The Gathering Dark

by Christopher Golden

  He pressed her back against the wall of the corridor and people streamed past. An enormous bear of a man reached out and grabbed Kuromaku’s shoulder, tried to sweep him along.

  “Weg rennen, du idiot!” the German man bellowed, eyes frenzied and wide.

  Kuromaku shook him off, knocked his arm away. Instead he stood as tall as he was able and tried to see what pursued these people. At the back of the fleeing passengers he saw a man and woman together hustling a small boy along in front of them.

  Then he saw what it was they ran from. It was a rich blue-black, the color of lividity bruises on a dead man. The thing loped after the passengers, its plated body, limbs, and razor talons so thin it seemed like every inch of it was a blade slicing the air. Its head was sheathed in a hard black shell from beneath which a spiked proboscis extended, darting ahead of it, wagging like the sensitive antennae of some nightmarish insect.

  The thing was nearly upon the family of three, and the woman screamed. Her husband grabbed at their son and the boy stumbled, began to fall.

  “Kuromaku!” Sophie cried.

  But he was already moving. He stepped away from the wall, pushing the husband and wife behind him, even as Sophie reached down and caught the falling boy, tugging him up and toward her.

  The plated scythe of a creature froze and its head turned up toward Kuromaku, where he stood before it in the passageway. The spike that protruded beneath its face-shell whickered toward him as if taking his measure.

  Silent, it leaped at him, fingers like daggers slashing down toward him.

  Kuromaku lowered his head and lunged forward, the point of his katana cracked through the demon’s armored chest, and he impaled it. The demon’s only cry of protest was a bizarre, almost hydraulic hiss. Then it slid off his blade to the floor of the passageway.

  More screams came from the next car. Heavy thuds struck the outer skin of the train. Metal tore and more glass broke, and in that passageway, no one spoke. All eyes were upon Kuromaku. He saw them staring at him, wide-eyed, as though quietly praying to him for deliverance.

  Then someone at the other end of the car screamed and more of those scything monsters leaped into the corridor from the compartments on either side, apparently having crashed through the windows. Kuromaku hissed air through his teeth and let loose a guttural shout of fury and regret.

  He snatched Sophie’s hand. “Come,” he told her.

  But she held back. He stared down at her. “We must find shelter.”

  Her head shook. “What . . . what about everyone else?”

  Kuromaku glanced once more along the corridor to where the monsters had begun to drive human passengers down onto the floor, tearing into them. The wet sound of their talons ripping flesh could be heard in among the screams.

  He sensed the one behind him more than he heard it, and spun, decapitating it with a single swipe of his blade. Then he snapped around once more and shouted at Sophie to be heard over the cries of agony and anguish. The sounds were deafening, the horror overwhelming.

  “If we stay, we die with them! You are my priority! We must survive to find a way out of this!”

  Once more he tugged at her arm, and though she hesitated a moment, it was only a moment. Then they were running down through the train car. At their heels came the family Kuromaku had saved. He hoped that they could keep up.

  At the end of the car came a thunderous noise and the door to the train crashed inward, two of the scything demons atop it. Others followed, swarming in after them.

  “Here!” Sophie shouted.

  Kuromaku turned, saw that she was leading the family into a side compartment, carrying their little boy herself, and he swore. Then he followed them inside and rushed past them to the window. With a single blow he shattered the window and shards of glass rained down around him and blew out onto the blasted, ruined landscape.

  In the preternatural darkness outside the train Kuromaku could still see the town and the hideous forest of the dead, and darting silhouettes like night-black cutouts against the putrid orange sky. Screams came to them, there in the compartment, but most were from inside the train. The car rocked with each new impact.

  Immediately beyond that window he spied only two of the scythe-limbed demons, as well as a plodding, mammoth creature covered in porcupine quills. It lumbered toward the train on two massive feet like those of an elephant. The enormous creature had twin upturned tusks jutting from its mouth and a flat, bald, apelike pate. Where its eyes ought to have been were only long, wet vertical slits that seemed to pucker and breathe like the gills of a fish.

