The Gathering Dark (27 page)

In the distance, above the tops of houses and trees, where mountains rose over Wickham, the orange sky had darkened and thickened. Ominous storm clouds had formed and even now dipped toward the ground as though they might at any moment touch down and become tornadoes. The air—even there in the place where the world had returned to normal—felt heavy and damp.

Tendrils of storm hung from the horrid sky and their color deepened from orange to bloody red. They drifted toward one another until they began to fuse—two, then four, then six prongs of furious, raging storm that from a distance looked very like antlers, perhaps horns, or the prongs of a crown.

In the massive wall of raging winds and debris that was whipped up from the ground beneath that crown, Peter Octavian was certain that he saw a face. The scarlet storm had black eyes and a slit for a nose and a gaping maw for a mouth.

And the storm came on.

At first it had seemed only to drive in upon itself, a war between ground and sky. Now that massive twist of furious winds, of deadly tornadoes, began to move in their direction. Even over the tops of houses they could see cars and chunks of buildings torn up from the ground and sent to whirl inside that massive storm.

The face in the storm leered at them.

Nikki clung suddenly to Peter’s side. “What is it?” she whispered.

Keomany spoke up before he could respond.

“It’s the thing that did this,” she said. “The thing that took Wickham.”

Father Jack had not moved. He simply stared at the oncoming storm, weapon hanging useless at his side. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” he said, voice barely audible over the rising howl of the wind as the blood red storm thundered toward them. “How do you kill that?”

“Let’s solve that one from outside Wickham,” Nikki said. She grabbed Keomany by the hand and the two women started toward the driveway, where the rented Navigator sat waiting.

Peter did not move. He stared at the face in the storm, at the black eyes like sinkholes in the midst of that crimson hurricane, tendrils of tornado stretching up into the stratosphere forming the crown of this power.

“We can’t outrun it,” Peter said flatly. “It’s all around us.”

He felt it, knew it. Though he had pulled a small portion of Wickham back to their dimension, the rest of the village was filled with the power of this thing they now faced.

Father Jack stared at him. “So we just wait for it to reach us?”

“It’s already here.”

The priest frowned but then he paused and shivered as though he felt it too. Nikki and Keomany stopped on the grass just short of the driveway. They all turned to look at the figure that appeared from the woods behind one of the houses across the street.

This was not like the other things they had encountered, not a skittering, hissing, indigo-armored demon. It was shaped like a human being, though impossibly tall and thin, and it was clad in rags and strips of cloth that clung to it as though pasted on, a papier-mâché effigy of a man. Strips of cloth covered its face as well, or as much as they could see of it, for its features were shaded by the hood of a ragged cloak that swirled around it with a wind churned up by the approaching storm.

Peter Octavian stared at this nomadic figure, this strange tatterdemalion, and he felt afraid.

It strode beneath the structure of an enormous family swing set, and though it did not touch them, the swings seemed to sway aside for it to pass. In its path was a sandbox shaped like a green-and-orange dragon lying on its back, its belly full of sand, a too-cute character out of children’s storybooks. The thing walked over it, feet treading sand and then grass again, in a straight line toward them. A white picket fence cordoned off the back yard and the wooden struts shattered as it passed.

Nikki shouted something to Peter but he could not hear her. The roar of the incoming storm had grown much louder, drowning her words.

The Tatterdemalion reached the street, its eerily slender form silhouetted against the house and the woods and the roaring, blood red storm that massed above the trees—the sinister face of the storm glaring down upon them. The creature was close enough that Peter could see that some of it was covered with not rags but actual pieces of clothing—a little girl’s sundress, a pair of denim jeans, a green silk blouse.

At the place where the horrid orange light ended and golden sunlight began, at the crossroads between worlds, it stopped. Tendrils of cloth flapped in the high winds. It did not seem even to notice Nikki and Keomany, and though its hooded eyes might have seen Father Jack, Peter was certain it was staring at him.

“Sorcerer,”
the Tatterdemalion said, and despite the howling winds and the rumble of the storm, he could hear its high, wheedling voice perfectly, as though it had spoken in his ear.

Peter raised his hands, clenched into fists, and magickal fire blazed up around them. He held his breath. His friends were nearby and he could feel their closeness as well as their vulnerability. Whatever this thing was, he would not allow it to lay its hands on Nikki.

“Give back what you’ve taken!” Peter shouted into the wind, barely able to hear his own words.

The cruel storm had paused, lingering just beyond Little Tree Lane, but it filled up the sky. Beneath it, the Tatterdemalion tilted its head to one side as if studying him.

“You are powerful,”
it said, voice echoing in his head.
“The Whispers fear you. Yet know this. Your magicks, no matter how ancient, cannot defeat me. They were forged to combat the energies that govern your own realm and many others. But your world is new to me, and I am new to it. The power I bring is like nothing that has ever been here before.”

At that place where the two dimensions clashed, the Tatterdemalion inclined its head.

“I leave you now. Of all my holdings, I have found this land to be least interesting. Therefore I will grant your request and return it to you. I warn you now, though, sorcerer. I will do as I wish in this plane, as I have in all others I have encountered. If you interfere further with my Whispers or my will, you shall be destroyed.”

As the words lingered in his mind and Peter tried to make sense of them, tried to formulate some kind of response, the wind whipping around the Tatterdemalion increased. Nikki and Keomany ran the last few feet to the Navigator, afraid the storm was going to strike them in full. Father Jack leaned into the wind, but was so thin that Peter wondered how he managed to keep his footing.

