Night of Demons - 02 (10 page)

The bright red in his pupils seemed to dance and flicker slightly.

“It came to you in a dream?”

“Maybe something more than that,” I said. “A vision.”

“You’re a visionary now?”

I didn’t particularly care for the hint of dark sarcasm in his tone.

“Who or what exactly is T’choulon?”

See, I hadn’t mentioned Amashta yet. And he seemed to understand that I was holding something back from him. I’m not sure that he liked that very much. But this seemed to be a matter of importance, and excited him. His fingers wrapped themselves around each other nervously for a few seconds. And his head went down and swayed from side to side a little. He looked utterly consumed in thought.

Then, at last, he got himself calmed down. He put his palms on his thighs, and then straightened on his camp bed.

“Early on in my researching days,” he told me, “I got a notion that was unusual at the time. That if I tried to plan everything, do everything to schedule, then I wouldn’t get as far as I might, simply because the supernatural doesn’t work that way. Better, I decided, to surrender myself to the vagaries of tide and time, and let them deposit me on whatever shores they chose.”

I thought I could see what he was getting at. He’d had a whole wide world to choose from, after all.

“So I allowed myself to drift around a couple of years. Hitched rides on a whim, took random buses. Walked down certain streets because I felt I ought to. Got on trains because it just felt right. And it worked, to an extent. You’d be surprised how much you can find out, that way, about the world we live in and the other ones we barely know.”

I was trying to be patient. Willets, as I’ve mentioned, took his own sweet time getting to any given point, and it was no use trying to hurry him. He had become even more intense and serious than usual, his face a heavily lined mask of concentration in the gloom.

He wet his lips before continuing.

“One time, I wound up in Nebraska. I was walking on my own, near dusk, cornfields all around me. And I thought at first I was alone…until I came across a very old medicine man, settling down by the roadside for the night. He invited me to join him. A peculiar-looking fellow.”

Willets paused yet again, digging back into his memory. It seemed to be very important to him that he got the details right.

“It was difficult to tell his age precisely, but…he was very old. Very skinny. Hooked nose, slightly bulging forehead. Eyes as dark as any I had ever seen. Whitish hair, like straw. And he had this—”

One of the man’s hands came up.

“This scar cut into the side of his neck, just under the left ear. Like a hash mark.”

Which made my mouth go dry. The rest of the room seemed to fade away. The only time I’d seen Amashta, there had been a scar carved into the exact same spot. In her case it had been two parallel lines, like an equals sign. But I was pretty sure that it was no coincidence.

“He wouldn’t tell me his name,” the doctor continued, “or even what his tribe was. Told me stuff like that had no importance in the true order of existence, which was odd. But he let me share his campfire for the evening, and we talked. He told me stuff. He claimed to belong to a family that went back almost to the last ice age.”

I sat up a little straighter myself. That couldn’t be true, could it? Someone claiming lineage the whole way back to times like those? I kept on listening anyway, holding my tongue and nodding.

“According to him, they’d passed on tales, purely by word of mouth, relating to that era. Stories six thousand years old and more. An astounding claim, and quite absurd sounding, I’d suppose. Except—you had to have been there—he was utterly convincing. And in several of the stories, that same name cropped up.”

He looked straight into my face.

“T’choulon. A city. The world’s first, older even than Eridu in Sumeria. He referred to it as a ‘city in the rocks,’ so I’d imagine it was based on caves.”

His pupils fastened on my own.

“But many shamans gathered there. And then, there was a war between them.”

Millicent Tollburn’s residence—she’d had it built to her own design with part of the settlement from her divorce, and called it Millwood House—was square and largely featureless on the outside, with a flat roof. The place was built of pale brick and was ostentatiously large, with fourteen bedrooms. Odd, for somebody who had few visitors, no live-in staff. It looked out onto Plymouth Drive, about halfway up the gradient. The grounds behind it descended the slope for more than half a mile before they gave way to a tree line. There was a pond halfway down, overgrown with algae. And stables too—she kept four horses And a wall around the entire place, some ten feet high, with iron spikes at the top.

Her Jaguar was sitting, with its top still down, on the sprawling gravel drive, where it had been most of the night.

Millicent was standing by a window at the rear, gazing out across the town. The embroidered silk drapes that she was leaning against were just a façade to show the outside world. The interior of her place was minimalistically furnished. Very modern, exactly the way she liked it. Nothing cluttered. Nothing a mess. She even emptied her ashtray every time she smoked a cigarette.

