Son of the Endless Night, page 51
The defendant turned his head slowly, vaingloriously, toward her.
"Edithhhhh." It was a dry sound, with faint rustlings of malevolence as of ancient silk stirring in a newly opened tomb.
Seeking to regain the defendant's attention, Tommie Harkrider pressed closer to the witness stand and said in a loud hectoring voice, "Well, I want to talk to you, Zarach'. Because I want to hear the truth, and I know damn well I'm not going to hear it from Richard Devon!"
Gavel. "Mr. Harkrider— "
"Edith," said the defendant, growing as giddy as ribtickling Death, "the sun has set. The time is now."
"Get away from him, Tommie!" There was a note of despair in her ultimate warning.
Harkrider turned quickly, glaring, offended by her interruption, then thrust his face to within inches of the defendant's. He was like a beast sniffing excitedly the blood pumping from a torn jugular.
"Come out, come out!" he said challengingly. "Come out and talk to me, Zarach' Bal-Tagh!"
Tommie stood on his toes, trembling from the force of his righteous contempt, both hands clutching the railing of the witness stand. The defendant was aloof. He had raised his eyes to the courtroom clock. It was three fifty-one in the afternoon. A slight tremor went through him.
And if Tommie Harkrider, or anyone else, could have looked directly into his eyes at that moment, they would have seen the beginnings of a stormy eclipse.
113
In Heraclio, the plaza was now deserted, except for Sigrid Torgeson.
The burnished bronze sundial gleamed in the last rays of the setting sun.
Seabirds wheeled raucously overhead.
There was no wind, but the force issuing from the sundial peeled Sigrid's blond hair back from her temples. Her body, minimally clad in a singlet, was outlined in an aura of scintillating, foaming white light.
114
The clock in the courtroom in Chadbury stopped.
Edith, braced for a taxing denouement, bowed her head. The courtroom was plunged into hell.
115
At approximately three-fifty that afternoon, the twenty-ninth day of June in Chadbury, Vermont, a plague of insects appeared from out of a fair sky and poured, like ruby red wine from a transparent vessel, onto the courthouse, the small lawn in front and the locust trees that grew there. They covered the sidewalk, the street, and part of the village green. They were a little like horseflies and a little like grasshoppers. From a single thick stream they separated into millions of individuals. They had a high, honed, whining sound in concert that tended to give pain to the eardrums. Dogs, cats, and even birds fled the vicinity.
The insects seemed to prefer crawling to flying. They crawled over everything, not voraciously but with a blanketing, stifling effect, obscuring the outline of the three-story courthouse, covering all the windows, burying the roof inches-deep, and the clock tower. The clock soon stopped, its works gummed by a mass of insects. The sun shining through rosy wings cast a pall over the area. No one was able to go in or out of the courthouse without literally taking a bath in insects. The red bugs didn't bite, but they disintegrated all too easily, giving off a noxious odor and searing human skin with their vital fluids. After a few painful welts had been raised, people kept their distance. It got late.
Entomologists and pest-control experts were sent for. The insects willingly died at the first whiff of toxic chemicals, but the odors of their dying drifting on the evening breeze threatened to make much of the surrounding area uninhabitable. And when the insects died, there seemed to be even more to take their places. Tens of millions of people saw live coverage of the eradication attempts on television, and close-ups of the unidentified insects. Within the hour a number of amateur and professional authorities on prehistoric fossils had concluded that the last-known specimens of this now-abundant insect dated from the late Jurassic period, an epoch one hundred sixty million years distant.
Meanwhile no communication had been possible with anyone inside the courthouse. Telephone lines were dead. There was a great deal of concern. The fire department tried to open a path to the front doors with a high-pressure hose. The insects loved water. They reconverged almost as soon as they were washed aside. Men in awesome white suits, hoods, and boots waded toward the doors but became so covered with insects they couldn't see where they were going; they slipped and fell on smashed bodies as thick as cranberry sauce.
Not a few people, relating the phenomenon of the insects to the trial going on inside the courthouse, gathered spontaneously at dusk a block away. They prayed for divine intervention but were soon acrawl with vivacious, glittering red insects and fled in terror.
