Beyond the Pale
Authors: Mark Anthony
A DARKNESS IS COMING.…
A figure stood inside the elevator, silhouetted by fluorescent light. Grace blinked against the sterile glare. The sounds of the Emergency Department receded into the distance, yet her pulse throbbed in her ears, mixed with the thrum of a hundred other heartbeats, as if the very air had become a stethoscope transmitting the life and sudden fear of all those around her. The figure stepped out of the elevator.
It was him. The man she had pronounced dead three hours ago. He was naked, his skin mushroom pale. With mindless deliberation, the man with the iron heart walked forward, his bare feet slapping against the tile floor.
Sound rushed back into the ED. Screams sliced the air in all directions as people scrambled to get out of the dead man’s way. Grace backed up against a wall. She knew she should run, but it was a dull knowledge, and could not connect with the nerves and muscles of her limbs.…
This edition contains the complete text
of the original hardcover edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED
.
BEYOND THE PALE
A Bantam Spectra Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam Spectra trade paperback edition published November 1998
Bantam Spectra paperback edition / November 1999
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1998 by Mark Anthony.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-19550.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79540-3
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v3.1
For Carla Montgomery—
who has the Touch.
For Christopher Brown—
a true Knight Protector.
And for Sean A. Moore—
who understood the magic of Circles.
For a thousand years the Pale King lay mantled in dark, enchanted slumber, imprisoned in his desolate dominion of Imbrifale.
And then …
Two worlds draw near.
The spell is broken.
The derelict school bus blew into town with the last midnight gale of October.
Weary brakes whined in complaint as the vehicle pulled off a stretch of Colorado mountain two-lane and into an open field. Beneath a patina of highway grime that spoke of countless days and countless miles, the bus’s slapdash jacket of white paint—a shade called Pearly Gates, just five-ninety-nine a gallon at the Ace Hardware in downtown Leavenworth, Kansas—glowed like bones in the phantasmal light of the setting horned moon. The bus’s folding door squeaked open, and two painted-over stop signs flopped out from the vehicle’s sides like stunted angel wings. One sign admonished
Repent Your Sins Now
, while the other advertised
Two for the Price of One
.
A figure stepped from the bus. Wind hissed through dry grass around his ankles and plucked with cold fingers at his black mortician’s suit. He reached up a quick, long hand to keep his broad-brimmed pastor’s hat planted on his head, then gazed into the darkness with dark eyes.
“Yes, this will do fine,” he whispered in his steel-rasp and Southern-honey-pecan voice. “This will do just fine.”
Then the man—who had been called many names in the past, but who these days went by the moniker of Brother
Cy—leaned his scarecrow frame toward the bus, like a lodgepole pine bending before the storm, and called through the open door.
“We have arrived!”
A chorus of excited voices answered him. Someone flicked on the bus’s high beams, and two cones of light cut through the night. The rear emergency door swung open, hinges creaking, and a dozen shadowy forms leaped out. They dragged a heavy bundle into the field and unrolled it with deft movements. More dim figures scurried from the back of the bus, wrangling poles and rope, and hurried to join the others. Brother Cy stalked to the center of the field and paced a wide circle, digging the heel of his worn black boot into the turf at measured intervals. When the circle was complete, he stood back and looked on in satisfaction. Here would stand his fortress.
Canvas snapped like a sail.
“Blast and damnation, watch that pole!” Brother Cy shouted as his workers strained to stand a length of wood as tall and thick as a tree on end. A billowing shape rose up before him, like an elephant lumbering to its feet. Brother Cy prowled around it: the hungry lion.
“Stake down that wall!” he roared. “Untangle those lines. Get a rope through that tackle. Now pull! Pull, or you’ll think the Dark One’s domain a sweet paradise compared to the hell I’ll show you!” Brother Cy thrust his lanky arms above his head. “
Pull
!”
A score of dim forms strained. The mound heaved itself higher into the air, and higher yet, like a mountain being birthed. At last its pointed peak reached the top of the high pole. Ropes were lashed around wooden posts and tied off, stray edges of canvas were skewered to the ground, lengths of cord were tucked away. Where minutes before there had been empty moonlight there now stood a tent. It was an old-fashioned circus tent, what in days gone by had been called a big top, torn and patched in so many places it looked as if it had been sewn from the trousers of a hundred penniless clowns.