Chương 18: Chapter 269 - Pattern Recognition

Siobhan Month 5, Day 14, Wednesday 5: 30 p. m. Despite everything Siobhan had seen over the past few days, the sight of that single, dead hand poking out of the dirt sent rippling chills running from her scalp to her toes. She froze for an embarrassingly long time. Only when her lungs began to burn did she realize she'd been holding her breath. She let out a gust of air and, after a moment to brace herself, turned around and went back up the stairs.

The shaman had a small shed in the back yard where he kept gardening supplies, from which she borrowed a couple of shovels. She didn't want to dig the corpse out with her bare hands. Rory had followed her out and was sticking close to her side. When she handed him one of the shovels, he took it reluctantly.

"Do we have to?"

"Yes," she replied ruthlessly. Rory vomited when they uncovered enough of the corpse to release the smell, and Siobhan's stomach almost followed suit, so they went upstairs and found some scented sachets to tie with strips of cloth over their mouths and noses. It didn't mask the scent of death completely, but it helped enough that they were able to clear the corpse. As Siobhan had suspected, it was the shaman. His eyes were still open, though they had clouded, sunk, and begun to leak.

She didn't want to touch his face to try to close the lids. The man showed no signs of emaciation, a distended belly, strange fungal growth, or any of that thick slime. This was a relief in one way, but it left her with more questions than answers. She searched his pockets first but found nothing strange. There was blood crusted under his nails, but she couldn't tell if it was from an assailant or simply a natural result of decomposition.

No vermin or bugs had gotten to him, but that was probably a result of good household wards rather than any sign of freshness. Rory was crying—deep, shuddering sobs and hiccoughing breaths that he couldn't suppress. Siobhan considered sending him out but couldn't bear the thought of being alone in this dark, dank room with the corpse. As she moved her light, she noticed bruising around the shaman's throat and moved to brush away the loose dirt there.

Dark purple bruise marks stood out around the front and side before fading into the deep, livid bruising of blood that had stagnated and, drawn by gravity, pooled under his skin after his death. However, she could easily make out the shapes of fingers. Trembling, she placed her own hand over them, matching the positioning. Someone had strangled the man. Someone much larger than Siobhan. The perpetrator was a man—or a woman with big hands and a strong grip. But Siobhan could find no other clues.

Still, her mind was in free-fall as she considered the implications. That a shaman, someone who might have been able to help with the curse, had been murdered just as the effects became so blatantly obvious, was no coincidence. Someone had removed him from the picture. And if this was not a coincidence, maybe the curse wasn't either. She'd thought Mom had brought it home from her last trip and that everything afterward had been an unavoidable consequence.

But perhaps everything that had happened was the handiwork of someone with the ability to reason and plot. Siobhan left the shaman's body uncovered and pulled Rory back up into the house. She closed the cellar door, then washed her hands over and over, trying to get the smell off. She didn't want to go back to the village. She wanted to run away. When—if? —Grandfather returned, he could surely track her down with magic, no matter where she went. But she wasn't sure she would be safe anywhere.

And Rory's family was still there. She didn't feel right about leaving him to go back alone. He was helpless, just a child. She looked out through the kitchen window. The sun was setting soon, and they were too exhausted to set out again. Even if they could make it without proper rest, they wouldn't be physically or mentally effective if they arrived completely broken from exhaustion.

She returned to the shaman's stores of potions and, though they weren't labeled, used their look and smell to pick out a couple of healing potions and something to help them sleep. They ate the shaman's food, and then each took small doses of the potions. She and Rory slept together on the couch in front of the fireplace, huddled close for comfort more than warmth. Neither mentioned it, but she knew they were both uncomfortably, unforgettably aware of the cottage's owner lying dead in the cellar below.

Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work! On the approaching edge of dawn, Siobhan woke and separated from Rory's lightly snoring form. She planned to spend the time until they were ready to leave reviewing more of the shaman's sparse texts. Her body was still stiff, but after the healing potion, no longer quite as achy. Movement drew her eye to the fireplace, and she froze in shock.

A tiny Paimon stood among the ashes, formed not of fire, but sculpted out of the same earthy orange and sunset red of the stone growths that had appeared on Siobhan's treehouse. He was in the four-legged, animalistic form that Siobhan used to play fetch with when she was very little and too stupid to understand what he really was—a powerful demon that could have flash-burned her to death in approximately two seconds. Unblinking, Siobhan started to hyperventilate as she watched this tiny Paimon.

