Greely's Cove (40 page)

Carl smiled faintly, sadly. “No forgiveness needed. Lorna and I were divorced, a condition I brought on myself. I don’t have any right to feel hurt, and certainly no right to be pissed off at you. I was just a little—surprised.”

“You’re not going to rip my arm off and beat me to death with it?”

“Not hardly. Who would I get to take me sailing in the San Juans?”

As evening fell, the drizzly mist floated eastward across the Puget Sound, driven by a sharp winter breeze that left a scatter of forlorn stars above Greely’s Cove. Carl and Renzy finished their work at the storefront on Frontage Street and ambled back to the bungalow on Second Avenue, chatting quietly as old friends do, often slipping into a private jargon of their boyhood that an outsider would have found unintelligible. Carl grew quiet as they neared the little house that squatted dark and silent between the tall pines in the front yard.

“Something’s wrong,” he said, as they turned onto the walk that led to the porch.

“No kidding,” replied Renzy. “Your yard looks like a fucking biological warfare experiment. What’s happened to the shrubbery, for cripes’ sake? The grass is half-dead, and even those old pines are taming yellow.”

“That’s not what I mean. If Jeremy were here, like he’s supposed to be, there’d be some lights on.” Carl dug for his keys as they clomped onto the porch, unlocked the door, and pushed it open, only to be greeted by darkness and silence.

Just as Carl had feared, Jeremy was gone.

Robinson Sparhawk sat quietly in the stuttering candlelight and tried not to watch Hannie Hazelford disrobe, though she clearly suffered no compunction over doing so in the presence of a man she had met only one day earlier. Nakedness was a requirement of the business she was about, a very serious business that allowed for no squeamish modesty.

Robbie tried to concentrate instead on the mysterious paraphernalia of the small room: the incredibly old-looking tomes that lined the walls on sagging shelves, the ornately carved wooden table that stood on waxen blocks at the center of a pentagram inscribed on the floor, the murky bottles and jars that sat in clusters atop musty cabinets and bureaus (most were full of vile-looking liquids and powders and chips and chunks of things he dared not even guess about).

But try as he might, he could not resist staring at the spectacle of Hannie’s nakedness as she peeled off the last of her clothing. Her leathery breasts hung flat against her sunken chest, pendulous and long empty of flesh. Her rattleboned arms and legs were so spindly that they appeared near breaking. The skin of her misshapen torso hung in droopy folds and creases, giving the impression that her organs were rolling around loose inside.

Off came the blond wig, revealing a nearly bald and spotted skull that looked too ancient to house a living brain. Lastly, she removed her turquoise contact lenses and replaced them with a pair of silvery pince-nez that perched crookedly on the bridge of her nose, enlarging her filmy eyes beyond absurdity.

Naked but for her pince-nez and shiny witch’s ring, she sat down at the table and opened the hinged wooden box that lay before her on a thick block of wax, inside which was the instrument that she had reverently shown Robbie the previous day—the scrying mirror. Its round obsidian surface and pewter mounting gleamed softly in the candlelight.

“I’m quite ready now,” she said, glancing up at Robbie. “I must warn you that I may behave strangely, once the scrying begins, and I may even appear to be in some distress. But under no circumstances should you try to help me or even communicate with me. Any interference by you could be extremely dangerous to us both. Is that understood?”

“Quite,” replied the Texan, imitating her British manner. “I’m s’posed to sit here and watch, nothing else.”

“Very good. I must warn you, too, that you yourself may be affected, owing to your own considerable psychic ability. You may see unsettling images, feel forces around you, but you must take great care not to unleash any of your own psychic energy, no matter how frightened you become. My scrying spell will protect us both, unless of course you interfere, either psychically or physically, which would be akin to battering down our defenses from within.”

“Don’t worry, Hannie,” said Robbie. “I’ll hold my self back, no matter what happens.”

