by S. L. LUCK
The lowering of the Prime Minister’s head prompted Ada and Anabelle to do the same, but behind the dark lenses of Anabelle’s sunglasses, her eyes were everywhere but on the memorial. To her left, to her right, over the promenade fence and onto the depleted riverbed, she looked for the woman, but the area was teeming with demons that clouded her vision. Beside the Prime Minister, at Mayor Falconer’s feet, on the shoulders of every plain-clothed Mountie in and outside of the perimeter, malignants of all shapes and sizes lurked and scrabbled about like ghostly spiders on Anabelle’s unsolicited web. It was the greatest collection of evil she’d seen to date, no doubt because their scouts had delivered news of her power. With their many legs and their many arms and their many heads, the superior beasts wheeled around Anabelle, jabbing for possession, but her invisible breath stung them, and her clasped hands imperceptibly struck them until they fell still. Inside, her energy thrummed.
The crowd grumbled as a mob of opportunistic reporters seized the riverside pause and scurried in front of bawling children and furious parents. There was a flash of cameras and a thrust of outstretched microphones and a burst of pleading from overly made-up journalists for the Prime Minister to turn around. Such a fuss they made that Anabelle wondered which evil was worse. She was reflecting on the good fortune that Jessica Chung wasn’t among them when the Prime Minister touched her shoulder. He didn’t say anything but continued to stare straight ahead. Anabelle let his self-serving gesture continue until at last he tilted his head upward and blinked dramatically. His eyes were dry when he swung around.
“Over here! Prime Minister, over here!” came an immediate shout.
“Ms. Cheever!” came the second.
“Wave, Charlotte, wave!” said a mother who, not to be outsmarted by the aggressive press corps, carried her daughter over an unguarded stretch of fence, deep onto the desiccated bed of the Callingwood River. When the unsuspecting Prime Minister waved to the pig-tailed toddler in the mother’s victorious arms, a crush of parents hurried to the riverbed so their offspring, too, could see Canada’s leader. Bottoms were scooped over the promenade fence, more were maneuvered through gates further on, all for a glimpse of someone who would forget their faces before the hour was done.
With cameras recording his every movement, the Prime Minister’s manicured fingers swept out in benevolent greeting to the future voters. An aide tried to sway the tarrying leader back to the Mustang, and there was an overt showing of her watch before he acquiesced. Effecting a winning smile and a vote-grabbing wave, he finally turned.
Grateful the farce was almost over, Anabelle sighed and was about to return to her spot in the back of the Mustang when a gust of wind blasted over the riverbed. Yanked from the hands of children, a trio of balloons—red, yellow, white—were whipped upward where no amount of squealing could recover them. Collars were drawn up, and a great many eyes squinted against the wind that gusted here, there, this way, the other, so brutally violent that the realization came that not just the political affair was over but so was the parade.
A team of men hurried their leader into the SUV behind the Mustang while a lone agent, slanted against the gusts, offered his hand to Anabelle. A spike of wind forced his hand back. Again he reached for her and was not so much forced as ejected away from Anabelle. In the cruiser a few feet from the Prime Minister’s motorcade, Susan Cheever let out a squeak of fear. Out her open window, she reached for Anabelle and was caught by her seatbelt.
“Anabelle!” she screamed. “Anabelle!”
“It’s a goddamn tornado!” William cried from the backseat, pointing north to a spiraling column of black air rising from the adjacent marshland and advancing toward them.
He fumbled with his seatbelt, but Dan and Huxley were already out of the cruiser, steaming toward Anabelle. Once more, the wind lashed out. The locks on Dan’s cruiser depressed and, like a toy car, it was shoved out of the perimeter toward the last car in the Prime Minister’s motorcade, where it blocked the advancement of the parade. The cruiser touched the front bumper of the Suburban and came to a rest.
On the other side of the riverbed, the spinning column grew wide, spreading its deadly limbs outward while it drilled a path of destruction toward little pig-tailed Charlotte and the twenty-seven other families sidled next to her. Mothers and fathers and children screamed while, one by one, each vehicle in the Prime Minister’s motorcade sped away.
