Deadly Violet - 04 (18 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY

“Are you sure that this is wise, sir?”

Raine was back inside his manor. He had a wearily frustrated air, since he had spent a good long while off in the purple universe to absolutely no effect. He’d done his very best to reason with its inhabitants. He had begged, teased, pleaded, cajoled, bargained, made several dry stabs at humor, and even a few veiled threats. And it had gotten him no reaction whatever. Like trying to get a sensible response out of a block of wood.

The walls had remained static and the tunnels empty. Not a single skinny figure had emerged. It was as if they’d plugged their ears. And he preferred to think of the whole business in those terms, since one thing that he absolutely loathed was being ignored.

It was time to approach this in a different way. And he’d been turning his options over for a while. He couldn’t remember the last occasion he had held any subject in his mind for more than a few minutes. The world was such a fascinating and a multi-layered place that his attention was constantly being diverted.

But he had to face facts – the town that bore his name was going under. And acknowledging that had made him resolute. His inner thoughts and feelings had become extremely focused.

How to put an end to this?

Hampton wasn’t really helping with his incessant yammering. In point of fact, the man was doing it right now.

“I have to tell you, sir, that I have never approved of this whole business. Separating your soul from your corporeal body? What if something went wrong, and you couldn’t get them back together?”

“Then I suppose there would be two of me.”

Hampton went bug-eyed and swallowed.

“Uh, not exactly, sir. I don’t think you’re grasping what I’m trying to point out.”

Raine kept going from room to room, his servant bustling around his heels. And Hampton carried on complaining, but his master wasn’t listening any more. He went into his father’s study, and his golden gaze darted about.

It alighted on a dark rectangle lying on the huge mahogany desk. An old notebook. He snatched it up, flipped through it quickly. It was full of scribbled spells.

He already had an armful of them, written not merely in books. There were strips of parchment. Sheets of vellum. There were spells engraved in brass and copper. One was even woven into a tapestry
– he believed that was the handiwork of his grandmother. Every bit of magic knowledge that his family had accumulated down the generations. He had been prowling round the house, collecting every scrap of it that he could find.

Because it had occurred to him that if he couldn’t solve this problem by way of the Oon, then the only course available to him was Violet Tiswell. Which meant somehow reaching back through time.

Time was a dimension wasn’t it, the same way space was? He believed some German boffin had proved that to be the case some decades back. And he already knew that he could fling himself great distances through the ether. And so why not time as well?

When he’d tried it, though
– when he’d attempted Temporal Projection – it hadn’t worked. Nothing had happened. He’d stood there with his eyes shut, making funny grunting noises, going nowhere.

The Amethyst couldn’t be blocking him. He was planning to go nowhere near it.

And it couldn’t be that Temporal Projection was impossible. Nothing was impossible, if you used the right magic. It was simply that he couldn’t visualize precisely how to do it.

“I’m begging you, sir, reconsider,” said his servant, breaking up his concentration once again.

Raine frowned. Hampton had his best interests at heart, he knew. The man was deeply loyal. But he was being an absolute nuisance right now, butting in continually while he was trying to apply himself.

“If you want to help, then be a chum,” he murmured. “Go fetch me my books on counter-magic measures.”

“But those are on the far side of the house,” Hampton pointed out.

“Exactly.”

Woodard snapped his fingertips.

Hampton had the time for one truncated yelp, then vanished. Raine ought to have felt guilty, but he smiled instead. Ah, peace at last.

It would be several minutes before Hampton – who was pretty large and generally moved rather slowly – found his way back through the manor’s twisting corridors. Time enough, surely, to discover the solution to this dreadful business. Woodard started rummaging through the secret knowledge that he had collected.

Here was a spell to make kitchen herbs grow faster. Interesting, but of utterly no use.

Here was one to conjure up a basilisk. And there were others, when he studied them, that involved making changes to the weather, making a loved one very happy, improving one’s night vision, turning milk into bourbon – that must have been Uncle Vance – and getting rid of a house’s cobwebs. He studied each one briefly before flinging it aside.

And the longer that he worked at it, the larger the pile of discarded jottings grew. There was over a century of arcane knowledge here. But nothing that addressed the subject that he was concerned with.