She’d gotten no sleep last night, but was not in the least bit bothered about that. Too much occupied her mind. Somewhere out there in that seething anthill of a town was the most valuable part of her inheritance. Her blue-green gaze narrowed with anger at the very thought.

She’d earned it, in the hardest way you could imagine. She deserved it. Damn, the Wand of Dantiere was hers!

She watched as a tiny-looking green bus rumbled to a halt on Brent Street. The passengers started getting out. They looked like bugs from up here, but it wasn’t just the distance. She’d despised the people of this town ever since…

She shuddered, then tried to close her mind to the memories. No.

She was clutching something in her right hand. Woodard Raine had given it to her last night. He knew about the wand, how Lucas had used its power to spy on his peers, even influence their minds. Most people would have been shocked. But Raine was different—a moral law unto himself. He lived so distantly from the real world, stuff like that amused him. To his mind, it was a merry game. And he’d offered his help—enthusiastically, in fact—as soon as she had told him it was gone.

She opened her hand a little wider, and the object she’d been given glittered in the filtered sunlight. It was called a Thieftaker, a very rare and special magical device. There’d been one in the Raine family for generations, or so she’d been assured. At first glance, it looked like a solid jewel, roughly the size of a hen’s egg. But when you took a closer look, you could see that it was more than that.

There were gaps between the facets. And the entire thing was hollow. It was made up, in fact, of hundreds of much smaller jewels, all linked together in continuous strands, crisscrossing each other in the most intricate fashion. When her palm quivered slightly, they shifted a touch, a motion like tiny cogs in the belly of a pocket watch.

Raine had told her which words to use, and the ones to emphasize. The spell was in Latin. And, like the device itself, was a complicated thing. But if anyone had stolen something from you, this would get the object back. And—so she had been promised—it would bring the perpetrator along for the ride. Revenge, you see, was part of its purpose.

It could not be used in daylight. She would have to wait until nightfall came slipping down again. But, simply holding it, she felt its influence reach out. She got a definite sense of the man who had killed Poppy and taken the wand. He was not from around here—that was the biggest surprise. And his thoughts seemed to go flying off at tangents even more bizarre than Raine’s.

The dirty piece of thieving scum was extremely pleased with himself, right now. For the moment, he was laying low. She wasn’t sure quite where, but it seemed to be a very dark place. Murky. Fetid. Not in the least bit pleasant. But that didn’t seem to bother him. He was chortling quietly to himself.

“Shadow Man” were two words she got off him. And then “special fun.”

And that word—‘special’—brought the memories tumbling back. She could not stop them this time.

“This will make you special, Milly. This will make you strong.”

Her grandfather’s face, both eyes clear back then, loomed up in front of hers. The most venerated adept in the Landing, yes. Except that was not the entire truth. When she’d been a little child, he had insisted on spending time alone with her. Hours alone.

She clenched her teeth, trying to fight against the images flooding through her head. It did no good. She couldn’t stop them.

He’d use his magic on her, doing dreadful things. Turning her into awful creatures. Sending her under the ground.

“But I don’t want to!”

“How do you expect to be a powerful magician if you don’t understand all the darkness in the world?”

And if she kept protesting, he’d cast spells on her that made her hurt.

“I’ll tell Mom and Pop!”

“You can tell them anything you want. I’ll sneak into their thoughts and change them. It will make no difference. This remains our special secret. You will thank me later on.”

The scene suddenly changed. She was at a garden party at the Vernon house. The occasion…her grandfather’s sixty-fifth birthday.

The broad, sprawling mansion with its Grecian pillars lay off in the distance. She was standing on a perfectly clipped lawn, surrounded by topiary cut in the shape of mythic beasts. A huge satyr crouched like it was stalking her. A Minotaur stretched out its arm. She knew that they were only plants, but they frightened her, and she was trying not to show it.

There were hundreds of people around her. Everybody who was anybody in the town was here. And it was not just adepts. There was the mayor, Edgar Aldernay. There were men from the police department, and the fire chief and his assistant. There were representatives from the Board of Commerce, ministers, folk from the PTA.

It was a brilliantly sunny day, the sky a startling shade of blue. A constant thrum of chatter rose toward it. Folk were getting to know each other, and old acquaintances were being renewed.

Waiting staff carrying large salvers were circulating. A string quartet was playing nearby. Millicent stood frozen on the edge of all of that activity and sound.

At the direct center of it was her grandad. Everyone seemed drawn to him. Everybody smiled. His hand was being shaken constantly. And people were respectful, deferential to him. When he spoke, they hung on his every word, and smiled, and even laughed.

