Nineteen minutes past two. He looked at his watch and he knew that at that precise moment, he had decided to die. It had taken him twenty minutes to walk back the long way round to the truck from McFarlane’s house, avoiding the corner though he knew in his heart there would be no ice cream sign there now, and it had been twenty of the darkest minutes in his life.
He could feel the beast constantly, keeping pace with him, moving without sound but never hurrying. Sometimes he caught a maddening glimpse of something running low over a porch, or disappearing with spidery agility into a crawl-space, and his stomach walls touched.
The worst had been only yards from Jezebel. He had tried so hard not to run, and then the sound came again. The unearthly rasping attempt at his name, followed this time by something that approximated a thin laugh.
His body had acted for him, bolting forward towards the distant and false security of Jezebel, but leaving him short of breath, having to stagger against a tree, back up against the trunk to gulp in air. His hands had gripped the rough wood behind his hips and moved against it as he stared back up the street towards the source of the sound. That was when his fingers had touched something rougher than bark. It took only seconds, but the information he processed through the tips of his fingers seemed to take an age to reach his brain. In that time, his skin registered a substance that felt like wet leather pitted with thick, coarse hairs, hot and stinging to the touch and leaving a residue like mild acid on Josh’s fingers. He pulled his hand away with a shout only to look down and see two long fingers of a clawed hand slide from view around the wide bole of the tree. He launched away as though expelled by electricity and ran at the truck, gulping back the vomit that nestled at the base of his throat. It was only on reaching the door and falling gratefully against it that he remembered the movements in the sleeper, that writhing beneath his comforter.
Nineteen minutes past two in the morning, and the stark realization that sobered his fright rather than fuelled it, was that if Jezebel wasn’t safe, then nowhere was. The tape in the machine labelled ‘Josh Spiller’ had come to the end and there was no automatic rewind. The only choice left now, was how he was to die.
Josh stood up and fought to catch a breath.
‘Promise me,’ Griffin had said, ‘you’ll think about the first option.’
What had been unthinkable for thirty-two years now seemed not only plausible, but desirable. Josh didn’t want to die, but unlike the demented cowardice that suicide had always suggested to him, to cheat the creeping darkness at his heels by taking his own life suddenly seemed almost honourable.
He’d only ever known one person in his life who’d committed suicide. Tan Levinson had been a company driver who sometimes drove the same route as he and Eddie, and ended up swallowing midnight breakfasts in the same stops or unloading aluminium in the same docks. He’d been a quiet man, had a wife and one son in Detroit, but nothing had ever made either of them think he was ready to pull the rip cord.
Eddie used to call him Springsteen, on account of Levinson always leaving one unused work-glove hanging from the back pocket of his jeans, but any jokes at his expense were waved away amicably with a limp hand as he smiled from behind a veil of cigarette smoke.
And then one January, he’d pulled into the TA at Tuscaloosa, parked between a tanker and a Schneider doubler, taken a hand-gun from his overnight bag and spread his brains over the padded walls of his sleeper. No one knew if there was a reason. Everyone said there had been none. But Josh remembered once, late at night in a stop in South Carolina, that Levinson had stared out the window into the blackness and said something to Josh, apropos of nothing, that had stuck with him:
‘If you don’t outrun it, it runs over you.’
Josh had cast Eddie a glance, hoping for a laugh, but he’d grunted and carried on reading a truck-trading free-sheet.
‘Yeah, Tan. What’s that?’
‘Life, you dumb fuck. What you think?’
Josh had played with his coffee cup, slightly embarrassed without the jocular support of his partner. ‘Uh-huh? So how you outrun it then?’
Levinson had turned and looked at him with tired eyes. ‘Get to the finish line first.’
Josh put his head against Jezebel’s door, his own name flourished above his bowed skull like graffiti, and wept.
‘I thought it best if this weren’t found in the truck.’
Nelly took the log book from Pace’s hand and raised an eyebrow at it. She looked back up at him and smiled, then cradled it in her lap like an opera programme. ‘You have a policeman’s attention to detail.’
