Nightworld

Dinu Pass, Rumania

"Look down, Nick. At the ground. Do you see anything?"

Night had come. So had the bugs. The air was dense with them. From the base of the keep's tower, Bill watched their bizarre and varied forms buzzing, darting, drifting in the air a mere half-dozen feet away.

But he and Nick were safe. Though they stood in the open doorway, the bugs kept their distance. As soon as it was dark, Bill had guided Nick back into the depths to the heavy stone door where now they both stared into the hungry darkness outside.

"Come on, Nick," he said. "Take a good look. Do you see any of that glow you saw last night?"

He nodded and pointed straight ahead. "There."

A slow change had come over Nick during the day. He seemed more alert, more responsive to the world around him. Were the effects of his descent into the hole wearing off?

"All right, then." Bill's insides were coiled tight. "I guess this is it."

He turned to the baker's dozen of villagers armed with chairs and torches who waited behind him in the tower base. The thirteenth was Alexandru, standing off to the side.

Through Alexandru, Bill had explained that the red-haired man who'd come here in 1941 was still alive and in America, that if he could recover some pieces of the "magic sword" that had shattered here on these stones, he might be able to close up the hole out there in the pass and bring the sun back. They'd helped him search around the base of the tower this afternoon but their efforts had been no more fruitful than his own in the morning. They'd have to go out at night.

Bill had expected to be laughed off as a madman, or rudely rebuffed at the very least. Instead the villagers had conferred together, then agreed to help him. The women had begun wicker-weaving while the men set about making torches. Now they were dressed in multiple layers of clothing, wicker armor on their thighs and lower legs, heavy gloves, sheepskin hats and vests. They looked ready for an arctic blizzard, but it was a different sort of storm they'd be facing.

Bill nodded to the men. It was time. Their faces remained mostly expressionless, but Bill noticed glances pass between them, saw them begin to breath more heavily. They were scared, and rightly so. A perfect stranger had asked them to put their lives on the line, to perform the equivalent of wading into a piranha-infested river with only a crab net and a spear for protection. If they turned around and headed back up the stones stairs now, he wouldn't blame them.

But they didn't. They filed out through the opening with their shields and torches raised, to form a shallow semicircle of protection into which Bill and Nick stepped. And then, just as they'd rehearsed it inside the keep, they advanced as a group, the end members closing the circle behind Bill and Nick as they moved away from the tower wall.

The bugs assaulted in a wave. The men in the circle around him began to cry out in fear and anger and revulsion as they blocked the swooping creatures with their raised chairs and shields while thrusting at them with their torches. To the accompaniment of buzzing wings and sizzling bug flesh, they inched forward.

Bill crouched next to Nick, his arm over his shoulders, keeping his head down as they moved. He shouted in his left ear.

"Where, Nick? Show me where!"

Nick kept his eyes down, searching the rocky ground but saying nothing. Bill had a sudden, awful fear that Nick might not be able to see the glow because of the torches the circle of villagers carried. If daylight obscured the glow, would torchlight do the same?

As if in answer to Bill's unasked question, Nick said, "Here's one."

His pointing finger was directed at a spot two inches in front of his left shoe.

Bill shouted to the group to stop, pulled out his flashlight, and began pawing through the stones with his free hand. He felt the circle constrict around him as the villagers were beaten back into a tighter knot by the bugs. But under the stones there was nothing but dirt.

"There's nothing here, Nick!"

But Nick kept pointing. "There, there, there."

"Where, dammit?"

"The glow. There."

Nick sounded so sure. Out of sheer desperation, Bill began digging through the moist silt. It didn't seem likely, but maybe rains over the decades had buried some of the fragments and the glow was filtering up through the ground. The trip had been a bust so far and they didn't have much time out here, not with the increasing ferocity of the bug attack, so he was willing to try almost—

Bill's fingers scraped on something hard and slim with rough edges, something that felt nothing like sand or stone. He forced his fingers down into the silt, worked them around the object, under it, then pulled it free.

A rusty, dirty, jagged piece of metal lay in his palm. He held it up.

"Is this it, Nick?"

"Can't you see the glow?"

Bill turned the object over and over in his hands. No glow. Just a broken, pitted piece of metal.

"No. Are there more?"

"Of course." He pointed to Bill's left. "Right there."

Bill began to dig again. One of the men shouted something to him. Bill didn't know the language but the meaning was clear.

Hurry!

Bill placed his flashlight on the stones and used the first piece to help dig after the second, throwing dirt in all directions as he dug. He heard a faint clink of metal on metal and was reaching into the hole to feel for it when a chew wasp darted between the legs of one of the men and sank its needle teeth into his arm. Without thinking, Bill lashed at it with the metal fragment in his hand.

The flash of light nearly blinded him for an instant. He blinked, and when the purple after-image faded, he saw the chew wasp flopping on the stones and gnashing its teeth in waning fury, a deep, blackened, smoking wound in its back.

Bill stared at the metal fragment in his hand for a second. Whatever power this blade had once held was not completely gone, not by a long shot.

He threw himself into probing deeper into the bottom of the second hole. He found another piece of metal almost immediately and held it up.

"How about this one, Nick? Quick! Does it glow?"

Nick nodded. "Yes."

"Great. All right now. Where's the—"

Then one of the villagers screamed and fell backward, landing across Bill's back and nearly knocking him flat. Bill thought the bugs might have broken through his defenses and latched onto him en masse, but he was wrong.

It was worse.

