Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (58 page)

Sara frowned. “On the weekend?”

“Leonids should be peaking around 3 A.M. Sunday. The 18th, remember? The paper says we’ve got a good chance at the meteor storm of a lifetime. Sesh’tet’s really excited.”

For Her restoration she shall swallow up their fires in the night…

“I’m sure she is.”

Fighting the urge to warn her, Sara halfway promised to come if she didn’t oversleep. Then she hung up, her exhausted mind spinning. After reading Martin’s photocopy until dawn, all she knew for sure was that power wouldn’t be the only thing raised this Sunday morning. Not if Sesh’tet had her way.

She tried catching up on her sleep that night—hardly her idea of a Friday—then spent Saturday running around madly. The
Gate
translation offered little guidance, and less encouragement. Like other tomb texts, it was a “book” for believers… but not for use in the next world.

Instead, most passages spoke of Ammutseba manifesting in
this
world.

Hail, O ye who open up the ways of night, O guide and guardian in the nameless hours… devourer of the beaten path of stars, She who was the thought of Isfet before the sky was split from the earth… before the Ones Who Were withdrew to their abysses beyond the sky…

That sky was utterly clear when she drove out of Boulder around one on Sunday morning. Sara cut her headlights a mile from the site, praying she wouldn’t cause an accident. Faint meteor streaks in the distance tempted her to drive faster—what if the ritual had already started?—but gravel roads weren’t quiet at speed.

She inched along impatiently until she spotted the first parked cars. Then, turning off her engine, she waited for her eyes to adjust. In the open field ahead, flashlight beams bobbed and wove in some kind of dance. She watched for a while, then eased her door open. The light sharp wind carried women’s voices, raised in a song—chant?—which didn’t sound Egyptian at all. Or like any pagan ritual she’d ever attended.

Her spine stiffened as she recognized names and phrases from
The Gate of All Lost Stars
. They were burning incense, too, the same bitter stuff from the circle meeting… and one page of Evelyn Bishop’s journal, where she’d smeared yellowish paste from a jar in the tomb.

Grabbing her overstuffed knapsack, she ducked away from her car.

Meteors were streaking above the Flatirons now, more every minute. The chant grew louder. Some of the women were coughing as they chanted, choking on the strange gutturals—or perhaps on the smoke twisting up against the night. They’d marked out their ritual circle with smudge pots.

Stepping carefully on the crisp grass, Sara moved forward until she could recognize people. Diane, of course, her believer’s face lifted to the shooting stars. Seven or eight other women—two on crutches, one on blankets on the ground—and, in the center, a tiny figure swathed in darkness.

Sara loosened her pack’s drawstring as she slipped it from her shoulders.

It was Sesh’tet’s voice, she realized, which rose so clearly over the others—reedy and thin, yet with unmistakable power. Every syllable fell crisp and perfect from her lipless mouth, ringing with adoration.

“Ia! Isfet-daughter! Ammutseba!”

A collective gasp rose from the circle of women. They were all staring into the sky—even Sesh’tet, though she still kept up the chant, soloing now.

Sara noticed nothing at first. Nothing but a thin dark haze, like incense smoke stretched across the night… but too high and far too plentiful for mere smudge pots. The wind wasn’t moving it around, either. When one meteor’s path crossed into that haze, it flared abruptly and vanished, like a candle flame blown out.

Sesh’tet raised both arms in a wide, triumphant gesture. “
Ia! Ammutseba
!”

As the others echoed her, the woman on the blankets began moaning. Diane and another circle member hurried toward her, only to be intercepted by their High Priestess.

“She is first to ascend!” Sesh’tet cried. “She is first among us all to live forever!”

From where Sara stood, the stricken woman was doing no such thing. As her moaning changed to whimpering, she lifted herself on her elbows, staring around in shock and agony. Then one thin tendril of whitish…
smoke
? …seeped from between her parted lips, snaking on the wind toward Sesh’tet.

Sesh’tet inhaled. Another meteor winked out in the thickening mist overhead.

“Ia! First among us all to live forever!”

As her circle sisters took up the cry, the woman on the ground collapsed. Sesh’tet lifted her arms higher, their enfolding dark sleeves slipping back for the first time. The skin underneath, though brown and smooth and perfect, was crisscrossed with some very odd striations. Like bandages.

