And Amos W. Baldwell, Bookseller, bought by an enterprising young couple when the original owner gave up and left town, was belly up within a few months.
Kate had felt the walls closing in, then. She could see no horizon in Peters. The town had no windows to the outside world, no doors. It neither welcomed nor inquired. But because it had been Craig's town, and because she'd wanted to keep something of him, no matter how distant from the reality of who he'd been, she'd stayed. In that bloodless, dusty, drybone atmosphere, she had accommodated herself to the verities of small-town life; she'd gone to library meetings and looked into the Jaycees; she'd attended events and pretended contentment.
Driving west on Sunrise Boulevard through one of the smaller cities that made up the outer ranges of Fort Lauderdale, she felt herself dropped into the center of a world with a pulse, and its pulse made her own heart beat faster. This place where a new idea was not met with raised crosses and gasps of "spawn of Satan"; where people by-God bought books and read them and discussed them in the aisles of bookstores that were redolent of the rich scents of coffee and paper; where, standing quietly, the rustle of turning pages sounded like wind through the leaves of a forest of trees—this place lived. Breathed.
Kate breathed with it.
Suddenly she realized the road to her left had been Southwest 136 Avenue, where she'd needed to turn. She drove up to the Sawgrass Expressway, realized she would have to pay a toll if she used it to turn around, pulled off into the median and looped into the eastbound lane. Not the most legal of turns, but she was running short of quarters. She rechecked the map, turned right on 136, then left into a beautiful walled neighborhood. She needed a few minutes to locate Silver Palm Boulevard, and a few more to drive the ellipse it comprised, checking house numbers.
But as she swung left and headed west, she found Callion. His house, a sprawling two-story neo-Spanish hacienda, sat not too far back from the road but nearly hidden by the luxuriant, beautifully landscaped jungle growth. Birds of paradise graced bougainvillea-covered white stucco walls, sago palms and palmettos formed islands between a smooth curve of well-tended lawn, and the palms that graced the wrought-iron gate at the front entry gave way to flanking ficuses the size of ancient oaks. The brown-red of hand-baked roof tiles accentuated the predominantly green-and-white motif.
Kate hadn't expected Callion to live in a house like that. She wondered if she had the wrong place.
Rhiana's reaction set her straight. She said, "Kate, get out of here fast. There's something in there—something that's almost ready to explode…" The Glenravener went pale and shut her eyes.
Kate didn't stop to ask questions. She accelerated, turned right at her first opportunity, and right again on Sunrise Boulevard.
As she waited to pull out behind a line of traffic, she saw a huge mall complex across the boulevard. The signs that led to it were shaped like alligators. Her annoyance at those tacky signs, juxtaposed against her fear that whatever was going to explode would do so before she could get out of the neighborhood, struck her as at least bizarre and possibly insane.
When they were well away from Callion's area, Kate asked Rhiana, "What did you feel?"
Rhiana sat on the seat with her head hanging down, with her hands clenched in her lap and her eyes squeezed tightly shut. She looked like a child trying to convince herself that the monster wasn't under the bed while at the same time believing that it was. She whispered, "I don't know. Magic…angry and hungry…a predator pacing in a circle…trying to find an opening in the cage it's in…trying to break through the bars to the prey that it feels moving all around it, just out of its reach. It has a secret…it has a need that drives it to madness…but I don't know what it is."
"Callion?"
"No."
"The Watchers?"
"Maybe."
"Can we do something to stop it?"
"Not yet. It feels…" She exhaled sharply, frustration evident in every line of her body as her eyes came open and she turned to Kate. "We can't reach it inside of its cage. The trickles of magic I felt, the movement…they were only a part. Like light through a crack in a roof. A single pinhole, but the light that came through was so bright it illuminated the room. Terrible. Evil. Everything I could throw at this thing, it would devour. Some magic will keep it in its place, but not the magic I know." She fell silent; looked down at her hands, suddenly still as a wax figure, still as a corpse, as death.
Kate tried to imagine that caged predator. She couldn't get a feel for the sort of thing it was. None of the Glenraveners knew; none of them had been present when Callion took them from the woman who had been Watchmistress of Glenraven before this new woman, Jayjay Bennington. Kate thought of softball, of the Peters Library Lions. Kicked herself back on track.
This monster in Callion's house was a danger that wasn't going to respond to the spells she and Rhiana had practiced. It wasn't going to shrivel into a little ball and die. It paced. It hungered. It had secrets.
She wondered what secrets monsters might keep.
