Deadly Violet - 04 (5 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

And when I say ‘something,’ I’m using the term as loosely as possible. That word might cover an awful lot of ground, but nothing quite on this scale.

It emerged from the hole with a smooth sliding motion, like mauve paint being squeezed out from a giant tube. The thing was mostly cylindrical, and was genuinely massive.

I couldn’t see the whole of it, at first. Largely the front of its head, which was as big as a truck tire. It was concave, and seemed to be all mouth. All teeth. Sharply pointed, triangular ones. Whole concentric rings of them, spinning around like circular saws, fizzing and spitting as they clacked against each other. Each ring looked like it was turning in a different direction.

And combined, they looked capable of grinding up pretty much anything that stood in their path. For the briefest moment, I felt unsure whether this was animal or a machine.

But then I noticed several other salient points. The body stretching out behind the head was slightly flatter than I’d first thought, and gelatinous. And it terminated in three whip-like tails, with stingers on them.

And at the centre of those whirring rings of teeth, there was a blinking, purple eye.

Shock surged through my body and my blood was running colder. I couldn’t even figure out how this thing was propelling itself. It was floating slowly through the air. There were no wings or membranes that I could make out. Its body simply seemed to pulse, and that pushed it in our direction.

How could anything like this come barging out into the regular world with no real warning whatsoever?

It sounded like Willets agreed, because the man yelled, “
Holy hell!
”

He staggered back a few paces, and then froze up entirely. I’d have liked to do the same, but did not allow myself that luxury. I yanked out my Smith & Wesson and started taking potshots at the apparition.

I could see sparks fly where my bullets struck the teeth, but there was no other effect. Which raised the question, were my shots ricocheting off … or was this sonofabitch eating them?

It ambled casually over to us, treating the air like it was water. Something that the doc had said came back to me, about the usual rules no longer applying. The sound that it was making was one of the most ominous things I’d ever heard. And the only course of action left for us was to retreat.

But Willets finally came around, raising both his palms. And a brace of flaringly red energy bolts shot out. Except we weren’t dealing with any oversized arachnids this time.

The flares hit the whirring teeth, and were absorbed by them as well. The creature kept on coming at us.

It didn’t look like it was in any kind of hurry, but it was closing the gap between us faster than was comfortable. So I grabbed the doctor by the sleeve. Got us moving steadily away, although it wasn’t easy. The further into the backyard we traveled, then the deeper the snow got.

It was above our knees before much longer, slowing us down to a leaden crawl. And tall wooden fences surrounded us on three sides. There was no obvious way of getting past them. The doc had better do something real fast, or he’d have to spirit us both out of here.

I hated the thought of running away, but when there is no choice …

I looked at my companion’s face and saw a familiar expression, in spite of the pressure we were under. An idea had come to him

“Move as far away from me as you can, and cover your eyes!” he ordered.

Concept one I had no problem with. But the thought of shutting off my sight while something was still trying to eat me …

If bullets weren’t working and neither were those red flares, maybe some even stronger magic would. I wondered what he had in mind. Then stopped doing that, and flailed away to the rear fence.

When I turned back, the man was floating ten feet in the air. And I could finally see where this was leading. I could feel my face going rigid, and my mouth went dry with apprehension.

Like I said, he’d taught himself this kind of magic. But its power had overwhelmed him in those early days. He had become manic, not to mention messianic. Tried to get himself a group of followers and pass his knowledge on to them.

They’d died instead. He’d tried to pass on too much of his magic, far too quickly, and had burnt them all to cinders. An accident, but dead was dead. It was why he was a hermit these days. He couldn’t forgive himself.

But that whole thing had started with him floating up beyond arm’s reach, the same way he was right now doing.

The creature was directly underneath him. And it stared across at me at first, its eye blinking slowly. But then its huge head tilted up. It had noticed there was someone closer by. Its massive body curved up, and it started to drift higher.

Willets’s eyes no longer held a tiny dot of crimson. They had both turned searing red from lid to lid. His prematurely aged face was crumpled up, and he was holding both his arms entirely stiffly.

His mouth was wide open, and his tongue curled back.

I barely remembered his second instruction in time. Wasn’t able to cover my eyes, but at least I shut them. The brilliance that lanced down from him seared right through my eyelids anyway.

I winced. Turned my face away, throwing an arm across it.

And when I was able to look back, the beast was gone, though there was no visible dead body and not even any debris.

And the hole it had emerged from
– it had closed up tight.

Willets had descended by the time I stumbled back. His cheeks were drained of blood, and he was rubbing at them. His expression was exhausted. And his eyes – which had returned to normal – had a faraway and haunted look.

I understood what was tearing at him. He’d been genuinely afraid that, if he used that kind of power, he would lose his mind again. Both of us were grateful that it hadn’t gone that way.

“Holy hell,” he said again.

But far more quietly than before.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He nodded.

Then I stared back at the nursery window.

“Did she cause that?” I asked, meaning the Little Girl. “Did she sic that thing on us?”

Willets peered up at the window with a studied manner. Then his gaze became a little puzzled, and he pursed his lips.

“I don’t believe so.”

“Are you
sure
of that?”

