Nightworld

DINU PASS, RUMANIA

"I think we're lost, Nick," Bill said.

They were tipping and grinding and scraping along what passed for a road in these parts as Bill fought the wheel of the Rumanian equivalent of a Land-Rover. It was rust streaked, its odometer was in kilometers, it had creaky, ratchety steering, failing brakes, and a leaky exhaust system. But it seemed damn near indestructible, and its thick glass seemed impervious to the bugs that had swarmed over them in the Ploiesti area. Not too many bugs around here, though. Maybe because there weren't many humans or animals in these parts to feed on.

Bill squinted ahead. Sheer mountain walls towered on either side, closer on his left, but the formerly seamless blackness beyond the flickering, dancing headlights was showing some cracks. Morning was coming. Good. Although traveling east had made the night mercifully short, he was tired of the darkness. He had a blinding headache from the carbon monoxide-tainted air as well as the tension growing in his neck, his left leg and right arm burned from fighting the creaky clutch and stubborn gear shift, and he was sure they'd missed a crucial turn about ten kilometers back.

And he'd begun talking to Nick. Nick hadn't deigned to reply yet, but the sound of his own voice gave Bill the feeling that he wasn't completely alone out here in a remote mountain pass in the heart of a benighted country where he spoke not a word of the native language.

"We'll never find our way back home again," he said. "Unless it's in a pine box."

Joe Ashe had piloted them across the Atlantic and Northern Europe in great time, riding the jet stream all the way. The field at Ploiesti had been deserted except for one of Joe's East European pilot buddies—apparently the Ashe brothers had a global network of kindred spirits—who had this beat-up old land-rover waiting for them. They'd assumed Bill would wait until daylight before setting out. But dawn, such as it was these days, had been nearly three hours away. And three hours seemed like a lifetime. Sure, it was 6:02 a.m. local time, but the clock in Bill's body read only midnight. He was too wired to sleep, so why not put the time to good use? The Rumanian land-rover looked sturdy enough—more like a converted half-track mini-tank than a car—so he'd loaded Nick into the passenger seat and headed out into the darkness.

A foolish mistake. Bill realized that now. He glanced at his watch. Eight o'clock. They'd covered thirty miles in two hours—the majority of them coasting along the road north from Ploiesti, the last few crawling along this ridge road. According to the Sapir curve, dawn was due at 8:41, after which there would be eight hours and thirty-eight minutes of sunlight today. Which was about half an hour shorter than the shortest day of the year in the dead of all the Decembers that had preceded the celestial changes.

Bill shivered. A new kind of winter had come. A winter of the soul.

"I know what you're going to say, Nick," he said. "You're going to say, 'I told you so.' And maybe you did, but I guess I wasn't listening. Doesn't matter now, though. We're stuck out here in the middle of nowhere and we'll just have to wait until the light comes and hope to find somebody who can tell us how to get to this keep place."

Nick, ever polite, refrained from an I-told-you-so.

Bill scanned the terrain ahead for a level place to park and noticed the road widening. Great. He could pull to the side and wait for the light. Then he saw the white shapes ahead. As he got closer he realized they were houses. A cluster of them. A village.

"Maybe there is a God after all, Nick," but he knew Nick didn't believe that. Neither did he.

Bill almost wished again for the old days when he did believe. Because he'd be praying now for help, for direction, for the Lord to inspire his hands on the wheel to guide them to the right road and lead them to their destination.

But those days were gone. His god was dead. Mumbled words would not bring help from on high. He was going to have to do this just the way he'd always done things—by himself.

As he followed the road on its winding course among the houses, he felt no lessening of his sense of isolation. What had appeared to be a village was really no more than a collection of huts, and those huts looked beat up and run down. As the headlight beams raked them he saw how their white stucco walls were scarred and chipped, noted the gaps in the shakes covering their roofs. Hard times had come to this place. He didn't have to search the huts to know the village was deserted.

"Now we're really lost," he told Nick. The fatigue was settling on him like a ratty blanket. "Lost in the middle of nowhere. If there is a God, he's forsaken this place."

Then he saw the flames. On the far side of the village, flickering fitfully in the fading darkness. It looked like a campfire. He drove toward it, steadily picking up speed.

A fire meant people and that meant he wasn't completely lost. Maybe there was still hope of salvaging this trip.

But suddenly there was nothing ahead—no road, no grass, no earth, only emptiness. He stood on the brakes, tumbling Nick into the dashboard as the rover swerved and skidded to a stalling halt at the edge of a precipice. A hole, dammit! Another one of those bottomless holes!