Chapter Twenty-Six
too close
pressure
hunger and bursting, pain, time closing time almost on them on us time to move to feed to grow
press here, press there, move faster
the walls the walls the walls the master's walls too tight too hard a shell that doesn't give doesn't stretch doesn't fit
must break
must
break
move faster
thin walls, movement wears them thinner, time growing near,
need
need
need
need
rivers of blood flesh warm blood hot skin and bone and hair and fear and pain running howling screaming weeping begging meat with bodies legs that run arms that flail bones that crack and twist and crunch full of moistness full of meat
the gifts the prey outside everywhere wander unhunted unknowing weak and slow and stupid shell-less, just outside the cage
contract
feel the pain pulse hotter, feel the power build
expand
the hunger comes the pain hot white pain maddening pain torture the master tortures it tortures the cage tortures and they we I
contract
expand
contract
and the walls thin
blood outside the cage blood so thick so hot we will drink the night to whiteness and the blood will run surge pour streams rivers oceans
something moves outside the walls
something dangerous
something hurtful cold hot whitelight wrapped in blood and flesh and bone but bad to eat bad dangerous searching
feeling
them us me
and then it moves away
knew it found them us me but not yet it will come for us it is hunting us but not yet not now
time they we I have time to move to stretch to fill
spin
faster
and the walls
thin
expand
contract
expand
and now the cage bulges
bulges
and they we I
contract
contract
contract
let the pain the hunger the madness build and build and build and wait, pull in tighter, harder, closer, small be small and angry hotwhite angrymad bloodhungry small
expand
free
hunt
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Val and Tik and Errga sat staring at the television when Kate and Rhiana came in, their expressions glassy and stunned.
"This is happening right now," Val said. He didn't look at them; his face never turned from the bright, flickering picture.
Kate heard screaming over the voice of an on-the-spot reporter, who was saying something about people running out carrying bodies.
Tik, his back shoved against the wall, his legs splayed, said, "This i
s worse than anything I've ever seen."
"What's happened? An airplane crash? A car accident? Did someone try to shoot the president?" Kate moved to the space between the double beds where she could see the screen better and tried to make sense of the images she saw.
By the time she got a look, the camera was leaving the outdoor screaming and hysteria behind. She could hear the sound of a siren in the background, or maybe a lot of sirens, but the reporter and his cameraman were moving past the huddled knots of weeping people who clung to each other and cried out to God in a dozen languages.
The reporter was no longer doing a standup. He was doing a walk-and-talk, a sort of stunned running monologue of what he found. He went through the doors and the picture on the television set did an excellent job of rendering the red of blood and gray-white blur of a young woman's body sprawled just inside, lost in the boneless grace of death. "There aren't any more people leaving the mall; I'm going to see if…I can find out what happened in here…what…I'm going to see if there are any survivors still trapped inside."
He'd come in through a side door. Kate got a quick glimpse of a Target sign and the red-and-white bull's-eye logo—then the camera panned left, down a side aisle. Three black boys in bright clothing lay unmoving. Silent. The store was silent. If there were survivors inside, Kate would have expected to hear some sounds. The cliche "silent as a tomb" took on fresh meaning.
"Again," a voice-over said, "we're looking live at the inside of the Sawgrass Mills Outlet Mall in West Broward County, where just moments ago people poured out of the building's many exits, screaming 'the lights, the lights.' Back to you, John."
John, the reporter, was breathing hard, stopping from time to time to stare at a particularly gruesome death tableau. "Thanks, Bill. I can't see any sign of an explosion. Nothing in the store seems to…to be out of place…except the…ah…the bodies. Not too many bodies, really, considering that at this time of the day this place is usually wall to wall."
The camera panned to the right. A brown-skinned woman in Bermuda shorts and sandals leaned against some shelves, her eyes wide and unblinking, her mouth open. Blood ran from her eyes, from her nose, from her mouth, from her ears. Her hands lay palm-upward at her sides, fingers curling gracefully, her last gesture one of helplessness, of incomprehension, of "why me?"
"Hello," the reporter shouted. "Can anyone hear me?"
Only silence greeted his response.
"I hear police cars beginning to arrive. I'll try and cover them, too, but…this is unbelievable, this is just unbelievable…I can't hear anyone in here."
The reporter was looking at the camera as he reached the main aisle. For once, Kate saw a man reporting news who didn't seem to be getting a vicarious thrill out of the whole experience. He looked scared. He started to turn, to point out the direction he was going to explore, when halfway through his turn, he froze.
"Ohmigod. Ohmigod. Ohmigod." His voice dropped to a whisper. "Those poor people."
The camera panned right from the reporter, showing a thickening trail of corpses. Where the ones Kate had seen to that point looked like they had died where they'd fallen, this new angle revealed a level of violence an order of magnitude above what she'd seen before. Bodies no longer sprawled facedown in the aisles. Now they draped over aisles and piled into drifts and dunes against the shelving and formed a hill against the back wall. There had to be hundreds of people piled in that mound. Hundreds. The camera hung on that image far longer than Kate could bear; she heard the reporter retching off-camera but not out of mike range.
She couldn't believe the local news people were running the film live.
John came back on camera. He looked only slightly more alive than the corpses. "Things might be better in toward the center of the mall," he said. "I might have come in at the worst place. We'll look for survivors there." He turned left, and the scene switched to the news anchor at his desk.
