The cheeks were sunken. The forehead was gnarled. And both eyeballs had turned jet black.
She couldn’t see the mouth, of course. But it felt more like an animal’s muzzle than it had done, and seemed to be hanging onto hers by means of suction. She tried moving her head from side to side, but couldn’t get away.
Terror coursed through her whole body. Constance stiffened up, attempting to push herself off. Tried to scream again, but it came out very muffled.
Then she felt another yank inside. It wasn’t short-lived, this time. It continued steadily, as if the creature were drawing something out of her. She kept on struggling feebly.
And finally, she understood. It wasn’t anything physical that was being pulled from her. It seemed to be … her very soul.
An emptiness began to fill her body, utter blackness rushing in. She had never known anything quite so dark.
Then her thoughts began to fade away, a much stronger and deeper voice taking them over.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, a sedan backed up onto the house’s driveway. The engine stuttered to a halt, the headlamps blinked off and the two occupants got out. Tom Bancroft emerged from the passenger side. His face was flushed, and he was reeling slightly. But tonight had been a special one, and Effie did not begrudge him that.
“Hell of an evening, sweetheart,” he was saying. “We’re lucky to have such good friends.”
“Couldn’t have better ones,” she agreed.
“We’re the luckiest people in the world.”
How many more times was he going to use the ‘L’ word? Effie smiled patiently, then got the house keys from her purse and came around to his side of the car. Tom leaned across and pecked her on the lips.
“Love ya,” he mumbled slurredly. “Seems incredible, doesn’t it? Thirty years?”
“Always knew we’d make it,” she smiled. And then she turned her attention to the house, and her manner became a little more serious. “Better see how Connie’s been managing.”
She unlocked the front door, then reached for a light switch.
“Odd,” she muttered, clicking it several times. She peered down the street, but there had been no power outage. “Looks like a bulb’s gone.”
Tom squeezed past her. He went further down the hall and tried another switch, with the same lack of result. So perhaps it was the circuit breaker.
That was when Effie noticed there were no lights on in the living room either. And for how long had her poor mother-in-law been sitting in the dark?
“Connie?” she called.
“Mom?” Tom added, seeing what the problem was.
He had sobered up a good deal by this juncture. He marched swiftly out to the sedan again, got a flashlight from the glove compartment, then came back in. Effie followed him through.
He pointed the beam at Constance’s chair, playing the small circle of light the whole way up and down it. It was empty, but there was a hollow impression where his mother had been sitting.
“Where’s she gone?”
“I’ll try the bathroom,” Effie said. She meant the downstairs one.
The door was unlocked and the small tiled room was empty. Both of them were starting to get badly worried.
“She can barely walk,” Tom pointed out. “So where the hell’s she gotten to?”
Which was when they heard a faint bump on the floor above them. And that made them stiffen. Constance couldn’t make those stairs. They both knew that.
Tom’s face was sweating gently and his mind was starting to get fogged, but he managed to come to a swift enough decision.
“Wait down here,” he told his wife. “If anything goes wrong, you get round to the neighbors, call the cops.”
And before Effie could protest, he was stamping quickly up into the darkness.
A few seconds later, everything went very quiet. So utterly silent she could hear her own heart beating. And this, surely, wasn’t right? She ought to be able to hear Tom moving around up there, opening doors and such. Instead of which …
Her eyeballs felt raw and dry. Her skin crawled.
There was suddenly a God almighty crash that made her almost jump out of her shoes. Her hands went to her mouth. Then she got some kind of hold on herself and moved up to the first riser, peering anxiously into the murk.
“Honey?”
She couldn’t see a thing up there at first. But then the spot cast by the flashlight reappeared. It was moving along the wall beside the staircase. And it wasn’t Tom who was making it do that. He seemed to have dropped it. She could hear it rolling.
It trundled into view and fell off the edge of the landing, hitting a step halfway down and bouncing a couple of times before finally coming to a halt in front of her. It was now angled upward, its glow making the whole stairway look crooked and distorted.
Effie blinked, then jerked again.
Something had appeared at the top. Not Tom. No, something that was coming down toward her on all fours. She thought at first it was an animal, until she saw its face.
Connie …?
She couldn’t fathom what was happening. How could a woman so old and frail manage to move around like that? And what had happened to her face -- it had been wrinkled for a long time, sure, but why exactly was it twisted up that way? There seemed to be a peculiar dark gloss hanging over Connie’s eyes. Had she finally gone senile? Effie couldn’t understand how that could happen so abruptly. And even if it was the case, she didn’t see how any of the rest -- being upstairs, or moving smoothly on her hands and feet -- was possible.
The approaching, crinkled mouth came stretching open, wider than it should have done. Effie tried to scream.
And never got the chance. The aged figure sprang at her, covering the remaining distance in a single bound.
Narrow limbs, incredibly strong, wrapped themselves around the younger woman’s body. Connie pressed her wizened lips to Effie’s own.
And began sucking, drawing out her consciousness.
