Tiny pinpricks of fear ran across her flesh like the legs of a thousand spiders. Keomany felt as though her throat was closing up and tears began to sting her eyes. Her hands lashed out to either side in an attempt to leverage herself up and shards of broken glass cut her. She looked back toward the store room and now she saw them far more clearly than she had before, as if they had gathered the darkness of the room to carve their own bodies out of those shadows.
The creatures were not black but the indigo of the midnight sky. Their near-skeletal bodies were covered in a strange armor plating like some insectoid carapace, their heads sheathed by the same chitinous material save for the long, whipping tendril that dangled from beneath each of those plated heads like some obscene and deadly rapier tongue. If they had faces under there, Keomany could not see them, and it was that more than anything else that snapped her from the paralysis of her terror and sent her scuttling backward, slicing her palms to ribbons on broken glass, toward the door.
“What the hell are you?” Keomany cried as she finally spun onto her knees and launched herself to her feet.
The shadow things hissed in unison and her back felt exposed, a target simply waiting for the attack. In the space between eyeblinks she imagined in excruciating detail the long, slender, blue-black talons of the things raking her back, slicing her throat, and ripping her chest open. She could feel the hunger in them, could sense their malign intentions, as though she was receiving those savage images of her own mutilation directly from their minds.
They came after her, then, scrambling and capering like monkeys, those hideous rapier tongues darting about as though they might reach for her, thrust their foul points into her flesh.
Keomany raced for the door.
It was closed.
She did not even slow down. When she reached the door, she thrust herself forward, pulling her legs up beneath her and crashing through the plate glass of the door, her mind consumed wholly with her terror and the thundering of her heart in her chest and the knowledge that if she did not escape these things she might end up like Paul.
In a tangle of limbs and shattered window she tumbled across the sidewalk and a sliver of a thought plunged into her brain, how the tinkle of broken glass upon the walk sounded like wind chimes. Then the display window of the store exploded outward and the shadow things began to leap out after her, crouching and dancing madly in a way that drove home her thought that they reminded her of monkeys.
But she was out of the shoppe now. Sweet Somethings was behind her. Paul was worse than dead and there was no way to know what had happened to anyone else. All she knew was that she had to get off Currier Street and she had not torn herself up crashing through that glass door to die here on the sidewalk or to have herself hollowed out and leave some demon behind wearing her face.
The shadow things came at her and Keomany was already in motion. She felt herself simply flow off the ground as though the sidewalk were helping her up. I am not going to die, she thought.
She ran for her car. The sky had darkened, that rotten pumpkin orange seeming to thicken the air, and she understood that whatever was going on here in Wickham, it had been a mistake for her to think that it had happened while she was away. It was happening right now, this moment, still going on, and whatever it was, she had drifted right into the middle of it.
Blood trickling from her hands and slipping like tears down her face where she had cut herself rolling in glass on the sidewalk, she reached into her pocket and grabbed her keys and raced for the little Kia. It seemed to call out to her, to beckon, to urge her on.
I’m not going to die, she told herself again.
Which was when strong indigo talons clamped on her shoulder from behind and others slashed at her legs and then one of them barreled into her from behind, clinging to her back and driving her down to the pavement again. Still no traffic on the street. Nothing moved except the shadow things and her . . . their victim. And she felt it then, the thing she had feared most of all, the thing that made hot, disgusting bile rage up the back of her throat.
Something sharp pushed into the flesh of her back, injecting itself beneath her skin, probing, and she thought of mosquitoes.
“No!” Keomany screamed, her face mashed against pavement. Then, more definitively: “No!”
All of this was unnatural. These things, demons, whatever they were . . . they were an abomination against nature, an atrocity perpetrated against the earth itself. All of this, the putrid orange sky, the fetid air, and the surreal texture of the world of Currier Street . . . it was all wrong, and yet beneath it she could feel the earth, the natural world she worshipped, bucking against it, fighting this cancer that was growing on its flesh.
