THE LINE STRETCHED down the entire block.
The sidewalk we were on was wide: ten feet or more separated us from a street teeming with cars that flew helter-skelter past, the roar of engines cut only by horns that honked in a discordant symphony. I could see the Man in Black ahead of us, taller than everyone else on the sidewalk. People moved out of his way, crushing against each other as he passed.
One lady darted out of his way and into the street, her fingers pulling hair from her scalp as she ran. Her voice was a loud warble of meaningless babble. A taxi slammed on its brakes, the car’s rear rising on its shocks as black smoke boiled from its tires. She didn’t notice, just continued to wail as she ran down the lane past us. The cabbie followed behind her, head and arm out the window, screaming curses that were a mix of three languages.
The Man in Black turned the corner, disappearing from my sight.
I reached out, grabbed Daniel’s hand, and began to hurry.
We were in a city. A big one. All the buildings stretched high in the night sky. Lights shone everywhere: streetlights, signs, traffic lights, headlights, even just the ambient light of thousands of windows along buildings lit from the inside. Everything seemed to glow in a thousand colors that blended into a dull, blanched white. Light pollution bounced off everything.
All I could see were the shadows.
They clawed up the sides of buildings and lay in pools underneath everything. I could feel things inside them watching me. Maybe even the shadows themselves had taken on some malevolent sentience, some hostility to human life that made them watch and hate and lie in wait for someone to slip into their trap, to fall prey to their patience.
It would have sounded stupid yesterday.
Tonight I knew it could be true.
Nerves jittering, I moved faster, my steps hurrying into a run. Daniel ran beside me, his hand in mine, unquestioning, following my lead. We pelted toward the corner, pushing through people on the sidewalk.
Rounding the corner, we nearly ran headlong into the Man in Black.
He turned. “Rushing into the maw of the lion, Acolyte? How unlike you.”
“I’m here to finish this.”
“So you are.” The gemstone around his neck pulsed in the shadowed depth of his coat. People stepped around us as we stood in a pool of neon light. The Man in Black’s coat fluttered out, tattered tendrils licking the ankles and feet of passersby.
Daniel made a noise in his throat. His hand tugged mine, and I looked over at him. He stared with wide eyes over the Man in Black’s head.
I followed his gaze.
We stood in front of a temple dragged from some ancient time and wrapped in bars of neon lights. The stones that formed its bulk were green like jade and cut in odd shapes that shouldn’t have fit together but did, held in alien geometry by some arcane masonry. The lines of the building hurt my eyes, dragging my sight in too many directions to follow without discomfort. The roof curved deeply like a Shinto temple of Asia, made of sodium-yellow tiles laid like scales on a lizard’s back: overlapping, interlocking, and conjoined. They formed lines that pointed to the heavens, where the peak of the temple disappeared into a murky shadow. Garish tubes of neon light traced every corner, every crease, and every edge, blaring out into the street where we stood. The words R’yleh Wok ’N’ Roll pulsed across the front in bloodred neon flashes like the ponderous heartbeat of some great beast lying in wait. The line of people we’d run by shuffled and shambled up wide concrete steps that led to a pair of doors yawning open beneath the flashing words.
Lambs to the slaughter.
Daniel spoke. “So that’s where we’re going?”
The Man in Black nodded, once down then up.
Daniel grunted. “Looks like a sushi joint designed by a nut job.”
The Man in Black turned, looking up at the building. “It is a juncture, a temple folded from lost history.” Dark eyes glittered. “They once served as feasting boards for my kind.”
Daniel’s eyebrow rose in an arch. “So we should steer clear of the California roll then?”