Aren’t you coming? she asks.
One more thing I gotta do. You go on ahead.
She hugs him again for luck, for courage, then wades in. A few feet from shore, it is already too difficult to stand. He calls her name.
She turns, looking back at him, the downriver currents still trying to claim her even as she struggles for the calm channel in the center.
He raises his fist to the bridge of his nose, taps it twice with his knuckles. He nods and she nods back.
Then the waves pull her under.
Chapter 50
Severance and Drexler lay in the shadow of the stage, the smell of cordite hanging in the air above them. One by one, the redmouths abandoned their weapons, unable to control themselves any longer, and waded into the crowd to feed on the wounded. Random shrieks sounded throughout the clearing, punctuating the low drone of the former Black Cadre’s incessant giggling. Severance rolled off Drexler, who had broken Severance’s fall, and by the looks of it had broken a bit of himself.
Drexler rolled over and stared up into the sky, gasping and unblinking. It was as if the pain were so great, he was in another place.
“Bad…form, Richard.”
“You left me no choice.”
“Do you remember,” said Drexler, trying to catch his breath, “the first Välkommen?”
Severance shook his head.
“It was our base of operations when we were in Red Cliff…looking for the wendigo.”
“The house on the lake…”
“That was the name. Of the house. There was a wooden arrow sign, pointing to it from the road. VÄLKOMMEN burned into it.”
“I never noticed.”
“I did.”
The earth trembled then. The torches guttered. Fresh screaming came from the center of the crowd. People ran in every direction, and the crowd expanded enough to reveal members of the camp dropping from sight. Had the earthquake created a fault line? Severance looked closer and saw the earth move again, but the ground didn’t tremble. It rotated in a slow whorl, as if the center of the field were spinning down an hourglass.
A widening gyre.
“He always called me bookish,” said Drexler. “Like it was a curse. He hated that about me. So I’ve used his own bookshelf against him.”
“What have you done, Henry?”
“The chest was a portal, but you destroyed it, Richard. So I made my own. It worked, didn’t it? It’s here?”
Severance peered through the darkness. The earth had stopped moving, leaving a pit in the center of the field the size of a large swimming pool, where the ground had caved in. The camp went silent, save for the low moans of the wounded. Even the redmouths, their faces wet with gore and in the grip of frenzy, raised their heads and watched.
“This place was never the end goal, Richard. It was an appetizer.”
Before the torches went dark, Severance saw something black peek above the rim of the pit. The back of his neck and forearms erupted in gooseflesh. To Severance, it looked at first like a long, slender finger, thick toward the bottom and tapering to a point. Then he saw a twin row of suckers on its underside and realized he was looking at a tentacle. It shone oily in the dim moonlight and swayed in the night air, as if tasting it, before toppling like a tree onto the lip of the pit. The length of the feeler rippled, then contracted, anchoring itself, and three more thick stalks unfurled themselves from the pit.
“And when I named it Välkommen,” said Drexler, “it wasn’t the people I was welcoming.”
Chapter 51
Lindsay feels like she’s being pulled through water. As if she is water-skiing, when the propeller ahead grips the water, the towrope goes taught, and for a moment, the whole river resists enough to tear her apart. In that moment, Lindsay digs in, and suddenly she’s rising and her speed picks up, higher and higher, faster and faster, the Gaudí flashes stretching and streaking by in colored ribbons until she careens into her body with a start, sits up in a rush, and gasps…
Lindsay pressed her fingers to the back of her head.
Whole, she thought.
Had it all been a dream?
Alex was crouched beside her, staring at her dumbfounded. He grabbed her arms. She held on to him.
“My God, it worked,” he said.
“What worked?” she asked.
“I did.”
Lindsay turned and saw the twisted and broken bodies of four Black Cadre on the floor. One was missing an arm, which seemed to account for the fresh coat of blood on the walls. In the middle of the carnage she saw a small woman propped against the wall, beneath the Nazi flag, her eyes unfocused, a trickle of blood coming from her nose. A slight smile played on her lips.