She felt the thing’s filthy proboscis under her skin and the weight of them on her, talons holding her down, cutting her, and a rage blossomed inside Keomany unlike anything she had ever felt before.
Her teeth bit down on her lower lip.
“Get . . . the fuck . . . off of me!” she shouted.
Then Keomany pushed.
The pavement all around her shattered as tree roots thrust up from the earth and impaled the shadow things that were on top of her. Other roots twined around their legs and necks and hauled them down to the buckled road. Keomany heard their carapaces crack, saw the living roots slithering through wounds in their bodies like serpents in the bones of the dead, and she knew that it was her doing.
The natural world was striking back at these parasites upon its flesh, and yet it was more than that. It was her. She had summoned them. Even now she felt in the core of her, not in her heart but in her gut, that she was controlling each root as though they were her own fingers, extensions of her self.
Earthwitch, she thought giddily as she staggered to her feet, watching the roots tear the faceless, armored things apart.
“I’m an earthwitch!” she screamed at them, as though it meant anything at all to them.
Keomany had seen power in others who worshipped as she did, but she had never imagined this sort of power within herself. It was too much for her to make sense of all at once, not when she still had to get away from Currier Street alive, not when she had to make sense of what was happening here, of the evil that had infected her hometown, pervasive evil that was spreading like disease.
Bloody and exhausted as she came down from the adrenaline rush of what had just happened, the earth magick that had just surged through her, she stumbled to the little Kia, her keys miraculously still clutched in her hand. Other shadow things were crawling out from beneath nearby cars and several were crouched in the doorway of The Lionheart Pub glaring at her, but they were slow to approach.
Behind her, seven or eight of the things lay dead or broken beneath the writhing roots that had erupted from the street. These things were evil and savage, but they were not irrational. This was a new thing, what she had just done, and they were hesitant to test its power.
Keomany snatched at the door of the Kia, and a tiny shard of glass still stuck in her flesh sent a fresh jolt of pain through her. She practically fell into the driver’s seat, thrust the key into the ignition, and turned it. In the moment before it caught, she was sure the engine would not start, but then it roared to life somehow louder than before, as if it felt the fear and rage and panic in her.
Then she was driving, tearing off down the street with the accelerator pinned, heart hammering in her chest. She could taste her own blood on her lips along with the horrid, syrupy air that blew through the window. She had to slow slightly to turn and her tires shrieked as she rounded the corner onto Briarwood Road. She sped up again and the sky began to change color, the rotten orange bleeding out of the air and sifting back to bright, perfect blue with just a few wisps of cloud. Her chest rose and fell rapidly and she realized for the first time that she was moaning to herself in a soft, keening wail with every breath.
Keomany looked in the rearview mirror and the sky was blue there as well. The intersection with Market Str
eet was ahead and she could see cars going back and forth. Up ahead she saw a couple walking their dog. Quiet Al Pratt and his funny, quirky wife whose name Keomany could never remember. The dog was Brandy, though, she knew that.
The Kia coasted to a stop and then she pressed her foot down on the brake and kept it there as she bent over the steering wheel and let the tears come. Huge, racking sobs that shook her entire body.
A rap at the passenger’s side window made her cry out and jump in her seat. She looked up to find Al Pratt staring at her with deep furrows of concern wrinkling his brow.
“Keomany,” the man said, his voice muffled by the closed window. “What’s the matter? What’s—” He faltered when he saw the cuts on her face, the blood on her clothes and on the steering wheel where her ravaged hands had smeared it. “Jesus God!”
But then Al Pratt’s concern and his shock were drowned out by the abrupt intrusion of a police siren. Wickham was a small enough town that the sound was rare and both Keomany and Al—not to mention the man’s wife and Brandy the dog—looked quickly up to see a police car tearing around the corner up at the intersection with Market Street. It roared down Briarwood Road toward Currier, and Keomany leaned out the window, craning her neck to see where it was going, frightened for whichever officer was inside that car.
