THE BRAVE TALE OF MADDIE CARVER
Copyright © 2010 by Stacia Kane
All Rights Reserved.
The Brave Tale of Maddie Carver is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This is a companion piece to the “Downside” series by Stacia Kane. As of December 2010, the other books in that series, in order, are:
UNHOLY GHOSTS
UNHOLY MAGIC
CITY OF GHOSTS
This story was originally published on the Paranormal Haven blog, October 7 2010, with a different ending. I’ve expanded it a bit (it’s about 800 words longer than the original version) and given it the ending I think it should have had from the beginning. It’s just a short little gift for all of you readers, to say thank you so much for your kindness and enthusiasm this past year.
Happy holidays! I hope you enjoy the story as much as I enjoy writing for you.
Stacia
October 28, 1997
Candy sat in the bowl by the door; the green plastic skeleton on the back of the front door glowed faintly in the dark as Maddie Lerner walked down the hall to check the locks. Just past ten, and time for bed. She didn’t know why she’d been so tired lately, or why butterflies seemed to dance constantly in her stomach. But she knew something wasn’t right.
She’d asked the others—only three of them in Baltimore, but three she trusted—if they felt the same, and they said they did. Somehow that made it worse. An old woman’s instincts were often dull, even hers; age could fool the senses, could create tremors where non existed. But Thaddeus was a young man, only twenty. Virginia at thirty had more strength than Maddie had seen in some time, and of course Wallace…
The door was locked. Good. She stood for a second, peering through the narrow pane of watered glass beside the door. All looked well. The gibbous moon hid and disappeared between tree branches still clinging to their last few leaves; a few clouds passed behind them. The streetlights glowed, and something white passed before the window of the house across the—what?
Without taking her eyes from the window Maddie reached over and touched the sigil etched into the doorframe by Elias Carver, her great-grandfather several times over and one of the First. Probably a silly thing to do, but that power, that connection, made her feel better anyway. The couple across the street liked to stay up late, and rarely closed their blinds. They didn’t seem to worry about what they did in front of their windows, either. It was rather sweet in a pornographic kind of way, though considering how many children were in the neighborhood Maddie wished they’d be a bit more careful.
But that wasn’t the reason her heart kept pounding, harder than it should have, even though she tried to convince herself that’s all it was. That it was just that silly young Mrs. Blake—sorry, Miz Blake—in some sort of nightie or something.
Another glimpse of white. The cold glass chilled Maddie’s nose, started to hurt from how hard she pressed her face to it. It didn’t help. She still couldn’t see anything, not anything real. But that feeling, that horrible feeling of something being wrong, that there were disturbances in the worlds that shouldn’t be there, kept getting stronger. Like someone touching her to get her attention, and when she didn’t turn to look at them they poked harder and harder.
But when she turned to look, they weren’t there. That wasn’t a good sign. She’d been around long enough to know that anything that hid itself like that didn’t have positive intentions, and anything that felt like that couldn’t be positive either. She’d spent her whole life learning that, from the time she took her first steps and spoke her first words, all those years ago. All those years that led up to this night, to the unease she’d felt for weeks and the terror slowly taking shape inside her.
The branches moved again. Moonlight flashed across the lawn like slow lightning, almost hiding another movement, slower, steadier. Just outside the Blake house, on the left—or was it the right? How did you describe something when you looked at it that way? It was Maddie’s left, the Blake’s right, and as she watched it all thought of right and left disappeared from her head because what she saw couldn’t be possible.
A shade. A spirit. A walking soul, a thing which should not be, emerging through the solid wall of the Blake house. Another opened the front door, left it hanging open behind it—a gaping black mouth from which only fear emerged—and crossed the grass to join the other. When she looked closer she saw the silver blade it carried, saw the darkness on the edge of that blade and realized what it was. What had happened. By all the Truths she knew, all of the Facts she’d ever learned…her mouth felt so dry, her teeth and tongue gummy from nerves turning to panic.
Time to move.
Pausing only to press her finger against the sigil on the door and put whatever energy she could spare into it—which wasn’t much—she raced for the small closet under the staircase. The narrow length of the house, so typical for Baltimore, had never seemed so long; the closet had never seemed so far. Her nightdress threatened to tangle in her legs, her long thick braid sat heavy between her shoulder blades like a length of rope. She tried not to imagine a pale glowing hand grabbing it and yanking her back, throwing her to the floor. That couldn’t happen, not in her house. Not when she was protected by the knowledge of centuries.
She knew that, but it was hard to remember when screams started seeping through the walls, echoing in the street from the house next door to the Blake’s.
The closet door banged against the narrow iron table hugging the wall when she flung it open and grabbed the heavy bag inside. The phone started ringing; she held the bag in a painful grip and ran for the kitchen, already knowing whose voice she’d hear when she answered.
“Miss Maddie,” he said, and his tone sent another wave of panic through her. Not just there. Not just her street. It was real. It was Truth. “Are thee well?”
“For the moment, Thaddeus, yes.”
“But they are there. Thou has seen them.”
“Yes. Thaddeus, my neighbors—the couple across the street. And further down, I watched it leave their house, I watched it walk into the next.”
Silence, while he thought. She knew that’s what he was doing, that he was being methodical and trying to come up with a plan. Knew too that beneath his calm, beneath his genuine fear and sorrow and horror lurked excitement, the furtive joy of the very young who believe they will never die, who have suddenly found a change in their world and have not yet seen enough change to mourn the loss of what they had. “I shall come for you. I shall bring Virginia. Thy house is well protected, I know. We shall plan what to do from there.”
“Yes.” She paused. Unnecessary to say it, she knew, but she couldn’t help it. “Be careful, Thaddeus. Please.”
“We’ll be there soon.”
