.

He hadn’t considered it too much, but it
slowly became clear that these houses were mostly abandoned. They
hadn’t fallen into disrepair and the strange world around him had
seemed to keep them in perfect condition. It was the empty insides
of the houses that gave them away. Occasionally they would pass a
row that had taken damage. Lowell couldn’t help but imagine the
monster he’d seen Marka fight lumbering into walls and pillars and
destroying the carefully crafted statues.

No two of the houses were alike and Lowell did
what he could to try to survey each one, appreciating what he
imagined was a good deal of work and craftsmanship. He was admiring
the carving in a stone overhang when the corner of his vision saw
Marka come to a dead stop in the middle of the narrow
street.

Standing in the street ahead of the unseemly
pair was a short, fat woman. She was broad and pale with light
hair, though closer to a sandy blonde and wavier than Marka’s
dreadlocks. Her skin was free of any sort of markings. She stared
forward, seeming not to notice Lowell the entire time, her eyes
locked to Marka and her eyes wide. Lowell watched the scene
motionlessly for what felt like forever before a pain in his foot
forced him to shift his weight. The motion pulled the woman’s eyes
up to his face. She narrowed her eyes a short second and shook her
head, then looked back to the heavily tattooed girl. As if a wave
of realization swam over the woman, she let go a piercing scream
and turned running away flailing just about everything she could in
awkward lopes down the street.

Lowell didn’t really have to ask. That was
definitely bad. There was a sort of universal language in the whole
running away screaming thing. It wasn’t good, but he couldn’t know
what to make of it. Maybe the beast Marka killed was some
protection monster? Maybe she was a criminal? The woman had almost
seemed more in awe than anything before she had looked at him. Was
he the problem? That stood to reason. This was a gated community
after all, not the sort of place that wanted strangers walking
around unattended. Though he was attended. Maybe it didn’t
matter.

Marka looked at him with a stern face and
motioned with her head toward the side streets that ran through the
city. They were thin, not nearly able to let two people walk down
the alleys side-by-side. They were winding and Marka moved through
them quickly. She clearly knew her way around, but that seemed as
though it ought to be expected. Lowell kept up well enough but
regularly caught the edge of an arm or shin on the outcroppings
that the houses sent into the alleyway. They seemed to serve no
purpose other than to inhibit free movement. Occasionally they
would pass a patch of inscription in the wall, again in the style
of the tattoos and the door markings and all the rest. They were
magic and they were there for a reason. Lowell felt almost stupid
thinking that, but there wasn’t another explanation.

The jagged, winding alley gave way to a thin,
clear street. There were doors here and windows, though it was not
as wide as the street they had left. It was in the middle of the
street when Marka again stopped abruptly. Lowell was ready this
time and watched her intently. She seemed to shudder from the
ground up and her eyes shot toward the direction the tower had been
when they had been on the hill at the door to this curious
world.

He seemed to feel it before he heard it. A
wave of warm wind and a pressure that pulled him toward the ground.
Then the sound came. In any language, a siren. An alarm.

Marka grabbed his hand and began to
run.

Chapter 6

Lowell could hardly keep up as Marka
pounded through the narrow alleyways. The outcroppings caught his
legs more than a few times, doing their best to hobble him, but the
girl didn’t care. Her eyes were locked forward, occasionally
shooting up to check the lines along the roofs. Lowell, for his
part, was given a chance to rub his shins a pair of times as they
crossed larger streets like the one before.

The ruined houses with their curious statues
had been left behind now and the lots were more spacious and filled
with nicer houses. There were no people, though. Not a soul since
the woman who had been the cause of the hurry that was now tugging
Lowell toward some unknown place. He pondered where it might be as
they ran but none of the situations were particularly bright. The
best case Lowell could make for the fleeing was that they were
hurrying to some sort of place with people in charge of things to
tell them there was some crazy misunderstanding. The woman had
looked at him before she ran off. That’s never the best feeling and
the alarm only really drove home the idea that he was probably
going to be experimented on.

He’d been lost from the start but now the
spire had disappeared behind taller houses and though the yards
were larger, each had an eight foot high wall wrapped around the
perimeter. As they flashed by the occasional gate when crossing
roads, he saw that the houses were ornate and covered with
intricate designs as everything seemed to be. These were a bit
different though. The designs were put on with care and in places
that were more aesthetically pleasing. They worked with the
contours of the buildings where the poorer area hadn’t seemed
bothered. The lines themselves were clean and expertly put into the
stone.

There wasn’t much time to enjoy the work as
they took a sharp turn in a direction he told himself was away from
the center of the city proper. They had made several turns, though,
and he couldn’t say with any certainty. He thought about asking
Marka but she hadn’t taken a spare breath to make a sound since
they’d started moving. Lowell was beginning to hit the edge of his
admittedly pretty pitiful endurance. It hadn’t been so long, maybe
five minutes, but the work was exhausting and he was a desperately
lazy man.

The houses seemed to become more modest again
as they moved, still not a sign of a person. As they moved along,
in the streets proper now, the walls started to shrink. Soon there
were open yards and clear overhead views. Lowell looked around to
orient himself and found the spire in the distance. They were
moving away from it as he had guessed. Marka’s pace slowed and he
turned his attention to the girl, worried she might be
hurt.

