Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack) (46 page)

And he’d begun talking to Nick. Nick hadn’t deigned to reply yet, but the sound of his own voice gave Bill the feeling that he wasn’t completely alone out here in a remote mountain pass in the heart of a benighted country where he spoke not a word of the native language.

“We’ll never find our way back home again. Unless it’s in a pine box.”

Joe Ashe had piloted them into Romania in great time, riding the jet stream all the way. The field at Ploiesti had been deserted except for one of Joe’s East European pilot buddies—apparently the Ashe brothers had a global network of kindred spirits—who had this beat-up old land rover waiting for them.

They’d assumed Bill would wait until daylight before setting out. But dawn, such as it was these days, had been nearly three hours away. And three hours seemed like a lifetime. Sure, it was 6:02
A.M.
local time, but the clock in Bill’s body read only midnight. He was too wired to sleep, so why not put the time to good use? The Romanian rover looked sturdy enough—more like a converted half-track mini-tank than a car—so he’d loaded Nick into the passenger seat and headed out into the darkness.

A foolish mistake, Bill realized now. He glanced at his watch. Eight o’clock. According to the Sapir curve, the coming day would be about half an hour shorter than the shortest day of the year in the dead of all the Decembers that had preceded the celestial changes.

Bill shivered. A new kind of winter had come. A winter of the soul.

“I know what you’re going to say, Nick. You’re going to say, ‘I told you so.’ And maybe you did, but I guess I wasn’t listening. Doesn’t matter now, though. We’re stuck out here in the middle of nowhere and we’ll just have to wait until the light comes and hope to find somebody who can tell us how to get to this keep place.”

Nick, ever polite, refrained from an I-told-you-so.

Bill scanned the terrain ahead for a level place to park and noticed the road widening. Great. He could pull to the side and wait for the light. Then he saw the white shapes ahead. As he got closer he realized they were houses. A cluster of them. A village.

“Maybe there is a God after all, Nick,” but he knew Nick didn’t believe that. Neither did he.

Bill almost wished again for the old days when he did believe. Because he’d be praying now for help, for direction, for the Lord to inspire his hands on the wheel to guide them to the right road and lead them to their destination.

But those days were gone. His god was dead. Mumbled words would not bring help from on high. He was going to have to do this just the way he’d always done things—by himself.

As he followed the road on its winding course among the houses, he felt no lessening of his sense of isolation. What had appeared to be a village was really no more than a collection of huts, and those huts looked beat up and run down. As the headlight beams raked them he saw how their white stucco walls were scarred and chipped, noted the gaps in the thatch and shakes covering their roofs. Hard times had come to this place. He didn’t have to search the huts to know the village was deserted.

“Now we’re really lost.” Fatigue settled on him like a ratty blanket. “Lost in the middle of nowhere. If there is a God, he’s forsaken this place.”

Then he saw the flames. On the far side of the village, flickering fitfully in the fading darkness. It looked like a campfire. He drove toward it, steadily picking up speed.

A fire meant people and that meant he wasn’t completely lost. Maybe he could still salvage this trip.

But suddenly he saw nothing ahead—no road, no grass, no earth, only emptiness. He stood on the brakes, tumbling Nick into the dashboard as the rover swerved and skidded to a stalling halt at the edge of a precipice. A hole, dammit! Another one of those bottomless holes!

No, wait. To his left, vague and dim, an ancient bridge of some sort, with stone supports plunging into the pit. It coursed across the emptiness—a rocky gorge, he saw now; not a hole—toward the campfire. And now that he was closer and the sky was lighter, Bill realized the campfire wasn’t outside. It was
inside,
glowing through a tall open gate set within a massive stone wall that seemed to spring from the mountainside. He could make out human forms standing around it. Some of them might even be staring back at him. On the structure’s leading edge, a thick, sturdy tower rose a good forty or fifty feet above the top of the wall. The whole thing looked like a small castle, a pocket fortress. He felt a smile spread over his face—how long since he’d really smiled?

He was here. He’d found it.

The keep.

Bill let out a whoop and pounded the steering wheel.

“We made it, Nick!”

He restarted the vehicle and headed for the causeway, intending to drive across. But when the headlights picked up the worn and ragged timbers, he stopped, unsure if he should risk it.

“What do you think, Nick?”

The question was rhetorical, but Bill noticed that Nick seemed more aware than he’d been a few moments ago. Had the impact with the dashboard jostled his mind? Or was it something else?

Maybe it was all the bugs swarming around the keep. He hadn’t noticed them before, but he could see now that the air was thick with them. Perhaps because the only people in the pass were clustered around that fire inside. But why were the doors open? And why weren’t the bugs running rampant through the place, chewing up the inhabitants?

One thing Bill did know was that walking across the causeway now was impossible. They’d be ground beef before they traveled twenty feet. Of course, they could wait. But Bill couldn’t wait, not another minute. He hadn’t come this far through the dark simply to sit here with his destination in sight and wait for dawn. Screw the bugs. He was going across. Now.

“All right, Nick. Here goes nothing.”

He put the rover in first gear and edged forward, fixing his gaze on the timbers directly ahead. Not so easy with the bugs batting against the vehicle with increasing frequency. A bumpy ride, but smoother than the ridge road they’d been traveling. A glance ahead showed a group of figures clustered in the gateway of the keep, watching him.

“Stop.”

Bill slammed on the brakes. Nick’s face was pressed against the side window. His voice was as lifeless as ever, but Bill sensed real emotion hidden within it—almost excitement.

“What is it, Nick? What’s wrong?”

“I see them. Down there. Little pieces of the sword.”

