When he rapped on the glass, Jo stepped out and almost fell, crying out as their hands slipped. When she was ready, she knocked on the glass behind her and Gayle came out. She grasped Jo’s shoulder like a vise. The short human chain started off. being whipped and shoved along the street. In another moment Palatazin felt Jo’s hand grinding his fingers together, and he knew she couldn’t get a breath. “NOT FAR!” he shouted, instantly choking. She nodded, her slitted eyes weak and glazed. All he could see of Gayle was a faint dark shape.
Jo fell. As he helped her to her feet, dark motes spun before his eyes, and he knew they were all slowly suffocating to death. They weren’t going to make it; there were still three blocks to go. “COME ON!” he shouted and pulled them toward the gray shapes on the right-hand side of the street. The shapes slowly materialized into wood-framed, two-storied houses not much different in design from his own. They were all terribly dark, and Palatazin was afraid of what they might be holding. He tripped over something that lay on the sidewalk, half-covered with sand. It was the corpse of a young man, a bullet hole in his cheek. Palatazin stared dumbly at the body for a few seconds and felt the hot waspish buzz pass his face before he heard a muffled crack! He looked up in time to see the orange flash of the second shot fired from an upstairs window in the house that stood before him. The corpse at his feet shuddered. A man’s voice rose to a frenzied wail, “Get away, ye heathen things of Satan! God Almighty shall strike you DEAD! And DEAD! And DEAD!” Palatazin pulled Jo after him, running toward the next house. The front door, its paint scoured down to the bare wood, was closed but unlocked. Palatazin plunged inside as the madman’s shrieking turned into a sob of anguish.
When Gayle was through the door, Palatazin slammed it shut and bolted it. The air within the house was stale and heavy, but at least there were no torturing winds here. His face and hands felt raw, and he could see that Gayle’s eyes were terribly bloodshot. Jo was gagging; she still held on to his coat, and sand was slithering off of it to the floor. He helped Jo over to a chair and wiped the beads of cold sweat off her face with his cloth. Her eyes were dark and vacant; she didn’t seem to know where she was. “Jo?” he said. “We’re all right now. We’re safe.” She began to cry very softly. Through the wind’s howl Palatazin could hear the madman’s scream. “…show yourselves! I know you’re hiding in there, ye foul Satan spawn!” He began to sing in a high, croaking voice, “Shall we gather at the riiiiiiver, the beautiful, the beautiful riiiiiiiver…?”
Palatazin shut him out. Now he was wondering if they were alone in this house. The idea of being locked in here with another armed maniac filled him like sour wine. He was glad to have the reassuring weight of the .38 in its shoulder-holster, though from the size of the bullet hole in that corpse’s face the man next door had to have a high-velocity rifle.
Gayle had the same idea at the same time. “What if we’re not alone here?” she whispered.
“Anyone home?” he called out. There was no answer. Palatazin took his gun out of its holster and released the safety. He walked through the neatly furnished living room and into a short hallway where a flight of stairs led up to the second floor. “Anyone here?” he said, watching for the slightest movement. “We won’t hurt you! We just wanted to get out of the storm!” He waited another moment, but there was still no reply. He put his gun away and went back to the living room. “I think we’re alone,” he told Gayle. “Maybe they got out before the storm hit.”
Gayle looked around. There was a circular, red and blue braided rug on a hardwood floor, a large, comfortable-looking sofa with scrolled arms and legs, a dark-stained coffee table where a few copies of Antique Monthly, National Geographic, and Horizon magazines were neatly arranged, a couple of overstuffed chairs with clear plastic on the arms; and a brick fireplace over which hung an upside-down horseshoe. She could see ashes being stirred in the hearth by the wind’s force. There were framed, sepia-toned prints on the walls and on the fireplace mantel a grouping of color photographs—a middle-aged couple smiling and hugging each other, kids and dogs at play.
The madman next door brayed with laughter.
“Jesus!” Gayle said softly. “That bastard tried to blow our heads off.”
Palatazin nodded and stepped over to Jo, who’d regained at least some of her color. “You’re better now?”
