The Croning Part 16

Don was stricken, although he mastered the impulse to flee blindly through the twisting caverns, or fall upon his knees and gibber like an ape. It was a close matter. He wasn't prepared as Mich.e.l.le would've been-his job didn't ordinarily involve unearthing scenes of primitive bloodshed. He was no anthropologist or archeologist trained and hardened to scenes of ritual atrocity and pagan strangeness.

Even as he observed, the hole in the ziggurat dilated, rapidly expanding to the diameter of a bowling ball, then a hula hoop, and it emitted an icy, metallic keening. His flesh tingled. Blood trickled from his nose and the droplets undulated in a stream of globules that were sucked into the hole. His nipples stiffened, as did his p.e.n.i.s, and his body verged upon weightlessness. He said, "Dear G.o.d. Dear G.o.d. This is unbelievable."

"Behold the portal. To be taken through it is to be carried to the home of The Children of Old Leech, chief among the Dark Ones who serve vast blind things in the lightless wastes where mortal physics collapse into nonsense. Perhaps you'll travel unto Old Leech himself. Were I not such a coward..."

"Cowardice pleases them just the same as devotion," Connor Wolverton said. He emerged from the cover of a stalagmite, and bowed slightly. His robes were of a magnificent red silk embroidered with the broken ring in rusty black. He wore many rings set with black gemstones. His eyes were black as the gemstones. "Cowardice tastes like fear, and they enjoy the taste of fear very much. Eh, Barry?"

"Come away from there. The distortions in the time stream are a wee bit dangerous. Hate to see you get fused with your geriatric self, or your infant self. Be awkward to explain the second head at board meetings." Rourke glided across the ground and steered Don away from the yawning black hole that was a deeper, darker mirror of the pit in the floor. He brought Don near the altar slab where Wolverton waited, hands folded in the sleeves of his robes.

Connor Wolverton said, "Miller, excellent to see you again so soon! I feared those vile government chaps would spirit you away from my demesne; a tragic embarra.s.sment. Every so often intrepid do-gooders in the various world intelligence agencies slip their leashes and come sniffing around our business. Seldom does it prove more than an inconvenience. Let not your heart be troubled; those dastards are paying for their temerity as we speak. Their suffering shall last for decades. Those photographic plates you received in the mail? That material is brain-matter rendered pliable by the unspeakable technology of our friends on the other side of the abyssal gulf."

"That's twice," Rourke said to Don. "Twice the Children have interceded on your behalf. You are blessed, or cursed, depending upon your perspective." He laughed, a brittle, humorless laugh, and Don guessed that the man was abjectly terrified of Wolverton.

Probably a grand Pooh-Bah of this cult. I wager he's well aware that man among men Barry Rourke is getting cold feet on this devil worshipping business. Don wasn't sure what to make of this. He filed it away while another part of his brain resisted the siren song of the black portal, the urge to run toward it and hurl himself through. The hole could easily accommodate a man walking upright and it writhed and flickered like black fire.

"Indeed," Wolverton said. "The last time you were here was in the hands of certain loyal and capable servants. I never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Kinder. A shame. His reputation as acolyte of the dread mysteries was impressive. That worthy bore you here because you were asking questions about your wife, meddling, etcetera, etcetera. Kinder was convinced the Children desired blood sacrifices, that he was bound to be rewarded for slaughtering an interloper. He underestimated our masters, the scope of their imagination, the nadir of their depravity and jealousy in regard to unholy prerogatives. In abducting you he acted impulsively and without sanction. Much like the tragic fate of agents Dart and Claxton, for that transgression, poor Kinder and his merry men suffered a thousand-thousand deaths in a pit that Dante couldn't have imagined in a dozen lifetimes."

Don, mesmerized by the keening of the ziggurat, marshaled the wit to say, "I remember. I remember what they did. Scoundrels were going to split me wide open."

Wolverton and Rourke watched him, obviously waiting for him to connect the dots.

"Barry said I was spared a dreadful fate because of Mich.e.l.le."

"Yes," Wolverton said.

"Why is she so important? What do you want with her?"

"We want her to do as her ancestors for countless generations have done-to join us, the select few, the elite. To serve the Great Dark."

