Deadly Violet - 04 (16 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Ritchie Vallencourt had been driving around in his Chevy again. Looking for one of those purple openings again. But not for the same reasons as the last time, or anything like.

His thoughts were still dull and his brow was throbbing. He was trying to get his head around the way that everything had panned out, and the awful things he’d gone and done. And it felt, from his point of view, as if his memories were not his own. They were like those of another person, fitting awkwardly inside his skull.

He stared at his reflection in the rearview mirror, taking in the shadowiness of his features and the chilled look in his eyes. What had he been thinking of? What exactly had been going through his mind?

But a storm had been raging in him. And he hadn’t taken any notice of the evidence of his own senses. He’d whaled on that purple creature anyway, unable to stop himself, in spite of the fact that it hadn’t lifted a finger in its own protection.

Ritchie blinked morosely. What exactly was he? He had always thought of himself as a good guy, committed to doing the right thing. Had joined the force for precisely that reason. But after what he’d done
– if Heidi were to re-appear in front of him right now – he felt so ashamed of himself that he doubted he would be able to look her in the eye.

He was a murderer. And worse than that, he’d done real harm to this whole town. And that was something that he couldn’t allow to stand. He couldn’t change the past, but he could try to put it right.

A new instinct took hold of him. He turned off Colver Street onto a narrower byway. And, before he’d gotten halfway down it, Ritchie caught sight of a wavering glimpse of purple, off beyond another house.

He took a right, and there it was. Another of those openings to a different universe. It was smaller than the others that he’d seen. And there were no beings emerging from it. But that gave him precisely the chance he needed to redeem himself.

It was shrinking. Ritchie took that in unhappily. It was dwindling before his eyes, reducing from a six-foot gap to considerably less than that. Another few seconds, and the opportunity would be gone. So Ritchie floored the gas.

He powered the Camaro over. Slid to an uneven halt. Then flung his door wide open, the engine still running.

The hole had reduced to only three feet wide. He ran at it, his breath rasping in his throat.

And then, while it was still diminishing, he flung himself inside.

He hit ground on the far side, rolled, then came up on his feet. And froze stock still, thunderstruck.

His eyes blinked repeatedly, trying to adjust themselves to their new surroundings. He was used to seeing a variety of different hues. But there was nothing like that here.

Shades of purple, everywhere he looked. And that wasn’t the only thing. He’d been expecting another planet. A flat stretch of earth beneath his feet, and a horizon to look at. Instead of which, he’d found himself inside a network of tunnels, rather like a mining complex. Was he underground?

When he pushed a heel into the floor, it felt slightly spongy, almost like organic matter. He became slightly light-headed, taking in his new surroundings. And there was the most curious smell in here, like fresh raw meat. So this was probably not any kind of mine.

The plainclothes cop stood there for a short while more, then pulled himself together. He wasn’t here on any kind of sightseeing trip. He’d come here on a mission.

So he got a grip on himself and pressed forward, heading down the widest tunnel he could find. His gaze went everywhere, but he was unable to detect the slightest sign of motion.

No square-headed, thin-limbed men came lurching at him. Nor anything else. He stopped walking several times and listened, but could not make out a sound.

So, after a while, he started to call out. If he could not find the purple beings, maybe he could bring them to him.

“Hey!” he yelled out. “Here I am! The human who killed one of yours!”

He got no response, turned right and went a different way.

“It’s down to me and no one else! And you can do whatever you want to me! But please, don’t take it out on the rest of the town!”

What was wrong with these things? If a wanted criminal had walked through Union Square and given himself up the way that he was doing …

But the tunnels’ openings stared back at him, with nothing showing up in them. What in God’s name did these creatures want?

He threw his arms out to the sides.

“Look, I’m guilty! I’m your guy! Just leave the others alone, okay? They had nothing to do with it!”

He was starting to become convinced that he was wasting his breath. But then the floor beneath him moved. It rippled, and Ritchie stared down.

A thin, mauve-tinged membrane started lifting from it, like the surface of a bubble.

It swelled around him so very quickly – passing over his whole body and his outstretched arms – that he could do nothing about it. It reached his neck, and then his face. Ritchie shuddered as it went up past his nose and eyes, except there was no loss of breath. And the stuff wasn’t hurting him in any way.

It rose over the top of his head, closing up seamlessly. And then stopped growing.

Ritchie peered at it uncomfortably, wondering what it was for. He took a slow lungful of air, then pushed an index finger out.

