The Gathering Dark

by Christopher Golden

  This was who he was.

  When he reached the first police officer, Peter spread his arms wider and his fingers sketched at the air as though he were conducting an orchestra. One of the MPs shouted in alarm, demanding to know what he was up to. The man barely finished his sentence.

  A bright flash of green light burst from Peter’s hands, rolling like a wave over those who had been guarding the road. As it struck them, they fell one by one to the ground, unconscious.

  “Jesus!” Father Jack hissed.

  Nikki glanced back at him, smiling. “Was that a prayer, Father, or were you taking the Lord’s name in vain?”

  The priest did not respond. He only stared, just as Keomany did, as Peter turned his back on the men and women he had just rendered inert with a gesture and walked back toward the Navigator. Tapped into nature, Keomany felt as though she could sense the power of the earth itself, even access it a little. But she could not imagine the kind of magick that Octavian had at his disposal. A thousand years in Hell, and he had brought this back with him.

  Peter opened the door and smiled in at them. “It was just going to take too long to explain,” he said. “And we’re kind of in a rush.”

  9

  Peter Octavian took a deep breath of sweet Vermont mountain air. His heart sped with anticipation, a kind of adrenaline high filling him. For so long he had been denying himself this rush and now he could not remember why. Something about wanting to live normally now that he was mortal again, wanting to have an ordinary life.

  What the hell was I thinking? he asked himself now.

  In Venice and Salzburg and New Orleans he had faced horrors unimaginable. He had spent an eternity in Hell and somehow been reborn on the other side. Nearly every person he had ever loved, human or vampire, had been taken from him to that place after death. He had wanted to live, to be bored, to paint and be human and love and cry. But Peter Octavian had seen the destruction of his home and his family and his loved ones before. For hundreds of years, it had been the pattern of his life. It had been foolish of him to think he could escape that, that he could hide away the truest part of him.

  There on the outskirts of Wickham, with the sky so blue above and a massive, barren landscape before him, the warrior in him came awake for the first time in a very long while.

  “Peter?” Nikki called from inside the Navigator.

  He had been standing just inside the open passenger door. Now he grinned up at her. “I’m fine.” Peter climbed up into the rented SUV and slammed the door. He glanced over his shoulder at Father Jack and Keomany.

  “Jack, the guns?”

  The priest turned in his seat and reached into the back of the Navigator for a metal case that he dragged over into his lap. As Nikki and Keomany watched, he opened the case. Peter eyed its contents with satisfaction: a quartet of Heckler and Koch nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistols, gleaming silver, and a dozen replacement clips, already loaded.

  “Very nice,” Peter said. “The Lord provides, huh?”

  Father Jack smiled. “Or the Bishop does. Even if he doesn’t know it.” Then the priest glanced up at Nikki, who was leaning over the front seat to get a better look. “These things have a hell of a kick. Most demons are vulnerable to traditional weaponry if you hit something vital, or shoot them enough.” His gaze went to Keomany. “But all the ammunition is also blessed, just in case.”

  “Will that make a difference, really?” Nikki asked.

  Peter nodded, watching as Father Jack pulled out the first of the HKs, checking the weapon’s action and confirming that it was loaded. “It’s a kind of magick all its own, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t need a gun,” Keomany announced.

  “What?” Nikki asked.

  She had beat him to it. Peter frowned as he studied the woman who had brought them all here, her gentle Asian features now grave. Her choice of words was curious. Not that she did not want a gun, but that she did not need one. It reminded him that there had been something he had been wanting to ask her about her exodus from Wickham.

  “You don’t need one?” he asked now. “So how will you protect yourself? Better yet, maybe it’s time you tell us how you got out of here alive the last time.”

  Nikki shot him an admonishing glance as though he were being harsh, but Peter ignored her. They were here together, a unit, and the truth of it was that he was the only real warrior among them. It fell to him to keep them alive, so he needed to know everything about the people he was with. Father Jack had a modicum of sorcerous ability, knew enough spells to combat certain kinds of enemies and to protect himself and possibly others. But he was also going to have a gun. Nikki was fast and smart, but beyond that she would be armed.

  Keomany was staring at the open case with obvious distaste. “They’re unnatural. Guns.”

  “What do you call what’s going on out there?” Peter asked, tilting his head toward the windshield, beyond which the distorted air that marked the perimeter of the reality disruption was clearly visible.

  The woman nodded. She looked up at Nikki and smiled almost shyly before turning her gaze to Peter.

  “I’m an earthwitch.”

  Father Jack held up the gun in his hand. “Meaning your religion won’t allow you to handle one of these?”

  “That’s not what she means,” Peter said.

  Keomany glanced at him and a kind of understanding passed between them. For Peter, it was as though he were looking at her for the first time. Her pupils seemed to glow dimly even in the sunlit interior of the Navigator, as though dawn were fast approaching behind her eyes.

  “We’re not talking about pagan rituals and dancing naked around the fire, are we?” he asked.

  Keomany smiled softly. “Well, there’s plenty of that too. But no, we’re not. I’ve known a lot of earthwitches with a certain amount of power. Weather influence, mostly. But when I was trapped here . . . something happened. I tapped into Gaea herself. At least I think I did.”

