The Gathering Dark

by Christopher Golden

  Peter Octavian sat at a small table on the sidewalk patio in front of The Hovel with Carter and Kymberly Strom, enjoying the warm spring day and the view up and down St. Marks Place, watching the world go by.

  “So what do you think of the place, Peter?” Kymberly asked as she snapped her chopsticks at the Ocean Stir Fry Plate on the table before her. Kymberly was an attractive, dark-skinned woman with truly regal African features and an easy grin that had charmed Peter the first day he met her.

  “It’s . . . interesting,” Peter replied with a wary glance at the souvlaki that had been set in front of him.

  Carter laughed loud enough to draw the attention of others who were having lunch on the patio, but he either did not notice or did not care. Peter’s agent was a big, heavyset bald man with enormous hands and an accent from his native Austria. People at gallery shows were often astonished to learn that this was Carter Strom, a respected figure in the art world. But Carter liked that: challenging people’s expectations.

  “Kym, haven’t you realized yet that Peter doesn’t like things to change?” Carter asked his wife with a broad wink at Octavian. “He’s upset we didn’t go to the White Horse. You should have said something, Peter.”

  He pronounced “something” as zumzing.

  Peter gave them a lopsided smile. “If it bothered me, I would have said ‘zumzing.’”

  Kymberly laughed at his teasing, but Carter shot him a stern look.

  “You make fun uff the man paying for lunch? Not very wise, I think.”

  The conversation deteriorated further and then they were all occupied with eating their lunch. Peter was surprised to find that his souvlaki—which he would usually only buy from a sidewalk vendor; they always seemed to have the best—was quite tasty. Throughout their lunch he hid quite well the fact that Carter was right. He was not pleased with the change of plans. Kymberly had been ill when he had finished the last painting for the upcoming show and so they had put off their celebratory lunch until today, when Carter had insisted that Peter try someplace new. The Hovel wasn’t very far from his apartment, but ever since he had become mortal again—ever since he had begun to age once more—Peter had found comfort in things that were routine.

  Once upon a time he had faced in battle a sorcerer named Liam Mulkerrin. The man had used magick to prolong his human life, so that as he neared the century mark, he still looked barely sixty. Peter knew that he could similarly extend the time remaining to him, but in his heart of hearts he was afraid of what would come after.

  It was strange to him, because he also relished his mortality. After all the years he had spent knowing he could not die, to be human again made him appreciate every second that ticked past on the clock, for he knew he would never get it back again. Anytime he wished, he could ask for the gift of immortality from Kuromaku or Allison; either of them would be pleased to give it to him. But he would not.

  Peter feared what was after death, but he found a pleasure in the smallest things in life that he knew he would not have felt if the specter of his own eventual demise did not loom ahead of him. He wanted to live a simple, mundane life as part of the flow and rhythm of humanity, after so many centuries existing outside of it.

  But Carter and Kymberly had reminded him today that he had taken such desires to the extreme.

  The Hovel was a fine restaurant, the world that churned along St. Marks Place vibrantly alive. And the souvlaki was tasty.

  “Thanks for suggesting this place,” he said as he finished his meal.

  Carter looked up with one eyebrow raised. Then he smiled. “You are very welcome, my friend.”

  “Kymberly, I’m glad you’re feeling better,” Peter added. “Now just stay healthy. The show’s only a few weeks away and I won’t get through it if you aren’t there.”

  Her expression was soft and kind and Peter reflected that she did, indeed, remind him of a queen. He had met royalty several times in his life . . . his father had been an emperor . . . and Kymberly Strom had the bearing of a monarch.

  “I wouldn’t miss it, Peter. And it will be wonderful, of that I’m quite certain.”

  “I wish I shared your confidence,” he told her.

  A busboy came and began to clear some of the plates from the table. Carter began to go over some of the details of the upcoming gallery show again, but Peter was never very concerned with such things, preferring to leave them in his agent’s hands. He nodded solicitously, but then let his gaze drift across the patio.

  A trio of girls whose ankles all bore identical rose tattoos sat chattering happily to one another several tables over. Further along there was a fiftyish couple toasting one another with fluted wineglasses and sharing a glance the intimacy of which was both inspirational and intimidating. On the other side of the table where Peter and the Stroms sat were two young men who spoke softly to one another, ignoring their lunch, their hands clasped across the table. A first or second date, Peter thought. And beyond them, three couples arrayed around two tables that had been pushed together.

  And from the street a scream.

  Peter snapped his gaze up to find the source of that horrid, guttural, animal sound. When he spotted the woman crossing the street toward the open patio of The Hovel, he stiffened immediately. She looked forty, but given the filth and grime that covered her and the snarled nest of her hair, she might have been considerably younger or even older and he would not have been able to tell. Her clothes were torn but she hugged herself in a way that kept them clinging together.

  As she crossed the street, a car locked on its brakes and the driver sounded the horn. The filthy woman’s head moved with fits and starts like a nervous bird, and she walked with the same jerky motion. Her eyes were wide, and when the driver of the car shouted out the window at her, she seemed not to notice.

