The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding

  I wasn’t even sure why I felt like I had to say the words to begin with. It was just that I had seen her face earlier, when Uncle Barnabas mentioned her mother, and for that one single second, it felt like I had seen a secret corner of her heart. One that was very dark, and very sad.

  “Did your mom teach you?” I asked. “Before she…?”

  “Yeah.” I had to strain my ears to hear her. “She taught me a lot, but not enough to make him happy, I guess.”

  “Well…I think it’s cool,” I offered. “It’s more than most people can do, right?”

  The shower water cut off with a loud groan from the pipes. I could hear Uncle Barnabas muttering to himself, but couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying.

  “Prosper?” Nell whispered. “It will work. I promise.”

  I shut my eyes, waiting for Al’s cackle or the humming sound of his breath in my ears. But there was only the silence of deep sleep, of the bright moon hovering high over us.

  “It already did.”

  It did not, in fact, work, but Alastor couldn’t blame the little witch for trying. Pathetic as the attempt was.

  He had been worried that his little performance earlier had been too dramatic to be believed, but he was pleased to discover that his host was, as suspected, as dull as an old doorknob. The boy’s spirit slipped down into dark sleep, and Alastor’s rose up to its rightful place.

  It might have been careless of him to reveal his ability to control the boy’s body, but the temptation to frighten him into submission had simply been too great. Making him squirm, feeling his heart grow heavy with dread—truly, it was a delicious thing. He fed off the boy’s misery to replace what energy the disgusting leech of a hag had taken.

  Possessing a body had once been as easy as sliding a hand into a silk glove. Now it took far more concentration. He hated the solidness of the boy, the cramped quarters, his human stench. More than anything, he hated feeling young and weak again, when he still had his past lifetime’s long memories.

  Over eight hundred years old and trapped in the body of a boy who couldn’t tell the difference between a tharborough and a theorick! The Fates were so unkind!

  Still, it was intriguing to look through the boy’s memories. Horrifying, however, to see what had become of the human world. He had learned much in a few short hours and almost wished he hadn’t seen the truth at all.

  Alastor swung the human’s legs off the couch and planted them carefully on the ground, mindful of the sleeping figures in the beds across from him and the annoying changeling dozing upon the witch’s chest. How easy, he thought, it would be to make a run for it, heading straight back to Redhood to finish the curse he had begun years ago.

  But he needed these flea-bitten, witless humans. Alastor’s powers were growing back to their full strength, but if the wrong creature were to find him even a day too soon…well, it was simply not an option.

  Alastor moved across the room, darting from shadow to shadow. The humans were breathing low and steady, fixed fast into sleep. The changeling’s ears twitched at the sound of his faint steps, but its eyes did not snap open—Alastor waited, and nearly crowed in triumph when the creature merely turned over onto its side and began to snore loudly.

  There was a reason changelings were hardly better than rodents to be exterminated in his realm. He’d heard that witches in the human realm had taken to them for their unshakable loyalty. Changelings imprinted upon the first being they saw as infants, binding themselves to their caretaker. More than that, they did, he could admit, make fair guards, as they possessed all of the excellent hearing and vision of their betters. That is, if they weren’t sleeping.

  More importantly, changelings could alter their appearance into anything, including malefactors and other superior fiends. That simply would not do. Every fiend Downstairs had a rightful place in the order of things. Anything that disrupted it, whether it be a changeling or a hag, had to be brought in line or permanently dealt with.

  Still, Alastor felt a strange curiosity about the witch. Something tickled and nagged at the back of his memory when the boy glanced at her—an unlikely resemblance. He not resist the opportunity to examine her now.

  He leaned in closer, inhaling the next soft breath she released. Yes, Alastor thought, this girl would surely fetch a high price Downstairs at the soul market. Such salty courage, tinged with bitter sadness. An irresistible mixture.

  But it was her face that struck him now, being so similar to the servant girl he had been trapped inside. The one who had cried and begged as the fire was at her feet.