It was eight fifteen P.M. For more than four hours no one had emerged, not a sound had been heard from inside the courthouse.
116
In the courtroom to which Zarach' Bal-Tagh had been summoned, time had no meaning at all.
At the instant the clock stopped, the light of day, occult in its mathematics, reversed itself, spiraling in toward the center of the feverish eclipse.
The light changed swiftly; in the disorienting deepness of vermilion, faces glowed like pink ingots. A magnetic disturbance combed through each of them, huge as a stellar tide.
At each window tiny wings oscillated. Their room had become a nest, and they were food for the nest.
On the witness stand the defendant rose, and lowered his gaze to the captive spectators. To the jury of those who were no longer his peers. The radiance of his eyes painted the room with magenta shadows.
To each of them he gave clairvoyance; and from all but a few, he took reason.
They found themselves removed to the far edge of the universe, their little seething nest suspended over a void terrifying in its immensity, scorching in its blackness. Here the soul of a man had no more hope of survival than a drop of water in a desert, and they screamed telepathically in fright.
The defendant smiled at this tribute to the effectiveness of his initial exercise. Then his magic became harsher.
Those who tried to escape from their seats, to trample others mindlessly and batter themselves against unyielding walls and doors, found themselves immobilized by various ingenious means.
Tommie Harkrider had taken only two steps before he felt a biting pain in his left ankle. He looked down and saw that he had stepped into a trap of sorts: the gaping jaws of a human skull. Strong teeth bit him to the bone.
At the prosecutor's table Gary Cleves could move his hands and feet, but not his head. His bearded chin was pressed against the top of the table and his extended tongue was impaled on a wooden stake. As he struggled to free himself the stake grew like a tree from the roots of his tongue; his body rotted to feed it. And in the branches of the tree that swelled above him deformed shapes stirred and spread their wings.
Opposite him Edith Leighton sat with her head bowed, almost on her chest. Alone in the ruddiness, the blood-splashed gloom that had turned other faces to anguished masks drawn in shadows, she glowed like a lantern. There were fierce pulses in the otherwise dormant flesh of her body. She was impervious to the horrors now visiting them, the withering vanity of the master of the revels, their oppressor. Her eyes were narrowed, but in them were steady depths. Inwardly she was a coldly burning skein of nerves, a puzzlebox of impulse, a psychic transmitter.
Louise Vale, the bereaved mother of Karyn, found herself on her back with her knees up, her belly a heaving mountain as she gave birth— to dribbling packs of rodents, which upon entrance into the air, began voraciously to pierce her thrombosed veins for nourishment.
The eyes of the oppressor touched them all in turn; his lurid alchemy raged in the secret mind.
Some were toughened by the assault: their minds held fast. Father James Merlo, acclimated to horrors, prayed steadfastly in support of Edith Leighton, prayed for a turning of the black torrent.
And still they had seen nothing of the oppressor's full power. They had yet to look into the face of Zarach' Bal-Tagh.
Gina Devon, her mind too still, like a glassy pond beneath the threat of a runaway moon, sought the strength of her husband. Turning to Conor, she found he had divided at the waist into two warring wolves, yellow-eyed they snapped and slavered in each other's faces.
Lindsay Potter, violated once again by the crack of doom, embraced her pain and shuddered in orgasms that rubbed her raw; with nerves unbraided and flesh falling from her bones like drops of dark rain she sorrowed for a more powerful, truly consuming love.
WHO SEEKS ME? went the whisper around their minds.
Edith felt the stirrings, the craving for deliverance in the three jurors whom she also coveted: Mary Adelaide Hotchkiss, Ivan Mandelko, and Gerald Aughtman. She felt the confusion of their naked souls; she fought the further encroachment of Zarach' Bal-Tagh, who lied like the Serpent, flattered with a winkless eye. Her features all but disappeared in the scintillation from the sundial on her breast.
Her own power gave the oppressor pause. But then, enriched by the violence around him, by primal fear and blood, he descended from the witness stand. And with each princely step, he stood taller.
Tommie Harkrider fell shuddering at the feet of the oppressor, who looked past him at Edith. Edith's own eyes waxed distantly behind the helm of white light that protected her.