He looked at her impassively. ‘How long’s he got?’
She crossed her legs under a black wool dress and tipped her head to one side. ‘Now, come on, John. How many times have you helped summon this particular servant?’
‘The same one,’ he said in a whisper, ignoring the question.
She rubbed a finger and thumb together absently. ‘As far as your understanding stretches, yes. The simplest way I can paint it is it’s the same species. But that’s not quite right either. Lord, I’m not in the mood any more tonight for instructing the ignorant.’
Pace swallowed, and she waited a moment before smiling cruelly.
‘You saw it, didn’t you?’
He said nothing and she continued as though she hadn’t expected a reply. ‘And that’s good. Because to know is always better than not to know.’ Her voice hardened. ‘I want you to come into the laboratory.’
Pace shook his head. ‘It wasn’t a request, sheriff.’
She stood up and led the way out the room. He knew the route well enough and after looking at his feet, alone in her study for a few moments, his legs found the strength to follow.
He walked slowly across the polished hall floor, through the Scottish Room to the far wall, where the concealed door stood a few inches ajar.
John Pace pushed the door open and paused. He had been here only once, ten years ago, and although the sacrifice had been nearly consumed by then, even the cloudy memory of its remains nauseated him. It would be worse now. A fresh sacrifice. A fresh horror.
But soon it would be over, and he dug deep to summon the strength to face his destiny. His jaw moved as his back teeth clenched involuntarily, and Pace walked forward, descending the narrow wooden steps with difficulty, burdened by his thick frame. There were fourteen steps without the benefit of a handrail, ending in a small square landing and door lit by a single naked bulb. He went down holding on to the brick-lined wall for support, and wiped a film of sweat from his upper lip. The whispering had been audible from the top of the stairs, surrounding him and growing in strength as he descended. But now, standing before the half-open door it was almost loud enough to make out isolated words. Pace clenched his teeth harder and knew that would be fruitless. He had nearly bolted last time, afraid for his life. Afraid that whatever belonged to the ugly rasping little voices, lisping those whispers, would appear to fulfil the plans they were hatching.
The words they were speaking were in a language he didn’t care to comprehend, and his fists opened and closed against the horror of syllables that he knew no human mouth could form. He lifted his head higher, put a hand out and pushed the door open.
The whispering stopped abruptly as though a tape had been cut, and while he still had the courage he stepped through the doorway and into Nelly McFarlane’s lab.
He was right. It was much worse. The last time, he remembered, his entrance had been like breaking a spider’s web. Not in the literal sense.
There had been nothing to feel. It was a subtle internal sensation alerting unused senses to an unidentifiable threat. This time as he crossed her diabolical threshold the invisible threat was not subtle. It wrapped him like chainmail. Pace drew in a faltering lungful of air, and across the small room Nelly McFarlane watched him without expression.
‘Close the door.’
He fought for breath. The smell in the room was complex and heady, so thick with elements other than oxygen that it made him wonder if it was breathable. He closed his eyes briefly, and as his hand pushed the door shut behind him he concentrated on calming his panic and breathing normally.
She held up Josh Spiller’s log book, then threw it down contemptuously in front of a buzzing, illuminated computer screen.
‘He wasn’t supposed to come back here.’
Nelly McFarlane’s voice was light, but Pace could read it better. He looked up and kept his eyes firmly on hers.
This was not a space he cared to look around. It had the feel of a boiler room, indeed the louvred slit of a window that ran along the base of the yard wall above them betrayed to the rare inquisitor who might ponder on it from outside, only that it contained part of a heating system.
Two generations of McFarlane children had kicked a ball against that grate in the stone wall, believing that the thin pipe expelling steam from the centre of the metal slats was nothing more than plumbing.
Or perhaps they believed nothing of the sort. Maybe they could hear sounds coming from that pipe as they bent down to retrieve a ball, or chalk a scored point on the stone. Sounds like malicious whispering voices. Maybe smells that weren’t the smells of radiator steam. Was it really better to know, than not to know? John Pace didn’t think so.
