home.
Mae ran for those boards, ran for her door, ran for her home.
A rumble of thunder rolled beneath her feet. It was not an earthquake. Something beneath the ground paced her, scraping its back against the sod and pushing soil and grasses up to trip her feet.
She didn’t slow, didn’t pause. She ran, lurching over the uneven ground. Just a few more feet, a few more steps. Thunder rolled, lifting the soil like an ocean wave and crashing dirt and rock and grass into the front of her home like a swell breaking against stone cliffs.
Mae flung her arms wide. The wooden walk caught her, and held steady beneath her feet as she stretched out for the door and yanked it open. She stumbled into the room backward, Colt aimed at the field and forest.
The same man, same creature, filled the doorway, his long, long arm catching at the door, his long, long fingers clicking on the doorjamb.
He should be dead. She’d seen him fall into pieces. And yet he stood before her, put back together again.
Mae took no time to question. She fired the Colt.
The man shattered into pieces outside her door. Just as he had in the forest.
Then he rebuilt himself. She caught a glimpse of too many hands beneath his coat, fingers, arms, and oily mandibles clicking into place with the flash of gears, piston rods, and ropy tendons strung tight between pulleys, until he once again stood before her in the shape of a man.
Nightmare. Ghoul. Bogeyman. The Strange.
“You may not enter my home.” Mae fired the Colt again, aiming for his chest this time. The creature staggered back one step, but he did not fall apart.
There was no blood on his coat. There was just a bullet hole and a shine of bent brass where his heart should be.
He sucked his teeth, making a
Mae stepped back and lifted the shotgun to her shoulder, sighting between the copper tubes and the glass vials that had now begun to glow an odd green light.
Only five bullets. All the bullets in the world. It was likely she’d need all five to kill the man who killed her Jeb. But it was also likely she needed to practice her aim on this creature first.
She aimed for his head. The hum of the gun was so high only a dog could hear it, but she wasn’t sure if the needle showed a full charge. No time to wait. She took a breath, braced for the recoil. Before she could fire, the creature put one foot across her threshold and screamed, pulling his foot away.
The wooden trinkets in the room echoed the creature’s shouts, as if his scream triggered them to life.
Jeb’s gifts to her held their own kind of protection. She had always known that. Mae could feel their protection falling like a spiderweb down the edges of the room, digging deep into the wooden floor, holding her safe inside, and holding that creature, that Strange, outside.
The man pulled away from the threshold and tipped his head down, his eyes burning red as stoked coals from beneath his hat. He folded his arms across his chest and tapped razor-tipped fingers against the cloth of his coat, snagging small holes.
“You will come with me,” he rasped.
“I will not. Leave my land. Leave my home.” Mae shouldered the gun again, but she must have done something to unhitch the gears. The vials were no longer glowing and the clockwork was still. She thumbed the lever setting the gears into motion once more.
Then she took a deep breath and began chanting the words of blessing, protection for her home, for herself, and for all things nurtured by the light. The wooden devices around the room hummed, picking up on the song like strings resonating to a bow.
And the web of protection grew stronger.
The man paced, his fingers tapping, tapping, glaring at Mae, at her house, looking for a way in, waiting for her to pause for too long a breath.
Mae was afraid to shoot him again, afraid the shotgun would break the fragile web of magic and song that held him out. She did not step any farther away from the door, though. She sang, chanted, prayed, the wooden notions humming along with her, strengthening her song. And she held the gun at the ready.
She realized she’d seen this man in town when she was trading a blanket for nails from the blacksmith. He’d been standing in the shadow of the shop, watching, silent. The forge and fire sent heat rolling out of the shop, but when she’d passed this man by, she had felt the dead of winter.
The man stopped pacing. He strode to the left of the door out of her sight. Mae sang softly, hoping to catch the sounds of his footsteps. But he was too quiet.
The shutters across the wall behind her rattled, first the one above her spinning wheel, then the other near the hearth. The shutters were strong, carved by Jeb’s hands, and rubbed down with linseed infused with Saint- John’s-wort for safety and strength.
Mae swallowed down the taste of dust and fear and kept on singing.
The shutters each rattled again, then lay still. A moment passed in silence. Then a knocking stuttered across the chimney; the pounding of fists—too many fists—pummeled the back door. The man walked the perimeter of her house, pounding, prying, plucking. But her house, her song, held strong.
There was nothing she could drag to the broken door to close it, no way to stop him from stepping in, except her magic. If the magic didn’t hold, she would sacrifice a bullet and use the shotgun.
He strolled around the front of the house again, standing in her broken doorway. He smiled and bowed low, rolling his hat off between his long fingers with a grand flourish. He paused at the lowest point of the bow, and Mae heard something metal hit the wooden planks.
She glanced down. It was a brass button. And as the man stood again, he was missing a button from his coat.
“Begone,” she whispered in the pause of her song. But the man smiled and said a guttural word.
The brass button at his feet sprang open and flipped over. A hundred wriggling legs tucked beneath its armored body. The head was a drill with long mandibles and no eyes. It quickly tipped its snout to the wood plank at the man’s feet, and burrowed into it, sawdust and soil pushed up and out of the tunnel by its back legs as it headed toward her doorway.
“Easy as threading the eye of a needle,” the man hissed. “Spy the hole, pierce the hole, stab the weave.”
Mae swallowed, glanced down. She could not see the burrowing creature, but knew the man was right. If it could dig past her protections, if it could dig up inside the circle of magic that held her safe, it would break her barrier and the Strange man would be able to cross into her home, easy as thread pulled by a needle.
What could she do? Shooting him didn’t kill him. The shotgun was still humming, warming slower this time, the needle on the gauge not even at half charge. There were no spells that would make a man drop dead in his tracks. She could curse him, but if she stopped singing, the wooden devices would fall quiet and the web of protection around the house would end.
What did she have that could stop him? She glanced around the room, still singing, her mouth going dry, her heart pounding too hard, too fast. Herbs and wool and tinctures. Healing things, loving things, living things. Cooking pots, frying pans, her woven blankets stacked in a willow basket.
None of these things would do him harm.
Then she remembered the tatting shuttle in her pocket. It was a token of Jeb’s love to her, made of hawthorn, silver, and gold, given to her as a courting gift. She slid her fingers into her pocket and caught hold of the slim oval. It warmed at her touch, the edge of it sharp against her skin.
Sharp enough to draw blood. Heavy enough to be used as a weapon.
The drilling beetle dug and dug. She could see the scar it chewed into the threshold, a hump of wrinkled wood trailing its progress. Any second it would be drilling up and up, and then the man would have a hole small enough, large enough, to thread his way through and into her home.
No time to wait for the gun to charge. No time to reload the Colt. No time left at all. She threw the shuttle at the man. It flew as if it had wings. The shuttle slashed across the man’s cheek, drawing a deep red line through his flesh. Blood gushed from that wound, pouring black as liquid coal.
