Midnight's Angels - 03

by Tony Richards

  I hunkered down a while and watched her. And it began occurring to me, far more than on earlier visits, that she looked a good deal healthier than she’d done in a whole age. Her skin had been dead pale for the past couple of years. By this time, it was light brown from being so much in the open air. And even though her hair was dirty, there was a rich luster to it.

  When she finished exercising, stood up, everything about the way she moved was measured. Back when she had lived in town, she’d normally looked keyed-up and twitchy.

  Her dark eyes seemed to have a gentler glow. There was still a strength and fire in them, but it was more controlled.

  Was she ready to come back? I wondered. Or did living out here genuinely suit her, and she’d only implode again if she was lured back into her old lifestyle? I didn’t make the slightest move, and kept myself completely hidden. Probably because I was afraid what the answer to that last question might be.

  I kept on wondering how to go about this. But as it turned out, the decision was taken out of my hands.

  Cassie reached across and wiped her face down with a nearby rag. And then, without even turning, asked out loud, “Enjoying the show?”

  And when I failed to reply, she followed that up with, “What, the detective business getting to you too much? Turning you into some kind of peeper? That’s not you.”

  At which point, I stood up. And she glanced across her shoulder at me.

  “How did you know I was here?” I asked.

  “I’ve known the past five or six weeks. Hell, I could feel you watching me.”

  “And you knew it was me precisely how?”

  She stared directly into my face, with a look that told me I was being stupid. Then she put that aside with a shrug. Went across and lit the fire. Got some water from the river in a metal pot, poured some granules from a tin can into that, and suspended it over the flames.

  “It’s okay,” she told me, once that she was finished. “You can come the whole way down here. I don’t bite anymore.”

  “Saul’s recovered,” I called out to her as I headed down the slope.

  I really felt she had to know that straight away.

  And when she looked at me again, it was with amazement. She didn’t seem sure how to react. Almost killing him had been one of the things that had pushed her over the edge, making her abandon her old life completely. Now, a variety of emotions fought each other across her features.

  “He was out of it a good long while,” I continued. “But he’s back amongst the living. Willets mostly saved him.”

  Her eyes went blankly glossy for a while. Which made me worry she was going into some kind of a relapse. But they cleared at last. And she even managed a tight smile.

  “That’s real good news,” she answered. “Boy, I’m definitely pleased to hear that.”

  She said it in a lengthy gasp, as though a part of herself had been holding its breath this entire time. Then her gaze began to sparkle slightly. I could see how genuinely glad she was.

  But it was time to let the past go and move on beyond it. A necessary process. One that I had to be careful to approach gently and slowly. She looked a little more beat up, this close to me, than she had done from a distance. Still in great shape, though. But did that apply to her mentality?

  “Nice little setup you’ve got yourself here,” I said, glancing around again and trying not to sound sarcastic.

  She nodded. “Yeah. I’ve even got a sitting-log.”

  “A what?”

  She pointed to a fallen tree trunk over to our left. “Everyone should have one. Make yourself comfortable, and I’ll fetch us some coffee.”

  I did as she had asked, finding it quite hard to get comfortable. But I pretended it was fine. Watched as she poured hot brown liquid into two stained metal mugs. She was acting casually about all this, like nothing in the slightest was out of the ordinary. But I simply couldn’t read her, work out how she really felt, and I’d been able to before.

  I took the mug she offered. Sipped at it, then spat it out, wiping the back of my hand across my mouth with something approaching anguish.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “Roasted, ground-up acorns. Folks in Europe used it as a coffee substitute during the War.” She gave me a joking look. “I may not read an awful lot, but even I’ve watched the History Channel from time to time.”

  I wished she hadn’t, spilling the remainder of the muck onto the ground between my feet. That didn’t seem to offend her.

  She sat down herself, about five feet away from me. It’s easy to avoid getting up close and personal on a sitting-log.

  Studied me a while, then turned her gaze out on the river.

