Solomon Kane (33 page)

“Why do you risk everything to save her?” The sibilant voice seemed to hiss with amusement. “Even your soul,” Malachi said.

For a moment Kane had engaged his attention, but it drifted away as Malachi gazed at the demon. Another footstep shook the floor, and Kane felt the heat seize hold of him and heard the clank of an enormous chain. The demon was about to wield it, to strike Kane down or to bind him with the red-hot links, a first taste of the eternal torture that awaited him. He saw a drop of blood trickle down Meredith’s neck from the point of the knife as she stifled a cry. He had one chance to make a difference to her in his final moments, but almost no time to think how. If Malachi’s power was bound up with the mirrors, perhaps destroying the largest might lessen his power, but would closing the portal not leave the demon at large – leave Meredith at its mercy? There was only one way Kane could hope to release her and to mitigate her danger. He snatched his pistol from his belt as a final immense footstep shuddered through the floor. It was so close that it sprinkled him with fire, and he felt the hair on the nape of his neck begin to smoulder. “I made a promise. I must keep it,” he said and pulled the trigger.

The shot struck Malachi in the centre of his forehead. The thin lips stretched wide in a grimace that resembled an unpronounced curse, and the knife clattered to the floor. The arm that had been holding Meredith jerked away, its fingers writhing in convulsive rage, and she darted out of reach, to the side of the mirror. She seemed not to know where to look – at Kane or at the spectacle
of Malachi. The gout of blood that had sprung from his forehead was rising above him to stream into the mirror. He was not dead yet, for he uttered an appalled shriek as his body started to blacken and tatter and disintegrate. All the corruption it housed was overwhelming it, and it flew apart in a sluggish explosion of putrefied scraps that were sucked into the blackness of the mirror. Meredith backed away, and Kane thanked God that she was out of range of the process. He was not, however. A fiery hurricane had risen at his back and was rushing into the mirror.

Flaming chunks and particles of fire raced past Kane, and he knew that the demon was bursting apart as Malachi had. He would have been reassured if the violence of it had not threatened to overwhelm him. Before he could attempt to dodge aside, he was raised helplessly into the air, to hover in the midst of the onslaught of fire. Why was it not carrying him onwards? It seemed to lift his arms from his sides and extend them as far as they could reach, so that he could have imagined he was still on the cross. The storm of flame and molten matter rushed past him, not quite touching him, and all at once he understood that the force that had raised him up to crucify him in the heart of the firestorm had nothing to do with the mirror.

It was a kind of purification. He felt as if his sins were being seared from him at last – as if, although the fire was bypassing his flesh, it was penetrating his soul. It gave him a foretaste of eternity, and while it endured it was timeless. At last every iota of fire was swallowed by the mirror, and the power that was holding Kane aloft released him. As he crumpled to the floor the mirror turned black, and it seemed the world did.

K
ane was at peace. It was more than an absence of sensation; he had no need of feelings any longer. If there was a gentle light, it showed him nothing that would trouble him; it showed him nothing at all. He might have believed that time had ended for him, since he had no means of measuring it and no desire to do so. Perhaps that was a definition of eternity, but it did not require him to put it into words. He was giving up the last of his thoughts – it seemed to him that any doubts would depart with them – when he heard a distant voice.

It had spoken his name. At first he thought it was praying for him, and then he grasped that it was also calling to him. He had not yet earned peace after all, and he fancied that the voice was summoning him back into the world to continue his task. It returned his senses to him. The light was less constant than he had imagined, and as he glimpsed its flickering he felt soft rain on his upturned face. He was lying on his back on stone, and as the awareness took hold of him, so did the pain of his wounds. That opened his eyes, and he saw Meredith.

She was kneeling beside him, and the rain was her tears. As he met her gaze and held it she wiped her eyes. “Solomon,” she said once more. “It’s gone. You sent the demon back, and it took Malachi instead.”

“Your father told me that if I saved you my soul would
be redeemed.” As he spoke Kane was recapturing his memories and his sense of himself. “I have, and it is,” he said. “The Devil’s claim on me is no more.”

He had more to say, but he heard the doors to the antechamber open wide. Meredith helped him raise his head as Telford and a few of his men came into the great hall. “The guards have fallen,” Telford said. “Axmouth is yours, Captain Kane.”

Meredith supported Kane while he struggled to his feet. He steadied himself with an arm around her shoulders, and then he took hold of her left hand. The mark imprinted by the witch had gone, and the palm looked renewed – reborn. “You destroyed the evil,” Meredith murmured. “Thank you, Captain Kane.”

