When he reached out to touch the nearest wall, a swift instinct grabbed Esther.
“No, don’t do that!”
But she was too late. John had already laid his palm against the plaster.
The yellow glow immediately surged through him, going up his arm, then filling his whole body. His threw back his head to bellow, but the light exploded through his eyes and mouth instead.
Esther went as rigid as a lump of coal. Oh my God, it had to be the wiring! He had gone and got himself electrocuted!
But it didn’t look precisely like that. John’s whole outline had turned black. She could not make out his features, nor the colors of his clothing any longer. His eyes were still shining brilliantly gold, though. And there was a touch of that same brightness leaking from the edges of his lips, despite the fact that he had shut them.
He was still in that condition when he let go of the wall.
He remained perfectly upright, not so much as teetering. Looked around, then took a step toward her. Something was now happening to the top of his head.
Were those horns that were appearing?
He hadn’t been shocked. He had been somehow … changed.
Esther started screaming, even louder than her baby.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
West Meadow had the nearest Eastlake buildings, and so me and Lauren headed there, Saul Hobart’s Pontiac in my rearview mirror. Our attention was captured, several blocks off, by a few glimpses of some unnaturally glaring yellow light. And that got transformed into way more than a few glimpses, the nearer we got.
The place was a hive of frantic activity by the time that we turned up. A bunch of Saul’s men were already there, and they were working in an air of desperation.
Little wonder, since the whole building was lit up like a surreal lighthouse, shafts of amber brilliance pouring out of every window. It was so intense, I had to squint. But when I did that, I could make out vague and upright figures moving through that glow.
Tenants were banging on the glass and wrenching at the windowpanes, struggling to get out. The cops were trying to help as best as they could. Several of them had a battering ram. Others were using the stocks of their riot guns and smashing at the lower story windows.
Very little real progress was being made, though. One of the smarter cops had figured out a window frame was rotten, and was jimmying it loose. He jumped back as the entire pane crashed onto the sidewalk, and the three people inside crawled out.
But most of the rest were still trapped, the same way that the officers had been back in that bungalow. I could hear their muffled yelling, and it made the muscles in my neck tense up.
Then I thought I saw an even taller figure, with horns on its head, go moving through a rectangle of sulfur-colored light. It was there and gone in half a second, but the sight made my insides try to curl into a knot.
Martha, Willets, and Emaline had arrived here too. They were standing by a lamppost, huddled close together, watching the unfolding nightmare helplessly. It looked like – once again – their powers had deserted them. And it had to be awful for them, knowing there was nothing they could do to save these people.
I hurried across, with Lauren at my heels, and grabbed hold of Willets by his coat sleeve.
“Tell me that I didn’t just see what I thought I saw!”
But that question got answered for me a bare second later. Another tall figure came into view, on the second story this time. It was closer to the window than the last had been and I could make it out distinctly. A thick black silhouette, with long horns curving up from the crown of its head, its eyes the same hue as the light around it.
Willets stared at the strange shape, then wiped a hand across his face.
“Some of the folks in there seem to have actually been turned into demons,” he said, in a muted whisper. “And the rest are victims, I’d imagine. There to be tormented.”
I couldn’t even make him look at me, the man was so distraught.
“It’s not a person or a creature that the Portal’s brought, Ross. No, it’s Hell itself.”
“Say what?”
“I’d imagine it’ll take these places over first. Then, most likely, it’ll spread through the remainder of the town.”
He finally turned his gaze to me, and there was a pained gleam in his carmine pupils I had never seen the like of.
“This is what Eastlake’s been planning all along. It’s the bargain that he’s made. He’s turning this entire town over to his masters.”
But what was in it for the man? And then I thought I saw it. If the Landing was going to become a province of that lower place … well, provinces need rulers, don’t they?
“And there’s no way to stop it?”
The doc’s expression became utterly slack and stymied
“Something of this immensity? Even if we could still use our powers, we wouldn’t know where to start.”
But that was when another idea struck at me, an insistent memory from a while back in the past. I left the adepts to their anguish, heading back in the direction of my car again, with Lauren still accompanying me.
“Where’re we going?” she gasped.
“Cassie’s place.”
“Wh –? What can she do?”
“Not her. I’ll explain on the way.”
“You remember how Emaline marked all of the locations on her map with those little dots of orange light?”
“Sure.”
We were powering along Colver Street, swinging around other cars and openly ignoring stoplights. I was forced to keep on jamming my palm on the horn. Block after darkened block was going past us in a blur. But I kept the pedal to the metal, craning forward so far that my face was nearly up against the windshield.
“And you remember what happened the first time I asked her to join all the dots together? When she first tried it, it didn’t work. A pattern only appeared when I made her add that final one.”
“Davina Eastlake’s mausoleum?”
“Absolutely.” A garbage truck was trying to turn left ahead of me, but I spun around it. “I think it’s central to all this. Without it, the Portal might not work. Our best bet has to be to destroy it.”
