The Gathering Dark Part 26

"All right. Now we will see what we can do," Kuromaku said.

He had thought, all along, that the unique nature of his species, the command of his molecular structure, might allow him to somehow slip through or even force a tear in the fabric of the thing. Barring that, it had occurred to him that they might try to ram the Volkswagen through it. Anything. They would try anything.

Yet even as he thought this, Sophie began to scream.

"No! No, d.a.m.n you, no!" The words were French, but the agony in her voice would have come through in any language. Her anguish was a language all its own.

At first Kuromaku had no idea what was wrong with her. He grabbed her by the shoulders, tried to talk to her, to get her to look at him, but then he realized that she was staring at the barrier, at the manifestation of magick that had torn them away from their world.

There were shapes beyond the barrier. Strange geometry. The static was resolving itself into something else. It took the ancient vampire warrior a moment to confirm his worst fear.

A road was appearing in front of them. A road that led up a steep hill to the top of a plateau, where a city of whitewashed buildings and church steeples overlooked the dusty plains. The architecture was Spanish. Another piece of the old world patched together in the h.e.l.lish puzzle being built in this one.

"No, no, no!" Sophie roared, screaming at the city that resolved itself in their path. "What do we do now?" she cried, turning to Kuromaku, pale and quivering. "What do we do?"

He grabbed her elbow and propelled her back toward the Volkswagen, where Antoinette sat staring out the window at the Spanish city on the plateau.

"We hurry," Kuromaku told Sophie as he got her into the car and then climbed in after her. "We move as fast as we can and we get to the other side of this town."

"What if it doesn't end there? What if we can never reach the edge in time?" she asked as she started the engine, her voice a frightened rasp.

Kuromaku did not turn toward her and he did not respond. The words he had in mind would not have comforted her. For there was only one answer, really. If they could never manage to reach the end before another city appeared, then eventually there would be no world to go back home to.

The tires squealed as they tore off up the winding road toward the city high above. The night sky in this new landscape had only just begun to turn orange and there were people on the streets, panicked faces turned to the sky in terror.

Here, the horror was just beginning.

17.

Agamemnon stood at his usual post in front of the door to The Voodoo Lounge. An old tune by Blues Traveler leaked from the club out onto the street, but there was n.o.body there to hear it, no one to be drawn into the place by the lure of the music. In all the time he had worked the door, deciding who could enter The Voodoo Lounge, and removing those whose time it was to leave, Agamemnon had never seen the street so quiet.

No, he thought. It isn't just the street. It's the city. The whole d.a.m.n world, for that matter. It isn't just the street. It's the city. The whole d.a.m.n world, for that matter.

The enormous man felt a twist of something in his gut, a feeling so unfamiliar he didn't even know if he could call it fear. New York City still gleamed with neon life, the trains still ran underground-he could hear them screaming up at him through gratings in the sidewalk-and there were still cabs and cars out on the street. Yet, though it was a beautiful night, he had seen very few people walking. Many stores and restaurants had shuttered early, their windows dark.

Still, Agamemnon raised his chin and kept his arms crossed. He had a job to do. Despite the quiet of the streets, there were plenty of people jammed into The Voodoo Lounge. Regulars, mostly, looking for company, frightened to face the uncertainty of the world alone. All over the city, Agamemnon figured people were glued to their television sets, glancing warily out their windows from time to time, waiting to see what was going to happen next. Waiting to find out if they needed to run.

Or if there was anywhere left to run to.

The crowd of regulars inside The Voodoo Lounge was uncharacteristically quiet. Even the music was turned down lower than usual, on account of the TV set behind the bar being turned up. It did not matter what channel was on now. It was not just the news channels anymore . . . with the possible exception of the kids' shows, every single station had coverage of the crisis.

In front of the door, out on the sidewalk, Agamemnon tried not to listen, tried to let the noise of the city and the low music from the club drown it out. But the city was too f.u.c.king quiet. New York City had fallen into a hush, as if the five boroughs were holding their collective breath.

"Hey."

Panic shot through him and Agamemnon clapped a hand to his chest, making a fist with the other one as he whirled around to find his boss, Cole Bradenton, standing behind him. Bradenton raised both hands in surrender.

"Whoa, relax, man."

"What's wrong with you, Cole, sneaking up on me like that?" Agamemnon snapped. He sniffed, glancing at the sidewalk, embarra.s.sed that he had been so easily spooked. "Made me jump out of my skin."

"I'm sorry. Really."

The sincerity in Bradenton's voice was unsettling. Agamemnon glanced up at his friend and employer and saw that Bradenton's face seemed even thinner than usual, and the Chinese dragon tattooed on the man's throat undulated as Bradenton swallowed several times in quick succession.

