Текст книги "Mysterium"
Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson
Соавторы: Robert Charles Wilson
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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 18 страниц)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Dex didn’t like the idea of driving into gunfire, but Shepperd’s plan was the only real option: make for the logging road and pray for confusion. The snow was deep enough now to be a real impediment, bad enough on the streets of Two Rivers and certain to be worse on a one-lane track through the forest. But he would worry about that later. His first task was to pick up Clifford Stockton and his mother, and his second was to put distance between himself and the fission weapon in the Ojibway land.
Linneth sat beside him with her attention focused on the predawn gloom beyond the windows. The streetlights burned pale amber overhead. There were lights in many of these houses, as if the buildings themselves had been startled awake. Dex wondered how much of the population had been warned about the escape. Lots of the parents had been contacted, Shepperd had said. Getting kids out was a priority, and school staff had been generous with names. The black community around Hart Avenue had been nervous ever since the Proctors forced them to register as “Negroes or Mulattos” on the town rolls; that was another substantial fraction of the convoy.
But Two Rivers was too big for a genuine mass evacuation. Word had spread rapidly in the last couple of days, but there must be many who simply hadn’t heard. Dex saw them peering cautiously from the draped windows of their houses, no doubt wondering at the sound of gunfire and all the unaccustomed traffic. Dex’s car was not the only one on the road. Several sped past him, too panicked for caution, and at least one ended up in the ditch beside La Salle Avenue with its wheels spinning vainly.
Dex pulled over at the address Clifford had given him, a house not far from Coldwater Road, and left the motor running as he ran to the door. He knocked, waited, knocked again. No answer. Was it possible that Clifford and his mother had somehow slept late? Or left early? In desperation he pounded his fist on the door.
Ellen Stockton opened it. She wore a housecoat and her eyes were red with weeping. She held in one hand what appeared to be a mason jar of oily water—but it smelled like bathtub hooch.
Dex said, “Mrs. Stockton, I need you and Clifford in the car right away. We really don’t have time to wait.”
“They took him,” she said.
The falling snow clung to her dark hair. Her eyes were red and unfocused. Dex said, “I don’t understand—you’re talking about Clifford? Who took him?”
“The soldiers! The soldiers took him. So go away. Fuck you. We don’t need you. We’re not going anywhere.”
∞
Linneth helped get the drunken woman dressed and into the car. Despite the occasional obscenity, Mrs. Stockton was too tired to fight and too intoxicated to offer more than a token objection. In the back seat she became a malleable object under a woolen blanket.
Dex sat at the wheel of the car. It was fully morning now. There were plumes of smoke all over town, Linneth saw, and still that sporadic crack-crack of gunfire—sometimes distant, sometimes much too close.
She said, “The boy is probably at City Hall. They have a makeshift prison there.” Unless he was dead. Which was possible, even likely. But Dex must surely know that, and Linneth didn’t want to say more in front of the mother.
The Stockton woman said something about a neighbor who had seen the soldiers taking her boy into City Hall—so at least Clifford had been there, not long ago.
Dex said slowly, “There may not be much of a guard. All the Proctors are gone by now. Soldiers, though, maybe.” He looked at Linneth.
She thought, He wants me to decide. Then: No … he wants my permission.
Because it was her life at risk, too, not just his own.
She thought, But we might die. But surely that was true no matter what. People were already dying. More would die very soon, and she would probably be among that unfortunate majority—and so what?
The Renunciates had taught her that if she died outside the Church she would be scourged by the angel Tartarouchis with whips of fire, forever. So be it, Linneth thought. No doubt Tartarouchis would be busy, with the war and all.
City Hall was five blocks behind them. She told Dex, “We should hurry,” wanting to get the words out before her courage failed.
He smiled as he turned the car around.
∞
Symeon Demarch sat braced against the plushly upholstered rear bench of the Bureau car as his chauffeur mumbled to himself and drove at a dangerous clip east toward the highway.
Demarch had stopped thinking about Evelyn. He had stopped thinking about Dorothea, or Christof, or Guy Marris, or the Bureau de la Convenance … he wasn’t really thinking at all, only gazing from this sheltered space at the pine-green and cloud-gray shape of the exterior world. He faced the window, where each flake of snow that lighted would cling a moment before it slid into wind-driven dew.
“Some trouble at the military barracks,” the chauffeur said. The chauffeur was a young man with pomaded hair and a Nahanni drawl: a civilian employee, not a pion. Demarch saw the nervous way his eyes flicked to the rear-view mirror.