“Yes,” she said and smiled weakly. “Better.”
“Night’s falling,” Gayle said. “Very soon now.” She pulled aside a curtain to look out at the street and could see very little but the swirling sand. The darkness was creeping. She turned and stared at Palatazin. “This storm will…keep them away too, won’t it?”
“No. They don’t breathe, and they have some kind of transparent eyelids that will keep the sand out. They have us where they want us.”
“And where is that?” she asked.
“Trapped. All of us. Everyone in this city. No way out.” He held her gaze for a moment and then looked away quickly because he’d realized they were in an unprotected house—no garlic smeared on the windowsills, no crucifixes on the doors and windows. He dropped his hand to his pocket to touch the bottle of holy water there; it seemed terribly small. “I’m afraid,” he said softly, “that it’s much too late for your story to do any good. The balance has shifted in their favor. They hold the power—”
“No!” she said. “There’s still something we can do! We can call somebody, the police or the National Guard or…somebody—” She was silenced by the sand that spattered up against the window, hissing like hot fat at the bottom of a frying pan.
“I think you know better than that. I doubt if the phones are working. I’d try the lights if I wasn’t afraid we’d stand out like a neon sign over a vampire diner. The air’s none too good in here, is it?”
Gayle put her head in her hands. “Shit,” she said in a faraway, dreamer’s voice. “All I ever wanted to do was…be a good writer. That’s all. Was that too much to ask?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I wanted to leave my mark. I wanted to…do something important. Be somebody important instead of a nobody…which—let’s face it—I am.” Her voice cracked a little bit, but she quickly cleared her throat, and then she was okay. “All mouth and fake guts,” she said. “Will…what they do…be fast or slow?”
Palatazin pretended not to hear her.
The night closed in.
TWELVE
Father Silvera had reached his church before the worst of the storm hit, and now he opened the front door a crack and peered out. The street was deserted and already heaped with small sand drifts. There were no lights in any of the tenement windows simply because there was no electricity. Silvera had turned on the sanctuary lights for perhaps fifteen minutes before they flickered several times, dimming steadily with each flicker, and then went out. Darkness was filling up the church, deepening every minute. He looked out for a while longer, narrowing his eyes against flying grit, then went back to his room. He found several candles tucked away in a drawer, meant for either weddings or funerals, and he lit all of them, dripping wax onto saucers and sticking the candles into the hardening puddles. He took the candles out into the sanctuary and placed them around the gleaming brass crucifix on the altar. Looking at the Cross shamed him. He prayed that Palatazin would be safe in his journey and that when he found that castle, there would be no master there, no vampires there at all. He prayed that Palatazin was wrong, that he was suffering from fatigue or overwork. But at the back of his brain a shadow had begun to stir, and he was trying very hard to keep it from fully awakening. He had recalled something that an older priest had told him during his education in Mexico: “Some men are prisoners of rational thought.” Perhaps he had been seeing the world through bars for a long time.
The sanctuary door creaked open. Silvera looked up from the altar to see a small figure come staggering out of the storm, whirlwinds of sand spinning around him. It was Leon LaPaz. Before Silvera could reach him, he fell, coughing violen
tly, to the floor. Silvera helped him up onto a pew and then used all his strength against the door to keep the sand out.
“Are you all right, Leon?” he asked the boy, kneeling down beside him. Leon nodded, but he was pale and there were tear tracks down his cheeks. “I’ll get you some water,” Silvera said. He hurried back to his room, took a glass from a shelf over the sink, and turned on the cold water tap. The pipes stuttered for a few seconds, then let out a thin trickle of brownish water. Damn it! Silvera thought. The sand’s even getting into the water! He sipped it, then spat it into the sink. The stuff was undrinkable.
“I’m sorry, Leon,” he said when he went back out to the boy. “The water’s going to have to wait.” He put a finger under Leon’s chin and tilted his face up. The boy’s lips were wind-chapped, pulped, and swollen. “What were you doing out in that? You could’ve died out there!” Then he suddenly asked, “Where’s Sandor? Your father hasn’t come home yet?”
