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Issue #05 · Dark Fantasy · English

Salt for the Dead

On the night the bells stopped tolling, Master Odran ordered his apprentice down into the cellar to fetch a jar of human teeth.

“Top shelf, on the left,” he said. “Not the milk teeth.”

Iwo didn’t ask what they were for. After four years of apprenticeship, he knew that any question starting with what for, asked before dawn, rarely yielded an answer one wanted to hear.

He descended the stairs, holding his candle well clear of the bundles of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling beams. The cellar smelled of pure grain alcohol, damp earth, and something sickeningly sweet that had been seeping from beneath the small storeroom door for the past three days. The door was barred with three heavy iron padlocks. The master claimed he kept failed experiments behind it.

Iwo reached for the jar.

Then, behind him, someone knocked.

Three raps. Soft. Polite.

He turned. The cellar was empty.

The knocking came again, this time from behind the locked door.

“Iwo?” his mother’s voice called softly. “Open up, please. It’s so cold in here.”

The candle went out.

Iwo’s mother had died six years earlier, during the winter when starvation drove the rats up from the sewers and into the streets. Iwo still remembered tying the white cloth beneath her chin so her jaw wouldn't slack open. He remembered her voice, too. Low, slightly raspy, always softening whenever she spoke his name.

It was that very voice.

Iwo bolted up the stairs so fast his shoulder slammed against the frame. In the workshop, Odran stood by the bench, grinding teeth to dust in a stone mortar.

“There’s something in the storeroom,” Iwo said.

“I know.”

“It speaks with my mother’s voice.”

The pestle paused for a second.

“Then don’t listen.”

Beyond the workshop windows hung a dead silence. Not the ordinary quiet of a late hour, gentle with rain and the distant footfalls of town guards. In Brzezina, seven bells rang from the temple spire on the hour, every hour. Everyone, even the babes, heard them through their sleep. Now, not one tolled.

Odran poured the powder into a bowl and added a measure of black liquid from an earthenware jug.

“Did you bring the jar?”

Iwo looked down at his empty hands.

The master sighed. Taking up a lantern, he went down to the cellar himself. He returned a few minutes later with the teeth, his face so drained of color that Iwo didn't dare ask if he had heard the voice, too.

“What did you lock away down there?” Iwo asked only after Odran set the jar on the table.

“Yesterday, I didn’t yet have to give it a name.”

Odran drew a brass key from his coat. He set it beside the mortar, but kept his fingers pressed against the metal.

“Six nights ago, the burgomaster’s daughter died. You know this.”

Iwo nodded. The girl had been nine years old. She knew how to whistle through her teeth and sometimes came by the workshop for cough syrup.

“The burgomaster brought me a tome taken from the crypt beneath the temple. In it, I found a way to tether a soul to the flesh before it wanders too far.”

“Did you bring her back?”

“Not yet.”

Odran finally pulled his fingers from the key.

“A soul returns only when it has something to long for. The text instructed me to gather the tears of those who mourned the child. Their voices. Their memories. I needed many people, so I left vessels throughout the town. By the cemetery gates, under the temple arches, beside the public well.”

Iwo remembered the small silver bowls. He had seen folk tossing coins into them, touching their rims before turning away.

“They took more than I intended,” Odran said. “What they gathered found its way into the cellar. When I spoke to it in the girl’s mother’s voice, it learned to answer.”

Something heavy rolled across the roof above them. Both men looked up.

“And the bells?” Iwo asked.

“I ordered them silenced. Their ringing agitates the thing. It begins hunting for a way out.”

At that moment, a scream drifted from the market square.

Torches flickered through the streets, though the gray edges of dawn were already creeping in. Townsfolk stood outside their doorways, listening to voices issuing from chimneys, wells, and locked trunks. One chest was calling out to an old cobbler in the voice of his dead son. At a street corner, a woman knelt beside a well, promising whoever was down in the dark that she would fetch a rope right away.

Iwo and Odran walked briskly toward the temple. The master carried a leather satchel laden with vials. To his apprentice, he handed one—a narrow phial filled with a cloudy, murky liquid.

