DRINK OLD ENGLAND DRY

EDITOR’S NOTE

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October is my favorite month. Autumn is in full-swing, things are cooling down, leaves are changing, the veil between worlds starts to thin…

Among the multitude of genres found in vintage Pulp fiction, it’s hard to deny the that the so-called “Weird Tale” owns the most title for most enduring. Due in part to the lasting popularity of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Yog-Sothery”, these stories of strange horror remain a prominent fixture in Popular Culture. The publication aptly titled WEIRD TALES acted as a sort of home base for Lovecraft and his contemporaries: Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, & Seabury Quinn, among others.

In the following story, author Nathaniel Webb follows in the footsteps of such greats with a tale that blends a well-researched Napoleonic world with classic supernatural chills.

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DRINK OLD ENGLAND DRY

by Nathaniel Webb

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May, 1809

TROOPER STEFAN VALENTINE, 16th Light Dragoons, watched the sun set over the endless rumpled hills of northern Portugal. He sat alone at the crest of a narrow, rocky ridge surrounded on all sides by identical rises. Five years ago he might have imagined the land as an eagle would see it: staggered spines of tan and green spattered with the blue-black of rivers, like a crumpled watercolor painting. In those days he might have seen the sky as a painting, too, bold slashes of pink on clouds of white wove paper. Now he saw shredded linen bandages, sodden with blood.

“I say, Valentine!” A form came puffing up the shadowed side of the ridge: Lieutenant Camplin, helmet tucked under his arm. “There you are, man! Come along, Captain MacLeod wants you. There’s a lad.”

Camplin reached the ridgetop and returned Valentine’s salute. The lieutenant’s smooth young face gleamed with sweat and the neck of his dolman was open. Despite a month under the Portuguese sun he was somehow still as pale as a schoolboy.

“What’s the matter, sir?” Valentine followed Camplin back down the ridge. The 16th had made camp beside a brown stream that ambled vaguely down a narrow dell. There was barely room for two horses to stand nose to tail between the hills on either side. Camplin led Valentine up the second rise, explaining between gulps of air as they went.

“It’s Price.” Puff. “He was on picquet duty.” Puff. “Smith found him.”

“Dead?” asked Valentine.

“As a doornail.” They had reached the crest of the ridge and Camplin paused, leaning over with his hands on his thighs, apparently unashamed to be seen in such a state by an inferior. “He’s just here through this wood. Not a hundred yards out.”

They started through the trees, which grew dense this close to the Cávado River. Their trunks were gray and cast long black shadows in the failing light. Sound was muffled as well; the crunch of Valentine’s boots through fallen leaves seemed to disappear into the gloom almost before it reached his ears. In such a place, a French soldier might hide ten yards away and never be spotted.

In a small clearing stood a ring of men in the blue and scarlet of the 16th, all staring at something on the ground: Captain MacLeod, Sergeant Smith, Trooper Bailey. MacLeod looked up at Valentine and Camplin’s approach. His prematurely thin hair stood in disarray from his uncovered head and an unlit pipe hung from his lips. His eyes were bright.

“Ah, Valentine. What do you make of this?”

“Damned unnatural, I say,” growled Smith.

“Enough,” said MacLeod with the tone of one who’s tired of an argument. “‘Ill deeds is doubled with an evil word,’ as the Bard says. Let’s hear what Valentine thinks.”

The circle of men parted to absorb Valentine and Camplin. Together they stared down at the corpse of Corporal John Price. He lay on his back with his knees up and his arms bent at the elbows, as though he’d tried to curl into a ball but died before he could complete the motion.

Price had been young—camp rumor claimed he enlisted at just fourteen—but the body at Valentine’s feet looked nigh ancient. The skin was pale as paper and about as thin, as though it would crumble away at the first touch. The flesh looked somehow tight, too: cheeks sunken, lips pulled back over brown teeth, cheekbones and temples standing out sharply. Overall the effect was of a skeleton attempting to push its way free of the body.

“He’s been drained of his blood, sir,” said Valentine.

“Is that possible?” asked MacLeod.

“Not by the hand of man,” said Smith darkly.

“I’m no doctor, sir,” Valentine said. “But I had the opportunity to attend an anatomy lesson in London. The fellow’d been, ah, decanted beforehand. He looked much the same as this.”

Camplin turned away and coughed delicately into his hand. MacLeod nodded. “That’s something. Any suggestion how the deed was done?”