Hannie then leaned forward until her senescent face hung directly over the scrying mirror, but with her eyes closed, her bony hands alongside her head with palms facing downward and fingers pointed stiffly toward the lustrous disk of obsidian. Her old lips, wiped clean of lipstick, began to move. From her mouth issued low, sibilant words that Robbie had never heard before—a language as ancient, he imagined, as the human species itself. After seven repetitions of a long phrase, she broke into heavily accented English that was very unlike the modern British dialect she normally spoke, grammatically familiar but hard to understand because of its singsongy, weirdly modulated tones and exaggerated diphthongs.

Was this the English of centuries past, Robbie wondered, perhaps spoken in the manner of Shakespeare or Henry VIII, from an era when Hannie Hazelford was already one of the oldest humans alive?

Mother under the Sea, with whom Woman is One,

In the fullness of Lammass now having begun,

Using Mugwort, Plantain and an herb called Stime,

Have I proffered a Plea and uttered a Rhyme.
...

She began to rock back and forth in short, rhythmic jerks, eyes suddenly open wide and fixed upon the disk. Robbie detected the papery sound of her nipples brushing the wooden tabletop. Gone now was any doubt in Robbie’s mind that everything Hannie had told him was anything but the awful truth.

Throughout the previous afternoon and deep into the night, from the very moment he had been summoned to this cottage, he had listened to her dark story while sitting in her comfortable parlor and sipping tea from a Wedgwood cup that Hannie kept perpetually full, munching little cakes that she brought from her cupboard until he could not eat one more bite. They’d graduated eventually to gin, which Hannie seemed only too happy to pour, until Robbie had become so tipsy that he could not possibly have driven back to the motel. He’d had no choice but to let her put him up in a spare room.

With the coming of morning, the telling had resumed, over breakfast and continuing through midmorning coffee, then over lunch and afternoon snacks and finally supper, interspersed occasionally with her interrogating him thoroughly about his ordeal at Whiteleather Place.

That he had stayed so many hours with this queer old crone in her little cottage, listening raptly to her words like a newly initiated disciple at the feet of a wizened holy man, would itself have seemed incredible, had not her words given him answers to the dark questions that had plagued him since an episode years ago at Carlyle Lake. Having recently met the thing that called itself Monty Pirtz, Robbie had needed those answers more desperately than he had ever needed anything in his life. Hannie had supplied them. In addition, she had been hospitable and kind.

She radiated a feeling of power and, more important, of
hope
, to which Robbie felt himself drawn—power against the evil that had nearly consumed him on the front porch of Whiteleather Place, and hope that there was some way to defeat it, kill it, cleanse the earth of it.

With these Nine Herbs, which are Three times Three
,

And the power of the Words, which comes from Thee
,

I shall loose this Charm into the World of Light

To guard me from harm and to save me this night

From Craft of vile Creatures, whose Names Thou dost know,

And to grant me Thy Favor, O Mother Below
...

She lapsed again into the old tongue that would have sounded like gibberish to Robbie, had it not been so fulsome and rhythmic, so alive with power. His crutches lay across his lap, and he discovered that he was gripping one of them so tightly that his hands ached. He wished that Katharine were with him, sitting beside his chair with her massive head resting comfortingly on his knee, and not locked away in the spare bedroom as Hannie had insisted. Dogs, the old witch had explained, are psychically sensitive and easily frightened by the energies released during a scrying session. If a huge dog like Katharine were to go berserk during the session, the result could be disastrous.

Hannie fell silent at last and leaned forward to stare closely into the black surface of the mirror, a hunkered caricature of the ancient hag, her face twitching and contorting in the dancing candlelight. Robbie stared at that face, scarcely daring to breathe and feeling the first tentative tingling of his own psychic nerves.

It was happening now, whatever it was, this business of scrying, by which Hannie had learned of his nearly catastrophic meeting with Monty Pirtz two nights ago, by which she had located him on Sunday afternoon at Liquid Larry’s. For a seasoned practitioner like Hannie, the scrying mirror was a window into time and space, through which she could locate and observe the doings, comings and goings of others—past, present, and future. With it she could track the forces of the unseen world.

Yes, the Old Truth was real—of that Robbie was certain beyond any flittering doubt. He felt ashamed for having so neatly ridiculed Mona Kleinian’s attempts over the years to make him see this. But now he had come face-to-face with it—if one could indeed say that Monty Pirtz had a
face
—and he had taken Hannie Hazelford’s crash course on the subject. He had become a true believer.

