The Amazon stood over him, panting for breath, blood streaking a face that seemed as fierce and inhuman as those of the warrior-women statues. She wiped thick blood from her mouth, looked down with disdain upon the man, and spat at him, bloodily. Then she turned, groping for the fallen pincers to sever her enemy’s head from his body. She reached down for it, gripped it, started to turn for Evan again.
But he had already leaped from the floor and launched himself at her like a human projectile. Drago grunted as the air was forced from her lungs, and screamed out as he gripped her throat and drove her backward, backward, backward, off balance…
Toward that statue in the far corner. The one with the drawn, sharply tipped sword.
Drago’s eyes writhed with blue fire; Evan drove her back with every shredding fiber in his body.
And then Drago’s shriek of bloodcurdling fury was intermingled with a cry of pure pain. The stone sword pierced her back and then her stomach; the gleaming point of it emerged from her body, red against black robes, and the woman-thing thrashed against it, still trying to strike him with the pincers; she got a hand on his shoulder and wrenched him forward, and before he could jerk away, he felt a white-hot pain lance his own stomach. And then he realized, with sharp and sudden clarity, that she had driven him onto that part of the sword that protruded from her own body.
Drago gripped him, wouldn’t let him free. The flame in her eyes wavered. “Die,” she breathed, the word as mangled as her tongue. Red-flecked spittle clung to her lips. “Die. Die. Die. Die…”
Evan sagged, the pain brighter and hotter than a thousand August suns. But even as he sagged he pushed forward, driving her back father upon the merciless Amazon blade. Her mouth opened, opened, and remained open even as that terrible flame of spectral power flickered, flickered, and died from her eyes. Then he was looking into the black eyes of a corpse, and a red mist of pain and fire swept between him and the dead woman, obscuring his vision.
Replacing it with the soft and silent sheen of a golden field where a dead tree stood, naked branches reaching toward the sky. A body lay in that field, near a branch that had broken and toppled to the earth. A young body, a boy’s body, lying motionless. And Evan standing over it, grown-up Evan now, but still the Evan he always was. I’ll run get help, he thinks. I’ll hurry and get Dad and then he’ll say that Eric’s okay, he’s okay, he’s not dead after all. But the grown-up Evan knows now that one cannot run from Death, not really, and that one must fight the Hand of Evil wherever it is, even on its own pestilent ground.
Evan steps forward, puts a hand to the young boy’s shoulder.
And Eric looks up, grinning widely. “Fooled you, didn’t I?” he says impishly. “Whooey, I took a fall! ’Bout knocked the stuffing out of me!”
“You’re…all right?” the grown-up Evan asks softly.
“Me? Sure!” Eric stands up, little-boy Eric who has never changed at all, and rubs the dirt from his knees. “But that sure scared me, I’ll tell you!”
“That was…dangerous,” Evan says, squinting in the warm sunlight. “You shouldn’t do that anymore.”
“Oh, I won’t. Just once is enough, I’ll tell you! Whooey!” Eric suddenly looks past his brother, into the distance. “Hear that?”
“No. Hear what?”
Eric grins. “Aw, come on! Mom and Dad! They’re calling for us to come home! It’s time, y’know.”
“Yes,” Evan nods. “I guess it is.”
“Let’s go then!”
But Evan still stands staring, as if he’s trying to remember something just beyond the reach of his memory.
“Come on, slowpoke!” Eric shouts, laughing. “They’ll be along in a while, you’ll see! Come on! I’ll race you!”
And grown-up Evan turns toward his still-small brother, and he smiles and says, “I always could beat you in a race,” and together they run laughing toward the edge of a golden field that seems to stretch on forever.
