Wildwood Road (21 page)

He is Moloch.

In his eyes, there is no spark of benevolence, nor even of intelligence. There is only savage hunger.

The god-king dips his heavy head and moans with anticipation as he reaches out for her. She has been so frightened she could not move, but now at last she tries to turn to flee. Even the darkness of one of those tunnels beneath the city would be preferable to his touch.

Moloch grasps her. Bones crack in his grip as he turns her to face him. Once more he dips his head and then he thrusts forward, one of his horns impaling her. Yet there is no pain, only discomfort. Only a terrible coldness. She stares down at the place below her left breast where the horn has entered her, pushed through fabric and flesh, and she realizes that it has not gutted her. It is as though Moloch's horn has passed through her without harm. It is inside her. But there is no wound, no real pain, only . . .

She flinches. Begins to shake.

Her tears flow freely now.

The god-king has not opened his mouth, but where they are connected, Moloch has begun to feed on her. Draining strength and hope from her as surely as if the monstrosity were leeching her blood. She wants to cry out for her mother, wishing that she could be coddled, once more, in that good woman's arms, just as she had been as a small child.

Then the urge has passed, for she cannot recall the feeling of such comfort and safety.

There is only sorrow in her now.

Moloch has begun to moan again with the pleasure of his feast. Her vision begins to dim and she ceases any struggle, falling limp in his arms, her head lolling to one side.

And she sees them, emerging from the darkness of those tunnel mouths. Wisp-haired women in shapeless cloaks, faces stretched and distorted, nearly as hideous as Moloch himself.

Hungry.

“Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnno!” The sound began with Michael grunting through his teeth, and ended as his fingers sifted through wet leaves and closed around the same rock he had struck his knee on earlier.

They still held him tightly, but the one before him was little more than a wraith now, a hollow, withered shell. Yet its fingers were still anchored inside him. With an incoherent roar he forced himself up, twisting around and swinging his arm to slam the rock into the face of the misshapen woman whose fingers were sunk into his left shoulder.

The rock tore open its face. Its flesh. As the wound gaped open, a silver mist began to spill out, like a tendril of fog made of mercury. It hissed as it slid from the gash and the wind through the trees began to pull at it. The silver mist swirled languidly away, like blood in the ocean.

Blood,
he thought.
They can bleed. They can be hurt.

This realization took a fraction of an instant, and then he drove his elbow back into the chest of the other who had been holding him. The one in front withdrew its finger from his forehead and Michael hurled the rock at it. The stone caved its face in with a puff of dust and a crackling noise, a dried husk breaking.

It fell.

The others hesitated.

He turned and hurled himself down the hill, unmindful of the incline or the wet leaves, hardly feeling the branches whipping around him. He ducked beneath a bough, grabbed hold of it and swung himself past. His heels slipped and he began to slide. He could see the place below where the trees thinned and the incline began to level off, where the light of the overcast day seeped in. His heart leaped with a frantic hope unlike anything he had ever felt before.

His arms wavered and he tried to keep his balance. Tried, and failed. Michael tried to grasp low-hanging branches but he only continued to slide. His ass bumped over rocks and roots and it was all he could do to keep from somersaulting ass-over-teakettle the rest of the way down. An image swam in his mind of his head striking a tree trunk and splitting like overripe fruit. Like something was rotten inside his skull.

And maybe it was. The taint of those images, those memories, was still inside him.

His back and neck crawled with the fear that the twisted women were dancing and floating in pursuit, coming down the hill through the trees after him. But he would not turn, would not even glance over his shoulder. He didn't want to see them. Branches tore at him as though they, too, wished to hold him back, and then Michael reached the bottom of the hill. His knees nearly buckled as he adjusted to the level ground, and then he exploded from the trees and ran to his car.

Stay away,
he heard, a whisper on the wind, a suggestion in his ears. Or perhaps in his mind. Or in his veins, where their touch had tainted him.
Stay away.

