Patrick drew his firearm with one hand, and pulled the makeshift amulet with its spiral mark out of his pocket with the other.
“Keep your hands where I can see them,” Patrick said, aiming the barrel of his pistol at the guy’s chest while holding the amulet out at arm’s length.
“There’s no need for that,” the guy said, taking a step closer, and the blots grew larger. The sun had just dipped below the skyscrapers of City Center to the west, bathing the street in deep shadows. “I just want to talk.”
Patrick could hear the sound of the swing doors at the rear of the truck being opened, and the scuff of approaching footsteps.
“Stay back.” Patrick gestured with the barrel of the pistol, and held the amulet up in the guy’s face. Then he chanced a glance behind him.
The driver was walking quickly toward him, followed by three other men and a woman.
“You can shoot this one if you want,” the guy said, reaching out and wrapping his hand around the barrel of Patrick’s gun. “But put away that damned squiggle. That’s just being rude.”
The driver and the four others were closing in behind him, blots blooming on their exposed skin.
“Your friends aren’t here, and you won’t have time to make a circle around yourself with that salt in your pocket this time, will you?” The guy stepped closer still, lifting Patrick’s pistol and pressing the barrel to his own forehead. “So if you need to shoot first, go for it, and then the rest of my people will bring you to me so we can talk.”
Dark shadows swirled in the guy’s eyes, as the blots on his face grew larger.
Strong arms wrapped themselves around him from behind, and as Patrick jerked reflexively the gun in his hand went off.
The skin around the entry wound smoldered as the back of the guy’s skull exploded outwards, raining gore onto the sidewalk and lawn.
“Got that out of your system, did you?” the dead man said, staring at Patrick through now lifeless eyes, his voice like an echo from the bottom of a deep, deep well. He put his sunglasses back on, as a viscous trail of blood oozed down from the hole in his forehead.
“I’m glad,” the driver said, wrenching the pistol from Patrick’s hand. “Now we can talk.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Izzie sat in the passenger’s seat of the Volkswagen Beetle as Joyce drove through the concrete canyons of the Financial District. She held the journal that the old man had given her in her lap, her gaze resting idly on the battered and scorched cover.
“Sorry I couldn’t talk Hasan into letting us stay past visiting hours,” Joyce said as they waited at an intersection for the light to change. “Maybe if we’d been there in an official capacity, but . . .”
She trailed off, and glanced over in Izzie’s direction.
“So what’s in there?” Joyce asked, indicating the journal with a curt nod. “Have you taken a look yet?”
Izzie shook her head, and ran her fingertips along the cover’s edge. She was still thinking about what G. W. Jett had said about needing to see the shadows in order to face them.
“Well, what are you waiting for? With this traffic, we won’t be back at Patrick’s place for another twenty or thirty minutes. Crack that thing open and read some of it.”
Izzie looked up from the journal and glanced in Joyce’s direction. “Out loud?”
“Sure, why not?” Joyce shrugged. “I’m pretty curious to know what’s in there, myself.”
Izzie nodded absently, and flipped open the front cover of the journal. The interior pages were somewhat yellowed with age and filled with handwritten lines, the neatly formed block letters faded to an almost sepia-toned brown.
“The first entry is dated October of 1942,” Izzie said. She scanned a few lines. “This Alistair Freeman was a pulp novelist, right?”
“Yeah?” Joyce said as she shifted the car into gear. “So?”
“Well, this is pretty flowery stuff. Here, listen to this. ‘I dreamt of that day in the Yucatan again last night. . .”’
Saturday, October 31, 1942.
I dreamt of that day in the Yucatan again last night. Trees turned the color of bone by drought, skies black with the smoke and ash of swidden burning for cultivation, the forest heavy with the smell of death. Cager was with me, still living, but Jules Bonaventure and his father had already fled, though in waking reality they had still been there when the creatures had claimed Cager’s life.
As the camazotz came out of the bone forest toward us, their bat-wings stirring vortices in the smoke, I turned to tell my friend not to worry, and that the daykeepers would come to save us with their silvered blades at any moment. But it was no longer Cager beside me, but my sister Mindel, and in the strange logic of dreams we weren’t in Mexico of ’25 anymore, but on a street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side more than a dozen years before. And I realized that the smoke and ash were no longer from forest cover being burned for planting, but from the flames of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that had ended her young life. “Don Javier will never get here from Mexico in time,” I told my sister, as though it made perfect sense, but she just smiled and said, “Don’t worry, Alter. This is the road to Xibalba.” Then the demons had arrived, but instead of claws, they attacked us with the twine-cutting hook-rings of a newsvendor, and we were powerless to stop them.
Charlotte is still out of town visiting her mother, and won’t be back until tomorrow. When I awoke alone in the darkened room this morning, it took me a moment to recall when and where I was. In no mood to return to unsettling dreams, I rose early and began my day.
I ate alone, coffee and toast, and skimmed the morning papers. News of the Sarah Pennington murder trial again crowded war-reports from the front page
