Greely's Cove (53 page)

The Words of Power.
Carl had seen that title on the cover of a book in Jeremy’s room. The memory of it produced a cramp in his abdomen.

“Lindsay, Carl, Robbie.” Hannie peered at all three of them through the thick lenses of her pince-nez. “I must ask you all to disrobe now.”

“
What?
” Lindsay’s voice rang out like a rifle shot. “You want us to—you want us
nude?
”

“Yes,” answered the old woman. “Nudity is a necessary part of the ritual. The participants must be unencumbered by—”

“Okay, this is where it stops!” shouted Lindsay. “I’m now in my twenty-sixth hour of fasting, and I haven’t complained. I’ve skipped work. I’ve worn the same grungy clothes since yesterday, slept on a lumpy sofa last night, and sat through an entire day of rituals and lectures and nonsensical hokum. I’ve let you take blood out of my arm, a fingernail, a snip from my expensive haircut, and I’ve even given you a jarful of my urine. But I’m
not
going to take off my clothes and get naked with two men and a witch. This is where it stops!”

“Lindsay.” Carl turned toward her and tried to say something, but he found himself at a loss. He struggled. “Lindsay, this isn’t a game. Something very serious is at stake here. We’re talking about—”

“I know what we’re talking about! What I don’t know is how I let myself get dragged into this! I’m so hungry I’m ready to faint, I’m tired because I didn’t sleep last night, and I’ve had it up to here with hocus-pocus!”

Carl could not say that he blamed her, because he too was near the end of his rope. The cottage seemed like a jail cell, his head buzzed from the oppressive pall of burning spices, and his eyes ached for sunlight. But he had an advantage over Lindsay: He believed in the elaborate, maddeningly arcane exercise that Hannie was putting them through, had been putting them through since the first rays of morning; he believed in it, because he had no choice, because he had visited the undercroft of Whiteleather Place and seen its secrets. Lindsay had not.

“Please don’t go, Lindsay,” said Robbie, hobbling after her as she darted around the cottage, collecting her jacket, handbag, and the toiletries she had bought last night at the Seven-Eleven. “This stuff all sounds like nonsense, I know, especially to somebody who’s never seen—”

“It
is
nonsense!” shouted Lindsay. “I’m getting out of here before I become as crazy as all of you.” She made for the door, pulling on her jacket.

“Darlin’, it could be dangerous out there. If you don’t want to join the ritual, that’s okay; you can stay in the back room with Katharine, if you want. But at least wait ’til morning before you—”

“Negatron,” said Lindsay. “I’m not staying another minute at this funny farm. Nice meeting you, Robbie.”

Carl bounded into the living room from the kitchen as the fire-blackened front door slammed shut. “Christ almighty, you didn’t let her go out there, did you?” he asked.

“Didn’t have much choice, Bubba.”

Hannie appeared at the kitchen door. “If she’s kept the charm around her neck, she should be safe from nearly anything Hadrian might send,” she assured, “short of a full-fledged demon. If he were to send something like
that,
the whole neighborhood is in dire trouble.”

“What if Hadrian himself is out there?” asked Robbie, touching the front of his brightly colored western shirt, under which lurked a painful blister. “I seem to recall that he can make short work of a pouch around the neck.”

“Oh, I
do
hope he hasn’t come himself,” said Hannie weakly. “If Hadrian is close by, then that poor girl-—oh, dear.”

Lindsay stood in the darkness of Hannie Hazelford’s driveway and pawed through her handbag for the keys to her Saab. The wind off the Sound had grown cold since nightfall and had blown a heavy cloud cover over Greely’s Cove, dousing the moon and stars. She cursed the chill and the blackness, cursed herself for not cleaning out her handbag weeks ago when she had thought about it. She became more urgent in her search for the keys. Lipstick, eyeliner, pens, coins, Kleenex, candy bars...

“
Miss Moreland?
” The whisper was close. And husky with sickness. Not long ago it had been a young woman’s voice. Lindsay’s body turned to stone as she stared into the darkness.

Next to the rear fender of her Saab, not four feet away, stood a shadow that looked something like a young woman. But as Lindsay’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, they gleaned hints of grievous bodily injury. She nearly swallowed her tongue.

“Miss Moreland, you don’t know me, but my name is Elizabeth Zaske,” the thing said, moving still closer. “You might’ve read about me in the papers awhile back.”

