Summoned (20 page)

“Everything seems fine,” Jeremy said.

“Fine over here, too.”

He straightened from flashlight-probing the space behind cabinets. “Oh, the cartoons of the Founding.”

“Is that what you call them? They make me realize how complex the windows are.”

Jeremy joined her. “While I was down south, my intern took the windows apart. Like to see?”

“Please.”

Three long tables held trays of glass shards, each with a wax-penciled number that corresponded to the numbers on the cartoons. Some trays held already-cleaned glass, as brilliant as flattened gems. Others held glass in a cleaning solution. “I shouldn’t have to do much repainting,” Jeremy said. “All in all, we’re looking good.”

“I know the windows will be beautiful.”

“That’s the point,” Jeremy said in a matter-of-fact tone that made her smile. “We better get going.”

They returned to the room in which the staircase rose. Now that the lights were on, Helen saw that it, too, was a studio, with glass-faced cabinets, drafting tables, and easels. Jeremy’s space had an exhilarating air of controlled chaos. This one was too dustless and polished and orderly to be in use. The one open easel supported a canvas that had turned its neatly stapled backside to the room. Propped against the canvas was a palette on which the paints had dried into a clumpy abstract of yellows surrounded by greens:
Egg Yolks in the Meadow Grass
. But the other thing she’d missed on her way in, the thing that made her stare, was a stained-glass triptych set high in the south wall. Though the sun had set, these windows glowed like noon, apparently backlit by spotlights under the carriage house eaves.

The left window showed a knight on a parapet, battling a Saracen. The right showed the same knight, armor exchanged for a simple robe, bending over the bed of a sick woman. Both were astonishing, but the central window fascinated Helen. It had a medallion centered on a background at once entirely wrong and undeniably right: a mesh of virulent yellow glass streaked with red and flecked with black, violent, unsettling. The medallion itself was ethereal blues, greens, and violets. It featured a woman with sandy hair, the sick woman from the right window, now flushed with health. Like a young Madonna not yet encumbered by a halo and queenly robes, she wore a white gown with pale-blue girdle and sat in a walled garden, an easel before her, a paintbrush poised in her right hand. In her left, she held a spike of royal-blue delphinium, which she regarded with serene intensity.

Oddly, it was the delphinium that wore haloes of a sort, globular auras of spectral blue that surrounded each floret. Wait, and the bristle-end of the brush had a similar aura, a subtle golden luminescence that you saw more clearly when you looked away from it slightly. Any last doubt she’d had that Jeremy would do justice to the Founding windows evaporated, gone for good.

Helen stepped closer and saw that the plants in the glass garden were minutely rendered: apothecary rose, angelica, sage, foxglove, valerian, and elder. Plantains and violas studded the turf between beds. She looked for Jeremy and found him at her elbow. “What does it mean?”

Jeremy stood silent so long Helen was afraid the question had offended him. But when he turned toward her, there was an unprecedented openness in his eyes. “It’s about the Knights Hospitallers. During the Crusades, they built a hospice at Rhodes.” He pointed at the medallion. “That’s my wife, Kate. She was a painter. This was her studio. She died about nine years ago. Ovarian cancer. Hospice helped us, me and Sean, so she could stay at home.”

What could Helen say, beyond the standard
Oh, I’m so sorry,
and that too many years late? Helen didn’t want to go on automatic now, so she kept her mouth shut and thought of Sean’s sandy hair, of the profusion of delphiniums in the garden outside, of the rosemary in the urn, which like all the plants in the medallion was an herb of healing. She could still smell it on her fingers.

Jeremy cleared his throat. “It was very hard. Sean was so close to Kate. I tried to protect him from her dying, but he wouldn’t put up with that. He stuck right by her the whole time. He didn’t seem scared of how sick she was, all the medical bullshit. He was only scared when she was out of his sight. I think he was stronger than me at the time, really. Now I wish I could make up for it, if that makes sense.”

“It does,” Helen said.

“Sean thinks he’s tough enough to deal with anything—I guess that’s how he got into this mess with Orne. He
is
tough, some ways. But he’s not hard; he’s not nearly as savvy as he pretends. If he’d come to me right off—”

“Would you have blown up?”

“Probably.” He shook his head, his smile a rueful twist. “But even if you can’t hold their hands, these kids, you’ve got to try.”

Gus called from the bottom of the stairs: “You two all right?”

