Greely's Cove (43 page)

“He will be no problem whatsoever, of that I can assure you. Now, if you will please assist me...”

She withdrew from the pouch a small earthen dish, into which she poured something, and handed it to him. In the moonlight streaming through the windshield, Robbie saw that it contained a mossy wick that floated in what looked and smelled like animal fat.

“Kindly set that afire, if you please,” she instructed, and Robbie dug into his pockets for his butane lighter. He was about to flick the lighter when a torrent of psychic dread gushed over him, fluttering his heart and knotting his stomach. His hands began to shake, and his spine felt as though it had turned to mercury. Jhis was not Jeremy he felt, and neither was it the newborn. This was something more ancient, more powerful by far, a presence that had communed so often with Hell that it carried Satan’s stink. It was very close.

This was
Craslowe.

A muscle spasm caused Robbie’s thumb to tighten on the lighter, and the flame leapt upward from the tip, flooding the interior of the Jaguar with yellow light.

“Good heavens!” said Hannie, having glanced up into Robbie’s petrified face. “What is it, man?”

“It’s—I think it’s—” His throat felt tight and cold, his vocal chords frozen, and he fought fora breath that did not want to come. “I think it’s Craslowe. He’s close, Hannie.”

“Craslowe! But why would he be—good God! He must have detected the scrying, perhaps even our identities and plans. He must have known that we’d come here and try to—” She broke off and began stuffing back into the pouch the objects she had taken from it only seconds earlier. “We mustn’t stay; not just now. We aren’t prepared to face Hadrian Craslowe tonight.” She threw the pouch into the rear and twisted the ignition key, giving life to the huge twelve-cylinder engine. She flipped the headlight switch and—

Robbie felt himself screaming. Illumined by the powerful glare of the Jaguar’s headlamps was the being he knew was Hadrian Craslowe, clothed in a baggy tweed suit and hanging unsupported in thin air, upside down, his inverted face only inches from the front grille. Craslowe’s arms were spread wide, as were his massive, taloned hands, as though to embrace the pair who huddled before him. The index finger of each hand was easily twice the normal length, topped with a long, hooklike nail. On his face was a lascivious grin that made Robbie’s guts roil, and from his baneful eyes beamed a light that was nearly blinding.

Hannie slammed the gear-selector into drive, cramped the steering wheel to the right, and gunned the engine, throwing mud and gravel into the air. The Jaguar swung sideways, filling the night with a lusty roar. The seconds dragged by as the car careened around to face the direction from which it had come, then straightened out and accelerated toward the wood line and the intersection with Sockeye Drive.

Robbie still held the flaming lighter, which was becoming hot, then performed an actual feat of will to relax his hand and let it snap off. He wondered why he had not caught fire, since the liquid fat in the dish had spilled over his lap, his hands, his jacket, thanks to the bucking of the car over the uneven road. But this was a minor concern, because from the corner of his right eye he caught sight of the horrible, teratoid face of Hadrian Craslowe, only inches from his own on the other side of the window glass, grinning obscenely, wantonly, gleeful with evil.

The Jag was rumbling down the road far faster than any man could run, and it was weaving and bouncing over ruts and potholes, coming close to ditching now and again as Hannie fought the wheel and held the throttle down. But here was Craslowe on the other side of the glass, his arms spread wide and his fingers coiling -and uncoiling, not running beside the car or even holding fast to it, but
flying
alongside.

“
Hannie!
” screamed Robbie, and his voice died in a gag.

The old woman glanced to the right and grimaced fearfully, tromped the accelerator harder, and began to chant in that ancient language at the top of her lungs as the car lurched and heaved down the road.

Robbie cowered from the face outside the glass, strained against the seat belt, and screamed and choked and fought to keep from pissing himself. Above the roar of the engine and Hannie’s shrieking chant came a groaning, moaning growl—it
had
to be coming from Craslowe’s mouth—that burrowed into his skull, into his sanity, where it erupted like a volcano of hideous promise and threat:

You cannot seek to destroy my handiwork and live. You cannot spy upon me, come prowling around my servant and the object of my demon-love, and live. I will cut off your testicles with a red-hot knife; I will tear out your organs, one by one, while you still live; I will burn out your eyes and tongue; and I will force-feed you a dead man’s shit before giving you to the Giver of Dreams...