What were they laughing about so loudly? Was he telling them about his secret games, and what a helpless little fool she was? Millicent watched the whole thing numbly. Didn’t they know who he really was? That evil man. Why were they treating him this way?

It finally occurred to her. They had to be in on the secret. And they either didn’t mind, or simply didn’t care. Her dismay turned to simmering anger, although she took care to hide that too.

Another half an hour, and photographs were being taken. People started gesturing to her. She was obviously expected to be a part of this.

“Come on, Milly! It’s your turn!”

Everyone was looking at her. She quaked furiously inside.

“Don’t you want a picture with your granddad? He’s a very special man.”

And she wanted to come right out with it. Tell everyone exactly what kind of cruel filth he was. But there were hundreds of eyes fixed on her. Hundreds of faces, beaming expectantly. And she realized, in that instant, they’d despise her if she told them that.

Finally she walked across, a smile fixed tightly on her lips. It didn’t even falter when his arm settled across her shoulder, although revulsion uncoiled through her gut.

He moved his cheek so close to hers that their faces were almost touching.

“Look into the camera, dear.”

“Yes, Poppy,” she heard herself reply.

The flashbulb blinded her—once, twice, three times. And her head was spinning so much that she thought that she was going to faint. But when her vision cleared, everyone was chuckling and applauding. So she was a joke to them. And they were all in on the secret, weren’t they?

It was hurting her face simply to smile by this time. Just as well they couldn’t see past it. It was lucky for them they couldn’t hear the thoughts now running through her mind.

I hate you. All of you. This entire town.

And one of these days, you’ll pay for this. I swear it. You will all pay dearly.

The FBI had taken over Shadow Man after the first few killings, naturally. But it had been her case in the first place, and Lauren had stuck with it in her spare time. This particular month, she had been delving into the plethora of crazy things that had previously inspired serial killers. Lunar cycles, astrology, the motions of the planets. Sunspots, for heaven’s sake. And, going through the files, she’d noticed something that she hadn’t been expecting. Never in a million years.

The weather…

She was woken by the noise of someone ringing on the doorbell. And it wasn’t like the buzzer in her own apartment on the edge of Chinatown. It was heavier, a clanging sound. Lauren felt disoriented at first, not at all sure where she’d wound up. But then she remembered some of it. The boonies, for heaven’s sake. She struggled up into a half-seated position on the edge of the small bed, rubbing at the gunk that had formed in her eyes.

She found her watch in a pocket of the robe that she was wearing, squinted at it. Damn, she hadn’t meant to fall asleep this long.

She still felt out of kilter, squinting at her new surroundings. This room reminded her of Tommy Valentine’s on Dartmouth, back when she had been a little girl. Then the whole of it came back to her. Raine’s Landing, yes. Ross Devries’s home.

The bell was still ringing, and no one seemed to be answering it. She noticed a piece of paper on the nightstand, picked it up and read it. Then she went to the front door.

When she yanked it open, Lieutenant Hobart was standing on the porch. He stared at her, looking quite surprised. She realized why, and pulled the robe a bit tighter around her. What did the man think was going on?

The street was washed with sunlight behind him. Birds were singing in the trees. Hobart stared down at his massive shoes, then said, “We agreed I’d pick you up and take you to the murder scenes.”

Straight to business, then.

“Give me five minutes. You can come in, if you like.”

But he looked wary and mumbled, “I’ll wait by the car.”

As he lumbered away, she was struck once again by how ungainly he seemed. She knew it was unkind, but she’d already given him the nickname Herman Munster. An odd sort of man to be a detective, although he seemed to suit this particular town.

She thought it through again as she scrubbed at her teeth and got her hair untangled. No computers. Not so much as a boarding house. What kind of place was this? Talk about back of beyond.

Still, these were not the kind of mysteries that she was paid to solve. She had been determined to catch Hanlon ever since she’d seen what he had done to his first victims, a family on Fairfield. She had sworn to get the man, in fact. She went back through into the bedroom, got a change of underwear and a fresh shirt out of her little case. Caught a glimpse of herself in a nearby mirror as she put them on. She had a black belt in jujutsu, and she swam a lot, and felt pleased with the way her body looked.

Which got her thinking about her host. She already knew how she felt about Hobart. But what did she think of Mr. Ross Devries?

He’d seemed too controlled and unforthcoming when she had first met him. And she’d thought initially that he was a cold fish. Although as it turned out, he wasn’t exactly that. He’d been hurt emotionally, that much was for sure. And he held himself at a slight distance from the world because of that. But she’d begun to like him, on the drive back here. He was intelligent, a little wry. Reserved certainly—but what the hell. She hated men who talked too much. Tall and narrow, with his blond hair and his pale gray eyes. He was certainly attractive.

