“Yes, I do.”
“Then that’s all that matters. That’s something to take with me when I go.”
“We always hoped you’d come back, but not like this,” Mum said. “I’d rather know you were living another life without us than see you this way.”
“What happened, Dad?” I had to ask. It didn’t feel so strange now, calling him that, but my chest felt as heavy as stone. “Why didn’t you come back?”
“I tried to,” he said. “The night I left, I knew that was all I wanted: to make things right, the way they used to be. But I also knew we needed time, your mum and I, so I made myself wait a month before calling to see if she was ready.”
“But you never called,” Mum said. “That was the hardest part. The not knowing.”
He smiled a broken smile. “But I did call, you see. I called I don’t know how many times. It must’ve been rotten timing, because you were always out or away when I rang. After leaving my friends in Newcastle, I moved to a B&B in Edinburgh. But the farther away I got, the bigger the pull I felt to come back. So I bought a ticket home. I thought if I could just see you up close, it would be easier.
“So I was coming back. I was on my way home when the accident happened, and everything I’d dreamt of went flying out the window.”
“The train crash,” I said, the heaviness increasing in my chest as I thought of Becky huddling down in the wreckage, playing hide-and-seek. That train crash.
Mum looked at me, aghast.
Dad nodded and lowered his gaze. “You may have heard of it, Donna — the crash on the East Coast line that killed so many passengers. But you wouldn’t have known I was one of them.”
“Oh God . . .” Mum’s cry trailed off into space. I held on, keeping her upright.
The Overseers averted their eyes.
“It came without warning,” Dad said. “One second I was watching the countryside go by, the next there was debris and glass everywhere, an inferno running through the carriage, panic and screaming. Then there was some kind of explosion. The impact threw me against the window headfirst, and I never left my seat after that. I was one of the few who never made it out in any kind of shape. No one could’ve identified us. I remember looking down through the furnace, seeing myself in the seat, everything turning black around me. I knew what the fire had done to me, but I didn’t feel any pain, not physical pain. Only the pain of missing you and not being able to find a way back.”
I looked at him, the burned man, the horror-film and comic-book fan. He looked as he used to, his features almost fully restored.
“We’ve missed you too, Dad. Missed you like crazy.”
Mum nodded, speechless.
“I’m sorry for everything,” he said. “For my stupid mistake, for leaving you without a clue. I tried to contact you so many times, I ranted and raved, but you never heard . . . not until that day in the classroom, Ben, when you saw me for the first time. I know I messed everything up, but you need to know I never loved anyone but you two. If I could take it all back, I would.”
He paused, and I sensed an electricity in the air that told me our time was nearly over.
“I’m glad we had this chance,” Dad finished. “I’m glad I could finally say what had to be said. But now we have to let go and move on. Can you do that, Donna?”
She shook her head in protest. “I don’t want to.”
“You’ll learn how.”
He touched her face, and a shudder ran through her as he wiped away her tears. He rested a hand on her bandaged arm a moment, looking into her eyes. Then he took my hand, and tiny sparks of lightning surrounded our fingers as we touched.
“Only thing is, I don’t know what happens now,” Dad said. “They didn’t explain that. They said you’d know.”
I looked at the conference table. No one reacted, least of all Mr. October, who sat with his head bowed and his back turned to us.
But suddenly I realized I didn’t need his help for this. I knew, or thought I knew, without being told.
Inside the stained-glass windows, the warring figures seemed to be subtly moving, as if the aftershocks of their battles were still vibrating. But the pictures didn’t show what I wanted. They gave no sign of a way out, a place where the departed were supposed to go.
“There,” Dad said suddenly, looking past me. “Could that be the place?”
In the darkest corner of our side of the room, a fine-line crack of light had appeared, as fine as the crack between the walls in the alley. That had to be it. We looked at each other and knew. We started toward it.
Mum held herself back, as if she understood she couldn’t play a part in this now. She could only look on as I walked Dad away, and as I did he half turned to look at her, and the look that passed between them seemed to speak volumes, saying everything they’d left unsaid.
We were nearly there. Even at close range the crack wasn’t easy to see. But when I put out my hand, I felt something solid and cold, something very much like a doorknob. My fingers closed around it.
“Love you, Dad.”
“I know,” he said. The look in his eyes took me back years to the times when he sang me to sleep and read me bedtime stories. “Love you too, Ben. Wish I could say I’ll be seeing ya, but you know this is where it ends. Take care of Mum.”
“I will,” I said, and then I opened the door.
The bright burning rectangle that loomed against the wall gave off a comforting warmth, so comforting I almost wanted to step inside it myself. But instead I moved aside, letting Dad pass. His last look seemed to say, It’s all right now. Everything’s fine now.
He didn’t speak, though. He didn’t hesitate. He walked into the golden-yellow beyond, just as Mitch and Molly had before him. The warmth engulfed him, and as he moved farther inside I began to lose sight of him. Then he was a part of the welcoming flames, and I closed the door and leaned against it, sobbing.
Slowly the room came back into focus. Mum watched me with tear-filled eyes, not knowing which question to ask first. I took her hand and the veil seemed to lift midway across the room as I steadied her back to the conference table.
