The Gathering Dark

by Christopher Golden

  An ancient Madonna song recorded the year Keomany was born came on the radio. She began to sing along but her voice dropped off. A blue Dodge pickup was just to her left and she could hear the same song coming through its open window. A battered BMW sailed past her going much too fast.

  Her eyelids grew heavier, her whole body warm.

  Madonna sang along to the sound of her tires humming against pavement and then the music was gone as Keomany’s eyes closed and her chin began to dip and finally her head canted forward. It was the sensation of falling that snapped her eyes open, rocked her back in the seat. There was an instant of knowing, where she understood that she had fallen asleep at the wheel, and her hands gripped the steering wheel so hard they hurt. Her entire body was rigid in that slice of time.

  Then she saw the Dodge pickup looming too large in her peripheral vision. Her rearview mirror was a whisper away from the Dodge and the driver laid on the horn. It seemed too loud through her open window, blaring like an air raid siren, and she cut the wheel hard to the right.

  Too hard.

  All on instinct.

  The little Kia had drifted from the middle into the fast lane, and now it darted back across the highway too far, sailing all the way to the breakdown lane. If there had been another car in the slow lane— or a lunatic like the one in that battered BMW . . .

  Keomany couldn’t think about it. She hit the brakes and let the Kia roll onto the soft shoulder, tires kicking up gravel. Her legs were weak and they hurt from the sudden rictus of her muscles and her hands were shaking as she put the car in park. Her chest rose in ragged gasps as she laid her forehead upon the steering wheel.

  A tractor-trailer thundered by and the Kia shuddered as though it might be tugged along in the truck’s backwash.

  “Oh my God,” Keomany whispered as she glanced up over the top of the steering wheel and out the windshield. Just ahead of her on the soft shoulder was a green sign showing the distance to Montpelier and Montreal. Another half-dozen feet and she would have torn right through the steel struts that held up the sign.

  “Holy shit.”

  She got out of the car and stood back to stare at it. Blinking in amazement, she walked a circuit of the Kia and marveled at the little car as though it were the most extraordinary vehicle ever built. Not a scratch on it. Or on her.

  “Holy shit,” she said again, out loud this time, and it occurred to her how sadly ineloquent trauma had made her.

  The thought made her laugh. It was a little crazy, that sound, but she shook her head and then slid back behind the wheel of the car and continued to let the strained giggle roll out of her because she needed to.

  Just for fun she said “Holy shit” a third time and then laughed some more. Keomany sighed and ratcheted around to look backward along the highway and she waited several minutes until there wasn’t a car in sight before she pulled out.

  She kept to the slow lane for almost twenty minutes, and when she at last moved back into the middle, she shuddered. Her skin was tingling all over the way it had when she was a little girl and had done something naughty and then gotten away with it.

  This was like that. It made her feel lucky and somehow brand new.

  A short time later Nikki Wydra’s song came on for the third time and Keomany laughed and sat up straight and sang along at the top of her lungs.

  But she kept her eyes on the road.

  And she didn’t feel tired anymore. Not at all.

  Despite the giddiness she’d felt after nearly dying, by the time Keomany drove past the fire station and into Wickham late that afternoon, all the benevolent energy she had built up at the Bealtienne festival—and in bed with No Last Name Zach—had completely dissipated. She was relieved to be home but there was a kind of bitterness in it as well, for she felt very keenly that something had been robbed from her, that the exuberance she had been feeling had not merely been tainted, but stolen.

  It had soured her disposition, and she had never liked to feel sour.

  Still, as she drove through town, she tried to force herself to cheer up at least a little. She was fine, after all. Pissed at herself more than anything. It was foolish to let the incident ruin what had been an otherwise perfectly pleasant break.

  So intent was she upon her mood that though she noticed how deserted the sidewalks were on the normally busy Currier Street, it failed to register as anything particularly remarkable.

  Keomany parked the Kia across the street from Sweet Somethings and climbed out of the car. She paused and took a deep breath to center herself, to touch the earth with her mind and speak to nature with her heart.

  And she recoiled.

  “What the hell?” she muttered and she stared around as though she had just woken up. Something had seemed off ever since she had fallen asleep behind the wheel, but that was just her nerves. This . . . this was something else.

  Eyes narrowed, she glanced back at her car. The window was open. If it was just a smell, she ought to have caught the odor before she got out. But it was more than that, much more, and it had simply not affected her until she had left the car and exposed herself to Currier Street.

  With a shudder of dread, she started toward her shoppe. But everything seemed off kilter, soiled in some way, as though the air itself had grown thick and damp with rot. Halfway across the street she froze, with no thought at all given to the possibility of being struck by a car.

  What did she have to fear? There were no cars moving on Currier Street.

  Damp with rot? What had made her think that?

  Yet whatever had formed the image in her mind, she could not shake the thought now. The air did indeed have an unpleasant taint to it, not merely when she inhaled it, but when she touched it in the way that those of her faith could. Paul Leroux might tease her about being an earth goddess—and that was fine because goddess she most certainly was not—but she did have a connection to the magick in nature. “What the hell is going on around here?” she asked aloud.

