Rising Darkness

Chapter Nine

SOMEHOW MARY MANAGED to pull away from the restaurant without clipping anybody else. In a crisis of shock and pain, her breathing erratic, she drove by rote until she found herself parked in front of a huge old Victorian house in an older tree-lined neighborhood close to Howard Park, near the St. Joseph River.

The house was more utilitarian than its sprawling gingerbread-trimmed neighbors. It was covered in beige aluminum siding, not painted, and fringed with sturdy plain white gutters. There were no perennials or shrubbery planted in its miniscule front lawn. It had been divided into apartments, and the backyard converted into an asphalt parking lot.

She had shared the upstairs apartment with three other women while attending Notre Dame. The rent had been cheap and there had been no cockroaches, so she had counted herself lucky although sometimes she had felt as if she would have been happy to sacrifice a limb for some privacy.

Muscle by muscle, she forced herself to unclench her death grip on the steering wheel. Then her body jerked as a new wave of dread hit. She twisted in her seat to search for any sign that she’d been followed or was being watched.

All she found were the peaceful sights and sounds of a quiet neighborhood settling into dusk. The adrenaline faded, to be replaced by bone-rattling tremors and the faint roil of nausea.

She was going to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder over this day. She had earned it, she was planning for it and nobody was going to take it away from her.

What happened made no sense. Who would want to attack her? What was she running from?

How did those men know her name?

She didn’t know anyone or anything. She certainly didn’t own anything anymore. Nobody had whispered a mafia deathbed confession to her in the ER. The whole thing might be laughable except that four people were dead.

[struck, overpowered, carried to a black, unmarked van]

A wail built at the back of her throat. She clenched her teeth and swallowed the sound. If she started making noise, she might not stop. Worse, she would draw unwanted attention to herself.

[so many hawks, swirling like a storm in the jewel-toned sky]

She couldn’t just sit here outside her old apartment. This street was too trafficked. Sooner or later someone would notice.

She inspected the abrasions on the heels of her hands and dismissed them as minor. Then she tilted the rearview mirror and checked the damage to her face, pressing light fingers along her swelling cheek and jaw. The damage wasn’t too bad. If she were at the hospital she would order x-rays to check for bone fractures, but that would be just a precaution.

What hit her in the solar plexus, causing her mouth to wobble and eyes to blur, was the bright spray of drying blood that dotted her face and hair. She looked down. She was covered in other people’s blood.

[flat, popping noises, the blossom of ruby stars on a child’s T-shirt, and four people falling]

She pressed both hands to her sore mouth, panting, until the fresh wave of nausea had passed.

Oooh-kay. Okay. Usually she only dealt with that much blood in a medical facility where she was insulated with scrubs and the duties of her profession, and she wasn’t clammy from shock.

She had to wash, but she couldn’t walk into a public restroom looking the way she did. She looked around. The unopened bottle of water she had bought earlier lay in the passenger seat, where she had thrown it after the drive-thru. She also kept a first aid kit and a change of clothes in a gym bag in her trunk.

A block ahead of her, a car turned onto the street. Twin beams of light flashed across her face. The car approached at a slow pace. She twisted at the waist and bent down, drumming her fingers in a rapid tempo against the water bottle until the car had passed.

She had to move. Definitely.

She started the car and drove around to the back of the apartment house, and pulled into the parking lot. There was only one car parked in the slot closest to the house. A Dumpster squatted in the corner of the lot like a giant, bloated orange insect. She pulled the Toyota around and backed toward the Dumpster then popped the trunk.

Switching off the engine, she jumped out and limped to the back of the car as she glanced around. Dusk was deepening fast. The spring warmth from earlier that afternoon had fled, leaving behind a deepening chill. The windows from neighboring houses threw golden rectangles of light across the darkening backyards.

She didn’t see or hear anybody outside.

Did that matter? Would she be able to hear anybody in time to avoid them? How paranoid should she be?

That woman in the Grotto said she had a powerful enemy.

