“I’m afraid so.”
Possession wasn’t that scary a word to him, because wasn’t possession the ultimate excuse for bad behavior? Hey, I didn’t do anything—it was the monster wearing my skin. Except in Sean’s case, it was him kind of wearing the monster’s skin while the monster was still inside it and in control. Either way, he couldn’t dodge all the blame for the continuing shitstorm. The Black Man had suggested calling the blood-spawn, but he hadn’t forced Sean to change incantations and squeeze his own blood into the fire, so that the Servitor could spin itself a material form in its new home. He closed his eyes. Though he didn’t get even the faintest overlay of Servitor sight, Geldman’s potion hadn’t severed the soul-thread; after a few seconds, Sean felt it again, like a fish line hooked into his solar plexus, and when he concentrated on that sensation the line snapped taut. “It’s coming,” he said.
Seconds later, the Servitor galloped up the riverside path and crouched, a lashing shadow, at the foot of the steps. Helen drew close to Sean. Did she think he could protect her? Right, like he’d protected Eddy and Dad just now. The Servitor had learned that its summoner was weak and ignorant, that when Geldman’s potion wore off it could own Sean again. Tentacles rearing, it probed his mind.
The fold of his left elbow oozed warmth from its new teat. Sick with disgust, Sean dashed a trickle of blood off his forearm. To get rid of the gummy residue of Servitor-saliva would take serious scrubbing, and Jesus, it stank. He stank. “Get away!”
Its tentacles reared and swayed like eyeless cobras. It was laughing at him, and when it slouched off into the river it went of its own accord.
Helen let out a ragged sigh. “Did you—”
“No. It wanted to go. It knows it can get me later.”
“I have more potion. And the dismissing spell.”
Someone was running down the bluff path. Helen shut up. After a few seconds, she shouted, “It’s all right. He’s all right!”
Her eyes were working better than his. Sean didn’t see Dad until he heaved himself onto the tomb porch, panting. Drool burns blotched his face, and one leg of his jeans was slashed and black with blood. Man, if Sean could just curl up and croak, only him croaking wasn’t the way to make things right for Dad, who was probably still crazy enough to want him around. What Dad needed was for Sean to be as all right as Helen had yelled he was.
“He’s had some potion,” Helen said. “Looks like it’s working.”
Dad didn’t take his eyes off Sean. “Where’s the thing?”
Again, it was Helen who spoke: “Back in the river. How about Gus and Eddy?”
“They’re up there, with O’Conaghan. Gus sprained his ankle. Otherwise they’re both okay. O’Conaghan showed up with some kind of magical flashlight. It scared the bastard away.”
A flashlight, not a wand, dumb ass. That’s what had cast the burning beam. Sean refound his voice: “He’s that detective, right? Did Uncle Gus call him after all?”
Dad had started coughing. Helen said, “Professor Marvell finally called me back, Sean. He and O’Conaghan are in a group that deals with Mythos, ah, outbreaks. O’Conaghan’s going to take care of us until Marvell flies in tomorrow.”
So there were Mythos police. That explained why O’Conaghan had been interested in the animal killings and why he’d noticed stuff like the pentagram. Mythos cops. Beyond cool, but right now Sean couldn’t think about anything but Dad and what to say after this last close call. The best he could come up with was flat-out lame: I’m sorry for almost getting you killed, Dad. Again. Oh, and I’m glad I didn’t get Eddy killed, or Uncle Gus, or Helen. For things to be so majorly fucked up, so that he couldn’t find words strong enough to apologize, he had to have done something terrible, hadn’t he? Not just something stupid. Something evil.
Dad finally stopped coughing. “Sean,” he said.
Sean swallowed the impulse to launch a pre-emptive strike of excuses, however lame.
“I told you not to leave the house,” Dad went on.
That was the worst accusation he could manage? The absurdity of it smacked Sean upside his already-scrambled head, and he couldn’t help grinning. The grin was a gateway expression to laughter. At first he fought it, but what the fuck. He laughed, laughed because Dad was alive to lecture him, and because he was alive to hear it, and for all he cared, Dad could go on lecturing forever.
Dad didn’t go on. His brows knit. Then he bent over, hands on knees, and heaved staccato barks that sounded like they hurt him, but they were laughter, too, definitely laughter.
