Cass stepped in a little closer, not sure how she ought to react. They were definitely behind the glass. Were walking deeper into it, getting further away from the mirror’s surface. Her mouth sagged open.
There was the same violet light in there as in the rest of the place, but it wasn’t being cast by any bulb this time. It looked like it was emanating from the glass itself. And she thought she could make out the shadowy walls of what appeared to be a tunnel. Heidi and the two girls were progressing down it.
When Cass stared closer, she could see that there were figures at the other end as well. They were beckoning to the woman and her young companions, ushering them in their direction.
Her Glock came up again, but there was no clear aim to take. Besides which, she had no idea what these things were. Were they harmless or malevolent?
She couldn’t see their faces. But their arms kept coming into view. Some looked normal, although terribly skinny. Others were not human arms at all. She kept on catching glimpses of appendages that looked like tentacles.
But she wasn’t doing anything. That struck Cassie forcibly, a second later. Normally, she was the first one to go charging in when there was danger. But she’d frozen up, uncertain how to deal with this. She’d seen a lot of peculiar stuff in her day, but this beat her to a dead halt.
She fought against that, taking a couple more teetering steps in, yelling Heidi’s name. The tall, blond woman did not so much as glance back. She was moving at a steady, even pace. And the same was true of her companions. Maybe they’d been hypnotized.
“Get out of there!” Cassie shrieked. “What do you think you’re doing?”
That got nothing in response.
The only course of action left now was to follow them right in there. Cass absorbed that, hurried across to the mirror and put a hand against it. And felt solid resistance. It was a normal sheet of silvered glass.
So how’d the others gotten through?
She was still trying to figure that one out, gazing helplessly at the receding human shapes … when the surface of the mirror wavered, then went blank. And then returned to normal.
Cassie was left gawping at her own reflected face. Heidi and the kids were gone. She had been unable to stop it.
Numbness spread out through her. And was shattered – seconds later – by the bellow of a sports car engine, splitting the air outside the house.
Ritchie Vallencourt had finally arrived.
And what precisely was she going to tell him?
She’d gotten back to the front door by the time that he burst through it, knowing what was coming next and hoping she could calm things down.
The young detective sergeant was already in a hellish state. His almond eyes were as wide as a startled horse’s. And he usually had color in his handsome face, but that was in the past.
His Browning was already drawn. He stared through Cass as though she wasn’t there.
“Heidi?” he began bellowing.
Cassie holstered her own weapon.
“Kate? Joanna? Talk to me!” he yelled.
She tried to get a hold of his shoulders, knowing how appallingly painful this had to be for him.
“Ritchie, you need to slow down,” she begged him
But he didn’t even look like he could hear her.
“Where are they?” he howled.
“We’ll get them back, I promise.”
“Where’ve they gone?”
He started moving forward. Cassie tried to stop him. And an instant later, she found herself being shoved aside and slammed against the nearest wall.
Her hands went instinctively to her belly, frightened for the life inside her. But her back had taken the force of the impact. There had been no genuine damage. And besides, Ritchie hadn’t meant to do that – he just wasn’t thinking straight.
She watched him helplessly as he went running down the hall. He disappeared from sight, but Cassie could still hear him. His yells were becoming increasingly frantic. And it sounded like he was overturning stuff, driven by his panic to a mindless frenzy.
The worst thing was that she had been the same. When Kevin, Angel, and Little Cassie had been taken from her, she’d been like a wounded animal, screeching and clawing at anything that moved. She still remembered every dreadful second of it. Now, the same was happening to someone that she knew and liked.
There was nothing in the slightest she could do but listen. Cassie let her head drop back against the wall and felt her shoulders tremble.
When the hell was Ross going to get here? He was the kind of person who could deal with stuff like this a hell of a lot better than she was able. Mr. Calm and Sensible. Mr. Reliable. It was part of what she liked about the guy.
And she was still waiting for him, when she heard the gunshot.
It came from the same direction Vallencourt had vanished. And was followed by a cry, a thump, and then more yelling. Except that Ritchie wasn’t calling for his wife, this time. This was wordless yelling, caused by pain or fear.
Something else was going down. And, again, she had no idea quite what. But both her Glocks came out, and then Cassie was powering herself in the direction of the screams.
They were coming from the bathroom. Something bad was happening to the man in there. And the door was most of the way closed, so that she couldn’t make out what it was.
Cassie kicked her way in. And her dark gaze tightened sharply in the violet light.
CHAPTER SIX
We swung around the corner of Haswell Avenue, then sped down it till the right house came in sight. The front door was flung wide open. Ritchie’s car was stopped out front, slewed across the sidewalk with its driver’s door pushed open too. And I could make out Cassie’s Harley. No surprises there.
I didn’t bother parking. Simply stopped dead in the middle of the street. And the second that I got out, I heard shots and yelling. So I started running, Saul hard on my heels.
I noticed, as I drew closer, that there were two people crying out. One of them was a man, bellowing with pain. But the other voice was Cassie’s, and she wasn’t hurting. She was cursing up a blue streak, and she only usually does that when she finds herself right up to her neck in trouble.
