Authors: Tony Richards
Outside … another minute, and I couldn’t wait to get outside. We might have had our disagreements in the past, but I couldn’t bear to see the judge like this. A massively smart man, of shrewd and independent thought, rendered to a puppet and an implement.
A substantial man in every way, made wholly insubstantial.
I stumbled out onto the porch. My head hurt from the pressure in my temples. And I reached for the cigarette pack in my pocket, but didn’t complete the motion.
The fragrance of night-blooming honeysuckle from the trellises on the facade, swept over me, but only made things worse. The cloying sweetness filled my head and made me want to vomit. I stepped down onto the clippered front lawn, trying to escape the smell, and pressed my eyelids shut.
Was
I
the one who was losing it? Or worse, was I already lost, drifting on a sea of passing time, with a sharp reef – my final moments – looming up ahead of me?
Then I took in something else. I didn’t like magic, no. But – whatever problems this town had faced in its checkered past – it had always relied, and been able to fall back upon, the powers of its adepts.
Without them, what was there left? Me? Just one man with a gun?
I suddenly felt terribly alone, even more than I had during the past couple of years. This was a different thing, like being wholly severed from the life that I had known. There was a horrible inertia to it, like I’d dropped abruptly from the edge of a great cliff.
A sudden gust of wind made my head lift and my eyes come back open. And I looked at the night sky once more. There was another thin dusting of cloud up there. Some of the stars were obscured. But I could see the moon clearly enough. And I kept on going over what the Little Girl had said to me.
I squinted puzzledly. There seemed nothing odd or different about it. Just the same old moon that had shone down on the Landing since I’d been a kid, as familiar as one of my own hands.
And then I saw what the problem was.
At first, I tried to tell myself the motion of the clouds was deceiving me.
But I watched closer, and became convinced that that was not the case. And why hadn’t I noticed this before? I’d been in my car, that was why. I too had been traveling at speed. And because of that, I hadn’t seen …
The moon was drifting through the blackened heavens like some great spherical zeppelin. You couldn’t call it hurtling exactly, but I could now see that it was moving far too quickly. Completing its celestial arc at much too fast a rate.
As I watched, it reached its zenith and then started coming down the other side.
My heart thudding, I looked at my wristwatch. The second hand was turning twice as quickly as it ought to. And the minute hand was following along like some dog on a tight leash.
I had believed – until this moment – that we had almost a day left before the ceremony. That we still had time to come up with something, even though I wasn’t quite sure what.
It seemed that Saruak wasn’t even going to allow us that.
He had already taken over nearly the whole town. And by this stage in the proceedings, even time itself was bending to his will.
I watched the big mottled disc slipping down toward the far horizon. And could almost hear the spirit’s laughter, ringing through my head again.
Willets had returned to the Manor, when I got back there. He had noticed what was going on as well. And the realization had thrown him into a blue funk.
He was pacing the ballroom furiously, his hands knotting and unknotting and his head tucked down. And he kept on mumbling to himself. I’d not seen him
this
agitated in a while. Was it possible that he was awed as well, or even humbled? What Saruak had just achieved – not even the Doctor could pull something like that off.
“The same happened at every house I went to,” he told me.
The red of his pupils glinted.
“Vernon, van Friesling. Hell, the sisters. Tried to touch them, exactly like you did. Tried to use some of my own powers on them – it didn’t work. I even visited old Lucas Tollburn. He was fast asleep, and there was nothing I could do to wake him up.”
For his own part, Woody had become extremely quiet and still again. His eyes remained open, shining in the dark. His gaze seemed to be very tightly focused, as though he were concentrating hard on something directly in front of him. But there was nothing there at all, at least that I could see.
I started to become alarmed. Could Saruak have gotten to him as well. But no. He blinked, next second. He had simply been musing.
“I wonder,” he murmured. “Is it they who have become like ghosts, impossible to touch? Or is it us?”
So far as I could figure out, it didn’t really matter either way. But he’d just put his finger on something.
“Why
not
us?” I pointed out. “How come everyone in town, even the strongest, is under his power in some way, and the three of us are still operating freely?”
Or maybe we were just kidding ourselves. It might only be an illusion that we were. But I explained to them my gut feeling about the general quietness that had gripped the Landing.
Willets nodded. “Yes, I sensed that too.”
I took out my cell phone. As I had expected, Raine inclined his head toward it and then looked unhappy.
“Sorry, but I’ve got to do this.”
