Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Call Page 9

  In the near-darkness and without her glasses, she could only blunder around and feel the walls like a blind person. There had to be something here. Her mother’s spirit wouldn’t bring her down here on a wild goose chase.

  She was still contemplating this when she put her left hand against a part of the wall and felt it move. A section of the wall pushed back like a door to reveal another cavern. The door was low enough that she had to get down on her knees to crawl through the opening.

  As she did, a work light like in the subbasement came to life and filled the cavern with harsh light. She squinted into this light and saw what appeared to be a desk and chair like the ones she had salvaged, on top of which sat a radio that was probably thirty years old at least. Was this part of the bomb shelter?

  The sound of someone clearing his throat shook Emma from these thoughts. She didn’t see anyone in the cavern, at least until she looked up. She thought it must be a trick of the light and her blurred vision that there appeared to be a bearded man in a robe and pointed hat floating above her. That was until the man spoke. “About time you got here,” he said with an accent that sounded somewhere between Ian’s Scottish and Mr. Graves’s English one. “Thought you’d never make it.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am Marlin, Keeper of the Lore for the Order of the Scarlet Knight. Welcome to the Sanctuary.”

  Emma stared at the ghost for a moment. Then she dropped into the chair beside the desk and passed out.

  ***

  When she opened her eyes, she hoped to find herself in her new subbasement office or her apartment or even the hospital would have been welcome at this point. Instead, she saw she was still in the same cavern, with the blue-white specter of a man hovering in front of her. He had moved close enough that she could see he had very human eyes, which at the moment glared at her.

  “Bloody women,” he growled. “I don’t know why it would call for you. Probably faint again at the first sight of blood.”

  She reached out with one hand; it passed through the hem of Marlin’s robe. He didn’t seem to have any feet, at least not that she could see. She thought of the old Casper comics she had seen as a kid, although this ghost seemed far from friendly. “You’re a ghost?”

  “Got it in one. I’m ever so impressed. Now, can we get started or are you going to keep napping?”

  “This isn’t real. This can’t be real.” She closed her eyes, but it didn’t help at all. “It’s a concussion.”

  “Concussion? Bollocks.” Marlin shook his head. “Pity I can’t pinch you.”

  She pinched herself and winced; this was really happening. It just didn’t make any sense. “What do you want?”

  “Good, now we can finally get down to brass tacks. I thought you might go on disbelieving for the whole day.” Although he was a ghost—by all appearances—Marlin stopped as if to gather his breath. “We’re a little pressed for time, so I’ll give you the short version. You have been chosen to become the next Scarlet Knight and fight an evil sod known as the Black Dragoon.”

  Emma stared at Marlin for a moment. She thought of all the stories Mr. Graves had told her during her visits to the museum. “There really is a Scarlet Knight?”

  “Of course there is. You thought it was something like Santa or the Tooth Fairy? Then again, you probably still believe in those.”

  “No,” she said weakly. She hadn’t believed in either of those since she was two and began to read. By the time she was three, she already understood those were stories parents told their children. She had thought the Scarlet Knight was the same thing, a story Mr. Graves told to entertain her.

  “Again, we’re pressed for time so I’ll give you the thumbnail version of our history. Long, long ago, my master Merlin—”

  “The wizard?”

  “Yes, as in Arthur, Excalibur, and all that nonsense. How those stories got started I’ll never know.” The ghost shook his head. “At any rate, my master was—and still is—the greatest wizard in all the land. He created the Scarlet Knight as a bulwark against a servant of evil known first as the Black Demon and then in later years as the Black Dragoon. I believe you’ve already met him. The bloke with the claws?”

  Emma put a hand to the cuts on her midsection. “So it was a monster on the steps.”

  “After a fashion. There’s a man inside of it. The rest of it is an especially nasty suit of armor. When he came around our village, my master created some magic armor of his own. Wasn’t much at first, basically a loincloth and cowl with a spear, but that was enough. Ever since then we’ve fought our war. Every time the Dragoon appears, a new Scarlet Knight rises to destroy him.”

  “I’m supposed to stop that?”

  “Yes, well, you certainly weren’t my first choice. Of course I don’t get a vote. I’m just the Keeper of the Lore. No one ever consults me about anything.”

  “Why me?”

  “Why you indeed.” When the ghost sighed, Emma felt a breeze cold enough to make her shiver. “The usual reason is because you’re pure of heart.”

  Emma’s face turned red at this. “You mean because I’m a virgin?”

  “Oh please. Virgins are getting harder to come by, but not that hard. What it means is you’re good and noble and all that nonsense. That’s how you resisted the Dragoon when it tried to turn you.”

  Emma’s eyes widened. “That awful thing that spoke to me was the Black Dragoon?”

  “Very good. You are a quick learner after all. It tried to use you as a host. When it couldn’t, it sought greener pastures.”

  “Who?”

  “I haven’t any idea. Believe me, I tried to find out. Whoever it is is not a very nice person, I’ll tell you that much. You should have seen what he did to those people after he finished with you.”

  “What people?”

