Lost Ones

CHAPTER 5

M usic played low on the radio in Jackson Norris’s car. Sara had ridden with the sheriff several times since coming back to Maine, and she’d never gotten used to that. Sure, his police radio squawked, but there was nearly always music playing as well. In the movies and on TV, the cops never had their regular radios on.

Sting’s song “Fields of Gold,” began. The irony was there, in the back of her mind, but she had to concentrate for a second before she dredged it up. Right-Sting had been the front man for the classic rock group the Police. There you go. Irony.

Sara earned strange looks whenever she got out of the car with its cop paint job and the light bar on the top, never mind the Wessex County Sheriff’s Department logo on the doors. But at least she wasn’t riding in the back in cuffs.

Not that she gave a shit what people in Kitteridge, Maine, thought.

She didn’t care about much, these days.

“You know you don’t have to go back to Atlanta,” Sheriff Norris told her, his tone gentle.

“You know I do, Jackson.”

A burst of static came from the police radio.

“I can’t just hibernate in that little house, waiting for my father to come back. I’ll go insane. How long do I wait? What if he never-”

Sara couldn’t finish. Her throat closed up and she felt her face flush. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the sheriff looking at her. After a moment he returned his focus to the road. It had been warm the week before-unseasonably warm for Maine, though it was late winter. Today the sun still shone, but the cold was back. The snow had all melted, but somehow that made it worse, icy wind whipping across frozen tundra. It got down into her bones.

Atlanta would be beautiful by now. Soon, the whole city would blossom.

She had to go home.

“You could be a photographer up here, you know,” the sheriff said.

“For who, Downeast magazine? I don’t think they’re looking for a fashion photographer.”

Sheriff Norris smiled. “Who knows? You could meet a guy…”

He let the words trail off, having brought the topic up several times over the past few months, the way an uncle might. Sheriff Norris had always been a sort of uncle to her. A sweet man, but he had never been that quick on the uptake. Since subtlety didn’t work, she decided it was time for the direct approach.

“Jackson?”

The sheriff glanced at her. “Yeah?”

Sara waved at him. “See me? Over here? Gay. I like girls.”

He blinked. To his credit, he hid his astonishment well. The thought had never even occurred to him.

“Oh,” he said after a moment. “Well, then, you’ve got a hell of a lot better chance of meeting someone nice in Atlanta than up here.”

With a laugh, she drew herself across the front seat and kissed his slightly stubbled cheek.

“Thank you,” she said.

“For what?”

“For being a good friend to me and to my father.”

A sadness came over the sheriff then. He felt at least partially responsible for Ted Halliwell’s disappearance and it weighed on him.

“You really have to go, huh?”

“I really do.”

They rode in silence for a while, tires crunching on sand left over from the snowmelt.

After years away from Maine, she had come home when word had reached her of her father’s disappearance. Yet months had passed without any sign of his fate or clue as to how he’d vanished in the first place. She had flown to Bangor just before Christmas, her schedule clear until after the first of the year. When she called her clients-most of them advertising and fashion people-during the first week of January and explained her situation, they had all been understanding. They didn’t want to use another photographer, but they would make do until she was back in town.

Now it was the middle of March, and her phone had been ringing for weeks. It wouldn’t do to abandon her clients so long that some fell so much in love with her replacements that they abandoned her. That was pretty much what had happened in all of her relationships-she’d gone off on some assignment and come home to find her latest girlfriend had moved on.

But she had to earn money to live, and maybe a return to Atlanta and her friends and her routine would help to stave off her sorrow.

Before she went, however, she had asked Sheriff Norris to arrange a meeting for her.

He signaled for a left and then took the turn, following driving regulations without even thinking about it. The heater whirred, though it wasn’t very effective, and Sara huddled deeper into her thick winter coat. The trip to Freeport had been one of many distractions she had engineered in the past two months. None of them had been terribly effective.

