Sam’s fingers closed about the Loetz vase, and he brought it up in a swinging arc. The light in the dim room caught it, and it gleamed blue and black and green iridescence, like Ely himself.
Just before the flash, the sound like a furnace flaring to life, Sam saw the glass shatter against Stern’s face, had time to think, That will leave a mark.
The dolls, in all their delicacy and indifference, watched Sam burn.
Chapter Twenty-Three
NEW YORK
Down the street. She had been there all this time, only three houses down, and he hadn’t known, hadn’t suspected.
From his living room window, Cal could still see the embers of what had been Sam Lungo’s house, pulsing darkly in the night, wisps of smoke curling weakly, the stench of charred wood and flesh heavy in the air. In the firestorm that had en-folded it, the roof had crumpled, timbers falling in on themselves, throwing up a firefly swarm of sparks and ash. Mercifully, a breath of summer rain had come and quenched it, and the blaze hadn’t spread.
The street outside was empty now, but it bore witness to the maelstrom that had passed through, windows broken, chunks of pavement gouged out, nameless fragments scattered wholesale as if some giant, willful child had played his roughhouse game, smashed his toys and moved on.
It was a new world indeed, one where men-or what had been men-could see in the dark, shoot light from their hands, fly. New gifts of power but, clearly, none of insight. Cal felt he’d been given no gifts at all, only a dream in which he’d seen the ridiculous sword that hung at his side, but what use had it been? He was a man, nothing more, and that had proved achingly inadequate.
Standing nearby, Doc caught Cal’s expression. “If you’d like to crucify yourself, I could get some nails.” But there was sympathy in his eyes, a forgiveness Cal could not grant himself.
“ ’Scuse me.” Goldie slid between the two of them, stepped lightly to the window. He cracked it open, lifted a potted plant from the sill and upended it without looking, dumping dirt and greenery onto the thankfully vacant street below.
The earthenware pot now empty, Goldie cradled it in one arm, gliding along the periphery of the room, his free hand outstretched, hovering above each object like a psychic metal detector.
“Deja vu all over again,” Colleen sighed, to no one in particular.
“Symbolism is very important when it comes to visions,” Goldie said, not stopping, not looking at her. “You burn something as a token of what you want to see. In this case, we want to view something that, yesterday, sanity would have told us was. . ah.”
He snatched a copy of TV Guide off the television, said to Cal, “You won’t be needing this.” He dropped it in the pot. “And, um, if I could trouble you for a light. . ”
Cal fished in his pocket, tossed Goldie the lighter. Goldie plopped cross-legged down in the middle of the room as the others looked on. He set the pot in his lap, then shot his cuffs. “Nothing up my sleeve.”
He flicked the lighter. A thin blue flame shot up, which he angled to the edge of the TV Guide. The pages started to smolder, blacken, curl like moth wings aborning.
Goldie bent his head and began to mouth words under his breath quickly, blurred in a droning mantra. He repeated the incantation, gaining in speed and intensity. He rocked from the waist, davening like a Hassidic rabbi, eyes screwed shut, mouth working. Cal strained to make out the words, caught several syllables, a snatch of phrase. Something about not believing what you hear, only what you see. .
Goldie was intoning the lyrics to “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”
Colleen hissed, “This is such bullshi-”
“Shh,” Cal cut her off. For the smoke rising from the burning digest was becoming something more, resolving into a vague, rectangular shape, a flickering cascade of light playing over it just like. .
Snow, on a television screen.
The shape hovered above the pot, smoke framing it, the lilt of Goldie’s words a soft, toneless music. In the darkened room, the light from it illumined their faces, stilled in wonder, even Colleen’s.
The screen-for such it was-began to clarify into an evanescent image, shimmering as though seen through a rain-slicked window. Quickly, it gained substance, took on weight and solidity. The object was beautiful and ornate in its war of Nouveau and Deco. The gilded, dark gleaming stone stood cold against a malevolent night sky.
Of course it was where Stern would go. Cal felt the chill rise through his veins.
Goldie let out a soft groan. The image folded in on itself and winked out. The fire died, the magazine consumed.
Goldie opened his eyes. His face shone with sweat, and he was trembling. He looked up at Cal with regret. “Sorry, man, couldn’t hold it.”
“It’s all right,” Cal murmured.
The Stark Building-Stern’s office, and his-stood waiting.
Cal and his cohorts advanced toward the building cautiously, alert for any assault, but it proved needless. The street was deserted, shut up tight, no light in any window. Fitful gusts spun bits of paper about their feet and ankles. A pale, un-caring moon lit their approach.
Drawing close, Cal peered at the brooding structure, towering over its neighbors, its stylized lightning bolts and stars of steel and gold whirling about doorframes and ledges. In his mind’s eye, he had a vision of how this building, this street, would look in a hundred years, a thousand, vines choking its stones, birds shrieking from empty windows, as lost to memory as Angkor Wat or Machu Picchu had been.
This place had served its purpose, and now it was done, abandoned by those who had used it, left only to monsters.
The Stark Building’s massive doors had been locked, but that proved no impediment. Colleen, as part of the maintenance crew, had a key.
The lobby, however, proved a surprise. When Cal had last seen it, it had been a vast, open space, airy and clean. Now it was a wreck, dust hanging thick, a charcoal stench in the air that caught at the back of his throat. Both the staircases and elevator shafts were trashed and scorched, ragged chunks of concrete piled high in them, tumbled like a storm of meteors, blocking all passage.
Stern wanted no visitors.
So now they stood outside again, staring at its black immensity, hard against the night sky.
“I don’t suppose you have any spells to conjure up a helicopter,” Doc said to Goldie.
Colleen set down her heavy shoulder bag and unzipped it. She withdrew coils of rope, nylon harnesses, bags of chalk dust, tapered aluminum wedges.
“I’ll let you know what I find up top,” she told Cal, securing her crossbow across her back. She took a step toward the sheer face, but he reached for her shoulder.
“Nobody goes unless I go,” he said.
She scrutinized him with a baleful eye. “You ever climbed anything but a corporate ladder?”
Cal shook his head. Colleen pointed out that it was suicide for him to attempt a climb like this and, when Cal refused to be swayed, brought out every colorful epithet she could remember from a childhood of Air Force bases and low-rent dives.
Through it all, Cal was gently, maddeningly deaf to protest.
In the end, she handed him a harness.
Doc stepped up. “You know, I fancy a little exertion myself.”
“Sorry, Ivan,” Colleen replied, “just got the gear for Rory and me. Two’s the limit.”
“My first name is not Ivan,” Doc noted.
“Someday, remind me to ask you what it is.” She turned to Cal and smiled grimly. “Ready to climb, farmboy?”
“This city’s finished.”
From where he crouched high on the roof’s edge, Stern could see pallid lights flickering here and there on the black, unknowable surface of the city, like maggots on a corpse. It was a dying thing, he had known that for years, had only forgotten it momentarily in the heady exhilaration of his new birth.