“Where is she? Where the hell is she?” Huxley whirled around.
Struggling against the gale, Dan worked a hand around Anabelle’s waist and tried to pull her back to his cruiser when Anabelle raised an arm and pointed across the river at the bottom of the column where a figure was materializing in the vortex: a little old lady with a wicker bag.
“Oh God! She’s gonna get killed!” shouted a man who was unable to look away during his sidewise scramble onto the back of an idling truck. “That old lady is done for!”
“What the hell?” Dan shouted, realizing for the first time how skeptical he’d been.
Following the direction of Anabelle’s arm, Huxley’s mouth fell open. “It can’t be!”
There was a mad clambering of parents bumping each other as they raced to get off the riverbed when young Charlotte’s mother suddenly stopped. From her feet to her knees to her hips to her teeth, the ground shook her body, shook her little girl. The other parents stopped shoving each other long enough to sense the terrible tremble rising in their own skin, in their own children, and their fear turned to outright terror.
Back on the promenade, there was not a single spectator. The idling floats succeeding the Prime Minister’s departed motorcade were now abandoned. Strollers and wheelchairs and blanket-strewn wagons deserted the sidewalks and now there were just Dan, Huxley, and Anabelle and Anabelle’s frantic parents trying to escape a car that was being battered by wind-swept banners and gale-extracted siding. One, two, three blasts of air corralled the occupants back toward the center of the river. The little old lady, who by all common sense should have been shucked into the swirling mass above her, bore the storm impassively and continued her purposeful stride in Anabelle’s direction, clutching her wicker bag with her two small fists against her stomach. All this Anabelle saw and more, so much more, for the tornado was not just a weather phenomenon but a cataclysm of evil housed within a towering, tempestuous demon.
As Sylvia stepped onto the opposite riverbank, a roar erupted from beyond the western bend in the river, and Anabelle knew with brutal certainty that the river would soon be dry no longer.
“S-she’s filling the river!” Anabelle stuttered to Huxley and Dan. “She’s going to drown them. We need to get them out!”
“Christ have mercy!” Dan groaned and made for the riverbed. Huxley rushed after him.
Give it to me, Pandora pressed onto the electrons around her in an attempt at atmospheric morse code.
Anabelle received the message and returned one of her own. Leave us alone.
Return what you’ve stolen, and I’ll go away, Pandora transmitted.
If it were as simple as giving the devil-thing her power back, Anabelle would have done it, but her parents had raised no idiot. First, she wasn’t about to leave herself vulnerable, and second, she didn’t believe the woman would go away if she did. No. The devil-thing would kill her, would kill others, and Anabelle was not about to allow that. Go away, Anabelle broadcasted back from the promenade.
Then the little old lady that was not an old lady dropped her wicker bag and a tendonous, many-tentacled creature issued from its opening. It waited at the old woman’s feet like an obedient pet. Meet my Dark Friend, Anabelle. His home was … lost. But you have space in there, don’t you? Plenty of room for two. If you don’t give me what you’ve taken from me, my Dark Friend is going to move in, and I don’t think you’ll like his baggage. Give me what’s mine, and we’ll go away. At this, the writhing creature at her feet rasped its approval.
No, Anabelle refused. Westward, there was a thunder
clap of something gushing in their direction and then they saw it: a wall of water five meters high raging toward the corralled children and the corralled parents and Huxley and Dan.
“Son of a bitch!” Dan howled, driving his body against the wind to push a father and the two children in his arms up the embankment. Behind him, Huxley dragged the pig-tailed Charlotte and her frantic mother toward the shore. Neither man was going to make it.
Last chance, Pandora intoned through Sylvia’s blackened mouth. The water rushed near; so near that the hopeless parents on the riverbed now closed their children’s eyes against the fate that was upon them. Resigning themselves to their doom, Dan and Huxley locked eyes in a last gesture of mutual respect. Then they braced themselves.
