I was aware how anxious Cassie had become, listening to him talk. Her face had gone extremely taut, her eyebrows raised in high, thin arches. And I felt bad talking about this so openly in front of her, but there was still another question to be asked.
“What if he tries to lift it?” I put in. “Surely he’s strong enough that …?”
At which point, I heard my voice trail off. Willets was staring at me in a way he’d never done before. And when he shook his head, it was with absolute finality.
“If he attempts to go against it, Ross, then God alone knows what might happen to him.”
* * *
Nearly all the adepts gone. The only ones we had left were the doc here, Martha, and a guy who had the power to light up a town and its population, but could not so much as crack an eggshell without bringing something awful down upon himself. Which led me to the same conclusion I’d arrived at several times before. If witchcraft couldn’t resolve matters, it was up to ordinary folk. Guys like me and Cassie, with our guns, our fists, our wits.
I turned the whole thing over for the dozenth time.
Then, “Erin Luce,” I muttered to myself.
“What’s that?”
Willets was peering at me oddly. I explained to him the course of action I’d decided on.
“Are you sure that’s wise?” he asked.
No, I was pretty sure it wasn’t. But it was still the only thing that I could think to do.
Look at it this way. What did we really have to lose?
* * *
Before much longer, Cass and me were heading out into the darkened suburbs once again. Up Sycamore Hill again, although we took the car on this occasion. It was filled with lanterns, just like last time. Venturing this deep into enemy territory, we didn’t want to rely merely on the glow our skin was casting out.
I kept on wondering for how long that would last. But Quinn had kept the townsfolk safe until the sun had risen, the first time that he’d intervened. So I supposed that this would not be any different.
The gloom reflected in my rearview mirror kept on shifting constantly, before we’d gotten even halfway up. Segments of it would detach themselves from the surrounding murk, moving up closer. But once they’d figured out what we were, they would opt for caution and hang back. There had to be whole cadres of hominids following us. Keeping a close eye on us, and wondering what we were up to in their own dull way.
Of the angels, there was not a sign. We hadn’t seen them for a while, in fact. That ought to have been a blessing. But I’d been doing stuff like this for long enough to understand that what seemed fortunate might be the reverse. It felt ominous. I genuinely doubted they had given up -- they had no reason to. So I was left guessing what they’d be doing when they showed up next.
We went by Gaspar Vernon’s mansion. There were crouched shapes on the move on its extensive roof.
Two intersections later we turned right, then did the same again, onto a gravel path. It took us in among rows of trees, then brought us to a pair of huge gates, which were hanging open. The shadows were so deep that you could barely make out the house beyond, until sections of it began appearing in my headlamp beams.
It was built of dark gray stone rather than brick. Great, roughly hewn chunks the approximate size of a truck’s engine block. They made the place look like a castle. And a pair of conical turrets in the roof reinforced that first impression.
This grand mansion had once belonged to Erin Luce. And was now the property -- so far as I was aware -- of her great-granddaughter, Holly Masterton, who’d lived there with her husband and their three young children.
The whole load of them would have been taken over by the angels, I expected. This entire damned hill had gone that way. It occurred to me that I had not seen any children in the mobs that had attacked us. Maybe they were far too small and weak. Or was there something else?
Shapes were on the move here too. We could see them bobbing about everywhere. And something darted across the front wall, a split instant before my headlamps struck it. But we’d come prepared for that. We drew up to the porch and climbed out, both of us clutching Very pistols.
I sent up the first flare. It climbed unevenly, leaving a corkscrewing trail of smoke behind it. And then, at its apex, it exploded into life, bringing the building into sharp relief.
There were abrupt rattling sounds as the hominids around us dived for cover. And before too much longer, we were completely on our own out here. Which was the way I liked it.
The front door was locked. But Cassie has a fairly shady past, and so that wasn’t the case for very long.
“Just an ordinary stone? No more than that?” she asked as we went in.
In a building this size, yeah, it was one hell of a long shot. But I figured that, wherever Erin Luce had hidden this Clavis, it might be someplace she could keep an eye on. Where better than inside her own home?
“Keep a lookout for paperweights and stuff like that,” I suggested.
But then, as I played my beam around, I began to see how crammed and cluttered this place was. There were vases and sculptures everywhere. Figurines, in bronze and stone and china. They covered the shelves and mantelpieces. There were more of them in cabinets. The fact that Holly had three kids under the age of eight meant that everything on view had to be protected by a Spell of Fixing. None of these objects would move if they were touched. But the sheer volume was daunting. Talk about haystacks, needles.
I began wishing we’d brought Willets along. He was extremely perceptive. But this wasn’t the time to go heading back.
“Split up?” Cass asked, keeping her voice steady.
Which had its good points, since we could cover more ground that way. But I could hear faint skittering noises deeper into this vast domicile. And decided we’d be safer if we stuck together.
“She must have had a study somewhere. That would be a place to start.”
And so we headed up the stairs.
