Midnight's Angels - 03 (18 page)

This wasn’t helping a lot. What I really needed was something written. A diary or journal of some description. But I turned over the entire nursery without finding anything like that.

I was finally ready to throw in the towel, frustration pounding through me, when I noticed something on the floor. What seemed to be the corner of a rectangle of cardboard, poking out from underneath the bed.

I stooped down and retrieved it. Turned it over, and saw to my amazement that it was a birthday card, a big pink number five on the front of it. There were a couple of  dozen signatures inside it, most of them childish scrawls. A card from a grade school classroom, then.

Happy Birthday, Katie
, was the message.

Which told me something, but not much. So I went down on my knees and tried under the bed again. There was something else amongst the fluff and shadows. The envelope the card had come in.

I pulled it out. And it was addressed, in big block capitals.

KATIE McALISTER.

Which took me closer than I’d ever gotten to finding out who the Little Girl was.

Except that it would have to wait. Far more urgent matters needed my attention.

I folded both items carefully and tucked them in a pocket of my coat. And then I headed down and went out to my car, anxious to rejoin the others.

What with the whole town arriving in one enclosed space, everybody had their work cut out. Cass and I were put in charge of laying our hands on every available weapon. We ended up with a big heap of firearms, then watched as queues formed and they were handed out. They might be a defense against the hominids, but I already knew they wouldn’t stop the angels. We’d have to rely on the remaining adepts to do that.

But with that much to do, the afternoon was over almost before we knew it, the evening approaching like a gray, incoming tide. Union Square was packed, the theatre and office buildings spilling over with their brand-new occupants. Everyone was trying to keep things as orderly as possible, but it was difficult with kids around.

Nobody had been allowed to bring a car the whole way in here -- Ritchie Vallencourt had seen to that. Vehicles were parked three deep in the surrounding byways, and it looked like a motor race to nowhere out beyond the square. But it provided no real kind of barrier, and I didn’t even try to kid myself along those lines. I’d seen the way those scuttling creatures moved, and knew it wouldn’t do a single thing to slow them down.

The air grew dimmer. A lot of people around me were checking their shotguns and rifles, with a great deal of metallic clicking.

“We came to a final decision while you were gone, by the way,” Lehman Willets said, coming across and grumbling in my ear. “These hominids, as you call them. If they come at us again --“

“There’s no ‘if.’”

“Okay. But if they look like overwhelming us, we’ll have no option but to kill them. Doesn’t matter who they once were -- it’s either put a stop to them, or this whole town goes down the chute.”

Which did not sit with me particularly well. We’d always stuck together in the Landing, looked out for each other, whatever it took. The thought of treating some of its inhabitants as disposable hit me where it genuinely hurt.

To give him credit, Willets looked as unhappy as I felt. Being factual about it didn’t help. The redness in his eyes had almost totally faded, making him look more human than he’d done in a good long while.

“If any other course of action presents itself, we’ll take it,” Martha Howard-Brett assured me, appearing behind the doctor’s shoulder. “Lethal violence is the last resort.”

But the way that this was going, it might turn out to be the
only
one. How exactly had it come to this? When I turned to Cassie, she was looking very grim.

“We’ve been in some sucky situations in our time,” she complained. “But this outsucks them by several hundred miles.”

Then she tried to think of something else to say, and couldn’t, and shut up.

The mood across the whole square was uncomfortable. Everybody knew what was at stake. What the price of survival might be. And they mostly looked like they’d prefer to put this off. But time slows down for no one, and was gradually forcing us into a corner.

The sun was already bleeding away behind the shadowy mass of the big hill. It vanished from view, only the edges of its glow remaining like a huge crimson halo. And the shadows around us stretched much further, spreading out.

There’d been a good deal of cloud in the sky for the late part of the afternoon. We watched great masses of it turn blood red. The light continued to weaken around us. The globe-shaped streetlamps came on, and the lights in the surrounding buildings. And then Lehman Willets raised both arms. A signal.

