Midnight Solitaire (17 page)

Kit bolts into the storm, Greer right behind her.

Freezing wind burns their flesh and lungs and makes their eyes tear, while the deep snow makes their legs feel like they’ve been submerged in wet cement up to their thighs. But they keep running as best they can, shuffling forward and forcing their way through the storm.

One explosion is quickly followed by a second.

Incredible force slams into them from behind, sending them sprawling and cartwheeling through the night.

Greer flies through the darkness, across an embankment and into a thick drift of snow. The last thing she sees is Kit tumbling away into curtains of night and snow like a piece of debris riding the wind.

* * * *

The house is an old Victorian Greer doesn’t recognize. Everything in it is dated and old. Everything is black-and-white and Greer feels like everything—including herself—is moving in slow motion. Almost as if she’s just emerged from a deep sleep but hasn’t yet fully escaped it, isn’t yet completely conscious. But doesn’t she dream in color? She thinks she does. In fact, she’s sure of it.

So this must not be a dream then. This must be something…else.

She moves through the foyer and sees a large and winding ornate staircase that leads to the second floor. Everything here is dark and yet the windows reveal it is daytime. But even the light is different here, muted and strange. She looks around at the old furniture and worn paintings hanging in bulky wooden frames, enormous formal portraits hanging on the walls and scattered throughout the house.

They’re all there, all of them represented.

Doc…Luke…Carlin…Greer herself…

She moves closer to her own portrait, gazes up at it. She has no memory of ever having sat for such a painting. A shiver rattles her to the bone and she hugs herself. It’s freezing in here, doesn’t the house have heat?

Greer looks at her hands. They are cold, raw, red and sore.

She doesn’t want to be here but understands somehow that she must be. It is not a choice.

Greer slowly climbs the stairs, following the long staircase up to the landing on the second floor. A narrow hallway with doors on either side runs the length of the house in both directions. She can go left or right, but chooses left, because at the far end of that section of hallway, a lone door stands open.

She follows the hallway, feels the old floorboards creak and moan with each step, and finally reaches the open doorway.

Inside, but for a small table and chair in the center, the room is completely empty and painted entirely in white. In the center of the table sits an old and worn deck of playing cards, neatly stacked.

Kit stands before a long, tall window, the only one in the room. Because there are no curtains, inordinately bright shafts of daylight cascade through the room and along the walls and floor, eerie in the otherwise drab house.

“Kit?”

She glances back over her shoulder, stone-faced, but says nothing. One of her eyeglass lenses sports a web-like crack. She seems not to notice.

Greer slowly crosses the room and joins her at the window.

Outside, the yard below is dead and gray. There is no snow but the world is sheathed in ice, even the dead trees lining the edge of the property and towering over the house like forgotten and crippled sentries have not been spared.

She cannot clearly see past the wall of trees, but it appears as if a solid, beveled, and intricately formed wall of ice stands just beyond them.

It’s like some sort of prison, Greer thinks, a glacial prison of ice and cold.

“Kit…where are we?”

Everything is impossibly still outside. No wind. No motion. No life.

“Are we dead?” Greer asks, her voice weak and tired.

Kit slowly turns her head and looks at her. “Not yet.”

Behind them, out in the hallway, the floor creaks. Someone…some
thing
is coming…

“There’s something here,” Greer says, “in the house with us.”

“Yes. There is.”

Greer clenches shut her eyes as fear rises, slithering through her like a serpent coiling around her spine. Despite the cold, all she sees in the darkness of her mind are flames. “Am I dreaming?”

“No,” Kit whispers. “I am.”

TWENTY-ONE

Although it’s only late afternoon, it’s already getting dark.

A gentle though ominous rain falls over the city as a woman in a trench coat, dark dress and heels hurries through the shadows of a narrow alley, finally ducking under an awning over the stoop at the rear of a Chinese restaurant. A small Asian man in a bloody apron sits on an overturned crate smoking a cigarette, obvious to the weather. He glances at the woman with disinterest then looks away, back down the alley, as if expecting someone or something else to follow her.

The woman, mid-thirties, dark-haired, pretty and petite, escapes through the door, crosses through a busy kitchen and the unwelcome stares of several cooks and workers and pushes through a swinging door into a small, candlelit but otherwise dark dining area. She hesitates a moment, eyes scanning the room. Three Asian waiters stand against the kitchen wall in a formal row.

There are no booths here, only tables outfitted with dark red tablecloths and small single candles in squat red globes.

It all feels like a dream, but it’s real. She wishes it wasn’t, but knows it is.

All but two of the tables are unoccupied. A young couple sits at one while a dwarf of perhaps fifty sits at the other.

With a purposeful stride, the woman walks to a table in back. Cloaked in shadow and candlelight, the dwarf sits alone at the table, a lighter and pack of cigarettes before him, along with an exotic-looking drink complete with paper umbrella. Dressed in an ill-fitting suit, he straightens his tie even though it doesn’t need straightening, clears his throat and looks up at the woman with an expressionless, decidedly reptilian-like gaze.

From hidden speakers Ella Fitzgerald quietly sings “The Nearness of You.”

“I’m in trouble,” she tells him.

He selects a cigarette from the pack and rolls it into the corner of his mouth. “I’ve always had a soft spot for women in peril.” After lighting the cigarette, he motions to the chair across from him.

She removes her raincoat, puts it over the back of the chair and joins him, nervously looking back over her shoulder before continuing the conversation. “We’ve made a terrible mistake.”

