Under cover though he is, the black glare of the streetlights bothers him. The shafts from headlights are worse, and the thumping of car stereos makes him hunch pulpy shoulders over his drumhead ears. A pack of girls cruises close to the cemetery wall. It’s gross how slime drips from his mouths at the smell of them. His emptiness expands. No, not his emptiness. He, Sean, wants to run back to the river. It, the Servitor, refuses to move from its ambush. It’s the one making the decisions, which means Sean hasn’t possessed its body after all; he’s just riding around in its skull, a parasite plugged into its senses. That watery rush beneath his thoughts? That must be the Servitor’s thoughts.
He—it—squats motionless. Mosquitoes don’t trouble it—what runs in its veins doesn’t interest them. An owl flies by, another silent piece of the night. Crickets and cicadas, which hushed at the Servitor’s intrusion, sing again, and a fox pads close enough to peer at it through the spindly trunks of the maple saplings. The immediate scent of human blood fades—pedestrians are getting scarce.
Good. Let it go back to the river. Go back.
The blood scent fades, then sharpens again. The Servitor’s tentacles twitch. A man with a dog, a mini schnauzer, crosses the boulevard to walk beside the cemetery wall. He passes the clump of rhododendrons. He’ll soon be safely away. Except the man stops, lifts the schnauzer onto the wall, and clambers up after her. Is he nuts? Sure, people walk dogs in the cemetery woods. But at night?
Not twenty feet from man and dog, the Servitor sinks to all fours. Saliva spills from its mouths.
The schnauzer has been frisking around the man’s feet. Now she growls, snout pointed at the thicket. The man jerks her, bristling, onto one of the paths that ramble through the trees.
In the concealing brightness of the thicket, which must be pitch-black to the man, the Servitor is a shapeless shadow. Besides, the man’s busy dragging the dog, who sees with her nose and bursts into maddened barks. “Christ, you’ll wake the dead,” the man says, and laughs at his own lame joke.
The Servitor eases onto the path the man follows. Hunger is a universe of void inside it. The man and dog are a few leaps away, hidden from the slowing life of the street by the trees. No one will help them. One talon-slash will end the frantic barking. Another will cut short any scream from the man.
He, Sean Wyndham, is asleep at his aunt Cel’s house on Keene Street.
He, Sean Wyndham, moves with the Servitor in dream, and in dream he will feed with it.
No. Stop.
“What the fuck’s that smell?” the man mutters.
It—Sean, they—crouches to spring.
No. Back off!
The Servitor doesn’t spring. Instead the rushing stream of its consciousness rises toward the parasite-Sean. He shrinks from its frigid touch, but if he wants to speak to the Servitor, he has to endure the probing cold. He knows that as sure as he knows his name, which is Sean, Sean. Back off. I’m the one that summoned you, so do what I say.
The Servitor listens. It also takes a step after the man and dog. The schnauzer yelps and rips the leash from the man’s hand. She runs deeper into the wood, with the man in cursing pursuit.
Dropping low, the Servitor gives insectile chase.
I gave you my blood. I’ll give you more. Mine!
It pauses. It listens again. Its mindstream is inarticulate, but it coils around parasite Sean like a python of ice and constricts until thought is pressed to thought in such crushing intimacy that Sean knows the Servitor’s intention. If he promises the blood, it will come to him.
No! Go back into the river. Stay there until I come.
It is hungry.
I’ll come. Wait in the river. Just wait there.
Back at Celeste and Gus’s, Sean is asleep, but sleep shreds, and the bright night wavers. The Servitor moves, but where? After the man and dog? No, God, please. No, it’s away; it’s galloping down another path—
“Sean.”
Cool smoothness under his hands. Wood, a window frame. Sean stared out into a night that was dark, not light. Arms were locked around his chest, Dad, holding him.
Sean squirmed free. Helen stood in the open door of his room, Gus and Celeste behind her.
“It’s all right,” Dad said. “I think he was sleepwalking.”
Celeste led Sean to his bed. He was shaking like crazy, and he felt sticky cold all over. The pillow under his hand was damp. With river water?
Celeste palmed his forehead. “The fever’s broken. I guess you sweated it out, Sean.”