The police car disappeared.
The air shimmered like the surface of a lake and the police car was swallowed up by it just as though it had crashed in the water. Reality wavered around the vehicle as it sped into nothingness, and in the folds and whorls of that fluctuation in the air she saw the putrid orange sky again. Just hints of it. But it was there.
“Holy shit! Did you see that?” Al Pratt’s wife shouted. “Al—Jesus, Al, did you see that?”
But Keomany was barely listening. She was staring, mouth open, heart hammering again. Her tears and her blood were drying on her face. I just came from there, she thought. That’s where I was. So everything in that direction, everything around Currier Street . . .
“Oh, no,” she whispered, reaching for her glove compartment, snatching her cellular phone from it and punching in numbers. “No, no, no.”
The sky was blue again. She had thought it was going to be okay. Something awful had touched Wickham, some evil she could not begin to understand, but she had for just a moment imagined that it could be fixed. There had been evil in the world before and there were ways to deal with it, and if none of those ways were effective, she would just take her parents and leave it all behind.
Keomany clapped the cell phone to her ear and closed her eyes and whispered prayers as it began to ring on the other end.
“Goddess, please,” she said. “Dad, pick it up. Pick up the—”
There was a click. A rasp of breath. Keomany felt relief wash through her body with such strength that it almost hurt. Her father was a lifelong smoker and you could always hear it in his voice, in his breathing, even in his sleep.
“Dad? Listen, Daddy, this is important. You’ve got to get out of town. Leave the house now but don’t go through the center of—”
“Hello, Miss Shaw.”
A rasp of a voice, like distant thunder.
“It was nice to see you,” said that voice that did not belong to her father. “Come back soon.”
4
The morning of May seventh was lovely in Paris, and yet cooler than those unfamiliar with the city might imagine. It would warm up later in the afternoon, but particularly in the long shadows of the narrow streets around Montmartre, the night’s chill held on all through the early part of the day. Still, it was lovely in Paris in the spring. The city had a vigor and joy to it that was palpable, and all the trees and gardens were in bloom.
Kuromaku lived in Bordeaux in the south and had taken a train to Paris. He loved to travel by train so that he could watch the extraordinary French countryside pass outside the window, reminding him with every mile why he had chosen to settle here of all the places in the world a lonely wanderer might have come to rest.
He had arrived the previous day and spent the afternoon along the Seine as always, exploring yet another wing of the Louvre and then visiting the Notre Dame Cathedral to gaze up into the eyes of the gargoyles, searching for some trace of the dread they had once inspired. In the evening he had met with Sophie Duvic, an attractive young woman who had become his attorney when her father had passed away the year before. Lawyer and client had dined in a tiny corner restaurant in the Latin Quarter and then strolled among the vibrant night life of the City of Lights.
This morning it was all business, and Kuromaku was bored.
The office of David Truchaud was situated in a spectacular location on one of the tiny streets that criss-crossed Montmartre, within sight of the white steeple of Sacré-Coeur that jutted like a beacon of faith from the top of that hill with all of Paris unfolding below it. Among the women’s boutiques and fine French and Italian restaurants, tucked into buildings that had seen the ghosts of centuries pass through their doors, there were some of the most respectable businesses in all of France. Truchaud’s office was entered by walking through a tall, Medieval doorway into a courtyard filled with colorful flowers in bloom. The silence in that courtyard was extraordinary. Several doors led off the courtyard, but Truchaud’s offices were accessible from the one farthest to the right, and up the stairs to the second floor.
The architecture was admirable but the décor was depressing as hell. Kuromaku had managed to gather quite a collection of antiquities over the years. He bought and sold them as a business and a pleasure and had amassed a significant fortune in doing so. But in rooms as staid as these—all dark wood and very little light—the paintings and antique furniture Truchaud had decorated his headquarters with solicited only gloom from those who came through the door. Kuromaku’s own estate in Bordeaux was sprawling and open, every room planned so that it was awash with light on days when the sky was graced with the sun.