Sting stopped singing and an ad for the local television news came on. The DJ hadn’t identified the song. Sara could remember when they had always told you what song you had heard and never could understand why they stopped doing that. If you liked it and wanted to go buy the CD-or if you wanted to download it-how were you supposed to know what it was called?

Sheriff Norris pulled into the driveway of a beautiful home, the kind of place she always wished she could live but knew she never would. Sara made an excellent living as a photographer. Maybe one day she’d even have enough money to think she was rich. But she didn’t think she was destined for a place like this.

The car went silent. She blinked and looked over to see the sheriff taking the key from the ignition.

“You all right?” he asked.

Sara smiled. “If we wait for that, I’ll be sitting in this car the rest of my life.”

She popped open the door, shut it behind her, and led the way up the walk toward the front door. The sheriff had to hurry to catch up. On the steps, Sara reached out to ring the doorbell, but before she could, the door opened.

The woman who stood inside had been beautiful once. In some ways, she still was. But despite the elegance of her clothes-a counterpoint to the blue jeans, boots, and bone-white turtleneck Sara wore under her coat-she looked faded, like dried flowers or antique furniture. Her lips were folded in a tight line, so that when she blinked and smiled, she looked as though the act pained her.

“You must be Sara,” Mrs. Whitney said. “Please, come in. You too, Jackson. It’s freezing out there, and I’ve made hot cocoa.”

“Thank you,” Sara replied, stepping inside. “That sounds perfect for a day like today.”

The sheriff followed her in and, while Mrs. Whitney closed the door behind them, they took off their coats. She hung them in a closet so as not to mar the immaculate house. It looked more like a museum than anything else.

“I’m afraid that my husband was called away at the last moment to meet with a client,” the woman said. “So it will just be the three of us.”

Sara glanced at the sheriff, who didn’t seem at all surprised. It was Saturday morning. She suspected that Julianna Whitney’s father simply didn’t want to talk to a stranger about his vanished daughter. Though Sara did not like the pretense this forced on Mrs. Whitney-the poor woman shouldn’t have to lie for her husband-she understood.

“That’s all right. We won’t take up too much of your time, anyway,” Sheriff Norris said.

“Oh, please,” Mrs. Whitney said, waving away his concern. “Time is all I have, these days.”

She brought out a tray with a pot of cocoa and a plate of shortbread cookies. Sara had never tasted better hot chocolate. It had to have been made from scratch and she let it warm her. Very little could.

When they had all sipped at the cocoa for a few minutes and the sheriff was on his third shortbread cookie-this strange pantomime of civilized behavior a soothing mask over their grief-Mrs. Whitney fixed Sara with her gaze.

“I’m glad of the company,” she said. “But I think perhaps it’s time for you to tell me what it was you wanted to talk about.”

Sara managed a smile as she set down her cup. “More than anything, I just wanted to meet you. I’m…well, I’m making plans to go back to Atlanta soon. That’s where I live. I don’t think there’s anything else I can do here, and I have responsibilities.”

“Of course you do,” Mrs. Whitney said kindly, but there was a kind of sad envy in her expression, as though she wished that she too had responsibilities that would take her away from this place and the specter of her daughter’s disappearance.

As she tried to continue, Sara’s breath hitched and she paused, fighting not to cry.

Mrs. Whitney reached out and laid a hand over hers. Whatever differences were between them-age, social status-none of it mattered. As of last December, they were now far more alike than they were different.

Sara nodded, though the woman had said nothing.

“I just thought maybe you could tell me a little about Julianna,” she said, studying Mrs. Whitney. She gnawed her bottom lip a moment, then shrugged and gave a soft laugh. “I guess I thought if I knew her, knew who she was, I mean, then I’d feel like maybe my dad wasn’t out there alone. Wherever he is.”

Julianna’s mother put a hand across her heart. Her eyes were moist.

“I think that’s a lovely idea.”

Jackson Norris sat and sipped cocoa and ate shortbread cookies while the two women talked. They shared stories about Julianna, and about Sara’s father, and before they knew it more than an hour had passed.