“If anything draws near you, smash it against the stones.”

“What’s inside?”

“What was left of the first attempt.”

Iwo did not ask further.

A dozen guards stood before the temple. The entrance doors had been boarded shut from the outside. The burgomaster, a fur cloak thrown hastily over his nightshirt, waited at the foot of the stone steps.

“Is it inside?” Odran asked.

“My daughter is sitting by the altar,” the burgomaster replied. “She walked in on her own. She says she’s frightened.”

Odran closed his eyes.

“That isn’t her.”

“She recognized me! She asked about the wooden horse I hid away for her birthday.”

“The bowls collected your memories as well.”

The burgomaster stepped into his space.

“You said she could return.”

“I said I would try.”

A child’s voice drifted through the timber planks of the door.

“Daddy? Why are you having them keep me in the dark?”

The guards averted their eyes. One tightened his white-knuckled grip on the hammer he had used to drive the nails. The burgomaster lunged for the door, but Odran stepped into his path.

“We will open them,” the master said. “When I am ready.”

Three silver bowls sat against the temple wall. They were full to the brim, though no rain had fallen for days. In their dark surface rippled the pale morning sky and the faces of those who had long since passed.

Odran placed an earthen pot near the entrance and emptied the powdered teeth into it. From his satchel, he drew a slender scroll of parchment. He unrolled it, searching for the proper line.

Then Iwo saw the master’s fingers trembling.

“You aren't sure this will work,” Iwo said.

“The book gives no remedy for when the voices break free of the vessels. I only found the rites to summon them.”

Odran glanced up toward the bell tower.

“All at once. Then we will have only a heartbeat to seal them away.”

“Where?”

The master looked down at the earthen pot. It was no larger than a milk jug.

From inside the temple, the girl’s voice sounded again. This time, she coughed in the middle of a sentence—that dry, hollow cough she always had when she came asking for syrup.

The burgomaster wrenched the hammer from the guard’s hands and wedged it beneath the first plank.

Iwo tried to hold him back, but the man shoved him aside so violently that Iwo tumbled down the steps. The moment the final board was ripped away, Odran smashed a vial against the threshold.

The murky liquid burst into blue flame. The great doors swung inward.

Inside, amidst rows of guttering candles, sat a little girl in a red dress. In her lap, she cradled a carved wooden horse. Her bare feet did not touch the flagstones.

“Daddy,” she said.

The burgomaster surged toward her, but Odran caught him by the cloak.

The girl turned her head, fixing her eyes on the alchemist. Her lips moved, but the voice that came out belonged to the woman weeping by the well:

“Will you bring the rope?”

Then in the voice of the cobbler’s boy:

“Father, open the chest.”

Then in the voice of Iwo’s mother:

“You left me in the cold.”

Iwo felt the bite of the stone floor against his palm. He had no memory of crossing the threshold.

“I didn't leave you,” he whispered.

The girl stood. The candle flames shrank to pinpricks. From every dark corner of the nave, something began to draw breath.

Odran threw the powder into the blue flames and shouted words in a tongue Iwo did not know. The voices fell dead silent for the space of a single heartbeat. The girl swayed, and the shadows pooling at her feet dragged her violently toward the clay pot.

The pot cracked and burst into shards.

Odran stared at the shattered earthenware. The parchment slipped from his numb fingers.

“It needs something larger,” he breathed.

The shadows surged toward the open doors. Outside waited an entire town of people whom they could call by name.

Behind the high altar, Iwo spotted the crypt doors. Thick stone banded with blackened iron. He remembered the locks in the master’s cellar, and the voice that had seeped through them without effort. If they penned the shadows in the crypt, the dead would still have gaps to whisper through.

A handful of tooth dust remained along the rim of the broken pot. Iwo scooped it into his hand. Odran had taught him how to blend powdered bone and salt into an alchemical glaze used to seal cracked retorts. It hardened instantly in fire.

“I need more salt,” Iwo said.

“In the satchel.”

“And fire across the crypt threshold.”

