•
Janis held the photographs in trembling hands.
Jill's eyes stared back into her own. From Evelyn's face and from others, from the faces of people she did not even know. From yet another woman dressed as a nun. From one of the vampires. From the hindquarters of the two-person horse, emerging sweaty and laughing from beneath her costume to accept a glass of champagne. Jill's eyes.
No, she thought. This is stupid. All it means is that Jill had a very common facial type. She used to complain about it, in fact—you remember. She disliked her looks. She thought that they were ordinary. But Jill wasn't ordinary. She wasn't ordinary to me.
Janis blinked rapidly. Oh, I can't do this anymore, she thought, dropping the photos on Chris' desk and pushing herself out of the chair. Not alone. I need to talk to Mark.
She crossed the room to Chris' phone, lifted the receiver, and dragged it back to the desk with her, barely noticing as the cord twisted and unwound, knocking one of the plastic champagne glasses off of the night table. Mark would be glad to hear from her. He would come right away, even to Chris' room, if she asked him to. They could look at the photographs together, and he would say, "What are you talking about, Janis? Those aren't Jill's eyes. I'm a neurology major: I know these things," and then she could forget about it. She could show him the pictures of Stephanie instead, and say: "Hey, look at your girlfriend. Isn't she a knock-out?"—or no. No, she guessed that she couldn't really do that. But maybe he'd see it for himself. And maybe then she could tell him about Utah.
Janis jabbed at the keypad on the receiver, gazing down at the desk, down at poor Stephanie, so inappropriately dressed, so completely unaware of how little it mattered. She could see it, as clearly as if it were happening right in front of her eyes. Mark's phone, ringing at—she glanced at Chris' alarm clock—a quarter after three in the morning. Him waking, answering. Of course, Janis. I'll be right there. Grabbing his clothing, pulling it on, telling Stephanie, sleepy and confused in the bed beside him: that was Janis. She's back in town. And it sounds like she's in trouble. She needs me; I've really got to go. No, I can't explain. Don't worry about it. Go back to sleep.
Barely even looking at her when he said it. Not really thinking about her at all.
Janis stalked back across the room and slammed the phone back down on its cradle so hard that it let out a tiny half-ring of protest. Oh Mark, you son of a bitch, she thought, and then, with a kind of defiance: And I am not cruel. I am not. I am nice.
She paced stiffly back and forth, trying not to look at the photographs, finding her attention drawn helplessly back to them. One of them had fallen onto the floor, face-down; it looked like it had just narrowly missed the wastebasket. She bent to pick it up, flipped it over, and then gasped as her internal temperature seemed to plummet to zero degrees.
It was Jill's boyfriend Albert. And he was talking to Death.
Barely breathing, the hairs on her arms prickling with gooseflesh, she straightened to hold the picture to the light. She exhaled, hard.
No, of course Albert wasn't really talking to Death. This was a costume party, for Chrissakes! He was just talking to some friend of his who had come dressed as Death. And she didn't even make a very convincing Death: her broad, good-natured face beamed out from beneath her hood, and even the voluminous shroud she wore couldn't quite obscure her ample proportions. Janis even thought that she recognized the woman, vaguely: she lived on Mark's street and had some boy's name, Billie or Bobbie or something like that. She'd probably chosen her costume in the hopes that it might make her look thinner: fat women always seemed to like wearing black. Albert, standing next to her, hadn't even bothered to come in costume. He slouched awkwardly in his t-shirt and jeans, looking ill-at-ease, eyeing the other students with a barely-concealed contempt.
Typical, Janis thought, with intense dislike, and then was immediately swept by a wave of guilt. She had all but forgotten about Albert, whose murder had been the only reason that Jill's death had made it into the Utah papers (only double murder, it seemed, was sufficiently unusual to be deemed newsworthy in Utah). She had been so shocked to read about Jill that she had barely given Albert a second thought. And now here she was, thinking ill of him.
So what if he was a bit of a creep? she rebuked herself. Jill loved him, so he couldn't have been all bad. And even if he had been, even if he'd been an unmitigated asshole, so what? He still hadn't deserved to be murdered. He hadn't wanted to die. But some asshole had come along and shot him anyway. Dead. Dead, at the age of twenty. And you couldn't even be bothered to think about him.
She forced herself to look at Albert's image. She touched it lightly.
I'm sorry, she thought to it. I didn't like you, and I can't help that. But I am very sorry that somebody killed you.
