Free The Right Hand of Sleep by John Wray Page B

cover and he followed them up to an old logging road running west below the cliffs. He scrambled onto the road and headed east until it joined with another he recognized as leading up to the reliquary, then turned and carefully retraced his steps. Where she had stepped out into the sun a cut showed in the snowbank and beyond it were three deep, sharp-edged prints in the yellow mud. Her boots were new and thick-soled and threw small clots of dirt to the side with each step. A tear in a branch showed where she’d left the cover of the birches. Voxlauer walked back through the loose-flung trees to the bridge and the cottage, looking back every few steps over his shoulder.
    That night Voxlauer lay awake and thought about the woman. She’d been coming from Pergau, or from the colony, possibly. She moves like an old man, he thought. Cautiously and tiredly. But she dresses like a member of the Red Guard. He felt his face wrinkle itself into a smile. A vision of Anna came to him then unbidden: Anna in her crepe dress, relic of better years, laughing at his parodies of the Kaiser. Ah, Franz Josef, she would say, nodding soberly. A terrible man, I’m sure. And he, Voxlauer, would say: No, not a terrible man, but a fool, and they’d talk awhile, without much interest or urgency, about the war or some other long-past thing. Anna in her dead husband’s army clothes bent over stiffly behind the house, saluting tiredly as he pulled up in the battered trap. Voxlauer lay a few minutes longer staring upward in the darkness, then stood and felt his way to the table and lit the lantern.
    Above the table were two shelves running the length of the wall, cluttered with tins and empty jars and sacks of nails and plaster. The upper shelf was too high to see onto properly and he pulled the chair over to it. It was filled with tins similar to those on the lower shelf, beans and spinach and pickled herring and others whose labels were torn or illegible from watermarks. At the end of the shelf he found a folio much like the one he’d looked through in the parlor a week before. He took it down and brought it to the table.
    The folio held three pencil-and-gouache sketches on heavy paper: one still life and two portraits. The still life was drab and uninteresting to him but the portraits, one of a woman and the other of a long-haired child, were spare and delicate and very beautiful. Voxlauer sat at the table for a long time looking at them, holding them close to the lantern. The faces looked back at him starkly and directly, without reproach but also without any tenderness or goodwill. They were carefully drawn and the resemblance of the one face to the other was unmistakable. I’ll ask Pauli about them next time, he thought. The old man, Bauer, must have done them. He sat awhile longer at the table, remembering what few details Pauli had told him, before putting the lantern out finally and going to sleep.
    A noise roused him a few hours later and he sat up at once, rigid and stock-still, feeling for the wall with his fingertips. The fire had gone out and he had no idea whose bed he was in or by what force he’d arrived there. All was in blackness and he felt numb and far from things. The sweat ran cold between his shoulder blades and he stripped off his shirt and rose from the bed and listened. The sound came again like the scraping of bootheels over gravel, clear and insistent. He remembered now where he was and looked about him for the rifle, stepping silently toward it in the dark. The steel of the barrel felt cold to the touch and he held it uneasily a moment, shifting from foot to foot. Then he put it down and went to the door.
    The door shuddered as it swung open and he heard them scampering away before he saw them, a large fox and two half-grown cubs, pausing a moment at the edge of the turf with their huge eyes reflecting the starlight. They were slender and dark and their ruffed tails stood out straight behind them. They seemed reluctant