by Gideon, John
“I must ask you to fill this with urine,” she said. “And do hurry. We haven’t much time.”
“With urine? What the hell for?”
“A charm, of course. It will give you some protection in the event you need it.”
Robbie gulped, and his stomach did a flip-flop. The Old Truth certainly had its disgusting aspects. As he hobbled on crutches to the bathroom, he worried about whether he could work up a good piss, but he managed, then hobbled back to Hannie’s chamber and handed her the warm jug.
“Really, such a face, Robbie,” she said about his scowl. “If this disgusts you, wait until later. You’ll be positively mortified!” Robbie got the impression that she was enjoying his discomfort, despite the deathly seriousness of the business at hand. “Now,” she said, “I’ll need a short lock of your hair, a clipping of fingernail—”
“A lock of my hair? Now hold on, darlin’, I just got it cut last week. I’m very sensitive about my hair.”
Hannie held up an extraordinarily old-looking pair of scissors , and her hard expression gave no hope that she would be dissuaded from taking a chunk out of Robbie’s mane.
“Small price to pay,” she said archly, “for immunity against demons and familiars, wouldn’t you say? Also, I’ll need a small quantity of your blood.”
“Is this when I’m supposed to be mortified?”
“Oh, heavens no! This is nothing!”
She went to work on him—first on his head, from which she snipped hair, then on the index finger of his right hand, from which she clipped a crescent of nail, and then on his right forearm, in which she made a rather deep and stinging incision with along, bone-handled knife. She directed the blood into a pewter bowl.
Having collected hair, nail, piss, and blood, and having cleansed and tightly wrapped Robbie’s wound, she set about brewing the charm—uttering old words and mixing things into bowls and jars, crushing and grinding and pulverizing, even doing an absurd little dance around the table. Robbie watched and tried not to be woozy. Abruptly it was over, and she poured a sample of the mixture into a tiny glass vial, placed the vial into a small skin pouch on a leather thong, and slipped it around Robbie’s neck.
“There now,” she said, with a twinkle in her turquoise eyes, “this will protect you from the minor forces. They’re seldom lethal, but they can be troublesome and hurtful.”
“What about yourself?” Robbie wanted to know. “Don’t you need some kind of protection, too?”
“Not to worry—I possess power of my own. One doesn’t serve a thousand years as a witch without picking up a few tricks, you know.” She donned her orange slicker and gathered up the large pouch that contained the odds and ends she had collected earlier, then headed for the door.
“What’s all that stuff?” asked Robbie, hobbling along behind. “You fixin’ to cast another spell or somethin’?”
“In a sense, yes. These are the items we need to kill a newborn offspring of the Giver of Dreams, provided it hasn’t yet matured to—” She fell abruptly silent and busied herself with turning out lights, checking the locks on the doors, and digging for her car keys.
“Matured to what?” pressed Robbie, distressed by her apparent reluctance to say more on the subject. “Are you say in’ that the thing can grow to a point where we can’t kill it? Is that what you’re say in’, Hannie?”
“I’ve said no such thing. Now kindly go into the garage and make yourself comfortable in my Jaguar. It’s high time we were on our way.” Robbie did as he was told, feeling as though he had little choice in the matter.
From his vantage point, Stu Bromton watched the red Jaguar roll out of the driveway and head down the hill toward the heart of the village. He was parked in his old Pontiac at the mouth of the service drive that divided Hannie Hazelford’s land from the estate of which it had once been part, hidden in the deep shadow of a high hedge that ran along the property line. Behind him, against a sky that was bright with a full moon, loomed the proud Tudor manse that dominated fashionable Torgaard Hill—now an apartment house peopled mainly with affluent retirees who treasured their views of the Puget Sound and the village below. Most of the windows were still lit, but a few had already gone black, and the others would have done so by nine o’clock. Old people usually hit the sack early—unless they happen to be Hannie Hazelford.