She guessed that meant she should be pretty paranoid.

[We’ll kill everybody in the restaurant if we have to. Not that we’d mind. We like to kill.]

Who talks like that? Nobody does.

She yanked her cotton sweater off and pulled it inside out, shivering as she inspected it under the dim light in the trunk. The only spot she could find that was not soiled was inside the back. She opened the bottle, splashed water on the material and scrubbed hard at her face, hands and arms, wetting the sweater as needed. While she worked to clean herself, she took a mouthful of water, rinsed her sore gums and tongue and spat out rusty liquid. Then she swiped at her braid with the ruined sweater, threw it in the Dumpster and yanked open the gym bag. A worn white T-shirt, a pair of jeans, underwear and old, blue canvas shoes were tucked inside.

Shaking from cold, she plunged her head and arms into the T-shirt. Did she need to ditch her jeans? She checked. The knees were wet with large, dark red patches.

[people toppling like mown flowers]

She must have crawled through blood to get to her purse. She didn’t remember. She had been focused on the men, their guns, the hawks and her own terror.

The jeans joined her sweater in the Dumpster, and she hopped into the clean pair.

A small wind gusted into her face, and a thread of a voice said in her head, Hurry.

She froze. How could she have forgotten her daemon? She slammed the trunk, slid into the driver’s seat and started the car again, letting the engine idle as she turned the heat on. Only then did she roll her window down partway.

The breeze blew in and bounced around the interior of the Toyota. Whatever it was, it seemed as upset as she.

Is there more danger? she asked. She locked her doors.

Not here. Not now. It swirled around her. It seemed as uneasy as she did about being motionless, but she could be projecting. If she followed her first impulse, she wouldn’t stop running until she hit California. Then she would think very hard about getting on a boat.

But there’s still danger, she said. Close? Searching?

Yes. We must leave.

Okay.

With her shock lessening so that she could more or less strategize, she said, I need to go to the police.

No!

Disappointment and fresh fear slammed her. Why not?

Her daemon didn’t answer. Perhaps it didn’t have the capacity to communicate the answer, or she didn’t have the capacity to hear what it said. It continued to rotate in agitation around her so she turned her own thoughts to answering.

She didn’t believe her house burned in a freak accident. Someone set fire to it. She didn’t yet know why, so she set that aside for now.

If she had been followed from her house, those men would have taken her earlier in a much less public place—for instance when she sat outside Gretchen’s house, or when she was alone in the Grotto. Nobody knew where she was, or where she would be next. They couldn’t, because even she hadn’t known. She had gone through her entire day on impulse and instinct.

How had they found her at Friday’s?

The restaurant manager had done as she had asked, that’s how, and had called the police. Whoever was looking for her either had contacts on the police force, or they could monitor police communications.

She blew out a shaky breath, more grateful for her small presence than she could say. Without it, she would be headed right now for the nearest police station.

Okay. No police. And visiting Gretchen again was out. She couldn’t put the other woman in danger, no matter how much she wanted to see what the psychic would make of the hazardous Rubik’s cube her life had become. For the same reason, she wouldn’t be looking up old classmates in South Bend or coworkers in St. Joe, or go knocking uninvited on Justin and Tony’s door.

A train wreck of a feeling clenched in her gut. Shit, she was more worried than ever about Justin.

Air caressed her cheek.

I know, she said to it. I can’t have a nervous breakdown in the parking lot. I’m a sitting duck here.

The world had transformed into a weird mystery, and she was all alone in it except for a small puff of air that talked to her. It was such a quiet little voice, just something she heard in her head. For all she knew it was a splinter of her own overstressed personality.

If it was, it was smarter than the rest of her and had saved her life, probably more than once. It also seemed to be pretty clued in to what was going on, so she needed to pay sharp attention whenever it gave her any advice.

The thing was, she didn’t think it was a piece of herself. Maybe if it had been just a small voice in her head, yeah sure, but it wasn’t. Even now it plucked at strands of her hair and gusted against her swelling cheek as if patting the injury.

