Midnight's Angels - 03 (5 page)

Ritchie felt the hairs on the nape of his neck crawl as he stared at the completely darkened house. There was nothing outwardly remarkable about it. It was on two stories and recently painted, with a rather grimy white truck parked out front. But he’d been around trouble his whole adult life. Before he’d been promoted, he had mostly worked the Tyburn area of town, which was a challenging beat to put it mildly.

So he knew what trouble looked like, felt like. It set up a low vibration on the air. And right now, he could sense it clearly. Lord, he could almost taste it.

“This has been happening all over town?” he asked the uniformed patrolmen who had called him here.

“Fourth report we’ve had so far,” replied the older one, Harrison Whitby. “And Christ knows how many others have gone unreported so far.”

They were on Cartland Street, on the inner edge of the Greenwood district. Garnerstown lay to the south of them, and Tyburn to the west. The air was very still around them, and their breath was misting slightly on it. The whole street looked perfectly normal, except that a few lights had come on in the windows of the nearest houses, and a few faces were peering out. A scream had been reported coming from this place, some forty minutes back. A family called the Hermanns lived here.

But it wasn’t these patrolmen who had turned up in the first place to investigate. They hadn’t even been inside, as yet. A second black-and-white was sitting on the driveway with its doors wide open and its lights switched off. Ritchie knew whose car it was. Bob Beecham and Luther Clayburgh’s, good officers both.

“Neighbors said they forced an entry. And that was the last that was seen or heard of them,” Harrison explained.

Except the door was shut again. They’d obviously used a credit card, since there was no visible damage to the lock. If there was one thing Ritchie couldn’t tolerate, it was bad things happening to his own men. And two officers disappearing counted very much as that.

He frowned and peered more closely at the house. There didn’t seem to be mere ordinary darkness in there. It was pitch black past the windowpanes, like they’d been painted over from the inside. Not any of the glow from the streetlamps made its way in past those panes. And it ought to have done. There should be outlines visible. He didn’t like the look of that.

“Anyone tried calling them?” he asked.

“Several times, sir,” Lee Drake said.

And dammit, cops didn’t go vanishing for no good reason. So what was the deal here?

Vallencourt got his Browning out and started closing the distance.

“Sir?” Harrison asked behind him. “Shouldn’t we wait for backup?”

“You can do what you like,” he answered. “Me? I’ve waited long enough.”

When he got within six feet he charged, slamming the door with his shoulder. The lock burst open easily enough. Ritchie stumbled into the hallway. A swift clatter of footsteps told him that the uniformed guys had followed him up. And he’d have done this on his own, sure. But he felt a whole lot happier knowing that his back was being watched.

He raised his left hand, signaling the pair of them to keep quiet and slow down.

Aside from his own breathing, there was not another sound. The house was wholly immobile around them, like it had been cast in stone. Then he noticed something else.

The door was fully open, wasn’t it? And there was a streetlamp on the curb out past this same front yard. He ought to be standing in a strip of faded yellow. But …

Everything was
still
black around him. Was as seamlessly dark as a coal mine. When he glanced at his own raised hand, he could barely make out the edges of it. And that simply couldn’t be the case.

Which confirmed -- if he didn’t already know it -- this was something supernatural.

There was an unexpected shuffling noise to his right. Ritchie swung in that direction, but still couldn’t see butkiss. Had no idea what had made that sound. This was virtually like being blind.

At which point, Harrison Whitby unclipped his flashlight from his belt, switched it on, and played it around. And that seemed to work. It was only light from outside that could not get in, apparently.

He played the beam where that first sound had emanated from. An open doorway emerged from the gloom, with a dining room beyond it. But Ritchie couldn’t make out what had made that shuffling.

“Let’s see what you look like,” he was whispering.

But nothing showed itself. At least, not at first.

There was a polished table, surrounded by chairs. A glass-fronted cabinet beyond that with some crystal ornaments arranged inside. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Harrison took a few steps closer so that he could get a better angle on the room. And when he stopped, the sound came again.

The beam danced everywhere, still picking up nothing. The carpet was bare. So if something was on the move in there, then where exactly was it?

Ritchie’s gaze lifted a little higher and he thought, for the briefest second, that he’d caught a wink like silver. Like the light being reflected off a metal object. Like a badge?

Harrison had seen it too, and growled, “What the
blazes
?”

The pool of light went to the far end of the room. All that it illuminated was some faded wallpaper, the metallic glint no longer apparent. Ritchie didn’t think their eyes were playing tricks on them. But there seemed to be nothing there.

He had been keeping quiet this whole time. But now, he decided to announce himself.

“Bob?” he bellowed. “Luther? If you’re in here, show yourselves!”