Suddenly there was heat on Robbie’s chest, and it quickly became searing. It scorched his shirt and filled the car with an acrid, dizzying smoke, making him writhe and claw wildly at the pouch around his neck. The charm that Hannie had given him for protection against “minor forces”—the ones that could be “troublesome” and “hurtful”—was throbbing and growing hotter by the second. The pain was excruciating. Just when he was certain that he was about to burst into flame, the vial exploded, shredding its skin pouch and spattering its horrid contents all over his front, his face, his hands. The heat, mercifully, was gone.

But Hadrian Craslowe, sorcerer, steward of the Giver of Dreams, was not. His lurid face was less than an inch from the window, contorted with that slavering grin, and his body was twisting and his arms flailing like the wings of some wicked, reptilian flier. The wind stream was whipping at his dark tweeds. He planted a horrible hand on the glass, and to Robbie’s stark terror, the glass began to fizzle and melt.

Hannie turned her attention away from driving—which itself could have been disastrous—and leveled a bright-eyed stare at the thing that glided mere inches from where Robbie sat. Her chanting grew louder. Her face and eyes were luminescent.

Somehow the Jaguar stayed on the road. A blast of bluish-tinged energy rushed past Robbie’s face from Hannie, and he felt more than saw it impact against Craslowe, saw the abominable form falter briefly away from the window. Another blast came, and then another, and Craslowe fell out of sight, just as the Jaguar dashed out of the woods to shoot headlong onto Sockeye Drive, where it whirled with a screech of rubber and a scream of brakes, before Hannie got it under control again.

Stu Bromton, warned by the oncoming roar of a huge engine, plunged into the thicket at the side of Old Home Road and flattened himself against the bark of a pine as Hannie Hazelford’s Jaguar thundered by, a bright streak of headlamps and bloody red taillights. He stood still a moment, catching his breath in the inky blackness, listening to the diminishing roar and wondering just what the hell was going on.

Why Hannie and Robbie had driven from town to Old Home Road, he could not imagine. The fact that they had done so was more than a little unsettling, because the only two inhabited houses out here belonged to Cannibal Strecker and Mitch Nistler, neither of which should have been of any interest to them. Hannie and Robbie had sniffed at the edges of the local crack industry, perhaps without even knowing it, and this gave Stu a case of ants.

Having seen Hannie’s Jag turn onto Old Home Road, he had hidden his Pontiac in the trees near the intersection, pocketed his police-issue flashlight, and started trudging toward Nistler’s house on foot. He certainly could not have followed in the car without giving himself away, since Old Home Road came to a virtual dead end at Cannibal Strecker’s crack house. Casual traffic was nonexistent, and any passing car would have attracted attention. He had walked less than two hundred yards before he heard the sound of the approaching Jag and saw the first glare of its headlights, before he realized that it had reversed its direction and was fleeing toward him at high speed.

Yes,
fleeing.
Lurching, swerving, thumping over ruts and watery potholes, barely staying on the road as it bore down on him. Stu had just managed to hide himself before the car was past him.

He picked his way through damp foliage back to the road and stood a moment in the bright moonlight, thinking. Mitch Nistler, he knew, was away from his house, because this was Monday, and Monday was delivery day. After carrying a batch of Cannibal’s crack to Seattle, Nistler would return with a load of unprocessed cocaine and drop it at the crack house farther up the road. But that would not happen until much later. Cannibal Strecker and his appalling girlfriend were undoubtedly waiting at the lab this very moment, probably drinking and toking and snorting themselves blind. It seemed unlikely that Hannie and Robbie had gone to the crack house, quite simply because there had not been time. The road beyond Mitch Nistler’s hovel had deteriorated badly, even worse than this stretch, and Hannie would have been forced to drive at a crawl to keep from high-centering the low-slung Jag. She and Robbie would just now be arriving at Strecker’s place, Stu figured, had they been headed there.

So they had stopped at Nistler’s, but only briefly.

Why?