Wishing she’d brought binoculars, Sara felt her gut clench. What she thought she’d just seen—what the
Gate
translation had predicted in gleeful detail—simply could not be happening. Meanwhile, the Leonids kept raining down just as predicted, a real banner year.

Except that now a lot of them weren’t raining
down
. Just vanishing into that body of dark vapor overhead—which was looking more and more like a real body.

The body of Nut-mother, but twisted… corrupted… stretching out across the stars to devour them…

Diane wasn’t chanting now. She was screaming. Wrenching her attention from the horror overhead, Sara saw her friend fall to her knees at one edge of the circle. The others spiraled out in their dance without breaking step, leaving her alone at the center with the body sprawled on its blankets.

And with Sesh’tet.

Fishing a lighter from one pocket, Sara reached into her knapsack. The first bottle gurgled in her hand as she lit its rag wick. Barely pausing to aim, she hurled it flaming toward the circle’s heart, praying Diane wasn’t wearing anything flammable.

Her first throw went wild, catching one of her target’s flowing sleeves. Sesh’tet shrieked and tore the burning cloth away, exposing her right arm to the shoulder. Just above the elbow, that same arm dwindled to a dark twig of leather and bone. Worse, her enveloping hood had slipped back. Above that narrow face with its strange, too-wide eyes, nothing but mummified skin stretched tight over her skull.

“Look at her!” Sara yelled at the others, voice raw with desperation. “She’s not human! She was
never
human!”

Their chanting faltered as dancer after dancer—all but Diane, sprawled on the ground now—broke step and stared. Sara lit another bottle. This time, it landed right at Sesh’tet’s feet, spattering her with broken glass and flaming fuel.

Without stopping to watch, Sara ignited a third. Sesh’tet shrieked again, gesturing in her attacker’s direction with her still-draped arm.

“
She must… not… live
!”

The others hesitated, trembling like aspens in a high wind. Then, in one tight silent pack, they rushed her.

Sara hurled her last missile over their heads and ran as hard as she could. Circling wide, she doubled back toward Diane—and the writhing woman-torch still lifting her hands to the sky. Still calling on the Darkness now stretching Her solidifying mass above their heads, quenching meteors like so many fireworks.

“Isfet-daughter! Ammutseba!”

Diane was on her hands and knees now. Crawling toward the High Priestess, she grabbed a handful of burning hem and yanked with all her strength. Sesh’tet staggered. Still racing to help, Sara stumbled over one of the smudge-pots, shattering it.

Sesh’tet’s shriek changed to a high, terrible wailing.

Breaking the Red Pots
. These pots weren’t red—aside from their distinctive hieroglyphs, anyhow—but they were certainly breakable enough. Sara turned and kicked another pot, then another. Charcoal and incense scattered across a patch of snow and died.

As the pack caught up at last, Sara kicked at more pots and shouted for their help.

“They’re making her stronger. They’re making that thing in the sky stronger! Get this stuff put out now!”

One or two women grabbed at her, still confused, but the rest started stomping or swatting with crutches. Sara looked around for Diane. She was still dragging at Sesh’tet’s robes, her own hands and arms horribly burned. Her lips moved in a profane litany.

It took Sara a moment to realize what Diane was dragging the burning woman toward. Her final missile—unbroken after a bad throw—lay on the ground, still half-full. Releasing her hold on Sesh’tet with one hand, she grabbed for it.

“It’s OK,” Diane said, grinning at Sara as she raised the smoldering wine bottle. “I’m taking the bitch with me.”

Tightening her grip, she smashed it against Ammutseba’s priestess.

Somebody ran back for a Land Rover’s water jugs, but it didn’t matter. Seasoned by thousands of years, Sesh’tet went up in a flaming pillar against the night. The last sound from her dying captor’s mouth was a scream of triumph.

Overhead, the dark mist-shape quivered and swirled, coalescing again briefly. Then it dispersed on the wind, accompanied by a few scattered meteors.

“She really was dying anyway,” the Rover’s owner told Sara softly. “She told us tonight, before the ritual. Those tests…”

Sara turned away. There was a hard, cold lump in her throat, and she didn’t want to start thinking about lumps. Maybe she and the others would be all right in the morning.

Maybe that tiny burning pain she’d felt in one breast lately would be gone.

