The Broken Lands (46 page)

They started out quiet, whispers as insubstantial as thoughts, like words uttered at the waking edge of dreams.

I saw a woman crying in fear. This woman shrieked Jack Hellcoal's name.

I saw a man running. This man whispered the words
pillars of the city
as he ran.

The people who heard these whispers had no idea what they meant. The whispering voices got louder, more insistent.

I saw a woman who whispered the words
pillars of the city
as she lay dying. Why did this woman die? We do not understand the meaning of the words we are listening for.

I saw a man read words written in blood on a wall. This man read Jack Hellcoal's name. I saw the body below the words on the wall. Why did that man die? We do not understand the meaning of these words.

We do not understand why we are listening for these words.

We do not understand why we are here.

Hundreds of thousands of people heard the voices. Everyone who had uttered any of the words Christophel had written on the paper he had smoked with Walker's cheroot heard them, and that included the thousands of people who were now talking excitedly about the fiery message that had appeared briefly across the central span of the bridge.

Sam and Jin started hearing them about midway down the tower's ladder.

She paused on one of the landings, eyes wide. “Did you hear that?”

His face was drawn. “Yeah.”

“I've been hearing strange things all night,” Jin whispered. “I thought it was just me. What do you hear?”

“Someone asking . . . it's asking about Jack.”

Jin nodded, steeled herself, and started climbing down again.

At the bottom of the last ladder, the other three waited, faces white and panicked. “You hear them?” Mapp demanded.

“You, too?” Sam asked.

“All of us. Voices saying . . .” Constantine shuddered. “Awful things.”

Then, out of the fog, the speakers began to appear: ghostly shapes, only barely human, murmuring questions.

I saw three men sitting around a table.
The creature that spoke walked up to Jin, its voice coming inexplicably from a vague white face that had no mouth.
One of them shouted at the others. All three of them spoke the words
pillars of the city.

Another walked up to Sam and searched his face with eyes like pits
. I saw a man with red eyes kill a woman who screamed in fear. This man spoke the words
pillars of the city.
Why did this man kill? I do not understand why I must follow this man and witness his killing.

You spoke the words
pillars of the city, said a third to Mapp.
What does this mean? Are you the root?

Why must we listen for these words we do not understand?
a fourth demanded of Ambrose.
Why must we witness these things? Why are we here? Are you the root?

“There are so many of them,” Jin whispered, wonder battling fear. Then horror took over. “Oh, no.
We did this.
”

More and more came into view, crowding the space below the tower, pouring down from the ladders. There were
scores
of them, all whispering about the things they had seen and had heard and demanding, gently but persistently, to be allowed to understand what it all meant.

“Jin,” Sam murmured, “back in the cellar, back in Red Hook . . .”

“Yes,” Jin whispered. “This is how Walker and Bones were listening. Through these . . . creatures. And now we've flooded the system . . . and . . . they've escaped.” She tore her eyes away from the legion of confused and whispering daemons. “What do we do, Sam?”

Sam stared at the pit-eyed, mouthless beings. “I don't know.”

“We gotta get back to the hotel,” Mapp said, decisively. “I've seen a lot of things but I've never seen anything like this.”

Cautiously, they piled into the boat. “Will they follow?” Constantine asked in a shaking voice. “I don't know if the boat will float.”

“I did this,” Jin murmured, sick at heart.

Sam put an arm around her.

The daemons followed, walking on the water of the river in the wake of the boat as easily as insects, whispering all the while of the awful things they had seen, of their confusion, of words they did not understand.

 

Meanwhile, a bundle of linen washed against the pilings of a shipping dock in Red Hook. One hand after the other, the High Walker who had once been called Redgore pulled himself onto the pier and lay coughing, choking up the salty water of the East River onto the warped old boards.

He fought his way through his soaked jacket to his waistcoat pocket as he lay gasping on the pier. The battered old watch was there. Walker managed a smile through cracked and splitting lips, and dragged himself painfully to his feet.

