by Gideon, John
“Robbie and I will keep Hadrian and Jeremy at bay,” whispered Hannie, “and you, Stuart, will proceed immediately through the dark archway in the far wall. By now the Giver will have begun to feast on Carl. The creature will be weak from the poisonous magic that Carl carries in him. You must utter the words I gave you, and you must strike the thing with the sword, again and again, until—”
Suddenly the door of the undercroft blew off its hinges with a roar, showering Hannie and her soldiers with splinters. From the vaulted chamber raged a wind that tore at their clothing and toppled them like bowling pins. The baneful laugh of Hadrian Craslowe assaulted their minds and ears, descended upon them amid the blizzard of forces he had unleashed. Lindsay was flung against the wall of the passage, where her head slammed into stone; she fell unconscious, twitching and gagging. A shard of wood connected with Robbie’s forehead and knocked tiim off his crutches. The wind literally rolled him backward until he too collided with the wall and lay in a motionless heap.
Stu Bromton caught hold of Hannie as the wind lifted her off the floor and, like a human anchor, held her with one hand while clinging fast to the doorjamb with the other. Having lost both her wig and pince-nez, Hannie managed to point her face into the core of the maelstrom, where she could just make out Hadrian and Jeremy hanging in midair, with their deformed hands pointing directly at her. Against the onslaught cf demon-force she screamed words in the Old Tongue, summoned influences and energies from the edges of the unseen world where she had poised them, drew in ligatures and called in old debts, directed the flow of power from her eyes and hand toward the sorcerer and his disciple; she screamed the words again and saw Hadrian falter; she saw Jeremy crash rudely to the floor, where he lay still in a heap of garish satin; she saw the green hatred in Hadrian’s eyes waver and fail, then grow bright with one final burst of malevolence.
Hannie endured another blast of death-wind but survived it and retaliated with her own finality. Hadrian Craslowe dropped out of the air and landed stiffly against the table, knocking a score of silver plates and bowls and chalices to the stone floor. He came to rest like a figure of bronze that had tumbled from its pedestal in an earthquake, rigid and leaning unmanlike against a wall.
Hannie struggled to her feet, actually helping Stu regain his. Silence beat against their eardrums. Stu found the sword on the floor, clutched it tight, and searched Hannie’s face for confirmation of his instincts: Go to the darkness beyond the arch and—
The old witch suddenly collapsed again, and Stu just caught her. He edged her through the open door into the undercroft. Her face was an awful shade of gray, her eyes sunken and rolling. Her breath came in very short, shallow huffs. Stu gently laid her against the stone stairs and cradled her head in his arms.
“Hannie, are you all right? Hannie, can you hear me?” Clearly the energy that had passed through her body had taken a tremendous toll, as had the assault she had endured at Craslowe’s hands. Combined with the trauma of having recently taken a load of buckshot at close range, having lost much blood... God, thought Stu, it was a wonder that she was even alive.
“Stuart,” she croaked, “the sword. Take the sword, and kill the Giver. D-do it, Stuart, before Hadrian recovers. I-it’s your only chance.”
Carl had expected dreams, but as yet no dreams had come. The thing had planted its horrible mouth onto his left shoulder and started to feast, holding him fast with its stinging claws. This was perhaps the “special treatment” that Jeremy had promised: to endure being devoured without the anesthetic benefits of dreaming, like an insect caught in a spider’s web.
The pain was a constant acidic thrill, a continuous jolt that radiated from the wound to every cell in his body. He prayed that his endorphins would soon kick in, the brain’s natural painkillers, bat still the agony grew. The sounds were as horrible as the pain, the munching of his flesh and the squeaky sucking of his blood, the rip of teeth through his skin. And worst of all were the creature’s low moans of ecstasy. He struggled ferociously, clawed at its slimy skin, flailed and gouged with his fists and elbows and knees, only to feel its serpentine limbs close more tightly around him and press him more deeply into its stinking bulk.
He screamed.
Cursed his terror.
Fought to hang on to his reason.
Thrashed against the gristly bone and leathery membrane of engulfing wings—wings like a bat’s or an extinct reptile’s, wings from the imagination of a medieval painter whose commission was to depict a creature of Hell.