“And so …” Lauren faltered. “Why Cassie’s?”
I had to explain that to her as well, since she’d not been present when the deadly angels had attacked this town. They’d caused a doorway called the Clavis to start opening up. And only one person in the whole of Raine’s Landing had had sufficient power to make the thing blow up.
“Quinn?”
“Yeah. Maybe he’ll repeat the same trick that he pulled off at the Farrow Chapel.”
“No, he can’t,” Lauren reminded me. “Christ, have you forgotten, Ross?”
And that suddenly struck me too, hitting me so hard it numbed me. In my rush to turn up a solution, I’d let several details slip out of focus. The way he’d rescued me and Willets. The draining of his strength from doing that. The damage to his ethereal form. In all the panic, it had slipped my mind.
My foot was easing off the pedal. We were slowing down.
“He survived death once,” Lauren was saying, “but I’m not sure he can manage it a second time.”
I stamped on the brake, bringing my Caddy to a squealing halt. Then pressed my forehead down against the steering wheel, the blackest of despairs filling me. How could I have been so dumb? But Quinn had been our best last chance. I couldn’t think of any other way to stop this.
Lauren’s soft voice drifted to me. She was suggesting, “We could destroy the thing ourselves.”
But my head refused to come back up.
“You saw how big that mausoleum was,” I grunted. “And believe me when I tell you that it goes pretty deep. So what are we supposed to do … huff and puff and blow it down?”
“Some C4 ought to do it.”
My despair took on a bitter edge. “We don’t have any of that stuff. This is only a provincial town.”
B
ut off in the middle distance, I could hear a low, regular thrumming. And I finally looked up and took in my surroundings.
My Caddy had stopped outside a big, well-lit gas station. A fuel tanker had shown up and was pumping gas down through an open hatch.
Me and Lauren watched the big hose jerking for a few mesmerized seconds before staring at each other.
There was an urgent, wild gleam in her eyes. Which most probably meant that she was thinking the same thing I was.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Neither of us had hijacked a truck before. But to our surprise, it turned out to be pretty easy. There was no one else out on the forecourt. The guy in the gas station’s booth looked like he was tallying up receipts and had his head tucked down. So I walked over to the tanker’s driver calmly, asking him if he could change a twenty. Lauren came up silently behind him while I did that, and then put her Walther to his head.
I felt bad when I saw his scared expression. But I told myself this wasn’t any time to go getting soft hearted. We made him uncouple the hose, then climbed into the cab with him.
The guy in the booth came running out, shouting angrily, when we drove off. He was obviously wondering why we’d left his tanks half empty. And the driver glanced back anxiously, but Lauren gestured with her gun. He peered ahead and sped up, heading west.
It turned out his name was Milo – it said so right there on the faded company jacket he was wearing. He was a middle-aged feller with a shapeless face and a stubbled chin, and had on a baseball cap with the word ‘hero’ printed on it. He was now looking a good deal more confused than frightened, and I thought that I knew why. This was one of Raine’s Landing’s occasional brief visitors.
If the curse had cut us off altogether from the world beyond our borders, then we’d have been heading back into the Stone Age long before this time. To be more accurate, an awful lot of people would be dead. And that was not what Regan Farrow wanted. No, she wanted us to suffer at considerable length. And so supplies from the outside world could still get in.
Guys like Milo, they would show up without any warning, barreling in from the nearby turnpike. They’d make their deliveries as quickly as they could and head back out as soon as they were able. And our best guess was, as soon as they left this town, they plain forgot that they had even been here.
“You gonna hurt me?” Milo asked, his voice all quavery. He kept on blinking, peering through the windshield like he couldn’t understand how he had wound up in this place. “Cause I gotta say, I’m not too fond of that idea.”
“Nah, you’ll be okay if you behave,” Lauren assured him.
Then I started giving him directions. We were heading back into West Meadow, still following Colver, going past the northern edge of Sycamore Hill. The gradients on Plymouth Drive were too steep for a rig like this, and so it made more sense to go the lower route.
“Left here,” I ordered.
Milo shifted gear. We were coming up on the edge of the Marshall Drive district. Exeter Close wasn’t too far off, and the cemetery was directly above it.
The tall bluffs on this side of the hill were rearing up above us before too much longer. I had us turning left again, along a smaller lane, and Salem Lawns began emerging into view ahead of us.
The wrought iron gates were still half-closed.
“Drive straight through!” I snapped.
“Aw, c’mon guys. Show some respect. This is a graveyard, ain’t it?”
Lauren waved her gun again.
“Straight through? Well, okay then,” Milo nodded.
Sparks flew and the rig shuddered fiercely when we hit the metalwork. But then we were powering past it, chewing up the neatly manicured turf like it was a big wet wad of tissue paper. I was scanning our surroundings. I already knew that Harker Eastlake was able to watch us with his inner vision, the same as the adepts. But my best guess was that he was so engrossed with what was going on inside his homes, he wouldn’t notice anything else.
