Greely's Cove (58 page)

This isn’t me!

—ejaculates and rejoices in this spectacle of suffering and killing, whose hatred burns hot and beautiful on no other fuel than lies and visceral fear. He sucks in the essence of the evil even as he breathes in the smells of the forest—the vapors of death mixed with the tart smells of birch and fir. His ears glean the choking cries of the dying above the chatter of startled sparrows. He sucks it in, laps it up like good soup. It is delicious, this evil. It is what he was made for.

No!

With an incredible eruption of psychic strength, Carl tore himself out of the dream and fled the horror of actually
being
evil. He almost welcomed the return to the physical agony of the beast’s clutches, for here, at least, he knew who he was. His escape from the dream, he prayed, meant that Hannie’s poison was at work, that even though the beast could tear him to pieces and devour his body, it lacked the power to eat his soul.

Had it really been a dream, though?

This
surely was no dream: the sight of Stu Bromton, framed in the flickering center of the arch, moving forward on unsteady legs, with the charmed sword gripped in his fists. Stepping now into the maw, into the cavern of dark. Causing the creature to pause in its feasting and stir, to groan and growl with apprehension.

Yes! Good old Stu, good old Hippo! Come on, big guy, just a few more steps! The fucking beast is weakening
. The grip of claws and wings faltered ever so slightly.
I can feel it! You can kill him! Come ON, Stu! Chop this son of a bitch into a billion stinking pieces!

The sword was raised high over Stu’s head, and Carl would not have cared if Stu had missed his mark and struck
him
rather than the beast, as long as he tried again,
tried again!

Carl cried out to warn his old friend of the shadow behind him. But too late. Heavy wood whistled through the air: a baseball bat, taken from the riot of discarded goods in the basement above—a child’s toy. It cracked down on Stu’s skull, caving it in and popping his eyes out of their sockets, ejecting a gout of blood from his mouth. The big man went down like a puppet whose strings had been cut and thudded heavily to the stone floor. Hannie Hazelford’s magic sword clattered down harmlessly beside the twitching corpse.

The demon drew a relieved breath and started to feed again, and Carl would have screamed himself to death if he had been able, because the hands around the baseball bat belonged to a familiar and much-loved face.

A face that belonged to Renzy Dawkins.

Without his crutches Robbie could only crawl. He pulled himself with his arms and hands along the floor of the passage, back toward the undercroft. His eyes were awash in blood from the wound on his forehead. He wondered how long he had been unconscious after his collision with the stone wall, if he had broken any bones and whether any of his friends had survived. He wondered too at the god-awful silence, a silence that caused painful knots of dread in his guts.

He found Lindsay lying against one wall of the passage, rummy and bleeding from the scalp, but alive. He left her and made for the door of the undercroft, where Hannie’s gauzy head lay just visible against a stone step. Her ancient face lolled toward him as he crawled near. She reached out to grab his collar with a bony hand.

“
Robbie,
” she whispered hoarsely, “we are in great trouble! Stuart has been killed, and the Giver is still alive. It still has Carl!” She coughed painfully, and Robbie could see the life ebbing from her rheumy eyes. His heart weltered.

“We have but one chance, Robbie. It must be you and I together, because I alone am so weak. I haven’t much left, Robbie. I need your
Gift!
”

“It’s okay, darlin’, it’s okay,” answered the psychic, snaking his arm around her neck and cradling her head. “Whatever I’ve got is yours, you know that. Now what is it you want me to do?”

Earlier in the day, while the sun still shone, Mitch Nistler had struggled back to his house to die, only to find the house itself dead. Everything in it and near it was dead.

The mayor in the living room, shot in the back, a riddle that did not matter.

Stella DeCurtis out back in the Blazer, cold and glass-eyed, lifeless as alabaster.

Corley the Cannibal in the stairway, chopped into several barely recognizable pieces.

The wormy shell of Lorna Trosper, peppered with bullet holes in an upstairs bedroom, truly dead now.

And nearby, scorch marks on the wall and floor, the sooty silhouette of something.

The
offspring
, surely. Dead and gone, somehow reduced to ether.

There was a peculiar joy in the deadness around him. Mitch felt at peace for the first time in living memory. He lay down on the living-room sofa, utterly spent from a cold night in the forest, and awaited sundown. When the darkness finally came, he welcomed it, resigned himself to letting his sickness consume him. His horrors had ended. He yearned to slip away before new ones sprang to life.