"To become like Burton, you mean." Don visualized the pilot's grotesque smile, the skins at Wolverton's mansion, and thought of beautiful, vibrant Mich.e.l.le gone chalky as a corpse, her mouth too wide, her dark eyes glimmering with the evil joy of an alien mind. To break the spell, he slapped himself, hard, grimly satisfied at the jolt of pain and anger. He spat a gob of blood and watched it splatter on the rock floor, then bubble and curve toward the ziggurat, a trail of snail slime minus the snail.

"Still don't recognize him?" Rourke said. "Lupe Ramirez helped bring you to this very cave. Goes by Derek Burton these days when he's in town. They put new sp.a.w.n into fieldwork right away, while their perspective is still fresh. Or maybe the new sp.a.w.n volunteer."

"Best not to speculate," Wolverton said. "The man known as Burton, or Ramirez, repaid his debt to the great ones after a period of torment. He was absorbed unto the Plenum and reborn. He is at a middle instar of development-more than a man, and thus his need to wear the suit of flesh lest the sun scorch his viscid form- yet neither is he fully of the tribe.

"On the other hand, your wife is not destined to be co-opted as an immortal; not for a while. In the meantime, her talents as an indigenous native are valuable. She will keep her own flesh, as I have mine, most of her brain, as I have mine, and most of her essential humanity. It delights them to invest select humans with subtle enhancements; human ident.i.ty permits us to maintain our doubts and fears, our qualms. Our terror. She's invited to serve as I serve, and as Barry serves, and untold mult.i.tudes of others. We are watchers, liaisons."

"She's an anthropologist!" Rourke said, and chuckled. "Got to love the universe's sense of humor. The irony of it slays me. To have seen the look on her face when Kalamov pulled back the curtain on that 'lost tribe' she's hunted for years... Jane Goodall in h.e.l.l."

"The little people," Don said, trying valiantly not to weep. "You must be joking."

"She got the hollow Earth part right-just isn't Terra," Rourke said. "The Children of Old Leech dwell inside the cores of a cl.u.s.ter of dead worlds. These worlds are encased in a blood clot of darkness. Their Diaspora is far from here, beyond an immeasurable gulf between galaxies. A starless abyss. Yet their technology is so advanced it permits small numbers of them to slither across time and s.p.a.ce and punch into our lovely little blue sphere, and a thousand others like it. Yonder ziggurat is a portal, an end point of a tunnel. The life-sucking tendril that taps humanity's vein. Its activation occasionally causes quantum fluctuations in our reality. Say, a sinkhole that plunges to Jupiter; time distortions..."

Wolverton smiled with grim kindness. "No need to fret, Miller. By my reckoning the deed is done. Mich.e.l.le has either fulfilled her destiny and gone to visit the masters, or she's been destroyed. As for you... You're doubtless wondering why we brought you here. Barry, please be so good as to tell the man what's behind door number three."

Rourke nodded. He looked at Don. "The powers on high have invited you on an all-expenses-paid vacation to their domain. They could've sicced the Limbless Ones on you in your home, could've had you bundled to a neat little dolmen not five miles from your backyard. Yep, the Mocks didn't pick that land for the view or the green pastures. No portal in that dolmen, alas. More of a chute for live meat-"

"Barry, let's not traumatize him excessively, shall we? He's been a real sport."

"Mea culpa," Rourke said. "As I was saying, this is the kind of invitation very few receive. Make it easy on yourself. The devil only knows what will happen if you decline."

Don considered this for a few moments. Slowly, because of his divided attention, he said, "If these masters of yours are so powerful, why do they need human skin? Rather low-tech solution for infiltrating the ecosystem."

"To monitor an ant colony one inserts a probe," Wolverton said. "It's not a case of simply tearing off a man's skin and wearing it as a cloak. The process is one of grafting, of co-opting aspects of the central nervous system. This process also facilitates communication. I suspect the mechanisms in play are infinitely more sophisticated than our lunar rockets or deep sea vessels, or superconductors."

"Communication is a small piece of the whole deal," Rourke said. "Sol and Luna are too bright, the world too warm. The light isn't their favorite thing-"

"Barry, enough. They don't appreciate that kind of talk, do they?"