“Nobody heard anything?” asked Valentine. “A scream, a struggle?”

“Bailey?” MacLeod prompted. Trooper Bailey, who looked about as pale as the corpse, shook his head. His lips were pressed tight and a haunted look shadowed his eyes.

“Bailey was standin’ picquet the next post over,” said Smith. “Says he heard nothing, not so much as a footfall. I tell you, I saw native scouts in the American war who might step through a forest like this without a sound, but I’m damned if there’s such a man anywhere on the Peninsula. Makes a body wonder—”

“You’ve had your say,” snapped MacLeod. “Valentine, I’d like you to find the devil who did this and give him a taste of your sabre. He’ll have left a trail somewhere. Find it.” The captain looked at the sky, where night had arrived, strewing stars. “Wellington has us moving on in the morning—we’ve got to come to grips with Soult before he reaches Spain. You’ll have to catch us up once you’ve handled this.”

“Yes, sir,” said Valentine.

“Godspeed you,” said Camplin.

“And you too, old boy,” said MacLeod. “You’re going with him.”

The color drained from Camplin’s face. “Me, sir?”

“An officer’s eye will be needed, and perhaps an officer’s judgment as well.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Screw your courage to the sticking-place,” MacLeod added, but Valentine had in mind a different line of Macbeth.

Turning away from Corporal Price’s body, he murmured, “Blood will have blood.”

*****

CAMPLIN AND VALENTINE, acting with the preparedness customary to light cavalry, were mounted and away in less than a quarter-hour. Both sat their horses with the ease of long practice, and if Camplin’s mount was the better fed, Valentine’s was a touch more responsive to his commands.

Despite the horror of Corporal Price’s body, Valentine proceeded into the wilds with all the confidence of the hussar. In those rapid minutes of preparation he had checked his carbine and his saddle-pistol; both were free of rust, with fresh flints, and sat close to hand in their holsters. His long, curved sabre bounced comfortingly at his side. And the tracks of the enemy had not been so hard to find, after all. The Frenchman, or whoever he was, had eliminated his footmarks from the forest floor but left a trail of bent branches and snapped twigs that Valentine followed like a country road.

They were headed roughly southeast, away from the Cávado and Soult’s presumed line of retreat. Soon the forest tailed off, leaving the British dragoons exposed on the scrubby hillsides that characterized so much of Portugal. But it was evening, and the hills were steep, so that Valentine led them easily from shadow to shadow and did not worry much about detection. Even here there were signs of the enemy’s escape: the occasional footprint in soft dirt or line of broken grass.

As they moved along a goat path on the side of a high ridge, Valentine suddenly held up a hand. Camplin reigned up behind him.

“What is it?” he whispered.

Valentine took a long breath in through his nose. “Do you smell woodsmoke, sir?”

“Why—” Camplin mimicked him. “Why yes, I’d say so. And that’s the scent of roast fowl, or I’m Horatio Nelson.”

“If I might, sir?” Valentine indicated the hill to their right. Camplin nodded. Valentine dismounted, drew his sabre and his saddle-pistol, and started up the rise. A few minutes’ cautious climbing found him at the crest, where he lay on his belly with his face to the ground. Then, slowly, he raised his head until his eyes broke the line of the ridge and he could see into the valley beyond.

There was a house there, sure enough. It was small and humble, identical to a thousand other homes belonging to Portuguese who had once scratched a mean living from the land and now were either fled, killed, or gone guerilla. No lights shone in its broken windows; no horses moved in the weedy yard. By all indications it lay abandoned.

Except for the smell of woodsmoke.

Valentine lay silently staring at the house, listening with such intensity a headache began at the base of his skull. It was fully dark now, with a bare sliver of moon, and the house was just a humped shadow, gray against lighter gray. Then a laugh pealed in the night, a throaty Francophone laugh that shredded the stillness of the hills and fell suddenly silent.

Valentine scuttled a few paces back down the hill. When he was sure his head would not be seen over the ridge, he rolled onto his back and made to stand.

Instead he found himself staring into the mouths of three muskets. The soldiers surrounding him wore black shakos and blue coats with high red collars: chasseurs. The biggest of them, a tall man with long mustaches, barked something in French. His tone was unfriendly.

Valentine reached for his pistol, but it was between his body and ground. As he struggled to drag it out the tall chasseur reversed his musket and brought the butt crashing down onto Valentine’s head. He saw fire, then darkness.