And he nodded.
“Perfectly acceptable, under the circumstances.”
Even he could see how serious this was. He still squinted uncomfortably as I punched the speed-dial button. And he murmured something about ‘thumbs.’ By the pricking of them, perhaps?
Cassie answered on the second ring, which seemed to indicate she was still
compos mentis
.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Fine, unless there’s something I don’t know about.”
“Where are you?”
“At home.”
Her voice sounded as lively as it usually did, no hint of torpor in it. So whatever had overcome the rest of the Landing wasn’t affecting her either.
“Anything much happening down there?”
“Down … where are
you
?”
I told her, and she made her usual grumbling noise.
“It’s quieter than a funeral home on Christmas Day,” she told me. “I keep hoping that’s a good thing.”
Which was setting too much store by hope. I brought her up to speed with what was going on, warned her to be on her guard, then dialed another number.
Saul was at the station house, and in his office. He too picked up on the second ring.
“Hobart,” he announced.
Just saying his name, he sounded anxious. Glad, perhaps, of something new to occupy his mind.
“What’s up?” I asked him.
“Ross? Where did you get to?”
“I’ve been busy. Magic stuff. And you?”
“Precisely the opposite. There’s nothing going on – except the clocks are moving faster.”
“Yes, I know. How are your guys?”
“Meaning what exactly?” he asked.
His tone was wary, straight away. The safety of his people was always one of his top priorities.
“Do they seem … well, normal?”
“They’re in limbo. Simultaneously tense and bored as hell, if that’s what you’re referring to. Otherwise, they’re perfectly fine.”
He paused.
“You know what this feels like to me? The proverbial calm before the storm. And I left my umbrella at home this morning.”
Yeah, I knew the feeling.
Once I’d rung off, Willets put his two cents in.
“I think I know what’s happening. And it’s all down to our visitor’s psychology. His frame of mind.”
Okay, Sigmund Freud
, I thought.
Let’s hear it.
He seemed to
detect that and peered hard at me, unamused.
“What use is a victory, without anyone to watch it happen? What use a triumph without someone else experiencing defeat? The way this Saruak’s mind works … he’s a gloater, yes?”
I nodded. I’d had plenty of that from him.
“So this is his way of saying, ‘You are the most important here. You are the controlling forces, the authorities, the powers-that-be. And still, you cannot stop me.’”
He had left us twisting in the wind, in other words. Incapable of doing anything but watch.
“For heaven’s sake,” Raine muttered. “This is ludicrous. There must be something ...?”
But if there was, I couldn’t think of it. And neither, by their expressions, could the others. Willets just looked blank. Raine had an expression on his face like he was astonished something of this nature could descend on him at all.
All three of us were lost for words. The candles in the ballroom kept on flickering. But there was no other movement.
It was quite literally the shortest night of my whole life. Although in a lot of ways the longest one as well. I got no sleep at all. How could I possibly? I spent most of my time out on the mansion’s sprawling porch.
The moon had disappeared altogether. It had sunk so rapidly from view, it might have been trying to run away from this town and its troubles. But most of the clouds had gone as well. The sky was clear and filled with stars. And they were moving too. Not so quickly, but they wheeled against the heavens in a graceful and ethereal ballet. Billions of years old, they were, and I felt very insignificant beneath them. Nothing more than a miniscule, dim spark. And one that might – before much longer – be snuffed out completely.
Every so often, I would go back in and check up on the adepts. They had given up on magic spells. After all, look how far that had gotten us. And were doing what the Little Girl had already begun – searching for some other power, unknown, that might help us in these final hours.
It was like they were asleep, but standing up. Raine in particular looked odd that way. Their brightly pigmented eyes were closed. Their hands were spread out to the sides and their heads leant slightly backward.
If they’d found anything, it wasn’t apparent, since their faces were still barren of expression.
How rapidly was time progressing? The hands of my watch were still turning at the same accelerated rate. But as to exactly
how
fast, I had nothing to measure it against since every timepiece – Hampton’s watch, a clock out in the hallway – had all sped up the same way.
I wandered back outside, looked eastward.
The blackness of the sky had phased to an increasingly pale charcoal, steely-edged along its base. And I had seen those hues a thousand times before. The gradual approach of dawn. The nearness of the sun out on the distant, low horizon.
But I had never till this morning seen it all happen so fast.
The silver spread, then turned to a pale lemon shade. That deepened as I watched.
