Landslayer's Law (6 page)

Something between a thud and a splat, as it evolved, but in any case more pleasing than the causal
plunk.
And so, mission accomplished, David moved to renew his slumbers. The clock by the bed read 5:30 in bright red LED that would’ve been easier to decipher had it not been entombed in the gaping maw of a yard-high papier-mâché dragon’s head Myra had made as a prop for one of her paintings.

But did he really want to return to bed now?

Well, he could definitely stand more shuteye, but he feared that rejoining Liz would only rouse (that was the operative word, too) his interest in activities he would have to awaken her to properly pursue. And while he doubted she’d complain, he also knew they both had finals the following afternoon and really needed to catch whatever Zs they could. A shower was out, because of the noise. But maybe he could relax (or at least distract himself) in the rain-cooled breezes by the window.

Moving as silently as he did when hunting in the woods of his native Enotah County (which was pretty damned quiet, even Calvin McIntosh, who was authentic Cherokee, admitted), he threaded his way between stacks of paintings to the velvet-draped square of striated light that filled most of the streetside end of the long narrow room. A pair of love seats faced each other there, avalanched with brocade pillows. A glass of zinfandel he’d abandoned the previous evening gleamed on the windowsill. He snared it as he sank down and sipped it absently, even as the other hand sought the cord that would raise the blinds. They rustled softly, and he found himself holding his breath as he lifted them just high enough to permit him to gaze out on College Square. Actually, the view was mostly of treetops and two lanes of one-way street flanked by parking. The buildings across the way were largely obscured: China Express on the corner of College and Broad, The Thirsty Scholar next door, and adjoining that, Barnett’s Newsstand, where various of his friends worked, and one door down from that, the Grill, which in spite of being open all night, seemed as lifeless as everything else.

Probably it was the rain, a steady patter that made the pavement gleam like charcoal silk and the branches glitter with a fey shimmer that reminded him far too much of realms where a much more malignant magic than love or rain on a tin roof was alive, well, and perhaps growing stronger.

But it was certainly deserted out there now. Not a single Goth girl or townie boy lingered beneath those dripping boughs. Not one of the scruffy, rootless young urchins he’d heard called street elves
(Ha!),
who often hung out all night in front of Barnett’s playing hackey sack, bumming cigarettes, and braiding each other’s Kool-aid-toned hair. And certainly not one of the older, uglier (odd, if you thought about it: how that seemed to be a given) derelicts whom
that same anonymous taxonomist had christened sidewalk trolls.

Another sip of wine found David staring dully at the shining tarmac, listening to the pattering susurration of the rain—hovering on the ragged fringe of slumber. Almost he returned to bed, for the breeze had taken a colder tack that made him shiver, as though someone had opened a door on the arctic north and admitted a blast of December.

He did shiver when he thought of that, for sometimes that actually happened—almost literally. Sometimes doors
did
open to other places, other worlds—Worlds, rather—that overlay his own. He’d seen them. Been there. Walked their meads and meadows with a fair number of his friends, and made friends of a sort there as well. Tomorrow was Midsummer’s Day, too; a day born in part to celebrate those other folk.

But a door to
there
shouldn’t have opened now. Not here, not in downtown Athens. Not if all was right with the World Walls. The last time that had occurred was two autumns back, when he, Alec, and Aikin were engaged in their annual ritual hunt. That had precipitated yet another in a seemingly endless series of adventures among those other Worlds.

This was Athens.
Downtown
Athens. Athens of concrete and steel. An Athens which, if anything, should be burning holes into that other place.

The breeze grew colder, and with it came a spicy scent, as of exotic flowers. But with it also came a too familiar, too ominous burning in his eyes. He stiffened abruptly, combing the striated shadows with his gaze, seeking…what? Movement, probably, or mass where there had been none. And then he saw. A figure—young, by its slightness; male, by the width of the shoulders—emerging from the recessed doorway next to Barnett’s. A figure inhumanly pale, clad in a preposterously dagged cloak the color of a stormy night. The figure glanced around furtively, then froze as though startled and lifted his head to stare straight across the street to where David sat sag-mouthed at an open window. Teeth flashed in a scornful smile, and then the youth raised one hand in a mocking salute, turned, and was gone: a swirl of darkness in a deeper gloom.

