Authors: Tony Richards
“Make her a tea of this when she wakes up,” he told me, handing me a small glass vial with some nondescript brown shapes in it.
I didn’t even like to guess what they were.
“Full of iron,” DuMarr assured me, “far more than in a tablet. Otherwise, make sure she rests. Which will be hard work – yes, I get that.”
He looked utterly exhausted, but delighted with himself. Cass was in an armchair, heavily wrapped in blankets. Still completely out of it, but a glow was finally returning to her cheeks.
I started to express my thanks.
“No need, no need,” the man said, brushing me off quickly. “I did what I could. It’s up to you now. Take her home.”
We turned at long last onto Rowan Street, a wide, nondescript avenue in East Meadow, one of the rather shabbier parts of town. Not as dingy as Cray’s Lane – at least the road was paved. But a lot of the old wooden houses had been partitioned off into – in some cases – curiously shaped apartments. And the whole place had an air of neglect about it
I’d been here a good deal, back when I’d been on the force. Nothing very major ever drew me here, you understand. Mostly domestic disturbances and the handling of pilfered goods. It’s the sort of community, in other words, that stretches concepts like relationship and economy past their normal limits. The sidewalks were empty. A fox appeared in my headlamps for a moment, and then vanished like a ghost.
The neon sign outside her place was turned off, but I could still read it. “Cassie’s Diner.” That was what she used to do, before her whole world got turned head over heels. It had a low flat roof, big plate-glass windows, and you could make out the shapes of the tables and chairs inside. A deep-fryer. A coffee machine. A sign on the door read ‘Ask about our specials.’ It was peeling away at one corner.
She owned the place free and clear, and had done okay with it. I’d dropped in many times, when I’d still been a cop.
I drove around the back, stopping outside her apartment door. The screen was torn. There was a bug lamp to one side, but it hadn’t been switched on in months.
The sky above us was a hazy, starless charcoal murk. Something flittered across it that I thought might be a bat.
I looked Cass over carefully. She was sleeping soundly, her breathing mildly sonorous, and I felt grateful just for that. I fumbled with my keychain till I found the one for her place. We keep each other’s, for situations just like this. And then hefted her again – she didn’t make a sound.
The instant that the door came open, there was a mewl from near my feet. Her big old tabby cat, Cleveland, was staring up at us with those dusky amber eyes of his. When he saw that there was something wrong, though, he beat a retreat, disappearing off into the back. The goddamn coward.
Once inside, I bumped the light switch with my elbow.
And there they were, even in the hallway. The children she’d once had. Staring at me – tiny – from the walls, in dozens of framed photographs.
Kevin, six years old. Angel, five. And Little Cassie, only three.
Trapped at those ages forever, motionless and two-dimensional.
I knew her story. Not all of it, but enough.
Cass had never married, but there’d been plenty of men. The problem was that – strong and hardy and dependable herself – she’d always had a penchant for, been drawn to, total losers. Flotsam on the sea of life. Guys who wasted their existences, and used up other folks’ along the way. Drinkers. Gamblers. Semi-criminals. She liked them the same way other people took a shine to stray dogs. She would move them in and feed them like you would a scruffy, homeless mutt.
It never lasted long. After a few months she’d get bored, and then show Mr. Wrong the door. Cass had never been the sort of person to get all tied down. So I guess that, on one level, she preferred her life that way.
Her kids, as a consequence, each had a different father. But she loved them deeply, fiercely, all the same. I’d seen her with them, in the old days. She was like a tender lioness, with them around. When she needed to be firm with them, she always did it kindly. They were her whole life. So imagine how she must have felt, to turn around one day and find …
She still felt pretty weighty, but I didn’t mind a bit. Not when you considered option number two. I shifted her in my arms, and headed slowly toward the next door down the corridor.
She had never told me the full details. Couldn’t bring herself to do it. Every time she tried, the words just piled up like a car wreck in her throat. I’d got the gist of it, however, down the last couple of years.
She’d been out front, flipping burgers. Her kids and her new paramour were here in the apartment. He’d gone out that day, despite the fact that it was freezing cold, and brought back something with him. Some kind of ornate talisman, a black stone at its center. Where’d he even got it? Stolen it, more than likely.
“You be careful with that thing,” she’d told him.
She was busy at the time, with a new raft of customers out front.
“Don’t let the little ones touch it.”
A normal day, then. Flipping burgers. Snow on the pavement outside and the windows of the diner misting up continuously. The griddle sizzling. The smell of coffee on the air.
She had somehow sensed that something was wrong. Simply a mother’s instinct. And come running back inside, to find an utter, yawning vacuum where her family had been.