She pulled her suit and shoes on, checked her Walther, then returned to the front door.

Saul Hobart, true to his word, was waiting by his Pontiac. As she approached the man, he peered at her again with an inquiring expression. And it wasn’t anything to do with the robe this time. He was staring at her like she was some kind of total mystery.

People didn’t normally react to her that way. And she wasn’t quite sure why, exactly. But Lauren got the strangest feeling he was hiding something fairly important from her.

Saul drove her up Sycamore Hill first. As they neared the top, she got some glimpses through the gates of the enormous, sprawling mansions here. Wow, this was genuinely impressive. Who’d have thought so many wealthy people lived in a town no one had ever heard of. It occurred to her that—just maybe—they had sufficient influence to keep it this way, keep the place anonymous. Was that the explanation for the odd things she had noticed?

They pulled off onto a narrow lane and drew up to a smaller gate. Saul led her across a broad front lawn and past the yellow tape at the doorway of a cottage, and then took her through to the conservatory. It was washed in yellow light as well. What was a bureau doing there?

Lauren walked around carefully. The scene had been processed to a good standard, she was pleased to see. There were chalk marks, and numbered tags all over the floor. By the amount of spatter, it was just an ordinary stabbing. Except that, in the dried-up pool of blood where the body had been lying, someone had left a knee-print. She’d come across the same at other killings. That had been Cornelius, crouching down to leave his signature.

Other than that, there was nothing more she could turn up than what the local cops had found.

“Let’s take a look at the Anderson place,” she suggested.

It turned out to be most of the way across town. And that struck her as very odd. Why’d Cornelius gone so far to find a second set of victims, when he’d constantly returned to the same districts, even the same blocks, back in the city?

The town sped by them as they left the hill behind. They headed down a road called Sandhurst Avenue, then turned east onto a wide, straight thoroughfare the signs told her was Greenwood Terrace. And, gazing at her surroundings, Lauren felt a nagging sensation, not for the first time. She could almost hear a little voice whispering in the back of her mind. Telling her that she did not belong here. That she ought to leave.

She’d heard it several times already. First when she’d been heading into town. And then when she’d been wandering around it, before she’d met Ross.

And the appropriate word was “huh”? She’d been to towns like this before, and this one looked pretty much par for the course. Some quaint older houses thrown in among the newer ones. A variety of rooftops, weather vanes on some. They went past a schoolyard. It was midmorning break. The kids were playing with Frisbees and brightly colored balls in the sunshine. Older folk were outside too, mostly tending their front yards. A phone company van rolled by, although it was no company that she had ever heard of.

But all this normalcy seemed lost on her. She felt her heart bump over quickly. Go, right now! the voice inside demanded. But it couldn’t be real. She simply ignored it. It was just a vibe that she was picking up. She remembered what Ross had told her—this was a place that minded its own business. Little wonder she felt out of whack here.

The plain fact of the matter was, she was determined not to leave without Cornelius Hanlon. She would turn her own gun on herself before she contemplated that.

Saul swung the Pontiac around a corner again, heading north this time. She caught a flash of the river in the distance. Then they were going past a massive park, with a huge blue lake at the center of it. There was a rowboat out on the water. Folks were fishing on the banks.

See, it was all perfectly okay. The voice died away in her mind.

They stopped outside the Anderson house, which looked as utterly mundane as everything they’d passed. But Lauren had to steel herself before she went in, all the same. Family homes, with children involved, were the mentally the toughest crime scenes she’d ever had to deal with. She had never gotten used to it, even after month after month of the Shadow Man. Recollections came surging back.

The weather.

On four separate occasions, the Shadow Man had returned to a city block he’d previously visited, entering a different house. He’d done it completely at random, so there was no way of predicting it. But—to her astonishment—she found that several days before the first killing on each block, there’d been a storm or a strong overnight wind. So she’d begun canvassing those areas again.

“Sure, we had a few tiles loose. We called the insurance people, and they sent this guy around.”

She’d found a ladder, climbed up on the roof herself. And from there, she could see the back of every house on the far side of the block. There was the Nevills’ overly large cat-flap. And there were Mrs. Sommer’s windows with their rusted-open locks.

