The River of Souls

He was standing in a room in which there were five doors. They were all ordinary doors, with ordinary handles, yet Matthew sensed that behind each was something extraordinary…and perhaps terrifying.

For better or for worse, he was compelled to open the first on his left, which opened onto a scene he remembered well: Rachel Howarth in the dirty cell in Fount Royal, throwing off her gray cloak and hood to reveal her naked body, and saying defiantly to the world Here is the witch.

Suddenly Matthew’s hand was on the next door, and opening it displayed the Prussian swordsman Count Anton Mannerheim Dahlgren, he of the blond hair, gray teeth and deadly command of the rapier. He whom Matthew had bested, broken his left wrist and sent him reeling into a fishpond. He who had seemingly vanished from the world, and was yet out there somewhere in the shadows. In this instance, however, Dahlgren had the use of both arms and was coming at him, teeth bared, with a rapier. Matthew slammed the door in his face.

The third door showed a wagon travelling under a sky threatening rain, and a man with a patchwork beard sitting in the back with his eyes closed, his arms and legs confined by irons. A fly landed at the corner of the man’s mouth. The man did not move, nor did his eyes open. The fly began to crawl across the lower lip, unhurriedly, and when it reached the center the man’s mouth moved in a blur. There was a quick sucking sound, and then Matthew heard the faintest crunch. The eyes of the killer Tyranthus Slaughter opened and fixed upon Matthew, and when the man grinned there was a bit of crushed fly on one of his front teeth.

Matthew also slammed that door.

The fourth door opened upon a dining hall, and sitting in a chair before the assembled guests was a man who was not a man, but appeared to be an automaton, a wiry-looking construction of a man dressed in a white suit with gold trim and whorls of gold upon the suit jacket and trouser legs. It wore a white tricorn, also trimmed in gold, white stockings and black shoes with gold buckles. The hands were concealed in flesh-colored fabric gloves, and a flesh-colored fabric cowl covered the face and head yet showed the faintest impression of nose-tip, cheekbones and eye-sockets. With a sound of meshing gears and the rattling of a chain the figure began to move, the head turning…slowly…left to right and back again, the right hand rising up to press against the chin as if measuring a thought, and then from the bizarre figure issued a tinny voice with a hint of a rasp and whine, One of you has been brought here to die.

Matthew closed that door firmly, but with an unfirm hand.

He stood staring at the fifth door.

Behind that one…what? He feared that one, perhaps more than any other. Behind it was…something he had never known before, something that perhaps he could not survive. Something that perhaps would remove Matthew Corbett from life itself, and distance him from everything and everyone he had ever known and loved.

That door…the fifth one…he could not bear to open, yet it must be opened because he realized it was his destiny.

He reached for it and took the handle. He had no choice but to open it, and see what was ahead for him…if he could indeed take the sight of his future and not lose who and what he was in the present.

He began to open the door.

Wisps of smoke drifted out. He smelled the smoke, very strongly.

“Matthew? Matthew?”

He opened his eyes. He was lying on the ground, with his head on Quinn’s lap, and the odor of smoke was not confined to the realm of dreams. Indeed, smoke had drifted into the storm-dark woods and moved sinuously around them like spirits of the dead.

“Matthew?” Quinn said again, shaking his uninjured shoulder.

And he realized then that they were not alone.

He sat up.

Standing not twenty feet away in the thicket were three black men. Two were younger, and supported an older man between them. The older man, who had a pate of close-cropped white hair and a frizz of white beard, looked to be in pain; he was putting no weight on his left leg. The elder was thin, with a seamed face that looked as if it had suffered many hardships, but the two younger men were thicker-bodied and fit-looking. One was bald, with heavy eyebrows and a long chin adorned by a dark patch of beard, while the other had a high forehead, high cheekbones and expressive eyes that also held the darkness of suffering. The elder man wore brown trousers and a gray shirt, his clothing tattered by thorns. The other two were dressed in similar brown trousers, both with patched knees. The bald one was wearing a dark green shirt and the other man a white shirt stained with sweat. All their clothes were much the worse for wear, having been torn at by the claws of the wilderness.

They stood staring at Matthew and Quinn, as if trying to decide what to do. Tendrils of smoke crawled through the woods around them, and not too far behind them the smoke was thick enough to blur out the trees.

Matthew spoke. “Which one of you is Abram?”

They didn’t answer, nor did they move.

“Mars,” Matthew said to the elder, “I’ve spoken to your grandmother. Help me stand up, please,” he requested of Quinn, and she did. He wavered on his feet but found his balance. “You have to go back to the Green Sea. Abram?”

The man with the expressive, suffering eyes said, “Yes.”

“I’ve come out here to find you. There’s a group of men looking for you…all of you. Among them Royce and Gunn. They don’t want you to tell the Kincannons what you know. If they can, I think they’ll try to kill you.”