We tried ten doors in succession before we found the right one. And when we finally stepped into the room, I took in the fact that it had never been modernized. No one seemed to use it anymore. It had been maintained as some kind of shrine to Erin Luce’s memory. Not a thing here dated past Victorian times.
There were lace antimacassars on the furniture. A map of the world on the wall across from us that had Persia, Ceylon, and Siam on it. The lampshades had amber-beaded fringes. And there was a brass barometer to one side of the map that would have fetched a fortune at an auction house.
All perfectly clean, though, not a speck of dust in view. I didn’t doubt that magic kept it this way, like it kept the ornaments safe. There was floor to ceiling shelving for the woman’s library of books, half of which were about varied matters and the other half on the subject of spells. Some of them were damned impressive volumes. On her desk were a lamp, a golden pen-and-inkwell set, a blotter, and another book. As wide and flat as a scrapbook this time, bound with dark red leather. It had the word ‘Journal’ printed on it in gold leaf, which made me decide to take a closer look.
February, 1898 was the first date I opened onto. The penmanship was copperplate. I’d no idea in which year Harmon Luce had created his device, nor the date that his wife had found out about it. So I kept on flicking through the brittle pages, desperately searching for the one word ‘Clavis.’
It came leaping out at me within a minute. I had started with the right year, but the entry was in August. I angled the flashlight down and squinted, my eyes straining, as I read through Erin Luce’s memories and thoughts.
Harmon is a good man, certainly, but too much filled with pride for his own good. This project of his … it was intended to impress me, without the slightest shadow of a doubt. And so, in that frame of mind, he paid no apparent attention to the awful dangers that this ‘Clavis’ might present us with. I thought him more mature than that. It really was extraordinarily foolish of him, and I found myself obliged to reproach him in the strongest terms
.
The deed is done, however. The die is already cast -- there is no turning back. Since this ‘Clavis’ cannot be undone, I must assure myself that it will never be discovered. And here, if you will, is a literary twist. Whilst choosing a suitable hiding place for it, I was put in mind of Mr. Edgar Allan Poe’s infamous tale ‘The Purloined Letter.’ I shall say no more than that.
“A story about stolen mail?” Cassie said, right next to my ear. She’d leant across my shoulder to make out what I was reading. “Wow, sounds exciting!”
If there’d been a Nobel Prize for Sarcasm, she would have won it hands down, every year. But she was missing the point. I started explaining to her what that last line referred to …
When something moved in a hallway outside.
Then my cheekbone got hit, really hard.
The room revolved. I started falling.
CHAPTER 45
It was Cass who stopped me going the whole way down. She grabbed me by the shoulders and then hauled me back to my feet. But she was retreating as she did so, dragging me along with her. My next blurry glance at the study’s open doorway told me why.
The hominids were back again. There was nothing to stop them. It was pitch dark throughout the house, except the places that our flashlights touched.
I caught a glimpse of a narrow arm swinging. And another missile came flying at us.
Cassie ducked. It barely missed her head. Hit the wall behind us, bouncing off it with a clang. And I got a glimpse of the object that had been thrown -- one of the metal figurines from downstairs. So the spell which was protecting them had been broken.
It couldn’t have been these things who had done that. Which made me wonder … were there any angels near? If so, their power seemed to have taken on extra dimensions, exactly as Willets had predicted.
The hominids could not attack directly, not with our skin’s unnaturally healthy glow. But they’d figured out that they could get us from a distance. They’d adapted and evolved as well.
I had dropped my flashlight, but I scooped it up. Played it out into the corridor. The pool of electric brightness held the creatures back, and no more missiles came from that direction.
But then there was an almighty crash from the window. It imploded, something much larger than a figurine coming through it. Shards of glass went everywhere.
Something hit the corner of the desk with a huge shudder before dropping to the floor. A rock the size of a watermelon. Then a second one came through, ripping a couple of the drapes to tattered shreds.
There was scrabbling, a great deal of it, on the wall outside.
We both had our guns out, but we knew they were the last resort. We used our flashlights like batons, swinging them about to keep the horde at bay.
Every time a face appeared, we’d sweep a beam toward it. And the creature would be gone immediately. But as soon as one had disappeared, another would replace it.
They kept tossing heavy objects through. One of them struck Cassie on the leg. Another grazed my chin. It didn’t do any serious damage, but I’d become aware my face was bleeding.
“We’ve got to get out of here.”
If we stuck around in here, we’d gradually be overwhelmed. Cassie aimed her Very pistol and fired a shot through the smashed window. Which meant it exploded far lower in the sky than mine had done. But it had the required effect. The creatures outside were retreating once again. We had less than a minute, I figured, before the dark closed back around us.
I had envisaged forcing our way back down the stairs. But we had no idea how many hominids were waiting for us out there. Cass went to the windowsill instead, and leaned out.
She grabbed hold of some undamaged drapes, ripping them down from their fittings. Knotted them rapidly together, then tied one end around a broken segment of the window frame. That gave us a downward climb of six or eight feet before we were forced to let go. And we were only on the second story, so it was sufficient.