  Abruptly, as if at some unseen horror that had appeared in the middle of the street, the woman let loose another ferocious scream. Then this strange creature rushed the rest of the way across the street, paused on the sidewalk just beyond the shrubs that lined the patio, and began to jabber to the large party at the two shoved-together tables, all of whom were studiously avoiding looking at her. One of the men rose and strode purposefully toward the entrance to the restaurant, likely to bring a hostess or manager to shoo the homeless lunatic away.

  “Poor thing,” Kymberly said, the sadness in her voice palpable.

  “Someone like that, it’s terrible,” Carter added. “Probably she was a patient at a hospital somewhere, and her insurance ran out. They do that, you know? Put the crazies out on the street when they can’t pay.”

  But Peter was not paying any attention to his friends. Instead, he was listening to the woman. This horrid vision of madness who was speaking to the people on the patio, insulting them in a language not spoken on Earth in tens of thousands of years . . . a language Peter had only ever heard spoken in Hell.

  “Excuse me,” he said, standing up so quickly that the legs of his chair scraped loudly upon the patio stones.

  “What? Oh, Peter, no. Don’t get involved. There’s nothing you can do.”

  He paused and glanced at them, a frown creasing his forehead. These were his friends, certainly. But how well did they really know him? Not well at all, in fact, for he had only given them a little of himself. They had seen the artist, the soft-spoken man who kept his hair too short, did not shave often enough, and who had begun to go gray at the temples.

  Then he smiled. “Let’s see.”

  Peter moved past the young men on their date, who had stopped holding hands, their time together now soured by the madwoman’s approach. He strode toward the large group at the joined tables, some of whom glanced at him curiously as he approached. At the edge of the patio he simply stepped over the shrubs.

  The nattering, grime-covered woman turned on him, spittle flying from her mouth as she threatened him in that ancient tongue. Then she blinked, as though a bit of awareness had crept into her mind, and an agonizing scream erupt
ed from her throat.

  “I can help,” Peter told her.

  But then her eyes narrowed again as the thing inside her regained control. It spat at him, and where it flecked his cheek, the saliva burned. Peter quickly wiped it on the leg of his jeans and the denim began to smolder there until he slapped at it a couple of times.

  The thing inside the woman was grinning madly.

  Peter raised both hands and contorted his fingers as though he were a puppeteer controlling some invisible marionette. Under his breath he muttered several words, and then he whipped his arms back, tugging hard. The woman’s mouth opened and she screamed again, only this time, those who heard that scream would have noticed that there were two voices screaming—one the woman’s and one a low, guttural, savage snarl that had not been there before.

  A yellow fog the approximate shade and stink of urine erupted from her mouth as though she had vomited it up. It began to dissipate but Peter would not allow that. With a wave of his hand and a flick of his wrist he crafted a sphere of energy that enveloped that putrid yellow fog completely. Then he whispered to it and the sphere grew smaller and smaller until at last it disappeared with a tiny pop like a bubble blown by a child. Those who were nearest to him might have heard a muffled, guttural shout of pain in that moment, but it was abruptly cut off.

  The woman collapsed and Peter grabbed her, held her until she was steady enough to stand. She stared at him with moist, brown eyes filled with fear and anxiety.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  “Greenwich Village. New York City,” he told her.

  Her mouth dropped open in astonishment and she gazed about her. Tears began to streak her filthy face and she shuddered. Then she turned to him again, almost violently. “When?” she demanded.

  When he told her the date and the year, she covered her mouth and could not speak for twenty or thirty seconds. Peter waited patiently, and when a small moan escaped her, he touched her shoulder gently.

  “It’s over now, though. It’s done. Is there someone you can call?”

  She bit her lip and then slowly nodded. Peter slipped his phone out of his pocket and handed it to her. For a long moment she only stared at it and then she began to dial. It took three calls before she reached someone, and when she did, there was a great deal of sobbing, during which he turned back toward the restaurant for the first time.

  The patio was crowded with patrons and wait staff who stood and stared at the bizarre tableau he and this woman created. They had given up any pretense of not being interested and were openly gawking now. All save Carter and Kymberly, who had apparently paid the bill and were now making their way out of the patio—the proper way, rather than over the shrubs.

  His friends hurried toward him. The look on Carter’s face was one of great concern, but there was something almost beatific about Kymberly’s expression.

  “That was extraordinary, Peter,” she said.

  “Yes. Extraordinary, true,” Carter agreed. But then he took Peter by the arm and leaned in toward him. “What did you just do? What happened here? Who is this woman?”

  Peter glanced at Kym and then back to her husband. He sighed slowly. “I don’t know who she is. She was possessed by a demon. I . . . helped. I get the impression she’s been . . . lost . . . for a long time. I’m letting her use my phone to try to find someone to come and get her, to take care of her.”

  They were staring at him. Then Kymberly shook her head slowly.

  “You told us about your past, about the Shadows and your magick. But it’s all been so prevalent in the news this last decade that I supposed we never imagined you were telling the truth.”

  “You thought I was lying?” Peter asked, taken aback.

  “Not lying, precisely,” Carter replied. He pronounced “precisely” as pre-zeiss-li. “We thought perhaps you needed to spin such wild tales as inspiration for your paintings.”