Sweat, that was all right. He had never really been in the river. He, it, they.
“How do you feel?”
He rubbed his belly (his own belly). “My head doesn’t hurt. I’m hungry.” Hungry? That was an understatement. He was empty. Not like the dream-Servitor was empty, though. He’d have to starve for weeks to get as savagely famished as it was.
“That’s good,” Dad said. “Come on. We can both get something to eat.”
Helen squatted in front of Sean. “We can make it a mass refrigerator raid. But, Sean, were you dreaming just now?”
It was no casual question—her gaze was uncomfortably intense. “Well, yeah.”
“What about?”
He didn’t want to tell her. But that couldn’t be right. She was here to help him. “It was about the Servitor.”
“Big surprise,” Dad said.
Helen shook her head. “It might not be that simple. What was the dream like?”
“It was freaky, superreal, but not normal real. It was real like things would be for the Servitor, you know? Dark things looked light, and I could smell and taste things people can’t.”
“You mean you experienced things as if you were the Servitor?”
He had to tell the truth. “I was, like, a part of it, out there in the river and the cemetery. I stopped it from killing this guy. I’m scared—what if I was really in its head, not just dreaming?”
Nobody spoke. Dad scuffed his bare feet on the carpet. Then Helen said, “I was afraid this might happen.”
18
Five A.M. came minus the rosy fingers of dawn. Outside in the persistent dark, wind strafed the porch screens with rain, and the gusts made restless music under the eaves. To be moving, doing, Helen started clearing the debris from Sean’s midnight feast. He’d put away two plates of linguine, then bedded down on the living-room couch. Jeremy stood beside the kitchen door, an ear obviously cocked for sleepwalking. At the table Gus and Celeste pored over Helen’s latest translations.
“I’m not sure I understand this,” Celeste said.
Gus riffled through the pages he held. “It’s a little clearer here: ‘If the sorcerer desires communion with his daemon-familiar, he must put its ichor or saliva into his own veins. Such inoculation will weave a soul-thread between the two, so the sorcerer may, even at great distance, know the familiar’s mind, see through its eyes and command it. Inoculation is simplest with those familiars made from the blood or bones of men, the f’tragn-agl or the hlaast.’”
Helen scraped strands of linguine from the plate she held, red and white, blood and bone. The plate shook in her hand.
Celeste sighed. “The way that thing mangled Sean’s wrist, we can assume he was inoculated.”
“I’m assuming the same thing,” Helen said. She scraped another plate. It shook like the first and made a telltale clatter as she slotted it into the dishwasher. “He had the symptoms Alhazred describes, fever, headache, tiredness.”
“And this says the psychic connection starts with dreams,” Gus said. “Then progresses to a waking connection, telepathy, I guess.”
“That’s when the shit hits the fan, right?” Jeremy said, sudden and sharp. Helen dropped a fork. Good timing: a little more noise to ramp up the tension.
Celeste, at least, was unrattled. “Jere, let’s not wake Sean up. What else, Gus?”
Helen slotted the offending fork, more cutlery, glasses. She heard paper rustle. Then Gus read:“‘It is per
ilous for a sorcerer to maintain the soul-thread indefinitely. Unless his mind is as adamantine and cold as the daemon’s, such union must end in his madness.’”
“So how does a sorcerer switch off the modem?” Jeremy said.
Gus shrugged. Celeste excused herself to get ready for work. Passing the sink, she gave Helen’s arm a light squeeze. Celeste meant to reassure, but she might as well have squeezed Helen’s throat, the way it tightened. She hadn’t come to Providence to wash dishes or to translate ominous passages and then run away from them. Her place was at the table, however useless she felt there.
Helen closed the dishwasher. She didn’t make it to the table, but she did turn to face Jeremy. “Alhazred writes that to break the connection, a sorcerer ‘sunders the soul-thread and holds both ends in his hands, to knot together again when he pleases.’ How he does that I don’t know yet. The only other way to break the psychic connection is to dismiss the familiar.”
“Which puts us back to square one. Worse. The connection could start driving Sean crazy. And, if what Sean dreamed was real, the thing could start killing people.”
