The lights ahead of us were phasing through to green. I started pushing forward, only Willets told me, “Not that way. Turn right.”
Before much longer, we were driving east on Greenwood Terrace.
“Why this direction?” I asked.
“Let’s call it an educated guess.”
And the doc leaned back in the rear seat, his features growing thoughtful.
“Aren’t you still supposed to be under police protection?” was my next, slightly strained question.
But his head didn’t so much as lift.
“Lauren’s a cop, and you used to be one. So I guess you’ll do.”
“And where precisely is this educated guess leading us, or am I just supposed to drive around all morning?”
He squinted blankly till he’d put his finger on it.
“Harker Eastlake’s properties are mostly back where you’ve just been, and in East Meadow. And I’d like to take a proper look at one. Specifically, one of the worst ones.”
“You’re thinking of moving in?”
“Will you cut it out with the smart remarks?” He sat up a little straighter. “Harker Eastlake has been putting up those dumps for more than thirty years. And you might not understand this, Devries, but there’s something very special about bricks and mortar. They’re the main way human beings try for permanence. The way we tell the world we’re here to stay. That gives a building, almost any building, psychic resonance. Houses carry the imprints of those who’ve built them, and the echoes of everyone who’s lived inside them. So maybe taking a closer look will tell us more about this whole crazed business.”
I’d never heard any of that before. Only what choice did I have except to shrug and keep on driving?
The clouds were even lower than they’d been at dawn, churning not too far above the rooftops as we wound our way into East Meadow. And they lent the whole district an even more dismal look than usual.
It’s not my favorite neighborhood to say the least, slightly lawless and extremely shabby. Cassie lives here, sure. But in the first place, she was raised here and is used to it. And when she’d set up Cassie’s Diner, with her home out back, it was the only property of any decent size she could afford.
Me, I like front yards and back ones. Calm patches of greenery and trees planted along the curbs. Picket fences are a nice touch too. But you could search for hours and not find much of that up here.
And the worst streets were the ones where Eastlake’s buildings had intruded, Dutton Street being a case in point. It had once been wood-built homes, albeit crammed together. Except that Eastlake’s lawyers had chased out their inhabitants so he could bulldoze all the empty shells.
In their place stood rows of four-story apartment blocks, so featureless that they resembled concrete bunkers. There were tiny little squarish windows. Stairwells and walkways that looked damp the entire year round. A few lights were on behind the drapes, but most people were out at work. Ordinary people, trying their level hardest to get something good out of their lives. They deserved a lot more for their efforts than a bad landlord like Eastlake.
There were cracks along the walls where the foundations had subsided and some ugly staining near the roofs. Eastlake had been pulled up on code violations several times in his career.
“Stop there,” Willets told me, pointing.
And I could see why he had chosen that particular block. The rest might be in a sorry state, but this one was totally dilapidated, in such bad repair that the authorities had shut it down. Planks had been nailed across the lower windows, but we could still make out the upper ones. The openings to the sidewalk had been sealed with big wide sheets of board, yellow stickers warning you that it was dangerous to enter.
“Good God!” Willets breathed disgustedly, his gaze drinking it in. “And this place has been here for … how long?”
Back when I had been a cop, I’d known pretty much every small detail regarding this town. And I seemed to recall this block had gone up only twenty years ago. I told the doctor that, and watched his face grow darker.
“Why do we even tolerate somebody like Eastlake in a town like this?”
Well, in the first place, there was nowhere else for him to go. We couldn’t lock him up forever. And we live, as best as we can, by rule of law. And that’s a good system but not a perfect one. If a man has enough money and attorneys, he can find his way around it.
Willets raised his right hand, with the palm out flat. He aimed it at a barrier and jerked his fingers, muttering a word under his breath. And the board vanished, revealing an opening.
Which he went through, something crunching underneath his shoe as he stepped in. When I followed him, the stench of mildew – which had already been strong – got considerably worse.
I glanced back at Lauren, noticing she’d drawn her Walther.
“What’s that for?” I whispered.
And she looked slightly embarrassed.
“Force of habit. Back in Boston, there might be God knows who holed up in a dump like this.”
“Junkies, huh? None around here, so far as I’m aware.”
“Will the pair of you stop twittering like ninnies?” Willets snapped. “Let me have some peace and quiet. I’m starting to pick up on something.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“It’s all around me,” he was muttering quietly, “but not really there at all. Everywhere and nowhere. I think that I can feel it, but I’m not sure what it is.”
I could hear what he was saying, but could not make head or tail of it. Willets can be seriously cryptic on occasion, and it looked like this was one of those.
His manner had become dreamlike, his eyes wide and his head tipping from side to side. We reached a grubby stairwell, and he started heading up it.
My own eyes had adjusted just about enough to see the inner walls were badly streaked from years of leaking rainfall. And my shoes were knocking garbage to the side with every step I took. Something scuttled away and I barely caught a glimpse of it. But I was left with the impression it had small red eyes.
