Shaking her head briskly now, she tried to put it right out of her mind.
She didn’t believe she’d ever been down this particular street. It was much like all the others in this well-heeled neighborhood. Spacious, leafy, and with sprawling green front yards. Prosperous looking without being overblown or ostentatious. The trees lining its verges had been neatly pollarded. Ivy clambered up most of the walls.
Out front of one house, there were nesting boxes and a fancy bird table with a thatched roof, a speckled starling perched on it. Down the side of another was a little sailboat on a trailer. It got used at Crealley Street Park, doubtless, or on the river, although the latter didn’t really take you anywhere. Cass regarded it with just a touch of sadness. She had never even been on a boat.
Right deep down, she’d always hankered after living in a neighborhood like this.
The kids, she thought, would have simply loved it. Proper grass to play on instead of the dirt out back of the diner. Banisters to slide on, trees to climb, and a great big room for each of them.
They could have even bought a dog. Oh, wouldn’t Cleveland have loved that? Kevin had always wanted one, and a big one at that, a German shepherd or even a Great Dane. But, “We can’t have some huge slobbering mutt running around the diner,” she had told him.
God, how she regretted that. If she ever got any of them back from wherever they’d gone – she often thought – then she would go down to the pound and get a dozen dogs, the biggest, sloppiest ones she could find.
A slight dampness was forming in the corners of her eyes, but Cassie just cruised on, ignoring it. If she spent her whole life dwelling on her past regrets, allowing them to overwhelm her every time they surfaced … then she’d never get anything done. And she’d structured her existence, since her family had disappeared, round doing things. Dealing with the problems that arose like mushrooms in this place, perhaps to distract her from her single biggest one.
There’d been an earlier period in her life when she had been like this.
After her parents had died, she had been utterly alone. She hadn’t gotten on well with her half-sister, Pam, at that stage. There had been few other relatives. There was her folks’ house, which was paid for, and a small sum of insurance money. So she’d had somewhere to live, something to eat, at least. But at seventeen, that isn’t enough. You need stability, to make up for the inner turmoil. She had none. And so she’d wound up mostly on the streets.
O’Connell was the one that largely bothered her. Because every time she went down there at night, she would invariably run into some drunken older guy who wanted to do stuff with her. Try and touch her, mostly. But her dad, as well as firearms, had taught her the basics of judo. So she didn’t have all that much trouble fending them off. She carried a knife with her most days, anyway. The incidents disturbed her, all the same.
But one bar in particular kept on drawing her attention.
It was simply called The Hole. There was a red-lit doorway, and a long flight of stairs leading to a basement. She had never been inside. But she had noticed, several times, the small squadron of motorcycles parked outside it beyond ten o’ clock. And she had always been attracted to those kinds of machines.
She’d finally steeled herself one evening, and gone down there. She was already tall and looked older than she was, so it was no real problem.
Grunge music – Nirvana’s ‘Aneurysm’ – was playing from a tape deck. And it was so dark she could barely make out where she had wound up exactly. But there were people down there, seven of them, grouped around the bar. And all around her age. They had stiffened when she’d walked toward them. But then one of them, a handsome seeming young man with a close-cropped beard, had grinned at her.
“Who’re you, sweetcheeks?” he asked her in a lazy, throaty drawl.
She had already figured out the best way to approach these people was to be completely straight with them. “I’m Cassie.”
He nodded politely.
“Rooster. You look like you’re missing something.”
“Maybe.”
“Can you ride a bike?”
“I’d like to learn.”
“Okay, then. I’ll teach you.” He patted the empty stool next to him. “In the meantime, you can ride on mine.”
That seemed a whole lifetime ago. She had changed so much since then. It wasn’t that she’d become more respectable. It was simply that she had more respectable ambitions these days, as she’d recently been proving to herself. Kids changed you that way.
God, it was so quiet round here. That struck at her forcibly, the further she progressed. The whole town had seemed at low ebb all day, since that ruckus in the square. She’d seen no one run, or shout, create any kind of fuss or upset all this afternoon. And it wasn’t that the people of Raine’s Landing usually swung from the nearest lamppost. But they’d seemed unnaturally placid for a good few hours.
Folks had largely finished work by this hour and come home. Lights were appearing in most of the windows surrounding her. She could see potted ferns on the sills, and china figurines. Through one pane, she could make out the portrait of a lady who was finely dressed, looked very cool and dignified.
Most of the driveways that she passed had cars parked on them. Their owners had disappeared indoors. And that had been the last she’d seen of them. No one reappeared to mow the lawn, water the roses. And there were no kids outdoors playing on the sidewalk, riding skateboards, pedaling their bikes.
On a summer’s evening like this? She guessed that people were just really scared, after everything that had occurred the past couple of days. But the town seemed more than simply hushed around her. It appeared half dead.
Cassie wondered how accurate that was. Could the place that she’d grown up in be nearing its End of Days?
The intersection with Beaumont came up, and she paused at it again. Another, vaguer, memory came drifting back into her thoughts. Had she dreamt it, or had Ross hovered for a while over her bed last night?
