The Guy with the Scythe
by Jamie Lynn Wirth
part 1
Rosie couldn’t say what woke her. Not a noise. The red glow of her alarm clock read 3:07 a.m. She pulled her pillow over her face. It blocked the light, but not the smell: sulfur and burning.
Rosie groaned and dragged herself off the side of the bed, sliding her feet into her green Invader Zim slippers to shuffle to her door. Her double bass leaned in the corner, her music stand beside it blocking most of the glow from the street lamps outside. I can’t believe I left the stove on. Again.
The hall between the kitchen and bedroom was short. She didn’t bother to turn on the hall light. She pushed open the door to the kitchen, and saw a pair of glowing eyes. “Joey,” she huffed as she flicked on the light. Joey’s sleek gray-brown fur flowed as he trotted over. “Why aren’t you asleep? Let’s turn off the stove and get back to bed.” She scooped the Pekingese up. When he wriggled, she tucked him under her arm like a hairy football.
None of the burners on the stove, however, were turned on. Neither was the stove itself.
The acrid stench was stronger than ever.
Is it a gas leak? Uneasy, Rosie backed out of the kitchen and glanced into the living room. She flipped on more lights. There was nothing beyond her futon and the low bookshelf cluttered with sheet music.
At the end of the hall, the bathroom door stood ajar.
Joey wriggled again, gave his low woof, and launched himself off Rosie’s front to scamper forward.
“What’s gotten into you?”
He nosed through the door with a creak of hinges. The smell was worst here. Rosie was awake enough now that her brain could start making connections. She gave up any hope of sleep. Not gas. It’s a sewer leak.
She flipped on the bathroom light, expecting to see the toilet overflowing with brown, filthy water, as it had in July when tourists had flushed what seemed to be a handful of maps down the toilet downstairs.
What met her eyes wasn’t sewage. Joey nosed at the black thing, fur and leathery wings and feathers and fangs. Grabbing the tattered shreds of whatever lay butchered on the faded linoleum, Joey shook it rapidly back and forth. Black liquid spattered his fur.
Rosie snatched him back with a yell. “Drop it.”
He did, wagging, mouth gaping in a doggy grin when the thing thudded against her slipper. Joey’s mouth was coated in black slime. He reached his head up to lick her face.
“I love you, but no.”
For a moment, she was unsure whether to put Joey in the sink, get a garbage bag, or violently upchuck everything she’d eaten or thought about eating for the past week. She swallowed.
Kicking off her ruined slippers, Zim’s huge eyes stained black, she padded back to her room. She picked up her phone from the bedside table. Joey was squirming again, but she held him firmly.
“Non-emergency, how can I help you?” The monotone on the other end of the call sounded tired and not at all helpful.
“I’m... not sure. There’s a... thing in my bathroom. Can you send Animal Control to come get it?”
“Uh-huh. What kind of animal is it?”
“Some kind of raccoon? Or maybe a bat.”
A car hummed past outside. “What kind of animal?”
“Look, I don’t know, but it’s dead and it’s in pieces all over my bathroom.”
“Ma’am, Animal Control only picks up live animals. If you have anything dead, you just need to clean it up.”
“But it’s...” Rosie sighed. “Okay. Thank you.”
Despite his objections, Rosie stuffed Joey under the faucet and rinsed off as much of the goop as she could. He gave a high-pitched yipe and snapped at her, careful to miss but letting her know he was mad.
“You should have thought of that before you started playing with corpses.” She wrapped him in a dishtowel. “Now you still stink, and you look like a drowned rat.”
The time, 4:17 a.m., displayed on her phone. Too early to call Rory, her landlord, and let him know there was a hole somewhere he needed to patch. Too early to ask or beg or guilt him into cleaning up whatever it was on the bathroom floor. She sighed again.
There were no garbage bags left in the box under the kitchen sink. She put Joey in his bed with a firm, “Stay.” She slammed the bedroom door as he bounded up to follow her. “I’ll be back. Rory has garbage bags in the bookstore downstairs.”
The last time Rosie had turned on the light in Tales and Tomes at night, angry tourists had started pounding on the glass display window, yelling to be let in. Just because tourist season is over doesn’t mean it can’t happen again. No, thank you. Using the flashlight on her phone, Rosie edged out onto the landing and started down the stairs leading to the side entrance.