Helen was the toughest of them, because her voice merely hitched. “There’s a car coming, Jeremy.”
“Must be O’Conaghan’s. Privileges of being a cop. Security let him in.”
A black sedan with the red-haired detective at the wheel crunched into the gravel turnaround at the bottom of the road. Eddy hung out a window, mud caked but unmangled. Gus sat in the backseat.
“I’ll tell them you guys are right behind me,” Helen said. She hoisted her backpack and headed for the sedan.
She must have figured Dad wanted to be alone with Sean so he could get back to chewing him out. Slowly Dad recovered from his barking. He straightened, pawed back his hair, and then closed the gap between them.
Laughter cut and feet planted, Sean braced to say it again, the simple thing that might not help, but which was true. It was so true he ached with it. “Dad, I’m sorry.”
“We’re almost through this. Hang on with me, Sean, okay?”
The way Dad held out his hand made words gush from Sean, like spoiled food he couldn’t, shouldn’t, keep down: “While we were in the tomb, while it was drinking, the Servitor showed me this weird place, another planet, and I was getting all into it. The Black Man was there—he wanted to talk to me. I started running right to him, instead of staying here with Eddy, and that could’ve got her killed. Why’d I want to talk to the Black Man so bad?”
Dad’s hand made it to Sean’s shoulder. “Geldman told Helen some things. I don’t understand it all yet. Hell, I don’t understand any of it. But we’ll worry about that after we’ve dismissed the Servitor. One job at a time, all right?”
One job at a time. That was what Sean had watched Dad learn to do in the bad times after Mom had died. At first Dad hadn’t been able to do anything at all. Cel and Gus and Grandpa Stewie and Uncle Joe had seen to the funeral and the visitors. They had cleaned the house and kept food in the kitchen and looked after Sean. Dad had let them, while he’d paced his studio or sat in Mom’s among the drawings and canvases and paint tubes and brushes that lay exactly where she’d left them after she’d gotten too sick to work. But when they’d tried to pack up Mom’s stuff and close her studio, Dad had freaked. Those jobs were too important. He was going to do them by himself. And he had done them, a closet one day, a dresser the next, then a bookcase. The night he’d started on Mom’s studio, Sean had followed him and said he couldn’t lock Mom’s unfinished paintings away while they were still humming. Not that Dad could feel the hum—he’d never been able to. That night, though, he’d let Sean touch all the paintings, all the drawings, one at a time, and then he’d made it Sean’s job to take care of them while they hummed and to put them away when they’d stopped.
The humming. Jesus. Oh Jesus. Sean hadn’t thought about that for years, except as one of those nutcase things little kids make up and talk themselves into believing. Had it actually happened, then, a sign he had magical potential? In a way, it didn’t matter if the humming had been real. Not believing, not understanding, Dad had let him treat Mom’s paintings as if they were alive. He’d let that be Sean’s duty, for as long as Sean had needed for it to be.
Helen had gotten into the backseat with Gus, and both of them had squeezed over to leave room for Sean and Dad. Eddy was waving at them from the passenger seat. What with his throat gone tight, Sean just cocked his head toward the car.
“Right,” Dad said. His throat didn’t sound all that loose, either. �
��We’d better go.”
They walked toward the turnaround. Dad limped a little, and it was good, the way he leaned on Sean, that and the way Sean found he could carry the weight.
27
En route from the cemetery, Helen listened to Eddy spin the cover story she’d tell her parents. See, she’d suspected Sean was goofing around in Swan Point, so she’d gone after him, but he was all the way down by the river and she’d slipped in this gross puddle of sewer runoff. That would explain the mud and the Servitor-stink, wouldn’t it? O’Conaghan approved Eddy’s alibi, and Helen would have goggled at her sangfroid if Eddy’s words hadn’t tumbled out a little too fast, a little too shrill. The girl was holding up damn well, considering how close she’d just come to dying. The full horror of it would probably hit her later. Helen had better ask Marvell what they should do to help Eddy and, yes, what they should do to help Helen. Eighteen reasonably smooth years as a kid and adolescent, then seven years more or less cradled in academia, had left her mental armor of personal invulnerability little dinged. Since Monday, however, the Servitor-situation had corroded that armor to brittle lace.