Anabelle thrust her arms outward, commanding every proton and electron as far as she could reach. With all her might, she steered them away from the shuddering parents, away from the trembling children, away from Huxley and Dan and up, up, up to Sylvia and the sky-thing that was Pandora. The old woman did not flinch. When the water hit, she drew it up into the twister and lashed spikes of rain onto their faces and bodies. The creature at Sylvia’s feet slithered up her leg and waited for instruction. Anabelle pushed, driving the outer bands of the vortex backward, more, more, until the people on the river bottom were freed of Pandora’s grip. Then they ran.
Pandora roared. Sylvia’s arm whipped sideways and the giant wire-framed turkey from the Garrett Grocery float went whizzing across the sky. Again Sylvia’s arm shot out. A tuba went by. Then two Canadian flags. A rainbow flag. An inflatable Air Canada airplane. A driverless tractor still attached to a hay wagon. Then a miniature hockey rink on a trailer. With Dan in the front and Huxley in the back, the terrified families were led back onto the promenade, where they bulleted toward their vehicles and drove away. The men returned to Anabelle just as the river filled.
“Holy God, look!” Huxley cried and pointed at the sky. There, a hundred feet above, was a moose, a beaver, and a bear making pies. With the lightness of a feather, the Cardinal family float barrelled toward Anabelle and Huxley, but Dan yanked them down just in time. The float crashed against the memorial.
“Give me back my power!” Pandora shrieked in a voice everyone could understand.
Something rolled against Anabelle’s foot, and when she looked down there was a World’s Best Grandma mug with a broken handle beside her shoe.
“Is that smoke?” Dan called through the furor.
He raised his nose to the air. Huxley and Anabelle did the same. The scent was unmistakable. Drifting from behind one of the promenade’s several art installations were the scents of cedar, sage, sweetgrass, and tobacco. Joined by the Elders, Dak, Wendy, Jesse, and Johnny helped the medicine forge its path.
Pandora howled as the medicine abraded her outer bands, then she thrust herself outward and it wasn’t just floats coming at them, but cars and eighteen wheelers and boats recently winterized.
“Give me my power!”
Anabelle pushed the onslaught back and countered with her own. One, two, ten light poles speared toward the little old lady. Pandora flicked them away and drove her Dark Friend at them. Anabelle crushed it mid-air. Whatever it was disintegrated in a flash of black blood and fell into the raging river.
From an alley between a bakery and an insurance brokerage, Father Pauliuk, Father Bonner, and Ed Norman emerged, riding a golf cart. Ed was driving while, reading from their Bibles, the priests performed their first major exorcism. Holy water was flung from the golf cart, and Anabelle propelled every drop across the river.
A shrill cry resounded throughout the sky. “Give me back my power! Give it to ME!” Then the bands of wind unfolded, lengthening into giant serpentine jaws that struck high out over the water, slashing at Anabelle. Smoke rose, holy water splashed, and the distant prayers and devotions of citizens of many faiths across the city united for a common purpose. Pandora squealed. One of her claws shot out, and when it drew back over the water, Ed Norman was no longer in the golf cart. He was sky-high in the grip of hell.
“Do something!” Huxley cried.
“Oh my God!” Dan gasped.
“Lord have mercy!” the priests pleaded in unison.
High above, with his stomach clamped tight and the soulless eyes of evil bearing down on him, Ed reached for the part of himself that still believed and found that—through his hiatus—the Unchanging remained unchanged. He looked down at the Fathers, and then his eyes swept skyward to where Bessie was waiting for him. Then, for the first time in many years, Ed Norman prayed.
There was a wail of pain, another and another. Efforts were doubled, tripled, and Anabelle converged all her strength, all her energy, every prayer, every plea into a great and singular core and thrust it at the beast. A stomach-emptying howl erupted over the city. Pandora’s limbs struck out, and one connected with Dan’s head. He crumpled to the ground beside Anabelle. Rushing to Dan, Huxley dodged Pandora’s strike. The next one sliced his shoulder.
Anabelle looked at the two men now collapsed at her feet, toward Dan’s cruiser where her parents were buried in wind-blown rubble, and up at Ed Norman’s strange grin as he mouthed something not to the devil-woman, but higher up to the sky. Anabelle drew power from the earth, from the sky, from the water, and fused it with her own.