But then the dark air stirred, just as it had stirred the previous night, when some tickling force had enfolded his heart and urged him to attack Stu Bromton with a crowbar. What had he felt in that crackling magic?
Hope?
The magic was back now, and it passed over his face like the breath of an angel.

Robbie’s head was a volcano of pain. Each eruption shook the marrow of his bones. His will was linked to Hannie’s through some puissant magic that he would never understand. His Gift was turned to feats he had never before contemplated, never dreamed himself capable of.

Like forcing his spirit from his body and flying over the treetops, into the clouds. Searching fields and roads, reaching out and groping, gravitating, gravitating...

To Mitch Nistler’s house, drawn there like a bee to a fragrant blossom in the golden afternoon.

Communicating, touching, urging the little man to leave his house and come to Whiteleather Place. From somewhere Robbie heard Hannie’s voice saying that Mitch Nistler was their only hope, because Mitch Nistler had eaten of the Giver’s flesh and had carried its monstrous seed. And whatever his weaknesses, Mitch Nistler was blessed with a certain immunity from the evil magic of the Giver’s minions.

“Bushman, you’re in there, aren’t you?” Renzy stood in the opening of the maw, his head tilted to one side. Carl could just make out his handsome face through a haze of pain and terror. “I can’t quite see you, old son, but I can sure as hell feel you. Can you hear me, Bush? We gotta talk.” He rested the bloody baseball bat in the crook of his arm, leaned against the edge of the stone arch, and stared into the blackness.

“
R-Renzy, please!
”

The beast tore more flesh from Carl’s back, causing him to scream with blinding pain. He felt his bladder let go and his stomach heave, but only acid came up, flooding his gullet and mouth with sour heat. Still, through the rage of agony and horror, he could hear Renzy’s voice. He wriggled an arm free of the creature’s grip and thrust it toward his old friend, clawing the darkness, reaching, begging.

“I didn’t want this to happen, Bush, you know that. But there wasn’t anything I could do about it. This was all—”

“
Renzy, kill it! P-please kill it! The sword, Renzy!
”

“Oh, Christ, Bush—I can’t do that. I
work
for Hadrian, and I’ll go on working for him until I can see my way clear to blow my own brains out, which I hope is soon. I intend to do it the very minute he takes the hex off my sister.”

Carl’s ragged mind reeled. He caught a vague image of Renzy’s once-beautiful sister, Diana, languishing in a mental institution, a prisoner behind blank walls. A prisoner like Ianthe Pauling’s brother. Did this mean... ? He struggled again, twisting and writhing, but a clawed hand settled over his head and drew him in by the hair.

“Too bad about Hippo, huh?” Renzy went on, glancing down at Stu’s corpse, which had by now ceased its twitching and throbbing. “The poor son of a bitch never really got it together, did he? Classic case of wanting more than you’re capable of getting. Still, he had his good points, and he deserved better than what he got. I hope he’s in a better place, I really do.”

Renzy’s voice took on an echolike quality. Carl’s consciousness began to drift through a field of ripples and blurs, as though he had entered another dream. The creature that held him bit into his flesh again, and against the veil of pain Carl imagined that he could actually
see
Renzy’s words.

“I suppose I owe you some kind of explanation,” Renzy went on, “considering what we’ve been to each other. We were like goddamn brothers, weren’t we? You, me and Hippo—the Triumvirate.”

Carl saw three sub-teenaged boys in a distant playground on a summer afternoon, chasing a bouncing basketball around a hoop that had no net. Their laughter, their shouts, the smell of their boyish sweat were as real as the razored teeth that were tearing into his shoulder.

“Shit, if anyone had ever told us it would end like this,” said Renzy, “we would’ve laughed them right out of the state! But anyway, Bush, this whole sorry mess was cast in concrete long before you and I were ever born. Know why? Because my mother was the granddaughter of Tristan Whiteleather.”

Mitch Nistler left his little house for the last time, carrying the Winchester that had lain next to the corpse of Chester Klundt. He knew vaguely that he must go to Whiteleather Place, but he did not know why. Neither could he have explained why he was taking along the shotgun. He knew only that he was doing the right thing, that the magic in the air was about to resolve the anarchy that had ruled his life for so long. He got into his El Camino, started it, and drove away into the rainy night.