She was scanning the rows of houses intently.
Her speed returned and they took another sharp turn at the next
bend. The run was getting to Lowell but what could he say? He
didn’t see anyone give chase. He hadn’t seen another living being
since the woman ran off. Part of his mind wanted to stop Marka and
demand an explanation or to try to calm her down but the part he
decided to heed told him that she knew this place in ways he never
would.

Another pair of turns and Lowell’s troubled
mind and tiring lungs would have a bit of rest. Well, his lungs
anyway. The pair stood in front of a crumbled stone wall that sat
in front of one among many of the dilapidated houses that seemed to
make up the bulk of the strange city.

Marka listened to the sky a moment and looked
over the empty streets cautiously before she stepped over the
rubble of the wall. Lowell didn’t follow immediately, only stared
at the back of the girl, her tattoos drawing his eye. Before he had
time to drift too deeply into the curiosities of this world, Marka
made a short, quiet clicking noise with her mouth. Lowell looked up
and she waved for him to follow. He did.

The inside of the house was, he imagined, more
or less as it had been before whoever lived there had decided to
abandon it. The furniture was covered with dust and dirt from the
collapsed surroundings. It was not nearly as ornate as the rest had
been and was made of a hard smooth material that he was beginning
to think might be bone. There were large stone tables around the
main room and small statuettes on each featuring heroic looking men
and women in various poses. Some among the small set appeared to be
carvings of children.

The chairs were padded but too dusty to bother
sitting on. Really, it was a bit eerie in general and Lowell half
believed he was going to get possessed by some ghost and forced to
live out a weird domestic life in this strange land at the hands of
the embittered former owner of the place. There were stairs to a
second floor, but they seemed to be more or less out of order as
some upstairs wall had collapsed onto them.

“
Stay.”

He looked down at the tiny, scratchy voice and
saw Marka looking up, intent and concerned.

“
Stay,” she said again, patting him
intently as if asking for an answer.

“
O-okay? Yeah, fine.”

With that she moved around him and quickly
made her way out the doorless entryway. Lowell ran to follow but by
the time he had made it to the threshold she was gone.

He let go a deep sigh and turned around to
look back over the house, or what of it he had access to. He could
no longer hear the siren and he wasn’t entirely sure if it had
stopped or if the thick stone walls of the house were responsible
for deadening the noise. Either way he was thankful. It wasn’t much
of a bother while they’d been moving but now the noise in his brain
was more than enough to make him uncomfortable.

Left without Marka there to steel the idea
that he had a purpose in this place, the strangeness of it all
began to seep in. There must be someone he could explain things to,
surely. But then, what could he possibly explain? Even if he wasn’t
in some weird, European Wizard of Oz place, the police would be
more than happy to drag him to jail without so much as even trying
to hear him out. If he couldn’t explain it to seemingly reasonable
adult human beings, what hope did he have of explaining to whatever
demon lord ruled over a place where people opened doors with purple
glowing shit?

Lowell resolved to consider what he might say
if he managed to find Marka’s parents. Lots of apologizing. Or so
he thought until he remembered how scared she’d been to even make a
sound and that stupid brave resolve filled him back up. But she’d
come back on her own so maybe there was a reason. He clicked his
tongue and wondered why things couldn’t be more straight forward. A
bad guy was a beautiful thing. Uncomplicated.

He poked around the room and looked at the
carved figures. There wasn’t much to say about them. Heroic looking
people in heroic looking poses, most of them men, especially the
statuettes that were visibly older. They began to change and grow
slimmer and younger the less worn the carvings became. Family
members maybe? There were letters on the base but he couldn’t
understand them, though the symbols looked vaguely familiar.
Something like an ornate version of the alphabet. The words weren’t
familiar though. Across the statues, many of the names seemed to
repeat, regardless of the gender.

On the far side of the room from the entrance,
there was a bookshelf hewn into the rock of the wall. Most of the
books were gone. Lowell picked up one of the remaining ones the way
he might have in a library where everything was in German. He knew
he couldn’t read it but the habit was still there. He flipped the
pages, mindlessly, waiting for the words to make sense but they
never did.

He flipped through a half dozen or so until he
came across a very old book that seemed somewhat unlike the others.
It was bound more loosely and didn’t seem to have been made with
quite the same care as the other things on the shelf. It had fairly
crude drawings of monsters. One even looked like the creature Marka
had fought in a way. Lowell turned the pages a bit more carefully.
The book seemed hand written. Maybe they all were, but this one
didn’t follow any sort of real convention. The top of each page had
the same line or two before the text proper but otherwise the pages
were a mash of long runs of text and small paragraphs jotted
hastily and patterns or drawings with small notes. It could have
been a scientific thing maybe?

Shifting rocks outside the entryway startled
Lowell and he dropped the book. One with patterns similar to
Marka’s. He shifted and watched the door intently in what he
imagined was a good fighting stance. After a quiet moment, he slid
closer to the door and took a look out. There was nothing that he
could see. Just some rocks deciding that that had been the perfect
time to shift. The tension fell away and the knot in Lowell’s
stomach loosened.

He returned to the book and as he picked it up
off the dusty floor, a piece of paper fell from the pages. He
chastised himself for having ruined a book, though it was unlikely
it belonged to anyone who cared. He grabbed the page and flipped it
over. There was a picture on the paper. Not a photograph, but it
had the realism of one. It looked like a rubbing, but there was no
indentation in the paper. It showed a woman standing in a large
square with a massive building behind. She was holding a child
bundled in a sheet and the look on her face wasn’t happy in the
least. He squinted and leaned toward the picture. The woman in the
picture was scared and sad.