Another gust forced him backward, half turning him around.
A third made him duck his head and move on, skirting a table tipped onto its side, nearly tripping through an empty doorway with no walls on either side.
The wind blew more strongly.
The sand didn’t move.
He smelled fire and burning tar.
He heard his own breathing, rough and shallow, as he tried to keep his balance against the wind and the soft, shifting sands.
Through rooms and courtyards until finally he saw a fluted pedestal as high as his chest, standing alone in a wasteland of rocks and rocky sand. Its top was round and wide, its sides streaked with stains that could have been rust, could have been blood.
He walked around it slowly, frowning, reaching out to dust the pitted marble with his fingertips.
He had no idea what this was, or what it once held, until his left foot kicked something buried at the base. He leaned over and saw a streak of black, carefully brushed the sand away and blinked once, slowly.
It took both hands to lift the three-foot statue from the ground, and his face was streaked with perspiration as he placed it on the pedestal.
Anubis, exquisitely fashioned in onyx, every detail clear despite the. complete absence of color.
The jackal-headed god stood with one foot slightly behind the other, teeth slightly bared, eyes slightly narrowed.
Its left hand was raised shoulder-high, palm out.
Its right arm was raised over its head, but it stopped at the elbow.
The rest was gone.
He backed away from it slowly, scowling as he scanned the ground for signs of the missing limb. He didn’t know what the god had been holding in its other hand, and he didn’t care. The fact that it had been mutilated was enough to make him nervous.
The green sky darkened.
The wind began to scream through holes in the rock.
Something told him to leave, now.
And something else made him watch as Anubis turned its head toward him and opened its jaws.
Richard sat up abruptly, eyes wide, mouth open in a shout that never made it past a moan caught in his throat. His gaze snapped around the bedroom, half expecting to see an intruder waiting in ambush deep in the shadows. But there was nothing but the dresser, the closet door, and the first faint light of dawn slowly filling the window.
“Damn,” he whispered, and swallowed heavily. “Damn.”
Wearily he dropped back onto the sweat-damp pillow and stared at the ceiling. The apartment was cool, he liked it that way, and it helped to drive away the remaining fragments of the nightmare even as he tried to figure out what it meant.
The ruins had been part of his dreamscape for years; most of the time they signified little, if anything, beyond the reminder of what his people had once had, and had lost. Every so often, however, the scene was altered, and every so often he found something he needed to know.
But he had never been afraid of them before.
Never.
He lay still for another minute, calming his breathing, clearing his mind, before ruefully deciding there was no chance he’d be able to find sleep again. Slowly he sat up again, and slid his legs over the edge of the bed. He scratched his chest and scalp vigorously, shook his head quickly, and moved to the window to check the street.
Under an overcast sky a car crawled east; the old man from up the street walked his yapping, mostly hair, dog; two kids on bikes delivered papers.
Nothing he hadn’t seen a hundred times before.
Whoever had been watching last night was gone, and he still couldn’t figure out if it had been a threat or not.
He waited a few minutes longer, just to be sure, then spent the next hour preparing for his trip across the state to the outskirts of Roanoke. He wouldn’t be back soon. The summons Fay Parnell had given him told him that much.
What he still didn’t know was why she had broken off their conversation so abruptly. He had known her for several years, and for a brief and dangerous time they had been lovers. Mystery was, of course, a part of her allure, but he had never known her to show the slightest bit of fear.
Yet there had definitely been fear in her voice the night before.
For him, he wondered, or for herself?
He grunted sharply in a scold. Speculation was useless, and at this stage it would only get him into trouble. Not, he thought wryly as he dressed, that trouble and he were strangers. Not only was it part of his job, but he also managed to get into enough of it on his own, without any help from outsiders. He knew full well that impulse and instinct were often necessary to his survival; he also knew that once in a while, despite his best efforts, they stampeded reason, and left him scrambling for solid ground.
Whenever you feel the urge, Fay had once told him with a smug, friendly grin, count to five before you walk off the damn cliff, okay? And be sure you have a parachute.
The trouble with that was, by the time he remembered the advice, he was sometimes already on the way down.
Without the damn parachute.
Another grunt, this one more like a laugh, and once packed—a small cloth bag, nothing more, that he would keep on the seat beside him—he activated the apartment’s elaborate security measures, pulled on a fleece-lined leather jacket, and stood before the owl.
Tell me, he asked it silently; tell me what you see.
Then he sighed and left, stopping in the large, once elegant lobby to knock on Mrs. Allantero’s door. She answered immediately, as he knew she would. The woman never slept, and no one ever left the building without her somehow knowing about it.
She wore ancient slippers, and an oversize floral dress that made her look heavier than she really was. As it was, she barely came up to the middle of his chest. A squint at his bag over the top of her reading glasses: “You going away?”
“For a while, yes.”
She nodded. “You be good, Richard. The world’s going to hell out there.”
He grinned. “I’ll take care, don’t worry.”
