Desolation

by Derek Landy

  They waited. The Charger waited. But nothing came.

  Milo’s skin lightened and the burning red left his eyes and mouth, and his curved horns retreated into his hairline.

  “What the hell?” said Amber.

  Milo examined his hands. “I don’t know. I can still feel—”

  He shifted again without warning, into that black-skinned, horned demon, and he snarled in irritation and immediately reverted to his normal self.

  “That was weird,” he muttered, then looked at her. “You’re going to have to change back.”

  “But it hurts.”

  “You have to change, and then you’ll have to fight against the impulse to shift again. It’s strong. It’s very strong.”

  “For Christ’s sake …”

  She gritted her teeth and reverted, and fresh pain sprang from her fingers and blinded her to her own thoughts and there was another flash of pain and she was a demon again.

  “I can’t do it,” she gasped. “I can’t.”

  “Revert,” said Milo. “And hold.”

  “Give me a minute.”

  “Now, Amber.”

  “I’ll try again in a minute, you dick!”

  “Now,” Milo snarled, his eyes starting to glow red, and Amber snarled back and reverted and this time she held it, despite the pain, and she focused on staying a normal, clumsy, ugly human …

  And when the pain retracted far enough she took a deep, deep breath.

  “Well done,” Milo said, settling back into his seat.

  “This is horrible,” said Amber. Every inch of her wanted to shift. Her nerve endings jumped. Her skin was electric. The human form she inhabited was all wrong. “I feel like I need to pee,” she said. “I don’t need to pee, but you know that feeling? When you’re about to burst and you know that all you have to do is relax and it’ll suddenly feel so much better? It’s like that, times a thousand.”

  Milo looked at her for a while. “Right,” he said at last. “Not the analogy I’d have used, but fair enough.”

  “What’s wrong with us?”

  Milo didn’t answer. He just got out of the car. Amber turned in her seat, watched him walk to the sign. He passed it and turned, a curious look on his face. He took a big step back to the Charger and shifted.

  He stepped to the other side of the sign and reverted.

  Scowling, he walked back to the car, shifting as he did so. By the time he got behind the wheel, he’d reverted again.

  “This town is a curiosity,” he said.

  “You think whatever shielded Buxton from the Shining Demon is the same thing that’s making us shift?”

  “It’s likely the reason, yeah. Pity he didn’t mention this to us before he flew off.”

  “I don’t like this,” said Amber. “I don’t like this feeling.”

  “How’re the hands?”

  “They hurt. Like, a huge amount.”

  “We’ll get to that motel you found on the map,” said Milo. “You’ll be able to shift behind closed doors, and you’ll heal faster as a demon. A day or two, tops.”

  He was probably right. The swelling had already gone down and her fingers were returning to their normal colour. Being a demon had its advantages.

  “Sorry for calling you a dick,” she said.

  “That’s okay. Sorry I snarled.”

  “Guess we’re a little ruder than we’d like to be when we’re horned up.”

  Milo looked at her.

  “I should probably use a different word for that,” she said.

  “Probably,” he agreed, and they started moving again. The town was affecting the Charger, too – its rumble was deeper, and somehow even more menacing, than usual.

  Amber had examined the map online a dozen times before now, and as they drove she did her best to match it with her surroundings. They passed a used-car lot (TODD’S NEARLY NEW CARS! BEST PRICES!) hemmed in by a chain-link fence. The cars stood in their rows like prisoners in an exercise yard, their gleaming potential bridled by circumstances beyond their control.

  Beyond the lot was a gas station, complete with small convenience store, and then they were in the town proper. Main Street was the widest street the place had, and the longest, and it boasted a church and a healthy array of businesses. The Hill Hardware Store was next to Lucy’s Laundromat, which stood opposite Doctor Maynard’s office, which in turn stood next to Reinhold’s Pharmacy. Moraga Discount Store was the massive building on the east side of the square, a slightly raised public meeting place in the exact centre of Main Street that the road itself circled. The west side was taken up by the grander Desolation Hill Municipal Building, which had eighteen steps leading up to its doors and pillars on either side, marred only by the scaffolding that scaled it from ground to peak like the skeleton of a building that had been left there to die. There was nothing on the square itself except what looked like an old wooden mailbox on a post that had been set into the concrete.

  The Charger drew some curious looks as it passed. Amber was used to that – it was certainly an impressive car. But today she thought the attention they were getting was different, somehow. Not hostile, exactly, just … wary.

  Milo turned off Main Street, passed a bar named Sally’s, and kept going through a residential neighbourhood. The town itself continued up into the hills, into all those trees and all that snow, but they took a narrow blacktop without a yellow line up to a tall building that looked like it should have been perched on the edge of a cliff somewhere. The Dowall Motel was the only place to stay in the area, not counting a few bed and breakfasts, and the sign said there were vacancies.

  They parked outside and got out. It was the beginning of May and there was a startlingly blue sky and yet Amber’s breath still crystallised in the air. She doubted it was much above forty. On Main Street there had been no snow, but up here, elevated slightly, it was still packed tightly at the sides of the road.

