Nightworld

  What a strange request. Why did Glaeken want him to look like a priest?

  “I don’t have one. I … I don’t believe in any of that anymore.”

  “I know. But I must be at my most persuasive. And the presence of a Jesuit at my side might lend some weight to my arguments. We’ll fit you for a new cassock.”

  Bill shrugged. “Anything for the cause. Where on Long Island?”

  “The North Shore.”

  A familiar pang stirred within Bill.

  “I grew up in that area.”

  “Yes. In the village of Monroe.”

  “How did you know?”

  Glaeken shrugged. “That is where we’re going.”

  “Monroe? My hometown? Why?”

  “Part of the weapon is there.”

  Bill was baffled. In Monroe?

  “It’s just a little harbor town. What kind of weapon can you hope to find out there?”

  Glaeken turned and walked down the hall to attend to his wife. He cast the reply over his shoulder.

  “A small boy.”

  In the East Eighties, Bill knocked on an eighth-floor apartment door. It opened and a slender woman with ash blond hair, fine features, and a pert, upturned nose stared at him. Carol. Their decades apart had been kinder to her than to him. But now her face was tight, her eyes haunted, her usual high coloring blanched. She knew.

  “It’s begun, hasn’t it?”

  The afternoon sun filled the room behind her with golden light, lending her an almost ethereal quality. The sight of her disturbed once again the old feelings he tried to keep tucked away.

  Bill stepped across the threshold and closed the door behind him.

  “How did you know?”

  “I heard about the late sunrise on the radio.” Tears filled her eyes as her lips began to tremble. “I knew right away it was Jimmy’s doing.”

  Bill reached out and folded her in an embrace. She trembled as she leaned against him. Her arms locked around his back and she clung as if he were a tree in a flood. Bill closed his eyes and let the good feelings wash through him. Good feelings were so hard to come by these days.

  He’d been moving through a black fog since the deadly events in North Carolina.

  Three times his world had been all but torn apart.

  First, the violent death of his old friend and Carol’s first husband, Jim Stevens, followed by the bizarre murders in the Hanley mansion and Carol’s flight to parts unknown; he’d recovered from that.

  Then, years later, his parents’ death in a fire, Danny Gordon’s mutilation and all the horrors that followed, capped by his own flight and years of hiding.

  He’d dragged himself from that well of despair and was just settling into a different sort of life when he’d had to face Renny Augustino’s brutal murder, Lisl’s suicide, and the exhumation of Danny Gordon’s living corpse.

  Bill wasn’t bouncing back this time. He wasn’t sure he had any bounce left. He’d dragged himself back to New York but it was no longer home. No place was home. In this entire teeming city, Nick Quinn and Carol Treece were the only people left alive from his past that he dared approach.

  “You’ve got to call him Rasalom and stop calling him Jimmy. Got to stop thinking of him as your son. He’s not. There’s nothing of you and Jim in him. He’s someone else.”

  “I know that,” she said, holding him tighter. “In my mind I know that. But in my heart is this feeling that if I’d loved him more, if I’d been a better mother, he’d have turned out differently. It’s crazy, but I can’t get away from it.”

  “Nothing anyone could have done in his childhood would have made the slightest bit of difference. Except maybe strangling him as an infant.”

  He felt Carol stiffen against him and was sorry he’d said it. But it was true.

  “Don’t.”

  “Okay. But stop calling him Jimmy. He’s not Jimmy. Never was. His name is Rasalom and he was already who he was long before he took over the baby in your womb. Long before you were born. He didn’t develop under your care. He was already there. You are not responsible.”

  He stood there in the middle of her tiny living room, holding Carol’s thin body against him, breathing the scent of her hair, spying the streaks of gray nestling in the ash blond waves. Trickles of desire ran down his chest and over his abdomen. With a start, he felt himself hardening. He became aroused so easily these days. Sex had been no problem when he’d still considered himself a priest. But now that his lifelong beliefs had been reduced to ashes, buried with the charred remains of Danny Gordon, everything seemed to be slipping out of control. Here he was, his arms wrapped around Carol Treece, formerly Carol Stevens, née Carol Nevins. His high school sweetheart, his best friend’s widow, now another man’s wife. Priest or ex-priest, this wasn’t right.

