Midnight's Angels - 03 (6 page)

Standing in the darkness for so long, he’d felt as if the shadows were scouring at his edges, almost like he was dissolving. Thank God the daylight had come around. You could always rely on that, at least. Morning’s advance had made him whole again, and he was grateful.

Harrison Whitby glanced in the direction of the rising sun and squinted. It was not a good idea to look at it directly or too long. So he returned his attention to the house on Cartland Street, which he’d been guarding since the small hours. It was totally unchanged.

The light didn’t arrive all at once. It came stealing down the byways of Raine’s Landing like some stealthy, golden-colored cat. Wherever it touched it would disperse the gloom, and fresh colors became apparent. The trees along the street took on a crisper look. And the dwellings around him were transformed from lifeless slabs to proper homes.

And then it touched the residence in front of him. Started at the shingles on the roof first, and then tumbled down the eastern-facing wall.

What had looked for hours like a grim, forbidding building actually seemed to shrink a bit in size. That was psychological, he understood. The house just seemed a good deal less imposing now the sun was up. It turned out that the walls were a very pale green. There was a doormat on the porch with a round smiley face printed on it. Some children’s toys were scattered nearby, a couple of brightly colored balls and what looked like a broken G.I. Joe.

There were plants as well, in brightly glazed pots. Of what kind Harrison was not sure. His wife, Eudora, was the one who was into growing things, not him. He couldn’t tell a chrysanthemum from a cactus.

A window came open in a house across the street, creaking, making his gaze swing around. He’d not had to deal with the general public up until this point. But an old man’s head came poking out, its white hair tousled and its pale gray-blue eyes wide, like an owl’s. The guy took in the fact that there were uniformed men on his street, and seemed to wake up pretty quickly.

“Something happened to the Hermanns?”

Harrison gnawed at his moustache, wondering how to handle this. He had years of experience to fall back on, and finally opted for a soft but steady show of authority.

“We haven’t quite established that,” he called back. “If you could get back in, sir, please? At least until we’re certain what the problem is?”

The white head popped back straight away. But the intrusion, however brief, immediately set him thinking. Folk would start heading into work before a whole lot longer. Kids would start making their way to school. The homes around him would begin disgorging people, many of them passing by this very threshold.

And might they be in any danger? What exactly ought he do about it?

He glanced across at Lee Drake, which was little use. The man was staring into thin air, and seemed to be chewing on imaginary gum. He was an okay cop, but not what you’d call overly bright. Besides, Harrison was the senior officer here, and it was his decision.

He decided to call it in, then noticed that the old man’s head had popped out again across the way. The fellow was not as good at following instructions as he’d first appeared. He had on a pair of thick-lensed glasses this time, and was peering curiously at something.

“What’s happened to the windows?”

“Sir?”

“Have George and Vi fitted blackouts? Why the hell would they do that?”

Harrison turned back around, and stared at the front windowpanes. The sun had risen by a few more inches, its reflection glinting on the glass. But he
still
couldn’t see inside. He knew the downstairs curtains were not drawn. You ought to have been able to make out some furniture, the flat surfaces of the inner walls if nothing else.

Instead of which, it was like gazing into a perfectly rectangular tar pit. That troubled him badly.

And then he noticed something even more unsettling. Around the edges of the house, in the porch and below the eaves, the shadows that the sunlight had melted away …

They were returning.

They spread as he watched, darkness beginning to reclaim the whole exterior of the place. That couldn’t be. He didn’t see how it was possible.

“What the --“ he heard Lee Drake blurt.

It was like the Hermann residence had become detached from the regular world, no longer subject to its influence. The place was not merely dark, he reckoned. No, it was in the
total grip
of darkness.

Harrison stared at it coldly for a while, and then a new thought struck him. Was this the case with the other affected dwellings too?

He went across to his car and got quickly on the radio.

Levin offered him a glass of brandy too. He’d left the decanter downstairs, but an adept could put that right easily enough.

“At this time of day?” Willets declined with a small shake of his head. He still looked breathless, but his strength seemed to be coming back. “Is there any coffee left in that pot? Aw, the hell with it!”

He snapped the fingers of his left hand, and a steaming mug of java appeared in his right. It had the crest of Boston U. on it, which was where he’d been a lecturer before he had come here.

A shaft of golden light was streaming in through the dormer window, making the brass fittings in the room gleam and lighting up the big, glass-fronted armoires that hugged the wall on one side. I felt glad of the warmth that accompanied it, the way that everything looked sharper, clearer. I spend too many of my working hours hunting vague shapes through the murk.