  Amber had spent her whole life feeling miserable in the heat, so she wasn’t about to start complaining about the cold. Even so, the temperature was making her hands throb with a renewed vigour, and she hurried into the motel while Milo carried in their bags.

  Inside, it was warmer. The wooden floorboards creaked under her weight. A moose head hung over the front desk, its terrific antlers rising to the high ceiling. A man came out of the back room. He looked young, in his thirties, but his side-parted hair had already gone grey and he held himself so stiffly that a sudden draught might possibly have snapped him in half.

  He saw them and looked confused. Amber smiled, and led Milo to the desk. The man wore a little badge that identified him as Kenneth.

  “Hi, Kenneth,” said Amber.

  Kenneth didn’t answer. He had a mole under his right eye.

  “We’d like a couple of rooms, please.”

  Kenneth looked at them for quite a long time before speaking.

  “I wasn’t expecting visitors,” he said.

  This struck Amber as a somewhat strange thing to say.

  “This is a motel, isn’t it?” Milo asked.

  “Indeed it is,” said Kenneth.

  “And you rent out rooms to visitors, don’t you?”

  “Indeed we do,” said Kenneth.

  “So do you have any spare rooms to rent out to us?”

  “Indeed I have,” said Kenneth. “I just wasn’t expecting you, that’s all.”

  Silence threatened to descend.

  “Should we have called ahead?” Amber asked.

  Kenneth blinked at her. “We don’t take reservations over the phone.”

  “Online?”

  “We don’t have a website,” he said. “My mother never approved of the internet. She said the internet was a filthy place for perverts and degenerates who only want to watch pornography.”

  “It also has cats,” said Amber.

  “We don’t allow animals,” Kenneth said quickly. “My sister is allergic to animal hair. If you have cats, you can’t stay here.”

&
nbsp; “We don’t have cats,” Milo said. “We don’t have any animals. Is there anyone else staying here right now?”

  “No.”

  “Then could we please have two rooms?”

  Kenneth hesitated.

  “I’m a little puzzled,” said Amber. “You don’t take bookings online or over the phone, and obviously you don’t like it when people turn up unannounced … so how does anyone actually stay here?”

  “The motel is not very busy,” Kenneth said.

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “I can let you stay,” Kenneth decided, “but only until Wednesday. On Wednesday you must leave. We are fully booked up for Wednesday.”

  Amber frowned. “How?”

  “I’m sorry?” said Kenneth.

  “How has anyone been able to book for Wednesday, since you don’t take reservations over the phone and you don’t have a website?”

  “A long-standing arrangement,” said Kenneth. “You must be gone by ten o’clock on Wednesday morning.”

  “I guess we could stay at a bed and breakfast,” said Milo.

  “You misunderstand,” Kenneth said. “You must leave our town. On Wednesday we have our festival.”

  “I like festivals,” said Amber.

  “It is a private festival,” Kenneth said. “For invited townsfolk only. You must leave by ten in the morning.”

  At no stage did Amber think Kenneth was joking, and yet she waited for the punchline all the same. When it didn’t come, Milo spoke up.

  “Sure,” he said. “That’s fine.”

  Kenneth hesitated. “Maybe you shouldn’t stay,” he said.

  “Of course we should,” Amber assured him. “We’ll be gone by the time the festival starts – it’s all good. We totally understand. Today, tomorrow, Monday and Tuesday and then we move on. You got it. How long does the festival last?”

  “One night.”

  “Then how about we come back on Thursday?”

  “Thursday and Friday are for clean-up.”

  “Then Saturday,” Amber said, smiling. “If we leave and come back for the weekend, would that be okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Excellent. We’ll do that. So put us down for four nights now, and then Saturday. If we like it here, we might even stay longer.”

  Kenneth nodded. “Very well. Welcome to the Dowall Motel. This is a family business.”

  Amber gave another smile. “Well, okay then.”

  Kenneth showed Amber to her room, and Milo dropped off her bag and followed Kenneth to his. Amber shut her door. The room was old-fashioned but clean, and smelled of fresh air and green trees. It had a fireplace that wasn’t to be lit and a good-sized bed. It had a bathroom with a bathtub and a window that looked out over the town. It was a good room. A fine room.

  Amber stood at the window. From here, she could almost see the road they had come in on, the one with the sign. That would be the road the Hounds would use. They were anywhere between ten and fifteen hours away, but it took Amber a long time to stop watching for their arrival.

  VIRGIL FOUND THE NUMBER scrawled in an address book that had slipped down the back of a file cabinet. He tried to ignore the other names – seeing them brought pangs of recognition and regret – but despite himself he glanced through them. Here was Erik Estrada’s number. Good kid, that Erik. Burt Reynolds. Lynda Carter. Ah, Lynda Carter. Robert Culp. Farrah Fawcett’s number was here. He’d never managed to get with Farrah because of his (strained) friendship with Lee Majors – but he’d wanted to. Oh my, how he’d wanted to.

  Then he found the number he was looking for, and he took out his ridiculous phone and eventually figured out how to make a call.

  It was answered by a woman who told him the person he was looking for no longer lived there. She went off for a few minutes, eventually coming back with another number. He called that, and it was answered by a man who gave him the number of a retirement home. Virgil rang the home, gave them the name, and waited.

