I went inside the Town Hall and went up the staircase to a window on the top story to get a better view of what was going on.
What had happened to Tyburn and the hill come yesterday’s dawn had spread pretty much everywhere. Most of the town was still completely dark. The rising sunlight wasn’t touching it.
It chilled me to the bone to see the Landing that way, its streets and houses sunken in an immovable murk. The blackness that had settled over it rose above the rooftops like the densest possible of smogs, slowly filtering off a few yards above the low suburban shingles. So the Dweller’s influence had spread to almost every corner of our home.
The square was still okay. So were O’Connell and a couple of streets running parallel. But it looked like we were stranded on an island by this time, surrounded by a huge expanse of motionless black water. And we’ve always been an isolated place, but this was just too much.
I headed back down. As I descended the stone steps out front of the building, the power lines above stopped crackling and the streetlamps finally went out. So did every other bulb in view. We were now being bathed in golden autumnal sunshine, so that didn’t bother anyone particularly.
Cassie reappeared, from the same direction I’d originally come. And the fact that she was headed this way wasn’t simply a coincidence. Her bike was parked below me. She was coming to fetch it. I took in the fact that she’d been gone all night.
And I could see it in the way that she was moving. I could see it in her eyes, when she got closer and looked up at me. And my reaction to that … well, it even surprised me a little.
I’d always known that this would happen one day. She was an attractive, vibrant woman, with a long string of affairs in her past. But -- close as we were, with such a tight bond between us -- I had always imagined that, when this moment came, I’d be a little jealous.
But I wasn’t in the slightest. I felt pleased for her, if anything. So there it was then. The basic truth of our relationship. We were simply good and earnest friends, and nothing more than that.
How to broach the subject, though? I knew it would be mean to tease her. Then I thought, the hell with that.
“Where’ve you been?” I asked, raising my eyebrows in a mock-judgmental fashion.
Her face did not take on even the slightest extra shade of color. She was much too grown-up and experienced for anything so girlish. But when she smiled at me, there was a slight uncertainty to it.
“Oh, you know, with Quinn. Just hanging out.”
“Hanging out or working out?” I noticed that her hair was damp. “Looks like someone let you use their shower.”
“Wish I could say the same for you,” she came back at me smugly. “You look terrible.”
And I saw she had a point. My hair felt all pushed to one side, and my clothes were crumpled like a month-old newspaper. That’s what sleeping in a restaurant’ll do for you. Was that special sauce I could smell on my coat?
“Most of us don’t have access to proper facilities at the moment,” I pointed out. “Except for you. And were they adequate?”
Her smile changed to a smirk. “More than.”
So it turned out there was no way I was going to embarrass her. And I found myself wondering, was this merely Cassie being her usual assured self? Or was there something more than that? An echo of a smile seemed to hang about her features, long after the actual smile had gone away. And her movements were gentler than was normally the case.
It seemed she’d found a genuine cause for happiness at last. I could only hope, seeing the danger we were in, that she hadn’t left it much too late.
There was a sudden yell from the square ahead of us. Which took both of us by surprise. We looked around to see Ritchie Vallencourt on his way in our direction. And he had someone with him, a familiar hulking figure.
When I saw who it was, I almost crowed. Cassie let out a yelp, both of her hands going to her mouth.
Saul Hobart looked like he had never been shot, never been operated on, never spent weeks lying comatose in a hospital bed. He was dressed in as smart clothes as ever, although it looked like he had pulled them on extremely quickly. Everything was a touch askew. And he was marching toward us with that familiar swift, slightly lumbering tread.
Cassie, overcome with joy, forgot herself at that point. She ran across and hugged him. She was the one who’d hospitalized him, after all. She’d not meant to -- she’d been under the influence of Ms. Tollburn and the Shadow Man. But it had been weighing on her like a five-ton millstone.
“Oh my God!” she yelled delightedly. “I’m so glad you’re okay!”
“That’s nice of you,” he said when she let go of him. But he was staring at her blankly. “And you are …?”
When I walked across, he didn’t seem to recognize me either. Ritchie, standing by him, shoved his hands into his pants pockets, looking thoroughly unhappy.
* * *
Memory intact or not, he was still Saul, and had done good. We sat down on the steps. And, with Ritchie prompting him, he told us what he’d witnessed in the blacked-out areas of town. He had only seen it near the hospital, but I could take a guess that the same was happening right across Raine’s Landing.
Those things out there weren’t simply on the prowl for victims. They were actively searching for something.
Everyone looked mystified, a reflection of my own expression, doubtless.
“What do you reckon they’re after?” Vallencourt asked, voicing the question on all our minds.
There was no way of telling. But I said, “It has to be important.”
But important how?
Our two remaining adepts showed up just as the conversation began faltering. And it turned out that there was no need to bring them up to speed. Willets, even from a distance, had heard every word that had passed between us. So we stared at him expectantly.
“I’ve no idea either,” he said, looking vague. “Their minds remain unreadable.”