  There was silence inside the vehicle but Peter was not going to let it last long. Soon enough the cops and MPs outside would be waking up, and he didn’t want to have to give them another jolt if he could avoid it. Even if he was careful, there was always the possibility he might seriously hurt one of them.

  Nikki reached across the front seat and took his hand, but her attention was on Keomany. “So you’re a sorceress?”

  “No.” Keomany shook her head.

  “Magick has many sources,” Peter said. “Or so I believe, given everything I’ve learned about it. It’s possible it all comes from one place, different kinds of energy, manipulating molecules. What is today’s science but yesterday’s magick? Father Jack and the Bishop would tell you it comes from God. Maybe it does. But I’ve met an earthwitch or two before—though they called themselves other names. Gaea is a real source of power. It’s the heart of this world.”

  “The heart?” Father Jack asked. “Or the soul?”

  Keomany looked to him and her eyes shone more brightly. “That’s it exactly. Gaea’s the spirit of this world.”

  “Mother nature,” Nikki said, pushing her blond hair away from her face. “Well, I’m sure this kind of shit really pisses her off.”

  “You could say that,” Keomany replied.

  Peter nodded, wanting to move on. “Jack, take two of the guns for yourself. Give Nikki the other two.” He gazed at Nikki, reached over, and put his hand on her upper arm, the contact meant to reassure himself as much as her. “You remember how to fire a gun?”

  She grinned as the breeze picked up, blowing through the window and rustling her hair. “Something tells me a demon gets up in my face, it’ll refresh my memory.”

  “It might not come to that,” Peter replied, but the words sounded hollow, even to him.

  He faced forward again, gripped the steering wheel with one hand, and turned the key in the ignition. The Navigator roared to life, the engine like some caged beast. In his peripheral vision he saw Nikki accepting the tw
o guns from Father Jack, then he dropped the transmission into gear and accelerated.

  The Navigator lurched toward the distortion field, which shimmered and flickered as they drew nearer to it. It was as though the view of a barren wasteland that had replaced the village of Wickham was little more than a blurred, static-filled image broadcast on a ballooning television screen. Peter guided the vehicle around the roadblock and the fallen sentinels who had been guarding it.

  The distortion field loomed before them now, stretching out as far as they could see on either side and reaching up toward the sky at an odd, curving angle so that it seemed Wickham had been swallowed up by some warped dome of electricity. As the Navigator rolled closer, Peter could even hear a sort of hum that was being emitted from it.

  “What if it’s real?” Nikki asked suddenly, a hitch in her voice.

  Almost unconsciously, Peter let up on the accelerator. “What?”

  “What if it’s just blurring our vision but that’s really all that’s left?”

  “Then where did the town go?” Father Jack asked.

  “Let’s find out,” Peter answered, ignoring Nikki’s question mainly because he had no satisfactory answer.

  Right arm stiff as he gripped the wheel, he thrust his left hand out the window. It was not easy to make his throat and lips form the words, but he spoke in a guttural, demonic language known to no one else on Earth. Hell had taught him many things.

  A moist ball of pink light blossomed around his left hand which was closed into a fist. As he opened it, spreading his fingers out, the light turned from pink to crimson. He muttered the words again, grunting deep in his chest.

  In the back seat Keomany turned to Father Jack. “Is he all right?”

  Peter ignored them.

  With a final word, punctuated by the clack of his teeth coming together, he clenched his fist again and the sphere of damp crimson light flashed away from his hand as though a silent explosion had occurred in his palm. The sphere grew enormous in half a heartbeat and, soundless, it struck the distortion field.

  “Holy shit,” Keomany whispered.

  Father Jack grunted. “Was that a prayer or a curse?”

  The crimson sphere burned through the distortion field. For a moment it did nothing but create a red-tinted window through which they could see that barren wasteland in focus for the first time. And that was precisely what it was on the other side of that window. No sign of the village of Wickham, or its people.

  But Peter’s magick burned deeper, seeking beyond appearance, tearing at the distortion field but also seeking out the source of it. A shudder went through him as he kept his foot pressed on the Navigator’s brake, waiting for an opening. If the infernal denizens of other dimensions could make breaches into this world, Peter could return the favor.

  The crimson sphere glowed brightly, and then it exploded into shards of red-tinged light that were instantly swallowed by the sickly orange glow that erupted from within the distortion field. Rotten pumpkins, Peter thought. That’s how Keomany described it. And he could see the comparison. The orange light was impossibly dark and tainted, and where it streamed out of the hole he had blown in the distortion field, it seemed as though it had been vomited into existence.

  Unnatural, he thought. Keomany’s right. This has nothing to do with our world.

  “It isn’t just distorting our vision,” he said quietly. “It’s a dimensional displacement.”

  “Explain,” Nikki demanded.

  “You were right. Wickham really is gone. Sort of. It’s been shunted out of this plane of existence and into another.”

  “So what now?”

  Peter frowned, took his foot off the brake, and put it down on the accelerator. “Now I drive.”

  He floored it. Father Jack shouted an objection but Peter barely took note of the words. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Nikki brace herself on the dashboard with one hand, but in the other she held one of the HKs Jack had given her.