His voice echoed down the hall. He got no other answer.

But when he heard another shuffle, it was coming from above them.

Harrison, beside him, jerked. The light shot up, wavering spastically. It passed across bare ceiling for an instant, and then settled on a darker shape. Ritchie could make out the deep blue of a uniform. Within it was the glitter of the badge he’d seen.

And finally, a pale face was revealed, actually hanging upside down.

It was Bob Beecham.

* * *

Vallencourt went lurching back. So did both the uniformed cops. The beam flew off wildly for a second and the pallid features disappeared. Then Harrison got a handle on himself and redirected it, revealing the same bizarre sight it had done before.

There was Officer Robert Beecham, on his hands and knees. And it was strange enough that he was on all fours. But that way on the
ceiling
?

There seemed to be nothing holding him up. Ritchie had seen a lot of weird sights in his time, but nothing quite like this one. He felt his arms begin to quiver. And there seemed to be ice water rushing through his veins. He’d come across some stuff as bizarre as you could possibly imagine, but this beat them all.

God Alive, he
knew
this man! Bob Beecham had a wife and a three year-old son, and lived in a nice little house in West Meadow. He’d been around to them for barbeques during the summer months, and had gone out drinking with the guy on several occasions. Bob was the decent, normal type. So what had happened to him?

The face above him twisted to a mask of pure malevolence. Its eyes shone strangely in the flashlight’s beam. It moved a few inches, the whole body still defying gravity. And then, its lips began to slide apart.

There was nothing red beyond them. Nothing wet or moving, like there’d usually be when someone’s mouth came open. Just impenetrable blackness, the same kind there had been when they’d first entered the house. It was like Bob was no longer filled with flesh and blood. Like all of that had been gouged out and then replaced with hollow darkness.

The mouth had formed an almost perfect circle, but it showed no signs of trying to speak. Ritchie could see the man’s limbs tensing. Was Bob going to attack?

His head was reeling. He still couldn’t grasp what exactly he was looking at. He took aim with his Browning, although he did that reluctantly. The thought of shooting at another cop sent shivers down his spine.

That was when Lee Drake, behind him, shouted, “Oh my good God --
Sarge
?”

The flashlight swiveled around. The beam immediately started picking out more faces.

Officer Luther Clayburgh still had his uniform cap on, albeit it was tilted at a very peculiar angle. His features were twisted up the same way as his partner’s, his eyes like pools of dark, polluted oil. And the rest of them …?

There were a middle-aged couple, a husband and wife, presumably the Hermanns. Several children of various ages. And what might be an aging relative, an old man with his perfectly bald head offset by a pair of bushy sideburns.

Their expressions were the same, horribly contorted. And their eyes looked soulless, throwing back no slightest human spark.

It took Ritchie’s fractured mind a little while more to figure out what was happening above him. These people were spaced around the staircase, but not on the actual
stairs
. They were clinging to the banisters, or hanging from the nearby walls. Defying gravity, the same way as Beecham.

So whatever had happened to them, it had set them free of natural laws. Staring at them, Ritchie was put in mind of huge, ungainly insects. They were, like Bob, on their hands and knees.

As he watched, their mouths started coming open too, with ugly wet smacking noises. One of them, a dark-haired girl of about six years old, abruptly leapt from her position on the wall and landed on a banister post. Then her brother started scuttling down to join her.

Stand and fight, was Ritchie’s usual credo. Whatever you are facing, face it down.

But not tonight. An instinct overtook him. Staying put and letting these things come at him was not the brightest plan. The mere fact they were getting closer made his entire body cringe.

He had to examine this more closely. Get a better idea of what he was up against. And that would take the adepts’ help -- of that he was absolutely certain.

Both the six year old and her brother were tensing again. Getting ready to spring forward this time? The rest were stealing closer too, creeping down the walls. Ritchie swung his aim around, but did not fire.

These had recently been people, even if they looked like they might never be that thing again. He wasn’t sure. He had to opt for caution at the moment.

“Back on the street!” he hollered to his men. “We’re
out
of here!”

Neither guy exactly needed telling twice.

By the time I finally managed to get in touch with Vallencourt, it was gone three in the morning. Judge Levin had had a speakerphone installed in his study since I’d last visited, so we moved up there. His wife, Fleur, had come fully awake by this time -- understanding something bad was happening -- and was fetching us a pot of coffee.

I listened as the sergeant described what he had come across in Greenwood. Then I told him what I’d seen.

“Angels?” he blurted. “This was nothing like that. This was --“

“Yeah, I get it,” I said. “More like animals, but human ones.”

Me and Levin exchanged sour glances.

“And this is happening …?” he asked.

