The Time of the Dark

CHAPTER THREE

“Where you headed?” Gil carefully guided the VW in a small circle, bumping slowly over stones and uneven ground, and eased it back onto the road again. The road, the hills, the dark trees of the grove had turned gray-blue and colorless in the twilight. In her rear-view mirror, Gil saw Ingold’s sword blade held high in salute. She could see him on the cabin porch, straight and sturdy in his billowing dark mantle, and her heart ached with fear at the sight. Rudy, chewing on a grass blade, one sunburned arm hanging out of the open window, was about as comforting as reruns of The Crawling Eye on a dark and stormy night.

“San Bernardino,” Rudy said, glancing back also at the dark form of the wizard in the shadows of the house.

“I can take you there,” Gil said, negotiating a gravel slide and the deep-cut spoor of last winter’s rains. “I’m heading on into Los Angeles so it’s not out of my way.”

“Thank you” Rudy said. “It’s harder than hell to get rides at night.”

Gil grinned in spite of herself. “In that jacket it would be.”

Rudy laughed. “You from L.A.?”

“Not originally. I go to UCLA; I’m in the Ph.D. program in medieval history there.” Out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed his start of surprise, a typical reaction in men, she had found. “Originally I’m from San Marino.”

“Ah,” Rudy said wisely, recognizing the name of that wealthy suburb. “Rich kid.”

“Not really.” Gil objected more to the label than to the facts. “Well—I guess you could say that. My father’s a doctor.”

“Specialist?” Rudy inquired, half-teasing.

“Child psychiatrist,” Gil said, with a faint grin at how well the label fitted her.

“Yow.”

“They’ve disowned me,” she added with a shrug. “So it doesn’t matter.” Her voice was offhand, almost apologetic. She turned on the headlights, and dust plumed whitely in their feeble glare. By their reflection Rudy could see that her face wore the shut, wary look again, a fortress defended against all comers.

“Why the hell would they disown you?” He was indignant in spite of himself for her sake. “Christ, my mother would forgive any one of my sisters for murder if she’d just finish high school.”

Gil chuckled bitterly. “It’s the Ph.D. mine objects to,” she told him. “What up-and-coming young doctor or dentist is going to marry a research scholar in medieval history? She doesn’t say that, but that’s what she means.” And Gil drove on for a time in silence.

The dark shapes of the hills loomed closer around the little car, the stars emerging in the luminous blue of the evening sky, small and bright with distance. Staring out into the milky darkness, Rudy identified the landmarks of his trip into the hills, rock and tree and the round, smooth shapes of the land. The green eyes of some tiny animal flashed briefly in the gloom, then vanished as a furry shape whipped across the dark surface of the road.

“So they kicked you out just because you want to get a Ph.D.?”

She shrugged. “They didn’t really kick me out. I just don’t go home anymore. I don’t miss it,” she added truthfully.

“Really? I’d miss it like hell.” Rudy slouched back against the door, one arm draped out the window, the wind cool against wrist and throat. “I mean, yeah, my mom’s house is like a bus stop, with the younger kids all over the place, and the cats, and her sisters, and dirty dishes all over the house, and my sisters’ boyfriends hanging out in the back yard—but it’s someplace to go, you know? Someplace I’ll always be welcome, even if I do have to shout to make myself heard. I’d go crazy if I had to live there, but it’s nice to go back.”

Gil grinned at the picture he painted, mentally contrasting it with the frigid good taste of her mother’s home.

“And you left your family just to go to school?” He sounded wondering, unbelieving that she could have done such a thing.

“There was nothing there for me,” Gil said. “And I want to be a scholar. They can’t understand that I’ve never wanted to do or be or have anything else.”

Another long silence. Up ahead, yellow headlights flickered in the dark. Long and low, the cement bridge of the freeway overpass bulked against the paler background of the hills; like a glittering fortress of red and amber flame, a semi roared by, the rumble of its engine like distant thunder. The VW whined up the overpass; Rudy settled back in his seat, considering her sharp-boned, rather delicate face, the generosity belying the tautness of the mouth, the sentimentalism lurking in the depths of those hard, intelligent eyes. “That’s funny,” he said at last.

“That anybody would like school that much?” Her voice held a trace of sarcasm, but he let it go by.

“That you’d want anything that much,” he said quietly. “Me, I’ve never really wanted to have or do or be anything. I mean, not so much that I’d dump everything else for it. Sounds rough.”

“It is,” Gil said, and returned her attention to the road.

“Was that where you ran into Ingold?”