We reached the second story landing, and the smell grew even worse. There was still the flat, dank stench of rot, but there was something overlapping that. Something sharp and acrid, that kept catching in your throat.
One of the apartment doors was hanging open on its hinges, so we went into its empty living room. There was one of those tiny windows, but the glass was so dirty it let little daylight in. Barely enough to see that there were deep impressions on the sodden carpet where some furniture had once stood. And off in one corner was a discarded pacifier. So a couple had once lived here, with a little child.
That made me downright mad. Raine’s Landing – when not under attack – is a community that values decency and fairness. How’d Eastlake gotten away with this for as long as he had? The Mayor’s office should have been coming at him full force, with the local press backing them up. I couldn’t help but wonder what had stopped that happening.
The doc was still behaving like a confused sleepwalker, when I stared at him again. He was going round the center of the room in small, tight circles, his arms stretched halfway out like he was trying to feel his way around.
“Can’t you hear it?” he was asking. “It’s like a sound at the very edges of your senses. Can’t you feel it? Like a faint vibration on the air. Where it’s coming from, I cannot tell. I think I’ve got it pinned, but then it shifts.”
I couldn’t hear a goddamned thing, and hoped he wasn’t losing it, the way that he’d done in the past. But then I thought I saw the truer picture. He wasn’t going crazy, no. Simply crazy with frustration. He normally shows expert skill at tracing magic, but not today, and it was driving him half nuts.
I grabbed him by a sleeve. At least that stopped him shuffling and muttering.
“There’s someone else who’s pretty good at this,” I pointed out.
All he did was blink at me like some big owl, uncertain whom I was referring to.
<
br /> So I tipped my head back and yelled out.
“Emaline? A little help here?”
The yellow-haired High Witch appeared in front of us a second after that. She didn’t blur, the way the adepts did. She simply popped into existence with a flash of light, like the reverse of a bubble bursting.
“Ross?” She smiled at me, then reached across and shook hands with an awkward looking Willets. “What is it you need of me?”
I explained to her, with the doc’s help, precisely what the problem was. And she looked as though she understood it far better than I did.
Her smile became a little smug.
“Well, of course, my friends. I’ll do my very best to help.”
She closed her eyes. The corners of her mouth curled up.
And then she said, “Let me explain.”
“A trick of shadow, or a trick of light. A ripple on the surface of a pool of water, or the way the moonlight can rob our surroundings of their depth. Our eyes deceive us all the time. We see things that are not really there, and fail to notice things that should be obvious. For day-to-day living, eyesight is sufficient. But in matters of great magic power,” and Emaline spread her arms theatrically, “I prefer to look for what I seek not with my eyes but with my soul.”
Well, of course she did. Why’d I think she would do anything else?
She went very quiet and simply stood there for a while. But then she jerked abruptly, letting out a noise like she’d been punched. And when her eyelids came back open, a sharp, pained gleam was revealed.
“Oh, by the Goddess!”
“What?”
“This place is wholly steeped in darkness. It just reeks of evil sorcery.”
And that was not good news. But all the same, I asked her to be a little more specific.
“I’m not certain that I can, Ross. It’s magic of a kind I’ve never known before. I’m not even sure I have the right words to define it.”
“It has to be stronger in some places than others,” I suggested.
She worked her neck and shoulders to untense them, and then her head bobbed.
“You’re right. I’ll try again, although it’s not what you’d call pleasant.”
But her face took on a tight expression of resolve. She shut her eyes a second time. Lifted her right arm in front of her. And she began swiveling it from side to side, as though it were a compass needle trying to find magnetic north.
A vee appeared in her smooth brow. It looked like she had settled on a point behind me. I was forced to step out of her way next instant, because she suddenly began walking in that direction, blind.
And it wasn’t too much longer before her palm hit a wall.
“Dig here,” she breathed, her voice hoarse.
Dig?
“Do it now!” she rasped.
And so I guessed she wanted me to go in through.
I rapped it with my knuckles. It was only cheap, thin drywall. So I hit it with my elbow, and it dented without cracking. It was damp as well.
I took out my Smith & Wesson and turned it around, sending bits of plaster flying. And once I’d made a large enough hole, I began to rip it with my hands.
There was a foot-wide gap before much longer. But the light was far too weak to make out what was in there. Lauren took her cell phone out and fiddled with the function buttons, and the screen lit up to cast an even glow. I hadn’t even known a phone could do that.
But she held it to the opening, to reveal an upright wooden beam.
Carved into it was a pentagram.
“But that has to have been put there …” Willets pointed out.
Yeah, I got it. It had to have been carved there well before this building was completed. And if that had been some twenty years back … well, our young friend Ryan Eastlake could have only recently have been born, if that.
Emaline had moved away. Her arm was still extended, and was being drawn to something else.