She whispered, “You’ve been with me all day, haven’t you? I just wasn’t aware that it was you I was hearing.” The presence circled around her, like nothing so much as a small cat purring. She put a hand to her cheek. “Okay. As the Skipper might say to Gilligan, where to now, little buddy?”

North, her daemon said, flowing along her fingers in an insubstantial caress. Go north. We must find the Grandmother.

The vision at the Grotto had said Mary needed to travel north, but the woman hadn’t looked anything like a grandmother. Mary chewed her lip as she thought back over the conversation. The woman had also warned her about danger and told her to take care.

Later in the restaurant she had tried to rewrite what had happened because she hadn’t understood. While reasonable, that was a mistake that could have gotten her killed and had probably contributed to the murders of four innocent people.

She rubbed her eyes. She couldn’t think about it right now. She had to channel Scarlett O’Hara, and think about that tomorrow.

Okay, she said to her only friend. North it is. But I’m going to have a truckload of questions to ask when we find this Grandmother of yours.

She put the car in gear and, her thoughts rambling through bits and pieces of TV and movie trivia, she pulled away from her old home.

Overhead, a couple of resting hawks took flight and followed.

HER GAS GAUGE hovered a millimeter over the red E. She had to stop and fill her tank. At least if she was being hunted, they already knew she was in town. A credit card trace wouldn’t tell them anything new, and she could keep the cash she had for later. Thanks to the kindness of Gretchen and T.G.I. Friday’s, she still had ninety-five dollars in cash.

What kind of response time would anybody have to tracing a Visa swipe? An hour? Half an hour? That had to depend, in part, on their resources and how close they were to the site of the transaction, and also on how secretive they had to be, because God only knew, the attack on her had been illegal six ways to Sunday.

Screw it. She didn’t have a choice. She would have to go in with an agenda and get out fast.

She pulled into the first Marathon station she came to and leaped out, her abused muscles yelping in protest. She kept her head down as she shoved through one of the double doors and arrowed toward a restroom.

Once inside, she checked her appearance. She’d missed a couple of smears of blood. She threw handfuls of cold water over her face and neck, snatched paper towels from a dispenser and scrubbed herself dry.

The quick wash couldn’t improve the looks of the hollow-eyed woman in the mirror with the lopsided, bruised face, but at least it removed the last visible traces of blood. When she was finished she strode through the convenience store, grabbing bottles of water, a large coffee, a tuna sandwich, a turkey sandwich, a chocolate bar, and a couple of bags of trail mix.

The cashier was a beanpole of a male around twenty years old. He held a cell phone between his jaw and one skinny shoulder and talked into it as he checked her items. She kept the bruised side of her face angled away from him, staring out the plate glass at the passing traffic as he swiped her card.

The countdown began.

While the kid bagged her items in transparent plastic, she pivoted and used the ATM machine opposite the cash register. She punched numbers to withdraw the limit as her heart rate picked up. The machine spat out green bills. She snatched at them, grabbed her bags and launched out the door.

Now that she was taking action, she found the focus she used in the ER. Her movements became smooth and efficient. She tossed the bags in the car, jammed the coffee cup into the driver’s seat drink holder, slammed the gas nozzle into her gas tank and swiped her card again. As it processed she did a three-sixty.

All the traffic looked normal. A couple of cars pulled in and out of the gas station. The island where she stood was exposed by white halogen light. She imagined the barrel of a gun pointing at her from the shadows. There was no breeze.

Her card was approved. She cocked the nozzle, and the machine poured gas into her tank. Time bled out. She tracked it by the rhythmic pulse of the pump, which ran with excruciating slowness.

She wished she could try calling Justin again to see if he was all right, but all of her nerves were screaming at her to get on the move.

The pump clicked off, the sound overloud in the quiet evening. She nearly leaped out of her skin.

She had the gas tank capped and was in the driver’s seat within the space of her next breath, and she forced herself to pull away from the gas station slow and smooth, like a normal customer. As soon as she was on the road she sped up.