She didn’t ask. when he would be back, didn’t even blink when he handed her an envelope that contained the next four months’ rent. It disappeared somewhere into the folds of her dress. Then she reached around the door, and handed him a brown paper lunch bag, stuffed with cookies and, probably, an orange and an apple. It was another of their rituals; he seldom left town without one of her trip-snacks.
A quick good-bye, then, and he hurried outside, around the corner of the building to the side parking lot as he shivered against the unexpected damp cold. His car was purposely nondescript and looked as if it should have been traded in a dozen years ago. Yet it felt like a favorite glove—not pretty, but it fit him perfectly. It warmed up quickly, and as he pulled into the street, he looked back and saw Mrs. Allantero in her window. Watching; always watching.
Her left hand lifted in a tentative wave, and he smiled and waved back.
Surrogate mother, he thought.
He wondered, then, what she would think if she knew her star tenant and surrogate son was actually a member of a race that called itself the Garou.
She wouldn’t know what that meant.
But she would, without a doubt, recognize a werewolf.
Shapes and shadows in the fog.
As the land rose toward the Blue Ridge Mountains, the clouds lowered, and across the increasing number of pastures and fields, pockets of mist and fog rose from creeks and streams, and crept out of the woodland. By Roanoke, shortly before sunset, most of the summits were buried in ragged gray, and thin, gray patches had slipped across the road.
Richard was uneasy.
Just like the night before, he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something out there, pacing him— flashes of dark movement in the fog, a breeze-caused rip in the mist to reveal something standing in a meadow, the sense of something on the highway behind him, keeping out of sight just around the last bend.
It was foolish.
It was probably an understandable combination of being summoned again after so long a layoff, the nightmare, and Fay’s inexplicable warning. A touch of imagination, a dash of paranoia; he was lucky he wasn’t seeing UFOs land on the highway.
Nevertheless, the shapes and shadows were out there, and he was more than a little relieved when he crossed over Interstate 81 west of Roanoke and, a mile-and-a-half later, took a little-used side road down into a narrow valley where night was only a few minutes away. Open land had given way to trees and dense brush, the side road to his destination practically buried behind tall reeds hiding a shallow, wide creek on the right.
As always, he drove past it twice to be sure no one had followed, then took the right turn slowly onto a single-lane road, and stopped almost immediately. He checked the rearview mirror, rubbed his chin, and finally got out, trailing one hand along the car’s side as he walked to the back bumper and checked the main road in both directions.
Just be to sure again.
Nothing.
And nothing in the thick woods across the way, nothing in the sky below the clouds.
Maybe, he thought, and not for the first time recently; maybe I’m getting a little too old for this game.
As he turned to get back into the car, a flurry of crows exploded noisily out of the trees across the road, spinning dead leaves and alarms in their wake. He spun instantly into a crouch, cocking his head to listen as the flock’s cries faded into the hillsides, straining to find movement in the twilight beneath the branches.
Most the trees were pine, but there were gaps he could see through, and shadows that dipped and wavered as a breeze slipped out of the woods into his face.
Slowly, uncertain, he rose and crossed the road, sidestepped down and up the mossy sides of a shallow ditch, and made his way in.
A crow called in the distance.
It could have been a deer, a bear, but their recognizable scents were not in the air; the birds could have spooked themselves, but he didn’t think so.
He moved around a gnarled, half-dead pine, letting the lower branches glide off his left arm and shoulder.
Above him, the breeze had kicked into a wind, soughing, scattering leaves, snapping off dead twigs. Good and bad: it would mask his own movement, but he wouldn’t be able to hear anyone else’s.
Another ten yards that took him ten minutes.
Pine needles on the ground matted into strips of brown and dull green; the nearly flat body of a long-dead squirrel lying beneath a laurel; a small pool of black, stagnant water that rippled thickly when the wind touched the surface.
He saw no prints, caught no spoor, and was about to give himself a swift mental kick in the butt, when he saw something quivering in a bush off to his right.
The branches, thick and dark gray, were horned, and a small piece of cloth struggled near the bottom. He pulled it off between thumb and forefinger, held it close to his eyes, then squinted into the wind. Still no prints, but this time he had the scent.
Human.
And long gone.
There was still a chance Richard might catch him—whoever it was had probably bolted when the crows took flight—but there was no time.
And for the moment, there was no danger.
Still, he waited a few minutes more, just in case, before returning to the car and rattling over a narrow wood bridge in serious need of repair. The road beyond was mostly stone and potholes, a deliberate discouragement to the casual weekend explorer.
A quarter of a mile later he reached a broad clearing and took his foot off the accelerator, letting the car roll to a silent stop.
* * *
The house, despite its size, was not very imposing. It had been constructed to follow the top arc of the long circular drive that fronted it, yet it didn’t seem to be that large. Towering firs on the slopes behind and away on its flanks shrank the single-story brick and white-trim building, and even its one-acre front yard with its evergreen shrubs and now barren gardens looked little bigger than a postage stamp. The eagle weather vane in the center of the peaked roof, its brass dull without sunshine, quivered. Carriage lamps on either side of the paneled, double-front doors were lit, but the amber glass seemed less welcoming than cold. All the windows were blinded by closed draperies.