Lindsay’s brain labored, deciding whether she was in danger; and if so, what to do about it. The breeze brought a horrible stink to her nose, and she wanted to step away, but her limbs had become as uncooperative as hardened plaster. Fear gripped her, like a claw, right between her breasts.

“I disappeared, remember?” the shadow-thing said, but it was no longer a mere shadow. It was near enough now to give evidence of its solidarity, of real flesh and bone. “I was the waitress at Bailey’s Seafood Emporium.”

“What do you want?” demanded Lindsay, with as much authority as she could muster. “I don’t have time to talk. I was just leaving.”

“Oh, you can’t leave, Miss Moreland. I’m supposed to stop you from leaving, no matter what happens.”

“And just how do you intend to do that?” A flutter had crept into Lindsay’s voice, utterly destroying the authoritative effect.

“It’s easy,” said Elizabeth Zaske. “I’m doing it right now. I can’t finish what I’m supposed to do, though, unless you help me. Please take off that awful thing you’re wearing.”

Lindsay felt her hand go to the little skin pouch that hung around her neck, the charmed vial that contained ground hair and nail, samples of her body fluids and she hadn’t dared to guess what else. Her
protector,
Hannie had called it.

“Wh-why would you want me to take it off?”

“Well, because it’s offensive,” said the creature, who had lost much of its skin and flesh, who stank like an open grave, who knew what
offensive
was. “If you keep it on, you and I won’t be able to have any fun. We won’t be able to go to the Feast.”

Lindsay had not heard Carl approach from behind. She choked with startlement as he stepped between herself and the one-time Elizabeth Zaske.

Suddenly the creature’s eyes glowed bright green. Lindsay nearly lost the contents of her bladder.

Carl seemed confident in the protection of his own charmed vial. He slammed a fist into the creature’s face, knocking it backward. Before it could recover, he slammed another into the side of its head. It went down onto the concrete, and Carl delivered a kick to the throat, which dislodged pieces that might have been teeth or bone. They made little snicks as they landed on the concrete.

Incredibly, the thing got back on its feet again. Its breath came with horrible, moist-sounding whistles.

“
Hey, you’re pretty tough against little girls!
” shouted a voice from the deep shadow, this one male and scratchy with disease.

From behind Robinson Sparhawk’s van, which was parked next to Lindsay’s car, stepped one of the things Carl had seen in the undercroft.

“Want to try your luck with
me,
Bucko?” It had once been a large and healthy man in his early fifties—probably Wendell Greenfield, the missing service-station operator. He was no longer so large, because he had given up so much of his meaty self to the Giver of Dreams. But there was no telling how much damage he could do, charm or no charm, and Carl backed away, grabbing Lindsay’s arm.

“Come on, let’s get inside,” he said.

“I can’t!”

“For God’s sake, Lindsay, how can you need any more proof than that?” He motioned toward the Zaske- and Greenfield-things, both of which were approaching now, their eyes aglow with greenish light.

“I don’t need any proof, Carl!” Lindsay’s voice was cracking now. Tears were flowing. “I can’t move! She
did
something to me!
I can’t move!
”

Carl waited not another second. He ducked under her arm and looped it around his neck, then swept her up and made for Hannie’s front door. At the last possible moment it opened, thanks to vigilance at the window by Robbie. The door slammed shut behind him.

As he laid Lindsay on the sofa, Carl saw that she had fainted dead away.

The ritual finally ended.

The four of them silently gathered up their clothes and pulled them on, for there was work to be done. Midnight work.

None of them looked forward to it, but none shied away from it either—not even Lindsay, who only hours ago had tried to sever herself from the others. Now she was with them, having encountered a sample of the evil that Hannie, Carl, and Robbie had insisted all along was real, an evil that had claimed her nephew and her sister, had worked such horror upon an innocent little town. Hannie had administered an herbal potion that had quickly cured the paralysis inflicted by the Elizabeth Zaske-thing. Along with the others Lindsay had shed her clothes and had participated in the ritual, not yet fully believing that she was living anything but a nightmare.

