The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding (The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding #1)(19)

Uncle Barnabas nodded, obviously pleased. “The families were great rivals. Honor Redding tried everything he could to destroy Daniel Bellegrave—sabotaging his crops, spreading malicious rumors about him, stealing correspondence. And still, the Bellegraves flourished. Back then, you know, the town wasn’t called Redhood at all.”

“Yeah,” I said, trying not to give him a “duh” look. I’d only had to hear about this every day of my life since birth. “It was called South Port.”

“Right. Once the Bellegraves were finally out of the picture, Honor renamed the town in…well, his honor.”

“And he drove them out by making a pact with a demon?” I said, not even bothering to hide how stupid I thought that sounded.

“A fiend,” Nell corrected.

“Okay, sure, a fiend,” I said, trying to ignore the way that word tasted like ash on my tongue. “So what does this have to do with me and Prue?”

“I’m getting there,” Barnabas said, standing. He made his way over to the corner functioning as the kitchen and began rummaging around in the boxes of tea. He kept me waiting until he had a mug of water spinning around in the microwave. “In order to outmaneuver the Bellegraves,” he called finally, “Honor used a very ancient kind of magic, one he’d only heard about in the stories passed down in his family for centuries. He summoned a malefactor.”

When Uncle Barnabas came back toward us, it was with one of the computer printouts that had been hanging over the bed alongside the newspaper clippings.

I took it with an uneasy feeling in my stomach, almost afraid to look. Three men and a woman were gathered around a fire, their hands thrown in the air—toward the winged, split-tongued devil floating above them in the cloud of smoke.

“Back then, anything that frightened the colonists was labeled witchcraft and devilry. They were never quite able to understand that the Devil—religion, for that matter—has nothing to do with this. Magic has been around for much longer than any of us could know, and flows from a place that exists between ours and whatever might lie beyond.”

“Like…the Internet?”

Uncle Barnabas choked on his tea, coughing. “More like another world or dimension. The souls sent there obviously do not return, and fiends are forbidden to talk about their home. So there are no first-person accounts to give us a sure answer.”

Nell jumped in here. “There are four worlds—four realms—in all. The human world at the top”—she held out a hand, then slid her other hand beneath it—“the fourth realm. The fiend world is the third realm”—she moved her hand again, creating another layer—“the world of ghosts—specters—is the second realm. The first realm is the realm of Ancients, the mysterious race of creatures that created magic and balanced the world when it was very young and full of darkness.”

“So they live in Earth’s crust, or something?”

“No!” she said, rolling her eyes. “Dimensions, Prosper. Worlds that exist layered beneath ours.”

Uncle B waved a hand between us, interrupting the conversation. “No one knows who or what the Ancients are. Ancient civilizations believed them to be gods, but their kind no longer leave their realm. The only thing we know for certain is that they were the first occupants of this world, and to ensure life would survive, they created a new world for the fiends who were ravaging ours. Humans and fiends cannot coexist without destroying the balance between the realms and causing each world to collapse in on itself.”

“Uh, okay,” I said. My brain felt like mush. “That’s really cool and all, but can we go back to the malefactor thing? Why are they in our world if they’re fiends or whatever?”

“When an evil human dies,” Uncle Barnabas began, “their spirit—their shade—is guided down to the realm of specters. Unless, of course, they formed a contract with a malefactor during their life. Then, upon their death, their shade goes to the fiend realm and serves the monsters there in eternal servitude.”

“There are hundreds of different fiends,” Nell said, “but malefactors are the only kind of fiend that can make the contracts.”

“What are the contracts for?” I asked, not liking where this was going. This was unbelievable…but then, so was everything that had happened in the dungeon.

“I’ve heard of different contracts requiring different things, but I know the one Honor Redding signed with Alastor required eternal servitude for the entire family in exchange for the lasting success of the Reddings and an influx of wealth,” Uncle Barnabas said. “In a way, you could say that they punish people by granting their wishes.”

Nell jumped in. “It’s like a fairy godmother with a catch. Or a genie with a price tag. Their real job is to collect souls to serve the fiends in their world. The malefactors influence other humans through magic, plant ideas, carry sickness—that kind of stuff. After the contract is signed, they not only get to come back for the shades, but they get to feed off the misery of the signer’s victims.”

Of course it had been Honor. The image of perfection, ingenuity, bravery, and resilience that had been shoved in our faces all of our lives. He was the standard we were supposed to surpass, or, at the very least meet. He was everything to my family, the whole reason they’d survived. I should have known no one could ever be that uncompromisingly perfect.