He dared not look up while he tore open the door; once he was inside, he locked the car and started the engine, ratcheted it into gear, and hit the accelerator. The car leaped forward, spitting sand from under the tires, and only then did he glance around.

The twisted women—the husks—were gone.

He shook all over, barely able to keep his hands on the wheel, but he did not pull over. It was not until he was back out on Old Route 12 and passing by a strip mall that he brought the car to a stop, threw it into park, and held himself, rocking and staring wide-eyed at nothing, trying to make sense of the impossible.

W
HEN
M
ICHAEL AND
J
ILLIAN HAD
announced that they planned to go to Austria for their honeymoon, the prevailing wisdom amongst their family and friends was that this was sheer lunacy. The recommendation, spouted from dozens of sets of lips, was that they spend the days subsequent to their wedding in warmer climes. A Caribbean cruise, for instance. Mexico and Bermuda were also popular suggestions.

Aside from the fact that both Jillian and Michael loathed the idea that they should choose a destination solely based on its popularity, there was the additional obstacle of Michael's despising the beach. His mother had been, and still was, an inveterate sun-worshipper. As a child he had been dragged to the shores of Maine, Cape Cod, and Florida so frequently that body-surfing, collecting seashells, and building sand castles no longer held any appeal for him. Like any child forced to engage in any activity so often, even when he had no desire for it, he had developed a certain antagonism toward the whole enterprise. In fact, during the entirety of their relationship thus far Jillian had been able to drag Michael to the beach exactly once, and that had been in Maine the previous New Year's Day. Not the ideal climate for sun and surf.

In response to the dismay with which their friends met their plans, Michael could only remind them that when it was their turn to go on a honeymoon they could choose whatever destination their hearts—or the latest trend—demanded. But he and Jillian had other interests.

The truth was that Jillian would have been more than happy to take a Caribbean cruise. In fact, had she insisted, or seemed even the least bit upset about the options Michael presented, he would have submitted without argument. He loved her, after all. The important thing was for them to have time together, away from their usual lives, to recover from the chaos that accompanied any wedding.

However, for his own part, he wanted more than lying out under the sun, drinking daiquiris and margaritas and things with little umbrellas in them. He wanted history and adventure; he wanted discovery. He wanted to spend time investigating whatever locale they chose. Most of his friends would have been appalled to learn that one of the destinations they had considered was Alaska, until they'd set the wedding for October. Austria would be chilly that time of year, but Alaska . . . that was too much even for Michael. Those same friends would have been astonished if he and Jillian had announced the honeymoon spot they had settled on initially. Michael had always had a fascination with Egypt. So much so that despite the turbulence and violence in that region, that marvelous adventure had been their plan right up until the very moment he discovered that the coolest month to visit Egypt was January, when it was still ninety-five degrees in Cairo and one hundred and ten on the Nile. He would have endured a lot to see the Great Pyramids, visit the Sphinx, and cruise along the same waters that had once carried Cleopatra's royal barge, even ignoring travel warnings from the U.S. government. But there were limits. Someday he hoped to visit Egypt . . . but not in October.

The morning after the wedding was a wonder. As tired as they were, they were filled with a kind of energy that neither of them had ever felt before and both doubted they would ever feel again. It was pure exhilaration. As they drove to the airport together, and later on the plane to Vienna, Michael looked at her dozens of times and repeated the same words.

“You're my wife.”

To which Jillian would reply, “Yes, I'm aware of that.”

Michael would gaze at her in amazement and shake his head. “No, you don't understand. You're my
wife
.”

There was a wonderful period of adjustment to that idea. They had been married less than twenty-four hours and already he found a kind of peace and comfort in her presence that he never could have imagined. Jillian treated it as though she thought he was being silly. Charmingly so, but silly nevertheless. Yet he could see in her eyes that she understood and that she felt that same calm, that sense of rightness.

