Midnight's Angels - 03

by Tony Richards

  “That would be a nice idea.”

  His head didn’t even lift. And his eyes disappeared again. He began lining up another shot, as if we weren’t discussing anything important.

  “Why should I even bother? Those who’ve lost their souls? They’re entirely happy as they are.”

  I heard some odd things come out from his mouth, but that took me right off balance. What on earth was he talking about?

  “It took me a while to see the truth. But human beings, sport … on one level they resent their humanity, their conscience. Those things stop them doing what they really want, hem them in and hold them back. That pack that chased you to the gate? They’re fine like that, all mindless and feral. Even Levin.”

  I took in his words with a numb feeling of shock. Then I started getting angry. This was a fine time for Raine to turn into an amateur philosopher. A pretty lousy one at that. Exactly what had brought this on?

  He seemed to sense what I was thinking.

  “The fact is,” he explained, “I’ve grown tired with humanity in general. I’ve worked very hard to help this town.”

  He’d done no such thing. He’d helped a little when I’d prodded him, but that was pretty much the whole picture. But -- as was normally the case with the man -- the facts of the matter didn’t even slow him down.

  “And what have I gotten for it? Nothing really changes. Nothing genuinely improves. Here you are yet again, sport, coming to me cap in hand, begging me to get you out of another mess. I say there are limits. I say ‘no,’ it stops here!”

  There was another clack. A ball ascended vertically and hovered, still spinning, beneath the chandelier.

  “Woody?” I asked, biting down my fury. It was a bad idea to lose your temper with him and I already knew that. “You’re not serious?”

  He straightened again and faced me.

  “I’m afraid I am. You and that nasty girl of yours are going to have to sort this out by yourselves.”

  I felt my gaze narrow. “Who helped us at the gate then, if it wasn’t you?”

  His eyes became deeply puzzled, like he didn’t have the faintest clue what I was talking about. But then his attention wandered away from me.

  Right in that instant, I finally got it. Saw what this was genuinely about. When Woody’s face shifted position, a touch of candlelight wandered across it. I could see how tight his features were. It wasn’t indifference I was looking at. It was a kind of blank embarrassment.

  It wasn’t the case that he was willingly abandoning us. Rather, he was trying to save face. He had probably already looked into the problem. And seen that there was nothing he could do to solve it.

  The great Woodard Raine, Master of the Manor, powerless? The sky would cave in before he admitted that. Or maybe -- it occurred to me -- he wasn’t consciously lying. I knew the way reality got filtered in his mind. Maybe he’d convinced himself that his opinion was an honest one. I could see how that was possible. The question now was how to change it.

  The best way to approach this was to gently nudge his train of thought.

  “People aren’t all bad, you know.”

  “I never said they were.”

  “If you leave them this way, then the whole town might go down.”

  “Maybe for the best,” he answered dryly.

  “You’d have no regrets if that happened? All that history and heritage gone? Your family’s tradition?”

  His free hand wandered through the air like some pale butterfly. “I’ve become a lot more of a modernist than I used to be.”

  “So this is the message that you want me to go back with? The Master of the Manor doesn’t care about us anymore.”

  The brightness faded in his gaze. So I’d managed to get to him a little. But he turned his head further away a moment after that. He couldn’t even bear to look me in the eye.

  “Conversation over, sport. If you’d excuse me …?”

  I widened my stance slightly, told him, “I’m not going anywhere.”

  The man just sighed and set his pool cue down.

  Spread both his palms in my direction. And there was a flash of pure white light, so dazzling it blinded me. And an accompanying sense of motion.

  When my vision cleared, I was no longer in the manor, nor even in the grounds. I was at the foot of Sycamore Hill, beside my car, where I had started. Cassie was beside me and was turning around on the spot, utterly bewildered.

  She finally pulled herself together enough to ask me, “What went on in there?”

  But I didn’t answer her for a full minute. I just gazed up the hill in the direction of the manor, a pressure like concrete filling up my gut.

