Beyond the Pale (10 page)

In front of the ED’s automatic doors, a white-haired
woman in a bathrobe struggled with her wheelchair. One of the wheels was stuck and would not turn. With arthritic fingers she tugged at the brake, then tried again. The wheelchair spun in a slow circle but did not move forward. Confused by its proximity, the automatic doors slid open, then shut, then open again, as if wracked by silent, spastic laughter. The woman looked up, and fear touched her faded eyes. Her wheelchair stood directly between the dead man and the doors.

He was going to kill her. The dead man would not move to one side, would not go around her. Instead, he would destroy anything that lay in his path. That was the nature of this … creation. Grace knew it—knew it with strange and perfect certainty. But then, this was not the first time she had come face-to-face with evil.

In that fractured moment, Grace made a decision. She could not allow this thing to do whatever it was it had been made to do. The naked man bore down on the wheelchair. The woman had stopped struggling and now simply gazed at the approaching corpse. Like all the very old, she knew the Angel of Death when she saw It coming.

With dreamlike calm, Grace knelt beside Erwin, unbuckled the leather holster at the dead officer’s hip, and pulled out the revolver. She stood, turned, and pointed. The gun seemed an extension of her arm.

The dead man reached for the old woman. Grace did not hesitate. She squeezed the trigger and called down the thunder. The dead man jerked and arched his back, as if struck a blow by an unseen enemy. A wet blossom appeared on his right temple. He took a staggering step forward. Grace pulled the trigger again. Light and sound shattered the air like crystal. The corpse’s arms flew out to either side, the wings of a weird bird trying to take flight. Again she fired, and again. With the last shot the entire right side of the man’s skull exploded. Dark fluid stained the old woman’s face, and she watched in dull amazement as Death died before her.

The man with the iron heart toppled to the floor. For a minute he convulsed violently, legs jerking, hands scrabbling at the tiles. Then he went still. One last trickle of blood oozed from his chest before the flow ceased. Even this thing needed a brain to function. It was over.

Her back against the wall, Grace slid to the floor and crouched beside the dead police officer. No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t over. Somehow she sensed it was just the opposite. She leaned her cheek against the wall, cradled the gun against her chest, and gazed into Erwin’s peaceful, empty eyes. The words whispered by the purple-eyed girl in the park drifted once more in her mind, and with them came a strangely exultant sensation.

Yes, a darkness was coming.

Excited voices sounded around her. People rushed into the admitting area now. Two police officers knelt by Erwin and swore as they examined him. Grace did not look their way. Instead, her gaze was drawn to the floor before her, to the shards of the broken coffee mug. A faint smile of wonder touched her lips. So sometimes the containing circle could be broken after all, and the ripples sent free.

It wasn’t until he saw the revival tent glowing in the distance that Travis realized where he was going.

How long he stumbled through the night after fleeing the destruction at the Magician’s Attic he didn’t know. Perhaps it was minutes, perhaps hours. For a time the keening of sirens echoed in the distance. Then the blocky shapes of Castle City shrank behind him, and his boots scuffed against weathered asphalt. After that there was only darkness and the hiss of the wind.

As he walked, he rubbed his right hand—the hand Jack had clasped just before everything had gone mad. It still throbbed, but now the pain had dwindled to a swarm of pinpricks, like the aftereffects of an electrical shock. Travis remembered the fierce light that had blazed in Jack’s usually kind blue eyes.
You are our hope now
, he had said, and even more mysteriously,
Forgive me, my friend
. Travis didn’t know what to make of those words. None of this made any sense. All he knew was that his best friend in the world was quite possibly dead.

Through his sheepskin coat he felt the small, heavy lump
of the iron box. What did it contain? Whatever it was, it couldn’t possibly be worth all that had happened. Or could it? After all, Jack had told him to keep the box safe—no doubt from the people who were after him, the people who had broken into the antique shop and had set it ablaze. Except, now that he thought about it, Travis wasn’t so certain it
had
been people who had attacked the Magician’s Attic. At least not any sort of people he knew. He saw again the silhouette he had glimpsed for a fleeting second. So tall, so thin, moving with eerie grace. It might all have been a trick of the light, but even the light itself had seemed
wrong
. Too bright, too piercing. Travis shook his head. He had so many questions and no place to go for answers.