*****

IT TOOK VALENTINE a full minute to realize he was awake. He lay on a splintering wooden floor in a room lit by a single candle, which burned on a low table where the tall, mustachioed chasseur sat with his boots up. As his eyes slowly adjusted to the dark, Valentine spotted a window in one cracked wall, but beyond it was only blackness.

It was still night, then; in all likelihood he had not been out too long. If he could escape, he might reconnect with the 16th and make his report before they were too far along the road to Spain. This little nest of Frenchmen in their rear must be burned out, to say nothing of the sinister murder that had led him here.

The memory of Corporal Price’s body brought up thoughts of Lieutenant Camplin. Had he, too, been captured? Or was he even now thundering back to the regiment, soon to return in force?

No, there was little chance Camplin was free. If the Frenchmen had seen or heard him galloping away, they would be preparing the farmhouse for an assault, or more likely, pulling up stakes and moving off into the mazy hills. At the very least they would not be so stingy with the light if they’d already been discovered. In all likelihood Camplin was a prisoner like Valentine. Or, since he was not in the room, he was dead.

The guard coughed into his hand and shifted in his seat. He glanced suddenly at Valentine, as if remembering the Englishman was there. Luckily Valentine had shut his eyes while considering his options. He held still, his head down, his breathing steady. A moment passed, then another. Valentine heard the scrape of the guard’s chair and judged it safe to crack one eye. Yes—the chasseur had turned away.

Slowly, Valentine tested his limbs. The arms first: incredibly, they were free. The Frenchmen must be confident indeed if they hadn’t even bothered to tie him up. He moved his hands to his hips. His sabre and pistol were gone, but that was only to be expected. Next he tried his legs, bending and unbending them as much as he dared, careful not to scrape his feet across the floor. They seemed unharmed, but here was a surprise: his feet were tied at the ankles. The Frenchmen hadn’t bothered to remove his boots, instead wrapping the rope in a figure-eight about them and tying it off, and Valentine hadn’t felt the bonds through the thick leather.

He nearly laughed aloud at the coincidence. He had shipped off to Portugal in a new pair of boots purchased by his mother, who seemed to feel that if only her Stefan could keep his feet dry, the rest of his troubles would take care of themselves. Naturally those boots had been stolen less than a week into the campaign.

Valentine had ridden in his socks for a day, then in borrowed boots, and finally after the Battle of Douro he had stripped a fresh pair off a French cuirassier whose steel breastplate hadn’t saved him from a bullet through the neck. The Frenchman’s boots were tall, shiny, and about a size too big. They had been a constant source of irritation over the last month, but now they might save Valentine’s life.

Watching his guard closely through slitted eyes, Valentine began to twist his feet within his boots. He only dared work one at a time, first the right, then the left. With the rope knotted about the ankles, there was barely space to move his feet, but it was enough.

The chasseur yawned, crossed his arms, and slouched in his chair. He looked again at Valentine, but it was only an idle glance.

A minute’s work brought Valentine’s right foot up into the leg of his boot. His ankle tingled where it had been bound, a feeling of escape and rushing blood that would have been painful were it not so glorious. With the pressure of one leg against the other removed, it only took a moment to similarly free his left foot. Then there was a period of waiting, a minute that felt like an hour, as feeling returned to both extremities.

He was free, but unarmed. In the unreliable light of the candle, Valentine discerned a sabre at his guard’s waist and a pistol on the table. Perhaps the French hadn’t been so foolish, leaving his hands untied: even with his legs free there was little chance he could cross the room without receiving a bullet in the chest.

Without warning the wall beside the guard’s table opened, letting in light from a front room where a small fire burned in the grate. There was a door there which Valentine hadn’t even guessed at. He must be in a back room of the farmhouse, then, most likely a kitchen. The layout suggested another reason he’d been left with hands free: even if he evaded or overcame his guard, the rest of the chasseurs sat in the front room, solidly in between him and freedom.

The newcomer and the guard nattered back and forth in French. Clearly the guard was being relieved, but it was a lengthy affair, punctuated by numerous gestures in Valentine’s directions and derisive references to “le rosbif,” the French nickname for the British soldier. The tall chasseur said something that made his comrade laugh, then he stood and both men moved to Valentine’s side. Valentine lay still, eyes shut, and tensed his body.

The blow came a moment later, delivered to his ribs at the toe of a chasseur boot. It was all Valentine could do not to wince, though he allowed himself a long, low moan that seemed appropriate for an unconscious man. The Frenchmen laughed, shared a word, and commenced upon the most thorough beating Valentine had yet received in his twenty years of life.