  Like a wart grown back on his heart, stubbornly resisting his efforts now to cut it off, Alastor could not shake the image of the girl. He thought that it was a terrible thing, to not know her name, but to remember that her fear tasted metallic, like blood, and her pain, like ash.

  He was a fiend of logic, and no part of him was willing to deny that the girl’s death had, in turn, saved his own life. Without her fear and agony, there would not have been enough power in him to escape to the Inbetween, sleeping, biding his time until the witch’s bloodline no longer walked the earth and he could return.

  Dreaming all the while of what he would do to the Redding descendants.

  Alastor cast a look around the room. He did not mean to go far, only to assess his new surroundings. The glimpses he had caught of this world on the drive in the horseless wagon (car, he corrected himself, when he remembered what the little witch had called it) had rattled him. He remembered Salem from his last life; he had visited it once with Honor Redding.

  Honor Redding. It had been nearly four hundred years, and yet…it only felt like days since they had last met. Perhaps it was because the boy himself bore such a strong likeness to the young man Honor had been. Surely, the resemblance would not stop there. His sister, it seemed, had been born with a faulty heart, but the boy’s weak heart was inherited, passed down from coward to coward. Alastor knew it would only be a matter of time before the boy agreed to a contract, much like Honor had.

  Honor Redding had not been a friend. He had not even been a partner. Humans were the lowest form of life, tolerated only for the service their shades could provide. This boy was Honor’s legacy—if he could just get the boy to agree to a contract, the energy formed from the new bond would feed him, and provide the last push of power needed to escape the child early, before the little witch and her father could bind him to another life-form and kill him.

  Alastor was a reasonable sort. He could sacrifice owning those four souls, the boy’s immediate family, if it meant hundreds more from the Redding family were at his disposal. He could summon the long-dead ones from the shade realm, and finally put them to use building a new palace for himself Downstairs.

  The boy’s arm, cut neat and quick by the cursed iron blade, hung useless at his side as he passed through the door into the hallway. He poked at the bats hanging from the ceiling, wondering how they could sleep so deeply—and in the company of humans, no less.

  The rest of the house was enchanted—ghosts moved between the floors, mostly unseen. The magic here bloomed against the boy’s skin like deadly nightshade, its wild wickedness both tainted and tamed by the pure hearts of the witches who defended this realm. Alastor reached the window in no time, but took a moment to sniff at the skeleton hanging there. It had a strange smell. Not the earthy reek of most humans, but a sort of hollow…burned something, perhaps. One he had never scented before. Why would a human keep such ruined bones?

  Well, humans were strange, and stranger now than ever before. He turned back to the window, and thrust it open with the boy’s one good arm. Ah. Yes. There was a long black ladder attached to the ledge. It was tricky business slithering out through it—business that was clearly below a being such as himself—but he continued wiggling and worming until he was balanced at the very top of the ladder.

  “Egads.” He gasped, feeling the freezing metal rock. With a loud creak, the ladder shot to the ground. The mal
efactor cursed in every language he knew, and several he didn’t. The feet of the metal beast struck the wet earth and threw him off.

  “A pox upon this house!” he hissed, raising a fist and shaking it.

  Then Alastor, First Prince of the Realm, Master Collector of Souls and Commander of the First Battalion of Fiends, took in one deep breath of midnight air, and was off, running.

  There was something very peculiar about this Salem.

  His memories of his time here were dusty, but Alastor could not recall quite so many human houses, their lanterns blazing. Fiends had clearly failed in their duty of human population control, but it looked as though they had decorated the town themselves, adorning it with enormous spiderwebs, skeletons, and gravestones. If only the buildings were built from bone as well as stone, and spiraled up into the moonless sky like the towering homes Downstairs. Then Alastor might feel truly at ease. These humans and their square homes and slanted roofs. Honestly.

