He turned into a blur in front of me. Which projected itself upward, only coming to a stop once it had reached the Town Hall’s roof.
The doctor rematerialized underneath the Massachusetts banner, which was flapping in the gentle breeze up there. But his voice was still perfectly clear, like he was standing by my shoulder.
“No sign of movement yet,” he told me.
Traces of faint light remained in the sky, albeit they were shrinking fast. My guess was, the hominids were going to wait for total darkness before showing up.
“Oh my God,” the doctor muttered.
He had moved along the roof a few yards, and was facing due southwest.
A little crimson was still clinging to the far horizon. And for a breathless moment, it seemed like it might stay there. But hope is one thing, and reality another. It faded off. The stars came out. The sky became a canopy, the deepest shade of navy blue.
“They’re on the move,” Willets told me. “Thousands of them.”
Then he swiveled around toward Sycamore Hill, obviously expecting the same. But I could see his shoulders slump, and he hunched forward.
“What is it?” I asked.
A puzzled tone had crept into his voice. “I can’t see anything in this direction.”
“They’re not moving?”
“No. They’re doing that, Ross. I can feel them. But … they’re not heading this way.”
He looked at Tyburn once again, like he was trying to get his facts straight.
“Neither are the others. They’re not coming here. They’re heading for the western edge of town.”
Which took me aback. It made no sense.
“But there’s no one there. I have got that right, haven’t I?”
“Yes.”
“Then what the hell is this about?”
The doctor didn’t know. And so I struggled to think of anything important that might lie in that direction. And my first thought was the Little Girl. Except that, so far as I was aware, she wasn’t present any longer. What would they want with her, besides?
What lay beyond Marshall Drive? The answer that came back was … just the river and a small section of woodland. The same section of woods -- if I remembered the town’s history correctly -- in which Levin’s original ancestor had been trapped, a baby born in a tinkers’ wagon, his family simply passing through.
But was there anything else?
There was …
Oh no, not that. I stared at the streetlamps around me, then peered down O’Connell with its brightly lit-up diners and its neon signs. A thudding started in my chest.
I was about to tell Willets what I’d figured out, when three white points of light lifted themselves into the air above Tyburn. And -- unlike their servants -- they started moving in this direction. Which meant I couldn’t take the doctor with me, nor Martha. They were needed here.
I was yelling out for Cass next second. The people here might have been required to leave their cars behind. But she still had her Harley.
* * *
I’d ridden pillion with her before. And this was pretty much the same experience, the engine howling underneath and the streets around us melting to an almost seamless blur. She wore no helmet and so, obviously, didn’t have one spare. The air was moving past us so fast I had to tuck my face right down to breathe. But none of that seemed to bother her. She’d never been what you would call a cautious driver.
Back in the Victorian era, Woodard Raine’s great grandfather, Regis, had decided to modernize this town. And that meant making the switch from gaslight to electric power. You’d have thought that would be pretty simple for a man with so much witchcraft at his fingertips.
But there are rules to magic, most of the time solid and unbreakable. And one of them -- the same way as in normal life -- forbids perpetual motion. An adept cannot simply say ‘let there be electrical current,’ and then walk away and expect it to last forever. That won’t work, since magic is a hands-on thing.
So Regis had two choices. He could either stand there until the end of days, conjuring up juice for the rest of us. Or he could give himself a break, and commission a power station to be built.
It’s at the far western edge of town, out past where the houses start to thin and the trees begin taking over. The building’s right beside the Adderneck. In fact, that part of the river got a dam as part of the construction.
The Adderneck is deep, you see, its currents strong. And Regis Raine figured, correctly, it would make a perfect source of power. There’s a massive turbine that’s been turning in that dam for more than a century. It needs maintaining, of course. But now, the workers were all gone.
We hurtled down Marshall Drive, going past the corner of Bethany without so much as a sideways glance. The people who fled this place had, as instructed, left the lighting on in their abandoned homes. Windows were still glowing everywhere we looked.
The forest began to swell ahead of us. It had always looked, to my mind, like a semi-living thing. Was filled with overlapping strips of black. And before much longer, it was looming above us like a massive, frozen wave.
If our entire population perished, how long would it be before the tree line started moving in and slowly ripped the town apart? Or would the curse be lifted, letting brand-new people come here, if we were gone?
Mortal thoughts. There was no time for them, so I pushed them aside. Cassie braked so violently that the wheels smoked. I was almost thrown across the road, but clung on tightly.
The houses had vanished by this time. The river was visible to our right. First a pair of willows and a bed of reeds. And then the churning surface, catching the starlight and stretching it out into platinum filaments. We could hear the gurgling it made. But as the Harley’s rumble died away, something else came to my ears.
A compressed rushing, the low snarl of machinery. That was the dam, the turbine.
