Usher's Passing (51 page)

But after a few minutes she'd picked up the pups and, one by one, crushed them in her jaws.

The little kid beside Logan had burst into tears. As Logan left, the wolf was nudging her pups, trying to make them feed again.

He'd tried it only once with a person: Mr. Holly, his geometry teacher in high school. Mr. Holly was a gangly old geezer who wore bow ties and suspenders, and was going to flunk him. One morning in class, Logan had stared at Mr. Holly when the old man was rattling on about areas of triangles, and had caught his gaze. Logan had formed the mental image of Mr. Holly in his rustbucket Ford, with his foot pressed down hard on the accelerator. Mr. Holly's mouth had stopped spewing formulas. Logan had added details to the picture: the car was racing along the county road between the high school and Taylorville, and ahead was the Pearl Creek Bridge. Inside the Ford, Mr. Holly was sitting with a zipper across his mouth, the same kind of smug look on his face as when he told Logan he was in danger of summer school.
Twist the wheel,
Logan had commanded mentally, and pictured the old man spinning the steering wheel violently to the right, sending the Ford crashing into the bridge's concrete railing so hard that Mr. Holly was ejected halfway through the windshield before the steering column pierced his guts. When Logan had let the vision fade out like a movie, Mr. Holly said he felt sick and needed to be excused. The whole class had heard him puking in the hall.

But he was back the next day. For more than a week, Logan played the same movie in his head. At the very least, it interrupted the old man's boring lectures. Soon, Logan tired of the game and began thinking up ways to cheat on the final exam.

A month later, the
Foxton Democrat
said that Mr. Paul Holly of Taylorville, aged fifty-eight and a geometry teacher for more than seventeen years, had died when his Ford hit the Pearl Creek Bridge. The scuttlebutt around the school, which Logan had heard with a stunned sense of satisfaction, was that crazy old Holly had left a suicide note to his wife that had
Twist the wheel
written on it a hundred times.

But the teacher who'd taken Holly's place in May had flunked Logan anyway.

Logan had always kept his talents to himself. He didn't understand where they'd come from, or why he had them, but he knew his control was getting better. He didn't want his mom and dad knowing—what would they say if they found out what he'd done to Holly? Logan regretted having cut Mutt open; that had been damned stupid, but Granddad hadn't called Edwin about it, so he figured he'd gotten away with his little experiment.

The almost imperceptible cracking of a twig brought Logan out of his trance. Within a minute his pulse had returned to normal, as had his body temperature. His senses quested in the darkness. He could smell a cat, prowling close by.

Brush stirred near the path. Careful, Logan warned himself. If the bastard jumps at me, I'd better be ready. He was hoping to stun it with the light before it had a chance to attack him. He waited a moment longer, listening, then aimed the light toward the path.

He switched it on.

The beam exploded onto a skinny bobcat with tattered ears, its tongue licking hungrily at the crusted blood beneath the newly hung carcasses.

Its eyes flared in the light, and Logan saw its hind legs tense for a leap into the underbrush. He quickly decided that he wanted to add it to the collection, and summoned the image of the bobcat frozen on the path, sending that image like a cold spear that left his mind and linked him with the animal. The bobcat tried to leap, but its will was sapped. It scrambled in a circle, snapping at its tail.

Logan concentrated on the image, strengthening it, slowing the animal until it stood panting and confused on the path, its legs stiff and its mouth open in a snarl. Its eyes had begun to frost over.

Logan could feel it trying to tear itself loose, and he kept the image firmly in his mind as he approached. Except for the movement of its sides as it breathed, the bobcat might have been a stuffed hunting trophy. Logan bent down a few feet from the animal, looking at the pink tongue and the gleaming, exposed teeth. He unsnapped the knife from its sheath at his ankle, then extended his arm and jabbed the bobcat's side.

The animal's mouth opened wider, but its legs didn't move.

It always amused him to see them like this—helpless, waiting for the killing stroke. He had an animal snare in his mind, and he could trap or release them as he chose. Of all the animals he'd caught, killed, and hung from the wires, the squirrels had been the toughest because they moved so fast. It was harder to stop them when they were on the run.

Logan traced the bobcat's ribs with the point of his knife. The animal shivered suddenly, then was motionless again. He put the blade to the soft flesh of the bobcat's throat and jabbed inward, then slashed with a skill born of much practice.

Blood jetted over his arm before he could get out of the way. The bobcat shuddered, a high hissing noise coming from its mouth. It was hard to hold them when they felt that pain, and Logan moved backward in case the link snapped. In another few seconds it did, and the bobcat shrieked, clawing wildly at empty air, its body out of control and writhing in agony. With cold, clinical interest, Logan watched it die. Finally the bobcat lay on its side in its own blood, and its breathing stopped.

Logan wiped his blade on the animal's fur, then snapped it back into its sheath.

And when he stood up, the flesh at the back of his neck crawled. He sensed at once that he was being watched by something very close.

He spun around, probing with the light. He saw nothing but trees, rusted cages, hanging vines, and rough-edged boulders. Still, his flesh tingled; something was there, very near, but what it was he couldn't tell. Greediguts? he thought, and felt a shiver of panic. No, no—it wasn't an animal. There was no animal scent in the air. He swept his light back and forth across the path. Whatever watched him was as good as he at merging with its surroundings.

His legs were stiffening, turning freezing cold. Move! he told himself. Get back to the house!

He tried to move his feet, and whimpered softly when he found that his knees were tightly locked. The cold was rapidly spreading through his body, weighting his limbs.