From fire-ravaged Cowlington Street Kay saw the museum roof collapse, sending up a geyser of sparks and flame. There was a great, earthshaking rumble as if the museum itself were about to fall into a fast-opening bottomless fissure. She blinked, the flame scorching her face; two women stood on either side of her, pulling; their hands were ice-cold. Like corpse hands. My hus—band, she thought. No no not your husband anymore! another, more terrible voice within her shrieked. Yes. My husband. Evan. No no not your husband! Evan’s…in there. He’s inside that place! Let him die let him die let him… My husband! Oh dear God where’s my husband! She tried to jerk free of those women, but she couldn’t move her arms, and they were pulling her along, faster and faster, and everywhere there was fire and smoke and a high, wailing noise. Where’s Evan I’ve got to find Evan! The heat puffed her face, and within her that more terrible voice seemed distant now, and fearful: Go with the others hurry go with the others!
She shook her head from side to side, both eyes leaking hot tears. Tried to pull away, was wrenched on. “Evan!” she called out, trying to fight them. “I’ve got to find him!” Windows in the museum exploded, a hideous cacophony that split her head with pain. The voice within her, dying, dying: Get away! Hurry! Get away! “Where’s my husband?” Kay shouted, struggling from something that lay upon her like the cold, clammy grip of an unseen hand. A voice, fading to nothingness, screaming within her soul. “I want to find my husband!” The voice gone.
And through the wall of smoke and fire that lay across Cowlington emerged a monster with blazing white eyes, its voice an eerie, rising wail. White light froze Kay where she stood, and suddenly the two women who had been beside her—who had they been?—were gone, running in opposite directions through the smoke, vanishing from sight. There was a long, heart-stopping squeal of brakes, and the firemen were leaping from their truck toward the dazed woman who staggered in black robes.
“You okay?” one of them, a burly man with thick black sideburns, yelled above the noise. “What’s your name?”
“Kay,” she said, trying to think. “I’m Kay Reid.”
“Jesus Holy Christ!” another fireman shouted beside her. “This whole damned village is burnin’ to the ground! Where’d this damned fire start?”
Kay shook her head, tried to focus on the men.
“She’s out of it, Jimmy,” the black-sideburned fireman said to the other. “Come on, ma’am, let’s get you to the truck!”
“Jesus Holy Christ!” Jimmy said again; his double-chinned face was streaked with ashes. “Where are all the people? Where are all the damned people?”
They led her quickly to the truck. Behind them a tree crashed flaming across Cowlington.
“My husband,” Kay said, fighting to breathe through the smoke. “I have to find him.” She turned, stared back at the house as it began to melt and run. “My husband was in there!”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Black Sideburns said soothingly. “We’ll find your husband. Right now we’ve got to get you out of here. Come on, just lean on us and you’ll be—”
“Laurie!” Kay shouted, gripping at the man’s shoulders, new panic welling within her. “Where’s my little girl?”
“Hold on, now,” Jimmy said. “She’s probably fine and waiting for you.” A roof exploded into a million cinders. He ducked his shoulders slightly, hurried her toward the truck. “The emergency unit found a bunch of little girls over at a house a couple of streets over. The nursery school.”
“Oh, God,” Kay sobbed, feeling her legs give way beneath her. The firemen caught her, guiding her forward. “Oh my God oh my God oh my God…”
“You’re gonna be just fine,” Jimmy said. “Here you go, get up into there. Holy Christ, how’d this damned fire start?” He blinked a couple of times, glanced over at the other firemen, said in a low voice, “Christ, Steve! This lady doesn’t have a stitch on underneath that robe!” He took off his coat, gave it to her as he sat beside her in the truck’s cab; she bundled up in it, hardly realizing that it smelled of sweat and acrid
smoke.
And then she began to cry. Couldn’t stop.
“There, there,” Jimmy said. “There, there.”
V
* * *
AFTERWARD
31
* * *
Ruins and
Beginnings
TWO FIGURES STANDING on a plain of charred ruins. A woman and a little girl, holding hands. The September breeze, cooling into autumn, whispering through cracks in freestanding walls, sighing eerily around jutting black chimneys and the ashen stumps of trees long hauled away.
