Magda felt as if she were moving in a dream. Even with all her strength put into the effort, her legs wouldn’t move fast enough to get her within range to stab the man, to stop what she knew he was about to do.
Lashing out with lightning speed, his clawed hand raked through Isidore’s middle. Isidore’s scream turned to a grunt with the impact of the blow.
An arc of warm blood and flesh splattered across Magda and then in a diagonal line up across the wall.
Isidore’s legs began to buckle.
“Run! Now!” she cried out at Magda as she was going down.
Magda instead rammed her knife into the side of the man’s neck. She had to stop him before he did any more damage. All she could think was that she had to stop him and then get help for Isidore.
Driving the knife in deep didn’t feel like stabbing into muscle and sinew. It felt hard and leathery and dead. She tried to yank the knife back so that she could stab him again, but it was stuck fast.
She gripped the handle with both hands, trying to pull the blade back out of his neck. It was then, when she was close enough, that she saw in the dim light that the man, though he moved with impossible speed and power, didn’t look like a man.
He looked like a corpse.
His face was sunken and partially decayed. His jaw hung crooked to one side; his dark teeth were exposed behind shrunken, shriveled lips. He looked like a rotting cadaver.
But even as dead as the rest of him appeared, his eyes were something altogether different. The look in his eyes sent an icy chill through her.
It wasn’t just that they glowed with a kind of inner light. It was that the glow was fired by the gift, yet unlike any light of the gift she had ever seen before. It was at once dead and empty, but alive with menace.
Magda was so shocked by what she saw that it stopped her cold for an instant.
Then, that frozen instant shattered with a crack that made her ears ring. The room suddenly spun in her vision. Her back smacked the wall, driving the air from her lungs. Her head hit the stone so hard that it knocked her senseless. Through the pall of pain she only dimly heard the terrible roar of the thing, only dimly saw blurry movement in the swirling room.
Magda could taste dry stone dust and blood. She realized then that the man had struck her with a blow so powerful it had lifted her from her feet and thrown her back across the room.
She was distantly surprised to realize that she still had her knife gripped tightly in her fist. Isidore’s warm blood ran down Magda’s arm and over her hand, making for a slippery hold on her knife.
Magda blinked, trying to clear her vision as she struggled to get her breath back. Looking up from the floor, she saw the man in a wild fury ripping into Isidore. He tore off the side of Isidore’s face and top of her skull with one powerful blow, the rest of her head with the next.
The dark figure roared as he flailed and ripped at Isidore’s body. Blood and gore from the poor woman splattered across the floor and up against the walls as he swung both arms in mad fury.
In a strange pall of quiet shock, Magda told herself that it was too late to do anything but escape. If she didn’t get away, she would be next.
As the man bellowed in a wild frenzy of savagery, she told herself that there was nothing she could do for Isidore. This was her only chance to get away. She knew that she had only a few fleeting seconds if she was to live.
She told herself to move.
Magda scrambled to her feet and staggered toward the black entrance to the hallway out. She snatched up her lantern on the way past.
Once into the hall, she looked back over her shoulder as she ran. She was still stunned from the blow, and her wobbly legs wouldn’t move fast enough. She could see the man back through the entrance, finished ripping Isidore apart, turn toward her.
A cry of anguish for Isidore caught in Magda’s throat as she struggled to run. The cat appeared out of the dark doorway and raced after her.
Chapter 38
In a daze, Magda stumbled as she ran. Tears streamed down her face. Blood dripped from her fist holding the knife. Glancing down at her arms, she thought it looked as if she had just butchered someone.
As she ran, she struggled to comprehend what she had just seen. She knew that something only remotely human, or maybe only once human, had just slaughtered Isidore. It made no sense.
It was such a horrific sight, such a shock, that she was already questioning if she had really seen what she knew she had seen when she had looked into the man’s face. She began to wonder if it could have been a trick of the shadows.
But she knew it wasn’t.
She cried out in fright when she suddenly ran into one of the walls of hanging cloth. It caught her, flapping around her like arms grabbing for her. She slashed wildly with her knife, frantically trying to get away from what she thought for a second was the man who had killed Isidore trying to seize her.
She shoved the cloth aside and started running. She could only see a short distance ahead into the empty maze of halls.
She looked down as she ran, fumbling with the lantern door, trying to get it open so that she could see better. It finally sprang open, casting a bit of useful light into the passageway.
She realized that, lost in the maze as she was, she would soon be the next victim of the thing that had killed Isidore. It was coming for her. If she was wandering around aimlessly it would likely be able to catch her in short order.
Magda thrust a hand into her pocket, frantically searching for the map that Tilly had given her. She dug around with trembling fingers but couldn’t find the map. She didn’t know if she’d dropped it as she was running, or if she’d lost it in the fight. All she knew for sure was that the map wasn’t in her pocket.
She turned back the way she had come, holding the lantern up, trying to see if she had dropped the map when she had fought her way out of the embrace of the hanging cloth. She didn’t see it on the ground anywhere.
She heard a sound. She thought she saw a dark shape move back in the direction she’d come from.
Then she saw the glow of his eyes off in the darkness, like some goblin from her childhood nightmares come to life.
Magda abandoned the search for the map and started running. She knew that it was foolish to run in a maze without knowing where she was going, but she was too panicked to stop herself.
Besides, what choice did she have?
She ran with wild abandon, taking random passageways at intersections. From time to time she could hear the dead man in the distance behind her. He let out a growl of rage as he came, his feet sometimes dragging on the floor. Magda ran all the faster, imagining the goblin from her nightmares hot on her heels. She knew that she didn’t stand a chance fighting against him. She had to get away.
She was suddenly brought up short in a dead end. She spun around and saw the man step into the passageway from a side hall, blocking her way back. Magda stood panting, knife clenched tightly in her fist, trying to decide what to do.
His glowing eyes watched her, and then he started toward her. As he got closer, the cat sprang out of the darkness onto the man’s head, clawing at his gleaming eyes with wild fury. He twisted to the side, his arms thrashing, trying to swipe the cat off his head.
Magda knew that it was her only chance. She didn’t hesitate. She ran toward the man and the only way out. As she reached him, she bent low and slammed her shoulder into his ribs, knocking him to the side. He lost his balance and fell against the wall.
Pain shot through her shoulder from the solid impact with his rocklike torso. Magda was already past him and running at full speed as the cat sprang off the man and raced after her.
Magda took intersection after intersection, ducking around heavy panels of hanging cloth whenever they appeared unexpectedly out of the darkness. She didn’t know where she was or how to escape the maze. She was simply trying to lose the man close on her heels. The man who had killed Isidore.
Charging down a long hallwa
y, she suddenly came upon another hanging cloth that loomed up out of the darkness. Magda pushed it to the side with an arm as she went around it. When she did so, she realized that it was different from the others she had encountered. Unlike the others, this one was light and airy.
Almost immediately, before she could wonder at the silken nature of the cloth, she saw in the weak lantern light that it was a dead end. She couldn’t go any farther.
Magda spun around. The man had already reached the other side of the cloth wall blocking the passageway. It was too late to go back the way she had come.