The Gathering Dark (26 page)

They went up.

At the top of the steps Peter glanced to his right, into what Nikki imagined was the living room. Keomany was right behind him, but Peter stopped and turned to her, held a hand up to stop her where she was, to keep her from going farther. He shook his head, grim compassion etched into his features. Nikki felt all the air go out of her lungs.

“Oh, Keomany,” she whispered.

But Keomany would not stop. She pushed past Peter now and he did not stop her. She went to the top of the stairs and looked into the living room. Nikki knew she should stay where she was. She did not want to see what had happened up there. And yet somehow she could not stop her feet from going up the steps.

“They’re getting closer,” she heard Father Jack say from the front door.

Nikki did not even glance at him. She walked past Peter on the stairs and stood beside Keomany. Over the top of a half-wall that separated the stairs from the living room she saw her friend’s parents. Among delicate furniture and shelves filled with antiques, their bodies were sprawled on either side of the splintered coffee table. Their torsos were torn open and completely eviscerated, hollowed out until all that remained of them were shriveled husks that reminded her of melon rinds.

The carpet was stained with blood and the demons had tracked their prints all over it in scarlet, but of Mr. and Mrs. Shaw’s viscera there was no sign. Whatever the things had torn out of these people they had either eaten or taken with them.

Keomany whimpered and turned to Nikki, who embraced her tightly. The women held one another and Nikki felt Keomany’s breath hot on her throat, felt her friend’s warm tears drip on her neck. Cold anger burned in her, as resolute as guilt or grief, but so much more powerful.

“I’m so sorry,” Nikki whispered, jaw clenched in fury and shared pain.

“The dogs,” Keomany whispered. “Where are the fucking . . .”

She let her words trail off mid-sentence and turned to go into the kitchen. Nikki followed her. The linoleum floor was covered with the bloody demon tracks. Keomany ignored them as she went to the sink and looked out the window above it—a window that gave a view of the back yard. Over her shoulder Nikki could see the broad expanse of lawn and the trees back there, as well as the twin cables that ran from the house to the woods. Dog runs.

And tied to each of the runs, a pair of yellow Labrador retrievers, who even now hid in among the trees as though waiting in ambush for the demons that would come no closer to them than they could reach. Their masters had been slaughtered and the dogs had been unable to help. Nikki could only imagine the baying and growling and barking that had ensued.

“Muggsy,” Keomany said. “Bonkers. You poor boys.”

From the bottom of the stairs, Father Jack called up to them. “They’re coming!”

Peter had followed Nikki and Keomany only as far as the top of the steps. He stood and stared at the blood-soaked living room, at the corpses of Mr. and Mrs. Shaw. When he heard Father Jack shout to them that the demons were attacking once more, he snapped his head around and glared down at the priest.

“No they’re not.”

He marched down the stairs. Father Jack was even paler than he had been before. His eyes were haunted but he did not look away under the weight of Peter’s scrutiny. The priest nodded and stepped aside, then followed Peter out the door. He sensed Nikki and Keomany coming down the stairs behind them but did not turn.

The chain of demons that was stretched out in a circle around the property were moving slowly, inexorably forward. They were nine and ten deep in places, hundreds of them, and yet they moved nervously, all of them with their faceless heads tilted toward Peter, waiting for him to attack.

But he had no intention of fighting them. Their number seemed infinite. It was a battle he might not be capable of winning, no matter how much sorcerous power he was able to wield. But defeating these monsters was not the battle he had come to fight. Not at all. There was another victory to be had here, a far more important one. Keomany’s parents were dead, but Peter felt certain there were others still alive in Wickham. He wanted to make sure they stayed that way.

Father Jack raised his gun and leveled it at the approaching hordes. Peter glanced over at him.

“Don’t bother,” he said.

Then he turned and spotted Nikki and Keomany hanging back near the brick steps at the front of the house. “Keomany. Come here, please.”

It was as though his voice had awoken her from some horrible fugue state, a trance of grief and impossibility. He suspected the power she wielded was just as much a part of that as were the demons and the infernal landscape around them. More than likely she had already distanced herself from all of this psychologically, just to deal with it.