The magick burned around his hands and surged through him and he felt he should strike, should attack the thing, but did not know how much power it truly had. Whatever horror lived in that storm it was as terrible as any of the ancient demons he had confronted during his time in Hell.

The wind whipping around it became a cyclone and for a moment the Tatterdemalion simply stood there. Then the green silk blouse was torn away from it, followed by the blue jeans and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of ragged strips of cloth.

The cloak was twisted around by the wind and funneled into a small tornado of cloth.

And the Tatterdemalion was gone.

In an instant, the space between two heartbeats, the sky above Wickham returned to normal, as though the sun were a spotlight turned on to dispel the filthy orange clouds. The blood red storm became pink mist and showered to the ground, leaving no trace.

The village of Wickham was in ruins, most of its citizens dead, but the sky was blue again and somewhere nearby birds sang and a dog barked furiously.

Nikki stomped across the lawn toward Peter, stood before him, and pointed at the place where the Tatterdemalion had stood.

“Excuse me, but what the
fuck
was that?”

Slowly, he shook his head, gazing at that same spot.

“I honestly have no idea.”

The Cleft of Ronda was breathtakingly beautiful from the vantage point offered by the New Bridge. The Carling sisters remained on the bridge for nearly fifteen minutes as Nancy took photographs of the vistas offered on both sides. From the western view she could see the remains of centuries-old battlements in the foothills below the cliffs of the plateau, and to the east the Guadalevin River flowed through a sprawl of whitewashed houses surrounded by lush trees and other greenery.

Perhaps most startling—and it was a sight Paula insisted Nancy take several photos of—was the view available to them when they had reached the other end of the bridge. Looking back from the Old City to the comparatively new, they could see the back of the government-owned luxury hotel that loomed at the edge of the plateau, and the craggy drop below. They could, in fact, see all around the western part of the plateau, the outcroppings of rock and the striations in its composition, the ledges where dense shrubbery grew, the steep cliff face that made Nancy think that a leap from that height would feel like falling forever.

Not that she had any plans in that regard.

“So,” she began, glancing at her sister. “You’ve got the map. Where to first?”

Paula smiled. “Sure you don’t want to toss the map over the bridge?”

Nancy held out her hand. “Try me.”

“I don’t think so.”

While her sister perused the map of Ronda and the descriptions of the various sights in the Old City, Nancy watched the cars and mopeds rumble past. People walked across the bridge as well and she struggled to hear their voices. She heard Spanish, of course, as well as Italian and German, but only one fortyish couple speaking English, and them with British accents, not American. Ronda seemed out of the way, the sort of place that people here knew about but that was not a destination the way other Spanish cities were. Americans had not really discovered it yet, it seemed. She liked that.

“Let’s start up this way,” Paula said.

Together they set off to the east along a road that ran parallel to the Cleft on one side and what the map identified as the family home of the Counts of Santa Pola. The street ran steeply upward and it narrowed the farther they went, their path taking them on a jag to the right, between two rows of beautifully restored buildings that appeared to have been renovated into apartments. At the northeastern edge of the Old City, not far from the protective ramparts, they found a beautiful archway and an ancient Moorish bridge whose actual age, according to the map, could only be guessed at.

Only a stone’s throw away the sisters came upon a strange structure, an array of stone upheavals in the ground with small rounded windows built into them.

“Moorish baths,” Paula informed her sister after consulting the map. “The best preserved in the country, according to the write-up. Built at the end of the . . . holy shit . . . built at the end of the thirteenth century. That’s like twelve hundred and something.”

Nancy pursed her lips. “Thanks. I can do the math.”

They descended along a short set of stairs and entered the Moorish baths. Nancy felt herself holding her breath. The place was like an underground church constructed of stone, bare floors punctuated only by enormous stone pillars that supported the ceiling. Beams of sunlight shone down through the circular holes in the roof.

It was not the first time she had been filled with wonder in Ronda, and it would not be the last. The beauty and age of the place entranced her, and as they moved on, she even forgot to keep up the usual back-and-forth jabs with her sister.

They wandered south along streets lined with shops. Elegant old row houses on either side were adorned with second-and third-story iron-railed balconies, some of which had beautiful wood and glass enclosures that were unique in Nancy’s experience. These master-works of carved wood and paned glass hung out above the sidewalk and she yearned to go inside one of the homes, to look out at Ronda from the other side of that glass.

Everywhere they walked there were architectural pleasures, from the churches and their towers on the tallest portion of the plateau to the meticulously laid tiles of blue and green and white that finished the appearance of signs and the corners of buildings with the perfect flourish. A trio of bells, one larger between two of equal size, topped the façade of a convent whose upper windows mirrored the position of the bells, one large round window between two smaller.

They explored museums and gardens that overlooked the plains below, torn between the beauty of the view and the tile work and history within. During lunch at a little restaurant Paula studied the map and pointed out that they had not yet visited the Mondragon Palace, the description of which sounded beautiful, though Nancy suspected Paula was most intrigued by its name. It was the sort of thing that would appeal to her, dragons and moons and such.

“It was built in 1491 when the Moors had been driven out,” Paula said. “It sounds like something we shouldn’t miss.”

After lunch they set off to discover the Mondragon. Even with the map they found themselves turned around more than once, in the shadow of the Church of Santa Maria la Mayor. Paula became frustrated, propping her sunglasses up on top of her head and twining one finger in her hair before assuring Nancy that, at last, she had figured out the maze of narrow, zigzagging streets on the western edge of the Old City.