  We’d been in trouble many times before. But never this badly -- never so deeply that it scared Raine off. He was so detached from reality that I’d not previously believed such a thing was possible.

  Apparently, it was.

  CHAPTER 29

  When Ritchie Vallencourt walked back into the small room in the hospital, Amelia Hobart peered at him and immediately commented, “You look like you’ve had a rough night, Sergeant.”

  She didn’t look too great herself. Her curly hair had obviously been tugged at by her fingers far too often. Her skin was the color of ashes from a week-old fire, and her eyes were more marbled than they’d ever been. Ritchie could see it wasn’t merely tiredness making her look that way. Hurt had scoured away her optimism and resilience.

  Propped up in the bed beside her, Big Saul stared at him with genuine unease, as guileless as a child.

  “Who’re you?” he mumbled.

  Ritchie felt his heart sink. He had already been warned of this, but hearing about it and seeing it for real were two entirely different things.

  “Richard Vallencourt,” he answered softly. There was something about this whole business that struck him as insane. “Lieu, you promoted me yourself, a couple of months back.”

  “I did?” Hobart turned to his wife. “Amy here keeps telling me I used to be some kind of cop. I suppose that might be true.”

  He couldn’t even get her name right. Tears began appearing in the corners of Amelia’s eyes. Ritchie already knew that their young daughters had been sent home, frightened by the way their father didn’t even recognize them.

  He moved up closer to the bed, making sure he kept his movements smooth and even.

  “Saul, you were a great cop. Everyone in town relied on you.”

  “But this is just a small town, isn’t it? There can’t have been too much for me to do.” Saul worked his jaw pensively. “I do remember one thing. Always wanting to leave, and never being able. Do you suppose I was bored here?”

  When a smile worked its way across Ritchie’s lips, it was a bitter one. He tried to hide that, but couldn’t entirely.

  “To be honest, Raine’s Landing ain’t that boring, Lieu. Don’t you remember Saruak? Cornelius Hanlon?”

  “Bad guys?” Saul asked mildly. “So did I arrest them?”

  Amelia decided to change the subject. She had obviously been putting up with this for hours, and wanted to find out what had been going on outside.

  “A little news has been coming in. And I have to say, it sounds pretty bad.”

  Ritchie gave his head a tired shake. “That’s the truth.”

  Amelia’s head tilted, her lips tightening. “I heard that the adepts …”

  But she couldn’t even finish up that sentence. To her, like most of the folks in this town, the loss of their natural leaders was a pretty frightening thought.

  “Willets and Martha are still with us,” Ritchie assured her.

  She nodded uncertainly, and he knew what she was thinking. Just the crazy doctor and a nice but second string witch, out of the whole bunch of them?

  “That’s good?” Saul asked, smiling hopefully.

  Looking back at his boss, Ritchie felt his heart sink even lower. The lieutenant was staring at them vacantly. Following their conversation without understanding so much as a word of
it.

  How exactly do I answer that? he wondered. Because the plain truth was that there was very little good this morning.

  “Saul was saying something earlier,” Amelia pointed out.

  She was beginning to talk about her husband like he was not even in the room, and Ritchie felt awkward about that.

  “He kept on saying ’Tyburn,’ over and over. What do you suppose it means?”

  Puzzled, Ritchie asked her when he’d started saying that. And when she told him the precise time, his eyes came open very wide indeed.

  * * *

  Accompanied by three of his neighbors, Nick McLeish had headed back to his own district, Garnerstown. Not everyone had fled last night. A lot of people had stayed put for practical reasons -- very small children and the like. Or they’d been hardheaded, stubborn, and refused to abandon their homes. That pretty much summed up the place, the independent spirit of its people. Nick was proud of that.

  For the first half hour, he and his companions had tried to stick together. But there were so many householders remaining, they had finally agreed to split up. They could cover far more ground that way. It was daytime after all, and what could happen to them?