No, wait. To his left, vague and dim, an ancient bridge of some sort, with stone supports plunging into the pit. It coursed two hundred feet across the emptiness—a rocky gorge, he saw now; not a hole—toward the campfire. And now that he was closer and the sky was lighter, Bill realized that the campfire wasn't outside. It was inside, glowing through a tall open gate set within a massive stone wall that seemed to spring from the mountainside. He could make out human forms standing around it. Some of them might even be staring back at him. On the structure's leading edge, a thick, sturdy tower rose a good forty or fifty feet above the top of the wall. The whole thing looked like a small castle, a pocket fortress. He felt a smile spread over his face—how long since he'd really smiled?

He was here. He'd found it.

The keep.

Bill let out a whoop and pounded the steering wheel.

"We made it, Nick!"

He restarted the vehicle and headed for the causeway, intending to drive across. But when the headlights picked up the worn and ragged timbers, he stopped, unsure if he should risk it.

"What do you think, Nick?"

The question was rhetorical, but Bill noticed that Nick seemed more aware than he'd been a few moments ago. Had the impact with the dashboard jostled his mind? Or was it something else?

Maybe it was all the bugs swarming around the keep. He hadn't noticed them before, but he could see now that the air was thick with them. Perhaps because the only people in the pass were clustered around that fire inside. But why were the doors open? And why weren't the bugs running rampant through the keep, chewing everybody up?

One thing Bill did know was that walking across the causeway now was impossible. They'd be ground beef before they'd traveled fifty feet. Of course, they could wait. But Bill couldn't wait, not another minute. He hadn't come this far through the dark simply to sit here with his destination in sight and wait for dawn. Screw the bugs. He was going across. Now.

"All right, Nick," he said. "Here goes nothing."

He went slowly, keeping his eyes glued to the timbers directly ahead. Not so easy with the bugs batting against the vehicle with increasing frequency. A bumpy ride, but smoother than the ridge road they'd been traveling. A glance ahead showed a group of figures clustered in the gateway of the keep, watching him.

"Stop."

Bill slammed on the brakes. It was Nick. His face was pressed against the side window. His voice was as lifeless as ever, but Bill sensed real emotion hidden within it—almost excitement.

"What is it, Nick? What's wrong?"

"I see them. Down there. Little pieces of the sword."

He was pointing down to his right, below the base of the tower, down to where its rocky foundation melted into the gorge, fifty feet below. Bill could barely make out the floor of the gorge. How could Nick see little pieces of metal?

"I don't see a thing, Nick."

"Right there. They glow with bright blue fire. Are you blind?"

Bill strained to see but could find only darkness below.

"I guess so. But as long as one of us can see them, we're in business."

Bill was congratulating himself on how smoothly this mission was going when the rear window cracked and bellied inward as one of the bigger bugs hit it like a stone. It held, but for how long? Because suddenly they were under full-scale attack as the bugs launched a blitzkrieg on the rover, scraping, gnawing, pounding, and slapping against every square inch of the vehicle's surface, as if the approach of dawn had driven them into one final feeding frenzy before they'd be forced to return to the hole from which they'd sprung.

Bill shifted into first but held the clutch. He couldn't see. With all the chew wasps, belly flies, spearheads, men-o'-war, and other things clustered against the windshield and the other windows, the outer world had become a squirming mass of gnashing jaws, writhing tentacles, and acid-filled sacks. He'd be driving blind. No guardrail, and fifty feet of empty air awaiting them if the rover strayed more than three feet left or right.

Then the rear window bulged further inward with the weight of the onslaught and he knew he had no choice. Even going over the side was preferable to sitting here and being eaten alive when that window gave way.

Taking a deep breath, Bill eased up on the clutch and they started to move. He found that by looking down through his side window he could catch an occasional glimpse of the causeway's edge. He used that as a guide.

As they rolled forward, he heard a noise, faint and indistinct at first, but growing steadily in volume. It sounded almost like human voices—cheering voices. It was. The sound reached into the rover and touched him, warmed him. Using it as a beacon, he increased his speed, homing in on it.

And suddenly—like driving under an overpass in the heart of a cloudburst—the bugs were gone. Swept away, every last one of them. Silence in the rover. Except for the voices. Instead of bugs the vehicle was now surrounded by cheering people. Men and women, middle aged and older with rugged peasant faces, coarse clothing, sheepskin vests, woolly hats. They pulled open the rover's door and helped him out, all the while shaking his hand and slapping his back. Bill returned the smiles and the handshakes, then glanced back along the causeway. The bugs crowded the air outside the arch of the gateway, but not one ventured through.

He turned back to the people and saw children and goats wandering around behind them. And beyond those, on the stone block walls, crosses. Hundreds of crosses. Thousands of crosses.

What sort of place was this? And why did he feel as if somehow he'd returned home after a long journey?