“But why? Why go through all that trouble? I mean, it was just to get hold of Hengwr, wasn’t it? Christ, with his resources, why did he need the Force to do his research for him?”
“Your people were already moving into the area of paranormal research,” Gannon explained. “Mr. Walters is a thrifty man. Why should he duplicate research that was already underway? He merely put his own man in charge to ensure that the PRB concentrated on what was valid—rather than the charlatans and frauds that pervade such research.”
“And how did he know that Hengwr was the real stuff?”
“Mr. Walters knew Thomas Hengwr in his youth. Hengwr was an old man then. Years later, Walters met Hengwr again, and while he had gone from youth to middle age, Hengwr didn’t appear to have aged a single year. Subsequent investigation proved that while a man answering Hengwr’s description appeared sporadically over the last few hundred years, he did not exist on paper. There were no records on him—birth certificates, passports, that sort of thing. From what data we could acquire, we discovered that Thomas Hengwr apparently possessed the secret of eternal life.
“Mr. Walters is very concerned with aging. He’s in his fifties now. He wants Hengwr’s secret of longevity. The rest of Hengwr’s supposed paranormal abilities would be only so much topping on the cake.”
Tucker shook his head in amazement. Given this information a week earlier, he would have laughed it off. But given what he knew now, that these abilities were real—all too real—he went cold at the thought of someone like Walters acquiring them. The man was a voice that was heard in more than one of the world’s major nations. He moved high in political, industrial and academic circles. Every day you read something about him—about his acquisition of this, his support of that.
The one thing about Walters that stood out in Tucker’s mind was his ruthlessness, an utter disregard for anyone but himself, for anything but what served him. It wasn’t something that the average man in the street would be aware of, but to someone like Tucker who knew how to look and what to look for, it was all too plain to see. Give a man like that immortality . . . paranormal powers . . . what could ever stand in his way? Those that he might conceivably not be able to defeat, he need only outlive.
At least Hengwr had kept a low profile. From the skimpy file he had on him, Tucker couldn’t really see the old man as a threat. It had always been the possibility of the extraordinary abilities that he might possess that had worried Tucker. Not as they were used by Hengwr, but as they might be used by another. Someone like Walters.
“So,” Traupman said, ticking the items off on his fingers. “We’ve established why Mr. Gannon and his associates came to be in the House. We have provisions. We have the shelter and protection of the House.”
“We can’t be sure of that last item,” Blue said. “We still don’t know what it is about the House that keeps those creatures out. It could cut out at any time.”
Traupman nodded. “Granted. But that is only a part of our primary concern. Topmost in our priorities should be discovering a way to return to our own world.”
“And if we can’t?” Gannon asked.
Nobody wanted to think about that.
Well, we’ve got Thomas Hengwr, Blue thought. All we’ve got to do is bring him around. Because if they didn’t. . . .
“We’re going to have to do a little reconnaissance of the area,” he said, thinking aloud.
Gannon nodded. “Maybe pick up a local and get some directions—though if those things out there are all we’ve got to work with. . . .”
“It’s out of the question,” Jamie said. “We can’t possibly send someone out there to scout around. He wouldn’t last five minutes once those creatures caught wind of him.”
“There’s one bright side we haven’t looked on,” Tucker said. “At least we don’t need silver bullets to kill them. We can hurt them—for as long as our ammunition holds out.”
“And then?” Jamie asked. “What happens when we run out of bullets before the enemy runs out of wolfmen?”
“Thomas Hengwr,” Traupman said slowly, echoing Blue’s earlier thought. “He’s what it all boils down to. We’ve got to bring him around.”
Gannon shook his head. From the quick look he’d had at Hengwr after the battle in the front hall with the tragg’a, he wouldn’t put much hope in the old man. He remembered being shocked at the frail figure Hengwr was, lying there under the bedclothes, the skin drawn tight across his face, almost translucent, the scars puckering one half of it. He found it hard to picture Hengwr as the immortal sorcerer that Walters had made him out to be. He didn’t look strong enough to support his own weight.
“He’s all we’ve got?” he asked Traupman.
“Not unless you have a better suggestion.”
“Nothing that comes to mind. This isn’t exactly my field of expertise—if you take my meaning. But isn’t there something you can do to snap him out of it? What exactly is the matter with him, anyway?”
“As I told Jamie earlier,” Traupman explained, “he appears to be suffering the effects of some severe trauma—the cause of which we can only guess at. Given the creatures that attacked us earlier, I can only shudder to think of what he has had to face.”
“So we wait?” Gannon asked. He looked around the table. No one seemed pleased with the idea, but like him they didn’t have any advice to offer either.
“Well,” he said. “Let’s work on our defense. I don’t want to be caught sleeping if those creatures manage to break in again.”
Blue nodded. “I figure if we patrol the ground floors, that should be enough.”
“But no one outside,” Jamie insisted.
“No one outside,” Blue agreed.
Though sooner or later, someone was going to have to go out there and scout around. Blue didn’t have enough patience to sit around and wait for their enemy to make the next move. Come the morning, he’d give serious thought to having a look at what lay beyond the fields around the House.