The idea made her throat go stiff. She wasn’t quite certain how she felt about something like that. They were firm friends, and almost seemed to think along the same lines sometimes. He was the one person she trusted before anyone else. And she respected his quiet courage and his keen brain. But beyond that?
All she felt was a strange blankness, when she tried to work it out. She’d chosen the wrong men so often – almost infallibly, she was forced to admit. When it came to that part of life, she didn’t even seem capable of separating good ideas from bad ones.
One of her palms dropped from the handlebars. She looked up and then stared around.
It was almost grating at her by this juncture. All the streets. So very quiet.
There was no sound in the slightest from the neat houses in her field of view, despite the fact that some windows were open. Not a television. Not a radio. No one was visible. There was not even any barking.
She was nearly at the point where it was starting to alarm her, when she finally heard a voice. Except … it seemed to be inside her own head. And she sat up very straight.
“Nothing for you here, Cassandra. Best if you go home.”
And yes, that did seem like a good idea. Cassie’s frame relaxed.
Then she turned her Harley back the other way, and finally gave vent to the throttle.
The roar of its twin-cam engine still hung on the air for a few seconds, after she was gone.
THIRTY-SIX
In another hour, the light was beginning to fail properly.
Samuel Howard Aldous Levin – Judge Levin to almost all the town – didn’t even switch on his desk lamp. He was seated in his study, which was underneath the gables of his home on Billings Avenue, just off Plymouth Drive. Going to the window, you could see the Vernon residence from here. Except he didn’t go there now. He was almost motionless in the gathering twilight.
His hands were clasped around his chin again. His tired eyes gazed into thin space.
&
nbsp; My God, he was exhausted. Hadn’t slept a wink last night. And as for today … he kept going over, in his mind, the battle with that Saruak character. He had never come across anything that equaled the experience, the shock of it. Heaven’s sake, he had torn at the creature with enormous claws. Felt them rend flesh and part sinew. And the fellow had shrieked with pain.
But then this new intruder had stood up and laughed about it, like no harm in the slightest had been done. Had the screams merely been a sham, or was the creature like the surface of a pond? You could disturb it, part its outer skin. But then it simply closed over and calmed down again, like nothing at all had happened.
He had never been made to feel so utterly ineffective. It was far from the most comfortable sensation, wholly alien to him. His family had enjoyed great power in Raine’s Landing for so many generations. And, outcast stock though they once had been, they had worked very hard at fitting in, making themselves acceptable.
He let his gaze drift about slightly. Just look at this study, for a case in point.
It was as archetypically New English in its character as any room could be. The furniture was American Classic, as was the china in the tall armoires. A collection of scrimshaw sat behind the leaded panes of glass as well. There were engravings of old-time whalers fastened to the walls, little rowboats after mighty beasts that could smash them with a brief flick of their tails.
There was even a stuffed moose head up above the door, its glass eyes shining down at him. And he didn’t even hunt.
He was a gentleman of Massachusetts then, his ancestors – those tinkers with their strange accents and foreign customs – long ago forgotten. He knew the law from back to front. Had studied the Constitution avidly and grown to revere it. If anything kept this benighted town sane, it was people like himself – Levin was quite sure of that. It was his raison d’être, his whole justification.
Which made what had happened today all the more alarming. It wasn’t just a darkness that had seeped into the Landing. It was insanity too, the breakdown of everything rational. And that was a quality more usually confined to the enormous manor further up the road.
He remembered Saruak, sitting in that tree beyond the border, dangling his legs and mocking, chortling. Exactly like some spiteful child, delighted at the mayhem it had caused. You couldn’t even reason with a mind like that.
But combined with such enormous power, it was the most dangerous thing he could imagine.
Levin breathed out hard, trying to stop thinking about it for a little while and totally failing.
The boys – he had two teenaged sons – were very quiet tonight. He couldn’t hear a sound from the rooms below him. His wife, he knew, was helping Fran – their cook – prepare this evening’s supper. And maybe a good meal would help. But he doubted it. He felt as if his insides had been hauled across some jagged rocks. And his limbs were aching. He was so horribly weary.
Although he couldn’t fall asleep, or even doze. Didn’t feel like he would ever get to rest his mind again – at least, until this was resolved one way or the other. What to do about it, though? Saruak was beyond his reach.
At his window, the last chink of daylight glimmered and then disappeared. A charcoal grayness closed across the glass. The shadows in the study swelled, completely filling it. Levin didn’t even move, just sat there listening to the dull sound of his own exhausted thoughts.
A sudden movement in the corner of his eye brought his narrow head swinging around. Maybe he’d imagined it. There was no doorway there.
But a figure had entered the room.
It was tall. He couldn’t quite make out its shape, beyond the fact it seemed to have a hat on. Gaspar, maybe? His old friend sometimes dropped in this way, unannounced.
The figure moved forward and its left eye glinted.
Levin sat bolt upright in his chair.
And then an icy whisper pushed out from between his lips.