  “Something new’s up, isn’t it?”

  I suddenly felt very bad. God, but I could sense what she was thinking. The first time I’d approached her in two months, and it was when I needed something. Trouble a-brewing. Big black clouds on the horizon.

  So I tried to explain. “It’s not like that.”

  “What is it like, then?” she came back, still refusing to look at me. “Any major problems? What the hell, just dump them in Cass Mallory’s lap. She’ll sort ‘em out. That’s what she’s for.”

  “There’s more to you than that.”

  But her head shook.

  “That was part of the problem, Ross. I’m not sure there was. Not since my kids went, anyway. And maybe that’s the reason why I quit and came out here. I could no longer bear living in one dimension.”

  She gave me a moment to absorb that, and then added, “Know what frame of mind I’ve been in, most of my time out here?”

  I stared at her, my shoulders hunching.

  “Pretty bored, to tell the truth. And quite honestly, I’ve been fine with that. No monsters to fight. No demons to vanquish. No one shouting, ‘Help me, save me!’” Her mouth twisted. “Who saves me? I’ve done a lot of thinking on that score.”

  I struggled to get the measure of what she was trying to tell me.

  “If you’re talking about personal stuff …?”

  She let out a brisk kind of laugh that was mostly snorting.

  “I’m talking about me, Ross. And there’s nothing for me back there,” and she tilted her head in the direction of the town, “except obligation, duty, expectation. None of it reciprocal.”

  Her neck seemed to go tense. She rubbed at it.

  “I turn up. I save the day. I go back home again, and folks are glad I helped them, but that’s all. You cope with it fine. It seems to suit you. But I don’t think I can hack it any more.”

  “You’ve got friends.”

  “I had a cat as well. You’d think friends and a cat would be enough. But hey, apparently they’re not.”

  “You could have just about any man you wanted.”

  “Been down that route, more than a few times. And look what it got me.”

  She was talking about Tom Larson, the idiot and lay-about who’d accidentally made her kids vanish. And when her eyes grew damp, I knew that she was staring back into the past.

  I’d been going cautiously with her up until this point. But figured maybe that had been the wrong approach, and so I let a slight hint of annoyance creep into my tone.

  “What do you want, the whole town to turn out and throw you a parade? We don’t do this because we have to. We do it because we can. You said it yourself, once. ‘It’s gotta be someone.’”

  Staring at her wasn’t helping, so I gazed out at the river too.

  “Whether we care or not, the monsters are still out there. They’re not going to stop hurting people because you don’t want to fight them anymore.”

  I chanced another glance at her. Cassie’s head had dropped, and she studied her knees for a while.

  “Whoa,” she murmured finally. “For the strong and silent type, you’re certainly talkative this morning.”

  Then she peered at me again and asked, “Okay, what’s happening?”

  I went away from her some half
an hour later with the promise that she’d think about it echoing between my ears.

  CHAPTER 14

  Einstein was of the opinion that time is relative, dependent on our own perception. What he failed to mention was that perceived time can really suck. The fact was, we had until nightfall -- if Willets was right -- until the angel things came back again. And the daylight hours were getting chewed up like a pet dog eating its family’s breakfast bacon.

  One of the most difficult questions was how to persuade the general public to keep their lights on throughout the night without spreading panic too early. During the lunchtime news on RLKB, Marlon Fisk, the town’s roving reporter, made some guff up about ‘power surges’ and urged everybody to cooperate. Which only jammed up the switchboard with people complaining.

  “Are you guys offering to pay our utility bills?”

  Folks in a provincial town like ours like to watch their pennies.

  “Tell them the truth, goddamit,” Ritchie Vallencourt kept urging.

  And he had a point, since the truth would -- without doubt -- make itself apparent soon enough.

  That sparked a whole new conversation. We’d re-gathered in Judge Levin’s study, which had turned into our base of operations by this hour. The way that it was fitted out -- the shelves of books and the expensive prints, the collections of scrimshaw in the cabinets -- gave the place the air of an exclusive clubroom. Which, when you looked around at its current occupants, was appropriate.

