Twilight Eyes (45 page)

Up.

Slowly up.

Into light.

Gray, blurry.

Mysterious shapes.

Then it all cleared.

I was slumped in my seat, damp and chilled with sweat. The station wagon was stopped, parked.

Rya was leaning over me, one cool hand on my brow. Through her luminous eyes, emotions darted like schooling fish: fear, curiosity, sympathy, compassion, love.

I straightened up a bit, and she eased back. I felt weak and still somewhat disoriented.

We were in an Acme Supermarket parking lot. Rows of cars, drably dressed in winter grime, were divided by low walls of soot-streaked snow shoved into place by plows during the most recent storm. A few shoppers shuffled or scurried across the open pavement, their hair and scarves and coattails flapping in a wind more brisk than it had been before I had passed out. Some of them were pushing wobbly-wheeled shopping carts that they used not only to transport groceries but for support when they slipped on the treacherous ice-spotted pavement.

“Tell me,” Rya said.

My mouth was dry. I could taste the bitter ashes of the promised—but as yet unfulfilled—disaster. My tongue kept sticking to the roof of my mouth, and it felt thick. Nevertheless, slightly slurring my words and in a voice pressed flat by a massive weight of weariness. I told her about the holocaust that would someday wipe out an ungodly number of Yontsdown’s elementary-school children.

Rya was already pale with concern for me, but as I spoke, she grew paler still. When I finished, she was whiter than Yontsdown’s polluted snow, and shadowy smudges had appeared around her eyes. The intensity of her horror reminded me that she had personal experience of the goblins’ torture of children from the days when she had clung to a precarious existence in an orphanage overseen by them.

She said, “What can we do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can we stop it from happening?”

“I don’t think so. The death energy pouring off that building is so strong . . . overwhelming. The fire seems inevitable. I don’t think we can do anything to stop it.”

“We can try,” she said fiercely.

I nodded without enthusiasm.

“We
must
try,” she said.

“Yes, all right. But first . . . a motel, somewhere we can crawl in and shut the door and block out the sight of this hateful town for a little while.”

She found a suitable place just two miles from the supermarket, at the corner of a not-too-busy intersection. The Traveler’s Rest Motel. She parked in front of the office. Single-story, about twenty units. Built in a U-shape, with parking in the middle. The late-afternoon gloom was so deep that the big orange-and-green neon sign was already switched on; the last three letters of MOTEL were burned out, and the neon outline of a cartoonish, yawning face was noseless. Traveler’s Rest was slightly shabbier than the general shabbiness of Yontsdown, but we were not looking for posh quarters and luxury; anonymity was our primary need, even more important than reliable heat and cleanliness, and Traveler’s Rest looked as if it could provide precisely what we sought.

Still drained by the ordeal which I had endured merely by passing the elementary school, feeling parched and weak—ever so weak—from the debilitating heat of those foreseen flames, I had some difficulty pulling myself out of the car. The arctic wind seemed even colder than it actually was, for it contrasted sharply with the memory of fire that continued to hiss and flicker within me, vesicating heart and soul. I leaned against the open door, dragging in quenching breaths of moist March air, which should have helped but did not. When I slammed the door, I almost fell backward. I gasped, swayed precariously, got my balance, and leaned against the station wagon, dizzy, a strange grayness seeping in at the edges of my vision.

Rya came around the car to assist me. “More psychic images?”

“No. It’s just . . . the aftereffects of the ones I already told you about.”

“Aftereffects? But I’ve never seen you like this before.”

“I’ve never felt like this before,” I said.

“They were
that
bad?”

“That bad. I feel . . . blasted, crushed . . . as if I left a part of me back there in that burning schoolhouse.”

She put one arm around me for support, slipped her other hand under my arm. There was, as usual, great strength in her.

I felt foolish, melodramatic, but my bone-deep exhaustion and rag-limp legs were real.

To avoid destroying myself emotionally and psychologically, piece by piece, I would have to stay far away from the school, take routes through the city that kept those brick walls out of sight. In this case, as in no other, my clairvoyant vision was stronger than my capacity to endure the perceived pain of others. If ever it became necessary to enter that building to prevent the future tragedy that I had glimpsed, Rya might have to go inside by herself.

That possibility did not bear consideration.

Step by step, as she helped me around the car and across the pavement to the motel office, my legs firmed up. My strength slowly returned.

The neon sign, hung on metal pins between two poles, squeaked in the polar wind. In a brief moment of relative silence that befell the street, I could hear the leafless branches of the ice-jacketed shrubs clicking against one another and scraping the walls of the building.

When we were a few feet from the door to the office, when I was just about able to proceed under my own power again, we heard a dragon-deep roar in the street behind us. A large, powerful truck—a mud-brown Peterbilt cab pulling a long open-bed trailer heaped full of coal—was turning the nearest corner. We both glanced at it, and although Rya evidently noticed nothing unusual about the vehicle, I was instantly riveted by the company name and logo painted on the door: a white circle surrounding a black lightning bolt on a black background, and the words LIGHTNING COAL COMPANY.

With my Twilight Eyes I perceived emanations of a unique, disquieting nature. They were neither as specific nor as shattering as the grim clairvoyant images of death that had poured off the elementary-school building, but in spite of their lack of specificity and explosive effect, they had a disturbing power all their own. They chilled me so completely that I felt as if needle-fine spicules of ice were forming in my blood and were adhering to the walls of arteries and veins. A psychic and prophetic coldness, infinitely worse than the frigid winter air of March, radiated from the logo and name of that coal company.

I sensed that here was a key to unlocking the mystery of the goblin nest that had been established in Yontsdown.

