He shivered, absently wiping water from his face.
He glanced west and almost found the courage to go down there, go all the way down there, and demand explanations.
Almost.
He couldn’t.
He didn’t want to know what Reverend Chisholm would say.
What he did was leave the church walk and head up the slope. He didn’t hurry. There was no need to hurry now. What was left was probably just cleaning up, making sure there were no fires in the woods, making sure there were no embers burning in someone’s yard or on someone’s roof.
Halfway there he thought he heard a gunshot up a side street, and shrugged it off as simply wood splitting in the fire’s heat. He came over the top and paused, seeing no one running, even a few standing in the street, smoking, talking, taking a break, while those who had spelled them worked to keep the fires where they belonged.
He squinted, coughed as the light wind blew smoke into his eyes and lungs, and thought he saw Nate up there, by the school, Rina trotting toward him. It was too dark to tell, the fire’s light too uncertain.
Then he saw the sun rise from the school’s roof, and flaming hands reach out from the already shattered windows.
Then Nate was gone, Rina gone, and half the men in the street were on their backs, yelling, one screaming, and someone, a ghost, smacked him in the chest with a plank and he, too, was on his back, blinking into the rain.
Only then did he hear the explosion, and night turned back into day again, the rain laced with bubbling sections of tar paper, with whole bricks and brick shards and things that were nothing but balls of stinging fire.
As he lay on his back, waiting for his lungs to start working again, he was afraid for a moment that he had gone stone deaf. When the moment passed, however, he could hear things, all kinds of things, but he couldn’t tell what they were because they were too muffled.
Nate.
“Nate,” he groaned, and got to his feet in painful stages, swayed and fell to his knees.
Rina.
He gasped and swallowed.
Most of the school’s front wall had been blown outward, fire lurking there like the fire in a furnace waiting to be fed. A voice pleaded for help, another for a new hose, another for someone to get in a goddamn car and get to the nearest town, they were dying like flies here.
A shadow in front of him: “Boy, are you all right?”
A hand gripped his arm and helped him to his feet.
“You all right?”
There were too many speckles of red and grey in the air; it took him several seconds and several more questions before he said, “Fine, I’m fine.”
Mabel Jonsen nodded sharply and hurried away.
Reed was all right; she couldn’t waste her time.
“Nate,” he said, but there was no one there to hear him.
He headed for the school, half turning when a cloud of thick smoke rolled in his direction; when it passed, he had turned all the way and was on his way down toward the flat. His left leg bothered him, but he was able to run a little; his ears were still stuffed and there were whistles in his head, but he was able to understand just where he was going.
When he was opposite Mackey’s he saw a man lying against ne base of the wall, another man standing in the doorway, watching him, saying nothing.
When the road sloped downward again he realized he had a shadow, faint and uncertain.
When the slope flattened again, he realized he was crying. Soundlessly. Hard. Chips of rusty steel tearing his lungs and throat.
His legs were slow to obey, and he veered helplessly to the left, nearly tumbling into the trees he could no longer see. Once he regained control, he had to walk or he would fall; once he walked, he stopped crying, but the steel chips were still there, at least one of them, he thought, lodged in his heart.
He stopped when he finally reached the last house on the road. -
There were no lights.
Not even the fire reached down this far.
Maybe down by the river? he wondered, and wondered if he could make it there and back. Or maybe he should just break a window or break the door down and go inside and wait. Or maybe he should just go back, because this wasn’t getting him anywhere while other people were up there, getting themselves killed.
Maybe, he thought, it didn’t matter anymore.
* * * *
And a voice whispered behind him,,” ‘ “Vengeance is mine,” sayeth the Lord.’ “
* * * *
7
A
s Casey walked up the center of Black Oak Road, Reed straggling behind, he saw Hell sketched across the bottom of the clouds, reached out with his right hand and caught Reed’s shirt and dragged him alongside.
“Where is she?” he said, looking nowhere but straight ahead.
The boy stumbled; Casey held him until his hand was slapped away.
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Reed snapped. “And I don’t care. You’ve got those powers and things, and you ran away, goddamnit. I don’t have to—”
Casey grabbed him again, both hands, and stopped, holding him close, forcing him up on his toes. “I don’t know who or what you think I am, son,” he said kindly, sternly, “but I’m only who I am, no one else, and don’t you forget it.” He pulled him higher. “If you don’t know who I mean, then get out there and find her. You’ll know her when you see her.”
He released him, and Reed staggered backward a few paces, turning to keep his balance, turning again to make a stand.