A ray of golden light sprang up. And then …
It had always been a joyous thing, watching that intensely bright disc start to reappear. But this time, as its top edge came boiling up, I felt my insides clench.
Long shadows were cast at first, so that the ground was dark even in newborn daylight. But the sun came rushing up behind them like a juggernaut. A thousand windows shone with its brightness. Color flooded out across the landscape. There was a load of green down there, and lot of brown and red roofs, and the big lake glinted blue.
The town remained as motionless as it had been all night. No kids on bikes appeared, delivering newspapers. Nobody emerged to walk their dog. The little oblong dots of cars sat unused on their driveways.
But then finally I spotted someone who’d come walking out. He or she – it was impossible to tell from this far away – moved along the front of a short row of houses, over by Crealley Street Park. Paused for a few seconds on the sidewalk, and then headed toward Union Square.
Others were joining in before much longer. All over the town, people were emerging and then heading in the same direction. They seemed to move mechanically. It was almost like watching ants at work. The bottom edge of the sun had cleared the horizon, and I looked back at my watch.
Seven o’ clock already, dammit. Were the hands moving even faster, or was that simply my frame of mind, lending them some extra impetus?
The first person I’d seen emerge had almost reached the square. Entered it a minute later, going round the barriers that had been set up, walking at an even speed, moving closer to the stage. The figure came gently to a halt in front of it. Then settled down, and moved no more.
I went back inside and managed to rouse Willets.
“Can you see what’s happening?
“Yes, I can! Just leave me be!”
He couldn’t affect it in any way. That was what was making him so angry. All that he was capable of was trying to find someone else who could.
About a dozen tiny dots were clustered on the flagstones, when I went outside again. And here was another unpleasant surprise. A bus was rolling up from the far suburbs, trundling to a halt on the corner near the public records office. It seemed to be full. All the passengers started disembarking.
There was nothing I could do about it either, I kept on telling myself.
Hell, there was
definitely
nothing I could do from up here. All this going on, and I was just sitting around?
I headed for my car.
I was forced to slow down when I reached the streets leading directly into the square. They were absolutely
full
of people, all walking at the same even pace and gazing in the same direction. Flowing like a river round the lampposts and mailboxes. Going past the stores and eateries as though they were not even there. And not all of them, by any means, were sticking to the sidewalks.
Apart from the fact that this was starting to look like a jaywalkers’ convention, there was nothing odd I could see about any of them, in spite of their behavior. They had, apparently, gotten up and washed and shaved or combed their hair. Got neatly dressed. Then simply come down here, like they had some kind of appointment. Not a single one of them looked troubled. Not a single one of them, I noticed too, was making any sound.
More were arriving all the time. Another bus went trundling by. I wound my window down and gazed at the faces behind me, dozens of them. They didn’t look transfixed in any blank-faced kind of way. Rather, like Judge Levin, they seemed thoughtful. Placid and even slightly expectant. Like – it struck me – they were hoping for good things to emerge from this particular day.
A community of passive wishful thinkers, then. That was what these people had become. And there were finally so many of them I was forced to abandon my car, get out and walk myself.
I finally reached Union Square. The barriers had all been pushed aside. And I could feel my eyes widen as I stared around.
It had only it taken me a matter of minutes to get down here. But in that time, hundreds more had arrived. They had all sat down on the hard, smooth flagstones. Their eyes were raised as one toward the empty, waiting stage.
There were townsfolk of all ages and professions. Workmen in jeans and overalls. Guys in smart gray suits. High school kids in T-shirts. And the women were got up in everything from sweats to floral dresses.
I recognized our postman, some of the people who worked at Jacklin’s Family Restaurant, a couple of regulars from the diner I frequented. And there were Joe Norton and Jack Stroud.
The square, despite their numbers, was not anywhere near filled up as yet. As I said, it’s a pretty large one. But newcomers were flooding in the entire time. They were arriving from all of the surrounding avenues, and pouring in a steady stream across the bridges on the Adderneck.
There were whole families, I could see. Little kids being led by the hand or carried. And
they
were very silent too, which was the eeriest thing of all.
I caught sight of Saul Hobart with a couple of his men, over by my office building’s doorway, so I made my way across to him. He was slack-jawed and his pupils glittered with astonishment.
“What the hell are they doing?” he asked. “The ceremony’s not till eight.”
Which was not so far away as it had once been, and he fully understood that.
“They’re being controlled by Saruak,” I told him. “The whole town is, even most of the high adepts.”
