The Sound of Midnight - An Oxrun Station Novel

by Charles L. Grant

  "But why you?" Dale asked Liz. "I see about the children, but why you and Dave and the others?"

  Liz, suffering the conversation with only expressions of congratulations flashed in her face, frowned. She shifted the gun to her other hand and brushed at her hair, smoothed at her cheeks. Her lips were drawn tight, a sneer rather than a smile. Another façade, Dale thought suddenly. Liz wasn't nearly as calm or as brave as she was pretending—somewhere within there was a doubt, a nagging uncertainty about the course she had taken. Most likely she had been promised something for her part in this: immortality, wealth, power, whatever form her greed had taken. Now she was afraid that the payments for her loyalty wouldn't be met. Had Dave and Elinor been that afraid, too, and had they threatened to expose the cult and scatter the influence Flora had so painstakingly gathered? Had it been the chilling effects on the children that had changed their minds, and caused their deaths? It had to be! It had to be that, or why would Dave take the chance of bringing the chessmen to the store, insist that a traveler buy them instead of a Station local? What a relief it must have been to Flora, she thought bitterly, when McPherson rescued them.

  "You're doing a lot of thinking, Dale," Liz said sweetly. "Have you decided I'm insane?"

  "Insane or not, I feel sorry for you," Dale answered. "If it really happens, if those so-called gods really do come back from their . . . I don't know . . . hibernation, what makes you think they'll pay any attention to you? You've done what you were told, except for killing us. They won't need you anymore."

  "Nonsense," Liz flared. She lifted the gun and pointed it like a finger. "You saw in there . . . in there . . ." She swallowed and closed her eyes to regain control.

  And it was all the hesitation Vic needed. He leapt across the table, landed on his chest as one hand vised Liz's wrist and forced the gun up and away while he slid into her and toppled them both onto the floor. Dale backed to the door, watching the two struggle, her own screams added to Liz's when the gun fired harmlessly into the ceiling, again into the wall. And when she saw Vic was in trouble, she ran to the fight and began kicking at Liz's side viciously. The woman shouted obscenities at her, spat in Vic's face, but he slammed her arm to the floor and the gun sprang from her grip. Without thinking, Dale snatched it up, shouting until Vic scrambled free and leaned against the table, panting, gingerly touching the streaks of blood that lined his face.

  Liz backed on hands and knees to the wall, using it as a brace to regain her feet.

  "Keep her there," Vic said. "I'll look around here for a phone and get hold of Abe or Fred."

  "No!" Liz screamed. She launched herself off the wall, sprawled on the table and grabbed at the silverware neatly famed over festive napkins. When she stood again she was brandishing a knife. "No!" she screamed again and ran at Vic.

  "Liz!" Dale shouted. "Liz, stop!"

  The woman hesitated, then pulled back her arm to throw the knife. Dale shook her head violently, tears already on her cheeks as she fired the gun. The knife dropped, and Liz was slammed back against the table, rebounded into the wall next to the window. Standing. Mouth opened. Eyes disbelieving. Slumping, then, slowly to the floor, a broad streak of blood gleaming on the woodwork.

  "My God," Dale whispered, and the gun fell from her hand. "My God."

  "She was insane," Vic said, taking her arms and holding her against his chest. "Insane. You . . . saved my life, kid. You couldn't have done anything else."

  "They're using the children," she said. "Vic, they're using them."

  "We'll find them," he insisted. "Don't worry, Dale, we'll find them and bring them home. They must have told the parents they were going to have a party. Like Fred, they were going to have a party."

  Dale stared at the blood on the wall, felt nausea fighting to rise in her throat. But there was no time. She had too much to do before she could react to what she had already done.

  "Dale? You okay?"

  "Come on," she said angrily, and ran into the living room, swept the chessmen into her pockets, giving those that didn't fit to Vic. "Remember," she said as she hurried him outside, "what you read to me in the library, how those things supposedly come into the world?"

