And Ba was right. Ba had said it all.
Whatever it was, it was evil.
Dinu Pass, Romania
“Look down, Nick. At the ground. Do you see anything?”
Night had come. So had the bugs. The air was dense with them. From the base of the keep’s tower, Bill watched their bizarre and varied forms buzzing, darting, drifting in the air a mere half dozen feet away.
But though they stood in the opening, he and Nick were safe. The bugs kept their distance. As soon as darkness fell, Bill had guided Nick back into the stone depths to where they now stared into the hungry night.
“Come on, Nick. Take a good look. Do you see any of that glow you saw last night?”
He nodded and pointed straight ahead. “There.”
A slow change had come over Nick during the day. He seemed more alert, more responsive to the world around him. Were the effects of his descent into the hole wearing off?
“All right, then.” Bill’s insides were coiled tight. “I guess this is it.”
He turned to the baker’s dozen of villagers armed with chairs and torches, waiting behind him in the tower base. The thirteenth was Alexandru, standing off to the side.
Through Alexandru, Bill had explained that the red-haired man who’d come here in 1941 was still alive and in America, that if he could recover some pieces of the “magic sword” that had shattered here on these stones, he might be able to close up the hole out there in the pass and bring back the sun. They’d helped him search around the base of the tower this afternoon but their efforts had been no more fruitful than his own in the morning. They’d have to go out at night.
Bill had expected to be laughed off as a madman, or rudely rebuffed at the very least. Instead the villagers had conferred, then agreed to help him. The women had begun wicker-weaving while the men set about making torches. Now they waited, dressed in multiple layers of clothing, wicker armor on their thighs and lower legs, heavy gloves, sheepskin hats and vests. They looked ready for an arctic blizzard, but they’d be facing a different sort of storm.
Bill nodded to the men. It was time. Their faces remained expressionless, but he noticed glances pass between them, saw them begin to breathe more heavily. They were scared, and rightly so. A perfect stranger had asked them to put their lives on the line, to perform the equivalent of wading into a piranha-infested river with only a crab net and a spear for protection. If they turned and headed back up the stone stairs now, he wouldn’t blame them.
But they didn’t. They filed out through the opening with their shields and torches raised, forming a shallow semicircle of protection into which Bill and Nick stepped. And then, just as they’d rehearsed it inside the keep, they advanced as a group, the end members closing the circle behind Bill and Nick as they moved away from the tower wall.
The bugs assaulted in a wave. The men in the circle around him began to cry out in fear and revulsion as they blocked the swooping creatures with the raised chairs and shields while thrusting at them with their torches. To the accompaniment of buzzing wings and sizzling bug flesh, they inched forward.
Bill crouched next to Nick, his arm over his shoulders, keeping his head down as they moved. He shouted in his left ear.
“Where, Nick? Show me where!”
Nick searched the rocky ground, saying nothing. Bill had a sudden, awful fear that Nick might not be able to see the glow because of the torches the circle of villagers carried. If daylight obscured it, would torchlight do the same?
As if in answer to Bill’s unasked question, Nick said, “Here’s one.”
He was pointing at a spot two inches in front of his left shoe.
Bill shouted to the group to stop, pulled out his flashlight and began pawing through the stones with his free hand. He felt the circle constrict around him as the villagers were beaten back into a tighter knot by the bugs. But under the stones he found only dirt.
“There’s nothing here, Nick!”
But Nick kept pointing. “There, there, there.”
“Where, dammit?”
“The glow. There.”
Nick sounded so sure. Out of sheer desperation, Bill began digging through the moist silt. It didn’t seem likely, but maybe rains over the decades had buried some of the fragments and the glow was filtering up through the ground. The trip had been a bust so far and they didn’t have much time out here, not with the increasing ferocity of the bug attack, so he was willing to try almost—
Bill’s fingers scraped on something hard and slim with rough edges, something that felt nothing like sand or stone. He forced his fingers down into the silt, worked them around the object, under it, then pulled it free.
A rusty, dirty, jagged piece of metal lay in his palm. He held it up.
“Is this it, Nick?”
“Can’t you see the glow?”
Bill turned the object over and over in his hands. No glow. Just a broken, pitted piece of metal.
“No. Are there more?”
“Of course.” He pointed to Bill’s left. “Right there.”
Bill began to dig again. One of the men shouted something to him. Bill didn’t know the language but the meaning was clear.
Hurry!
Bill placed his flashlight on the stones and used the first piece to help dig after the second, throwing dirt in all directions. He heard a faint clink of metal on metal and was reaching into the hole to feel for it when a chew wasp darted between the legs of one of the men and sank its needle teeth into his arm. Without thinking, Bill lashed at it with the metal fragment in his hand.
The flash nearly blinded him for an instant. He blinked, and when the purple afterimage faded, he saw the chew wasp flopping on the stones and gnashing its teeth in waning fury, a deep, blackened, smoking wound in its back.
Bill stared at the metal fragment in his hand. Whatever power this blade had once held was not completely gone, not by a long shot.