The dwarf exhales through his nose, eyes slowly blinking.

“They thought it didn’t work,” she says desperately. “But it did.”

“It was a failure.”

“No. It wasn’t.”

“The entire thing was scrapped years ago.”

“They didn’t wait long enough.” The woman brings a trembling hand to her face. “Things are…happening.”

He sips his drink. “Drink? Something to eat? The Duck here is positively orgasmic.”

She shakes her head no.

The dwarf holds a hand up, stopping an approaching waiter before he reaches the table, then returns his attention to the woman. He draws on his cigarette, staring at her through the spirals of smoke. “You were told side-effects were always a possibility.”

“You don’t understand. I’m telling you it worked. Maybe not at first, maybe not even for years, but—”

“The program no longer exists. In fact, it never did.”

“But—”

“Even if after all this time I could contact the proper channels and let them know there’s been a new development that requires their attention, which is highly doubtful, you must realize their solution will be immediate quarantine and probable termination. Then again, if what you’re saying is true, that may not only be best, it may be wholly necessary.” He butts his cigarette in a glass ashtray on the table. “We can’t always wait for nature to thin the herd, now can we?”

“Interesting philosophy,” she says, “especially coming from you.”

He takes another sip of his drink. “You really should have one of these. It’s called a Volcano. No idea what’s in it but it’s delicious. Rum, I think.”

“I’m afraid of my own child.” The woman’s eyes turn moist. “She’s only a teenager and I’m terrified of her. I love her, but her imagination frightens me. In a few years she’ll be capable of things no one will be able to stop.”

“As e.e. cummings wrote…‘To destroy is always the first step in any creation,’” he says. “Meaning if by some slim chance you’re right, then it’s wise to be afraid.”

“If I am…it would make her—
God
—wouldn’t it?”

The dwarf licks his lips, remembering her nude pregnant body on display all those years ago. “Don’t be silly.” He reaches across the table and gently pats her hand with his tiny fingers. “There is no God.”

TWENTY-TWO

Something tickles open her heavy eyelids. As the world slowly blends into dark focus, Greer realizes she’s lying on her back watching an endless mass of snowflakes descending upon her. For what seems an eternity she cannot move, or perhaps doesn’t really try to. She just lays there, cold and dazed and unsure of what’s happening. But the memories slowly return and the jumble of disjointed and frenzied thoughts firing through her head eventually becomes more coherent and she realizes where she is.

She tries to move her arms and legs and finds that although they’re stiff and sore, she is able to do so. She rolls over and into a sitting position.

Falling over against a large drift of packed snow, Greer sees the piles of rubble that were once the motel and diner. They are still burning, the debris crackling and popping, shooting occasional showers of sparks high into the air. Even at a considerable distance the heat from the flames flush her face.

A faint cough slips through the wind-sounds.

Greer wipes snow from her eyes with a trembling hand.

The illumination from the flames cast shadows across the snow, revealing someone a few feet away: Kit, on hands and knees.

At first both are too shaken and exhausted to speak, but Kit sees her and eventually crawls closer.

“Is it over?” Greer asks breathlessly.

Kit falls against the drift a few feet from her, mouth open and eyeglasses cracked. She nods. Or maybe she only shivers. Neither can be sure. “Are you all right?” Kit asks.

“I’m alive…I think.”

“For now. The fire’s helping but it won’t burn long in this storm. Once it’s out we’re done.”

“The fire, the explosions…someone had to see it.”

“Maybe.”

“You think they’ll find us out here?”

“Not sure they could get to us right now even if they wanted to.”

“They wouldn’t just leave us out here, would they?”

“Even if they do get to us, might not be in time.”

Both have seen that the explosions also toppled the shed they had planned to use for shelter, but neither mentions it. There seems little point.

“Why did everything have to be destroyed like this?”

“Doc said the flesh of the host had to be annihilated. We had no choice.”

“It stopped The Dealer, but it doomed us too.”

“Maybe we were already doomed.”

Greer wipes her nose. She thinks it’s running until her hand comes back slick with blood. Normally a nosebleed would upset her, but what difference does it make now?

Kit reaches into her jacket and hands her a crumpled tissue.

Greer takes it, holds it under her nose a moment then tosses it aside.

After a moment, Kit shows her what’s in her other hand, the crystal, dangling from its satin cord, swaying in the wind and sparkling in the snow and firelight.

“You took it?”

“Doc was holding it but his hand was outside the circle. He wanted me to.”

“It should’ve gone up in flames with them.”

“I was supposed to take it, that’s what Doc wanted.”

Greer lets it go. “So now what?”

“It needs to be hidden somewhere no one’s ever going to find it.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“If we bury it in the snow, when it eventually melts, someone will find it.”

Kit removes her glasses and paws ice from her eyes with a shaking hand. “Sometimes the best place to hide is in plain sight. If I don’t make it they’ll find me out here but they won’t know what this is.” She reaches out into the snow, retrieves her knapsack and drags it closer. “They’ll think it’s just cheap jewelry.”

Greer stares at her awhile. “I don’t think I can feel my feet.”

“Me either.”

“Aren’t you afraid?”

“Of what?”

Greer motions to the crystal.

“Doc said he was trapped for eternity unless someone lets him out.”

“Thought you didn’t believe in any of that.”

Kit shivers. “Do you still hear him talking to you?”

Greer shakes her head no.