The Dark on the Other Side

by Barbara Michaels

  The entire picture came at him in a single vast blasphemy; it was much later before he could isolate the details, and by that time he was already trying to forget them. Lights all around the room, burning with the clear softness of wax. Lights on the black-draped, table like object at the far side of the circular chamber. Black candles. Black hangings, draping walls and ceiling. Briggs stood before the altar; and as Michael’s mind had denied the parody of the ritual music, it rejected the obscene caricature of priestly vestments that adorned Briggs’s fat body and set off the pallor of the pale, epicene face. The reek of incense he had expected was present; some of it came from the golden censer in Briggs’s hand. It was mixed with another smell. Michael averted his eyes from the thing that lay, mercifully motionless now, on the table.

  Even Galen was struck dumb and motionless; and while the two men stood frozen, Linda moved past them, out into the room. Michael made a futile grab at her. Before he could move again, Briggs spoke.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “pray don’t be hasty.”

  He had a gun. Michael repeated the words incredulously to himself. Proud Satan’s aide, allied with the powers of Hell-Briggs had a gun. A pretty little pearl-handled job, which he held as demurely as a woman might fondle a flower. It seemed innocuous after the things Michael had imagined.

  It was enough to stop him, though, even without the restraint of Galen’s outflung arm.

  “Linda,” he said helplessly, knowing he could not reach her.

  She had advanced into the center of the room. The hood of the cloak had fallen back over her shoulders, and her hair streamed down around her face. It had the pure pallor of a saint’s image as she stopped, facing the man who stood in the middle of an elaborately figured, colored carpet. Behind him the black draperies billowed, and Michael realized there must be a window there, or a door, leading to the outside stairs.

  Unlike his coactor, Gordon was not in costume. He had discarded coat and tie; his shirt was open at the throat and his sleeves were rolled up. Hands and bare forearms were splashed with drying stains. His handsome, tanned face was calm. Michael was struck with a realization of the man’s power-physical strength and beauty, combined with enormous will, and with another quality that Michael had not recognized until he saw the slender, submissive figure of Gordon’s wife facing him with bowed head. A surge of hate rose up and nearly choked him. He would have moved then, forgetting the gun, if Galen’s arm had not barred his way.

  “You’d better come in and close the door,” Gordon said calmly. “There. That’s far enough.”

  He lifted both hands in a convoluted, ritual gesture.

  He believes it, Michael thought. He really believes he can stop us, like that… Glancing at Briggs, he felt sure that the secretary had no such faith. His narrowed eyes were as cynical as his gun. He was leaning back against the table; the plump pink feet and calves were bare.

  “Briggs,” Galen said. “Don’t be a fool. So far you’re guilty of nothing the law can touch you for. You can’t possibly expect to get away with murder. Put down the gun.”

  “Gun?” Gordon seemed to see the weapon for the first time. His face twisted with annoyance. “Come, now, Briggs, you know we don’t need that. I can hold them.”

  Galen ignored him.

  “I’m a doctor, Briggs. This man is psychotic, and very dangerous. If you cooperate with us, I’ll see that you get away scot-free.”

  For a second Michael thought it was going to work. The fat man’s eyes narrowed until they almost disappeared. Briggs was perfectly sane, in the usual sense of the word; his faith in his dark master was almost all sham. Michael could see him weighing the advantages: Gordon’s money and influence, the satisfaction of the various lusts of the flesh to which Gordon’s patronage gave him access, against-what? Freedom and immunity? Freedom to return to the cold, hostile outer world and abandon his nice soft nest.

  “Briggs,” Gordon said impatiently. “Put away that silly toy and go on with the ceremony. Our audience has arrived. I want them to see everything.”

  “Yes, master,” Briggs said quickly. “But-can you keep your control of them, and give your mind and heart to the offering?”

  “I have bound them in the web of darkness. There they will stand until they rot, unless my will releases them.”

  Michael was dangerously close to jumping the main actor. Briggs’s ridiculous gun had destroyed the aura of superstitious terror that had hitherto shielded Gordon; he saw the man for what he was, half mad, wholly evil. He felt light-headed with relief at the removal of that greatest fear, and was inclined to dismiss the menace of the weapon. A little thing like that, in Briggs’s pudgy, womanish hand-hell, he probably couldn’t hit a barn door at ten paces. Two things kept him in his place. One was his promise to Galen, silent at his side. The other was the sight of Gordon’s big-muscled hands, so close to Linda. He could snap her neck with one twist of those brown hands. And he was capable of doing it, if his fantasy world was destroyed.

