Выбрать главу

It wants us all inside the circles. It can draw more power that way.

The chanting of the monks got louder. Banks felt the call of the dark, saw the shadows swirl darker, and stars appear in the blackness. The void opened out all around the pentacles where they stood.

Outside, the oberst took another step toward the retreating men. They were almost backed up against the outer circle.

“Bugger this for a lark. Up,” Banks shouted to Wiggins. “Take us up.”

“What? Are you daft, man?”

“That’s a fucking order, Private,” he shouted. “Fly this fucker out of here, right now, before it takes us all.”

Banks thought about the saucer, glowing brighter, and rising off the hangar floor. It appeared that Wiggins took his order to heart, for it felt like his own thoughts were amplified, boosted, and the view out of the window changed as the saucer rose, slowly at first, then definitely accelerating upward.

The tall oberst looked into Banks’ eyes. The last thing Banks saw before the view of the hangar slipped out of sight completely was the German’s lips raise in a smile, and a black, forked, tongue slither out between them.

- 17 -

The dance washed over Banks in a wave of blackness and void, starless and bible-black at first, then slowly taking form as they drifted with the beat. Part of him was aware that he still stood inside a pentacle, on the floor of a golden saucer, hovering now above the broken fragments of a shattered dome.

But that part was insignificant compared to the vastness of the void, and the call of the dance. Banks wanted to fall into it, to let it take him off and into the deep dark, where there was nothing but the dance, and peace, forever.

I want this.

And with it came realization.

This is what I want. It’s what I have always wanted, in my heart. The fucker is still inside my head. And it wants something else.

He tasted salt water at his lips, and remembered how Carnacki had stood, alone in the dark, remembered where Churchill had found his ‘demon.’ He had a final epiphany.

“Wiggins,” he shouted into the dark. “Go left. Ten feet then head for the door.”

“Then what, Cap?” the private’s voice came from everywhere and nowhere, a boom like the voice of God in the dark.

“Then jump. Jump if you want to live.”

He felt the assisted boost of Wiggins’ thought that, along with his own, moved the saucer slightly to one side, away from the shattered roof of the dome.

“Jump, Private, that’s a fucking order,” Banks shouted, and, judging to luck, left the pentacle at a straight run, heading for what he hoped was the doorway.

* * *

He met Wiggins just as his vision cleared. They almost wedged each other into the doorway. The second it took them to disentangle themselves was almost the end of them both; the saucer started to accelerate, heading toward the sea.

Banks didn’t hesitate. He threw Wiggins out the open doorway, then jumped through after him.

The fall seemed to take forever.

- 18 -

He hit soft snow over hard ice, landing on his back, and was able to turn just in time to see the saucer hit the surface of the sea far out in the bay. It skipped like a flat stone, twice, before breaking apart with a screech of tearing metal that echoed around the cliffs.

At the last, as it sank a black shadow, wings unfurled, spread out across the surface, then slowly sank away. A fresh squall of wind and snow came in, passed over and when it cleared, there was nothing to see but the sea itself. The last thing to go was the far-off sound, monks chanting, not in the wind as Banks had thought, but from somewhere deep — deep, dark, and dancing in the abyssal swell, with the taste of salt water at their lips.

* * *

He was trying to pull Wiggins out of a snowdrift when the three remaining members of his squad came up the slope at a run. Wiggins’ eyes were fluttering — he had taken a blow to the head and wasn’t fully conscious, but there didn’t appear to be any broken bones.

Hynd reached them first.

“I don’t know what you did, Cap, but it fucking worked. There’s nothing left but dirty freezing water down there.”

Banks heard a new noise. He looked out over the sea again. The icebreaker was coming around the farthest point on the right side of the bay, and the distant whop of the heavy engines of a dinghy in the water echoed all around the cliffs.

“I sent the fucker where it wanted to go all along, ever since it was trapped on that Jerry sub all those years ago.”

“And where was that, Cap?”

“Home. I sent it home.”

* * *

They were all on the quay waiting by the time the dinghy came alongside. Wiggins, still semi-conscious, hung held upright between Hynd and McCally, and they moved quickly to get him into the dinghy as soon as it reached the dock. A bespectacled, bearded man that Banks took for the expert got out of the dinghy, took one look up at the shattered dome, and looked back at Banks in disgust.

“You call this sanitizing?”

“You’re fucking welcome,” Banks replied.

“That’s what the sarge’s wife says too,” Wiggins replied.

THE END