And then I heard something else, swelling up violently and cutting across it. A clattering I recognized from not long back. When my eyes adjusted, I could see a solid stream of crouched hominids moving across my field of vision. It was like one of those old chiller-thriller movies I’d seen, of soldier ants, except a great deal larger. They were some four hundred yards ahead of us, and had not seemed to notice we were there as yet.
Their attention was fixed on something else. As I had already guessed, they were closing in on the power station.
It stood two stories and was built in the style of the day, in dense looking red brick. Pylons reared up from the ground around it. Dozens of thick cables ran from those, heading off on wooden posts to every part of town. There were still lights on inside the place. But I knew, like the houses, there was no one looking after it. It only ever requires a bare handful of staff, mostly there to keep an eye on things.
As I watched, the first ranks of the creatures reached the wide front doors, and then poured through them.
“What do we do?” Cassie asked.
The only thing that I could do was shake my head, since we were heavily outnumbered.
The sounds of destruction came drifting across to us. Heavy thumps and crashes. And glass breaking. There were instruments in there, naturally. And by the sound of it, the hominids were getting hold of everything they could, and laying waste to it.
The rumble of the turbine, which had been smooth until this point, began to falter. I looked out across at the river again. A few crushed bodies were floating into view from wide vents in the dam. And when more appeared, I felt genuinely sickened.
They were pulling the same stunt as they had done with the electric cables. Throwing themselves into the works in an attempt to jam them.
And these had once been people, no different than us. Willets had described to me the contempt the Dweller had for all things living. So this was the second time I’d watched that being demonstrated.
Why exactly had we come here in the first place? Just to watch and nothing more? Cassie went rigid, frustration paralyzing he
r. I knew how she felt and released my grip on her, letting my arms hang down by my sides.
Creaking noises started in the dam. They got rapidly louder, growing in intensity. Until there was an abrupt splitting sound, loud bangs following that. Something pretty major had been broken, there was little doubt. The rumbling turned to a whine that became lower-pitched and slower as the whole turbine shut down.
I glanced behind me. The lights back there were going out.
And when I cast my gaze further along, the same was happening to the entire town.
CHAPTER 32
Most of what we could see, after that, was restricted to the tight circle of light cast out by the motorbike. And there was nothing sensible that we could do except head back.
The town lay in murky silhouette around us, only the stars providing any light. The moon had been covered by a dense blanket of cloud. It looked as if a black tarpaulin had been thrown across the entire Landing. I wasn’t sure how Cassie felt, but I was really sick at heart.
We were passing streets where people relaxed after a day’s work, enjoyed the company of family and friends. A place where homework was attended to, meals were cooked and children played. But now it was all gone.
The outer suburbs were completely dead. Tomb dead, nothing on the move. Suck the light from a place, and you drain the life from it as well. I’d never seen that demonstrated quite so thoroughly.
We rounded a corner, and my spirits lifted just a touch. Up ahead, there was a brilliant orange glow. A shifting one, which danced across the rooftops off in that direction. It was being cast by the bonfires in Union Square, the blackout making it even more intense. And to my mind, that seemed to announce, We’re still here, and we’re still human. I didn’t quite manage a smile, but I was glad of that.
Cassie was heading back in far more slowly than before, the pitch darkness confounding her. She’d stop occasionally, propping one boot against a curbstone. Then she’d kick off again like a swimmer pushing away from a jetty, continuing inward. Maybe it wasn’t just the lack of light, it occurred to me. Maybe she was freaked out the same way I was.
The crowds parted for us as we reached the square. Startled faces gazed at us, their eyes full of questions. What exactly could we tell them? We’d be lucky to survive this night?
At least the angels hadn’t moved in any closer. They were hovering in mid-air some half a mile off, the fires keeping them away, Everything around us was swathed in shades of amber now the street lighting was gone.
Martha Howard-Brett came down the Town Hall steps. Then there was a blur beside her, which resolved into a solid shape. Willets again, back from the roof. His eyes saw much further than normal ones, so I didn’t need to tell him what had happened.
“At least some more of them are dead,” he commented. “Not nearly enough, though. And the rest are on their way back here.”
Martha nodded anxiously, confirming that. Even she could sense when there was danger coming.
“Can either of you fix the power station?”
“To do that,” the doc explained to me, “we’d have to understand how it worked in the first place. And I don’t think either of us are particularly technically minded.”
“If Gaspar were here, it might be different,” Martha put in. Then her face went very tired. “But he’s not.”
The fact that someone else was missing struck me forcibly at that point. I turned around on the spot, my eyes hunting for a familiar face. But it refused to show itself.
Where had Nick McLeish gotten to? The man was usually right there in the thick of things.
There were more questions than answers this particular evening. The main one being, what was going to befall us? I could see it on the faces all around me. Nobody knew that.
* * *
Everyone understood it by this juncture. Something bad was on the way. You didn’t have to be an adept to get that. The ground seemed to tremble under us, or maybe that was just our pulses.
Everyone was stiff. Their eyes were wide. And the few children who’d wandered out were being ushered back inside.
