Fingers of Death—No, Doom! Read online

  “You can crawl through there,” Darvin said, pointing to one of the larger rabbit holes.

  “What?!” Fife shouted, barely stopping his voice from squeaking. “Why me? It’s large enough for you, too.”

  “Because you’re tiny,” Darvin announced.

  Fife glared at him. “The gods curse you for that.”

  “Are they tiny gods?” Darvin asked, grinning.

  Fife didn’t bother bruising his already soiled dignity, and instead removed his backpack, shoving his cloak inside. “Remember, if I die, it’ll be on your head.”

  “It’ll be a tiny funeral,” Darvin said cheerfully.

  The tunnel was small. Not so tight that Fife felt pressed in, but not so wide that his breathing didn’t rabbit faster. Darvin would have a hell of a fit inside, and that made Fife smile.

  Obstructions jutted out at sharp angles. Fife crawled over and under them, elbow over elbow, pulling and scraping skin, snagging clothing and tearing fabric in small nicks. Every foot deeper into the burrow tightened a fist around his chest, and panicked thoughts butterflied in his head. He stopped, almost gasping, wanting to crawl back out before the tunnel snapped its teeth around him.

  He stared ahead and squinted; did the passage open up, or was that the illusion of desperation? Fife wanted to push forward, but as he watched, a shadow moved against shadow, pebbles clattering in its wake.

  Something waited for him just past the opening. He froze.

  ∗∗∗

  Darvin considered lighting a torch to see better; Fife had vanished up ahead, the darkness swallowing him up.

  “You okay up there?” Darvin shouted down the throat of the tunnel.

  “Shh!” came the response.

  “You ‘shh!’” Darvin cried back.

  “SHHH!” Fife hissed more urgently.

  Darvin almost shouted back at his companion, but a splash caught his attention. He spun around as more splashes followed, echoes that danced along the walls of the tunnel and up his spine… then nothing.

  Darvin tiptoed to the edge of the platform. The dying ebb of waves lapped against the stone. Something coursed under the water, casting ripples, heading straight for him.

  Unbidden, his memory suddenly offered up a crystal-clear image of the severed hand dancing on the fraying rope, finger-blades flickering.

  Darvin bolted for the small hole, shoving Fife’s bag in first and crawling after it. Rocks and the tips of broken timbers poked and jabbed him. The bag snagged and he struggled to push it forward despite the tearing sound that followed. The tunnel pressed against him, and he wrenched his shoulder pushing himself through.

  “Fife!” Darvin shouted.

  “Shh!”

  “Move!”

  “For the love of our mother, shh!” Fife cried back.

  “Stop telling me to shush! The hand’s behind me!”

  “No it’s not,” Fife shouted, far closer than Darvin would have thought. “It’s in front of us.”

  “Behind!” Darvin insisted. The bag hit resistance, and Darvin looked up at the blackened soles of Fife’s feet. Something scampered in the tunnel behind Darvin, and more stones tumbled from their perch. He couldn’t see past his own body, however, and opted to push instead.

  ∗∗∗

  Fife felt something press against his feet and almost shrieked in terror. He raised his head to see Darvin shoving his bag—shoving Fife—toward the opening a handful of feet away and the noise that had turned into an impatient clicking, like the tapping of metal fingers.

  “No, Darvin!” Fife shouted. He pressed his hands against the rocks and kicked at the bag.

  “Stop that, you lout! Something’s behind me!”

  Before Fife could protest, Darvin gave another shove, sending the halfling toward the hole and pinning his hands under his body, squashed tight against rock.

  The mummified hand leapt into the opening, its tensing fingers covered in blades. Fife screamed. Darvin screamed in response, though unlikely for the same reason. Or maybe it was. Fife didn’t care.

  The hand scampered forward on its fingers, and Fife struggled to free his arms. Darvin pushed him another inch closer. The hand was, for the lack of better measurements, only a handful of feet away.

  Fife rolled to his side, pressing his back painfully against the rubble until his arms popped free, his fingers aching and bruised. The hand sprang toward him, fingers propelling it forward. Naturally, Darvin pushed him again, screaming something about the thing at his feet and life having failed his expectations. Fife couldn’t reach the dirk at his belt, but in the attempt his hand rubbed against the bamboo quill in his breast pocket. He grabbed it and swung hard, stabbing the amputated hand as it came within an inch of shaving his eyebrows.