Rourke licked his lips, glancing around the cavern. He composed himself and continued dryly, "Get down to the nitty gritty, they want to scare the s.h.i.t out of us. Letting the mask slip and the zipper show in the costume is half the fun! Man, read your old-school fairy tales. Rumpelstiltskin has everything laid out if you squint at it right. That's the Bible on the Dark Ones. What they want, what they're like."

"What about Bronson Ford?" Don said. "Barry, is your kid an ET, or Satan sp.a.w.n? We had a great conversation at your house last weekend, Connor. Me and the kid yukked it up, big time. I suppose he was trying to clue me in on this whole scene. Too bad for me my memory is a sieve."

"He wasn't cluing you in, he was sucking your fear," Rourke said in a decidedly petulant tone. "He's got it in for you. He likes to watch you dance as the iron shoes heat up."

"It is a rare honor to speak with Him," Wolverton said, ignoring Rourke. "He is powerful among his kind and not given to conversation. It was he who commanded that you be brought here to this sacred nexus and given the opportunity to join our fraternity. Beyond that portal lies a vista of evil splendor. A new life. Go through the membrane and be with your sweet Mich.e.l.le in the dark. Be changed, and return as part of something much, much larger than one's self."

Without being aware of moving, Don stood fifteen or so feet from the ziggurat, Rourke at his side to steady and direct him. Wolverton remained behind, encircled by a ring of torches that spontaneously burst into flame and revealed more of the cavern-the vault of the ceiling raised still higher than the illumination. Ancient runes and alien carvings decorated the rough walls which were glaciated from eons of water drip and pierced by vermiculate openings. Some of the holes were sufficiently large to admit a small animal, others were fully cave entrances. Don recalled Ordbecker's comment: There's a honeycomb under this mountain.

Except, the honeycomb extended farther than under Mystery Mountain, didn't it? This suspicion was confirmed as the blackness of the ziggurat's hole glinted with specks of light, phosph.o.r.escent gases and clouds of nebula dust, and his breath billowed forth like frost.

The image rippled and the stars vanished and the veil parted with the soft, wet noise of a live birth. Black yolk sloshed in a minor flood down the foot of the ziggurat where it pooled and stank of offal and innards gone rank in heat. Gazing into the dripping hole was akin to gazing through a reversed telescope. Something large obstructed the throat of the tunnel between stars-a great, squat pillar the dimensions of an apartment building, or an aircraft conning tower, that quaked and quivered as only living flesh may do.

The being uttered a sibilant cry that echoed for miles and scratched at Don's mind, wheedling his name in an alien rebus of maggots and bones and a toothless maw drooling a slow waterfall of gore. The tongue of a colossal, putrefying worm murmured and cajoled and offered to enter his a.n.u.s and lodge in his cerebral cortex, to inject him with a love greater than the Milky Way. It promised to raise the rotting corpse of Jesus or one of a hundred saints, and make them dance for his pleasure. It sang.

Don's bladder failed. He took a knee upon the hard cold ground while corrupt whispers susserated in his head, and ghostly images of his naked wife, his crying children, a barking dog, lunatics in masks, and rivers of blood whirred past with the gut-churning intensity of a diabolical kaleidoscope. The accompanying sound effects stretched his sanity like a rubber band. Through this cacophony he heard Mich.e.l.le scream in mortal agony. A shrill, animal cry that terminated within moments.

Rourke leaned over him and took his hand to help him rise. "It's either this or get sliced in a blood ritual, Don old chum. Wish I could do more. Best get moving. They don't tolerate delays."

Don bared his teeth and clouted Rourke with the pointy stone his hand had closed upon as he knelt. Rourke's left eye rolled back in shock. His right eye deformed and collapsed as the edge of the rock squashed it into the socket. The man's blood fanned in a kite pattern toward the hole and the figure that awaited, and suddenly untethered from Euclidean principles, Rourke's feet drifted free of the floor and he rotated end over end and fell with lazy velocity through the opening. He dwindled, dwindled, and the hole irised shut leaving the bare, stony flank of the ziggurat, and the keening ceased upon that instant.

"My stars, Miller. You've got gumption, as the toothless set are wont to say. I like you more and more." Connor Wolverton laughed in genuine wonderment. He turned his head to the left and said, "Well, this has gone slightly pear-shaped, hmm? What shall we do with him?"

