Night of Demons - 02 (9 page)

I left a brief note by the side of Lauren’s bed. Then I drove to the commercial district, which is hidden behind a strip of parkland with a double row of fir trees, at the northeastern edge of town. There were a couple of older structures in view, the lumber mill, the brick-built smokestack. But most of the buildings had gone up between the fifties and the modern day.

I was heading past office blocks before too much longer. Warehouses and light-industrial factories. A truck went by that was from out of town. I could see the driver’s face behind the windshield. He looked rather anxious. That’s the way the curse usually works on folk who were not born here. They don’t like visiting this place. They want to leave as soon as possible. And once gone, we’ve come to the conclusion that they simply forget about us, all knowledge of our town dissolving from their minds.

I watched the trailer in my rearview mirror. It was moving away from me at quite a speed. Then a forklift truck piled with wooden crates came rumbling out from a factory door, yanking my attention back.

It stopped for me, and I continued on. I was driving to the very outer edge, where the township gave way to dense forest. Dr. Lehman Willets lived out there, if you could call it living.

“Sanderson’s Supplies” read the big sign painted near the top of the building. There were three stories of it and a basement, all of grimy, crumbling brick, the mortar interlaced with moss. The windows were dusty, lightless. Some were broken. And you would have thought it was abandoned. But everyone knew who inhabited the place.

If you don’t count Raine, who at least has Hampton, then Lehman Willets is this community’s best-known hermit. And he has another distinction as well. He is the only person living here who was actually born in the outside world.

He’d been here for a good few years. And the fact that he could walk out any time he liked?…Let’s just say he has his reasons, and they’re not exactly happy ones. Most people are afraid of him. So far as I know, no one ever visits him, except for me.

He’d set his home up in the lower sections of this place. And so I headed for the metal door around the side. There was a wasps’ nest in an air vent higher up, the black dots spiraling out from it rather sluggishly by this time of the year, distracted by the cooler air. Dimly conscious in their tiny minds of the approaching winter, their own End of Days. That had put them in a bad mood, which was understandable. One of them hummed angrily in front of my face until I swatted it away.

I was about to turn the handle, when a window swung open above me. I must admit, it made me jump. I’d not been expecting anything like that. When Willets’s head came poking out, it was in silhouette against the sky. My surprise leveled off to puzzlement. He was somebody who almost never altered his routine. So what was he doing up there?

I could just make out his pupils from this distance. They were tiny specks, a searing shade of red. And I supposed that he was scowling at me, since the man never had much of a cheerful demeanor. He’s African-American, and looks much older than he really is, gray-haired before his time.

“Oh, it’s you, Devries!” he called.

As if he’d been expecting someone else?

“What are you doing up there?”

“Been here since midnight,” he told me.

“Why?”

“Felt something creeping around, late last night. Something pretty weird, on the night air. Can’t tell you what it was. But…something we’re not used to. So I spirited myself up here—it just felt safer.”

Then he seemed to remember that I couldn’t move around that way.

“You’d better use the fire escape.”

Everything he’d told me came as a surprise. I knew the kind of magic he could conjure. What was capable of making him that nervous? I thought about it on the way up, and didn’t like the answers that I got. Willets might be an outsider, but he’d taught himself the use of magic in his first months here. He’d turned out to have a natural aptitude for it. And by this time he was, for all his shortcomings and foibles, one of the strongest sorcerers in town. Most adepts can’t cure injuries or wounds, for instance. But Willets could.

Whatever had spooked him, it had to be something really serious. If he’d felt obliged to alter his habits, then everyone had cause to worry.

He had been, back in the normal world, a researcher of the paranormal. That was what had brought him here. The curse had not deterred him. And once he had arrived, he had learned witchcraft so quickly that—for a while—it had sent him on a downward spiral into pure dementia.

He was no longer that way. Dotty, yes. Unpredictable, sure. But insane, like in those early days? It was better not to think about it.