We went down through the house until we arrived at the source. Going in, I found myself confronted by a sight that turned me halfway into lead.
The light in here was such a deep mauve that it lent shades of black to everything it touched. Like trying to see through impenetrably dark glasses. But my eyes adjusted enough to make out Ritchie Vallencourt, on his back down on the floor. He was writhing furiously and yelling. A creature had grabbed hold of him by one of his ankles. It looked like it had emerged from a wide hole that had opened in the wall beneath the washbasin.
And the first word that came into my head was ‘spider.’ But it wasn’t really that. It had at least twenty legs. Was the same color as the light surrounding us, which made it difficult to see. And had a massive, bulbous thorax, slightly more than two feet across.
Its mandibles were clenched around the lower part of Ritchie’s leg. And it was dragging him insistently in the direction of the gap. It looked awful strong for something of that size. And determined – Ritchie kept on slamming at it with his free heel, and he couldn’t knock it off.
Cass was standing over the thing, pumping 8mm rounds into its body. But it didn’t even feel them. Not at first, anyway.
She emptied her entire clip into the creature. And its outline wobbled sharply and broke up. The thing collapsed into a slimy mound of purple glop, which spread across the tiles for a few seconds before vanishing. At which point, I thought she’d saved Vallencourt’s young hide.
But then another of the things – exactly like the first – came scuttling out, grabbed him by the leg again, and the whole awful scene was being re-enacted before I could get my head around it.
This was like one of those dreams that keep on going around in a broad circle, with the same details perpetually repeated. And I couldn’
t think now to react to that, so I simply pulled my own gun out.
Saul was firing too, now. Shots were raining down upon these spider types as thick and fast as hail. But every time one of them faltered and broke up, another creature would come running out, and pick up where the last one had left off.
“What are these?” Cass was howling.
But that wasn’t the right question. The correct one was, ‘how many of them are there?’
An endless number, apparently. But the same wasn’t true of our supply of ammunition.
One of Cassie’s Glocks let out a ching as its extended clip ran dry. And Saul stared down at his own piece and cursed. I’d only had five in mine in the first place, it being a revolver. But I had more ammunition in my pockets, and had been placing my shots carefully, aiming for what I thought might be the spiders’ vital areas.
So far, I’d been wrong.
Cassie pulled a knife out and then went down on one knee, stabbing at the newest creature. I was afraid at first that it would turn on her, and there’d be two people we’d have to save. But it didn’t take the slightest notice of her. Just kept dragging Vallencourt in the direction of that big damned hole.
And her blade had absolutely no effect. It went in repeatedly through that glistening purple hide, without appearing to do any damage.
Saul and I looked at each other, and then grabbed one of the sergeant’s wrists apiece. And Ritchie’s yells became more frantic, because he’d become the subject of a tug-of-war. I still couldn’t believe how strong these things were.
Saul’s one of the largest guys in town, built like a brick outhouse. I might be slighter, but I’m certainly no weakling. And our combined efforts got us barely any real result. Something a couple of feet wide with skinny legs was exerting considerably more force than we could deal with.
Sweat started to flow. Cords stood out on necks. And with every passing second, Ritchie was dragged a couple of inches further in. Me and Saul gawped across at each other with our faces turning red, barely able to credit what was being done.
“Ideas?” he grunted painfully.
“Bug spray?”
“Fresh out.”
He had leant his full weight back on his heels, and it still wasn’t making any difference. Ritchie was bellowing with agony. The fact was, we were hurting him a good deal worse than the purple creatures had been doing.
Cass had given up with the knife and thrown her whole body across the sergeant’s, hoping that her added weight might slow him down.
It didn’t.
It was starting to look as if we either let him go, or we were all taking a trip inside that hole.
I stared into it. There were no recognizable shapes, back there. No dimensions, or impressions of depth. The only thing that I could make out was a shifting, violet dimness. And the thought of going in through that stuff chilled me to the bone.
I tugged at Ritchie’s arm with every last ounce of my might. It didn’t stop him moving, but it did get one result. He let out a high-pitched wail. And I took in the fact – with a horrible shock – that his shoulder had been dislocated. So I let his arm go and bent down and grabbed him by his coat instead.
The buttons started popping. Then the fabric began coming apart.
Why just one of these creatures at a time? That was the disjointed thought that was managing to spiral through my head. And why were they only going for Vallencourt? Smarter beasties would have come out all at once and overpowered the load of us. That told me we were dealing, here, with something fairly mindless.
Which was no big consolation. However dumb these things might be, they looked like they were winning. Ritchie’s ankle was mere inches from the opening.
My heartbeat was crashing in my head. My eyes were full of liquid salt. And so I felt rather than saw a shadow move behind me. Sensed rather than heard a footfall on the tiles.
A bright red bolt of light went sizzling past me, hit the creature, and the thing evaporated. A second flash destroyed the opening before a brand-new spider could emerge. There was no wreckage, when that happened. That part of the wall simply returned to normal, a row of clean white tiles reappearing.
