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An angry mob lurched through the town. They couldn't march, driven as they were not by a single leader commanding their actions but by an overwhelming sense of righteous anger and religious fervour. They shouted and screamed as they dragged their prisoner towards the town square. Their captive's normally unremarkable face was marred with bruises, blood dripping from his long eyelashes. He stumbled along in a daze, only held upright by his tormentors' grasps. The mob's shrieks were becoming louder now, deafening their hopeless victim.
"Burn the witch! Burn him! Send him back to the fiery pits of hell from whence he came!"
"I'm from Wexford!" Hopeless shouted back. He got a club to the head for his trouble and was hauled staggering the rest of the way to the town square.
The square had been transformed: the market stalls of the morning were gone, replaced with pews borrowed from the local church. In the centre, a group of men were building a pyre.
The angry mob waited awkwardly for the pyre to be finished. "Should have thought to do this first," one of the weavers muttered to another. There was a general murmur of agreement. Finally, the pyre was built and Hopeless was tied to it. The assembled mob was reorganised by the vicar into orderly rows, arranged so that everybody got a good view of the proceedings. They were again delayed when a disagreement arose over where the children should sit: If they were given the pews at the front so that they could see, it meant there wouldn't be enough seats for everybody. But there were fears that if they sat the children on the floor a log might roll out of the fire and hit one of them. As the argument went on, the sky began to darken – though not from nightfall.
"Rain," announced the vicar, and everyone groaned.
"No witch-burning today then," commented the cobbler. The crowd began muttering angrily, some of the smaller children demanding the rain be stopped so they could see a burning.
"I'm afraid not," said the vicar. Then, noticing the looks of disappointment surrounding him: "Come on now, we've only got to wait until it's sunny again. We'll get the witch burnt, don't you worry. The good lord will provide."
"I don't remember the last time the good lord provided more than ten minutes straight of sunshine in Ireland," said the cobbler. There was a general murmur of agreement.
"Well the next ten minutes we get, we'll burn him. Till then, put him in the crypts beneath the church. He'll keep till later." A few members of the mob hurried to do as the vicar commanded, shoving Hopeless through the church doors. The rest of the mob followed, dragging the pews with them before they could get soaked in the rain.
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The Dead Men watched, concealed behind the graveyard wall, as their friend was dragged down into the crypt.
"Oh, this is not good," whined Dexter. His fingers were twisting in his tunic as he turned to Skulduggery. "What do we do?"
"Simple," Erskine answered for him, "we go in there and get Hopeless out."
"But what if they catch us? Then they'll burn us too!"
"Catch us? Dexter, they're mortals. They don't stand a chance. Come on, last one to the crypt's a rotten zombie." With that, Erskine leapt over the wall, followed closely by Saracen. Dexter hesitated, but then jumped over as well, running to catch up with his comrades. None of them seemed to have noticed that Anton, Ghastly, and Skulduggery weren't following.
Ghastly gave a weary sigh. "They're going to get themselves killed."
Anton nodded. "Problematic. It will take a long time to find four new recruits of their calibre."
Ghastly was – for want of a better word – aghast. "Anton they're your friends!"
Anton nodded again. "And I love them more dearly than I loved my own mother. But I'm not going into that crypt to save them."
"We can't just leave them, Anton! United we stand, divided we fall, remember?"
"I didn't say that. Aesop said that."
"Actually, he wrote it. But that doesn't mean it's not true! And anyway, they'd–" Ghastly was cut off by the sound of a large scuffle from within the church. After a few minutes, the noise died down, but the four Dead Men did not emerge victorious.
A man with an unusually prominent chin half-ran half-limped out of the church. He had a split lip and a broken nose and presumably many other injuries under his clothes. He made his way back towards the town square and, from where they were crouched, the remaining free Dead Men could hear him shouting to the other townsfolk:
"Tell the vicar! And the carpenter, too! We need three more pyres for tomorrow. Other members of the witch's coven came to free him but we defeated them! Let it be known!" There were many cheers from the townsfolk following this announcement.
"Oh, no," moaned Ghastly, looking even more horrified than before. Anton, meanwhile, merely looked puzzled.
"That's foolish. Why don't they just tie all four of them to one pyre? What a waste of wood." Ghastly turned to him in disbelief.
"Are you made of stone, Anton? For God's sake, we can't just sit here. We've got to do something!"
"I've already told you: I'm not going into–"
"Quiet!" Skulduggery hissed. The injured man with the prominent chin was coming back, passing dangerously close to where they crouched concealed behind the low wall. The three of them froze, Ghastly and Anton holding their breath, as the man walked past them and towards the church. When he'd gone far enough away to be out of earshot, Ghastly spoke again.
"Look, he's about to go in. We'd better make our rescue attempt now, before he gets the idea to lock the main door."
"I'm not going," said Anton.
"What? Skulduggery, tell him–"
"Me neither," Skulduggery cut him off.
"What? What's wrong with you both? We can't just leave our friends!"
"Anywhere else," said Anton, "I would help, I really would. But not here."
"For heaven's sake, why not?"
"It's a crypt," answered Skulduggery.
"So?"
"Crypts are creepy," said Anton. Skulduggery nodded in agreement.
"Crypts are… why the hell… what does that…" Ghastly spluttered, looking from Anton's face – more suited to a funeral director than a warrior – to Skulduggery's skeletal one. "Are you serious?"