Helen nodded.
“Sean ordered the Servitor off that dog walker,” Gus said. “The connection turned out to be a good thing there.”
He was offering her a baton. Helen took it and tried to run. “Right. Sean seems to have some control over the Servitor, even though he didn’t bind it.”
“Sean called it off by promising it his blood,” Jeremy said. “Same way he called it off me. It’ll come to collect before long—am I the only one that feels like we’ve got a clock ticking?”
Jeremy didn’t wait for Helen’s response. He disappeared into the living room. An armchair creaked as he sat, probably the one by the couch, next to Sean. Gus looked after him, shaking his head. Then he began collating the printouts.
Should she help? Pretend to be accomplishing something? Helen felt her throat squeeze closed again. She turned to the window over the sink. Night had paled to an aqueous gray—this dawn was all water, dank wind, barrages of rain, the prickling at the corners of her eyes. It was hard to remember the sun-drenched park where she and Jeremy had sat the day before.
One step up the embankment at a time, but at the moment she couldn’t see any cracks into which to cram her fingers and toes. Uncle John would have had the answers. Probably he’d written them down in the papers he’d entrusted to Marvell. But with Marvell out of touch, John might as well have taken the papers into his grave.
Helen told the window, “I want to call Scotland again.”
“Please, use our phone,” Gus said.
The kitchen phone was a step away. Helen pulled out Marvell’s card and put in the call. Leezy McGrigor answered. “Helen, is it? How nice to hear from you again.”
“Thank you, Mrs. McGrigor. Have you heard from Professor Marvell?”
“Ah, no. The weather’s been so fine, I imagine he and Robert have been tenting out instead of running into town. Good luck for them, but not for you, I’m afraid?”
“No. I need to reach him if it’s at all possible.”
“Well then, here’s what we’ll do. I’ll send my Forrest, my son, you know, up toward Beinn Dearg. I reckon he’ll find our rogues.”
“I hate to be so much trouble—”
“Not a bit, my dear. Theo would never forgive me if I didn’t do my best by you.”
She gave Leezy McGrigor both her cell number and the number at the Chomsky house. Turning from the phone, she saw that Jeremy had returned to the kitchen door. “Mrs. McGrigor’s going to send her son after Marvell.”
“And meanwhile?” Gus said. “We keep at the disks?”
“That, and figure out who else to call for advice.” Someone at MU, at the library? Marvell couldn’t be the only one who knew magic was real. Another believer. Still better, a practitioner, like Redemption Orne—
The thunderclap of realization must have shown on her face: Jeremy and Gus were staring at her. “Gus, if you could go on with the Necronomicon?”
“No appointments today. I can keep right at it.”
“Okay. I need a shower and breakfast. Then, Jeremy, can you drive me back to Arkham?”
“If Gus will stay with Sean. Why?”
“I want to try him again, alone,” Helen said. “Mr. Geldman, at the pharmacy.”
Lulled by the rhythmic scrape of the windshield wipers, Helen fell asleep before Jeremy made I-95. She didn’t wake up until they were in Arkham, rumbling over the iron bed of the Peabody Avenue Bridge. The dashboard clock read: 10:31. “That was quick,” she muttered.
“Two hours. Couldn’t break any records in this storm.”
She smoothed her T-shirt, peering out the rain-bleared side window. “Wait. Don’t turn here. Go straight up to Curwen Street.”
“Why?”
“We’ve got to park a couple blocks from the pharmacy, out of sight. I’m going there by myself, remember?”
“I’ve been rethinking that plan. I’m going with you.”
“I wish you could. Stop, Jeremy! Go straight.”
He went straight, but he said, “I’m going.”
“You can’t. The pharmacy was always open for me until the other day, when I went there with you. What if it doesn’t want you to see it and you jinx it for me again? Wasted trip.”
Jeremy’s lips tightened out of existence. God, don’t let him go stubborn on her now. “He could be dangerous, Helen. We don’t know what he’s up to.”
“I’m not afraid of Solomon Geldman.”
“You don’t know him.”