But it was not a sentiment shared by our host. Levin squinted and ducked his chin a little when the sunlight brushed against him. Almost as if he had something to hide, some kind of ugly blemish. That wasn’t the case, but I could see already the problem. Those who venture constantly into witchcraft’s realms -- they prefer sticking to the gloom. “Let not too much light in upon magic,” Willets had once told me. It’s a notion that the major players on the Hill take very seriously.

So the judge went across to the heavy maroon velvet drapes, and pulled them most of the way shut. Only a gap about a finger’s width remained. In the sudden dimness, Willets’s pupils shone like molten metal. Levin reached out with his power and switched his desk lamp on.

Damn, I hated being in the adepts’ world, where something as simple and natural as the broad clear light of day becomes a problem. I had learned to live with it, but only partially. Heaven help me if I ever learned to live with it the entire way.

“So, doctor?” Ritchie put in gently. He had never met the man before, but had to know his reputation, and was still being a lot more deferential than was usually the case. “Maybe you can tell us what exactly’s going on here?”

The man peered at him, studying him up and down. Trying to get his measure. And he appeared to see what a straight shooter Vallencourt was, a solid and committed cop.

Willets smiled again, a little more warmly than before.

“Maybe I can, Sergeant. But I’m not sure you really want to hear it.”

Which did not sound in the least bit good.

“We’ve faced bad stuff before,” I reminded him. “Bad as it comes, and then some. How’s this any different?”

Willets turned his gaze on me, the soft smile still in place. But it had taken on a faintly mocking edge, like there was something that I was not getting.

“You’ve faced evil spirits, Ross. Monsters and madmen with more power than they ought to have. But what we’re facing this time falls into a different class entirely.”

I was getting fairly tired of this, impatience nagging at me. I knew that he’d been through an awful lot. But he was dragging this out, playing to a captive audience, perhaps because he hadn’t had one in a good long while. It was fine to behave this way on a podium in Boston. But I wasn’t any freshman, and I wasn’t much impressed.

The doctor seemed to get that. He had always dealt with me straightforwardly in the past. His head dipped, his bright pupils disappearing. Then, he came right out with it.

“I spend a lot of time on my own, in the dark. You know that.”

His voice was back to its stern, gravelly normal pitch. It seemed that his powers of recovery were very strong.

“A lot of time to think and ponder,” he said. “And explore. Just with my mind, you understand. This body,” he touched his shoulder, “stays put. But I’ve been delving recently as deeply as I can into the roots and origins of magic. Following the trails it leaves, as far back as I can go.”

He was the one who had explained to me that the whole business had a hierarchy, a structure. He’d explained who Saruak really was. And he’d known in advance about Lucas Tollburn, sensed the presence of the Wand of Dantiere.

“By gradual degrees, I’ve come to understand the truth.” He raised his face again and fixed me with his gaze, “That there are things out there, in the darkness beyond our plane of existence that, if humankind knew what was there, most people would curl up and die simply from the terror of it.”

Which sounded overly dramatic to put it mildly. But, considering what had come down on us last night, I let him continue.

“Truly dreadful entities, Devries. Beings with power beyond our grasp, and not a shred of conscience to hold it in check. Creatures that, confronted with a newborn child, would simply laugh and devour it. And what keeps them from overwhelming us? The light of day, in part. But mostly the light in our own hearts. Our basic, simple humanity is our best defense against them.”

That was kind of hokey to my way of thinking, and not the way the doctor usually spoke. I read books and watched TV. Knew what went on in the outside world. And a lot of it was not too cute or happy, our humanity often failing us. So I told him that, making no bones about it.

“You’re right. It’s true. Yes, all of that happens. But it happens when we forget who we really are. We stop thinking of ourselves as merely human, or stop thinking of our fellow men in those terms at all, and
that’s
when the dark forces manage to gain entry to this world, and Hell on Earth breaks out.”

I thought about old footage that I’d seen, of previous regimes and wars. Peculiar uniforms and strange salutes, and people behaving like automatons. And I could see his point. But nobody was here for any philosophical discussion. I knew Willets well enough to see this was leading somewhere. I just wasn’t sure how long he’d take.

The room had become utterly quiet. Even Levin looked subdued. He had sat down on a chair near the wall, and was staring at the doctor with his tented fingers pressed against his lips.