His fingers involuntarily opened; the flashlight fell to the ground.

Run! he screamed mentally. His legs wouldn't move. His brain was going numb with the cold, and he realized that he was being invaded, just as he'd invaded the bobcat a few minutes before. His heart was pounding, but his thought impulses continued to slow, like the frozen gears of a machine.

Spraying out across the ground, the light touched the shoes of a figure standing before him on the path, barely ten feet away.

Logan tried to cry out, but the muscles of his face were frozen and he couldn't open his mouth. His teeth ground together as he fought against a power that held him, but he knew that against this overwhelming force he hadn't a chance to break free.

The veins in his neck stood out; his eyes glistened with terror.

Pump . . . kin .. . Man,
Logan thought before his mind shut down like an icehouse.

The figure stood motionless before him for a moment longer, then silently approached and stretched out a hand to touch Logan's face.

TWELVE MILES FROM USHERLAND, THE TELEPHONE WAS RINGING
insistently in the Dunstan house.

Raven came out of her bedroom to answer it, switching on the hallway light. It was after three o'clock, and Raven had been reading since eleven, when she found sleep impossible. She picked up the phone. "Hello?"

"Miz Dunstan?" It was Sheriff Kemp's drawl. "Sorry to wake you up so early. I'm over here at the Foxton Clinic, and . . . well, a couple of hours ago the Tharpe woman and her boy brought in the old man who calls hisself the Mountain King. He's tore up pretty bad—"

"What happened?"

"Animal got him. The Tharpes won't talk to me, but it looks like they know what went on up there. The emergency nurse called me as soon as she saw how bad off the old man was."

"An animal? What kind of animal?"

"The Tharpes won't say. The doc here tells me they've done everything they can for the old man, but it don't look like he's gonna pull through. I'm callin' because the boy says he wants to see you. He says he'll talk to you, but not to nobody else."

"All right. Give me fifteen minutes." She hung up and dressed hurriedly in jeans and a dark blue pullover sweater, then put on a pair of warm socks and her battered but reliable hiking boots. She ran her hands through her black curls and shrugged into her brown tweed jacket. The books she'd checked out of the Foxton library that afternoon were on the table beside her bed. The librarian had looked at her as if she had two heads when Raven had told her what she needed.

After she'd driven down from Briartop Mountain, she'd sat shaking in her car on the side of the road. The things she'd seen the Mountain King do were beyond rational explanation. Her knee had been healed by one touch of his cane. The Volkswagen had been turned around by a superhuman force.

What Sheriff Kemp had said in his office had come back to her:
Then there's the stories about the witches, too .. . Supposed to be that Briartop used to be crawlin' with 'em . . .

The book she'd been reading when the telephone rang was called
Dark Angels,
a history of witchcraft and black magic. It lay open on the table to one of its weird, phantasmagoric illustrations: a seventeenth-century Welsh woodcut showing a figure in black standing atop a mountain, arms upraised, summoning an army of reptilian demons. Crouched at its feet was a shape that resembled a huge dog—or a panther, Raven thought. In the book Raven had read about the power of the Evil Eye to command men and animals, about spells and magic wands passed down through generations of both "black" and "white" witches, and about the witch's familiar—a beast created by Satanic power to protect and help its master.

The other two books—one by Bill Creekmore entitled
No Fear: The World Beyond,
the second called
The Unfathomed Mind
—
dealt respectively with life after death and extraordinary mental abilities. Raven had paged through a fourth book as well, and found that it included many elements of the witchcraft lore from the history volume: Rix Usher's
Congregation,
which she'd picked up from the shelf where her father had left it. She wondered what his reaction would be if he knew how close to the bone his fiction had carved.

Wheeler had rolled his chair into the hallway as she left her bedroom. She told him who'd called, and why, and said she'd be back before dawn.

As she drove toward Foxton, a scatter of hard rain hit the windshield. Dead leaves whirled before the headlights, and she tightened her grip on the wheel.

The question of the ruins themselves continued to nag at her. What had happened up there to burn the outlines of human beings on stone walls? She'd asked her father about the ruins today, but he didn't know who had lived up there, or how old the ruins were. The town that had stood at the peak of Briartop Mountain was not listed in any historical volume in the Foxton library, and a call to the Asheville library turned up nothing, either. There was no record of the people who'd lived there, where they'd come from, or—most importantly—what had happened to them.

The Foxton Clinic, a small red-brick building, stood a block away from the Broadleaf Cafe. A couple of doctors and nurses comprised the staff of the place, which saw more cases of flu and cold sores than anything serious. At night. Raven knew, one nurse ran the clinic and a doctor was on call.

But tonight the sheriffs car was parked in front, beside the Tharpes' pickup truck and two other cars. Raven guided the Volkswagen into a space and hurried inside.

Sheriff Kemp was sitting in the waiting room, paging through a copy of
Field & Stream.
Across the small room sat Myra Tharpe and her son. As Kemp stood up to greet her, Raven glanced at Myra Tharpe and saw that her shoulders were slumped, her vacant gaze fixed to the floor. Beside her, Newlan—wearing a flannel shirt and a baggy pair of trousers that were obviously not his—rose quickly to his feet when he saw Raven.

"We got us a mess here," Kemp said. His face was slack and unshaven, his eyes red from lack of sleep. "The old man's tore up like you wouldn't believe. Whatever it was jumped him from behind. Broke his ribs and collarbone, smashed his nose and jaw, too. Thing must've had godawful teeth, judgin' from the wound on the back of his neck."