The first thing she should do was go tell Jeremy and the Litinskis. The last thing she should do, the insane thing, was go upstairs alone. Nevertheless, her legs carried her along the broken line to the bottom step, where she peered up into darkness. “Sean?” she called softly.
No answer, no sound. “Sean?” She put a foot on the bottom step, where her sneaker slipped in a puddle of putative drool.
Enough. She backed toward the dining room. Before she could reach it to sound the alarm, she was spared the trouble by the scream that exploded down the stairwell.
Jeremy ran through the dining room door. “I think someone got in,” was all Helen had time to say before he was pelting up the stairs. Gus was next in the kitchen, but he froze, and Helen’s heart froze with him, at the sound of another scream, Jeremy’s, a thud, a third scream, Sean again.
Think. “Your gun, Gus.”
“Still locked in the car.” He tore outside.
Celeste was in the kitchen now, beside Helen. Upstairs Sean babbled, “Leave him alone! Come on. Drink.”
No sound from Jeremy. Celeste grabbed one of the kitchen chairs. Holding it in front of her like she was a lion tamer, she started up the stairs. “Helen,” she whispered. “Come hit the light.”
Helen ran over and flipped a switch inside the stairwell. The stairs went bright, a straight flight between cheerful yellow-and-blue-papered walls. The risers of the stairs were painted yellow, the rungs blue, a nice touch. It would be impossibly gauche for anyone to bleed on stairs like these, and so it had to be safe to climb them.
Helen sidled after Celeste. In the hall above, there was a hiss and a slurred whine. Sean again: “Jesus. Shit.”
They would never reach the top of the stairs. Even so, Helen kept moving, dogging Celeste, and at last they made a landing where the blackness of the second-floor hall loomed, a new impassible barrier. Below, Gus banged through the ripped screen door. “Tell him go up the front stairs,” Celeste whispered. She stepped off the landing, and the dark swallowed her in one gulp. As Gus peered up from the kitchen, Helen clambered down a few steps to rewhisper the message. He vanished. Helen was alone, caught between floors. She clambered back to the landing. What now, hit the lights again? She groped along the hall walls on either side of the door, and the seconds before she found another switch had hours of dread compressed into them, plenty of time to hear an ugly sucking noise, Celeste’s quick breathing, distant steps, cautious, Gus. Helen’s fingers struck a plastic lever. Light flooded the hall. She rushed into it, found Celeste’s back.
To their left, there. Jeremy lay crumpled against the wall. Sean crouched nearby with one arm in the grip of an enormous toad. Toad? That was what it was most like, one that had lived in a cave so long its skin had bleached pallid. Nothing human, no hoaxer. It had fingerling tentacles along its spine and more tentacles around a mouth that split the bald ovoid of a head in two. Long icicles of teeth protruded, and when the thing reared, here swelling and there thinning, it flexed horny scimitars of raptor claws.
Too suddenly it sprang and in the one spring was on Celeste. She swung her chair. It countered with both forelimbs; the chair flew; Celeste slammed into the door jamb and teetered on the edge of balance. The thing lunged; Celeste dive into the stairwell. Helen glimpsed her grab at the railing, catch it one-handed, pinwheel into the wall. Then Celeste might as well have been on another planet, because the thing changed targets and hurtled at Helen, and there she was, there was the chair she snatched up, there it was, colliding with the legs of the chair, thrusting her backward, panting the stench of hell into her face. Her throat tore with the force of her own shriek. It was all animal, that shriek, but it was still her own, like it was her own knees buckling when the thing herded her into a corner and wrenched the chair from her nerve-dead hands.
She saw its eyes, flat and luminous, fire streaked white. She clamped forearms and elbows before her face and throat, thighs up over her belly, inadequate protections—
There was a sharp crack and a world-shattering bellow. Thunder on steps. Hands on her, fingers, not claws, Gus. “I hit it,” he gasped. “I’m going after it.”
He was gone again.
It was gone?
Helen dropped her arms. She saw Celeste and Sean helping Jeremy sit. He was conscious, moving weakly. Blood streaked the front of his shirt, but the blood was Sean’s: His left wrist streamed red, where the thing must have bitten him.