Sara saw the clock and sighed.

“We should go. I really wanted the sheriff here to introduce us, but I hate to have taken so much of your time, and his.”

“Oh, Jackson doesn’t mind,” Mrs. Whitney said. “Do you, sheriff?”

“Not at all,” he said. But Sara knew that the man had other things to do. There were politics involved in his position, but there was police work as well.

“Still, we should go.”

Mrs. Whitney stood up with them and fetched their coats. As the sheriff put his on, the woman’s hands fidgeted.

“I presume there’s nothing new, Jackson?” she said.

Sheriff Norris zipped his coat. “It’s on my mind every day, Margaret. And it will be until I find them.”

The woman nodded, and then a frown creased her brow.

Sara noticed. “What is it, Mrs. Whitney?”

One hand fluttered in front of her. “Nothing, I’m sure. It’s just that I’ve been thinking lately about Friedle.”

“Who?” Sara asked, turning to the sheriff.

“Marc Friedle,” he replied. “He was the Bascombes’ household manager; basically, the butler, valet, driver, and everything else in one. He hired and fired gardeners, cooks, painters, that sort of thing.”

The sheriff looked at Mrs. Whitney. “Margaret, you know I looked into Friedle. We have no reason to suspect him of anything. His fingerprints were everywhere, but he practically lived in the house. There’s no evidence he had anything to do with Max Bascombe’s death or the disappearances of Max’s kids.”

The woman nodded. “I’m sure you’re right. But more and more, lately, I’ve been thinking about him, and about how odd it seems to me that he rushed out of Kitteridge so quickly when Max Bascombe was killed. Oliver and Collette had vanished, and everyone was searching for them frantically. But Friedle was the manager of the house. It was his responsibility, and he left so fast it was almost like he was the one person who never expected them to come back.”

Sara turned toward Sheriff Norris. A dark twist of suspicion began to tighten in her chest and she knew the moment she saw the sheriff’s brows knit together that he had the very same feeling.

It seemed her return to Atlanta might be delayed after all.

Halliwell felt the anger burning inside the Sandman. The creature had no veins through which poison might flow, but the anger churned in him just the same. It was part of the storm of his essence, just as Halliwell himself had become part of the Sandman. He was integral to the creeping, murderous thing, and its iniquity stained his soul. The Dustman was still there as well, a grave voice rising up from within Halliwell’s own mind like an echo down a canyon or a conscience long subdued.

Subdued, Halliwell thought. Is that it? Have I been subdued?

The question rankled. He had never been subdued in his life. Oh, he’d taken orders from superior officers and employers, certainly. But he had never kept silent when the situation called for someone to speak up. He wondered if that had changed. Between discretion and cowardice, where did one draw the line?

At murder, his conscience told him. Or perhaps it was the voice of the Dustman, the monster’s grim, less savage brother. One draws the goddamn line at murder-at the bloodthirsty mutilation of children.

Of course. Such a thing should not even have had to be considered. What kind of man would hesitate to agree with such an assertion?

But he was adrift within the Sandman’s essence and powerless. Briefly, when he had realized his fate, Halliwell hoped that perhaps he would be the poison that would infect and cripple the monster. But the Sandman didn’t seem even to notice his presence, or that of the Dustman.

It was the worst horror imaginable. It was Halliwell’s own poison, twisting his heart with hatred and his mind with hopelessness. He had heard the screams of the Sandman’s victims and seen the terror in their eyes-seen the monster reflected in the mirror of children’s eyes, just before he plucked them out and placed them between his teeth.

The nightmare had no end. He could not command the hands that murdered or the black lips that pulled back in a leer. In every way that mattered, he was the Sandman. The atrocities were not within his control, but he suffered through each moment, mind screaming in silence.