He threw himself into probing deeper into the bottom of the second hole. He found a second piece of metal almost immediately and held it up.
“How about this one, Nick? Quick! Does it glow?”
Nick nodded. “Yes.”
“Great. All right now. Where’s the—”
Then one of the villagers screamed and fell backward, landing across Bill’s back and nearly knocking him flat. Bill thought the bugs might have broken through his defenses and latched onto him en masse, but he was wrong.
This was worse.
Something had the man by the ankle, something uncoiling out of the darkness like a long black rope, but alive, tapered, twisting, and powerful. His fall had broken the circle and now the bugs were inside, attacking from within as well as without. The men tried to regroup but wavered as the snakelike thing began to drag their friend from their midst. Some bent to grab his arms to pull him back but the bugs were immediately upon them and they had to let him go to protect themselves. Bill watched in horror as the man was dragged screaming into the darkness, the bugs swarming him, ripping at him.
Another inky snake darted through the night and snared a second villager. And as he was pulled crying to his doom, a third creature caught Nick and pulled him off his feet. Nick made no sound as he landed on the rocks. Bill wrapped an arm around his chest but the snake began to drag them both away. Bill sensed something huge and dark looming in the blackness beyond the reach of the torchlight and realized then that these weren’t snakes but the long, smooth tentacles of a single monstrous creature. Glaeken’s offhanded comment floated through his mind …
The bigger ones tend to be slow; it will take them a while to get here, but they’ll get here.
Bill knew from the inexorable pull it exerted on Nick that he couldn’t resist its strength.
In desperation he reached down to the tentacle and slashed at it with the sword fragments. Another blinding, sizzling flash and suddenly the tentacle had uncoiled and its severed tip was writhing and flopping furiously about like a beheaded snake.
The villager
s were now in complete disarray, stumbling about, swinging their torches and shields wildly.
“Back!” Bill cried. “Back to the keep.”
He pulled Nick to his feet and half carried him over the rocky ground toward the base of the tower, flailing about in the air with the metal shards, clearing a path through the bugs. Finally they made it, trailing some of the villagers, just ahead of a few others, stumbling through the opening into the blessedly empty air of the keep. Bitten, bleeding, burned, they collapsed into panting heaps on the granite floor; compared to the rough stones outside, its smooth surface felt almost soft. Only the elderly Alexandru stood, exactly where they had left him.
“Where are the others?” he said, his eyes ranging through their ranks. “What happened to Gheorghe? And Ion? And Michael and Nicolae?”
Bill lifted his head and counted. Only eight of the dozen villagers who’d gone out with him had made it back. He went to the door and looked out. Four torches burned on the stones of the gorge. The men who had carried them were nowhere in sight. Behind him, the survivors began to weep and he felt his own throat tighten. Four brave men had sacrificed themselves so a stranger could dig up some chunks of old metal.
Bill looked down at the fragments in his hand, then again at the four sputtering torches.
These had damn well better be worth it.
Outside he heard something huge dragging its enormous weight over the rubble of the gorge.
Manhattan
Carol watched the light fade from the sky over the darkened city and thought of how lucky they were to have generators here. She thought of Bill. He’d been an integral part of each thought since he’d left yesterday morning, but especially now, with dark coming.
“Where is he?” she said to Glaeken.
He was passing by, carrying an empty tray from Magda’s room. He paused beside her.
“Still in Romania, I should think.”
She glanced at her watch. Almost five here. That meant it was almost midnight over there. Almost Wednesday.
“But he should have been back by now.”
“Could have been back, perhaps, but as for should…” He shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He reached out and gently laid a scarred hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry yet. Not until tomorrow. If he’s not back by this time tomorrow, then worry. You’ll have company then—I’ll be worrying with you.”
He left her and headed toward the kitchen.
Carol continued to stare at the darkening city, wondering if Bill was alive, on land, or in the air. If only she knew.
Dinu Pass, Romania
With the two metal shards settled deep in his pocket and Nick strapped into the passenger seat, Bill was ready to go. The villagers had nailed a board across the land rover’s broken rear window. Bill hoped it blocked the bugs half as well as it blocked his view.
“I don’t want to go.”
Bill glanced at Nick and was shocked to see tears running down his cheeks.
“Nick…?”
“I like it here. I feel … better here. Please let me stay.”
“Nick, I can’t leave you. I’ve got to go back and we may need you there. But once this is all over, I’ll bring you back.”
He sobbed. “Do you promise, Father Bill?”
Bill felt a sob building in his own throat. He gripped Nick’s hand.
“Yeah, Nicky. I promise.”
He felt miserable but hid it as he waved to Alexandru and the others.
“Tell them I’ll be back,” he told the old man in German. “After this is all over, after the holes are closed and the monsters are gone, I’ll be back. And I’ll tell the world of the bravery of your people.”
Alexandru waved but did not smile. Tears rimmed his eyes. Bill shared his grief, not only for the dead but for Alexandru’s little community. A village atrophying and dying as was his could ill afford to lose four of its most vital men.
“I’ll be back,” he said again. “I won’t forget you.”