“In a way I do. Every time I’ve seen him, I’ve felt—” What? Could she explain it? “Protected,” she said, and it sounded right.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Safe, watched over, I don’t know. But I’ve got to go with the feeling.”
Even though Jeremy offered no further argument, Helen wasn’t sure he’d given in until they turned onto Curwen and he pulled the Civic to the curb two blocks from Gedney. “This do?”
“Looks fine,” Helen said. “Do you have an umbrella?”
Jeremy got out and rummaged in the trunk. What he unfurled over her as she stepped into the rain was a cheerful yellow monstrosity on which someone had drawn black skulls and crossbones. “Sorry about this,” he said, handing her the umbrella. “Sean’s sense of humor again.”
“I like it. The Flying Dutchman look.” Though if she remembered her Wagner, that opera hadn’t ended too well for the girl. “Wait here five minutes. If I don’t get into the pharmacy, I’ll be in Tumblebee’s.”
“And if you do get in, how long should I wait outside?”
“Thirty minutes? Sixty. Let’s say an hour.”
“Then?”
“Call my cell. If you can’t reach me, try to get in. There’s a gangway next to the pharmacy. Maybe you could find an inconspicuous window.”
“Breaking and entering. I’m already set for that.” Jeremy opened his windbreaker to reveal a flashlight and cat’s-paw crowbar stowed in the inner pockets.
Should she laugh or be grateful for his forethought? Why not both, so she did laugh, and she said, “Thanks, but I don’t think you’ll have to use those. Five minutes.”
“Five. Not one more.” And he meant it; she’d better not dawdle.
Helen trotted off under the pirate parasol. Thunder grumbled out at sea. Raindrops exploded on the bricks under her feet. As she neared the corner of Gedney and Curwen, she dipped Sean’s umbrella in front of her face, but even as she shielded herself from disappointment she knew she didn’t have to. Geldman’s had been open for her before. It would be open for her again. She passed the side windows of Tumblebee’s, then halted by its steps and peeked under the rim of the umbrella.
Geldman’s Pharmacy was alive and well. The display windows radiated warm interior light. The green awnings offered shelter to the storm drenched. In one of the lace-curtained windows of the second-floor apartment, a black cat washed i
ts face.
The door opened, and Solomon Geldman wheeled out the fortune-telling scale. He looked up as Helen forded the flooded street. “Good morning, Ms. Arkwright. Wet but good, like all mornings.”
Jeremy’s paranoia had infected her, after all—she was reluctant to step under the awning and into Geldman’s sphere of influence. “I’ve been thankful for mornings lately.”
His brows lifted. “Then you’ve found the nights long?”
“Very. I was hoping we could talk.”
“Of course. Let’s get out of this wind.”
Furling her umbrella, Helen braved the awning. As far as she could tell, it shot no mesmerizing rays through the top of her skull. She followed Geldman inside and trod immaculate tiles to the counter, where he took the umbrella and deposited it in a stand. “Have you come for yourself or a friend?” he asked.
“A friend, Sean Wyndham. He bought the Powders of Zeph and Aghar here.”
“I remember the transaction. Shall we go in back? I could offer you tea.”
During the short walk between sidewalk and counter, she had regained her conviction that she’d be safe wherever Geldman was. Even so, she gave the entrance (escape route) one last look. Though she’d heard no splash of approaching footsteps, Jeremy stood pressed to the pharmacy door. Obviously he could see the place as she did, because his eyes met hers wide with astonishment. He tried the door. It didn’t budge. He knocked, then pounded on the spotless plate glass. The slam of his fist made no more sound than the fall of snowflakes on the other side of the world.
“You won’t let him in?” Helen said.
“No. He doesn’t belong here. However, it wouldn’t be polite to leave him unacknowledged.” Geldman closed his eyes.
On the other side of the glass, of the world, Jeremy spun toward the scale. It poked an insolent pink tongue from the brass slot under its face, out-in-out, until he grabbed the proffered fortune. As Jeremy read it, Geldman recited: “Mr. Wyndham. Please don’t worry. I mean Ms. Arkwright no harm. May I suggest you have coffee at the establishment opposite? The house blend is very good, and it’s best not to loiter around abandoned buildings.”
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