"What is it?" Agamemnon asked.

"Maybe you oughta come in now. We've got all the customers we're going to get tonight," Bradenton told him.

For a long moment Agamemnon glanced along the quiet street and the neon skyline above. Truth was, he would rather have stayed out here. As unnerving as the desolation was, it was better than having to look into the anxious faces of the club's patrons. But when Bradenton reached up to put a hand on his arm, the ma.s.sive bouncer reached up to touch the scar on his face-for some reason it ached today-and turned to follow him back inside.

The regulars gathered within all had drinks in their hands or on the bar in front of them. Some of them-screw the ordinance-were smoking cigarettes as they pressed into the crowd cl.u.s.tered together so that they could see the television. Someone probably should have shut off the music-n.o.body was paying attention to it and they were all straining to hear the TV-but apparently they were so wrapped up in it, none of them had thought of it yet.

The television mounted above the bar showed a series of images that Agamemnon had trouble making sense of. Paris. The Eiffel Tower. File footage of people walking along the Seine on a warm, sunny day. And then images of armed soldiers and military vehicles lined in front of one of those huge walls that had blocked off the outside world from the cities and towns that had gone missing. Slushwalls Slushwalls, Agamemnon had named them, though he kept the word mainly to himself. They looked like the gray, filthy slush on the sidewalk after a New York snowstorm. But you could sort of see through them, like they were a veil or something, except it never seemed real, what you saw on the other side, because it looked like there was just nothing at all.

Nothing at all.

Like whatever had been there really was gone, the way the news anchors were all saying.

Agamemnon frowned as new images appeared on screen, video clips of other slushwalls and other cities. They showed the Kremlin in Moscow. A minute later, he saw the Eiffel Tower again. The reporters and a.n.a.lysts and U.N. spokespeople were yammering on about various efforts being made to figure out what was going on, but none of them seemed to really be talking about what the latest news was, what these images were.

A shiver went through him. Agamemnon hated contacts, hated gla.s.ses, and wasn't about to have some f.u.c.king doctor take lasers to his eyes. The net result of this was that he had to squint to read the words scrolling across the bottom of the screen on the news ticker. That's where he saw it.

Paris and Moscow latest cities to go missing.

Agamemnon took a step backward and ran his huge hand over the smoothness of his bald head. He felt warm, clammy, though it was cool outside.

How can that be? Paris and Moscow? His mind was reeling. Most of the other places that had been taken so far were pretty small potatoes. Salzburg, Austria, had been the biggest city to disappear, the others mainly out-of-the-way cities or small villages. His mind was reeling. Most of the other places that had been taken so far were pretty small potatoes. Salzburg, Austria, had been the biggest city to disappear, the others mainly out-of-the-way cities or small villages.

"Jesus," Agamemnon whispered. He glanced around for Bradenton and spotted the harsh-looking man with his arm around Maggie Gross, a fortyish barfly who spent most of her nights in the Lounge looking for love and only getting lost. Bradenton had Maggie pulled tight to his side and the woman leaned on him as though without him she would fall forever.

"Cole?" Agamemnon began.

Bradenton glanced over his shoulder.

"Did you try calling Octavian? I know what he said, but-"

"I left a couple of messages," Bradenton replied. "He's . . . there's no answer."

Agamemnon put his hand on the back of his neck as though that might cool him down. Every fiber of his being screamed for him to do something, to take some kind of action, but what the h.e.l.l could he do that other people couldn't? It frustrated him, knowing he had to wait it out just like the whisky-and-beer-stinking patrons who were crowded around the bar.

He and Bradenton had seen crazy s.h.i.t before. Octavian had helped them out of a couple of jams. Terrified the h.e.l.l out of him, but now it looked like those incidents had been small potatoes.

A lull had come between songs on the sound system. He knew the rotation by heart at this point. The Robert Johnson song that had been playing would be followed in a couple of seconds by cla.s.sic ZZ Top. It was that kind of bar. But this time, in the pause between tunes, in that breath-holding moment, Agamemnon heard the crack of wood behind him. He turned, frowning, looking toward the booths at the back of the bar. n.o.body was back there. The place was empty.

For a moment his eyes lingered on the shadowed booths and he remembered the last time Peter Octavian had been in. Agamemnon and Bradenton hadn't had any idea that the Mister Nowhere freak was a demon, but they knew something freaky was going on. Octavian had saved some lives, killed the demon, made a h.e.l.l of a mess of the floor. Not for the first time, Agamemnon wondered how that demon had managed to keep all those people inside of it. Now he realized that maybe they had not been inside it all along.