  Michael heard a controlled, barely audible in-take of breath from the man beside him. Galen’s first attempt had failed. Briggs’s weapon enforced, and reinforced, Gordon’s madness, and Briggs was now committed. In seeming obedience he had stepped back behind the makeshift altar, his hands outstretched over it; but the wide sleeves of his robe, and the spacing of the candles, left those hands in shadow, and Michael had no doubt of what they still held.

  Galen knew the danger as well as he did, or better. But his friend’s next move took Michael completely by surprise.

  “I am bound in the web of darkness,” Galen said suddenly. “But not forever. I call upon the Masters of the Great College to come to me.”

  Hands lifted, he spat out a string of strange syllables, rich in gutturals. Michael wondered what half-forgotten adolescent lesson he was using; but he forgot that when he saw the impact of the words on the other listeners. Linda’s body jerked violently, as if something had struck her. Gordon went pale. He fell back a step, and after a moment his voice rose up, clashing with the other voice in an equally unintelligible chant.

  Galen, rock-still in his place, waved his hands and switched to Latin.

  His attention fixed on the combatants, Michael did not see what, if anything, Briggs was doing; later, he had to admit that Briggs might have thrown some new chemical into the smoldering bowls on the altar. But he felt the change in the air; it smelled like the acrid stench of burning flesh, and it made his head spin.

  Backing away, step by dragging step, Gordon resembled a fighter reeling under the blows of invisible fists. His face was no longer pale; it was dark with fury, and swollen out of recognizable shape. The words still poured from his distorted mouth; and Michael imagined, insanely, that he could see them take shape in the air and strike back, against the shapes of Galen’s incantation.

  Galen had gone back to Hebrew, having exhausted his stock of appropriate Latin and Greek. Alone in the center of the room, Linda swayed back and forth, eyes glassy. Michael had forgotten his desire to go to her; he was only half aware of a pudgy, dark form, creeping at them from the direction of the altar.

  Gordon was back now within a few feet of the shrouded window, his hands writhing, his face unrecognizable. Then Galen’s breath failed; and in the split-second lull, Gordon’s voice rose to a howl. The curtains behind him bellied out as if in a sudden gust of wind; the nearby candles flickered and went out. The black draperies wrapped Gordon around like enormous sable wings. Within their shelter he swayed, staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees.

  Galen’s voice faltered and went on; Gordon’s answered. The droning beat of the two voices, the evil stench in the air-untouched by the chill blast of wind-the effect of shadows and the movement of the shaken draperies…All these, and other, equally explicable factors, might have explained what Michael saw. The shape of Gordon Randolph-on hands and knees, four-footed like a beast, dark head lowered-blurred and shifted. When the outlines coalesced, they were no longer those of a man.
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br />   He was not the only one to see it. Linda screamed and covered her face with both hands. Michael moved, without plan, his only motive the need to get between Linda and the thing that paced slowly down the length of the floor toward her.

  What Briggs saw, or thought he saw, they would never know for certain. Michael heard the gun go off, at close range; the entire magazine let loose in one undirected, hysterical burst. The bullets had no visible effect on the dog. It came on, with the unnatural slowness of nightmare, its padded feet making no sound on the carpet. Michael saw something fat and black in his way; he removed it with one sweep of his hand and then caught Linda in his arms, turning, holding her head against his chest so that she could not see.

  Another shot and another…or was it the blood pounding in his ears? The room had gone dark-or was it because his eyes were closed? There was only one sense left to him, but it was enough-the feel of the warm, living body in his arms, and its response.

  Galen had to shake him, hard, before he opened his eyes. The older man’s pallor was so pronounced that he looked bleached-hair, face, eyes.

  “It’s all right,” Galen said. He laughed, shortly and humorlessly. “What a description…”

  “You got it?” Michael asked.

  “Got it? What?”

  “The dog…Don’t, I don’t want her to see.” He stiffened, trying to shield Linda as Galen’s impersonal hand caught her chin and forced her face up.

  “She’s all right, too,” Galen said. “I’m sorry, Linda; you’re entitled to a nice long bout of hysterics, but not just yet and certainly not here. The servants must have been wakened by that cannonade. We must leave before someone comes.”

  “I don’t want her to see…” Michael repeated, with idiot persistence.

  “She had better see it.” Galen turned them both, and Michael saw the sprawled body of Gordon Randolph. The white shirt was no longer white. The face was as blank as a wax dummy’s.

  “Dead,” Galen said. “Like any other mortal creature.”

  Michael felt Linda shiver, and lifted her into his arms as he heard the first tentative rap on the door.

