The Gathering Dark Part 5

An anger rose in her, doing combat with her fear. n.o.body had ever benefited from backing Keomany Shaw into a corner. It made her cunning and hard and stubborn. This was her town. Her parents were here somewhere. Her friends. It was her place. Her shoppe . . .

Keomany had reached the car. Whatever strength her anger had given her was not enough to overcome her fear. She'd leave, go back to the edge of town, and find a pay phone. h.e.l.l, chances were it wasn't the whole town anyway, just here. But the sky . . . the dirty orange color of the overcast sky was growing darker. She could drive to the police station. They'd think she was nuts for claiming to have had some kind of premonition, but something something was going on down on Currier Street. was going on down on Currier Street.

The shoppe . . .

Keomany glanced just once at Sweet Somethings. The shoppe was dark but she could see Paul Leroux behind the plate gla.s.s, staring out at her with wide eyes as though the sight of her terrified him, as though she were the thing that had tainted the world of Currier Street.

She saw him mouth her name.

Then Paul withdrew into the darkness of the shoppe and the rotten-pumpkin light that filtered from the sky-though not from any sun she'd ever seen-could not penetrate those shadows.

"f.u.c.k," she whispered.

Keomany glanced around at the other stores and restaurants, looked at the empty, parked cars, and stared carefully at the place where she had thought she had seen that slinking, jagged shadow thing. It has teeth. It has teeth. The words skittered across her mind. The words skittered across her mind. I don't think I saw them, but I felt them. I don't think I saw them, but I felt them.

The Kia beckoned to her from behind but she could not retreat into it. Not if Paul was inside the shoppe. He might have answers, and she wanted that, but the uglier half of that thought was that she might be the only chance he had of ever leaving Currier Street-or this infected version of it-again.

Holding her breath, she ran toward the shoppe.

The street was solid beneath her feet but everything else seemed completely surreal. A sound had begun to rasp across the sky as though the town of Wickham itself were breathing-like the distant rolling thunder of jet engines and yet somehow all around her head, whispering in her ears.

As Keomany reached the sidewalk, there came another fluid slice of darkness in the edges of her vision. She spun, heart thudding in her chest, to stare a moment at the entrance to the Currier Street Theater, where she thought she could see a kind of pus-yellow streak in the air as though the thing that had just ducked out of sight beneath the theater's marquee had left a trail in its wake.

Damp rot, she thought again. The whole street smelled of it, and it felt that way too, as though the world were becoming nothing more than the desiccated remains of reality.

The door of the shoppe was open perhaps two inches. As she reached for the k.n.o.b, a putrid wind blew and it swung further inward as though it were an invitation. The hand-carved wooden chimes struck one another with a sound more like brittle, hollowed bones. Keomany hesitated only a second, staring at her outstretched fingers, and then she shoved the door open the rest of the way.

It's my place, she thought. This is my place This is my place. And the thoughts made her mind skip like a stone across stagnant water to her own apartment, and then to her parents' home. Images of their faces swam up into her head like ghosts-an a.n.a.logy that made her stomach churn so badly she nearly threw up. But she saw them so clearly in her mind right then, her broad-shouldered dad with his hair prematurely white and the map of Ireland on his face and her tiny wisp of a mother with her perfect Cambodian features and silk black hair that made her look more like Keomany's sister.

In the foyer of the shoppe, she could feel the Kia parked back on the street tugging at her as though the little car had its own brand of magick. The safety of her parents was more important than whatever might happen to Sweet Somethings, or even to Paul . . . but Paul worked for her. He was her responsibility in a way. And after she'd seen his face, she couldn't just leave.

There was no sign of him as she entered the shoppe and rushed across the floor to peer behind the counter.

Her breathing was heavy and sounded too loud. The smell of chocolate that always hung in the air remained, yet it made her even more nauseous somehow. Keomany had remained silent save for small utterings of fear and astonishment. There had been dark things in motion out on the street, and in the back of her mind she had feared drawing their attention.