“Oh, confound it!”

Woodard straightened, dumping the remainder round his shoes. He was never going to find what he was looking for this way. And why make this kind of effort in the first place, when you could simply use a spell instead? A spell to find another spell. The idea amused and intrigued him.

He stretched out both his arms in front of him, tiny gleaming sparks leaping between his fingertips. And then began intoning.

“Words and words and yet more words. And reading them is for the birds. Stir yourselves and make some sense. This much I command you.”

The papers on the floor rustled, like a swift breeze had passed over them. Their edges lifted, quivering gently. And then …

The written words actually started rising from the pages and the copper plates. The individual letters broke apart and floated up into the air. Hundreds, and then thousands of them. A rising, swirling cloud of them, made up of vowels and consonants.

They lifted to head height, then started churning. Woodard found himself confronted with a dark tornado made up of the alphabet.

Why, this was considerably more bewildering than it had been before. How could he find what he wanted this way?

He spread his arms out to the sides, and tried another type of enchantment, to bring things into place.

“Put a stop to this confusion. Bring this to a swift conclusion. Tell me what I wish to know. I must be on my way.”

Every single floating letter suddenly caught fire. And the effect on each of them was different. Many of them – the majority, in fact – fizzled and crumbled away into nothingness. But those that were left behind began to glow a brilliant golden color, the exact same as his shining eyes.

They started moving purposefully through the air, rearranging themselves. Into lines. Then sentences. And then whole paragraphs. Woodard clapped his hands delightedly.

And in another few seconds, it was done. The lettering stopped moving altogether.

Raine paused briefly, then began to read out what had formed. Once that he had reached the end, he closed his eyes and projected his spirit.

And at first, it felt like it still wasn’t working.

Then he sensed it as his pupils glittered behind their closed lids. Raine got a sense of motion.

And the very next split-instant, he had left his body far behind.

His eyes were still closed. Why was that? Normally, when he projected, he could see everything around him, because he had no eyelids anymore.

But this was a different matter, temporal rather than astral. And so maybe there were different rules.

He willed his lids open and they did that.

He was sitting down. Another oddity. Slumped back in a deep armchair, in fact. And was no longer in his father’s study. But he thought he recognized this room. It was the drawing room in the west wing of Raine Manor, the same part of the building that had mostly been destroyed by the fire that had killed his parents. Except that, looking around now, he saw that it was perfectly intact.

Bright daylight was flooding through the windows. A grandfather clock was ticking in the corner. There were shelves of books, and portraits on the walls. Ornaments and valuable rugs and walnut furnishings. A harpsichord stood near the door, topped with a vase full of freshly picked flowers.

He looked down at himself, and saw that he was dressed in a very odd fashion. He was wearing britches, and a crimson velvet jacket with big ruffles on the front. A stiff collar was rubbing at his neck. That shouldn’t be the case since, when projecting, he never usually had any bodily form to speak of.

There was a mirror above the room’s large marble fireplace. And so he stood up inquisitively and wandered over to it.

Got a glimpse of his reflection, and reeled back with utter shock.

Raine took almost a minute steadying himself before he tried again. This time he held his nerve, though what he saw astonished him.

It was a face vaguely similar to his own. The same leaf-shaped ears that were the hallmark of his family. And his eyes were the exact dark blue they’d been before he’d turned them golden. But this was not really his face at all.

It was wider, about ten years older. The hair was slightly curly at the front and had a few strands of silver in it. There were bushy sideburns. And he had a thick moustache.

And he’d never worn one in his life!

Raine took hold of it and tugged at it gently. Then he did the same with the skin of his right cheek

Memories stirred. He thought he recognized this set of features from somewhere.

From several of the family portraits scattered round the dark halls of his mansion, perhaps. Was this …?

“Regis?” said a woman’s voice behind him. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

He spun around, to find himself confronted by an attractive woman in her late thirties – dressed in the Victorian style – who was peering at him with a severe expression.

“You were staring in the mirror like you didn’t recognize yourself,” she hissed.

His mouth dropped open, but no words came out. Because his thoughts were reeling furiously. Had she said “Regis”?