  Fife stabbed the hand again with the sharp quill, his vision red pinpricks of focus and flushed hot with blood. Suddenly, the lip of the tunnel loomed and he found popping free like a cork, shoved out by a panicking Darvin. He barely had time to roll nimbly away before his human companion came crashing down as well, almost crushing him.

  ∗∗∗

  Darvin pushed to his feet quickly, pulling on his sheathed dagger to defend himself, the stuck weapon flopping uselessly against his leg. The skittering in the tunnel grew louder.

  Darvin glanced up just in time to catch a scurry of movement and the gleam of red eyes. It took him a second to register that second part before several large and frightened brown rats tore out of the tunnel, screeching in protest. They ran past Darvin and a prone Fife, who pulled away from the rodents, before scrabbling through cracks in the wall.

  “Rats!” Darvin exclaimed, laughing in relief. “All that nonsense for rats!” He noticed the amputated hand, its fingers curled up like the legs of a dead spider. “When did I do that?”

  “You?” Fife stood and drew himself up to his full three-foot height. “That was me!”

  “Really?” Darvin said. “That sounds more like something I’d do.”

  “I killed it!” Fife said, then seemed to startle as he realized what he’d said. “Me! I did that! I killed it! I’m the hero of the village.” He held his bamboo quill aloft like a champion wielding a blade, or at least a really big turkey leg. “The quill is mightier than the sword!”

  “Now that’s just silly,” Darvin said. “Hyperbole will get you killed. Especially in a sword-versus-quill fight.” He looked around the chamber.

  The world seemed to slow, dread flowing back into him like cold water into an empty cup. “Fife,” Darvin said quietly, “don’t turn around.”

  Of course Fife turned around. As soon as he said it, Darvin realized how foolish the statement was. Turning is precisely the first thing one does when told “don’t turn around.” It was an inherent contradiction, much like when someone says, “This tastes horrible… here, try it.”

  They stood in a circular domed chamber, a door against the curve of the opposite wall. In the center rested a huge table with its sides flanked by drawers and the top covered in beakers, jars, books, powder packets, measuring tools, and innumerable other instruments. Above the worktable hung a wood-wheel chandelier crusted in wax.

  Twenty tables lined the curving walls, and upon each lay a corpse in some advanced state of decay.

  “Darvin,” Fife whispered.

  Darvin touched his brother’s shoulder. “I told you not to turn around.” In retrospect, though, Darvin wasn’t sure how he expected Fife to continue without turning around.

  “No,” Fife said, nodding to the bodies; all manacled, Darvin now noticed. And all missing their hands.

  “Oh,” Darvin said.

  And from all the dark places in the room and the large cracks in the floor came a scurrying of movement.

  Chapter Three: Hands Off

  Darvin cursed himself for not thinking, for not realizing how Fife would react. He’d raced halfway across the circular chamber, running for the door, when he realized something was amiss. He couldn’t feel Fife’s familiar presence, that
steady pressure by his side. Darvin turned to see Fife frozen near the collapsed passageway. All around them, from the shadows of the laboratory, a legion of amputated hands rushed forward on blade-sheathed fingers, skittering like spiders in a mad dash for the intruders.

  “Spider,” Fife said breathlessly as Darvin ran back to him, scooped him up, and dropped the halfling over his shoulder.

  “Not spiders!” Darvin said, hoping to cut his friend free from his terror.

  “Spider!” Fife yelled, and batted at Darvin’s back.

  “Ah!” Darvin cried, surprised, and a hand dropped away from his backpack. He booted it away quickly, before it could spring back up onto its fingers.

  “Runrunrun!” Fife screamed.

  Darvin hesitated. The hands converged on them the same way water flows down the slope, their fingers blurs of galloping motion and the opportunity for escape gone in an instant. Two more hands appeared from the hole through which they’d entered the room.