But then, within the interval between jackhammer heartbeats, the pain and fear withdrew to the outer frontier of his consciousness, leaving only a wisp of recollection.
He feels nearly himself again, alive and whole and strong, as he stands with his lieutenants in a sunlit clearing near the border between Poland and East Prussia.
“We are ready now, Herr Sturmbannführer,” says one of the others, a heavy-browed man with dull, unfeeling eyes. Carl glances to his left and sees that they are indeed ready, that the four machine guns are in place atop their tripods. To his right are the prisoners, kneeling naked in fresh snow before a newly dug trench, their faces slack with horror, their bodies sticklike and white with exhaustion after the long, cold trek from the village.
More than a hundred men, women, and children. Babies held close to shivering chests. Hands and arms linked, entwined.
To Carl they are stains on the sparkling winter landscape, infections on the skin of mankind. The latest train to Treblinka is full, jam-packed to the very roofs of the boxcars with Jewish vermin rounded up by the Einsatzgruppen SS. So he is forced to deal with the overflow as best he can.
“Very well,” replies Carl, “we shall begin in a moment.” He is speaking German, naturally. (When had he learned German? a tiny inner voice asked. Could this be?) “But first, I have some minor business to attend to.”
His lieutenants laugh huskily and trade knowing winks with each other. Carl steps smartly over the snowy ground toward the bedraggled prisoners, his mirrorlike jackboots crunching and his swagger stick whipping the seam of his britches. He troops the miserable, huddled line.
“This one will do,” he announces shortly, pointing his swagger stick at the bare form of a kneeling girl. She is maybe fourteen, dark-eyed and long-haired—just the kind he likes. A pair of helmeted SS troopers spring forward and seize her, drag her to the edge of the clearing, away from the line of fire.
“Would you care to man one of the guns personally, Herr Sturmbannführer?” asks the heavy-browed lieutenant in a tone appropriate to suggesting another piece of strudel.
“Don’t I always?”
This too raises snickers among the underlings. Carl takes his place at one of the four tripods, crouches behind it, being careful not to muddy his immaculate gray uniform.
No, I won’t do this! screamed that same tiny voice from some remote corner of Carl’s soul. This is abominable, unthinkable! This is evil!
But it is he, Carl Trosper, whose fingers wrap around the wooden firing grips of the weapon, whose steady gaze settles over the gunsights to take in the picture of pathetic families huddled before the rude trench that will be their grave. It is he whose penis suddenly stiffens with the thrill of the first barking bursts of fire, whose heart thunders with obscene joy as a storm of heavy slugs rips through torsos and limbs, detonating little explosions of bright blood. It is he who—
This isn’t me!
—ejaculates and rejoices in this spectacle of suffering and killing, whose hatred burns hot and beautiful on no other fuel than lies and visceral fear. He sucks in the essence of the evil even as he breathes in the smells of the forest—the vapors of death mixed with the tart smells of birch and fir. His ears glean the choking cries of the dying above the chatter of startled sparrows. He sucks it in, laps it up like good soup. It is delicious, this evil. It is what he was made for.
No!
With an incredible eruption of psychic strength, Carl tore himself out of t
he dream and fled the horror of actually being evil. He almost welcomed the return to the physical agony of the beast’s clutches, for here, at least, he knew who he was. His escape from the dream, he prayed, meant that Hannie’s poison was at work, that even though the beast could tear him to pieces and devour his body, it lacked the power to eat his soul.
Had it really been a dream, though?
This surely was no dream: the sight of Stu Bromton, framed in the flickering center of the arch, moving forward on unsteady legs, with the charmed sword gripped in his fists. Stepping now into the maw, into the cavern of dark. Causing the creature to pause in its feasting and stir, to groan and growl with apprehension.
Yes! Good old Stu, good old Hippo! Come on, big guy, just a few more steps! The fucking beast is weakening. The grip of claws and wings faltered ever so slightly. I can feel it! You can kill him! Come ON, Stu! Chop this son of a bitch into a billion stinking pieces!