Even with his eyes firmly on her face and not what lay between them, his skin was crawling and he pressed back against the door, with what he imagined was a subtle movement. She looked at him with contempt.
‘I’m finding the mortal fear of the unknown increasingly unattractive, John.’
Pace curled his fingers into the wood of the door and tried to make his reply sound normal. ‘Ain’t that what we trade on?’
‘We?’ She smiled. ‘I appreciate your solidarity.’
‘Nothin’s changed I know of.’
She scrutinized his face for a second, an enigmatic expression behind her eyes. But when she spoke it was with the familiarity of a boss to an employee. ‘You let him come back here. You make sure you clean up.’
Emboldened by the commonplace nature of her scolding, Pace let his eyes leave McFarlane’s face, and, studiously avoiding the horror in the centre of the floor, took in the room’s details.
The light source was an incongruous fluorescent tube hanging on two chains from the low, open-beamed ceiling, but despite the broad reach of its harsh illumination, the room was alive with shadows.
A stainless-steel counter, like the kitchens of a large hotel, ran the full length of the opposite wall. In its centre was a sink and surgical taps, a tray with implements lying at its side. The computer screen that buzzed and clicked as its display changed, sat at the end of the counter, a thick stalk of cables snaking from its back into a hole in the rough-hewn brick wall. Apart from the stark modernity of that area, the room was a repugnant temple to McFarlane’s madness.
Her athanor, the bullet-shaped alchemic furnace that had travelled the Atlantic with her ancestors, was mounted on a block of granite, and he could see a blue flame flickering in its heart as it stood unassumingly in the corner. Both the stone and the wall above the neat metal capsule were furred with a soot-like substance, in which scrawled marks, bizarre childlike writing, had been made with something sharp. Pace swallowed his fear as his instinct told him that Nelly herself had not been responsible for those wild symbols, and he looked away.
On the stone floor in front of the athanor, a pentangle marked out in dark brown smears was littered inside with droplets of mercury as though a vessel containing the quicksilver had been dropped and smashed. Against the wall four of the familiar metal packing-crates were stacked neatly, the ones that would take the plane ride away from here, like they always had, when the dull lead inside had been transmuted into something more useful.
As he looked he was sure he saw a furtive movement in the shadow behind the pile, the portion of a spidery limb being pulled back into the darkness. He looked away again quickly, desperate to focus on something that filled him with neither revulsion or fear. But looking away brought his gaze back to the centre of the room. John Pace expelled air through his teeth with an inaudible hiss.
Nelly McFarlane snapped at him. ‘Don’t be a child.’
He licked dry lips and surprised himself by finding he still had a voice and a fool’s courage. ‘You mean me, or her?’
He had no need to indicate what he referred to. McFarlane looked at him with a curious expression which made Pace squirm as he interpreted it as a look of anthropological interest.
Between them was a large flat stone, a soft sandstone lozenge carved around the edge with crude runic symbols. God forgive him, but he had personally arranged for its safe passage from the New York docks after its purchase in Scotland, and now it lay on its back in this room instead of in the field on the edge of Loch Fyne where it had stood for over three thousand years. But if it needed compensation for that blasphemous wrenching from its site and interruption in purpose, it had it in the form of the carefully dissected remains of Amy Nevin, which were stretched out on it like those of a laboratory rat.
The corpse was naked, and most, but not all of the skin, had been flayed and hung in tidy strips on a grid of steel sail-wires that suspended the massive stone from a crossed beam in the ceiling. Remaining patches of milk-white skin adhered only to those parts of the baby that had been most badly crushed, and an incision from breastbone to genitals had been clamped wide open. There was a strange beauty about the red gash of that empty cavity, the way it echoed an exotic orchid, the tiny white ribs like stamens from a bloom. And although the organs that had been laid within the smaller pentangles around the stone were not in themselves shocking, being livid with the bloom of the healthy child they had come from, the tidy, methodical way in which they had been sorted for different use made Pace nauseous again.
‘It’s rather late to give her advice, John.’
