“We never even sawhim,” Huck pointed out.
A chill ran through me. If it wasn’t Sarkany there, who was it? Rothwild? The robed cultists? How many people were after us?
“Maybe we’re okay for now,” Huck said after a few moments of silence.
“You think?”
“Yeah, I do.”
I let out a little breath and tried to relax. “How okay are we? Okay enough to light a fire? It’s too dark in here.”
“Couldn’t agree more. It’s giving me the willies. I feel like Sarkany’s going to jump out from behind us any second now. Oh, wait. Think I feel a lantern over here. Hold on.” Metal rattled; liquid sloshed. “Sounds like there’s fuel.” It took him a couple of strikes before a golden flame danced between us. He stuck the match inside a hole in the base of an old hanging oil lamp and lit the wick.
Light blossomed inside the small room.
So much better.
My eyes adjusting, I quickly scanned the space around us. Dried herbs hung from the rafters in a net of dusty spiderwebs. The walls were lined with dusty shelves, and there was an old stone fireplace.
But it was hard to pay attention to any of that, what with the animal skulls covering the walls. Dozens and dozens of them. Rabbit, racoon, fox... any number of small woodland creatures. They hung like trophies, all bleached bone and dark, empty eye sockets. Each one had a tiny symbol carved into the forehead, mostly crudeX’s.
Huck whistled softly as he held up the lantern to inspect the walls. “What the devil is all this?”
Some bizarre local custom? I didn’t know, but it gave me chills.
My gaze jumped from the skulls to a shelf filled with rusted iron traps. Ugly ones, with rows of iron teeth built to snap the legs of animals that had the terrible luck to walk into them.
Huck saw them too. “Trapper’s cabin.”
“Umm,” I said nervously, tapping Huck on the arm. “T-trapper.”
In the far corner, tucked behind some dusty open shelving that served to divide a sleeping space from the rest of the room, a human skeleton lay on a narrow cot atop a darkly stained quilt. Trousers and a shirt hung over bare bones. A few bits of gray, petrified skin clung to its skull.
“AhJaysus!”
I gritted my teeth and stared at the monstrous sight.
“Oh, my dear holy God,” Huck whispered, craning his neck to see beyond the shelving. “That’s not a real body... is it?”
“A dead one,” I confirmed. “Very, very,verydead.”
Huck swore profusely and made the sign of the cross in the air several times in a row.
“It’s just a skeleton,” I assured him... and myself. “We’ve seen a million of them in museums. My mother used to dig them up.”
“Ancient ones, banshee. Not fresh ones!”
“He’s not fresh. No smell.” Hesitantly, I shifted closer to inspect it. My heart thudded against my rib cage.
“Small relief, I suppose. An ugly bastard, isn’t he?”
“He’s, uh, remarkably preserved. I can’t even guess how long he’s been in here. A decade or more? Longer?”
“Oh,” Huck said from several feet away. “Now it makes sense. That’s why the door was barred from the inside—the trapper was inside. You think he passed on in his sleep? Why did he die in here?”
“See how his leg is twisted? Maybe he got stuck in one of his traps.”
“Or he got attacked by something with big teeth,” Huck said. “Hey, Theo?”