At least he hadn't suffered, she thought, placing his photograph gently back down on the desk. The papers had said that the shots fired into his back had entered his heart, that he had probably died almost instantly. So at least he couldn't have suffered all that much. Not like—
Janis shoved this thought away hard, pushed it under with all of the force she could muster. She half-expected it to come popping right back up at her, but instead what rose to the fore was:
Not like Jill suffered?
She drew in her breath sharply and sat back, thinking: Oh, God, no. Please let that not be true. Please let Jill not have suffered. She blinked back tears, blurring the image of Jill's eyes staring up at her from the surface of Chris' desk.
Oh, my dear child, a voice in her head sighed, sounding remarkably like Number One. Surely you know what this is? Why you've been seeing Jill's eyes everywhere tonight? Surely even you cannot be that blind? And you thought that you might not be capable of love?
No. Janis guessed that she did know after all. Those aren't Jill's eyes, she told herself. Only one person had Jill's eyes, and she's dead. And you weren't even here. You didn't even see her the day before she died. You missed the funeral, and you missed the memorial, and you aren't going to meet Lori. Ever. And even if you do some day meet her, it won't really matter, because the only real reason for getting to know her is gone. When you get back to your room, the closet is going to be half-empty, and even that stupid bunny costume will be gone. You'll never see it again. You'll never see Jill again. Jill, who wasn't ordinary. Not to you.
Janis sat down on Chris' bed and hugged his pillow. Lessons learned, she thought. Lessons learned. This is a hat. And that is the sky.
That was love. And this is grief.
She burst into tears, giving way to it, curling up on Chris' bed and howling her sorrow in huge, gulping, snotty sobs while across the room, Jill's eyes stared sightlessly up at the ceiling from a half-dozen different photographs. As did—although Janis, who was almost entirely without vanity, had failed to notice it—a number of pairs of Janis' own.
•
Shelby Moore, whose parents had endured years of jocular comments about their only child's resemblance to Baby Jane Caulfield until the changes of puberty had minimized said resemblance to a mere something about the eyes, turned her sleepless gaze to the window and tried to ignore her steadily mounting suspicion that perhaps she had breathed too close to the test tube after all.
The Debussy had turned itself off ages ago, but Shelby still fancied that she could hear it in the rustle of bedclothes, in Lisa's soft breathing, in the pattern of pulsating shapes the reflections of the street lights formed in the window pane—
Shit, Shelby thought. That's synesthesia, is what that is. Oh, shit. I'd better get myself to the hospital.
Gently, carefully, so as not to wake up the woman sleeping beside her, Shelby lifted the covers and lowered herself out of bed. She padded silently across the room to stare out of the window, admiring the patterns that so perfectly replicated the Debussy which had once been playing in this room, perhaps still was playing, because time wasn't really linear, was it? No, it was not, they just perceived it that way, was all, and...
She shook herself, trying to remember just why it was that she had got out of bed.
PMD80, she reminded herself. Hospital. But this thought slipped frictionlessly into others: hospitals, ambulances, emergencies, injuries. Blood. Jack Bitsumi's slit throat in her nightmare. That student who had been found with her throat slit in Saki dormitory. The cut she had got on her hand while cleaning up the glass from her shattered window on the night of the murder. The smell of Woodbury scented candles, and the way that her cards had seemed to be lying in wait for her. Like a predator. Or a lover. And connections, half-seen between all of these things, almost viewed, shimmering and pulsating like the tidal melodies of the Debussy, washing over the strand and receding, washing and receding, washing, receding, washing...
Shelby's face relaxed as she stared out the window.
On the bed behind her, Lisa Morowitz cried out in her sleep.
Shelby did not hear. She crossed the room to kneel beside her backpack, rummaging, hands moving of their own accord. When they found what they had sought there, she stood up, moved silently into the living room, seated herself at Lisa's table. She pushed the pile of papers waiting there to be graded off to one side, unwrapped her cards, and placed them before her. She hesitated, head cocked to one side, eyes blank and incurious, listening, listening...
Then, lips slightly parted, she began to turn the cards over, one by one by one.
•
Three blocks away, Shelby's first cousin Nigel, dressed only in his dressing gown and a pair of BVDs, stumbled barefoot through the freezing night, oblivious to the darkness, oblivious to the cold, oblivious even to the fact that in his half-dressed state, his mastectomy scars were visible for all the world to see.
"Oh!" he cried, as the ground rippled and buckled before him. "Don't drink the water! Don't drink the water!"
