Greely's Cove

by Gideon, John

  “Chet, no!” Sounded almost like his son-in-law’s voice. Somewhere behind him, running and breathing hard. This was not good, because Stu would try to stop him. Chet tightened his finger on the trigger, wishing that he were a little closer, because the light was so bad, and the stink!

  “Chet, don’t do it! Don’t do it! Nooo!” First, one shot ripped the night, but a second followed in a heartbeat.

  Carl heard the shot but had no idea what it meant and did not care. The green light from Jeremy’s eyes bored into his soul and planted cold where once there had been love.

  “The words, Carl, the words!” screamed Hannie from below.

  Paralyzing darkness, petrifying cold—not at all what Carl needed to continue up the stairs with his charmed sword, not at all adequate to the task of killing the offspring.

  “P-please, Jeremy,” he stammered pitifully, feeling molten tears on his cheeks, “can’t you understand that I’m trying to help?”

  A heartbeat, another shot.

  The first, from Stu Bromton’s nine-millimeter pistol, was meant for Chester Klundt’s legs, because Stu had no wish to kill the man, much as he hated him. All he wanted to do was prevent a massacre, which for some un-fucking-known reason, Chet seemed on the verge of committing. But Stu was running up the porch steps, and the light was bad, and he had never been a good shot with a pistol. The round went high: It entered Chet’s back just above the buttocks on the right side, ripped through the old man’s bladder, and made a sharp turn, puncturing the stomach before exiting the front.

  The second, areflexive shot from Chet’s 12-gauge, lit up the squalid living room of Mitch Nistler’s house for a fraction of a second and filled it with a mind-numbing roar. A cluster of hot pellets tore into Hannie Hazelford’s shoulder, taking much of it away.

  Carl heard the noise and the screams from below, but he did not care, because his son was coming down from the ceiling now, his horrible hands spread wide as though to embrace his father. Though that embrace would have meant death, Carl was willing to accept it, willing, willing—

  “Carl, don’t let him touch you!” came Robinson Sparhawk’s voice close upon his back. The trance weakened slightly. Carl felt like a small, defenseless animal that a snake had hypnotized.

  “The words, Carl! Use the goddamn words, Bubba!”

  More noise and commotion from below—Lindsay’s screams, a man’s shout—but Robbie was close by and with him, and they pressed on, upward and upward. The trance-fog was beginning to thin, but Jeremy was so close, and the green fire from the boy’s eyes would—

  —would kill him, Carl suddenly understood.

  He raised the stubby Roman sword that Hannie’s magic had blessed, and Jeremy drew back, his face a spastic mask of hatred. This is not my son, Carl reminded himself aloud, as Hannie had admonished him to do again and again, but a thing that has stolen my son’s body and mind, the thing that Hadrian Craslowe created with a cutting from his own Hell-bound spirit.

  “The words, Carl!” Robbie was behind him, coming up the stairs on his crutches, a brave man.

  And Carl found the words:

  “By Mantis, by Daghda, by the Lord of the Wildwood and His Ten Thousand Names, I turn you back! I turn you back! I turn you back!”

  The sword began to glow pinkly, and a ray of color shot from its tip into Jeremy’s face. The boy screamed with a demon-voice and flew backward toward the upper landing, where he came to rest and turned around again, facing his father with glowering eyes.

  “I’ll not let you harm him, Dad!” Jeremy thundered, and Carl felt a stab in his heart. But he kept coming up the stairs, closer and closer, with Robbie hobbling along right on his heels. “I’ll have you in Hell before I’ll let you harm him! I’ll call a thousand demons to rip out your eyes! I’ll have you on a spit!”

  “By Mantis, by Daghda, by the Lord of the Wildwood and His Ten Thousand Names, I turn you back! I turn you back! I turn you back!”

  “That little speech may work against me,” hissed the boy, backing away tow ard the bedroom door. The door opened of its own accord. “But it will never work against him!”

  A shattering of wood and glass followed as if on cue from Jeremy’s long, pointing finger. Beyond the bedroom door, Carl saw a man-form crash through the window in a blizzard of splinters and shards. It hovered in the blackness above a rickety old bed: Hadrian Craslowe, birdlike or batlike in his lumpy tweed suit and baggy old overcoat, his white hair riotous, his eyes a double dose of hellfire. Jeremy floated up to meet him, and they hung together in the air like a pair of vultures, grinning.