Maybe the demon's gullet had been a kind of door.

By killing the thing, Octavian had shut the door, but everything that was going on in the world made Agamemnon wonder now what was on the other side.

A chill went up his back and Agamemnon looked back at the front of the bar, where something moved past the windows in the dark. The door was closed, but unlocked. Without him standing guard, anybody could walk right in.

Suddenly overcome with alarm, a tremor of instinct in the back of his mind, Agamemnon went to the door and pushed it open. He stood for a long moment on the sidewalk. There was nothing at all out there, the city was still quiet, silent as the dead. But there was a kind of buzzing in the back of his head, a sense of peril that he had learned to trust over the years. This wasn't the first time Agamemnon had had an instinct about something. That demon, Mister Nowhere . . . he'd made the huge man's head buzz like this too.

Somewhere far off a dog began to bark. The night wind blew cool across Agamemnon's face, but now there was a stink on it, a stench that was not wafting up from the subway tunnels but coming across the city from somewhere else. More dogs began to bark, a whole chorus of them joining in with the first, and then it was like every dog in the city had gotten p.i.s.sed off all at once.

Police sirens started to wail, a.s.saulting the darkness. Close by there was a shattering of gla.s.s and a woman screamed, and then an alarm began to peal. A clang of metal came from off to Agamemnon's right and he looked over to see one of the iron gratings in the sidewalk jump in its frame as though it had been struck from below.

Back in The Voodoo Lounge, Cole Bradenton swore loudly and people started to mutter in fright. It took Agamemnon only a second to realize what had upset them. He could not hear the droning of the television news anchors anymore. The TV signal was dead.

The sirens came closer. The dogs barked louder. Across the street, Agamemnon was sure he saw things moving in the darkness.

Above, the sky had begun to turn orange.

All of his fear disappeared. Agamemnon rose up to his full height, muscles rippling in his arms and back. He withdrew into The Voodoo Lounge, shut and locked the door.

Then he waited. This was his job, after all.

n.o.body and nothing got through this door unless it was through him.

n.o.body and nothing.

In the middle of the bullring in Ronda, Peter shouted a curse in Greek and stared upward. The moment of their arrival here there had still been a glimmer of pinp.r.i.c.k stars, a layer of the real world beyond the filthy orange sky in this twisted dimension. Now that was gone and only the hideous, rotten light remained. The air tasted differently and there was a rank odor that he had not scented in Wickham. Whatever dimension the Tatterdemalion had dragged these cities to, it was becoming more h.e.l.lish with each pa.s.sing moment.

"Peter!" Allison snapped. "In the stands!"

Octavian spun, studying the shifting shadows of the seating galleries that circled the bullring. Almost as though sparked by his scrutiny, the hidden corners became suddenly alive with motion. Like swarming insects, Whispers began to scramble down over the seats to leap over the low walls and into the bullring. Many of them crouched on the walls, tendril-tongues jutting out from beneath their eerily featureless faces, their indigo carapaces gleaming a hideous bruise-purple in the deep orange light.

"Enough of this," Peter muttered to himself. He had had his fill of these hard-sh.e.l.led, vicious demons in Wickham.

Allison stood ready to fight. Keomany's eyelids fluttered as she reached out, trying to touch the spirit of the world from which they had just been removed.

"Buy us a minute!" he instructed Allison.

He raced to Keomany and put a hand on her shoulder. She hissed a breath in through her teeth and her lids opened, brown eyes the color of pennies in the tainted light.

"I can feel her," Keomany said.

Peter did not have to ask who she meant. Keomany was talking about Gaea, the G.o.ddess spirit of nature, whom the earthwitches worshipped. He nodded.

"Let's do this. Just like in Wickham."

Allison grunted, drawing his attention. Peter glanced over and saw that the Whispers had reached her. But then it was not Allison anymore. She had morphed in a single eyeblink into an enormous Bengal tiger. The tiger's huge paws lashed out and she began to tear the Whispers apart.

But she could not stop them all.

Magick like rage blossomed in Peter's left hand, a crackling sphere of green fire. It shot from his palm and enveloped five of the Whispers in a moment, incinerating them where they stood. The others hesitated, and Allison launched herself at them, ripping with claws and jagged teeth.

"Now," Keomany rasped.

Peter turned to find that she had thrown her head back, her hair flying out behind her as if blown by some unseen wind. The earthwitch was beautiful, stunning in her power. The ground beneath their feet trembled and fissures split the earth. Tree roots pushed from the soil, shooting upward to impale Whispers, twining in the air and reaching out to crush other demons in their grasp.

