I sat bolt upright, my face bathed in sweat. Only a dream, I kept on telling myself. They were not even here anymore. And then I stumbled up and went across to the washbasin in the corner of the room. Sluiced my face until it felt clean again. Rubbed at it for ages with a towel. I finally glanced at my watch. Two hours had passed. So it was still morning.
I found myself a place to have breakfast on O’Connell. Only toast and coffee, but I still had trouble forcing it down. We were looking at the whole town going under at this rate, and there was no point trying to deny it.
That was when I finally noticed that there was a message on my cell. It told me that a sort of ‘campaign headquarters’ had been set up in the mayoral offices. There was still no sign of Aldernay, but matters were being taken in hand in his absence.
Cass’s Harley was parked by the front steps of the Town Hall when I went over there. The day was a bright one, the air crisp without being particularly chilly. I went up the curving staircase to the second story, and then marched along a largely deserted corridor. There was an anteroom at the far end, and then a set of double doors which, for once, were wide open.
A lamp was on. The Venetian blinds at the windows were closed. Even good, sane adepts such as Martha Howard-Brett don’t like to be exposed too much to daylight.
The three of them were clustered around our absent mayor’s desk, studying a large-scale map of the whole town. When I walked in, they looked up. Cassie had shadows underneath her eyes, and her tan had paled a little. But she seemed very alert, definitely in the game. The fact that she was consorting with adepts said a lot about the depths of trouble we were in.
As for Willets and Martha, I doubted that they’d got a wink of sleep last night. But most adepts have hidden reserves that they can draw on when they need to. Qualities that kept them going in a way that no amount of caffeine can. The doctor, if anything, looked rather spaced and twitchy. I could only hope that all of this activity was not pushing him close to the edge again.
“We’ve had to come to some pretty tough decisions,” he informed me.
He was holding a pencil over the map. And I could see that he had drawn a circle around Union Square itself.
“There’s no way we can defend the individual neighborhoods. There are just too many of these hominids. So we’ve already started putting word out. Everyone still normal in the Landing needs to leave and gather here.”
I gawped at him incredulously.
“You’re talking about thousands more people. How the hell is that going to work? Where are they going to stay?”
“There’s this building,” he answered calmly. It was massive, and had plenty of capacity. “Hundreds of surrounding offices. Then there’s the theatre, which can take a lot. If we extend our territory down O’Connell,” he went on, flicking his pencil to the left, “there’s bars and eateries aplenty. Facilities, food, drinking water. We can hold out for a while.”
But I didn’t like the sound of this one little bit. His talk of ‘our territory.’ A couple of days back, the entire town had been that. And now all we were claiming were a few hundred square yards?
“What does a ‘while’ mean?” I asked.
“That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?” Willets replied. “It would help if we had a proper idea what those damned angels are up to.”
He took in the way that I was staring at him like he’d been expecting it.
“Those things,” he reminded me, “are merely the servants of the Dweller. They are here to do its bidding. And it wants its Void back, remember? The whole Universe gone.”
I nodded uncertainly, not sure what point he was making.
“So tell me, why would a creature so ageless, with such gargantuan ambition, waste its time with a town like ours?”
“Why would it even notice us?” Martha put in. “We’re of no importance to it. Or at least, we shouldn’t be.”
I turned that over carefully, and saw that they were right.
“You’re saying there’s an ulterior motive?”
Willets nodded.
“And you’ve no idea what that might be?”
“Afraid not.”
“Hell, you’re the one who saw this coming in the first place. Can’t you …?”
He peered at me sternly, his pupils burning a little redder. But then his expression softened, and he frowned defeatedly.
“Don’t you think I’ve tried?” he asked. “Repeatedly, since this started? But to find that out, I’d have to get inside their thoughts. And that’s impossible. They’re nothing like ours.”
We needed someone who could see more clearly than even he, in other words. Someone who was capable of interpreting enormous strangeness. And I immediately knew who he was thinking of. The doctor was smiling at me gently.
“You’d better be on your way,” he said.
I was about to leave, but paused in the doorway, last night coming back to me.
“Did Cass explain what happened to us outside Raine Manor?”
Both the adepts nodded.
“Was it you who helped?”
Which got blank stares. And if it hadn’t been them, or Woodard Raine …?
Well, that was a mystery I’d have to give my full attention later. Right at this moment I had a new appointment, in the area of town called Marshall Drive.
* * *
It’s on the far west side of town, beyond the depthless bulk of shadow that the hill had been turned into. And the whole way there, my eyes picked out activity. No one had gone into work today. Cars were parked on driveways with their trunks and tailgates open, and most front doors were open too. Crates and suitcases were being humped outside. The people of Raine’s Landing were getting ready to abandon their homes, taking some of their belongings with them.
I’d seen stuff like this before on the TV news, mostly from benighted places in the dryer regions of the world. People who behaved in this way generally answered to the description ‘refugees.’ And that usually meant going from one place to another one. But, because of Regan’s Curse, no one here could really do that.
