The Croning Read Online Free PDF Page A

rack and iron maiden and dissecting table, then through a low arch scarcely wider than his shoulders and more downward curving stairs. The subbasement was correspondingly wetter and dimmer than the rest of the gloomy fortress, lighted by infrequent torches and dingy lanterns in recessed niches. Water dripped and small streams ran from cracks in the foundation and made the eroded stone steps treacherous. Bats squeaked and flapped, agitated.
    Somewhere ahead came the low sonorous cadence of chanting.
    The Spy had the queer and unwelcome sensation of sleepwalking, or trudging through a vivid dream that was rapidly becoming a festering nightmare.
    Did they say it was beef at supper? You fool! The voice hissed from the deep black near his left-hand side and he almost went for a tumble down the steps such was his surprise. He squinted and found no evidence of a lurker, nor were any more whispers forthcoming and he soon wondered if his nerves were betraying him. Meanwhile he reached a landing and traversed a narrow tunnel. His path drew ever nearer the chanting and the hairs on his neck prickled. The words were similar to Latin, yet another language entirely. Though the chant was incomprehensible it conjured images in his mind of noisome maggot nests and a river composed of wriggling worms and gore, of himself and the woman from the temple coupling in a hellish cavern as a toothless maw of a colossus descended and engulfed them.
    He cursed and bit his tongue until it bled, and kept moving.
    The tunnel let into a small box canyon on the opposite side of the mountain. The area was illuminated by a bonfire near a dolmen of great, great antiquity. The dolmen, four vertical henges of prodigious girth surmounted by another flat rock, was graven with runes similar to the many barbarian megaliths and cairns upon the moor. A boulder lay to one side of the dolmen entrance and this stone was fitted with manacles and chains.
    The beautiful woman from the temple languished naked, manacled at wrist and ankle. She serenely gazed toward the bonfire and its attendant figures in black cowls. There were thirteen hooded and robed figures and the Spy suspected that these were the servants of the estate gathered to participate in a blood sacrifice.
    He and his hound observed this spectacle from a ledge perhaps fifty yards distant. He pinched himself, glumly hoping to wake from this awful dream, and surely it must be a dream for no confluence of malign events could logically occur in a sane universe.
    Any shred of naïve assumption that the universe was in anywise sane dissolved, along with much of his own sanity, when Yvonne and Irina threw back their hoods and produced jagged daggers. Irina sliced the bound woman open from hairline to hip in a prolonged sawing motion. Blood spurted from the wound. The attendants chanted and the woman screamed and her screams escalated into a lunatic laughter that gathered strength and echoed like thunder from the canyon walls.
    Summoned by the laughter, the chanting, the copious flow of blood gleaming dark as honey in the bonfire blaze, the Dwarf, garbed in a cassock, hopped and skipped forth from the dolmen. He tore away the cassock and his liver-gray flesh hung loosely upon his squat frame as if it were a hastily donned and ill-fitting costume. He leaped forward with violent alacrity and seized the woman in chains and wrenched at her. The Spy felt nauseated, convinced that the little man was actually peeling her alive.
    Then the Limbless Ones squirmed from the darkness to join the fun. At the sight of them the Spy’s perceptions bent and buckled inward and smote him senseless. He shrieked and ran back through the tunnel.
    5.
     
    He made it to the Peddler’s quarters, his body bruised from many falls on the slippery stairs. The Peddler had been sleeping soundly and reacted in a groggy manner that suggested he’d consumed drugs. He’d eaten and drunk far more than the Spy himself had dared.
    The Spy slapped and