They turned onto the highway heading south. This road connected with the route to Fort LeDuc, but it also passed the motor hotel that had been commandeered as a military garrison. Demarch said, “Is that a threat to us?”
“I don’t know, Lieutenant, but it may be. See that smoke up ahead?”
Demarch peered forward and saw nothing but snow, the same snow that sent the wheels askew whenever the car turned a corner. “Must you go so quickly?”
“Sir, if I slow down we might end up spinning our wheels for traction. I prefer a little momentum.”
“Do what you think best.”
A few moments later the driver said: “God and Samael!” And the car lurched sickeningly as he pressed the brake.
Ahead, on the left-hand side of the road, the military barracks was burning. It was a strange sight in the falling snow and Demarch was mute, marveling at it. Black smoke billowed from the many windows of what had once been the Days Inn. The flames rising from the embrasures looked almost like faces.
The road was blackened with soot but passable. “Don’t stop,” Demarch said. “Not here, for God’s sake!”
Then a window shattered. It was the front window, driver’s side. The chauffeur jerked and turned as if to look back, but his visible eye was full of blood. His foot convulsed against the gasoline pedal and the car bucked sharply as he slid away from the wheel.
The car rolled into a mile marker. Demarch was thrown forward by the sudden stop, and before he could right himself he saw the chauffeur’s bullet-cracked skull staining the upholstery with slurries of blood. A cold wind came through the broken window. Demarch looked past the clinging tines of glass to the pine woods opposite the burning motel, where soldiers were emerging through flags of smoke. They carried rifles. Most of their rifles were aimed at the car.
The soldiers took aim as Demarch scrambled from the right-side rear door. He was wearing his Bureau uniform; even at this distance they would know him for a Proctor. Glass exploded all around him in brittle showers, and he heard the whine of bullets and their hammering impact on the snowbound roadway. When he stood to run, he felt the bullets enter his body.
Then he was on the ground. The soldiers shouted and waved their weapons, but that sound faded into noise. Breathless, Demarch turned his head to look at the burning building. The roar of it was all around him. The fire had melted the snow into mirrors of ice: mirrors full of sky, fire, ash, the world, himself.
∞
Clifford Stockton had slept a little during the night. Lukas Thibault had not.
Each had been given his own cage in the basement jail at City Hall. They were separated by a dusty space in a room that had once been the building’s archives. All the filing cabinets had been moved out and their contents burned when Delafleur took over the building. The walls were concrete. The ceiling was white acoustic tile. The floor was green linoleum, and it was as cold as winter earth. Clifford had learned to keep his feet off it; his snow boots were scant protection. He spent most of his time on the tiny hemp cloth cot the Proctors had provided.
He woke to the sound of Lukas Thibault’s cursing.
“I want my breakfast,” Luke was shouting. “Assholes! We’re starving down here!”
Brief silence, then the rhythmic banging of Luke’s fist against the bars. Clifford didn’t bother to look. He could see Luke’s cell only by forcing his head against the bars of his own cage and peering around an L-bend where the cages followed the wall. It wasn’t worth the effort.
He was grateful for the relative privacy. Clifford emptied his bladder into the crockery pot provided for the purpose, embarrassed by the sound. It was cold enough this morning that the pot steamed for a few minutes after he was finished.
He sat back down on the cot and wrapped the blanket around himself.
“Fuckers!” Luke was screeching. “Cretins! Bastards!”
Clifford waited until the soldier had lapsed back into silence. Then he said, “They aren’t here.”
Luke said, “What?”—startled, as if he had forgotten Clifford was in the basement with him.
“They’re not here!” It was obvious. For hours after dark the building had been full of sound: legions of feet upstairs, doors opening and closing, motors roaring and then fading away beyond the high, dust-clogged windows that vented the basement. “They’re gone. They evacuated. Today must be the day.”
The day of the bomb, he didn’t need to add. That was why Luke was here: for talking about the bomb.
That was also why Clifford was here, though no one had told him so—no one had talked to him. The soldiers had just put him in this cage and gone away.
It was too late now to do anything but wait, and he told Luke so.
Thibault called him a little idiot, a criminal, a liar. “They can’t leave me here. Sons of Samael! Even the Proctors wouldn’t do that!”
But the morning ticked on and Luke lapsed into a despairing silence. Clifford knew it was past dawn by the faint light in the vent windows. That was his only clock. The shadowy fluorescent tubes overhead were the only other light—and most of those were burned out.