  The boy’s breath fanned out white against the cool night air, each exhalation escaping like a tiny, glowing shade. As he walked, weaving and bobbing between the houses, grass and brick gave way to a strange gray material, one that was as cracked and stained as an old tree elf’s behind. Mindful of the tall humans watching him from across the street, Alastor forced the boy’s body down into a squat and took in a deep breath of the hard substance. Satisfied with the chalky smell, he poked it with a single finger. Solid. Good. Above him, great poles held black boxes that flashed green, yellow, and red, over and over.

  What language was this, he wondered, and what secrets did it hold?

  “Speak to me, great blinking being,” he called. “Tell me your truths!”

  He pushed a button on one of the poles and watched as the pattern repeated, green, yellow, red again and again, each of the one hundred times he pushed it. He walked down the street and pushed the button there as well. But the lights only flashed green, yellow, red.

  “Foul, toad-spotted dewberry! Dost thou mock me?” he hissed, when it was clear the great beings above his head would not converse with him. As he turned away, continuing his path along the odd silver snakelike path, the black boxlike face of the creature shifted back to red. Just to be sure they knew his fury, he punched each button along the way.

  Red was a good noble color, he decided, running the boy’s hand along a low white fence. The pain that pricked the battered skin only fed him that much more. Red was life. It was the drip of blood from his enemy’s fatal wounds. It was the color of anger, the most powerful of all energies.

  But orange was the most cherished color Downstairs. It was the color of royalty, of superiority, of nourishment.

  And there was much orange to be had in the Salem of this time. Parchment streamers wrapped around poles and dangled from trees like swaying spider legs. Flags with pumpkins fluttered, twitching and bobbing. One such flag stuck out from a pole, just low enough for the boy’s arm to reach up and rip it away. He used the strings to affix it around his neck, already feeling more regal. He relished the bite of the howling wind.

  Alastor stood with his face to it, letting it bring a bouquet of beautiful scents: waste, left too long in the sun, rotting vegetation from the dying leaves, and a perfectly putrid fishy odor wafting up from the nearby harbor. Orange streamed down from the lanterns that lined the streets, high above him.

  As he explored, he grew hungry. The face of the wooden house behind him, painted a hideous shade of pure white, was darkened. But there were two small rows of candle-like lights along the path that led up to the door. Even with the boy’s weak eyes, he saw the spiderwebs draped from one of its front pillars to the other, and the small black creatures that looked to be crawling over it. He leaped over the low fence and allowed the boy’s body to dance up to them, cooing with glee.

  He ran the boy’s fingers through the silky—yet not sticky?—web until he found what he was looking for: a pristine black spider, which he promptly popped into the boy’s mouth.

  “Ack! Ugh!” He flicked it out of the boy’s mouth with his disturbingly pink human tongue. It was hard through and through—no crunchy shell with gooey innards. It didn’t move or twitch when he bit down.

  Alastor tried the next one, then the next, until they were all crammed into the boy’s mouth. He spat them back out into the yard with one furious breath, and spun away, stalking down the path past the human bones half buried in the ground. But his journey had not been entirely in vain: for, just beside the blue door of the house, there lay another small button. And, unable to help himself, he jabbed a finger into its little glowing center.

  Ding-dong! Ding-dong!

  “Noooooo.” He covered the boy’s ears and fled from the horrendous sound of bells. The lights in the nearby windows flared. Alastor stumbled down the path, tripping over an old tree’s protruding root before reaching another fence. He tumbled over it, just as the door to the house opened, and an old crone stuck her face out.

  “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  So. These bells summoned humans. He would make certain to avoid them.

  Alastor glanced around him, wondering why the boy’s body seemed to be slightly sinking. The black dirt here was nearly turned, soft to the touch. Accounting for, he realized, the graves proudly displayed in front of this particular house. Clever humans, keeping their dead nearby. It would make for fertile breeding grounds for blood vipers, which would in turn hunt for changeling eggs and fairies.

  He examined the gravestones smugly. Humans lived for such a short time, blissfully unaware of the other realms.