Now, though, she could remain silent no longer. She could see that everything was as she had left it, the shoppe clean and orderly, despite that its interior was only barely lit by the rotten pumpkin orange sunlight leeching through the display windows. But it was wrong. All wrong.

Her place had been marked by something just as surely as if a pack of wolves had broken in and p.i.s.sed all over the floor to tag their territory.

"Paul!"

Her gaze swung toward the door that led into the back room. She ran to it, her footfalls too loud now, echoing like her voice. A certainty grew in her that every step, every shout was a beacon to those jagged shadows flitting about outside but she called his name again as she ran to the door to the back. Beside it there was a double switch plate. Keomany switched on the lights for the front and the back room with one slip of her hand.

There was a spark and the sound of something sizzling for a second, then nothing. It surprised her not at all. Her throat was dry and yet her lips were salty and only as she ran her tongue over them did she realize that she was crying. One hand fluttered to her face and she smeared her tears across her cheeks.

"Oh my G.o.d," she whispered.

The taste of her own tears, that salt on her tongue, made it all real. She had known it was, of course, but the queer texture of the world had insinuated that it might all be some hallucination, some hyperreal dream. h.e.l.l, it had occurred to her that she might have fallen asleep at the wheel and died.

But no, this was not death. Not yet.

Then Keomany laughed, a lunatic chuckle that she had called upon G.o.d, now and back when she thought she was going to crash her car. There might be a G.o.d, she was willing to allow that. But she had dedicated her life since the age of sixteen to another worship entirely, to earth magick, to the G.o.ddess all around her.

But not here, Keomany thought with a chill. She's not here now, not in this place. Because it isn't natural at all. She's not here now, not in this place. Because it isn't natural at all.

"Paul!" she cried a third time and she stepped through the door to the back room and peered into the shifting darkness and again she froze. Any one of those shadows, black upon black, might have been one of the furtive shadow things she had seen out on the street.

She narrowed her gaze and bit her lip hard enough that she could taste the copper tang of her own blood. Like her tears, though, it crystallized the truth of her surroundings for her. Keomany took three more steps into the pitch black room but would go no further.

"Paul?" she asked, hesitant now.

His face loomed out of the darkness, pale as the moon.

"Keomany? Tell me it's you. Are you real?" he rasped in the tiniest little-boy voice.

Her tears. Her blood. Keomany felt the truth of it inside her just as she felt the filthiness of her surroundings on her skin, breathed it in through her nose with utter revulsion.

"Yes, Paul." What happened here? What's going on? Did I see What happened here? What's going on? Did I see . . . . . . things out there? things out there? She wanted to ask all of those questions but that was for later, in the car, after they'd picked up her parents and gotten to the police. She wanted to ask all of those questions but that was for later, in the car, after they'd picked up her parents and gotten to the police.

Not the Wickham police, she decided, but elsewhere. The next town. Or the one after that. Maybe even all the way to Montpelier.

"Come with me," Keomany told him, and she began to turn.

"No," Paul said curtly, little-boy voice turning shrill. "You stay."

It seemed as though the very air trapped her then, becoming like taffy, tugging at her arms and her hips and her legs. She was moving through something with substance that slowed her as she turned to look at him again, to see what the change in his voice had wrought in his expression. His face, however, was the same.

But it was only his face.

Keomany had moved to one side and let the light seep in from the front of the shoppe and that tainted illumination showed her what had become of Paul. His face was suspended in the air in the midst of the room upon the tip of a rancid, pitted thing like a tentacle the color of oxidized copper. How it spoke she did not know. It extended, this limb, back into the store room among shelves of hand-dipped chocolates and shipping materials, and now she could hear something thick and fat and wet sliding along the concrete floor and in her mind she recalled the image of a manatee she had seen at the New England Aquarium when she was a girl. Yet she knew that this thing, if she saw all of it, would be nothing like that. It would be worse than what she had already seen, the face and the putrescent limb and . . .

