The Gathering Dark

by Christopher Golden

  Nikki followed her friend’s gaze, and she saw him.

  “Peter,” she whispered under her breath.

  In her mind she had played this scene out a hundred ways, and in each of them she had hung coolly back and remained aloof, let him fumble with his words, making certain he knew that she could live without him. But as she saw him walking down the street in blue jeans and a crisp white button-down shirt, Nikki felt herself rising from the curb almost as though she were being pulled toward him by some outside force.

  A laugh escaped her lips as she took several steps toward him. His expression was a million miles away, but that was nothing new for him. She saw that he had gotten a bit gray—prematurely, if you went by his biological age—but otherwise he looked just as she remembered him, that ragged cut hair, that strong chin. Peter had come within twenty feet of her before he at last lifted his gaze. His eyes widened as he saw her.

  “Nikki?” he asked, as though he thought her a mirage.

  “Hey, stranger,” she said, and for a trio of heartbeats, she managed that aloofness she had planned for so long.

  Then that familiar, almost goofy grin lit up his face and she could not help herself. She crossed the twenty feet between them in a run and collided with him with such force that Peter had to take two steps back to keep them both from falling. He wrapped his arms around her and she pressed her face against him and they both laughed and just held one another.

  Then Nikki pushed away from him and tapped his chest as she narrowed her eyes. “Why didn’t you ever try to get in touch with me?”

  Peter looked stricken. “You told me not to.”

  Nikki shook her head. “Fucking men.” Emotion welled up inside her but she would not let herself cry. She bit her lip lightly and then glared at him again. “In all the time you’ve been alive, you haven’t learned better than that?”

  Stop it, she told herself. Stop telling him the truth. It’s only going to hurt more after.

  But she didn’t care. It didn’t matter. Neither did Kyle. He was a sweet guy, but she had never stopped being in love with this guy, the man right in front of her.

  Peter stared at her, the depth of his melancholy visible in his eyes. “Nikki, I just wanted to respect your wishes. I wasn’t very good company and you wanted to get back out in the world, and—”

  “And I wanted you to come with me!” she shouted, loud enough that it echoed off the buildings up and down the quiet street. “You can paint anywhere!”

  But that last part she had already said to him, many times. She sighed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t come here to rehash old conversations.”

  Peter looked down at the ground, then past her to where Keomany stood on the sidewalk in front of his apartment. At length his gaze returned to Nikki. And all of a sudden she realized something—deep down in his eyes, she saw a glint of the edge that had drawn her to him in the first place. Hope fluttered inside her.

  “You have no idea what it means to me, seeing you today. I needed something . . . I don’t know, a sign, I guess. I think maybe you’re it,” Peter told her. “I was feeling a little lost.”

  Nikki reached up to touch his face. “We all feel that way sometimes. Sometimes most of the time. What’s wrong? Can I help?”

  Once again he took her in his arms but this time there was more tenderness to it, and a kind of relief. It gave her a comfort she had nearly forgotten, just to be held by him.

  “I never tried to find you because I didn’t think I was the same person anymore. I was afraid that if I followed you—”

  Nikki shushed him and Peter stopped talking. She hugged him more tightly, and when she spoke, she did not look up to meet his eyes.

  “How could you be the same?” she asked, searching his eyes. “You went through a lot of changes, Peter. In the course of a couple of years you lost almost everyone you cared about. I’m not even going to talk about what you went through before that.”

  She pushed him back now and looked up at him, smiling at the absurdity of it all. “You were fucking depressed, you asshole. Anybody would be. Maybe that’s why you’re such an amazing painter; all great artists are depressed. But I know the old you’s in there somewhere, I can see him in your eyes, and I need him now.

  “I need you now.

  “There’s something awful happening up north, something terrible and unnatural. Human or shadow, artist or sorcerer, we both know that what you are at heart—what you’ll always be—is a warrior. When you tried to give up that part of you . . . that’s what got you so lost, Peter.

