The Time of the Dark

“Oh, yes.” Sword in hand, Ingold moved cat-footedly to the door. “The Dark are not material, as we understand material. They are only incompletely visible, and not always of the same – composition. I have seen them go from the size of your two hands to larger than this house in a matter of seconds.”

Rudy wiped sweating palms on his jeans, sickened with horror and totally disoriented. “But if – if they’re not material,” he stammered, “what can we do? How can we fight?”

“There are ways.” Firelight played redly over Ingold’s patched mantle as he stood, one hand resting on the doorknob, the other holding ready the gleaming witchfire of the blade, his head bowed, listening for some sound. After a moment he spoke again, his voice barely a whisper. “Gil,” he said, “I want you to take Tir and get between the bed and the wall. Rudy, how much of a fire do we have left?”

“Not much. That wood was dry as grass. It’s going quick.”

Ingold stepped back from the door, though he never took his attention from it. The little room was filled with smoke, the flaring fire already sinking, feebly holding at bay the encroaching ring of shadows. Without looking back, he held out his hand. “Give me the kerosene, Rudy.”

Wordlessly, Rudy obeyed.

Moving swiftly now, Ingold sheathed his sword in a single fluid gesture, took the can, and set to work, unscrewing the filler-cap and throwing a great swatch of the clear liquid over the dry wood of the door. It glittered in the yellow firelight, its throat-catching smell mixing with the gritty foulness of the smoke, nearly choking Gil, who stood with her back pressed to the icy concrete of the wall, the muffled baby motionless in her arms. The fire’s light had gone from yellow to murky orange, the brown shadows of the wizard’s quick, sure movements wavering, vast and distorted, over the imprisoning walls. Ingold came back toward her and saturated the mattress with the last of the kerosene, its stink nearly suffocating her at close range. Then he set the empty can down softly, turned and drew his sword again, all in one smooth move; all told, he had had his sword sheathed for less than forty seconds.

He returned to the center of the room, a few feet in front of the dying fire, which had fallen in on itself to a fading heap of ash and crawling embers. As the darkness grew around him, the pallid light that seemed to burn up off the blade grew brighter, bright enough to highlight his scarred face. He said softly, “Don’t be afraid.” Whether it was a spell he cast, or merely the strength of his personality alone, Gil did not know, but she felt her apprehension lessen, her fear give place to a queer, cold numbness. Rudy moved out of his frozen immobility, took the last stick of unburned kindling, and lit it from the remains of the blaze.

Darkness seemed to fill the room and, heavier than the darkness, a silence that breathed. In that silence Gil heard the faint blundering sounds in the hall, a kind of chitinous scratching, as if dark fumbled eyelessly through dark. Against her own heart, she could feel the baby’s heart hammering with small violence, and a chill wind began to seep through the cracks in the door, touching her sweating face with feathers of cold. She could smell it, the harsh, acid blood-smell of the Dark.

Ingold’s rusty voice came very calmly out of the shadows. “Rudy,” he said, “take that torch and stand next to the door. Don’t be afraid, but when the creature comes in, I want you to close the door behind it and light the kerosene. Will you do that?”

Empty, cold, keyed up long past the point of feeling anything, Rudy whispered, “Yeah, sure.” He sidled cautiously past the wizard, the flaming wood flickering in his hand. As he took his post by the door, he could feel the presence of the thing, a nightmare aura of fear. He felt it bump the door, softly, a testing tap, far above his own eye level, and his flesh crawled at the touch. The thing would pass him – if it did pass him and didn’t turn on the nearest person to it as it came through the door – within touching distance. But on the other hand, the thought crossed his mind that if it did pass him, there was nothing to prevent him from slipping out that open door and making a run for the car.

If the car would start. If, having polished off Ingold and Gil, the Dark didn’t come after him anyway. No! The need was to finish it now – the Dark One, the Enemy, the thing from across the Void, the obscene intruder into the warm, soft world of the California night …

Groping for the shattered ends of his world-view, Rudy could only stand in darkness beside the door, torch in hand, and wait.