And he meant it. If he survived this, if he was alive to do so, he’d be back.
He threw the vehicle into first and started out the gate onto the causeway. The bugs swarmed him. He was halfway across when the headlights picked up the first tentacle. It lay stretched lengthwise along the planks and lifted its tapered tip at Bill’s approach, as if watching him, or catching his scent.
Bill stopped and squinted into the darkness as other tentacles pushed forward to join the first. Soon the causeway was acrawl with them. He found the high-beam button on the floor to the left of the clutch and kicked it.
He gasped and instinctively pressed himself back in his seat when he saw what waited at the far end. The light from his high beams reflected off a huge, smooth, glistening, featureless black mass, thirty feet high and at least a hundred feet across. He looked for eyes or a mouth but could find none. Just slimy-looking blackness. A huge sluglike creature with tentacles.
And those tentacles were reaching for him, stretching closer.
Bill looked for a way out, a way to get around it, but its massive bulk blocked the end of the causeway. Even if he could run the land rover over the tentacles, he’d end up against the immovable wall of the thing’s flank.
The tip of one of the tentacles suddenly appeared at the end of the hood. It coiled around the hood ornament and pulled. Bill shifted into reverse and backed up a dozen feet. The tentacles inched after him.
Trapped, dammit! Trapped until morning!
He pounded the steering wheel in impotent rage and undiluted frustration. He had the shards that he’d come for and he couldn’t get them back to Glaeken, couldn’t even set off for his return trip to Ploiesti until dawn.
More time wasted. And another night without seeing Carol. He wanted to be with her. Every moment was precious. How many did they have left?
Using the side mirror, he carefully backed the vehicle through the gates, then sat behind the wheel and swallowed the pressure that built in his chest as he stared out at the night. He felt like crying.
“We’re back?” Nick said, smiling. “Oh, I’m so glad we’re back.”
WFPW-FM
FREDDY: Jo’s catching some much-needed Zs, man, but I’m still here with you. The phones are down and our cable’s out. And hey, it’s time for you to get back inside. It’s 4:48. Get your butts to safety right now. Ten minutes of light left.
New Jersey Turnpike
By nightfall Hank was exhausted, but he would allow himself no sleep.
How could he? With darkness the drainpipe had come alive. First the sibilant stirrings, echoing softly around him, ballooning to a cacophony of hard-pointed mandibles clicking a hungry counterpoint to countless chitinous feet scraping against the concrete; then the sinuous shapes, faint and vague in the rising moonlight slanting through the grate, undulating toward him from left and right, sloshing through the water below, crawling along the ceiling directly above, the thinnest of them as thick as his upper arm, the largest as big around as his thigh, ignoring him as they slid by, weaving over, under, and around each other with a hideous languid grace that seemed to defy gravity, blackening the pale gray of the concrete with Gordian masses of twisting bodies, blotting out the moon as they nosed against the closed grate.
He heard a metallic scrape, a screech, then a clank as the grate fell back onto the pavement above. A sudden change came over the millipedes. Their languor evaporated, replaced by a hungry urgency as they thrashed and clawed at each other in a mad frenzy to join the night-hunt on the surface.
Moments later, the last of them had squeezed through. Once again Hank was alone with the moonlight.
No … not alone. Something coming. Something big. He knew without looking what it was. A few minutes later he saw her huge pincered head rise and hover above him, swaying.
Not again! Shit-shit-shit! Not again!
He’d worked since dawn on regaining control of his limbs, and for most of the day it had se
emed a hopeless task. No matter how he concentrated, how he strained, his body simply would not respond. But he’d kept at it, and as the light had started to fail, he’d begun to achieve some results. He’d noticed twitches in his arms and legs, in his abdominal muscles. Either the toxin was wearing off or he was overcoming it. It didn’t matter which. He was regaining control—that was what mattered.
But all his efforts would be for nada if the queen dosed him again.
She made no move, simply hovered there with her head hanging over him. Did she suspect anything?
Get the fuck away!
He’d spent the entire day willing his muscles to move, now he was begging them to be still. One twitch, one tremor, one tiny tic, and she’d ram her proboscis into his gut again and put him back to square one.
She watched him for what seemed like forever, then she began to move—
No!
—her head lowering toward his belly—
NO!
—and past him. She arched over him, her hard little feet brushing across the skin of his abdomen. He could feel nothing but he saw his abdominal muscles twitch and roll with revulsion and prayed she wouldn’t notice.
She didn’t. Her near-endless length finally cleared him and she wound her way up through the drain opening and into the night.
At last—time for action.
He strained his arms and legs upward as if fighting against steel manacles. To his delight he saw the muscles bulge with the effort. His fingers didn’t move, didn’t close into the rebellious fists he willed for them, but he watched the veins in the undersides of his forearms swell as blood coursed into the resistant muscles, watched his abdominals ripple and swell around the wound as he tried to sit up.
But nothing was happening. His veins and arteries continued to surge, stretching against the envelope of skin, his abdomen rippled like the Atlantic in a hurricane, but no sign of voluntary movement, only chaos.