  Darvin leapt into action, taking long strides, hurdling amputated hands that leapt and grabbed for them. He spun this way and that, clumsily avoiding attackers as his companion’s weight threatened to topple his balance. Fife protected his back, wildly swinging his bag of notebooks at the hands lunging at them from behind. One such assault thwacked Darvin on the backside.

  “Ow!” Darvin yelped. “That was a corner!”

  “Run!” Fife replied.

  The hands closed in, barely heeding or pausing at the blows that sent them careening back. They outnumbered the pair, and Darvin could only react, not make any real progress. He threw Fife on the high workshop table, breaking vials and scattering jars and books, before leaping atop it himself. The hands scrambled up the sides of the table.

  We’re surrounded, Darvin realized.

  ∗∗∗

  Fife swung his bag like a mace, shattering glass and dislodging metal fingers that crested the lip of the table. Behind him, Darvin stomped digits and booted away hands, but the crawling horrors possessed a heedless relentlessness. They landed a few feet away on the stone floor, recovered almost instantly, and scrambled back for the table.

  “We’re dead!” Darvin screamed. “We are so very much dead!”

  Fife wanted to respond, but hearing his brother’s panic only tightened its grip around his own throat, stopping him from speaking. The hands had them trapped, a dozen feet away from the other door and under the relentless assault of their diminutive foes. This is all my fault. He had dragged them into this misadventure. “I’m sorry,” he managed.

  A pair of hands grabbed Fife’s waist, and before he realized what was happening, Darvin had hoisted him up, toward the wagon-wheel chandelier above their heads. Fife barely had time to grab it before Darvin let go.

  “Save yourself!” Darvin said.

  The wheel swung on a rusted chain, creaking and groaning. Particles of dust trickled down from the chain’s anchor in the ceiling. Fife managed to slip upward through the spokes and atop the wheel before he looked down. The table looked like an island in a relentless sea of moving hands. The smell of rotten eggs and decaying flesh drifted up from the mess.

  “Darvin! Climb!” Fife extended his arm down to pull up his brother. Darvin busied himself kicking the hands away, trying to keep track of the table’s four sides. His movements grew frantic and wilder as exhaustion weighed more heavily upon him.

  When Darvin didn’t respond, Fife stretched down and grabbed for his brother in desperation, catching only a handful of the man’s long, sandy hair.

  “Ah!” Darvin cried, trying to kick the hands, maintain his balance, and not have a halfling-sized fistful of hair torn out by the roots.

  “Jump up!” Fife ordered.

  “My hair!”

  “Damn your hair! Jump!”

  One of the amputated hands grabbed Darvin’s ankle, and he kicked it away before jumping up. He grabbed the spokes. The wheel creaked, the chain groaned, and the pair swung ponderously to and fro. The hands jumped up on the tabletop and jockeyed for position. A few of them tried springing up to grab Darvin’s feet, but he pulled his legs up quickly and threaded them through the spokes.

  “Now what?” Darvin asked, whispering and looking at Fife through the gap.

  “I have a plan,” Fife whispered back.

  “Why are we whispering? They don’t have ears… do they?” He craned his neck to look back down at the hands.

  “Climb up,” Fife said, even as something in the ceiling creaked loudly.

  “It won’t take my weight!” Darvin hissed.

  “Exactly,” Fife said, grinning. “Now climb!”

  ∗∗∗

  Darvin remained dubious as only an older sibling could. Now atop the wheel, he froze and grimaced as more dust poured through the ceiling bolts and the wood complained beneath them.

  They would fall. That much he knew, looking down at the table with all the hands jumping up, trying to grab at them.

  “Now what?”

  Fife grinned in response and pushed himself up from his belly before thrusting himself down. The chain screeched in complaint and the wheel wobbled.

  “Wait!” Darvin said. “What’re you—”

  Fife pushed again. “Help me!” he said.

  Darvin suddenly understood. “The gods save us from your lunacy!” he said, and braced against the ceiling, pressing down against the wheel with his legs.

  “Are they tiny gods?” Fife asked.

  The chain didn’t snap, but instead broke from the ceiling anchors and dropped them, heavy wheel, unspooled chain, and all. The chandelier struck the tabletop with a crash of falling mortar, breaking glass, and the squish-thud-crack of pulped hands. The impact hammered the air from the brothers’ lungs.