The surface of the bubble shifted round it, expanding a few inches. But it did not show any sign of breaking. And when he shoved his whole palm up against it, Ritchie got the same result. The bubble’s skin was as thin as a whisper. But apparently unbreakable. So he was trapped inside it.

Okay, this was starting to look like a result. Not really the kind that he had been expecting. But what was going to happen from this point on? Were the purple creatures going to keep him standing here until the end of time?

It turned out that was not their plan. Because the walls nearby began to tremble. And a whole group of them emerged.

He counted ten of them, pretty much identical except for variations in their arms. There were no expressions on their lumpy, squarish faces, but he thought that he could make out curiosity in their perfectly round eyes. Had they understood what he’d been telling them? He hoped so, because his sacrifice was pointless if he couldn’t save the Landing.

He was getting pretty nervous, but fought against that, holding himself still. The creatures kept on staring in at him from different angles. Then a couple of them stepped back, holding their hands flat, their palms turned down.

The floor began to ripple again. And this time, a whole cluster of fresh mauve bubbles swelled up into view. They were smaller than the one that was holding him, and broke free of the general mass, rising a little more than a yard in the air before stopping.

There, they hovered. Most of them were perfectly round.

Ritchie was still wondering what they were for, when they began to shimmer. Next instant, they turned opaque. They remained blank for a few seconds. And then images began to fill them up.

He glanced from one to the next, his heartbeat thumping in his chest. These were images from his own life. His wedding day
– standing in the church with Heidi. Being sworn in on the force.

Scenes from earlier years, when he’d been a rowdy and pugnacious teenager.

His gaze kept moving, till he came to one that stopped him short.

It was from only a few hours ago.

Him, chasing the purple figure across the park. Catching up and grabbing the thing and starting to shake and yell. And the creature falling.

And that was when Ritchie began to wonder.

Had these beings merely captured him?

Or was he already on trial?

Some fifteen minutes later
– though the Oon did not mark time like that – one of their number, at the rear of the group, slipped quietly away from the rest. It had been familiar with the one who’d died. They had been close in their own way. And it already felt aggrieved by what had happened.

And the more it stared inside this multi-colored creature’s thoughts, the more that those emotions had transformed to horror.

It was hard to believe what was being revealed. On the surface, these things seemed pleasant enough. They had families and formed relationships. They worked for the good of their community, and tried to care for those who were weaker than themselves.

But that was merely an elaborate disguise, a mask. And when you ripped the mask away, when you got down to the nub of what these beings really were …

The scene kept playing over and over through its head. The human chasing an Oon through the whiteness. Catching it, and then mauling it savagely. And there had not only been the pictures. Some of the bubbles had revealed the ideas going through this human’s mind while it had done its deadly work.

You could barely even
call
them thoughts. They were more like an endless, savage scream. Or like a massive fire which devoured everything it touched, with no room left for sense or reason.

It was awful to look at. Terrifying. Vile. Strip these beings to their basic essence, and they were merely wild animals. They had been trying to be otherwise for thousands of their years. But they reverted to a feral state of being at the slightest provocation.

And that made them – to this Oon’s mind – the most dangerous creatures it had ever come across.

The fact that their worlds were now touching horrified it to its very core. And if they kept on coming in here …

That could not be allowed. They had to be stopped.

Masking its intentions from the rest, it stole away into the rounded central chamber where the device had been built. The thing was dormant at the moment, a flat, static pool.

The Oon stepped over to it and bent down. Cupped its hands and filled them with a little of the liquid, which it lifted to its mouth.

It blew a bubble, then returned the fluid to its source. And the bubble began to propagate, hundreds more immediately springing up.

The surface frothed, but not like last time. Every bubble sank away as soon as it was formed.

The machine to mend reality was working once again.

But this time, it was working in reverse.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Most of the group dispersed after another hour. There was simply no point hanging around Devries’s living room, waiting for the next dreadful event to occur. And what could they do about it anyway? Judge Levin had never felt so helpless.

Fleur was waiting for him when he arrived home. He kissed her, forced a smile, assuring her that everything would work out fine. But then he feigned weariness – not too difficult a trick under the circumstances. And headed for the study at the top of his tall wooden house.

One carpeted flight of stairs went by, and then another. And might this be the last time he ascended them? He paused for a few seconds, straightening the frame of one of the prints on the wall.

His mind, deeply troubled, was reflecting on the course of his whole life. Then further back, into the distant past.