He stumbled landward, blinking through the water dripping from his matted red hair, until he spotted the figure waiting for him on the road.

“Are you the root?” it asked.

Walker hesitated.

The figure stepped into the sickly light of a streetlamp. The red slick of blood sweat shone on its face.

“Oh, of all the—” Walker mumbled, exasperation cutting through his exhaustion. “Really?
Really,
Rawhead?”

The creature that had once been Basile Christophel tilted its head. “Are you the root?”

“The goddamn
root?
I don't know what that means, you conjure-thieving parasite,” Walker spat. “No, I'm not the bloody
root
. What the hell does that even
mean?
”

The Christophel-thing crossed the space between them faster than the girl on the tower had, and before he realized he was doing it, Walker flinched. The red-slicked face stopped inches from his. The letters
INIT
were carved into its forehead, just as they had been carved in the forehead of the tallow- daemon, Bios.

“I seek the root, the root of the tree,” it hissed. “There were to be no gods other than me.”

A slow smile broke out across the gambler's face. He shook his head. “Finally backfired on you, didn't it, you poor bastard?” The creature frowned, uncomprehending. “Get out of my way,” Walker snarled, his face beginning to break out into the black-and-red slash work. “Whatever the hell your root is, I'm not it.”

The two stared at each other for a long moment. Then the creature that was no longer Christophel turned on one broken heel and stalked into the shadows.

“Enjoy your search,” Walker murmured. Then he, too, turned and headed for the darkened streets. Before he had taken four steps, however, another voice stopped him.

“Walker.”

This voice was quiet and even, but Walker knew it well enough to sense the restrained fury that made that one word, his own name, sound like a thrown dagger.

The gambler took a deep breath that rattled in his lungs, and faced the newcomer. The man who approached wore a long leather overcoat and carried a lantern on a pole over one lean shoulder. Eyes like green bottle glass glittered in the moonlight. He had an easy, open expression on his tanned face, but the hand that gripped the pole was white-knuckled, and there was nothing friendly in his eyes.

“Jack,” Walker replied cautiously.

Jack Hellcoal stopped before the sodden gambler and looked him over. “Damn if you don't look like something the cat coughed up.”

Walker flicked the dripping cuffs of his coat and shoved his hair out of his eyes. “I had a bit of a fall.”

“You're telling me,” Jack replied, the first hint of accusation making it into his words at last. “I hear you took a tumble off a bridge, too.”

“Jack—”

“Funny thing, I seem to recall a fellow back in San Francisco, looked a lot like you, told me next time things would be
different
.” He spat the last word. “Who'd you underestimate this time? And where the hell is Bones?”

Walker tilted his head to crack his neck. He reached into his pocket and held out the watch he'd rescued from the top of the tower.

“Oh, you can hold on to that,” Jack said. “Somebody's gonna need to put a new skeleton together for him. That somebody's gonna be you, and when you're done collecting up the bones, you're gonna need that to bring him back.”

Walker muttered something under his breath.

“Say again?” Jack snapped. “You've got an opinion on the matter?”

“It's going to take years, finding new bones,” Walker said carefully. “Decades. Surely that's a job for . . . someone else?”

“It's a
punishment,
fool. And I can't think of anyone else who's earned that kind of punishment lately.” The man with the green eyes looked up at the smoke still drifting across the sky away from the bridge tower. “What a place this would've made,” he said thoughtfully. Then he shrugged. “Ah, well. Third time's the charm.”

Walker watched him cautiously. “And so . . . ?”

“So we move on.” Jack shrugged. Then he snapped his fin­gers. “Oh, you mean for
you
. Good point.”

The gambler's screams echoed through the streets for some time after that.

 

By the time Sam and Jin and their little crew staggered through the doors of the Broken Land, the weight of the daemons' questions lay like a judgment over Coney Island.