Nothing could have induced her to go near the U.S. 31 Bypass or 31 Business North. They were too closely linked to the routes that led back to St. Joe. If someone was hunting her, those roads would be watched.

No doubt there were dozens of back roads that could also take her north, but she didn’t know them, so she drove northeast, back toward Cleveland Road. She would take the 80 Toll Road East past Elkhart and turn north on Highway 131. She’d driven that route before. The roads were fast, and she would be traveling in the opposite direction of St. Joe.

All her surviving material possessions were with her in the car. She had no other change of clothes. She had two hundred and ninety-five dollars in cash. After this, she wouldn’t dare access her bank or credit accounts until she understood what was happening and, hopefully, was in some measure of safety again.

She had no idea where she was going, who was chasing her, why someone would try to kidnap her or why the attempt had been so violent. She was weaponless, she didn’t know who she was supposed to find, or how, and she didn’t understand the various psychic and/or strange phenomena she had experienced or witnessed that day. If she hadn’t seen the cloud of attacking hawks for herself, she never would have believed it.

She rubbed at the back of her neck and sighed. That seemed to sum up her situation pretty well.

She reached the entrance to the Toll Road, rolled through a booth for a ticket, and pulled onto the highway. Then she stepped on the gas until she was traveling the speed limit. The last thing she wanted was to draw attention and get a speeding ticket.

Full darkness had descended. The sky was a latticework of thin clouds and clear starlight, hung over a dark, quiet countryside dotted with farmland and clustered lights from the occasional neighborhood. There was a half-moon. She glanced at the moon a few times to see if it was surrounded by the Van Gogh effect, but it was partly obscured by clouds so she couldn’t tell. She gave up and concentrated on her driving instead.

She kept a back window cracked open. She was traveling at a speed that made the frigid wind knife through the interior but rather than close her window and perhaps trap her daemon outside, she turned up the heat. Welcome warmth blew over her damp hair. She sipped coffee and tried, as much as she was able, to let the tranquil scene soothe her jangled nerves.

She needed to regroup and gather her energy. It was difficult to do when she felt like someone had scraped her insides raw with the jagged edge of a grapefruit spoon. Whatever else happened next—and she truly could not imagine what that would be—she knew she was in for a long, hard night, and another long, hard day tomorrow.

Soon she reached the exit for Highway 131. She suffered a few bad moments as she pulled up to pay at the tollbooth. Her fingers were shaking as she handed money to the attendant, but the middle-aged man seemed bored and sleepy, and he hardly spared her a second glance.

Giddy with relief, she pulled up to the intersection and turned north. She made good time for a while as she passed through the small towns sprinkled throughout southern Michigan. Soon the highway broadened into four lanes. Then she picked up speed again, soaking up a fugitive sense of safety she felt at increasing the physical distance between her and South Bend.

Close to an hour later, she came to the outskirts of Kalamazoo and the traffic increased, and a horrified realization swept over her. I-94 was another fast highway. It hugged the southern part of Lake Michigan like a lover, curved north to St. Joe and then sliced due east across the width of Michigan.

It was a quick route, easy to drive. Someone could have traveled directly from St. Joe and already be in the Kalamazoo area, lying in wait for her arrival.

Wait. Did that even make sense? If she didn’t have any idea where she was going, how could anybody else know? Was she panicking unnecessarily? The problem was, she didn’t understand how they had found her in the first place.

Her attackers were somehow connected to the police, and she was vulnerable through the license plates on her car. But if someone had traced her that way, wouldn’t they have already pulled her over? Or could somebody be following her even now? How could she tell in the dark?

She felt as if she had slammed into a guardrail doing ninety miles an hour. The lingering energy from caffeine and adrenaline drained out the soles of her feet, and her body began to shake. Her eyesight blurred, and she had to keep blinking hard to keep the heavy traffic in focus.