Nikki took Keomany’s hand and together they rushed across the lawn to Peter. Father Jack looked on anxiously, his gun still wavering between the ground and the slowly advancing army of chittering demons that slunk forward, orange light gleaming off their black carapaces.

“We’ve got to get back into the Navigator,” Nikki said. “We’ve gotta get out of here, Peter.”

He shook his head. “No. That’s not why we came.” He reached out and touched Keomany lightly on the shoulder and her gaze lifted, their eyes met.

“This is real, Keomany,” he told her. “You understand that? All of what you see. All of what you feel. It’s real.”

Her delicate Asian features seemed to break then, and she bit her lower lip as she nodded. Her eyes pinched shut, squeezing tears that slid down her cheeks. Quickly she raised a hand to wipe them away and then stared at him again, almost defiantly.

“Good,” Peter said, and though his heart was grim and cold, he offered her a smile. “Then show me what you’ve got, Earthwitch. Give me one of those roots. Right here.”

He pointed to the lawn.

“Peter,” Father Jack warned.

“I know. They’re getting closer,” Peter replied, without even glancing at the demons. “Don’t shoot unless they rush us. I think they’re waiting for something.”

“For what?” Nikki asked.

Peter kept his gaze on Keomany. “I don’t think we want to know. Do we?”

Keomany took a deep breath. There was the faintest scent of perfume on her, like lilacs. She backed away from Peter and her brows knitted together as she stretched a hand toward the ground, her fingers curled as she beckoned something forth.

Peter shivered as he felt the power surge up from the earth. It came not from Keomany, as it would with true sorcery, but from the ground—from the very spirit of their world. The village of Wickham was from that other place, from their world, and so perhaps it was still connected as well, though it had been displaced. Perhaps Keomany would not have been able to touch the world of her birth if Wickham itself had not been stolen from there. But she did.

Somehow, though she had traveled into this terrible alternate dimension, Keomany was still connected to the world that they had left behind. With every fiber of her being, she called out to it now and it responded by striking out for her, bursting through into this horrid place like lightning arcing up into the sky.

The thick, gnarled root of a tree burst up through the soil and grass of the lawn, growing before their eyes, lengthening and tearing up more of the grass as it reached up. It rose from the ground like a serpent summoned from a wicker basket by some Egyptian snake charmer.

Keomany glanced at Peter for further instructions but he only nodded and thanked her.

His skin felt filthy, coated with a putrescent film that had collected upon all of them like pollen. It was the atmosphere of this strange realm, this place between worlds where some power had secreted the village of Wickham away and changed it forever, baptized the town in blood and cruelty. They were all tainted with it now, but the filth would wash off, might even burn off if exposed to the pure sunlight of their own world.

For all of them save Keomany. It had taken something from her and left a stain on her soul that might never be cleansed.

Peter knew he had to find the being behind this horror, but first there was Wickham to be dealt with. He glanced over at Nikki and took strength from the faith in her eyes. As if that were some silent cue, the indigo demons began to swarm toward them again.

The things were deadly and swift as they crossed the pavement and danced across the lawn, constricting the perimeter circle they had created. Their talons gleamed hideously in the hellish orange light. Father Jack and Nikki turned on them immediately and began to shoot, gunfire ripping through the first wave of attackers. They would be out of ammunition in seconds. There were too many of the creatures. Keomany had not plumbed the depths of her newfound power yet, but Peter did not think she would need to.

The magick that surged through him was much like electrocution. His muscles went taut, his limbs rigid, and pain lanced through him, deep as the bone. Peter summoned all the magick within him, all that he had learned and that was now a part of him, and he reached out his left hand and gripped the top of the tree root that jutted from the earth in front of him.

Connection.

It was instantaneous. Purely on instinct—as all of his most powerful sorcery had become—he muttered words last heard on the banks of the River Tigris many millennia before. Keomany had drawn that root forth from their world, from the earth they all knew. It had punched a hole into this realm and now Peter used that root as an anchor. He could
feel
the world of his birth. With his mind, with his magick, he reached his power down along that root and felt the edges of that puncture wound between worlds.