Mr. October was already on his feet. The elders looked down on us, nodding their heads.
“Now do you believe me?” Mr. October asked the portraits. “A first-rate show, young man. Astonishing. If my superiors still had any doubts about you, you wiped them away with what you just did. So . . . how do you feel?”
“Dunno,” I said. “Shaky. Empty.”
“Understood. Still, it’s good to have the chance to lay our own ghosts to rest. In time you’ll be glad of your part in this.”
Mum could only sniffle, still reeling with shock.
Mr. October turned to her now. “Our deepest sympathies, Mrs. Harvester. I know you’re still recovering from one loss in the family and this must be hard to bear. These things have a way of coming all at once — it seems so cruel and unfair. But there’s a new day waiting for you now, a very bright day.”
Mum muttered something I couldn’t quite hear. I gave her hand a squeeze.
“We should get you home,” Mr. October said. “If you don’t mind waiting while I speak with this young prodigy of ours, we’ll have you on your way in no time. Lu? Becky?”
The girls snapped to attention.
I was reluctant to let Mum go, but I knew she’d be safe with them. The Vigilants stood aside until they’d passed, then followed them from the room. The wind sighed past the open door, and again I heard something else inside it: a mournful wailing.
Now that we were alone, Mr. October became serious and agitated, morphing back and forth between three different personas.
“There’s something else you should know,” he said. “I couldn’t explain in front of your mother — she has too much on her plate already. But there’s another task facing us now. Do you recognize that sound in the wind?”
It was louder now, a chilling howl from the depths.
“You heard it the night w
e saved the Willow children,” he said. “It’s the enemy mourning losses of their own. Your father may have slipped through their fingers, but they won’t go away empty-handed. There’s been an incursion. They’re already inside the building.”
Above us, the elders let out a collective groan. Something stirred in the pool of shade under the windows.
“What should we do?” I asked.
“Whatever we can.” He reached out a hand, collecting his walking stick out of thin air.
A spider-shaped shadow crept out of the darkness across the room, shot up to the highest point of the wall, and spread itself out in a corner. The weave it threw across the ceiling seemed to suck light from the air.
As its web closed around the chandelier, the conference room fell into semidarkness. Other shadows appeared, stretching around corners, spilling out of the stone walls, sweeping across the living portraits to blot them out.
“Security!” Mr. October called.
The door was thrown open. Two Vigilants looked in, awaiting instructions.
“The enemy are here,” Mr. October said.
And I was the one who’d let them in. I’d punched a hole in the Ministry’s defenses when I’d taken that name. Somehow I had to make up for what I’d done, but for the moment all I could do was look on, helpless, as the demons tumbled out of their cover of darkness and into the room.
They came in all shapes and sizes, from every unlit corner, spilling from the fireplace’s gaping mouth, from cracks in the great stone walls. In the stained-glass windows the creatures portrayed in battle scenes came slowly alive, escaped their prison, and came flopping down to the floor.
Another door opened in another corner of the room. There was no welcoming light inside this one, though, only a pitch-black nothingness. A procession of Deathhead agents stormed out.
And worse: the Mawbreed, an entire nest of them, oozing through gashes in the stone floor and walls, sitting up out of the shadows. I hadn’t forgotten how hideous they were. Their coiled, wormlike bodies were semitransparent, with pale fluids pulsing under the skin. Their limbs, with their bristling suckers, reached far and wide. The ravenous mouths they had for heads craned above them, tasting the air.
In no time the room was alive with them, demons of every description. I couldn’t see the elders in the portraits anymore — they must’ve gone into hiding. If they had, I couldn’t blame them.
A siren sounded, loud enough to shake the building’s foundations. Clouds of plaster dust fell from the ceiling. Sounds of stampeding footsteps and discharging weapons echoed from the hallway.
I looked at Mr. October in distress. “This is on me, isn’t it? I’m to blame for all this.”
“What’s done is done. Now that they’re here, we’ll have to deal with them the best way we can. Run me an errand, Ben — go and check the receipts room. This shouldn’t be happening if Sukie has filed your father’s card. The numbers may still be out of alignment.”
I faltered, keeping an eye on a Mawbreed that had drawn too close for comfort.
“You’re trying to protect me, aren’t you? You’re sending me out to keep me away from this.”
“I need you to go. The name is high priority and must be filed by someone who knows what they’re doing.”
We retreated a few paces, keeping distance between us and the Mawbreed’s suckered hands. Mr. October twitched his walking stick toward it, uttering something inaudible under his breath. The Mawbreed drew back.
“Go now,” he said as a team of Vigilants crashed into the room from behind us. “Take care as you do, though. They may be everywhere. Remember what you’ve learned, Ben. Remember what you can do.”
“Mum’s still in the building. . . .” The full horror of that thought hadn’t hit me until then. “If they’re everywhere, what about her?”
“She’s in the only safe place. You haven’t been in the waiting room before, have you? The elevator music they play there is written in ancientspeak, with ancientspeak lyrics. They couldn’t go in there even if they dared. Now will you please get along and do as I say?”
