Fool on the Hill (38 page)

“Hobart?” asked Puck, for he too had caught the underscent. “What is—”

“The Fates!” Hobart swore, coming suddenly to life. “Get us out of here! Get us out of here right now!”

“What—” Puck began to say, and then the first Rat leapt up on the biplane’s left wing, sword drawn to kill. Puck did not balk at the absurdity—a Rat on two legs, wielding a weapon—he merely brought up his own sword, which lay unsheathed on the floor of the cockpit, and caught the Rat coming in, piercing it through the breastbone. It twisted away into the darkness with a squeal, wrenching Puck’s sword out of his hands.

Now from all around them in the dark shadows of the hangar came the sounds of swords being drawn, crossbows being cocked. The full complement of Rasferret’s Rats had been waiting here for over an hour, in the hope that the master of the Tower might return alone, or in such scant company as to be an easy mark. Fate had handed them a splendid opportunity.

“Turn us around!” Hobart was shouting, his own sword out, ready to defend. Puck, unarmed,
was
turning the plane, praying that the creatures would not think to shut the hangar doors. As long as the escape route remained open there was a chance, no matter how outnumbered they were; the biplane had a couple of good surprises in it.

Crossbow bolts struck the wings and fuselage of the plane as it swung around. One lucky shot smashed the wing-light; now the only illumination, what there was of it, came through the hangar doors. Emboldened, the Rats pressed forward. Some came at the sides of the plane, and Hobart fought wildly with these, finding strength in panic. A good many others moved to block the exit; as the plane completed its turn, Puck could see them, silhouetted against the opening.

As Hobart struggled behind him, crying out as he was wounded, the younger sprite reached low in the cockpit to find an almost forgotten switch—the switch connecting to the mini-cannons.
You’ll probably blow your own wings off,
he remembered Zephyr saying about them.
And maybe I will,
he thought now.

“Happy New Year, you bastards.” He flipped the switch and the biplane
jumped. Fire licked from beneath the lower wings, the blast resounding like a great cymbal crash. Eleven Rats were killed instantly, ripped apart by flying buckshot; a twelfth was blown clean out of the hangar.

Puck saw his chance. Keeping one eye on a nasty web of cracks in the lower right wing assembly, he throttled the biplane forward. But at least one of the Rats had some intelligence after all—the hangar doors were sliding rapidly closed, pulled by hidden counterweights. Already the opening seemed too narrow. Refusing to be trapped inside, Puck shoved the throttle to full and went for it anyway.

Both wing assemblies sheared clean off.

X.

The door snicked shut behind her. Jinsei stood on the green-carpeted floor of the White Library, staring at the gaping ruin of the north bay window. Here was the source of the crash: a man-sized hole had been punched through the glass. Wind and snow funneled in through the breach, dusting the Library. So it was no magic trick, after all. But there
was
magic here, of a darker sort.

Tap, tap, tap.

Cast-iron gantried bookstacks rose up two tiers high along the Library walls. It was from the upper tier, hidden in darkness, that the sound came.

Tap, tap, tap.

Jinsei should have been frightened, then. She should have asked herself just what precisely had punched such a large hole through the north window, should have turned, should have run. Instead, her earlier fear dissipated and, careful not to step on any broken glass, she made her way to the northwest corner of the room, where a circular stair led up to the tiers.

Tap—

Foot on the first step, face trance-like, some deep part of her trying to warn her to flee, her body paying no heed to the warning.

—tap—

Passing the lower tier, halfway up, climbing faster and faster.

—tap.

And now she had reached the top, stepped out onto the high tier. A few more brisk paces and she had come to a catwalk that reached from the west wall of the room to the east. Here she paused.

At the far end of the catwalk—which was not far at all, for the White Library is long but narrow—a pale sheet, ghostly in the darkness, stretched between two bookshelves like a shower-curtain. The sheet swung back and forth, beckoning her. Hidden behind it was the source of the sound, a rapping of metal against metal.

Tap, tap, tap.

Three long strides and Jinsei stood directly before the curtain. Again she paused, that inner voice screaming, shrieking at her. Unmindful, her left hand rose to pull aside the sheet. Her fingers brushed the fabric, which seemed almost alive.

From somewhere higher came another sound, like a muffled gunshot. Jinsei’s hand faltered.

