Danse Macabre by Laura M. Hughes

Author:Laura M. Hughes [Hughes, Laura M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-10-09T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

As the shopkeeper prepares to slam the door to the cellar, he pauses to shout one last comment down into the girl’s dark prison.

“Aye, I’ll let you go . . . when I’m done with you!”

In the moment it takes him to shout, Blue crosses the floor and kicks him in the back of the knee with all her strength. The shopkeeper gives a startled roar as his leg collapses; he loses his grip on the door handle, his arms windmilling just as the girl’s had moments earlier, and then he tumbles down the stairs, head over heels, heels over head. Blue hears a loud CRACK halfway down, and then a crunch as he reaches the bottom.

Blue pauses. There is no noise from below. She creeps silently towards the doorway and peers down the steps to the cellar.

The shopkeeper’s huge form lies still and broken near the bottom. His left leg is bent beneath his body and his neck is twisted at a peculiar angle, like Cripple Mack’s after he fell from that tree when he and Blue were five years old. Like Mack then, the shopkeeper dribbles blood from his open mouth. Like Mack, his eyes are open and surprised-looking.

Unlike Mack, he is no longer breathing.

A scuffling noise causes Blue to look past the shopkeeper’s corpse and into the shadows beyond. The girl is there, crouching in a corner. She looks bruised but otherwise unharmed. She stares at the man’s twisted form in horror. Both her fists are clenched to her face, fingernail marks white on tear-stained cheeks. She stares for a moment longer, frozen, then springs from her crouch and bolts up the stairs, past Blue and away into the light.

After a moment, Blue turns her back on the dead shopkeeper and follows the girl’s path across the scrubbed wooden floorboards towards the shop’s exit.

Blue pauses as she reaches the door. Her arm drifts out to a neatly-stacked display to her left, and her small fingers curl around the bright, firm flesh of an orange. She tucks it into a pocket and continues on her way.

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