Had that casual weekend explorer gotten this far, he would have sworn, despite the lights, that the place was deserted.
Richard frowned his bemusement when he realized there were no cars parked on the drive. There should have been. Six or seven, at least. A spur off to the right led to an old stable converted into a six-car garage. The three that he could see were open, and there were no vehicles in there either.
He checked his watch, and the frowned deepened momentarily. He wasn’t late, and he doubted the others were, either. He would learn the reason for their absence soon enough.
He parked just past the entrance and opened the car door, shivering slightly at the chill that ruffled across his face. A good feeling. The scent of fir and pine, the scent of untainted air—a good feeling that would do until he was given the reason for the summons.
He glanced at the darkening sky, and the clouds were lower still.
A crow called from the woods, and was answered by another, coasting beneath the clouds.
The wind sent a single leaf spiraling over the roof.
Richard watched it vanish behind the weather vane, and shook his head. He had never really liked this place. It was too isolated, too vulnerable. A glance over his shoulder, a scowl into the wind. That human, whoever he was, might be in there, in the trees, either watching and nothing more, or fixing the sights of a rifle on his head.
“Enough,” he told himself angrily. There was always the possibility it had only been a hunter or a hiker-, it wasn’t necessary to turn every shadow into something sinister.
Yet Fay had said, be careful when there shouldn’t have been anything to be careful of at all.
He was almost tempted to walk around to the back to do some checking on his own, but the temptation faded quickly, and he slipped his right hand into his trouser pocket, fingers closing around a small cloth bag. He squeezed it once, for luck and reassurance, then strode cautiously to the front door.
Unlike his previous visits, there was no sign of greeting.
None at all.
Suddenly, ridiculously, he felt like the heroine in an old suspense movie—she and the audience knew full-well there was danger on the other side of that door, and contrary to all reason, she opened it anyway.
She and the audience were always right.
“Damn,” he muttered. This was stupid. What the hell was the matter with him?
… be careful …
He took a slow deep breath and knocked.
The right-hand door opened immediately, soundlessly.
He started, cursed himself for the reaction, and stepped inside without waiting for an invitation, nodding once to a middle-aged woman dressed in a severe, expensive brown suit, no flourishes at all, her solid brown hair tightly caught in a bun at her nape.
“Afternoon, Hester,” he said pleasantly. “Will you tell them I’m here?”
Not a smile in return, just a sharp commanding nod that told him to stay where he was.
He didn’t argue.
The foyer was large, with a polished flagstone floor and undecorated white walls split by exposed beams. Dim light fell from a small teardrop chandelier in the center of the ceiling. At the back, sliding glass doors overlooked a yard nearly the size of a football field, mostly brown now, and spotted at the back with shaded patches of snow that must have fallen the night before. In the middle of the walls right and left were entries to corridors he knew ran the length of the house, all the rooms opening off them, a curious arrangement he had never bothered to question.
No one lived here.
As far as he knew, no one even stayed here overnight. Not even Hester Darchek.
The foyer was too warm. He unzipped his coat, then slipped it off and
draped it over his left shoulder, moved it from there to drape over his right arm. He walked to the glass doors and stared at the yard, walked back to the entrance and stared at the tips of his shoes, tried counting the bulbs in the chandelier, and decided that if he didn’t do something soon, he was going to drive himself crazy.
Hester returned a minute later, beckoned once, and he followed her into the hall on the right, its thick floral carpeting smothering their footsteps. Again, there was no ornamentation on the walls, the only light from candle-shaped bulbs beneath milk-glass chimneys in sconces beside each dark-wood door they passed.
Not a sound.
Not even the rising wind.
He wanted to whistle something, anything, just to break the silence, but he had a feeling Hester wouldn’t approve; he also had a feeling, without really knowing why, that he wouldn’t be very happy if he ever sparked her ire.
Still . . it was tempting.
Halfway along, the woman paused just long enough to gesture him to an open door before she headed back toward the foyer, hands clasped at her stomach.
Richard smiled pleasantly as she passed, and rolled his eyes when, as usual, there was no response.
In all the time he had known her, if “known” was the word, she had never spoken more than a few words at a time, never smiled, never broken the indifferent mask she wore.
A deep voice with a touch of an English accent said, “Do come in, Richard, come in.”
The room was a full twenty-five feet on a side, the walls papered white-and-rose on top, with dark walnut wainscoting below. A carved oak sideboard stood to the left just inside the door, and in the center was a gleaming refectory table large enough to seat eighteen.
There were no windows or other exits.
There were no lamps; the only illumination came from hooded bulbs embedded in the ceiling, one for each of the eighteen chairs. All else was in deep shadow.
There were only three others in the room.
Instantly, Richard felt all his defenses go up.
There should have been, at the very least, nine or ten men and women here.
Watcher: Based on the Apocalypse (World of Darkness : Werewolf) Page 4