Jeremy shot her a guilty look, like they were conspirators caught in a dangerous conversation. “Fine,” he called back. To Helen, he said, all action again, “I’ll get the lights. You go.”

Though sorry to lose sight of the windows, Helen trotted down the stairs and out of the carriage house. Gus stood by his Volvo, passenger door open for her. She slid into the car fast. It was full dark, and full dark went darker still after the carriage house lights went out, including the spots under the eaves that had illuminated Jeremy’s triptych.

At
the Litinskis’s house, Celeste had laid out a small feast: rye and French bread, cold cuts and potato salad, a bowl of peaches, a pitcher of iced tea. “Dinner’s ready,” Gus said. “And I am ready for it.”

Helen seconded that sentiment. Between the excitement of Geldman’s and coming to Providence, she’d missed lunch. “It looks delicious,” she told Celeste.

“Please, dig in.”

“Where’s Sean?” Jeremy said.

“Oh, he went to bed right after we ate.”

“Went, or you sent him?”

“Went.”

Gus, Helen saw, had pulled out a chair for her. “Thanks,” she said. “But I’d like to wash up first.”

“Of course,” Celeste said. “The bathroom’s off the kitchen.”

Helen scrubbed her hands, then her face, then her hands again. A faint whiff of Servitor (everyone’s least favorite cologne) still clung to her. She sniffed her fingers and smelled only rose-scented soap. Was it on her
clothes,
then? If so, why hadn’t she noticed it during the car ride back?

As she stepped out of the bathroom, the smell grew stronger. Jeremy must have brought in his samples to show Celeste. She looked around for the sandwich bags. What caught her eye instead, with a vengeance, was the back-door screen. It sagged open from eye level down. That couldn’t be a natural dilapidation in a house as neat as this one, and it suggested other torn screens.…

Heart thudding, Helen walked to the door. The screen had been slit and forced inward. The smell came from grayish-green slime beaded into the mesh, and from drops on the floor that formed a broken line to the stairway.

Sean had gone to bed. Bed was likely up those stairs.

The first thing she should do was go tell Jeremy and the Litinskis. The last thing she should do, the insane thing, was go upstairs alone. Nevertheless, her legs carried her along the broken line to the bottom step, where she peered up into darkness. “Sean?” she called softly.

No answer, no sound. “Sean?” She put a foot on the bottom step, where her sneaker slipped in a puddle of putative drool.

Enough. She backed toward the dining room. Before she could reach it to sound the alarm, she was spared the trouble by the scream that exploded down the stairwell.

Jeremy ran through the dining room door. “I think someone got in,” was all Helen had time to say before he was pelting up the stairs. Gus was next in the kitchen, but he froze, and Helen’s heart froze with him, at the sound of another scream, Jeremy’s, a thud, a third scream, Sean again.

Think. “Your gun, Gus.”

“Still locked in the car.” He tore outside.

Celeste was in the kitchen now, beside Helen. Upstairs Sean babbled, “Leave him alone! Come on. Drink.”

No sound from Jeremy. Celeste grabbed one of the kitchen chairs. Holding it in front of her like she was a lion tamer, she started up the stairs. “Helen,” she whispered. “Come hit the light.”

Helen ran over and flipped a switch inside the stairwell. The stairs went bright, a straight flight between cheerful yellow-and-blue-papered walls. The risers of the stairs were painted yellow, the rungs blue, a nice touch. It would be impossibly gauche for anyone to bleed on stairs like these, and so it had to be safe to climb them.

Helen sidled after Celeste. In the hall above, there was a hiss and a slurred whine. Sean again: “Jesus. Shit.”

They would never reach the top of the stairs. Even so, Helen kept moving, dogging Celeste, and at last they made a landing where the blackness of the second-floor hall loomed, a new impassible barrier. Below, Gus banged through the ripped screen door. “Tell him go up the front stairs,” Celeste whispered. She stepped off the landing, and the dark swallowed her in one gulp. As Gus peered up from the kitchen, Helen clambered down a few steps to rewhisper the message. He vanished. Helen was alone, caught between floors. She clambered back to the landing. What now, hit the lights again? She groped along the hall walls on either side of the door, and the seconds before she found another switch had hours of dread compressed into them, plenty of time to hear an ugly sucking noise, Celeste’s quick breathing, distant steps, cautious, Gus. Helen’s fingers struck a plastic lever. Light flooded the hall. She rushed into it, found Celeste’s back.