  Kymberly seemed almost embarrassed. “I suppose it was too much for us to believe that you lived what you were painting. We’d heard of Peter Octavian . . . of you. But it seemed like a perfect marketing tool.”

  “A tool,” Peter repeated.

  His gaze ticked back and forth between his friends but he did not know what to say. He supposed he should not have been surprised, and maybe in his heart he was not. Human beings spent a great deal of effort trying to put order upon the chaos of the world in their own minds, to make sense of things. As such, they often refused to believe in anything that did not fit their ordered image of the universe right up until the time when denial was no longer an option.

  But he was disappointed in them, and he felt it keenly.

  “We . . . we saw that thing that you pulled out of her,” Kymberly was saying. “And then the green flame that came from your hands. I never would have believed it if I had not seen it.”

  Peter smiled sadly. “No. I suppose most people wouldn’t.”

  He had no idea how this was going to change his relationship with the Stroms, but he was in no mood to discuss it with them now. There were people in the world who knew precisely who and what he was, but all of them were so far away. He felt very alone suddenly.

  “Excuse me?”

  Peter turned to find the grimy woman holding his phone out to him. He reached and took it from her, fighting the urge to clean it before slipping it back into his pocket, not wanting to embarrass her.

  “Did you reach someone?” he asked.

  She nodded, wiping at her face, her tears leaving swaths of clean white skin. “My brother. He lives up in Katonah. Still, thank God.” For a moment she paused to catch her breath, perhaps to prevent another jag of crying. “He’s on his way down to get me. Do you think they’ll just let me stay right here until he arrives.”

  Peter’s eyes narrowed and he turned to search the crowd on the patio for the manager. “I’ll make sure of it,” he said.

  When he looked back at the woman, there was the flicker of a smile on her face. “I’d kiss you, but I don’t want to get you dirty.”

  “I don’t think I’d mind very much,” Peter told her.

  “Oh, I couldn’t!” she said, looking down at her clothes.

  “Another time, then.”

  Despite all the horror she had experienced—all that she was experiencing even in that moment as she tried to put together how much of her life had been torn away, how long she had wandered under the sinister control of some infernal intelligence—the woman grinned broadly. It lasted just a moment, that full-wattage smile, but Peter thought it was a hopeful sign that she would be able to come out of this with most of her self intact.

  It took a lot of effort to convince the Stroms to go on about the business of their day and leave him there at The Hovel with the woman—whose name turned out to be Janelle King—but eventually Carter admitted he had another appointment and he and Kymberly reluctantly departed. Peter was relieved when they were gone. He needed some time to himself.

  Though he wasn’t foolish enough to try to convince management at The Hovel to let Ms. King into the restaurant dressed as she was, they were kind enough to allow the woman to sit there while he made a run to the deli two doors down, just to get some food into her. A short while later, her brother arrived to pick her up. Their reunion was heartbreaking.

  Peter started for home without waiting for them to even get into the brother’s car. He wanted to be home, to put some Mozart on the sound system and brew a pot of tea and sketch the face of Janelle King. He often sketched in addition to his paintings, but his pencil sketches were not for public display. He often painted moments and places from his past, but for the most part, he avoided depicting people in his paintings.

  The faces he saved for his sketches, and the sketches he kept. They were just for him, those faces.

  To help him remember.

  In the time she had spent sitting on the curb in front of Peter’s apartment on West Fourth Street, Nikki had made up her mind half a dozen times to leave. It had been more than
an hour and she felt ridiculous just sitting here waiting like some junior high girl hoping for a glimpse of her crush. But every time she opened her mouth to put voice to her desire to depart, words failed her. She couldn’t do it to Keomany.

  After her showcase the night before last, Nikki had beckoned her old friend backstage. During the time they had known one another— when both of them lived in New York—the two young women had both felt lost, searching for something they couldn’t even name. That kinship had created a bond between them, though they had not really kept in touch.

  But as soon as Keomany had begun to tell her story, silent tears slipping down her face, Nikki had reached out to embrace her. Her friend had shaken in her arms, as though something inside her had shattered into a thousand pieces.

  Now—thirty-six hours later and all the way on the other side of the continent—they sat side by side on that curb and Nikki reached out and slid her arm around Keomany.

  “How are you holding up?” she asked.

  Keomany smiled wanly. “I feel like shouting. I wish he’d get back.”

  “Me too.”

  Then Keomany winced as a thought struck her. “God, Nik, what if he’s not even around? What if he’s out of town?”

  Nikki had thought of this already. If Peter didn’t show up by nightfall, they’d have to rethink their plan.

  “I have some other friends we could talk to,” Nikki told her.

  Keomany nodded. “I know. I know and that’s . . . thank God for you. I didn’t know who else to come to.” Her voice quavered but she kept it together. Whatever had shattered inside Keomany they had managed to put it back together, but she was still fragile.

  Nikki didn’t blame her. She had been through a lot herself, but she had never had to do it alone. Nikki massaged Keomany’s shoulder. “You did the right thing.”

  But Keomany was looking past her, up along West Fourth Street. A hopeful spark shone in her eyes. “Is that him?”