  This was not simply the bad feeling left over from her near-collision. The town seemed deserted, the air had a strange texture to it, like the sky pregnant with moisture just before a storm, and yet this was different still from that. There was a copper tang in the air that she scented in her nostrils and tasted upon her tongue and a wild thought cantered across her mind, that at any moment the sky would begin to bleed.

  The late afternoon light had changed just in the few minutes since she had driven into Wickham. Now it was not golden but coarse orange, the color of rotten pumpkins.

  Keomany began to shake her head. Somebody else might have chalked it up as simply odd and brushed it off. A person who could not feel what she felt in the earth and in the air might have tried to go about their business. But this was not right.

  Keomany Shaw was an earthwitch, and no fucking way was she spending another minute on this street.

  Earthwitch, she thought with a laugh. You’re not even that strong in it. There had been dozens at the Bealtienne festival with more sensitivity to the earth than she had, with real ability to read ley lines and to call upon their power, to influence the weather, to uncover the secrets of the world.

  But if she could feel what had happened here this strongly, she had a feeling those others might have been crippled by it.

  Her throat was dry and it hurt when she swallowed as though she was already getting sick from whatever dark poison filled the air. She turned to walk back toward her car.

  Something moved.

  Just out of the corner of her eye.

  A chill raced through her and her skin prickled with gooseflesh as she turned to try to pursue it, the only thing she had seen moving since she drove into town. Down along the street between two parked cars. It might have been a dog running low but she knew that was not it. Her single glimpse of it was burned on her retina, a flash of blackness darker than shadow. She could feel the malice emanating from it.

  But it was gone.

  “Get in the goddam
n car, Keomany,” she muttered to herself.

  An anger rose in her, doing combat with her fear. Nobody had ever benefited from backing Keomany Shaw into a corner. It made her cunning and hard and stubborn. This was her town. Her parents were here somewhere. Her friends. It was her place. Her shoppe . . .

  Keomany had reached the car. Whatever strength her anger had given her was not enough to overcome her fear. She’d leave, go back to the edge of town, and find a pay phone. Hell, chances were it wasn’t the whole town anyway, just here. But the sky . . . the dirty orange color of the overcast sky was growing darker. She could drive to the police station. They’d think she was nuts for claiming to have had some kind of premonition, but something was going on down on Currier Street.

  The shoppe . . .

  Keomany glanced just once at Sweet Somethings. The shoppe was dark but she could see Paul Leroux behind the plate glass, staring out at her with wide eyes as though the sight of her terrified him, as though she were the thing that had tainted the world of Currier Street.

  She saw him mouth her name.

  Then Paul withdrew into the darkness of the shoppe and the rotten-pumpkin light that filtered from the sky—though not from any sun she’d ever seen—could not penetrate those shadows.

  “Fuck,” she whispered.

  Keomany glanced around at the other stores and restaurants, looked at the empty, parked cars, and stared carefully at the place where she had thought she had seen that slinking, jagged shadow thing. It has teeth. The words skittered across her mind. I don’t think I saw them, but I felt them.

  The Kia beckoned to her from behind but she could not retreat into it. Not if Paul was inside the shoppe. He might have answers, and she wanted that, but the uglier half of that thought was that she might be the only chance he had of ever leaving Currier Street—or this infected version of it—again.

  Holding her breath, she ran toward the shoppe.

  The street was solid beneath her feet but everything else seemed completely surreal. A sound had begun to rasp across the sky as though the town of Wickham itself were breathing—like the distant rolling thunder of jet engines and yet somehow all around her head, whispering in her ears.

  As Keomany reached the sidewalk, there came another fluid slice of darkness in the edges of her vision. She spun, heart thudding in her chest, to stare a moment at the entrance to the Currier Street Theater, where she thought she could see a kind of pus-yellow streak in the air as though the thing that had just ducked out of sight beneath the theater’s marquee had left a trail in its wake.

  Damp rot, she thought again. The whole street smelled of it, and it felt that way too, as though the world were becoming nothing more than the desiccated remains of reality.

  The door of the shoppe was open perhaps two inches. As she reached for the knob, a putrid wind blew and it swung further inward as though it were an invitation. The hand-carved wooden chimes struck one another with a sound more like brittle, hollowed bones. Keomany hesitated only a second, staring at her outstretched fingers, and then she shoved the door open the rest of the way.

  It’s my place, she thought. This is my place. And the thoughts made her mind skip like a stone across stagnant water to her own apartment, and then to her parents’ home. Images of their faces swam up into her head like ghosts—an analogy that made her stomach churn so badly she nearly threw up. But she saw them so clearly in her mind right then, her broad-shouldered dad with his hair prematurely white and the map of Ireland on his face and her tiny wisp of a mother with her perfect Cambodian features and silk black hair that made her look more like Keomany’s sister.