His ancestors were not from here, originally. Levin was hardly an old-time Massachusetts name, now was it? In the Sixteen Hundreds, they had lived in New York City, which back then was called New Amsterdam. They’d been tinkers by trade. And in those days, tinkers rarely remained in one place the entire time. They moved around when necessity warranted it, going from area to area in search of work.

The Levins had decided to take a risk and venture into New England in the middle 1690’s. It was Puritan country in those days, and they were not sure how they’d be received. So they’d moved carefully from one hamlet to another, always stopping their horse-drawn wagon out on the very edge of town, and being polite and respectful in the way they did their business.

But the plain truth was, they had encountered very little trouble. The Puritans already traded with the local natives, and so why not them?

By the time that they arrived at a small township called Raine’s Landing, Levin’s many-times great grandmother was heavily pregnant. And his direct ancestor – Avram – was born that night.

But something else happened
– around the same time – that not a single one of them could have possibly predicted. It was the same night when Regan Farrow spoke her curse.

“If I cannot leave, then none of you ever shall.”

Having been born a few feet inside the village boundary, Avram was trapped by it, the same way as everybody else who lived here. And when his parents found he could not leave, they made the decision to stay with him. The remainder of the family had no choice but to move on.

Thankfully, the townspeople had taken pity on a homeless couple with a newborn child. And
– since his bloodline had always produced far more sons than daughters – there’d been Levins in Raine’s Landing ever since.

He did not practice. How could he possibly? There were no temples here, no Jewish girls to marry. Of that whole slice of his history, only the family name remained.

And besides, Sam mused ruefully, he was a regular practitioner of witchcraft. He could not imagine Levins in the outside world finding too much to approve of in that way of living life.

The judge sighed, and continued up the final flight.

Avram’s children had been lucky here, and he was the first to admit it. From those humble beginnings, they’d gone on to acquire prestige, respect, and even power. There were incidents like these for sure. Monsters coming at them, or crazy men with magic at their fingertips. But when he thought about what had befallen his kind in the world beyond this town …

He’d read about it, and seen it in TV documentaries.

The persecution and the cruelty and slaughter. It was dreadful, almost unimaginable, and it troubled him sometimes. What had happened to those other Levins, those who’d gone away from here? Late at night, he would occasionally dwell on it, and those were not his happiest moments.

He reached the top floor, went along the short corridor to his study. And his feelings of anxiety lifted away slightly. Levin always felt at his most comfortable in here. The rows of leather-bound books on the walls. His collection of scrimshaw in its glass-fronted armoires. The dormer window out front, through which he could see the entire upper side of town. He went across to look. And was it going to vanish? Was it all about to end?

The air behind him flashed violet without any warning. Only very briefly, but it made him jolt. His head swam momentarily. He closed his eyes and tried to steady himself. But when he opened them again and looked around …

The furniture in his study was gone. And the walls were different. Before, they’d been papered. But now, they were plain, bare wood.

And the whole room was shaking, rattling. He could hear the squeal of metal wheels, and feel a sense of movement. Fright and confusion rushed through him. Between one instant and the next, it felt like he was riding on a train.

But there were no such things in town. They didn’t come here, never had. This was insane. Preposterous.

Levin marched over to the door. But it had changed too. It was larger, and had turned into the sliding type. And when he tried to pull it sideways, it only moved an inch before it met resistance.

When he shook it, there was a metallic sound. So it was padlocked from the outside.

He spotted a large knothole in the wooden wall nearby. Went up to it, and put his eye against it. And his agitation went up several notches.

Not only was he not on Sycamore Hill any more. He was no longer in Raine’s Landing. There was no surrounding forest. And the moving landscape he was looking at was chilled and gray and perfectly flat, tilled fields stretching away from him to the far horizon.

Where had he wound up? He couldn’t understand it. And then he looked down, and saw the way that he was dressed. His smart modern suit and handmade shoes were gone. He was clad mostly in coarse brown cloth, in a manner he had seen in photographs from way back in the 1930s.

Then he spotted something else, and fixed his gaze on it with disbelief.

Sewn to the breast pocket of his jacket was a symmetrical yellow six-pointed star.

It took that to make him finally figure where he was. And hadn’t he been thinking about precisely that subject, just a minute back? Now, it seemed his thoughts had turned into reality. And how far could this process go?

No, this was wrong! It shouldn’t be happening!

Levin went back to the door and started banging at it furiously, but with no result.