“I don’t think she had anything to do with it, directly,” he said. “It’s still unclear, but this close up … I can sense no evil intent up there in the slightest.”

And then he paused. His temples became deeply furrowed, and his eyes narrowed to tiny slits.

“I can sense someone else inside that nursery,
besides
the Girl,” he told me.

He was obviously struggling to identify who it might be. Then his gaze became a whole lot sharper. So it appeared he had pinned it down.

“Good God alive!” he breathed. “There’s another girl! A
second
one!”

“What exactly are you talking about?” I asked, peering at him worriedly.

His gray head was shaking.

“I’m not sure. But I can definitely sense a second presence, young and female. And the pair of them have somehow become bonded.”

“Well, that’s great,” I pointed out annoyedly. “That pretty much explains everything. We can go home now.”

Willets frowned at my show of impatience.

“Something extraordinary has happened up there, Ross, and you want instant answers?”

“Fairly quick ones would be nice.”

He took that in his stride, then drew himself up straight and sucked in such a deep breath that his chest thrust out. The man looked as if he’d come to some kind of decision.

“I’m going to attempt something that I’ve never tried before,” he told me. “I am going to try and contact the mind of the Little Girl.”

A protest started pushing up my throat, but never reached my lips. It didn’t have the time to

Because Willets went static. And I don’t only mean that he was standing still. His body became like a sculpture, not the slightest perceptible twitch or quiver. And his face was like a solid mask. His eyes, wide open, didn’t blink. In fact, his eyeballs had stopped moving, and they’d taken on the oddest glaze.

I stepped part of the way around the man. And he looked precisely the same from every angle.

Lehman Willets’s body might be standing there in front of me.

But his spirit had gone elsewhere.

CHAPTER NINE

His consciousness drifted for a fleeting second. And then Lehman Willets found himself standing on a level plain of brilliantly gleaming whiteness that stretched out for incredible distances around him. He waited for his vision to adjust. But there was no perceptible horizon that he could discern, however fiercely he peered.

And then he realized he could make out darker moving patches off in each direction. When he looked directly at them, they suddenly sprang into close, tight focus, though he couldn’t understand how that was possible.

They were each a scene from a different part of town, and how could that be?

The first one he looked at was of Ross Devries, still out in the backyard and moving unhappily around the doctor’s own immobile form. It was odd to see yourself in such a strange condition. Rather like one of those ‘floating above your body’ experiences that people talked about having when they’d been lying in sick beds. But in terms of distances viewed, this wasn’t really much of a stretch.

The second vision was of Union Square. The snow had recently been cleared, but nothing much else was going on.

The third was in a bar on O’Connell called
Nadine’s
. It was empty save for its owner, a woman with brightly dyed hair. She was cleaning glasses, humming to a record on a nearby jukebox. With the temperature the way it was, the entire town was running in neutral.

The fourth was of Judge Levin in his chambers at the courthouse, thumbing through a hefty legal book. Willets felt a smile come to his lips. He liked the man, and was unsurprised to see that the snow had not deterred him from his job.

The fifth was of Ritchie Vallencourt, lying on a bed at Raine General. They’d found no toxins in his system, but he was being kept under sedation. And it wasn’t the spider attack that had made that necessary. His mental stress was all down to his missing wife. Those little cousins of theirs as well. They …

Willets halted, figuring out what was really happening. He wasn’t merely observing things in a visual sense. He was perceiving them too,
understanding
each new vision that came to him. Looking at stuff the way the Little Girl had to, on a far deeper level than was normal.

There were thousands of these scenes. And that was merely in the town. But the Little Girl could see outside as well.

He caught sight of a long, straight road, automobiles and trucks going carefully along it. It was barely half a mile from the edge of Raine’s Landing, but most of this community was not even aware of it.

And then his gaze lifted higher and further. He could actually see Boston, the town he’d lived in before he’d come here. That was the Common he could make out, and he felt his heart leap momentarily. He’d loved going there in the springtime and the fall, when he’d been working as a lecturer in that city.

Willets moved up closer, looking through the window of an office block. He caught sight of a slim blond woman walking past a row of desks, a thick file tucked beneath one arm.

Good Lord, that was Lauren Brennan, the homicide lieutenant who had helped them beat the Shadow Man. Was the Little Girl keeping an eye on her into the bargain?

There were some scenes from the past as well. Ross going in the river with the monster called the Dralleg. Cassie defeating one of the Four Horsemen. Lawrence L. DuMarr turning into a dragon, albeit a harmless one. And additionally, there appeared to be a few scenes that, by the look of them, were coming from the future. It was nice to know that this town had one.

This was simply incredible!

There was such a rush of information, such a plethora of different scenes and happenings and events, that his temples began to pound, studying just a handful of them. And this was what the Little Girl saw the whole time? It was scarcely believable that one small mind could cope with it.

“But it can’t be impossible, because I do it,” said a gentle, high-pitched voice above him.

The sky up there was full of electric blue and glowing violet, coruscating streaks of each, constantly merging and intermingling in a massive storm of color. And as he watched, a couple of the blue streaks stabilized. They drifted to each other, and took on the shape of a pair of lips. Which started moving like a normal mouth.