It unsettled me all the same. The rules tend to be flexible in a place like the Landing, since we’re never quite sure what is coming around the corner next. But home and family remain the staples of our lives. To see so many people giving up on one of them … it had never happened before, not in my memory.
I skirted around the edges of the hill, heading out through Clayton. And was preparing to turn right onto Burnet Street, when a sudden flash of electric blue went searing through my head.
I grappled with the steering wheel, forcing my Caddy across to the curb and braking.
The light remained there, deep inside my skull. So intense that it was actually hurting. I’d never encountered anything like this. My head went down against the dash, my temples aching fiercely. And a desperate moan escaped my lips.
What was the Little Girl doing?
She suddenly appeared in my mind’s eye, a tiny, fair-haired figure dressed in gingham and white sandals. A girl of about five years old. As usual, her eyes were closed and she was rotating.
She had appeared to me this way on previous occasions. But never quite so violently. I could feel the pressure building in my skull. Her expression was usually calm and mild, but not this time. Her face was twisted up with anger.
“No, Mr. Ross!”
She usually spoke softly too. There may have been a couple of exceptions, but not enough of them to stop me jolting when she yelled. She could read minds, among her other gifts. And so she knew what I was thinking.
“I cannot do what you are going to ask of me!” she continued, in the same fierce tone of voice. “You do not understand what that entails!”
I had no real idea what she was. I’d simply found her in an upstairs room at 51 Bethany Street, one otherwise unremarkable evening. I had noticed the electric blue glow she constantly cast out, and gone to investigate.
I managed to push “Tell me” out
through my clenched jaws.
But she ignored that.
“You think you understand this, Mr. Ross. But you do not. I cannot do what you want of me. It is more dangerous than you could possibly know.”
And she stopped turning.
“You want me to enter the minds of these angels. No!”
I wondered why, my head still hurting. And she answered me, without my having to blurt out a single word.
“They have no minds of their own, understand that. They are simply instruments of that which they were created from. If I try to see inside them, I will come in contact with its thoughts. And they are far too powerful. I will be swallowed by the darkness too.”
“We’re all going to be swallowed if you don’t help out,” I grimaced.
Her features twisted tighter, her expression growing so enraged that I was glad her eyes were shut.
“I cannot! Know this. If the Dweller takes me, it will grow immeasurably stronger. Is that what you want?”
I was groping for an answer. Struggling to fully understand what she was trying to convey to me. But the bright light, the sharp pain and her image all abruptly vanished. Went away between one second and the next. I sucked in a breath and straightened up.
That had been wholly unexpected. I tried to think what to do next. She had never behaved this way before.
But being in such violent contact with her seemed to have affected me. My surroundings looked rather vague and distant. The houses around me, the people hurrying in and out of them, might have belonged to another dimension, one viewed from behind a sheet of lightly frosted glass. It was as if I’d just awoken from a very strange and troubling dream, and not pulled myself free of it completely. I dabbed at my features, feeling how stiff they were.
And then golden sunlight and more solid shapes came drifting back. My head cleared. I decided, in the end, to keep on going. If I could confront the Girl face-to-face, then maybe ...
The front door to 51 Bethany was slightly ajar when I finally walked up to it, the way it always was. But I felt strangely unsettled as I headed up the stairs. And that got worse when I approached the nursery door.
I ought to have been able to see the bright blue glow she constantly emitted. But I couldn’t. There was only a muted smudge of daylight, filtering through the patterned drapes. Had she somehow … gone out, like a bulb being switched off?
I straightened up and went in. And it turned out that the room was mostly the same as ever. The cartoonish wallpaper and drapes. The My Little Pony quilt on the bed. The silver mobile hanging from the ceiling, and the toys scattered everywhere.
But it wasn’t really the same. And it wasn’t just the absence of the electric blue light.
There was no turning figure at the center of the nursery.
The Little Girl was gone.
* * *
I was slack-jawed. If she’d vanished, where exactly had she gone? So far as I had ever been aware, she was a permanent fixture in this room, floating a few feet above the carpet. And if she had departed this place, was it for good? Had we completely lost her?
The fact was, it was yet another blow, another setback. First Raine and then this. Everything seemed to be coming apart at the seams. I saw that I could no longer take anything for granted.
A numbness descended on me again. It took another while to get my thoughts in order. Then it finally occurred to me that this might be a loss, but I had been provided with an opportunity as well.
I’d searched the rest of this house several times, trying to find out who the Little Girl might really be. But I’d never had the opportunity, until this point, to search her room.
The cop in me came back with a vengeance. I started with the cabinets first, pulling open every drawer. I’d glance over my shoulder from time to time, half expecting her to be there, studying me with an offended look. But she did not reappear.
The clothes stacked inside were clean and neatly folded. But were, when I touched them, rather stiff. As though they’d been there a very long time. There was a brittle dryness to them that could only come with age.