They both nodded.
Ghastly stared at them both. Skulduggery and Anton stared at their feet. "I'm going," he announced. "They've overpowered four of us already, so if I go on my own they'll probably defeat me too. Then all five of us will be dead before tomorrow noon. You can either help me or not, but I'm telling you now that you can't stop me. I won't let anything stop me from trying to save them."
A few moments of silence followed Ghastly's little speech. Finally, with a weary groan, Anton spoke.
"I'm coming with you."
Ghastly nodded at him. The two of them turned to face Skulduggery. For a while, he said nothing. Then:
"I'm coming too." Ghastly smiled and Anton nodded his head toward Skulduggery respectfully. The three men stood up and began walking towards the church, Ghastly and Anton in the lead. They turned round when Skulduggery spoke again: "I'm only going to be lookout though, I'm not going in."
Ghastly rolled his eyes but, unwilling to waste time persuading Skulduggery and risk Anton chickening out as well, made his way to the church door as fast as he could.
The three remaining Dead Men stood outside the door for a moment, Anton and Ghastly preparing to go in.
"Good luck," Skulduggery said. Ghastly pressed his hand to the door, Anton took a last fortifying breath, and then the two of them vanished into the church.
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Skulduggery had been stood waiting outside the church for two hours. His brothers-in-arms hadn't reappeared, but the man with the large chin had. Once again he'd gone running into town, this time shouting for the carpenter to make six pyres instead of four. Skulduggery wondered if Anton was still calmly contemplating the needless waste of good timber, or if he was starting to panic now. He wondered if he was scared.
Skulduggery was scared.
He'd been scared the last time he was in Anton's position. He remembered waiting for his own funeral pyre to be built, knowing that – if he was lucky – he'd only have to suffer the pain of being burned alive, not the far more agonising death that was Serpine's red right hand.
Skulduggery Pleasant was not a lucky man.
He was scared now, at the prospect of going into the crypts to save his friends. He'd avoided contact with all places associated with death since his own, the battlefield being the one exception. He could still feel the slight tug on his soul that was the afterlife calling to him. He wasn't sure if it was heaven or hell that awaited him, but he had no desire to find out anytime soon and every time he came close to a place like this – a place awash with death – the call became stronger.
He couldn't go in there. He couldn't face the ache venturing into a place like this would put on his soul.
But neither could he let his friends find out just how heart-wrenching and terrifying a violent death truly was.
His mind decided, Skulduggery stood up from behind the gravestone where he'd hidden as the large-chinned guard had made his last journey past and strode purposefully towards the church door. He took a deep breath – mentally, if not physically – and pushed it open.
The inside of the church was dimly lit, only a few candles and the faint remains of sunlight streaming in through the stained glass windows. The vast chamber that made up the main part of the church was empty, but still Skulduggery wrapped his scarf tighter around his face and pulled the brim of his hat lower still. As he walked over to the crypt he finally spotted a figure – the man with the giant chin.
Skulduggery crept up behind him, intending to take him by surprise, when suddenly the man whirled round, throwing a green powder in Skulduggery's face as he did so.
"Take that you foul demon!" he screeched. After a moment, it was clear the powder had no effect and the large-chinned man only had time to let out a confused "What?" before Skulduggery decked him, knocking him out cold.
The man dealt with, and no other guards in sight, Skulduggery made his way down to the crypt. The door was unlocked, and on opening it became apparent why: all six of the so-called witches lay unconscious on the ground, though with few obvious injuries. In the corner a powdery green lump sat burning on a brazier, presumably keeping the Dead Men asleep. With no lungs to inhale the powder, Skulduggery alone remained unaffected.
One by one, Skulduggery dragged his comrades out from the crypt into the more diluted air of the main church. One by one they roused and, predictably, began arguing over whose fault it was they'd gotten captured. When all of them were finally fully awake, they began discussing how mortals had managed to get hold of a clearly magical power like the one they'd been overpowered with. The discussion – and the debating of possible culprits – went on for a few minutes before Saracen noticed just how dark it was.
"Bloody hell, Skulduggery, it's night! Just how long did you wait before rescuing us?"
"Oh, a fair while. I was deciding if you were worth the bother. In the end I decided it would take too long to find a new tailor as good as Ghastly, so I decided to rescue the rest of you as well while I was at it."
"Seriously, though, what took you so long?"
"I had other problems to face than just the guard, you know."
"Like what?"
"I had to overcome my own fears."
"Really? What fears?"
Skulduggery hesitated for a moment, wondering whether he should tell Saracen and the others about his issues with death. Perhaps they had reached that stage where they could talk to one another about their deepest fears and dark pasts.
Or perhaps not.
"My fear of having to listen to Dexter's singing, for one. There was also my fear of having to listen to you moan about how late I was, my fear of being told off by Ghastly for wearing a blue shirt with a brown jacket, my fear of…." He went on and on, listing ever more ridiculous fears to make the Dead Men laugh as he led them out of the church. Soon the others were adding to his list and arguing with each other about how bad their personal habits were and the tension of the day was forgotten, everyone happily laughing and joking with one another, simply pleased to have survived another day.
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I'm not at all sure about the ending of this, I feel like it got a bit too dark. Let me know what you think and thank you to both the anonymous guest and to Nolder-Elf-Who-Likes-Cookies for their lovely reviews!