Ramirez (self-styled as Burton, apparently) detached from the shadows; a trapdoor spider emerging from its killing blind. His face had slipped nearly sideways and Don only recognized him by his pilot's jumpsuit. He waggled his overlong fingers at Don in greeting. "Oh, I'll think of something fun," he said through a mouth that opened vertically, and advanced, scuttling at terrific speed.

No wonder the man was careful to wear his helmet and walk in the shadows of the trees earlier today-these Dark Ones must fare quite poorly in direct sunlight. Don held on until the last second and then sprang forward and tried to crush his skull with the b.l.o.o.d.y rock. That didn't work.

Ramirez caught and embraced him. His breath was poisonous. His tongue lolled, fat and toadstool white, and glistening slime. As that horrid tongue wormed its way into Don's mouth and down his throat, Ramirez chortled. "We knew you'd refuse our offer. One Miller is the same as the next. Your stock never learns, never changes. Take a long look into the Dark, Donnie boy. I'll see you again in thirty years."

Don was paralyzed as the tongue bore deeper until it tickled his guts. During those moments of agony and fear he longed for death, at least unconsciousness, and was denied both. He felt every moment of exquisitely gruesome violation. The monster's tongue violently retracted with a spray of bile, and Don vomited and shrieked his outrage. Ramirez merely grinned with inhuman malignance and tossed him into the pit in the floor.

Long way down.

CHAPTER NINE.

The Croning.

(Now).

While Don lay semiconscious in the dark wood after fleeing whatever had emerged slothing and chuckling from the dolmen, he dreamed of choking on Ramirez's tongue; dreamed the brute tossed him into the pit in the cavern floor and Don hurtled formless and weightless, not toward a subterranean abyss or underground lake, but outward into the cosmos. He accelerated through star fields past the reach of the mighty Hubble Telescope. His astral projection zoomed toward a blot of pitch between glinting points of light and as he closed the blot spread in a vast, terrible stain to encompa.s.s the width and length of numerous solar systems; a small independent galaxy that seethed and undulated. The moving clot contained many dead, thin-sh.e.l.led worlds.

Within these hollow planets, far beneath barren surfaces, darkness reigned. Seas of warm blood filled the central caverns. The Children of Old Leech, whose native name was an unintelligible snarl in his mind, lived in the gory seas and writhed upon sh.o.r.es of diamond-hard bone and in millions of tunnels carved and inlaid with more bone harvested from a host of victims from ripe blue and green planets much like Terra.

The Children oozed and squirmed in noisome mounds, and even in the dream Don thanked G.o.d he only glimpsed impressions of them. For they were the stuff of nightmares; maggoty abominations possessed of incalculable and vile intellect that donned flesh and spines of men and beasts to shield themselves from the sun and enable themselves to walk upright instead of merely slithering.

Moments prior to waking, Don dreamed of falling back to Earth. He drifted, ghostly and unnoticed, through the living scene of a tale that would one day be scriven in children's books and made legendary.

The Dwarf arrived at court in the dead of night on the dark of the moon. Stunted and misshapen; protuberant of eye, hook-nosed, clothed in the mangy pelt of a wolf from the Black Forest, he hopped and trundled. His legs were deformed and he dragged a clubfoot. He sneered and snickered behind a greasy beard and mocked the soldiers who escorted him, heedless of their swords and ominous demeanor. Every one of them to the last man Jack would've gladly drowned the evil dwarf in a cistern, or cloven his pate with a swipe of a blade.

The Dwarf had come to the capital to claim his blood debt-the first-born son of the Queen herself. This in return for perpetrating the hoax that the Miller's Daughter could spin gold from flax. Of course, the lady had sought to renege upon the arrangement after she was made queen and became gravid with child. With diabolical perverseness, he agreed to rescind the deal if she could guess his name within a month. Thus, she'd dispatched spies, courtiers, and a.s.sa.s.sins to the four corners of the kingdom to learn the little brute's name whether it required cajoling, crookery, gold, or a pair of red-hot pokers. As the dark of the moon drew nigh, all reported failure, except for her best man, a wily stable boy and former lover she'd raised to the royal entourage upon her own ascension. He repaid her kindness with good news-he'd spied the little f.u.c.ker dancing around a bonfire in the mountains, cackling to a covey of witches and demons about how the Queen, dumb sow that she was, would never in million years guess the dwarf's name was Rumpelstiltskin. Etcetera, etcetera.

