Cedric sees his father

In spite of twelve years, five months, and thirteen days worth of warnings about playing on stairs, Cedric could not resist getting into another wrestling match with Colban on the way down, battling for the right to go second.

There was no going first: Conrad had shoved them both out of the way and claimed that right for himself – if not as the oldest, then certainly as the most grim. Unlike Colban, who only wanted to play, and Cedric, who had been looking for any lark to get him out of range of Kraaia and her dancing, Conrad wanted to know where the King had gone.

“Shut up, you monkeys!” he hissed as they neared the bottom floor of the tower. “Something’s happening down there.”

Colban only compromised by wrestling quietly, but then Cedric could hear what Conrad had, and he dropped his arms and swayed back against the wall. Colban immediately captured his head, but Cedric comforted himself with the thought that Colban’s armpit at least permitted him to hide his face as it turned red with shame.

Cedric’s father’s bedroom activities had never been confined exclusively to his own bedroom. He knew all too well the sound of his father’s moans behind a wall, so deep and rumbling that Cedric had always blushed to hear the rutting stags, even long before he had learned why they too were bellowing.

He was about to be embarrassed by his father yet again, and his body went limp with defeat. Colban squealed and plowed past him, leaving him in ever-​​more distant third.

After that first wave of shame-​​faced horror began to retreat, however, Cedric felt something else, more sinister, rising more slowly: not a sudden wave that would soon retreat, but a cold flood that would swell up until he drowned.

Though the voice he heard was his father’s, the moans were not of pleasure but of torment. Their hollow echoes in the steep stair-​​shaft seemed to arise from dizzying depths, as if the Old Sinner had gone to Hell at last, as he had long sworn.

As Cedric descended, those chilling sounds were joined by others, equally bestial. Dancing behind his sight were the nightmarish illustrations of Hell in his father’s Bible. In terror of himself, Cedric had studied them as a guidebook of what was to befall him – as a bestiary of Hell’s menagerie of half-​​human chimeras.

Each of his father’s groans was immediately followed by barking and snarling, like the bellowing of the stag-​​headed demon trying to flee the arrow that is already in his side, and the growling of the pack of razor-​​fanged wolf-​​men who run after, waiting for him to fall.

There was also the high-​​pitched gibbering of the red-​​furred, black-​​winged monkey-​​demon, and beneath it all some heart-​​rending animal sound that Cedric knew but could not name, so low and aching that he felt it humming in his teeth.

Before he reached the bottom, to these sounds were added the gasps and wails of Conrad and Colban as they dashed through the door and pulled up short before some horror Cedric could not yet see.

However, he could hear now that the winged monkey-​​demon was only Dunstan, though that knowledge simply made his panicked babbling all the more hideous.

He heard also one of the wolf-​​men snarling in Sigefrith’s voice, “What in Christ’s name are you two sniveling twits doing down here?” He corrected, “Three!” as Cedric stumbled in.

Cedric’s eyes were drawn at once to his father – his tall father, whose head still towered over the heads of such lesser mortals as Cedric’s whimpering friends.

But his father was uglier than Cedric had ever seen him: his thick lips were slack and quivering, his nose ran unwiped into his mustache, and his cheeks were smeared with blood and streaked with tears.

The shocking wreck of that noble face captured all of Cedric’s attention, though his friends seemed not to have noticed his father at all.

His father held out his right hand and whispered, “Cedric…” The hand too was hideous – red in the palm, red between the fingers, and shaking so spastically that drops of fresh blood were spattering all over the stones before him. “Come here, Cedric…” he whimpered. “To Papa…”

Cedric knew what he was seeing, and why his friends had not. Family legend said his father’s grandmother had sometimes seen the dead on the day they died, weeks before receiving the fateful letter that confirmed her vision. Cedric had never believed it until that moment.

He did not have to look to know what his friends were seeing – it was all they could see of his father: his lifeless body on the floor. Cedric was seeing his father in Hell.

Cedric himself still stood safely on life’s shore, but no celestial map in his father’s books and Bibles had ever drawn the strait so very narrow. Hell was only one foolish leap away.