Demons (42 page)

“You understand who we call, eh?” Yanan said, looking at Ira.

Ira nodded. “Someone who’s gone beyond—who can talk to their Retriever . . . Marcus . . .” He looked at the boy. He shrugged. “Marcus told me.”

The old priest got slowly to his feet—she could almost hear his joints creaking. The priest turned to look at her, his eyes like pale blue fire. He waited.

She took a deep breath, and let the anger slide away to some dark place inside her. She crossed to her small wooden stool and sat down; it was so low she had to squat as much as sit.

The priest came and sat opposite her. They all joined hands—and it began. They set out to summon the ninth participant in their Circle—a dead man.

Beneath Ash Valley

Glyneth could hardly feel her feet now in the cold water. How far had she gone? Her back was aching from hunching over; her socks had gotten bunched in her shoes. Now and then something slimy and furry wriggled past her ankles, making her hiss with revulsion, but she kept on, afraid of something worse. Following the coursing of the stream.

She stopped and listened. Sounds came to her, down the culvert, distorted with reverberation. Ringing sounds, cracks, splashes—losing definition. She took a deep breath and went on, followed her weakening penlight beam around a curve—and cracked her head on a pipe.

Gasping with pain, she fell floundering back to sit dizzily in the water, on slime-coated concrete. After a few moments the throbbing subsided, and she gingerly felt the goose egg on her forehead—it was tender. “Ow. Fucking
hell
,” she muttered. Then a moment of panic. The flashlight! Where was it? There was a dim glow in the water, like a phosphorescent fish. She snatched at the flashlight with cold-clumsy fingers, pulled it from the water. It blinked, twice, three times—and she whimpered. But it didn’t go out.

Then she froze, fell silent, listening. There was a heavy splashing coming up behind her in the darkness. Or was it up ahead?

She stood carefully, mindful that there was a pipe above her and, not knowing what else to do, moved on. Slowly, the sounds receded. The fading penlight beam wavered over the dirty water; she caught the lights of yellow-pink eyes, small wet snouts regarding her more than once from small drainage channels oozing water. She swore softly at them, and the rats turned and swam away, naked tails rippling like agitated earthworms.

She began to feel sick from cold and realized that her core heat was draining away in the slow, cold push of the water. She started to shiver uncontrollably.

Another fifty steps, and she thought she could make out a light in the distance. She switched off the little flashlight and found there was still just enough illumination to allow her to make her way down the sibilating tunnel.

The culvert opened up a bit, so she could straighten, and she discovered that the light was coming from above: a rainwater grate and a manhole up there, side by side. The light was mostly coming through the grate. It looked like street light. She heard a car go whirring by.

She crossed to a metal ladder and climbed the rungs that were sunk deep into the damp concrete wall, thinking,
This is it! I’m getting out of this stinking hole!

She reached the underside of the manhole and pushed. It didn’t budge, not even slightly. She tried again. It was utterly unyielding. She guessed that it must have been one of those manholes sealed in place by asphalt.

The sewer grate was bolted down—she could see the bolts. “Like to get hold of the genius who worked on that street,” she muttered through grinding teeth, descending the rungs, back into the damp darkness. “What is the fucking point of a manhole if . . . if . . .” She broke off, stopped on the ladder, peering downward.

There was something big, moving through the water, about a yard under her feet.

She squinted down in the dim light—her own shadow was obscuring whatever it was. She flattened against the ladder so the light fell on the thing.

It was a man, moving low through the water like an alligator, coming out of the tunnel that led toward Ash Valley—opposite the way Glyneth had come. He was dressed in a soggy sweatshirt and jeans, one shoe on, the other foot bare, and he was
pulling
himself through the water with his hands clawing at the bottom, and making excited babyish sounds as he went—cooing and sputtering and bubbling. The skin on the back of his neck looked bluish to her; she guessed he must be close to dying of the cold.

But he glided vigorously through the water to the branch she’d just come out of—there he hesitated, lifting his head to stare down the culvert.

Another man joined him, coming from the same direction. No, this was a woman. She was walking bent, crouched so low that her face was almost touching the water. She wore a torn dress, her wet hair plastered on her head, down her back, and dangling to trail in the dirty water.

The woman looked up, but not right at Glyneth; she seemed to be drawn to stare at the light overhead. Her eyes were milky, filmed over.

She returned her baleful attention to the opening of the culvert, cooing to herself, giggling now and then as she waited with the man, the two of them staring into the dark tunnel, teeth bared.

Glyneth’s arms ached. She shivered, and it was hard to keep her teeth from clacking together. But she was afraid of making any sound at all.

Another man came, a chunky guy in a white shirt and no pants. His shirt clung to him; she could see his naked ass, as pink as the tails of the rats. He was pulling himself along in the water like the first; he seemed to be keening like a lost cat.

He crouched alongside the other two, each making their own odd little noise, staring down the culvert the way she’d come.

And then a flashlight beam quivered from the opening. Someone said something. Maybe, “Who’s that?” Glyneth wasn’t sure.

The one she thought of as the alligator man seemed to dart forward, propelled up and out of the water. Someone yelled. There was a bang and a metallic echo; she smelled gun smoke, heard giggling. Then the other two moved into the culvert.

Now,
Glyneth thought as a frightened yell and the sounds of thrashing came from the tunnel. She climbed down to the water and went into the tunnel the three had come out of.