The sword was raised high over Stu’s head, and Carl would not have cared if Stu had missed his mark and struck him rather than the beast, as long as he tried again, tried again!
Carl cried out to warn his old friend of the shadow behind him. But too late. Heavy wood whistled through the air: a baseball bat, taken from the riot of discarded goods in the basement above—a child’s toy. It cracked down on Stu’s skull, caving it in and popping his eyes out of their sockets, ejecting a gout of blood from his mouth. The big man went down like a puppet whose strings had been cut and thudded heavily to the stone floor. Hannie Hazelford’s magic sword clattered down harmlessly beside the twitching corpse.
The demon drew a relieved breath and started to feed again, and Carl would have screamed himself to death if he had been able, because the hands around the baseball bat belonged to a familiar and much-loved face.
A face that belonged to Renzy Dawkins.
Without his crutches Robbie could only crawl. He pulled himself with his arms and hands along the floor of the passage, back toward the undercroft. His eyes were awash in blood from the wound on his forehead. He wondered how long he had been unconscious after his collision with the stone wall, if he had broken any bones and whether any of his friends had survived. He wondered too at the god-awful silence, a silence that caused painful knots of dread in his guts.
He found Lindsay lying against one wall of the passage, rummy and bleeding from the scalp, but alive. He left her and made for the door of the undercroft, where Hannie’s gauzy head lay just visible against a stone step. Her ancient face lolled toward him as he crawled near. She reached out to grab his collar with a bony hand.
“Robbie,” she whispered hoarsely, “we are in great trouble! Stuart has been killed, and the Giver is still alive. It still has Carl!” She coughed painfully, and Robbie could see the life ebbing from her rheumy eyes. His heart weltered.
“We have but one chance, Robbie. It must be you and I together, because I alone am so weak. I haven’t much left, Robbie. I need your Gift!”
“It’s okay, darlin’, it’s okay,” answered the psychic, snaking his arm around her neck and cradling her head. “Whatever I’ve got is yours, you know that. Now what is it you want me to do?”
Earlier in the day, while the sun still shone, Mitch Nistler had struggled back to his house to die, only to find the house itself dead. Everything in it and near it was dead.
The mayor in the living room, shot in the back, a riddle that did not matter.
Stella DeCurtis out back in the Blazer, cold and glass-eyed, lifeless as alabaster.
Corley the Cannibal in the stairway, chopped into several barely recognizable pieces.
The wormy shell of Lorna Trosper, peppered with bullet holes in an upstairs bedroom, truly dead now.
And nearby, scorch marks on the wall and floor, the sooty silhouette of something.
The offspring, surely. Dead and gone, somehow reduced to ether.
There was a peculiar joy in the deadness around him. Mitch felt at peace for the first time in living memory. He lay down on the living-room sofa, utterly spent from a cold night in the forest, and awaited sundown. When the darkness finally came, he welcomed it, resigned himself to letting his sickness consume him. His horrors had ended. He yearned to slip away before new ones sprang to life.
But then the dark air stirred, just as it had stirred the previous night, when some tickling force had enfolded his heart and urged him to attack Stu Bromton with a crowbar. What had he felt in that crackling magic? Hope? The magic was back now, and it passed over his face like the breath of an angel.
Robbie’s head was a volcano of pain. Each eruption shook the marrow of his bones. His will was linked to Hannie’s through some puissant magic that he would never understand. His Gift was turned to feats he had never before contemplated, never dreamed himself capable of.
Like forcing his spirit from his body and flying over the treetops, into the clouds. Searching fields and roads, reaching out and groping, gravitating, gravitating...
To Mitch Nistler’s house, drawn there like a bee to a fragrant blossom in the golden afternoon.
Communicating, touching, urging the little man to leave his house and come to Whiteleather Place. From somewhere Robbie heard Hannie’s voice saying that Mitch Nistler was their only hope, because Mitch Nistler had eaten of the Giver’s flesh and had carried its monstrous seed. And whatever his weaknesses, Mitch Nistler was blessed with a certain immunity from the evil magic of the Giver’s minions.