I reached another door at the top. And when I let myself through, trumpet music washed around me. It was very dim in here. Not that he had covered up the windows. He’d simply made them go opaque. The holes in the glass too, which seemed impossible. But not for Willets, apparently. I hung back while my eyes adjusted.

He’d lived underground for so long that he couldn’t abide direct sunlight. He seemed to have left most of his possessions downstairs. The big leather-bound volumes on the subject of arcana. And the old-fashioned iron kettle that he usually kept on the boil. His folding bed was here, though—he’d already sat back down on it. And at the center of the room was the source of the music. A matt black plinth with a turntable on top, the one thing left in the whole world he really seemed to care about. There was no other equipment, not even speakers. The chords lifted straight off the vinyl and then floated up into the air.

You could feel the power rising off him. As he came into clearer view, I could see that he was dressed in his habitual serge pants and tweed jacket. He didn’t even look at me. His chin was resting on his knuckles, and his features were intense and furrowed as he drank the music in.

“When there’s something genuinely bothering me,” he told me, still not looking up, “I always find myself going back to Miles. He soothes me like no one else can. This was recorded at the Blackhawk Club in San Francisco, April 1961. I went there once. A lovely city. Probably still is.”

He came from South Carolina himself, although he’d been a lecturer at Boston U. But it was rare for him to mention the outside world at all. So he was in a peculiar mood this morning.

His eyelids slipped shut, and he waited for the final chords of “Love, I’ve Found You” to slip away. Then he raised his right hand slightly, gave a gentle click of his fingertips. The turntable and plinth both vanished. And a canvas chair—for my benefit—appeared on the same spot.

As I settled down, I noticed something else. He’d only been up here a few hours. But small creatures had already started gathering around him. Spiders were spinning brand-new webs off in the corners. A few mice were watching him over by the skirting board. A pigeon had got in somehow, and was eyeing him from a rafter. That was the way it was, with the good doctor. His power was so massive that it captured everything’s attention.

It has to be pointed out, he used it very sparingly these days. When he first became deranged, you see, he’d tried to spread his newfound powers to the other people in this town. An act of charity, to his mind. Twelve had died as a result. Which was why he now lived where he did, completely on his own. He couldn’t bear to face the world beyond these walls. Guilt gnawed at him, every single day.

He finally peered at me with that unnervingly bright gaze of his.

“I know why you’re here,” he told me. “It’s about Lucas Tollburn, right?”

I looked him straight in the carmine-centered eye.

“Of course. Was it Hanlon who killed him?”

In addition to the red ones, Willets had a powerful inner eye that had a habit of fastening on anything remarkable that happened in the Landing. And he gave a cautious nod.

“I saw him approach Tollburn’s house, but not what happened after that. Circumstantial evidence, then. But this is not a court of law, so I’d suppose that it’ll do.”

I felt bemused. His gaze normally penetrated almost anywhere. Why hadn’t he seen more? But he seemed to understand what was concerning me.

“Ever since I first developed my powers, I’ve been aware of certain things regarding Tollburn. Firstly, he was a far more complexly talented adept than anyone ever suspected. His maternal grandmother was Erin Luce, one of the great dowager-witches of Victorian times, and he learned his magic at her knee. So I suppose that should have been predicted.”

He was right. I waited for him to go on.

“Secondly, for most of his life, he had not one but two Spells of Shielding set in place around him. One around his home, and the other around his actual person.”

“Stopping him from being watched?” I asked.

“Exactly.”

“Which is why you didn’t see the murder.”

Willets looked pensive and troubled.

“Tollburn was a mystery to me. Despite the fact I could not see him, I could sense him sometimes. And often, come nightfall, in places where he ought not be.”

Which was a completely new one to me. There had been no hint of that before. I felt my eyebrows rise.

“Other people’s homes, for instance,” he continued. “While they were asleep.”

But we were talking about a man in his eighties. What exactly was the doctor suggesting?

The pigeon on the rafter rustled its wings and then stopped again. Powder from them floated downward through the gloom, making it sparkle slightly.