She hung up, slightly reassured, and took a moment to look around. What to do, where to start? She glanced back at the door, at that slice of window. Something passed it, something glowing and awful. Something that should not be walking this earth.
Something she believed could not enter her home. All these years, her long life, she’d believed in the Truth her ancestors had discovered. But all these years she’d hoped never to have to use what she knew. Not like this. Not when her neighbors avoided her and she had no way to contact them. No way to help them. If she ran outside, ran next door at least, she may be able to raise an alarm, but—she wouldn’t make it. There was no way she could get there, wake them up, get them to listen to and believe her—the crazy old woman they avoided—and get back inside with them before they were f
ound, and set upon with weapons.
Nothing she could do. No way to rescue anyone. She’d have to stand there in her home, her big empty home that could house half the street—more if they didn’t mind being crowded—and listen to them die one by one. Her chest hurt. Her eyes stung. She’d always felt blessed to be born into her family, to know what she knew. It had never occurred to her, even to her, how that knowledge could be a curse as well.
Goat’s blood. Yes. She pulled the jar from her bag, unscrewed it with aching hands. The windows, and the door. Her feet pattered on the wooden floor as she ran, smearing the blood on the sills, daring to open the door to mark it with runes of protection she’d learned as a child. Their hate-filled faces watched her, came for her, but she slammed the door before they could touch her.
They weren’t good at climbing—they shouldn’t be, at least—but she ran up the stairs anyway to get the windows there, the doors of the small balcony her father had built in the fifties. Her bedroom window, the room that had once belonged to her parents and was now hers. Her mother and father…buried in the small cemetery half a mile away. Were they rising, were they coming for her? The thought made her more ill than she already felt. She took one last glance around at her bed, her dresser; the book she hadn’t finished reading yet, and hurried back down the stairs.
More of them in the yard. Worse than she’d feared. She had not the strength for this. Her heart beat too hard below her ribcage, slamming against it painfully. Why they hated the living so much…their jealousy of even the small amount of life she still had felt like ice in the air around her, so much colder then the late autumn breeze. They wanted that life. They wanted it, and they would kill her for it, and it wouldn’t help but they would keep trying.
When would Thaddeus arrive? The ache in her chest refused to lighten, spread down her arm.
The phone rang again. Elder Martin. Was she safe? Had she protected herself. The Elder Triumvirate were working on a plan. She was to tell the others when they arrived, and to stay in her house by the phone until sunrise. They believed sunrise would drive the dead into dark places, into hiding. Maddie wrote down what he told her, grabbed a thumbtack and stuck it to the banister where the others would see it immediately.
Outside her windows the dead wandered back and forth, through walls and back out, leaving homes full of death, carrying fireplace pokers and knives which caught the moon. Like a dance of fireflies in those long-ago summers of her youth, those sparks of light against the darkness. The lights then had been dimmer, small gas flames on poles. The memory was so sharp and clear: cobblestone streets and the sound of hooves on them, the ice cart in summer, those cool nights full of tiny stars blinking on and off in the shadows.
The sight of the silent dead as they floated across the grass and pavement should have been just as lovely as those memories, was just as lovely in a terrifying and awful way. Was even more terrifying for being lovely; death came glowing and beautiful, slipping through walls without a sound. It came for her, and she knew it, just as she’d always known she would.
And it claimed more every minute. Her neighbors joined them one by one; there was Miz Blake, glowing as she drifted across the street to join the others. All of them. Had they weapons? Did it matter? What the Church knew about them, what she’d been told about them, didn’t feel like enough. It could never be enough. The Church was strong, but the dead…they were stronger, they had uncountable numbers, doubling and tripling with every strained breath she managed to force into her chest. How could the Church, even at their full strength, even with every single one of their ten thousand members in the United States, beat that?
She couldn’t stand to look at them anymore.
But every one of them looked at her. They beat her doors with silent fists and jumped back in rage when the blood on the door burned them. They stared into her windows. They felt her, they knew her. They wanted her. And she felt their pull as she huddled there at the foot of the stairs in the house she’d spent her entire life living in. The house which would belong to the Church when she died, if there was a Church. If there was anyone to inherit, if they somehow managed to win and this wasn’t the end of the world. The end of everything, her breath rattled and her body shook, the end of it all…
A horn outside. Thaddeus and Virginia. Perhaps even Wallace. When she stood up to walk to the door a knife twisted hard in her heart. The door stood unlocked before her; closed but unlocked, because so far the house’s protections and her own power held, and no mere lock could keep out the luminous dead.
Her feet faltered on their slow way toward the door. Light burst through the windows; Thaddeus had brought that ridiculous sportscar he drove. She had time to smile—her last smile. He’d been almost a son to her, had he known that? Known that despite his parents and their silly prejudices, he had people who loved him, were proud of him? She thought he did, hoped he did.
The door burst open. Thaddeus, his pale hair mussed on his forehead. Virginia with her dyed black bob. And yes, Wallace too, the power coming off him in waves.
Their lips moved. She couldn’t hear them. The pain in her chest exploded in a shower of fire-bright sparks; she didn’t have much time, knew what she had to do. She couldn’t take the chance of locking herself in the house with them, not with all of the weapons, not when they’d have nowhere to go.
Through the haze of pain and fear, the memories clouding her mind—what year was it? 1997 or 1942?—she managed to speak. “Take care.”
They looked at her, confused. Looked even more so when she grabbed the door handle in her sweat-slick hand and yanked it open. This was it, this was it—they reached for her but with her last bit of strength she flung herself outside. Flung herself into the arms of death and let it take her.
Something had started, she knew; her last conscious thought, her last real thought, was to wish desperately for humanity to survive, to hope that if they did they’d make a better world, and to be sorry she’d never get to see it.
THE END