  Keomany said nothing.

  The blue sky disappeared above them. Peter took one look in the rearview mirror and spotted several of the cops he had knocked unconscious getting to their feet. One of them had drawn his weapon and was brandishing it, shouting after the Navigator, but one of his fellow officers reached out and grabbed his arm, pushing it down.

  Then the Navigator was bathed in that vile orange light. The vehicle shuddered and Peter kept both hands locked on to the wheel. He had torn a portal through realities but it was still not a smooth transition. The Navigator jerked as though they had burst through some invisible membrane and a hairline crack spiderwebbed across the windshield.

  The light dimmed and the engine whined as though it struggled against something, and then they were through, driving beneath a filthy orange sky through air thick with heat and a charnel house stink that made Peter begin breathing through his mouth.

  “We’re through,” Father Jack whispered. His words were barely audible over the hum of the engine.

  Peter drove slowly. Cars were stalled or parked or crashed at intervals and he had to weave around them. Some were turned over, others merely had the windows shattered. One had been wrapped around a telephone pole at high speed and had collapsed in upon itself like an accordion.

  The road was littered with human corpses, or what remained of them. The dead were mostly bones and dry snatches of parchment skin and sun-bleached clothing. He spotted two smaller skeletons with tufts of fur stuck to their bones and thought they were too small to be dogs. Cats probably. Things that might have been this world’s version of carrion birds picked at some of the cadavers, but Peter paid them no mind. The scavengers weren’t the real evil here.

  “Keomany,” he said, “show me the way. Let’s check the downtown, where you were before you left. I want to find the things responsible for this. It’s the only way to reverse it.”

  “My parents,” she said softly, gazing out the window and studying each of the corpses they passed.

  “We’ll check on them soon,” Peter told her. He glanced in the rearview and she met his gaze. “But you should be prepared.”

  In her reflection he could see the glow behind her eyes grow brighter, as though each were its own tiny eclipse.

  “Drive,” Keomany told him.

  Peter avoided colliding with the stalled or wrecked cars but he no longer bothered going around the remains of the dead. The wheels of the Navigator crunched bone and bumped over those who had had the misfortune to be caught out here upon the road by the sleek black demons Keomany had described, or by whatever else now infested Wickham.

  All four of them were on guard. The windows were rolled down and Father Jack and Nikki held their nine-millimeter semiautomatic weapons in their laps, but there was nothing casual about this. There had been few buildings where they had entered the displaced area, but now as he followed Keomany’s direction, Peter drove them into a more closely settled area of Wickham. Many of the homes had been burned out, some still smoldered. Others had been caved in from outside or had picture windows that had been shattered. The dead littered lawns and in one place the skeletal upper torso of a man lay upon a shingled roof with absolutely no evidence as to how it had come to be there. A picket fence had been turned into a thicket of spikes adorned with the impaled bodies of a dozen dead cats.

  “Left,” Keomany said, a hitch in her voice as though she were trying not to be sick. “That’s Currier. It leads into the downtown.”

  Peter turned, but as he did, a motion off to his left caught his eye. He glanced in that direction, at a house that was seemingly untouched, and saw a heavy curtain fall back to cover an upstairs window, as though someone had been watching their progress and had ducked back so as not to be seen. Dimly he heard the barking of a dog.

  Demon or human? he wondered, wishing he had gotten a closer look at the figure behind that curtain. It would have been good to know that there were at least some who had survived this horror.

  “Where are they all?”
Nikki asked, as though echoing his thoughts.

  “The people or the monsters?” Father Jack replied.

  Nikki sighed heavily, anxiously. “Either. It’s like it’s been abandoned.”

  “No. It’s not abandoned. I’m sure we’ve been noticed,” Peter said. “My guess is they’re taking our measure.”

  There was no response to that. He turned onto Currier Street and in the back seat Keomany cursed loudly in astonishment. Peter did not need to ask her what had affected her so deeply. They were rapidly approaching what had clearly once been a lovely shopping district, a classic downtown New England street full of boutiques and restaurants. The entire east side of Currier Street had been put to the torch, leaving nothing but blackened and charred remains smoldering where businesses had been. At the far end of the devastation, a small fire still burned.

  “Your shop?” Nikki asked, her pain for her friend’s loss evident.

  “No. I’m on the other side,” Keomany replied.

  Peter had known from the moment he had heard her story that Wickham itself might be rescued, lives might be saved, but the village would never be the same again. Despite however well she might have prepared herself, he understood that Keomany was only now beginning to realize the truth of it.

  As he drove, Peter glanced from side to side, watching both the ruins and the hollowed faces of the remaining stores for some sign of an enemy. Something he could fight against. He knew he could get them out—tearing another hole in the displacement field was not going to be difficult—and it might be possible to collapse part of it as well, but without figuring out the source of this magick, there was no way he could return Wickham to its rightful place in the world.

  A prickling sensation went up the back of his neck and he glanced sharply to the left. In the darkness within a restaurant something shifted, quickly seeking cover in the depths of the ravaged business. Peter said nothing to the others.

  “Here,” Keomany said.