  “Now it’s time to change that.

  “Time to go to war again.”

  The train rolled south toward Bordeaux, traversing beautiful French countryside that Kuromaku never tired of admiring, no matter how many times he made the journey over the years. On this particular trip, however, as he gazed out the window of the private, first-class compartment that had been reserved for him, his mind was not on the scenery.

  After the horror that had unfolded upon the steps of Sacré-Coeur he had begun to make certain gentle inquiries into similar occurrences—incursions, as he thought of them, of demons upon the human world. Kuromaku had been aware that the frequency of such incursions was on the rise, but even the most cursory examination of available data, even a basic search of the Internet, revealed a spike in the number of incursions that was startling.

  And deeply troubling.

  Once upon a time there had been a force in place to combat such things—a cruel and corrupt organization drunk on its own power—but that force had been eliminated. After years in which the resistance of humanity to their presence had been severely weakened, the evidence suggested that the creatures of shadow, the demons and other monsters, had at last begun to realize that there was no one left with the power to oppose them should they come en masse.

  Fortunately, the various breeds of Hellspawn hated one another and so the likelihood was small that such creatures of chaos would ever manufacture enough order to organize a sizable incursion. Still, the frequency with which shadows were breaching the human world was far too great and Kuromaku knew something had to be done to combat it.

  “Where are you?” a soft voice asked.

  It took a moment for the words to reach him, lost as he was in his thoughts. Then he turned in his seat and looked at Sophie, who sat opposite him in the private compartment. She wore a sleeveless, pale blue dress that clung wonderfully to her slim form, and her hair was tied back with a ribbon that matched the dress. Her golden hair shone in the sun that streamed in through the train window, but despite her youth there were tiny lines around her eyes as she studied him with a sad sort of curiosity.

  “I’m sorry,” Kuromaku replied. “There’s a crisis brewing. It’s getting under my skin. Once we reach Bordeaux, there are people I must notify. After that, I’ll be better able to focus.”

  She leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees, and the top of her dress gaped open indecently. Kuromaku politely averted his eyes. It was not that he did not want to see what might be seen, only that he did not want to come by such a sight dishonorably.

  “I feel like I’m running away,” Sophie said, her voice low, and she sat back again.

  Kuromaku frowned and searched her eyes for a connection. “You are not running. You are accepting my invitation, that is all.”

  She smiled softly, nodding slightly. “All right. I suppose I just regret that it isn’t under different circumstances. I’m glad to get away, and I am looking forward to spending this time—”

  With you, she had been about to say. But Kuromaku understood why she had let the words remain unsaid. They were only just beginning to explore whatever spark this was between them. He knew that she was anxious and wished he could explain to her that it was natural for her to feel that way. She was young and he very, very old. Sophie was human and Kuromaku had not been that for a very, very long time.

  A part of him was surprised that she had agreed to his suggestion that she
return to Bordeaux with him, after what she had seen him do. After what she had seen him become. Most women, no matter how adventurous they thought themselves, would have locked themselves up in their rooms and changed their telephone numbers. It had happened before.

  Now he focused his gaze upon hers and smiled. “You really are a remarkable woman. I’m not sure you realize that. A rare creature.”

  The sun was still upon her face but he thought the glow from within her then was even more brilliant. “How is it you always know just what to say? And from you it doesn’t sound like bullshit, when if another man said it, I might just laugh?”

  “Because I would never say it if it wasn’t true,” he told her, with utter sincerity.

  Sophie regarded him carefully a moment, something else going on behind her eyes that Kuromaku could not decipher.

  “My father respected you more than any other client he ever had,” she said, her voice low. “I’ve had a crush on you since I was twelve years old.”

  All thoughts of demons were obliterated from his mind. Kuromaku looked at Sophie, her petite body beneath that light summer dress and her eyes searching his for some vital bit of information, and he could think of nothing else.

  “Apparently I don’t always know just what to say, because I have no idea how to properly respond to that,” he confessed, smiling playfully.

