Dritches and thrals I thought of as animals, dangerous as they were, but from Howard I’d got the idea that the night-gaunts were monsters, monsters who if they had any allegiance, it would not be to me or my friends but to the Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods and to whatever forces they’d unleashed in my hometown. As I struggled against the powerful grip of the night-gaunt, it dipped and weaved through the air. I tried to calm myself, hoping that if I stopped struggling, the night-gaunt wouldn’t drop me a hundred metres to the ground. Then it let go of me.
I had a moment of belly-shaking fear, but it was no worse than being hit by a gust of turbulence aboard Sorcerer. I stopped falling, and started to rise again. Instead of swerving and bobbing through the night air, I rose steadily and the creature holding me settled into a rocking, swaying flight.
Something squeezed my chest and I realized what had happened. Once I’d been dragged off the ground, a yellow nylon rope had been looped around my chest. Now I was being transported not by one night-gaunt but by two, slinging my weight between them. Their wings beating in rhythm, I could feel we were going faster. Where were they taking me? From the air, everything looked different, but I blinked and recognized Cathedral High School on Wentworth, then the parking lot of the No Frills on Main. Unless they were going to start gaining altitude and surmount the escarpment, the night-gaunts were taking me downtown.
Big, strong and nasty-looking, with long claws and sharp fangs, if the night-gaunts had come to kill me, I’d be dead. At least, that’s what I told myself as my captors and I started to descend toward the centre of downtown, the GO station between James and John.
Something was wrong, though; something had changed in this part of town. Across from the station, a huge white building with just a few windows peeking out, like the Invisible Man’s bandaged head, occupied four square blocks. I remembered those blocks: offices, little shops that had been there for years, the YMCA, a Tim Hortons. Now all that was gone, and in their place was this brutal white monolith. I’d been told about it. This was Oracle.
The monument had a flat roof, and when we landed, I cried out in pain. The ropes loosened, I stumbled and for a moment was dragged on my knees along fresh tar and gravel, but that wasn’t what hurt the most. It was my scars.
Almost healed, they had retreated into pale striations as they lost their crimson glow and with that retreat, the connections they’d given me had also faded. Only rarely did their buried throb keep me up at night – like a guilty conscience smouldering in the flesh not the heart – or alert me to the looming influence of the Great Old Ones or their closest minions. The scars had flared up during our scramble out of Sorcerer to rescue Max and his friends from the shoggoth horde, but I’d barely noticed those flashes of heat and pain against the very real dangers around us. Since we’d landed back on Earth, whatever they’d been signalling had been drowned out by the suasion that was spreading through the city like a radioactive cloud.
As soon as my feet hit the roof, however, the scars crackled and snapped like a tree struck by lightning. Strength gone, I fell to my knees. When I looked up, I saw that the largest of the night-gaunts, the one that had captured me, had been tossed onto the surface of the roof, its wings convulsing uselessly against the gravel. The neural shock of my landing had gone straight through me into it. In the moments until it recovered, there was only one place I could go: a bulkhead door that jutted out of the roof in front of me like a cabin in the desert.
I ran to the bulkhead, threw open the door and pulled it closed after me. Fumbling in the dark, I found I couldn’t lock the knob, it had only a keyhole. I groped along the edge of the door and found a steel bolt, which I slid, with a sigh of relief, into a socket in the frame.
I turned and looked for a glimmer of light. Forget it. But there had to be a way down. I tried to picture what might be there. If there was a trap door, it better not be locked. At any rate, from the outside the bulkhead was not much bigger than a garden shed, so the way down into the building had to be right in front of me. I reached out and touched something hard and cold: a steel rail. Gripping it tightly, I put one foot forward and felt a downward step.
Then the little room shook as a clap of thunder hit the door. It shook in its hinges as talons scratched against the outside. There was a very pissed off night-gaunt out there.
I wanted to get as far away from it as I could. In the dark I had found not only stairs, but a rail, but before I followed it I stopped. I reached into my pocket and ran my phone’s flashlight along the metal balusters under the rail. In a moment I’d found, peeking around the edge of one of them, a bright green plastic B.