"Gaea!" Keomany cried, the word tearing from her throat as though she were speaking to a lover in the throes of pa.s.sion.

Whispering words he had learned in h.e.l.l, Peter held out his hands to either side and a web of pure golden light burst into being between his palms, stretching from one to the other. The earth beneath Keomany's feet blossomed with greenery and bright flowers that had not been there a moment ago. Without breaking the circuit of magick between his hands, Peter reached down and touched a finger to the petals of a gentle lily.

The Whispers hissed loudly and all of them froze as that golden light shot straight into the sky from the open petals of that lily. Keomany and Peter stood on either side of the flower and both of them gazed upward, where a hole had been torn in the sky, revealing black night and starlit heavens beyond.

"Allison!" Peter shouted. "Come closer."

With a rumbling growl the tiger leaped nearer to the golden light, which began to spread, the dimension rip around them growing wider. The Whispers were not put off, however. It was perhaps four in the morning in Spain and dawn still a ways off. The demons danced around them, tendrils darting from beneath their face-sh.e.l.ls. With a loud hiss they began to attack again.

Allison tore them apart. Peter was in awe of her fury and her bloodl.u.s.t. The rage that burned in her was unlike anything he had ever seen, and he knew that she must have made the perfect predator for the U.N.

A spasm of pain racked his body and he groaned. The magick that coursed through him began to falter.

"What is it?" Keomany asked, her legs now twined with vines that had grown up from the ground. "Are you hurt?"

Ebony talons clacking together, a Whisper leaped over lashing tree branches at her. Peter felt suddenly weak, barely able to keep the magick going that was ripping at the dimension tear, opening it wider, trying to drag Ronda back to the world where it belonged. He stretched out a hand and a spark of blue light leaped from his fingers ineffectually.

Keomany whipped toward the Whisper, screaming at it in defiance. From the broadening ring of earth-sky above came a bolt of lightning that struck the demon. It sizzled and charred, withering to little more than ash in an instant.

"f.u.c.k off," Keomany snarled at it. Then she turned to Peter. "What's wrong? I can feel you faltering."

Octavian gritted his teeth, angry with himself and filled with hatred for the Tatterdemalion, the creature responsible for all of this. Allison continued to shatter the body-sh.e.l.ls of Whispers, to snap them in half, to tear them apart. The bullring was strewn with their remains. Only a handful of the things remained alive, but Peter knew there would be many more where these had come from.

"Opening the portal that got us here cost me a lot," he reluctantly admitted, even as he reached deeper within himself, tapping into his darkest emotions. There was an undercurrent of cruelty in all of the magick he knew, which was what made it so unlike earthcraft. Now he touched it, and summoned it into his grasp in a way he had not done since his time in h.e.l.l. With a snarl that surprised him, Peter spat the words to a spell that he had learned, but never recited before.

Green light spilled out of his mouth and nostrils, filling him up so completely that he thought he would vomit magick. It emanated from his pores, causing his skin to glow green. His vision shifted and he could see the orange sky no longer-everything he saw now was a bright, vibrant green, and he knew that his eyes must be glowing with the dark sorcery he had woven into himself.

Keomany pointed across the bullring and vines shot from the earth to lash at a pair of Whispers that had foolishly thought to escape her. Now she turned, saw Peter, and her mouth gaped, her eyes widening.

"Peter . . . what . . ." She could not get the question out.

Nausea roiled in him. His skin felt as if it was on fire, his muscles taut as he began to rise off the ground. The few remaining Whispers let out a low, keening whistle he had not heard from the monsters before, and they turned and began to run. Peter let them go. The huge tiger did not bother to chase them either, turning now to stare at him even as Allison's body shifted and contorted until she wore her human face again.

"I needed more power," he said, his voice echoing strangely in his own ears. "Do you think sorcery comes from within the mage? Some does, I suppose, but not all. Not most." His eyes shifted toward Keomany. "Like your earthcraft, Keomany, my magick comes from elsewhere. I use it only for the best purposes, but I summon it from dark places. From the shadows."

The golden light that burned upward from the lily that had grown near Keomany remained untinged by the humming verdant power that now crackled around Peter, but the tear they had made in this dark dimension grew no larger. They had punctured it, returned a few square yards of this city back to the Spanish countryside it had been gouged from. No more.

"This thing . . . this Tatterdemalion, whatever power it is that wore those rags in Wickham . . . this place belongs to that ent.i.ty. We can barely steal back this bullring, never mind an entire city . . . never mind all the cities it has stolen."