Now other things were coming out of the mist and night at them. Hard spectral fingers tore up out of the earth; glowing blue stalks snaked from the mist and were repulsed.
Cal saw Tina’s aura flicker, begin to fade, read the weariness in her face. He gripped his sword, tensing for what might come.
But just as her light faded out, as she sank to the earth with a groan, they punched through the mist into the outskirts of town. No one was in sight, just a few tumbledown shacks, a scattering of weedy farm equipment in the moonlight.
Cal crouched beside Tina. Her hair pooled around her shoulders, her body earthbound now, with only the faintest twinkling playing over her skin. “You did it,” he said, but she didn’t seem to hear. She lifted her head and peered into the night, away from the fog, toward town. The tension had all fallen away from her, and her face held only a distant, contemplative serenity. It chilled Cal, pricked memory. Once, as a boy, he had passed the glassworks in Hurley, seen a frantic crowd trying to dissuade a hollow-eyed man from shooting himself. Aaron Barnes it had been, Cal went to school with his boy Cameron. Hanging back on the periphery, transfixed, Cal stared past dark-suited legs, the babble of scared, pleading voices engulfing him. It had looked as though they were swaying the man, when suddenly an expression of peace came over him, of vast relief, like an exhalation. . and he fired.
Cal made a move to gather Tina in his arms, to lift her, but she cut him off with an abrupt gesture, still gazing away, and struggled to her feet. Not weightless, not yet. Give her time to recharge and to come back to them.
Colleen, Doc and Goldie were checking out the bikes, seeing what was still attached after their flight. Cal looked beyond them, saw that the older woman had hurried down the dirt road to a derelict two-story house.
He walked up to her, found that she was staring intently at a spot on the ground where he could just make out a dark stain. Then she straightened, shaking her head. “Not blood,” she said with relief, and Cal wondered how she could be sure of that.
She scrutinized the tangled yard, the heaps of discarded washing machines, the labyrinth of trees farther on, seeing, Cal felt certain, far more acutely than he could, but not finding what she sought.
“What are you looking for?”
“A friend who put himself in harm’s way for me.” She shoved back her disheveled hair, managed a smile. “As you and your friends just did.” She extended a hand. “I’m Wilma Hanson.”
“Cal Griffin, from New York.”
“Well, Mr. Griffin, I’m afraid now that you’ve entered-” Her eyes grew alarmed as she glanced past him. “Stop her!”
Cal spun and saw that Tina was running hell for leather toward town. He took off after her, his legs kicking up the dirt, the cold air whipping at him. But Colleen, Doc and Goldie were ahead of him. They caught hold of her, dragged her to a staggering halt. She cried out, struggling, tearing at them, but there was no strength in her. She relapsed to stillness, her eyes on the dark, the unseen town.
We couldn’t have done that if her tank wasn’t on empty, Cal thought worriedly.
“Keep hold of her,” Wilma Hanson said. “There’s something in town that gets into them, makes them do things.”
Cal looked up sharply at this, caught his own look mirrored on Colleen’s face, and Goldie’s, and Doc’s.
Something that gets into them. Into Tina and Stern and that pitiful boy in the woods, and all the twisted, anguished ones. That beckoned them all the way from Manhattan. That blighted their waking hours, made a horror of their dreams, infected their souls.
Welcome to Boone’s Gap.
“Do you know what it is?” Cal asked quietly. “No,” Wilma replied. “But I know where it is.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
To Cal, the Wishart house looked like nothing so much as a pale reflection seen within dusky glass, a wavering mirage, elusive and then gone.
And yet he was staring right at it.
Peering out the window in Wilma Hanson’s front room, the crackling pine in the fireplace banishing the fog chill from his bones, Cal sensed or imagined-he couldn’t be sure which-shame emanating from that house, a shrinking from even the moon’s fading light.
Behind him, Goldie sat cross-legged in the corner, welcoming Wilma Hanson’s regiment of cats as they brushed against him, burnished him, while Doc and Colleen stood by the hearth with Wilma. Their voices were soft, their conversation banal. It was a breathing space, a tiny harbor in a great, unyielding storm.
Leading them to her home over rutted dirt paths, through the slumbering dark of town streets, Wilma had told of the comatose children and the old ones, the sense of their being drained like rivulets of water coursing to the sea, drawn inescapably toward the Wishart home.
“Even the power held in the land is being fed on,” Wilma had said, on the move, tensing against the pulse of the night that only she could sense, “the ghosts of this town’s history….”
Cal let the voices behind him blur to a comfortable drone, let himself float on the scent of woodsmoke, the taste of mountain air, the homey warmth of the room about him; all the subtle sounds and smells that brought home back to him. And he was a boy again in Hurley, his infant sister dozing in the far room, his mother a watchful presence to shield them from the chaos of the world.
Then he heard a soft shifting above him and looked toward the attic. Toward Tina.
They-he-had locked her there.
After her emergence from the fog, her headlong flight toward town, she was passive, seemed hardly aware of them. She allowed herself to be led to Applby Lane, not even glancing at the Wishart House as they passed it, only slowing almost imperceptibly.
But Cal noted her radiance growing ever brighter, her tread barely brushing the ground. She was regaining her strength, would soon have it all, and then none of them could hope to stop her.
So, in this brief span while she still mutely acquiesed, Cal agreed to imprison her in the one room with no windows, with a door they could bar.
While the house next door shimmered and waited.
From above, another thud, louder than before.
He turned toward the hearth, saw his companions in the Rembrandt light of the fire. His glance caught the photos on the mantel of Wilma’s sisters and their families, of her students.
“Have you lost many you were close to?” he asked.
“Well, it’s a very small town.”
“Those men,” Doc said. “The changed ones outside. Why did it kill them?”
“One of my friends, the one who-” Wilma stopped as though about to reveal more of her heart than she wished. “He said something got into his mind, was telling him to kill Bob.”
Bob Wishart. Bob, whom Wilma had thought should be dead already, dead when the machines went down. But who, at least in the minds of the changed ones, was very much alive.
“And you’re sure Dr. Wishart hasn’t been here in months?” Cal asked.
Wilma nodded as Colleen broke in, “But why the stay-at-home brother? The handyman? Why kill Bob, if he isn’t dead already? What could he have to do with draining the town?”
“Somehow,” Wilma said, “I have a feeling that whatever’s compelling those attacks doesn’t care about the town, about any of us.”
Cal began, “But why would the changed ones-”
“Because,” Goldie broke in from his cat-contented corner, “it told them to. Because you open yourself to it, and the world falls away.”
Cal stared. It was what Tina had said, in the fog. Goldie turned to him, somber. “There’s two pieces to this. Here and the big one. The real one. It’s not here your sister’s being pulled. It’s through here. To the other. The maw.”
Cal looked again at the Wishart house, as though he could see it now, even through Wilma’s walls. The brothers used to speak via computer; was Bob some secret whiz kid who had something to do with the Source Project without anyone’s knowing?