What Moves the Dead (16)

It was as I was leading the horses toward them, after the smell had time to dissipate, that I saw another hare sitting up in the grass.

I looked at it. It looked at me. It seemed completely normal as hares go, which is to say half-starved, with staring orange eyes. If it had some strange malady, it was not immediately visible.

“Are you a witch, then?” I asked the animal, half-amused.

I was not expecting an answer and I didn’t get one. It sat up on its hind legs with its forepaws against its chest and simply watched.

“Go on, shoo,” I said, waving a hand toward it. “Before I forget that I told Angus I wouldn’t hunt hares.”

It didn’t move.

I stamped a foot at it. It still didn’t move.

March hares are all mad, of course, but it wasn’t March and their madness tends to be much more active—leaping and boxing and bounding in all directions. This one was so still that if the breeze had not moved its fur, I would think it might be dead. It did not even twitch its ears. I had not seen it blink.

I took a few steps toward it, and finally it did move, but not like any four-legged animal I’d ever seen. It put out one front foot and seemed to drag itself forward, then the other. Then one hind foot, catching up, then the other. It looked like a man scaling a sheer cliff, but on level ground. Then it turned and sat up again, watching me.

“Have you no sense, hare?” I asked.

Its unblinking orange eyes held no answer.

Before I could do something thoroughly rash, like shoot it—and the thought was starting to cross my mind—Miss Potter and Denton reappeared. “Talking to yourself, Easton?” asked Denton.

“Talking to a hare,” I said, pointing, but when I looked back, the animal was gone.



* * *



The butcher was as good as his word and the first of the beef graced the table that night. As Angus had predicted, it was tough as boot leather, but the cook managed to make a broth and I saw with pleasure that Madeline took more of it than she had of the chicken that we had eaten for the past few nights.

Angus growled something when I came in. He looked surly, even by Angus standards.

“No luck fishing today?”

“Oh, I had luck, aye, if you can call it that,” he said. His mustaches bristled like an angry hedgehog. “Caught a fine fish. Only it weren’t so fine after all.”

“You’ve lost me, Angus.”

“Had a gob of stuff trailing out of it,” he said. “Thought t’were fish shit, and then thought maybe t’were its guts coming out.”

“Good God, man, what are you using for fishhooks if you’re gutting the fish with them?”

“My hook,” he said, with dignity, “were in the fish’s mouth where t’were supposed to be. As clean a cast as ever made, and reeled in proper. I gutted it and it were all through with stuff like slimy felt, including a string hanging out its arse.”

This sounded quite disgusting, and I told Angus as much.

“Yes,” he said. “Something wrong with the damn fish is what it is. I caught up a second one and what do you think I saw?”

“Slimy felt?”

“Gobs.” He folded his arms.

“Fish are slimy little devils to begin with,” I started to say, but Angus shot me a withering look with both eyes and mustache and I relented. Angus would know the difference between regular slime and something unusual. I remembered Miss Potter talking about fungus that attacked the fish in aquaria. “Could be a fungus. I can ask Miss Potter about it, if you like. Or you can ask her yourself. So far as I know, she’s the only Englishwoman stomping about the place looking at mushrooms.”

“We exchanged a wave,” said Angus. “I didn’t go bothering her, and she didn’t go bothering me.”

“A wave, though! From an Englishwoman, that’s practically a hearty handshake. She only deigned to speak to me because I was about to poke a mushroom with a stick.”

“The Good Lord looks out for fools. In your case, apparently He sends the occasional Englishwoman.”

“I thought He’d sent you.”

“You’re a two-person job, youngster.”

A thought struck me. “You didn’t eat the fish, did you?”

“Great blistering Christ, of course not. D’ye take me for an idjit?”

I am occasionally deficient in tact, but I knew better than to answer that. “Never,” I said, and retired to my bedchamber, while Angus muttered and grumbled about witch-hares and fish on strings. (I thought of telling him about my encounter with the hare, but what could I say? It looked at me funny? The way it moved was rather horrible?)

It was cold in the room and I was still half-dressed when I heard another soft creak of boards as someone passed my door. This time I leapt out of bed, ignoring stealth entirely, and flung the door open.

There! A white shape, just vanishing. I snatched up a candle and bolted after it, reaching the corner where I had lost it the night before, and saw it, ghost-pale in the dark. It did not enter any of the doors, but moved purposefully toward the stairwell.

A figure clad in white, I thought. Not a servant, unless Roderick had given his servants a uniform more akin to a burial shroud. It carried no candle, but shuffled along, steps oddly halting and yet moving swiftly for all of that, unbothered by the dark.