In the glow from the hallway I caught sight of Midge's writhing body, although so covered in the creatures was she that she resembled a multiwinged horror rising like some hideous beast from the pages of one of those splatter comicbooks. She was shrieking and beating at herself in terror, and I crawled toward her, ignoring the bats clinging to my own body.
She fell to her knees again and I beat at those hugging monsters in blind fury, snapping wings and breaking bones with a wildness even these tenacious bastards couldn't withstand.
They fell away. I ripped out two that had become entangled in her hair. I beat them from her shoulders, pulled them from her back. We had to get away from there, but to where? All the rooms had windows. And all the while I struggled, more bats were settling on me, while others were returning to her. I swiped them from the air, but for every one stunned, three more took its space. My own frustrated exertions were wearying me, and the bats' combined weight, insubstantial though it may have been, was gradually bringing me down. Midge and I sank together, bodies enveloped by the black-winged vermin.
We lay close on the floor and the pain wasn't that bad— nips and scratches were all we felt. It was sheer terror that kept us there.
I slumped over Midge in an effort to shield her, although knowing it was no use, the fuckers were going to get us. Just like they got the rabbits. Just like they got Rumbo.
I closed my eyes and waited.
Until the bats were suddenly gone.
THE POWER
THE AIR WAS empty of them. Their weight had been lifted from our bodies.
We listened to the retreating sound of their wings and we stayed there, faces buried into the bumpy carpet, waiting for the mass flip-flap to become distant, waiting for it to disappear completely.
Only when that happened did I raise my head to make sure we were really alone. A weak fluttering nearby caused me to search alarmedly for the source: one of the bats, a wing broken and useless, was rotating on the floor, pushed round and round by the tip of its good wing. Another dark shape across the room flinched feebly. Others, those I'd managed to kill, lay in silent mounds. The smell of them all, those dead, those flown, lingered in the room, combining with the musty dampness and rot; even the breeze cooling in from the broken windows couldn't dispel the corruption.
"Midge." I eased my weight from her, but she remained inert, face downward. "It's over, Midge, they've gone."
Her back shuddered and I realized she was weeping. I knelt back on my haunches and, with bloodied hands, I drew her up against my chest. By now we were both beyond questions and I could only hold and gently rock her in the way you'd calm a baby.
Our clothes were torn, shredded in places; yet although we were patchy with blood neither of us was seriously hurt. Even the wound in my neck only bled a little. As I stroked her hair, Midge's tears seeped into the material of my ragged shirt.
A soft click struck me motionless once more.
The noise had come from the hallway where the light still shone brightly. The click was from the door. The outside door. Impossibly, the key on this side was turning in the lock.
Midge, alerted by my sudden stillness, raised her head. She, too, watched the key.
Which turned completely round, clicking finally into its new position.
The bolt at the foot of the door began to slide, slowly, evenly, drawn back by an invisible hand. The metal bar stopped only when it had reached the end of its run.
Nothing happened immediately.
Then, almost leisurely, the door swung open.
Mycroft stood in the shadows outside.
I moaned and Midge collapsed into me.
He stepped into the light and his smile couldn't have been bettered by Boris Karloff himself. It made me cringe just to see it.
Mycroft strolled into the cottage, thin cane poised before him like a blind man's stick, and although he wore that plain gray suit he was no longer unimpressive. In fact, knowing what I did about him, his very blandness was all the more sinister: it'd assumed a strikingly direful quality. He stopped at the threshold of the round room, countenance in shadow again, light from behind outlining his figure. I heard him draw in a long, deep breath as though he were sucking in all of the room's foul air, filling his chest with the stench.
He'd used the bats to soften us up and now here he was, in person.
A big hand for Mycroft the Magician, illusionist extraordinaire. Only the bats had been no illusion—a breeze flowing in from the broken windows and blood staining my ripped clothes told me that. And the door really had unlocked itself—his presence in the room asserted that. I wondered if part of his act was making water boil in car radiators; and if he had such mental powers, then luring us close to his lair that Sunday couldn't have been much of a problem.
Mycroft reached out and flicked on the light before stepping all the way into the room. His smile was no more pleasant.
Others filed in behind him, going to his right and left alternately, keeping near to the curved walls to form a human claw that closed around us. I suppose there must have been a dozen or so of them, the others presumably keeping watch outside, sentinels in the moonlight.
I looked from face to face and they impassively returned my gaze. Even Gillie, who was among them, displayed no feelings, and I expected at least a leer from my old chum Kinsella but he, too, was stony cold.
"Some—" My voice cracked and I had to start again. "Something we can do for you, Mycroft?"
I didn't think that was bad under the circumstances, but it didn't seem to cheer up anyone, least of all myself.
"Not any more," he replied, and the idea that we were no longer of any use to him chilled me further. He pointed his cane at Midge. "She could have helped me, but chose not to. For that, I blame you." The cane singled me out.
I shook my head in protest. "We still don't know what's going on. We don't want to fight you, Mycroft, we don't mean to get in the way of your Grand Plan, whatever the hell it is. So how about just leaving us out of this?"
"Unfortunately it's too late for that. You've become an integral part of Gramarye."
"That's crazy. You want the place? So take it. Make me a reasonable offer. I don't give a shit." And I meant it; I really didn't.
"No!"
That was Midge crying out as she sprang away from me.
"Don't you know why he wants Gramarye, why Flora fought so hard to keep it from him?" she said to me. "He told us back there in the Temple, don't you remember?"
Again I shook my head, this time blankly.
"Gramarye, or at least the ground it stands on, is a channel for the power he uses, a supply source of some kind. Don't you see that? Whoever occupies this cottage is the guardian of that power. Like Flora, like the person who lived here before her, and before even her. The line is probably endless."
A month before—no, a week before—I'd have laughed at such a suggestion; now I wasn't so sure. It was hard to swallow, but then so was everything else that had happened there. And hadn't I had my own "insights" about the place recently?
Mycroft seemed amused. "Finally you're beginning to understand. You can feel the magic that gives life to this earth, makes air so that we may breathe, creates springs that become rivers so that we may drink, provides food to sustain us. Could you really imagine that ail we live among is one vast accident, that Nature has no design, no driving force? Don't you see there are sources contained within this planet that can never be understood? Sources sought after only by the enlightened through the centuries? Are you foolish enough to think all those legends of old, stories of wizards, of witches, of magic kingdoms, are no more than children's fairy tales?" He laughed aloud, Karloff at his finest, and there was appreciative murmuring from his henchmen around the room.