Nightwalk 2

  Nightwalk II

  This book is dedicated to my intrepid band of proofreaders and editors; six brave women who plunged into the syntactic morass of my early drafts in a heroic effort to redeem something of coherence and grammatical sanity. My thanks go out to…

  April Rood

  Julz Duxbury

  Stephanie Hilliard

  Santanita Winton

  Claire (Charlie) Paul

  Jeanne Theunissen

  …and as always, to my wonderful wife Karla who indulges my quixotic attempt at a literary career.

  Table of Contents

  Map

  Chapter One: Lest Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot

  ChapterTwo: Fractured Recursions

  ChapterThree: Temporal Revisions

  ChapterFour: Blazing Trails

  ChapterFive: Walking With Ghosts

  ChapterSix: Running With Ghosts

  ChapterSeven: Departures

  ChapterEight: Crossing Coventry

  ChapterNine: Gods and Insects

  ChapterTen: The Chasm

  ChapterEleven: Partings

  ChapterTwelve: Endgames

  Epilogue

  Chapter One: Lest Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot…

  “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” – H.P. Lovecraft.

  “Stella, are you sure about this?” I kept my tone measured, without any hint of pleading as we came down the stairs. “How are you going to get in the building?”

  “Security knows me. I’m one of the bosses now, remember?”

  “Sure, but it’s almost nine o’clock.”

  “Honey, I’ll be gone less than an hour,” Stella situated her purse strap on her shoulder. “I only need to pick up my laptop from the office.”

  “But why?” I protested as I followed her into the foyer. “I meant it about letting you use mine.”

  She paused at our front door and gave me the sardonic look both she and Casey did so well… although hers had a gentler edge to it.

  “I know you,” she sighed. “I wouldn’t be able to concentrate because you would spend the entire time hovering in the background, worried I would somehow hit that mythical wrong key that would erase your entire hard drive and fry the computer. No thanks.”

  Busted. But still, I had to try.

  “I could go hover and fret in another room. You won’t even know I’m in the house.”

  “Mark,” she closed her eyes and shook her head with an amused grin, “no. Just no.”

  “I will gag myself and sit on my hands in the corner. You can throw a sheet over me and pretend I’m ugly furniture.”

  “No!” she laughed. “This is getting silly. I won’t be gone too long.”

  “I know,” I sighed, “but I still worry when you’re out on the road at night. You can understand why, can’t you?”

  “Of course I can understand. But that was two years ago, Mark. It’s over now. And I was never the one in danger, anyway. You are being silly.”

  “Okay, maybe I just really like the feel of having you in the house in the evening.”

  “So I’ve noticed. I’m starting to worry about you. You really need to get out more and make some friends. We’ve lived here for over a year now, and you still don’t know anybody. I can’t be your only source of human contact.”

  “Hey, that’s not fair.”

  “But it’s true.”

  “Not entirely true. There’s Casey.”

  “Casey,” she poked me fondly in the chest, “moved back to Houston to go to college. And while I’m really happy you two learned to get on so well with each other, an email now and then does not count as human contact.”

  “Okay, so I’m a bit of a hermit. A lot of us authors are. You knew it when you married me.”

  “No, you were once a bit of a hermit. Now you’re a one hundred percent, grade-A recluse. And for your information, Casey has noticed it too. She’s even started making suggestions.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes!” She nodded brightly. “Her latest idea was… and I quote…‘You should find Mark a Dungeons and Dragons group for geezers. Then he can hang out and make friends with other huge dorks his own age’.”

  Oh, that little twerp.

  Over eight hundred miles away and she still found a way to get a shot in.

  “Yeah, well, we all know who’s getting a lump of plutonium in her stocking next Christmas.”

  “Ha! Right!” she snorted. “As if I didn’t know who’s been checking out and pricing used Mustangs lately. If you’re not careful, you’re going to end up spoiling the girl.”

  I assumed my best wounded look.

  “Being her mother, I would think you would consider her worth spoiling.”

  “Being her mother, I know she’s a normal nineteen-year-old girl who can smell a loving but inexperienced stepfather with wallet control issues from three states away. That high-end laptop and new cell phone were thoughtful gifts… but you, sir, are now getting fleeced. Got it?”

  “Got it. Less Mustang, and more stocking up on plutonium,” I sighed and favored her with a resigned smile. “But I guess if you’re going to get back in time to get some work done, I should let you go.”

  “Yes, you should.” Stella pecked me on the lips, then opened the front door. “But I mean it about you getting out more. This particular conversation is not over.”

  “Yeeesssss, dearrrr,” I sighed with an exaggerated groan.

  She pointed a mock warning finger at me as she stepped out, then gave a wink while pulling the door closed behind her.

  The click of her heels faded, soon to be followed by the soft purr of her BMW starting up. I watched her headlights come on through the frosted glass of the front door, then back down the driveway. They vanished as Stella turned onto the street, to be replaced with twin red glows that all too rapidly diminished into the darkness.

  Well, crap.

  I hated it when something like this happened.