“This was recently?” I asked.

He nodded. “Almost up until his death. I could feel him skulking around. But, no…”

He could see what was bothering me.

“Not physically, you understand.”

I didn’t. But I didn’t press him either. Willets took his time about explaining things, and it was usually worth the wait.

“More like his undiluted spirit. He went all over town that way, and stopped in certain places, just watching and listening.”

“But you said the people he visited were asleep.”

His head came up a few inches. “Watching and listening to their dreams, perhaps?”

And altering them to his benefit? A chill ran through me, at that thought. I had heard of some pretty weird power games being played by the Sycamore Hill set. Influence and status were like food and drink up there. But this capped almost everything. What exactly had the man been doing?

“You want to hear my theory?” the doctor asked, breaking across my train of thought. “I think Lucas Tollburn had some form of spell, maybe some kind of magic instrument, that rendered him invisible and let him move around that way. He always was near the top, hierarchy-wise. Maybe he used those powers to maintain his position.”

And we’d always had such a lofty opinion of him. I swore to God, when it came to the dealings of our upper echelons, it was like the court of Caligula sometimes. I struggled to make sense of what I’d just been told.

“So if Hanlon killed him, then he might have gotten hold of the instrument in question.”

Willets pursed his lips. “It’s more than likely.”

“And you’ve no idea what it might be?”

“None. But there’s one person who definitely will know.”

I got that one straightaway.

“Millicent?” The way she’d scrabbled through those desk drawers. “What can you tell me about her?”

“Again, Devries, practically nothing. She has the same two Shielding Spells in place. I’ve no idea what she’s been doing. I can feel something about her, though.”

His face became even unhappier than was usual. He drew in a breath and held it, and then let it out.

“Beneath that outward polish, she is very deeply twisted. There’s a blackness, like a canker, at the center of her soul. Someone hurt her, once upon a time. And all she’s dreamt of, ever since, is hurting someone back. Make sure it isn’t you.”

Cass had sensed pretty much the same, hadn’t she? The second warning on that subject, so I told him I’d bear it in mind.

“And that’s the entire sum of my knowledge on the matter,” Willets finished up. He brought his narrow hands together. “We won’t know how much danger we’re in till we find out what Hanlon stole.”

But I was already starting to get a clearer picture. That second set of murders, last night. Anderson butchering his family, then killing himself. Did this thing Hanlon had stolen merely make a person like a ghost? Or was there more to it, far worse than that? I didn’t feel too optimistic about the way that things were starting to unravel.

I reminded myself that it was still a bright day outside. This place was even worse than the basement, the unnatural darkness pressing in on me. The doctor was looking slightly impatient, which was odd for a man with so much time on his hands.

“You’ve something else to tell me?” I asked.

“Something I’ve noticed, yes.”

“About?”

“You, man. Usually, you’re straight out through the door once we’ve finished talking. Yet you’re still sitting here.”

My thoughts were half elsewhere.

“Excuse me?”

“I sensed things about the Tollburns, and I sense them about you as well. You’ve another question, haven’t you? On a completely unrelated subject?”

There was a scrabbling noise from the corner of the room, but it didn’t bring my head around. There wasn’t much that I could hide from him. I’d resigned myself to that a long while ago. And so, my mind went back to the vision that I’d had last night.

I remembered what I’d been told by Amashta. So I asked him, exactly as she’d advised, “What does the word
‘T’choulon’
mean to you?”

He looked utterly dumbstruck. His eyelids narrowed, making the pupils burn even fiercer. And the permanent furrows on his brow grew more pronounced.

His head gave a shake, like he couldn’t quite believe what he’d just heard.

Then he said, “It’s not a word, Devries. It’s a name.”

He peered at me gravely.

“Where exactly did you hear it?”

A squirrel had snuck in and joined the pigeon on the rafter by the time I’d told him everything I knew…which wasn’t much. The two creatures took no notice of each other. They merely perched there, side by side, gazing down at Lehman Willets. I was staring at him too.