But the lights were already on. The back shelving area, where Rory buried himself in rare old books and papers when business was slow, was ablaze with light. Rory sat slumped at the wide desk, his head in his hands. His gray-black hair stood out in tufts. He was still wearing his green bathrobe over faded blue-plaid pajamas.
The girl — What’s her name, Alice? Alex? — who helped out afternoons in the shop looked up as Rosie pushed the door open. Her dark hair was cropped in a jagged pixie cut, and her green eyes widened when she saw Rosie.
“I told you,” she hooted, slamming a wiry hand down on the desk. “Look at her. And the smell. Admit it. I was right, old man.”
“Let it go, Alex.” Rory lifted his head and turned enough to see Rosie, barefoot and bedraggled and reeking. “Oh.
What was she right about?” Rosie advanced, alarm and confusion chasing away the last of her exhaustion. “What’s going on?”
“I didn’t know what it was.” Rory turned back to Alex, who shook her head. “You can’t destroy it. They won’t buy it back. You have to go close the portal.”
“I don’t even know how or why it’s still open. And they were gone when I went back.”
Alex snorted. “No ‘racing hobbling goblins, tramping in the glen’? You knew you should have asked if you were going to buy something like that at the Goblin Market.”
“What is going on?” Rosie stopped herself from stamping her foot. “Why are we all awake at this ungodly hour? I’ve got a corpse in my bathroom that doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen, Joey made a mess killing it, and you two are talking about some market. What, like eBay?”
Rory turned to blink at her again. “He killed one? That puffball? I should have known,” while Alex murmured, “No, not exactly like eBay.”
Rosie raised an eyebrow at the teenager. “Don’t you have school in a few hours?”
Ignoring her, Alex scraped her chair back from the table. “We better go take care of it, old man.”
They all trooped up the stairs, Rory morose, Alex darting and curious, Rosie irked. As they opened the door to her apartment, Joey’s howls crescendoed.
“Huh. It’s more solid than I would’ve thought.” Alex toed the thing with her boot.
“I wouldn’t do that.” Rosie shook her head. “It’s rotten, and the gunk doesn’t wash off.”
“It’s not gunk. It’s ichor. What d’we do now, old man?” Alex asked.
Rory sighed. “We have to burn it. Otherwise, it’ll draw more.”
“That stone you bought at the Market is enough to draw more.” Alex toed the creature again. “The store is warded, but the rest of the building is completely open. The upstairs apartment is going to be their gateway.”
“Hold on — there are more? What is it?” Rosie couldn’t help the way her voice cracked at the end.
That was how the three of them, with Joey, found themselves standing by the edge of the woods behind Tales and Tomes and Main Street, facing a raging bonfire. Rory had doused the garbage bag holding the pieces of the creature with lighter fluid, stacking charcoal and fallen wood on top. While the heat of the blaze made Rosie’s face feel taut, a chill that had nothing to do with the late fall morning edged up her spine. This is surreal. I should still be in bed.
The horizon streaked vermilion as Rory explained.
“This was — I think — a creature called a maldracht. You saw the teeth. They were feeders. Mindless raveners that could decimate a military camp or a village in a single night. They’d build a nest where they fed, and from there they could infest a whole province in a week. When they swarmed, nothing stopped them until they devoured everything in their path. Humans, cattle, hounds, horses. A maldracht is hunger made flesh.”
He paused at her look. “It sounds crazy, I know, but my family’s been guarding against things like this for generations. It’s all too real.”
Meanwhile, Alex was fawning over Joey. Flickering shadows near the fire threw her cheekbones into stark relief. “He has a coat? And boots. I can’t believe he has boots. You are just the cutest.”
“But why here? Why now?” Rosie hugged Joey closer. “The way you talk about these, they’ve been gone for a long time. What changed?”
“They were sealed up in the Otherworld almost 3,000 years ago.”
When Rory shifted, pausing, Alex filled in the rest. “And our innocuous, mild-mannered bookseller opened one of the portals to a fey court — which, by the way, he does all the time — to buy rare books at the Goblin Market. He came back with a seal, that’s apparently also acting as a lure, and got followed home by a gruesome not-puppy.”
For a few moments, the only sound was the snapping fire. A branch cracked and settled in a fountain of sparks.
Copyright © 2024 by Jamie Lynn Wirth
