Thorn by Fred Saberhagen (reading like a writer TXT) 📕

hands folded themselves like the hands of a woman praying, or diving into deep water, and in a moment she had completed a soft lunging motion that brought her face into secure hiding against his chest. “Hold me,” she murmured.

      His hands held her, and they were warm. But his voice was inexorable. “Go back. You were asleep.”

      I can’t do it. Her protest was silent, but vehement as any shout, and she knew that it was heard.

      “I will help you. You are under my protection now. I would not ask it if it were not important. Will you not help me to find out the truth about Helen?”

      Mary dared not open her eyes. If she looked up her eyes might meet his.

      “Go through it all. Once more, with my help, through it all, and that will make an end to it. An end to the bad dreams that now plague you almost every night.”

      Surprise tricked Mary into looking up. “How did you know that?”

      His eyes were hard to see. But it was hard to look away from them again.

      “No,” Mary said once more. But she knew that the force of her protest was failing.

* * *

      Mary was sleeping, something she still did most comfortably and deeply in her old nun-pajamas. And even as she slept it seemed to her (though with some fitfully active portion of her mind she simultaneously knew better) that Thorn was unreal, that his talk in the dark mansion with her was nothing but a fading dream. A dream from which she would presently awake, to find herself in her own sunlit room, the bedroom next to Helen’s. When Mary awoke it would be cheerful morning, and she would be surrounded and defended by all the safe wealth of the Seabright house…

      …and into her sleep there tore a fist of shotgun noise. The roar slammed against her bedroom door from the outside, jarring Mary instantly awake. Her eyes flew open to register dark midnight, only accented by the pale dial of the bedside clock.

      Whatever that slam of sound had been, it must mean that something was terribly wrong. Adrenalin propelled Mary out of bed, grabbing in reflex for the red robe that lay as usual over a nearby chair. One arm in a sleeve of the robe, struggling to sleeve the other, she flung open her bedroom door and ran out into the hallway. Here the darkness was less intense; as usual some muted illumination was coming in through the hall windows from the security lights that ringed the exterior of the house. Somewhere out there now the mastiff, and another watchdog, were raging futilely.

      A few steps down the hall, a white bundle lay on the floor. Mary ran to it, and stopped when one of her bare toes touched warm stickiness on the carpet.

      Vaguely she was aware of sniffing the unfamiliar stink of burnt explosive. She could see the white thing on the floor quite plainly now, but in a state of new shock she was still trying to make sense of the world in which this white murdered thing could have existence. There were urgent human voices, not far away, saying—Mary could not quite make out what. She hardly raised her eyes. She still had not moved when vague figures walking the darkness, two coming from her right, one from her left, closed in to bracket her. A ski-masked man standing at her left was pointing a long-barreled firearm of some kind right at her midsection. Mary’s belly shrank toward her backbone.

      Delaunay Seabright, also in robe over pajamas, slippers on his feet, was standing at Mary’s right. Another ski-masked man was holding the muzzle of another, shorter weapon against the back of Delaunay’s head.

      “Mary,” Delaunay said. There was only a small tremor in his voice, which was basically calm and careful. “Mary? Do what they say.”

      “Oh. Uh.”

      “Mary. Listen to me. Keep control of yourself.”

      To this at last she gave some kind of an assent.

      As if he had been waiting to see what her reaction would be, the masked man holding his gun at Del’s uncombed gray head now spoke for the first time: “Move along.”

      The other gunman gestured and prodded Mary ahead of him, toward the descending stairs. Turning briefly, a few steps down, Mary saw that Ellison and Stephanie had come out of their rooms and were watching. They had stopped as if the first sight of the gunmen had petrified them in their tracks. One of the masked men had turned round too, and was motioning silently for Ellison and Stephanie to follow—keeping them, Mary thought, in sight, away from telephones.

      As Ellison obeyed, advancing slowly, he moved into a patch of security light from one of the hall windows and Mary got a look at his face. It was a good look.

      She was prodded again, and turned, proceeding down the stairs.

      At the foot of the stairs, on the floor of the great hall, some of the household staff were assembled, as for a called meeting. Not pausing in his slow descent, the man who was pointing a gun at Mary raised his voice, including them all as he recited a small speech.

      “You’ll be hearing from us about Delaunay Seabright. Getting him back is gonna cost you a lot of money. But this woman here”—a gun barrel poked Mary’s back—”is just insurance. Now get this clear. I don’t want to see police cars following us—we’ll leave her brains on the pavement for them to run over. I don’t want to see or hear no choppers overhead—they’ll see us put her out of the car doing eighty. We got high explosives out there in our truck too—if worst comes to worst we’ll go that way, and take both these people with us. We got all the cards. That girl on the floor upstairs is there because she ran, she panicked, and to show that we mean business.

      “Got all that? Remember? Don’t forget to explain it all to the pigs when you call ’em