Nightworld

MONROE VILLAGE, LONG ISLAND

Alan rolled his wheelchair along the network of cement paths that encircled Toad Hall, heading from the back yard to the front. Off to his left, to the west, he saw smoke rising over the trees. Not near smoke, from the Shore Drive neighborhood, but further away. From downtown Monroe, most likely. He'd heard stories of roving gangs, looting, burning, raping. They hadn't shown up out here, but perhaps that was just a matter of time.

Strange how things had worked out. He'd always imagined that if the world ever descended into anarchic nihilism, the violence and chaos and mob madness would occur at night, screams and flames hurtling into a dark, unseeing sky. But given the current situation, human violence was confined to the daylight hours. The night was reserved for inhuman violence.

Alan turned from the smoke and inspected Toad Hall. The old mansion had absorbed another merciless pummeling last night but, like the valiant, indomitable champion that she was, she remained on her feet.

The injuries were accumulating at an alarming rate, however. Her flanks were cut and bruised and splintered, her scalp showed through where her shingles had been torn up. She could still open her eyes to the dwindling daylight, though. Most of them, at least.

Which was why Alan was out here now. A couple of the storm shutters had refused to roll up this morning. Even from the inside Alan could see that they were deeply dented, more deeply that he'd have thought possible from a bug attack, at least from any of the bugs he'd seen so far.

Which meant there might be something new under the moon, something bigger than its hellish predecessors and consequently more dangerous to the little fortress Toad Hall had become. He coasted to a halt and stared as he rounded to the front.

The dents in the steel shutters were deeper than he'd realized. And they'd been scored by something sharp and heavy, with the weight and density of a steel spike.

But it was the rhododendrons under the shuttered windows that bothered him more.

They'd been trampled flat.

Alan rolled across the grass for a closer look. These were old rhodos, maybe fifty years old, with heavy trunks and sturdy branches, kept thick with healthy deep green leaves through Ba's magical ministrations. Tough wood. Alan remembered that from the times he'd cut back the rhodos around his old house before it burned down.

These hadn't been cut, though. The trunks and branches had been crushed, and their splinters pressed into the ground. Something awful big and heavy—or a number of big and heavy somethings—had been outside these windows last night banging and scraping at the shutters.

But they hadn't got in. That was the important thing.

As Alan pushed his left wheel forward and pulled the right backward to turn and roll back to the path, he saw the depression in the lawn. His stomach lurched. He hadn't noticed it before; he'd been too intent on the shutters and the ruined rhodos. But from this angle you couldn't miss it.

The fresh spring grass, overdue now for a trimming, had been crushed in a wide swath that angled in from the front gate, around the willows, and directly to the house. Alan tried to imagine what sort of creature could leave such a trail but all he could come up with was a thirty-foot bowling ball. With teeth, most likely. Lots of them.

He shuddered and rolled back to the path. Each night it got a little rougher. One of these nights Toad Hall's defenses were going to fail. It was inevitable. Alan prayed he'd be able to persuade Sylvia to move out before that happened, or that Glaeken would be able to assemble the pieces he needed to call for help.

Alan could feel it in his bones: they were all going to need help. Lots of it. And soon. Otherwise, if the Sapir curve was correct, they had two sunrises left. Then the sun would set for the last time at three o'clock on Thursday afternoon. And the endless night would begin.