Leon shook his head, his eyes glimmering with tears. He was still breathless, and it was difficult for him to speak. “No…a man…came…a little while ago…for my sister…”
“A man? What man?”
“A…black man,” Leon said. “To the apartment. He was tall and…mean and…he told me to come tell you…‘Cicero remembers’…”
“Cicero?” Silvera remembered the name of the black heroin dealer he’d stuffed into a garbage can. “When was this?”
“Maybe…maybe ten minutes.” Leon gripped the priest’s arms with small, trembling hands. “He took Juanita, Father! He said for me to come tell you he remembered and then he…took my sister and left! Where’d he take her, Father? What’s he going to do to her?”
Silvera was stunned. What was Cicero doing in this neighborhood during a raging sandstorm? Perhaps he’d been selling more horse and had been caught by the winds, unable to get out? And now that he had four-year-old Juanita, what would he do to her?
“There are other people in my building, Father,” Leon said. “A lot of the windows are broken, and the sand’s getting in. They can’t breathe too good.”
“How many others?”
“Mrs. Rodriguez, the Garacas, Mr. and Mrs. Mendoza, Mr. Melazzo, maybe thirty more.”
My God! Silvera thought. What would happen to the hundred of others trapped in those flimsy tenements as the sand whipped through empty window frames and cracks that should’ve been repaired years ago? They would slowly suffocate if they couldn’t find a better refuge! Silvera paused, then made his decision. “Leon, you know where the staircase to the bell tower is, don’t you?”
“Sí. Through that door over there.”
“That’s right. Now listen to me carefully. I want you to climb to the tower and crack open the shutters up there; you’ll see the handles. The wind may get bad after that so you’ll have to be very careful. Then I want you to take the rope that hangs down and pull on it as hard as you can. The bell may lift you off your feet, but that’s all right, you’ll come down again. Just don’t let go of the rope, and keep ringing the bell. Can you do that?”
Leon nodded, his eyes bright with the importance of his mission.
“Good.” Silvera squeezed his shoulder. Now he needed something to cover his face. As Leon scurried back through the door, Silvera took a towel from his bathroom and jammed most of it down into his coat so he could press the other end of it against his lower face and not worry about the wind carrying it away. As he approached the sanctuary door, he heard the first clear peal of Mary’s Voice. It was an urgent, warning sound, metallic and determined. The bell’s movement made the tower groan over Silvera’s head, and he could envision Leon’s little body being jerked upward. Silvera put his hand against the door and then he stepped out. The wind screamed in his ears.
Sand ripped into his face and hair. He was almost flung to the ground, but he fought for his balance by leaning against the wind. He could see absolutely nothing; the darkness had conspired with the storm to isolate him inside a well with spinning, black walls. He struggled on across the street, hearing tattered fragments of Mary’s Voice—it alternately pealed and moaned overhead.
Slowly, the line of buildings emerged from the murk. He was gasping for a full breath by the time he reached the door of Leon’s building. Sand covered the towel, and some of it had slipped through into his mouth and nostrils. His face felt as if it were shredded. Shattered glass from the building’s door lay about his feet as he stepped into the front corridor. He could hear tortured winds wailing along the stairs, and they tried to pull him in all directions at once. He tried to breathe without the protective sieve of the towel; his nostrils and lungs instantly flamed.
He knocked on the first door he came to, and Carlos Alva peered out, his dark eyes bugging above the gritty handkerchief he had pressed to his face.
“Carlos!” Silvera shouted, though he stood less than a foot away from the man. “Get your wife and children! You’re going to have to come to the church with me!” Alva didn’t seem to understand so Silvera put his mouth next to the man’s ear and shouted again. Alva nodded and disappeared into the room for his family. Silvera moved on to the next door.
It took him more than forty-five minutes to get them all gathered together on the first floor—thirty-three people not counting the infants in their mothers’ arms. Silvera had planned on getting them out in a human chain, hand-to-hand, but the infants created a problem.
