Marcus Hartwell's Arc

Chapter 4 of 7

The creature crawled toward Marcus. Its jaws clicked. Behind it lay the only door out. Marcus pressed his back to the wall and slid sideways. His candle shook. The light caught the thing's glassy eye, and it stopped, twitching its long feelers at the flame. He understood then. It hated the fire. Marcus thrust the candle forward. The creature reared back on its rear legs and hissed. He shoved past it toward the passage, close enough to feel its ridged body brush his knee. Then he ran. The passage opened into a low stone room. Marcus stumbled inside and froze. Wooden crates stood in rows. Some had cracked open. Inside them, more creatures curled and stirred. But it was the far wall that stopped his breath. A tree grew straight out of the stone. Its branches spread wide and bare. Among the leaves hung human heads, sprouted like fruit. Their eyes were shut. Their skin was cracked like old bark. One face opened its mouth, and a green shape pushed out between its lips. A parasite. The heads were not decoration. They were where the creatures were born. These were the townspeople. The clerks who never left. Aldrich fed them to the tree, and the tree fed his crates, and the crates fed Mr. K. Marcus finally saw the whole machine. The candle guttered. Behind him the first creature returned, drawn but afraid. Marcus grabbed a broken crate slat and swung it through a spider's web of dry twigs at the tree's base. The dead wood caught. Flame climbed the trunk fast. The heads began to scream. The creatures in the crates thrashed and screeched. Marcus ran through the smoke, past the burning tree, up the passage, and threw himself through the concealed door. He crashed out into the manor hall and landed hard on the polished floor. A pair of boots stood before him. Aldrich Pembrose looked down. He wore his evening coat, hands folded, calm as a man greeting a guest. Smoke poured from the open panel behind Marcus. The screaming carried up through it. Aldrich's eyes did not leave Marcus's face. "You opened my door," Aldrich said. His voice stayed soft. "Every clerk before you had the sense to run instead." Marcus rose to his knees, coughing. He had no evidence in his coat now. He had only what he had seen, and Aldrich knew he had seen it. "Those are people," Marcus said. "They were debtors. Like you." Aldrich glanced at the smoke. "You've cost me a shipment. That price comes out of a man one way or another." He stepped closer. Behind the wall, something heavy fell and burst. Aldrich smiled, and for the first time it reached no part of him but his teeth. Marcus was free of the passage. But the man who owned it now stood between him and the front door, and Aldrich knew exactly what Marcus had learned.