Regis Raine was his great-grandfather. And he’d never actually met the man. But was it possible that this was the way Temporal Projection worked? You didn’t simply hurl your spirit back through time
– you threw your consciousness into the body of an ancestor?

If so, it was utterly incredible.

“
Regis!
” the woman – great-grandma Ivy? – was barking at him. “We Raines have always had a sensible and level-headed reputation. But if you persist in behaving in this way, then you’ll ruin it completely. People will start thinking we’re insane.”

Wow, he’d never known great-grandma had been such a formidable battleaxe. He’d have liked to find out more about his origins. But Raine reminded himself what was going on in his own time. The situation was becoming urgent, and he really had to start thinking about getting back.

And so he willed himself out of his great-grandfather’s body. Felt his eyes shimmer again.

Then, he was racing back through time.

When he looked out again, he’d returned to the present day. A breathless-looking Hampton was there, standing anxiously in front of him.

Raine blinked, and his servant’s bulky frame slackened slightly.

“You looked like a statue for a while there, sir. I was getting pretty worried.”

Then his tone became inquisitive.

“But did you manage to do it, sir? Project yourself into the past?”

There’d be time for explanations later. He would fill the fellow in on every detail of the trip. But right now, there was something far more pressing that he felt impelled to do.

Woodard filled his lungs, threw both his arms up at the shadowy ceiling.

And then yelled, “
Eureka!
”

He had always dreamed of doing that.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

What Willets had suggested – trying to help those people that we could – turned out to be much too tall an order. Far too many were affected, simply on my own block, let alone the neighborhood. Some of them were waving their arms around in a terrified fashion and yelling at apparitions no one else could see. But in a few cases, the products of their madness were a lot more tangible.

Like Willets had said, every last rule was cancelled. And some of the things that people were seeing had managed to take on physical form.

I walked hurriedly over to Roger Lym’s house, directly across the street from mine. The front door was ajar. Once inside, I went to go into his living room … and the heads of several dozen snakes rose smartly into the air, forked tongues flickering in my direction.

Rattles whirred. The hoods of cobras flared like dark umbrellas. There was no sign of Roger, so I shut the door and got out.

Back on the street and heading south, I pulled my cell phone out and tried to get hold of Cassie. But I only got her answering service, which left me wondering what was happening in East Meadow. Probably the same as this. In which case, she’d have her own hands full.

The next home I tried was Dorothy Chase’s, three doors further down. And I couldn’t find her either. But it turned out that she’d always harbored a strong fear of cats. I could hear one moving around upstairs, purring.

The sound was as loud as a tractor motor. And something got knocked over, up there, that sounded to me like a chest of drawers. So that was my cue to leave again.

Yells were coming from every which direction, when I stepped back onto her front lawn. These were my neighbors, people that I’d known for years. And it was starting to look like I could do precisely zip to help them.

But then it turned out
I
was the one who needed help.

A bulge rose at the far end of the patch of grass that I was on. It was much too large to be the work of any mole or gopher. And it started to move across to me, gathering speed as it approached. Then the ground under my feet began to crumble.

I tried to jump away, but that turned out to be more difficult than I’d thought. Every time I put some pressure through my legs, the dirt under my shoes split apart and I lost my footing. I was sinking lower. And there were big teeth gnawing up and trying to grab me.

Willets suddenly blurred in and got me out of there. The world went sailing past us, so fast that it all got mushed together. And when we finally stopped, we were back on Sycamore Hill, up at a vantage spot called Coven Point.

It’s called that because the original Salem witches used to perform ceremonies there. At night, of course. And for the first few years, in secret.

It’s not the highest part of the hill
– that honor goes, naturally, to Raine Manor and its grounds. But it is on a jutting promontory, overhanging a sheer drop of several hundred feet, with sharply jagged rocks collected at the bottom. Such a dangerous place to be, in fact, that the town’s authorities had set up a barrier, a stretch of thick rope, supported by wooden posts. It ran the whole outer edge of the point, and was draped with icicles by this time of the year.

There were no dwellings near us, only trees. We were facing north and east, with a perfect view of nearly half the town. A freezing wind was cutting into me like razor blades. I pulled my collar up and rubbed my hands together, and then stared at Willets, who looked unaffected.

“Why bring us here?”

