And I "couldn't" because I still had to arrange a betrayal.

"Oh! Amon Ra," moaned a voice in the darkness.

"Oh!" echoed the sepulchral sound.

"G.o.d of G.o.ds," it sighed in the blackness.

"Death is but the doorway to new life," the voice intoned, seeming to come from the earth itself.

"We live today. . . ." The hair on the back of my own neck was starting to rise. "We shall live again. .

Cold, clammy hands clutched at me and- I awoke to the sound of thunder and the rattle of rain against my motel room window. I rolled over and pulled my watch from the nightstand: 1:22 p.m. Outside it was dark.

I closed my eyes but sleep would not come. Perhaps I was feeling a little ambivalent about putting out the welcome mat.

I got up and began dressing. The cat merrowed from the foot of the bed and I found myself the object of its unblinking stare.

"What are you looking at?"

The cat merrowed again.

"I'm going out to the lobby for a paper." I pulled on a pair of cheap running shoes and Velcroed them snugly. "Don't wait up," I said, going to the door and palming my room key. "And don't use my toothbrush while I'm gone."

Locking the door behind me, I moved down the hallway, thinking furiously. First, I needed a taxi: the Chevy van was too hot to be driving about in broad daylight-even if it wasn't exactly daylight, now.

Which was why I was going out, now. Which was why I needed an umbrella, first.

And then a taxi.

The motel lobby was devoid of pay or courtesy phones. I turned to the desk clerk, a plump, middle-aged woman with a greying beehive hairdo. She was lowering the receiver back into the cradle of the multiline at the back of the counter. "I was going to call a cab for you," she said, "but there's already one waiting outside."

Sure enough, a taxi crouched just beyond the gla.s.s door wrapped in gauzy curtains of rain. I looked around the lobby but no one else was in sight. I wondered how soon the real fare would show up and if they'd be inclined to share. Unless things had substantially changed since my departure, there was only one taxicab servicing Pittsburg and Frontenac combined.

I looked back at the desk clerk. I still need an umbrella, I thought.

"Here," she said, reaching under the counter, "you'll be needing an umbrella."

Interesting: unconscious domination coupled with telepathy. That thought was chased from my mind as I took the umbrella and moved toward the door. There was something else, now-something like an invisible force, an airy riptide that pulled me toward the hunched vehicle. As if the car were a domelit magnet and I was an iron filing with legs.Get in.

The thought reverberated in my mind, but it didn't originate there.

Get in. Take a ride.

Why the h.e.l.l not?

I opened the umbrella and pushed out into the rain. As I opened the back door of the cab a sodden brown ma.s.s of fur splashed past my feet and catapulted into the backseat. Twin tails attempted to wring each other dry.

"Hey," said the cabbie as I slid in next to the cat, "no animals without a carrier!"

"Don't mind the cat," I said, trying to reclose the umbrella and the pa.s.senger door simultaneously.

"I don't mind the cat," the driver said.

"She won't be any trouble." I hoped.

"Won't be any trouble," the driver said.

The cat seemed oblivious to the exchange, giving all her attention over to grooming her waterlogged fur.

"Serves you right," I said. "You should've stayed in the room."

"I should've stayed in the room," the driver said. The cab lurched forward and made a U-turn into the heart of the storm.

Chapter Twenty-One.

Atkinson Road ran a portion of the boundary line that separated northernmost Pittsburg from southernmost Frontenac. There, girdled by three vacant lots, a pond, and a building that once served as the old student nurses' dormitory, stood the vacant sh.e.l.l of the original Mount h.o.r.eb Hospital. It was abandoned and bricked up when the "new" hospital had opened on the south side of town some decades past.

Although I gave no destination, offered no directions, the cab pulled over onto the muddy, rutted path that parted the weeds between us and the ancient, three-story brick edifice. Vacant-eyed, he half-turned in his seat. "Jeez, mister," he asked through slack lips, "you sure you wanna go here?"

I looked up at the weathered brick walls. Unlike the old Tremont Hotel, these windows had long outlived their plywood barriers and had finally been mortared shut. And now the mortar was crumbling with age. I thought about the labyrinth of rooms and corridors and operating theaters inside that had been evacuated before I was even born.

