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The knockings and the scratchings redoubled. In but a short time they would burst through, she had no doubt. No door could hold them forever. They would burst through, and she would be their prey. Unless, unless…
“Stop!” she called, her voice trembling. “I abjure you, every one of you, and thee most of all, O Prince of Carrion. In the name of the ancient compact between thy people and mine.”
The sounds stopped. It seemed to the girl that there was shock in that silence. Finally, a cracked voice said, “The compact?” and a dozen voices, as ghastly again, whispered “The compact,” in a susurrus of unearthly sound.
“Aye!” called Amelia Earnshawe, her voice no longer unsteady. “The compact.”
For the scroll, the long-hidden scroll, had been the compact-the dread agreement between the Lords of the House and the denizens of the crypt in ages past. It had described and enumerated the nightmarish rituals that had chained them one to another over the centuries-rituals of blood, and of salt, and more.
“If you have read the compact,” said a deep voice from beyond the door, “then you know what we need, Hubert Earn-shawe’s daughter.”
“Brides,” she said, simply.
“The brides!” came the whisper from beyond the door, and it redoubled and resounded until it seemed to her that the very house itself throbbed and echoed to the beat of those words-two syllables invested with longing, and with love, and with hunger.
Amelia bit her lip. “Aye. The brides. I will bring thee brides. I shall bring brides for all.”
She spoke quietly, but they heard her, for there was only silence, a deep and velvet silence, on the other side of the door.
And then one ghoul voice hissed, “Yes, and do you think we could get her to throw in a side order of those little bread roll things?”
Hot tears stung the young man’s eyes. He pushed the papers from him and flung the quill pen across the room. It spattered its inky load over the bust of his great-great-great-grandfather, the brown ink soiling the patient white marble. The occupant of the bust, a large and mournful raven, startled, nearly fell off, and only kept its place by dint of flapping its wings several times. It turned, then, in an awkward step and hop, to stare with one black bead eye at the young man.
“Oh, this is intolerable!” exclaimed the young man. He was pale and trembling. “I ca
The raven looked unimpressed. “Before you start cursing, and probably dragging peacefully dead and respectable ancestors back from their well-earned graves, just answer me one question.” The voice of the bird was like stone striking against stone.
The young man said nothing, at first. It is not unknown for ravens to talk, but this one had not done so before, and he had not been expecting it to. “Certainly. Ask your question.”
The raven tipped its head to one side. “Do you like writing that stuff?”
“Like?”
“That life-as-it-is stuff you do. I’ve looked over your shoulder sometimes. I’ve even read a little here and there. Do you enjoy writing it?”
The young man looked down at the bird. “It’s literature,” he explained, as if to a child. “Real literature. Real life. The real world. It’s an artist’s job to show people the world they live in. We hold up mirrors.”
Outside the room lightning clove the sky. The young man glanced out of the window: a jagged streak of blinding fire created warped and ominous silhouettes from the bony trees and the ruined abbey on the hill.
The raven cleared its throat. “I said, do you enjoy it?”
The young man looked at the bird, then he looked away and, wordlessly, he shook his head.
“That’s why you keep trying to pull it apart,” said the bird. “It’s not the satirist in you that makes you lampoon the commonplace and the humdrum. Merely boredom with the way things are. D’you see?” It paused to preen a stray wing-feather back into place with its beak. Then it looked up at him once more. “Have you ever thought of writing fantasy?” it asked.
The young man laughed. “Fantasy? Listen, I write literature. Fantasy isn’t life. Esoteric dreams, written by a minority for a minority, it’s-”
“What you’d be writing if you knew what was good for you.”
“I’m a classicist,” said the young man. He reached out his hand to a shelf of the classics-Udolpho, The Castle of Otranto, The Saragossa Manuscript, The Monk, and the rest of them. “It’s literature.”
“Nevermore,” said the raven. It was the last word the young man ever heard it speak. It hopped from the bust, spread its wings, and glided out of the study door into the waiting darkness.
The young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines and credit cards and streetlights and computers…
“It is escapism, true,” he said, aloud. “But is not the highest impulse in mankind the urge toward freedom, the drive to escape?”
The young man returned to his desk, and he gathered together the pages of his unfinished novel and dropped them, unceremoniously, in the bottom drawer, amongst the yellowing maps and cryptic testaments and the documents signed in blood. The dust, disturbed, made him cough.
He took up a fresh quill; sliced at its tip with his pen-knife. In five deft strokes and cuts he had a pen. He dipped the tip of it into the glass inkwell. Once more he began to write:
Amelia Earnshawe placed the slices of wholewheat bread into the toaster and pushed it down. She set the timer to dark brown, just as George liked it. Amelia preferred her toast barely singed. She liked white bread as well, even if it didn’t have the vitamins. She hadn’t eaten white bread for a decade now.
At the breakfast table, George read his paper. He did not look up. He never looked up.
I hate him, she thought, and simply putting the emotion into words surprised her. She said it again in her head. I hate him. It was like a song. I hate him for his toast, and for his bald head, and for the way he chases the office crumpet-girls barely out of school who laugh at him behind his back, and for the way he ignores me whenever he doesn’t want to be bothered with me, and for the way he says “What, love?” when I ask him a simple question, as if he’s long ago forgotten my name. As if he’s forgotten that I even have a name.
“Scrambled or boiled?” she said aloud.
“What, love?”
George Earnshawe regarded his wife with fond affection, and would have found her hatred of him astonishing. He thought of her in the same way, and with the same emotions, that he thought of anything which had been in the house for ten years and still worked well. The television, for example. Or the lawnmower. He thought it was love. “You know, we ought to go on one of those marches,” he said, tapping the newspaper’s editorial. “Show we’re committed. Eh, love?”
The toaster made a noise to show that it was done. Only one dark brown slice had popped up. She took a knife and fished out the torn second slice with it. The toaster had been a wedding present from her uncle John. Soon she’d have to buy another, or start cooking toast under the grill, the way her mother had done.
“George? Do you want your eggs scrambled or boiled?” she asked, very quietly, and there was something in her voice that made him look up.
“Any way you like it, love,” he said amiably, and could not for the life of him, as he told everyone in the office later that morning, understand why she simply stood there holding her slice of toast or why she started to cry.