The Gathering Dark Part 14

Peter frowned, took his foot off the brake, and put it down on the accelerator. "Now I drive."

He floored it. Father Jack shouted an objection but Peter barely took note of the words. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Nikki brace herself on the dashboard with one hand, but in the other she held one of the HKs Jack had given her.

Keomany said nothing.

The blue sky disappeared above them. Peter took one look in the rearview mirror and spotted several of the cops he had knocked unconscious getting to their feet. One of them had drawn his weapon and was brandis.h.i.+ng it, shouting after the Navigator, but one of his fellow officers reached out and grabbed his arm, pus.h.i.+ng it down.

Then the Navigator was bathed in that vile orange light. The vehicle shuddered and Peter kept both hands locked on to the wheel. He had torn a portal through realities but it was still not a smooth transition. The Navigator jerked as though they had burst through some invisible membrane and a hairline crack spiderwebbed across the winds.h.i.+eld.

The light dimmed and the engine whined as though it struggled against something, and then they were through, driving beneath a filthy orange sky through air thick with heat and a charnel house stink that made Peter begin breathing through his mouth.

"We're through," Father Jack whispered. His words were barely audible over the hum of the engine.

Peter drove slowly. Cars were stalled or parked or crashed at intervals and he had to weave around them. Some were turned over, others merely had the windows shattered. One had been wrapped around a telephone pole at high speed and had collapsed in upon itself like an accordion.

The road was littered with human corpses, or what remained of them. The dead were mostly bones and dry s.n.a.t.c.hes of parchment skin and sun-bleached clothing. He spotted two smaller skeletons with tufts of fur stuck to their bones and thought they were too small to be dogs. Cats probably. Things that might have been this world's version of carrion birds picked at some of the cadavers, but Peter paid them no mind. The scavengers weren't the real evil here.

"Keomany," he said, "show me the way. Let's check the downtown, where you were before you left. I want to find the things responsible for this. It's the only way to reverse it."

"My parents," she said softly, gazing out the window and studying each of the corpses they pa.s.sed.

"We'll check on them soon," Peter told her. He glanced in the rearview and she met his gaze. "But you should be prepared."

In her reflection he could see the glow behind her eyes grow brighter, as though each were its own tiny eclipse.

"Drive," Keomany told him.

Peter avoided colliding with the stalled or wrecked cars but he no longer bothered going around the remains of the dead. The wheels of the Navigator crunched bone and b.u.mped over those who had had the misfortune to be caught out here upon the road by the sleek black demons Keomany had described, or by whatever else now infested Wickham.

All four of them were on guard. The windows were rolled down and Father Jack and Nikki held their nine-millimeter semiautomatic weapons in their laps, but there was nothing casual about this. There had been few buildings where they had entered the displaced area, but now as he followed Keomany's direction, Peter drove them into a more closely settled area of Wickham. Many of the homes had been burned out, some still smoldered. Others had been caved in from outside or had picture windows that had been shattered. The dead littered lawns and in one place the skeletal upper torso of a man lay upon a s.h.i.+ngled roof with absolutely no evidence as to how it had come to be there. A picket fence had been turned into a thicket of spikes adorned with the impaled bodies of a dozen dead cats.

"Left," Keomany said, a hitch in her voice as though she were trying not to be sick. "That's Currier. It leads into the downtown."

Peter turned, but as he did, a motion off to his left caught his eye. He glanced in that direction, at a house that was seemingly untouched, and saw a heavy curtain fall back to cover an upstairs window, as though someone had been watching their progress and had ducked back so as not to be seen. Dimly he heard the barking of a dog.

Demon or human? he wondered, wis.h.i.+ng he had gotten a closer look at the figure behind that curtain. It would have been good to know that there were at least some who had survived this horror. he wondered, wis.h.i.+ng he had gotten a closer look at the figure behind that curtain. It would have been good to know that there were at least some who had survived this horror.

"Where are they all?" Nikki asked, as though echoing his thoughts.