And the style of them … they were old-fashioned. The kind of clothes a five year-old girl might have worn, say, thirty years ago. How was that?
This wasn’t helping a lot. What I really needed was something written. A diary or journal of some description. But I turned over the entire nursery without finding anything like that.
I was finally ready to throw in the towel, frustration pounding through me, when I noticed something on the floor. What seemed to be the corner of a rectangle of cardboard, poking out from underneath the bed.
I stooped down and retrieved it. Turned it over, and saw to my amazement that it was a birthday card, a big pink number five on the front of it. There were a couple of dozen signatures inside it, most of them childish scrawls. A card from a grade school classroom, then.
Happy Birthday, Katie, was the message.
Which told me something, but not much. So I went down on my knees and tried under the bed again. There was something else amongst the fluff and shadows. The envelope the card had come in.
I pulled it out. And it was addressed, in big block capitals.
KATIE McALISTER.
Which took me closer than I’d ever gotten to finding out who the Little Girl was.
Except that it would have to wait. Far more urgent matters needed my attention.
I folded both items carefully and tucked them in a pocket of my coat. And then I headed down and went out to my car, anxious to rejoin the others.
CHAPTER 31
What with the whole town arriving in one enclosed space, everybody had their work cut out. Cass and I were put in charge of laying our hands on every available weapon. We ended up with a big heap of firearms, then watched as queues formed and they were handed out. They might be a defense against the hominids, but I already knew they wouldn’t stop the angels. We’d have to rely on the remaining adepts to do that.
But with that much to do, the afternoon was over almost before we knew it, the evening approaching like a gray, incoming tide. Union Square was packed, the theatre and office buildings spilling over with their brand-new occupants. Everyone was trying to keep things as orderly as possible, but it was difficult with kids around.
Nobody had been allowed to bring a car the whole way in here -- Ritchie Vallencourt had seen to that. Vehicles were parked three deep in the surrounding byways, and it looked like a motor race to nowhere out beyond the square. But it provided no real kind of barrier, and I didn’t even try to kid myself along those lines. I’d seen the way those scuttling creatures moved, and knew it wouldn’t do a single thing to slow them down.
The air grew dimmer. A lot of people around me were checking their shotguns and rifles, with a great deal of metallic clicking.
“We came to a final decision while you were gone, by the way,” Lehman Willets said, coming across and grumbling in my ear. “These hominids, as you call them. If they come at us again --“
“There’s no ‘if.’”
“Okay. But if they look like overwhelming us, we’ll have no option but to kill them. Doesn’t matter who they once were -- it’s either put a stop to them, or this whole town goes down the chute.”
Which did not sit with me particularly well. We’d always stuck together in the Landing, looked out for each other, whatever it took. The thought of treating some of its inhabitants as disposable hit me where it genuinely hurt.
To give him credit, Willets looked as unhappy as I felt. Being factual about it didn’t help. The redness in his eyes had almost totally faded, making him look more human than he’d done in a good long while.
“If any other course of action presents itself, we’ll take it,” Martha Howard-Brett assured me, appearing behind the doctor’s shoulder. “Lethal violence is the last resort.”
But the way that this was going, it might turn out to be the only one. How exactly had it come to this? When I turned to Cassie, she was looking
very grim.
“We’ve been in some sucky situations in our time,” she complained. “But this outsucks them by several hundred miles.”
Then she tried to think of something else to say, and couldn’t, and shut up.
The mood across the whole square was uncomfortable. Everybody knew what was at stake. What the price of survival might be. And they mostly looked like they’d prefer to put this off. But time slows down for no one, and was gradually forcing us into a corner.
The sun was already bleeding away behind the shadowy mass of the big hill. It vanished from view, only the edges of its glow remaining like a huge crimson halo. And the shadows around us stretched much further, spreading out.
There’d been a good deal of cloud in the sky for the late part of the afternoon. We watched great masses of it turn blood red. The light continued to weaken around us. The globe-shaped streetlamps came on, and the lights in the surrounding buildings. And then Lehman Willets raised both arms. A signal.
My God, he had changed so much the past couple of days. He’d turned into a leader.
The whole way across the square and down O’Connell, great wooden bonfires had been heaped up, in a far more orderly, efficient manner than last night. Some people were holding lengths of kindling with oily swatches wrapped around one end. Lighters were applied to those. They were tossed in. And then the piles of lumber started bursting into flame.
The irony of it struck at me. The way that history went off at odd tangents and repeated itself. This was the way, in olden times, they had killed witches, wasn’t it? This was the way, in fact, in which our ancestors had murdered Regan Farrow.
What goes around usually comes around, catching us completely by surprise. The town center was filled up with dancing amber light. And just in time as well. Because the harsh red tinge above was draining away quickly, giving way to purple darkness.
We could still make out Sycamore Hill, the same black bulk that it had been during the daylight hours. But not anything of Tyburn, where the main threat might be coming from. Willets decided to correct that.
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