“You!”
By the time that Saruak emerged from the front door, his dog at heel, night had closed its grip completely over Sycamore Hill. Crickets chirped on the summer breeze. Stars had begun to sparkle, and the moon was rising.
He peered up at it, a satisfied smile on his withered face. He had plenty more visits to make tonight. Lots more work to do. But what point was there, if you couldn’t stop a moment, savor it all?
He could feel the power coursing through his body, growing stronger as each hour passed. The whole of Raine’s Landing was obsessed with him. The entire town, from the oldest to the youngest. Little kids were asking questions that their parents found uncomfortable to answer. Full-grown men were jumping at the sight of their own shadows. And in the older people’s homes, the talk was muted when there was any at all, there was a grim air of finality.
Soon, this whole place would be his. But he felt impatience at prick him. Because soon was not really enough.
The moon was full, and rising like some dented silver buoy on a black tide. Its pale glow made his left eye gleam more brightly. He stared at it for another while, then stretched his hands toward its bulk.
He began to turn them in broad circles, clockwise. Sparks leapt from his fingers, crackling through the air. They lit up his face, making it shine. It was almost like he was trying to turn an enormous wheel, one that was invisible.
He threw his body into it, so that his whole frame shook and bucked. The motion grew faster. The atmosphere around him flickered with a bright electric charge. The wind hissed round him, curving past his narrow ribs. His ragged coat lifted, and the brim of his hat flapped.
He stopped abruptly, grinning again, pleased with himself. Because of what?
The sparks all died away. The gusts slowed down.
But next moment, a sound drifted toward him from the direction of Union Square. It was the clock on the Town Hall, ringing the hour. Nine. Although when he had started his hands moving, it had only been eight forty-five.
Saruak looked back at the moon, the way that it was traveling by now, and laughed again. Then he bent down and scratched his bulldog behind one distended ear.
“You see, Dralleg?” he murmured. “What they say is true. Time really does fly when you’re having fun.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Something was prodding, pretty hard, at my left shoulder. I dreamt for a moment that it was the Dralleg, jabbing at me with its claws. And, in my dream, I lashed out at it.
“Ow! Mr. Devries?”
My eyes came partly open, and the dim lighting of the games room seeped back into my consciousness. Then I focused on the large expanse of midnight blue material – Hampton’s uniform – in front of me. His dual-tone eyes were watering when he hunkered down and peered into my face.
“Are you okay, sir?”
He was asking the wrong person.
“Did I hurt you?”
“No.”
You couldn’t help but rather like a man who told white lies like that. He had a faint mark down one side of his cheek
Then I looked at my watch and saw that it was nighttime. There was no other way to tell, in a place like this. I sat upright sharply. How could I have slept so long, with all this going on?
Except I hadn’t just been sleeping. There’d been my self-appointed new associate, the Little Girl.
Hampton gazed at me like he was wondering what I was thinking about. Then he told me, “Master Raine and the Doctor request your presence, sir.”
So they had finally come up with something. Or at least I hoped so.
The man had another candle, and he led me back along the blackened, echoing corridors. I thought I could make out a few of the shapes better, this time. That was the Raine coat of arms that I could see, a unicorn dueling with a satyr.
A few more candles were shining in the ballroom, when I got there. It was slightly better lit. Hampton paused. I stepped inside.
My gaze fell on Willets immediately. You could see how bloodless his face had become. His eyes looked hollow, there was pers
piration on his lip. Whatever else the Doctor might be, he was still – deep down – an intelligent, perceptive man. And several hours spent in Raine’s company had apparently taken their toll.
He looked quickly around at me and seemed to deflate a little, like he’d been holding himself very stiffly for a good while now. When you considered all the tangents that his host’s mind kept on going off at, I could understand that.
Of Raine himself there was no sign at all, but I was sure that he was still around.
“You kids been having fun?” I asked.
Willets only scowled at me. But a pair of golden eyes came open, just behind his shoulder.
“Oh, tremendous fun, old chum. I really wish I’d gotten to know the Doctor sooner.”
Willets pulled the same kind of face as a little boy who had been forced to swallow medicine. I stepped in closer.
“What’ve you come up with?”
“In the matter of defeating Saruak,” Willets told me dryly, “nothing whatsoever, I’m afraid. It’s not just physically that we can’t reach him. Not even our magic spells extend beyond the borders of this town.”
But that didn’t apply to him entirely. He hadn’t been born here, and was not bound by the curse. So he could walk out any time he liked.
I pointed that out to him. But all he did was stare at me as though I were insane.
“You’re proposing I take on a fully fledged Destroyer single-handed?” His hot red gaze filled with displeasure. “Did nothing that I said this morning have the slightest impact?”
“We think,” Woody added quickly, trying for once to be diplomatic, “that he might have popped back into town a few times, in the last couple of hours.”
Popped back … what in blazes?
“He was too fast for us, unfortunately,” Raine continued.
And he nearly looked apologetic, which was difficult for somebody with such a high opinion of himself.
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