Renzy’s words seared Carl’s spirit as the Giver’s teeth seared his flesh, an exquisite garnishment to the physical torment. The words became clear images, a mental cinema of faces and movement, reality. Carl saw the unfortunate Ted Dawkins, a relentlessly ambitious man who had inherited the curse of the Whiteleathers in taking old Tristan’s granddaughter, Alita, to wife.

“It was like a bargain,” narrated Renzy, giggling madly now and then. “You marry a Whiteleather, you serve Hadrian Craslowe—know what I mean? Well, Mom and Dad got pretty good at it—doing Hadrian’s magic, that is. They got rich—which was part of the bargain—became pillars of the community, respected and loved by everybody in town. My old man was happier than a pig in shit, had everything he’d evei wanted. At least for a while. The problem was that the other part of the bargain wasn’t so rosy: They had to find somebody to sire the offspring of the Giver of Dreams, along with a suitable mother for it. As if that wasn’t enough, they had to find someone who could become its manciple, its steward.”

In the fuming dream fueled by Renzy’s words, Carl saw little Mitch Nistler, the homely and unpromising son of a local ne’er-do-well, the sad and retiring child whom other kids mercilessly tormented, a sorry specimen whose destruction would deny the world nothing of value. A perfect candidate to carry the demon’s seed.

The scene shifted: Ted Dawkins calling regularly at the Nistlers’ shack near the marina, delivering bitter-tasting food laced with magic potions and little “toys” that were really charms. Charity, supposedly—but in actuality, a polluting combination that damned poor Mitch to failure throughout his childhood, that compounded his weaknesses, rendered him malleable.

Ted and Alita Dawkins now, huddling together in the undercroft of Whiteleather Place, brewing potions and casting spells aimed at the local undertaker, Matt Kronmiller. So
that’s
how Mitch landed a job after prison, a job that put him in a position to steal a corpse when the time was right.

But this was not a dream, not a nightmare. It was real!

And the steward, of course, was to be Jeremy, selected before the boy was even born. Carl saw Alita hovering and fussing over the pregnant Lorna, all under the guise of friendship, taking every opportunity to pollute Lorna’s food with poisonous magical herbs and mixtures, leaving little hand-carved “figurines” around the Trosper house, which were supposed to cheer and amuse, but which were actually powerful charms. Alita’s magic proved successful: Jeremy was born an empty vessel, a child who seemed to lack a soul, perfect clay for the hands of Hadrian Craslowe.

And that brings up the matter of
Lorna,
said Renzy.

Carl cried out again in pain and rage—not only because the demon was tearing another strip of muscle from his shoulder, but also because he was seeing Lorna, hearing Lorna, as she announced with dancing eyes that they were going to have a baby.

And later, with tearful and desperate eyes, that she knew something was horribly wrong with their little Jeremy.

And much later, with empty eyes, saying that she would give Carl a divorce, as he wanted.

Carl roared with molten anger, heard his own voice reverberating against stone, felt it batter his eardrums when it bounced back.

Ah, yes, Lorna, who fell into Hadrian’s clutches like a ripe berry, said Renzy.

“Bush, I was the one who suggested that she take Jeremy to see Hadrian. And then I helped drive her crazy—even started taking her to bed in order to get the job done. Oh, I can’t really take much credit for her killing herself—Jeremy was the one who really pushed her over the edge, which you’ve probably guessed by now. I just did what Hadrian told me to do. If you’ve got Whiteleather blood in your veins, you don’t say no to Hadrian.”

Carl’s lungs erupted with another enraged roar. “Why, Renzy? Why did you do it? Why didn’t you fight him? You could’ve fought him!”

“No!” screamed Renzy, stepping deeper into the blackness. “I couldn’t fight him, Carl! That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I can’t let you think that I—”

“
You’re an obscenity! An animal! Lorna was good, Renzy, the only really good thing in my life!
” The Giver’s fangs sank again. Its spongy lips closed tight on the wound. Carl felt himself weakening, miring in a lake of pain. In his mind he saw a faded old photograph hanging on the bulkhead of
Kestrel,
Renzy’s yacht, the picture of a rumpled seaman, Tristan Whiteleather. At the captain’s side stood a somber man with a silvery hair and spectacles that exaggerated his watery eyes. The silver-haired man, Carl knew now, was Hadrian Craslowe, Renzy’s lord. The hurt was like a fountain in his chest.