Lindsay crossed the room in a few quick steps. Alex tried to protest, but Lindsay was already crouching beside the woman.
“Who are you?” she asked.
The woman lolled her head toward Lindsay, and Lindsay looked into eyes as pale and brilliant as lake ice.
“Marie?”
The woman smiled. “You remember.”
Lindsay blushed.
“I threatened your friend once…that I would strip the flesh from his bones and put him back together again, over and over,” she said dreamily, out of breath. She fixed her aquamarine eyes on Lindsay. “I’ve never put someone back together…as far gone as you.”
“Why?” asked Lindsay.
“I’m trying…something new,” said Miranda.
“We’ll take her with us,” Lindsay said to Alex.
They heard automatic gunfire beyond the door. When the sudden burst stopped, a collective gasp filled the sudden void of sound, as if the mob outside drew in its breath all at once to scream. And scream they did.
Lindsay and Alex looked at each other.
“I’ll be of no use,” said Miranda. “Go.”
“Breaux took Davis,” said Alex. “Drexler has the others.”
“All right,” she said. “Get your partner and I’ll get mine.”
“Then what?” asked Alex.
Lindsay looked into her palm and smiled. It hadn’t been a dream. Then her eyes climbed the wall, scanning the Nazi paraphernalia, until she spotted what she was looking for and her lip curled over her teeth. C’mere you. Its lion’s head pommel with its twin jewel eyes beckoned her. Its long, fine blade ached to be put to good use for once, she thought.
“We punch Välkommen in the nose.”
Chapter 52
The summer of his father’s diagnosis, before the chemo was to begin, Ben took his father on a trip to Key West. Ben had always loved the port city, and had wanted one more adventure with his father. This was the same summer the oil platform had blown sky high and there were news reports of the oil gushing into the Gulf. In the initial hysteria, Ben wondered if the beaches would be fouled, or if Big Ben was even up to the trip at all. When Ben made the trip to New Jersey, he wondered how in the world his father, shuffling gingerly, would even brave the Philadelphia airport.
But the trip ended up being a small miracle, one of those rare occasions when everything fell into place as if by magic. They’d been upgraded to first class, and the more comfortable seats with the extra legroom were a blessing. The Corvette he’d secretly rented, his father’s favorite car, surprised Big Ben, and after fistfuls of vitamins, he felt well enough to drive it up and down the Florida Keys, never relinquishing the car keys until they returned to Miami. The hotel in Key West had even put them in a room that opened onto Mallory Square, and though Big Ben wasn’t up to walking around, they didn’t have to. Ben popped in and out of the sliding glass door to buy mojitos in plastic cups from an outdoor bar just outside their room. They spent a perfect afternoon looking out over the crystal waters of the Gulf of Mexico, watching the people stroll by and the sailboats float through the channel and the evening show of an odd man who used trained house cats in a lion tamer act, all the while listening to his father’s stories—from his boyhood and as a young man, old favorites Ben had requested to hear again
and some he’d never heard before—until the sun went down. All the while, Ben tried not to think about that inevitable black tide, deep beneath the surface, slowly advancing.
Atop the stage, Ben floated alone, the platform a life raft. He was vaguely aware of the earth trembling, and his life raft jostled with it.
Sensations bubbled up to him slowly in his drugged haze, like those black balls of oil washing up onshore. The earth shook and each time, a new dark bubble detached itself from the oily slick and floated loose, only to be overtaken by another.
Broken fingers.
The earth shook again and his raft bobbed.
Shattered face.
Another tremor.
Stinging, stained skin.
Another.
Shame.
Another.
My fault, Lindsay.
Another.
Lindsay.
He was dimly aware of gunshots, of screaming, of wet, bolting sounds. Somewhere below he heard Severance and Drexler arguing, but it didn’t matter. His mind was already disconnecting. Drifting away. His life raft would capsize anyway and the dark ocean would swallow him whole. It would all be over soon enough.