  Gently, Bill put some space between them. Room for the Holy Ghost, as the nuns used to say when he was a kid.

  “Are we straight on that?” He gazed into her blue eyes. “You’re not responsible.”

  She nodded. “Right. But how can I stop feeling like his mother, Bill? Tell me how I can do that?”

  He saw the pain in her eyes and resisted the urge to pull her into his arms again.

  “I don’t know, Carol. But you’ve got to learn. You’ll go crazy if you don’t.” They looked at each other for a moment, then Bill changed the subject. “How’s Nelson? Does he know yet?”

  She shook her head and turned away.

  “No. I haven’t been able to tell him.”

  “Don’t you think—?”

  “You’ve met Nels. You know what he’s like.”

  Bill nodded silently. He’d met Nelson Treece a number of times—he’d even been invited over here for dinner twice—but always as a priest and an old friend of the family. Nelson was a straight arrow, a comptroller in a computer software firm. A man who dotted all his i’s, crossed all his t’s, and whose numbers always added up. A good man, a decent man, an organized man. The antithesis of spontaneity. Bill doubted whether Nelson had ever done anything on impulse in his entire life.

  So unlike Jim, Carol’s first husband. Bill couldn’t see Nelson Treece and Carol as a loving couple, but maybe that was because he didn’t want to. Maybe Nelson was just what she needed. After the way chaos had intruded repeatedly on Carol’s life, maybe she needed the structure, stability, and predictability a man like Nelson offered. If he made her happy and secure, more power to him.

  But that didn’t make Bill want Carol any less.

  “How can I tell him what we know?” she said. “He’ll never accept it. He’ll think I’m crazy. He’ll have me going to psychiatrists. I wouldn’t blame him. I’d probably be doing the same if positions were reversed.”

  “But now with the sun playing tricks, we’ve got an indisputable fact on our side. Carol, he’s got to know sooner or later. I mean, if you’re going to be involved—”

  “Maybe if he met Glaeken. You know how persuasive he is. Maybe he could convince Nelson.”

  “It’s worth a try. I’ll talk to him about it. Maybe tonight—”

  “Maybe not tonight. He’s been away on a trip.”

  “Since when does he travel?”

  “Just the past month or so. The company’s been sending him. And when he comes back he crashes. I don’t think he’s built for travel. It … changes him.”

  What was she saying? Or rather, what was she not saying?

  “I’m not following.”

  A shrug and a shy smile. “It’s nothing. Just stress.”

  Bill glanced at his watch. “When’s he due in?”

  “Any minute. His flight from Denver should have landed about an hour ago.”

  “I’d better go.”

  “No, Bill.” She took his hand and squeezed it. “Stay. Please.”

  Her touch shot a bolus of tingling warmth up his arm.

  “I can’t. I’ve got a bunch of errands to run for Glaeken. Now that Rasalom’s made his first move, the old guy’s looki
ng for countermoves. He needs me to be his legs.”

  Bill gave her a quick hug and fled the apartment.

  He hated lying to Carol. But how could he tell her that it ripped his heart out to see Nelson Treece stroll in the door and give her his usual casual hello kiss? Didn’t Nelson realize what he had? Did he have any idea what Bill would give—do—to take his place?

  He had another reason for wanting to leave. He was afraid to get too close to Carol, afraid to care too much. First and most obvious: She was married. But, more important, terrible things seemed to happen to people he cared about. All his emotional investments crashed.

  Bill began looking for a place where he could have a quiet beer and sit alone in the dark.

  Repairman Jack

  Jack sat at his back-against-the-rear-wall table in Julio’s, apart from the evening regulars, nursing a Stella and fuming.