As I started away, a creature from one of the windows came scampering across the floor, silent and stealthy as a cat, with eyes and mouths surfacing all over its shiny black body. A half-dozen Vigilants closed around it, cutting it off from Mr. October.
At the same time, a sucker-covered arm flashed down from the darkness near the chandelier, looping around one guard’s neck and hauling him screaming up to the ceiling.
His screams followed me from the room. The last thing I saw before stepping outside was Mr. October unleashing a fireball with a flick of his wrist. It detonated in front of the fireplace, trapping three invaders inside it, turning them into thrashing masses of flame.
The hostilities weren’t confined to the conference room. Out in the hallway, a dozen Vigilants were caught in a free-for-all with twice as many Shifters. The plasma weapons seemed to have little or no effect on the intruders. One lizardlike demon took a hit to the neck that spun it around, dazing it only briefly before it came again, leaping through the air and changing in midflight to a jellyish form that fastened itself over the head and shoulders of the guard who’d fired.
Other guards and demons were locked in hand-to-hand combat — in some cases hand-to-claw or hand-to-tentacle combat. I threaded my way among them, past a Vigilant with an axe in his hands. He lifted it high above his head and brought it down on a Shifter, which turned itself into an eel the instant before the blade fell. Then there were two eels, sliding away in opposite directions, one growing a new tail, the other a new head. One snapped its jaws at my ankle as I darted past the dispatch room.
The receipts office door stood open just ahead. This far down the corridor was clear of fighting, but new shadows were shifting and crawling all through it. Whatever was inside them would soon come out. I had no time to lose.
The first thing I saw in receipts was Sukie, passed out in the chair, bent forward over the desk. Her head rested on the typewriter and she held a freshly typed card between her fingers. She was breathing but clearly out of commission. It only took me a second to work out why.
To the left, inside the door, a demon was standing over the telegraph — one of the Deathheads. It didn’t see me at first but watched the machine as the latest list chugged out. They’d lost control of one soul tonight, and the demon was here to steal many more in return.
It seemed to sense me then and turned its head, narrowing its empty eye sockets into slits. The lipless mouth leered. I couldn’t be sure if it was the one from the old Willow house or another just like it, but its decaying gray hands were fully formed and long-fingered.
“You,” it said.
Without a thought I flung myself at it, hitting the creature full-on with my shoulder. It spun away and landed neatly on its feet, flashing out a hand that caught me squarely in the chest.
It was like being hit by a bus. The pain didn’t even register until I’d flown back across the room, smashing into a bookshelf against the far wall. I slumped to the floor in a rain of books. A screaming pain drilled through my upper body. And now the Deathhead turned from the telegraph, crossing the room with a single leap to stand above me.
“We’ll finish what we began,” it said. “I’ll be a cause of celebration in my domain when I take back your precious soul.”
But only the Mawbreed could take living souls, I remembered. This one would have to kill me first.
I sucked in air, fighting an urge to close my eyes as the demon bowed over me. I mustn’t look away. I had to think clearly.
Use the gift, I thought.
Your God-given talent, Mum’s voice echoed through my head.
Your developing skills, echoed Mr. October. Remember what you can do.
The demon craned lower and nearer until I felt its foul grave-breath on my face. I’d remember this in my dreams, I thought, if I lived to dream again.
“Now then,” it whispered, prodding my chest. A set of need
ling claws sprouted from its slimy fingertips. “One small incision here, another larger one there . . . Your measly body’s no use to us, but your life force is a topic of heated debate where I come from. You’re leaving here with me.”
It wasn’t until then that I saw it, that I knew what to do. The gift wasn’t something you thought about; in fact, the harder you thought about it, the harder it was to pull off.
I wish I could do what you do. Becky’s words floated back to me from that first time, our first walk home from school. Picture it in my head and put it down on the page as I see it. . . .
That was the key. I’d always had it, one way or another. I’d had it, but I just hadn’t known what to do with it till now.
All I really had to do was picture it. It was almost like drawing from memory.
The demon felt it. It seemed to sense what I had in mind. It lurched backward, opening its mouth wide and screeching as I got to my knees. Smoke rose gray and thick from the collar of its black suit. Its body began to quiver.
I pictured it now, seeing it clearly, holding it steady in my mind. Sometimes the sketches didn’t work out as intended. Sometimes, as with the fire children, they were almost exact. What I was imagining now was happening right there in front of me. A rattle escaped the Deathhead’s throat as its bony head began to melt.
Now I was on my feet again. The demon reeled away, thumping against a wall, both hands at its own throat. It stumbled past the telegraph machine, looking for an escape. But there was no escape for it now — only an exit.
What features the demon had ever had were now so blackened and warped out of shape that I didn’t recognize it. I waited, but only a heartbeat, until it plodded another step farther into the corridor. It stood there, rocking on its feet, wailing from what was left of its throat.
“See you in the great beyond,” it gargled.
“That’s right. Take this back to your leader.”
And with that, the sketch was complete.
The demon exploded in a great whoosh of dark red matter, a million tiny fragments of it blasting in every direction. A spray of heat and smoldering debris filled the space outside the door, then gradually dispersed until there was nothing left but red mist.
Graveyard Shift Page 20