The Last Page

“That’s from Stonehold . . . very old. Can’t open it though. Latch’s rusted shut, see?”

“How much do you want?” Sena had given him a coy look, then turned away, pretending to consider while his thin fingers had kept caressing the leather.

“The binding suggests it might have come from the islands before I found it.”

“I’ll give you three gold scythes.”

A simper.

“Five?”

The machine lurches down a wind-scraped cliff, carrying Sena with it, scudding through iron rib cages draped in grease. She watches the operator throw his switches and apply the brakes whenever they descend too fast. His eyes are furtive and lochetic. As soon as the great old lift clanks against its coupling in the ghettos of Seatk’r, Sena leaves.

Her animal is stabled nearby. It takes her out of the reeking enclave, pounding east and home along the lip of the plateau.

Delusions of robbery and loss stem her excitement. It is the fastest, most panicked ride she has ever made from Sandren.

When she finally arrives, she crosses the threshold of her cottage and locks the door, touching a chemiostatic lamp and flooding the kitchen with shadows more than light. When she slides her new possession out onto the table, the room sways around it. Reality seems to buckle. Her fingers twist her hair into ringlets while the object groans. There is no actual sound. But she can hear it, feel it, blasting her tabletop with psychomantic darkness.

She moves to wind a thermal crank in the corner. Yellow dials wobble to life as the metal snaps, expands and infuses the room with warmth incapable of dispelling the chill she feels pouring from the book.

For a while she frets, examines the metal ferrules riveted at the corners, beaten to resemble coiled Nerytian serpents whose bodies have worn smooth under centuries of handling. There are greenish pits where air works the metal. Like bariothermic coils, strange power sources in the south, the cover shocks her fingertips with cool. It does not have a title but a faint rune on the front reassures her that this is the object, the unbelievable end of her search.

Its ornate lock peers at her from where the tumblers nest like the rusted legs of a metal spider, crawled inside and curled up to sleep. Her rakes and picks are useless. Cutting the spine, sawing bits off, all would be equally futile and dangerous.

Her eyes trace its shape in the middle of the table. Awful, like a murdered child. She can only stare and think about the recipe.

On the twenty-third of Myhr her letter to Caliph remained unanswered. Light dribbled through the trees, pattered around the leaves from last fall. Sena sat at her kitchen table looking out the window. Her head was killing her. She got up, uncorked a honey-colored bottle and tapped the glass against her palm. Four aspirin rolled out. She drank them with milk, flipped out her pocket watch.

Eight sixty-four. Sixteen minutes ’til noon. A soft tapping echoed through the house.

Tynan? Three more taps.

She noticed a shadow fall across the curtains near the front door. Even through the gently tossing lace, the sound of mercurial breathing prickled over her skin like vinegar. Not breathing. It was mechanical, ill-regulated, gasping, then whispering, then whining like the draft beneath a door.

She moved around the back of the table carefully.

The shadow was massive and bent, like a huge cowl vent on a ship’s deck. The thing’s breathing fluttered strangely, disloyal to its origins. The sound bounced off glass, floor, coming from behind her, wet and unpredictable, like wind through a storm drain.

Sena jumped catlike to the top of her table with only a whisper of sound. She could look out at a better angle from here, bracing one hand against the ceiling, leaning out into the room, craning to see around the edge of the window.

The filthy shape of the visitor eluded her, wavering in and out of view. A mountain of rags. When it swung left she could see the tatters hanging from its bulk, heavy, barely swinging in the breeze, like dripping bandages. No visible feet. Its carcass was wrapped every inch in the sopping swaddling. How can it move? The rags poured down and pooled where torso met ground in an oozing pile the same consistency as wet cigar ash. The upper yards of fabric stretched taut across the creature’s hump, a great pile of muscle it seemed, where the body made its ninety degree turn like an elbow joint, undiminished in size or thickness, defying its own center of gravity.

Finally an appendage, impossibly thin, like pencils taped together end to end, articulated from a small lump of gray meat. It swung from a powerful rack of bone that must have connected somewhere beneath the rags to that enormous hump. Sena watched as the limb uncurled. There were nails, almost talons, eight inches long, uncurling like digits. One of them extended, the middle one, a stiletto poised. It drew back with dramatic acuity then struck forward against the door, tapping again with soft, almost human decorum.

She could see the shadow of the fingernail on her curtain. It was banded as though parts of it were translucent and parts of it were opaque, like a tropical fish spine, she thought, painted in bands of white and brown. Its staccato movement against her door stopped. The limb withdrew under the haystack of rags.

Sena had seen enough. She walked down her table like she would have walked down a staircase, stepping from table to chair seat, chair seat to floor. She was headed for the back door when Ns brayed like a snake. The cat was off the wall, through the back door and gone in a flash.

Sena gasped as the coldness passed through her. It did not hurt immediately but when she looked down she saw the slash on her bare waist. Like a slice through her finger in the kitchen; she didn’t want to look.

Instinctively she mashed her hand over her side. A warm tingling wash of red was gushing down her thigh.

Time slowed.

She noticed the long fingernail hovering above her wound, the rags swinging behind her like drapery. The huge presence was with her in the kitchen but the front door had not opened.

Where was the sound?

A fecal smell like tooth decay filled the room. She felt herself topple, fall toward the back doorway, clutch at the stones. She could see points of light now, oozing out of darkness. Sidreal. Slippery. Galaxies dripping dizzy. The bent torso of the rag-thing above her was fuzzy. Everything was fuzzy. A hand like a branch drooled cosmic cold.

She tried to talk but either she couldn’t hear or her lungs weren’t moving air. Tingling numbness was coursing through her sex, down into her legs, spreading from the wound. She couldn’t feel her ass. Her arms refused to work properly. She flailed.

Her numb body was sliding across flagstones now, out of the house. One of her fingernails caught on something and tore, a fibrous shredding that ripped it to the quick. But there was no pain. Her body was moving backward now. Back into the house. She was being fought over. Her torso hit the door frame with a limp solid sound.

Sena felt broken inside, like ceramic dishes dashed against the floor. She tried to steady herself and realized she could move her arm. Her finger slipped into the cut on her waist, brushed the hot slick pulse of her own entrails. She heard herself cry. Sound was coming back but there was nothing she could do. It no longer mattered where the rag-thing was or what it did. She was powerless to stop it.

Golden light fluttered down through the ghostwoods by the well. Shadows kissed back and forth across her face. She wanted the light to dissolve her, absorb her, reflect her off the stones, into the sky.

The bent, maggot form of the rag-thing covered the sun, haloed in streaming white light. It was trying to pull her out of the house. But for some reason it wasn’t succeeding. It looked at her not from a face but from a hole, a burrow in that dark cylinder of wrappings. It seemed to regard her as though suddenly surprised and then . . . the cottage took it.

Sena heard the creature bellow as it tumbled through the air into the room. It sounded like someone blowing across wide hollow pipes to make sound, bass and strange and much softer and more resonant than it was loud.