Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar

“I don’t like it because it’s not logical.” Rod’s chin looked even more granite-like than usual. “If it was spirits that were disturbed because the old man was digging their bodies up, why haunt the village? What did the villagers do to them? Why not haunt the old man?”

“Well, maybe they are! And they just spread out! Or maybe they are trying to get the villagers to do something about the old man!” Her eyes flashed with anger. “Just because you don’t believe in ghosts—”

Behind them, a couple of the Companions whickered as if laughing.

“Then they’ve got to be stupider in death than they are in life,” Rod countered. “Because you’d think it would be a lot easier to just appear in front of people and say politely, ‘That old man is robbing our graves, and we’d hate to have to make you miserable because of what he is doing, but if you don’t make him leave us alone, we’ll just have to make all of you as unhappy as we are.’ Instead, they’re getting nothing done except to make people terrified at night!”

Arville’s head swiveled back and forth between them, as if he were watching a game. Ryu just lay flat on the ground with his ears over his paws.

“Oh!” Laurel said, driven to speechlessness with anger. “Oh!”

“Anyway, you just stay here in the barn and tell Elyn what you think of me,” Rod said ungallantly. “I’ll be outside with Arville and Ryu and the Companions laying a trap. Because it’s not ghosts, it’s people, and I am going to catch them!”

“Wait, what?” Arville replied, looking panicked.

“If you don’t need me,” Alma said carefully. “I do have something I need to check in here.”

:Mayar?: Elyn thought.

:He asked us, and it’s a good plan. Certainly better than Laurel’s idea of holding a seance to find out what the spirits want. If it’s people, we will catch them. If it is demons, well, you will find us stampeding into the barn fast enough. And if it is spirits, we can try Laurel’s idea.: Mayar seemed quite satisfied with whatever it was that Rod had decided.

Well, she was supposed to be getting them to think and plan for themselves, wasn’t she? And they had certainly plunged into this, not only with enthusiasm, but with some forethought.

“Go ahead and set your trap, Rod,” she said firmly, cutting short any protests. “Alma, Laurel, we three will try to make enough sounds in here to make it seem as if all of us are in here.” She glanced out the open door. “If you’re going to get things set up, Rod, you’d better do so now, and then you’ll be in hiding well before sunset. I want all of you that are going to be setting up the trap to go in and out several times so that if anyone is watching us, they’ll likely lose count. Get water or wood, anything you think is a good excuse. Laurel, you and I will take care of the camp chores and make a lot of noise about it while Alma does her investigation.”

Laurel looked ready to burst with indignation, but she didn’t protest. Alma dove into the storage compartments and assembled a mortar and pestle, a couple of buckets of water, some dishes, and some other apparatus, and set to breaking up something in the mortar and pestle that made enough noise to cover just about anything.

Looking very unhappy, Arville and Ryu made several trips in and out of the doors carrying water and small amounts of wood, some odds and ends, before finally going out and not coming back again. The Companions made a more convincing job of it, bringing in quite a good deal of firewood before vanishing one by one. Elyn shut the door after them, lit all the lanterns, and, with Laurel’s sulky help, began making noisy supper preparations. At this point, Alma was doing something inscrutable with the dishes and the water; whatever it was, it was making some sound too, so Elyn left her to it.

She stretched out the preparations as long as she could; it wasn’t easy to tell in here whether the sun had set or not. Since it was a threshing building, it was as sealed against vermin as could be managed. The food was ready in what seemed to her to be far too short a time, but there was no point in wasting it. She and Laurel ate; Alma came and fetched herself a bowl of the thick soup Elyn had made, then went back to her buckets. Halfway through the meal, she had stopped messing about with the buckets and was pounding again, this time using the pestle as a hammer against a stone, pounding something she had wrapped in a bit of cloth.

She unfolded the cloth, peered at what was in there, and then did something with it. “Aha!” Elyn heard her say.

And that was when everything exploded outside.

The long, moaning howl began. Elyn heard Ryu yelp, Arville burst out with a terrified exclamation of “G- ghosts!” and Rod shout, “Got you!”

And that was the signal for what sounded like a battle royal.

She ran for the doors, but they were both bolted again. She and Alma and Laurel pounded on them fruitlessly for a while, while outside she could hear not only Rod shouting, but the sounds of fighting, of other men shouting, of Arville and Ryu howling, of angry whinnies and hoofbeats.

:Get back!: Mayar “shouted” in her mind.

She cleared Laurel and Alma away from the doors; there was a furious kick and a crash and the door burst open.

Through the now-open doors poured a tangled heap of people and nets, some free and fighting and some not, followed by all five Companions, relentlessly driving them all inside. Arville and Ryu were the most tangled up, but there were some strangers in there too, all of them masked and draped in tattered rags that smelled like mold and rotting wood.

Masked they might have been, but they were fighters; Elyn slashed Ryu and Arville free with her sword while Alma and Laurel joined in the fight. By now all the noise had brought the villagers out of their homes and up to the barn; several of the bravest grabbed pieces of firewood and waded into the affray while the Companions circled the outside of the mob and kept anyone from escaping—

—including one masked miscreant, who, alone among all of them, was not armed and not fighting. Mayar was the one who caught him by the scruff of the neck in his teeth as he tried to get away, and kept him dangling off the ground while the rest of the gang was subdued and trussed up.

With them was an assortment of noisemakers that had produced all the unearthly howls. There were bull- roarers, a set of several predator-calls strapped together so they could all be sounded at the same time, and a contraption with a rough piece of twine that could be pulled through something like a drum-head of rawhide, producing a truly uncanny moan.

“I told you it was just people!” Rod shouted in triumph, when the last of them—the fellow dangling from Mayar’s teeth—was firmly bound and set with the rest.

By now all of the village—most tellingly, all of the youngsters, including the ones that Rod had suspected—had crowded into the barn. “Well it might not have been spirits,” Laurel sniffed, examining first her improvised club, which she then cast aside, and then her nails. “But it wasn’t who you thought it was.”

And hanging in the air was the unspoken so there!

“Let’s find out who it is, then,” Elyn said evenly, before they could start fighting again. She pulled the mask off the one nearest her, revealing a fellow with a lot of bruises, a black eye, and a surly expression. She looked at the villagers. “Anyone you know?”

Baffled, they all shook their heads. She continued to pull off masks, to similar bafflement, until she came to the last. Then came the gasps.

“Old man Hardaker!” shouted someone. The old man snarled, but said nothing. “Why would you do this to us?”

“I think I know,” Alma said in a hard voice, and came forward with that bit of cloth. “Look.”

She opened it up, and a small piece of something yellow and shining glimmered in the lamplight.

They all stared. “Great Havens,” Elyn finally said. “Is that gold?”

The villagers gasped as Alma nodded. “You know how Herald Bevins always says ‘Find the motive and you find the criminal?’ I went looking for a motive. When we were up at Stony Rill I thought I saw a little bit of gold- sand, so I started gathering up what I thought were likely bits of sand and rock. I panned this out of what I crushed up.” She grinned in triumph. “When Rod told me the story the boys had told him, I was pretty sure I was right, anyway. The old man here was digging for treasure, all right, but it wasn’t in a burial mound. And when Stony Rill turned red, it was just because he’d been washing the gold-rock. Right, old man?”

Hardaker spat in her direction.