  Sophie lowered her chin so that when she gazed at him now, looking up at him, there was an incredible seductiveness about her glance. And yet he did not think it was purposeful.

  “You spend too much time thinking about what’s proper,” she told him, then let her gaze drop to the floor. “I have to ask you something.”

  “Please do.”

  Sophie looked up at him and locked her gaze with his. “Do you drink blood?”

  Kuromaku raised an eyebrow. For a long moment he simply looked at her and then he leaned back against his seat. “The simple answer is yes.”

  Her lips must have been dry, for Sophie ran her tongue along them to moisten them. She looked very nervous, and Kuromaku could not blame her. The woman had agreed to accompany him even after discovering that all the rumors about what he was were true, all her suspicions had become reality. If she had indeed been attracted to him since she had been a girl, that helped him to understand her decision. But now she needed to know more about what he was.

  “And the complex answer?” Sophie prodded.

  Kuromaku regarded her carefully. “I’m surprised you didn’t ask this question before we left.”

  She glanced away. “Maybe I was afraid that I wouldn’t have the courage to come with you if I knew the answer.”

  Kuromaku let his gaze drift for a moment out the window to the French countryside the train sped through. Sophie had been nothing but honest with him and it was only fair that he do the same. Honor demanded it. He turned to face her again.

  “Very little of what is thought to be true of those you would consider my kind is accurate. Fundamentally true are two things: silver can be poisonous to us, and we require blood to survive. Perhaps what you’re asking is do I kill for blood, or take it forcibly. The answer to that is no. I am not a predator.”

  Sophie blushed as she glanced down, the silken flesh of her neck gleaming in the sun. “Do you want to drink mine?”

  From her tone it was clearly a question, not an invitation. Still, it gave Kuromaku pause. How to answer this honestly without frightening her? At length he nodded once.

  “Yes. But not as much as I want to kiss you.”

  He could hear her sharp intake of breath from across the cabin. Sophie looked up at him, smiling open-mouthed in a way that was incredibly erotic. A stray lock of her hair had hung loose from where the ribbon tied it back and now she reached up and tucked it behind her ear.

  “Well, why don’t you then?” she asked.

  A shiver went through Kuromaku. He was unused to such boldness in himself or in his lovers. Certainly he had enjoyed the attentions of a great variety of women in his long life, but with those he had truly cared for there had always been a bit of ritual and courtship involved, and never such a frank revelation of attraction. Yet there was a vitality to this electric connection he felt with Sophie that could not be denied.

  He rose to cross the compartment. There could be no mistaking his intention here, nothing subtle about the process of kissing her. His only purpose in moving those few feet from one side of the compartment to the other was to kiss this beautiful young woman whose blue eyes drew him so magnetically toward her.

  Something rocked the train hard and he stumbled, reached out to plant a hand flat upon the broad window to keep his balance. The entire compartment was thrown into a filthy gray gloom. From a perfect, clear day, the sun had abruptly been blotted from the sky.

  Sophie swore under her breath.

  Kuromaku saw the sudden fear etched upon her face and he turned to look out the window. The landscape had changed. They were passing through the village of Mont de Moreau and he could see buildings on fire. A forest of enormous posts, perhaps torn from a fence, jutted from the lawn of a home they sped past. Humans had been impaled upon those posts.

  Winged demons circled like vultures in a sky filled with a thick soot that had cast everything but the fire in a drab gray, as if they had passed from their world into a realm of demons. And perhaps they had.

  The train rumbled as if the tracks were no longer smooth. Sophie lurched over to grasp Kuromaku by the waist, and she stood with him, staring out the window. With a scream of brakes and a terrible, stunted shuddering, the train slowed to a halt in the midst of that infernal landscape.

  “What’s happened?” Sophie whispered. “My God, what is it?”

  “I’m not sure,” he confessed. “But I fear we will be forced to find out.”