Cass had one of her larger weapons ready. She’d chosen the assault carbine over the shotgun, which made sense. The hominids, if they managed to get close, would try to overwhelm us with sheer weight of numbers. So a gun that fired bursts of ammunition was the better choice.
Cops were spread evenly through the crowd, mostly at its outer edges. I caught a glimpse of Ritchie Vallencourt off near the statue’s plinth. He had a radio speaker clamped to his mouth, and was directing operations.
Then I caught sight of another face I recognized. It was the man whose family we’d saved yesterday evening. The rest of them had to be indoors. But he’d gotten hold of a hunting rifle. And the look on his face spoke volumes. The terrors of the previous night were still fresh in his mind. But he wasn’t being scared off. This was very likely payback time.
I took out my Smith & Wesson. None of us wanted to start killing these creatures, not considering what they had been. But was there any slightest chance of them returning to us, standing up, becoming human?
Once again, there was no way to tell. We couldn’t take that chance.
We’d hear them coming, I was sure. An approaching clatter, just like at the power station. I could almost feel my ears prick, waiting for that sound.
Something sparked in the corner of my eye. My head jerked around, and it wasn’t the only one. A cold dead flickering brought our gazes to the west. And several people gasped.
The angels were on the move again. Still remaining clear of us, but swinging around toward Sycamore Hill, off beyond the far end of O’Connell. They stood out against its lightless bulk like a trio of unworldly fireflies. But why’d they changed position?
Cassie raised her carbine to her shoulder but they were too far away. She started moving, trying to push closer, so I grabbed her by the elbow. When she looked around, I shook my head. This was more of a waiting game.
Why had they bothered to show up anyway, simply to hover around like that? Maybe they had some kind of plan -- that wasn’t an idea I cared for.
I ought not have been able to make out their faces clearly from this distance. But something about their cold fierce glow -- it seemed to project them, making them crisper and more vivid than was natural. And I got a glimpse of what their mouths were doing.
“What the blazes?” Willets grunted.
Their lips were stretching as wide as they could, revealing that pure black again. The same way as one of their servants pulling out a human soul. But that did not seem, on this occasion, to be their intention.
Their wings were beating faster, a pallid blur in the surrounding night. Except the figures had stopped moving, so I wondered why that was happening.
When a sound finally washed across us, it was not a clatter but a low, purring whistle. And the air began to move around my face. Softly at first, but then with increasing force. It was coming from the west as well. The angels were doing this.
I thought I got what they were up to. They were exhaling in one long, continuous breath and stirring the air currents with their wings at the same time.
And it was turning into a full-blown gale.
There were several loud shrieks. The flames of the bonfires, which had been leaping vertically before, were dragged earthward. Some of the stacked wood in them collapsed, hot embers showering out.
I shielded my eyes and stared at the closest one. It had been turned into a frightening apparition. Flames were being dragged down almost horizontal by the wind. The people nearest it were backing off, yelling, pawing at their hair and clothes.
The air was filled with yellow sparks. Everyone was being forced to crouch. Several hot pinpricks struck my own face, making me curse angrily.
The wind grew even stronger, screeching. Made the fires dance unevenly. And then start going out.
CHAPTER 33
Cassie -- out of all of us -- wasn’t prepared to stand around and take that
passively. She might answer to a lot of descriptions, but not that. She started running west along O’Connell, taking potshots at the things. And she wasn’t achieving a whole lot -- she was still out of range. But she was right. Stand here and do nothing and these things would grind us down to pulp. If we managed to distract them then we might achieve something.
So I took a deep breath and started off after her. Willets and Martha did the same. We tucked our heads down and pushed against the howling wind. But it was far from easy.
The firelight around us had already dropped to a pale shade of its original intensity. Some of the bonfires had been extinguished completely, ungainly blackened ruins in the dark. And the rest looked like they were about to follow. That gave an added urgency to everything we did. The hominids hadn’t shown up yet, but they were on their way.
Willets raised a hand, still running. And a huge red flash came surging out. Martha followed suit, blazing gold rushing from her open palm in the form of a lightning bolt.
But the angels seemed to have gotten the measure of that kind of magic. They simply parted, drifting away sideways. The bolts of energy went by them harmlessly. And the same thing happened when the adepts tried again.
Cassie had gotten herself into proper firing range. She aimed swiftly and precisely, pumping rounds out at the glowing forms. But the angels didn’t even bother to evade them. Ordinary slugs, however powerful, were still useless against them.
Which was something my companion didn’t like one little bit. The air turned blue around her.
The rest of us staggered to a halt, frightened townsfolk milling around us, many of them shouting. I thanked God the kids were still inside. It doesn’t happen often, but a genuine feeling of defeat began closing its grip around me. The gale was blowing just as strongly as it had been. I’d been hoping -- if we could divert the beings’ attention, even for a short while -- it would at least weaken. But we had not managed that.
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