Cassie had searched for hours after that, first in every corner of her silent and deserted home. Then through the white-clad streets outside. One of her regulars had called the police. It was no use at all, none of it. That man of hers, and all three of her kids, had simply …
“Vanished, right?” she managed to ask me just one time, the tears pouring freely down her cheeks. “Not forever, though? Not dead? Just like your family … right, Ross?”
Right, I’d told her. But the plain fact was, I didn’t know for sure, in either case. There was simply no way of telling.
Not then, and not even now. It drives me practically crazy, sometimes.
I bumped my elbow on another switch, at the entrance to her living room, revealing flimsy nylon drapes, cheap looking ornaments, a threadbare rug. The kind of furniture you had to screw together, which looked second-hand from new. A TV set that belonged in some kind of museum. There was clothing of hers scattered everywhere – I’ve already told you she’s not tidy.
The walls had been painted light pink a considerable while back. There were biker magazines in a heap on the coffee table – she’d owned a chopper since she’d been eighteen and run with a bad crowd. Propped against the couch was the Gibson acoustic guitar she likes to strum sometimes.
And there were hundreds, literally hundreds more of the same kind of photograph. Kevin, Angel, and Little Cassie, happy, innocent, and beaming.
I’d seen them many times before, but never quite gotten used to them. How could she come home every night to this? And I was better placed than most to understand how it tormented her.
Exactly like in my own house, all the children’s toys were packed away. ‘For safekeeping,’ I guess she tells herself, the same way I do. There were hardly any books. She had a stereo cabinet, the equipment pretty old.
And over in the corner, about three foot tall, was a shiny, gleaming tinsel tree. There were colored lights strung all around it, but they’d been unplugged a good time back. The silvery star at the top was hanging partway off.
And that was the worst of it, the grimmest aspect. Her children had disappeared just two weeks before Christmas.
Something hard and dry moved in my gullet.
Forget it now
, I told myself. Then looked away. I always hate the sight of that damned tree.
I carried her through into the bedroom. Set her down and covered her up, making sure that she was comfortable. I hovered there for a while with the lights turned off, just watching her. Then, leaving the door open a small gap, I went into the kitchen.
It was all perfectly clean, don’t get me wrong. But she always set things down wherever it was most convenient, not even bothering to stow them away in cupboards, so the work surfaces were a big jumble of pans, skillets, crockery and cups.
She’d never really cared about stuff like that, not even when the kids had been around. Neatness and respectability
… they were just diversions, to her way of thinking. The only thing that really mattered was the degree of happiness with which you lived. And that had been intense until …
Until happiness had been torn from her grasp, leaving her with nothing to hold onto except what we did to help this town.
I went across and got a beer from the fridge. My hands smarted gently as I yanked the ring pull off. I felt like I’d run a marathon. My muscles were aching, and my body was filled with a tiredness so profound it seeped right through into my bones.
What an evening this had been. I’d never known one like it. I gazed around again, taking a slow pull from the can.
My mind couldn’t find release, however exhausted I might be. It kept on banging away at the same questions. What might Saruak be planning for us next? What else did he have in store for this peculiar town of ours?
The answer came a good deal sooner than I had expected. In the very next second, in fact.
A sudden vivid brightness flared outside the kitchen window. And then it began to spread and grow.
The single letter hung, in blazing fire, high up against the night sky. Too far away to tell how large it really was. But smoke was trailing from its edges. It was massive and illuminated this entire district. I reckoned it was lighting up almost all the town.
I’d gone outside, round to the front of Cassie’s diner. And was not the only person out here. Everywhere I looked, folks were spilling onto the sidewalk, drawn there by the vivid glow. And this had to be happening everywhere. Heads were angled back. Eyes mirrored the churning flames. Their faces were lit up, flickering yellow. I was reminded of those neighbors back on Cray’s Lane the other night.
They looked uncertain and afraid. Precisely what was happening now?
Another letter began to appear, like it was being traced there by some invisible pen.
A
There’d been a television crew back at St. Nevitt’s. It had, almost certainly, gone on to St. Agnes’s as well. Most people had to know what had been going down this evening. I remembered what the Little Girl had said. Awareness of the evil spirit. That was how he would tighten his grip on us, until it squeezed us half to death.
R
the moving finger wrote. And, having written, moved on to a
U
. It was our friend again. There was no doubt on that score.
He was impinging on the consciousness of this whole town. Growing larger in its people’s thoughts, until he obsessed them. They already knew that horror in its purest form had descended on the Landing. It had been a shapeless and an unknown form, up until this point. But now it had a name. They knew exactly what to call the thing they’d grown to fear.