  “Soooo, Mr. Carl Trosper,” boomed Craslowe, as Carl stepped onto the landing, “you come armed with magic, I see. And powerful magic, too. That old sword you have in your hand—it is the one that the Emperor Nero used to kill himself. Fascinating historical tidbit, no?”

  He floated toward Carl and Robbie, his arms spread wide, his dark talons gleaming at the tip of each index finger.

  “But we’re not here to discuss history, except in the sense that it’s being made. You see, the survival of an offspring of the Giver of Dreams is indeed a very historic occasion, one that I intend to see come off without a hitch. Unfortunately for you, Carl, and for that sorry little specimen of manhood shivering behind you, survival is not the operative word.”

  Carl raised the sword: “By Mantis, by Daghda, by the Lord of the Wildwood and His Ten Thousand Names, I turn you back! I turn you back! I turn you back!”

  But Craslowe was not turned back, as Jeremy had been. The pink outpouring from the tip of the sword did not faze him, and he moved closer, grinning that bestial grin.

  Hannie lay in a lake of her own blood in the hallway below, with Lindsay cradling her head and Stu Bromton hovering with his flashlight.

  “Take me up the stairs,” she croaked. “Do it now, immediately! Hadrian has come!”

  Stu started to protest, to insist that she lay still, because her right arm was hanging by little more than a few threads of skin and she had lost an incredible amount of blood. Stu wanted to call for an ambulance.

  But he stood back as an ashen-faced Lindsay Moreland helped the old woman to her feet, and unbelievably they made for the stairway, where light was leaking downward. They went up, step by step.

  Craslowe would have been on Carl, would have ripped him to pieces as a small child might rip a paper doll, had Robbie not used his Gift.

  The psychic visualized a boulder roughly the size of a baby grand piano, poised it above the old sorcerer’s head, and let it drop. The shock was apparent in Craslowe’s aged face, in the faltering light from those dreadful eyes. The pink energy from Carl’s sword intensified, and the magic seemed to have effect now. Craslowe screeched and staggered backward, roiled and flailed his arms, before recovering from the shock and coming back at Carl.

  Robbie screwed his eyes shut and launched another blast of psychic energy, but damn! this wasn’t easy, and he did not know how many more times he could do it.

  Suddenly Hannie and Lindsay were on the stairs behind them, and something was horribly wrong. Hannie was covered with blood, her blond wig was gone, and her arm!

  She wasted no time but pointed a crooked finger of her good hand squarely at the hovering mass of Craslowe. That most ancient language poured from her lips.

  The magic flowed in a torrent from her eyes, assaulted Craslowe and drove him back into the bedroom with Jeremy. The sword in Carl’s hand glowed hot now, and the pink flow from the blade enveloped them and drew screeches of pain Robbie threw chunks of mental energy against the pair as they hovered in the little bedroom, as they turned and writhed and twitched—all within the space of seconds.

  Jeremy and Hadrian Craslowe plunged through the window into the cold night, fleeing the magic that Hannie Hazelford had wrought, flying away like two Hell-birds on a storm.

  An onerous silence descended.

  Carl would have directed the beam of the flashlight to the bed, but he already knew what lay there
, and he doubted that either his guts or his soul could endure a clear look. He turned his attention to the breathing sounds in the corner of the bedroom, where something waited.

  Something subsumed in near-total darkness.

  Carl stepped toward it, keeping the light to one side, worrying that he might actually see its face and that he might lock gazes with it. Hannie was at the door behind him, chanting in the Old Tongue—which was good. The sound of her voice gave him strength. He heard heavy feet coming up the stairs, but this did not concern him. What concerned him was the darkness in the corner, the darkness that seemed alive and hungry.

  He raised the sword and waded into the gloom, getting the vague feeling of bulk and slitheriness, of reptilian wings and claws, the definite impression of fangs and teeth and a predatory mouth. He nearly vomited at the baby like cry that came as he brought the first blow down.