He knew she could not, by herself, stop his transformation, his tumultuous growth.
With a beautifully disarming gesture, Zarach' Bal-Tagh revealed himself.
In the language they had all been given to understand— and speak— they heard him: the seductive lyre of his palate, the gracious, singing tongue.
His looks were a match for his voice: in the midst of red chaos, anarchy of the senses, self-torture, shone the redeemer's golden eyes, a brazzle in their ashen bones.
"I AM ZARACH ," he advised them.
"ONLY I CAN SAVE YOU."
"Yes, save us! Zarach'! Zarach'! Save us!" Threatened, groveling, they begged for a glint of his compassion.
Edith groaned, as if she lay in drugged sleep.
"WHO AM I?" Zarach' demanded.
"You are Lord!" they answered, forgetting pain, obsessed by his beauty.
He nodded devotedly. Eight feet tall, robed like the phoenix, he spread his arms to embrace them.
"No!" Edith shouted, in the only language they now understood. Almost no one heard her.
"THEN YOU SHALL BE SAVED," Zarach' said. "AND ALL OF YOUR KIN."
"All! All!"
"AND ALL OF THE PEOPLE OF THE EARTH WHO COME TO ME,
AND PLEDGE THEMSELVES TO ME, THEY TOO SHALL BE MY CHILDREN."
"We will all come to you, Lord! We will follow you!"
"He is no messiah," Edith warned. "He is worse than death. He is the Endless Night!"
But they had suffered too much; they believed the lies of Zarach'. Many of them rejoiced in the dysangel's undeniable majesty: the caves of light at his temples, cheeks of milk and blood, mercy in the offered palm. His strong body attracting them as sky attracts the bird.
Even as he seduced the others Edith felt the boldness of Zarach' swelling like a storm-driven sea, rounding on the light of the sundial which she had so zealously conserved; the breadth and blackness of the wave approaching her scared her to the marrow. In this winding-sheet of salt rose heavy, mouthing things, to swallow the light from her breast— and then her powerless, emptied bones.
Strength, she murmured to herself, now sightless within the storm breaking around her head, wearied by the outcries of the nearly maddened souls she must somehow turn away from Zarach'.
Edith's hands were raised to her breasts, fingers pointing outward. The sundial glowed within her hands like a star exploding into thought.
Engrossed, she nursed it to a white noon of volatility. Then, refreshed, Edith hurled the equation of the light into the jury box, into the shadowed minds of Hotchkiss, Mandelko, Aughtman.
At the first tentative bonding of the tetrad, before its power could be released, Zarach' Bal-Tagh's siren song ended and he flew into a frenzy of hate. With the full resources of the demon-sorcerer he struck at them all. New horrors abounded in the courtroom.
In a dreary winter landscape Martin Vale sat sobbing, surrounded by the truncated flesh of his daughter. He sorted through feet and hands and tresses trying to put her together again while nearby, crouching, Richard Devon with eyes lividly mad was eating the heart he held in streaming hands. Dark rays fell from the sun like petals from a blackened rose.
"WHO SEEKS ME?" Zarach'demanded.
"Zarach'!" they began again, wailing.
In the hands of Judge Knox Winford were the faces of his children, their throats swelling up from the cruel tendons of his wrists, eyes of fancy blue. He began sadly to applaud, ignoring their screams and then the sharp bone-crack, bringing his hands together again and again until the faces became squashed, mixed, unrecognizable.
The population of the courtroom doubled in an instant, became crowded with breath. There were ant forms, and fan-shaped serpents, and slinking noisome beasts of no known species. There" were jaded ladies with the stingers of scorpions curled over their shoulders and perplexing eyes faithless as gold. A mob of youths fair-faced but grossly furred at the hips and wobbling on claws. Great cats, all ebony and ire, with the slowly stirring wings of jackdaws. Old demons in rouge and silk, the long nails of their hands whispering like rapiers for the unguarded soul. Late of this earth, they were the scarred, the treacherous, the corrupt. They contributed to the tumult until the thin, pure light of the cross of the tetrad shone through the bloodred murk.