She didn’t have a mind for this kind of existence. She glanced around, trying to spot any anomalies. All the traffic was traveling more or less at the same speed and going in the same direction. That’s what people did on highways.

Her body reminded her that she’d been on the losing end of a fight and dropped to the pavement more than once. Her hands, wrists, arms and shoulders throbbed with a ferocious ache. Between the open window and the blowing heat and her own whirling senses, she couldn’t sense whether or not she still had her airy presence.

“I can’t go on any longer,” she muttered. She flung out a question. Daemon—are you there?

I am here. Hang on a bit further, the small presence said.

At least that’s what she thought it said.

Or maybe that’s what she hoped it said.

She scrubbed at her face, turned off the heat and rolled down her window. The resultant chill sank into her bones and made her abused muscles ache even more, but at least it slapped her awake.

She reached the north side of Kalamazoo and passed the turn for a town named Alamo. A few miles north of that she passed the intersection for Highway 89. She was taking in hard breaths like a runner at the end of a marathon.

Then she truly couldn’t do any more. If she didn’t rest, she would pass out at the wheel. She looked for the next exit, took it and drove half blind until she reached a quiet side road. She slowed and turned, took the next road and turned again, until finally she found an obscure one-lane gravel road dark with overhanging tree limbs.

She pulled onto it.

Trees, darkness, the cold night air and the rustling sounds of unseen creatures surrounded her. She stopped the car and put it in park. The cold was so bitter it forced her to roll up her window, daemon or no daemon. Shivering in violent spasms, she tucked her jacket around her torso and huddled against the door. She had passed the point of balance long ago and couldn’t unclench her rigid limbs. She felt as though she was bleeding out something essential, but she couldn’t make it stop.

“I need help,” she whispered.

Help help help.

The word went out from her in a gushing, rhythmic pulse.

She didn’t fall asleep as much as plummet into a pit.

The pit didn’t have a color. It was a wicked, lonesome black.

SHE WAS A daughter of one of the great houses in a city that sprawled like a lazy, tawny lion by the sea. Towers, minarets, domes and sails filled the horizon, all crowned by the gold and cerulean bowl of heaven.

The city was the center of civilization, turbulent with dust and heat and politics. The scent of spices, perfumes and rich foods mingled with the rank smell of animals and slaves. The cries of market hawkers were punctuated with the ululating call to prayer.

One of the five Pillars of Allah’s faithful, the prayer that saved and sustained the world.

There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his messenger.

In a place where beauty proliferated, the people called her mother the Jewel of the City. They called her the Flower. She had thrived in a progressive court filled with musicians, architects, mathematicians, scientists, theologians and philosophers, physicians and magicians. Once she’d been considered an accomplished physician in her own right.

Now she lay in her bed, restless from dreaming of what once was, and what might have been. She never quite fell asleep and only sometimes managed to fully awaken.

Pain redefined the evening of her life and became her entire world, her lover, her friend, her enemy, her bedfellow, the child of her heartbeats, companion to her breath and her sovereign lord.

He came to her daily, and each time she would rouse.

He would raise her head with skilled hands and help her to drink the wine spiced with medicines and poppy. Then as she began to drift, he would unlace her stiff leather corset and open it wide. He would part the edges of the deep, jagged wound that ran from collarbone to pelvis. Abdominal organs lay exposed to his intent scrutiny. After probing the wound he would sprinkle magical powders into the crevices of her body and whisper words, or prayers, or incantations.

The sum of her existence had come down to this irreducible place. He knew her with a greater intimacy than did any of her family. She should have long since died from the wound, but his powers kept her alive.

As she endured the unendurable, he whispered to her how her family had abandoned hope. They had stopped searching for a miracle cure for her mysterious wound that would not heal. He whispered other dark things, a corrupt and insidious councilor sowing anxiety and fear at kingdom’s fall. All the while he laced her tight in a perpetual bondage that held her torn body together and kept her spirit leashed to his hand.

Then he would leave and she would dream again, a bloodred petal drifting in twilight.