  “What fell force created and compels the bladed hands?”

  Hands crawled away, their fingers snapped, small bones exposed. Some lay dead like curled-up spiders. Others rolled away to safety.

  “We killed them,” Fife whispered, but Darvin pulled him away.

  “C’mon! Let’s go!”

  They bolted for the door even as the surviving hands sprang or wobbled to their digits. Ignoring whatever shock or injury the intruders had meted out, the hands immediately set after them in hot pursuit.

  Darvin pulled at the door and sighed gratefully when he realized it wasn’t locked. In fact, the passageway angled upward. The two brothers ducked through and Darvin slammed the door shut behind them, laughed despite himself—a desperate, exhausted bark of triumph and relief.

  Then he caught Fife’s expression. Following his brother’s gaze, Darvin looked down and saw the small square at the bottom of the door, crowned by a hinge. Darvin knew he should understand what it meant, but his adrenaline-addled brain wasn’t quite up to the challenge.

  “What is—?” he began, but Fife interrupted him.

  “It’s a dog door!” the halfling cried.

  That’s silly, Darvin thought. “But I didn’t see a—”

  The first hand barreled through the swinging door, and Fife stamped desperately on it. The door shuddered as multiple thuds struck it, and several hands wedged at the small access as they all struggled to get through next.

  Darvin acted, kicking the hinged flap and scattering the hands back into the room. He turned to find Fife no longer kicking the hand in question, but instead jumping up and down with both feet, knees as high as his chest, vigorously stomping the amputated monstrosity into the ground.

  “Die, spider!” Fife screamed. “Die, die, die!”

  “It’s already dead, dead, dead,” Darvin said, and grabbed Fife, pulling him along the passageway. The human did pause, however, and stomp heavily on the hand one last time before the pair bolted.

  They ran hard, past shadowed corners and down strange passageways. Fife glanced through doorways, almost distracting himself once when he spied ancient tomes lining long bookshelves in one study. Darvin, however, grabbed Fife and pulled him along; he knew well how the halfling’s natur
al curiosity overcame his survival instincts.

  Finally, the corridor dead-ended at a doorway, the wood etched with strange arcane patterns of sweeping, curving meridian designs. Darvin glanced back behind them, but the stampede of hands was nowhere to be seen. He raised a foot to kick open the rune-marked door.

  “No!” Fife screamed, and tackled Darvin’s thigh.

  Darvin grabbed the wall for balance and tried to shake his friend loose. “Do you mind?” Darvin asked, calmly.

  “You don’t know what those markings mean!” Fife said, arms wrapped tight around Darvin’s leg. “It could be trapped!”

  Darvin sighed. He just wanted to get away from here, from the village, from this entire ordeal as soon as possible. “Why would anyone trap their home?”

  “Why would he lop off hands and animate them?” Fife asked, letting go.

  “Maybe he couldn’t afford a full staff?” Darvin offered.

  “The point is, who knows what he was thinking?” Fife said. “Remember the Tale of the Moaning Virgin’s Ghost?”

  “You mean the one you wrote?”

  “Yes.”

  “Actually,” Darvin said, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that one. I don’t think you thought the title through.”

  “Darvin!” Fife said, eyeing the door. “What I mean is, I research my material for authenticity. The wizard in that story trapped the door to keep something inside. It’s based on a real spell!”

  Darvin thought for a moment. “Alright,” he said. “In that story, how did I open that door?”

  “You…” To Darvin’s satisfaction, Fife hesitated.

  “I kicked it open, didn’t I?” Darvin demanded.

  “Yes,” Fife said. “But that was a story. And you got cursed in it.”

  “Right,” Darvin said, and kicked open the door.

  The runes splintered under the breaking wood, glowing brightly for a moment before fading from the frame. Fife groaned in worry, but Darvin shoved his way through.

  Fresh air swept across them, driving away the pungent, earthy smell of decay and replacing it with the dewy wetness of night and grassy hills and wind-ruffled trees. Moonlight filtered through the branches and the pair pushed forward, thrashing their way through the bush that hid the doorway and its rocky outcropping. The air felt infinitely better than the stink of death behind them.