  “Some riffraff over in the old factories. The one was ghastly even by his standards.”

  “Did he kill Dr. Brighton too?”

  “Can’t say about that one. Wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

  Emma ran a hand over her face as she tried to make sense of this. That horrid thing in her closet had gotten loose and now it was out killing people. “But what can I do? I’m a geologist.”

  “Please. We’ve had fishermen, bakers, bankers, and even one bloke who sold women’s lingerie. You don’t want to know what he wore underneath the armor. Anyway, you put on the armor and then you’ll have the power to destroy him.”

  “Armor? What armor?”

  The ghost pointed over to a darkened corner. Emma pushed herself out of the chair. She made her way slowly towards the corner. She braced herself to find a trap of some sort, perhaps that monster—the Black Dragoon. She saw only what appeared to be a red box. Its lack of any markings gave it the same overall appearance as the object that had been in her closet upstairs. This made sense from what Marlin had told her; the Black Dragoon and the Scarlet Knight were polar opposites of each other, one evil and one good.

  She knelt down beside the red object and reached out cautiously with one hand. The moment she touched it, the sides of the object came to life. Unlike the black object, the faces that appeared on this were those of adorable cherubs. The object split along the side to open like a box.

  It was a box. Inside she saw a red suit of plate armor stacked neatly. Her eyes widened at this sight; she reached inside to pull out the helmet. By all accounts it seemed a perfectly ordinary example of 15th Century craftsmanship with a hinged visor to cover the face and a golden plume that dangled from the crown. Except she had never seen armor of this color before. With one fingernail she tried to scratch it, to flake off some of the paint so she could study it. Her fingernail cracked while the helmet remained unscathed.

  “So this is it? I put this on and I become some kind of superhero?”

  “If that’s how you want to see it. In the old days they thought of it as becoming a demigod, which I think sounds more dignified.”

  “I still don’t understand
why you’re asking me. I don’t know how to fight.” What little she did know came from one self-defense class at Berkeley after a string of rapes on campus.

  “I agree, you’re probably useless in a fight. But you’re the one who answered the Call.”

  “What’s ‘the Call?’”

  “When it needs a host, the armor sends out a sort of distress signal. One who is pure of heart hears this and is drawn to find the armor and take up the mantle.”

  She looked back towards the door to the cavern, towards the elevator her mother’s spirit had led her to. She thought back to what Mom had said about finding her destiny and how important this was for everyone. “How does this Call manifest itself?”

  “Usually it’s a vision. Of course sometimes we’ll get lucky and some bloke will stumble across it on his own. Or a couple times we’ve had someone choose a successor after he was badly wounded. Saves us a lot of time that way.”

  “But in my case it was a vision. In the hospital. And then upstairs a few minutes ago it happened again.”

  “Probably.”

  Emma dropped the helmet into the case. She hung her head and chided herself for her foolishness. “It wasn’t really Mom, was it? Her ghost or angel or whatever didn’t really come to me, did it?”

  “I highly doubt it.”

  “You tricked people by making them see someone they love?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t decide how the Call manifests itself. If it chose your mother it probably thought you would listen to her.”

  “And I did.”

  “I suppose you did.” There was an awkward silence for a moment before Marlin said, “If you would put it on, we have a lot of work to do.”

  Emma shook her head. She closed the case. “I’m not putting anything on.”

  “If this is about your mother, I told you I don’t have any control of that—”

  “It’s not that.” She sighed and then looked down at her hands. “You’ve picked the wrong person. I’m not a superhero. I’m not any kind of hero. I’ve never been able to help anyone. Not my parents, not Aunt Gladys, not Dr. Brighton.”

  “Well now’s your chance to make up for lost time.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She got to her feet. “You’ll have to find someone else.”

  “There is no one else. You think this is a bloody beauty pageant? You think if you can’t fulfill your duties we go to the runner-up?” Marlin floated close to her, enough that she shivered from the cold that radiated from him. “The one who answers the Call becomes the Scarlet Knight. That’s how it’s worked for four thousand years now. You came down here, now you’re the one. That’s all there is to it.”

  “I can’t do it. I’m really sorry. Maybe someone else will hear your call.” She trudged back towards the entrance to the cavern.

  Marlin stayed with her, actually hovering inside the wall. “You’re being bloody selfish. I hope you realize that. People are dying. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “I’m not the person for this job. I’m not a hero.”

  “That’s what they all say, or most of them at any rate. Some of them were bloody braggarts.” Marlin cleared his throat. “You’re not like that.”

  She slipped through the opening and began the slog back to the elevator. Marlin seemed to take the hint; he no longer followed her. She slumped into the elevator and pressed the button for the subbasement. Before the doors closed, he said, “You’ll be back. No one has ever resisted the Call.”

  She unzipped the jumpsuit and left it on the floor of the subbasement along with the muddy galoshes. She walked barefoot across the floor, not caring about the coldness of the metal floor. Then she sank into the chair, she put her head on the desk again. No, she was not a hero, not by any stretch. She had failed everyone she had ever cared about, especially her parents. “I’m sorry,” she whispered not just to Marlin but to the rest of the ghosts in her life.