  Gaspar Vernon had shown up, in a far more subdued mood than usual. The McGinley sisters were here too, and Kurt van Friesling and Cobb Walters. Martha Howard-Brett had arrived. And I was pleased to see that, not only because I liked her. Her help had proved invaluable, the last time we’d been facing danger. She was talking to Willets who -- unusually for a man so reclusive -- had opted to stick around.

  His manner had become casual and rather friendly. He had a thumb tucked under his chin as he spoke, and seemed to have forgotten that he was usually a solitary crank. Maybe it was simply the effect that Martha had on people. But it looked to me like he was easing himself back into the fabric of the normal world.

  The judge was behind his desk. Fully dressed by this time, he’d taken off his jacket, rolled his shirtsleeves up, and was puffing on one of those big cigars he liked. A layer of blue haze cut across the air in the room. And if anybody minded that, they kept it to themselves. This was his home. We were his guests here.

  He leant forward, managing to draw Willets’s attention away from Martha’s lovely face.

  “I still can’t figure,” he asked, “why you’re the only person here who can sense these things and understand what they’re doing.”

  The happy expression vanished from the doctor’s features, and he went back to looking strained and pensive. We watched as he tried to sort his thoughts out.

  “I’ve been a long while living in the dark,” he answered. “And’ve had very little to do with my time but let my mind and senses wander. Maybe that has strengthened them, like doing mental push-ups. I’ve learned an awful lot about the dark side of the Universe, these past few years. It holds few surprises for me. So perhaps I’ve simply gotten attuned.”

  He didn’t sound the least bit pleased about that, and I couldn’t blame him. There were some things in this life that you ought not get used to. Martha reached out, touched his sleeve, and he did not flinch away from her.

  “But what’s brought these things here? To the Landing especially?”

  The doctor slowly closed his eyes, and I could see he was still probing.

  “They’ve been on the move ever since the Dweller was driven away. Have been visiting different galaxies and different worlds, and extinguishing light and life everywhere they find it. Trying to recreate the Void, in fact. We haven’t seen them at their strongest yet. I get this feeling that … the longer they stay in a place, the more they take control of it. They might even develop new powers to help them achieve their goals.”

  Willets paused, his dark brow creasing.

  “As to why Raine’s Landing specifically, out of all the places in this world? Haven’t any of you noticed yet? When I first arrived in this town, there were supernatural attacks for sure. But not so dramatic, and not nearly so frequently. Yet in the past six months, we’ve had Saruak, then the Shadow Man, then this. And do you think it’s mere coincidence?”

  His eyelids drifted apart, the pupils gleaming. Then he peered around at us, trying to see if we had got his drift.

  “This town’s becoming like a kind of magnet for the evil things out in the darkness. Don’t you see? There’s some kind of convergence going on. And it’s speeding up and getting worse.”

  Which made me think about the ancient shaman woman who had visited me -- Amashta -- and her talk of matters prophesied. But I kept my attention on the here and now, still gazing at the doctor.

  “To be frank,” he added, “I’m not sure I want to be here when it comes to a conclusion.”

  * * *

  The whole group of us were outside a few hours later. We had spent most of the afternoon trying to come up with a workable plan. The daylight was failing, bleeding off to leave us with the hollow gray of twilight. We walked to a point on Sycamore Hill from which we could see most of the town.

  The streetlights were coming on a little earlier than usual, courtesy of our power company. Push-comes-to-shove time was on its way, and Ritchie Vallencourt in particular knew it. He was talking almost constantly on his cell phone.

  “The gods damn it!” Gaspar Vernon snapped. The fringe of his moustache was stained with wine, just like the last time that I’d met him, and I wondered if he had a problem. “I can see plenty of houses with their lights switched off!”

  I glanced at my watch.

  “A lot of people won’t be back from work yet,” I told him.