Upon their arrival in Vienna, they thanked God for taxicabs. Much like many of the other old capitals of Europe, Vienna was a diamond in the rough. The rough consisted of the industry that had grown up to surround the heart of the city during the twentieth century. There were office buildings, factories, and featureless apartments that could have been part of any city in the world. But once they had crossed the Danube Canal, the old city rose around them. There was romance in every stone of the architecture. The artist in Michael rejoiced.

When the cab stopped at a red light beside a tower in which was housed the most intricate glockenspiel he could have imagined, Jillian scrambled for the camera. But Michael did not want a photograph. He pulled out a pad and sketched madly, grateful for the traffic and the red light. Two minutes later as they pulled away, he craned his neck to get a last glimpse and then closed his eyes to sear it into his mind. He spent the rest of the ride sketching furiously. Jillian said nothing, only watching over his shoulder. She reached over to stroke the back of his neck, fingers twirling in his hair. She understood. Hell, that was one of the reasons he married her.

He would carry that pad wherever they went in Vienna, but then, in the madness of nearly missing their stop at Salzburg, he would leave it on the train. Later, he would vow to himself that he would return once more to Vienna, just to draw. But so far, no luck.

Still, the loss of his sketch pad was yet to come—like so many losses and victories, small and large. On that day they wove through narrow back streets. Without the cab driver they never would have found the Hotel Kärntnerhof. It wasn't on a main street, or even precisely off a main street, but in a small alley called Grashofgasse, which seemed hidden away off of a side street. Even after they had found it, the hotel seemed hidden from the rest of the city.

They lugged their bags from the car, checked in, and spent only moments in the room before finding a map and heading out onto the streets of Vienna after dark. The hotel was quaint and seemed impossibly far from everything, yet in moments they found the magic in the city they had been hoping for. At a tiny restaurant in which no one spoke a single word of English save “hello,” Michael ate something he couldn't pronounce but guessed was a kind of potato dumpling. Jillian ordered Wiener schnitzel, because after all, it was their first night in Vienna.

A short walk through a narrow arcade just around the corner from the hotel brought them into the midst of Rotenturmstrasse, and minutes later they were standing in a broad open plaza staring up at the extraordinary façade of St. Stephen's Cathedral. It stunned Michael with its combination of architectural styles, from the Romanic foundations of its basic structure to the stunning Gothic traditions of its towers. He knew he had to draw it, but that would have to wait for daylight. Lights burned in the tower and the windows, accenting the mystery of the place.

They continued on from the plaza, strolling along Kärntnerstrasse, a pedestrian street lined with elegant shops, chocolatiers, cafés, hotels with globe lampposts, and one extraordinary structure after another. It was evening in Vienna, and this seemed the city's beating heart. There were Austrians on the street, but Michael heard half a dozen other languages spoken by people passing by. He strolled arm in arm with Jillian, gazing in shop windows and just soaking up the amazing history of the place, the clash of architectural styles that gave it its unique flavor. The city had been a jewel of Europe, fought over for centuries, and it reflected the influences of its various suitors.

Walking around he realized how chilly it was, and they bought scarves for twice what they were worth. Jillian dragged Michael into a bakery café called Linzner's. As Jillian looked at Michael over her Sacher torte and he licked whipped cream off the rim of his cocoa mug, she laughed.

“Well, I'm married now. I guess it doesn't matter anymore if I have three desserts a day and put on forty pounds in a week.”

He winked. “We'll get fat together.”

While they didn't visit Linzner's three times a day, they were there at least once, usually twice, a day for the duration of their stay in Vienna. In between visits for chocolate, coffee, and tortes, they wandered the city, ducking into tiny antique stores and taking tours of the grand baroque palaces of the Austrian capital. They explored the Vienna Woods, and walked through the Tiergarten at Schönbrunn Palace, the oldest zoo in Europe. They took in the Sigmund Freud museum, and the Imperial Crypt of the Hapsburgs.

On their final afternoon in Vienna, Michael told Jillian he had a surprise for her. He had just finished a sketch of St. Peter's Church, whose origins as a house of worship dated back into the mystery of the fourth century, though Charlemagne himself had supposedly founded a church on the site four hundred years later.