Carl led the group out of the house to Robbie’s van, carrying an immense flashlight and the long rawhide scabbard that Hannie had presented him with during the ritual. As the flashlight beam poked into the shadows of shrubs and the dark places at the corners of the house, it revealed the hunkered shapes of Hadrian Craslowe’s victim-dreamers, lurking and hungering to get close. Green fury spewed from their eyes. Hannie’s magic kept them back:

Spell of spice from the good Sister’s mouth
,

Raptus of Morrigan, North and South
,

From Heaven and Hell, and from West and East,

Flow from mine eyes to repel this Beast.

Robbie drove them down Torgaard Hill to Frontage Street, then turned right and followed a route he had come to know too well. Carl sat in the rear of the van with Lindsay, his head bowed and his eyes shut tight. The silence conquered the droning of the engine, the rush of tires over pavement. Another turn, onto Sockeye Drive.

She had worked her magic while the other three sat naked in a triangle, at three tips of the waxen pentagram drawn on the floor of her kitchen. She had bustled to and fro in the candlelight like a twiggy little elf, singing and chanting both in English and the Old Tongue. She had flitted now and again to her hoard of bottles and pouches and boxes and jars, extracted this or that, sometimes interrupted her chants to explain things to her listeners, to reassure or warn. She had mixed and chopped and brewed—

“
Of Herb Grace and Sweet Flag, with teeth of a hanged man,

And Sandalwood oil and unripe Cubeb, to flavor the bite
,
I murmur this song, I murmur long as I can To draw Thy tears and dry them with petals of Clove Pink this night,

All here, all here
,
Seething with fire,

To fear, to fear...

—and Carl had felt the power of the words as the fumes of burning herbs seeped into his head. He had drunk the foul mixture she had poured from an Osterizer into a silver cup and chewed the bitter chunks of something she had chopped in a Cuisinart. And her laughter had fallen like rain. She’d said that blenders and food processors were the best things that had ever happened to witches.
...

Another turn, this time onto Old Home Road. Not far now to Mitch Nistler’s house.

The van halted, and Carl raised his head to look out through the front. A Pontiac sedan blocked the road, and next to it—standing with an arm upraised—was a hulking figure of a man whose broad face was white in the glare of the headlights.

“Well, I’ll be dipped,” said Robbie under his breath. “It’s Stu Bromton, and he looks like he means to rain on our parade.”

For the second time this night Mitch Nistler heard the approach of a vehicle on Old Home Road. The first had been less than an hour ago: Stu Bromton’s Pontiac, which for some unknown reason had stopped about a hundred yards from the house and switched off its lights.

Mitch had worried frantically that the police chief would storm in and find the fruits of all the hellish doings that had been afoot here: a dead body upstairs; the half-living Cannibal Strecker, whose restless, shuffling footsteps could be heard above the ceiling; the comatose Stella DeCurtis, who sat in a Blazer out back, waiting, waiting; a bag of reasonably pure cocaine that Mitch had brought with him from Seattle last night; and last—oh, this would really be special—the offspring of Lorna Trosper’s corpse.

But Jeremy had reassured him, told him not to worry. The situation was well in hand. Best for Mitch to get some rest, the boy had said, and then he had gone upstairs to “commune,” or whatever it was that he did with the offspring. So Mitch had sunk onto his old living-room sofa and tried to sleep.

Tried.
The darkness of his living room had come alive with the kind of tingling ferment that precedes a violent electrical storm. If it was the product of magic, it certainly was not from Jeremy’s kind, which produced only torture and terror and hopelessness. This magic crackled with a curious sense of hope.

He rose from the sofa and pressed his face against the front window. He saw headlights up the road; some kind of van. People were getting out, and Stu Bromton was confronting them, trying to turn them back.

But he shouldn’t turn them back!
something screamed deep inside Mitch’s heart.
These people are hope!
Without really knowing what he was doing, and certainly not knowing why, Mitch got his hurting body into motion, aimed it for the front door, and plunged outside. He needed to hurry, or Jeremy would hear his thoughts and stop him before he could—

What was
this
? The spare-tire compartment of his old El Camino? A crowbar? He took it into his fist, savoring the icy bite of the metal, and strode toward the headlights.

“I’m afraid I can’t let you go any farther, Carl,” said Stu Bromton, standing his ground like a block of granite. Despite the cold night wind, he was sweating like a butcher inside his padded nylon jacket. The headlights of Robbie’s Vanagon were giving him a blinding headache.