He felt hot breath on his neck and smelled the coppery tang of blood, followed by the sound of a dry chuckle. He was not alone on his raft after all.
Chapter 53
The pit was blooming with feelers. Severance wanted to scream, to run, to leave his sanity behind, but it was hypnotic. Once a feeler had a firm grip, its suckers affixed to the ground, the top of it began to roil and bubble, and suddenly more tentacles would burst from its oily flesh. In moments it looked like the root system of an upended tree, but the roots were alive and black and seeking new purchase.
Soon there was a matrix of feelers along the clearing’s floor, spreading in every direction like a sprawling lattice. When the feelers encountered someone in their path, wounded and redmouths alike, they washed over them like an incoming tide, or simply pulled them screaming into the pit. The people of Välkommen who could run sprinted in every direction, pouring into the woods, bolting toward the road, stampeding over one another.
In the darkness, Severance saw a hobbled man trying to hop away from a reaching tentacle. It was Hendrix. The tattooed man tripped over another body and fell on his face. Severance could not look away.
A large feeler fell across Hendrix’s back like a tree trunk.
The man writhed, but he was pinned. The tentacle quivered and contracted and his bloodcurdling screams were cut short. Severance squinted. Hendrix looked in his direction, and by the light of the few torches still lit, Severance saw the man redden and shudder until a feeler burst from his ear. A moment later his eye popped with a wet sound, followed by another black finger writhing from his mouth to grip the ground.
Severance grabbed Drexler and tried to lift him to his feet.
At that moment, every feeler attached to the ground seized the field’s floor and squeezed, contracting, and the ground trembled again. It was like the earth had just passed through a cobweb and shuddered, and Severance shuddered too as he tried to imagine what was heaving itself up from the depths. Its dreadful bulk, its eyes that would strip him of all reason. He tried to picture its contours, but his mind could not grasp it and saw only doom. The tide ceased its advance and dug in again. Each time it did so, more of its mass rose from the hole, like a drain backing up. Each time, the earth shuddered and more torches went dark. More screams were cut short. The endless blooming continued. The revolting tide rolled on.
Severance had fallen beside Drexler. He wanted to get to his feet, to flee, but he was desperate to see too.
All is lost, he thought. Why bother running?
Then he heard the scream. It was unlike the others. It wasn’t a terrified, piercing cry or a wounded howl. It was a roar, filled with righteous fury. He looked in its direction and saw Lindsay then, bathed in light, astride a bay horse and wielding a sword, hurtling toward him.
Chapter 54
Davis lay on his back, blinking at the pitch black around him. He could scarcely believe he was alive. In fact, he wasn’t sure he was alive until he saw Mother, his silhouette framed in the open trapdoor above him, peering down at him, a smirk creasing his face. He remembered the man’s words then.
I’ll give you enough rope to hang yourself…
“Best lay low now,” said Breaux.
“This changes nothing,” said Davis. “I’m coming for you.”
The man winked at him.
“Looking forward to it. Have a good ’un, Galahad.”
Then the face was gone, leaving only dim moonlight.
Davis rolled onto his side, then onto his knees, and in his movements he felt something cold brush the skin of his hand. He knew instantly that Mother had left him his blade. He was equal parts grateful for it and furious with himself that he had to accept it from Breaux. Beside it was Alex’s club. As he sawed through his bonds, he made a promise to himself to kill Breaux for what he had done to his friends, what he had done to him, and for all he had wrought here; then he pushed it aside to ponder his next, immediate move.
He didn’t like his options.
He had to help his friends, the ones still alive, but he was trapped. The people of Välkommen thought he was hanging dead in the darkness beneath the enclosed stage, but how long would it be before one of the crackers came for a closer look? At least now he had weapons to defend himself against anyone crazy enough to crawl down in the dark after him.
Mother’s idea of fair play.