Clifford gazed at that patch of daylight far up at the margin of the ceiling for a time he could not calculate; it was interrupted only by the sound of Lukas Thibault’s sobbing.
Then there was another sound: gunshots, and not far away.
“Sophia Mother!” Luke cried out.
This was a new threat. Clifford was dismayed: better the bomb, Clifford thought, than a gun. He had read about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bomb washed everything away in a tidal wave of light. The people were gone with only their shadows left behind. He had resigned himself to dying in the bomb blast, but this gunfire was different. It worried him.
The shooting paused, crackled for a time, paused again.
Then the door marked FIRE EXIT swung open, and here was the Proctor Delafleur wide-eyed and with a pistol in his hand.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
In the beginning was the ennoia, and the world was made of light.
Then Sophia, a thought of the Uncreated God, committed the sin of creation. Cast out from the primordial Nous, she fashioned base matter, the hyle, and fertilized it with her spiritual principle, the dynamis, which is both seed and image of the World of Light.
Thus the world was both created and separated from its origins; it was matter with a kernel of spirit in it, neither kenoma nor pleroma. It was incomplete, less than whole; it was asymmetric.
Here was the metaphor Stern had found so compelling. It resonated with modern cosmology: pull a linchpin from primordial symmetry and everything cascades forth: quarks, leptons, atomic nuclei, stars; eventually kittens, dung beetles, physicists.
And in all this there is embedded an unquenchable epignosis, the memory of that ancient isotropic unity of all things in the uncreated world.
Sophia, abandoned, wanders the infinite shoals of hylic matter with her terrible longing for the light. And yet—And yet… Sophia laughed.
Howard had found the phrase in Stern’s notebook, circled and underlined and crowned with question marks. Sophia laughed.
∞
Howard calculated that he had to walk a hundred yards across the parking lot of the Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory to reach its central building, the collapsed concrete-block structure where—perhaps—Stern had died.
It was not a long distance, ordinarily. But this was no longer an ordinary place. He had passed the boundaries of the ordinary. He was inside the glow.
No snow fell here. The air was suddenly moist and warm; the neat bordered lawns near the workers’ quarters were green, though the grass had not grown since the spring. Did time pass more slowly here? If so, Howard thought, his attempt to reach Stern might be futile; the bomb would detonate between one footstep and the next.
But he could see the snow falling only a few paces behind him, and it was falling at its usual pace. So time didn’t pass especially slowly here, though he supposed it might pass differently… and he took another step forward.
His vision was obscured. The eye didn’t like this environment. Nor did the other senses; he felt dizzy, awkward, alternately too hot and too cold. Most confusing, though, was this refusal of any solid object to hold still and be seen. Images curved and lost proportion as if the act of seeing them challenged their reality.
Observation, Howard thought, was a kind of quantum guillotine: it sliced uncertainty into this or that, particle or wave. Here there seemed to be no such effect. The collapsing wavefront, the moment of isness, was imprecise, too fluid, as if he were experiencing time a fraction of a second before anything happened. For instance, this asphalt under his feet. Glimpsed briefly, it was the lab parking lot, spaces marked with whitewashed numbers, 26, 27. Stare too long and it became granite or glass or grains of crystalline sand. And the temptation to stare was immense.
He understood why the firefighters had beat such a hasty retreat: too much exposure to this would surely affect more than the senses. Madness must look like this, Howard thought.
But he took another step and another after that.
The light around him was bright but sourceless. It wasn’t daylight. It pervaded everything; everything was lit up from within. Colors were divided, split as if by a prism into countless bands. Every motion was a blur.
He took another step and another, though his stomach was churning. There was a turbulence all around him. The air itself seemed to solidify and take form, as if translucent bodies were moving through it. More ghosts, he supposed. Maybe they really were ghosts, the restless remains of the men and women who had died in these bunkers the night of the explosion.
But Howard doubted it. There was something purposive in the way they crossed his path, circling the laboratory buildings as if they were trapped here, and perhaps they were: maybe these were the creators of the fragment, still attached to it, orbiting it a helpless half step out of time.
He shook his head. Too much speculation: that had been Stern’s downfall.
Stern, who was calling him onward. Set aside the rationalization and that was why he was here: Stern had called him. And Stern was calling him yet.
∞
You might be as smart as your uncle, Howard’s mother used to say. It was a compliment, a suspicion, a fear.