With his eyes tightly closed, he tore it wide open.

He had done this earlier, ripped a hole in this dimension that allowed portions of Wickham to spill back into its rightful place. The effort had driven a wedge of pain through his skull. This was completely different. Then he had sensed their own dimension lurking just beyond the veil that enclosed this realm. Now, with Keomany’s earthcraft aiding him, he could feel it. Touch it.

Peter could hear ripples of gunfire but it all seemed distant from him now. Nikki and Keomany and Father Jack, they were all so far away. He smelled freshly mown grass and felt the warmth of the sun on his face. He opened his eyes and looked up.

The dreadful pumpkin sky had been wounded. A circular hole gaped in that bilious ceiling; a hole through which the sky was pure blue with white wisps of cloud, and through which the life-giving spring sunlight burned down upon the small patch of lawn where Peter now stood. The grass seemed to yearn for it, the tree root in his hand trembled as the circle of sunlight on the Shaws’ yard began to grow. Visually, it was deceiving, for he was not pushing the hellish landscape away. Rather, he had grabbed hold of his own world and was
pulling
them back into it.

Peter took a deep breath, focusing his energy. He propelled it out of him, into that jutting root, and he felt the barrier tear, felt more of Wickham pulled back into alignment with its proper place. White sparks leaped from the blades of grass in the lawn as the area he had affected grew wider and the sunlight spread and the circle of blue sky above blossomed and spread until all of the property that had belonged to Keomany’s parents had been reclaimed.

An island of peace in the midst of Hell.

The gunfire died.

Peter looked up to see Keomany staring at him. The demons were shrieking and retreating, scrambling over one another, trampling each other as they fled away from this otherworldly light to the safety of the disgusting realm they knew. The difference was tangible. It terrified them. This time they ran not only beyond the veil that now separated the two worlds, but farther, slipping into the black-orange shadows, into the broken windows of houses across the street or the woods beyond them, into the hole just down the block where the Slogute had burrowed.

One of the monsters, mewling like an injured kitten, turned the featureless, horseshoe-crab shell that served as its face up toward the blue sky, tendril-tongue darting out to taste the air, then dropped to the ground and began to dig insanely. It had given up hope of fleeing beyond the reach of the light of the earth-dimension’s sun and now tried to excavate itself a hole in which to hide.

Father Jack took four quick strides toward it, aimed, and blew the carapace over its skull to pieces. The priest blessed himself and looked around as if searching for other targets, but all of them had gone. Peter had no doubt they were watching from their hiding places, but for now he knew they would not attack again.

Nikki held her gun by her side as she walked to where Peter and Keomany stood on either side of the jutting root. Peter still clutched it in his hand and Nikki glanced at his grip before she met his gaze.

“That’s a start.” She grinned. “What do you do for an encore?”

Keomany could not seem to summon a smile; her grief was too great. “Can you do this for all of Wickham?”

“It wasn’t just me,” Peter assured her. “But with your help, I think I can, yes. I think
we
can.”

Father Jack muttered something, his voice barely above a whisper. Peter ignored him, focused on Keomany. The earthwitch nodded and laid her hand over his upon that living root. Peter wondered if it were just any tree, of if there was something more to it, if Keomany had touched on the roots of nature itself, the earth spirit those of her faith believed in. In ancient Norse myth it had been called Yggdrasil, the world tree.

Perhaps
, he thought,
all trees are part of Yggdrasil.

“Octavian!” Father Jack snapped, but the intensity in his voice was born of fear rather than anger.

Nikki grabbed Peter’s free hand but she was staring back the way they had come. Peter followed the line of her gaze and saw what had entranced her and terrified Father Jack. He felt Keomany’s hand slip from his own and then, barely conscious of having done it, he let go of the root himself. The Shaws’ property remained bathed in the warm sunlight of their world, but Peter felt cold in spite of the sun.