The master looked at him, then gave a sharp nod. He seized the dazed burgomaster by the arm and dragged him toward the altar.

The girl followed them with her eyes. She took a step forward as Odran spilled lamp oil before the crypt, but Iwo put himself between her and his master. He unstoppered the vial of salt and spilled a white line across the floor.

The shadows recoiled at the barrier. From their writhing center stepped the shape of a woman in a white kerchief.

Iwo saw her with terrible clarity: the exhausted eyes, the strands of hair stuck to her damp forehead, the thin scar beside her thumb from a slipped kitchen knife.

“Let me come closer, sweetling,” she said.

He did not know how the thing knew about the scar. From his own memory, from the silver bowl, or if it knew things he had long buried.

“Tell me what you made for my last birthday,” he begged.

“I fried you apple pancakes.”

It was true. He remembered them: thin, burnt black at the edges, eaten under the covers while he burned with fever.

The figure reached out her hand.

Behind Iwo, Odran sparked the oil. A wall of fire cut across the stone floor. The master threw the crypt doors wide.

“Now!” he roared.

Iwo stepped back across the threshold and scattered the rest of the salt. Odran recited the words from memory now, faster and faster. Shadows skimmed across the stone, frantically seeking a breach through the flames.

The mother’s form remained still.

“Iwo,” she said. “Do you remember giving me your share of bread, pretending you had already eaten?”

He remembered. He had never told that to a living soul. Not even Odran.

He reached out and brushed her fingertips.

There was no skin. Something wet, cold, and minute clung to his hand. He jerked back his sleeve. Hundreds of tiny black grains were swarming up his wrist, writhing beneath the cuff of his shirt.

Iwo screamed. He shook his arm frantically over the flames, casting them into the fire.

The shape of his mother dissolved into a chorus of shrieking voices.

“Shut the doors!” Odran bellowed.

Most of the shadows were already trapped within the dark vault. Iwo slammed the heavy doors shut. Something slammed into the timber from the other side so hard the iron hinges groaned. The burgomaster lunged forward, throwing his shoulder against the wood. Together, they drove the door flush against the stone jamb.

Odran smeared the wet paste of salt and bone dust down the seam. Iwo touched a burning splinter to the line. The white paste hissed, boiled into a violent froth, and hardened into stone.

From deep within the crypt came the muffled weeping of a little girl.

The burgomaster dropped to his knees against the cold stone.

“She’s in there.”

Odran sat down heavily beside him. For a long time, both men did nothing but listen.

“I know you hear her,” the alchemist murmured softly. “I hear someone I buried, too.”

The church bells rang out again at noon. Their deep, brass resonance drowned out the remaining whispers in the well and the scratchings in the cobbler’s trunk. The townsfolk gave the silver bowls a wide berth for days, until the watch finally gathered them with iron tongs and carried them far beyond the city walls.

Odran burned the crypt tome in the open square before the temple. The burgomaster watched the calfskin binding blacken and shrivel in the coals, never once looking at the alchemist.

That evening, Iwo returned to the workshop. Down in the cellar, the three iron padlocks still hung from the storeroom door. He heard no mother behind them. He heard only Odran upstairs, restlessly shifting tools from one wooden drawer to another.

Iwo took the jar of teeth. He carried it out to the town graveyard and buried it deep beneath the perimeter wall, far away from the consecrated graves. Then he walked to the cobbler’s cottage. The old man was sitting beside an open, empty trunk, clutching a child’s shoe on which he had never finished lacing the twine. Iwo sat down beside him. He stayed there in the dark until night had settled fully over the town.

The next morning, when the cobbler came to gather the rest of his boy's things, Iwo helped him pack them away.

When they finished, the old man said:

“Yesterday, I heard him so clearly. I would have given everything I own just to hear him answer me one more time.”

Iwo closed the lid of the chest and pressed the iron key into the old man’s palm.

“So would I.”

He didn't offer empty words of comfort, nor promises he couldn't keep.

Not every loss can be mended. And in clawing after those who have passed, it is far too easy to lose those who are still beside us.