  “It’s locked,” Galen said softly. “But we’d better get going. Down the outside staircase.”

  When they got to the car, Michael was somehow not surprised to see a familiar shape sitting on the roof. Galen grabbed Napoleon, who came without protest. They were back on the main highway before anyone spoke.

  “Put about ten miles behind us and then find a place to stop,” Galen ordered. “I’m going to put Linda to sleep. And you aren’t fit to drive far.”

  Michael nodded. He knew, better than Galen possibly could, how unfit he was. When Galen told him to pull over, he was glad to change places with the other man. Linda was already half asleep. She looked so fragile that Michael was almost afraid to touch her. She opened her eyes and gave him a wavering smile.

  “…Love you…” she whispered, and drifted off.

  “I wonder,” Galen said, after a time.

  “Wonder what? Whether she loves me?”

  “Oh, that. No, I think you’ll make out all right there. You’re her hero, aren’t you? Fighting the powers of darkness for her soul…What are lions compared to that?”

  The familiar sardonic tones woke Michael completely. He leaned forward, arms folded on the back of the seat.

  “What did you see, Galen?”

  “At the end?” Galen slowed for a blinking stop light, and then picked up speed. “The original delusion of lycanthropy was Randolph’s, as I suspected. He reverted completely.”

  “I saw him change,” Michael said quietly. “I saw the dog. How do you define a hallucination, Galen? If three people out of four see one thing, and the fourth sees something else-which of them is hallucinating?”

  Galen’s silence was eloquent-of what, Michael wasn’t sure.

  “How do you know Briggs saw a dog?” he asked finally.

  “What was he shooting at, his beloved employer?”

  “He flipped,” Galen said shortly.

  “I admire your technical vocabulary. Where did he go, by the way?”

  “Out and down. I didn’t think the little swine could move that fast… It’s possible that he was aiming at you. When the gun was empty, he made a dash for it, and I can tell you I didn’t try to stop him.”

  “And then you walked out on a murder. In view of your haste to leave, I gather you don’t intend to inform the police that we were there.”

  “No.”

  “Why not, Galen?”

  “There is no purpose to be served by such an act. Briggs killed his employer during one of their insane rites. If the police wish to question Mrs. Randolph, she has been with me. No problems.”

  “What a nice bloody liar you are,” Michael said admiringly. “It all spells Merry Christmas, doesn’t it? Satisfies you completely?”

  “I’ve explained everything.”

  “Yes, you have. Galen-what did you see? Honestly?”

  There was a pause. Finally Galen said,

  “Drop it, Michael.”

  “But if you-”

  “Drop it, I said.” Eyes steady on the road, Galen drove on. “I saw what I wanted to see. Collective hallucination is a catchword, but it satisfies me. I don’t want any glimpses of the dark on the other side.”

  “Only one problem,” Michael said.

  “What’s that?”

  “They’ll do an autopsy, of course. On Randolph’s body.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Which gun fired the shot that killed him, Galen?”

  Galen didn’t answer immediately. When he did, it was not in words. Michael took the object that was passed to him. To his overheated imagination, the barrel still felt warm.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Not of which shot killed him, no. I fired at Briggs. He was spraying bullets around like a machine gun, and I thought he was aiming at you. But people were moving pretty fast.”

  “They’ll be able to tell, if it was a bullet from this gun.”

  “They won’t find either gun. Briggs took his with him, and if he has a grain of sense he’ll destroy it.”

  “And this one?”

  “I’ve got to go back to Europe next week.”

  “Some convenient lake in France, or a ditch in Holland…Nice.”

  “What do you suggest I do, hand it over to the police?”

  “Don’t lose your temper. I’ll never be able to thank you for what you’ve done tonight… Maybe I shouldn’t tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “It was a bullet from this gun that killed Randolph.”

  “That wouldn’t keep me awake nights,” Galen said icily. “But how do you know?”

  “There was only one bullet in it.”

  “So?”

  Michael put his head down on his arms. His bad arm ached and he was sick with exhaustion. But tonight he would sleep without fear, or remorse.

  “It was a silver bullet.”

  About Barbara Michaels

  ELIZABETH PETERS (writing as BARBARA MICHAELS) was born and brought up in Illinois and earned her Ph.D. in Egyptology from the University of Chicago ’s famed Oriental Institute. Peters was named Grandmaster at the inaugural Anthony Awards in 1986, Grandmaster by the Mystery Writers of America at the EdgarÆ Awards in 1998, and given The Lifetime Achievement Award at Malice Domestic in 2003. She lives in an historic farmhouse in western Maryland.

  ***

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