Lemon-yellow eyes glanced upward at the sky. The moon was a sliver, the heavens sable black. The stars seemed withdrawn, as though they dared not come too close to the world of the legendary in these ugly days. The monster had learned that Oliver Bascombe was being held in the dungeon at the king’s palace in Palenque. Bascombe wasn’t going anywhere, so he would kill Kitsune first. He would shred the fox-woman’s flesh, just as soon as he found her.

A rasp accompanied the Sandman as he slipped through the nighttime streets. The village slept, but fitfully. Spectral, little more than a wraith, he moved toward a building whose first floor was a candy shop. A soft glow illuminated the eyebrow windows set into the gables of the roof-an attic room, a candle still burning.

There would be children here.

Halliwell felt the thrill run through the Sandman, so much like lust. Were those terrible lemon eyes his own, he would weep.

The Sandman clambered up the side of the shop as though carried by the wind. His cloak billowed around him and then he collapsed into a flurry of sand, slipping through the open window. Once within, the sand skittered across the wood floor and the small throw rug at the center of the room. Grain by grain, he reconstructed himself, a shell that now housed three beings.

A small boy slept beneath a freshly laundered blanket. His face was so beautiful in repose, cheeks flushed, lips open slightly. His brown hair was tousled and wild on his pillow. Lovely, heartbreaking innocence.

Halliwell was sickened to realize that the Sandman saw the same beauty in that innocence. He tried to grasp at any straw of hope that his imagination could muster. The child was sleeping. The legend of the Sandman spoke of him punishing only those young ones who were still awake when he arrived, claiming their eyes in return for their insolence.

But the monster had taken sleeping victims before. Simple enough to torture them to screaming wakefulness.

In a single stride, the Sandman stood beside the bed and reached long, narrow talons down to slowly draw back the covers. The blanket smelled of lavender soap.

The sleeping boy sighed and his brow creased, troubled, until he turned onto his side and pulled his knees up to his chest, his body aware of the missing blanket.

The Sandman went still. Awareness prickled. Somehow, he had heard Halliwell scream. Or felt it. Inside the monster, Halliwell could not move. His soul had gone rigid with fear unlike anything he had ever known-a terrible denial that would drive him fleeing into the darkened streets if only he had legs with which to run. Shame cloaked him, now, but he drew it tightly around himself as though it might shield him.

This was death and dream and anguish. How could he not flee?

After a moment, the Sandman moved once more, attention no longer turned inward. With the relief and release Halliwell felt there came bitter fury both at the monster and at himself.

This had to stop.

Then the voice, welling up from the depths of their shared psyche. Fool, said the Dustman. You have told him we are here.

The anger stirred in Halliwell again. Who the hell are you to judge? What have you done but hide?

For a moment, he thought the Dustman had gone. The terror that struck him at the idea that he might be trapped within the monster alone was almost worse than the attention of the Sandman. But then he spoke again. Halliwell could not see him-he saw only through the lemon eyes of the monster-but he could feel the Dustman coming closer and his memory supplied an image of the legend-the old London gent with bowler hat and thick mustache, the collar of his greatcoat turned up, the gray dust and dirt texture of his clothes and flesh identical.

Shut your gob and listen, the Dustman whispered in Halliwell’s mind. Come down into the dust with me, Detective. It’s time we had a chat.

The Sandman snatched the little boy from his bed, dangling the child by one arm. The boy’s eyes snapped open and grew wide with terror. He opened his mouth in a shriek, legs twisting and kicking as he tried to pull himself loose from the Sandman’s grip. The wraith only held him more tightly, and the child cried out in pain.

The bedroom door crashed open. The father stood silhouetted in the doorway, the mother in the hall behind him, both frantic with worry.

Then they saw the monster that held their son. The mother screamed. The father backed up a step, grabbed hold of the doorframe to steady himself.

Come, Detective, the Dustman whispered. Nothing you can do for them. Not yet. Turn away.

I can’t.

Turn away. The voice was insistent.

All along, Halliwell had been afraid that if he allowed his tenuous hold on the world-his view through the Sandman’s eyes-to go dark, he would be adrift forever in the swirl of darkness in the creature’s venomous heart. But the Dustman beckoned him deeper.

