All the while, Glaucous was muttering words with no apparent sense or connection to their journey or their periclass="underline" “Shoestrings and jute! Oakum and fiber! Paper and rags, any old iron! Scallions! Onions!
Leeks! Bones and FAT!” (This as lightning struck again) and “Plasters and pastes! Plasters for all, plasters and poultice, what ails will draw!”
A stench filled Jack’s nose, rank and oppressive, not just the sweat and confinement of the bag, but a taint from his recent jaunt. He had jumped too far, crossed into a diseased knot of world-strands, dissolving, looping—stinking of something awful.
He knew that the van was being followed, that his reek was being tracked…
Glaucous seemed to share the same opinion. In between his pointless calls—he was now working his way through “Bluing! Blue stuffs! Indigo!”—he paused and leaned toward his partner, as if to speak in confidence, then, shaking his head, pulled back and wrenched his spine straight, his shoulders as square as they could be, incredulous he would even think of giving voice to such thoughts, whatever they might have been.
He could not afford doubts—not now.
Penelope had broken the armrest from the van’s door and held it out, squeezing the plastic and steel like a banana. Her eyes almost popped from their fat-draped orbits.
Speckles of weird light danced on their faces.
Glaucous clapped a hand over his mouth and nose and stared above his thumb, eyes wide.
“What isthat?” Penelope shrieked, her vocal register that of a frightened kindergartener.
“It is magnificence!” Glaucous shouted. “It is power and promise, a plight, a troth!” His words belied his expression; brows low, piggish eyes receding into his skull.
Jack now had his arm out of the sack up to the shoulder and was squirming to push his head through.
“What are you saying?” Penelope squealed.
“Something is hunting us! Too eager, waiting too long!”
“Hunting what? You promised we would be safe!”
“ Iwill be safe.” Glaucous gave her a guilty glance, then wheeled the van onto an off-ramp and said, with grim curiosity, sunken eyes on the rearview mirror, “I turn up this road—bolts like giant feet, stamping feet, they follow and turn withme! I have not seen this before, believe that, dear queen of buzz and hum—not before, not ever. We have not called for a delivery, yet I sense something other than a Gape. The Chalk Princess is anxious. More than we bargained for. A large bite, this youngster—more than we can chew!”
Jack was beyond fear. The cloying treacle and liquor of Glaucous’s talent had pinched to sour vinegar, stinging in his nostrils and brain, opening up choked glimpses of branching, looping world-lines—none of them good, all of them in fact awful.
What was happening had never happened before, not in Jack’s experience, nor in the experience of any ancestor who had ever contributed to the sum of the genes ratcheting in his flesh and blood—even as far back as the primordial slime.
CHAPTER 47
Wallingford
Daniel drew up Fred’s gray wool jacket and walked west, shoulders hunched, feeling the storm gather its power.
A sharp jerk of sense had reversed his arrogance and pleasure at his new body. The storm wasn’t after him—but it would work quite well as a distraction. He had been too preoccupied to pay close attention—stupid, stupid!
There was almost certainly another target nearby—another fate-shifter. Maybe more than one. But someone in the employ of the thing that hunted them could still set his sights on Daniel. He would be special. I no longer dream of the city. I don’t know why—I just don’t. A bad shepherd—isn’t that what they call me?
Lightning whited the facades on his right. Just blocks from the turn to his home, as he walked beside the big lamp shop, all the chandeliers, switched on for the morning trade, suddenly went dark. The air hissed.
Daniel had to drag his new body by main force toward the abandoned house. Fear was bringing Fred back, unpleasantly strong, and Fred most certainly did not want to go. Daniel could not jaunt again, even had he the strength, the concentration. The corrosion would be everywhere. Nothing but hideous, gray looped worlds bunched up between this dissolving segment of history and whatever lay at the end: tumbled lengths of fate, frayed out, soaked and sour-smoky with decay. Another voice—not his own, not Fred’s. Fred was already being pushed back like a slug under a stone. Why bother, Mr. Iremonk?
Lightning flew down the street, sizzling, blinding, and struck a fire hydrant. The blast nearly knocked him off his feet and shattered all the glass in the lamp shop windows.
He stumbled on, whining like a kicked dog.
You have an appointment, long delayed.
People on the sidewalks were screaming, running.
He whirled around. An old woman in tight pedal-pushers held an inverted black umbrella in one hand and dragged a terrier along behind her, on its side, legs kicking. Each time the dog got to its feet, she jerked the leash so hard it fell over again. Big splats of rain—drops the size of baseballs, mixed with sharp chips of ice—hurled from the churning sky.
Just a few miles from the center of the storm.
The sweep of her robe, merely that. Nothing compared to the Gape. Remember, Daniel? Poor bastards, all of you. But especiallyyou.
Half a block behind him, Daniel saw a small man with oily, slick black hair. Daniel turned left. Across the street waited another—slender, dressed in old black clothes shiny with water and age—and a block east, a third, clutching a dripping, battered bowler hat in one white hand. All were smiling, enjoying the storm—ignoring the rain and the ice.
Where is the net’s fourth corner, Daniel?
Trying to run backward, he almost fell, so he swiveled, arms wind-milling, and lit out—gave it all he had. He wouldn’t look back.
Had to reach the house.
Had to.
CHAPTER 48
West Seattle
The storm had a dead, hollow voice. It had never known hunger, care, passion, or any growl of hormonal surge; its voice had never vented from flesh or form.
The storm was a thousand spins and drafts of wind and water, filled with restless veins of flash and charge, and all it knew—all it could possibly know—was that it had been set free, liberated from probability, and that it had a power no storm had ever before possessed. It could gather, it could kill— with malice.
One wet black swirl had almost caught up with the white van.
“My dear, it is our quarry, our cargo!” Glaucous shouted over the roar. He jerked his thumb toward the back. “He trails a spoor…”
“Of thread?” Penelope shrilled.
“Spoor, not spool! He exudes, he stinksof the bad places, not hell—though he must have come very close, dipped an ankle or a knee… Violet! Indigo! Blue! Red! Red bolts and orange! All for madam’s delight!”
Jack needed all his strength. He pressed his feet against the doors at the rear of the van, clutched the sack around him, rolled, grunted—
The light from the windshield darkened. Glaucous and Penelope screeched like terrified parrots. Jack peered out of the hole he had pushed through the cinch, between the silhouettes of the massive, cowering woman and the driver—through the van’s windshield. There, he saw something inexplicable. The vision refused to be cataloged or stored away, even in short-term memory. A seam, a gap, a failure.