Joe considered, mentally crossed his fingers, and said a prayer. He’d noticed in the past few years that he was getting into the habit of doing that. He decided. “A man named Talisman told me.”
“You know ‘im, huh?” The old man gave a wise, slow nod, as if impressed; and in the next moment burly policemen were milling around both of them, talking about the roads and the weather.
As they were driving along the highway on the north bank of the Sauk, some miles west of Blackhawk, the old man began urging them to stop. Presently the whole caravan had pulled over. The sun was setting and they’d all just put their headlights on. They were right at some wide place in the road called Frenchman’s Bend. The few houses and shacks were all dark and silent, looking totally uninhabited. The rain had stopped, for the time being anyway, and the swollen river looked ominous and dirty.
The old man got out of the car on the side toward the river, and then just stood for a moment peering across, as if he could really see something on the far side. Joe could see the dark, humped smudges of the wooded bluffs over there and an enormous full moon struggling to get airborne above some of those trees and between the clouds.
“That’s the place,” the old man said. “Right over there.” He sounded eager, but not in any particular hurry.
“Might be,” someone muttered. “It oughta be about there.”
Someone even raised the idea of trying to get a boat, but no one else had any enthusiasm for that idea.
Once they crossed the river again, at the next bridge thirty miles below Blackhawk, they started having some more trouble with roads. With a little luck and daring they got through, but it was full night by the time the caravan reached what had to be the castle. The main building was invisible, but headlight beams fell on a massive stone wall, and after they had driven a little way along the road that followed the wall they came to where a private drive went in through an old chained gate.
The full moon was now well above the trees in the east; it evoked bizarre shapes and shadows among the trees inside the grounds.
“We’re not going to bother the owners tonight, correct?”
“It’s not that late, we could give them a try.”
Men got out of their cars, looking for a doorbell or something similar. They milled around, some of them with pocket flashlights in hand.
“Where’s Falcon?”
“Where’s Falcon?”
“He was right here, sonovabitch. Sonovabitch, come on, guys, where is he?”
“He was right—”
But he wasn’t anymore.
When the screams started from the direction of the house it gave them an even better reason for breaking in.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Hildy Littlewood was running for her life, fleeing from her husband, from the man with whom she’d once sworn love, undying love. On flying feet she sped through darkened stone passageways, past midnight vaults. The lights in the castle were few, and seemed to be going out one by one. Once she stopped running in a place where she was sure there was a light switch, and ran her hands over the wall for what seemed like hours, whimpering all the while, until she found it. She flicked the switch up and down a score of times but nothing happened. Somehow the electricity must have been turned off. Maybe the lightning…
Now she could hear Saul’s pacing feet, not running after her, pursuing patiently instead. His voice, a room away, called: “Hil?”
She fled again, gasping with the effort, knowing this was all a dream, taking comfort in the fact that before much longer she would simply have to wake up. To find herself where, and doing what? Hildy came to a door that she knew had to lead to the outside. She threw herself at it, wrenching and pushing at the latch and knob. They would not turn or move, they would not even rattle. As if the whole door and wall had been carved in one piece from wood, or built in one piece of reinforced concrete. Hildy almost collapsed, sobbing.
Here came Saul’s patient feet again, pacing and pausing, once more a room away. Saul probably feared that if he came into the same room with her she’d had another hysterical screaming fit.
His voice was still patient too. “Hil, in a little while they’ll all be back, Vivian and all her helpers. Then there won’t be even this pretense of hiding, of getting away. So you’d better stop pretending now. You’d better be sensible. If Vivian finds out that you’ve been trying to cut and run…” There was a faint quaver in the unfinished sentence. Hildy knew Saul well enough to realize that he was now really, badly, frightened. It made her own terror all the worse.
Hildy ran once more. She couldn’t have stopped running if she’d tried. This time her sprint brought her to a door she’d never opened, as far as she could remember; she was in one of the parts of the castle that she had never had the time to explore fully. The door opened for her, and she went through in a burst of desperate hope. To stop almost at once. She was on a balcony, halfway up the wall of a circular room, very high, maybe thirty feet across. Below her on a stone table, dark puddles were half-congealed in the light of a ring of torches. The bodies of the Wallises lay there, naked, broken, stabbed with a hundred wounds and drained of blood. Blade still in hand, wearing the face of Grandfather Littlewood, the executioner looked up at Hildy and smiled. She screamed and screamed and screamed and then someone or something had seized her from behind.
The moment Talisman’s body vanished, Simon tried to take advantage of the confusion that suddenly appeared among his enemies. He turned, and leaped past Vivian, over the edge of the bluff, ready to die in a rolling, bouncing fall rather than stay where he was. No one, nothing stopped him, and it seemed for a long moment that he had got away. His leap turned into a fall into mist and darkness, and the fall went on and on, long past the moment when he should have struck some portion of the hillside. He felt no fear, only relief that he was going to be killed, and would not have to exist any longer as a pawn in Vivian’s service. And just then he landed with a thump, arms and legs collapsing under him so that his face was pressed into sodden leaves. Their wetness had a [lint], familiar smell, and Simon knew that he was once more somewhere near the castle on the Sauk.
He got to his hands and knees and looked around. Again it was near sunset on a cloudy, warm day; it seemed to him that it was always near sunset in this place. The sky was ominous, but only a little rain was falling at the moment. Only another leap away was the edge of the bluff, and below that would be the river, the way out to sanity. Simon sprang erect, ready to leap again.
A shadowy figure, almost invisible, moved at the corner of his eye. As if it had been waiting for him here, it seized his elbows from behind, and marched him back toward the castle. He did not try to turn his head to see what it looked like.
In the grotto, a ring of torches was flaring in the twilight, supported in ancient-looking wrought-iron stands that Simon had never seen before. The familiar statues looked on uncaring. There were other figures about besides the statues, creatures in and of the twilight, that Simon could not fully see. He made no effort to see them better. A hand unlocked the barred cave-door and Simon was thrust inside, and the door closed and chained tightly again after him.
Looking out across the grotto, he could now see no one, no presence, nothing moving but the wavering torchflames that ringed the waiting, empty stone. Drops of rain hissed sullenly in the torches. Was this to be yet another test? He could see without turning that the secret tunnel was no way out this time. It was forbidden, pre- empted, occupied by something, some process, so hideous—
There was the tiniest sound behind Simon, and he spun round. In a small natural alcove, on the opposite side of the cave from the mouth of the descending tunnel, the twins from the antique shop, still dressed as medieval servants, sat huddled together like small children in a corner.
Simon stared at them. They returned the stare, but he could not tell if it was with hope or fear.
“What are you doing here?” he asked at last.
They looked at each other. Neither wanted to answer him.
“You’ve got to tell me what you know about this. If there’s going to be anything we can do, we have to —”
“Sacrifices,” said the boy at last. It was a small child’s voice. “She’s going to kill us. You too. You’re in