“Slim?” Rya said.

“Wait...”

“What’s wrong?”

“Don’t know.”

“You’re shaking.”

“Something . . . something . . .”

As I stared at the truck, it shimmered and appeared translucent, then almost transparent. Through it, beyond, I saw a strange, vast emptiness, a lightless and terrible void. I could still see the truck perfectly well, but at the same time I seemed to be staring straight
through
that vehicle at an infinite darkness that was deeper than night and emptier than the airless reaches between distant stars.

I grew colder.

From the fire at the school to the sudden arctic chill pouring off the truck, Yontsdown was welcoming me with the psychic equivalent of a brass band, albeit a band that played only tenebrous, decadent, and distressing music.

Though I could not understand why the Lightning Coal Company affected me so powerfully, I was filled with horror so rich and pure that I was immobilized by it and barely able to breathe, as one might be totally disabled by a paralyzing but not deadly dose of curare.

Two goblins, disguised as men, were riding in the Mack. One noticed me and stared back as if he realized there was something peculiar about the intensity with which I was studying him and his truck. As they drove past, he turned to keep his hateful crimson eyes on me. At the end of the block, the big coal-hauler went through a changing traffic light, but then it started to slow and began to pull to the side of the road.

Shaking myself to fling off the disabling dread that had gripped me, I said, “Quick. Let’s get out of here.”

Rya said, “Why?”

“Them,” I said, indicating the truck that had now stopped at the curb a block and a half away. “Don’t run . . . don’t let them see that they’ve spooked us . . . but
quickly
!”

Without further questions she returned to the station wagon with me, slipped behind the wheel as I settled in the passenger’s seat.

Farther down the street, the coal truck was awkwardly executing a U-turn, though its maneuvers were illegal. It was blocking traffic in both directions.

“Damn, they’re actually swinging back to take a closer look at us,” I said.

Rya started the engine, threw the station wagon in gear, and swiftly backed out of the parking space.

Trying not to sound as frightened as I really was, I said, “As long as we’re in their sight, don’t move too fast. If possible, we want to avoid looking as if we’re running away.”

She drove around the Traveler’s Rest Motel, toward the parking-lot exit that led into the side street.

As we slipped past the corner I saw that the coal truck had completed its U-turn back there on the main thoroughfare—and then it was out of sight.

The instant that I could no longer see the truck, the special and terrible coldness faded. The impression of an infinite void no longer troubled me.

But what had it meant? What was the formless, faultless darkness I had seen and recoiled from when I had been looking at the truck?

What in God’s name were the goblinkind up to at the Lightning Coal Company?

“Okay,” I said shakily. “Make a lot of turns, one street right after another, so they won’t catch a second glimpse of us. Chances are they didn’t get much of a look at the car, and I’m sure they didn’t write down the license number.”

She did as I suggested, taking a random, winding route through the northeastern outskirts of the city, her glance flicking frequently toward the rearview mirror.

“Slim, you don’t think . . . did they realize you could see straight through their human masquerade?”

“No. They just . . . well, I don’t know . . . I guess they just saw how intently I was staring at them . . . how shaken I was. So they got suspicious and wanted a closer look at me. Their kind is suspicious by nature. Suspicious and paranoid.”

I hoped that was true. I had never encountered a goblin that could recognize my psychic power. If some of them had the ability to spot those of us who could see them, then we were in even deeper trouble than I had always thought, for we would lose our single, secret advantage.

“What did you see this time?” she asked.

I told her about the void, the image of a vast and lightless emptiness that had risen in my mind when I had looked at the truck.

“What does it mean, Slim?”

Worried and weary, I did not respond for a minute. I gave myself time to think, but taking time to think didn’t really help. Finally I sighed and said, “I don’t know. The emanations that poured off the truck . . . they didn’t knock the stuffing out of me, yet in their own way they were even more horrible than the forthcoming fire I sensed at the school. But I’m not sure what it meant, what exactly it
was
that I saw. Except that somehow . . . through the Lightning Coal Company, I think we’ll be able to learn why so many goblins are concentrated in this damn town.”

“That’s the focus?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

Of course, I was in no condition to begin an investigation of the Lightning Coal Company until tomorrow morning. I felt almost as gray as the winter sky, and no more solid than the ragged beards of mist that hung down from the ominous faces—warriors and monsters—that an imaginative eye could discern in the storm clouds. I needed time to rest, regain my strength, and learn to tune my mind away from at least some of the continuous background static of clairvoyant images that crackled and sparked off the buildings and streets and people of Yontsdown.

Twenty minutes later, day gave way to darkness. You might have thought that night would cast a concealing cloak over the meanness of that wretched and noisome city, bringing it at least a small measure of respectability, but that was not the case. In Yontsdown the night was not stage makeup, as it might have been elsewhere. Somehow it emphasized the grubby, smudgy, smoky, foul, and fulsome details of the streets and drew attention to the grim, medieval quality of much of the architecture.

We were sure that we had lost the goblins in the Peterbilt, so we pulled into another motel—the Van Winkle Motor Inn, which was not half as cute as its name. This was about four times the size of the Traveler’s Rest, two stories. Some rooms opened onto the courtyard, and others opened onto a promenade—iron posts painted black but rust-pocked and peeling, an aluminum awning—that circled the back of the building’s four wings. Claiming exhaustion after our long journey, we requested quiet rooms at the rear of the inn, as far from the traffic noise as possible, and the desk clerk obliged. Thus we not only enjoyed quietude but also we could park the station wagon out of sight of the street, as insurance against its being accidentally spotted by one of the Lightning Coal Company’s goblin employees from whom we had fled, an improbable but by no means impossible danger.