She was still examining him, eager to see what he would do next, to see if his challenging words would expand to a physical threat. Her expression, a slightly open mouth and lowered brow, suggested that she might relish that. What he did made her eyes glaze over with disappointment.
John Pace backed against the door and slid down it to a crouch. Something wet scuttled deeper under the stone’s shadow as his view altered to take in more of the floor, and he closed his eyes against the slight trail it had left. He heard her sigh.
‘I want him gone before it’s time. You’ve nearly three hours to persuade him.’
He wiped his mouth with an arm and blinked up at her. ‘And Griffin?’
‘I would hazard a guess and say she’s a lot further than three hours away. What do you think?’
Her voice was so hard, the barked, weary instructions of emperor to slave, that the tenderness in his caught her off-guard.
‘Councillor? How much more killin’?’
Nelly McFarlane looked over the hanging stone at the rugged man crouched like a frightened child against her door and let her hands fall to her sides. She walked slowly around the fearsome obstacle and knelt in front of him, putting slim hands on knees that stretched his policeman’s slacks to the limit in this unpolicemanly position.
‘John. Amy was mine to give. You know that. That’s why we have power again. Look.’ She indicated the room he knew was far from empty.
‘Can’t you feel it?’ She laughed like a young girl. ‘They’re no more willing, and no less eager to deceive and disobey, but, oh sheriff, I’m so much stronger.’
He looked at her hands on his knees, willing them to stop touching him.
‘And the trucker?’
‘Would you mourn him if he was a name in a newspaper paragraph detailing the fatalities in a ten-vehicle pile-up?’
She didn’t wait for an answer, but shook her head for him.
‘No. Because that’s the random daily nature of life and death. Just as this is. Just as he might have made the wrong decision on the highway and ended up mince, he just drove into the wrong town. Lord knows you gave him enough chances, but the stupid man simply made the wrong decision over his statement.
‘His death at least will be more interesting than a mundane head injury finishing him off in some county ambulance with poor suspension. At least in the last few days, and certainly in the last few minutes of his ordinary little life, he will glimpse that part of the secret and incredible world hidden from the majority of men, that you are privileged to witness, and I am privileged to control.’
Her face was mad with an inner ecstasy that Pace had never seen in her mother. But, as Pace had reasoned so recently that it still seemed like a blasphemy to think it, like most of Nelly McFarlane’s relatives who had possessed the power of the philosopher, Morven McFarlane hadn’t survived long enough to curb that insanity.
He nodded, eyes down, as though he understood, but she could tell he was lying. Nelly McFarlane could tell a whole lot of things. Especially until the remains of that tiny body were all used up.
‘Do you think we do harm, John?’
There was no use in pretending. ‘We kill. We keep on killin’.’
She shook her head. Not unkindly. ‘We kill rarely. In comparison to some inner-city juvenile gang, or a despotic government, we’re angels of mercy.’
‘But councillor, Jesus said …’
She cocked her head, waiting, and he knew it was useless. The hands he so badly wanted off his legs, tightened their grip on the flesh around his knees.
‘The Antichrist will come, John. I’ve told you this. Often. Make no mistake. And only we will have the financial resources to combat him. And why? Because through the love of Christ we have the Philosopher’s Stone, the means to conjure and control not only the tawdry metal that the world holds so dear, but the very dark forces themselves that would side with the Antichrist. Now, you think our Lord would disapprove of the loss of a few unimportant lives when it’s part of how we’re preparing to defend His return?’
He spoke in a tiny voice, that was almost comic coming from such a large man. ‘Not one sparrow falls.’
Mercifully, she removed her hands. Her face was still soft, but her voice had an edge returning to it. ‘Then Christ’ll know when our trucking sparrow falls at sunrise, and will presumably mourn him.’ She stood, smoothing her dress. ‘Stand up.’
With the effort of the portly, he obeyed, following her with his eyes as she crossed the room to the aluminium workbench and picked up a small glass bottle next to the sink. She held it cheek high.
‘I have the usual assistance if you require it.’
