The Dark at the End

7

“‘It may never happen, Weez,’” she said, quoting. “‘This may all be wasted time and chatter.’”

Jack, behind the wheel, stared straight ahead and said nothing as they cruised north on the New Jersey Turnpike. She’d called shotgun for the trip home. She was too rattled about what lay ahead to concentrate on the Compendium.

She studied Jack. He’d been strangely silent since leaving the Lodge. Something was bothering him. Endangering the baby? She doubted it. That was her worry.

“But, since it is going to happen,” she added, “I guess it wasn’t just wasted chatter. Not that I have veto power.”

He glanced at her. “We all respect your feelings, Weez. There’s just…”

“… too much hanging in the balance,” she said. “I know that. I just…”

“… never believed the end justifies the means.”

Behind them, Eddie laughed. “Are you two going to spend the entire trip finishing each other’s sentences?”

They were, weren’t they. Once again she was filled with such a longing for Jack. What was it? He wasn’t handsome-not ugly, but a long way from a hot guy. He didn’t radiate alpha masculinity; it might be there, but he hid anything that might draw attention.

But he was Jack, and he couldn’t hide what he was from her. And she’d fallen for who he was.

They made a pretty good team too. Didn’t he see that? Well, maybe he did, but he didn’t feel about her the way she felt about him. Not even close. How could he? To him, they were simply… buds-close as could be, with a history that went way, way back, but she didn’t go beyond friend for him. He would never see her any other way, and that tore a hole in her heart.

After a couple of beats of awkward silence, Jack said, “In this case, I don’t think the means are so terrible. The baby won’t know he’s got an Other name.”

“I know. I’ve come to terms with it. The Lady won’t perform the ceremony on anyone else, so that’s the way it has to be.”

Eddie said, “Why not give him a plain old American name right after the ceremony. That way he’ll grow up answering to Tom or Dick or Harry or whatever.”

“Assuming he grows up,” Jack said.

Weezy frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Assuming we have the right name, assuming the Compendium has the right ceremony, and assuming the ceremony will do what we hope it will, we all just might see the summer.”

The summer…

Jack was convinced-said he’d heard from multiple sources-that darkness waited in the spring. If Rasalom had his way, if they didn’t find a way to stop him, there’d be no summer.

“If just one of those assumptions is wrong,” he added, “then all this is for nothing.”

She couldn’t argue with his logic, but he seemed so negative lately.

“The Compendium hasn’t let us down yet.”

“But the name…”

Yes… the name. Everything hinged on the name belonging to Rasalom.

“We have to trust it’s his Other Name.”

“Trust? Trust whom? R?”

“Trust what we know about him from Glaeken-that he suffers from a monstrous case of hubris. The Seven served the Otherness, and one by one he eliminated them until only he remained. It fits perfectly with his personality that as he eliminated them he removed their Other names from his sigil-like crossing them off a list-until only his remained. And it makes sense that he kept that sigil as a souvenir of his triumph.”

Jack shook his head. “But does it make sense that he left it in Johnson, New Jersey, where we could find it? Seems just a little too convenient.”

“Now that you mention it,” Eddie said. “It seems a lot too convenient.”

“On the surface, yes, but ‘too convenient’ implies that someone put it there for us to find. Think about that. We first discovered that sigil when we were in our midteens. Rasalom was reborn just a few months before you. That means when you were fourteen, he was fourteen. Do you see him, at some time during his first fourteen years, hunting down his sigil, transporting it to Johnson, New Jersey, and somehow hiding it under the Lodge? And that’s a big ‘somehow’ because the sigil would never fit through that trapdoor we found back then. ‘Too convenient’ requires an awful lot of assumptions, don’t you think?”

Jack mulled that a moment, then gave a reluctant shrug. “Point taken. But I’m still uncomfortable with how convenient it turned out for us.”

Weezy understood. That skepticism made Jack Jack, one of the reasons he had survived so long doing what he did. She doubted she could make him comfortable, but maybe she could make him less uncomfortable.

“I don’t think he had anything to do with its presence in Johnson. But I’ll bet the Order did. What do we know about the sigil? It’s a relic of the First Age, which makes it about fifteen thousand years old. Because it’s made of the virtually indestructible tenathic, it survived the Great Cataclysm that ended the First Age. Because it’s a relic of that time, it was only natural that the Septimus Order-which adopted it as its seal-would have preserved it through the ages. Somehow it wound up in the Pine Barrens.”

“It’s that ‘somehow’ that bothers me. Even if it’s not ‘too convenient,’ it’s one helluva coincidence. And ‘no more coincidences,’ remember?”

“Well, we know from Glaeken that the Order settled in the Barrens and caged the last q’qr there-another leftover of the First Age. Is it such a stretch to believe that they’d bring along this ancient, damaged sigil too? Unless they’ve got some sort of Rosetta Stone, I’m sure they had no idea of the significance of the seven glyphs, or that it had once belonged to the One. But they kept it because it was an antique, a reminder of their salad days. It wound up in the town that was eventually buried, and they built the Lodge over it.”

Jack’s expression remained sour. “Just blocks from the home of the Heir.”

“No, you’ve got it backward, Jack. Rasalom’s sigil was brought to the Barrens long, long before you were born. Probably before the Pilgrims arrived. The sigil wasn’t moved near you-you came to it. Do you know why your folks settled in Johnson?”

He shook his head. “Never occurred to me to ask. My folks got married in the fifties, and moved to Johnson after Kate was born. I have no idea why they chose Johnson. I’m pretty sure it was my dad’s idea-he liked the idea of raising a family in a small town, away from all the crowding and problems of big-city life, and my mother tended to leave those decisions up to him. Wish he was alive so I could ask him.”

“Well, I can see only three possibilities: He was either drawn there, pushed there, or just happened to stop there.”

Jack grimaced. “I’ve been moved around the chessboard all my life. Maybe he was too.”

“So maybe it’s not a coincidence.”

“Maybe it’s not,” he muttered.

He still didn’t seem satisfied.

“What’s wrong, Jack?”

Instead of answering, he pulled off the road into a service area and parked near the food court.

“We have to go back.”

“What?” Eddie said. “No way. We’re halfway home.”

Weezy was baffled. “Go back for what?”

“I need to see that sigil again.”

Eddie popped his seat belt loose and leaned forward. “But you won’t get to see it again. As it was, we were lucky we weren’t arrested for trespassing or breaking and entering. They’ll be watching for us. We got what we came for. If we go back to that Lodge again we’re sure to get arrested and that’s the last thing we need.”

For once she had to agree with her brother. As much as she hated to side against Jack…

“He’s right, Jack. Risking arrest only plays into Rasalom’s hands. We need to get this name to the Lady and put the Naming Ceremony behind us.”

“Okay, maybe three of us can’t go back, but one can.”

“How?” Eddie said.

“Where the hell are we?”

“Exit Seven-A is ahead,” Weezy said. “Route 195. Trenton, et cetera.”

“Good. Gotta be a car rental place there. I’ll rent something and drive back to Johnson while you continue on to the city.”

He put the car back in gear and started moving again.

She said, “I don’t get it, Jack. I just don’t get it. What do you hope to find?”

“Nothing. I hope everything is just what we think it is. But I…” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Give me something. Please.”

“I just don’t like the way everything is falling together so neatly. It feels orchestrated.”

“Maybe it is orchestrated-but by the Ally.”

“Yeah, well, you know how much I trust the Ally.”

Weezy sighed. She had no comeback for that. She knew what the Ally had done to him. She didn’t trust it either.

But she trusted Jack.