At the bottom of the stairs I shoved a crash bar and, without a second’s pause (I really needed to put distance between myself and the night-gaunt), went through another door.
My scars flared up like gasoline on a bonfire. I looked out on a vast floor of desks and office cubicles. It looked like a business that had been abandoned on its first day. Chairs before empty desks; unopened boxes of printers, monitors and computers; open water bottles stood on desks; and lingering in the air was a miasma of decomposing takeout salads.
This was the top floor. At different points throughout the room, the floor tiles had been replaced by Plexiglas sheets. Through the Plexiglas, my phone’s light showed a steel grate, but beyond that nothing – the space was large enough to make the stark white flashlight beam seem wobbly and feeble.
A dark trail led from the stairwell to the broad door of a freight elevator against the right-hand wall. It could be routine dirt and tar deposits from the roof, but it included scattered objects – phones, shoes, a pen, a baseball cap and tools – as if a maintenance crew had been part of the crowd who had picked up and fled at a moment’s notice. I picked up a claw hammer and stuck it in my belt, just in case I had to bust through a door or something.
Eyeing the floor for movement, I followed the mucky path to the elevator. As I stood before it, my scars flared and throbbed. I reached to press the button, but my hand started to tremble and I backed off, looked around for stairs. In the distance, I could hear the roof access door thundering once more. I had to keep moving.
One of the sources of light was a red exit sign that glowed from across the floor. But as I walked to it, in the dim light careful to avoid desk corners and debris, I felt queasy, as if I was walking on very thin ice over a very deep lake. I looked through one of the plastic panels: If a light turned on down there, what would I see? There was a shift in the darkness – something white bobbed up like a curious fish, then sank back and was gone.
My head started ringing with a dull roar, and I could hear distant voices, begging and commanding, just on the edge of audibility so that I turned my head this way and that to check that I was really hearing them. I went through the door to the stairs and stood for a moment listening to the darkness below. It was an unlit space, but far below me there was a rustle of movement, a squelching noise that recalled unpleasantly my glimpse inside the vulsetchi hold back on Sorcerer and over them all, an irregular banging sound.
Somewhere down there was also a window. The glow of the city reached up here just enough for me to make out the shapes of the stairs and rails.
I kept going down – a journey that took longer than I expected. Instead of, as usual, a landing after a dozen or so steps, the stairs just kept going. I counted them. After fifty steps, I came to a landing, but the window had disappeared. From the landing stretched a corridor, and when I walked cautiously down the corridor, I found another stairwell going up. I checked the rails and found a plastic K. From what Sam told me, this was good; it meant I was heading to ground level. But the dim light showed no door. The landing was just there for architectural practicality, so that the stairs could reverse direction but keep heading downwards. Chthonic backstairs or not, I was getting somewhere, but the lack of doors suggested that I was descending past not different floors of Oracle but a single high-ceilinged space like a gym or auditorium.
After another fifty steps, I was at the bottom. Here I came to a set of double doors leading into the building – presumably, to the bottom of that huge interior space – and better yet, glass doors with crash bars leading down a short concrete path to James Street. It was from these doors that the banging was coming. Someone in a wheelchair was banging to get in. A few people were standing around him, not visibly helping, but also not trying to stop him. What would happen if I busted out this way?
I knew there was at least one very pissed off night-gaunt on the roof; by now, it could very well have battered its way inside. The smart thing to do would be to fling the doors open and run for home.
Instead, I stayed in the shadows. I recognized the person in the wheelchair – Raphe Therpens, the former Proprietor of the Resurrection Church. His companion Clare held the chair by the handles – I wondered why she wasn’t being more supportive, and banging on the door with him. But why was anyone trying to get in here in the dead of night? Perhaps Clare and Therpens were homeless. “It changes your schedule, not having a place to go, or getting kicked out of your kip when you least expect it,” I’d been told by Dana, whose life on the street had ended badly.
I felt the air move – behind me a door had opened.