Stu swung out of the service drive after the Jag had gone about two blocks. He followed it toward Frontage Street, where it stopped for the traffic light and made a right turn. Stu did likewise, maintaining his distance behind it and taking care not to betray his presence. At the end of Frontage Street, the Jag signaled right and turned west onto Sockeye Drive, causing Stu to slow and allow it to gain another quarter-mile of distance. Sockeye Drive was dark and nearly deserted of traffic. His headlights in Hannie’s mirror would have been a tip-off.
Something strange was going on; of that Stu was rock-solid sure. Just a day earlier, on Sunday afternoon, Robinson Sparhawk had received a telephone call from Hannie at Liquid Larry’s and had driven immediately to her cottage to meet with her, leaving Stu by himself at the bar. Robbie had denied him even the semblance of an explanation before leaving, and he’d seemed ruffled, like a man who was wrestling with some colossal problem.
Whether the subject of Hannie’s call was the reason for Robbie’s discomfort, Stu did not know. Maybe it was the mysterious encounter with one of Dr. Craslowe’s patients at Whiteleather Place the previous night. Stu did know, however, that Robbie had received a strong psychic impression from the smear of slime that was evidence in the investigation of Teri Zolten’s disappearance, even though Robbie staunchly refused to admit it. And although the psychic had vowed to leave the Cove—apparently out of fright—something had caused him to change his mind, to pay a nocturnal visit to Whiteleather Place and generally start behaving strangely.
Stu himself itched to have a look-see around Whiteleather Place—not because he suspected Dr. Craslowe of any connection with the disappearances, but because the area surrounding the estate was fairly remote and heavily timbered. A homicidal kidnapper would find no shortage there of places to hide his victims. Maybe Robbie had gotten a psychic feeling about the area and, after deciding for some unknown reason to poke around the place himself, had run into one of Craslowe’s patients. Such an encounter could indeed be frightening, both to Robbie and the patient, especially on a black, foggy night.
Earlier in the day, Stu had talked to the county sheriff’s office and suggested another sweep in the vicinity of White-leather Place, only to be rebuffed: The area had already been thoroughly searched on two previous occasions, it was pointed out to him. Resources were scarce, and overland searches of rugged, heavily vegetated terrain were costly and exhausting. Helicopter fuel wasn’t cheap, and neither were the man-hours of pilots, ground-pounders, and dog-handlers. The State Patrol and the sheriff’s office had concluded that the key to solving the disappearances lay not in sweeps of forest and shore but in good, old-fashioned police work. At the conclusion of the search currently under way, the National Guard, the pilots, and the dog-handlers were to be sent home and replaced by a team of special agents from the FBI.
Thanks, Stu, but we’re handling this now, so...
So kindly get out of our way. Better still, make yourself scarce.
Which should have suited Stu just fine, in view of the fact that his days as the chief of the Greely’s Cove Police Department were numbered. He would soon be free of the petty local politics and the inane little rituals it demanded. The stroking and flattering. The pretense of being interested in the suggestions of some dipshit city councilman. The charade of cooperating with other jurisdictions. By the end of the year, he planned to have amassed some $50,000—ten months’ worth of payments from Luis Sandoval’s drug cartel—in addition to his own meager savings from his pathetic salary. More than enough to finance a suitable southern exile.
Happy a prospect as this was, Stu yearned to possess just one more prize in additio
n to his freedom: He wanted to go out in a thunderclap of success. He wanted the denizens of Greely’s Cove to lament his departure, to remember him with admiration as they chatted about local politics over dinner or drinks, to hearken back to his tenure as the “golden days.”
Stu wanted to be the one who solved the woeful mystery of the missing people of Greely’s Cove, not only to sop up the glory that it would bring, but also to salve the emotional sores that it had inflicted on him. He had imagined an invisible cloud of evil hanging over the town, had believed the whispered rumors of missing people who visited friends and loved ones in various states of dismemberment and decay, had even let himself conclude that Lorna Trosper’s suicide was a symptom of the “sickness” in the air. In short, the case had driven him nearly insane. The healing salve would be the discovery that there were plausible, real-world explanations for the madness afoot. He needed those explanations; he meant to get them and regain his mental health.