His boots ground against the pavement as he slowed to a halt. For a moment he considered returning to the light and warmth of the Mine Shaft. But that wasn’t possible, was it? Maybe they were following him, the beings in the light. What would happen if he led them back to the crowded saloon?

Travis shivered inside his coat. He supposed it was midnight by now. Far below, the lights of Castle City gleamed in the mountain dark, beautiful as stars, and as utterly unreachable. His eyes traveled up the desolate stretch of highway, and for a moment he wondered if maybe he had been following the road back to his cabin, with its drafty log walls and leaking roof—if maybe he had been going home. Yet even as the thought occurred to him, he knew it was not so. He did not belong there any more than he belonged amid the lights shining in the valley below. Somehow, during the course of that night, Travis had stepped outside the boundaries of his usual world—he had gone beyond the pale—and he did not know how he would ever return. It was the loneliest feeling he had ever known.

“I’m afraid, Jack,” he whispered, but the words turned to fog on the cold air and melted away.

He turned to continue on, and that was when he saw it, beside the highway not far ahead. The old-fashioned circus tent. Golden light spilled from the half-open entrance flap and through rents in the canvas to give the big top the aspect of a great, grinning jack-o’-lantern. Travis stared for a long moment. Then, before he even knew what he was doing, he
started walking toward the tent. But the man in black had gazed into the darkness gathering on the horizon with knowing eyes, and Travis had nowhere else to go.

As he drew closer to the tent, he passed the blotchy white school bus he had seen earlier. Parked beside it was a motley collection of vehicles, ranging from pickups and rusted-out station wagons to suburban minivans and gleaming sports cars. Travis hesitated a moment before the entrance. Did he really think he would find answers here?

There was only one way to find out. He took a deep breath, then plunged into the golden light beyond.

Despite the lateness of the hour,
Brother Cy’s Apocalyptic Traveling Salvation Show
was in full swing.

The first thing Travis noticed was that the tarnished light came, not from electric bulbs, but from punched-tin lanterns suspended below the canvas ceiling. A haze of smoke hung on the air like an atmosphere of mystery. To either side of the entrance hulked a bank of wooden bleachers. A scattering of people sat upon the splintery planks, perhaps two dozen in all. It was an unlikely mélange. A walleyed trucker in faded flannel kicked up his battered boots, smoking a cigarette. Nearby, a woman in a smart blue business suit perched on her bench like a stiff bird. Beyond her, an old blind man in thrift-store garb leaned forward on his rattan cane, head bowed, listening. Sitting in the front row was a young woman—barely more than a girl—clad in a nylon coat of dirty sky blue with matted fake fur around the neck, a small child clutched on her lap. The young woman’s thin face was tightly drawn—in weariness, and perhaps in trepidation—but the child stared around him with wide eyes, a look of wonder on his grubby cherub’s face.

Feeling conspicuous, Travis found a vacant place and sat down. He lifted his head, and that was when he saw him.

The man in black.

Or Brother Cy, for that was certainly his name, and this was most certainly his traveling revival show. The preacher
prowled on a stage opposite the bleachers, clad in that same black coffin suit, and paused now and then to thump a bony fist on a podium that looked as though farm animals had drunk out of it in its last incarnation. He had taken off his broad-brimmed pastor’s hat to expose a phrenologist’s dream of a cranium. With a start, Travis realized the rich music he had heard rising and falling on the smoky air was in fact Brother Cy’s magnificent, terrible, honeyed-rasp voice, preaching up a storm.

“… and you, my friends, you who lurk in your comfortable tract houses,” Brother Cy thundered with as much spit as volume, “believing yourselves protected from all harm, wallowing in your reclining chairs, drinking your six-packs of beer, and prostrating yourselves before the altar of television. You are in for a surprise, my friends.” The podium shuddered under his fist, and his eyebrows bristled like black caterpillars. “For whether you live in a hilltop mansion or a river bottom shack, it will find you just as easy and knock upon your door. For I say to you again—there is a darkness coming!”

“Amen!” a smattering of voices said, and there was even one faint “Hallelujah!” Brother Cy grinned, fire lighting the pits of his eyes, as if it had been an affirmation a thousand voices strong. But he was not finished yet.