As they kicked him they continued their chatter, and to his surprise Valentine found he could understand a word or two of the French. Its meaning was as clear as if they’d been speaking the king’s English: diable, “devil,” he’d been called that enough by his enemies. Mort meant “dead,” or perhaps they were saying muertre, “murder.” Valentine’s blood thundered in his ears and his breathing grew ragged. Did they intend to kill him here and now, an ignominious and lonely death by a thousand kicks?

No—after a seeming eternity of brutality, they left off at a word from the tall chasseur, who must be a corporal or sergeant. A moment later he departed, shutting the door behind him.

Valentine let his eyes flutter open. The fresh guard sat at the table with his feet up and a book in his hands, reading by the faint light of the candle. Valentine squinted to make out the title: Les Martyrs, by Chateaubriand. He had never heard of it, but he had a vague idea the author had once been Bonaparte’s pet Catholic but was now on the outs.

Well, the devil take them both. Valentine reached carefully backwards until his fingers touched the rope still looped about the ankles of his boots. It took only a moment to untie, but long minutes to fashion the freed rope into a noose. Valentine worked as quickly as he dared, keeping his slitted eyes on the guard all the while. He must freeze at every incidental motion, in case it presaged a glance over at the prisoner who, as far as the Frenchman knew, was still unconscious and tightly bound. Nine times out of ten the guard was simply turning a page or shifting in his seat, but when he did think to check on Valentine, he saw him slumped and still.

The pain in his stomach and chest hampered him as well. Everything was sore, and the wrong motions stabbed him with pain like lances of fire. Surely a few ribs were broken. God willing that was the worst of it.

The noose was tied. Valentine gave it an experimental tug, making certain the rope ran free through the knot. Then he rose to a crouch, let out his breath, and threw the noose over the Frenchman’s head.

The guard leapt from his chair, clawing at his neck. Valentine was already pulling the knot tight, scrambling forward at the same time. The same sharp, savage motion that closed the noose around the Frenchman’s throat also jerked him backward off his feet. Eyes rolling like a panicked horse’s, tongue lolling from his mouth, he fell into Valentine’s waiting arms. Valentine held him until his struggle had ended forever. Then he lowered the body gently to the ground and dragged it into the darkest corner of the room.

Valentine drew the sabre from the guard’s hip, moved to the table and snatched up the pistol. At the door he paused to collect his thoughts. There were at least two chasseurs in the next room, more if there were an officer or two he hadn’t yet seen. The odds were against him—but the enemy seemed not to have heard their comrade’s death, so surprise would be on Valentine’s side.

He settled the weapons in his hands and prepared to fight. Only one thing still scratched at his mind: the fate of Lieutenant Camplin. If Valentine’s luck held, Camplin might be in the next room, ready and able to join the fight. If not…

Suddenly, as if in answer to Valentine’s uncertainty, a scream broke the silence of the farmhouse. He froze, listening. The sound did not come again, but he knew what he’d heard: Camplin’s voice, somewhere below his feet.

*****

VALENTINE FOUND THE thought of a cellar below this night-shrouded farmhouse inexplicably chilling. It was only to be expected—the Portuguese who’d abandoned the place had to keep their wine somewhere, after all—but his flesh crawled to think of descending from the darkness of the candlelit house into the deeper darkness underground.

Still, there was nothing for it but to proceed. The scream had been unmistakably Camplin’s, and it was no less than Valentine’s duty as a soldier and an Englishman to rescue his lieutenant.

The cellar entrance was simple to find. If Valentine’s makeshift prison had once been a kitchen, the basement would be accessible here. On hands and knees, his body aching and his ribs stabbing every time he twisted too far left, it took him only a minute to put his fingers on the fat iron ring of a trap door.

Valentine stood and gripped the ring with both hands, braced his feet, took a painfully deep breath, and hauled. The trap door came up with a minimum of groaning, and thank God for that; the last thing he needed was to alert the chasseurs in the front room. Below the door a ladder of splintering wood plunged into shadow.

Valentine tucked his pistol into his sash and took up the candle on the table. Returning to the trap door, he was again struck by an unwonted thrill of terror. It was as though his body itself rebelled at the thought of being forced down the square black hole where only two rungs of the ladder could be seen. His hand was shaking; he tightened his grip on the dead Frenchman’s sabre. The trap door gaped like a maw of night, a pit into Hell itself.