Everyone had said that the States were the best place to go if you really wanted to start a new life. It was so easy to pass there, they had said. And everyone knew that the Yanks were gaga over British accents. And since his Dad was an ex-pat, it had been simple to get the visa. Herschberg, Minnesota, had seemed the ideal place to work on his novel. It had sounded...quaint. Quiet. Peaceful. Norman Rockwellesque. But it was also a liberal college town, which had seemed like a good idea too, really. Just to be on the safe side, don't you know. Just in case.
"Oh, please don't drink the water!" Nigel screamed, his eyes rolling wildly in his head.
Yes, it had seemed like such a good idea at the time. Even better than a good idea: a compelling idea. An irresistible idea. As if it were fated. As if it were meant. He could hardly have anticipated the bad dreams. Or intuited the strange, half-formed presentiment that had led his father, the black sheep of a large and scattered family, to seek his fortunes half a continent and a wide wide ocean away from the American Midwest. He could hardly have guessed that a nice little town like Herschberg, Minnesota might have had what it took to drive him mad.
"Black helicopters!" shrieked the Mad Brit, not even noticing as all around him, the trees spelled out his secret. XX, read their branches, crossing and recrossing like the branches of Nigel's own convoluted family tree. XX. XX. XX.
"Black helicopters!" he screamed. "Oh, please don't drink that water!
•
On the third floor of O'Henry dormitory, a junior named Louise, who had gone out with Chris briefly in their freshman years, and who still found herself gazing longingly at him from time to time, even though he was so not her type, stared at her fractured reflection in what was left of the mirror above the bathroom sink and did not even consider drinking the water.
Jill's nose was reflected in one of the splinters of glass, Nigel's clean brow in another, Evelyn's strong jaw in a third. Louise didn't notice. She had no idea what had possessed her to don her red Coke t-shirt and pretend to the police that she was Jill Mankevich on the night of the murder, any more than she had ever understood why she had accepted a place at Herschberg—her safety school, for God's sake!—when her first choice, Brown, had been perfectly willing to admit her. Any more than she now understood why she should be standing here in the third floor bathroom, staring into the mirror as if it had some very important message it was trying to convey.
It had been a bad week for Louise. She had spent most of it in a state of agitated paralysis, convinced each time there was a knock on the door that it must be the police: they had found the t-shirt she had buried in the Arb and lifted her fingerprints off of it, or had simply recognized her around campus; and now they had come to arrest her for obstruction of justice, if not worse. She had missed classes and lost weight, and three of her papers were now overdue.
But tonight, at least, Louise was free from all of that. She wasn't dwelling on such concerns tonight. She wasn't thinking of very much of anything, truth be told, as she stared blankly at her fractured reflection in the bloodied mirror, gasping and sobbing with the pain of her broken left fist, which drove itself over and over and over again against the splintered glass.
•
In the field behind the Tiptree Memorial Library, Rhiannon (which was not her given name, but her special witch one) heard the cry of "Don't drink the water!" and turned to her best friend Morgan (ditto) with an expression of profound comprehension.
Pollution, she thought, and Morgan nodded, understanding instantly.
Yes, she agreed. That's why we've been called. To heal—
—Gaia. Rhiannon finished for her. They giggled in unison and linked hands, as the library lights danced madly in their field of vision, as the frosted grass rippled underfoot, as they prepared to invoke the elements.
It came as no surprise to either of them that they had become telepathic. They were best friends, after all, and best friends had no need for speech. They had been inseparable ever since that first Wicca class last year, after which they had stayed up all night talking, discovering that not only did they like all of the same things, but that they were actually cousins as well. And their friendship had only been cemented a few weeks later, when they had slept with that cute guy Chris from group, both of them, together, taking him in turns, barely believing their daring, tearing themselves away from him occasionally to kiss each other, long and lovingly, both of them privately wondering—as they had confessed to each other the next day—whether this would, like, totally fuck up their friendship, whether they'd even be able to look each other in the eye the next morning. But of course it hadn't, and they had, and wasn't college just the greatest?
The air, summoned from the north, howled past Rhiannon, tearing her hand from Morgan's grasp. Fire shot from the south, bisecting their tiny circle, rising up between them. Morgan flinched from the flames, feeling an energy not of their own making forcing them apart.
The Dark wanted to speak to each of them, alone.
•
Across campus, a quiet senior named Vera, who as a child had poisoned her baby brother with Drano playing "house" one hot summer's day while their mother had been outside watering the flowers, knelt shivering at the feet of the being which stood before her and pressed her forehead hard against the plush carpeting of her Wodehouse single.
It had been an accident, of course. That's what everyone had said. That, in fact, was how she had told it to Chris at that party a few weeks ago: tearfully, knowing from the look of horrified sympathy on his face that she was now guaranteed to get him in the sack that very night.