  It was a moment before he nodded, halted at the top of the steps and looked up and down the street. She knew what he was thinking. Knew, and hoped whatever other parties there were wouldn't be interrupted.

  They headed west on Chancellor, the road still slippery but cleaner now that the plows were working regularly.

  "We'd better get there in time," she said once, nodding at the dashboard clock. "It says only an hour, but you never know with these things. I never had a car clock that worked for more than a day."

  Vic only grunted.

  Had events not been so separated by time, had not so much . . . but she reminded herself that she'd plowed that ground before. The reality was whispers in the park, bonfires, deaths, the fire-thing on the hill—and in the burnt-out orchard a sid, a doorway for the Children of Don. No matter that centuries had buried them under a cloak of mythology; no matter that science would, right to the end, deny their possibility, deny their power. She didn't care then what derision might be born in the rest of the world—she knew what she had been through, and she knew the consequence of her failure.

  And if she was successful, no one would know about it, and it would be just as well. There were enough nightmares to go around; the world didn't need another.

  Ignoring the probability that a patrol car would spot them, they parked on the far shoulder of the highway and scrambled across the drainage ditch and through the hedging into the field.

  Here there was little protection, and the snow lashed into their faces, stinging ears and nose, burning eyes, and drawing breath cold from their lungs. They held hands to keep from being separated, fell too many times for Dale to keep count; her limbs grew numb, her arm a wooden shield that gave her the illusion of seeing through the storm.

  A light, then, wavering in the distance.

  The wind, screaming.

  The light steadied. A fire in the air. Dale stiffened, shrank back, but Vic yanked at her arm and she allowed herself to be guided to the outer trees, those not destroyed by the first fearful blaze. He cupped his hands around her ear. 'They're all there, I think," he said, and she nodded. Despite the storm she could see the children standing around the mound, the sid, in what had once been a place of cheering young dreams. They were dressed in black robes with cowls drawn up, motionless and silent.

  Three more paces and Dale blinked. A barrier of some sort kept the storm out of the orchard. Suddenly it was warm again. No snow fell, the ground was bare.

  And in the air over the sid, stark against the black and white night, a single yellow flame.

  How much time, she wondered, feeling Vic pressing close as he stared at the tableau. He was waiting for her instructions; after all these months, the moments that had kept them together and apart, he was waiting for her to make the first move, to tell him that what his eyes were seeing, what his mind was denying, was too much the truth. She shook her head, rubbed self-consciously at her side and felt the bulge of the chessmen in her pocket. Somehow these talismans had to be used to a purpose directly opposed to their original intent. She gnawed at her lower lip, tasted the salt blood that broke through the chapped skin. She licked. Glanced back over her shoulder and saw the storm thundering its silence over Oxrun Station.

  A movement caught her eye.

  Flora glided into the circle. She was dressed in a dull white robe, dull in contrast to the vivid whiteness of the hair that flowed to her waist. Age had been driven from her hands and face, and she was beautiful, a woman carved from a timeless block of unsullied ice.

  Priestess, Dale thought, too numbed by the sight to move, to breathe, to cry out her anger.

  Flora held out a hand and Milly broke through the circle, held it while the woman climbed assuredly to the top of the mound, smiled down at the children, and lifted her palms toward the single yello
w flame.

  The children removed their cowls.

  Vic fumbled for the lapels of his coat, hung on tightly as though without them he would fall.

  Jaimie. Carl. Melody. Debbie. Carol.

  They each those a large stone from the slope of the mound. Milly's face was raised toward the sky, her expression hidden, her hands stiff at her sides. Carl threw first, followed swiftly and accurately by the others. Milly crumpled to the ground, arms jerking to a silent tune, her head crushed, her blood staining the earth, the robe, the tired gray of her hair.

  The single yellow flame multiplied—two, four, and inferno. The cloud. The face.

  The giant's roaring.

  Flora clenched her fists, spread her fingers wide, wove a sonic pattern in a voice that was the sound of midnight that captured all Time, summoning her Children to take the children waiting patiently at her feet.