I gazed up with a defeated air as the second
A
and final
K
sprang into being, knowing there was nothing I could do about it anymore. Saruak. It would be in people’s dreams tonight. More likely in their nightmares. It would trip from the mouths of infants, and be the first word people thought of when they woke. It would hang there in their minds, the way the flames were hanging. And then, as the Little Girl had told me, it would take root, grow.
I could almost feel the heat of the huge letters from down here. Even the adepts up on Sycamore Hill would be watching, I knew. And how long before they got involved?
Was there anything that we could do to stop him?
After a while, it all began to fade away, crackling into nothingness like marsh gas. But its impression remained. I could still see that word every time I blinked. I couldn’t be the only one.
The heat must have been so intense that it had actually seared the night-borne haze away. The stars were winking down at me again, very cold and distant. I turned my head from side to side. A few people were still looking upward. Most of the rest were gazing at each other with their mouths hanging open.
“What did that mean?” I heard, several times.
Something in me wanted to tell them. But I got the feeling that they’d all find out quite soon enough.
I went back in to check on Cass. She was fine, still sleeping. Lucky to be out of it. This room was as big a mess as the rest of the house. But there were clumps of lucky heather on her dresser and a four-leafed clover set in a cube of acrylic on her nightstand. I’m not superstitious personally, but I brushed my fingertips against it all the same.
Cleveland had returned and was now dozing on the quilt down by her feet. She called him that because she’d always wanted to see other places, and that one sounded – to her ears – like it had a cool, exotic ring to it. I had read enough about the outside world to understand she’d got that wrong, but I’d never had the heart to tell her.
They both looked pretty cozy, like everything was all right with the world. And that eased my dark mood a little, making me feel slightly better.
So, leaving them to it, I went to get another beer, then slumped down on the living room couch, making the guitar hum slightly. I didn’t think I’d actually sleep.
But tiredness can descend upon you like the most silent of traps.
I’ll merely settle back a moment. I’ll just close my eyes.
And then, I was pounding up the stairs at Mrs. McGaffrey’s all over again. Coming to a stiff halt at the top, in front of Goad’s room.
What I was looking at … I could scarcely believe it.
Pale white light was flowing from the room. A solid stream of it. It didn’t flicker, which meant this was magic at its most extreme. And it was so intense I found it hard to look into. I shielded my eyes with my free hand and squinted. It was still so bright that I could only make a few vague shapes out.
But they were human, four of them, dim smudges in the brilliance. Two were taller than the other pair. And one of them was broad as well. I already understood who
that
had to be.
Goad stepped toward me, spreading out his arms. I could see as he got closer he was wearing some kind of cloak. His sandals were gone too and his feet were bare. I couldn’t tell what his expression was, but could hear from his tone of voice that he had to be smirking.
“Hey there, neighbor! Keeping well?” He said it cheerfully, like we had just bumped into each other in the park.
Was he kidding me? I moved forward carefully, with my gun held out. But it got knocked from my grasp, clattering to the floor, the instant that my hand drew level with the opening. My knuckles stung like they’d been hit with an iron bar. I’d run into some kind of barrier, invisible to the naked eye.
“Oops, sorry about that,” he chortled. “Man, I should have warned you.”
I recovered quickly, slamming at the thing with my forearm. It just made a dull thudding sound, and did not yield a millimeter.
Goad let out a snort. He was right up close to me by this time. And I could now make out his features, although they were indistinct. A sloppy grin was spreading over his face. Dressed the way he was, he looked like Nero after an extended nap.
I tried to stare him down, but he looked unimpressed.
“Mr. Authority personified!” he crowed. “But you’ve got none round here, dude!”
I pressed myself against the barrier.
“Let me in, right now!”
His head shook delightedly. “No can do.”
And so I looked over at the vague shapes behind him, mostly made of heads and shoulders, only vague blurs underneath. None of them were moving. And they didn’t seem to be conscious that I was even there. It ripped at my insides to see them that way. He wouldn’t deliberately hurt them, would he?
“If you’ve touched one
hair
on them –”
I thumped at the barrier again, with the heels of my hands this time. Goad just peered across his shoulder, then returned his nasty gaze to me.
“If I’ve touched your
wife
, you mean? Not to worry, Rossie. All I’ve done so far is bring them up here for the ceremony.”
Which was the first time that word had come up. I wondered what in God’s name was he planning to do.
He turned around and walked toward them. It was only when he stopped that he returned his full attention to me. He put an index finger to his chin.
“Know what your problem is, huh, Ross?”
Humor him, I thought. So I asked, “What?”
“You think so very small. Here you are, surrounded by actual living magic, and you don’t even grasp the opportunity. You roll around in your patrol car and let all these boundless possibilities drift by. That’s okay by you? Each to their own, I say. But your family …?”
He pointed at them.