The route to Hanlon had been very simple after that…

They both went in. The wallpaper was a slightly garish yellow, but otherwise this was a normal family home. She could see framed certificates for musical achievement on one wall of the living room. The couch was yellow too. These people seemed to have really liked the color. A small plastic model of the Hulk was lying at the foot of the staircase.

It was best, she’d always found, to get the worst part over right away. So she asked if she could see the kids’ rooms first.

The sight of blood on child-sized bedsheets made her tighten up.

“What were their names?” she asked, as calmly as she could manage.

“Joe and Aggie,” Saul responded quietly.

He looked angry, and his big face had gone gray. There was dampness in the corners of her own eyes, but she didn’t let it overwhelm her. If she couldn’t act professionally, she had no business being here. Lauren drew herself up straight and went through to the girl’s room. Damn, there were the instruments. This was the kid who had earned those certificates downstairs.

Both rooms were in the same state. By the pooling of the blood, there had been no struggle in either case. They’d almost certainly died in their sleep. Son of a bitch! She never ceased to be amazed at the sheer depth of Cornelius’s evil. Lauren felt her hands begin to shake, and clasped them together to stop that happening. She took note of what she needed to, and then moved on.

The main bedroom was a completely different story. There had been an obvious struggle, an attempt at flight. She scrutinized the muddled red smears on the vivid yellow wallpaper.

“This was all…Christine Anderson?”

Saul fingered the loose skin at his throat and nodded.

“And what was her husband doing? Was he restrained?”

Her opposite number squinted at her.

“We found him lying on top of her body, with his throat cut.”

Which was not Cornelius’s style at all.

“Ligature marks?”

The big man shrugged.

“Tell you the truth, we had it down as a murder-suicide, at first.”

Why’d they come to that conclusion? Lauren frowned. But, looking at the evidence around her, none of this made any sense. She worked it over in her mind, then came to a new decision.

“Okay. I’d like to see the bodies.”

The morgue was precisely the same as you found anywhere in America. An unreal-seeming place, except that it was too real. An environment where everything was kept as businesslike as possible, to avoid the word “macabre.”

They went down a wide corridor. The fluorescent lighting was harsh and robbed everything of its color. The paint on the walls had once been white, but had faded to a tepid, neutral blandness. And the whole place reeked of carbolic, in a vain attempt to cover up the lingering smell of death.

The coroner, a bearded man with hair down to his shoulders, had the husband on the slab and was cutting into his chest cavity when they walked in. His name was Leonard Furbellow, Lauren could see from the plastic nametag on his stained white coat. Anderson was a medium-sized man who had kept himself in reasonable shape. Handsome in a slightly dull way.

“I think there’s something in his lungs,” Furbellow said, looking up and nodding at Saul. “Was this guy a heavy smoker?”

Lauren hadn’t noticed any ashtrays. But considering there were kids in the house, maybe Stephen Anderson had taken his habit outside. Saul, apparently, thought the same.

“I’ll get back to you on that,” he answered. “Mind if we have a private moment with the vic?”

The coroner frowned, then set his scalpel down and went outside.

“Hold on,” Lauren said, the instant he was gone. “Where is it?”

“Where’s what?” Hobart asked.

“The symbol on his chest. The theta.” She stepped forward, peering at the corpse. “If this was Hanlon, then there ought to be one. Where are the other bodies?”

Hobart led her across to a row of oversized steel cabinets on the far side of the room. She watched as he slid several of them open. They had already been examined and then tidily stitched up again. The sight of grade school kids in that condition frankly made her want to hurl. But she was too confused for that. Each of these had the
thanatos
carved into their chest.

She peered back at the body of the man of the house.

“So how come he has nothing?”

“That’s why we thought it was a murder-suicide. He had his family’s blood all over him. What other conclusion would you like us to come to?”

Her head spun slightly. She could feel her face draining of heat. This wasn’t what she’d been expecting. Lauren tried to take a step back. And then had to reach out for the nearest solid object, to steady herself.

Could Hanlon have somehow forced the guy to murder his own family? But that didn’t ring true. She’d read his profile several dozen times. The Shadow Man took massive pleasure in the act. It was both high art and entertainment, to his fractured mind. He wouldn’t delegate it to anybody else. In which case…?

She had no idea. Her head was rotating even worse. And those strange voices had started up again, far more loudly this time. Everything seemed to tilt abruptly.

“Lieutenant Brennan?” she could hear Saul asking. “Hey, are you okay?”

She felt hands grip her shoulders. Normally, she’d be affronted…but right now, she was glad of it.

“We’ll go outside for a while, okay?” she heard him saying. “This place gets to me sometimes too. Perfectly understood.”