But he had already seen it. Sweet Somethings. The sign was still hung in front of it, though the windows were gone. Broken glass lay scattered across the sidewalk. Peter pulled the Navigator up in front of it, put it in park, and glanced over his shoulder.
“Do you need anything from inside? I can go in for you.”
She shook her head.
Father Jack raised one finger. “Peter? I know you say they’re watching us, but it looks like they don’t want to be found. Can you track them?”
Peter frowned. “We won’t need to. Look around, Jack. It’s only a matter of time before they come after us. In the meantime, we’re going to keep poking around, kicking the bees’ nest, trying to get a reaction. They’re here, all right. And now that we’re in, they’re not going to let us out without a fight. But while they’re leaving us alone, let’s go look for Keomany’s family.”
In the back seat, Keomany said something so quietly Peter did not hear her.
“What?” he asked.
In the rearview mirror he saw her staring out the window and looked to see what had drawn her attention. A postal truck had crashed through the front of a bakery and what remained of the postman hung out the door, his chest torn open, ribs split, a gaping cavern where his organs ought to have been.
“Bobby Donovan,” Keomany said, staring at the dead postman. “He was two years behind me in school. He asked me out once, when he was a freshman. It must have taken guts. I wish I’d gone.”
Once more they all fell silent and Peter turned the Navigator around and drove back the way they had come, more vigilant than ever. Several blocks up Currier, Keomany told him to turn. Instantly the area became more residential and again most of the homes had been burned or ravaged. There were more cars wrecked or overturned or simply abandoned, and there were more bones.
Peter was focused on a house up on the left that was untouched. In the filthy orange light that seemed to envelop every structure, to fill their lungs with its stink, he could not be sure at first what it was that he saw on the lawn. A body, to be sure, but as he drove nearer, he saw that this corpse was not wisps of hair and flesh on a withered, skeletal frame. He put on the brakes and stared at the dead man who sprawled on the lawn, limbs jutting at odd angles, head caved in.
The corpse was fresh.
Somewhere nearby a dog was barking, its anger muffled by windows and doors and walls. He glanced up at the house with the dead man sprawled on the lawn and he knew the sound was coming from within. A dog, alive, barking angrily.
From the garage.
Peter stared at the garage door, which was one of those with a row of square windows along the top. In the gloom within he thought he could see a human face illuminated by that sickly orange light. Possibly more than one.
The dog kept barking.
Dead cats impaled on a picket fence.
But no dead dogs.
On the other side of the street, two houses up, was another home that had been untouched. Peter sped up, came to a sudden stop in front of the house.
“What?” Nikki demanded. “What is it?”
Father Jack began to speak.
Peter shushed them all and listened. There were sounds he had not noticed before, a distant rumble like thunder underground, a small earthquake rolling their way. He put the sound out of his mind and listened more closely, staring at this new house, a beige ranch-style with an ancient, rusted television antenna on the roof that seemed odd in a world of satellite and cable.
And he heard it, coming from inside the house.
Barking.
“Keomany,” he asked, speeding up again without looking back at her. “Please tell me your parents have a dog.”
“Two,” she said quickly, obviously sensing something in his manner. “Muggsy and Bonkers. Why?”
“I think there are people still alive in some of the houses that haven’t been attacked. I’ve heard dogs barking at all of them. It’s possible that—”
But he did not need to finish. Keomany understood. Quietly she began to pray, not only to Gaea, but to God as well, a God he guessed she had not put any faith in for a very long time. In a low voice, Father Jack joined his prayers with her own.
“The . . . the second right,” she said. “Little Tree Lane. It’s number seven.”
Peter drove a little faster, no longer paying attention to the houses they passed. His mind was awhirl as he tried to make sense of what had happened in Wickham. The town had been shunted through a breach to some infernal landscape, some parallel hell—that was obvious. Whatever the primary life-forms were here, whatever the demons were, they were afraid of ordinary dogs. It might be a pheromone thing or just the barking, he did not know. But things that were afraid of dogs could not be responsible for an event of this magnitude, stealing an entire village from one plane of existence and displacing it to another. And yet he was sure it had not been mere chance.
Some savage intelligence had done this, some demon of incredible power.
So where was it?
The little green sign marking Little Tree Lane still stood, though the house on the corner had been reduced to rubble. Peter slowed the Navigator to make the turn.
Thunder shook the pavement beneath the vehicle. The ground bucked and rumbled.
“Peter!” Nikki cried, grabbing hold of the dashboard again. “A fucking earthquake now? Come on!”
“Not an earthquake,” he said as he slammed on the brakes.
Just ahead of the Navigator a sinkhole appeared in the pavement, no larger than a sewer grate. Then the road cracked as something slammed at it from beneath. Once. Twice. The third impact tore the pavement up, pieces of it struck the front of the Navigator’ s roof and broke a headlight. Had they struck the already cracked windshield, it would have shattered, but the chunks of pavement thunked down around them.