Stu had driven by Hannie Hazelford’s house half a dozen times since Sunday afternoon and had seen Robbie’s Vanagon in the drive each time, causing his curiosity to build like steam in a pressure cooker. What connection did Robbie have to that funny old Englishwoman, Stu wondered, and why had he stayed in her cottage so damned long? And what in the hell were they doing in there, anyway?
At the close of his shift, Stu decided to watch Hannie’s house, believing that Robbie would have to leave sometime. A hunch suggested that the psychic’s stay at the cottage had something to do with his extraordinary Gift. If that was so, Robbie’s next move would be a significant one, a move that could well involve his reason for coming to Greely’s Cove in the first place: the disappearances. If the hunch was right and Robbie was to make such a move, Stu Bromton wanted to know about it.
Hannie slowed the Jaguar to a crawl and steered off the pavement of Sockeye Drive onto a rutty strip that led deep into a wall of timber, past a rotting wooden sign announcing Old Home Road.
“It won’t be much farther now,” she said to Robbie, who sat in the right-hand bucket seat, his stare frozen forward.
“I know,” he said tensely. “I can feel it. Hell, I can almost see it.” He pawed inside his jacket for a cigar, then decided against having one. “This place where Nistler lives—it ain’t very far from Whiteleather Place, is it? Mile and a half, maybe two?”
“Not far at all,” answered Hannie. “As you perhaps surmised during the scrying, distance means little to Jeremy. He’s already progressed beyond needing his feet for transport, or wheels either—just one of the little advantages he has over us.”
“But I thought you witches were supposed to be able to fly, too. How come we’re not ridin’ your broom, instead of this here twelve-cylinder rocket?”
“Some witches have been known to fly, though not actually on brooms. I’ve done it myself, but I’ve found that it requires more magic than it’s worth—saps energy that could be better used for other things. Besides that, it’s cold in the wintertime.”
“I guess Jeremy wouldn’t agree with you,” said Robbie. He fell silent again, watching the jouncing shadows cast by the headlights in the trees.
“Your Gift has become very strong, hasn’t it?” remarked Hannie. “That often happens to people like you, after they’ve undergone the kinds of things you have. They discover powers and capabilities that have lain dormant all their lives. Sometimes those powers can be a mixed blessing.”
Robbie merely nodded. His senses now were full of Jeremy Trosper and the newborn thing that a dead woman’s body had borne, a thing closely related to the feculent presence he had felt at Whiteleather Place. Both were near, very near.
“I have often envied people with your Gift,” Hannie went on, “and have often wished I possessed it myself. It would make things so much simpler for someone in my line of work. You see, even though I command considerable powers, they are powers outside myself. They come from words and the magic they invoke. Oh, I’ve become quite good at using the forces available to me, but how much simpler life would be if I could know things by merely feeling them, or influence events with my mind, as you now can. Magic is useful, Robbie, and frequently there is no substitute for it, but it requires so very much knowledge—much more, really, than the vast majority of people could ever hope to learn in a lifetime. And concentration, too, and discipline. That’s why there are so few real witches and warlocks anymore, so few sorcerers. Magic requires sacrifice.”
They emerged into a clearing, on the far edge of which, at the end of a muddy drive, stood the house where Mitch Nistler lived—dark and lonely and tumbledown, a sorry place, even in the filtering light of a silvery full moon. Hannie braked, turned toward the shoulder of the road, and halted. She shut off the engine and doused the headlights.
“Before we go any further,” she said, “I want to express my gratitude to you.”
Robbie ran his tongue over his lips, which had become as dry as the skin of a rattlesnake. “Gratitude? For what? I haven’t done anything yet.”
“I’m grateful for your courage,” said Hannie, “and for your willingness to help me. Your Gift will provide me with an additional set of eyes and ears—powerful psychic ones that can warn me of any lurking dangers. Without your help, it’s doubtful whether I could succeed in what I’m about to do. I can’t thank you enough, Robbie.”
The Texan squirmed inside his heavy sheepskin jacket, which was becoming hot and sweaty. He itched to get on with things. “Well, I’m glad to do what I can,” he said finally. “So, what do you say we get started? What’s first?”