  “Yeah?”

  The voice on the other end sounded old, frail and ill-tempered.

  “Javier?” said Virgil.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Virgil. Virgil Abernathy.”

  There was a silence, and then,

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why? Why’re you calling? Why the hell’re you calling me? It’s been forty years and now you’re calling me and I want to know why, goddammit. If you’re calling to apologise, you’re about forty years too damn late.”

  Virgil frowned. “Why would I be apologising?”

  “You’re the one calling me!” Javier shouted. “You’re the one calling and now you have the, the, the nerve to ask why you’re calling? I’m the one asking why! I ask, you answer!”

  “Javier, I really think we’re getting our wires crossed here …”

  “Dementia, is it?” Javier said. “You know that you owe me an apology, but you can’t remember why, is that it? Y’know something? I’m glad. I’m glad your mind is leaving you. Couldn’t happen to a nicer fella.”

  “My mind is fine, Javier, but to be honest you’re starting to irritate me here.”

  Javier hooted down the phone. “Oh, is that right? Oh, is that right?”

  “I just called to check on you,” said Virgil. “I’ve been thinking about the old days a lot and I saw someone last night who could have been your double from back then, someone who I would have sworn was you if I hadn’t known what age you were. I’m calling to ask if you have a son or a grandson and if they’re anywhere close to Desolation Hill.”

  “I don’t know where that is,” said Javier, “but it sounds like just the place you deserve to be.”

  “Do you have anyone in your family that looks just like you did forty years ago, or not?”

  “No!” Javier yelled. “I don’t have any children, you dirty, lying, treacherous sonofabitch! I never had children and I never got married! The only woman in the world I ever loved looked at me like I was a joke and it was all your fault!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Darleen!”

  Virgil frowned. “Who?”

  “Darleen! Darleen Hickman!”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “The wardrobe lady on set,” Javier said, anger biting at his words. “I fell in love with her and you knew it. There was a future there. A possibility. But you couldn’t let that happen, could you? You couldn’t stand the thought of any pretty girl being with anyone but you, the star of the show.”

  “What is it you think I did, Javier?”

  “You know damn well what you did. You gave me that nickname.”

  “What nickname?”

  “Don’t make me say it.”

  “I don’t know what it is we’re talking about.”

  There was another silence, and then, “The Goat-molester.”

  Virgil’s laugh was as loud as it was unexpected, and he immediately felt bad. “Oh right, yeah. That. Uh … and that damaged your relationship with the wardrobe lady?”

  “Darleen,” said Javier. “And of course it did. Everyone was laughing at me behind my back. Nobody took me seriously from that moment on. She had feelings for me – real, actual feelings – but how could she look at me in the same way once she’d lost all respect for me?”

  “I’m … I’m really sorry, Javier. I’d forgotten all about that.”

  “I hadn’t,” said Javier bitterly. “That ruined my life, Abernathy. Ruined it. And it’s all your fault.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Virgil. “I am genuinely sorry, Javier, I really am. I had no idea it would cause you such hardship. The only thing I can say is that it wasn’t done with any degree of maliciousness. It wasn’t personal.”

  “It felt personal.”

  “And I regret that. I do. Please accept my apology.”

  “You know what?” Javier said. “I don’t. I’ve been waiting forty years for you to say sorry, and now t
hat you have, it means nothing to me. You were a sonofabitch then and you’re a sonofabitch now. I hope you do get dementia. I hope you get dementia and you die a slow, horrible death.”

  “Right,” said Virgil. “Well, in my defence—”

  “Your defence can go to hell.”

  “In my defence,” Virgil persisted, “and taking all things into account, with the benefit of hindsight and whatnot, I don’t know … maybe you shouldn’t have molested that goat.”

  Javier hung up.

  SOMEONE KNOCKED ON HER door and Amber woke immediately and went to spring out of bed. As she was moving, she realised two things. The first was that she had shifted during the night and was now in full demon mode. The second was that she was about to put her full weight on to her left hand, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

  The pain hit her like an electric shock. She pulled her hands into her chest, rolled off the bed, and landed on her feet in a crouch, gritting her teeth to keep from crying out.

  That knock again. It was calm. Unhurried. No urgency to it.

  Amber waited for the worst of the pain to pass, then straightened, and moved slowly to the door. “Who is it?” she called.

  “Me,” said Milo.

  “Anyone else with you?”

  “No.”

  She gripped the key between her palms and turned it, and the lock clicked and she stepped back as Milo opened the door.

  He saw the look on her face and frowned. “Hurting?”

  “A little. I’ll take the painkillers.”

  “You shift when you were sleeping?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  He nodded. He was clean-shaven and his eyes were calm – the benefits of a good night’s rest. “I’m going to head out to the edge of town,” he said, “keep watch for the Hounds.”

  “Let me get dressed.”

  “No need. I’m just going to be sitting there. You take a look around, see what’s what. If we can hide out here, it’d be nice to know what the town has to offer.”

  Amber frowned. “You mean … we’re going to be apart? During the daytime?”

  “Is that okay with you?”