  With one rapid glance over his shoulder to confirm that they were still alone in the compartment, Kuromaku leaped out through the shattered window, landing in a crouch on the ground below. In his right hand, he gripped his katana, but now in one fluid motion he reached down with his left and withdrew from that same impossible place the wakizashi that was its mate. The grip of the short sword felt good in the palm of his left hand. So often he sparred or did combat with only the katana that sometimes he forgot the beauty of fighting with both blades at once.

  The lumbering, quilled behemoth opened its tusked mouth and let out a long bellow. As if in response, the two skeletal, razor-edged demons twitched and turned in Kuromaku’s direction. The spikes from their mouths searched for him as though they could use those wavering needles to see with.

  They sprang at him, streaking across the ground that separated them. Kuromaku braced to meet their attack, then sidestepped, leaping in with balletic grace into a pirouette in which both swords spun with him in a circle, the blades so swift they blurred almost to nothingness.

  Jagged claws gored his back but Kuromaku did not flinch, merely completed the motion he had begun. His swords found plated flesh, one cracking and slicing through the abdomen of a scythe-limbed demon, severing it in two, and the other coming down to cleave the head of the second demon in twain. Skull and natural-shelled helmet fell away like the twin halves of a walnut.

  He glanced quickly in both directions along the ravaged, derailed train. There were others, many others, so many that he could never have counted, and they swarmed across the train, leaping through windows and capering up into doorways and tearing through the metal skin of the train.

  Twenty feet away, the elephantine beast covered in quills bellowed at him again. The wet slits where its eyes ought to have been now spread open like twin vaginas and Kuromaku saw that tiny, green-black, pinprick flames guttered in their depths. It took one shambling step toward him, and Kuromaku knew then that it was too slow to catch them.

  He spun toward the shattered window of the train, knowing any moment could bring more demons over the top of it, or through the interior door of the compartment.

  “Come!” he snapped, his voice a low rumble that he prayed would not garner attention. He reached up toward Sophie, but she stepped aside to allow the other woman to jump out ahead of her. The woman’s husband passed their son down to her, and then Sophie came out.

  The man was last, and he shot a nervous glance over his shoulder before leaping out onto the blasted terrain.

  All throughout the horror that unfolded around them, the young boy had remained pale and wide-eyed, yet silent. Shock, Kuromaku knew. The boy was too stunned to respond to their surroundings. He had shut down. Probably for the best.

  A loud bellow came from behind them and Kuromaku spun to see that the enormous quilled demon had come closer, but only just.

  “This way,” he instructed them quietly, then he turned and led them off toward the village at an angle that would take them around the field of impaled corpses. It was the only thing to do. There was no telling what might lurk on the other side of the train, away from the village. At least in the village itself, there might be shelter of some kind.

  Unconsciously he sheathed the wakizashi, the short blade disappearing beside him. He reached out for Sophie’s hand. She clasped his, fingers twining. Together with the young couple, the father holding hi
s son in his arms, they ran toward the village.

  Another bellow came from behind them, but now when Kuromaku turned, he saw that the quilled beast had turned its back to them. A barrage of quills sprang from its back, fired like arrows from a bow. They sliced the air toward them and Kuromaku stepped in front of the others, let his flesh take those painful spines.

  Instantly, a fire raged through him.

  Poison, he thought.

  It seeped into his blood and Kuromaku doubled over in pain, teeth gnashing.

  “Run!” he commanded the others.

  Sophie balked, reaching for him, calling his name.

  “Get out of range!” he roared. “Go!”

  She must have seen something in his eyes, for she did what he had ordered. Sophie ushered the others on and they kept on toward the village, running across an open expanse of land just beyond the field of corpses.