The sheet swept aside anyway. The Rubbermaid uncoiled from behind it, swinging the mace upwards in a diagonal arc. If Jinsei had hesitated in the slightest—if she had taken time to scream, for example—the police might well have found her body lying beside the broken window, snow-frosted, head dashed open.

She did not hesitate; she threw herself backward with the blessed speed of reflex. Even so the first swing might have finished her, had her feet not chosen that same moment to tangle beneath her. She fell flat on her back on the catwalk, the mace stroke whipping past her as she tumbled, the tip of the weapon brushing the tip of her nose like a lover’s caress.

Undaunted, the Rubbermaid stepped forward, raising the mace high for another shot. As the weapon reached the height of its arc, Jinsei looked directly into the blue glow of the mannequin’s eyes. In that instant she knew everything that had happened on the suspension bridge; she knew Preacher was dead, and how.

Maybe it’ll bring you luck sometime.

Fury empowered her. Even as the mace started down Jinsei sprang up, aiming a blow of her own. She swung not her left arm but her right, leading with the edge of her wrist, on which the silver-banded bracelet now burned with green fire. It struck the Rubbermaid full on the side of the head.

With a crack like a rifle shot, the bracelet burst into a dozen pieces. The mannequin’s own swing went wide, striking the catwalk railing; the mace jolted free and spun away into the darkness. The Rubbermaid itself was hurled back, as if jerked by a cable, to smash jarringly into the bookstack behind it. In a shower of books it collapsed, falling in a heap. But the glow in its eyes did not go out.

“Oh God,” Jinsei croaked. Fury washed out of her as quickly as it had entered, to be replaced by an unbearable sense of loss. She staggered against the railing, blinking back tears while the white sheet whispered seductively against the bookshelves. “Oh God, Prea—”

The Rubbermaid straightened an arm. It sat up, scattering more books.

Once again, Jinsei acted reflexively. Both her wrists now bare, she gripped the catwalk railing tightly and swung herself over the side. The Rubbermaid sprang forward to grab her but did not quite make it; plastic fingers half-snagged a pants cuff and then let it slip free.

It was a long drop to the floor.

XI.

It was a long drop from the pinnacle of the Tower to the Library roof. The biplane, little more than a propellered pipe without its wings, dangled over the void at a paralyzingly steep angle. The closing hangar doors had caught the tail of the plane like a pincer, and right now were the only things keeping it from a fatal plummet.

Puck, one arm thrust into a shoulder strap of his emergency parachute, was trying desperately to get Hobart’s attention.

“The wind, Hobart!” he shouted, snowflakes whipping past his face. “You have to talk to the wind and get it to help us! I don’t know if my parachute can hold two!”

Hobart had slumped forward in his seat, bleeding from a scratch across his scalp and a far more serious sword puncture in his shoulder. He seemed in shock, oblivious to his surroundings or his peril.

“Hobart, please!” Puck screamed. “You’ve got to hear me! Hob—”

Another voice, heard only in the mind:
Ho-bart.

Now Hobart stirred, raising his head sluggishly. “Wind . . .” he whispered, through dry lips.

Above, the General of the Rats stood just within the hangar doors, staring down the length of the plane at them. Yellowed teeth formed something that might have been a grin.

Ho-bart,
the Rat General thought at them.
Thresh ends you, Ho-bart.

Deeper within the hangar, another Rat pulled a lever. The doors began to shunt open again; the nose of the biplane dipped like a descending pendulum. “The wind!” cried Puck, attempting to grab Hobart and finish putting on his parachute at the same time. “The wind!”

Thresh ends you.

The biplane dropped, tumbling end over end and dashing to pieces on the Library roof below. Yet what of the occupants? A sudden furious blast of wind drove Thresh back from the doors, hiding their fate from him; likewise the Messenger, soaring high, was all at once so buffeted that it lost concern with anything but its own flight.

And as for the Grub, his attention was presently focused elsewhere.

XII.

In one sense Jinsei was extremely lucky: a long study table stretched directly beneath the catwalk and it would have been quite easy for her to land half on and half off it, breaking her back or worse. Instead she hit feet first on a strip of carpet little more than a yard wide. Her left leg took most of the shock; she felt her ankle scream in protest as she collapsed full out on the floor.