  Nick strolled down the street parallel with his own, wandering from house to house and bringing people up to date on what was happening. And it was far from an unpleasant chore. He had a lot of friends around these parts. Had lived here since he’d first gotten married, bought a house. And, being a talkative and helpful sort, he tended to get on with pretty much anyone.

  The fact was, he’d done okay for himself in the construction business, and could have afforded to move out a few years back. But he had set down his roots here. He liked the casual atmosphere of the whole neighborhood. What did he need with somewhere snooty? So even when the opportunity had arisen -- when his house had been flattened during the demon attacks -- he had decided to simply rebuild and stay put.

  Not that the hood was what you’d call pretty. Garnerstown wasn’t a slum precisely, but it wasn’t any Sycamore Hill either. The back streets were in disrepair, the pavement full of potholes and the curbstones cracked. A lot of folk simply didn’t have the where-with-all to keep their houses properly spruced up. If you could have made a living selling dandelions, then this place would be a goldmine. You could see them on the lawns and driveways, everywhere you looked.

  But that wasn’t the point, so far as he was concerned. To get the real measure of a place, you didn’t look at the surface. You looked into people’s hearts. And the hearts of the folk around here were mostly open, honest ones. That was worth more, to his mind, than all the silk in China.

  He knocked on the Tibbins family’s front door. Wanda’s face appeared, slightly bug-eyed from lack of sleep. Her two kids were pulling at her skirt, behind her. He waited until she’d sent them away before filling her in on the situation.

  “Just how long are we supposed to keep a fire going?” she asked. “And with what, exactly? Do we burn our clothes?”

  Which was something he’d been hearing a lot. A good number of families on this street were already -- to put it bluntly -- scratching their asses with pennies. And the homes around this way were oil-heated, so firewood was not abundant.

  He explained to her what he’d suggested to her neighbors, that the whole street get together and start up some kind of communal bonfire, the same way as in the square last night.

  “The young uns would like that,” she nodded.

  And he grinned back at her. See, that was the true Garnerstown spirit.

  There was only one house left before he moved on to another street. And he knew its occupant extremely well. When he had time to himself -- which was not often with a young family -- Nick liked to hang out in the big, beer-smelling pool hall at the bottom of Keane. And old Bob Crakely had been running that place back when most of his customers had been in diapers.

  He lived alone. Always had. Bob had had a good number of female admirers in his younger days, or so the stories went. But for some reason, he’d never settled down.

  He was a good old feller, ready to chew the fat and offer his opinion on whatever subject was under discussion. Nick’s step took on an extra spring as he crossed the street. Hanging out with Bob had always been a pleasure.

  Thick net curtains hung across the windows in deep pleated folds. They were tinged with brown -- the fellow smoked a pipe. The lawn had recently been mown -- you could smell the sharpness on the air as you headed down the pathway. But no lights were on and to all appearances the house was empty.

  Which was odd, because Bob didn’t open the pool hall until midday. So he ought to be around.

  Nick rapped at the front door with his knuckles. It swung open a little under that slight pressure -- for some reason, it was off the latch.

  He hadn’t thought to bring a gun, believing himself safe in the daylight. It looked pretty dim in there. Nick’s heart started thumping, and he took a couple of steps back. Cast his gaze around, searching for some kind of weapon. And found one within a few seconds. A bent, rusty barbequing fork was lying in a weed-filled border. So he went down and picked it up, then stepped onto the porch again.

  Just a precaution, he kept telling himself. Maybe the latch was faulty. This street might be on its uppers, but there was not a great need for security around here. Nobody was going to steal from you. It was fully possible Bob might not have heard about the creatures out on Greenwood. Wandered home a little drunk last night, and failed to shut it properly.

  He pushed the door the rest of the way open. Its hinges squeaked when he did that. The living room looked hollow and abandoned. Sunlight filtered only very weakly through the dense screen of stained nets.

