Black Swan Rising (41 page)

“My aim was a little bit off,” he said sheepishly in reference to the car, as he settled me on the ground.

We were in front of an entrance to Van Cortlandt Park near the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail, a sign told us. I didn’t know the neighborhood at all, but I was struck by how deserted the street seemed. I didn’t want to dwell on the possibilities for why, but certainly the bigger the disaster, the bigger the audience watching on TV at home.

“Or else that tree splitting the car is a very recent arrival,” Will went on. “It certainly didn’t appear on the geoscreen I used in plotting the landing. If that’s the case, that’s a shame about Jean Robin’s capacity for error. I knew him and liked him way back when. But sometimes his botany could get a little out of control.”

I was too drained to ask for examples of Jean Robin’s “past errors.”

But I wasn’t too drained for a kiss.

We entered Van Cortlandt Park and started along the Croton trail. As I followed Will’s increasingly fast pace on the wooded trail, I began to wonder what we were going to do when we found Dee. If Dee was so powerful that he could cause massive traffic accidents with invisible force fields, blow up buildings, and start huge fires, what chance did we have against him?

“I don’t understand how we’re going to get to the High Bridge Tower from here,” I yelled to Will on a more immediate point. He’d stopped up ahead at a small, square, stone building and was standing in front of a boarded-up and padlocked door. “What’s this place?”

“The Weir,” he said, leaning his shoulder against the door. The wood groaned, splintered, and suddenly just wasn’t there anymore. Through the dust of the shattered door I saw stone steps leading down into the ground. “We’re going underground,” Will said, taking my hand. “Come on. There’s not much time.”

As I followed Will down the stone steps, I snapped my fingers to produce a small flame to see by. At the bottom of the stairs the flame danced off a sheet of black water, sending ripples of
light up into an arched brick tunnel hung with stalactites. Tree roots snaked out of chinks in the brick, twisting across the arched roof in an intricate weave. It looked like the entrance to the underworld, but I had figured out what it was by now.

“The old Croton Aqueduct,” I said aloud.

“Yes. It leads straight to the High Bridge Tower.” Will stepped off the last step into the water, which I was glad to see was only a few inches deep. Still, I felt an innate dread of stepping into that dark water.

“Come on,” he said, holding his hand out for me. “You traveled through the whole water system yesterday.”

“As disembodied molecules,” I answered, stepping gingerly into the water, “and that was clean drinking water.
This
—” The water eddied around my feet, rippling in long ropes of black and white in the firelight. “This looks like it could have—”

“Don’t say it!” Will ordered, grabbing my arm and pulling me into a fast walk. “As we get closer to Dee, we’ll be susceptible to his influence. He’ll pick up on any fears you voice—or even think—and make them real.”

Great!
I thought; I hadn’t said the word
snakes,
but now it was the only word in my head—except maybe for
rats
and
giant mutant crocodiles.
“I thought you said that Dee wouldn’t see us if we approached the tower underground.”

“I’m
hoping
he won’t see us, but even if he doesn’t, he’ll have set some traps in the tunnels. Don’t think about it—just stay close.”

Will set such a fast pace that soon I didn’t have the breath to talk anymore. That left a lot of room for my imagination to roam over all the potential horrors that might be lurking in the underground, disused aqueduct. I tried to focus on the blinding white-hot anger I’d felt for Dee when I learned he’d killed
my mother. I pictured him standing by the car fire, his face impassive and cold as my mother burned to death. But then, instead of feeling anger, I felt horror as I imagined my mother burning in that fire. I tried to push the thought away. It was the one image I had forbidden myself from ever picturing. She was already dead when the car exploded, I’d told myself. Or the explosion happened so quickly she wouldn’t have felt anything. But now when I pictured John Dee standing beside that fire, I heard my mother’s screams as well and knew that her last minutes on earth had been a living hell.