She shook her head. Though it hadn’t seemed to bother the wizard that Rudy thought him a candidate for the soft room, she didn’t want to discuss Ingold with Rudy.

Rudy, however, persisted. “Can you tell me what the hell that was all about? Is he really as cracked as he seems?”

“No,” Gil said evasively. She tried to think up a reasonable explanation for the whole thing that she could palm off on Rudy to keep him from asking further questions. At the moment a queer uneasiness haunted her, and she didn’t feel much in the mood for questions, let alone obvious disbelief. In spite of the occasional lights on the highway, she was conscious as she had never been before of the weight and depth of the night, of darkness pressing down all around them. She found herself wishing vaguely that Rudy would roll up his window instead of leaning against the frame, letting the night-scented desert winds brush through the car.

Billboards fleeted garishly by them, primitive colors brilliant in the darkness; now and then a car would swoosh past, with yellow eyes staring wildly into the night. Her mind traced the long road home, the road she’d seen in last night’s aching dream of restlessness that had told her where she must come, then had framed awkwardly the next chapter of her thesis, which had to be worked on tonight if she were going to make her seminar deadline. But her mind moved uncontrolledly from thing to thing, returning again and again to that silent, isolated cabin, the salute from the blade of an upraised sword …

“You believe him.”

She turned, startled, and met Rudy’s eyes.

“You believe him,” he repeated quietly, not as an accusation, but as a statement.

“Yes,” Gil said. “Yes, I do.”

Rudy. looked away from her and stared out the window. “Fantastic.”

“It sounds crazy … ” she began.

He turned back to her. “Not when he says it,” he contradicted, pointing his finger accusingly, as if she would deny it. “He’s the most goddam believable man I’ve ever met.”

“You’ve never seen him step through the Void,” Gil said simply. “I have.”

That stopped Rudy. He couldn’t bring himself to say, I have, too.

Because he knew it had just been a hallucination, born of bright sunlight and a killing hangover. But the image of it returned disturbingly—the glaring gap of light, the folding air. But I didn’t see it, he protested; it was all in my head.

And, like an echo, he heard Ingold’s voice saying, You know you did.

I know I did.

But if it was all a hangover hallucination, how did he know it?

Rudy sighed, feeling exhausted beyond words. “I don’t know what the hell to believe.”

“Believe what you choose,” Gil said. “It doesn’t matter. He’s crossing back to his own world tonight, he and Tir. So they’ll be gone.”

“That’s fairy-tale stuff!” Rudy insisted. “Why would a—a wizard be toting a kidnapped Prince through this world on the way to someplace else anyway?”

Gil shrugged, keeping her eyes on the highway.

Annoyed, he went on. “And besides, if he was going back tonight to some world where he’s got magical powers, why would he need to bum my matches off me? He wouldn’t need them there.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” Gil agreed mildly. Then the sense of what Rudy had said sank in, and she looked quickly across at him. “You mean, he did?”

“Just before we left,” Rudy told her, a little smug at having caught the pair of them out. “Why would he need matches?”

Gil felt as if the blood in her veins had turned suddenly to ice. “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

I am entitled to risk my own life … but I draw the line at risking the lives of others …

As if a door had opened, showing her the room beyond, she knew that Ingold had lied. And she knew why he had lied.

She swerved the Volkswagen to the side of the highway, suspicion passing instantaneously to certainty as the threadbare tires jolted on the stones of the unpaved shoulder. There was only one reason for the wizard to need matches, the wizard who, in his own world, could bring fire at his bidding.

There was only one reason, in this world, that the wizard would need fire tonight.

He hadn’t spoken of going back until she’d offered to remain with him, until she’d spoken of the possibility of the Dark following him through the Void. He had refused to flee Gae until all those who needed him were utterly past help. So he would take his own chances, alone in the isolated cabin, rather than risk involving anyone else.

“Climb out,” she said. “I’m going back.”

“What the hell?” Rudy was staring at her as if she’d gone crazy.

“He lied,” Gil said, her low voice suddenly trembling with urgency. “He lied about crossing the Void tonight. He wanted to get rid of us both, get us out of there, before the Dark Ones come.”

“What?”

“I don’t care what you think,” she went on rapidly, “but I’m going back. He was afraid from the beginning that they’d come after him across the Void … “

“Now, wait a minute,” Rudy began, alarmed.

“No. You can hitch your way to where you’re going. I’m not leaving him to face them alone.”

Her face was white in the glare of the headlights, her pale eyes burning with an intensity that was almost frightening. Crazy, Rudy thought. Both of them, totally schizoid. Why does this have to happen to me?