  I closed my eyes and started a slow count to 150. This would give her time to change her mind and get back if she forgot anything, or be completely out of the neighborhood if she didn’t. Focusing on the counting also helped keep my breathing steady. But as soon as I finished, I dropped all pretenses and rushed to the kitchen. Doing a frantic calculation of how long she should be gone, I subtracted five minutes from the total and entered the result in the timer on the microwave oven.

  Then I went from room to room, turning every light in the house on.

  Soon the place blazed with light, and only then did the tightness in my chest start to loosen.

  Much better.

  Much, much better.

  I took a deep breath followed by a slow exhale, then carried on with the last part of my secret “home alone at night” routine.

  Moving to the large windows opening onto our rear balcony, I gazed out over the distant lights of Albuquerque. From the vantage point of my new, white, Art Deco style house, situated on the lower slopes of Nine Mile Hill, the city would always be reassuringly visible. And this being New Mexico, there wasn’t a damn tree within a mile of me.

  Nothing but scrub, sand, and tumbleweeds. A desert wasteland.

  God, how I loved it.

  After the disaster in Coventry Woods, we had spent about a month living in a hotel before leaving the area entirely. Stella had family near Morgan City, Louisiana, so we relocated there next.

  Unfortunately, Morgan City didn’t fit us well. Stella wasn’t truly close with the Louisiana branch of her family and, despite her somewhat unpolished ways, Casey definitely wasn’t a small-town girl. Not to mention, the lowlands of south Louisiana came with an atmosphere bearing an uncomfortabl
e resemblance to that monster-infested night, which didn’t endear it to me either.

  And by then I was having real trouble fighting the nightmares.

  At first, they involved the man in white and the awful last glimpse I had of him. He had haunted my dreams as I compiled evidence on Dr. Chandra and the device which wrought all that destruction. And it was those grinning jaws in the darkness under that headdress laughing in my nightmares as I struggled over whether to release what I had discovered. In the end, I chose not to.

  Then they changed to include the dead I had left back there in Coventry Woods. Ed, Sid, Allen, Agnes, Darla, Ashlyn, the Sawyer family, and strangely enough even Tommy. All people I had met that night, and maybe people I had let die. What if I had told Sid we would make do with the rags we had? What if I had been willing to be the bad guy and insisted Tommy climb the cell tower instead of Ashlyn? Hell, what if I had actually kept my composure and admitted the very real probability he had missed and killed Ashlyn by accident instead of pinning her death on him like I did?

  How many more people would have walked out of the darkness if not for my mistakes? Maybe my actions didn’t matter so much after all…or maybe they did. I would never know. But the dead faces I saw in my sleep stared back from that same darkness with the silent accusation I should have done something more.

  Between the dreams and being surrounded by forested Louisiana swampland, it was becoming all I could do to hold myself together while being there for my family. I knew Casey must have been suffering as well. I even tried to talk her and Stella into having her skip a semester of school, but Little Miss Macho wouldn’t hear of it.

  And that didn’t turn out so well.

  Casey managed to tough it out through the autumn, yet I knew her grades suffered. She still hurt too much and it was just too soon. Not to mention she carried a lot of anger over what had truly happened to her old home… and her beloved Uncle Ed.

  Her suppressed anger finally came to a head during the bus ride to school on an early November morning. Apparently one of the more popular girls thought it would be funny to snatch the do-rag off the head of the new girl and throw it out the window. The results didn’t end up being as funny as she thought. I had to pick Casey up from the police station, and a certain homecoming princess was forced to wait for the bruises on her face to heal before taking pictures for the yearbook.

  I never said a word to her. We simply walked up and down the side of the road together for the next two hours until the do-rag turned up.

  Fortunately, something finally went our way. Stella announced a week later that she had been transferred to a new bank branch out west. We wasted no time in moving, and I never looked back.

  New Mexico suited us much better.

  Stella settled into her new job well, and Casey recommitted herself to her education. As for me, I retreated into our grand new house overlooking Albuquerque to revise my latest manuscript before sending it off to the publisher. I had designed my main antagonist as a serial killer, and after having met and fought a true psychopath I decided he definitely needed tweaking. The publisher had been pleased with the results.

  Then Casey graduated high school and shocked everybody by announcing she would be returning to Houston to go to college. I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise.

  Be it ever so damaged, there’s no place like home.

  So on a bright August morning, we said our goodbyes at the airport. Casey had hugged Stella and told her that she loved her, after which she hugged me and said she loved me, too… but also added a request to take care of her mom and please stop buying dorky hats. Then she boarded the plane and an era came to an end.

  Stella cried half the night, and I will concede a tear or two on our pillows may have been mine as well. It’s only natural to cry when somebody you love is crying, too. Right?

  Then life went on while Stella and I got used to rattling around in our big empty nest. Oh sure, Casey called from time to time…okay, we called her…and we saw her at Christmas, but she had definitely started moving on with life. She was truly a young woman now and forging her own path in the world. She had only come back to visit for a week this past June because she decided to take summer classes in order to ease her class load a little.

