The Dark at the End

5

Jack turned away from the Lady’s window and faced the occupants of the room. He’d taken Gia and Vicky home from Weezy’s, then returned here.

“Storm’s done. You’re sure he’s still alive?”

Both Glaeken and the Lady nodded from their customary places at the table. Weezy was in her place too, the Compendium open before her. And next to her, a new face: Eddie.

Under different circumstances, Jack would have been amused at his reaction to seeing Mrs. Clevenger alive and well, and finally meeting the mysterious “Mr. Foster.” Even though Weezy had prepared him, he’d been awestruck.

Over in the corner, Dawn’s baby, confined in a playpen, contentedly chewed on a bone-a freaking soup bone.

When Eddie had seen him he’d whispered a simple, “Jesus.”

At least he hadn’t done a Kramer.

Glaeken said, “And slowly, very slowly, growing stronger.”

Not what Jack wanted to hear. A supernova of frustration blazed in his chest. He’d blown it. His original plan had been sabotaged-unintentionally, but sabotaged nonetheless-and he’d been forced to improvise. But he couldn’t excuse himself. He’d blown it.

“I need to get back to Nuckateague.”

“For what possible purpose?” Weezy said.

He glared at her. “Oh, I don’t know. To toast some marshmallows over the ashes of Rasalom’s mansion. What else?”

He was walking a thin line here and he didn’t need anyone baiting him with stupid questions.

“I’m serious, Jack. You’ve seen the news. That whole area is crawling with state and local cops. Even Homeland Security is into the act. The Coast Guard found the wreckage of the cabin cruiser, so they’re out on the water patrolling the bay, looking for bodies.”

“But Rasalom is not a body. And he’s not in the water. I don’t care how resilient he is, he’s saddled with a human body. It may be a special human body, but human muscle can’t function in near-freezing water like they’ve got in that bay. Somehow he made it to shore-maybe somewhere along the South Fork, maybe Gardiner’s Island, I don’t know. But he’s on land, and he’s hurt, and he’s hiding.”

“I don’t disagree,” Weezy said. “And if he’s findable, he’ll be found. But not by you.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

“Think, will you?” she snapped. “You’ll be conspicuous as all hell out there. If you’re poking through the bushes on land, the cops or DHS will want to know who you are and what you’re doing there. If you somehow find a boat to take out, the Coast Guard will want to know the same things. If there’s a chink anywhere in your ID you’ll wind up in jail and completely out of the fight. Is that what you want?”

Of course it wasn’t.

He forced a smile. “I hate it when you’re right.”

She continued her stare. “Funny. You didn’t used to.”

“I’m not exactly who I used to be.”

“And you seem to be getting less like him every day.”

Jack glanced at Glaeken and remembered what he’d said last night about the Ally.

The Ally wants a tool… a relentless tool.

He raised his hands in surrender. “Peace. You’re right, I’m wrong. I’m open to suggestions-anything but ‘let’s just sit back and see what happens.’ Anything but that.”

“All right,” Weezy said. “Let’s play a game.”

“Weez…”

“No, I’m serious. And this is a serious game.” She closed the Compendium and stood it up on its spine. “Guess which page it will open to when I let go of its covers.”

Had she lost her mind?

“Weez…”

“I’m going to guess the page about the Otherness Naming Ceremony.” She let the covers go and the book fell open. She looked down and said, “Well, well. What do you know: the Otherness Naming Ceremony. Let me try it again.”

She did.

“How about that? The Otherness Naming Ceremony.”

Jack moved around for a look. Sure enough. He recognized the page.

She called Eddie over and he got the same result.

Jack took the book from her and tried it himself: same page.

“What the-?”

He knew this book. Before Weezy had come back into his life and taken over the Compendium, he’d owned it, studied it-or at least tried to until its sequencing went on the fritz and pages began appearing in random order, anywhere they damn well pleased.

In all his time with the book it had never done anything like this.

“Since coming across that first reference on Wednesday I’ve been finding more and more mentions of the Other Naming Ceremony. Think about that: In all those months, not one reference till last week, then one after another, and now the book won’t open to any other page.”

“Another malfunction in its pagination?” Glaeken said.

“I showed it to Gia this morning and she said it looked like the book was trying to tell me something.”

Jack laughed. “Yeah, but she was-”

“-joking, or at least half joking, sure. But it got me to thinking. Could it be trying to tell me something?”

“It’s a book, Weez.”

“But the Compendium isn’t like any other book in the world, maybe not like any book ever made-and I emphasize ever. I’ve been studying it a long time. I’ve become attuned to it. It’s kind of, well, almost interactive, and I’m wondering if maybe it’s somehow become attuned to me.”

Silence around the table.

Jack didn’t know what to make of this. A book-even the most maddening and amazing book in the world-trying to tell them something? It didn’t sit right. His instinct was to reject the idea out of hand. But Weezy had instincts too, and he’d learned to respect them.

Finally Glaeken cleared his throat. “What do you think it’s trying to tell us?”

“That maybe what we talked about when I first showed you the page is a way to go.”

Jack vaguely remembered. “Putting someone through the Naming Ceremony and giving him Rasalom’s Other Name?”

She nodded. “That’s it. ‘ No two humans may have the same Other Name. The First-named shall be powerless as long as the Second-named lives. ’ That sounds pretty good to me. In fact that sounds like just what we’re looking for.”

Glaeken said, “You neglected the rest of it.”

Weezy remedied that: “‘ The First-named shall hear the Name within the Second and thus be able to resolve the duplication. ’”

Glaeken was nodding. “Which means the One will be powerless until he hunts down the usurper and wrings his neck. Which won’t be very long if he can ‘hear the name’ within the unfortunate who has it.”