“I’ll go with you,” he said. It was a statement, not an offer.

She drew back, instantly suspicious.

“Not that I believe you,” Rudy went on, slouching against the tattered upholstery. “But you two gotta have one sane person there to look after that kid. Now turn this thing around.”

With scarcely a glance at the road behind her, Gil jammed the accelerator, smoking across the center divider in a hailstorm of gravel, and roaring like a tin-pan thunderbolt into the night.

“There,” Rudy said, half an hour later, as the car skidded to a bone-jarring stop on the service road below the groves. Ahead of them on its little rise, the cabin was clearly visible, every window showing a dingy yellow electric glare. Gil was out of the car before the choking cloud of dust had settled, striding quickly over the rough ground toward the porch steps. Rudy followed more slowly, picking his way carefully through the weeds, wondering how in hell he was going to get out of this situation and what he was going to say to his boss back at the body shop. Dave, I didn’t make it to work Monday because I was helping a wizard rescue a baby Prince out someplace between Barstow and San Bernardino? Not to mention explaining why he never made it back to Tarot’s party from the beer run.

He looked around him at the dark landscape, distorted by starlight, and shivered at the utter desolation of it. Cold, aimless wind stirred his long hair, bearing a scent that was not of dusty grass or hot sunlight—a scent he’d never smelled before. He hurried to catch up with Gil, his bootheels thumping hollowly on the board stairs.

She pounded on the door. “Ingold!” she called out. “Ingold, let me in!”

Rudy slipped past her and reached through the pane of glass he’d broken last night to unlock the door from the inside. They stepped into the bare and brightly lighted kitchen as Ingold came striding down the hallway, his drawn sword in his hand and clearly in a towering rage.

“Get out of here!” he ordered them furiously.

“The hell I will,” Gil said.

“You can’t possibly be of any help to me … “

“I’m not going to leave you alone.”

Rudy looked from the one to the other: the girl in her faded jeans and denim jacket, with those pale, wild eyes; the old man in his dark, billowing mantle, the sword gripped, poised, in one scarred hand. Loonies, he thought. What the hell have I walked into? He headed down the hall.

Tir lay wrapped in his dark velvet blankets on the bed, blue eyes wide with fear. The only other thing in the bare room was a pile of kindling in one corner, looking as if every piece of wooden furniture in the little cabin had been broken up; next to it stood the can of kerosene. Steps sounded behind him in the hall, and Ingold’s voice, taut as wire, said, “Don’t you understand?”

“I understand,” Gil said quietly. “That’s why I came back.”

“Rudy,” Ingold said, and the tone in his voice was one of a man utterly used to command. “I want you to take Gil, get her in the car, and get her out of here. Now. Instantly.”

Rudy swung around. “Oh, I’m gonna get out of here all right,” he said grimly. “But I’m taking the kid with me. I don’t know what you guys think you’re doing, but I’m not leaving a six-month-old kid to be mixed up in it”

“Don’t be a fool,” Ingold snapped.

“Look who’s talking!”

Then, as Rudy bent to pick up the child from the bed, the lights went out.

In one swift movement, Ingold turned and kicked the door shut, the sword gleaming like foxfire in his hand.

The little starlight leaking through the room’s single window showed his face beaded with sweat.

Rudy set the whimpering baby down again, muttering, “Goddam fuses.” He started for the door.

Gil gasped. “Rudy, no!”

Ingold caught her arm as she moved to stop him. There was deceptive mildness in his voice as it came from the darkness. “You think it’s the fuse?”

“Either that or a short someplace in the box,” Rudy said. He glanced over his shoulder at them as he opened the hall door, seeing their indistinct outlines in the near-total blackness; the faint touch of filtered starlight haloed Ingold’s white hair and picked out random corners of Gil’s angular frame. The edge of Ingold’s drawn sword glimmered, as if with a pallid light of its own.

The hall was black, pitch, utterly black, and Rudy groped his way blindly along it, telling himself that his nervousness came from being trapped in a house in the middle of nowhere with a deluded scholar and a charming and totally insane old geezer armed with a razor-sharp sword, a book of matches, and a can and a half of kerosene. After that stygian gloom, the dark kitchen seemed almost bright; he could make out the indistinct forms of the table, the counter; the thread-silver gleam on the hooked neck of the faucet; the pale, distinct glow of the windows by the door; the single one in the left with the broken pane.

Then he saw what was coming in through the broken pane.