Stern had always loomed over him like a monument, stony and unapproachable. In Howard’s family no-one talked much about the important things. But Stern always came with a baggage of big ideas and he always shared them with Howard. Teased him with them: You like this morsel? Then how about this? And this?
Howard remembered his uncle leaning forward from the cane chair on the porch, on a summer evening alight with stars and fireflies, his voice obscuring the faint rattle of china dishes on a faraway table: “Your dog sees the same world we do, Howard. Your dog sees those stars. But we know what they are. Because we can ask the right questions. And that’s knowledge the dog can never share. By his nature: never. So, then, Howard—do you suppose there are questions even we can’t ask?”
∞
Fireflies here, too: sparks in his vision.
He was approaching the central building. Its roof had collapsed, but the concrete-block frame was intact. A crack ran through the steel door. On closer inspection, the brickwork was filleted with jewels; diamonds clung like barnacles to every wall. There was something seductive about these faceted surfaces and Howard was careful not to stare too long. There were other horizons here, not his own.
He touched the door. It was hot. This was real heat, and he was probably close enough to the core event that he was being bathed with real radiation. Enough to kill him, probably, but that was of no concern any longer.
He had used the word awestruck in the past without knowing what it meant, but now he understood it. He was stricken by awe, consumed by it; it obliterated even his fear.
This was the place where his uncle had crossed the border of the world.
∞
If Stern had brought them all here, did that make Stern a Demiurge?
Had he found this world or actually made it? Constructed it, consciously or unconsciously, with the aid of the Turkish fragment, from his own fears and hopes?
If so… then, like Sophia, he had made an imperfect thing.
Everything he had wanted from his ancient books, a key to the pain and the longing he felt, a cosmogony beyond physics, here in the world of the Proctors it was all transmuted into something base: a lifeless dogma. Everything noble in it had grown calcified and oppressive.
Maybe Stern was lost, Howard thought. Trapped in his own creation and helpless to redeem it. Am I prepared to face a god? He shuddered at the thought. But he opened the cracked and jeweled door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
With daylight, the town surrendered to panic.
Fire broke out in the Beacon Street business district and there was no one to control it; Tom Stubbs had headed west, along with most of the Volunteer Fire Department. Flames swept through the Emily Dee Large-Size Fashion Shop, the New Day Bookstore, and an empty corner property with boarded windows on which the faint words COMING SOON! ANOTHER FRY CASTLE FAMILY RESTAURANT were still faintly legible.
Refugees approaching Coldwater Road encountered a roadblock manned by a detachment of soldiers—word of the escape attempt had leaked—but the lead cars, including Calvin Shepperd’s, each carried three sharpshooters and the cream of Virgil Wilson’s collection of semiautomatic rifles. The gunfire began before dawn and continued sporadically through the morning.
Three truckloads of soldiers, turned back from the road to Fort LeDuc by steel gabions and a skirmish line of tanks, passed through town at high speed.
One truck made it nearly to Coldwater Road before a rear guard of armed civilians caught it in a crossfire. The driver was killed instantly and spared the knowledge that his last act had been to steer the vehicle over a barricade and down a vertical embankment into the shallow ice of Powell Creek.
The second truck headed north in a vain attempt to cross the firebreak and reach safety; it broke an axle in a snowy hydroelectric right-of-way. Twenty-five soldiers without winter clothes or adequate supplies formed a line and marched into the dark woods, hoping to outrun the angel Tartarouchis.
The third truck turned over in front of City Hall, spilling a cargo of angry draftees who fanned out and began to empty their rifles into the unblinking facades of these alien houses, in this town on the edge of the Abyss, this Temple of Grief.
∞
Dex started a turn onto Municipal Avenue when he saw the soldiers among the trees on the City Hall promenade—and the soldiers saw him.
Taken by surprise, he twisted the steering wheel hard right. The road surface was too slick for traction. The car slid at a skewed angle toward the sidewalk and Dex fought to keep the wheels out of a drainage ditch. Something pinged from the hood: he saw the new dent and a gleam of steel where the paint had been scoured by a bullet.
He told Linneth to get down. “And keep her down, too!”—Ellen Stockton, who was gawking at the soldiers with boozy incomprehension.
The car stopped shy of the ditch. Dex threw it into reverse and stepped on the gas with as much restraint as he could muster—but the wheels only raced on a slick of compressed snow.