“Right across town,” Ritchie told him. “Six different locations so far that I know of.”

“And how are your men responding?”

“I’ve told them to secure the perimeters, but not to enter. We don’t want more cops going down before it’s clear what this thing is.”

Which was the only course of action he could take, and I confirmed that. The judge was nodding. Until we understood what we were really up against, we had to opt for holding back.

But there was one thing that we knew for certain. For the second time in one night, our humble town was under some kind of attack. You wouldn’t have even known it from up here. We were underneath the roof. The window was a dormer one, and had a clear view of the north and western sections of the Landing. It looked peaceful, the rows of homes like slumbering dogs. I could make out my own neighborhood, and not a thing seemed out of order.

Except you can’t always believe what your eyes tell you. Because the truth is, bad magic is like a poison, seeping through the bloodstream of a closed community like ours.

My temples throbbed. I wished I knew a whole lot more. Wished I hadn’t been forced to leave Willets behind, since I had no doubt there was an awful lot that he could add to this. Without his special insight, we were groping in the dark.

“We need to form a strategy,” Judge Levin was saying. Although, by his expression, he didn’t seem quite sure what that might be. “Can your men be trusted to their own devices, sergeant?”

“Sure,” Ritchie answered, sounding slightly wary.

“Then you’d better get up here. I’ll look forward to meeting you.”

He usually consulted with Hobart, and had not had the pleasure, so far as I knew, of standing face-to-face with this town’s new numero uno cop.

Ritchie gave an okay, then the line went dead. Levin joined me at the window. It was still dark beyond the glass, the sky like a navy blue bowl above us and the intersecting rows of streetlamps like a puzzle posed by fireflies.

“You’d think that I’d be used to this by now,” he murmured.

And I knew precisely what he meant. My heart couldn’t seem to slow down properly. And I could feel a mild, constant vibration underneath my skin.

“Yet every time something like this comes down on us,” he went on, “my lungs tighten, my palms grow damp, and I start wondering if this might be my last hour on this planet. I have wealth and the community’s respect. Power, both judicial and paranormal. And despite that, I feel wholly shackled by my own mortality. Isn’t that odd?”

“Being an adept doesn’t stop you being human,” I told him. “Welcome to the club.”

The man stared at me wordlessly for a few seconds and then pulled a face and shrugged.

* * *

It took Ritchie another half hour to show up, so he’d obviously spent a while making sure that he could leave his people to cope for themselves. But finally we heard a car pull up, the doorbell chime, and then Fleur Levin let him in.

When he walked into the study, I got a mild shock. He had transformed somewhat from the hard-nosed, fiery young sergeant I had come to know. He was slightly hunched, his eyes downcast, his every movement under tight control. His manner overly respectful. And I immediately saw what this was. Damn it, if he’d owned a cap, he’d have it clasped between his fingers and been fiddling with the brim right now.

It was Levin he was nervous of. And perhaps I should have been expecting this. It was the typical relationship between most of the ordinary townsfolk -- who only practiced magic occasionally -- and people like the judge who had been born to it and used it all the time. The former was extremely wary and respectful of the latter.

That doesn’t apply to me, since I’ve never practiced magic, the same way my folks refused to when they were alive. I think it’s playing silly games with the natural rules, and refuse to be cowed by it. Okay, it is a pretty impressive form of power, startling at times. But power -- on its lonesome -- doesn’t get my vote.

Ritchie Vallencourt, on the other hand, wouldn’t even meet the judge’s eyes. He introduced himself quietly, then added, “It’s a great honor to meet you, sir.”

And when Levin reached out to grasp his hand, he practically jumped back. But the judge wouldn’t have that, stepping in and sliding his fingers around the sergeant’s palm.

“How nice to meet such a polite young man. What a pleasant change,” he commented, glancing across at me and beaming in a smug, gratified way.

Despite his democratic principles, he was obviously enjoying this. If there’s one word that sums up the adepts of Sycamore Hill, then that word is ‘patrician.’

I suppressed an angry comment.

“Anymore been happening down there, sergeant?” the judge inquired.

Ritchie’s face finally came up, the pale eyes gleaming.

“Not that I know of, sir. Like I said, six homes that have been …” And he struggled for the right word. “Changed. Apart from that, there’s nothing else to report. But it’s enough, ain’t it?”

Then he squinted at me curiously.

“Do you suppose that this thing and your angels are connected?”

It was far too much of a coincidence if they were not. I told him so.

“There were two of them in the commercial district? Should I send some of my people up there?”

That wasn’t a particularly tempting prospect. I remembered how urgent Willets had been, ordering me out of there. He didn’t seem to think I had a chance against those things, and I was far more skilled at fighting supernatural beings than an ordinary cop.