  Meanwhile, Stella got a promotion at her job, and I had buried myself into crafting my next big adventure for the intrepid Mitchell Notch. We found a new rhythm to our lives. Time had passed and my scars had faded.

  Or at least most of them had. I’d been doing a pretty good job of hiding the ones that remained, and the things those scars led me to do.

  Now Albuquerque shimmered below me like a carpet of luminous humanity. Its lines of golden street lamps were light-etched promises of order and civilization. They meant the world still made sense. The moving dots of cars gave proof of society going about its business, and the great wash of house lights reassured me that home and hearth were still living havens of security.

  I had convinced Stella it was the beauty of the view causing me to stare out our back windows so often. In truth, it had become my anchor.

  Having recovered my equilibrium, I felt comfortable enough to move over to the back door and step out on the balcony. I couldn’t have picked a nicer night for it. The cool desert air carried the clean scents of juniper and sage on the barest hint of a breeze. They were perfume to my nostrils.

  I moved to the rail and took another deep breath. This time, the exhale carried a sigh of relief.

  I was okay.

  This was my home now. This new and timeworn place, with the glowing city at my feet and the ancient smell of the desert in the wind.

  It was enough to make a man wax poetic.

  “The desert has its holiness of silence…” I breathed, quoting Walter Elliot in admiration of the view.

  “…and the crowd its holiness of conversation,” finished the last voice I ever wanted to hear again.

  ###

  Oh, no.

  Both my heart and my throat seized up at the sound of his voice.

  Oh, please no.

  Not this.

  Oh no, no, no, no, no… this just could not be.

  It was supposed to be over! Goddammit, that whole thing had happened two years ago and it was supposed to be over!

  I fought to breathe as I clutched the railing in a white-knuckled deathgrip. Hell, I fought not to faint dead on the spot. Everything I experienced that night washed back through me in a flood of memories. Ashlyn’s pain-wracked cries while being pulled into the sky by a floating obscenity, Tommy’s gore-lined face under the headband he had made from Darla’s skin, the screams of the Sawyer family being slaughtered together in their vehicle… the death, the blood, and the nightmares made flesh. Everything I had fought to put behind me now thundered back at the sound of this one unforgettable voice.

  I finally managed a ragged inhalation, then turned to look to my right.

  It was him.

  The man in white stood at the other end of the balcony, apparently enjoying the same vista. Tall, swarthy, regal… he wore the same top hat and suit, with the same pharaonic chin beard and kohl-rimmed eyes. His ivory cane lay in front of him on the railing. And most telling of all, he also brought the very same sense of being so much more real than his surroundings that they almost faded into the background.

  “My compliments on your choice of location, Mr. Garrett.” He spoke softly as he took in the view. “Of all the different settings, in all the uncountable places I have walked, the desert has always been my favorite.”

  He gazed at the distant lights a moment longer before turning to face me. Just like two years ago, he wore an expression of cheerful benevolence. And I still didn’t buy it. Because also like two years ago, his eyes contained the same unsettling mixture of humor and… something else. Something alien, and detached, and inexpressibly remote.

  Not to mention, I would never forget the last glimpse I had of him, when he showed himself to be something very different than wha
t now stood beside me.

  “Ah yes,” my visitor replied with a smile as if I had spoken my misgivings aloud. “I suppose I owe you an apology for that little oversight. I didn’t mean to alarm you. Once I saw you and Miss Stafford were safely past the police, I had turned my attention to other matters and inadvertently allowed my aspects to shift a little. It was clumsy of me.”

  It unnerved me how he did that —answering unspoken questions— yet it also gave me something concrete to latch onto, and helped me find my voice. As frightened as I was, I needed an answer to that issue.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” I whispered. “But what I saw at the police line, that’s who you really are, isn’t it.”

  “Not at all!” he laughed “No more than the tip of your nose is really your true face. I have a great number of aspects, Mr. Garrett… ‘different sides’ so to speak… and I assure you this one is as real as any. Think of what you saw at the police line as merely an unflattering angle. Nothing more than poor presentation on my part.”

  Right.

  The most frighteningly powerful being from the single most terrifying night of my life just showed up unannounced on my back porch… and when I asked him why the last time I saw him he had turned into a big scary monster, he basically shrugged it off as bad stagecraft.

  But I didn’t dare push it any further. Any entity who can bend space and has an “aspect” with the appearance of what I saw that night is the last thing I would ever want to piss off. Field mice don’t get far in the world by getting pushy with tigers.

  Unfortunately, this left me back in my previous state of being speechless.

  “Mr. Garrett,” he now leaned on the railing with his elbow, and sighed with wry exasperation, “would it put your mind at ease if I informed you that all you have to do is ask me to leave, and I will immediately vanish and never trouble you again?”

  Oh, really now?

  I considered this with suspicion. It couldn’t be that easy.

  “I promise, it is exactly that easy. Have I ever lied to you?”

  He had a point. In my two previous encounters with him, everything he said had turned out to be true. And the one time he had fudged a promise, he had done it in our favor in order to meet us before we reached the overpass and exposed ourselves to a sky full of killers. But at the same time, I still had the feeling he had chosen his truths for his own purposes.