He removed the noose carefully so as not to disturb the length of rope and tip the crowd off. He heard the crowd gasp then, and his heart burned, but the gasping sounds were directed away from the stage. He quietly collected his weapons and pressed himself against the boards in the stage. Between the cracks he could see only the backs of the last row of the crowd, but something clearly had their attention on the main stage. He wondered what it could be when the gunfire erupted all around. Everyone screamed and surged and he realized that the shots were being fired into the crowd.
A young skinhead yelling “shit, shit, shit” with every step ran straight into the stage and knocked himself cold. Davis jumped back, but when he approached the slats again, he saw one of the Black Cadre hunched over the man, checking his pulse. When he looked closer, Davis saw he wasn’t checking the skinhead’s pulse: He was pulling the man’s head back. Suddenly the guard sank his teeth into the man’s neck. Davis shrank back, his heart beating wildly.
Oh shit, he thought. Redmouths.
He gripped his blade and the club tighter. He knew that, ironically, the safest place for him to be right now was beneath the stage. He owed the crowd nothing. But he needed to get topside. He prepared to poke his head through the trapdoor when the first tremor hit.
By the time he had found his feet and pulled himself through the trapdoor and up onto the stage, no one was watching the gallows. No one cared about him. They were either running or rooted to the spot in terror or being consumed by Drexler’s wolves in sheep’s clothing. People lay dead and dying, scattered about the field like fallen leaves, and redmouth silhouettes huddled over them, thrashing their heads back and forth. But this was worse than Barnabus. At least then, there had been light. The sun had been setting, the town was on fire. Everything glowed. Here there was only darkness. There was the barest illumination overhead, the field was hemmed in by trees, and the torches posted at intervals marking the ribbon were all blown out like birthday candles, leaving Davis to guess what the hell was overflowing from the crater that had appeared in the field between the two stages.
He sensed in the reptilian part of his brain, the oldest, most primitive part of him, that there was no running from the doom in the hole. It was a superpredator. A cosmic predator. He knew it down to his cells. Worse, he had no idea how to fight it.
But redmouths?
Redmouths he could fight. He choked up on Alex’s club.
Go down swingin
g, he thought.
He heard a faint beating of the air then. It drew closer, and Davis recognized the whump-whump-whump of the Eurocopter. It hovered over the trees and threw its spotlight—a blessed, bright disc—along the ground, punching a hole in the night.
In the center of the spotlight was Lindsay, streaking toward the main stage on horseback. As she passed the spent torches, he swore he saw them flare up again, as if the light were contagious.
Davis prided himself on never being caught totally unaware or unprepared, but his jaw fell open and he stood frozen on the stage.
“You going to stand there all day?”
Below he saw Alex charging toward his stage. In his path, redmouths abandoned their easy meals to intercept him.
Davis leapt from the gallows stage and into the fray.
Chapter 55
The beam shone down from above, a divine finger pointing the way. Slip streaked between the outbuildings, Lindsay urging him on. They weaved through Välkommen’s fleeing denizens, who were now pouring out of the clearing. No one stopped or even seemed to notice the roaring woman clutching a sword and riding a horse into the storm of people. They were in full panic.
She rounded the corner and saw why.
So did Slip. The unnatural horror blooming in the field spooked him and he reared up on his hind legs. He has more sense than me, thought Lindsay.
“You owe me, boy,” she said and dug her heels into his side.
It broke the spell. He shot forward again, skirting the spreading tentacles. She urged him toward the main stage rather than the pit itself. Erica lit the way from above. She hoped it would be enough of a distraction for Alex to make it to the gallows stage.
They streaked forward, Slip in an all-out run. She glanced to her right, saw the black, rubbery mass trying to spill over the lip of the pit, its feelers seeking and gaining purchase. She knew deep down that there was no stopping it. At best they could annoy the thing, as a horsefly might bedevil her mount. Take a small bite out of it, a little sting, only to be swatted away as an afterthought. She pressed on anyway. Nothing would sway her from her single-minded purpose: Get to Ben.
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