  And what might be waiting for them when they arrived back home? Vallencourt had probably been right. Maybe we should have outlined the whole situation from the get go.

  I gazed west with a heavy heart. Beyond the mass of dense autumnal forest that surrounds the town, only the top edge of the sun was still in view. It had turned red as a cherry. Then it vanished completely.

  The clouds off in that direction turned a heavy shade of crimson. And the shadows around us deepened.

  The Landing was glittering more brightly than it usually did. Sparkling like a big static firework display in the cooling evening air. In spite of Gaspar Vernon’s retort, a lot of folk had done as they’d been asked. And there were moving lights as well, headlamps drifting along the major avenues. This was how big cities had to look, when viewed from a distance. I could only guess at that, but hoped I’d got it accurately.

  Hell, my mind was wandering again. Shying away from what was happening. Which was understandable, but I dug my fingernails into my palms.

  Ritchie’s cell emitted its sharp ring-tone once again. I was standing close to him, could hear the voice emerging from it. And I recognized Harrison Whitby, who had returned to his post on Cartland after a short break.

  “We’ve finally got movement, sir!”

  CHAPTER 15

  But he couldn’t have been talking about the movement we were seeing. Because, right over on the eastern edge of town -- where the meteors had originally landed -- two glowing specks of flickering light suddenly appeared. They rose slightly above the rooftops, re-entering our town from the forest. Then they started moving inward, at a good hard speed.

  They weren’t heading for Cartland Street, opting instead to head across the southern suburbs. And there was no way of making out, from this distance, exactly what was going on down there. So precisely what kind of movement was Harrison referring to?

  I got a terrible tight feeling in my gut, one I was familiar with. The kind that comes when you take in the fact that the ordure has already hit the fan. Everything seemed to be happening at once.

  Ritchie started shouting on his cell phone, but to no effect.
It seemed to have gone dead. The sorcerers around me had tensed up and were looking imperious. Almost like they’d swelled a little in the dimness, their faces becoming very prominent. Their eyes had taken on a slightly lambent glow. They were getting ready to do battle. I’d already seen what that could lead to.

  “Where the hell’s the third one?” I heard Lehman Willets mutter.

  Which was a good point. Only two of our new visitors had shown themselves. I supposed they were the same ones who had tried to get at him in the abandoned building.

  The third, the one that had presumably been roaming around town, hadn’t appeared. I wondered where it was. What was going on right at this moment seemed pretty disorganized. Was that the case, or did these ‘angels’ have a plan?

  We were going to have to split up. That much was obvious. I turned around to point that out. But events had gotten ahead of me.

  Levin and his closest colleagues were no longer on the hill’s crest. They’d turned themselves into rolling, churning balls of darkened smoke, and were hurtling off in the direction of the two approaching spots of brightness. Which left myself, Ritchie, Martha Howard-Brett, and Lehman Willets. Vallencourt looked anxious to get going. Let’s face it, something might have happened to his men.

  I thought of heading for my car. But there were quicker ways to travel.

  “Ross?”

  Martha held out a slender hand. I’d been in this kind of situation before, knew what was involved, and took it. Then she beckoned Vallencourt to do the same. She nodded to the doctor.

  “Ready?”

  We were transformed to swiftly moving blurs. I knew that, but it didn’t feel like that from the inside. More like everything around us had become completely insubstantial. Like the real world hadn’t stopped exactly, but had taken on the same form as a rather shapeless dream.

  It wasn’t anything that you’d call pleasant.

  And you still don’t understand why I hate magic?

  * * *

  When everything came back, we were on Cartland Street. The only thing odd was it looked a good deal darker than it should have been. Darker than the rest of town. Not a single one of the streetlamps was on. And there was not the flicker of so much as the dimmest bulb from any of the surrounding windows. Which immediately set my nerves jangling. This wasn’t right. The place looked like the neighborhood from hell, everything around us rendered down to murky silhouettes.