dedicated hers.
They think we’re small and weak and helpless. Easy to kill, his mother had told him as she lay dying. Are we easy to kill, John?
“No,” John murmured aloud now, as he had then to his mother, “we’re not.”
Looking over the piles of photographs, however, he thought his family had been easy to kill. They’d been victims again and again. But no more. The killers would not get away with this carnage.
John thought, This is my list of who will pay.
While John occupied himself in his grandmother’s cabin, the Young Dread sat on the slanted corridor floor within Traveler, studying Catherine’s journal. She hadn’t wanted to look at the journal at first, hadn’t wanted to see evidence of the Middle’s crimes. She’d been forced to coexist with the Middle Dread since she was a small girl, and that had been possible only by turning a blind eye to the worst parts of his nature. After she’d killed him, it had felt good to imagine that she’d wiped away every trace of him—but the journal told her otherwise. It told her that, while she’d known a few of the Middle’s misdeeds, there were countless more of which she’d been completely unaware.
There was an entry near the middle of the book that had drawn her attention the previous evening. She read it again now.
April the Twelfth, 1870
Father,
The Middle Dread returned not three days past. He did not announce himself, but Gerald was hunting alone and spied him by the loch and fortress.
Shall I make some acknowledgement of his presence? I do not wish to offend with forwardness, nor with lack of respect.
Further, something new. There are two youths with him, of lowly families by their dress and speech. The Dread instructs them in swordplay. They do a strange arithmetic among them, counting numbers, and always they sum to two hundreds.
What are we to make of this?
My love to you and my brothers.
Thomas
This was written in a fairly modern hand, using modern spellings, and Maud could not make out every word. The earliest pages of the journal were the only ones she could properly read. But she understood “two youths…of lowly families,” being trained by the Middle Dread.
My great-great-grandfather saw the Middle Dread training others, Catherine had said, years ago, in the forest. This was probably the very letter that Catherine’s ancestor had written, Maud realized. And the two strange boys Maud and John had seen on the Scottish estate—was it possible they were the same youths described here? Last night, sitting by the fire, Maud had become quite certain the answer was yes. Catherine had mistaken the boys for additional Young Dreads. Of course they weren’t that. They were something else, and they belonged to the Middle.
Maud was convinced he’d taken a whipsword and cut it in half and given it to them, and perhaps he’d given them the boar athame as well. This letter had been written nearly two hundred years before, so those boys were spending time There, stretched out, which explained the Dread-like flavor of their physical motions.
The letter was dated 1870. Was I awake in 1870? the Young Dread wondered. She knew, in a general way, how long she’d been stretched out, and when, and how long she’d been awake, but she put little emphasis on exact years and so couldn’t be sure where she was in 1870. She might well have been There while the Middle Dread was out and about in the world training those boys. But what was he using them for?
She flipped to the earliest pages of the diary, seeking out, as she had done several times already, one particular entry. Written on parchment was a description of the Middle Dread killing a Young Dread, centuries ago. It was not the murder she’d witnessed but an even earlier one.
This scrap of parchment is proof the Middle killed at least two Young Dreads before me, she thought. This is surely more than my master knew. If he had known everything, would he have gotten rid of the Middle sooner? She feared the answer was no. The Old Dread had acknowledged the Middle’s old crimes, but he’d been tied to the Middle somehow, unable to bring him to justice, until Maud herself had taken matters into her own hands and killed him.
The Young Dread looked up from the journal and found an unexpected glint of metal in her line of sight. To the right of the cabin doorway, a broken section of wall hung out