“We’re almost at the bridge,” Will’s voice broke into the painful image. I was glad for the distraction, but when I focused on the scene ahead of us, my heart sank. The aqueduct sloped steeply downward and disappeared in a sea of fog. “This is the gate chamber that pumped the water upward to the bridge. Dee’s filled it with fog to make it more difficult to cross. We’ll have to be especially careful. There are dead ends and siphons that plunge down into the hillside. Can you use your flame to shine through the fog?”

I held up my thumb and willed the small flame into a larger torch. The flame swelled up a foot high, but instead of lighting a path through the fog it revealed shapes in the murk—bulging blobs like giant amoebas, writhing, swelling, dividing . . . then swelling again.

“What are they?” I asked, horrified to see that some of the blobs were acquiring the rough shapes of human beings.

“It’s the cellular matter of the fog. The fog shapes itself into images using negative energy. It’s still at a protozoic stage, but as it grows stronger, the fog will be charged and then it will form into whatever mental images it encounters.”

“So basically people all over the city will get to meet their
worst nightmares mentally even if they manage to avoid them physically.”

“Exactly. Even now if it encounters a strong enough mental image, it will shape itself to that. Since you’ve been exposed to training from the four elementals, your mind can send images powerful enough to spark life into it. So try to keep your mind blank.” He turned to me and smiled, but in the ghastly yellow light of the fog it looked more like a snarl. “And please stay close. We’ll have to feel our way across.”

Will tucked my arm under his and we started down the slope. The ground underfoot was slick and, once we were in the fog, invisible. I slipped several times, but each time he caught me. I tried to hold on tighter, but my hands were dripping from the fog and shaking from the cold. His hands felt as chilly and brittle as bare bones, flesh that had been dead a hundred years—and of course he had been dead for much longer than that.

“It’s not much farther.” His disembodied whisper came from beside me. The fog was so thick I couldn’t even see him . . . did I really even know it was Will I clung to? I peered through the thick clotted air for Will’s face. Even the face of a vampire—a creature of the undead—would be a welcome sight right now. I leaned closer . . . and a white skull loomed out of the fog, leering at me with empty eye sockets. I screamed and backed away, wrenching my hands out of the skeletal fingers I now saw clutching at me.

“Garet!” the voice came from the loose-flapping jaw.

I took another step back . . . and fell. Will—or whatever that
thing
by my side was—was too far away to catch me. I slid down the steep slope, through muck and ooze, and landed in a
pool of foul-smelling water at the bottom. I heard Will’s voice calling from above me, but all I kept seeing was that horrible leering skull.

It’s the fog,
I told myself, but another voice said,
But that’s really what he is—a four-hundred-year-old corpse.

So I stayed quiet. I didn’t answer Will’s call. I got to my hands and knees and began to crawl up the opposite slope. I would go on to the tower myself, get the box from Dee, and then this pernicious fog would soon evaporate and Will—the real Will—would catch up to me. Everything would go back to normal, then. That’s what I had to focus on—my old life returned to stability and normalcy. My father would come home from the hospital and we’d find a way to pay off that loan. Becky and Jay would make up and find a way to compromise on the band’s direction. And I’d prove to Detective Kiernan that my father had had nothing to do with the robbery. I continued to climb, keeping my mind on these mundane problems, which had seemed so huge a few days ago but were now somehow comforting. In fact, my everyday worries seemed to be an antidote to the fog. When I reached the top of the slope, the fog cleared and I could see the tunnel entrance to the High Bridge. I snapped my fingers and produced a small, flickering flame that I held up to the mouth of the tunnel . . . lighting up the figure of a man standing just inside.

I screamed. The man turned around and aimed a flashlight into my face, blinding me.

“Garet James, is that you?”

The voice was familiar, and when the man lowered the flashlight, I saw that he was Detective Joe Kiernan. “What are you doing here?” I gasped.

“We saw that you looked up the High Bridge Tower and figured you’d come here,” the detective said. Then turning, he shouted into the tunnel, “She’s here. I found her.”

Two figures emerged from the gloom: Jay and Zach Reese. I’d never been so happy to see anyone in my entire life.