David simply gaped, too stunned to react more overtly. And was still sitting there seconds—or minutes—later, when that same darkness that had received the figure suddenly fractured again, to spit out a small, pale shape who stumbled a half-dozen paces before coming to a shivering stop on the empty, sodden walk.

Boy,
David guessed tentatively, from the clothes: jeans, sneakers, T-shirt, and baseball cap worn backward. Eight or nine, by the size.

And dry, he realized an instant later, shuddering all over again, the more so because the boy was simply standing there, shaking and getting soaked. Obviously the kid was in shock.

David’s first impulse was to call someone—but that would disturb Liz, nevermind the quizzing he might have to endure. His second was to go down himself, retrieve the kid, and try to get someone in the Grill to take charge.

He was spared either action by an Athens Police cruiser, which eased around the corner from Clayton to turn down College. Fortunately (or maybe not, depending on what it portended), the boy didn’t run, even when the Crown Vic angled toward him. Nor did he react when the car stopped, a uniformed woman got out, spoke briefly (and apparently inconclusively) to the lad, then whisked him into the back seat and drove away.

David exhaled his anxiety in one long hiss, and drank the remainder of the wine to the dregs. One crisis averted—he hoped. If he was lucky, it might not even have been a crisis, not of the sort he’d dreaded. Optimally, he’d read about it in the
Banner Herald
the following afternoon. No way, though, any article could reveal more than a shadow of the truth; no way it would—or could—say that the nameless figure who had left that very human child standing shocked and shivering on a city sidewalk was not what most folks would have called human.

Another half-glass of wine killed the bottle, and that plus fatigue and the ungodliness of the hour made him sleepy all over again. Liz’s body warm against his back, he drifted off, pondering how he’d spend the next few days distrusting shadows.

\

Chapter IV: Rude Awakening

(Athens, Georgia—Friday, June 20—early morning)

Something was gnawing Scott’s nose.

Something with very sharp teeth, a musky odor, and which, though it weighed almost nothing at all, still managed to muster sufficient mass to be annoying when that mass pressed untrimmed claws into the bare skin of his hairless belly. He batted at it drowsily, provoking a scratchy arc of pain across his chest. Another swat—which connected more firmly—prompted those teeth to snare a nostril and dig in.

“Goddamn, Marsh! What the fuck is
with
you?” he grumbled, as he brought both hands to bear on the normally placid ferret that had elected to play surrogate alarm clock. One hand lifted the aft end of the persistent creature, the other pried ever so gently at the offended orifice.

Oh well,
he thought grimly, as the critter proved tenacious,
maybe it’s time to get a nose ring.

A final squeeze, and Marsh let go. Scott resisted the urge to instruct the critter on teleportation, and dumped him on the floor instead—which maneuver caused the remaining cover to slide off his legs. Somewhere in the chaos near his head, the for-real alarm clock produced a steady, piercing chime. He fumbled at it—just as the backup arrived with the cavalry, in the form of very loud radio: something especially raucous by Pearl Jam, if his ears were still functioning right. A well-aimed swat silenced the first. A trip across the cluttered bedroom in the Toombs Avenue apartment would likewise have negated the latter, had his feet not become ensnarled in an unlikely combination of rumpled sheets and irate, leg-climbing mustelid and sprawled him lengthwise on the floor. The Pearl Jam succumbed to an incredibly irritating local Mitsubishi commercial, and that did it.

Regaining his feet by the expedient of climbing up the front of a bookcase, Scott finally found the radio, thwacked the OFF button hard enough to rattle the dishes in the adjoining kitchen, and managed to secure the ferret just before it invaded the no-man’s-land inside the more occupied leg of his purple satin boxer shorts.

Scott paused for a moment, winded from the fall and subsequent exertions, and no more than one-third awake in spite of all that, raised the ferret scruffwise to eye level, and regarded it speculatively. “I have a garbage disposal,” he hissed through fine white teeth. “
And
a flush toilet. Hear my words, O beast, and amend thy ways!”