What little remained of Bethany’s Sin had been cordoned off for weeks by the police and fire departments as they sifted through the sea of ashes looking for clues that might explain the sudden and terrible holocaust. Kay had been questioned repeatedly, first by the police and then by reporters. To all of them she said the same thing: I don’t know. In the last week or so, the reporters had started calling the small, one-bedroom apartment Kay was renting in Johnstown—God only knew how they’d managed to get the telephone number—badgering her day and night, treating her like some sort of macabre celebrity. Recently they’d even begun hanging around the private school Laurie was attending, hoping to ask questions of her; but Mrs. Abercrombie, bless her soul, was a smart lady, and she could spot those reporters a mile away. On several occasions she’d called Kay at George Ross and told her that Laurie would be waiting at the back door today, because you-know-who’s outside again this afternoon.
Kay’s last session had been with a Lieutenant Knowles, a fiftyish man with curly gray hair and blue-as-flint eyes. He’d offered her coffee, a cigarette. No thank you, no thank you. Let’s just get this over with, shall we?
“Right,” the man had said; he’d smiled apologetically and then eased himself down into a black-vinyl swivel chair. “I know how painful this is for you…”
“Then why do you keep asking me to come back? Of course it’s painful!”
“Well, I’m really sorry,” Knowles said. “Really I am.” His eyes meant it. “But it seems that you’re just about the only person who came out of that fire. Well, you and the children, of course. But the children don’t know anything…”
“And neither do I.”
“Mind if I smoke?”
Kay shook her head.
Knowles reached for a pack of Trues and a lighter. “This whole thing is so…crazy. So really crazy.” He lit the cigarette, pushed the pack away across his desk. Pictures of a smiling wife and two children were placed to his right, Kay’s left. “The sheriff’s car crashed into the gas station, nothing left of him to speak of; that crazy place with all the statues and old junk; a few skeletons lying around…”
She shifted uneasily.
“Sorry,” Knowles said over his cigarette. “But that’s the truth. One skeleton even missing its head! Another one with a spade or something stuck in its gut. And you know how the firemen found your husband and that Dr.—” He paused, flipped through a few pages of notes he had before him.
“Drago,” Kay said. Something about that name made her skin crawl now.
“Right. Well, I’ll tell you, nothing makes sense.” He looked at her, narrowed his eyes. “And you still can’t remember? I mean, nothing’s come back to you at all?”
“I’ve already told you people what I remember. I’ve told you again and again. I remember seeing my husband inside that museum. Then I don’t remember anything else until I was out in the street.”
“How about up to that point? Anything?”
She took a deep breath. Oh, God, this was where it got confusing. It seemed that she recalled lying in a bed in the clinic, staring at the shadows on the ceiling; the nurse had just brought her some of that awful, chalky tasting orange juice, and she remembered thinking that orange juice isn’t for nighttime, it’s supposed to be for breakfast. She remembered worrying about Evan, about what he might do in his present state of mind—she’d told no one that—and then she’d felt suddenly and strangely cold, unable to reach for the buzzer beside her bed when she wanted to call for another blanket. Nothing after that, at all. Just empty darkness. “No,” she said, and Knowles looked disappointed.
The man drew on his cigarette, tapped it into an ashtray; his brow was furrowed, had been furrowed ever since this nasty business had begun. There were so many damned unanswered questions! The gas station explosion; the skeletons of the man and woman, melded together by the heat, found in the ruins of that museum; a few female skeletons in the ashen forest, along with the charred remains of horses, of all things; other fire-ravaged corpses in several of the houses, where they’d been trapped by fallen debris; the fact that Bethany’s Sin had been deserted but for the children, this woman who sat before him, and assorted bits and pieces of burned-beyond-recognition bodies. The coroner was still counting; he’d already passed fifty. The other people who’d lived in that village had just vanished. Strange. Maybe the strangest thing he’d ever heard of.