But not all accidents are really accidents, and Vera herself, writhing on the floor in a kind of ecstatic abjection, had always known better. As did the creature which smiled down at her as it heard her vows of undying loyalty.
It had not had to lure her outside to speak with her. She had invited it in.
•
Matilda Schreiber, who had never in her life ingested a hallucinogen, and who therefore had interpreted the shimmering and pulsing at the edges of her vision as symptoms of eye-strain when it had begun an hour or so ago, sighed dramatically as she gave up on her fifth attempt to make it through the dreadfully dry, if canonical, Cabot and Marsten and instead returned, with some relief, to Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf.
She was not, truth be told, the best student at Herschberg University, a school to which she had only applied on a kind of hopeless whim, and whose acceptance of her she often suspected to have been due to some clerical error in the admissions office. Not that she was complaining. But now that she was here, she was really going to have to study hard if she was going to pass all her classes. She really shouldn't be wasting all of this time reading up on wolves. Or experimenting with her new condition. Or worrying about what she had seen, or thought she might have seen, that night in Albert's closet, the night of the murder, the night she had set out to prove to Jill that in a windowless room, blocked off completely from the rays of the moon, she could prevent her transformation. (Not that she ever wanted to do that again. It had hurt!) And she certainly shouldn't be spending nearly so much time thinking about how Chris' hand had felt under her shirt that one night, right before Janis had walked in on them together. That had been really stupid. And wrong, as well. Wolves were supposed to be faithful. They didn't pull that kind of shit on each other, not like people did. And when they did mate, it was supposed to be for life.
Matilda suddenly realized that she was outside, in the field behind the library. She blinked, confused, trying to remember exactly when it had been that she had given up on her reading and decided to go for a walk instead. Someone somewhere was screaming, and it was very cold. She shivered and peered into the darkness, puzzled and more than a little disturbed.
Out from the darkness at the edge of the field, a young woman came running, hands clamped over her ears, eyes closed, moaning. Matilda had to jump backwards to avoid a collision with her as the student bolted past. She stared after her. What the hell was going on out here? There was a strange tingling in her extremities, and all of her joints felt peculiarly fluid. She glanced up at the sky in disbelief.
It isn't even new, she thought. It's half. This didn't happen last month. What is this?
Eyes wide and in a spirit of experimentation, Matilda walked out to meet the darkness.
•
In the M.R. James Memorial Hospital, Jill Mankevich herself, helpless to resist the Dark's summons, tore herself nearly free from her body before she could go no further. Oblivious to the sirens and alarms which summoned an army of panicked doctors to her bedside, she threw herself gratefully into the arms of her ghostly lover, whom she had found peering intently up her left nostril.
She did not think of Chris as she pressed herself against him.
Jill had lost all interest in her ex-boyfriend the very night that his seed had implanted itself so fatefully in her womb.
•
All across Herschberg, young women were drawn into the cold November night. Forty-three of them in all, the far-flung offshoots of the same vast and hopelessly tangled family tree, they were called. And into the night, some shuffling, some running, some screaming, they came: the long shots, the dark horses, the wild gambles. Distant relations, scions of lineages which a hidden group based in Utah had long ago written off as unusable, those in which the Old Blood had been deemed too weak...
(Matilda Schreiber wandered through the darkness, confused and troubled. Of the many beings which stepped from the shadows to have a word with her, she was aware of not a one. After two hours, shivering with the cold, she decided that she must be coming down with the ‘flu, returned to her dorm room, snuggled under her covers, and went to sleep.)
...or too tainted...
(The dark being smiled coldly at Vera as it condescended to allow her to press her lips fervently against its left hand. It did not yet know that Vera's mother, a gynecologist who bore a remarkable resemblance to Jane Caulfield, had years before taken a long cool look at her only daughter and seen there something—the shadow of a murdered child, perhaps, or possibly something of her own dark nature reflected in her daughter's eyes —something, at any rate, that had set her soul to a vague, half-understood murmuring of bad blood, bad blood; that had led her to think no, enough is enough, this ends right here; that had prompted her to violate every principle she had ever believed in by forging, in sorrow and in love, the medical documents necessary to recommend a full hysterectomy for her only surviving child shortly before sending her off to be educated in Minnesota.)
...or simply otherwise unsuitable...
(Shelby Moore, who would have found Chris far more interesting had he a sister, turned over her last card, gazed at it dispassionately, and then rose from the table and went back to bed. Blocks away her cousin Nigel, nee Nichole, ran screaming past the denizens of the Dark, who shook their heads sadly as he passed, because while the Old Blood ran strong in him, they had come several years too late to use him as they might have wished.)