“Listen to me, all of you!” Silvera shouted at them. “We’re going to have to make it to the church! Can you hear the bell ringing?” Now it sounded distant and muffled, and Silvera knew that Leon’s arms would be about ready to rip from their sockets. “We’re going to follow that sound!” he yelled, pointing in the direction of the church. “Everyone clasp the shoulder of the person in front of you and hold on tightly! I don’t want the women to carry their babies. Give them to your husbands! The wind’s very strong out there so we’ve got to walk carefully.” He saw frightened eyes everywhere around him. There were cries for God and muttered prayers.
“We’re going to be all right! Don’t be afraid, just hold on! Be sure to cover the infants’ faces! Is everyone protected? All right! Are we ready?” Someone starting sobbing. Carlos Alva, holding his baby son in one arm, gripped Silvera’s shoulder. Silvera took a breath of flaming air and moved out into the street, the people trailing behind him.
He couldn’t hear the bell for a few seconds. Keep ringing it, Leon! he called out mentally. Then he heard it, wailing for the lost. Behind him the human chain flailed against the wind, some of them falling and having to be helped up. The street had never seemed so wide or so wicked. Silvera felt he’d reached the middle of it because he couldn’t see either side, but he couldn’t be certain. Suddenly he heard a piercing scream behind him that went on and on. It reached a high crescendo and then rapidly faded. “What is it?” Silvera said over his shoulder to Alva. “Who screamed?”
Alva sent the question back. In another moment he told the priest, “Mrs. Mendoza is gone! Something pulled her out of the chain!”
“WHAT?” Silvera shouted. “STAY WHERE YOU ARE!” He felt his way back to the hole where Mrs. Mendoza had been between her husband and Mr. Sanchez. “What happened to her?” he asked her husband, whose face was pallid with shock. The man couldn’t answer; he was muttering “Maria, Maria, Maria…” over and over again. Silvera looked around for her but couldn’t see a thing. He peered at Sanchez. “What happened?”
Sanchez’s teeth were chattering. “I don’t know, Father!” he shouted. “She was holding onto my shoulder one second, then…she wasn’t there! I heard her scream, and when I looked around, I thought I saw…I thought I saw…”
“What? What was it?”
“Something…a man maybe…dragging her off…”
Silvera stared into the darkness, sand slithering down his neck. There was nothing out there, nothing at all. He heard himself say, “Close the hole,” and then he felt his way back to the front of the chain. His heart wa
s thundering, his stomach roiled with fear. Alva clutched his shoulder again, and they started off. Within ten seconds there was another scream, fading into the distance. Silvera’s head whipped around. “Felizia!” he heard a woman wail. “What happen’ to my little girl? FELIZIAAAAAA!” The woman started to leap out of the chain, but Silvera shouted, “HOLD ONTO HER! WE KEEP MOVING!”
A figure suddenly ran in front of him, and then was quickly engulfed in the storm. He stopped so abruptly he could feel the entire chain bump together. He’d gotten the impression of a young boy in a black jacket, grinning out of a silver-eyed skull. Sweet Jesus, protect us! he thought. Please help us get to that door! PLEASE! He began walking again; Alva’s hand dug into his shoulder. There was a scream from far behind, almost at the end of the chain. “KEEP MOVING!” he shouted, though he knew they couldn’t possibly hear him back there. He hoped they’d close the gap and stagger on. And now he seemed to be aware of movement all around him—figures darting back and forth, shadowy shapes made formless by the blowing sand. He stepped onto the opposite curb. The church door was only a few feet away at the top of five steps.
“WE’RE HERE!” he shouted and realized at the same instant that Alva’s hand was gone. When he looked back, he saw that both the man and his wife had been taken out of the chain, leaving only their small daughter frozen with terror, her hand outstretched where she’d been clutching her mother’s dress. Silvera grasped her hand. The bell sang out furiously overhead. Silvera threw open the church door and stood there, quickly herding them in while he counted them. Of thirty-three who’d left the building, twenty-six had made it. When the last one had stepped across the threshold, Silvera slammed the door shut and leaned against it, the breath rasping through his lungs. Several people fell down before the altar and began to pray; there were shrieks and sobs, a wild tumult of noise.