The royal guards brought R to the Queen's private antechamber. The chamber was dim and the Queen waited alone, garbed in her winter robes. She was pale from fear, her lips pressed into a grim line. They danced the dance that fairytales recounted for centuries afterward, although the coa.r.s.eness of the Dwarf's language as he mocked the Miller's Daughter pretending to royalty, and the bizarre references he made to diabolic compacts and Dark Ones who dwelt between the stars, were uniformly excised.

When the Queen finally summoned the courage to utter the creature's name, a marvelous, and frightening sequence of events transpired-most of which was also left upon the cutting room floor of children's literature.

First, the dim lamps guttered and nearly failed.

A throng of children entered the room via the main entrance, or crept from behind tapestries and clambered up through grates in the floor. Upon closer inspection these were not children, they shone with a sickly wet pallor of burrowing creatures and moved in a sinister and disjointed fashion. Grubs or worms with vestigial limbs and rudimentary visages. A pair of these abominations fell upon each guard. It was over quickly; cries throttled, the men were ragged from the room and back into the vents.

By the poor light Rumpelstiltskin doubled in size, then doubled again. His dwarfish proportions remained the same, but he towered as a goliath, fully the height of three big men. He laughed that the Queen's spy had indeed witnessed his ritual in the mountains. Rumpelstiltskin wasn't really his name, it was the name of some stupid dwarf he'd molested and skinned ages ago. Nonetheless, a deal was a deal. He grasped the Queen when she tried to flee and lifted her to his mouth. He crunched off her head.

When the Dwarf turned, his face was slick with blood, his expression ecstatic and enraged. The beard had thrown Don until that moment. Across time and s.p.a.ce and mutable reality, he recognized, as he always did, Bronson Ford's grin, his inscrutable hatred.

He awoke to weak sunlight streaming through the branches and the bitter taste of pine needles and bile. Thule raised his snout to sniff the air and grumbled. Don spent several minutes working with his cramped and knotted muscles and gathering the intestinal fort.i.tude to make it to his feet. Without his gla.s.ses, the world was blurry and strange. He recriminated himself for neglecting to carry the second pair-those were stashed snug in a drawer back at the house. If Mich.e.l.le had nagged him once, she'd nagged him a thousand times to keep the spares in his pocket. He leaned against the bole of a tree and composed himself, spending a few minutes squinting at the compa.s.s. The device seemed to be working again.

Don focused as best he could and took a heading. As he walked, grabbing limbs and shrubs for support, the pink and purple clouds that fogged his mind gradually dissipated and he had an a.n.a.logue to the reputed out-of-body experience so commonly reported across the world; he shook himself and emerged from the stupor that had coc.o.o.ned him for years, decades, the waking coma that had divided his personality and diminished him. He thought of that big scientist Cooye who died in a car wreck, the series of plates that allegedly detailed the event, how Ron Houghton had promised to have a buddy give them the once-over for authenticity. What happened to those d.a.m.ned things? What had become of Frick and Frack, the government agents?

After the horrors in the unknown caves of Mystery Mountain, Don had lost his mind completely, had withdrawn into a sh.e.l.l and submerged the atrocities in the primordial muck of his subconscious. Such trivialities as speculation about Frick and Frack, cryptic warnings and photographs no longer concerned him. He became mild and sedate, compelled solely by his research and an ever-strengthening devotion to his wife and children.

Mystery Mountain was a half-glimpsed story on late-night TV.

Yes, the company line went that Wolverton vanished in an unrelated hiking incident, while Dr. Noonan and several others were lost after falling into a sinkhole in the mountains. Don turned up disoriented and amnesiac, for the second time in his life, wandering the river valley near camp. Theory was methane or some other noxious gas damaged his brain. AstraCorp had plenty of money to bankroll any medical or legal cover-up that ensued. Don accepted what conciliatory company reps told him about his missing time; he accepted what Mich.e.l.le told him as well. He curdled and atrophied and became a mild, toothless old man who feared the night and suffered fugues and delusions for the rest of his life.

Barry Rourke had once told him the degradation of memory was a side-effect of exposure to the Dark. As he weaved through the woods, ragged and traumatized, Don figured the low-grade amnesia was also equal parts self-preservation. His consciousness had evaluated the threat posed by these affronts to sanity and decided to dim the lights and flip the sign to OUT OF SERVICE.