“I’ll take the first shift,” Tucker said, glancing at his watch. “It’s going on nine. Say three-hour shifts?”
“This is a big place,” Blue said. “We better have at least two guards—one to patrol the east and south wings, the other for the north and west.”
“Sounds good,” Gannon said. “I’ll share the first watch with the Inspector.”
“Then I’ll take the second,” Blue said, “with . . .” He looked around the table, settling on Gannon’s companion.
“Mercier,” Gannon said. “Chevier and Fred here can have the three-to-six shift, then the Inspector and I’ll take over.”
“What about us?” Jamie asked.
Tucker shook his head. “We’ll need you and Dick alert enough to deal with Hengwr.”
“And me?” Sam asked.
“You can share the dawn shift with Chevier and Fred,” Blue said.
For a long moment after that they sat and looked at each other. The full implications of what had actually happened to them still had to sink in. Intellectually, they prepared for the coming confrontation with Hengwr’s enemy who had now become their own enemy. It was easier to put aside the shock of the unreal being real when they were all in a group like this. It would be later, when they split up, when some tried to sleep and others patrolled the House’s lonely corridors, that they would each have to cope as best they could.
They were trapped in a situation where logic had no perimeters, where all their experiences meant nothing. They didn’t know the rules. If there were any rules.
“Well?” Chevier asked when Gannon and Mercier met him back in the front hall.
“Better get some sleep,” Gannon said. “You’ve pulled the dawn shift.”
“Yeah. Sure.” He took out a mint and popped it into his mouth. “But how’re we handling this, Phil?”
“We play along with them. What else can we do? We’re in a no-give situation.”
“And Walters?”
> Gannon shrugged. “We’ll worry about him when and if we get back to the real world. But then . . . well, we’ll grab Hengwr and make our break.”
“Tucker’s mine,” Mercier said.
“Yeah? Where’d you get a hard-on for him?”
“Well, we can start with him wasting Serge.”
Gannon nodded. He was remembering his own confrontation with Blue in the hallway moments before Serge got hit. It irked him to have been taken so easily by an amateur.
“Okay,” he said. “The Inspector’s all yours. But the biker’s mine.” He grinned. “What about you, Mike? You got a preference?”
Chevier shook his head. “Sounds to me like you don’t want to leave any witnesses,” he said in his whispery voice. “If that’s the case, there’ll be plenty for all of us. I’ll just take whatever’s left.”
“I don’t think we should wait,” Mercier said. “It’s when we get back to Ottawa that they’ll be expecting us to make our move.”
“He’s got a point there,” Chevier said.
“We wait,” Gannon said decisively. “I’ve got the feeling that we’ll need every hand that can hold a gun before we get out of this place.”
“I wish you hadn’t come,” Tucker said to Maggie. She was accompanying him on his rounds along the south side of the House.
“There are times when you infuriate me with your protecting-the-helpless-female attitude. You know that, Tucker?”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she replied, mimicking him. Then she sighed. “But this isn’t one of them. I just couldn’t stand the thought of phoning you just to have you ask me to wait for you at home.”
“I know. In your shoes, I’d’ve done the same.”
“You wouldn’t fit into my shoes, Tucker.”
Tucker smiled, for the first time in hours, and put his arm around her waist to draw her close.
“I thought we were supposed to be patrolling,” Maggie said, snuggling against him.
“We are, we are. This is all part of the job.”
“Oh, really? Maybe I should’ve been a cop.”
“What? And miss out on the high drama of playing Perry Mason?”
A look of mock horror passed over her face and she patted her stomach.
“Do you think I’m putting on weight?” she demanded.
Tucker shook his head. “Your weight’s in all the right places.”
“Betcha can’t wait till twelve,” she said with a grin.
“You just won yourself a bet.”
Alone for the first time in hours, Jamie paced the length of his study, pausing from time to time to glare at the blank viewscreen of his computer. There was a solution to their problem in it. He knew it. Just as Tom’s program had been hidden away in it for so many years. What else had Tom entered into its memory banks? And what was the code he needed to call it up? It was going to be something simple. Something obvious. So obvious that he probably wouldn’t know it even if he tripped over it. Damn Tom, anyway, for being so obtuse. It wasn’t right to play around with people’s lives like this.
Turning from the desk, Jamie settled in one of the easy chairs in front of the hearth. He took out his pipe and filled it, searched for a match on the table beside him. His manuscript for the International Wildlife article was still sitting there, Sara’s blue pencil on top of it. Setting aside his unlit pipe, Jamie stared into the cold hearth.
Sara, he thought, his chest tightening. He could sense an answering tension in the walls of the House. Through all that had been happening, her disappearance had been in the forefront of his mind—a sharp ache for which there was no remedy. Was this the Otherworld that Tom had sent her to? Was she still safe with his apprentice, or had this Mal’ek’a thing captured her? Maybe she was just beyond the edges of the field that encircled the House, being held by the creatures. Held? Lord, if they had her, she wasn’t even alive.