I could even hear the ticking of the grandfather clock in the downstairs hallway. It seemed to be measuring the passing seconds slower than it ought. Willets sat a little more firmly, his composure coming back.

“Last night, I managed to reach further than I’d ever done before. Right out to the edges of the Universe, in fact. And I found an evil there I’d never even guessed at.”

His eyes slid shut at the memory of it. I thought I saw his shoulders quiver. Coffee slopped across his fingers, reminding him that he was still holding the mug. He set it down. His eyelids parted slightly when he did that, and the red in his pupils was glowing far more dully than before.

“It took me a good while to figure out what I was looking at. But finally, I understood. It was … less than nothing. A minus in the whole equation of existence. It had no shape, no form, no hue. No body and no soul. But it was
there
nonetheless. And then I recalled that I’d seen mention of it once before. Not in a book, but an inscription on a very ancient clay tablet that I’d once studied. I realized what I’d found. The Dweller in the Dark.”

Those last five words … they seemed to linger on the room’s air. Hang around us, as if they had substance. The study appeared to fade a little, and the ticking of the clock downstairs could no longer be heard, the world withdrawing from us slightly.

“Being?” I managed to ask.

Willets threw a look at me.

* * *

He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, dried his fingers, then the bottom of the mug.“What was here before the Universe?” he asked the room in general. Then he answered his own question. “Not a vacuum, no. A vacuum’s simply a gap in existence. There was utter nothingness. No time. No space. And no dimensions. An utter void. The Void.”

And we could all hear the capital letter.

“Except there happened to be a solitary creature dwelling in it. Nature’s laws didn’t apply back then. It was also made of nothingness, but it was conscious. And it simply floated in the Void, content with its peculiar existence. It could have stayed that way throughout eternity, since time did not exist.

“Then along we came, with an almighty blast. Abruptly, there was light and substance. And the Dweller in the Dark was forced to go away. It ran ahead of the spreading light, and finally found refuge in the dark chasms beyond the edges of reality. It’s been out there, waiting, to this very day. Staring in, resenting us with every fiber of its being. Hating all light and all life, and wanting to destroy it.”

A chill seemed to have settled over the room, despite the narrow crack of sunlight filtering in. There was a cold glaze to the armoires now.

Myself and the others exchanged troubled glances. We had never heard anything like this. And it was  the judge who asked the doctor the first question.

“If I understand you correctly, then you’re saying that, however fearsome this thing is, it can’t get to us. Can’t survive on our plane of being. So what does this have to do --?”

“When it fled,” Willets broke across him, “it left a few tiny particles behind.”

“Three of them?” I took a guess.

The man nodded.

“Somehow, they adapted. Swelled in size, and took on shape. My guess is, they take on different guises with each world they visit. They cannot stand direct light. But they’ve been, for a very long time now, the Dweller’s agents here. They answer to its bidding, and they do its work.”

“Which is?” I heard Ritchie ask.

“Anywhere they go, they try to suck the light out. Anyone they touch, they rip out the humanity, the soul. They deliver that person into the Dweller’s influence. And I sense something else about them too,” he added carefully. “They’re here for a reason, though I can’t tell what.”

It was a real effort to get my head around this. If the angels were as Willets had described, that was why Judge Levin had found nothing when he’d tried to sense them. There was nothing physical to sense. And if the adepts couldn’t even keep track of them … that might mean that we were in a pretty serious fix.

“Why did they come after
you
?” I asked.

Willets harrumphed. “I suppose they knew that I’d found out about them, realized what they were. And so they made it their first job to try and silence me. That way, they could take the rest of you unawares.”

“And now the sun’s come up, where have they gone?”

“My best guess is, if you re-inspected those three meteors, you’d find they’ve closed up. They’ll be pretty impervious to anything that we can do. And when darkness falls, they’ll open again. Of that you can be certain.”

Vallencourt peered at him with his features as stiff as a waxwork. “And how do we handle that?”

“Bright electric lighting ought to beat them off initially. It’s probably a good idea to circulate that information. But apart from that? I talked about the light inside us. That might be our strongest hope. If we can stand together, light a shining beacon in our hearts, refuse to be swallowed by the darkness …”

Then he faltered, coming to see -- as everyone in the room could -- that he was speechifying to no purpose. All of this was just vague sentiment on his part and not nearly a good plan.

The sun continued rising, out beyond the window. Filling our whole town with light. But casting shadows too.