"Oh, you poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Keomany whispered to Paul.

She had taken in all of this in the tiniest fraction of a heartbeat and in the very next she saw the shadows deeper inside the room begin to unfold. They were sharp, those shadows, and they were coming for her.

Keomany screamed and stumbled, turned and fled back into the shoppe. Something hissed from behind the counter and she glimpsed other dark things rising back there. The smell inside Sweet Somethings had changed once more, the air now heavy with an acrid stench like burning rubber. With another small shriek she launched herself toward the front door and collided with a floor display unit of gla.s.s and metal candlesticks. Now she did not even have the luxury of screaming as she fell, the display crashing to the floor beside her with a clanging of metal and a spray of shattering gla.s.s.

Tiny pinp.r.i.c.ks of fear ran across her flesh like the legs of a thousand spiders. Keomany felt as though her throat was closing up and tears began to sting her eyes. Her hands lashed out to either side in an attempt to leverage herself up and shards of broken gla.s.s cut her. She looked back toward the store room and now she saw them far more clearly than she had before, as if they had gathered the darkness of the room to carve their own bodies out of those shadows.

The creatures were not black but the indigo of the midnight sky. Their near-skeletal bodies were covered in a strange armor plating like some insectoid carapace, their heads sheathed by the same chitinous material save for the long, whipping tendril that dangled from beneath each of those plated heads like some obscene and deadly rapier tongue. If they had faces under there, Keomany could not see them, and it was that more than anything else that snapped her from the paralysis of her terror and sent her scuttling backward, slicing her palms to ribbons on broken gla.s.s, toward the door.

"What the h.e.l.l are you?" Keomany cried as she finally spun onto her knees and launched herself to her feet.

The shadow things hissed in unison and her back felt exposed, a target simply waiting for the attack. In the s.p.a.ce between eyeblinks she imagined in excruciating detail the long, slender, blue-black talons of the things raking her back, slicing her throat, and ripping her chest open. She could feel the hunger in them, could sense their malign intentions, as though she was receiving those savage images of her own mutilation directly from their minds.

They came after her, then, scrambling and capering like monkeys, those hideous rapier tongues darting about as though they might reach for her, thrust their foul points into her flesh.

Keomany raced for the door.

It was closed.

She did not even slow down. When she reached the door, she thrust herself forward, pulling her legs up beneath her and crashing through the plate gla.s.s of the door, her mind consumed wholly with her terror and the thundering of her heart in her chest and the knowledge that if she did not escape these things she might end up like Paul.

In a tangle of limbs and shattered window she tumbled across the sidewalk and a sliver of a thought plunged into her brain, how the tinkle of broken gla.s.s upon the walk sounded like wind chimes. Then the display window of the store exploded outward and the shadow things began to leap out after her, crouching and dancing madly in a way that drove home her thought that they reminded her of monkeys.

But she was out of the shoppe now. Sweet Somethings was behind her. Paul was worse than dead and there was no way to know what had happened to anyone else. All she knew was that she had to get off Currier Street and she had not torn herself up crashing through that gla.s.s door to die here on the sidewalk or to have herself hollowed out and leave some demon behind wearing her face.

The shadow things came at her and Keomany was already in motion. She felt herself simply flow off the ground as though the sidewalk were helping her up. I am not going to die I am not going to die, she thought.

She ran for her car. The sky had darkened, that rotten pumpkin orange seeming to thicken the air, and she understood that whatever was going on here in Wickham, it had been a mistake for her to think that it had happened while she was away. It was happening right now, this moment, still going on, and whatever it was, she had drifted right into the middle of it.

Blood trickling from her hands and slipping like tears down her face where she had cut herself rolling in gla.s.s on the sidewalk, she reached into her pocket and grabbed her keys and raced for the little Kia. It seemed to call out to her, to beckon, to urge her on.

I'm not going to die, she told herself again.

