The Runes of the Earth

Linden saw no other cars. Either the sheriff had not received her message in time, or he had elected to ignore it.

Still she did not hesitate or hurry.

Leaving her headlights on, she turned off her car, grabbed the keys, and surged out into the wind.

Behind his blankness, Jeremiah would be terrified. She could not know what he remembered of his terrible past; but on some level, he might recognise what was being done to him now. Or he might believe that he had been returned to that cruel time when his mother had given him into the Despiser’s power.

Cries which he would not be able to utter for himself filled Linden’s heart as she pushed through the blast to the back of her car. Again she had trouble handling the keys: they dug at her gouged palm as she fumbled to open the trunk. Then she jammed the right key into place.

From the trunk she took her medical bag and a heavy flashlight, and turned toward the house.

A sizzling flash snatched the house into light, rendered it stark and bleached against the black night. Without warning, gusts caught in the trunk of Roger’s sedan. The lid slammed shut like the jaws of a trap.

She wanted to clutch for courage at Covenant’s ring hanging against her sternum, but she needed both hands. Grimly she thumbed the switch of the flashlight. Like her car’s headlights, its beam seemed to fall ineffective to the ground. It barely reached the house; cast no illumination at the front door.

Wind snapped her sleeves against her arms. Holding the flashlight before her like a weapon, she advanced on the dark farmhouse.

He is threatening my son.

Her light traced the outlines of the door. It had no windows, offered her no way to see past it. Its panels had held their paint better than the wall, and that white made the door look somehow newer than the rest of the house, fresher: a portal pulled forward in time by recent use.

Shifting the flashlight in her grasp, she used two fingers and the tip of her thumb to test the doorknob.

It turned easily; and at once the wind ripped it away, kicked the door open inward. It hit the limit of its hinges hard enough to shake the frame.

Her flashlight could not penetrate the darkness. Wind and dust lashed more tears from her eyes. She had to rub the moisture away with her wrist before she could step over the threshold, force the beam of her light into the house.

The open door let her into the living room.

If she had not remembered the room so clearly, she might not have recognised it. Seen in the brief gleams and streaks cast by her flashlight, it seemed ruined, uninhabitable: the scene of an earthquake or some other catastrophe. Amid funnels of wind-driven dust lay chunks of plaster from the ceiling and broken boards from the walls. The couch against one wall had been gutted, eaten alive by rats and roaches. Its stuffing blew like snow among the dust devils. Shards from shattered windows lay on the armchairs, the coffee table, the rank carpet. Sections of the walls looked like they had been blown apart by shotguns.

Roger Covenant had made no attempt to pretend that he and his mother would actually live here. If anyone-Megan Roman, Sheriff Lytton, Linden herself-had had the foresight to visit his intended “home,” they would have seen the truth beyond any possible contradiction.

At first, Linden could find no sign that Roger and his victims had been here. Any marks which they might have left in the dust had been blown to confusion. But then she noticed darker patches among the room’s debris. She had taken them for clotted dust and dirt. Now, however, she saw that they clung to the floor as if the wind had no power over them. Some of them caught a moist gleam from her flashlight.

Crouching to examine them, she found without surprise that they were blood: viscid and thickening, but still wet, recently shed.

“God damn you,” she muttered at Roger through her teeth because she already knew what he had done; knew what he was doing. “You will not get away with this.”

Linden had sworn that he would claim Joan over her dead body; but she had not kept that oath. She had talked herself out of taking her fears seriously enough. Now she knew better. She would not make that mistake again.

In God’s name, that bland bastard had not even had the decency to slaughter an animal instead-

Knowing the truth, and dreading it deep in her guts, she tightened her grip on her bag and went forward, into the short hallway which connected the living room and the kitchen.

The kitchen was as bad as the living room. Half the windows had been blown out. Splintered fluorescent bulbs intensified the litter of glass, plaster, and broken cabinets on the floor. And knives and utensils: whoever had cleaned out the house after Covenant’s death-Megan Roman? – must have neglected the kitchen. Open drawers had spilled their contents like scree.

Here, too, Linden found smears and puddles of blood.

She should have been terrified for Jeremiah, but she was not. Her fears were certain: Roger’s intentions for her son would not end so soon.

He had not yet had time to offer Jeremiah to the Despiser.

From the kitchen another short passage led to three doors, a bedroom, the bathroom, and another bedroom. Her flashlight showed the way in splashes of illumination. Dark drips and smears marked the floor as if Roger had blazed a trail for Linden to follow to the end of the hall.

She did not have far to go to reach the last room, where Covenant had cared for Joan. Six forthright strides: ten hesitating steps. The door stood open ahead of her, inviting her deeper into the night. Even though she knew what she expected to find, her dread mounted.

She clung to the handle of her bag. Its weight comforted her. She had neglected it ten years ago, when she had followed Covenant into the woods after Joan. It might have helped her then, counteracting her terror. Perhaps it would aid her now.

Stabbing her light ahead of her, Linden approached the open door; stepped past the edge of the frame.

With a splintering crash like rent heartwood, lightning struck somewhere nearby: so near that she seemed to feel the impact in her stomach. For an instant, fierce white filled the hall as though it shone straight through the walls into her eyes; as though in that moment the hallway and Linden herself had been ripped into another reality by the accumulated ferocity of the blast. Every hair on her body seemed to stand on end as darkness recoiled over her, stifling her flashlight, leaving her blind. The ripe reek of ozone shouted in her nostrils.

She had time to think, God, that was close-

Then her struggling flashlight brought the room beyond the door back into being.

She gazed inward at more ruin, the wreckage of a dwelling that had been left without love or care for ten years: fallen plaster and sprung floorboards, broken window glass, drifted refuse and dust. Abandoned so, the bedroom looked toxic, fatal, as if during his years here Thomas Covenant’s illness had seeped into the walls.

Like the cushions of the living room couch, the mattress on the single bed had been torn apart by time and vermin. Briefly Linden seemed to see the bed as it had lain since Joan’s abduction and Covenant’s death; forlorn and unused. But then her flashlight asserted its tangible vision; and lightning glared from the windows; and she saw the truth.

On the bed lay Sara Clint, desolate in her own blood.

Beside her head, a large kitchen knife had been driven into the remains of the pillow. Perhaps Roger had found it here, and had used it because it had belonged to his father. It stood like a marker at Sara’s head. A warning-

Involuntarily Linden dropped her bag. It could not help her now. No medical power would undo Roger’s cruelty.

Blood dried on the edges of the cuts which had been made in Sara’s uniform, soaked from the wounds in her flesh. As Linden stepped into the room, she saw more and more places where the white fabric had been sliced through; and at first she feared that Sara had been cut and cut and cut until she had simply bled to death: slowly, helplessly; in terror. Sara’s wrists and ankles had been secured to the bed frame with what appeared to be duct tape. She could not have avoided Roger’s knife to save her soul. Then, however, Linden saw the raw wound that grinned under Sara’s chin across her carotid arteries. Roger had pulled his blade through her life there, ending it quickly.

Apparently he had wanted more blood than he could gather from less fatal cuts.