“It’s important that we do find out,” Martha commented. She looked at me. “That friend of yours, the Little Girl? Didn’t she tell you anything?”
Which was the kind of pointless question people ask when they can think of nothing else to do. I’d already explained that she wasn’t being too cooperative these days.
“Then you’ll have to persuade her,” Willets told me, rather brusquely.
I wasn’t sure how I could manage that. She wasn’t even around to be reasoned with, or that was how it seemed.
And besides, there was another problem. Her place was over on the far side of town.
And that area had been sunken into darkness too. So how exactly was I going to get there?
CHAPTER 40
I had my headlamps turned to full beam, and the courtesy light inside my car had been left in the ‘on’ position. By itself, that probably would not have been enough. So we had raided the nearest hardware store, taking every battery-powered lamp that we could lay our hands on. That amounted to several dozen. The inside of my old Caddy was glowing like a Yuletide ornament that had been created by a pyromaniac.
There was a definite downside to that. It made the inside surface of my windshield awfully reflective, but I could see no other way around this. I pushed my face up close to it and squinted and drove on, making out vague shapes and then steering past them. We were skirting around the edge of Sycamore Hill again, since I didn’t much like the idea of running into another transformed adept.
But I could not get over what had befallen our town. A couple of days back, it had been full of life and bathed in sunshine. Now, it looked like a ghost village which the ground had swallowed.
“I don’t believe this,” I kept mumbling, mostly to myself.
But Cassie, who was riding shotgun, heard me. Her face tilted in my direction.
“I’m in a relationship with a guy who drinks tea,” she told me. “With honey in it, no less. So I’d believe pretty much anything, right now.”
I felt my e
yebrows rise again, of their own accord this time.
“What was that word you just used?”
“Honey?”
“No. The one with the ‘r.’”
I was still concentrating on the road ahead, and so I only saw her awkward smirk out of the corner of my eye.
“Okay, maybe I’m jumping the gun a little. But there’s hope.”
“After one night? And I thought you hated adepts anyway?”
“Not automatically. Just the snooty airs a lot of them have.”
Which sounded to me as though she were revising her own history.
“Big change of heart on your part, huh?” I asked her.
“What are you?” she snapped back. “My biographer?”
Every so often, in the heavy murk around me, I could pick out something moving. It was mostly behind partial cover, a bush or a low fence. But there were shapes out there, hurrying along to either side of the road. Following our progress. I had little doubt of that.
There was another motion up ahead, out beyond the edges of the headlamps’ beam. Cassie raised her Mossberg, tightening her grip around it. And I got a brief impression of hunched figures darting off to either side. Then the road became completely clear again. I wondered what they had been doing.
Got the answer, several seconds later. As my car reached the spot where the hominids had been, there were several soft pops underneath us. And I thought I recognized the sound.
The Caddy began slowing down, the steering becoming ungainly, and I took in the fact that the tires were deflating.
Cassie got it too, and glanced around alarmedly. Those creatures we’d seen had been out on the pavement for a reason. They had obviously left sharp stuff there, tacks or maybe broken glass. In another minute we’d be riding on bare metal.“Some help?” Cassie yelled.
Except … who was she talking to?
The steering wheel abruptly steadied underneath my grasp. I felt the whole frame of the Cadillac rise smoothly. We were cruising along easily within a few more seconds. So the tires seemed to have been repaired, the air rushing back into them.
How the hell had that happened? When I looked across at Cass, her eyes were shining with delight.
“Your new boyfriend?” I guessed out loud.
“Just before I left this morning, he told me he’d be watching over me, and he’d do everything he could to keep me safe.”
So Cassie didn’t merely have a brand-new lover. She had a supernatural benefactor on her side. I turned that over for a while, the implications of it sinking in.You’d think -- living in a strange place like the Landing -- there’d be nothing more that life could turn up to surprise you. And you know what?
If you believed that, you’d be completely wrong. There’s always something.
* * *
There was a freshly washed Chrysler parked outside the garage at 51 Bethany, as usual. Who precisely washed it was a matter for conjecture. But it blocked the whole driveway, so there was no approaching the front door that way. It seemed a shame to mess up the neatly tended, flower-decked front yard, but I couldn’t think of any other way to do this.
I went straight through the picket fence out front, across the borders and the flat green lawn. If I managed to survive this, I’d fix up the damage later. Right now, we needed to get as close as we could manage to the house.
I was relieved to see the door was still a few inches ajar. No one but me ever went in so far as I knew, under normal circumstances. But there were the two of us this time. Cass followed my lead, grabbing one of the brightest lanterns and clambering out.
The hominids had followed us. Their numbers had swelled while they’d been trailing along in our wake. There was a great mass of shapes out there in the gloom, and they were not trying to stay hidden any longer. Figures loped across the pavement in what would have been clear view, if there’d been more illumination. Others were clambering up the poles and trees nearby.