My God, he had changed so much the past couple of days. He’d turned into a leader.

The whole way across the square and down O’Connell, great wooden bonfires had been heaped up, in a far more orderly, efficient manner than last night. Some people were holding lengths of kindling with oily swatches wrapped around one end. Lighters were applied to those. They were tossed in. And then the piles of lumber started bursting into flame.

The irony of it struck at me. The way that history went off at odd tangents and repeated itself. This was the way, in olden times, they had killed witches, wasn’t it? This was the way, in fact, in which our ancestors had murdered Regan Farrow.

What goes around usually comes around, catching us completely by surprise. The town center was filled up with dancing amber light. And just in time as well. Because the harsh red tinge above was draining away quickly, giving way to purple darkness.

We could still make out Sycamore Hill, the same black bulk that it had been during the daylight hours. But not anything of Tyburn, where the main threat might be coming from. Willets decided to correct that.

He turned into a blur in front of me. Which projected itself upward, only coming to a stop once it had reached the Town Hall’s roof.

The doctor rematerialized underneath the Massachusetts banner, which was flapping in the gentle breeze up there. But his voice was still perfectly clear, like he was standing by my shoulder.

“No sign of movement yet,” he told me.

Traces of faint light remained in the sky, albeit they were shrinking fast. My guess was, the hominids were going to wait for total darkness before showing up.

“Oh my God,” the doctor muttered.

He had moved along the roof a few yards, and was facing due southwest.

A little crimson was still clinging to the far horizon. And for a breathless moment, it seemed like it might stay there. But hope is one thing, and reality another. It faded off. The stars came out. The sky became a canopy, the deepest shade of navy blue.

“They’re on the move,” Willets told me. “Thousands of them.”

Then he swiveled around toward Sycamore Hill, obviously expecting the same. But I could see his shoulders slump, and he hunched forward.

“What is it?” I asked.

A puzzled tone had crept into his voice. “I can’t see anything in this direction.”

“They’re not moving?”

“No. They’re doing that, Ross. I can feel them. But … they’re not heading this way.”

He looked at Tyburn once again, like he was trying to get his facts straight.

“Neither are the others. They’re not coming here. They’re heading for the western edge of town.”

Which took me aback. It made no sense.

“But there’s no one there. I
have
got that right, haven’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Then what the hell is
this
about?”

The doctor didn’t know. And so I struggled to think of anything important that might lie in that direction. And my first thought was the Little Girl. Except that, so far as I was aware, she wasn’t present any longer. What would they want with her, besides?

What lay beyond Marshall Drive? The answer that came back was … just the river and a small section of woodland. The same section of woods -- if I remembered the town’s history correctly -- in which Levin’s original ancestor had been trapped, a baby born in a tinkers’ wagon, his family simply passing through.

But was there anything else?

There was …

Oh no, not that. I stared at the streetlamps around me, then peered down O’Connell with its brightly lit-up diners and its neon signs. A thudding started in my chest.

I was about to tell Willets what I’d figured out, when three white points of light lifted themselves into the air above Tyburn. And -- unlike their servants -- they started moving in this direction. Which meant I couldn’t take the doctor with me, nor Martha. They were needed here.

I was yelling out for Cass next second. The people here might have been required to leave their cars behind. But she still had her Harley.

* * *

I’d ridden pillion with her before. And this was pretty much the same experience, the engine howling underneath and the streets around us melting to an almost seamless blur. She wore no helmet and so, obviously, didn’t have one spare. The air was moving past us so fast I had to tuck my face right down to breathe. But none of that seemed to bother her. She’d never been what you would call a cautious driver.

Back in the Victorian era, Woodard Raine’s great grandfather, Regis, had decided to modernize this town. And that meant making the switch from gaslight to electric power. You’d have thought that would be pretty simple for a man with so much witchcraft at his fingertips.