Its smell surrounded Helen so thickly that it dripped to pool at her side. She looked up and saw lumpy pink gouts on the wainscoting at her back. That was what dripped. That was what stank more abominably than the gray-green slobber and what drove her to shaking legs and away from the corner.
Sean, his bleeding wrist clamped in an armpit, also wavered to his feet. His face had a fragile calm Helen doubted her own could match. “You saw it, right?”
She nodded.
“It knocked Dad down. It was going for him. But Orne told me what it would like better.”
Sean’s blood, the blood that had made it. It was only that afternoon, during the car ride from Arkham, that she had read Orne’s e-mail and the chat records. Only a few hours ago. Helen nodded again, stupidly.
Celeste had come through the thing’s attack with no visible harm apart from bruises on her temple and cheekbone. “Your dad will be all right, Sean,” she said. “A lump on the head, that’s it.”
“Sean,” Jeremy mumbled.
“Be quiet, Jere. Sit still so I can take care of him.”
Right. Sean was the one bleeding. Helen watched Celeste lead him to a love seat at the front of the hall. “Helen, bring me some towels. The bathroom, there.”
Celeste pointed, and Helen would have obeyed, except that something was charging up the back stairs. She shrank to a door beyond which more steps rose, but the Servitor hadn’t come back, not yet. The charger was Eddy, armed with an aluminum baseball bat. “I saw it!” she said. Then she started to take in the situation. “Oh. Oh man.”
“Eddy,” Celeste said tersely. “Get me some towels from the bathroom.”
Weren’t the towels Helen’s job? Before she could let go of the door to the third floor, Eddy had carried an armload of blue terry cloth to the love seat.
Helen pushed the door wide open and sank onto the lowest step. She had to sit, the way her knees were knocking. Jeremy sat on the floor, rubbing the back of his head. Water. She should get him some water, and some ice to bring down the swelling. She could do that much. Ice from the kitchen.
But what if the Servitor had come back, was down there?
Helen rose, stiff legged. A few feet away, the pink gouts smoked. Yes, smoked. They were eating into the paint on the wainscoting and the varnish on the floorboards. Gus had hit the thing. Shot it. The pink gouts were true ichor, the fluid flowing in the veins of the gods. Had the Greeks known the same stuff flowed in the veins of demons?
At the other end of the hall, Celeste was saying she needed to take Sean and Jeremy to her office. Fine. Helen would help. She had to help, had to stop her damned useless shivering. First the ice. Slow and careful, planting her feet well away from the globs of ichor on the stairs, Helen willed herself toward the kitchen, where unless the invasion of a Servitor had changed the fundamental nature of their little universe, there would be a refrigerator and ice trays.
15
Back when he was a kid and Mom was sick, Sean had heard a hospice lady say that lots of people died at three in the morning. Four in the morning was worse, though. That was when, if he’d fallen asleep, he’d wake up afraid Mom had died an hour before and he’d missed the chance to save her, to grab her hand and not let her go.
This four in the morning he woke up in one of the third-floor bedrooms at Celeste’s house. It took him a few minutes to remember why he wasn’t in his own room downstairs: His own room smelled like Servitor. Maybe it always would now. Besides, this room had an air conditioner, so the windows could stay closed and the door locked. It also had twin be
ds, the one Sean lay in and the one on which Dad was curled, tight as an armadillo. That was how he’d slept on the couch in the family room, next to Mom’s hospital bed. Every night Sean would peer around the banister to make sure Dad was safely asleep before he’d tiptoe over to Mom. Awake, Dad would make him go back upstairs. Mom would let Sean sit on the hospital bed next to her. Sometimes he’d read to her in a careful whisper. Sometimes he’d just sit. She would call him Kit, and he’d let her, even though it was his long-discarded baby name. Kit didn’t mean a kitten. It meant a fox cub, and she’d named him that back when he was a wild, tumbling, troublemaking ball of a baby, according to her, always doing dumb-ass shit like wedging his head under the sofa or pulling a whole bowl of spaghetti down on himself. Funny, Dad hadn’t called him Kit much until after Mom had died. Then, after a couple weeks of hearing the name from his mouth, Sean had pitched such a fit Dad had never called him Kit again. And so, what with Mom dead, nobody had.