“Thank God.” Kane stumbled to the altar and leaned a fist on it as he stared into the pit in the floor. Its contents had petrified, reverting to the stone of Axmouth, although the bottom of the pit was dark with the blood it had consumed. He remembered sensing that the fabric of the castle was corrupted, possessed with unholy vitality, but he had no such impression now. He saw shadows growing restless beyond the columns of the hall, but they were merely the companions of the torchlight and the candle-flames. Through a window he caught sight of the glint of a star, and knew that the pall no longer loured over Axmouth. He gazed at his father’s chair and could see only the heaps of entangled cadavers that flanked it like tributes. Nor could he avoid seeing his brother’s charred and mutilated remains, profaned by the demonic parasite that lay nearby in an attitude that parodied its host’s. Marcus looked shrunken, reduced to his boyhood stature. “It is not over,” Kane said almost to himself.

Telford came to stand by him. “What must be done? Shall we destroy the altar?”

“And every mirror,” Kane said. “Let no man look within them.”

“It shall be as you say.” Telford gazed aghast at the corpses of Malachi’s sacrifices. “And however long it takes,” he said, “each victim shall have a Christian burial.”

“The guards too,” said Kane. “The demons will have left them.”

“Will there never be an end to it?” one of Telford’s comrades muttered. “Some of us died fighting them.”

“And Captain Kane offered up his soul to fight the evil,” Meredith cried.

Kane felt unworthy of her impassioned defence – he had let her brothers and her father be slaughtered, after all. “The fight goes on,” he said.

He pushed himself away from the altar and wavered where he stood. Telford grasped his arm, and Meredith hurried to him. “You are wounded,” she protested. “Stay and let me heal you.”

“God bless you, Meredith,” Kane said and leaned on them both. “And then I must go forth again,” he said. “I have my work to finish.”

T
he top of the cliff was the green of sunlit grass after months of rain. Only the two elongated heaps of rock beside the Celtic cross introduced a sombre note. Except for a flotilla of white clouds along the horizon of the sea, the azure sky was clear. A sun like a token of a pure eternal light stood above the gentle waves. A breeze that smelled as salty as a voyage crossed the bay and rustled the grass that had already set about softening the outlines of the mounds of rock. Kane stood for a long time between the mounds, deep in thought and prayer. At last he raised his head and spoke as if those who lay hidden before him could hear him. “Brother, forgive me for all that I did to you,” he said. “Father, I have kept my promise. Meredith is returned to her mother.”

A movement over Axmouth caught his eye. Birds were wheeling in the sky above the castle – birds as white as the crows had been black. They were gulls, which flew with plaintive cries across the cliffs and out to sea. “The demon is gone,” Kane said. “It is banished to the shadows along with the sorcerer who cursed us all.”

He could see just one shadow on the cliff top – the shadow of the cross. It was a sign, and Kane knew what it had to mean to him. “Evil is not so easily defeated,” he said. “I know I will have to fight again.”

He seemed to hear a whisper of response. It was the
wind in the grass, a murmur so wordless that it might have been encouraging him or issuing a challenge. “I am a very different man now,” he said. “Through all my travels, all the things I’ve seen and done, I have found my purpose.”

For a long breath he gazed towards Axmouth. The castle was his home now, and perhaps in time he would return. He had kept his pledge to Meredith’s parents, and now it was time to commit himself to another oath. He said a last prayer over the graves and left them with a sign of the cross before mounting his horse. “There was a time when the world was plunging into darkness,” he reflected. “A time of witchcraft and sorcery, when no one stood against evil.” He let his gaze rest on the graves while he remembered the events that had led there – his masked brother laying his hands on his followers to infect them with evil, his father imprisoned as much by having yielded to temptation as by the chains in the dungeon. The memories lent power to his vow, and so did the knowledge that he was the last of his line, its only champion. “That time is over,” he declared and was positive that God could hear him. Spurring his horse, he rode to find whatever might await him.

THE END

T
he
Oxford Companion to English Literature
describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”. He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association and the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild. Among his novels are
The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear
and
Creatures of the Pool
. Forthcoming is
The Seven Days of Cain.
His collections include
Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead
and
Just Behind You
, and his non-fiction is collected as
Ramsey Campbell, Probably
. His novels
The Nameless
and
Pact of the Fathers
have been filmed in Spain. His regular columns appear in
Prism, All Hallows, Dead Reckonings
and
Video Watchdog
. He is the President of the British Fantasy Society and of the Society of Fantastic Films.

Ramsey Campbell lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever’s in that pipe. His web site is at
www.ramseycampbell.com
.