But if he were to rescue Camplin, he must be swift. It was only a matter of time before another chasseur came to relieve the murdered guard, or just to offer him wine or share a joke. The whole business might be uncovered at any moment.

“God protect me,” Valentine murmured, and began his descent.

The moment his head broke the line of the floor he was in blackness. There was no wind, but the candle flame tossed like a horse’s mane. For all its agitation it failed entirely to shed light; the little fire remained trapped within its own boundary, glowing like an eye in the dark but doing nothing to relieve the oppressive gloom all around.

The ladder went deeper than Valentine expected. Eventually it gave out about a foot above a dirt floor. He stepped silently down. By the candlelight he could barely discern a narrow space lined with shelves to either side of him. It ran forward into shadow.

He moved along cautiously but swiftly. His feet made no sound in the dirt, for which he was grateful, and as he crept forward the darkness seemed to loosen its grip on the world. Soon the walls around him were faintly visible: he was in a brick tunnel with a low, arched ceiling. It was just tall enough for him to stand his full height, but he crouched anyway.

Another few yards brought Valentine in sight of an open doorway, really just the conclusion of the tunnel. There was a chamber beyond the door, the source of the scant illumination that had eased his passage. The shifting red glow within the room suggested torchlight, but Valentine noted this only subconsciously. His attention was dominated by the grisly sight before him.

In the center of the chamber stood a table of oak planks, triangular in shape, with seven stout legs. Lieutenant Camplin lay strapped to it like a surgery patient, thick leather straps binding both legs, both wrists, his chest, and his head. He was breathing, but shallowly, in the fluttering gasps of panic. A noxious medical scent of alcohol hung in the air.

To the left of the great table stood a series of low shelves crowded with instruments and paraphernalia whose purpose was unintelligible: glass jugs of all sizes connected by stretches of glistening tubing that resembled intestines. Weirdly shaped bottles with uncertain contents. A dozen or more fat black candles, burning with stark red flames.

A man stood alone at the shelves, affixing a narrow hose to a spigot on the side of a bottle. He was short and somewhat rotund, but with a pallor that suggested he spent all his time in subterranean lurking. His clothes were not just plain but shabby, as though he’d bought them off a laborer and never bothered to change them: a wide-brimmed black felt hat, a moth-eaten blue-black coat with old-fashioned tails, breeches stained the color of old bone.

As Valentine watched in frozen horror, the man played out the hose, unreeling it with stumpy fingers. He sang softly to himself as he worked and Valentine recognized a snatch of “La Marseillaise”: “Qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons…”

He reached the end of the hose, where a long, narrow needle glinted redly in the candlelight. Clutching the needle between his fingers he turned to the prone form of Camplin on the table.

Valentine drew his pistol and stepped into the room. “That’s quite enough of that, Johnny Crappeau.”

The Frenchman whirled, and to Valentine’s surprise there was an infantry sabre in his fist. The blade flashed red as the Frenchman sprang forward in a deft lunge. Valentine knocked it aside with a ring of steel on steel, but was forced to leap back almost into the hallway by the fury of his opponent’s attack. His arm tingled with the force of the blow he’d deflected. It was like striking the mast of a ship. There was more power in the little Frenchman’s doughy frame than he’d anticipated.

“The name is Cerveau,” said the Frenchman in English. Then the fight began in earnest.

Cerveau came at Valentine in a flurry of edge cuts. But this was no untrained slasher; he had plainly read the situation and drawn the same conclusion as Valentine, that the Englishman had the reach but the Frenchman the strength. Thus Valentine must keep Cerveau at arm’s length, for should they close up, the Frenchman would surely overpower him.

Valentine let himself be forced backward, deflecting or avoiding each slash and thrust with the most conservative motion he could manage. Cerveau’s expression hardly changed as they fought. He seemed to regard the whole exercise with academic detachment. But every parry rang Valentine’s arm like a bell, so fierce were the blows, and he could feel numbness setting in. The Frenchman must possess an incredible reserve of energy.

Valentine darted a stab at Cerveau’s eyes, forcing a parry, and took the momentary respite to open the distance between them. While they fought they’d circled the triangular table where Camplin lay bound, from feet to head and back down again. Valentine could feel the exaggerated rise and fall of his own chest as he sucked down huge breaths. Cerveau seemed more bored than anything.

“I’ve never cared for these uniforms in the hussar style,” said the Frenchman unexpectedly. His English was accented but precise. “So much ornamentation. I do not see the purpose.”