A huge head poked out of the hole in the street, accompanied by clawed, three-fingered hands that seemed absurdly tiny in comparison. The massive thing that hauled itself up out of the ground resembled a mole, but only in its snout and small claws and rough body shape. The thing was three times the size of the Navigator and its ridged hide reminded him of an armadillo. It sniffed the air and turned toward the Navigator and Peter saw that it had no eyes.
But it knew they were there.
“Slogute,” Father Jack said. “I’d no idea they were real.”
“Everything was real once,” Peter told him.
Nikki leaned out the window, took aim, and fired three times. The bullets cut into the monstrosity and it turned and slithered its fat belly across the street away from them. On the lawn of the ruined house on the corner it paused, then turned to face them again, blind face searching, sniffing. Rivulets of thick white pus slid down its chest where the bullets had pierced its flesh.
“All right. Let’s try that again,” Father Jack said. He and Nikki both pointed their weapons out the window.
“My parents!” Keomany said. “Their house is right up there! Please just go!”
“Or at least save your ammunition,” Peter said.
He spoke the words calmly, yet they must have carried his conviction with them. Nikki and Father Jack both turned away from their windows to shoot him a quizzical look. Peter gestured out the windshield toward the hole the Slogute had made in the road.
The things that leaped out of that hole, scrambling on top of one another like a colony of ants, were hideously thin. The creatures had long arms with talons like black knives, their skeletal forms covered in something that looked for all the world like the carapace of some enormous insect. Their heads were plated as well, dark tongues like rapiers jabbing from beneath those blank, blue-black skull coverings. An image flashed through Peter’s mind of horseshoe crabs, their shells and tails, and then he saw that this was truly what they looked like, these things, their faces were like the shells of horseshoe crabs, tongues like the crabs’ tails.
He did not have to ask Keomany if these were the same demons she had run up against be
fore; their indigo carapaces gleaming a filthy purple in the rotten pumpkin daylight matched her description perfectly.
“There are more,” Keomany said behind him.
Peter glanced over his left shoulder and saw the things leaping and almost dancing out from behind the houses they had just passed. Then, like ants, they were swarming from everywhere, from among shrubbery and from overturned cars and from the wreckage that had once been a neighborhood.
The Slogute had begun to burrow into the ground again as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. Or perhaps it was frightened. Not of him and his companions, Peter was sure.
Of them.
“Just drive!” Keomany cried.
“They’re not letting us go any further,” Nikki said, voice cold.
“So we do it here,” Peter said.
He killed the Navigator’s engine and opened the door, both of his hands crackling with green energy. The indigo demons were swarming, more coming up from the collapsed street every moment. When the first of them leaped atop the hood of the Navigator, its taloned feet scraping the vehicle with a shriek of metal, Peter raised his right hand and with a gesture he crushed the demon in a circlet of green flame that cracked its shell and snapped it in two.
The magick flooded through him and his entire body was engulfed in brilliant, verdant power that lifted him up off the ground, crackling around him as though he were cradled with a ball of green lightning.
As one, the swarm of demons paused.
A whine like hydraulic engines rose up from the skittering beasts, and then they swept in toward the Navigator.
10
Nancy Carling and her sister Paula had carefully mapped out their trip to Spain with the travel agent before departure, knew where their hotels were, how many hours it would take to drive their rental car from place to place, and what to expect when they got there. Neither of the sisters had ever been to Spain before, but both of them had long desired to explore this nation where romance and history echoed in every architectural flourish.
Upon their arrival in Seville, Nancy and Paula had been disappointed. Driving from the airport to the hotel had taken them past long rows of enormous apartment buildings that seemed to have been transported from some gritty dystopian future. The mazelike interior of the city had them hopelessly lost until they chanced on a sign pointing to their hotel, which they at last discovered on a narrow street with barely enough room for a single car to pass a pedestrian.
The hotel had been attached to some kind of church—an older building but without the grandeur of the religious edifices they expected to find here—and a U-shaped courtyard in front of the two buildings was all the parking that was available. The inside of the hotel was beautiful with tiled fresco walls and hanging plants, as well as smaller interior courtyard gardens whose flowers gave the whole place a wonderful, wildly aromatic bouquet.
After they had checked in, they walked deeper into the San Juan area of Seville and discovered the city’s heart, a sprawl of alleys lined with restaurants and shops and inconspicuous doorways where men promised live flamenco dancing later that evening. At the center of all of this they had come upon an enormous square that spread out from the most breathtakingly beautiful and massive structure either of them had ever seen.
In touring the Cathedral of Seville they learned that those who had built it had set out to construct a church so immense that anyone beholding it would take its architects for madmen. The Carling sisters had seen photographs before coming to Seville, of course, but they were nothing compared to the awesome reality.
This, then, was Spain.
That night when they sat down for a very late dinner—yet early by the standards of Spaniards. who rarely ate before 10 P.M.—they were already examining their travel plans. They had struck up a conversation with an elderly couple from Scotland who sat at the next table in the otherwise empty restaurant. Only tourists ever ate this early. Stuart and Claire Vandal had done quite a bit of traveling and when the sisters explained their plans subsequent to their departure from Seville—a leisurely drive south to the coastal resort town of Torremelindos—the Vandals grew almost stern.