Sean shook the random memory from his head. Even with the AC on, he was sweating, and the new stitches Celeste had put in his wrist stung like bitches. He kicked off his sheet and sat up. The window beside his bed faced the backyard, dead black space. That was the problem with 4:00 A.M.—night was old, but dawn wasn’t even a tease yet and in the airless space between realities he couldn’t fend off the memory of Dad silhouetted in the bedroom doorway, of the rubbery twist of the Servitor toward him, then its leap, so powerful that the kickback had shoved the mattress into Sean’s nuts, doubling him over for precious seconds. It could have killed Dad. It would have killed Helen if Gus hadn’t shot its ass—it had been right on top of her, too pissed off by the intrusion to care that Sean was bleeding for it. Or maybe it had already sucked enough blood. For the moment.
The only good thing was, they had all seen the Servitor, even Eddy. They were on the same page now, and maybe by this time tomorrow it would be a page in the Necronomicon, with the dismissing ritual on it. When Celeste had brought Sean and Dad back from her office, Helen had already been working on the disks.
But the Servitor had almost killed Dad. It had smashed him into the wall, then stretched toward him, as expandable as a slug, its jaws gaping. If Sean had taken a couple seconds longer to get over his slammed nuts, if he hadn’t been able to grapple it away (like grappling a greased sack of snakes), if he hadn’t thought to give it what it wanted more than Dad—
He shut his eyes so tight the lids hurt. Then he groped on the nightstand for his water glass and the two pills Celeste had left for him to take if he couldn’t sleep. He had to sleep, and no dreams. He had to be ready to learn the dismissing ritual. The Servitor was his. His blood had made it. Whatever it did, he was at least partly responsible. Yet he hadn’t meant for any of this to happen, had he? Like Mom hadn’t meant to get cancer. It had been a cellular accident, nobody could blame her for it, and the summoning spell had been a magical accident, kind of.
Sean swallowed the pills and lay down. Twisting around to get comfortable, he ended up with his chin practically between his knees. That made him an armadillo like Dad, and what did armadillos do when they were in the middle of a road and a truck was bearing down on them? They curled up and lay there all smug, like their scaly hides were thick enough to take the crush. Trucks. He imagined one with tentacles sprouting from its grill. The armadillo that was going to survive that had better roll its butt out of the road, but before Sean could roll, or run, or grow titanium scales he sank down into sleep.
Light leaked under Roman blinds and over the chaise longue on which Helen sprawled, one sneakered foot up, one bare foot down. That arrangement made no sense. Neither did the sunlight. At around two, she’d lain down to rest—had she slept through the night, leaving Gus to struggle with the Necronomicon alone? A tasseled cord hung within reach. Helen tugged on it until the blinds were all the way up. Gus wasn’t in the study, but through the French doors to the living room came a low rasp of snoring.
Stifling groans, Helen sat up. Her arms throbbed like they’d been wrenched out of the shoulder sockets, and her midriff ached where the Servitor had rammed the kitchen chair into her. The broad, ugly bruise under her sternum was the worst of her injuries. Celeste, too, had gotten off with bruises, but Jeremy was lucky to be alive. Sean had saved him by offering the Servitor the blood it craved most: its summoner’s. The utter madness of the memory made Helen feel light-headed.
Coffee. A Thermos carafe stood on the study table. She limped over and poured lukewarm dregs into her dirty mug. Disgusting, but caffeine was caffeine. After a few gulps, she was able to sift through the mental jumble of the last day, Sean’s story, the deserted pharmacy, the Servitor. Gus returning from the unsuccessful chase and Eddy describing how she’d heard a gunshot and seen the fleeing monster on her way over. Good thing her parents had been out, or they’d have called the cops for sure.
Once he’d escorted Eddy home, Gus had advised Helen to go to bed. Bless him for understanding how futile that would have been. Ironically, she hadn’t stopped shaking until they’d double-teamed the Necronomicon; the mental effort had focused her, and Gus’s commiserating grin had let her laugh off the scare whenever a beetle or moth had tapped on the windows behind them.