To their left, there. Jeremy lay crumpled against the wall. Sean crouched nearby with one arm in the grip of an enormous toad. Toad? That was what it was most like, one that had lived in a cave so long its skin had bleached pallid. Nothing human, no hoaxer. It had fingerling tentacles along its spine and more tentacles around a mouth that split the bald ovoid of a head in two. Long icicles of teeth protruded, and when the thing reared, here swelling and there thinning, it flexed horny scimitars of raptor claws.

Too suddenly it sprang and in the one spring was on Celeste. She swung her chair. It countered with both forelimbs; the chair flew; Celeste slammed into the door jamb and teetered on the edge of balance. The thing lunged; Celeste dive into the stairwell. Helen glimpsed her grab at the railing, catch it one-handed, pinwheel into the wall. Then Celeste might as well have been on another planet, because the thing changed targets and hurtled at Helen, and there
she
was, there was the chair she snatched up, there
it
was, colliding with the legs of the chair, thrusting her backward, panting the stench of hell into her face. Her throat tore with the force of her own shriek. It was all animal, that shriek, but it was still her own, like it was her own knees buckling when the thing herded her into a corner and wrenched the chair from her nerve-dead hands.

She saw its eyes, flat and luminous, fire streaked white. She clamped forearms and elbows before her face and throat, thighs up over her belly, inadequate protections—

There was a sharp crack and a world-shattering bellow. Thunder on steps. Hands on her, fingers, not claws, Gus. “I hit it,” he gasped. “I’m going after it.”

He was gone again.

It was gone?

Helen dropped her arms. She saw Celeste and Sean helping Jeremy sit. He was conscious, moving weakly. Blood streaked the front of his shirt, but the blood was Sean’s: His left wrist streamed red, where the thing must have bitten him.

Its smell surrounded Helen so thickly that it dripped to pool at her side. She looked up and saw lumpy pink gouts on the wainscoting at her back. That was what dripped. That was what stank more abominably than the gray-green slobber and what drove her to shaking legs and away from the corner.

Sean, his bleeding wrist clamped in an armpit, also wavered to his feet. His face had a fragile calm Helen doubted her own could match. “You saw it, right?”

She nodded.

“It knocked Dad down. It was going for him. But Orne told me what it would like better.”

Sean’s blood, the blood that had made it. It was only that afternoon, during the car ride from Arkham, that she had read Orne’s e-mail and the chat records. Only a few hours ago. Helen nodded again, stupidly.

Celeste had come through the thing’s attack with no visible harm apart from bruises on her temple and cheekbone. “Your dad will be all right, Sean,” she said. “A lump on the head, that’s it.”

“Sean,” Jeremy mumbled.

“Be quiet, Jere. Sit still so I can take care of him.”

Right. Sean was the one bleeding. Helen watched Celeste lead him to a love seat at the front of the hall. “Helen, bring me some towels. The bathroom, there.”

Celeste pointed, and Helen would have obeyed, except that something was charging up the back stairs. She shrank to a door beyond which more steps rose, but the Servitor hadn’t come back, not yet. The charger was Eddy, armed with an aluminum baseball bat. “I saw it!” she said. Then she started to take in the situation. “Oh. Oh man.”

“Eddy,” Celeste said tersely. “Get me some towels from the bathroom.”

Weren’t the towels Helen’s job? Before she could let go of the door to the third floor, Eddy had carried an armload of blue terry cloth to the love seat.

Helen pushed the door wide open and sank onto the lowest step. She had to sit, the way her knees were knocking. Jeremy sat on the floor, rubbing the back of his head. Water. She should get him some water, and some ice to bring down the swelling. She could do that much. Ice from the kitchen.

But what if the Servitor had come back, was down there?

Helen rose, stiff legged. A few feet away, the pink gouts smoked. Yes, smoked. They were eating into the paint on the wainscoting and the varnish on the floorboards. Gus had hit the thing. Shot it. The pink gouts were true ichor, the fluid flowing in the veins of the gods. Had the Greeks known the same stuff flowed in the veins of demons?

At the other end of the hall, Celeste was saying she needed to take Sean and Jeremy to her office. Fine. Helen would help. She had to help, had to stop her damned useless shivering. First the ice. Slow and careful, planting her feet well away from the globs of ichor on the stairs, Helen willed herself toward the kitchen, where unless the invasion of a Servitor had changed the fundamental nature of their little universe, there would be a refrigerator and ice trays.