  The pain in Dale's lip finally broke through the stupor that had entrapped her, and she reached into her pocket. The ground beneath her feet suddenly became warmer, tinted a faint red that spread from the base of the sid like a flameless fire. A trembling, then, and a rumbling that could have begun as far away as the stars. Small rocks slid off the mound and gathered at the children's feet. Flora remained unmoving, the cloud/face/fire like a globe suspended above her hands.

  A fissure opened along the top of the mound.

  Dale yanked out the carving her hand had taken and, with a look to Vie that disrupted his trance, she screamed out Willy's name and flung Govannan, Llew, the fortress Gower into the face of the growing apparition, urging Vic to do the same, watching as the chessmen fed the fire, became fire themselves in raging conflagration.

  The rumbling increased and Dale lost her footing, fell back against a tree, and slid to the ground with her arms wrapped tightly around the bole. Vic pitched backward into the storm and laid still, his head propped at an ugly angle, his face quickly whitened by the passing of the snow. Desperately she reached a hand toward him, drew it back when she heard a rising scream.

  Flora was struggling with the flame overhead. It was descending, slowly, dropping a cage of fire around her, beneath her. The children backed off, stumbling like drunkards, rubbing at their faces until one of the girls, one of the boys began crying loudly before shifting to screams that matched the agony played out on the sid.

  The mound ruptured. Thunder, then, and red/amber lightning, and the blizzard ripped through the orchard to cover the earth, hissing, steaming, while Flora sank into the doorway she'd opened; her hair was afire, her robe in charred tatters, her face like a masque of yellow melting wax. Gone to her shoulders, her hands grabbed at the lip of the sid, scrabbling, clawing, while the sound of midnight became the pleading of the dying.

  The cold returned.

  The mound collapsed into a rubble of stone.

  And the fire-thing dwindled to a single yellow flame that hovered defiantly before the storm snuffed it out.

  Dale watched, wept, then called to the children who ran to her arms and joined in her weeping, shivering in the thin cloth of the robes they wore. Together, then, they carried the still dazed Vic back to the car and brought him to the hospital on the far side of the park. Weeping. And laughing.

  And she sat in the waiting room, Jaimie peacefully asleep with his head in her lap. Once the doctors had notified the police, there had been turmoil for several hours while the parents came and went with explanations of drugs and a deranged old woman. Abe had come and gone, but there were no questions, only silent anger and a look of sad bewilderment. Dale promised to see him as soon as she found out how Vic would be, to tell him everything including the body she'd left in the house. If she was believed, and the children stood by her, she would reopen the store and search for a way to soothe poor Bella's feelings.

  As if nothing had happened.

  As if the fire had never been.

  A soft voice paged a doctor.

  A patient was wheeled past by two laughing interns.

  Vic's doctor stopped to see her, whispered so he wouldn't wake the boy. And she grinned, wiped at her face, brushed a trembling hand through her soaking wet hair.

  In a few minutes she would be able to see Vic, to see him and tell him the nightmare was over.

  In a few minutes more she would tell him again that she loved him, needed him, couldn't let him go.

  And when Jaimie awoke, whimpering until he saw her smile, she cradled him against her breast and rocked him slowly, crooning softly, promising him a new home filled with plants, noisy with television, smelling of food and all kinds of candy.

  He laughed and snuggled closer.

  She laughed and kissed his forehead.

  "Miss Bartlett," he said, "can I have a shelf for my toys and things?"

  "You mean those terrible monsters you used to build?"

  He nodded; she nodded; and they laughed again, loudly, oblivious to the smiling stares interns and nurses sent their way. "And Miss Bartlett, can I put this there too?"

  And the interns and nurses stopped when she screamed, raced to restrain her when she threw the boy far from her and began tearing at her hair.

  They carried her away, while Jaimie crouched on the floor, smiling, turning over and over and over in his hand a small wooden carving of the Hound of Culann.