Parasite Soul by Chris Jags Page A

lay crumpled at the center of the room,
staring back at him with blank glass orbs. Simon had the eerie feeling
that he was looking at a graveyard. Worse, Niu was nowhere in sight.
    “I don’t care what he wants,” the older woman – ‘mother’ –
snapped. “I’m sick of that infernal noise! Keeping him was
foolish. Had I been a wiser woman…”
    “Hush, mother,” the girl said sharply. Simon sucked in his
breath. Had she heard him calling for Niu? Had she detected Niu
herself? He spun away from the window and flattened himself against the
cabin wall, breathing hard.
    “Don’t you tell me to hush, girl! And don’t you be calling me
mother! You’re the ungrateful baggage I inherited when I married your
father…”
    “Oh?” the girl’s voice rose sharply, and if she had suspected
intruders, the older woman had refocused her attention. “ I’m the
baggage, am I? I cook for you, I care for you - I clean
your damned chamber pot! – and… and, as for father, I do everything for him! When was the last time you lifted a finger to…”
    Mother’s quavering voice rose an octave as she cut across the girl.
“Don’t you dare speak to me like that! I won’t have it! Your
father…”
    “Ha! Father wouldn’t take your part in this if Vanyon himself
demanded it!”
    “Is that so? Is that so, you little witch? Is that what
you think? Conveniently hard to ask him, though, isn’t it, you sorry
little harlot?”
    “ Don’t you call me a harlot, you filthy old hag – what’s
that?” A different kind of tension entered the girl’s voice. “Did
you hear that?”
    “All I hear is the disrespect of my useless…”
    “ Shut up !” the girl roared, and the woman fell obligingly
silent. “There’s someone in the house!”
    Niu , Simon thought desperately , get
out of there. For all his defense of country folk, something uncanny
was going on in that cabin, and he wouldn’t even have minded enduring the handmaiden’s
inevitable dry I-told-you-so if they could just leav e.
    “Where are you?” the girl hissed. Simon could barely make out
the words, but there was no mistaking her tone: predatory, excited.
Little as he wanted to set foot in that ill-omened cabin, it was time to save
Niu for a change. He dithered for a moment, dancing on the spot, then
dashed up the porch stairs before he could lose his nerve, making as much of a
racket as he could. Not only would the groaning stairs attract the occupants’
attention away from Niu, the noise committed him to the enterprise, which
strengthened his resolve to see the matter through.
    Ramming the door with his shoulder, only to find it both unlocked
and hanging open, Simon flew into the cabin and collided with an interior
wall. Grateful that no one had witnessed his inglorious entrance, he
stared left and right. He found himself in an untidy little antechamber,
dominated by a looming wardrobe and overseen by an enormous stag’s head mounted
on the wall. Multiple pairs of shoes and boots lay where they’d been
kicked. A woman’s jacket lay crumpled in one corner where it had fallen
from its peg. Disconcertingly, several unpleasant-looking stains reddened
the bare floorboards.
    Chickens , he told himself frantically. Might
have been chickens .
    He dashed to the right, in the direction of an escalating
commotion. The older woman was shrieking like a harpy, and the girl was
yelling at someone, probably Niu. Something brittle impacted the wall;
crockery, Simon guessed. He was right, and in time to watch white shards
skittering across the floor of the common room he found himself in.
    He had no time to examine the room in detail. He had the
impression of a cozy little den of a type which might, under different
circumstances, have made him homesick. An empty hearth which surely
crackled merrily on cold winter nights; a thick rug upon which Simon could
easily imagine stretching out, his feet to the fire; a rocking chair of the
type in which his father liked to doze.