I shooed her away. “Go. Make his nest your own. Don’t forget the dishes.”
When she was gone, I looked at the Stephen King novel. ‘Salem’s Lot. I didn’t read Stephen King because I was, frankly, a big fat chicken when it came to being scared, but Viv swore he was one of the great American masters. This one was an older book, very battered, with a scary-looking bald man poised to attack the reader. I picked it up and jammed it onto one of the shelves, maybe even in the place she’d taken it from, given that there was a gap the right size. These were not books that would ever be auguries, because they were outside the oracle’s space, but I couldn’t help wondering if they contributed to the oracle’s body regardless. There was so much about it I didn’t know.
I glanced at the rest of the books on the shelf. A title caught my eye: Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. That sounded like it could be about Abernathy’s. I pulled it off the shelf and flipped it open, intrigued by the cover flap copy. My watch said 5:42. I could read this while I waited for six o’clock to roll around, maybe even take it home with me.
I settled behind the counter and started reading. It was fascinating, and the first bit did remind me a little of my interview with Mr. Briggs, though Abernathy’s concealed a different secret, naturally. It would be funny if Abernathy’s only loaned out its auguries rather than selling them. We’d be so busy tracking down returns we’d never be bored.
Reading the book also made me wonder, not for the first time, how things would have been different if Mr. Briggs hadn’t been murdered. He couldn’t have kept the secret of the magical world long, and I would have had a much different reaction if I’d come to it slowly instead of in the aftermath of finding my boss’s dead body.
I glanced at my watch. 6:14. Amazing that reading had distracted me to such a degree. I used the cover flap to mark my place and stretched. Outside, evening shoppers passed by, chatting or holding hands or pointing at things I couldn’t see. It was a peaceful scene that relaxed me further.
A couple strolled past the door, which turned them into diffuse smears, and came to a stop beneath the ABERNATHY’S sign painted on the plate glass window. Both of them were pointing at something down the street. Then they took a few tentative steps backward, and I heard their muffled voices raised in argument.
No—it was fear.
I stepped forward to look in the direction they were pointing just as they turned and ran, screaming. I couldn’t see anything that might scare someone, but then some people across the street turned and did the same thing, and suddenly the street was full of terrified people, caroming off the few cars noodling down the narrow road and shouting warnings I could barely hear.
I hurried to the door, but paused with my hand on the knob. A terrible, uneasy feeling crept over me. I returned to the window and pressed my face against the glass, peering into the distance up my side of the street. The street looked unreal, like a painted backdrop for a play, with the light all wrong for early evening and the air thick with impossible fog. Dark figures moved within the fog, too angular to be human. I involuntarily clapped my hand over my mouth to stifle a shriek as the first invaders emerged.
27
They slipped through slits in reality, two-dimensional paper cutouts that expanded into fully-formed, horrible shapes made more horrible by the obscuring fog. It had to be real, I couldn’t have seen it if it were an illusion, but it looked ridiculously fake, a bad special effect in a horror film with no budget. The invaders strolled or loped or flew along the street as if they had all the time in the world—but that was a different kind of illusion, one born of my fear, because even as they moved slowly, they caught up to the fleeing people, and then the screams turned agonized.
I stood frozen at the window, watching people die. Security. Dave had said Abernathy’s had a security detail. So where were they? No fatigue-clad men and women challenged the nightmarish figures. Which meant the invaders had taken them out first. Aside from the wards, Abernathy’s was defenseless.
But if the security force was dead, that meant no one was around to report the attack except me. I had to tell someone. The Wardens needed to know Portland was under attack. The invaders couldn’t touch me, not with the store as well warded as it was, but the Wardens could save everyone else. But I couldn’t stop watching the carnage, was unable to even take the few steps to the counter where my phone lay.
The first people collapsed, drained completely, then others joined them. Soon the street looked like a scene out of a disaster movie, bodies lying everywhere, blood red or moss green or chitinous black invaders leaping on new victims. A screaming woman fled past the store and was pounced on right in front of me, and I screamed along with her, my heart trying to beat its way out of my body. The invader, its blue body glistening like a scarab, its eight legs gripping its victim and its terrible jaws clamped on her throat, ignored me. I backed away, fumbled for my phone, and tried to find Lucia’s number without taking my eyes off the invader.
The call went straight to voice mail. “Lucia, invaders are attacking Portland—maybe you know—they are outside Abernathy’s right now and I don’t know where the security is—I need help!” I gasped in one long breath. I ended the call. The invader had finished draining the woman and was gone. I went back to the window and gazed helplessly at the carnage. Cars idled in the street, their drivers having abandoned them, and invaders crawled or hopped over them, scoring the paint with their claws.
In the middle of the road, between two cars, a vertical black line cut through reality as if it were the stage backdrop I’d imagined it as. The line glowed bright blue all down its center, like light leaking through it from the other side of the backdrop. And a thing slipped through it, flattened like paper. Insert Tab A into Slot B, I thought madly. Whatever the thing was, it fit the line perfectly.
Then it shook itself, and became three-dimensional. Numb horror struck me. I’d seen that thing before. Its clawed, multi-jointed legs scraped the asphalt as it walked with deliberation toward me. A dozen beady eyes like drops of fresh blood focused on me, and the tentacles in the place where its mouth should be undulated slowly, as if it were tasting the air with fat, sucker-coated tongues. One eye was a ruined mess, and I remembered jamming a broken baton into that eye and felt sick.
I took an involuntary step backward and ran into the counter. That startled me out of my horrified, frozen state. I raised my phone, not sure what else I could do. Knowing the wards were there was no comfort to my primal animal brain, which was screaming at me to flee.
It had no mouth, but its tentacles curled in what was nearly a smile. “Custodian,” it said in a voice that cranked my instinctual panic to eleven. “This is the end.”
Its words were muted by the glass, but it was perfectly intelligible. “You can’t get in here,” I said, proud of how my voice didn’t shake even though the rest of me wanted to. “The wards are too powerful.”
The invader cocked its pointed black head to one side. It was such a human gesture I wanted to run—but I had nowhere to run to. “Suppose I told you we will go on killing humans until you let us in,” it said.
“In the first place, I wouldn’t believe you, and in the second place, I can’t take that offer.”