Stu decided to have a look. After a brisk, ten-minute hike—which, because of the fulgent moon, had not even required his flashlight—he stood before the front door of the rickety, neglected house that Nistler called home. The surrounding weeds were nearly shoulder-high, the yard was a nest of refuse and abandoned appliances, and the windows were stygian maws.

How could anyone actually live here? Stu wondered.

As he placed his foot on the first step of the porch, his eyes caught a flicker of movement behind an upstairs window, a trace of greenish light that had the indefinite quality of an old-fashioned, radium-coated watch dial. He put it down to a prank of the moonlight, for clearly nobody was home. The muddy drive was empty of Nistler’s old El Camino.

The lock on the front door was broken, apparently having been recently forced with something like a crowbar, or so suggested the splintery marks on the wooden frame. The door swung easily open.

He stepped into the blackness of the house and immediately choked on the thick, putrescent stench that descended on him. He fought to keep his lunch down, drew a handkerchief from his pocket, and pressed it over his mouth and nose.
It smells like a body
, he said to himself.

Unwholesome, worrisome thoughts flashed into his head, scenarios in which Mitch Nistler was the perpetrator of the spate of evil doings in Greely’s Cove, the kidnapper and killer who abducted innocent people and snuffed out their lives, who stashed their bodies in the closets of his sorry little house in the woods, or in the cellar or under the floor, or maybe even sewed them into the furniture. But that couldn’t be, Stu reassured himself—not Mitch Nistler, whom he had known since boyhood. The guy was weird, no doubt of that, and was certainly not the type you’d want your sister to marry. But he was no homicidal kidnapper, no malicious blood-fiend.
Was
he?

Stu snapped on his flashlight and waded deeper into Mitch Nistler’s abode, sweeping the beam over the beggarly contents of the living room, moving into the reeking kitchen where the refrigerator suddenly kicked on and nearly scared him shitless, into the main-floor bedroom with its pestiferous bed and sheets. Amid the squalor he saw nothing that accused Nistler of kidnapping or murder, nothing to indicate that Hannie Hazelford and Robinson Sparhawk had been here. And certainly nothing that explained their hasty retreat from the place.

Then he heard a sound overhead, the crack of old flooring and something that sounded vaguely slithery. He moved out of the bedroom and beamed the light against a warped and splintery old door that he assumed led upstairs. He pulled it open.

A moment earlier he would not have believed that the stench could have gotten worse, but now it was indeed worse, an egregious vapor that stung his eyes and soaked through his handkerchief to torture his nostrils and throat. It was the reek of dead things, of moldering flesh and decaying bones.

He lowered the handkerchief and stuffed it into a pocket, letting his hand fall onto the handle of the Smith and Wesson nine-millimeter pistol that hung in his holster. As he stepped onto the creaking stairway, he wondered why his instincts were raising such a ruckus, why a part of him wanted to turn and run away from this house, to sprint fiercely toward Sockeye Drive and his waiting Pontiac. He fought those instincts, wrestled them back into their holes, knowing that, having come this far, he could hardly run away without first finding answers to his questions. He climbed the stairs, step after creaking step, until he stood on the upper landing.

A few feet ahead was a door that stood partially open, a thin rectangle of scant moonlight that filtered through a dirty window in the bedroom beyond. He pushed through the door, following the flashlight beam into the bedroom, trying not to think about the smell. He stepped on something that seemed fleshy and soft, yet somehow brittle. He lowered the beam and saw that he had crushed the head of a dead cat, or more likely a kitten, judging from its size.

Rats must have gotten to it, he told himself, for much of its flesh was gone, and its orange hide was splayed open, ripped to shreds. He swallowed a clot of spit and kicked the lifeless animal aside, hoping that he had found the source of the stench, though he doubted it.

Movement. To his right. Barely a ripple in the blackness on the fringe of the flashlight beam.

He swept the circle of light across the floor to the far wall and nearly choked at what he saw: a dog, or what had once been a dog. It was a small, dark animal, leaning against the musty wallpaper, lacking its eyes and much of its snout—for that matter, a good share of its body. The hide had apparently been ripped backward from its neck, or so suggested the raglike train of bloody fur that hung from its hindquarter onto the floor. There were gaping holes in the muscle tissue of its shoulders and torso, through which hung tatters of arteries and veins. Incredibly, it was still alive.