We went past several massive mausoleums. Then the one with the great flock of angels swelled up in our windshield. Both its metal doors were shut, and I didn’t want to waste time climbing down and checking whether they were locked.
“Ram them too,” I said to Milo.
“No way, feller! Hey, that’s plain disgusting! Some poor dead person’s laid to rest in there!”
Lauren put her gun away, reached across and grabbed hold of the steering wheel and yanked it out of his grasp, sending the front end of the truck hammering into the iron doors. Then she found reverse and stretched her boot out till it reached the pedal, backing us away from the big hole she’d made. She swung the truck around so we could reach in with the hose. All very neatly performed, as was usually the case.
“Okay, Milo,” I announced. “Time to get to work now.”
“Here? But how?”
We got him down, got the hose unhooked and in position, and started the fuel flowing in a big, bad-smelling rush. I went inside the mausoleum with a handkerchief across my nose. Spoke the words that opened the way down. A heavy surge of gasoline went past my shoes and started gurgling off into the lower depths.
When I re-emerged, I could make out Milo’s silhouette retreating down the slope.
“I couldn’t stop him,” Lauren shrugged.
There was no need. He’d served his purpose. The poor guy would most probably keep running till he went across the border. And once he’d done that this entire incident would just fade from his mind, which was certainly some kind of blessing.
I forgot about him, turning my attention to the mausoleum’s entrance. The air in there was wavering with fumes, and so we both backed off about a dozen steps.
“I had a look around in Milo’s cab while you were gone,” Lauren informed me.
She produced a book of matches and a half-used roll of sticky tape. Then she stooped down and hunted on the turf until she found a suitably large stone. She folded the book around it with the match side out, and taped it into place.
I could see what she was planning, and we headed off a good deal further.
“Give me that,” I told her, holding out my palm.
“Why?” She peered at me in an offended way. “You think that you can do this better because you’re a man?”
“No. I think that I can do this better because I was lead-off pitcher for my high school three years running.”
And that stopped her short. She thought about it briefly and then lobbed the stone and matches over.
“Okay then. Let’s go, Babe Ruth.” She briefly clapped her palms. “Show us the heat.”
The fact she knew that Babe Ruth was a real good pitcher, as well as a batter, told me she was probably a Red Sox fan. That was something else we had in common, but I couldn’t think about that now.
I only had one shot at this. And if I fouled it up, this whole game might be over.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
What I was holding was, essentially, a little makeshift detonator. So I pulled one of the matches off, struck it and then touched it to the rest. I held it away from me while the whole bunch of them flared up. Waited till there was an even flame, then held the warm stone by its bottom edge.
I asked Lauren to go behind the cover of another mausoleum, which she did without any argument. She was safe back there, but I was going to have to do this in the open.
I stared at the broken doorway. It looked almost as small as a postage stamp from this distance, and I held my breath.
Bottom of the ninth and tied. Two men out, but a runner on second. A breathless hush falls across the stadium, and every eye is on you.
There had been a couple of occasions in the past when I had discussed Zen philosophy with Lawrence L. Dumarr. And there was one concept that he’d described I liked the sound of. ‘The arrow has struck its target before it’s even left the bow.’ My best days on the mound were all like that. And so I squinted at the opening until it was the only thing that I could see. Cleared my mind of any other
thought. Then wound my arm back, made the pitch.
I could see the bright flame dwindling. But it shrank so small it vanished. And I wasn’t sure … had it fallen short, or even gone out?
I started taking a step forward. Never managed to complete that move. Because the boiling blast of light came first, so fierce it seared my retinas. I was aware of the pink marble angels being torn apart, their mournful faces shattering into fragments.
Then the sound and shockwave hit me simultaneously. My senses were being overloaded and, next instant, I was plucked into the air.
I had to have been carried for at least ten yards. And when I hit the damp turf, I was barely conscious.
Hobart, Willets and the rest all turned round as a shuddering whump sounded from the direction of Sycamore Hill, just in time to see the blackened sky light up. And then a fireball rose into the air, followed by a pall of smoke. It looked like someone had let off the biggest firework in all Creation.
Hobart looked appalled. “For heaven’s sake! What’s happening now?”
But when he glanced across at Willets, the doctor was smiling.
“I think our friend Devries just got a favorable result.”
And Saul was still in two minds about Willets. The doctor wasn’t quite the fractious lunatic he once had been, but he still had strange ways and peculiar opinions. What precisely was he on about?
Except that something new was happening to the apartment block. The searing yellow glow was fading, pale electric lighting ebbing back in to replace it.
And without any further preamble, doors were being flung wide open and windowpanes were swinging back. The people from inside were scrambling out. Some of them in the higher up apartments were trying to lower themselves from ledges, and the uniformed guys began clambering up to help them.
“Thank you! Thank you!” he could hear a woman shouting.
Saul could only watch, his whole face going slack. He hadn’t done anything to make this horror go away, but someone had.
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