In the child’s bedroom, the father demanded that the Sandman release the boy. The monster’s laugh skittered along the floor like errant grains of sand. The mother rushed past her husband, hands raised, fingers hooked into claws to save her son. The Sandman let her come and, as her fingers dug furrows into him, covered her face with his free hand. Her scream was muffled. Sand filled her throat. His hand expanded, covering her face, scraping…eroding.

When he dropped his hand, the mother’s face had been scoured away, leaving only bloody muscle, gleaming bone, and screams. The monster batted her aside and held up the struggling boy as his prize.

“What do you want?” the father screamed.

The Sandman crouched low, holding the boy to him as though the child were precious.

“There is a secret place nearby,” the monster rasped. “A haven for Lost Ones and old legends. Twillig’s Gorge, they call it. I would know where it is.”

The father only gaped in despair and confusion.

“You’ve heard of it?” the Sandman growled.

“Yes. Of course,” the man said, desperate, trying to ignore the whimpers from his wife, trying to keep his son alive. “But I don’t know where it is.”

The Sandman narrowed his lemon eyes.

Halliwell tried to look away. The Dustman called to him.

The monster’s rasp was barely louder than the scratch of sand upon the floor as the breeze rose again.

“Pity,” the monster said. “Now I will have to ask another father. Another mother.”

Hopeless, now, Halliwell surrendered. He released his hold upon the world and let his spirit drift down into the maelstrom of the Sandman’s heart, where the Dustman whispered to him of will and grit and bone.

The gods of wine and depravity lived in bloated torpor in the ruined cellar of a palazzo in the Latin Quarter. The openings that led down beneath the ruin were treacherous. Grape vines-half withered-had grown over some of the shattered columns and fallen arches and stone blocks of the palazzo.

“Here?” Kitsune asked.

The sky had cleared and the sun beat down on the stones and made the grape leaves curl on the vines. Her copper-red fur was a part of her, but it felt too warm now, too close. Still, she would not remove it. To do so would make her feel less the fox and more human, and she was feeling too damnably human as it was.

She hated the Atlanteans and the Myth Hunters for what they had begun. She wished she had never met Oliver Bascombe. More than anything, she wished she could tear out the love in her heart.

No. No more thinking about Oliver.

Easier said than done, however. Particularly when all of her efforts now sprang from having known him. She would like to think that she might have stood and fought against the enemies that would destroy her and her kin-that would shatter the Two Kingdoms and take down fair and wise monarchs-even if she had not met him. But Kitsune could not have said that with any certainty, and this troubled her most of all.

“Here?” she repeated, turning to Lycaon.

Not even the old gods, it seemed, could escape time.

“So much for Olympus,” Lycaon said, his voice a growl. He did not look at Kitsune, or at Coyote, who climbed across the rocks, trying to keep up with them.

Kitsune stared at the opening that Lycaon expected them to climb into. “There must be others whose circumstances are less dire.”

“None who’d welcome me, or see you because I asked,” the monster replied.

“Cousin,” Coyote began.

Kitsune silenced him with a look. He sighed and came to join her in the rubble. With a glance back at Lycaon, they started down. A slab of stone shifted under her feet. If not for her natural agility, Kitsune would have tumbled into the hole.

Just a few steps lower, however, they found the original stairs that led to the wine cellar. The stink of fermenting grapes rose from below, powerful enough that the small hairs on the back of her neck rose and she was forced to breathe through her mouth. Drunken laughter rippled up from below.

Before she had even seen them, she knew the wine gods would not join them in their campaign against the invaders.

At the bottom of the stairs she found a heavy wooden door, but it hung open. She glanced back at Coyote. In the gloom, his eyes gleamed with a hint of red and gold. He nodded, urging her onward. Beyond him, Lycaon hesitated. Kitsune wondered if he would betray them, but the beast would not have bothered to rouse himself from his kitchen just to lead them into trouble. No, that was the trickster’s nature, not the monster’s.