“We figured out what was going on,” Jay said. “And we came to help.”

“You shouldn’t have tried to do it all by yourself,” Zach said.

“I wasn’t—” I began, looking behind me. What had happened to Will? “I didn’t think anyone would believe me,” I said instead.

“It
is
pretty unbelievable,” Kiernan said, “but some pretty unbelievable things are happening up above. Fires and explosions everywhere. Come on. Let’s find this guy Dee and stop whatever he’s doing to this city.” Joe Kiernan smiled encouragingly. It was such a clean, honest smile that I wondered why I had taken such a dislike to the officer before. He was only trying to help. He took my arm now and led me into the tunnel. Jay took my other arm and Zach walked behind us. I could hear his steps reverberating on the iron supports of the bridge, a pounding that made my head hurt.

“This is really cool,” Jay said, pointing his flashlight onto the floor. “Look, the pylons of the bridge are hollow. You can see all the way down to the river.”

A dizzying abyss opened beneath us and I gasped.

“Don’t worry,” Jay said. “I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.” Then he whispered into my ear, “You know how I feel about you, don’t you?” His breath, so close to my face, smelled coppery. I turned to look at him, but he’d turned away so all I could see was his profile.

“She doesn’t feel that way about you,” Joe Kiernan said.
“She doesn’t really care that much about you or Becky. Look at what she let happen to Becky.”

“And to her father,” Zach added from behind us. I tried to turn around to face Zach, but Kiernan tightened his grip on my arm.

“That’s right,” Kiernan said. “You led those men to your house so they could shoot your father, didn’t you? If he had died, it would have been a convenient way out of your troubles. And you wouldn’t have to waste the rest of your life catering to a senile old man who gambled away your inheritance.”

“You wished him dead just like you wished your mother dead,” Zach’s voice came from behind me. But it wasn’t Zach. The two things marching me across the bridge weren’t Joe Kiernan and Jay, either. They were demons I’d conjured up out of the fog. I closed my eyes and said aloud, “You’re not real.”

The three men laughed. “Aren’t we?” the one in Jay’s shape said. “We know all about you. Remember the time we cut school and took the ferry to Staten Island? I wanted to kiss you that day, but all you talked about was some boy you had a crush on.”

“And remember what your father said at your mother’s funeral?” Zach asked. “I was the only one close enough to hear. He said he wished it had been you who died instead.”

“That’s not true!” I yelled, struggling to break free and turn around to face Zach. “He said if I’d been in the passenger seat I would have died.”

“But that’s what he was thinking.” Kiernan clucked his tongue. “What a terrible thing for a father to think, but then your father always has been a selfish man. If he really cared about your well-being, he wouldn’t have gambled away all your money.”

I pulled my arm away from Kiernan and he suddenly let go. Jay let go of my other arm. I took a step forward, but then I looked down and saw that we were at the edge of one of the bridge’s pylons. Far below me I could see the churning water of the Harlem River.

“Go ahead, Garet,” the three men whispered together. “Jump!”

I braced myself, waiting for them to push me over the edge, but nothing happened. They didn’t have that power, at least not yet. They were made of air and water and, I suddenly remembered, I had power over both. I turned around and faced the three of them. “You’re just water,” I said aloud. The shapes turned gray and began to waver in the air. I lifted both arms up—the way I’d seen Ariel summon the wind—and listened for the wind’s song. I felt it rushing over the High Bridge and skimming the water below, insinuating itself into the cracks between the bricks. Then it came through the tunnel like a freight train, lifting me off my feet for a moment. The shapes of the three fog-men began to disintegrate until there was only a trail of smoke that the wind blew out the other side of the tunnel.

“Thank you,” I said aloud.

A sigh stirred the air and then was gone. In its place I heard my name.

“Garet? Are you there?” It was Will.

“I’m here.” I saw him coming out of the gloom, his face pale and drawn but whole. The fog was gone now. This was the real him.