And so Childe Roland to the dark tower came. . . .

A moment later we were sheltering under my borrowed umbrella as the taxi plowed twin trails of mud in its wake. "I still say you should've stayed in the room," I said as the cat looked up at me and merrowed piteously. "No, I'm not going to carry you. You chose to come along on your own, so you canjust hoof it, the same as me."

Come. . . .

The cat stiffened, its tails forming twin exclamation points.

"So, you felt it, too," I murmured.

Come inside. Come out of the rain. . . .

The cat yowled and took off after the cab like . . . well . . . a cat out of h.e.l.l.

"Wuss," I said as it streaked off, a brown blur melting into the grey mists behind me.

Come. . . .

"Okay, okay; keep your cape on." I turned back toward the old hospital complex and began picking my way through a minefield of mud puddles.

A mental voice has no tone or timbre in the way that speech does when produced from human vocal chords. Even so, there was no mistaking the signature of this summoning: Elizabeth Bachman was putting out the welcome mat.

I could turn back even now. At least that's what I was telling myself. The possibility remained that any willpower I felt was an illusion itself.

But I moved toward the daynest. The plan was not complete: even now it might go one of three ways. Within the hour the final course would be set and the plan locked in. The important thing was to not die prematurely: I had to rescue what remained of my wife and daughter, first.

And then all bets were off.

Climb . . . came the thought as I reached the side of the building.

Of course. With the windows and doors mortared shut. . . . I laid the umbrella on the ground. Then I thrust my fingertips into the slotted s.p.a.ces between the bricks over my head. Red chips and grey powder sifted down as I pulled myself up. Bricks fractured and mortar crumbled as each new handhold pitted transformed flesh against ancient masonry. I scaled the three stories effortlessly, like a human fly. Or bat.

Or something. . . .

Once on the roof the way in was obvious: an access hatch jutted from the flat, tarpapered surface and had been capped with a metal trapdoor. Superhuman strength had wrenched the cover free of its latching mechanism and curled it backward like so much tin foil. No attempt had been made to bend the metal back into a semblance of its original shape: a reminder that these people were careless and sloppy.

But still dangerous.

Come down . . . come inside. . . .

I started across the roof but never made it to the trapdoor. The tar paper sagged beneath my feet and tore like soggy cardboard. I fell ten feet, pa.s.sing through the remains of a secondary ceiling and landing on a sodden ma.s.s of debris on the floor of the third story. The room was empty save for the rusted, skeletal remains of an old metal bed frame. I stood up and allowed the dribbling waterfall that followed me down from the roof to wash the grit and detritus from my already rain-drenched clothing.

"Christopher. . . ."

I scrambled down off of the mound of trash and stumbled to the door.

"Christopher. . . ." No mindspeech, now, but an actual voice drifting up from the depths below.

My night vision was compensating for the narrow cone of uncertain light filtering down from the hole in the ceiling and roof. But, as I moved out into the hall and approached the stairway, the visual greyscale faded to near-black. For the moment, there was only my own, cooler-than-human body heat to provide illumination in the infrared spectrum. The only other source of light was an occasional crack or c.h.i.n.k in the mortar of the outer walls and rain-swollen clouds had already turned day into the equivalent of night.

"Fie, foh, fum," I whispered, and groped my way down the stairs. My feet shuffled through patches of loose debris, fallen plaster, and ceiling tiles. And what felt like the desiccated remains of smallanimals-perhaps birds, perhaps rats. . . .

As I reached the first floor I could see a faint gleam of light another level below. I completed the turn with my hand firmly coupled to the bannister railing and stepped down into the depths. Now I was descending into the bas.e.m.e.nt, below the surface of the earth. Though a vague promise of illumination flickered somewhere below, I felt the darkness pressing in more forcefully now.

I reached the bottom of the stairs and stumbled as my foot sought another step down where no more steps remained. To my left the darkness was cleft by a shimmering thread of gold, a thread which trembled, then exploded with a metallic groan into supernova brilliance. There was no time to shield my eyes: I was dazzled into temporary blindness.