She would have liked to just lie there and cry out her pain, but Jinsei understood on a most fundamental level that she had no time. There was movement on the catwalk above, and any second the thing, whatever it was, would be down after her. Too much to hope that it would hurt
its
ankle.

What was it? She had no time for that question, either, no time to think how impossible this was, how this simply could not be happening. All her effort she concentrated on one thing, escape. She stood up, ignoring the complaint from her ankle as best she could, and half-hopped to the door.

A fluttering behind her as she set her hand on the knob. Jinsei did not look back, but if she had she would have seen the Rubbermaid descending through the air in slow motion, white sheet trailing behind like the cape of some vampiric Zorro. Jinsei yanked the door open, stumbled through. The wind coming in through the window slammed it shut after her with a roar.

Jinsei rushed down the stairs as quickly as her wounded ankle would allow, nearly falling headlong twice. She thought briefly of Mrs. Woolf and knew that the librarian was on her own; there was no way to warn her. As she staggered down the last steps to the main doors, she tried to recall the location of the nearest Blue Light Phone. She also wondered where she might go to hide.

With a crash louder than the original window-breaking, the Rubbermaid plowed right through the White Library door, snapping the wooden frame, shivering the glass to bits. Once out, however, it did not race to catch up or engage in any more leaping; it descended the stairs with a self-assured ease, as if confident that Jinsei could not escape.

Jinsei, confident of nothing but her own mortality, loped past the checkout desk. She was in luck; she had forgotten to relock the main doors after saying goodbye to Preacher.

Preacher, oh Preacher I
—

She thrust the thought away, shoved through the doors, ankle throbbing now. Outside the wind seemed almost angry; it tore at her clothes, whipped her hair around. She did not bother locking the doors behind her, knowing her pursuer would not be deterred.

No Blue Light was immediately visible. Jinsei lost her balance on the Library’s front steps, found it again, and limped toward the Arts Quad. On her right a sculpture rose up, The Song of the Vowels. Flash of a memory: a November night, cold but not as cold as this and without snow, she and Preacher sitting at the base of that sculpture, hugging for warmth. They had just come from a movie . . .

Stop it!

There: across the Quad between Goldwin-Smith and Lincoln Halls, looking terribly distant, the glow of a Blue Light. Moving as swiftly as possible, Jinsei set out on a diagonal for that cold spark of hope, not wanting to consider her chances. A hidden ice patch sent her sprawling before she had gotten ten feet.

The wind had quieted enough that she could hear the crunch of leather boots on snow, the flutter of the white sheet . . . she scrambled back to her feet, shouting now, though she knew there was no one to hear: “
HELP ME! SOMEBODY! SOMEBODY!"

Her voice echoed back flat and dead from the Quad buildings. The statues of Ezra and Andrew stood mute. No help there.

Jinsei stumbled forward a few more paces before falling again. Fresh pain shot her ankle; she feared this time she had broken it. She tried to push herself back up anyway, and plastic hands caressed her shoulder blades.

Jinsei screamed, putting all her strength into it. She screamed as the hands like steel pincers gripped her upper arms, screamed as they turned her over, screamed as she looked up into the face of the Rubbermaid, eyes blue death, lips stretched into a grin.

The scream choked off abruptly as the mannequin’s hands found her throat.

XIII.

The patrol car reeked of vomit. Both windows were rolled down despite the cold, but this was not enough for Sam Doubleday; he had lit a cigar, El Topo or something equally foul, to further kill the smell. As far as Nattie Hollister was concerned the smoke just made things worse, but she bore it in silence, steering south on Thurston Avenue, passing Risley on the right.

They had just come from a house party up on Triphammer Road, where a very drunken individual had gotten it into his head to climb a tree on the front lawn. After fifteen minutes of coaxing they’d managed to get him back down, at which point he’d thrown up a great glurt of alcohol and half-digested junk food on Doubleday’s trousers. Doubleday had wanted to arrest the drunk. Hell, he’d wanted to beat him senseless, even if that were a bit redundant. In the end Hollister’s cooler head had prevailed; they’d seen to it the fellow was put to bed and taken off in a hurry. Now another call had come in, a domestic dispute over on State Street.
Bet they’re going to love us,
Hollister thought, as the car cruised over the East Avenue Bridge.