He cursed quietly. He had obviously been afraid that was the case.
“There’s something else you have to do. Once the ceremony starts, there’s going to be a big stampede.”
You’d have thought I’d grown an extra head. “There’s
what
?”
“Everybody’s going to try and leave here, all at once. Not without good reason. And these –” I gestured, “are just the start of it. There’s going to be thousands more, the entire square filled to bursting.”
He gave me a look that asked,
How do you know any of this?
Which hardly mattered, right now. If we got out of this in one piece, I would explain it to him then.
“Listen, you’ve got to get the streets around here all cleared out, and I mean entirely. Every obstruction. Every parked car. The mailboxes, if you can. Anything that people can be crushed against. It’s vital, Saul.”
His gaze flickered again. He’d already told me who he didn’t take instructions from. But I kept on remembering, vividly, that final scene the white jewel had revealed, and I wasn’t in any mood to argue.
“Hundreds will be trampled otherwise. For God’s sake, would I steer you wrong about something like this? Can you afford to take that risk?”
It must have been my tone of voice. His expression got all furrowed up. He stared across the growing crowd perplexedly.
And then he said, “I’ll get right on it.”
His head ducked and he began consulting on his phone.
A familiar deep growling brought my head around. Cassie had arrived and was picking her way through the clumps of people on her Harley, taking care to steer wide of the littler kids. Her expression was the same as Saul’s had been. She seemed to half believe she was hallucinating all of this.
“What
is
this?” she called out as she reached me.
I quickly outlined what was going on.
“And your highfalutin friends up on the Hill can’t do anything about it?”
When I told her about Levin and the rest, she whistled. Saruak had finally impressed her, I could see. I described everything that I’d been doing since we’d last met up.
“I
knew
those nuts would be no use,” she came back at me, loudly. “And what the
hell’s
a Changer of Worlds, when it’s at home?”
Apparently, it wasn’t. I was pretty sure, by this stage, we had no such being in our town. In which case, the others were going down a route that was entirely pointless.
Cassie chewed the whole thing over, and seemed to come up with something. Like I’ve said, she can be pretty shrewd.
“The bum who made my kids … you know. He certainly changed
my
world. Have you thought of that?”
I hadn’t, until now. Perhaps I’d shied away from the idea. But she was right, so I gave it some consideration.
The guy who she was talking about … he’d only ever mentioned his name once, and that had been when she’d been pretty drunk. Tom Larson. I’d known the man. I had arrested him for burglary, one time. And he had
definitely
turned her world upside-down, the same way Jason Goad had done mine.
But my mind rebelled against the whole idea. It
couldn’t
be either of them. Apart from any other matter, they had both disappeared, in the self-same moment that our families had.
Something, though, was murmuring deep in the background of my thoughts. Something …
No. I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t put my finger on it yet.
We both gazed out across the square. The sun had climbed above the Town Hall roof. The flags up there cast gently drifting shadows, the same way that the banners were doing with the crowd. There were a few white clouds up in the sky beyond them, just as I had seen back at the Manor. A lazy breeze was towing them along.
About a hundred more people had arrived and sat down, by the time that I looked back.
They didn’t move at all. If they were even blinking, it was hard to tell. Their gazes all shone dully in the sunlight. Did they know that we were there at all?
I wondered what was going through their minds. Perhaps they could hear Saruak’s voice, telling them that everything would be just fine. The ceremony would work. They’d be out of Raine’s Landing by late evening.
They remained completely motionless, and looked comfortable enough, in spite of the hard stone that they were sitting on. For all the world like they were waiting for a concert to begin.
But there would only be one instrument, I knew. The Final Trump.
“Maybe I could scare them up a little, fire some shots into the air?” Cass suggested.
But that didn’t sound like too much of a good idea. I was trying to think of a better one, when a harsh bark of a laugh rang out.
I recognized it straight away, and swiveled round in its direction.
Saruak was marching toward me from beneath the shadows of the stage. How long had he been there, skulking in his leery way? There was no way to tell.
The tattered hems of his coat flapped. There were threads hanging from its edge that almost reached the ground. His boots looked grimier than before, from his trip to the great outdoors. His hat still covered half his face in obfuscating shade.
The Dralleg was shambling along at his heels, hunched over and snuffling. Its claws were out. I felt a sharp pang of unease, watching it move past all these helpless, placid folk. It could easily repeat what it had done on that bus yesterday, recreating all that mayhem twentyfold or more.