The realization brought a cold chill. Cursing Tom Hengwr again, he rose and went to his desk. He switched on Memoria, hand poised above the terminal. Where did he start? A random search? Try for a key word? A phrase? He knew they were supposed to be conserving energy in case they were in for a long stay, but he didn’t really care. They had to do something about their position now. There might not be a later.
Sighing, he had Memoria call up the Weirdin bone file. One by one he left each bone on the screen, staring at it with his mind open, trying for an instinctual understanding, some leap of intuition that would help him where logic had failed.
Sally wanted to accompany Blue on his turn of guard duty and, thinking of the scouting expedition he had planned for himself in the morning, he made no protest. He planned to take his trail bike—the big chopper wouldn’t be worth a damn in this kind of terrain. But even with the bike and his Weatherby, he knew he was asking for trouble. Still, they couldn’t just sit around the House, waiting for a solution to present itself to them. They had to get out of here. Back to Ottawa.
He didn’t have much faith in Thomas Hengwr being of much help to them—even if he did come round. Hengwr was the one who’d gotten them into this screwy mess in the first place. And there was another thing. Echoing the worry that was running through Jamie’s head, he too had the feeling that Sara might be out there somewhere—maybe stumbling through the bush, lost, waiting for them to find her. The wolfmen mightn’t have a clue what the roar of a trail bike was, but she’d know. If she was out there, near enough and able to move, she’d come to him.
“Heavy stuff,” Sally said. “What’s going to happen to us, Blue?”
Blue sighed. “We’re going to kick ass and get out of this mess, that’s what’s going to happen. No way we’re going to roll over and die just to please those things outside.”
“It’s not even just them,” Sally said. “Those men—the one called Gannon and the other two. They give me the creeps.”
“They are creeps,” Blue said. “I’m not even all that sure about Tucker. They’re all in the same headspace—Tucker, Gannon, the others.”
“I don’t think you can put the Inspector with those other men. He may be straight, but I think he’s pretty upfront.”
Blue never got a chance to reply. They had just turned the corner of the hall that led from the east wing to the south side that would have faced Central Park if they were still in Ottawa. A crash of breaking glass came from the third room on the right. Working the bolt of the Weatherby as he ran, Blue burst into the room, Sally hard on his heels. He lifted the rifle as she panned the flashlight across the window. There was a stone on the floor, jagged shards of glass scattered across the carpet. Something came through a hole in the window—a paw, maybe a hand—and Blue’s finger tightened on the trigger. Before he could fire, blue light flared and whatever had been trying to get in was gone.
Sally took a step forward.
“Hold it!” Blue said. He kept the rifle leveled at the window, his gaze never wavering from it. They both watched, with a mixture of astonishment and fear, as the window began to repair itself.
“Blue . . . ?”
“That didn’t look like any monster’s paw,” he said. “That looked like a hand.”
“The window, Blue.”
“Yeah. I know.”
Whatever it was about the House that protected them was still operating. Shaking his head, Blue lowered the rifle. The House had always been a little strange, but this was freaky.
“I gotta go out and have a look,” he said. “Give me the flashlight, babe.”
She shook her head. “I . . . I’m going with you.”
“Don’t be crazy,” he began, then paused at the look of determination on her face.
She was scared. Shit, he was scared. But she wasn’t going to back off. That was part of what had drawn him to her in the first place. She didn’t seem like she’d back off from anything. She might’ve been a little weirded out when all of this started—hell, who hadn’t been?—but she was pulling like a trouper now.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”
They made their way to the nearest outside door, eased it open and stepped out onto the porch. Sally held the flashlight at her side, the light turned off. For long moments they stood there, waiting for their eyes to adjust to the starlight, listening, watching. When Blue was satisfied that there was nothing out there, at least nothing close, he led off towards the window. When they reached it, Blue studied their surroundings again, receptive to the slightest pinprick warning of danger. But the night was still. The only scent in the air was that of wildflowers and the tall grass. The only sound was that of the wind and their own quick breathing.
“Take a look around the window,” Blue said. He kept his back to the House, gaze darting left and right, and out to the open expanse of field.
“What am I looking for?”
“For some sign of whatever was trying to break in. A footprint. Whatever.”
“There’s nothing,” she said after a moment. “Have we got the right window?”
“What’s the ground like?”
“Soft.”
So it would’ve held a print. Whatever had tried to get in had to have left some sign.
“You keep watch for a sec,” he said.
He passed her the rifle and, using the flashlight, hunkered down to have a look. Sally was right. There was nothing there. The ground lay undisturbed. So what the hell had been trying to get through the window before the House fried it?
“Let’s check a couple more,” he said.
They investigated the ground under three more windows, then double-checked them in their return to the door. The story was the same under each one—nothing had left a track. Not even a scuff. Blue had set his own weight in the dirt and left a bootprint. Sally, weighing in at a hundred and two pounds, had tried as well with the same results.
“Let’s go back inside,” she said suddenly. “I’m starting to feel creepy—like we’re being watched.”
“We probably are,” Blue said, but he motioned for her to go on ahead of him.
He stared off into the darkness for a long time, lips pursed as he thought, before following her inside. “What do you think it was?” he asked as he locked the door once more.