The lesser demons panicked easily at the sight of the living cross that lay from the point of Edith's breastbone across the courtroom to the jury box. They went whining and howling and tumbling head over heels back to the Endless Night. They went empty-handed while Zarach' fulminated; he dwelled on Edith alone, source of his misery and potential defeat. His eye a weight of toppling stone, his countenance like the volcano towering over the sundial of Heraclio.
Bound by the law of the light, her energy committed, Edith trembled, clinging to her life as weightlessly as a damp leaf on a windowpane.
IT IS YOU WHO SEEKS ME, EDITH.
She had tried to prepare herself for pain, for the torment of having her mind pressed and pressed again until it leaked drop by inky drop down the sheer white bone of her forehead. She had not been prepared for such outrageous confidence.
I do not.
Her anger at Zarach' nearly exhausted her; she had never felt this frail.
He drew closer, as close to the light as he dared; peering in, like a giant at a keyhole. Her eyelids fluttered, her pupils darkened with his handsome head.
WE SHALL SEE.
And when he withdrew to a more bearable distance he did so with a shrug. In the next instant with a snap of his fingers he shed his plumed but smoldering resurrection robe, stood naked as glass to her enchanted eye, a tower of mirrors, bright prisms of magic in which she saw (closing her eyes but seeing through the lids) what she most feared to see:
Herself.
No!
But there was a shaking in the air, in the chill and deathwatch mirrors: her veins were ripped from her flesh and writhed round the light like strangler fig.
The power of the tetrad began to wane; the light was dying.
In the many-mirrored, enslaving body of the demon Edith sank slowly to those depths where sorrow goes.
I must not fail.
Another flicker of his magic; Zarach' showed her the twin side of her nature, with every weakness, every flaw magnified into evil.
WE WILL WORK SO WELL TOGETHER, EDITH.
So little of the light left; his shadow falling swift and fatally.
It was the will of God that the shadow exist. And Zarach' was a part of God; powerful, yes, but imperfect. He could torment them, make them suffer. But in their suffering they were redeemed. This was the power they had over Zarach', and even as she weakened and prepared herself to lie down in the grave of his illusion, there was a last exultant flaring of Edith Leighton's spirit.
Edith reached for the sundial on the chain around her withered neck, and found the strength to snap the chain.
Turning, she hurled the little sundial toward the smoking red-eyed mirrors of the demon-magician.
In midflight the sundial began to glow again; to speed. It struck the body of Zarach' with the force and luminosity of a comet. Light erupted piercingly, intensified by every shattered facet; spears of light shot everywhere through the courtroom as the whirling, white-hot sundial penetrated more walls of cascading glass. Zarach' turned, falling to pieces, roaring like a tornado as glass streamed inward toward a distant spot of darkness, following the flight of the sundial. The courtroom was afire like a tropic noon, but heatlessly. Only the spot of darkness persisted, entry to the Endless Night, a whirlpool of Stygian blackness terrible to contemplate.
Give him back to us, Edith prayed. Give him up. Now.
From out of the sink of darkness something came flying, almost too small at first to be grasped by the eye; then Edith realized it was a human body, small but perfectly formed, tumbling into the light. Just before it hit the floor it became the size of a man.
Richard Devon lay sprawled on his face, twitching, dazed, but with a cry for breath. In that instant the dark entry shrank to the size of a pinpoint; with a last stupefying shriek from an inhuman throat it closed altogether.
In Rich's outstretched hand was the sundial. Its light continued to flow over them like a warm and nourishing sea. Balm for the eyes, for the mind. No one stirred. Not one of them had the power to speak, or even to think very clearly: but there was no need for thought. They all had the same insatiable need, to bathe in the purifying light, and be cleansed.
117
In Heraclio several members of the Sundial community carried Sigrid gently from the plaza and put her to bed. She was trembling uncontrollably, and the muscle spasms continued for a while. Three of the women took turns rubbing her down. Part of the time she was conscious. She babbled happily, the way a new mother still under the influence of anesthesia will babble about the baby to whom she has given birth but hasn't yet seen. When Sigrid finally fell asleep, she would sleep for twenty hours straight.