“Bushman, you’re in there, aren’t you?” Renzy stood in the opening of the maw, his head tilted to one side. Carl could just make out his handsome face through a haze of pain and terror. “I can’t quite see you, old son, but I can sure as hell feel you. Can you hear me, Bush? We gotta talk.” He rested the bloody baseball bat in the crook of his arm, leaned against the edge of the stone arch, and stared into the blackness.
“R-Renzy, please!”
The beast tore more flesh from Carl’s back, causing him to scream with blinding pain. He felt his bladder let go and his stomach heave, but only acid came up, flooding his gullet and mouth with sour heat. Still, through the rage of agony and horror, he could hear Renzy’s voice. He wriggled an arm free of the creature’s grip and thrust it toward his old friend, clawing the darkness, reaching, begging.
“I didn’t want this to happen, Bush, you know that. But there wasn’t anything I could do about it. This was all—”
“Renzy, kill it! P-please kill it! The sword, Renzy!”
“Oh, Christ, Bush—I can’t do that. I work for Hadrian, and I’ll go on working for him until I can see my way clear to blow my own brains out, which I hope is soon. I intend to do it the very minute he takes the hex off my sister.”
Carl’s ragged mind reeled. He caught a vague image of Renzy’s once-beautiful sister, Diana, languishing in a mental institution, a prisoner behind blank walls. A prisoner like Ianthe Pauling’s brother. Did this mean... ? He struggled again, twisting and writhing, but a clawed hand settled over his head and drew him in by the hair.
“Too bad about Hippo, huh?” Renzy went on, glancing down at Stu’s corpse, which had by now ceased its twitching and throbbing. “The poor son of a bitch never really got it together, did he? Classic case of wanting more than you’re capable of getting. Still, he had his good points, and he deserved better than what he got. I hope he’s in a better place, I really do.”
Renzy’s voice took on an echolike quality. Carl’s consciousness began to drift through a field of ripples and blurs, as though he had entered another dream. The creature that held him bit into his flesh again, and against the veil of pain Carl imagined that he could actually see Renzy’s words.
“I suppose I owe you some kind of explanation,” Renzy went on, “considering what we’ve been to each other. We were like goddamn brothers, weren’t we? You, me and Hippo—the Triumvirate.”
Carl saw three sub-teenaged boys in a distant playground on a summer afternoon, chasing a bouncing basketball around a hoop that had no net.
Their laughter, their shouts, the smell of their boyish sweat were as real as the razored teeth that were tearing into his shoulder.
“Shit, if anyone had ever told us it would end like this,” said Renzy, “we would’ve laughed them right out of the state! But anyway, Bush, this whole sorry mess was cast in concrete long before you and I were ever born. Know why? Because my mother was the granddaughter of Tristan Whiteleather.”
Mitch Nistler left his little house for the last time, carrying the Winchester that had lain next to the corpse of Chester Klundt. He knew vaguely that he must go to Whiteleather Place, but he did not know why. Neither could he have explained why he was taking along the shotgun. He knew only that he was doing the right thing, that the magic in the air was about to resolve the anarchy that had ruled his life for so long. He got into his El Camino, started it, and drove away into the rainy night.
Renzy’s words seared Carl’s spirit as the Giver’s teeth seared his flesh, an exquisite garnishment to the physical torment. The words became clear images, a mental cinema of faces and movement, reality. Carl saw the unfortunate Ted Dawkins, a relentlessly ambitious man who had inherited the curse of the Whiteleathers in taking old Tristan’s granddaughter, Alita, to wife.
“It was like a bargain,” narrated Renzy, giggling madly now and then. “You marry a Whiteleather, you serve Hadrian Craslowe—know what I mean? Well, Mom and Dad got pretty good at it—doing Hadrian’s magic, that is. They got rich—which was part of the bargain—became pillars of the community, respected and loved by everybody in town. My old man was happier than a pig in shit, had everything he’d evei wanted. At least for a while. The problem was that the other part of the bargain wasn’t so rosy: They had to find somebody to sire the offspring of the Giver of Dreams, along with a suitable mother for it. As if that wasn’t enough, they had to find someone who could become its manciple, its steward.”