Then Anabelle attacked.
41
Silence followed the thunderclap. The tornado that wasn’t a tornado dissipated and was swept away by an agreeable breeze, and when the first chirp of returning birdsong sounded over the river, Anabelle, exhausted, dropped beside the officer and the doctor and found that they were still breathing.
Huxley opened his eyes. Hearing the pitch of sirens in the distance, he clutched his bleeding shoulder and sat up. “You had all that in you?” he said.
Anabelle nodded. “Are you going to tell?”
“Hell, no. I know what you’re capable of. But just don’t use it on anyone else, okay? If you ever get mad at your boyfriend or something, don’t fry him. Promise me that.”
“I promise.”
Ambling over to Dan, Huxley winced, and a fresh gush of blood rippled down his fingers. Anabelle gasped, but Huxley waved her away. “I’ll be fine. Go check your parents. Go or I’ll buy a goddamn billboard with your face and your electric hands on it.” She hurried away.
Hearing her daughter shout her name, Susan Cheever called out from an opening in the rubble. A moment later, Dak, Jesse, and Johnny were at the cruiser with Anabelle, working to extricate her parents from beneath the towering pile while Nikonha and Father Bonner hurried to Huxley and Dan. The Elder touched Dan’s limp fingers as Father Bonner anointed the unconscious police chief’s forehead and beseeched heaven for a miracle. Father Pauliuk, meanwhile, fixed his eyes on the body of his old friend floating face down in the water.
42
It was a rare day when Jessica Chung was a welcome guest at Garrett General. On the third floor of the hospital, where Dan was recovering from a minor cervical fracture and a concussion, Jessica, in an over-sized sweater and jeans, carried a small vase of flowers past the nursing station and ignored the glares.
Since Dan saved her life, the epiphany of her behavior had come upon the reporter like an illness, and she knew it would take her a long time to recover. Restitution was the remedy, or so her therapist suggested, so here she was, paying respects to her new friend. She had dabbed a little perfume behind her ears, and this is what Dan smelled as she gently hugged him.
“I like the new you,” he told her.
“I like the new me, too,” she responded, blushing, and that was as long as they had together before Sarah and Jesse came in.
“You look like hell, boss,” Sarah smiled, giving a dutiful once-over to Jessica, who took the cue and stepped respectfully aside.
“How are you feeling?” Jesse asked.
Dan rubbed the skin on his wrist. “Alive. How’s your dad?”
“Running his ass off trying to keep the doomsda
yers away from the gates.”
“Come again?”
“That asshole who almost ran her over is out on bail. He’s got his Winnebago parked near the front gates, harassing people with flyers. Tannin’s Tornado, they’re calling the storm. There’s about seven of them shoving pictures of a sea monster in front of kids, telling them the monster is going to eat them if their parents don’t take them to church.” Jesse’s frustration came out in a long, lip-rumbling breath. “These idiots sleep all day in their parents’ basement, but they sure know how to hustle when they put their greasy little minds to it.”
“Are we doing anything about this?” Dan asked Sarah.
“The usual, but Roy’s also got a load of manure that’s being redirected as we speak.” Sarah gave Dan a sly grin.
“You’re going to be a great mother,” he told her.
They were enjoying the overdue pleasure of laughter when Huxley knocked on the door. “I was going to make a ward exception and blow an airhorn in here, but the nurses already changed you once, and I didn’t want to torture them again. How’s the head?”
Their eyes fell on the sling hanging from the doctor’s neck. In the days since he’d been stitched up by one of the newer surgeons at the hospital, he’d gotten used to his temporary limitation, but still his bandage seemed to glow against the dark red fabric of his sweater.
Dan said, “I’m feeling so good that I’m beginning to think the only reason you’re keeping me here is so I don’t go to Reno without you.”
Huxley laughed. “I don’t need two hands to take all your money in poker—but, no, it’s not me holding you here. Adhira tells me you haven’t gotten any smarter with that whack. She says you’ve been begging to be released?”