It had been more than the incident at Mystery Mountain. There were also the incidents in Mexico and at the Wolverton Mansion, and Lord knew where else. An entire reservoir of suppressed memories could easily await him, burbling and seething below the surface of his placid consciousness. There was, for one, the matter of Mich.e.l.le's accident in Siberia; the Jeep rollover that left her hospitalized in critical condition and scarred for life. He'd received the bad news shortly following his rescue from the wilds of the Olympics. They came to him while he was wrapped in an insulated blanket and sitting on the tailgate of a park service emergency vehicle, hands shaking so much he couldn't get the foam cup of cocoa to his lips.

The ranger who delivered the message was an older, laconic gentleman with no bedside manner whatsoever. The man grunted and smoothed the brim of his tall hat and said something along the lines of, Mr. Miller, your wife was in a car accident. The doctors said it's grim. Here's the number of the Consulate. Don was sufficiently traumatized from his adventures in the hills that the gravity of the message didn't really dawn on him until he awoke in the night, panicked and crying for Mich.e.l.le.

It was his turn to fly to her side. Strange, though, that even in the depths of his grief for her condition and numbed by the deluge of malign events, the sight of his wife lying inert at the heart of a shining white bed, her coc.o.o.ned form tangled in a skein of wires and pulleys awakened in him a momentary callousness, an instant of wary appraisal as of an animal approaching a watering hole on the savanna. For despite Mich.e.l.le's wounds, her fragile state and its trappings seemed almost contrived; props elaborately staged to create a particular atmosphere and to elicit unquestioning sympathy...to eclipse his rational thought and replace it with instinct. This moment of clarity was a spurt of ice water into his veins, then quickly gone as the clouds rolled in and left scant room for anything other than fear and mourning.

Pausing to catch his breath, Don patted the big dog. "Thule, my faithful friend, what do you suppose is happening in Turkey? What's happening to poor Holly?" He imagined unspeakable atrocities visited upon his daughter. Holly was fifty, the exact age Mich.e.l.le had been the year she received those permanently disfiguring marks. He had visions of cowled supplicants brandishing knives as they danced around a mighty bonfire while Holly writhed on an altar of obsidian. "There wasn't any d.a.m.ned truck crash in Siberia. My loving wife has lied to me since forever. They carved her with stone knives, flayed her alive."

Later, after returning to the U.S. and healing well enough to totter around on a cane, she refused to speak of anything that transpired during the journey across the taiga and into the mountains. She didn't write a report of any kind that he was aware of. The university must've gotten some valuable data as she was feted and promoted, albeit sans fanfare. Possibly this is what Frick and Frack meant when they said she was an "untouchable," a select member of the herd who trafficked with the Dark Ones, protected from interference by government agencies. Or, more likely, abetted by those agencies. The cow handing the butcher his knife and ap.r.o.n, as it were.

These many years after the fact of Mich.e.l.le's alleged accident, as he trundled half-blind through the brush, he revisited that theatre scene at the hospital, relived his instant of grim clarity that marionette strings extending from his back gleamed in his comatose wife's fist, that every step he'd taken since they met at that fateful art show in 1950 was the jig and jog of a dance she called with small twitches of those wires, that his future promised more of the same. His so-called future, his so-called past, were puppet shows.

Who pulls your strings, my dear?

Frick and Frack had tried to tell him. Wolverton and Rourke had also laid it all out, and still Don felt as if he was merely glimpsing the surface of a dense and convoluted pattern. If he stared long enough the fuzzy shapes would resolve into a nightmare image of sufficient potency to smash his mind completely. He suspected that the mult.i.tudinous designs, the layers and textures, really were minute oscillations of perfect, illimitable darkness. Neither light nor heat could withstand it; to gaze into that nullity and to comprehend its scope was to have one's humanity snuffed.

Only the inhuman thrived in out there in deep black.

Reality contracted, then dilated, rhythmically as a pulse. Don floated, a helmetless astronaut, across a landscape he no longer comprehended.