"The people or the monsters?" Father Jack replied.

Nikki sighed heavily, anxiously. "Either. It's like it's been abandoned."

"No. It's not abandoned. I'm sure we've been noticed," Peter said. "My guess is they're taking our measure."

There was no response to that. He turned onto Currier Street and in the back seat Keomany cursed loudly in astonishment. Peter did not need to ask her what had affected her so deeply. They were rapidly approaching what had clearly once been a lovely shopping district, a cla.s.sic downtown New England street full of boutiques and restaurants. The entire east side of Currier Street had been put to the torch, leaving nothing but blackened and charred remains smoldering where businesses had been. At the far end of the devastation, a small fire still burned.

"Your shop?" Nikki asked, her pain for her friend's loss evident.

"No. I'm on the other side," Keomany replied.

Peter had known from the moment he had heard her story that Wickham itself might be rescued, lives might be saved, but the village would never be the same again. Despite however well she might have prepared herself, he understood that Keomany was only now beginning to realize the truth of it.

As he drove, Peter glanced from side to side, watching both the ruins and the hollowed faces of the remaining stores for some sign of an enemy. Something he could fight against. He knew he could get them out-tearing another hole in the displacement field was not going to be difficult-and it might be possible to collapse part of it as well, but without figuring out the source of this magick, there was no way he could return Wickham to its rightful place in the world.

A p.r.i.c.kling sensation went up the back of his neck and he glanced sharply to the left. In the darkness within a restaurant something s.h.i.+fted, quickly seeking cover in the depths of the ravaged business. Peter said nothing to the others.

"Here," Keomany said.

But he had already seen it. Sweet Somethings. The sign was still hung in front of it, though the windows were gone. Broken gla.s.s lay scattered across the sidewalk. Peter pulled the Navigator up in front of it, put it in park, and glanced over his shoulder.

"Do you need anything from inside? I can go in for you."

She shook her head.

Father Jack raised one finger. "Peter? I know you say they're watching us, but it looks like they don't want to be found. Can you track them?"

Peter frowned. "We won't need to. Look around, Jack. It's only a matter of time before they come after us. In the meantime, we're going to keep poking around, kicking the bees' nest, trying to get a reaction. They're here, all right. And now that we're in, they're not going to let us out without a fight. But while they're leaving us alone, let's go look for Keomany's family."

In the back seat, Keomany said something so quietly Peter did not hear her.

"What?" he asked.

In the rearview mirror he saw her staring out the window and looked to see what had drawn her attention. A postal truck had crashed through the front of a bakery and what remained of the postman hung out the door, his chest torn open, ribs split, a gaping cavern where his organs ought to have been.

"Bobby Donovan," Keomany said, staring at the dead postman. "He was two years behind me in school. He asked me out once, when he was a freshman. It must have taken guts. I wish I'd gone."

Once more they all fell silent and Peter turned the Navigator around and drove back the way they had come, more vigilant than ever. Several blocks up Currier, Keomany told him to turn. Instantly the area became more residential and again most of the homes had been burned or ravaged. There were more cars wrecked or overturned or simply abandoned, and there were more bones.

Peter was focused on a house up on the left that was untouched. In the filthy orange light that seemed to envelop every structure, to fill their lungs with its stink, he could not be sure at first what it was that he saw on the lawn. A body, to be sure, but as he drove nearer, he saw that this corpse was not wisps of hair and flesh on a withered, skeletal frame. He put on the brakes and stared at the dead man who sprawled on the lawn, limbs jutting at odd angles, head caved in.

The corpse was fresh.

Somewhere nearby a dog was barking, its anger m.u.f.fled by windows and doors and walls. He glanced up at the house with the dead man sprawled on the lawn and he knew the sound was coming from within. A dog, alive, barking angrily.

From the garage.

Peter stared at the garage door, which was one of those with a row of square windows along the top. In the gloom within he thought he could see a human face illuminated by that sickly orange light. Possibly more than one.

The dog kept barking.