The ferret twitched its nose; then, as if bored, yawned and closed its eyes.

“Beast!” Scott growled again in disgust, and set it on the bed, then stumbled through the crockery chaos of the kitchen into the bath.

Fifteen minutes later he was clean if not quite dry, and fifteen after that, was bageled once, coffeed twice, but still unshod.

At exactly eight o’clock, he slouched out the front door of the old blue-and-white house, half the upstairs of which he rented, and climbed into the black Mercury Monarch his one-time roommate, Jay Madison, had entrusted to him on that same roommate’s wedding day. Where Jay was now, he had no idea, save that it was clearly not Athens and he almost certainly wasn’t having to endure either nose-piercing alarm clocks or pernickety major professors.

The Monarch, alas, failed to start, and though Scott had a backup ten-speed, he feared for the second time that day, that he was doomed.

Doomed, because, though he’d worked a good chunk of the night on the latest batch of Landsats, and had actual hard copy as proof, he had not, in fact, completed all he’d
promised, courtesy of that distractingly screwy anomaly in Sullivan Cove.

And though slighting Rabun County had seemed a viable option at somewhere between one and two AM, the reason for that omission did not seem as workable in the brighter light of day. Even worse, he’d crashed (around three—having stopped at Jittery Joe’s for a cappuccino) intending to arise early, finish Rabun before anyone else arrived, and leave the results on Green’s desk before the Great Man sailed in. That way, they wouldn’t have to actually meet. That way, too, Green would neither be in a position to chide him about his unfinished dissertation, nor present him with more time-consuming tasks.

Trouble was, he’d forgotten to reset the alarms—and had just lost another crucial fifteen minutes fiddling with the stupid car.

Which in no way got him off the hook with Dr. Green, who always showed up spot-on at 8:30.

His only hope now, was to reach the lab ASAP, avoid observation if possible, unearth last night’s efforts, and drape his head and arms atop them, as though feigning sleep. If he was lucky—luckier than he’d been so far today—Green himself would find him there when he didn’t show for his scheduled audience, and he could pretend to have just awakened. That way he could appear to be super-conscientious, while still having an excuse for botching the assignment.

Of course it still meant he’d have to deal with Green, but that was unavoidable.

“Bloody hell!” he spat, as he turned the bike down College Avenue, aiming toward East Broad. And then, as though awakened by that sincere, if ineffective, curse, another phrase popped into his mind.

A name rather: one he’d heard Myra toss around now and then, and most of the so-called MacTyrie Gang as well.

Bloody Bald.

That mountain which showed on some Landsats but not others, and on no geological chart whatever, was called Bloody Bald. Which meant that the locals, at least, knew it existed; otherwise, it would still be unnamed.

Well, maybe. Sasquatches had names—terms, at any rate—as did unicorns and yetis, but he hadn’t seen George Page expounding on either on
Nature.

All of which, in spite of a temperature already in the low eighties, gave him a chill.

At which point a pouty-looking brunette in a white BMW convertible changed lanes
right
in front of him, and the resulting adrenaline surge and subsequent shout of anger washed all other concerns clean away—

—Until five minutes later, when he found himself confronting the gray, magnolia-fronted slab of the GGS Building.

Please God, I will go to church for the rest of the year if You will make me invisible for fifteen seconds now,
he prayed, as he dashed up the granite steps.

And I promise to be nice to every Jehovah’s Witness who ventures by,
he added, as he achieved the lower foyer still unmarked.

If his sudden change of luck (or divine intervention) persisted, he might even make it up the central stairs, around the globe at the top, and down to the lab as planned.

Holding his breath and trying to look neither furtive nor five years older than the surrounding underclass crew, he ascended to Foyer, Level Two. Miraculously, the coast was still clear: no one in sight with even vaguely gray hair, never mind as much as Green sported.

Around the globe now, and right down the hall (ducking below window level of Green’s office in transit), and he’d attain the Promised Land.

“Thank you again, Lord,” he breathed, as, beyond hope, he scored the door to the lab, already fishing in his pocket for his key. The lights were on. He wondered if he’d left them that way.