Which was when strong indigo talons clamped on her shoulder from behind and others slashed at her legs and then one of them barreled into her from behind, clinging to her back and driving her down to the pavement again. Still no traffic on the street. Nothing moved except the shadow things and her . . . their victim. And she felt it then, the thing she had feared most of all, the thing that made hot, disgusting bile rage up the back of her throat.

Something sharp pushed into the flesh of her back, injecting itself beneath her skin, probing, and she thought of mosquitoes.

"No!" Keomany screamed, her face mashed against pavement. Then, more definitively: "No!"

All of this was unnatural. These things, demons, whatever they were . . . they were an abomination against nature, an atrocity perpetrated against the earth itself. All of this, the putrid orange sky, the fetid air, and the surreal texture of the world of Currier Street . . . it was all wrong, and yet beneath it she could feel the earth, the natural world she worshipped, bucking against it, fighting this cancer that was growing on its flesh.

She felt the thing's filthy proboscis under her skin and the weight of them on her, talons holding her down, cutting her, and a rage blossomed inside Keomany unlike anything she had ever felt before.

Her teeth bit down on her lower lip.

"Get . . . the f.u.c.k . . . off of me!" she shouted.

Then Keomany pushed pushed.

The pavement all around her shattered as tree roots thrust up from the earth and impaled the shadow things that were on top of her. Other roots twined around their legs and necks and hauled them down to the buckled road. Keomany heard their carapaces crack, saw the living roots slithering through wounds in their bodies like serpents in the bones of the dead, and she knew that it was her doing.

The natural world was striking back at these parasites upon its flesh, and yet it was more than that. It was her. She had summoned them. Even now she felt in the core of her, not in her heart but in her gut, that she was controlling each root as though they were her own fingers, extensions of her self.

Earthwitch, she thought giddily as she staggered to her feet, watching the roots tear the faceless, armored things apart.

"I'm an earthwitch!" she screamed at them, as though it meant anything at all to them.

Keomany had seen power in others who worshipped as she did, but she had never imagined this sort of power within herself. It was too much for her to make sense of all at once, not when she still had to get away from Currier Street alive, not when she had to make sense of what was happening here, of the evil that had infected her hometown, pervasive evil that was spreading like disease.

b.l.o.o.d.y and exhausted as she came down from the adrenaline rush of what had just happened, the earth magick that had just surged through her, she stumbled to the little Kia, her keys miraculously still clutched in her hand. Other shadow things were crawling out from beneath nearby cars and several were crouched in the doorway of The Lionheart Pub glaring at her, but they were slow to approach.

Behind her, seven or eight of the things lay dead or broken beneath the writhing roots that had erupted from the street. These things were evil and savage, but they were not irrational. This was a new thing, what she had just done, and they were hesitant to test its power.

Keomany s.n.a.t.c.hed at the door of the Kia, and a tiny shard of gla.s.s still stuck in her flesh sent a fresh jolt of pain through her. She practically fell into the driver's seat, thrust the key into the ignition, and turned it. In the moment before it caught, she was sure the engine would not start, but then it roared to life somehow louder than before, as if it felt the fear and rage and panic in her.

Then she was driving, tearing off down the street with the accelerator pinned, heart hammering in her chest. She could taste her own blood on her lips along with the horrid, syrupy air that blew through the window. She had to slow slightly to turn and her tires shrieked as she rounded the corner onto Briarwood Road. She sped up again and the sky began to change color, the rotten orange bleeding out of the air and sifting back to bright, perfect blue with just a few wisps of cloud. Her chest rose and fell rapidly and she realized for the first time that she was moaning to herself in a soft, keening wail with every breath.

Keomany looked in the rearview mirror and the sky was blue there as well. The intersection with Market Street was ahead and she could see cars going back and forth. Up ahead she saw a couple walking their dog. Quiet Al Pratt and his funny, quirky wife whose name Keomany could never remember. The dog was Brandy, though, she knew that.