“Here as well,” she told us.
Lauren stepped across and gave the plaster a tight-fisted punch. Then she worked at it with her Walther, and a second pentagram came into view. A chunk of the drywall that had dropped away even had a date scribbled across its back. November eleventh, nineteen ninety-two.
“It has to be Eastlake senior,” Willets grunted. “He’s been practicing black magic all this while, with no one even noticing.”
It certainly explained why he had no proper regard for any of his fellow human beings. And perhaps it explained, too, why he had gotten away with his all this stuff for as long as he had with only the occasional rebuke.
Emaline was on the move again. She was headed for what used to be this apartment’s cramped bedroom. But I went up behind her and took hold of her by both her shoulders, slowing her down to a halt, then murmuring, “That’s enough.”
When she looked round at me, she seemed initially confused, as though she’d not been fully aware what she’d been doing. But then she took in the expression on my face and grinned.
“I did it?”
“Yeah, you certainly did. And thank you, Emaline, an awful lot.”
“Do you suppose that it’s the same throughout this building?” Willets asked.
“I can’t imagine why it would only be this random apartment.”
“All the buildings on this street?”
“Possibly, everything he’s ever built.”
“And that amounts to what?” Emaline asked.
“He’s put up dozens of apartment blocks here. And he’s redeveloped whole big areas of Garnerstown.”
There was a constant need for housing in this place, since nobody could ever leave. Not to the same degree as in the poorer suburbs, but I knew that there were Eastlake buildings scattered right throughout the Landing. There was not a single neighborhood without one, if you left out Sycamore Hill.
“Or my district,” Emaline pointed out. “He’s never built in Tyburn.”
“But …” Lauren looked astonished. “What’s he trying to do?”
Playing the long game, was my guess. Working toward some goal that had taken him not years, but decades. And he’d gotten his son in on the act too.
Willets was looking more and more startled.
“I’m still not sure what all this is about,” he breathed, “but I’m definitely certain of a couple of things. It’s not good. And we have to tell the others.”
And I nodded, heading for the stairs.
It was only when I reached them that I saw a flickering light below, and caught a whiff of smoke. And realized that a fire had somehow started down there. Which was the last thing that I’d been expecting, and it halted me, frozen with shock.
Maybe it was just a small, localized blaze? That idea got dropped when I took another step across to get a closer look. There was a sudden heavy whump. A huge cascade of sparks shot up. And the heat that rose to greet me almost singed my eyebrows.
There was a swirling sea of light down there.
The whole ground floor was burning.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
As I watched, a gout of flame reached up like some enormous yellow tongue, went licking across the ceiling of the space that I was in, and the tiles up there caught fire. Embers started raining down almost immediately. So I doubled back.
“We need to find another way out of here!” I shouted to the others.
But they’d already figured that one out. Both Willets and Emaline were trying to spirit us elsewhere, but with absolutely no success. Once again – as always seemed to be the case when darker powers were in play – their magic wasn’t making any difference. Lauren took a good look at the living room’s window, but decided it was far too small. And she was right. You’d barely fit a little kid through there.
We scrambled to the next floor up. The fire was following us, and I barely had the time to wonder how a place this damp could burn so easily. Walls were crumpling like playing cards below us. Everything was thin and cheap.
All of the apartme
nt doors on this level were shut. And we knew that there was no escape beyond them anyway, so we went up again.
This one was the final floor. There was a slightly larger window at the far end of the hallway. Lauren went to it, trying to pull it open, but the latch was rusted shut.
She backed off, yanked her Walther out, and fired three shots straight into the glass. They made round holes, but didn’t shatter it. Which wasn’t right.
That was when I started choking. For how long had I been breathing smoke?
‘Fire exit,’ said a small green sign above me. I followed where it went. There was a pair of swing doors to the roof, but a metal bar was fixed across them. And when I tried to shift it, it was locked in place.
A heavy fug was thickening the air around us. Emaline looked scared, and Doc Willets was peering around dumbly, like he’d half forgotten how he’d wound up here. But Lauren remained calm.
“Get out of the way,” she said.
She tensed up, then threw the hardest kick that she could manage at the doors. Her boot went through the woodwork.
Twenty seconds later, we were out onto the flat, bare roof. Only, by this stage, we were a good sixty or so feet above ground level.
We couldn’t find a way to climb down, anywhere we looked. And the fire was still heading up toward us.
“Can’t the two of you between you get us out of here?” I yelled at the magicians.
“We’re trying!” Willets grated. “Nothing works!”
Slivers of flame began shooting through the opening that we’d created. I could feel the roofing tar below us start to get a good deal warmer, sticking to my feet. And a thick column of smoke was rising through the air. We didn’t have a whole lot longer.
When I returned to the building’s edge, a crowd was gathering on the street below. And I could hear a siren in the distance, but it wasn’t going to get here in sufficient time. Windows were exploding on the floor beneath.
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