Something had the man by the ankle, something that had uncoiled out of the darkness like a long black rope, but alive, tapered, twisting, and powerful. His fall had broken the circle and now the bugs were inside, attacking from within as well as without. The men tried to reclose the circle but wavered as the snake-like thing began to drag their friend from their midst. Some bent to grab his arms to pull him back but the bugs were immediately upon them and they had to let him go to protect themselves. Bill watched in horror as the man was dragged screaming into the darkness, the bugs swarming over him, ripping at him.

Another inky snake uncoiled from out of the night and snared a second villager. And as he was pulled crying to his doom, a third creature caught Nick and pulled him off his feet. Nick made no sound as he landed on the rocks. Bill wrapped an arm around his chest but the snake began to drag them both away. Bill sensed something huge and dark looming in the blackness beyond the reach of the torchlight and realized then that these weren't snakes but the long, smooth tentacles of a single monstrous creature. Glaeken's off-handed comment floated through his mind…

The bigger ones tend to be slow; it will take them a while to get here, but they'll get here.

Bill knew from the inexorable pull it exerted on Nick that there was no way he could resist its strength.

In desperation he reached down to the tentacle encircling Nick's legs and slashed at it with the sword fragments. Another blinding, sizzling flash and suddenly the tentacle had uncoiled and was writhing and flopping furiously about on the stones like a beheaded snake.

The villagers were now in complete disarray, stumbling about, swinging their torches and shields wildly in the air.

"Back!" Bill cried. "Back to the keep."

He pulled Nick to his feet and half carried him over the rocky ground toward the base of the tower, flailing about in the air with the metal shards, clearing a path through the bugs. Finally they were there, trailing some of the villagers, just ahead of a few others, stumbling through the doorway into the blessedly empty air of the keep. Bitten, bleeding, burned, they collapsed into panting heaps on the granite floor; compared to the rough stones outside, its smooth surface felt almost soft. Only the elderly Alexandru was standing, exactly where they had left him.

"Where are the others?" he said, his eyes ranging through their ranks. "What happened to Gheorghe? And Ion? And Michael and Nicolae?"

Bill lifted his head and counted. Only eight of the dozen villagers who'd gone out with him had made it back. He went to the door and looked out. Four torches burned smokily on the stones of the gorge. The men who had carried them were nowhere in sight. Behind him, the survivors began to weep and he felt his own throat tighten. Four brave men had sacrificed themselves so a stranger could dig up some chunks of old metal.

Bill looked down at the fragments in his hand, then again at the four sputtering torches.

These had damn well better be worth it.

Outside, something huge and black dragged its enormous weight over the rubble of the gorge.

Bill was ready to go. The two metal shards were settled deep in his pocket, Nick was strapped into the passenger seat, and the villagers had nailed a board across the land-rover's broken rear window. Bill hoped it blocked the bugs half as well as it blocked his rear view.

"I don't want to go."

Bill glanced at Nick and was shocked to see tears running down his cheeks.

"Nick…?"

"I like it here. I feel…better here. Please let me stay."

"Nick, I can't leave you here. I've got to go back and we may need you back home. But once this is all over, I'll bring you back."

He sobbed. "Do you promise, Father Bill?"

Bill felt a sob building in his own throat. He gripped Nick's hand.

"Yeah, Nicky. I promise."

He felt miserable but hid it as he waved to Alexandra and the others.

"Tell them I'll be back," he told the old man in German. "After this is all over, after the holes are closed and the monsters are gone, I'll be back. And I'll tell the world of the bravery of your people."

Alexandra waved but did not smile. There were tears in his eyes. Bill shared his grief, not only for the dead but for Alexandra's little community. A village atrophying and dying as was his could not afford to lose four of its most vital men.

"I'll be back," he said again. "I won't forget you."

And he meant it. If he survived this, if he was alive to do so, he'd be back.

He threw the vehicle into first, and started out the gate onto the causeway. The bugs swarmed around him. He was halfway across when the headlights picked up the first tentacle. It lay stretched lengthwise along the planks and lifted its tapered tip at Bill's approach, as if watching him, or catching his scent.

Bill stopped and squinted into the darkness as other tentacles pushed forward to join the first. Soon the causeway was acrawl with them. He found the high-beam button on the floor to the left of the clutch and kicked it.

Bill gasped and instinctively pressed himself back in his seat when he saw what waited at the far end of the causeway. The light from his high-beams reflected off a huge, smooth, featureless, glistening black mass, thirty feet high and at least a hundred feet across. He looked for eyes or a mouth but could find none. Just slimy-looking blackness. A huge slug-like creature with tentacles.

And those tentacles were reaching for him, stretching closer.

Bill looked for a way out, a way to get around it, but its massive bulk blocked the end of the causeway. Even if he could run the land-rover over the tentacles, he'd end up against the immovable wall of the thing's flank.

The tip of one of the tentacles suddenly appeared at the end of the hood. It coiled around the hood ornament and pulled. Bill shifted into reverse and backed up a dozen feet. The tentacles inched after him.

I'm trapped, dammit! Trapped until morning!

He pounded the steering wheel in impotent rage and undiluted frustration. He had the shards that he'd come for and he couldn't get them back to Glaeken, couldn't even set off for his return trip to Ploiesti until dawn.

More time wasted. And another night without seeing Carol. He wanted to be with her. Every moment was precious. How many did they have left?

Using the rearview mirror, he carefully backed the vehicle through the gates of the keep, then sat behind the wheel and swallowed the pressure that built in his chest as he stared out at the night. He felt like crying.

"We're back?" Nick said, smiling. "Oh, I'm so glad we're back."