  The poison was agony to him but it did not keep Kuromaku from changing. He willed his body to become mist, nothing but molecules of moisture in the air, and in that way he cleansed himself. He drifted after the others, propelling himself, and transformed once more into a hawk. His wings beat until he was behind them once more, then he glided to the ground and once more took the form of a man. The katana was a part of him and so he had taken it unconsciously into himself. Now it manifested once more in his hand and he surveyed the land around them.

  Satisfied that there were no enemies near, he hurried up beside Sophie. They had reached a street. Ahead, on the edge of the village, what had once been a sizable chateau was engulfed in flames that seemed garishly bright in comparison to the sky. Tongues of fire leaped into the air and yet the air was already so hot and dank that there seemed little heat from the blaze.

  “What do we do?” Sophie asked, staring at the burning chateau and then at the village beyond. “Where can we hide?”

  For the first time Kuromaku really focused on the French family that accompanied them. The man was thin and darkly handsome, his wife also slender but taller than he. The boy had his father’s complexion and his mother’s hair. The husband and wife were whispering fearfully to one another, he stroking her hair. When the man looked up at Kuromaku, his gaze was defiant.

  “What is happening here? How can this be?” the man asked in French.

  “I wish I knew,” Kuromaku replied. “But somewhere in Mont de Moreau there must be a locked basement, or a windowless storage room in the back of a shop. We must find some refuge. Soon enough those things that attacked the train will tire of it.”

  “And then we die,” the man replied. “Even if there are no windows, there are doors. You saw what they did to the train. Like bees in a hive.”

  But even as the man spoke, Kuromaku looked past him, through the curtain of flame that leapt from the burning chateau, and on a hill in the midst of the village he saw the spire of a church jutting into the Hell-stained sky. Even at this distance the steeple looked white, he could see stained-glass windows that were unbroken, and the church called to him like a beacon.

  “There,” he said, pointing. “Stay close to the faces of the buildings,” he snapped off in rapid-fire French, reaching out for Sophie’s hand and getting them all moving deeper into the village, toward the church. “Head for the church. Whatever happens, do not stop. I will keep them off us as best I can.”

  He shot a quick look back at the train. It had come off the tracks, the rails twisted and torn, the skeletal, scythe-limbed demons still tearing at it. Several of the three-tailed carrion beasts circled overhead. They had to move now while the demons were focused on the train. It pained Kuromaku to know it, but the deaths of those remaining on the train had bought them this time to escape. He could not have saved them all—not against those odds, not and still have saved Sophie. She had come at his invitation, and he cared for her. He would not trade her life for that of strangers.

  The only wise choice now was to find safety, find time to determine what evil was afoot here, and do everything in his power to stop it from spreading beyond this little village.

  For Mont de Moreau, and the people aboard that train, it was already too late.

  In the tomblike silence of his basement office, Father Jack Devlin poured two fingers of Crown Royal into a tumbler and tossed it back before he had even set the bottle back down upon his desk. The whiskey burned its way down his throat, a little nugget of warmth that slid down inside him. He cupped his hand around the tumbler and let his gaze drift, seeing nothing. A niggling feeling at the back of his neck made him look up. He snapped his gaze over to the big mason jar on the shelf above the desk, where the hideous little Cythraul demon stared back at him. Its mouth was drawn taut in an obscene grin.

  “Fuck you!” he screamed.

  With a snarl, his chest rising and falling in heaves, Father Jack stood and snatched the Cythraul off the shelf, opened the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet, and set the jar inside.

  “Little shit. See how you like it in there.”

  A tiny sound came from the jar, and Father Jack thought the Cythraul was laughing at him. He slammed the drawer of the filing cabinet and slumped once more behind his desk. With a pained sigh he leaned far back in his chair and slipped his glasses off. He set them on the desk and ran both hands across his face, through his red hair. For a long moment he held himself there, trying to make sense of what had come to pass in the previous twenty-four hours.