He was pointing down to his right, below the base of the tower, down to where its rocky foundation melted into the gorge, fifty feet below. Bill could barely make out the bottom. How could Nick see little pieces of metal?

“I don’t see a thing, Nick.”

“Right there. They glow with bright blue fire. Are you blind?”

Bill strained to see but could find only darkness below.

“I guess so. But as long as one of us can see them, we’re in business.”

Bill was congratulating himself on how smoothly this mission was going when the rear window cracked and bellied inward as one of the bigger bugs hit it like a cinder block. It held, but for how long? Because suddenly they were under full-scale attack as the bugs launched a blitzkrieg on the rover, scraping, gnawing, pounding, and slapping against every square inch of the vehicle’s surface, as if the approach of dawn had driven them into one final feeding frenzy before they’d be forced to return to their hole.

Bill hesitated to release the clutch. He couldn’t see. With all the chew wasps, belly flies, spearheads, men-of-war, and other things clustered against the windshield and the other windows, the outer world had become a squirming mass of gnashing jaws, writhing tentacles, and acid-filled sacs. He’d be driving blind. No guardrail, and fifty feet of empty air awaiting them if the rover strayed more than three feet left or right.

Then the rear window bulged farther inward with the weight of the onslaught and he knew he had no choice. Even going over the side was preferable to sitting here and being eaten alive when that window gave way.

Taking a deep breath, Bill eased up on the clutch and they started to move. He found that by looking down through the very bottom of his side window he could catch an occasional glimpse of the causeway’s edge. He used that as a guide.

As they rolled forward, he heard a noise, faint and indistinct at first, but growing steadily in volume. It sounded almost like human voices—
cheering
voices. It was. The sound reached into the rover and touched him, warmed him. Using it as a beacon, he increased his speed, homing in on it.

And suddenly—like driving under an overpass in the heart of a cloudburst—the bugs were gone. Swept away, every last one of them. Silence in the rover. Except for the voices. Instead of bugs the vehicle was now surrounded by cheering people. Men and women, middle aged and older with rugged peasant faces, coarse clothing, sheepskin vests, woolly hats. They pulled open the rover’s door and helped him out, all the while shaking his hand and slapping his back. Bill returned the smiles and the handshakes, then glanced back along the causeway. The bugs crowded the air outside the arch of the gateway, but not one ventured through.

He turned back to the people and saw children and goats wandering around behind them. And beyond those, on the stone block walls, crosses. Hundreds of crosses.
Thousands
of crosses.

What sort of place was this? And why did he feel as if somehow he’d returned home after a long journey?

With the coming of day the bugs fled back to the darkness where they lived and the peasants trooped out of the keep with their children and animals, crossing the causeway to what was left of the real world, leaving Bill and Nick and their vehicle behind with the ashes of the night fire.

He knew he and Nick should head down into the gorge to search for the shards of the shattered sword, but he could not leave this place. Not just yet. The keep took him in, wrapped him in the arms of its walls, and demanded his attention.

The crosses … how could he spend two thirds of his life in the priesthood and not be taken in by a place so thoroughly studded with crosses? Not dull, dreary, run-of-the-mill Latin crosses, but strange thick ones, with brass uprights and nickel crosspieces set high, almost at the top. Like a tau cross or what was called St. Anthony’s cross.

Not all of the villagers had left. An ancient, white-bearded gent—eighty if he was a day—named Alexandru remained behind. He spoke as much English as Bill did Romanian, but they found common ground in German. Bill had studied the language in high school and college and had been fluent enough to read
Faust
in the original text. He found he’d retained enough to communicate with Alexandru.

The old man showed him around the structure. His father, also named Alexandru, had been the keep’s last caretaker in the days before World War Two. It could have used a caretaker now—a whole crew of them. Snow, wind, rain, drought, heat, and cold had left their marks on the keep. All the upper floors within the tower had collapsed, leaving nothing but a giant, rubble-choked stone cylinder. Yet although crumbling and in sad disrepair, it still exuded a certain power.

“It used to be a bad place,” Alexandru said. “Now it is a good place. The little monsters will not come here. All around they fly, but never in here.”

He went to the gate and gestured off to the left. Bill’s gaze followed the pointing arm to a black circular area, hundreds of feet across, marring the verdant floor of the pass.

A hole.

“That is where they come from, the little monsters.”

“I know. The holes are everywhere.”

Alexandru then led him to the keep’s cellar and showed him the opening in the stone floor there. He told of how the Germans had camped in the keep in the spring of 1941 and nearly wrecked the place, of how something immeasurably evil had awakened and slaughtered all the soldiers, of how it had almost escaped before it was destroyed.

Alexandru looked at Bill with watery blue eyes.

“At least we
thought
it was destroyed. Now I am not so sure.”

“How was it destroyed?”

“A redheaded stranger came and slew it with a magic sword—”

… a magic sword …

“—then he limped off with a Jewish woman from Bucharest and was never seen again. I wonder whatever happened to him.”

“He’s old and gray now like you,” Bill said, wondering what Glaeken had looked like in his prime. He must have been magnificent. “And he and the woman are still together.”

Alexandru nodded and smiled. “I am glad. He was a brave man, but terrible to see when he was angry.”

With the aid of Alexandru’s directions, Glaeken’s notes, and a flashlight, Bill led Nick down through the utter blackness of the subcellar to the lower segment of the tower. A narrow stairway wound down to the base where some of the foundation had crumbled. Alexandru had said something about a strange American named Dmitri Menelaus who had carted off many of the loose stones years ago. Light seeped through the opening into the base of the tower.

“All right, Nick,” he said, leading him outside. “Do your thing. Where are they?”