  Some low-rent scumbag had tried to put the moves on Gia this morning while she was waiting with Vicky for the school bus. At seven in the morning. Right in front of Vicky.

  He couldn’t get it out of his mind. Hoped the creep tried it again tomorrow. He planned to be across the street. Watching. Waiting.

  Everything seemed to be going to hell. After a long period of relative peace, the city was becoming unmanageable again. Same all over the world. During the past year or so he’d witnessed a slow unraveling of the social fabric. He had a pretty good idea what was behind it. Or rather, who.

  It had started last year with the advent of the Kickers, but had spread from there, going into overdrive since March. As if the worst sensed that something was coming and they’d better grab what they could while they still had time.

  Too many people had begun acting as if nothing was beneath them. Rip off an old lady’s handbag or a toddler’s candy bar. No item too small, no deed too low. Everything up for grabs, anything okay if you got away with it—that was the operating ethic.

  Mine was anything I could take and keep. If you put something down and left it unguarded, it became mine if I could snatch it and make off with it. Civilized folk were on the run. Those who could afford to were leaving, others were withdrawing, tightening their range of activities, limiting their hours in public. And those unfortunates who had to be out on the streets and down in the subways were fodder. And they knew it.

  Like the city had gone back in time to the seventies and eighties.

  On the way over tonight he’d passed car after car with “No Radio” signs in the windows. Every street was flanked with them. A symptom of the city-dwellers’ response to the predators. With failing faith in City Hall’s ability to make the streets safe, they retreated. When they parked their cars they removed their satellite units and took them into the steel-doored, barred-windowed fortresses they called home. One more piece of ground surrendered. They’d pulled all their belongings in from the street; after having shrubs and small trees repeatedly dug up and carted off from the fronts of their apartment houses, they’d stopped planting them, and they’d chained—chained—the trunks of the few larger ones that remained.

  The Taint was taking over.

  It all sickened Jack. He’d had it up to here with watching the good folks retreat. But maybe it served them right. They’d allowed themselves to be disarmed, surrendered all responsibility for their own safety until they’d been reduced to rabbits cowering in their burrows, praying the wolves wouldn’t find them.

  Jack sighed and sipped.

  “Is this seat taken?”

  Startled, Jack looked up and saw Glaeken standing across the table, one big hand holding his cane, the other resting on the back of a chair.

  “How do you do that?”

  The man could slip through a room like a ghost.

  “Years of practice.”

  Years … right. More like millennia.

  Julio ambled over, wiping his hands on a towel.

  “Hey, G. The usual?”

  “If you’d be so kind.”

  “Comin’ up, meng.”

  “Make that two,” Jack said.

  Glaeken sniffed the air as he watched the muscular little man hustle back to the bar.

  “I do believe he’s managed to find a cologne worse than the last.”

  Jack nodded. “I think this one’s Eau du Wet Stray Dog.”

  The old man looked older than ever as he dropped into the chair and stared at the tabletop.

  “Something wrong?”

  Glaeken looked up. “Wrong? Of course there’s something wrong. Have you been in a cave all day?”

  The snapping tone was uncharacteristic. Glaeken upset … not good. He never got upset.

  “Let’s pretend that’s just where I’ve been. What’s up?”

  “The sun rose five minutes late this morning and set ten minutes early tonight.”

  The words hit him like a bucket of ice water.

  It will begin in the heavens.

  Rasalom’s warning back in March.

  March … the horror of that night in Glaeken’s apartment. Weezy, Eddie, the Lady …

  “Oh, hell.”

  “Exactly: Hell. How could you not have heard?”

  Jack had glanced through Abe’s newspapers at the shop this morning and spent the rest of the day setting up a fix over in Brooklyn.

  “Guess it happened too late for the morning papers and I’m not much for radio and TV.”

  “It’s all everybody’s talking about.”

  Jack gestured to the crowd of Julio’s regulars, yakking and yukking it up like any other night.

  “Not here.”

  “This place has its own consensual reality. It doesn’t count. But you know now, and I think you know what it means.”