An alien sun swung low across the rim of the hills and the shadows glowed purple and red. Stars hung in a belt of crushed gla.s.s where the sky darkened from blue-white to seared iron. The house waited, cool and formless in the lee of the twin maples. Kurt and Argyle's vehicles were parked in the driveway. Shiny steel and gla.s.s curved backward into invisibility and already seemed well-maintained relics in a museum of humanity, ages after humanity had been blotted from existence. Don was a shambling wreck, but his brain was recording everything and executing a sequence of increasingly dire calculations.

Husks of leaves covered the gravel and m.u.f.fled the crunch of Don's footsteps as he approached the backdoor. His heart thumped in his ears. This place hadn't felt safe in the past, and now...He went through the door into the unknown, Thule at his heel.

The kitchen was a cave gallery suffused with the dim purple light.

Normal sounds were hushed or suspended entirely-the tip-tap of water dripping somewhere, the creaks and groans of subsidence, the cries of birds in the yard, all muted or absent. The atmosphere was gravid with the electricity of a building storm and he had the impression that the forces of darkness gathered around him.

Through this preternatural hush, a fly batted and whined against the window pane over the sink. The voices of a million doomed souls diminished to a strident drone as they gazed over a city skyline as doom slouched toward them from the depths of s.p.a.ce. Their ghostly faces were quite vivid to him until he blinked them away and went to the window and, after a moment's deliberation, crushed the trapped fly and ended a million miseries in one stroke.

"Why you, sweetheart?" he said to the smear on the gla.s.s. "Of all the primates on our wobbly ball of dirt, what is it about you Mocks anyway?" He drank water from the tap that went down like acid and looked around the place, ready for the next shoe to drop, the next sign, the arrival of whatever was surely descending upon him. And saw that the cellar door was ajar by three inches. He smiled grimly and walked over and pulled it wide open and stared through the threshold into the musty gloom and its mysteries.

"For the love of Christ, don't do it, Pop," Kurt said. He stood near the kitchen table, hair wild, eyes bulging, clothes in tatters as if he'd tumbled down the side of a mountain. He was covered in blood and dirt. His left arm dangled, broken. "Get the f.u.c.k away from that f.u.c.king door."

As Don glanced back at his son, he swayed a little, feeling the gravity well of the stairs dragging him toward a swan dive. He caught the frame and steadied himself, and took a breath. "You're alive. Where's Argyle?"

"Alive, yeah. Argyle's...Uncle's gone. The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds took him." Kurt went toward the pantry. He was missing a shoe and he left a b.l.o.o.d.y smear like the fly on the window.

Don longed to go to him, extend a comforting hand, but it was all he could do to grip the door frame and hold on for dear life as the proboscis of the cosmos sucked at him. "What happened out there?"

Kurt's shoulders. .h.i.tched as he laughed silently and took a slug from a bottle of sherry left over from the last dinner party. He gained control of himself with visible effort and said, "They came from inside the trees and took him. Argyle couldn't run, Dad. His hip. He didn't really try. Stood there waving his cane and shouting. I left him. f.u.c.kers didn't follow me. We paid the blood price for trespa.s.sing in their territory and that was it. If they were coming here it'd be curtains for us already." There were tears in his eyes and he took another huge gulp from the bottle. "Running won't help, anyway. I don't imagine there's any safety in town, or a bunker. Monsters go wherever monsters wanna go."

They came from inside the trees. Don had no trouble imagining the scene that must've transpired as Kurt and Argyle trudged through the forest, gradually noting the doors carved into the boles of the trees. Then, at a certain moment before sunset, those doors thrown wide and the occupants of the hollows spilling forth. As for monsters roaming w.i.l.l.y-nilly, he decided that probably wasn't quite correct. The Dark Ones and their servitors didn't enjoy the light of the sun. Their G.o.ds dwelt in pitch darkness. All of them waited for Sol to dim and Terra to cool and glaciate in its twilight. These were not omnipotent ent.i.ties, simply powerful ones. There was at least a sliver of hope for respite from their menace.

"I take it you didn't find Hank," Kurt said.

"He went into the dolmen. Begged him not to."

"Whatever's creeping around out there probably got him. Thought they were worms, even though that's impossible. Worms don't move so fast. Don't grow so big. Not even in the ocean." Kurt's expression was confused as his gaze focused on a distant vista. "There's doors in the wood. Everywhere."

"I know."

"We should do something."

"Of course."

"Call the cops, the FBI. Somebody."