My hands remained outstretched before me as if to ward off the light and the vague shapes that moved within its painful depths. Unseen fingers curled around mine. I was pulled toward the light.

I did not resist: I could not fight what I could not see, and more importantly, I had come to cut a deal.

To arrange a betrayal.

And when the blinding glare had finally diminished, shattered, and fled back to the hundreds of candlewicks that crowned the waxen obelisks scattered about the old boiler room, I looked into the scarred face of Elizabeth Bachman and made my mouth smile.

A wooden ruler, broken in two, and held so that both pieces intersected to suggest a Christian symbol-the triumph of light over darkness.

The potency of belief.

Cool, dry wood, fleetingly touched to the skin and yet the ruin of her face could not have been equaled by burning firebrands in that same amount of time.

The wound began at the left corner of her mouth and angled just beyond the edge of her eye, where it made inroads into the hair at her temple. Bisecting this was another trenched burn that continued on the perpendicular and on down toward her neck. And it wasn't the wealed scar tissue in shiny hues of white, pink, purple, or grey. It was black. Charred flesh that refused even the semblance of a healing. There was no half-hearted, plastic compromise of cicatrix here nor even the more severe keloid deformity that one would expect as the aftermath of a severe burn. Just a hideous crucifix of blackened flesh scooped from the side of her face as if seared by intense heat only moments before.

And, like the wound, itself, the pain hadn't diminished with the pa.s.sage of time. She teetered on the brink of madness with the unrelieved agony of it.

Undead flesh did not heal like living tissue; it required infusions of living blood to regenerate and knit.

Yet the blood she had taken since I had branded her had failed to erase the mark or lessen her pain.

The potency of belief. . . .

Elizabeth Bachman now believed she could only be healed by the blood of the one who had wounded her. By the blood of one who was neither living nor dead. Nor undead. By the same blood that transcended such distinctions.

Blood, she believed, that must be offered willingly.

Not that she wouldn't try to take it by force, I believed, if it was denied her.

"So I have a bargaining chip," I said, as my own superhuman hearing picked up the sound of feet shuffling down the stairs behind us. Dead feet.

"A bargain?" Her mouth twisted and spasmed. "You did this to me and you speak of bargains! You owe me!" she screeched.

A jittery madness seemed to fog the air and I felt my composure slip a couple of notches. "Owe you?" I inquired softly. "I think not."The Doman of Seattle may owe you: repayment for your betrayal. What do I owe you? Repayment for violating my family's graves? For working unnatural sorceries with their remains? Tormenting me with false hope?" My own voice was growing shrill. "Tell me what I owe you for that. For stalking and hunting me, driving me from my home, and preferring me dead if I did not ally myself to New York?"

"I was your friend!" she protested, trembling. "If I served the Doman of New York instead of Pagelovitch, that was no concern of yours. You, yourself, said that you owed him no allegiance. And during that time I was looking out for your best interests-"

"I look out for my best interests!" I snarled. "My mistake was ever in letting anyone decide anything for me. Well, no longer! I have learned to put my faith in no allegiance and you, among my many teachers, have tutored me best!

"But-" I hauled myself back from the edge of high melodrama "-I will bargain with you so that we both might have what we want," I concluded in a more reasonable voice.

She stared at me, her body quivering like the plucked string of a musical instrument.

"Your terms?" she whispered.

"First, call off your lackeys. I heard them on the stairs a few moments ago and I know that they have just come through the door behind me. If they take another step toward me, I shall leave this place and your bargain is flown."

Her eyes narrowed. "I summoned you here. I could summon you again."

I picked up a fat candle and hurled it at her. "I heard your call, and I came of my own free will because I wish to make you an offer. Of my own free will. That's the power in my blood. But if you continue to annoy me, I will be done with you and take my business to others who will treat me with respect."

She hesitated.

Call them off! my mind thundered.

She was visibly shaken. She gestured and I felt those behind me back out into the corridor. "You have changed."

"You don't know how much."