Those whom the Light had rejected for consideration, the Dark was willing to assess.
The Dark was accustomed to playing from a losing hand.
•
As, in her own way, was Special Agent Riggs, who armed the sweat out of her eyes as she left Hiawatha Towers and wondered where Mr. Moore could be at this time of the night.
Looking for werewolves probably, she thought, and smiled thinly.
From several blocks away, she heard a scream, followed by a squeal of tires. She frowned and paused, listening.
Somebody, she could not tell even if male or female, laughing madly, a high insane cackle, off to the west.
Another scream, this time from the direction of campus.
A boy's voice, high, wavering, scared, reciting some sort of poetry: "When the Dark comes rising, Six shall turn it back—"
A girl's voice: "Leave me alone!"
"Black helicopters!" That was Mr. Moore, all right. "Black helicopters!"
"Well, sonofabitch," said Riggs, and checked her watch. Her frown deepened. The stuff wasn't supposed to disseminate this quickly. What the fuck? And what kind of students were these, anyway, drinking tap water and taking showers at three o'clock in the morning on a Friday night? Hadn't they ever heard of vodka, for Chrissakes? What were they, some kind of water fetishists in this Godforsaken town?
Her watch couldn't have stopped, could it?
She shook her wrist and listened. Nope. Took a licking and kept on ticking.
Riggs thought for precisely one minute and three seconds, then shrugged.
Oh well, she thought. So the eggheads were wrong. Wouldn't be the first time. No one knew diddly about PMD80 anyway.
Still, this wasn't great. She was really going to have to move if everything was going to be ready by morning.
Exhaling sharply, Riggs broke into a run, as all about her the town of Herschberg moaned.
•
Chris ran blindly through the darkness, his trench coat flapping wildly against his legs. He had no idea where he was going; every time he tried to make a turning, or even to stop to think, he found his way blocked by trees, everywhere the trees, their skeletal hands reaching out for him, snarling, laughing, whickering, hissing. He hadn't ever realized that there were so many trees in Herschberg, but they were everywhere, planted along every street, lining every avenue, dotting every common. Mature trees, whose broad canopies would provide shade and respite in the summer, but which now merely had...long arms.
And there were worse things than the trees, as well. He couldn't quite see them, but he knew they were there, lurking in the shadows, just waiting to make their move.
"When the Dark comes rising," he chanted as he ran. "Six shall turn them back. Three...three..."
A dead leaf was scraping along the pavement of the sidewalk behind him, blown along after him by the wind that was not a wind. He ran faster, clutching at the stitch in his side, hearing it gain on him as he ran.
"Three..." he gasped, and then he felt it, dead and dry, November dry, like the carapace of some giant insect, tickling the back of his ankle. He cried out and kicked wildly at it, veering sharply off of the sidewalk. The unbuckled belt of his trench coat caught on something, and he tugged frantically at it, sobbing.
"Three rings to rule them all," he screamed. "Three rings to find them. Three rings to bring them all—"
There was a hollow laugh. Chris fell to one knee, pulling at his belt with both hands, cringing from the low and drooping elm branches which held him there, fast.
And in the darkness bind them, boy? it sneered.
"No!" he screamed. "That is not what I meant at all! That is not it, at all!" He gave his belt one last desperate tug and then tumbled over backwards as the branches suddenly let go to lunge forward, groping, reaching for him. He tried to make it to his feet but stumbled and fell, cried out, covering his head with his hands, shivering, waiting to feel the cold abrasive bark tangle in his hair, or the bone-like branches close around his throat...
The tree laughed mockingly.
Chris slowly uncovered his head and looked up, revelation dawning in his eyes.
"You can't touch me," he said wonderingly.
The branches clawed at the air before his face. He flinched, but did not pull away.
"You can't touch me," he repeated. "You really can't." He pulled himself slowly to his feet, brushed at his coat, tucking the loose end of its belt securely in his pocket. "All you can do is threaten me."
Steeling himself, he walked directly beneath the elm tree, passing close by its trunk. Its branches tossed and waved and clenched, but their motion now struck him as more frustrated than predatory. He laughed in astonishment. Brittany had been right about the trees. She had been right all along.
Chris stopped dead in his tracks. Had there been anyone there to watch him, he would have slapped himself on the forehead. As it was, he contented himself with speaking out loud.
"Of course," he said. "Brittany!"
And turning, he began to run, just as fast as he could, towards Hiawatha Towers.
•
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