As before, Jack was thinking that would be an excellent way to make Rasalom come to him, but he saw a couple of major problems.

“Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves?” He turned to the Lady. “Once again, I volunteer, but you’re the only one who can perform the ceremony and you’ve already said you won’t.”

“It is a death sentence,” she said, shaking her head.

He turned back to Weezy. “But even if we can change her mind, we don’t know his Other Name.”

Weezy looked at him, her expression intense. “I have an idea where we might- might be able to find it.”

“I’m all ears. Where?”

“Under the Johnson Lodge.”

The previous silence around the table had been baffled. This one felt more like stunned.

Finally Eddie said, “Johnson? Our Johnson?”

Jack said, “You mean those tunnels, that buried town?”

She nodded. “Remember we came across a big model of the Order’s sigil down there, the one made out of the same black stuff as the little pyramid we found?”

Jack had a vague memory of it. He’d archived most of his childhood and pretty much everything else that had happened before his break with his past and arrival in New York. Most of what he could dredge up from their teenage venture into the dark region beneath the Lodge involved running from some bearlike creature they never saw clearly-what might have been the last q’qr-and trying to keep from drowning.

“What about it?”

“It was damaged, remember?”

He shook his head. “Sort of.”

More like hardly. He remembered finding it and calling Weezy to take a look, but the details…

Looking frustrated, she pulled a pad and a pen from her backpack and began drawing. When finished she held it up for all to see.

“Here’s the sigil as we know it. Check the outer border-the rows of boxes running between the points. Each row has seven boxes.” She looked at Glaeken. “Didn’t you tell me that each of the Seven’s Other Names had seven characters?”

Glaeken nodded. “As do their taken, worldly names-like Rasalom. The original sigil belonged to the Seven. Seven points for the seven agents of the Otherness, interwoven to show a unity of purpose. Each of their public names was carved into the boxes of the great sigil that overlooked the hall where they would meet to draw up their plans for rule by the Otherness. After the Cataclysm, when the Seven and their schemes and their armies were no more, the Order adopted the sigil, but without the names.”

“The great sigil is mentioned here,” Weezy said, tapping the Compendium. “But so is another sigil-seven of them, in fact-all engraved with the Other Name of each of the Seven.”

“I’d heard rumors of that back in the First Age,” Glaeken said. “But I thought it was just wishful thinking on our part.”

“Why?” Jack said.

“Knowing their Other Names would give us power over them.”

Jack didn’t get it. “What are we talking about here? It’s just a name.”

Glaeken shook his head. “The Conflict was out in the open back then. The laws of nature were different and could be bent in ways no longer possible. The things we could do in the First Age would be called magic now.”

“Okay. I’ll take your word for that. But that makes it all the less likely that they’d share this Other Name with anyone.”

Glaeken gave a wry smile. “The Otherness did not cull the Seven from the cream of humanity. They were vicious and ruthless and without honor. Those of us fighting for the Ally were flawed in many ways-some fatally-but compared to the Seven, we were the First Age equivalent of choirboys.”

“All the more reason not to let the Hank Thompsons and Ernst Drexlers of their day in on your closest secret.”

“Ever hear of mutually assured destruction?” Weezy said.

Of course he had. “With nuclear weapons, yeah, but names?”

Glaeken was nodding. “It does make a sort of sense. If one of them or even a pair of them went rogue, the others had the means to bring them into line or wipe them off the face of the Earth.”

Weezy started erasing parts of her drawing.

“Okay, what if I told you we came upon a sigil, six feet high or so, and certain parts of it were missing?” She held up the edited drawing. “What if it looked like this.”

“See?” she said. “Six of the seven borders have been removed. Only one remains-and that’s got a name on it.”

Glaeken leaned forward, keen interest sparking in his blue eyes. “What name?”

She leaned back. “I don’t know. That’s why I put little X’s in the boxes.”

Jack couldn’t hide his shock. “You mean you forgot? You never forget anything.”

“I doubt I ever knew, Jack.” She closed her eyes. “I can see it there, leaning against the wall of the tunnel. It’s covered with dust. You even rubbed off some of the dust to show me how it was made of the same black material as the pyramid. I can see that six of the borders are missing, and I have an impression of seven symbols on the remaining border, but for the life of me I can’t remember what they are.”

“That photographic memory of yours never failed before. Why now? Try.”

Her eyes opened and flashed at him. “What do you think I’m doing right now? It’s simply not there. You remember what it was like that night. We thought that door opened into some kind of floor safe but it was much bigger than that. It was dark down there, we had crummy little flashlights, I was nervous, and we were looking for a lost kid. So excuse me if I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to a dusty old sigil. I can’t remember something if it never registered.”

He realized he’d ticked her off. He hadn’t meant to. He couldn’t remember ever being so impatient. He also realized she was ticked at herself for not being able to remember it.

“Okay. Sorry. If that’s the way it is, we’ll just have to resign ourselves to not knowing.”

“But we can find out,” she said. “I mean, assuming the sigil is still there.”

“If it is, it’s got to be buried under a ton of mud from when the lake flooded in.”

“Maybe, maybe not. I think we should go see.”

“Where? Back to Johnson? What for?” He nodded to the Lady. “If no one’s going to perform the ceremony, why bother?”

“We can worry about ceremonies later. Just knowing Rasalom’s Other Name could be important. Don’t you want to know it? Aren’t you curious, even a little?”

“Not a bit.”

“You won’t go back?”

“No.”

No way he was leaving for the wilds of New Jersey while Rasalom’s heart was still ticking up here. If an opportunity arose to finish the job, Jack wanted to be ready to jump on it.

Where was that son of a bitch?