“Reed.”
He knew what the boy saw before the boy bolted, and it gave him no pleasure.
He walked on, neither slow nor fast, and there were no fantasies with him this time around. The gunslinger was gone, the marshal cleaning up the town, the priest who had all the answers because God spoke to him on the hour every hour, the miracle worker, maybe even the coward.
He hadn’t lied: he was only who he was, nothing more, nothing less.
He wore black from shirt to boots, but he didn’t wear his collar because he still hated the stupid thing, it still felt like a starched noose. Around his neck was the gold chain, the cross tucked between the second and third buttons of his shirt, shifting lightly against his chest. His heels came down hard, very hard, on the blacktop, not for any sense of the dramatic, but because he knew she would hear him.
When he reached the flat, he paused, and shook his head sadly at what he saw: the debris on the ground, still smoldering in the rain, Moss still lying over there at Mackey’s, the cracked window at the Moonglow, the smoke crawling off the Crest and mingling with the mist and raindrops. And firelight like a fading sunrise.
He was the only one on the street.
Alone, for the moment, with the voice of the fire.
He could still leave.
He could still turn around and take off the black, maybe go down to the river and take one of Micah’s boats and let the current carry him as far south as it could.
He could.
He smiled a little ruefully.
Sure.
He flexed his fingers, tried to blow out the fear that walked with him as he walked forward, tried to remember that it was no crime, no shame in being afraid. And it had been anger, it had been shame, that had driven him away tonight, back to the house where he had stood in the yard and stared at the sky and waited for a sign that would tell him what to do, how to make amends for his failure in protecting those who had counted on him for protection.
There was none.
Not a comet, not a star, not even a burning bush.
When he realized how idiotic he must look, drenched to the skin, whining for special favors, beating his breast and checking out hair shirts, he had thrown up his hands and laughed, laughed all the way inside where he stripped and toweled dry, and pulled out the clothes he should have worn all along.
They were neither a shield nor a uniform, they were simply what he was.
Closer to t
he Moonglow now, the pink neon hazed by the rain, the crack a dark silver.
He didn’t know precisely what he would do when she finally came. He had no spells or special weapons or a blessed amulet or his Bible. And he reckoned words weren’t going to be all he would need.
At the intersection at Hickory, he looked left toward the rented house, snapped his head around when he heard a moan.
And saw Todd. Crawling on his stomach, using his elbows and hands to drag him along, hunched in the middle as if he couldn’t bear to let his stomach touch the ground. With a moan of his own he ran over, went down on one knee, and put his hand on Odam’s head to tell him he was there.
Todd looked up, resting on one elbow. “Aw, Jeez, Case,” he said, “where the hell’ve you been?” Pulled himself higher as Casey lowered the other knee and rested his friend’s head on his lap. “She killed Bobby.”
Casey frowned. “She? Who?”
Todd managed to point down the darkened street. “A demon, Case. Damn, but...she was a ... demon.”
Casey smelled the blood, tipped Odam over a little and saw it seeping through the jagged edges of the rip in his open shirt. “Todd.”
“Demons, Case. They can’t die. I tried. Those new people are demons.”
No, he thought. It would be easier if they were. If they were in fact the clichéd monsters from Hell, swarming across the globe to do Satan’s work, it would be so much easier.
“Case.” Todd sagged, and Casey hurried to grab his shoulders and hold him close, leaning over to shield him, at least from the rain. “Case, it ain’t the UFOs.”
“I know.”
He heard voices, distant and high and angry.
“Case.”
“Come on, Todd, let’s get you to Mel’s.”
Todd shook his head, more like a shudder, and pushed weakly until Casey let him lie on the ground. Rain spattering on his face and side, rain spattering on the street.
“Aw, Case,” he said, and said no more; he closed his eyes.
Casey lay a hand on his head, whispered a prayer and a promise nothing like a prayer at all, and looked down the street. A woman stood there, only her face visible, but none of her features.
You’re not her, he thought as the face disappeared. He brushed rain from Todd’s cheek, kissed his fingertips and placed them on Todd’s forehead, and rocked to his feet against a gust that tried to shove him.
He wouldn’t let it.
He walked on.
Looking side to side, searching shadows and houses and trees and gutters.
But she wasn’t there; she wasn’t anywhere.
Be patient, he cautioned; be patient, she knows.
Midway up the next block he looked over at the clinic as the door opened with a shrill creak, and Mel stepped out. He lifted his face to the rain for a second, groaned loudly, and was about to return inside when he saw him.