Other things bothered him, too, made him sit awake nights now trying to figure them out, but he realized that he’d probably never grasp the whole picture, no matter how long he and his team investigated. Fragments of some kind of scrapbook had been found in the sheriff’s office; clippings of murders and disappearances dating years back. In another half-charred notebook, calculations of when the moon would be full, the lunar sequence painstakingly worked out through December. Who the hell could explain that? What had Wysinger been, some sort of astronomy nut or something? And from the reports he’d seen, Kay Reid had lain in a hospital bed for three days after the fire, alternately feverish and shivering, hysterical and silent. Complaints of recurrent nightmare, of seeing figures standing over her bed, some doctor had written on one of her medical forms. Nightmares vague, but indicative of severe trauma.
And now this woman, possibly the key to whatever had happened that August night in Bethany’s Sin, sat here in his office and insisted she could remember nothing. He could look into her face and see the new lines around her eyes, and he knew she’d come a long, hard way back from Bethany’s Sin, but was she lying to him? Trying to pretend she knew less than she really did?
So he decided to take a gamble. “Are you still having those nightmares, Mrs. Reid?” Knowles asked her, watching for her reaction as he stabbed his cigarette out.
She winced, quickly regained her composure. “What do you mean?”
“The nightmares you were having in the hospital. Do they still bother you?”
Kay paused for a moment. “No,” she said finally. “No, they don’t.”
“That’s good to hear. What were they about?”
“Have you decided to trade your badge in for a psychiatrist’s couch?”
Knowles smiled, shook his head. “No. Just curious.”
For a long while she pretended to examine her nails, still uncertain whether to tell him or not. And then she seemed to relax visibly, as if ridding herself of a haunting, terrible weight. She looked up at him. “Yes,” she said softly, “the nightmares. I was afraid to sleep at first because they came every night. They were…especially bad when I was in the hospital because being there reminded me of somewhere else. The clinic in Bethany’s Sin. I was…sick, and the doctor put me in a room there.”
“What was wrong with you?” the man asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. When I try to remember what happened to me from then on, my mind just…well, it’s like my memory’s blanked out or something. I know it sounds strange, but it’s as if I…ceased to exist entirely. I was cold, terribly, terribly cold, and in a place of utter darkness.” Kay looked into the man’s face, her own gaze intense and fearful. Knowles clicked his lighter, lit another cigarette. “I couldn’t find my way back,” she said, “until I heard Evan call my name, as if he were off in the distance somewhere and trying to help me. And then I began to fight toward where the light was; I began to repeat my own name over and over again, and I tried to remember everything in my life that had made me who I am.” She
saw that Knowles’s eyes were vacant above his cigarette, and she knew he couldn’t possibly understand or believe. “It was like drowning in a bright blue pool, and trying to struggle toward the surface where the sun was shining.” She saw him blink suddenly, and she lapsed into silence.
Knowles cleared his throat uneasily, shifted in his chair. “All that was part of your nightmares?”
Kay smiled thinly. “Yes, that’s right.” She wouldn’t tell him what she’d really seen in those night visitations: herself in black robes, drifting along a wide, stone-floored corridor, flanked on both sides by grinning statues with volcanic, half-human eyes; and at the far end of that corridor stood a black rectangle. A mirror, Kay realized as she neared it, but reflecting nothing but its own dark, evil-glowing self. And as Kay leaned forward to peer into that mirror, she saw a shape within it, something ancient and scabrous, wafting like dust, turning in on itself, churning like a maelstrom of agonized hatred. As she stared, unable to tear herself away, the shape coagulated, became something mimicking human form, with blue-burning, unblinking eyes that touched her to the soul.
And from the mirror the hand of a skeleton reached out, gripping her around the wrist and pulling. It was then that she realized, in numb-beyond-thinking terror, that this was not a mirror, no, not a mirror, but instead a doorway to that region of entities drifting in the bodiless void between Life and Death. The skeleton had tightened, tightened, pulling her slowly toward the doorway. But always she found her voice and screamed, wrenched away from the nameless horror, turned and ran back along the corridor even as the statues began to shamble toward her, raising their swords and axes and spears to strike her down.