“You’re Dr. Willets, aren’t you?” they remarked. “You’ve helped this town a lot, and saved a good number of lives, including Mr. Ross.”

He wasn’t quite sure how to answer, so he stood there dumbly.

“And yet you still blame yourself for those people whose deaths you caused. You shouldn’t, sir. You didn’t mean to do it.”

And her words had a peculiar effect on him. He felt compelled to tell her the entire truth.

“I can still see their faces,” he sighed, “every time I close my eyes.”

The blue lips smiled.

“That may be true, but you are missing something, sir. I wish that you could hear their voices too. They’re saying, ‘we forgive you.’”

Maybe she was telling him a white lie. Simply trying to cheer him up. But Lehman got the sense that she was dealing with him honestly. And he couldn’t help what happened next. Tears began to flow across his cheeks. Of all the things he’d ever hoped to hear, that was the one that meant the most to him.

He could have let emotion take him over, but he wiped his eyes and stiffened his resolve. This wasn’t what he’d come here for.

“I need to find out what’s been going on today,” he asked the apparition, once he’d cleared his throat.

The smile above him faltered, then transformed into a gentle frown.

“I’m not entirely sure myself.”

“But how can
that
be? You see everything, don’t you?”

The Little Girl’s tone remained mild and placid.

“I can see what’s going on, naturally. But the plain fact is, I don’t know why it’s happening.”

Willets took that in with a sense of dull frustration.

“When I reached into your room before, I sensed a second little girl.”

“Yes, that might be part of it,” came the response. “I came across her last night, and we are linked at the moment.”

“How?”

“She’s a telepath. There has to be some adept blood back in her family’s past, although they’re certainly not adepts now. Her name is Violet. She’s a very poor little girl, extremely scared and angry.”

At which point, Willets noticed something odd.

“You don’t mean poor as in ‘unfortunate,’ do you?” he asked. “You mean poor as in ‘poverty.’”

“Yes. That’s right.”

Now, Raine’s Landing had plenty of inhabitants you wouldn’t really call well off. Ordinary working types, who struggled to meet house payments and cover all their bills. But as for actual poverty, there was none of that in this place, not that Lehman knew about. This was a responsible community that looked out for its people.

“So where exactly does this Violet come from?”

“East Meadow,” the lips answered slowly. “Back in the Victorian Age.”

Which struck Willets like a thunderclap. Of anything that might have come out of that bright blue mouth, this was the very last he’d been expecting. She might as well have told him that the other little girl had come from the Jurassic Period.

“Good God, she’s reaching out to you through time? How in heaven’s name is she doing that?”

“Again, I’m not quite certain. She is holding a small object. It’s too bright for me to look at, but I’m sure that it is magic.”

Willets felt bewilderment.

“She owns an artifact, and she’s still poor?”

“I don’t think it belonged to her originally.”

Well, at least that made some sense. A street urchin from those times would lift anything that hadn’t been nailed down. But …

“How’s an artifact causing all of this? These holes and creatures, and these disappearances?”

“I’m not sure that I understand any of it,” the Little Girl told him, her tone remaining so calm that it started to irritate him slightly. “One thing appears to have nothing to do with the other. I am deeply puzzled.”

Lehman’s gray head whirled again. He tried to sort the information through, but couldn’t get a handle on it.

“These events began as soon as she contacted you? Have I at least got that right?”

“You have.”

“Then make her let you go,” he suggested.

The bright blue lips above him tightened up uncomfortably.

“I’ve already tried, sir. And I can’t. The artifact she’s holding is extremely strong.”

Goddamn
, Willets thought.

“Too strong even for you? But what’s she doing?”

“Violet is just standing there. I think she’s in an alley. And it looks like she is stuck, the same way I am. She’s not moving.”

The Girl paused, her voice becoming slightly mournful.

“Neither of us can break the link. So someone else will have to do it.”

And the doctor was still thinking up a bucketload of other questions, when the brilliant white landscape faded, and the snow-covered backyard returned. Whether he’d been dismissed or this was a natural process, he had absolutely no way of knowing. But Ross Devries was standing right in front of him, and peering curiously at his face.

So the doctor blinked, letting the fellow know that he was back. Shrugged his shoulders several times, until his frame unstiffened.

And then started to explain what he had learned.

“I don’t believe this,” I said, when he’d finished. “This Violet whosis … she comes from more than a hundred years back in the past?”

The doc stamped his feet against the cold. “Apparently so.”

“And we need to stop her making this connection?”

Willets nodded.

“You don’t happen to know of anyone who owns a time machine?” I asked.

My companion pushed his lower lip out glumly.

“Then how exactly are we going to do that?” I pressed him.

Then an idea came to me. And I had been this route before.

“We can at least take a proper look at what’s been going on,” I pointed out.

And at first, Willets looked mystified. But then, he saw what I was proposing. His eyes took on a troubled gleam, and he started trying to back off.

“Oh no,” he gulped. “You must be kidding. If you seriously think I’m going to have dealings with
that
nut job again –“

But I’d already grabbed him by the upper arm, and was propelling him toward the street.