CRAMPED IN HER awkward position, her body aching, Mary surfaced from the black pit. She had a blurred impression of her car’s interior, the edge of the steering wheel that dug into her hip, the lush purple and green of the dark forest. Her mouth was dry and her heart hammered, a rapid, skittish feeling. She groaned and struggled to find a better position.

Then she slid into another space.

She stood up, away from her body and out of the car, into the cool velvety colors of the forest at night. She felt light and airy. Looking back in the car, she pitied the young woman in the driver’s seat whose abandoned body lay in an awkward huddle.

Mary held up her hands. She saw the shadow of tangled underbrush through her fingers.

She was like crystal.

She looked down at herself, or at least where her body should have been. She saw a transparent version of the woman that lay in the car, except in this version a jagged crack ran down the length of her torso. Light blazed like lava from the crack, illuminating the Toyota, the line of a tree, the gravel road. The crack didn’t hurt. She almost poked curious fingers inside it, but an instinctive aversion made her stop.

A delicate cloud of lavender mist came to settle around her torso.

She caught her breath. Daemon? Is that you?

Yes. The lavender cloud swirled around her. You must stop.

Stop what? I don’t know what you mean. She stretched, or perhaps she just pretended to, for her body was back in the car. Whatever she did, it felt as pleasurable and as expanding as a full-bodied stretch. She felt as if it was the first pain-free movement she’d had in days.

You are burning up. Her spirit companion turned in circles.

Am I? She glanced down at herself, at the crack in her torso that blazed like a sun. I don’t mean to be.

Agitation. You must find a way to stop.

I don’t know what I’m doing. Do you?

You’re dying.

Goodness. She looked around. She didn’t feel like she was dying. She had no idea dying could be so beautiful. Okay, she said. What do I do to stop?

The spirit wouldn’t or couldn’t answer. It twisted into endless, agitated knots.

She felt sorry for all the trouble she had caused it and started to apologize, but then it shot into the forest, disappearing so fast she couldn’t tell where it had gone.

Saddened, she wondered if that was the last she would see of it, but then she realized that if she were dying, it wouldn’t matter. She hoped her actual moment of death would be as painless and as pleasant as this. She experimented with walking, or pretending to walk. She loved the sensation of lightness and freedom.

Afrit.

The word popped into her mind, along with the memory of a mythology class she’d taken in high school.

Or was it afreet? She couldn’t remember. Djinn. They were Middle Eastern mythological spirits of air, immortal, unpredictable, often mischievous and amoral, and not to be confused with angels or demons. That didn’t seem like a fair way to describe her companion, which, if anything, seemed like an anxious, kind little thing. She preferred to think of it as a daemon, a supernatural being somewhere between a god and a human.

She heard a whisper of noise, a sound so slight that her physical ears would not have detected it.

She whirled. A wolf came out of the forest and took mincing steps toward her. Its head was lowered and its yellow eyes fixed on her—the crystalline, ethereal her and not the abandoned battered body in the car.

Oh, she said, or pretended to say, aren’t you gorgeous?

Lady, the wolf said. You called.

Did I? She blinked. I don’t remember.

Another wolf stepped out of the forest, then another, and then three more. Overcome with astonishment, she stared. What a lovely but incomprehensible dream. More wolves poured onto the gravel road. Soon her car was surrounded.

The one that had spoken was the largest and most powerfully built. It approached and sat near her transparent leg. It said, You asked for help. We have come. We will do what we can to protect you.

She flashed back to the cloud of hawks that had attacked her abductors. Some had fallen and hadn’t risen again. You mustn’t try to help me, she said. She looked around at the pack of wolves. They were so beautiful. Don’t risk yourselves. It isn’t worth it. Apparently I’m already dying.

The alpha wolf fixed its intelligent, lupine gaze on her. Sister, we stay.

Overcome by their generosity, she said, My heart is full of gratitude.

Only much later did she realize how stylized her words had been, as if they belonged to another place and another time.