He never knew how he got back to the bedroom, though later he found bruises on his body where he’d blundered against the walls in his flight. It seemed that one instant he was standing in the darkness of the tiny kitchen, seeing that hideous shape crawling through the window, and that next he was falling against the bedroom door to slam it shut, sobbing. “It’s out there! It’s out there!”

Ingold, standing over him in the gloom, scarred face outlined in the misty gleam of his sword blade, said softly, “What did you expect, Rudy? Humans?”

Firelight flared. Gil had made a kind of campfire out of splintered kindling in the middle of the cement floor and was coughing in the rank smoke. Lying on the sagging mattress, Tir was staring at the darkness with eyes huge with terror, whimpering like a beaten puppy afraid to bark. Another child would have been screaming; but, whatever atavistic memories crowded his infant brain, they warned him that to cry aloud was death.

Rudy got slowly to his feet, shaking in every limb with shock. “What are we gonna do?” he whispered. “We could get out the back, make it down to the car … “

“You think the car would start?” In the smoldery orange glare, the old man’s eyes never left the door. Even as he was speaking, Rudy could see that both his hands were on the long hilt of the sword, poised to strike. “I doubt we would make it to the car in any case. And—the house limits its size.”

Rudy gulped, cold with shock, seeing that thing again, small and hideous and yet rife with unspeakable terror. “You mean—it can change its size?”

“Oh, yes.” Sword in hand, Ingold moved cat-footedly to the door. “The Dark are not material, as we understand material. They are only incompletely visible, and not always of the same—composition. I have seen them go from the size of your two hands to larger than this house in a matter of seconds.”

Rudy wiped sweating palms on his jeans, sickened with horror and totally disoriented. “But if—if they’re not material,” he stammered, “what can we do? How can we fight?”

“There are ways.” Firelight played redly over Ingold’s patched mantle as he stood, one hand resting on the doorknob, the other holding ready the gleaming witchfire of the blade, his head bowed, listening for some sound. After a moment he spoke again, his voice barely a whisper. “Gil,” he said, “I want you to take Tir and get between the bed and the wall. Rudy, how much of a fire do we have left?”

“Not much. That wood was dry as grass. It’s going quick.”

Ingold stepped back from the door, though he never took his attention from it. The little room was filled with smoke, the flaring fire already sinking, feebly holding at bay the encroaching ring of shadows. Without looking back, he held out his hand. “Give me the kerosene, Rudy.”

Wordlessly, Rudy obeyed.

Moving swiftly now, Ingold sheathed his sword in a single fluid gesture, took the can, and set to work, unscrewing the filler-cap and throwing a great swatch of the clear liquid over the dry wood of the door. It glittered in the yellow firelight, its throat-catching smell mixing with the gritty foulness of the smoke, nearly choking Gil, who stood with her back pressed to the icy concrete of the wall, the muffled baby motionless in her arms. The fire’s light had gone from yellow to murky orange, the brown shadows of the wizard’s quick, sure movements wavering, vast and distorted, over the imprisoning walls. Ingold came hack toward her and saturated the mattress with the last of the kerosene, its stink nearly suffocating her at close range. Then he set the empty can down softly, turned and drew his sword again, all in one smooth move; all told, he had had his sword sheathed for less than forty seconds.

He returned to the center of the room, a few feet in front of the dying fire, which had fallen in on itself to a fading heap of ash and crawling embers. As the darkness grew around him, the pallid light that seemed to burn up off the blade grew brighter, bright enough to highlight his scarred face. He said softly, “Don’t be afraid.” Whether it was a spell he cast, or merely the strength of his personality alone, Gil did not know, but she felt her apprehension lessen, her fear give place to a queer, cold numbness. Rudy moved out of his frozen immobility, took the last stick of unburned kindling, and lit it from the remains of the blaze.

Darkness seemed to fill the room and, heavier than the darkness, a silence that breathed. In that silence Gil heard the faint blundering sounds in the hall, a kind of chitinous scratching, as if dark fumbled eyelessly through dark. Against her own heart, she could feel the baby’s heart hammering with small violence, and a chill wind began to seep through the cracks in the door, touching her sweating face with feathers of cold. She could smell it, the harsh, acid blood-smell of the Dark.

Ingold’s rusty voice came very calmly out of the shadows. “Rudy,” he said, “take that torch and stand next to the door. Don’t be afraid, but when the creature comes in, I want you to close the door behind it and light the kerosene. Will you do that?”

