How I hated the gong. The clocktower’s reverberations sounded throughout the town as evening settled into night. The dim and fading twilight, the last, fading vespers of the setting sun’s glory, glowed beneath the hills like dying embers. The stars, royal, beautiful, shone, and yet dread filled me as I stared up at their soft light. Tonight, the end, a final encounter to settle the score once and for all—already written, I assume, for any master of lore—all written down up there, written in heaven’s light. Yet I, earthly and low, cannot see by the stars as see the wise. I must take up my lamp.
I feel the bell’s final throb in my bones as I go down the street on my bloody crusade. A cane holds me up, a foppish eccentricity, a hollow thing, some think, some know—a hollow thing can hold a sword.
A man’s outside the saloon, his wine-red eyes, not his own but the spirit’s, are on me. He smiles a friendly smile and waves. I nod at him and smile too. Best to smile, to be kind. The world needs kindness too. And on I go, leaving him to the night and the lights of merriment that come through the window he sits beneath. It was an invitation, I think, but I must be sober this night.
Down the street, down the darkening street, away from the light, the inviting light, a warm hearth’s glow. I must away before I weaken to such charms. Into the night I go, a hidden sword in one hand, a lantern in the other.
I know where I have to go, and hardly need to think to find my way. My feet know the path too well.
***
A knocking from without. The tired, mustached man sighs. He’d been leaning over the mantle, contemplating lighting his pipe. The knocking continues. Hurriedly, he takes up the tongs, grabs a small coal, and the deed is done. Puffing away, he leads a cloud of smoke toward the interruption and throws the door open, scowling at the dark and silent figure whose irritating lantern seems to find his eyes no matter where he twists his head. At once, the chill of the night feels like a punch in the face, a loss of all the warmth he’d gathered, but when the immediate shock is over, a much colder dread takes its place.
An idea forms in the mustached man’s mind, a thought, a question.
“Who’s there then?” he shouts, but a blade slices through his throat.
The pipe falls from his mouth as he falls gurgling to the floor. With lantern high and his ready sword dripping blood, the stranger steps over the corpse and into the little, cluttered room. It only takes him a minute to go down the trap door. He’d used it many times.
***
The corpse smiled inwardly as its briar was carried toward the virgin. Dark hair and face pale as the moon, her wide eyes and gapping mouth stole something of her beauty, but the drug had that strange effect on them all. They were bound to the table, not so much as to keep them from running away, but more so that their helpless seizures wouldn’t interrupt the ritual.
His charnel hand reached out a curved, talon like finger and pulled her bangs from her face. There was something familiar there.
A cry of agony interrupted his thoughts, and the corpse craned its creaking neck over its shoulder to see his purple-robed followers, not in their regularly ordered horseshoe, but a mass of screams and raised fists. He watched in disbelief as their bodies fell, and as their numbers thinned, he saw the man, the avenger, smiling with glee, as he perforated the unarmed witches with his dancing blade.
“Stop him!” he shouted, and the headless things which carried him, which once were men, set his briar down beside the table and slowly marched toward the bloody intruder. The sword did not fly at them. They both knew that that would be useless, he most of all. Had he not woven the spells and bound these bloody men into his service? What good was a sword? It was useless, but this whole thing was useless, a sullen betrayal. The man did not surrender as the wizards backed away and let the monsters approach. There would be no quarter anyway, and it would be short work. They would each take a limb and pull him asunder. There had not been an opportunity to do so in centuries, and the corpse chittered to itself in anticipation.
Calmly, the stranger waited as the headless portents shambled toward him. The corpse was half jumping in its seat now. Then, the anticlimax; the stranger whispered something, and the four undead fell amid the bodies already slain.
The corpse was suddenly very still and silent, the girl still writhing at his side, and the only sound in that dank chamber were her despairing moans.
“Fine,” it rasped. “You can keep her.”
The intruder smiled, and, stepping over the corpses, walked in an unhurried gait toward the table, shining his lantern at the desiccated husk. Six of the witches remained, cowards, not daring to draw near and defend their master from this grinning devil.
The corpse gazed up into that smiling face and seemed to read on it its horrid fate. Thrown onto the ground, the corpse fell, its brittle bones snapping, its dried joints breaking. The lantern was swung in a wild arc and shattered over the screaming undead.
Its last words, it screamed “No!” as the oil spread and the fire blazed.
The poor, quivering girl’s bonds were cut, and the stranger carried her shivering form away.
Tale Told 