The Kia coasted to a stop and then she pressed her foot down on the brake and kept it there as she bent over the steering wheel and let the tears come. Huge, racking sobs that shook her entire body.

A rap at the pa.s.senger's side window made her cry out and jump in her seat. She looked up to find Al Pratt staring at her with deep furrows of concern wrinkling his brow.

"Keomany," the man said, his voice m.u.f.fled by the closed window. "What's the matter? What's-" He faltered when he saw the cuts on her face, the blood on her clothes and on the steering wheel where her ravaged hands had smeared it. "Jesus G.o.d!"

But then Al Pratt's concern and his shock were drowned out by the abrupt intrusion of a police siren. Wickham was a small enough town that the sound was rare and both Keomany and Al-not to mention the man's wife and Brandy the dog-looked quickly up to see a police car tearing around the corner up at the intersection with Market Street. It roared down Briarwood Road toward Currier, and Keomany leaned out the window, craning her neck to see where it was going, frightened for whichever officer was inside that car.

The police car disappeared.

The air shimmered like the surface of a lake and the police car was swallowed up by it just as though it had crashed in the water. Reality wavered around the vehicle as it sped into nothingness, and in the folds and whorls of that fluctuation in the air she saw the putrid orange sky again. Just hints of it. But it was there.

"Holy s.h.i.t! Did you see that?" Al Pratt's wife shouted. "Al-Jesus, Al, did you see that?"

But Keomany was barely listening. She was staring, mouth open, heart hammering again. Her tears and her blood were drying on her face. I just came from there I just came from there, she thought. That's where I was. So everything in that direction, everything around Currier Street That's where I was. So everything in that direction, everything around Currier Street . . . . . .

"Oh, no," she whispered, reaching for her glove compartment, s.n.a.t.c.hing her cellular phone from it and punching in numbers. "No, no, no."

The sky was blue again. She had thought it was going to be okay. Something awful had touched Wickham, some evil she could not begin to understand, but she had for just a moment imagined that it could be fixed. There had been evil in the world before and there were ways to deal with it, and if none of those ways were effective, she would just take her parents and leave it all behind.

Keomany clapped the cell phone to her ear and closed her eyes and whispered prayers as it began to ring on the other end.

"G.o.ddess, please," she said. "Dad, pick it up. Pick up the-"

There was a click. A rasp of breath. Keomany felt relief wash through her body with such strength that it almost hurt. Her father was a lifelong smoker and you could always hear it in his voice, in his breathing, even in his sleep.

"Dad? Listen, Daddy, this is important. You've got to get out of town. Leave the house now but don't go through the center of-"

"h.e.l.lo, Miss Shaw."

A rasp of a voice, like distant thunder.

"It was nice to see you," said that voice that did not belong to her father. said that voice that did not belong to her father. "Come back soon." "Come back soon."

4.

The morning of May seventh was lovely in Paris, and yet cooler than those unfamiliar with the city might imagine. It would warm up later in the afternoon, but particularly in the long shadows of the narrow streets around Montmartre, the night's chill held on all through the early part of the day. Still, it was lovely in Paris in the spring. The city had a vigor and joy to it that was palpable, and all the trees and gardens were in bloom.

Kuromaku lived in Bordeaux in the south and had taken a train to Paris. He loved to travel by train so that he could watch the extraordinary French countryside pa.s.s outside the window, reminding him with every mile why he had chosen to settle here of all the places in the world a lonely wanderer might have come to rest.

He had arrived the previous day and spent the afternoon along the Seine as always, exploring yet another wing of the Louvre and then visiting the Notre Dame Cathedral to gaze up into the eyes of the gargoyles, searching for some trace of the dread they had once inspired. In the evening he had met with Sophie Duvic, an attractive young woman who had become his attorney when her father had pa.s.sed away the year before. Lawyer and client had dined in a tiny corner restaurant in the Latin Quarter and then strolled among the vibrant night life of the City of Lights.