He was smoking, burning up, and crumbling away into ochre dust. He was made of incense—that familiar scent of spice, wood, and warmth. Little Paimon disintegrated right before her eyes. She fell to the hearth in front of the fireplace and brushed away the old ash, trying to find remnants of him. There was nothing. It was as if she had imagined him. Behind her, Rory stirred.

"What's that smell? I'm hungry." She almost sobbed with relief.

"You can smell it? The incense?"

"Is that what it is? It's nice. Expensive-like." With trembling hands, Siobhan wiped away the tears from her cheeks.

"Yes. It is expensive." It contained components from the Planes of Earth and Fire, and had to be specially ordered into Malzhan. But Paimon had loved it, and Mom said that appropriate gifts were part of her contract with the elemental. In an inaudible whisper, Siobhan added, "Only the best for Paimon." While Rory prepared breakfast, Siobhan looked through the rest of the shaman's things.

Unfortunately, he didn't have any books that were conveniently about curse-breaking or maledictions, though she was beginning to suspect that they wouldn't have been useful anyway. Before she and Rory left, they restocked their packs, took several useful potions and a small artifact meant for pruning trees, and filched all the coin from the shaman's small lockbox.

"We might need it later," she explained when Rory gave her a scandalized look at the theft.

"Your pops and the others are probably going to need healing, and if the cursed villagers have eaten all the food stores, we'll need to buy supplies to make it through until harvest time." The shaman's potions were useful on their return trip, allowing both of them to continue at a pace that would have otherwise been impossible. Even with the potions, the ordeal would have left them with more serious damage than blisters and sore muscles if they had to keep it up for any longer.

But despite their best efforts, they made slower time on the way back and had to spend a night huddled together in the woods. Siobhan passed most of the long hours of their trek in deep thought. She didn't explain any of her speculation to Rory, not about the murder of the shaman or about her mom. There was something of Mom that remained; that much was obvious. Perhaps she was still alive but unable to show herself. Siobhan remembered her dreams.

In them, Mom was always half insane or horribly twisted, trapped, and tortured. Could she have not died, but fallen to Will-strain instead? Sometimes, instead of dying or breaking, people just lost some important part of themselves. Though the body remained, if the Will was broken, a person would likely never recover. Many needed constant care just to survive, or they would hurt themselves or others in their madness. Could Grandfather have hidden Mom in the tower?

Perhaps there was some other secret space within that Siobhan hadn't noticed. Alternatively, all of this was some elaborate trick meant to prey specifically upon Siobhan's weakness, to carefully push all of her triggers. But she wasn't sure what the point would be, so deemed it unlikely. If she counted carefully, incense-Paimon in the fireplace was the fourth seemingly benign manifestation of the curse, with the first being the sand in her room, then the blood eggs, and then the treehouse.

Siobhan narrowed her eyes. Had the fine grit suffusing the yolk of the blood eggs been ochre sand—incense? In fact, it seemed that each of those incidents, creepy though they were, shared various features. They were also the ones that seemed connected to Siobhan herself. Did the other curse effects have anything like that? No one had mentioned anything similar around the sheep or the grave-risen Old Pappy O'Kervick.

And of what she had investigated and seen herself, the common themes were desperate consumption, the red, veiny fungus, torn open chest cavities spewing out slimy fluid… and death. And the targets— Siobhan's thoughts were interrupted as Rory gasped and began to scramble forward, his face twisted with horror. He tripped, then got up again and ran toward the tree line. She hadn't realized how far they'd gone, or how much time had passed, but the sun was almost setting again, and they had passed through the forest.

She hurried to catch up with Rory, who had stopped at the edge of the tree line. She stopped beside him as what she saw hit her like a backhand blow from an uncaring Titan. She reeled, catching herself on a tree trunk as her body succumbed to horror and betrayed her. She had navigated them slightly off-course again, and they'd come out of the forest to the south of the village. Bathed in the residual light of the recently set sun, she could see everything.

It was as if something had consumed the meat of the village while some Titanic spider built a blood-red web over the entire area. The silhouette of the village had changed shape, too, as if new, taller buildings had grown like tumors amongst the others. In contrast, the dirt and stone of the original buildings had crumbled away to leave behind only support beams and a few random edges, like flesh rotted away from a corpse to leave behind only the skeleton.

Siobhan remembered the descriptions of the curse-touched villagers' dreams.

"Layers and layers of red spiderweb, growing like brambles," she whispered to herself.

"A city grown from the earth, made of roots with scaffolding of bone. Nothing above—no birds, no heavens, nothing at all. A hungry sky."