Dead cats impaled on a picket fence.

But no dead dogs.

On the other side of the street, two houses up, was another home that had been untouched. Peter sped up, came to a sudden stop in front of the house.

"What?" Nikki demanded. "What is it?"

Father Jack began to speak.

Peter shushed them all and listened. There were sounds he had not noticed before, a distant rumble like thunder underground, a small earthquake rolling their way. He put the sound out of his mind and listened more closely, staring at this new house, a beige ranch-style with an ancient, rusted television antenna on the roof that seemed odd in a world of satellite and cable.

And he heard it, coming from inside the house.

Barking.

"Keomany," he asked, speeding up again without looking back at her. "Please tell me your parents have a dog."

"Two," she said quickly, obviously sensing something in his manner. "Muggsy and Bonkers. Why?"

"I think there are people still alive in some of the houses that haven't been attacked. I've heard dogs barking at all of them. It's possible that-"

But he did not need to finish. Keomany understood. Quietly she began to pray, not only to Gaea, but to G.o.d as well, a G.o.d he guessed she had not put any faith in for a very long time. In a low voice, Father Jack joined his prayers with her own.

"The . . . the second right," she said. "Little Tree Lane. It's number seven."

Peter drove a little faster, no longer paying attention to the houses they pa.s.sed. His mind was awhirl as he tried to make sense of what had happened in Wickham. The town had been shunted through a breach to some infernal landscape, some parallel h.e.l.l-that was obvious. Whatever the primary life-forms were here, whatever the demons were, they were afraid of ordinary dogs. It might be a pheromone thing or just the barking, he did not know. But things that were afraid of dogs could not be responsible for an event of this magnitude, stealing an entire village from one plane of existence and displacing it to another. And yet he was sure it had not been mere chance.

Some savage intelligence had done this, some demon of incredible power.

So where was it?

The little green sign marking Little Tree Lane still stood, though the house on the corner had been reduced to rubble. Peter slowed the Navigator to make the turn.

Thunder shook the pavement beneath the vehicle. The ground bucked and rumbled.

"Peter!" Nikki cried, grabbing hold of the dashboard again. "A f.u.c.king earthquake now? Come on!"

"Not an earthquake," he said as he slammed on the brakes.

Just ahead of the Navigator a sinkhole appeared in the pavement, no larger than a sewer grate. Then the road cracked as something slammed at it from beneath. Once. Twice. The third impact tore the pavement up, pieces of it struck the front of the Navigator' s roof and broke a headlight. Had they struck the already cracked winds.h.i.+eld, it would have shattered, but the chunks of pavement thunked down around them.

A huge head poked out of the hole in the street, accompanied by clawed, three-fingered hands that seemed absurdly tiny in comparison. The ma.s.sive thing that hauled itself up out of the ground resembled a mole, but only in its snout and small claws and rough body shape. The thing was three times the size of the Navigator and its ridged hide reminded him of an armadillo. It sniffed the air and turned toward the Navigator and Peter saw that it had no eyes.

But it knew they were there.

"Slogute," Father Jack said. "I'd no idea they were real."

"Everything was real once," Peter told him.

Nikki leaned out the window, took aim, and fired three times. The bullets cut into the monstrosity and it turned and slithered its fat belly across the street away from them. On the lawn of the ruined house on the corner it paused, then turned to face them again, blind face searching, sniffing. Rivulets of thick white pus slid down its chest where the bullets had pierced its flesh.

"All right. Let's try that again," Father Jack said. He and Nikki both pointed their weapons out the window.

"My parents!" Keomany said. "Their house is right up there! Please just go!"

"Or at least save your ammunition," Peter said.

He spoke the words calmly, yet they must have carried his conviction with them. Nikki and Father Jack both turned away from their windows to shoot him a quizzical look. Peter gestured out the winds.h.i.+eld toward the hole the Slogute had made in the road.