“I must celebrate a short ritual,” answered Hannie, reaching into the rear seat to retrieve the bulky pouch she had brought along. “Then, of course, we must enter the house.” She began rummaging in the pouch, locating certain objects and putting them in order.
“But Jeremy’s in there,” said Robbie. “I can feel him. I thought you said he was dangerous.”
“Oh, he is dangerous, no doubt of that, but he is no Hadrian Craslowe, fortunately; at least not yet. Properly prepared, I can deal with him.”
“And what if Mitch Nistler comes back while we’re—uh—while we’re doin’ whatever it is we’re going to do?”
“He will be no problem whatsoever, of that I can assure you. Now, if you will please assist me...”
She withdrew from the pouch a small earthen dish, into which she poured something, and handed it to him. In the moonlight streaming through the windshield, Robbie saw that it contained a mossy wick that floated in what looked and smelled like animal fat.
“Kindly set that afire, if you please,” she instructed, and Robbie dug into his pockets for his butane lighter. He was about to flick the lighter when a torrent of psychic dread gushed over him, fluttering his heart and knotting his stomach. His hands began to shake, and his spine felt as though it had turned to mercury. Jhis was not Jeremy he felt, and neither was it the newborn. This was something more ancient, more powerful by far, a presence that had communed so often with Hell that it carried Satan’s stink. It was very close.
This was Craslowe.
A muscle spasm caused Robbie’s thumb to tighten on the lighter, and the flame leapt upward from the tip, flooding the interior of the Jaguar with yellow light.
“Good heavens!” said Hannie, having glanced up into Robbie’s petrified face. “What is it, man?”
“It’s—I think it’s—” His throat felt tight and cold, his vocal chords frozen, and he fought fora breath that did not want to come. “I think it’s Craslowe. He’s close, Hannie.”
“Craslowe! But why would he be—good God! He must have detected the scrying, perhaps even our identities and plans. He must have known that we’d come here and try to—” She broke off and began stuffing back into the pouch the objects she had taken from it only seconds earlier. “We mustn’t stay; not just now. We aren’t prepared to face Hadrian Craslowe tonight.” She threw the pouch into the rear and twisted the ignition key, giving life to the huge twelve-cylinder
engine. She flipped the headlight switch and—
Robbie felt himself screaming. Illumined by the powerful glare of the Jaguar’s headlamps was the being he knew was Hadrian Craslowe, clothed in a baggy tweed suit and hanging unsupported in thin air, upside down, his inverted face only inches from the front grille. Craslowe’s arms were spread wide, as were his massive, taloned hands, as though to embrace the pair who huddled before him. The index finger of each hand was easily twice the normal length, topped with a long, hooklike nail. On his face was a lascivious grin that made Robbie’s guts roil, and from his baneful eyes beamed a light that was nearly blinding.
Hannie slammed the gear-selector into drive, cramped the steering wheel to the right, and gunned the engine, throwing mud and gravel into the air. The Jaguar swung sideways, filling the night with a lusty roar. The seconds dragged by as the car careened around to face the direction from which it had come, then straightened out and accelerated toward the wood line and the intersection with Sockeye Drive.
Robbie still held the flaming lighter, which was becoming hot, then performed an actual feat of will to relax his hand and let it snap off. He wondered why he had not caught fire, since the liquid fat in the dish had spilled over his lap, his hands, his jacket, thanks to the bucking of the car over the uneven road. But this was a minor concern, because from the corner of his right eye he caught sight of the horrible, teratoid face of Hadrian Craslowe, only inches from his own on the other side of the window glass, grinning obscenely, wantonly, gleeful with evil.
The Jag was rumbling down the road far faster than any man could run, and it was weaving and bouncing over ruts and potholes, coming close to ditching now and again as Hannie fought the wheel and held the throttle down. But here was Craslowe on the other side of the glass, his arms spread wide and his fingers coiling -and uncoiling, not running beside the car or even holding fast to it, but flying alongside.