  “Hullo?”

  Nothing. He could hear no movement in the house. Nick edged in slowly, holding the fork out in front of him.

  “Bob?”

  He continued through until he found the bedroom. The sheets were lying in a crumpled heap at the center of the mattress, and it didn’t look like anyone had slept there recently.

  Maybe Bob -- who had become a little infirm this year -- had fallen over in the shower or something? So Nick checked the bathroom next.

  The light wouldn’t come on. His own murky reflection stared back at him from a mirror. He remained in the doorway, tugging at the cord. Then he tried one of the switches in the hall. And, hell, the power was out.

  The next door, when he opened it, led down to the cellar. It was so dark that he could barely see the top few steps. Too dark. An alarm bell started ringing in his mind. Maybe one of those inhuman things -- those ‘hominids,’ as Ross had started calling them -- had gotten as far as this district. Come along this street last night, and found a way into this place.

  In which case, he ought to get some backup.

  Something shifted in the gloom below him. There was no sound, merely a slight change in the texture of the lightlessness down there. Nick’s throat got tight, the fork quivering in his grasp.

  That was when the light -- already dim -- started to fade throughout the hallway. Blackness started swallowing it up. He’d done this, he understood, by opening the basement door. This darkness had substance, like a gas or fluid. And he’d let it out.

  He swiveled away and began to run. It was only a few yards to the living room. But somehow, it now seemed a greater distance. Like it was retreating from him, even though that was not possible.

  And when he heard a scuttling noise closing in behind him, he knew he wasn’t going to make it.

  * * *

  I tried to stab him, was one of his last conscious thoughts. And he dodged it like a teenager.

  The old rules didn’t seem to apply anymore.

  Then he was crashing down on his side, the man on top of him. Before he could think what to do, his arms were pinned. He opened his mouth to yell out. And Bob’s face clamped down across his own.

  Nick’s very final thought was of his family. His wife, Maggie, and their kids. How would they s
urvive without him? His heart swelled up with feeling for them.

  Then his consciousness was swallowed. And when he thought of those people again, it was no longer in human terms.

  Breed. They weaker. I control.

  His mind went to the people in the streets around him.

  Enemies. I fight. And conquer.

  Bob climbed slowly off him and then scuttled back into the cellar. And Nick knew that he ought to follow, but he felt a twinge of curiosity.

  Getting up halfway, still resting part of his weight on his hands, he finally reached the living room. The furniture looked different from this angle. The thin light from the windows pained him, making him squint unhappily. But he stuck at it, getting closer to them until he could see the street outside.

  A few people were hurrying along it by this juncture, talking animatedly and obviously nervous. His teeth clenched together in a bestial grin. They were terrified of his kind. That gave him a big advantage.

  Soft. Pathetic. Full of doubt. There is nothing you can do to stop us.

  And then a voice began to speak inside his head. The deepest voice he’d ever heard. The words came champing out like they were being produced from a machine, and echoed strongly.

  They were telling him to go back to the cellar, rest, and wait for the final assault.

  And he immediately knew whose voice it was.

  His new master’s.

  CHAPTER 30

  Somehow, I managed to get a couple of hours sleep. It was in the sparsely furnished little office that I keep a couple of stories up on the west side of the square. I couldn’t tell you why I’ve hung onto it, to be honest. I have never done much genuine business there. But the building was owned by Kurt van Friesling -- he had waived the rent since that whole business with Saruak. And something in me liked to have a bolt hole like this. A place away from home, at least. Someplace where I could hide from the emptiness that greets me at my own front door.

  So I pulled the flimsy blinds shut, slumped down in my chair. Then put my feet up on the desk, and slipped into a doze that became gradually deeper.

  The dream I had was -- as ever -- about my missing family. But not the usual kind, this time. They’d come back, but they had been changed. Were down on all fours, their eyes glazed and warmthless. And when their mouths came open, when they started making creaking sounds …