“Casey, God, is that you?”
“Yep.”
Farber started for him, but stopped when he reached the curb, his hands quivering at his side. Tessa came to the doorway, calling Mel, she needed his help, and cut herself off. She didn’t say a word.
“Casey,” Mel said, bewildered and exhausted, “we’re cut off. What were you doing? The whole place is blowing up, we needed you, damnit, people have—”
“I couldn’t have stopped it,” he said calmly. “Not then. I would have died myself.”
“Maybe you should have,” Tessa said from the doorway without a trace of emotion.
He tilted his head—maybe—and walked on, ignoring Mel’s calls, hearing Tessa order him to stop wasting his time, watching the firelight grow stronger, pulsing like a heartbeat within the clouds now, watching a group of people stagger over the rise like black ghosts, supporting each other, their voices low, urging, cursing, in pain.
Looking side to side.
And still he couldn’t find her, and he wondered if he was wrong, if he was too late for whatever it was he had to do.
At the next intersection he looked right and saw nothing, looked left and saw the little man in the trench coat standing near the block’s solitary streetlamp, the light to one side, turning half of him black. The little man swayed side to side, and Casey was sure he heard him humming.
“Reverend Chisholm!”
Ahead, one of the black ghosts had already reached the flat and had broken into a run.
Reed, nearly tripping in his haste, slipping on the oil slicks on the road, lunging for him, grabbing his arms. Casey didn’t know the word for what he saw in the boy’s face.
“Nate,” Reed said, in anguish, in despair. “Oh, God, Reverend Chisholm, Nate. And Rina.”
Casey hugged him tightly, one hand pressing the boy’s cheek to his chest. The children. They were killing the children, and here he was, still playing games, still walking the streets as if he owned them.
He stroked the boy’s back and let his sobs wrench from grief to rage and back again; he shook his head when Mel came up beside him and asked if Reed was hurt; he didn’t move at first when Tessa came to his other side and glared at him, daring him to say something, daring him to explain.
Then he turned his head slowly, and when she saw his expression she covered her mouth with a hand and moved to leave.
“Helen,” he said. Steady. Deep. The voice of the pulpit in the voice of the fire and rain. “Where is she?”
Tessa shook her head. “I don’t know. I... she was at the house when that woman...” Her eyes widened. “Oh my God, Todd!” And she turned to run.
“Helen,” he repeated.
Tessa stopped abruptly, leaning away, unable to leave. “She left me with Bobby, Casey. Then that woman...” Frantic hands through her hair. “She dragged me into the street, and then Todd showed up and he got her to let me go and ...”
Casey nodded, and eased Reed away, still holding his upper arms. “Wait here,” he said. He looked first at Tessa, then at Mel. “Both of you wait here.”
“I have a gun,” Mel offered. “In the clinic. I have a gun. We can get her, Case. We’ll find Helen, and we’ll get that woman.”
“No,” he said, and let his hands drop. “No, you won’t. You can’t.” He didn’t smile. “Not yet.”
“Then what the hell are we doing here?” Farber demanded.
“Waiting,” he answered.
Then he did smile.
“For her.”
* * * *
And it was for her that a path opened through them, averting his face from the brunt of a gust, flexing his fingers, wishing he could do something about the cold that had begun to spread through his gut, his lungs, his limbs, deadening all sound but the sound of his heels as he made his way across the street and up the flagstone walk to the steps, to the double doors.
A small explosion on the Crest startled him, made others cry out wearily.
He looked down at the knobs and closed his eyes briefly, found a number of different ways to call himself an idiot, because the keys, the damn keys, were still back at his house.
Feet on the blacktop, shuffling, kicking aside or stumbling over chunks of plaster and wood, brick and stone; whispers without words; the rain pattering on the grass; the wind humming through the steeple.
He didn’t want to do this.
He was in a cave without light, forced to move, too far from the walls, knowing that in the center was a pit filled with blood, knowing that the entrance was on the other side, and no one had told him why he was here or what he had to do to avoid drowning.
In the blood.
He didn’t want to do this.
The cold intensified.
He grabbed the doorknobs and remembered how foolish, how vain he had been.
“You can’t keep me out,” he whispered. “This is my church.”
He braced himself, and he pulled, and the doors rattled in protest, the hinges groaned, and the wind keened through the steeple.
“Mine.’’
He pulled, and the doors opened with
a scream when the hinges snapped and the wood cracked.
And there was silence.
Symphony - [Millennium Quartet 01] Page 32