Empty, cold, keyed up long past the point of feeling anything, Rudy whispered, “Yeah, sure.” He sidled cautiously past the wizard, the flaming wood flickering in his hand. As he took his post by the door, he could feel the presence of the thing, a nightmare aura of fear. He felt it bump the door, softly, a testing tap, far above his own eye level, and his flesh crawled at the touch. The thing would pass him—if it did pass him and didn’t turn on the nearest person to it as it came through the door—within touching distance. But on the other hand, the thought crossed his mind that if it did pass him, there was nothing to prevent him from slipping out that open door and making a run for the car.

If the car would start. If, having polished off Ingold and Gil, the Dark didn’t come after him anyway. No! The need was to finish it now—the Dark One, the Enemy, the thing from across the Void, the obscene intruder into the warm, soft world of the California night …

Groping for the shattered ends of his world-view, Rudy could only stand in darkness beside the door, torch in hand, and wait.

The last glow of the embers was fading, the only light in the room now Rudy’s smoldering torch and the gleaming challenge of the blade that Ingold held upright before him, his eyes glittering in the reflected witchlight like the eyes of an old wolf. There was a sibilant rustle of robes as he stirred, bracing himself, a whispering sigh as the dying ashes collapsed and scattered. The wind that ruffled so coldly through the cracks in the door seemed to drop and fail.

In the same instant that the door exploded inward, Ingold was striding forward, blade flashing down in an arc of fire to meet the bursting tidal wave of darkness. Rudy got a hideous glimpse of the fanning canopy of shadow and the endless, engulfing mouth, fringed in sloppy tentacles whose writhings splattered the floor with smoking slime. As if released from a spell, Tir began to scream, the high, thin, terrified sound going through Rudy’s brain like a needle. The sword flashed, scattering fire; the creature drew back, unbelievably agile for that soft floating bulk, the slack of its serpent-like tail brushing Rudy’s shoulders as it uncoiled in a whip of darkness. The thing filled the room like a cloud, its darkness covering them, seeming to swell and pulse as if its whole bloated, obscene body were a single slimy organ. The whip-tail slashed out, cutting at Ingold’s throat, and the wizard ducked and shifted inward for position with the split-second reflexes of a far younger man. In his dark robes, he was barely to be seen in the darkness; mesmerized, Rudy watched, hypnotized by the burning arc of the wizard’s blade and the thing that snatched at him like a giant hand of shadow.

Gil was screaming, “The fire! The fire!” The sound was meaningless to his ears; it was the heat of his torchlight burning down almost to his hands that made him remember. As if awakened from a dream, he started, kicked the door shut, and hit the greasy smear of the kerosene with the last burning stump. The door exploded into fire, scorching Rudy as he leaped back.

The Dark One, thrown into crimson visibility, writhed and twisted as if in pain, changing size again and shooting up toward the ceiling. But streaks of fire were already rushing up the walls to the tinder-dry rafters. Sparks stung Rudy’s exposed hands and face as he ducked across the open space of the floor and threw himself over the bed to crash against the wall at Gil’s side. More sparks rained, sizzling, on the wet, twisting shadow of the Dark.

The room was a furnace, blinding and smothering. Bleeding light silhouetted the creature, which fled this way and that, seeking a way out. Trapped by the fire, it turned like a cat and fell on Ingold, the whiplike tail elongating into spiny wire, slashing at his hands, his eyes, its claws catching at his body. The blade carved smoking slivers from the soft tissue, but the thing loomed too big, moved too swiftly in the cramped space, for Ingold to get in for a killing blow. Flattened against the wall, suffocating in the heat, and burned by the rain of falling sparks, Gil and Rudy both could see that Ingold was being pushed steadily back toward the corner where they crouched behind the filthy bed, hampered fatally by his need to remain at all costs between the creature and the Prince. He fell back, a step at a time, until Gil could have stretched her arms across the bed and touched his shoulder. Now, along with the sparks, they were burned by the flying droplets of acid that scattered like sweat from the creature’s twisting body.

Then the Dark One feinted with claws and tail, eluding the slash of the blade by fractions of an inch and throwing itself past the wizard with a rush. In the same split second Ingold flung himself over the mattress to the wall, between Gil and Rudy. As he did so, whether by accident or by design, the kerosene-saturated cotton went up in a wall of fire that singed the hem of his cloak and engulfed the Dark One in a roaring wave of scarlet heat. For one second Gil was conscious only of the wild, terrified screaming of the child in her arms, of the howling inferno only feet from her body, and of the heat of the holocaust that swallowed her. Then the wall of fire bulged inward, and the black shape appeared, distorted and buckling, blazing as it hurled itself, burning and dying, upon them all. Gil screamed as hot wind and darkness covered her.

Then all things vanished in a sudden, blinding firefall of light and color and cold.