  In the foyer of the shoppe, she could feel the Kia parked back on the street tugging at her as though the little car had its own brand of magick. The safety of her parents was more important than whatever might happen to Sweet Somethings, or even to Paul . . . but Paul worked for her. He was her responsibility in a way. And after she’d seen his face, she couldn’t just leave.

  There was no sign of him as she entered the shoppe and rushed across the floor to peer behind the counter.

  Her breathing was heavy and sounded too loud. The smell of chocolate that always hung in the air remained, yet it made her even more nauseous somehow. Keomany had remained silent save for small utterings of fear and astonishment. There had been dark things in motion out on the street, and in the back of her mind she had feared drawing their attention.

  Now, though, she could remain silent no longer. She could see that everything was as she had left it, the shoppe clean and orderly, despite that its interior was only barely lit by the rotten pumpkin orange sunlight leeching through the display windows. But it was wrong. All wrong.

  Her place had been marked by something just as surely as if a pack of wolves had broken in and pissed all over the floor to tag their territory.

  “Paul!”

  Her gaze swung toward the door that led into the back room. She ran to it, her footfalls too loud now, echoing like her voice. A certainty grew in her that every step, every shout was a beacon to those jagged shadows flitting about outside but she called his name again as she ran to the door to the back. Beside it there was a double switch plate. Keomany switched on the lights for the front and the back room with one slip of her hand.

  There was a spark and the sound of something sizzling for a second, then nothing. It surprised her not at all. Her throat was dry and yet her lips were salty and only as she ran her tongue over them did she realize that she was crying. One hand fluttered to her face and she smeared her tears across her cheeks.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered.

  The taste of her own tears, that salt on her tongue, made it all real. She had known it was, of course, but the queer texture of the world had insinuated that it might all be some hallucination, some hyperreal dream. Hell, it had occurred to her that she might have fallen asleep at the wheel and died.

  But no, this was not death. Not yet.

  Then Keomany laughed, a lunatic chuckle that she had called upon God, now and back when she thought she was going to crash her car. There might be a God, she was willing to allow that. But she had dedicated her life since the age of sixteen to another worship entirely, to earth magick, to the goddess all around her.

  But not here, Keomany thought with a chill. She’s not here now, not in this place. Because it isn’t natural at all.

  “Paul!” she cried a third time and she stepped through the door to the back room and peered into the shifting darkness and again she froze. Any one of those shadows, black upon black, might have been one of the furtive shadow things she had seen out on the street.

  She narrowed her gaze and bit her lip hard enough that she could taste the copper tang of her own blood. Like her tears, though, it crystallized the truth of her surroundings for her. Keomany took three more steps into the pitch black room but would go no further.

  “Paul?” she asked, hesitant now.

  His face loomed out of the darkness, pale as the moon.

  “Keomany? Tell me it’s you. Are you real?” he rasped in the tiniest little-boy voice.

  Her tears. Her blood. Keomany felt the truth of it inside her just as she felt the filthiness of her surroundings on her skin, breathed it in through her nose with utter revulsion.

  “Yes, Paul.” What happened here? What’s going on? Did I see . . . things out there? She wanted to ask all of those questions but that was for later, in the car, after they’d picked up her parents and gotten to the police.

  Not the Wickham police, she decided, but elsewhere. The next town. Or the one after that. Maybe even all the way to Montpelier.

  “Come with me,” Keomany told him, and she began to turn.

  “No,” Paul said curtly, little-boy voice turning shrill. “You stay.”

  It seemed as though the very air trapped her then, becoming like taffy, tugging at her arms and her hips and her legs. She was moving through something with substance that slowed her as she turned to look at him again, to see wh
at the change in his voice had wrought in his expression. His face, however, was the same.

  But it was only his face.

  Keomany had moved to one side and let the light seep in from the front of the shoppe and that tainted illumination showed her what had become of Paul. His face was suspended in the air in the midst of the room upon the tip of a rancid, pitted thing like a tentacle the color of oxidized copper. How it spoke she did not know. It extended, this limb, back into the store room among shelves of hand-dipped chocolates and shipping materials, and now she could hear something thick and fat and wet sliding along the concrete floor and in her mind she recalled the image of a manatee she had seen at the New England Aquarium when she was a girl. Yet she knew that this thing, if she saw all of it, would be nothing like that. It would be worse than what she had already seen, the face and the putrescent limb and . . .

  “Oh, you poor bastard,” Keomany whispered to Paul.

  She had taken in all of this in the tiniest fraction of a heartbeat and in the very next she saw the shadows deeper inside the room begin to unfold. They were sharp, those shadows, and they were coming for her.

  Keomany screamed and stumbled, turned and fled back into the shoppe. Something hissed from behind the counter and she glimpsed other dark things rising back there. The smell inside Sweet Somethings had changed once more, the air now heavy with an acrid stench like burning rubber. With another small shriek she launched herself toward the front door and collided with a floor display unit of glass and metal candlesticks. Now she did not even have the luxury of screaming as she fell, the display crashing to the floor beside her with a clanging of metal and a spray of shattering glass.