  7

  Kuromaku had fought in many wars, had slain enemies both human and otherwise. Yet never had he seen a vision so hellish as that which unfolded beyond the broad window of his train compartment now. The village of Mont de Moreau had been transformed into a tableau of damnation that was positively Boschian. But this was no painting, no portrait dredged up from the fevered imagination of a troubled artist.

  “Armageddon,” Sophie whispered beside him.

  They stood together and stared out at the ravaged village, at the dark, heavy sky, clouds hung low and stained with a hideous orange light. Kuromaku shook his head, mind awhirl as he tried to make sense of it.

  “Impossible,” he said. “The rest of the world was unaffected.”

  “As far as we know,” Sophie replied, her voice very small.

  “True. But look out there. This has not only just happened. Recently, perhaps. Hours ago, no more than a day. But nowhere else that we know of. If this is Armageddon, it is Armageddon writ small.”

  Screams and shouts of alarm and horror had erupted within the train and the cacophony continued as passengers reacted to the infernal domain where their journey had come to an unforeseen end. In the filthy sky two large shapes circled the forest of impaled human corpses like vultures. A moment later one of them darted downward, growing larger and larger until it landed among the dead upon their stakes. Kuromaku cursed under his breath. The thing was an abomination, a red-scaled beast with black-feathered wings, a trio of prehensile tails each tipped with a vicious stinger, and a long, thin beak. It reached for the nearest stake, upon which a woman had been impaled through her back, so her arms and legs dangled toward the ground in a macabre, gymnastic bit of puppetry.

  It tore her from the stake, and Kuromaku was glad that he could not hear the sound of it through the glass. The winged demon drove its sharp beak into the wound at the dead woman’s back and tore free a chunk of flesh, which it gulped down. Then it spread its black wings and took off once more into that dreadful sky. The thing flew above the train, and both Kuromaku and Sophie craned their necks to watch its flight.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Kuromaku spotted something else up there. Something mo
ving in the thick, bilious clouds, like a man o’ war jellyfish floating there, dyed an infected red, tendrils swaying beneath it like a storm of solid rain. He only caught a glimpse of it before the clouds swallowed it again, but that one glimpse made him think it was larger than any living thing he had ever seen or imagined.

  Silently, he prayed that Sophie had not seen it. Already, what she had seen was enough to crush a human spirit.

  Sophie gripped his arm at the bicep and Kuromaku glanced down at her crystal blue eyes. She seemed paler than he had ever seen her, her facial expression a mask of calm that must have taken extraordinary effort to maintain. Kuromaku thought that it was a mask brittle as a china teacup, and he feared what might happen to her mind if the mask were to crack.

  “What do we do?” she asked in a whisper.

  Kuromaku had no time to formulate an answer. And any answer he might have given would have been eclipsed by the impact that struck the car they were in at that moment. It rocked over to one side and they tumbled together in a tangle of limbs and slammed into the wall beside the compartment door. For a moment Kuromaku was certain they would tip over, he felt the train tipping, but then it slammed back to the ground, still upright.

  The screech of rending metal and the shattering of glass filled the car along with the cries of the other passengers. Kuromaku leaped to his feet and reached his hand to his side as his sword manifested there at the nearly unconscious summons of his mind. He drew the katana with the ring of steel upon steel and grabbed Sophie’s hand, helping her to stand.

  His own astonishment had dulled him for several moments, the horror that had enveloped them almost impossible to believe. But now they must believe or die. Adrenaline seethed in him now, and he sublimated all wonder, all fear, and gave himself over to the instinct of the warrior.

  “We are not safe here,” he told her. “Stay by me.”

  With a tiny, hollow laugh, Sophie swore in French. “Where else am I going to go?”

  Kuromaku rammed open the compartment door and lunged into the passageway, Sophie close behind him. To the left was a crowd of terrified passengers, many of them bleeding or injured in the abrupt stop or the massive impact upon the train. To the right there were others, but rather than crowding into the corridor to escape whatever was outside, this group were stumbling headlong toward Kuromaku and Sophie.