They'd returned Susannah's boat to its mooring near the mouth of the hidden tunnel and hiked up to Fulton Street, where they'd arranged to meet Mike in what had seemed the unlikely event that everything went according to plan. It had been a tight squeeze, but they'd managed to pile in for the long drive back to Gravesend.

The daemons had followed them, surging down the moonlit roads in the wake of the carriage like a parading army. Mike nearly drove off the road once or twice, unable to stop looking over his shoulder at the legions on the road behind him.

The hotel, though, was
seething
with them.

Cautiously, Sam and Jin, Mapp, Constantine, and Ambrose threaded their way up the stairs and through the atrium. The daemons lined the walls, murmuring questions, still talking about what they had seen. Some of them were even starting to look a little more . . . well, a little more human.

They found Tom, Susannah, Mr. Burns, and Ilana in the lounge. They were in much better condition than most everyone else at the hotel, but even they looked like they were on the verge of descending into madness as they stared, wild-eyed, at the strange creatures.

“Well, the plan worked, in case you hadn't noticed,” Ambrose announced. He stalked to the bar, poured himself a glass­ful of whiskey, and downed it, dribbling half down his shirt in the process.

“We couldn't stay in the room,” Susannah said shakily. “They were—there were too many of them, packed in like . . . there was nowhere to go, so we came down here.”

“Wh-what do we do?” Ilana stammered. “People are—”

“What do
we
do? This is
her
brilliant plan,” Ambrose snapped, pointing the bottle at Jin before refilling his glass, mumbling something about frying pans and fires.

Jin stopped dead in her tracks, her already-horrified face crumpling into an expression of anguish.

“Ambrose,” Tom rebuked.

“I'm so sorry,” the newspaperman said mechanically. “I really am. I didn't mean that. I just . . .” His words trailed off and he stared into the glass.

“Not sounding so much like the mayor of anything now, is he?” Walter Mapp observed. “Pull it together, would you? We don't need any more panic right now.”

“People are . . . people are . . .” Susannah stood in the doorway of the lounge, staring into the atrium.

In the front part of the hotel, there were strange currents of movement. The daemons crowded the walls, climbed the pillars and the curving banisters of the great central stair. There were so many . . . but of course it made sense. One of Walker's victims had been left right behind the hotel. People in this building had been talking about Jack Hellcoal obsessively for a couple of days now.

Then there were the real people.

They
moved like ghosts, passing stiffly among the creatures as if
they
were the interlopers, faces drawn and haunted. It was hard to tell how many of the humans were actually seeing the daemons, but they knew something was wrong. And even if they could not see the haunted beings, they could
hear
them.

The daemons seemed to understand only that they had been made to witness things they could not comprehend. They knew when they were looking at violence and pain, and they appeared to feel instinctively that these were wrong.

Inside the lounge, the creatures were no less persistent, but the group that had taken refuge there at least knew what they were dealing with, which was apparently what allowed them to see the horde of unearthly figures. The knowing and the seeing somehow made being surrounded by them bearable.

For the moment, at least.

“We have to do something,” Susannah said, trying to make her voice sound strong but failing. “People can't bear up under this. Not for long.”

From behind the bar, a derisive snort. “That's right. God forbid people have to face the truth of the world they live in.”

Ambrose had taken up residence on the absent bartender's stool, evidently the better to stay as close as possible to the liquor. “God forbid anyone confront them and ask them to answer for what they've done. No, people have no problem behaving like monsters, until another monster comes along and demands to know, why the monstrous behavior?”

Suddenly, the voices of the daemons fell silent. From the doorway, a new voice spoke. “The one who loosed us upon this city is in this room.”

Jin turned along with all the rest of them to find a man with a pointed beard staring at them from the doorway. His face was tinged with a wet, watery-red sheen, and the collar of his shirt and the lapels and shoulders of his suit jacket were stained with the same crimson color. The letters
INIT
were scratched across his forehead. Strangest of all, though, were his eyes: oily balls the color of storm clouds. They had no whites, no pupils, nothing but that slick gray. “Who is the one who loosed us?” he asked.