Hannie Hazelford was more than a thousand years old, one of the last members of the Sisterhood of Morrigan, an order dedicated to ridding creation of the kind of evil that had invaded Greely’s Cove. At Whiteleather Place, somewhere in its black lower echelons, lived a specimen of that evil, guarded and served by a sorcerer whose name was Hadrian Craslowe, himself old beyond belief. The evil had reached out into the community of Greely’s Cove in order to feed, to strengthen itself on the provender of human flesh, to procreate and inflict another of its kind upon humanity. It had commandeered the body, mind, and soul of a tragically impaired little boy named Jeremy, subjected him to execrable ceremonies and rituals in order to transform him into a steward, like Craslowe. Jeremy would serve the newborn offspring, just as Craslowe served
his
master.

Sickened as he had been by the story, Robbie would not have dreamed of refusing Hannie Hazelford’s plea for his help. Though newly converted to the Old Truth, and lacking even the status of a rank novice in its practices, he could be a valuable ally to her. He did, after all, possess the Gift. While facing the Monty Pirtz-thing and struggling to free himself from its clutches, he had discovered a new dimension of that Gift, a new power that he could use to defend himself and other innocent humans from the predatory evil of Whiteleather Place. He was no longer an aging, helpless cripple.

Their first goal, Hannie had declared, must be to find and destroy the newborn, and the key to accomplishing this, she’d been certain, was Jeremy. This would be no small undertaking, because although Jeremy was a mere slip of a boy, he already possessed awesome powers that Craslowe had transplanted into him from his own feral mind. Jeremy, no doubt, had driven his own mother to suicide, using those powers to stretch her sanity beyond the snapping point, subjecting her to hair-raising demonstrations of his evil magic, planting abominable thoughts and urges in her mind. He had become a dangerous creature in his own right. Hannie had concluded that the safest way to locate him and track him was through the scrying mirror, hoping that he would lead her and Robbie to the newborn.

Suddenly the old witch began to tremble. The table rattled, causing the pewter candle holder to vibrate against the wooden surface. Robbie stared at her and wondered if she were in pain, whether his imagination or a trick of the candlelight was giving a soft, greenish glow to the Kabbalistic symbols carved in the block of wax, upon which the scrying mirror sat. Low coughing sounds came from Hannie’s throat, and her body stiffened.

Robbie himself felt a tremor of psychic energy, and within the space of three heartbeats his mind was aswirl with images. At the very center of the gestalt display was Jeremy, and someone was with him, someone very old. On the periphery were fixtures like candles, heavy books and ponderous furniture that Robbie had never seen before. He knew that this was Whiteleather Place. The old man at Jeremy’s side, who Robbie could sense was Craslowe, was talking, giving advice, issuing warnings. Somewhere in the distance Robbie got an impression of someone searching, someone who was near panic, whose heart was full of dread, and Robbie’s mind was drawn to him. It was Jeremy’s father, Carl, whom Robbie had never met except in the story told him by Hannie. Carl, too, was with someone else. In an old car. They were cruising the dark neighborhoods of Greely’s Cove, searching for Jeremy—but for different reasons, it seemed, although Robbie could not be sure, because the focus of the scrying rippled and the scene was beginning to move. Something was happening...

Mitch Nistler parked his old El Camino next to Cannibal Strecker’s Blazer and trudged through the sharp night air to the front door of the crack house. He knocked tentatively on the splintery wood and waited for the door to open, which it did. But not until a dingy curtain had moved aside briefly in one of the front windows.

“So, it’s you,” said Stella DeCurtis, who was spiderlike under a sleeveless jumpsuit of leathery black. The flesh of her arms was nearly as white as her fissile hair. “Well, don’t just fucking stand there. You’re letting all the heat out.” She turned and wandered back toward what had once been the kitchen of the tiny house but had since become the production room of a crack factory. Mitch followed, pulling the door closed behind him. Corley the Cannibal sat in a plastic lawn chair with a beer in one paw and a cigarette between his lips, watching the
Bob Newhart Show
on a portable TV. An electric space heater glowed nearby.