  But this was not as bad as Lindsay Moreland’s scream, or his own quick flight into insanity after throwing a glance over his shoulder to the old bed behind him, after seeing—surrounded by the beam of Stu Bromton’s flashlight—his wife, Lorna, the mother of his son.

  Sitting up on the bed.

  Standing now.

  Moving toward him, glowering.

  Skin blistered and mottled green and brown, slipping away in places. Hair loose and falling, body distended. Eyes and tongue swollen, her face a chthonic rictus of murderous rage. She tried to speak, to hold out her hands, to keep Carl away from the thing that she had borne. Carl went weak and dizzy.

  Pistol shots erupted, pounding deafness into Carl’s head. Stu was firing, firing at Lorna. She was jerking and recoiling with every impact, going down, mercifully, going down and dying at last—really dying. Carl turned back to his murderous task, sobbing hugely and shoving the charmed blade deep into the slithering matter that hunkered in the corner, glad for the deafness. So that he could not hear the screeching as he chopped and slashed. Chopped and slashed. As blue fire consumed the once-living pieces of the offspring.

  32

  They fled to Hannie Hazelford’s cottage, the five of them: the original four soldiers and Stu Bromton, who because of what he had seen and done tonight was now with them. Hadrian Craslowe’s hold over the police chief had broken, possibly through the effects of Hannie’s magic, or possibly by sheer revulsion against a man who could sponsor such horrors as had taken shape before Stu’s very eyes.

  Unlike Mayor Chester Klundt, Hannie was still alive and kicking, despite the volume of blood she had lost and the fact that her mangled right arm hung grotesquely backward at her side. She immediately shed her blood-soaked clothing and set about brewing a potion in an earthenjar, employing dozens of spices and herbs and many words of magic. She kept the jar near her and drank of it often as Lindsay bandaged the shotgun wound and bound the crooked old arm in a tight sling. The potion, whatever it was, worked well against both pain and bleeding. But more incredibly, it gave her strength and vigor, even revived her feistiness.

  They sat in a circle in the living room, feeling safe behind the barricade of waxen symbols and vials and pouches and jars. They listened silently as Hannie told them what they must do.

  Whispered instructions went to Stu. Hannie snipped hair from his head and a nail from his finger, took his blood and urine, performed a ceremony, and gave him back a small skin pouch with a vial in it, marking him a soldier like the others. He left the house on his mission while the sun was still hours away.

  Robinson Sparhawk watched Hannie with fascination, listening to her words and feeling a mixture of admiration and dread: admiration for her personal strength and endurance, the potency of her magic, dread over knowing that the magic was devouring both her spirit and body, even as it propped her up in the aftermath of a shotgun blast that should have killed her. How much longer could she last? he worried.

  “You’ve done well this night,” she told them, her face a living riddle of creases in the candlelight. “I’m grateful to you. Together we’ve accomplished a great good, you and I: We’ve destroyed the offspring of the Giver of Dreams and have thus saved hundreds, perhaps thousands, of our fellow human beings from ineffable suffering. But you know as well as I that we have yet more to do. The death of the offspring did not free Jeremy from the evil’s grip, as we’d all hoped.”

  Carl stiffened at this. He tightened his grip on the bloody sword he still held in his lap.

  “But I tell you that there is yet hope for him. The hope lies in killing the Giver of Dreams and its manciple, Hadrian. Unfortunately, this will be no easy task. It will be far harder than destroying the offspring, which was a mere infant—less than an embryo, really, of the mature demon. To succeed against the Giver of Dreams, we must invoke the most powerful magic imaginable. We must carry out a ritual that you may find execrable and utterly revolting. But worse, one of us must make a sacrifice—a totally abhorrent sacrifice—which will be the key to the demon’s destruction. Without that sacrifice, we cannot hope to win.”

  She stared through her silvery pince-nez at Carl, her leathery old head tilted slightly back and her chin thrust out, her eyes magnified to eloquent sharpness. Carl knew that he would be the one to make the sacrifice, and his pair of colleagues knew it, too. Lindsay reached for him and took his hand, held it firmly. Her own hand was cold, but strong.