The aging Scottish couple had insisted that Nancy and Paula would be doing themselves a great disservice by taking the main highway. The Carling sisters must, the Vandals assured them, take the mountain road south out of Seville; a road that wound up into the mountainous region north of the Mediterranean and bring them, about halfway to the coast, to the town of Ronda.
Neither of the women had ever heard of Ronda but the effusive recommendation of the Vandals was too contagious to ignore. By the time they left Seville, they had mapped out their new route.
The dawn light through the curtains had roused them early and the sisters had found themselves excited to be breaking from their carefully laid plans. They were going off the path in a foreign country where they did not speak the language, with a few hundred words of high school Spanish and the fat guidebook to aid them. Nancy knew how silly it was to be so excited, that people did this sort of footloose travel all the time. But she and Paula had only been to Europe once before, and that had been to the U.K., where they spoke English. It was a bit of a thrill to them both.
They set off early after the meager continental breakfast provided by the hotel—snatching a couple of bananas for the road. They had gotten turned around several times just trying to find the secondary highway—the mountain road as the Vandals had called it—that led out of Seville, but eventually they managed and were soon rolling south.
The spring morning was chilly but Nancy had the window rolled down regardless, the wind whipping her strawberry blond hair across her face. In the passenger’s seat, Paula tied her chestnut hair back with a rubber band so that she could read from the travel guide without it getting in her way.
“Cool,” Paula said several times as Nancy drove. “This place sounds cool.”
Nancy had read the entry on Ronda two nights earlier, after they had first met the Vandals. It was brief, but unquestionably interesting. The region where it was located had been home to human beings since Paleolithic times. A broad, rocky plateau loomed high above the Guadalevin River valley. The rushing water had carved the plateau in half thousands of years ago and the city of Ronda sprawled on either side of the dizzyingly high, narrow canyon cut over the ages by the river.
“Did you know the ancient Romans built a castle there?” Paula asked, glancing over at her sister, even as Nancy tried to find a radio station without static.
“I read that,” Nancy reminded her.
The Romans had been just the beginning, actually. The height of the plateau and its daunting cliffs made it a perfect natural fortress. When the Moors had taken control of southern Spain, Ronda had become the capital of an independent Moslem sovereign, and remained a Moorish city for several centuries. For a city with such a grand history, Nancy had found it amazing that she had never heard of Ronda before, but she was intrigued.
She drove through the hills amid groves of olive trees and Paula took over trying to find something worth listening to on the radio. They talked about friends new and old, about the odd people at Nancy’s office and the new museum job Paula had secured. The sisters had had their share of squabbles growing up, as close siblings always did, but since Paula had moved from their hometown of Baltimore to Los Angeles, they had been planning this very trip as a kind of reunion. It had been a long time in coming. The same dynamic that had always existed between them lingered, however. Paula asserted herself as leader of their expedition by virtue of her status as the elder sister while Nancy tried not to lose her temper.
Right now, however, all of those tensions had slipped away. The winding, leisurely drive through the picturesque hills eased them both into a rare feeling of well-being, so that they did little more than chat and laugh together. When at last they gave up trying to find a radio station, the Carling sisters began to sing, challenging one another to name the television series to which a
particular theme was attached, or match a product to its advertising jingle, or name the band responsible for some horrid one-hit wonder.
In this way they soon found themselves at the turnoff that led up a long road into Ronda, past the high ramparts that had been built on the two far ends of the city where the plateau sloped down to the valley floor.
“Here we are,” Nancy said as she drove up the steep hill into Ronda.
Paula leaned forward to peer through the windshield. “It doesn’t look like much,” she sniffed. “The guide made it sound amazing.”
Nancy punched her leg. Her sister let out a satisfying cry of protest and she smiled. “Give it a chance. It’s an adventure, remember?”
“Okay, but ow!” Paula replied, glaring at her.
The moment passed quickly, however. They wove their way through streets lined with offices and hotels, gas stations and apartment buildings, following signs that announced that the Centro de Ciudad was ahead. A public parking garage loomed up on the right and they managed to squeeze the rental car down inside of it, though making any of the corners in the underground complex was quite a trick. This sort of thing was exactly why Nancy would not let Paula drive.
Their travel guide had a brief write-up about the city, but no map. Fortunately they were able to buy one very cheaply at the hotel above the garage. With her camera on its strap around her neck, Nancy slid the thick travel guide into the pocket of the light spring jacket she wore. She was a diminutive woman and seemed nearly always to be chilly, and so she found it made sense to always have a jacket along, even if she did not need it. In early May, the temperatures in Spain could vary greatly, particularly when they passed from bright sunshine onto shadowed sidewalks.
The sisters followed the Centro de Ciudad signs on foot for several blocks, examining the various structures for age and Moorish influence. The Moors had controlled this part of Spain for ages and built mosques and palaces unrivaled elsewhere in the West. Yet Ronda, despite the travel guide’s description of it as a former Moorish stronghold, seemed devoid of such influences.
The Gathering Dark Page 17