It seemed to him a horrible shame that they could be so close to such tranquil beauty as was to be found upon Montmartre, and yet exist in such dreary surroundings.
And so he sat in an uncomfortable yet extremely valuable wooden chair in Truchaud’s office and did his level best not to fall asleep. The room was so dark and the voices of Truchaud and his attorney so monotone that it was quite a feat to keep his eyes from fluttering closed. As it was, he had lost the thread of the conversation and perked up only when Sophie spoke.
Now, for instance.
“Kuromaku,” she said, voice somewhat urgent.
He lifted his chin, hoping he appeared to have been deep in thought rather than excruciatingly bored. With the slender fingers of his right hand he reached out and adjusted the crease of his pants at the knee.
“Yes? I’m sorry, what was that?”
His attorney did not smile as many would have done. Kuromaku was Japanese, though he lived in France, and Truchaud was of a grimly serious breed of Parisian businessmen. The proceedings were to unfold with a sobriety and dignity that left no room for amusement at Kuromaku’s lack of attention. He knew he ought to be embarrassed, but could not find it in himself to worry overmuch about any unintended insult. He was bored, pure and simple. The rest, as his American friends would say, was all bullshit.
“I asked if you had any more questions before the deal is concluded,” Sophie explained.
Kuromaku let his gaze tick from her face to Truchaud’s ruddy features and wispy white hair, then to his young, bespectacled attorney. “None at all. I am very pleased that Monsieur Truchaud has agreed to sell his vineyards to me and I look forward to caring for them for quite some time.”
“I am confident you will be a splendid caretaker,” Truchaud replied, nodding his head politely toward Kuromaku. “I am pleased to have found a buyer for my Bordeaux property who actually lives in Bordeaux.”
There was an ironic undercurrent to these words that Kuromaku sensed immediately. The man genuinely had wanted to find a local owner for his winery, bu
t was not entirely comfortable with the fact that though he had lived in Bordeaux for decades, Kuromaku was still—to Truchaud’s mind at least—a foreigner.
Kuromaku only nodded in return. “You are very gracious,” he told the white-haired man.
They had arrived at that moment when all of them realized the meeting was over and their business concluded. Kuromaku and Sophie rose and offered their gratitude to Truchaud and his attorney, then took their leave. There was something wistful in the old Frenchman’s eyes and Kuromaku wondered if he already regretted having sold the vineyards, or if he was simply sad no longer to have an excuse to visit Bordeaux.
But then they were walking down the stairs and out into the courtyard and the bright sunshine, and Monsieur Truchaud was forgotten. It was like that for Kuromaku, and always had been. Some people made an impression upon him so that he could never forget them, not in a thousand years. Others drifted across the path of his life like windblown autumn leaves.
Sophie, for instance. He had known the girl—now twenty-six, he believed—since her birth, and had always been fond of her. She had been a bright, happy child and seemed to be at least as competent an attorney as her father had been. Unlike others who crossed his path, Sophie had made an impression.
Now, as the two of them emerged from the courtyard into the narrow street that slashed across the steep hill leading to Sacré-Coeur, Sophie slipped her arm into his and smiled brightly.
“Congratulations, Kuromaku. I hope that you will let me visit the vineyards from time to time. The photographs are quite beautiful.”
He paused and turned to gaze quizzically at her, this sensual, lithe slip of a girl, with her golden blond hair and her eyes so bright and blue. No, he thought, not a girl. Sophie was a woman now. The understanding came as a revelation to him and he felt foolish because of it. How could he not have noticed this before? He had thought of her for too long as the little girl he had once taken on a boat ride along the Seine. And yet now there was a new spark in her voice, a flirtation that shocked him.
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