The last glow of the embers was fading, the only light in the room now Rudy’s smoldering torch and the gleaming challenge of the blade that Ingold held upright before him, his eyes glittering in the reflected witchlight like the eyes of an old wolf. There was a sibilant rustle of robes as he stirred, bracing himself, a whispering sigh as the dying ashes collapsed and scattered. The wind that ruffled so coldly through the cracks in the door seemed to drop and fail.

In the same instant that the door exploded inward, Ingold was striding forward, blade flashing down in an arc of fire to meet the bursting tidal wave of darkness. Rudy got a hideous glimpse of the fanning canopy of shadow and the endless, engulfing mouth, fringed in sloppy tentacles whose writhings splattered the floor with smoking slime. As if released from a spell, Tir began to scream, the high, thin, terrified sound going through Rudy’s brain like a needle. The sword flashed, scattering fire; the creature drew back, unbelievably agile for that soft floating bulk, the slack of its serpentlike tail brushing Rudy’s shoulders as it uncoiled in a whip of darkness. The thing filled the room like a cloud, its darkness covering them, seeming to swell and pulse as if its whole bloated, obscene body were a single slimy organ. The whip-tail slashed out, cutting at Ingold’s throat, and the wizard ducked and shifted inward for position with the split-second reflexes of a far younger man. In his dark robes, he was barely to be seen in the darkness; mesmerized, Rudy watched, hypnotized by the burning arc of the wizard’s blade and the thing that snatched at him like a giant hand of shadow.

Gil was screaming, “The fire! The fire!” The sound was meaningless to his ears; it was the heat of his torchlight burning down almost to his hands that made him remember. As if awakened from a dream, he started, kicked the door shut, and hit the greasy smear of the kerosene with the last burning stump. The door exploded into fire, scorching Rudy as he leaped back.

The Dark One, thrown into crimson visibility, writhed and twisted as if in pain, changing size again and shooting up toward the ceiling. But streaks of fire were already rushing up the walls to the tinder-dry rafters. Sparks stung Rudy’s exposed hands and face as he ducked across the open space of the floor and threw himself over the bed to crash against the wall at Gil’s side. More sparks rained, sizzling, on the wet, twisting shadow of the Dark.

The room was a furnace, blinding and smothering. Bleeding light silhouetted the creature, which fled this way and that, seeking a way out. Trapped by the fire, it turned like a cat and fell on Ingold, the whiplike tail elongating into spiny wire, slashing at his hands, his eyes, its claws catching at his body. The blade carved smoking slivers from the soft tissue, but the thing loomed too big, moved too swiftly in the cramped space, for Ingold to get in for a killing blow. Flattened against the wall, suffocating in the heat, and burned by the rain of falling sparks, Gil and Rudy both could see that Ingold was being pushed steadily back toward the corner where they crouched behind the filthy bed, hampered fatally by his need to remain at all costs between the creature and the Prince. He fell back, a step at a time, until Gil could have stretched her arms across the bed and touched his shoulder. Now, along with the sparks, they were burned by the flying droplets of acid that scattered like sweat from the creature’s twisting body.

Then the Dark One feinted with claws and tail, eluding the slash of the blade by fractions of an inch and throwing itself past the wizard with a rush. In the same split second Ingold flung himself over the mattress to the wall, between Gil and Rudy. As he did so, whether by accident or by design, the kerosene-saturated cotton went up in a wall of fire that singed the hem of his cloak and engulfed the Dark One in a roaring wave of scarlet heat. For one second Gil was conscious only of the wild, terrified screaming of the child in her arms, of the howling inferno only feet from her body, and of the heat of the holocaust that swallowed her. Then the wall of fire bulged inward, and the black shape appeared, distorted and buckling, blazing as it hurled itself, burning and dying, upon them all. Gil screamed as hot wind and darkness covered her.

Then all things vanished in a sudden, blinding firefall of light and color and cold.

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