  Jack nodded, feeling a little sick. “He’s started his final moves, his end game.”

  “Yes, the Change…”

  Why now, damn it? This conflict had been running for ages. Why did the final showdown have to come at a time when Gia and Vicky would be caught in the fray?

  Julio returned with two pints of John Courage. He’d put it on tap for Jack a few years ago. Jack had moved on to other brews but Courage Amber had become such a hit with the regulars that Julio kept it running with privately imported kegs.

  Glaeken lifted the glass with a big, scarred hand, quaffed about a quarter of its contents in one gulp, then loosed an appreciative burp.

  “Not as good as when they first made it back in oh-two, but still tasty.”

  Jack knew he meant 1902. He leaned forward. “What are our options?”

  Glaeken sighed. “I’d hoped not to live to see this day. But ever since … that night, I’ve been doing some research, trying to prepare.”

  “And?”

  “And I’ve found some of what we’ll need, but not all.”

  “What have you got?”

  Glaeken leaned back in the chair.

  “Nothing yet. One is a person—a boy. I could not very well go to his mother and tell her our story without something tangible—without evidence that I’m not simply a crazy old man. What is happening to the sun will lend credence to what I must tell her.”

  Jack shook his head. “If she’s got even one skeptical neuron in her brain, some fluctuations in the sun’s timing aren’t going to be near enough. A cosmic shadow war … that’s going to be one hard sell.”

  “Not as hard as the one I’m going to ask of you.”

  Jack stiffened. “Don’t like the sound of that. I’m not exactly the salesman type. Who’s the projected sellee?”

  “Someone you know: Kolabati Bahkti.”

  Kolabati … as much as Jack was devoted to Gia—now more than ever—unbidden memories of Kolabati’s long, dark, slender body occasionally floated back to him.

  Glaeken was eyeing him. “I’m trying to locate her.”

  “Can’t help you there. Haven’t seen her in years.”

  “Oh, I realize that. I’ll find her eventually. And when I do, that’s when I’ll need your help.”

  “W
hat for?”

  “I need the necklaces.”

  “You’re talking plural? As in both?” Jack shook his head. “You don’t know what you’re asking. Kolabati will never give them up. Not in a million years. I might talk her out of one, but never both.”

  “I’ll need both. And soon.”

  “Then forget it. The necklace keeps her alive, keeps her young. She’s on the downslope toward the end of her second century. But she looks only thirty or so. All because of the necklace. You think she’s going to give that up?”

  “That’s why I’ve come to you. So you can convince her once I’ve located her.”

  “She’ll die without it.”

  “I have faith that you’ll return with both necklaces.”

  Jack stared at him. “You asking me to kill her?”

  “I hope it won’t come to that.”

  “But if it does?”

  Glaeken didn’t blink. “Then I’ll leave that decision to you.”

  “News flash,” Jack said, feeling a burst of heat. “That’s the kind of decision that never was and never will be anybody else’s.”

  “Of course. But will you go to her when I find her?”

  Tough question.

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On where she is. If she’s still in New York, sure. I’ll do my best.”

  The thought of facing Kolabati … they had a history, but he’d locked it away. He didn’t want her thinking he was back looking for a key.

  “And if she’s not nearby?”

  “Well, then … I don’t know.”

  Glaeken spread his hands. “With the stakes what they are, how can you refuse?”

  “Because of the stakes—because I have no idea what Rasalom’s got planned. If Bati’s back in India, I’ll have to leave Gia and Vicky here. What if the Change kicks in full speed while I’m away and I can’t make it back?” The thought of those two facing the apocalypse without him … He shook his head. “Can’t risk it.”

  “They can stay with me.”

  “Oh, swell. You’re right in Rasalom’s crosshairs—numero uno on his extermination list. That would really put my mind at ease.” He noted Glaeken’s steely gaze. “Don’t take that personally. It’s just that I don’t consider camping out on a firing range the best way to keep from getting shot.”