"That film is being taken live at Sawgrass Mills Mall. We still have no reports of what might have caused this terrible tragedy. Survivors outside the building report seeing what they variously describe as 'a tornado of light,' 'millions of fireflies,' and 'something that looked like fireworks, but without the sound.' None report any explosions. Some, however, say they heard voices and faces in the light. To our military reporters, the hallucinatory nature of some of these descriptions suggest the release of some sort of gas, either accidentally or intentionally—"
Kate switched the channel. Another station was interviewing survivors.
She switched again, not certain what she was looking for.
Switch. A movie.
Switch. A game show.
A rerun.
A woman, her hair blowing and the sound of traffic from her side, standing in amongst a stand of palms, on a well-manicured median, in front of a row of large triangles of green-painted metal. Behind her, police cars, their lights flashing, blocked both entrance and egress to the place where she stood.
The camera backed off as she gestured toward her right, the camera's left, toward the mall that lay behind her. Kate wasn't listening to what she had to say. She was studying those huge green triangles.
The metal alligator head that made up the beginning of the sign came into view.
Sawgrass Mills Mall. She'd already known, but this was confirmation. The predator, whatever it was, had broken free.
"That's part of what we're after," she said softly. "The thing that did that, killed all those people—that's part of what we're hunting."
"No," Val said.
"Yes. Rhiana felt it in Callion's house and trying to get out right when we found the place. It must have escaped not too long after we left the neighborhood."
Tik took the remote control and flipped the channel back to Bill and John and the interior exploration of the mall. John and his cameraman were going through a cavernous food court. The lighted signs gave the scene a carnival look at odds with the toppled tables and bodies flung in all directions. Kate could only hear the reporter's running commentary, the questions from the anchor back at the station, and once, the sound of a police officer leaning against a wall being sick.
"Don't watch this," she said, but Rhiana, who'd said nothing until then, shook her head and said, "Don't turn it off. Not yet."
Kate looked over at her. Pale, sweating, her eyes huge in her small face, Rhiana still gave the impression that she was in control of herself and the situation.
Kate said, "Why not?"
"No closure."
"What?"
"No closure. Whatever I felt hasn't finished."
"It's still in there?"
"I don't know." Rhiana closed her eyes, and her body stiffened as she concentrated. Her knuckles and lips went white. Her breathing slowed.
"The death cloud is so thick…like dense fog. White fog. A fog made of light. There's light…so much light I…I can't make out clear details. Because the predator is light, too." She frowned, squinting her eyes tighter. "No. This won't do." She opened her eyes and looked at Kate. "We're too far away, and trying to connect to the site by looking at the TV picture isn't working. I don't know for sure what to expect. The feeling is not knowledge. It's intuition."
"We'll watch." Kate glanced at the screen, then turned away. "No. You watch. I have to go to the bathroom."
She didn't even have time to get up. The reporter and the cameraman behind him went around a corner. She could see a new line of shops, a claustrophobic, low-ceilinged interior, and in the middle of the corridor, down where it turned again, something huge and glowing.
The newsmen moved closer.
Details. Arms and legs and heads, bodies glowing deep ruby red, swelling, turning translucent so that first the muscles and then the bones were outlined in black against the balloon-like skin, and then light burning white-hot through the rifts, the bodies deflating, the skin melting into a puddle, the light moving down a layer, into and through the next bodies.
An enormous pile of corpses, b
ut the pile grew smaller as she stared.
The cameraman had started backing away. The reporter said, "Oh, shit, Lenny, we need to get out of here, man. Now."
Then the light changed. It lifted away from the bodies like mist rising off warm water in the cool night air; like fog rolling down a mountain; like a storm cloud grown enormous that wore its lightning on the outside—a storm cloud that knew anger and hunger and hatred, a storm cloud that, pulsing and flickering and burning, hunted and knew that it hunted. For an instant Kate could see it building momentum. Then reporter and cameraman turned and fled and the light was lost behind them, but not lost far enough.
They screamed. Light clouded the bouncing lens of the camera, firefly twinkles so beautiful she could not look away, and more deadly because they were so beautiful. She heard the first words from the cameraman, no longer nameless. Lenny. His name was Lenny.
"No! Back!"
He was Lenny, who had mistaken his invisibility from the viewers for true invisibility, who thought that journalistic privilege was a fact and not a convenient fiction, who had followed too long.
"God, no!"
Still faceless to the camera, Lenny—dying the way he had lived.
And John…John, who had words before, had none now.
His screams tore from his throat in short, terrible bursts, and when they died away, did so suddenly. The camera on Lenny's shoulder swung around as Lenny spun and toppled, showing John sprawled on the tiled mall floor; then it spun further, taking in the rest of the corridor in its slow-motion skid that was like an aerial ballet: looping crazily, hitting the ground, sliding forward, coming to rest on its side.
Pointed at the feeding mound.
And the animate light, the golden hell-cloud, descended like rain onto the bodies it had left.
The anchor's voice, hoarse. "Jesus, we let that go out on the air. Oh, Jesus."
And the scene snapped for just an instant to black.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
When Callion's phone rang, he almost didn't pick it up. But on the fifteenth ring, he grabbed the handset.
Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 02] Page 17