A gust of wind sprang up outside, a short while after that. It made the front door swing back and the latch click shut. And silence fell across the Bancroft house.
CHAPTER 4
When I got home, my place was darkened. Cold and quiet, like a tomb. It’s been that way since magic -- wielded by a maniac -- went completely wrong and made my loved ones disappear. My wife, Alicia, and my kids, Pete and Tammy. That had been more than two years ago, but it’s not exactly something you get used to.
Even before I switched on the hallway light, I saw the little red bulb was flashing on my answering machine. And when I played the message, I jolted with astonishment. Of all the voices that I might have expected to come out at me, Lehman Willets’s was the last. He was a hermit, keeping himself largely to himself. And so far as I knew, the guy didn’t even have a phone.
He had a lot of power, though. A lot of sorcery at his disposal. So I listened carefully. His tone was normally hoarse, but it sounded almost breathless on this occasion, like something had startled him badly.
“Devries,” he was telling me, “we have to talk, and sooner rather than later. Remember that discussion we once had regarding hierarchies of power? Well I’ve been doing some exploring, tracing ancient magics to their roots. And I believe that I’ve discovered something very strong and very bad, right at the top of the scale. I don’t believe that it can get at us right now. But some of its agents might be headed here tonight.”
He paused to clear his throat. Which gave me time to wonder what in hell’s name he was babbling about. I couldn’t make the slightest sense of what the man was trying to convey to me.
But it was clear that he was seriously rattled, and that is unusual for Willets.
“You know where to find me,” he finished up. “As quickly as you can, Ross. I’ll be waiting.”
Why didn’t he come here, if it was so all-fired urgent? Dr. Lehman Willets -- the doctorate was in philosophy -- was not born in Raine’s Landing, which is stra
nge for such a powerful adept. He came to us from the outside world, ignoring the curse that drives most normal folk away. It turned out that he had a natural aptitude for witchcraft, and he learned it really fast. But then it got too much for him to handle. And whenever I go out to meet him, I bear that in mind.
I glanced at my watch, then ran a palm across my face. It was already one thirty in the morning. And I felt hungry, and pretty tired in spite of my impromptu nap. The street was completely silent out beyond my front door. If it had been anybody else needing my presence at this hour, I’d most probably ignore them.
Willets, though? The whole time that I’d known him, he had never mentioned anything like this. Something could be on its way here. Something terrible, perhaps.
It occurred to me those meteors might be a part of this deal after all. And that made my mind up.
My stomach was still growling, so I went on through to my kitchen first. Fished a donut from a box of them and chased it down with juice straight from the carton.
That would hold me for a while. I checked my gun, and then went out again into the streetlamp-punctured dimness.
* * *
Something else occurred to me, about five minutes later. I’d never been into the commercial district in the dark. Not that it bothered me particularly. But I was seeing the place from a new perspective.
It covers the whole northeastern edge of the Landing, and a good number of the town’s inhabitants have jobs here. We cannot communicate all that much with the outside world because of the curse, but we do still manage commerce. And the folk around these parts are a generally industrious bunch.
The supply roads seemed different to the way they look in daylight. The street lighting was noticeably paler than in other parts of town. Colder, harsher, making the rows of squared-off buildings look completely flat and lifeless. The shadows were dense in most places, and there was plain no one around.
There wasn’t a night watchman anywhere that I could see. A prowl car might cruise through here occasionally but -- despite the problems our community has to deal with -- the vast majority of us are decent and honest. And we’d shed a number of our real bad apples back when we were dealing with the Shadow Man.
The signs by doorways spoke of light industry and medium-tech enterprise. A lot of furniture got put together here. The massive lumber mill went by on my right, a slumbering giant from the Twenties, its lights out as well. Beyond it loomed a Victorian, brick-built smokestack. It’s a landmark of a kind, although it stopped being used a long while back.
Willets’s place was only a few blocks away when something new caught my attention. I was steadying the steering wheel and continuing to wonder what was up. When a sudden flash of brightness made me hunch forward a little in my seat.
What had that been?
I tried to tell myself that it was just a streetlamp flickering. But it had been too bright for that.
Staring ahead, I attempted to catch another glimpse. And couldn’t at first. But then I saw two of them.
I applied the brake a little. What the hell were those?
They were a good distance above the ground, but much larger than birds. Seemed to be man-sized, in fact. And they kept on appearing and disappearing, flashing on and off like neon lights. That was when I figured out that they were circling behind buildings and then coming out the other side. My pulse ticked over faster as I watched them. These were obviously supernatural beings of some kind.
The real question was … good, or bad?
The glow they cast was a stark white. They seemed to have a human shape, but not entirely that.
I braked completely when I saw what they were doing. They were hurtling around the old, four-story building in the basement of which Willets lived.
And they weren’t doing that thing in any idle way. They looked like they were trying to attack it.
CHAPTER 5
As I watched, one of them moved in the direction of a grimy, broken window. It had almost reached the frame when there was a dazzling flash of bright red sparks in front of its face, like a vermilion firework going off. The blast didn’t appear to harm the creature, but made it back off swiftly. And when the second one tried slipping past, it got the same response.