Those of us who were still upright stumbled away as the pressure was released. I hit a towel rail, and it stung my ribs. But I didn’t really mind that, not one little bit.
Ritchie was still with us. And that was the only thing that mattered, to my way of thinking.
And the fact the flashes had been bright red meant that we’d been saved by Dr. Lehman Willets.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“What the hell’s been going on?” he asked me, when I’d gotten my breath back.
I let out a final wheeze. “I was kind of hoping you could tell me that.”
The only African-American in town – not for any questionable reasons, but because of the Landing’s curious history – peered at me bleakly, puckers appearing on his brow. There were glimmering dots of crimson at the centers of his eyes, a physical sign of his enormous power.
He doesn’t strictly count as an adept, being self-taught in the magic arts. And he’s certainly not one of the rich, uppity Sycamore Hill set. But Lehman Willets has an awful load of mojo at his fingertips, including the power to heal injuries, which the majority of adepts do not have. Once he’d dealt with our arachnid friends, he set about repairing Ritchie.
Popped his shoulder back, simply by waggling his fingertips around the injured joint. And healed his ankle too, which turned out to be broken. The creatures’ mandibles had applied that much pressure to it.
But healing a body is one thing. Healing a mind, another. We still had to call an ambulance for the young sergeant. He was pretty badly shaken up, and more about his wife and cousins than the battering he’d taken.
And we’d no idea what kind of effects a supernatural spider-bite might have. The skin around his lower leg had been broken in several places, so he needed to be kept under observation for a while.
Which meant we were already one man down, a good one too. And that’s not the kind of math that I’m a fan of.
“Couldn’t you see what was happening?” I asked the doctor, once the ambulance was gone.
He usually has twenty-twenty vision when it comes to second sight. But the only he did was shake his head.
“I got a vague sense something bad was going down, enough to bring me here, but that was all I got.” He peered at me slightly skewy. “You and Cass have dealt with creatures much larger than that. So what exactly was the problem?”
I explained to him how things had panned out. Not one spider but a whole procession of them. The terrifying strength they’d demonstrated. And the fact that weapons had a very limited effect on them. The more of it I told him, then the less it sounded like it made a whole big load of sense. But the doc appeared to get that fact, then move on past it.
“Vallencourt’s wife going through the mirror, then those things appearing?” I asked. “I’d guess that they’re connected. Am I right?”
His fingertips went to his lower lip. “They certainly would appear to be. The purple coloration and all.”
“So we’re dealing with some kind of place where everything’s invulnerable and super strong?”
He gave that some consideration, but then shook his head.
“Those spiders had thin legs and soft-looking bodies, so I’d doubt that’s the case. I’d say we’ve come in contact with a new plane of existence, where the natural laws do not apply.”
Which struck me sideways, pretty hard. If Raine’s Landing does nothing else, it certainly is good at throwing up surprises.
“Another dimension?” I blurted.
And he nodded.
“Can you sense anything else about it?”
In the past, he’d regularly reached out with his mind and found out a great deal about a given threat. But this time, Willets looked blank.
Then he murmured, “Everything’s a mess.”
Well, that was no big revelation. But not
, apparently, what he was on about. So I stared at him, waiting for a fuller explanation.
“I mean – it’s not merely what’s been going on. I keep trying to reach out and find the source of this. And it’s like trying to find a cotton ball in pea-soup fog. The vibes out there are totally fouled up. It’s damned unusual, even for the supernatural.”
Which left us with what?
“Everything is out of whack,” he told me. “Normally, even bad magic flows to recognizable patterns. But there’s none of that here. Whatever’s coming down on us, it’s nothing I can even get my head around.”
Back in the fall, we’d had something attack us that had come from right outside our Universe, and I wondered if the source was that.
“The Dweller in the Dark?” Willets mused. “No, the Dweller’s a malignant nothingness. Whereas this is …” He paused, and swiveled his head around like some disgruntled owl. “Utter confusion.”
And that didn’t sound the least bit promising. It meant we had no obvious way to find an answer to our problems. Spider things and shifting walls and disappearing families and purple lights. You added them up, and they came to a big fat nothing.
But if Lehman couldn’t help, there was another being who might. I’d been near her place barely half an hour ago. And when I brought her name up, the good doctor nodded.
“I was thinking the same thing myself. The Little Girl can be extraordinarily perceptive.”
Which was putting it mildly. She had helped me out several times in the past, noticing stuff that no one else in this town could.
I’d come to regard her as a kind of oracle, in fact. And when I go to visit her, it’s usually alone. But it was pretty clear the doc was keen to meet her too. And I could see no harm in that.
So we headed back out to my car.
We call her the Little Girl out of convenience, since that is what she looks like. A cute little five or six year-old blond tot, in white shoes and a gingham frock, inhabiting a perfectly ordinary nursery room on the second floor of 51 Bethany. But she’s really no such thing.
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