  Poor Little Susie, one stone read, her death was a doozy. Another read, I was Ted. Now I’m dead, and the one beside it, Mummy B. Ware. The stones were small, and when he knocked on one, hollow—not stones at all! Alastor kicked over the scythe leaning against the nearby tree as he moved toward the low brick wall that separated the other side of that house from the road.

  Then he saw him.

  The fiend was no bigger than a human infant and strongly resembled one. But instead of the rosy blush of new human skin, the vampyre’s flesh looked to have been cast out of white marble. Two long fangs hung still below unblinking black eyes. Alastor rushed up to it, seizing its dangling legs before he could stop himself.

  The vampyre came crashing down against him, its hollow head knocking against the boy’s. Its body was light, almost as if it was filled with air, but…squishy somehow.

  “Zounds!” he said, gasping. “Longsharp! Longsharp, what hast become of thee, friend?” He had known this vampyre—or one that had looked nearly identical—Downstairs. They had played Pickle the Faerie together many times, and had even traded tips on the best way to get a lucky cat’s tail without being mauled by the uncooperative feline’s claws.

  And now, Longsharp was…dead? Un-undead? Alastor shook the little body, trying to spark a reaction. When that didn’t work, he set it down on the ground, but the vampyre’s legs collapsed beneath him.

  Perhaps vampyres in this world slept during the night, rather than the day? No, that wasn’t right. Downstairs it was always night, and they could come and go as they pleased. But that had never been the case in the human world. The sun scorched them to dust (which in turn could be made into a fine cake batter, but that was beside the point). How foolish this vampyre had been to leave himself out in the open, unprotected.

  Without another thought on the matter, Alastor picked up the body and tucked it under the boy’s arm. He started through the fence, only to stop. A pumpkin, carved with a face like a troll, sat just beside where Longsharp had been.

  Sniff. Sniff.

  Of course. Orange—the color of sustenance. Of food. He snatched the pumpkin under his other arm and skipped off down the street with his bounty. It was hollowed out, but already tender as it began to rot. Perfection.

  He had worried that he wouldn’t be able to find the common, but there were signs aplenty and the walk was quite short. With the salty breath of the harbor to his left, he made his
way to Salem Common, stopping only to pick up one more carved pumpkin.

  The park seemed to be the only surviving section of the original settlement. Four-hundred-odd years had not struck Alastor as a particularly long time until he had seen the changes they had brought. The houses were wider, painted—something that, he noted, only the wealthiest could have afforded in the old days—and the roads wider, and painted with lines too. The first roar of the strange carriage—car—speeding past him had been enough to send him diving into the nearby shrubbery.

  So this was the present, then. Loud, crowded, and altogether too clean. And not one bleeding spider to eat!

  The trees in the common were cloaked in vibrant crimsons and golds, frosted with the cold night air. He claimed a seat on a nearby bench, the one closest to the magnificently reeking garbage canister so he might relish it, and set a still-sleeping Longsharp beside him.

  The boy’s skin prickled, numbed as he lifted the first pumpkin and bit into its smooth skin. Chewing happily, Alastor glanced up, searching for the moon through the overhead branches, trying to figure out the time of night. He knew it was most likely past the witching hour, but was still surprised there were no fiends out prowling. Surely there were errands that needed to be run. Imps sent out to gather the bones from cemeteries for their masters and mistresses, the shivering white light of a fetch sent to warn a human of a loved one’s death. There was not even a goblin running his mischief.

  Well. He had bigger concerns on his mind. The whole truth of it was this: He had not gone out that night only to see how Salem had done for itself. He had not gone just to find an escape route back to Redhood either. He needed fresh night air.

  He needed to think.

  Alastor needed to figure out which of his wretched siblings had helped the Reddings break their contract with him. Which of them had revealed his true name to Honor Redding.

  He’d nearly given up his own shade when the boy had asked about the names of fiends. He pulled his cape tighter around the maggot’s shoulders, his pitifully thin skin. How dangerously close he’d come to revealing the one way a Malefactor could be controlled…and how foolish the boy had been to not put the matter together.