Pushing the black velvet curtain of her hair away from her eyes, she knocked loudly, but there was no reply.

“Just go in,” Coyote said.

His impatience seemed to free something inside of her, so Kitsune pushed open the heavy door and stepped through.

A dozen steps took them down into a cavernous underground chamber whose walls were lined with racks and old wooden casks. Many of them had shattered or rotted away, and the dirt floor of the cellar was muddy with old wine.

Fresh grapes grew in huge quantities in the dark, far corner of the cellar, as though they could survive in that sunless hole. They did survive, of course; the wine gods made sure of that. Blocks of stone that had once been a part of the palazzo upstairs had been brought down to construct a dais in the center of the chamber. Upon the dais, on filthy velvet tapestries that might once have been art, the two gods sprawled. Each must easily have been seven or eight feet tall when standing, but they looked as though they had not bothered to climb to their feet in some time. Bacchus and Dionysus, of the Roman and Greek pantheons, respectively, looked very little like gods of any age or culture.

They were naked and dirty, their beards overgrown tangles of gray. One of the stinking gods sniffed the air, taking in the new scents that had entered the cellar, and then sat up. When he saw their visitors, he grinned.

“What have we here, brother Bacchus?” he said, slurring his words. “A pretty thing come to the party. Strip off your garments, girl, and make your offering.”

Kitsune blinked. Then, unable to help herself, she laughed. At the sound, Dionysus gazed at her blearily. He seemed more confused than insulted. But Bacchus struggled to raise his bulk. He had a jug of wine in one hand and accidentally spilled it across his chest.

“Do you mock, girl?” Bacchus demanded. He sneered, but his head swayed with the muzzy numbness of the besotted.

Neither of the gods had even acknowledged the presence of Coyote or Lycaon. They were discarded deities, living in filth, and yet their arrogance remained. Perhaps it was all that had kept them alive.

“No, Lord Bacchus. I wouldn’t dare. I have come on an issue of dire importance, with news that threatens all of Euphrasia, an insidious evil that will find its way even here, in this haven you have made.”

Bacchus gazed doubtfully at her.

“We are gods, little fox, not merely legends. What might frighten the Lost or the legendary means nothing to us.”

Kitsune hesitated. She would have loved to correct him, to tell him that most of the beings that had once been gods were no more powerful, and sometimes far less so, than many of the legends she had met.

“Lord Bacchus,” Coyote interjected, perhaps sensing her pique, “Kitsune speaks the truth. Atlantis has betrayed the Two Kingdoms. They’ve coerced and deceived Yucatazca and murdered its king. War has begun. Invaders swarm into Euphrasia. If the races of Euphrasia don’t come together now, it will be too late.”

The Roman god belched loudly. Burgundy spittle ran down his chin.

“Get out,” Bacchus sighed.

“You’re not listening,” Kitsune growled. “You can’t just wait here to die.”

Dionysus laughed. The Greek god had apparently not forgotten they were there after all. He glanced at Kitsune.

“Little one, we’ve been waiting to die for a thousand years. Until then, we pass the time. But perhaps some of our brothers and sisters will take a greater interest in survival. They’ve lived this long, after all. So many have scattered throughout the Two Kingdoms and beyond-far beyond-and twice their number have died. But there are still a few who might listen.”

He glanced at Bacchus, as though for approval, but the other god ignored them.

“Lycaon,” Dionysus said.

The monster flinched. Strange to see the beast, the cannibal, so cowed. “Yes, Lord Dionysus?”

“You brought them?”

Lycaon lowered his head. “Yes, lord.”

“Good,” Dionysus said. “Each morning, go to Lycaon’s Kitchen and wait. If any from our pantheons wish to hear what you have to say, they will find you there.”

“Wait?” Coyote asked, taking a step toward the dais. “For how long?”

Dionysus laughed. “Until the gods deign to see you.”