Valentine, sensing a trap, refused to look down at his own outfit, the brave blue-and-crimson dolman with its many rows of silver braid. Nonetheless the insult stung. He rather fancied the uniforms of the 16th.

“You wouldn’t, you—”

Halfway through his rejoinder Valentine attacked, driving his sabre point-first at Cerveau’s chest with the full power of his arm and shoulder, rotating the blade so it would slip between the ribs. The Frenchman’s eyes widened and he swung up his own sword, but it was too late; he could only redirect Valentine’s point so that it drove into his shoulder rather than pierce his heart. Cerveau hissed between his teeth and stumbled backward. Valentine sprang forward and pressed his attack, hammering blows down on Cerveau’s upraised sword with renewed strength as a crimson circle slowly stained the front of the Frenchman’s coat.

Then there was the sound of running feet, and shouting in French, and the snapping of firelocks on pistols and muskets. Valentine tore his gaze away from Cerveau’s and saw four red-faced chasseurs surrounding him with death in their eyes.

Their tall leader chattered to Cerveau in French and the little man’s expression grew somber. He delivered a few commands in a low voice, then a chasseur stepped forward to either side of Valentine. One held a length of thick rope and the other a set of iron manacles. The intent was clear: they would tie Valentine up and make him watch while Cerveau completed his sinister experiment upon Lieutenant Camplin.

A new voice spoke in the room: “Wait.”

The word was soft but resonant, filling the space with an authority so palpable the air seemed to vibrate. Despite himself Valentine looked away from his captors. A man stood at the head of the triangular table, resting one hand on Camplin’s pale cheek. He wore all black like a country parson, his head uncovered, showing a smooth, bald pate that looked red in the strange candlelight. He stroked the lieutenant’s face with long fingers—too long, almost the length of Valentine’s entire hand, unless that was just a trick of the shadows.

The newcomer smiled, and his teeth seemed numerous and narrow. “I think, Doctor Cerveau, that I would prefer the blood of Stefan Valentine. ’Twas a long journey up from Hell and I am quite famished.”

*****

THE CREATURE WATCHED hungrily as Cerveau and his men released Lieutenant Camplin. Next they came for Valentine, and under the menace of their guns he had no choice but to submit. His head swam with horror so potent it seemed to warp the room around him. He reeled like a drunkard as the chasseurs shoved him toward the table.  Of all the questions that clawed at his mind—how had Cerveau summoned this demon from Hell? To what purpose? What would it mean to be devoured by such a beast?—one crowded them all out: how had the thing known his name?

The soldiers held him to the table as Cerveau strapped him in place. Thick leather bands went around his ankles, his wrists, his chest, and his forehead. The little Frenchman pulled them all savagely tight.

Valentine stared upward, unable to turn his head. The ceiling of the chamber was a knotwork of fat, pale roots to which clods of wet earth clung like scabs. There was a scuffling of boots as the chasseurs dragged Camplin, still in a swoon, to the corner of the room.

The crack of a pistol broke the subterranean stillness of the chamber. Valentine jolted against his bonds, but they held.

The Frenchmen had shot Camplin.

From the corner of his eye, Valentine could just make out Cerveau busying himself with the nearby instruments. Suddenly Cerveau spoke, picking up the thread of his thoughts as though Valentine hadn’t interrupted with his sword: “It’s not that I do not appreciate things of beauty, Monsieur Valentine. I do. But beauty cannot be an end in itself. It must be tempered by pragmatism. By purpose. Wouldn’t you say? Versailles is beautiful, but it did not shield Louis’s neck from Madame la Guillotine.”

Valentine said nothing. The demon seemed to have receded into the shadows outside the red candlelight, but anticipation pulsed off it in waves.

“We made Versailles into an art school, you know,” continued Cerveau. “During the Revolution.” The same needle-ended tube he had nearly used on Camplin ran between his fingers.

The little Frenchman’s droning banality had soothed Valentine’s nerves somewhat. He took a few slow breaths. As his head cleared, a thought occurred: his straps had moved a little when he startled at the gunshot. Perhaps there was enough give…

He contorted a hand to reach back up the length of his arm, stretching it as far as he could, feeling along the wrist strap for a buckle. Nothing, nothing, nothing… yes!