Just as she entered, she realized the water was changing color around her knees, darkening, as if it were rusting, brown, red. Blood.

She heard a man scream like a small child.

She paused long enough to glance over her shoulder, only to see Dickinham, in the tunnel opposite, his face contorted with some terrible realization. He reached out to her imploringly, then the tunnel strobed as he fired the pistol again, into the ceiling. One of them had his wrist gripped in blue-white hands.

The two men and the woman bore him down. With inhumanly fast movements of their jaws, they tore red gobbets from his neck and shoulders, clawing bloody gel from one of his eye sockets, cooing and keening and giggling.

A ripple of sick disorientation went through Glyneth, something beyond terror, and she almost vomited. But that would make too much noise.

She turned away, looking inside for control of herself.

Fear, horror—it’s all just internal weather,
she reminded herself,
the weather of the mind. Let it blow—but don’t let it blow you away.

She began to splash determinedly through the darkness . . . then stopped, thinking:
How many more of them are there, waiting up ahead?

There was a smell she recognized in the air, too: D17.

She remembered the gas mask and pulled it over her face, set it for high cleanse, and forced herself to go on—though it was even harder to see now. She brought out the little penlight’s pathetic illumination once more. It felt good to move; it warmed her a little. A dozen steps onward, and then her foot struck an obstruction—a painful one. She bit back a curse and felt under the water. Found a piece of broken pipe, three inches in diameter, maybe a foot and a half long. Instinctively, she picked it up.

She went on, praying under her breath, then felt a sickening contact on her knee—she froze, afraid one of the madmen was about to bear her down as they had Dickinham. Something solid yet mushy, with bones inside it. Swallowing bile, she pointed the fading penlight beam down and saw the corpse of a Mexican man floating, caught against her leg. He was faceup, eyes glazed, lips dead white. A rat poised on its hind legs on the corpse’s collarbone, like a dog begging, peering up at her. She could see a ragged gash where it had chewed away the flesh of the dead man’s jawline, exposing bone.

She knew this time she was going to vomit. She got the gas mask off just in time as she splashed frantically away from the corpse, pausing to empty her guts into the water. She found herself laughing bitterly as she forced the gas mask back over her face. Breathing the smell of her own vomit. Hearing the sound of her own harsh breathing in there. At least the mask protected her face from wet, toothy little animals.

Keep going, keep going. Get out!

Another forty yards, and the penlight finally gave out. She shook it, fiddled with its switch. “Fuck!”

She shoved it in a pocket and continued on, feeling her way, thirty, forty, fifty steps, and saw another cylinder of wan light up ahead.

Glyneth hurried to the light, almost falling in her haste. She stopped abruptly in the opening to the shaft for the manhole. Up above was an open sewer grating. A way out!

But there were two people between her and the grating—both of them on the ladder.

There was a blond boy of about thirteen, wearing only his underwear, pale and skinny, whining, weeping, trying to get up the ladder, to get out; blood streamed down his back, his legs. One of the sopping, giggling madmen clung to the rungs below him, his right arm twisted through a rung, his hand clamped to the struggling boy’s ankle. He was a slender, muscular man, perhaps half black, without a shirt, a handmade tattoo on his shoulder:
999
. His loose trousers were crowded with pocket zippers. He wore slimy tennis shoes. In his left hand he gripped a clawlike gardening implement, which he’d dug deeply into the boy’s right calf. The wounds where it dug in ripped deeper and deeper as the weeping boy struggled.

Glyneth made up her mind. She had to get out that way—and she had to help the boy.

Fighting to keep control of herself, Glyneth hefted the pipe and came at the man from behind, grabbing a rung with her left hand, setting her foot on the lowest to hoist herself up, then bringing the pipe down hard on the back of his head.

He turned a milky-eyed gaze at her, startled, as blood gushed from his split scalp. He let go of the blood-slick gardening claw and grabbed her firmly by the throat, squeezing. She hit him twice more in the same spot. His eyes seemed to clear for a moment—he gaped at her in confusion, as if trying to remember how he’d come to this—and then he fell onto her, knocking her off the ladder.

Glyneth yelled as she fell back in the water, the weight of the man pressing her under, his blood curtaining the light away, closing the surface of the water with tightening skeins of red.

She torqued her body hard to one side, dumping him off, and struggled to her feet, swaying, looking for the boy.

Who was turning his own milky eyes to her—just as he leapt, snarling, laughing, at her.

Her scream was cut short as he bore her back into the water, onto the man’s body. The boy gripped her throat, pressing his thumbs into her windpipe. She swung the pipe at his head, quivered with revulsion as it connected, hard, crunching into the boy’s skull.

Sobbing, she rolled him off her, left him to float facedown in the water. Bubbles seethed up around his head. She let him drown. It was a kindness.

She climbed the ladder as best she could, though it was awkward holding on to the pipe. She didn’t want to let it go now.

The light grew brighter; the air a little warmer. Her relief at climbing to the open street, at the base of a streetlight, lasted only till she found that she was in the park square at the center of town, till she realized the warmth was coming from great, sky-licking fires consuming the entire block. She stumbled across the treeless, torn earth of the park, through rolling gusts of smoke. She saw the piles of bodies in the very center of the park and the other bodies being dragged there by the milky-eyed mob, by the shambling, giggling victims of the undiluted, aerial Dirvane 17 spraying that had taken place yesterday and today.

Till she saw that something squatted in the center of the pile of bodies . . .

Till she saw the demon.

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