I was hoping he had some specific purpose, but it turned out that he didn’t.

“The best thing to do with generalized madness is to raise yourself above it, Ross. Besides,” he added in a quieter tone, “this is a nice, deserted spot. I don’t think we’ll get anyone’s crazed fantasies coming at us in a place like this. And we can keep an eye on everything that’s happening.”

But that was
all
we could do, and we were both aware of that. The doctor had the unhappy look of a professional jock who’d just been told his knees were finished.

“So we stand here and watch while the whole town goes to hell?” I asked.

“You tried helping, and what did it get you? If I hadn’t come in when I did, you’d be literally worm-food.”

He was right, but I still hated this. I stamped my feet against the cold, and then walked over to the edge. The footing was precarious
– the wind had blown the snow away, leaving only sheets of layered ice behind.

But I stared at the town below me.

Somebody had driven a car into a tree down there. And a truck was slewed sideways, blocking an entire road. Tiny dots were visible, milling around wildly, and those dots were people. I started to recall the conversation that I’d had with Lauren, about the fact she had no need to stay here.

“Thinking about it, why don’t
you
leave?” I asked the doc. I wasn’t looking at him, but could feel him peering at me. “I mean, you’re not bound by Regan’s Curse. So why don’t you get out?”

Then I gave that a little more thought and added, “Why didn’t you do that a good long while ago?”

I could hear him making a soft grumbling sound.

“Sure, I could do that,” he responded. “I could go away from here, board an airplane and fly halfway around the world. And do you know what would be waiting for me at the other end?”

I thought I knew the answer, but I let him say it.

“A mirror. I would still be who I am, and have the same past as before. And till I’m satisfied I’ve put that right …”

He let the final words trail off, because there was no need to say them.

And I nodded and gave a small, wry smile, in spite of what was going down. But then my thoughts turned back to Cassie.

She most likely had Lauren with her. And I thought it better that the three of us stuck together, from this point on. So I had another go at dialing her.

Got no answer, yet again. And that started to bother me.

“Trying to raise Ms. Mallory?” Willets asked.

“Trying, not succeeding. Can you tell what she’s up to?”

He went entirely still, casting his senses out.

Then his expression altered. It became extremely sour.

“I can’t tell what
anybody’s
doing,” he explained to me. “There’s so much craziness in the air that it’s like trying to find a single ant in a whole churning nest of them.”

“Maybe you need to do that blurry thing again, and get us down to Rowan Street?”

He tipped his chin back and was getting ready to do that. When something stopped us both dead in our tracks.

I had pretty much lost track of time, but it had to be late morning, surely? I checked my watch and saw that that was right. And the sun was midway through an almost cloudless sky, as small as a polished coin and gleaming yellow-white.

But as we watched, that began changing.

Faint reddish tinges were appearing round its edges. And then spreading out across it, melding with blue ones and combining

It was turning purple too. Lighting up the sky that shade, and casting its strange violet glow on everything in town.

Reality was taking what looked like a final nosedive. Everything that we’d considered normal and inviolable was going to hell. The rest had been quite bad enough. But this came as a truly profound shock.

And it was something else into the bargain. Confirmation we were done for. How could we fight anything like this?

The town below me looked entirely different. A couple of basic colors were gone. Deep pools of inky shadow had gathered to the west of every building. And I looked at my own hands. And they were bathed in violet too.

Then a fresh series of movements captured my attention. Another row of homes was beginning to disappear. They were going faster than the first ones had, with no chance for their occupants to get out.

I stared further across. The very edge of the town looked like it was wavering, on the verge of falling apart altogether.

And the only thing that I could do was stand there with my mind numb and my body stopped in neutral. We had found our way out of some pretty awful situations in the past. But we weren’t going to be able to find our way out of this one.

I wasn’t even certain how much longer we had left. Maybe I would be re-joined with Alicia and my children, when the end came? I clung onto that desperate thought for all that I was worth, since my whole world was nearly gone.

“Oh,
do
cheer up, sport,” came a voice behind me. “I never thought you were the type to give up quite so easily.”

Woody? I was turning round to face him  …

When Coven Point, Lehman Willets, and the entire view beneath me vanished in a pitch-dark flash.

And I was back inside Raine Manor.