Cerveau scoffed as though Valentine had replied to him. “You lie there accusing me: ‘You revolutionaries all hate beauty, Doctor Cerveau.’ I say it is the British who hate beauty. Tell me, Monsieur Valentine, which is a better use of the hundreds of rooms at Versailles? As a jewel box for kings and emperors? Or to train up a new generation of painters and sculptors?”

Valentine twitched at the buckle with shaking fingers. He had saddled and unsaddled his horse in the darkness a hundred times, a thousand… but it was a damned tricky angle, this, with his hand bent backward on itself and only the tips of his fingers to do the work.

“Well.” Cerveau clucked his tongue. The needle sat in his hand, glittering. “We shall not solve these questions today, in this place. I only regret you will not be able to continue the debate with me.”

He stepped to Valentine’s side, the long tube attached to the needle trailing behind him like a rat’s tail. The Frenchman loomed huge in Valentine’s vision as he leaned in to consider his captive’s neck, no doubt seeking just the right spot to insert his implement.

The demon’s anxious hunger flooded the room. It was like a physical force, crowding in, pressing them, filling the space until the room must burst.

“Duc d’Eligor,” said Cerveau. The presence shifted as the demon’s attention turned to him. The Frenchman recited a few phrases in Latin which Valentine did not understand and slid the needle deep into his neck.

The buckle released. Valentine jerked his hand free. He grabbed the tube protruding from his flesh and yanked.

There was a great rattle and clatter from the shelves as bottles and jugs collided. Cerveau shouted something in French. The chasseurs started forward in a scuffling of boots. But it was too late: with grim satisfaction Valentine heard the sound of glass shattering on the stone floor of the chamber.

The tall chasseur shouted in alarm. For a moment Valentine was at a loss, then a great wash of heat enlightened him. Some of the candles must have toppled when he pulled the glass instruments over. In this crowded room where the tang of alcohol hung like a miasma, it would only take a moment for a fire to leap up.

Valentine drew the needle from his neck with a body-racking shudder. He still couldn’t turn his head, but Cerveau seemed to be distracted by the fire, hopping around trying to stamp it out while cursing volubly in French. Valentine stretched his free arm across his body, hoping to get ahold of the strap on his opposite wrist, but he couldn’t reach it. Nor could he lay even a finger on the straps around his ankles. He drew in a shaky breath and blew it out again. It seemed he would die here after all, burned to death if the chasseurs didn’t shoot him first. At least he had wrecked Cerveau’s little ritual.

The flames leaped higher and hotter, until the side of Valentine’s face scorched under the heat. He released the strap over his forehead and glanced around. The chasseurs had retreated from the fire, leaving Cerveau to battle it alone. The demon seemed to have gone, too; Valentine no longer felt the weight of its presence. The flames had spread around the table, presumably following the line of some spilled spirits. They rose in front of the brick tunnel in a sheet of red.

Perhaps he and Cerveau would burn here together. The idea was oddly satisfying.

Suddenly the pressure disappeared from Valentine’s left wrist. A moment later his chest was free, then one ankle, then the other. He sat up and stared: Lieutenant Camplin stood by his feet, one hand clutching his stomach.

“Lying down on the job, Trooper?” he said, and fell over.

Valentine slid off the table and stumbled to Camplin. The lieutenant lay staring at the ceiling with a vague smile on his face. His dolman was stained almost black with blood, but… yes, he was still breathing. Valentine knelt and hauled him to his feet. A discarded sabre lay nearby and he snatched it up. The Englishmen were more alive than they had any right to be, but there was a ways to go yet.

“It’ll be hot for a moment, sir,” said Valentine, eyeing the wall of fire that separated them from the exit.

“Send Julia for a lemon ice, mother,” Camplin murmured.

Valentine settled his shoulder under the lieutenant’s armpit, gritted his teeth, and dragged him through the flames. They seared as the men passed through, but no worse than the many other pains in Valentine’s body. The tunnel beyond was blessedly cool. Valentine looked back. The fire had grown to engulf nearly the entire room and showed no signs of dying out. It seemed impossible that any man could still live in that Hell’s oven—and yet he could see a shadow beyond the flames, the dark figure of Cerveau moving among his instruments.

The Englishmen moved down the tunnel at a shuffle. Camplin murmured incoherently to himself and leaned more and more heavily upon Valentine as they went. Soon he was barely walking at all. Darkness rose around them as they left the fire behind, until Valentine was as blind as when he’d first entered the trap door. As loath as he was to delay, he must halt to catch his breath and pray for his senses to adjust.