Red, I knew, was Willets’s color. The same hue as his glowing pupils. So I figured he was using his powers on the strange things, doing his best to keep them out.
What in God’s name were they? I’d seen a lot of peculiar apparitions in my time, but nothing of this type. They looked like they’d been created out of the paired nightmares of William Blake and Hieronymus Bosch.
I wasn’t close enough to make out too much detail. But the way that their bare faces seemed to be contorted, the way that their hands clawed at the thin air, left me in little doubt of what their nature was.
My pulse was thumping heavily. My grip had become dampened on the wheel. But I edged my car a little closer, trying to get a better look. They didn’t appear to have noticed me as yet. And I killed my headlamps to make sure of that.
I had to move in practically a full block before I got a clearer impression of them. The fact that they kept winking out of sight didn’t exactly help.
They were … Christ, they looked like an illustration in some very old Bible, one that had been water damaged so the angels in it were distorted. The same lean bodies you’d expect, and densely feathered wings. Except their wings were moving far too slowly to have any part in keeping them aloft. These things were defying gravity. I could see that they were almost bald, a few ragged strands of pale hair dangling across their scalps.
A pale glow was emanating from them.
I was still too far away, but got a brief impression of their eyes. And they appeared to be jet black. Twin spots of obsidian, startling in those pure white faces. Ice seemed to form inside my chest when I took that in.
They were still trying to find a way into the building. But every time that they attempted it, another burst of bright red flared in front of them and drove them back.
A battle was underway -- that was the fact of the matter. A savage duel between this pair of creatures, whatever they might be, and the adept in the basement. I’d no notion what had started it, or what the end result might be. But I was certain of one thing.
Willets might be very strong. One of the most powerful sorcerers we have. But magic isn’t limitless. It gets drained away under circumstances such as these. I’d seen that happen several times before. An adept might start off impressively enough, letting loose his thunderbolts and whatnot. But it’s not an easily renewable resource. And it diminishes.
Lehman might be fighting these things off impressively right at the moment. But for how much longer could he keep on doing that?
I’d stopped the car again, and was taking out my Smith & Wesson, when my cell phone started ringing in my pocket.
* * *
I put the gun in my lap.
“Devries? What the hell d’you think you’re doing?”
It was him again, his somber, rasping voice. And he seemed to know what was happening at my end of the line. I wasn’t, obviously, in the adept’s line of sight. But he’s possessed of massive inner vision, and sees most stuff that’s taking place. The fact that he was now in danger didn’t seem to have affected that.
My gaze went back to the floating shapes. They were buzzing around the derelict building like a pair of angry wasps, only a good deal larger.
“What’s going on?” I shouted down the line. “What are those things?”
“No time to explain!” came his reply. Which made my teeth grate. “Just get out of here!”
“No way. I --“
“You don’t have a snowflake’s chance of doing anything against them!” he bellowed at me. “I can hold them off till dawn, and they won’t stick around past then. Make yourself scarce, man, for the love of God! Before …”
He faltered, seeming to have noticed something else. My focus tightened, taking in a new turn of events.
One of the flying shapes had figured out that I was there and swung in my direction.
“Go!” Willets howled.
But he was howling from my lap, since I’d already dropped the cell phone.
It’s not my habit to retreat blindly from an imminent threat. You don’t usually achieve a lot by doing that. But I’d been around the doctor for a good amount of time, the past couple of years. And had never, until this point, heard him sound so urgent. All he ever normally does is sit around and contemplate stuff. He stays out of the town’s affairs unless he has no choice. But now, they had come knocking at his door, and he was in the thick of it.
The main thing about Dr. Willets is, for all his quirks and defects, he’s a smart, perceptive man. And had been that thing long before he became an adept. He’d written books. He’d been a teacher, in the same town Lauren Brennan hailed from. If he genuinely reckoned that I needed to get out of here, I wasn’t about to argue with him.
In the time it took me to think that, the creature had already covered half the distance to my car. It had dived down and was coming in low, targeting me like a hawk. It wasn’t even bothering to flap its wings, just spread them to their full extent. Then swelled in my vision as it rapidly approached.
I sucked in a breath, threw my Cadillac into reverse and stamped hard on the gas.
Which meant I had to crane around, drawing my attention from the creature. I still didn’t have the first clue what was going on. But it was something pretty bad, and that was enough for the moment. Urgency had fastened its tight grip around my craw.
The Caddy’s motor was almost screaming. She’s a good old girl, though, with a solid heart. Darkened buildings kept on flashing past me. But for how much longer could I keep on going on like this? In reverse gear, I could only do some fifty miles an hour. And from what I’d seen at Willets’s place, the thing chasing me could move a great deal faster.
I reached a broad intersection, and finally got my chance. Yanked on the safety brake and hauled the steering wheel around. The tires protested, but the Caddy skidded in a broad circle until it was facing the right way. And then I floored the gas again.
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