They were silent at first. But then a wall of sound descended on us. That clicking, rattling insectile noise again, emerging from a thousand throats. It was louder than I’d heard it before, really angry. And it chilled my blood, but didn’t make me stop. I sprinted for the front door. Cass came vaulting over the Cadillac’s hood, keeping up with me.
It was only a distance of a few yards, but we were still panting by the time we got inside. Nerves, rather than tiredness. Cassie slammed the door shut, leaning most of her weight against it.
“Reckon we’re safe in here?” she asked.
Which was a question that she ought to have asked several seconds back. It proved at least she trusted me. I doubted that those creatures would try and force their way into this particular house. Not with the kind of being that dwelt here.
Then I wondered if that was still the case. Maybe the Little Girl had totally abandoned us. You could never see her blue light from the downstairs hallway, so there was no telling yet.
“Coming up?” I asked Cass.
Once again, she shook her head. “Nuh-uh. I’ll be fine down here.”
Which was an answer that came instantly to her lips, and didn’t surprise me in the least. She’d only met the Girl once, and had seemed genuinely troubled by her, although I had no real clue why that was.
There wasn’t any time left to discuss the matter. I mounted the staircase, and felt my heart sink. There was still no blue illumination coming from the nursery, the landing above me completely devoid of light.
The lantern’s glow began to fill it as I went up the last few stairs and headed for the nursery door.
The room was the same way I had seen it last time. Nothing had been moved. A plastic ball rolled away from my foot as I stepped up to the center.
“Where are you?” I called out.
The only answer was a clatter from outside, the creatures. Undeterred, I tried again.
“Hey, I’m here! What’s wrong with you?”
Something brushed against the outside of the window, making me start and reach for my gun. But it only sounded like a moth. Calming down, I tipped my head back.
“I thought we were friends!” I shouted. “Don’t you want to help this town? It’s good to help -- you said that once! You can’t do that by hiding!”
A point of brilliant electric blueness resolved itself in the air in front of me. I started backtracking away from it.
And next moment, it seemed to explode, in a flash so intense it blinded me. I pawed at my eyes, still staggering off.
And when my vision cleared, the Little Girl was hanging there.
* * *
Light spilled from her entire body, filling up the nursery. She was -- as always -- suspended in the air, her small white sandals dangling several feet above the carpet. And she was rotating smoothly, like she always did. A little blond girl about five or six years old, her eyelids closed but jiggling with the motion of the eyeballs underneath. Or that was what she looked like anyway. No one had a clear idea of what she really was. Not even me, and I’m the only one who talks to her on anything like a regular basis.
Static filled the atmosphere, making my clothes stick to me. As was usual in her presence, I felt a little off balance, the plane of the world tilting slightly. But I’m used to that. I steadied myself and gazed up at her.
There are times she simply has a blank expression. Other times, she’s sad or worried. On this occasion, though, I thought she looked apologetic. And she confirmed that with her first words to me.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Ross.”
“For …?”
“Abandoning you when you needed my assistance.”
“Where were you?” I asked her carefully.
She turned that over.
“I think … it’s possible that … I ceased to exist for a while.”
And what on earth did that mean? How could such a thing be? I would have asked, but she could read my thoughts.
“I got scared, when you were coming here before. Decided I’d refuse to help you. And bec
ause of that, I stopped existing.”
I could feel my brow crease up, then start throbbing gently. The Girl had come out with some pretty curious riddles in the past. But what she was trying to convey to me now … I couldn’t even start to get my head around it.
Was she implying that, being my oracle, she had no purpose in this world if she stopped advising me? But it sounded to me like she was being far more literal. And how could any being -- even one as bizarre as her -- blink out of reality and then come back again?
She heard that as well, in spite of the fact that I’d not voiced a single word. And her expression became even graver.
“Yes, it is confusing,” she conceded.
“You don’t say?”
“Know what, Mr. Ross?” she added, her expression lightening up. “It is so very confusing that I do believe I’m dreaming all of this.”
Which didn’t clear matters up one tiny bit. In fact, it made them considerably more difficult to grasp. But it seemed to satisfy her.
Seeing as how I was standing in a room with a floating, revolving little kid who could see into the distance with her eyes completely closed, words like ‘simple’ and ‘straightforward’ didn’t even begin to apply, and I had to accept that.
“You’re going to help this time?” I asked.
Her features seemed to take on a layer of shadow.
“Yes,” she said. “But I am still afraid.”
I asked her why.
“I know what you want from me. You want me to tell you what the changed people are looking for. But that means tracing the magic that changed them to its source, back along the original route it took.”
Which she had done before. Where was the problem?
“The route leads to the Darkdweller itself,” she told me. “If I follow it, then I might fall under its spell. Which will be awfully dangerous.”
“For you?” I asked.
And her head shook.
“For the whole town.”
But I didn’t think that we had much of an alternative, if we were going to get to the bottom of this. So I asked her to do it anyway.
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