Now he heard voices. The chasseurs were just ahead in the darkness, whispering back and forth in panicked French. Debating whether to return for Cerveau, perhaps, or just who would dare the ladder first. Valentine determined to remove that problem from their hands.

He set Camplin down gently at the foot of the wall, gave himself a moment to steady his nerves, and leapt forward toward the voices, leading with his sabre.

The blade bit flesh at the first swing. There was a shouted curse in French, followed by a rattle of questions. Valentine stabbed into the darkness and struck home a second time. His blade caught on something, a rib perhaps, and he tore it free with the savagery of desperation. The next few seconds were a chaos of shouting, shoving, and stabbing. Angry French voices surrounded him.

A pistol went off, deafening in that little space. In its flash Valentine saw three bodies writhing at his feet and the terrified eyes of a young chasseur with his shako askew. The sabre lashed out—flesh and bone split—something fell to the ground—then there was silence.

Valentine stumbled back to Camplin and dragged him up again. Together they limped through the mass of injured Frenchmen. Fingers clutched at Valentine’s ankle and he stilled them with the heel of his boot. His reaching hand found a splintered wooden rung. He shoved Camplin forward and put the lieutenant’s hands on the ladder. Then, with an exertion that drove the air from his lungs and folded his broken ribs in like knives, he forced Camplin to begin that long climb.

*****

WHEN AT LAST they clambered free of the trap door, Valentine was nearly blinded by sweat. Heat had followed them, rolling down the tunnel and up the ladder in waves that shimmered the air and pricked his flesh. The fire was spreading.

Only two rooms to go. He clutched Camplin’s collar in a white-knuckled grip and began dragging him toward the door. The room swam around them in a red-cornered haze.

They reached the front room, where the detritus of the chasseurs’ camp lay scattered about. It was hot in here, too. Valentine’s stomach tried to retch, then relented as fresh pain stabbed his side.

The door to the outside stood open and swinging in a breeze that beckoned with a promise of sweet relief. He must reach that door. Then he could collapse and leave the rest in God’s hands.

Behind him came a roar and a great tearing sound. He glanced back in terror: the floor of the kitchen had collapsed into the cellar below. Flames leapt from the pit. He turned his gaze back to the door, set his shoulders, and resumed dragging Camplin.

*****

OUTSIDE, UNDER THE sweeping stars of the Portuguese night, the demon waited for them.

“Stefan Valentine,” it said with a smile.

A few yards from the burning farmhouse, Valentine let go of Camplin and dropped to the ground. His last ounce of strength had fled. He could not rise again, even if the creature held a sword of flame to his throat and ordered him up.

“The horses ran off,” said the demon.

“Good lads,” Valentine said. His throat was terribly dry. “Drink me dry if you will, but leave Camplin alone.”

“Loyal to the last. You know he thinks you a thickheaded peon?”

Valentine rolled onto his back. Above him, smoke piled on smoke in great black humps rolling off the fire. It blotted out half the sky. “He’s an officer. That’s his job.”

“Perhaps.” The demon peered up at the smoke. “I’ve drunk my fill tonight, Stefan Valentine. In fact, I believe you and the lieutenant both will survive.”

“Survive?” The word was cotton in Valentine’s mouth.

“Oh, yes. Your Captain MacLeod isn’t far. He’ll see the smoke and send a scout. I’ll make sure he does.”

“…why?”

“Stefan Valentine! Isn’t it obvious?” The demon smiled again, wider than a human mouth could smile. “I’m looking forward to following your career.”

THE END.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nathaniel “Nat20” Webb, is an author and musician from Portland, Maine. His blog chronicles his deep dive into the world of pulp fantasy, an early love to which he’s returned after years in the wilderness.

Webb’s writing includes the bestselling music biography Marillion in the 1980s, the gamelit novel Expedition: Summerlands, and adventures and supplements for the tabletop RPGs Shadow of the Demon Lord and Godless. As a lead guitarist, Webb toured and recorded with a number of acts including Grammy-nominated singers Beth Hart and Jana Mashonee and Colombian pop star Marre.

His latest release is A Conventional Murder, a funny, geeky murder mystery set at a sci-fi convention. He alsos wrote the #1 cozy fantasy and #1 cozy mystery on Kindle Vella: The Old Humblefoot Mysteries, traditional whodunnit stories starring a crotchety old halfling.

He is a member of the SFWA.

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Return Friday, November 7th for sword-swinging action in “DEATH FROM THE STEPPE!: Part 1” by Kevin Beckett!