HP Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror - Weird Tales

5nderground, I had lost the sense of time, and only
knew that it was passing—slowly, like water weeping
from the walls. The sounds of soft, dry voices of the
deaders mingled with the dripping of water; while the monotony
of it was somewhat lulling, the content was certainly not.
I learned that the cherrystone in question was cursed. A
traveling warlock passed through our town, many years ago.
When the Areti came to the warlock, demanding that he lend
his talent to them, they were met with a refusal. They sent their
thugs to make him pay for their humiliation, but the thugs were
never heard from again. The warlock was nonetheless angry
with the Areti. Before he left, he hid the cherrystone somewhere
in town, and told them that as long as the cursed stone
was within the town walls, our dead would walk the land.
When his prediction came true, the Areti looked for it.
They looked everywhere—on the bottom of the river, under
every rock, even in the catacombs under the deaders’ town.
After a few years they stopped looking—old legends are easy to
forget. The cherrystone was left be, until the present Mistress
of the Areti clan realized her mortality. The search for the cherrystone
had become an obsession, and she sent her goons and
hirelings to look for it. It took her a while, but she had learned
that it was in deaders’ town.
“Why does she want it?” I said.
“To end the curse,” said one of the oldest deaders.
I nodded. I could understand that desire, and yet I wasn’t
sure why the Areti were so concerned about it.
“It’s their family’s curse, or so they see it. It’s the matter of
honor for them,” said the child. “They don’t care what will happen
to us. They only know that they don’t want to become us.”
There was no good way to ask this question, but I asked
anyway. “Do you… do you like being like this?”
They whistled and chortled, their laughter akin to scratching
of nails.
“You’ll see when you’re in my shoes,” Jas said. “It’s more
life, even though you might not see it as such. See, I don’t relish
being what I am, but I still prefer it to lying still in the
ground, being eaten by worms.”
“Do you know where that cherrystone is?”
The crowd grew silent, and I felt their eyes on me, judging,
weighing. “‘Course we do,” Jas said. “That’s the first thing you
learn as a deader—it’s important, see. And we tell it to each
other every day, so that we don’t forget—about the Areti,
about their snooping goons…“
The appearance of two more deaders interrupted him.
One was tall and dark, one-handed. The other, a teenager,
seemed young enough to be his son, but his light hair belied
this conclusion. His nostrils were torn open, and a slow trickle
of pus trekked across his pale lips and down his chin.
“You came to kill us,” the youngster said.
Once again, I grew aware of the precariousness of my situation,
and protested my innocence with as much sincerity as I
could muster.
“The Areti sent you,” his companion said. “Just like they
sent us.”
I shrugged. “So? I find things; I never killed anyone.”
Jas’ heavy hand lay on my shoulder. I could feel through
my jacket how cold and clammy it was. “He wouldn’t do something
like that,” he said to the gathering. “He knows better.”
I nodded. “I do. Only others don’t. You think people
across the river would listen to me? Or to you, for that matter.
Far as everyone’s concerned, if the stone is gone, so much the
better. The Areti won’t leave you alone. Not with the present
Mistress.”
Everyone nodded in agreement.
“She won’t stop,” the bruised girl said. “Not until she’s
one of us.” She gave me a meaningful look. “Will you help us?”
“Whoa,” I said. “You’re not asking me to kill her, are
you?”
They murmured that it wouldn’t be a bad idea, and after
all, it wouldn’t be all bad for her. The deaders’ town was a nice
place.
“I’m not a murderer,” I said. “But I think I can help you.
The stone needs to stay in town, right? Doesn’t matter where?”
“No,” Jas said. “But she won’t stop looking.”
“I think I know a good place for it,” I said. “Just give me
the stone, and don’t worry about a thing. She’ll never find it.”
Their silence was unnatural—not even a sound of breathing
broke it. Dozens of dead eyes look at me, expressionless,
weighing my proposal in their oozing, ruined skulls. I asked a
lot of them—to put their very existence into the hands of an
aliver, a being as alien to them as they were to me.
If I were in his shoes, I doubt I would’ve done what Jas
had done: he pointed at the girl with the purple bruise. “Give it
to him,” he said.
The girl stepped back, away from me, and I reached out,
afraid that she would stumble and fall again. She remained on
her feet—I supposed she was getting a hang of her new limitations.
“Why do you think he’ll help us?” she asked Jas, but her
hand was already reaching for her chest.
“He’s my brother,” Jas said.
Her fingers pushed away a flimsy shawl that cradled her
slender shoulders, and I gasped at the sight of a deep wound,
left by a dagger. That was what killed her—an angry father, a
jealous husband, a sullen stranger. She reached deep into the
wound, pulling out a small round object, covered with congealed
gore. I tried not to flinch as the bloodied cherrystone lay
in my palm.
“Be careful with it,” the one-handed man told me. “It’s a
powerful thing.”
“What can it do?” I said, rolling it on my palm gingerly. It
left a trail, but didn’t seem very powerful.
“Whatever it has to do,” Jas said.
4he sight of the moonlit Areti manor greeted me from
afar. It was deep night, and not a window shone in the
darkness. The bulk of the building sat immobile but
sinister as a stone gargoyle ready to come to life and rip out the
heart of the next victim. I heaved a sigh and slowed my steps;
no doubt the manor would be guarded, and I was disinclined to
reveal my presence just yet. Fortunately, in my line of business
I had learned a thing or two about surreptitious visits.
I avoided the front door, where the two goons of my
recent acquaintance sat on the steps, trading monosyllabic talk.
H .P . L O V E C R A F T ’S M A G A Z IN E O F H O R R O R 17