* * *
We headed back to my car, still playing the beams around us. The flare in the sky was almost out, shadows reclaiming the entire landscape.
We reached the Caddy, and were powering away as total darkness fell across the drive.
“What was that mail thing about?” Cassie asked me, panting.
“It’s a mystery tale. The police turn up at a man’s apartment, looking for a stolen letter. And they turn the guy’s place upside down, but cannot find it.”
“Where’d he hide it?” she blurted at me.
“The mailbox inside his front door. The most obvious place for there to be a letter, but the last place that they thought to look.”
“But … how can you do the same with a rock?”
And that was the question, wasn’t it? Where was the most obvious place you’d find a piece of stone? I struggled to come up with a solution, but I couldn’t find one. It would have to wait until later, because other things were going on.
We were back on solid asphalt, and not far from Plymouth Drive. You could barely see the outline of the trees that we were going past. But then, a flickering brought them into some kind of perspective. Nothing to do with our lights, and that made me tighten up. It was something deep within the branches, and was getting swiftly closer.
As it resolved itself, I recognized that cold, dead glow.
One of the angels had returned and was moving in on us.
CHAPTER 46
In a few more seconds, it was out in front of us, blocking our passage onto the main drag. I wasn’t quite sure what would happen if my car hit it, but was pretty certain it would not be anything pleasant. So my first reaction was to stamp on the brake. The tires of my Caddy made a ripping, howling sound.
But then I had a second thought. We’d filled this car with bright illumination. And we knew the angels couldn’t stand it anymore than the beings they’d created. So I started edging closer up, hoping to nudge the thing out of our way.
It had to see the glow coming toward it, but the angel did not budge. Its wings beat lazily. Its dead eyes stared at us without once blinking. And that made the tight feeling around my heart grow a whole lot worse.
I wasn’t sure what, but something seemed to have changed. The thing looked more solid than it previously had done. A more robust image against the prevailing blackness. Had it, in some way, become far stronger?
I got the answer when it raised its hands. Something weird had happened to its fingertips. They seemed to have no definite ends. Simply appeared to bleed away into the gloom. But that was when I took in the fact that there was something coalescing there.
I wouldn’t have been able to make it out if it wasn’t for the glow from the Caddy. But an even deeper blackness was collecting there, more profound than the surrounding night. As thick as coal tar. It gathered and grew denser for a few more heartbeats. Then it began stretching in our direction, in the form of web-like strands.
“What’s that?” Cassie shouted.
I wasn’t sure. But I still had in mind what I’d been told when the angels had first arrived. As they adapted, grew accustomed to our world, their abilities would increase as well. I had no doubt this was a new one.
The only thing that we could do was stare frozenly as the strands approached my windshield. And if I was hoping that would stop them, the answer was ‘no.’ They were inside the car before I had time to react, passing through the glass as if it wasn’t even there.
We lurched away, afraid the tentacles were coming for us. But it turned out that we were not the target.
They headed for the backseat. For our collection of lamps, in fact. Touched them, drifting from one to the next like moving strands of ivy. And the lanterns flickered and then started fading. I wasn’t sure how, but the life was being sucked out of the batteries.
Cassie’s mouth came open, but I didn’t need telling. I slammed us into reverse and then practically stood upright on the gas. The Caddy started roaring backward, heading the way we’d first come. The outlin
es of the trees blurred past us, and the roof of the Luce residence came in view again.
My mind was working furiously. If we kept moving in this direction, we’d come to the intersection with Mill Street in another minute’s time. And once there, I could swing the car around, get us facing the right way and power off the hill at full speed. If we had that long.
I craned back. It was a reasonably straight avenue, so there was no problem reversing down it. When I took a hurried glance out through the windshield, though, I could see that the angel -- just like before -- was keeping up with us. Its wings were barely moving. It was floating through the air at precisely our speed. And the filaments were still expanding from its fingertips and reaching in here.
Still doing their deadly work. The batteries were almost gone. The lamps were so diminished the only thing that they were still casting out were weakened ochre glints.
Then I noticed several more strands appear. They weren’t heading for my windshield this time. They were sliding underneath the Caddy’s hood. The strength of my headlamps started to diminish. And when my gaze dropped to the dashboard, I saw the lights on it were going out as well.
The engine started sputtering.
And then it went completely dead.
* * *
Something that was not quite silence pressed in around us. There were still noises, but far fewer of them than moments back. The tires were rolling heavily across the pavement. And the chassis was giving little creaks and jiggles. But there had been a carburetor’s blast before, and that was gone.
My heart tripped over quickly in my chest and my brow grew damp. But I had the sense, at least, to keep my foot clear of the brake. Still moving was still moving. So I let us keep on doing that.
We were heading slightly downhill. But it’s one thing powering a car along, another when it’s simply cruising. The inevitable happened after we had gone a couple hundred yards.
The Caddy began to stray off course. I fought hard with the steering, but couldn’t correct it. A rear tire left the blacktop. Then my trunk caromed off a nearby tree, which really slowed us down.
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