From the table, Helen could make out Gus on the living-room couch. He slept with both feet sanely bare, and even his snore had a comfortable sound to it. Yet he’d seen the Servitor, too. He’d chased it. Helen couldn’t have done that after the first shock. Right, who was she fooling? She could never do it, not if Servitors got as common as houseflies.
She slipped into the chair in front of her laptop. Since she’d meant to nap for just five minutes (ha!), she’d left the computer on. Auto-locked by her long absence, the Necronomicon lurked under an innocuous screensaver, pastel waves like wildflower meadows on speed, one swift summer after another.
After summer is winter, after winter summer. The Old Ones wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.
That was a prime bit of Necronomicon. Darkness under light, the book waited. Alone and hungry, Helen couldn’t face it. She reached under the table for her backpack and slipped a hand inside. Her fingers grazed the cool plastic of a stack of jewel cases: disks of the Redemption Orne journals that she’d requisitioned on impulse along with the Necronomicon. The journals might come in handy, but right now she wanted the letter stashed under them. She didn’t take it out. She just touched the lokta paper envelope, deriving flimsy comfort from the connection to Marvell, who believed she could do the job Henry and John Arkwright had done, who believed in her courage.
Well, Marvell hadn’t heard her shriek. He hadn’t seen her cowering under the Servitor or, afterwards, unable to pull herself together enough to bring Celeste some towels.
Outside, a cardinal whistled two plaintive notes over and over. Helen walked to the bay windows. The song came from a huge beech tree in the yard next door, Eddy’s yard, and there was Eddy herself, lithely climbing the fence. She saw Helen and pointed toward the back of the house.
Helen went to unlock the kitchen door. She heard footsteps on the stairs: Celeste coming down. A mighty yawn in the living room: Gus stirring.
Morning had arrived, and their forces were gathering.
A queasy stomach and throbbing wrist greeted Sean when he woke up, but to make Dad happy he forced down a bagel and some OJ. Gus showed him an article in the Journal, two paragraphs in the local section: no new pet killings along the Pawtuxet, police still investigating, residents should continue to exercise caution. Except the residents of Pawtuxet Village would be all right, now that Sean had moved to the East Side. “It followed me here,” he said.
Gus nodded. “Helen and I are trying to find out how it managed that. You like to join us?”
Sean went into the study, where Helen was so intent on her laptop screen she didn’t notice him until he pulled a chair back from the table, and then she jumped. “Sorry to scare you,” he said.
Helen gave a weak laugh. “I’ve drunk so m
uch coffee, kittens in pink and blue bows would scare me.”
“Hell, I’m terrified of kittens, even bowless,” Gus said. He sat at his PC. Dad came in from the kitchen and took the chair beside Sean’s.
Helen got right to business. “I finally collected some of the creature’s blood without melting the bag. The corrosives in it must go inert when the stuff dries. But what do we do with our samples? Find a confidential lab to analyze them?”
“Why bother with that?” Dad said. “We know the thing’s real now.”
Sean winced. Poor Dad, overnight winner of Radical Mental Makeover.
“Good point,” Helen said. Like Eddy déjà vu, she pulled printouts from under her laptop. “Gus and I have been reading the Necronomicon. There are references to Servitors and summoning spells scattered through the text. Abdul Alhazred wasn’t big on organization.”
“He was crazy, right?” Sean said.
Gus shrugged. “So they say. If so, I just wish he’d had more method to his madness.”
Another good thing was how great Gus and Helen were getting along. She smiled at his joke before reading from her top printout. “‘It is neither fitting nor wise for a wizard to consult daemons of great power, unless after long service to the Outer Gods. A wizard young in craft should call only the lesser daemons, which are still dangerous. Yet some may be useful servants when the wizard has mastered their speech, which is not of the spoken word but of the mind.’”
Speech of the mind had to be telepathy. Monsters weren’t likely to speak English, or Arabic or Latin, either. For one thing, all their tongues would get in the way.
Helen read on: “‘The major division in familiars lies between those which are of the aether and those which are of the flesh. Those of the aether can do no bodily harm in our sphere, and thus we recommend them to the young practitioner. The commonest is called by the ancients the wind-salamander—’”
“That must be the aether-newt,” Sean said.
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