Before Eddy dashed into her house, she bequeathed her bat to Helen. Charred and pitted at the business end, it remained a sturdy weapon. Helen shook her head.
Celeste, older than Helen, seemed as relatively resilient as Eddy and the bat. Maybe the hustle of triage kept her too busy to overthink. She parked Gus on the living room couch and packed his sprained ankle with ice. She bandaged Jeremy’s leg and determined that his drool burns were superficial. She even checked Helen’s eyes, which had returned to near normal. It was Sean, unhurt, who baffled Celeste.
Helen looked over Celeste’s shoulder at the bizarre growth in the fold of his elbow: an inch-long conical nipple, rosy with blood flow. The Servitor had drunk from it, Sean explained, meeting no one’s eyes.
“Witch’s teat,” O’Conaghan confirmed. “I’ve seen them before. Familiars create them.”
“Can somebody take it off me?”
“Nobody will have to. It’ll shrink away after the dismissing.”
Thank God and thank Marvell, they had a real Mythos expert now. “Are you a magician, Detective?” Helen said.
“No. I’m a paramagician. Well, studying to be one.”
“I see.”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” Celeste said. “Is that like a paramedic?”
“Pretty much. I can’t do magic the way a magician can, but I can use magical tools.”
“Like that flashlight of yours?” Jeremy asked.
“Exactly. It’s a regular one modified to turn magical energy into wavelengths that repel things like the Servitor. Still, the light shouldn’t have been enough to drive it off its—” O’Conaghan looked at Jeremy, then shrugged. “Its prey.”
Jeremy snorted. “Actually, it had already given up on this prey before you came. Sean must have ordered it off.”
“Did you, Sean?”
Sean pulled away from his aunt. “It was the Black Man. You know who he is, Detective?”
O’Conaghan’s expression didn’t change, and maybe Helen wouldn’t have noticed him paling except for the way his freckles suddenly stood out like spattered brown paint. “He’s an avatar. Of Nyarlathotep. You’re saying he called off the Servitor?”
“The palace I went to in the Servitor’s mind, the Black Man was there, and I was going to talk to him. Then the potion pulled me back so I was seeing out of the Servitor again, only the Black Man came with me. I tried yelling at the Servitor to leave Dad alone. It wouldn’t listen. The Black Man said something to it, and it stopped right away.”
Sean ran out of breath, and his forehead had sheened over with sweat. He staggered. Celeste, Jeremy, and O’Conaghan converged on him. O’Conaghan, the closest, broke Sean’s fall and deftly maneuvered him into an armchair. While Celeste tucked Sean’s head between his knees, O’Conaghan drew Jeremy to Gus’s couch. He gestured for Helen to follow.
Conference time. Helen went to the couch. Screw her wobbly knees. Celeste could only handle one fainter at a time.
Low-voiced, O’Conaghan said, “I didn’t know how deeply Nyarlathotep was involved in Sean’s case.”
“Isn’t this Nyar-thing supposed to be a god?” Jeremy said, so tightly his teeth had to be clenched. “Why would a god pay attention to one kid, my kid?”
Gus said it without a trace of sarcasm: “He sees the fall of a sparrow.”
“This god’s not worried about sparrows,” O’Conaghan said. “Magicians are what interest him. If he’s after Sean before he’s even someone’s apprentice, Sean must be a serious adept.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?” Helen said. “That Sean’s adept, I mean.”
O’Conaghan pulled his tie and collar loose, exposing more freckles. “Could be. But direct contact with any Outer God is incredibly dangerous, even for a master magician. We can’t let Nyarlathotep get at Sean again. He’s doing it through the Servitor, so we’ve got to dismiss it tonight.”
“Professor Marvell said to wait for him.”
“But when you talked to him, you didn’t know the Servitor had already possessed Sean, so he didn’t have all the facts.”
“What about the hotel idea?”
“That would just keep the Servitor at a physical distance. Psychically, it could get to Sean wherever he is.”
Sean had raised his head. Could he hear? Helen dropped her voice further. “As long as the Patience Orne potion is working, the connection seems broken.”
“How much is left?”