“Your family deserves a whole lot better. Alicia in particular.”
I couldn’t stand to hear him speak her name, but there was nothing I could do about it. He was scaring me by this point, since his tone was getting louder, wilder.
“She’s a goddess, don’t you understand? I knew that from the start. And now? I’m going to be Zeus to her Hera.”
The power had gone completely to his head, the way it often did to people with weak natures. I began pounding at the invisible shield again. All I wanted was to get my family out of there. But the barrier wouldn’t give. It seemed impenetrable.
“Forget Sycamore Hill!” he was yelling. “Forget the dumbass adepts! I’m going to be the most powerful sorcerer the Landing’s ever seen. A great man, yes, superb. And great men need families, Rossie. How else can they build dynasties? I don’t have one, so I’m taking yours. I’m doing them a favor!”
He was going to try and conjure something huge, in other words. My sense of panic escalated massively. He’d only been learning for a bare few months. He might have managed, somehow, to create of all this energy. But did he have the knowledge, the experience, to control it? Things could go in all kinds of directions from here, I could tell. Including very badly wrong.
“Don’t
do
it!” I shouted. “It’s not worth the
risk
!”
All Goad did was sneer and take another step back, gazing at me like I was some kind of vermin.
“Oh sure, ‘be cautious.’ Typical of you. But look what I’ve already done? There
are
no limits! I can make whatever I
want
happen!”
Then I noticed that something was glimmering around his neck. I couldn’t see it clearly, but it seemed to be some kind of pendant, a jewel on a silver chain. Although the brightness wasn’t coming from it, it just seemed to hang there passively. I wasn’t sure what part it played.
Goad raised his arms, the sleeves of his cloak falling back.
“By the power that is in me!” he shrieked, throwing back his head. “By the magic that is mine alone, I seek to transform us!”
Transform?
“Please, stop!”
But he just ignored me.
I started yelling out Alicia’s name, and then my children’s. There was not even a flicker of response from them. I wasn’t sure that they could even hear me.
“I shall make us all immortal!” Goad was howling.
His short legs were dancing underneath the folds of his cloak.
“I shall make us gods on earth, and the wind shall sing our names!”
Alicia remained motionless. But, to my relief, Pete and Tammy started coming round. Then it struck me forcibly. Was that a good thing, or an indication that he didn’t have as much control as he thought he did? They peered around rather sleepily, then saw that I was there and both came hurrying toward me,
“Daddy! Daddy!”
There wasn’t even time to warn them. Their outstretched arms hit the barrier, and they both fell back. I collapsed to my knees in front of them, desperation setting in. They were mere inches away from me, but wholly out of reach.
And then the quality of light in the room suddenly transformed.
It got fiercer until, in a bare few seconds, my eyes hurt simply trying to cope with it. The kids were reduced to wildly moving silhouettes, still trying to reach me. I was bellowing at the top of my voice, but had no idea what sounds were coming out. My entire face was wet.
As I watched, the searing brightness started pouring into all four of them, through their mouths and eyes.
“You see?” Goad was hollering. “You
see
what I can do?”
The glow was filling up their bodies. They no longer resembled people. They looked more like angels. Maybe this would work, I tried to tell myself, though I was shaking furiously. They’d be changed, but still okay.
The light … abruptly went a much deeper hue, almost a bronze color. The kids became just vague shadows inside it. My heart froze in my chest. I tried to think of something I could do. But it was already too late.
Tammy screamed.
That went through me like a knife, jarring me back into action. I was scrabbling around, next instant, retrieving my gun. If I couldn’t break through this damned barrier, then perhaps a bullet could.
I swung back around, yelling a warning to my kids to get out of the way and thumbing back the hammer.
And the light inside the room …
Transformed to pure black, in the exact same moment. I never even got that second chance to try and save them.
The darkness faded gradually. Until at last, it revealed the loft room the way it had originally been. An unmade single bed. A bare dresser. And a very smeary window looking out on the backyard, a palm print distinctly visible on it.
There was no one left in there at all.
Jason Goad, and my whole family, were gone …
I woke with a yell, sitting violently upright. Children’s faces were staring at me when I looked around, and for a moment I thought they were my kids. I had totally forgotten where I was. But then the truth sank in. These were Cassie’s photographs and nothing more.
I peered more slowly round the living room, then rubbed at my hot cheeks. The dampness on them wasn’t merely sweat, just like in the dream I’d had.
I missed my wife and kids so much. All I had left to cling onto these days was the same belief that Cassie carried round with her. I hadn’t seen them actually perish. They might still be alive, but someplace else. Perhaps on some different plane of existence – I’d heard adepts talking about stuff like that. And I told myself that same thing, every single day.