  “This ritual is very old,” continued Hannie, “older than any other I know, though it has been amended through the ages with new names and words, added to and embellished. It combines the pure energies of the male and female—the man, who is the defender and warrior, with the woman, who is the giver of life and the provider—in order to loose the fury of the unseen world against mankind’s oldest enemy. I say once again, it is not easy magic, my friends. It is demanding and rigorous and dangerous, for we are not dealing with harmless woodland spirits here. We’re not speaking of Shakespeare’s Mustard Seed or Cobweb or Peaseblossom, but of things with names like Astaroth and Leviathan and Asmodeus the Destroyer—not their real names, of course, but the ones that men have given them. These beings existed tens of thousands of years before any man ever walked on the earth.

  “Suffice it to say that we cannot afford to make mistakes. We must be strong in our resolve, for we cannot leave the ritual unfinished once we begin it. We must be prepared to suffer, and having suffered, we must even then be ready to accept the consequences of defeat. The magic, you see, only works about half the time, for the Giver of Dreams is so very strong....”

  Carl surmised within minutes that the bubbling green potion Hannie had given him was an aphrodisiac, and a powerful intoxicant to boot. He felt warm and giddy as he gazed across the flickering candle flames to where Lindsay stood naked at a tip of the pentagram. His eyes devoured every detail of her lean, blond body, from her delicate toes to the gentle slope of her belly to the mounds of her breasts. She stood golden and still, her blue eyes flashing and her mouth faintly curved in a smile. She too had drunk the potion. Carl would have sworn that she was glorying in his stare, maybe even rejoicing at the spectacle of his engorged penis.

  Hannie chanted and brewed, used her microwave and the burners on the gas range—mixing and shaking and stirring, producing occasional flashes of fire and smoke. The air was thick with incense and foggy with the fumes of burning herbs.

  Whether morning had come or night returned, Carl did not know, did not care. The windows were shuttered and curtained. He knew only that Stu had come back a moment ago after accomplishing his dark assignment, toting a small bundle wrapped in black plastic. Carl tore his stare away from Lindsay and watched Hannie remove the shiny wrap, feeling his own eyes go wide and his lungs constrict as she pulled out the thing. He heard Stu’s deep voice explaining that he had used the computer at the police station to access the county’s vital statistics. He had found the record of an infant’s recent death, located the cemetery, and—

  God, spare us! This can’t be!

  The corpse of the baby boy was perhaps a week old, bluish and g
reenish and mottled with fungus, the tragic little remainder of an innocent life that never really got going, thanks to a defective valve in the heart.

  In the center of the pentagram Hannie knelt before a heavy cutting block, upon which lay a wide pewter bowl, and went to work with her long knife, singing an old song in a voice that could have curdled blood and maybe had:

  Comes now yellow Wolfsbane, embrace Aloe Root,

  To sharpen the senses when Dark Wind’s afoot;

  Monkshood and Nightshade, dried up brain of a cat,

  Comes now Mandragora, so purple and fat,

  Combine with the fat of an unbaptized Child,

  An Innocent’s Blood, unpolluted and mild.

  Her knife winnowed and flashed with easy speed, separated fat from muscle and muscle from bone, lopped the appropriate bits into the cold pewter bowl where they lay amid the chunks of powders and flecks of spices, the dark globules of—

  Sweet flesh of a venomous Reptile I bring,

  For the Semen of the Wizard needs temp’ring.

  She uncorked an ancient-looking vial and poured a white, almost vaporish fluid into the mixture, then picked up the knife again.

  Juice of an Innocent Babe’s tiny Liver

  Is Poison, dread Poison to the Dream Giver!

  The knife entered the infant’s body with surgical deftness found the liver, cut it out, and directed it into the bowl. The act seemed less a defilement than an honor. Next came boiling oil from the range, water from the tap, more chanting, but in the Old Tongue now. And dancing, and mixing, and beating, while Robbie Sparhawk stood nearby with the candle lantern that supplied light. With an amazing display of physical strength, Hannie, who was naked but for her mass of white bandages, held the heavy pewter bowl above her head with the one hand available to her. She danced. Lifted off the floor into the air and danced. She cast her crone’s gaze onto Lindsay, who fell immediately into a trance.