“Not a good idea,” I said.

“So what exactly
do
we do?”

I set my palms against the windowsill. “We wait.”

“For what, exactly?”

“For whatever happens next.”

And when he peered at me, I added, “
Something
always happens next.”

* * *

Ritchie made use of the speakerphone as well during the next couple of hours, so that all three of us could hear the reports from his colleagues. And everything we listened to had the same tone to it, that of stalemate. The cops still couldn’t see inside the affected homes. It remained pitch black beyond the windowpanes, with not a hint of movement. And no sounds were emerging either. The houses might as well have been abandoned, although we knew perfectly well that they were not.

There seemed to be no spread of this contagion or whatever you’d call it. And no sign of the intruder that had caused it in the first place. We’d agreed the meteors had somehow brought this down on us. But that was the only thing that we were even halfway sure of.

“Maybe it’s safe to go in now?” one of Ritchie’s men suggested.

Which got him yelled at by the judge.

“No, forget that! Absolutely not!”

When he turned to me, his narrow face was reddened.

“Know what’s really getting to me? Normally, when something bad comes down, I get this feeling. It happened when Lucas Tollburn died, remember? But I keep on reaching out with every sense I have, and I’m still getting absolutely nothing.”

“You sense nothing bad?”

“Nothing at all. Crazy, isn’t it?” He straightened up, his nostrils flaring. “Those altered people down there? It ought to start alarm bells ringing in my head. Instead of which, I can’t sense them either. It’s like they’re no longer there.”

The tension in the study had become palpable, by this hour. All that we could do was listen while the cops down there kept calling in.

I hated this. What I really wanted was to head down there myself and kick down doors, confront the situation. But I’d be ignoring my own advice.

At the moment when I thought that I was going to explode, the eastern horizon brightened, phasing through from gray to platinum. Then a ray of golden light appeared, the sun finally coming up. Levin switched the lights off in the room so we could see more clearly.

Shadows lifted from the houses in my field of view. The details and the colors of the town began making themselves apparent. Green and red expanses of rooftops. Backyards, pools, and parks.

As if on cue, there was another chime from the doorbell. We could hear Fleur go to answer it. A muffled conversation followed, and I thought I recognized the other voice. And then there was a sudden blur of movement in the hallway directly outside the study door.

It resolved itself into the shape of Willets. He’d conjured himself up here rather than bothering to use the staircase. And he must have used his last reserves of magic doing that. Because the middle-aged black man looked exhausted to the core.

His face was bloodless and his eyes were discolored. Dried sweat left a sheen on his brow. His prematurely gray hair was askew. And when he tried to step into the room, he teetered, almost falling.

Ritchie -- forgetting his fear of adepts -- rushed across to help.

In the years that I’d known Lehman, I had never once seen him in this condition. The man looked like he’d gone twelve rounds with a herd of buffalo.

And then I realized the truth of the matter. Those angels I had seen him fighting … had he been fighting with them
all night
?

There were questions that badly needed answering. But I could see that now was not the time. The man was on the verge of collapsing. Judge Levin had hurried across and was helping as well. They propped the man between them, and maneuvered him into the swivel chair behind the grand cherrywood desk in here. When they let go of him, he flopped a moment, like a fish. But then he seemed to understand that he was safe and let himself sink into the deep, luxurious upholstery.

Fleur, an attractive although slightly dumpy woman, had come upstairs after him and was hovering anxiously in the doorway.

Willets’s head slumped back against the leatherwork, his mouth lolling open. He was not merely worn out but parched. Levin snapped his fingers. A crystal jug of water appeared on his desk, with a glass beside it. The judge filled the latter, and then pressed it to the doctor’s lips.

Willets sipped, then coughed. He was so badly hunched that he looked almost boneless. But a little color returned to his cheeks.

“Thank you.”

Levin moved the glass away. The doctor blinked a few times and then turned his scarlet-studded gaze on me.

“Glad to see you’re still around.”

“Same here,” I replied. “So, did you win your battle?”

Despite the state that he was in, he formed his mouth into a tight, humorless smile.

“If you understood what’s come down on us this time … well, you wouldn’t ask a question like that.”

“Are you telling us you know what these things are?”

The man looked back at Levin.

“My guess is, the judge here has been trying to find out. And has come up with absolutely nothing. That would be a fairly accurate assessment?”

I was used to other people talking in strange riddles, but not him. We waited apprehensively. Those burning red pupils of his swept across us, taking in our sheer bewilderment. And then he tensed a little, managing to straighten slightly.

“Those things out there? They’re
less
than nothing. That is what we’re up against this time.”