The things that leaped out of that hole, scrambling on top of one another like a colony of ants, were hideously thin. The creatures had long arms with talons like black knives, their skeletal forms covered in something that looked for all the world like the carapace of some enormous insect. Their heads were plated as well, dark tongues like rapiers jabbing from beneath those blank, blue-black skull coverings. An image flashed through Peter's mind of horseshoe crabs, their sh.e.l.ls and tails, and then he saw that this was truly what they looked like, these things, their faces were like the sh.e.l.ls of horseshoe crabs, tongues like the crabs' tails.

He did not have to ask Keomany if these were the same demons she had run up against before; their indigo carapaces gleaming a filthy purple in the rotten pumpkin daylight matched her description perfectly.

"There are more," Keomany said behind him.

Peter glanced over his left shoulder and saw the things leaping and almost dancing out from behind the houses they had just pa.s.sed. Then, like ants, they were swarming from everywhere, from among shrubbery and from overturned cars and from the wreckage that had once been a neighborhood.

The Slogute had begun to burrow into the ground again as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. Or perhaps it was frightened. Not of him and his companions, Peter was sure.

Of them them.

"Just drive!" Keomany cried.

"They're not letting us go any further," Nikki said, voice cold.

"So we do it here," Peter said.

He killed the Navigator's engine and opened the door, both of his hands crackling with green energy. The indigo demons were swarming, more coming up from the collapsed street every moment. When the first of them leaped atop the hood of the Navigator, its taloned feet sc.r.a.ping the vehicle with a shriek of metal, Peter raised his right hand and with a gesture he crushed the demon in a circlet of green flame that cracked its sh.e.l.l and snapped it in two.

The magick flooded through him and his entire body was engulfed in brilliant, verdant power that lifted him up off the ground, crackling around him as though he were cradled with a ball of green lightning.

As one, the swarm of demons paused.

A whine like hydraulic engines rose up from the skittering beasts, and then they swept in toward the Navigator.

10.

Nancy Carling and her sister Paula had carefully mapped out their trip to Spain with the travel agent before departure, knew where their hotels were, how many hours it would take to drive their rental car from place to place, and what to expect when they got there. Neither of the sisters had ever been to Spain before, but both of them had long desired to explore this nation where romance and history echoed in every architectural flourish.

Upon their arrival in Seville, Nancy and Paula had been disappointed. Driving from the airport to the hotel had taken them past long rows of enormous apartment buildings that seemed to have been transported from some gritty dystopian future. The mazelike interior of the city had them hopelessly lost until they chanced on a sign pointing to their hotel, which they at last discovered on a narrow street with barely enough room for a single car to pa.s.s a pedestrian.

The hotel had been attached to some kind of church-an older building but without the grandeur of the religious edifices they expected to find here-and a U-shaped courtyard in front of the two buildings was all the parking that was available. The inside of the hotel was beautiful with tiled fresco walls and hanging plants, as well as smaller interior courtyard gardens whose flowers gave the whole place a wonderful, wildly aromatic bouquet.

After they had checked in, they walked deeper into the San Juan area of Seville and discovered the city's heart, a sprawl of alleys lined with restaurants and shops and inconspicuous doorways where men promised live flamenco dancing later that evening. At the center of all of this they had come upon an enormous square that spread out from the most breathtakingly beautiful and ma.s.sive structure either of them had ever seen.

In touring the Cathedral of Seville they learned that those who had built it had set out to construct a church so immense that anyone beholding it would take its architects for madmen. The Carling sisters had seen photographs before coming to Seville, of course, but they were nothing compared to the awesome reality.

This, then, was Spain.

That night when they sat down for a very late dinner-yet early by the standards of Spaniards. who rarely ate before 10 P.M P.M.-they were already examining their travel plans. They had struck up a conversation with an elderly couple from Scotland who sat at the next table in the otherwise empty restaurant. Only tourists ever ate this early. Stuart and Claire Vandal had done quite a bit of traveling and when the sisters explained their plans subsequent to their departure from Seville-a leisurely drive south to the coastal resort town of Torremelindos-the Vandals grew almost stern.