∇

The Oram County Whoosit

Steve Duffy

M
aybe for the rest of the welcoming committee it was the proudest afternoon of their lives; I remember it mostly as one of the wettest of mine. We were standing on a platform in Oram, West Virginia, waiting for a train to pull in, and it hadn’t stopped raining all day. It wasn’t really a problem for everybody else: the mayor had a big umbrella, and his cronies had the shelter of the awning, over by the ticket office. I had my damn hat, was all.

They belonged to the town, you see, and I didn’t. I’d been sent down from Washington, like the guest of honour we were all waiting on that day. Our newspaper had sprung for him to travel first-class, having sent me along the afternoon before in a ratting old caboose—to pave the way for his greatness, I guess. Because he was some kind of a great man even then, in newspaper circles at least. Nowadays, you’ll find his stories in all the best textbooks, but back then the majority of folks knew Horton Keith mostly from the stuff they read over the breakfast table; which was pretty damn good, don’t get me wrong. But then so were my photographs, or so I thought, so why was I the one left outside in the cold and wet like a red-headed stepchild? It’s a hell of a life, and no mistake; that’s what I was thinking. I was twenty-four back then, in case you hadn’t guessed: as old as the century. That didn’t feel so old then—but it does now, here on the wrong side of nineteen-eighty. Then again, the century hasn’t weathered too well either.

Away down the track a whistle blew, and the welcoming committee spat out their tobacco and gussied themselves up for business. Through the sheets of rain you could barely see the hills above the rooftops, but you felt them pressing in on you: that you did. Row upon row of them, their sides sheer and thickly forested, the tops lost in the dense grey clouds that had lain on the summits ever since I arrived. By now, I was starting to wonder whether there
was
any sort of blue sky up there, or whether mist and rain were the invariable order of the day. Since then I’ve looked into it scientifically, and what happens is this: the weather fronts blow in off the Atlantic coast, and they scoot across Virginia like a skating rink till they hit the Alleghenies. Then, those fronts get forced up over the mountains by the prevailing winds, and by the time they’re coming down the other side, boy, they’re dropping like a shot goose. And
then
, the whole bunch of soggy-bottom clouds falls splat on to Oram County, and it rains every goddamn day of the year. Scientifically speaking.

A puff of smoke from round the track, and then the train came into view. The welcoming committee shuffled themselves according to rank and feet above sea-level; one of them dodged off round the side of the station, and hang me for a liar if he didn’t come back with a marching band, or the makings of one at least—a tuba, half-a-dozen trumpets, and a big bass drum. The musicians had been waiting someplace under shelter, or so I hoped: if not, then I wasn’t going to be standing too close to that tuba when it blew. It might give me a musical shower-bath on top of my regular soaking.

The first man off the train when it pulled in was a Pullman conductor, an imperturbable Negro who looked as if he’d seen this sort of deal at every half-assed station down the line. Next was a nondescript fat man packed tight into a thin man’s suit, weighed down by a large cardboard valise. If he looked uncomfortable before, you can bet he looked twice as squirrelly when the band struck up a limping rendition of “Shenandoah” and the mayor bore down on him like a long-lost brother. One look at that, and the poor guy jumped so high I practically lost him in the cloud—his upper slopes, at least. In many ways he was wasted on the travelling-salesman game; he ought to have been trying out for the Olympics over in Paris, France. Instead, he was stuck selling dungarees to miners. Like I said before, it’s a hell of a life.

While that little misunderstanding was being cleared up, a few carriages down my man was disembarking, quietly and without any fuss. You may have seen photographs of Horton Keith—you may even have seen
my
photograph of him, which just happens to be the one on the facing-title page of his
Collected Short Stories
—but in many ways he looked more like his caricature. Not a bad-looking man, hell no; that sweep of white hair and the jet-black cookie-duster underneath meant he’d always get recognised, by everyone but the good folk of Oram, West Virginia at any rate. And there was nothing wrong with his features, if you liked ’em lean and hungry-looking. But the hunger was the key, and it came out in the drawings more vividly than in any photo I ever took of him. I never saw a keener man, nor one more likely to stick at it till the job got done. As a hunting acquaintance of mine once put it: “He’s a pretty good writer, but he’d have made one hell of a bird-dog.”