Wilma stepped onto her own porch. Goldman and the Brooks woman stood rigid, gazing toward the Wishart house, seeing only darkness, hearing only the vague sounds of the fading night.
Pausing behind them, Wilma caught a scent on the air, or thought she did, distant and elusive, of coal and earth and blood, heard a soft rustling in the woods that might have been wind. It brought Hank to her thoughts. Since they had been attacked, since he had thrown himself at the grunters and yelled for her to run, she had heard nothing of him, seen no sign. Had they killed him? Or had he managed, through the ferocity of his attack and his fleetness, to get away?
She had seen no blood at the site, and that had heartened her. But thinking on it now, it seemed strange. Hank had been outnumbered, surrounded. Surely they would have drawn some of his blood, or he theirs. In all their previous attacks, they had proven unrelentingly murderous. If they spared him, what possibly could have been their motive?
Puzzling over it, Hank’s struggled words came back to her. They know I led the men out of the mines, they’re looking to me to-
To what?
And then, with a chilling certainty she could not have explained, Wilma thought she knew.
To lead them.
Hank, with his cool head and audacious nerve, his relentlessness and grit. The voice in his head had been working on him, striving to fill him with an irresistible desire to kill Bob Wishart. What if it had overwhelmed him at last, as it had Joe Rance and Eddie Dayton and the others like him? But more than that, what if Hank-who alone had kept his wits about him even as he changed and had led his team, what remained of them, to the surface and safety-what if Hank retained his ability to strategize?
Not for him the unreasoning frontal attack doomed to failure. No, he would watch and wait for his moment, until the dark intelligence in the house was distracted, its attention focused on. .
Other visitors.
The scent was stronger, unmistakable now, wafting from the trailer park that bordered both her home and the Wisharts. And the sound, louder and most definitely not the wind.
Wilma stepped in front of Goldie and Colleen, both unaware of what was urgently, oppressively clear to her.
“We’ve got trouble,” she said.
GET OUT GET OUT. It came like a blow, and Cal stepped back. Tina’s fingers closed tight around his, and he felt her trembling. In its corner, the refrigerator jerked threateningly. Cupboard doors slammed in manic rage, their contents long since smashed to nothing.
GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT.
“Can you reach him, Tina?” Cal fought not to shout over the shriek in his mind.
“I’m trying.” She struggled to get the words out, a pulse twitching at the corner of her eye, her breath coming in short gasps. “But there’s something else in here pulling at me.”
He could hear the panic in her voice, and he tried to will into her what calm he retained. Whether coincidence or not, she seemed to gather strength. She closed her eyes and concentrated, her feet drifting down to graze the floor.
The scream in his mind eased back.
The refrigerator quivered and was still. The cupboards lapsed into silence. They walked forward more quickly now, into the lightless pit of the hallway, the faint illumination that radiated from Tina’s flesh magnified eerily by the dust.
The door of the far bedroom on the left was shut, blue-green light leaking out along its frame.
We’re not going to harm you, we’re not-
From the edge of his vision, Cal caught the blur of a dark object hurtling toward them. Tina saw it, too; her aura flared up to field it.
“Don’t,” Cal called to her. She caught his meaning-do nothing that might be perceived as a threat-and faded her aura back, rendering it insubstantial. Cal blocked the object, a black Bakelite telephone, with his forearm. Pain shot up his arm as the phone rebounded, bounced off a wall and lay motionless.
There was a quaking beneath his feet, he could hear cracks splintering along the walls on either side of him, and the whole house seemed to moan.
You’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe, but Cal could feel fear rising to engulf the universe, and he felt his own fear in answer.
In the flickering light of Tina’s glow, Cal could see the picture frames lurching and slamming against the walls to get free, the carpeting tearing itself up. Tina was shaking, her hair whipping about as in a gale. Her eyes were huge, desperate, as she strained to stay focused amid the assault of clashing wills.
“Cal-Cal-I-!”
And then it was as if something deep within the house snapped, and there was a roaring that went on and on. The dead bulb in the fixture overhead ruptured, spewing glass. Cal instinctively moved to shield his sister. Picture frames tore free, and yellow pages shuddered up and catapulted at them. He batted them aside wildly, shouting. Then he felt a tingling on his skin and his eyes were dazzled as Tina’s luminescence flared out to enfold him, and relief and disappointment flooded him.
Magazines reared like hawks, struck the incandescence and were rebuffed, a side table came swinging up to shatter. Medicine bottles launched themselves, exploded against the barrier; pills and glass shrapneled against the bubble and fell back.
And over the deafening fear-rage bellow, another noise, rumbling from deep within the walls, a cracking, crashing, ripping nightmare of a sound. Chunks of plaster burst from the wall, and a thick timber shot out of the opening, piercing Tina’s barrier. It caught her a glancing blow on the side of the head, like a giant flicking a finger. She cried out and crumpled, her radiance damping down to nothing, leaving them defenseless.
The very air seemed to vibrate with triumph as the onslaught intensified, a cannonade of pens and paperweights and metal trays raining down on them. Cal fell on his sister, covering her with his body, taking the brunt of it. An aluminum medicine cart crashed into him, a heavy wall clock, a radio. He cried out at the spiderweb agony of cracking ribs. Doors along each wall were flinging themselves open and shut, laboring to tear themselves from their hinges. A bookcase tumbled toward him, scattering heavy volumes and figurines, which tore and shattered yet still bounded forward to expend their fury on him.
Cal curled into a tight ball around his sister, unmoving beneath him, and he knew it was the end and there was nothing he could do. One of the doors shrieked loose and cartwheeled through the air, smashing down on him with mad exultation, and he screamed, and in the scream was the entirety of his failure and his love and how he would give anything, do anything to save her, to consume himself and all the world if only, only-
Oh God oh God oh God, for God’s sake, please, please, please, don’t hurt her!
And in the deafening silence that followed, he couldn’t say whether he had screamed it or just thought it.
But the response was immediate, as all the objects dropped lifeless to the carpet, the quivering of floor and walls and ceiling halted, and the dust hung mute in the air.
Beneath him, Tina was breathing in quick gasps, moaning softly. Cal rose, pushing the heaped debris and remnant of door aside. The motion sent white-hot needles coursing up his side, and he nearly blacked out. But he inhaled slowly, pushed the vertigo down.
Bending stiffly, hissing against the pain, Cal took his sister’s hands. She was conscious, breathing more evenly now. He helped her to her feet, and she rose shakily, floated up off the floor, glimmering once more.
Slices of misty, first dawn light filtered in through the frame whose door had ripped free and the others where doors hung ajar. Only the far door on the left remained shut, the ghost light seeping along its edges. Tina opened her mouth to frame a question, but Cal motioned her to silence. She leaned in to him, and he put his arm around her as they advanced.