But there are rules to magic, most of the time solid and unbreakable. And one of them -- the same way as in normal life -- forbids perpetual motion. An adept cannot simply say ‘let there be electrical current,’ and then walk away and expect it to last forever. That won’t work, since magic is a hands-on thing.

So Regis had two choices. He could either stand there until the end of days, conjuring up juice for the rest of us. Or he could give himself a break, and commission a power station to be built.

It’s at the far western edge of town, out past where the houses start to thin and the trees begin taking over. The building’s right beside the Adderneck. In fact, that part of the river got a dam as part of the construction.

The Adderneck is deep, you see, its currents strong. And Regis Raine figured, correctly, it would make a perfect source of power. There’s a massive turbine that’s been turning in that dam for more than a century. It needs maintaining, of course. But now, the workers were all gone.

We hurtled down Marshall Drive, going past the corner of Bethany without so much as a sideways glance. The people who fled this place had, as instructed, left the lighting on in their abandoned homes. Windows were still glowing everywhere we looked.

The forest began to swell ahead of us. It had always looked, to my mind, like a semi-living thing. Was filled with overlapping strips of black. And before much longer, it was looming above us like a massive, frozen wave.

If our entire population perished, how long would it be before the tree line started moving in and slowly ripped the town apart? Or would the curse be lifted, letting brand-new people come here, if we were gone?

Mortal thoughts. There was no time for them, so I pushed them aside. Cassie braked so violently that the wheels smoked. I was almost thrown across the road, but clung on tightly.

The houses had vanished by this time. The river was visible to our right. First a pair of willows and a bed of reeds. And then the churning surface, catching the starlight and stretching it out into platinum filaments. We could hear the gurgling it made. But as the Harley’s rumble died away, something else came to my ears.

A compressed rushing, the low snarl of machinery. That was the dam, the turbine.

And then I heard something else, swelling up violently and cutting across it. A clattering I recognized from not long back. When my eyes adjusted, I could see a solid stream of crouched hominids moving across my field of vision. It was like one of those old chiller-thriller movies I’d seen, of soldier ants, except a great deal larger. They were some four hundred yards ahead of us, and had not seemed to notice we were there as yet.

Their attention was fixed on something else. As I had already guessed, they were closing in on the power station.

It stood two stories and was built in the style of the day, in dense looking red brick. Pylons reared up from the ground around it. Dozens of thick cables ran from those, heading off on wooden posts to every part of town. There were still lights on inside the place. But I knew, like the houses, there was no one looking after it. It only ever requires a bare handful of staff, mostly there to keep an eye on things.

As I watched, the first ranks of the creatures reached the wide front doors, and then poured through them.

“What do we do?” Cassie asked.

The only thing that I could do was shake my head, since we were heavily outnumbered.

The sounds of destruction came drifting across to us. Heavy thumps and crashes. And glass breaking. There were instruments in there, naturally. And by the sound of it, the hominids were getting hold of everything they could, and laying waste to it.

The rumble of the turbine, which had been smooth until this point, began to falter. I looked out across at the river again. A few crushed bodies were floating into view from wide vents in the dam. And when more appeared, I felt genuinely sickened.

They were pulling the same stunt as they had done with the electric cables. Throwing themselves into the works in an attempt to jam them.

And these had once been people, no different than us. Willets had described to me the contempt the Dweller had for all things living. So this was the second time I’d watched that being demonstrated.

Why exactly had we come here in the first place? Just to watch and nothing more? Cassie went rigid, frustration paralyzing her. I knew how she felt and released my grip on her, letting my arms hang down by my sides.

Creaking noises started in the dam. They got rapidly louder, growing in intensity. Until there was an abrupt splitting sound, loud bangs following that. Something pretty major had been broken, there was little doubt. The rumbling turned to a whine that became lower-pitched and slower as the whole turbine shut down.

I glanced behind me. The lights back there were going out.

And when I cast my gaze further along, the same was happening to the entire town.