“It creeps nearer every day, this darkness—every hour, every minute. But have any of you seen its coming? Have you felt it, like a shadow falling across your soul?” He shook his head, perhaps in sorrow, perhaps disgust. “No, you have not! You have turned your eyes inward, you have shut your ears, and you have drowned yourself in the petty comforts of your material possessions.” He thrust his arms out to either side, and his voice vaulted to a crescendo. “I say, is there not even one among you who has dared to gaze into the heart of the approaching dark?”

Two dozen faces stared at Brother Cy, fearful, entranced. Then one tremulous voice rose on the smoky air.

“I … I have.”

It was the young woman who held the child.

Brother Cy gazed down at her for a protracted moment, like he was judging her with those black-marble eyes. Then he stepped off the stage and moved to her with his scarecrow
gait. He cupped a long hand beneath her fragile chin and lifted it until her look was lost in his.

“So you have, child,” he said in a secret voice. “So you have.” They remained that way for a long moment, as if some unheard conversation passed between them. Then he leaped back onto the stage and pounded the podium until its sides bowed.

“Are you not ashamed?” Brother Cy said. “Here before you sits one with a tiny child, who is little more than a child herself, pitiable and full of fear. Yet she has found the strength to do what the rest of you have not, to lift up her eyes and stare into the very heart of shadow!”

The spectators shifted on the hard bleachers.

“Yes, I see the truth now,” Brother Cy said. “There are disbelievers among us tonight, aren’t there? You know who you are.” He thrust out a skeletal finger and swept it over the audience. When the accusing appendage pointed toward Travis, it seemed to pause. Travis squirmed in his seat, and he felt naked. Then Brother Cy’s finger moved on past him.

“It seems I lack the power to convince all of you disbelievers,” the preacher said. “However, you are fortunate, for there is another here tonight who sees this darkness more clearly than anyone else. And with her is one who understands its nature far better than I.” Brother Cy thrust a hand toward a side curtain of moth-eaten velvet and bowed like a macabre facsimile of a game-show host. “May I introduce to you Sister Mirrim and Child Samanda!”

The curtain parted, and onto the stage stepped a woman and a girl. They approached Brother Cy hand in hand, and Travis had the sense that it was not the woman who led the girl but rather the reverse. Both wore heavy dresses of black wool that contrasted with their moon-pale skin. However, there the similarity ended, for the woman’s hair was wild and fiery, and she gazed forward with distant green eyes, a stricken cast to her otherwise impassive visage, as if she looked upon some far-off place, while the girl’s hair was raven dark, and her purple eyes seemed far too knowing for the angelic cameo of her face.

Brother Cy stood behind woman and girl, and encompassed but did not touch them with the half circle of his arms. “Sister Mirrim is possessed of great and unusual
sight,” he said in a stage whisper. “Would you have her see for you now?” He held up a silencing hand. “Wait! Before you answer, know that what Sister Mirrim sees may be good or ill, and in these times I say of the two it is far more likely to be ill she will glimpse. But then, from knowledge of evil can come great good, for those who dare to listen. Do any of you so dare?”

A chorus of affirmation rose from the bleachers.

“So be it.” Brother Cy bent close to Sister Mirrim. “See for us, Sister,” he murmured, then retreated. Sister Mirrim stood at the fore of the stage, her hands resting like frail doves on the small shoulders of Child Samanda, who stood quietly before her. At last Sister Mirrim spoke, and as she did her eyes grew more distant yet, gazing on things no other within the tent could glimpse.

“It comes from a place far distant,” she began in a chantlike voice. “Yet in that distance lies no protection. For I can see it growing now, sending forth dark shoots, and digging down dark roots, drinking a world to make it strong. And when it has drunk that world dry, and all that is left is ash and bone, it shall lift its gaze in this direction, and it shall slake its thirst upon this unwary world.” Her voice rose, shrill now. “Can you not see it? The birds of night have taken wing. Their pale master wakes, and his heart is colder than winter. Where are the Stonebreaker and the Blademender? I cannot see them yet. But there is something more, something darker still, a shadow behind the shadow.” She shook her head. “I cannot … I cannot quite …” Her voice was galvanized by panic, and the stricken look in her eyes became one of terror. “Alas! Alas! The eye that was blinded sees once more, and all is blackened and withered beneath its fiery gaze!”