“It’s attracted to the girl in Darcy’s house,” he said. “It’s concentrating its mischief up at this end. But never there—because it’s being elusive and that would give it away. That’s what I’m thinking. The girl’s attracted it and the girl’s guiding it, consciously or unconsciously. She’s got to be silenced. Stopped. Put out cold.”
“That’s pretty hard-minded,” John Quarles said. “That poor child, rider-boss, —”
“I don’t say do her any lasting harm, but if we quiet Brionne Goss it mightforget why it was here. At least it won’t have a human mind steering it. Slip her something. Darcy’s a doctor, for God’s sake. She’s got to have somethingin the office that won’t hurt her. This thing’s mapping the village for that girl. It’s going all around the village, but not there. It will. And thenwhat happens?”
“You can’t even tell us what it is,” the marshal’s wife said.
“I can tell you it’s not from this side of the mountains. I can tell you it’s damn smart. I can tell you while we’re arguing, it’s picking up our intentions in the ambient and telling a thirteen-year-old girl what we’re apt to do, and it’s only begun to do its work on this mountain if we don’t stop it here, Lucy. I’ll swearthat to you.”
“I’ll go put it to Darcy,” John Quarles said. “She’ll listen to me.”
“Not alone,” Ridley said. “Line of sight. Rifles lined up and us watching.”
“I’m aware the beast is dangerous,” the preacher said. “But if your theory is right, diminishing the threat to the girl andthe beast might actually lessen the danger.”
“I’ll have that porch in my rifle sights. —Listen to me, preacher. I’m asking you, don’t endanger anybody including that girl. Trust mygood wishes and if you hear anything untoward on that porch, drop flat instantly and I’ll shoot right over you. Don’t confuse our aim. Trustus. All right?“
“I’ve every confidence,” Quarles said, and handed his shotgun to the marshal. “But most of all, I’ll trust in the Lord.”
Quarles walked out through the falling snow, then.
Brave, Ridley gave him that, as he slid down from Slip’s back and lifted his rifle—not the only one drawing a bead on that area.
“Stay still,” Callie was saying to Jennie, and to all the people around them.
“She’s just real mad,” Jennie said quietly, her thoughts rising very softly to the top of the ambient. “She knows we’re here. She knows Randy’s here. She knows about the preacher coming to the door. She’s not happy at all. She wants it to come and drive us away.”
Jennie was sending too much, Ridley realized that too late. Jennie and Brionne were trading fartoo much, and what had been a quiet struggle between two kids was suddenly reaching after all of them. The rifle wanted to shake in his hands as he stared down the sight and widened his focus to the whole porch, any movement in the snow-obscured night.
Then he knew something else—a wider ambient than had existed. It had direction. Distance. Outside the wall.
Horses. On the road.
<Danny and Cloud,> it was. More than one rider. But that was definitely <Cloud.> And Jennie and Callie knew it from him.
<Danny> hit the ambient and shivered in the air, force added to their force.
He thought then of calling out to the preacher to come back. But he thought if a preacher could ever bein the ambient, John Quarles was there right now, and if ever they had the chance to reach Darcy, they had it now. Quarles knew something had changed just now, surely. He hadto be aware of the arrival.
<Danger flared through the nerves, and Danny still ran. Tara was beside him and he kept going, the way they’d challenged each other all along. The light was coming in the east, and they were on that last stretch of road that led them to a village under assault, a village where <blood> and <fear> had run riot and <desire> crazed the ambient.
They wanted, too. They wanted to be there, and around the next turning of the road, obscured in a thin veil of snow, Danny saw the village wall. He knew then they’d arrived and he pushed himself despite the ache in his side to keep running and not even to waste time getting up on Cloud. A jarred and frantic portion of the working brain said that in a crisis no one might be able to reach the gate to open it for them, and he might need to be on the ground to try to open it from outside. If the village had left the rope outside that made that possible.
He ran, he told the ambient <riders coming> as he stumbled down the last of the road. Cloud wanted <taking him up,> Cloud wanted <Shimmer and Slip and Rain, inside the wall, sensing danger. Horses listening to them as they came. Riders aware of them. Danger present—>
They reached the lesser gate through a trampled space that said that this gate at least had opened—but not in hours, Danny judged by the rounded edges of the prints. Horses were <inside the village,> at the other end of the street, no one was near the wall, and neither village gate had budged since yesterday.
Bad business. And the pull-cord wasn’tout.
“Damn it!” Tara said, and with her knife through a gap in the timbers tried to raise the heavy bar inside. Danny lent his hands to the effort, both of them pushing and struggling until finally it waslifted as high as they could hold it, and it wouldn’t clear the trip-latch.
They were atEvergreen, there was all hell broken loose inside as they listened to it, and nobody could let them in the gate.
He let off a rifle shot. It echoed off the mountain and into the ambient in a massive wash of <fear> and <hope> as everyone in Evergreen, deaf to the ambient or not, realized there was someone outside.
<Anger> came, too. Someone else—was fiercely <angry.>
They were shooting again, and Darcy flinched, though this shot was far away. “Listen to me,” John Quarles was saying through the closed front door. “Darcy? Darcy, —just for safety, I want you to find a sedative. I want you to find a strong sedative and get the girl calm. I know you want to protect her. You have a sedative, don’t you, Darcy?”
“Yes,” she admitted. But she didn’t want to do that. She didn’t want to lose the girl’s trust. Brionne was suspicious and afraid. Brionne suspected everyone out on the street, and John said terrible, incredible things, how something was prowling the village passages and it had killed people down at The Evergreen and it had killed Earnest Riggs.
She knew it was true, though. She knew the way she knew that people were outside and that they had designs on Brionne. It was as if pictures of everything were pouring in on her, John coming with the marshal, bringing her Faye’s body. She’d heard gunshots going off and it conjured that single shot that had echoed through the house, that moment she had known it came from downstairs, from Mark’s office. There were memories of blood, so much blood. Mark was a doctor. And he’d chosen that way, when there were easier ways in the locked cabinet. Mark had wantedviolence in the leaving of his life. He’d been so quiet. And he’d chosen violence for herto deal with.
He— dared—leave her—that unspeakable sight to remember. It was his anger. It was his spite. It was his blame. It was Mark saying again as he’d shouted at her the day before he died, Damn you, Darcy, shed a tear! Yell! Blame me out loud, don’t just look at me like that!
She wasn’t sitting on the couch, with John talking about God’s mercy, she wasn’t rocking back and forth like a fool, and still not able to cry, and John talking inanely about what colors to use at Mark’s funeral, as if anyone gave a damn. She was standing at the front door, and John was on the other side, begging her to drug the child senseless, when Brionne knew, she was sure Brionne knew people were betraying her. Pans were flying about the kitchen, crockery was breaking.