  But he could not. Could not make sense of it. Could barely comprehend it. The implications were so vast that each time he turned his mind to it, the priest felt a flutter in his heart that he had never felt before. It was fear. He knew that. For it was accompanied by a chill deep inside him, a cold dread that the whiskey could never warm.

  Which did not stop him from trying.

  Jack Devlin had never been much of a drinker, but now he poured himself another generous shot of Crown Royal—the fifth or six—and downed it quickly, drawing the back of his hand across his lips. Why the hell are you even using the glass, Jack? he thought bitterly.

  But he knew the answer. The whiskey was bad enough on its own. Drinking it straight from the bottle would seem far too much like giving up.

  “Fuck!” he screamed, and he threw the whiskey glass across the office. It struck the filing cabinet where he had stashed the Cythraul, and shattered there, shards falling upon the carpet.

  Father Jack started to laugh, shaking his head. He felt like an idiot. Throwing the glass was a bit of melodrama he had seen in too many movies, and now here he was copping from some film or another because he couldn’t find a way to get a handle on his own emotions.

  “Idiot,” he whispered to himself.

  He laughed again, shaking his head, and then fell silent. There was a sheaf of paper on top of his desk, along with his computer, but he had no interest in looking at the reports from Hidalgo again. He knew what they said. His face crumpled and his eyes grew moist.

  “Oh, dear Lord,” he whispered to himself, not kneeling or clasping his hands, but penitent and reverent just the same. “Where do we go from here?”

  The silence in the office deepened. After a moment Father Jack closed his eyes and sighed. Then he rose and crossed the office, grabbing his trash can so that he could begin picking up shards of the broken glass.

  When he was on his knees on the carpet, a knock came at the door. Whoever it was did not wait to be invited, and the door swung open before Father Jack could even begin to stand.

  The priest stared in amazement.

  Peter Octavian stood in the doorway. Behind him were two women Father Jack had never seen before. The mage raised an eyebrow and leaned casually against the door frame.

  “I’m sorry, Father. If we’re interrupting prayer time, we can come back later.”

  For a moment Father Jack only stared at him. Octavian was an enigma, one moment an amiable man, a regular guy, and the next waxing nostalgic about ancient battles and fallen cities any historian would kill to have seen with his own eyes. As h
e leaned there, Octavian’s eyes sparkled with humor and benevolence. The priest felt himself a good judge of character, and he liked Octavian, despite the sorcerer’s history and the fact that the man made him nervous. Now, though, Octavian must have seen something in his face, for he stood up straighter and frowned as he studied Father Jack.

  “What’s wrong?” he demanded. “What happened?”

  Careful not to set his hands in any broken glass, Father Jack gave up his task and rose. “Come in, please,” he said, gesturing to Octavian and his companions, an earthy blonde who looked somehow familiar and a petite Asian woman with long, silken hair.

  “What brings you here?” the priest asked.

  Octavian looked thoughtful. Then he stepped aside to let his companions enter the room. “Father Jack Devlin, meet Keomany Shaw and Nikki Wydra. Nikki, Keomany . . . Father Jack.”

  The priest’s hands fluttered in the air as he waved them toward his desk. “I just broke a glass. There’s nowhere to sit. A dungeon down here, actually. So watch your step, but come in.”

  He turned abruptly to look at Octavian face to face. “I was just getting ready to call you.”

  Octavian nodded slowly, as if the news did not surprise him. “I don’t suppose Bishop Gagnon wanted to invite me for dinner.”

  Father Jack could not muster a smile. “No. I’m afraid not.”

  The two men stared at one another for several seconds. It was Nikki who broke the silence.

  “Father Devlin—”

  “Please,” he said reflexively. “Call me Jack. Or Father Jack. My father was Father Devlin.”

  Nikki blinked and glanced at Keomany before looking back at him.

  “Sorry,” Father Jack said, chagrined. “Very off-color humor. Sort of ingrained in me. But please do call me Jack.”