She didn’t even know. Helen took the cobalt bottle from her pack and held it to the light of the nearest lamp. It couldn’t be, but it was: She’d already poured more than a quarter of the bottle’s contents into Sean.
O’Conaghan came over to look. “Was it full to start?”
“Yes.”
“It won’t last the night.”
She had pressed the bottle to her sternum as if it was a guardian amulet. “If you think Marvell would want us to go ahead—”
“Let’s do it now,” Sean said. His voice was calm, but Helen saw the white-knuckled grip he had on his left elbow. “When I close my eyes, I’m seeing through the Servitor again. The potion’s wearing off.”
“Helen,” Jeremy said. “Give him more.”
“No, Dad. She’s got to save it for when I do the dismissing spell. It’s going to be hard. The Servitor doesn’t want to go. Like, it’s still got a job to do.”
Helen put the obvious question, seemed she was good at that: “What job, Sean?”
“Bringing me to the Black Man. Even if I’d bound the Servitor, I wouldn’t be its real master. The Black Man is, in the end. In the beginning, too, I guess.”
Alpha, omega, merged and twisted into lazy-eight infinity.
“Sean’s right,” O’Conaghan said. He touched Helen’s pack. “You’ve got the ritual in there?”
With excruciating care, she stowed the cobalt bottle and withdrew the other treasure, Jeremy’s penciled notes. “Here. Sean, are you ready to learn it?”
Unfolding himself from his chair, he nodded.
Helen trailed him into the study, which was impenetrably dark to her again normal eyes until Jeremy flicked on the chandelier. The light made her wince, but only for the first seconds of adjustment, and she was relieved to realize that her headache was subsiding. Before the night was over, though, she might wish she had more of Bishop’s #5, so she could see what was hidden but, too certainly this time, not harmless.
Helen stayed awake and jittery during the study session. Maybe it was end-game adrenaline, maybe a communication of urgency from O’Conaghan. It wasn’t the coffee Celeste brought in. Helen didn’t dare touch that—why brandish a lit match at gasoline?
She, Jeremy, and O’Conaghan all memorized the incantations of the dismissing ritual along with Sean—if he stumbled, they had to be ready with prompts. It was a good thing that Enoch Bishop had been Puritan enough to prefer English t
o Latin pomp. Puritan wizards with their new and improved spells. Should she be worried that it was beginning to make sense to her? She fed Sean a couple teaspoons of Patience Orne’s #11, but his eyes still furtively strayed to corners and ceiling. Around eleven, he shoved his chair back. “We’ve got to go,” he said.
Gus’s swollen ankle barred him from their party. Celeste insisted on taking his place, which was a relief. Given the Servitor’s record, it was likely they’d need a field medic more than a sharpshooter. Helen shouldered her pack and Eddy’s bat, Celeste her emergency bag and Gus’s oak walking stick. O’Conaghan had his flashlight and service pistol. For pentagram drawing, Jeremy had pocketed pastel sticks. For his weapon, he turned down Gus’s Colt, muttering that he’d probably shoot his own foot off with that. While the rest of them piled into the cars, he disappeared around the back of the house. He returned shouldering a pitchfork with a worn-smooth handle and a well-oiled iron head. “Granddad Wyndham’s,” he said. “Cel’s got a garageful of his tools.” A good choice, if the books Helen had been cramming all summer were right: Tradition conferred a certain magic of its own.
Celeste rode with O’Conaghan, whose Camry took the lead. Helen rode in the backseat of the Civic. In the front, beside Jeremy, Sean slumped silent. No wonder: What more could any of them have to say?
As they crossed from Providence into Edgewood, however, Sean groaned. “I’m seeing with it all the time now. Even if I open my eyes.”
Helen scooted forward. “Can you tell where it is?”
“It’s swum down the Seekonk. Now it’s in the harbor, where the tankers dock. If it comes up the bay and around the neck by the Yacht Club, it’ll get back into the Pawtuxet.”
“All right. That’s what we need it to do.”
“But it knows we’re going to dismiss it. It must think it can repossess me, no problem. It must think I can’t stop it.”
“You can stop it, Sean,” Jeremy said. “You summoned it; you can get rid of it.”
“I don’t know, Dad. The Black Man doesn’t want it back unless it brings me. I don’t want to see him again. I don’t want to talk to him.”
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