Pace swallowed. ‘I don’t reckon he’s got a gun.’
‘In his heart he believes you passed him the runes, John. When he can’t give them back, who knows what he might do?’
He could tell there was suspicion growing in her face that he wouldn’t accept the tiny bottle of grey liquid, but his hand trembled at his side at the very thought of the revolting concoction that it contained.
‘I’ll be okay.’
She looked hard at him.
‘Interesting. You don’t want to take it, John. Yet you know its power. That nothing can harm you for seven hours.’
He stared back at her, silent.
‘Nothing human,’ she added with malice.
He ground his back teeth again and held out a shaking hand. Nelly McFarlane crossed the room to him, looked down at his wide palm and held the bottle between her thumb and forefinger. ‘Make him go to the woods. It’s tidier.’
Like a bully stealing a child’s playground candy, she closed her fingers around the bottle with a flourish, turned her back, walked to the bench and started to wash her hands under the surgical taps. John Pace looked down at his empty hand, slowly closed his own fingers and turned to go. As he faced the plain door his thoughts became words.
‘You ever afraid, councillor?’
When he realized he’d spoken, he turned back into the room. She still had her back to him at the sink, but there was something changing about the atmosphere in the room. Either the light was dimming or his eyes were failing, but the shadows were starting to have their own life, and Nelly McFarlane seemed to be absorbing the dark areas of the room. She turned to him slowly and he pressed back up against the door again as her face was revealed.
Her green eyes were glittering black pricks of hatred sunk in two deep, round craters. Her mouth was grotesquely wide at the corners, curling up in a clownish leer, and beneath her slightly parted lips, Pace feared he could see considerably more teeth than she could have called her own only minutes ago. When the deep, rasping voice came from that mouth, John Pace was already fumbling behind him for the door-handle, his mouth agape in terror. ‘Why should I be afraid?’
He grunted in his passion to escape, but even as he found the handle, slammed it down and stumbled through the doorway, part of his rational mind was thinking about that hideous inhuman face, and the very faint something he had so briefly glimpsed behind its eyes.
He had nearly puked his guts in his effort to reach the top step, by the time he decided something. It surprised him, horrified and comforted him in equal measures, but he would swear he was right.
Sometimes, somewhere deep inside her armour, Nelly McFarlane was very afraid indeed.
* * *
‘It’s three o’clock.’
‘Yeah?’
Griffin rubbed at her forehead. ‘Look. Can’t you just get on that radio thing and ask if someone else can pick me up from here?’
Eddie looked across at her from behind a magazine he’d selected purposely from the ancient pile behind his seat to offend her, titled Asian Babes. ‘Hell I’m sorry. Didn’t ’preciate you was a payin’ passenger. I kinda thought you was hitchin’. You know? Travellin’ for free? Takin’ other people’s gas and drivin’ time so you can see the country without playin’ jack-shit?’
Griffin folded her arms like a Vaudeville wife and looked out her window at the empty parking lot.
Eddie got back to the centrefold of Sinijta, originally from a village called Kharahyira, who had big naked tits and the bottom half of a sari tied round ample child-bearing hips, but wanted to convince the reader she was interested in in-line skating. He sniffed back some snot in the back of his throat and addressed the magazine rather than his reluctant passenger. ‘Anyhows. Can’t call out until they calls me. Need to keep on this channel.’
Griffin looked at him with disgust, then looked back out the window. The long dark band that marked the ridge of the mountains was already visible, by virtue of the lightening sky behind it.
Her heart tripped over itself in her chest as she imagined that hot, celestial orb hurtling over the Atlantic towards them, and how its arrival, so eagerly anticipated by every kind of man through centuries, was dreaded by one today, not more than fifteen miles from here.
‘I need a leak again.’
Without looking up, Eddie lifted a hand indicating the door, as though she would have trouble finding it.
‘Don’t go without me.’
He made a small head movement that could have meant anything, and she climbed out in a sulk. As she crossed the cold lot towards the building, Griffin shivered, squinting hatred at the magnolia sky like a vampire.