  Chapter 13

  From the throbbing in his leg, Percival knew the time was at hand. It was inevitable it would want to finish off that old piece of business between them.

  There was nothing he could do about it now. Maybe twenty years ago he still would have been spry enough even with the wound in his leg. Now he was seventy-three years old, much too ancient to fight anyone. He couldn’t even get the nurses to up his pain medication, or that bloody quack who insinuated the pain was in his head. Of course if he had explained the real reason for this pain, they would have carted him off to the loony bin.

  Before he went, there was one last piece of business to attend to. As he sat on the bed with a tablet of rest home stationary on his lap, he considered what he should say. He closed his eyes and pictured her in his mind. He couldn’t help but see her as that delightful little girl she had been when they first met. She had been so smart even back then, smarter than him when it came to the museum’s exhibits. That she should be working at the museum now seemed like a natural fit. He wasn’t joking when he suggested she would be running the place soon enough; in his mind there was no one else better qualified, no one else who loved that place more than she did.

  None of that helped him to figure out what he should tell her. She certainly didn’t need him to tell her she was smart; people had said that since she had potty-trained herself. She was as shy and sweet as ever, always downplaying what she had accomplished. It was certainly more than he could have done. Someone like him was just good for holding a rifle or a broom and then once he got too old for those he wasn’t any good to anyone. Not even any good to the person he cared about the most, the only one who’d ever seen anything of value in him.

  That was where he should start. With this thought in mind, he began to scribble his message on the tablet. He wrote in blocky print letters so whoever found it would actually be able to read it. What he came up with certainly didn’t amount to poetry. It didn’t do justice to how he felt, but it was the best he could do at the moment.

  He set the tablet on the dresser, presumably for one of the nurses to find later. Then he sat back and waited. The pain in his leg began to throb unbearably. He saw flashes of red in his vision. It was close. So very close now.

  He heard the heavy footsteps outside. He had enough time to put an arm over his eyes to shield them from the debris of the wall collapsing. When he dropped his hand, he saw he was right. It was here at last.

  The monster stood in front of the hole it had punched in the wall, its red eyes glaring down at him. It raised a clawed finger at him. He braced himself for the final blow, the one to finish things off. Instead, it spoke. “I’ve come for you at last, old man.”

  “Go on and finish it, you wanker,” Percival said. “You’ll be doing me a favor.”

  “I will finish it, but only after you have given me what I want.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You will tell me where you’ve hidden it, or you will die.”

  There could be no question of what it wanted. He supposed that made sense. It couldn’t destroy its foe, but it could find a way to keep its enemy at bay for a while. “I’ll not tell you anything.”

  “You will. All that is yet to be determined is how long it will take—and how much left of you there will be at the end.”

  With that it scooped Percival up as if he weighed nothing and threw him over its shoulder. Then it took off into the night.

  ***

  Emma opened her eyes and screamed. Marlin hovered over her bed, his translucent eyes glaring at her. “Is that all you’re going to do? Lie there and feel sorry for yourself?”

  “I already told you I’m not doing it.”

  “Yes, well, if it were up to me we’d have already moved on to some worthier individual, but it’s not and now we’ve got a bit of a crisis on our hands.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Listen, you spoiled brat! There is a good man in serious danger and you’re the only one who can help him. So get your arse back down to the Sanctuary and do your bloody job.”<
br />
  “Who’s in danger?”

  “Your predecessor. I believe you’re already familiar with him. Percival Graves.”

  Emma sat upright at this. “Mr. Graves?” She wanted to say it was impossible he could have been the Scarlet Knight, but then she thought of all the stories he had told her. She had thought he had made them up, but what if he hadn’t? What if he had been the last Scarlet Knight? “This Black Dragoon has him? Where?”

  “That I’m not sure about. I happened to go over there to tell him about your decision. I thought maybe he could talk some sense into you. Imagine my surprise to see the wall smashed in and him missing.”

  “Are you sure he’s still alive?”

  “I’m fairly certain. If the Dragoon had wanted him dead he’d have torn the old man up right there. He wants something else from him.”

  “Your armor?”

  “Very good. He can’t actually destroy it, but he could put it somewhere difficult to get to, delaying us until he’s gone through with his latest scheme.”

  Emma started to get off the bed but then stopped herself. “Wait a minute. How do I know you’re telling the truth? How do I know this isn’t a trick like with my mother?”

  “Well, you could call the nursing home for starters. Go on and ask them if the old codger is around.”

  She did this, dialing up the rest home. The nurse who answered sounded on the verge of panic. “I’m a friend of Mr. Graves. My name is Dr. Emma Earl. Could I talk to him?”

  “I’m afraid he’s not in right now.”

  “Did his son take him?”

  “No. He’s just unavailable at the moment.”

  “I see. Thank you—”

  “Just a moment. Did you say your name is Emma Earl?”

  “Yes.”

  She thought the nurse might mention something about Aunt Gladys, but instead the woman said, “He left a message for you.”

  “A message? Could you read it please?”