He worked the gear shift, rocking the car forward and back. When he spared a glance down the street he saw a soldier maybe a hundred yards away—a kid, it looked like, barely voting age, aiming a big blue-barreled rifle at him. It was a mesmerizing sight. The soldier’s aim wobbled and then seemed to steady. Dex hunkered down and goosed the gas pedal again.
A bullet popped two of their windows—back seat, left and right. The safety glass fell away in a rain of white powder. Linneth emitted a stilled scream. Dex stomped the accelerator; the car roared and leaped forward in a cloud of blue exhaust.
He worked the vehicle into a turn and steered away from the soldiers. He heard more bullets strike the trunk and bumper, harmless pings and thunks—unless one of them happened to find the gas tank.
He steered left on Oak, still fighting the wheel. The car danced but moved approximately north.
He was two blocks gone and around another corner before he dared slow down.
“Christ Jesus!” Ellen Stockton said suddenly, as if all this had only just registered. “What are they doing to Cliffy!”
“It’s all right, Mrs. Stockton,” Dex said. He looked at Linneth. She was pale with anxiety, but she nodded at him. “They don’t seem to have any particular interest in the municipal building. We’ll just have to go in from the back.”
Time was a precious commodity, and worse, there was no way to know exactly how precious it really was. Nevertheless, he waited in the car until the sound of the soldiers’ sporadic gunfire had moved away.
He was two streets beyond City Hall, in a quiet residential neighborhood—quieter than ever, except for the pop and echo of the gunshots. The road was flanked on either side by tall row houses, old buildings but carefully preserved. Some of these houses were empty; some, undoubtedly, were still occupied, but the occupants weren’t showing themselves. The snow fell in gentle gusts. On some distant porch, a wind chime tinkled.
It was cold, Ellen Stockton said, with the wind coming in these shot-out windows.
“Get under the blanket,” Dex said. “I want you to stay here while we’re gone. Can you do that?”
“You’re going to get Cliffy?”
“I mean to try.” Though it looked more and more like a futile effort, or worse, a gesture. City Hall had been evacuated. Clifford Stockton, in all likelihood, had been killed or carried off to Fort LeDuc.
He told Linneth, “Maybe you should stay here with Ellen.”
“I’m sure she’ll be all right.” She looked at him steadily. “It’s a misplaced chivalry. I’m not baggage, Dex. I want to find him, too.”
He nodded. “We should go on foot. It’s less conspicuous.”
“A good idea. And don’t forget about that pistol in your jacket.”
The funny thing was, he had. He took it from the vest pocket and slid the safety off. The grip was cold in his hand.
∞
They moved across a snow-humped backyard, over a cane fence collapsed and unrepaired, across another quiet street. The wind swirled snow into exposed skin and sifted it like sand against Dex’s vinyl jacket.
He reminded himself that Clifford was not David. It was tempting to yield to that obvious parallel: back into another doomed building to save another doomed child. Tempting, Dex thought, but we’re not allowed to reenact our sins. It doesn’t work that way.
But the memory came back more powerfully than it had in a long, long time, and he made room for it. Some part of him welcomed it. It was possible to smell the reek of burning in all this cold snow.
∞
There were no soldiers in the space behind City Hall, only a narrow corner of the Civic Gardens and the white wasteland of Permit Parking Only. No one had been here lately, Dex thought. The snow was pristine. He hurried into the shadow of the building with Linneth next to him.
City Hall was not a large building under all its stone facades and sculpted lintels. It contained an assembly room, a rotunda, and a battery of offices on two floors. And the basement. In better times he had visited this building sporadically, to renew his driver’s license and pay his rates.
The employees’ entrance was unlocked. Dex stepped inside with his pistol drawn, then beckoned Linneth after him. He listened for voices but heard only the rush of the wind through some distant vent. To his left, stairs led upward. He followed them to the second floor and out into an empty broadloomed hallway.
He passed doors marked OMBUDSMAN, LICENSE BUREAU, LAND MANAGEMENT. All these doors were wide open, as if the rooms had already been searched. “All abandoned,” Linneth whispered. She was right. Papers had been strewn everywhere, many with the letterhead of the Bureau de la Convenance plainly visible. Some of the office windows were broken; the wind rattled vertical blinds and rolled plastic cups like tumbleweeds over the carpet.
Dex touched Linneth’s arm and they both stood still. He said, “You hear that?”
She cocked her head. “A voice.”
He held the pistol forward. A marksmanship course in the Reserves had not prepared him for this. His hand was shaking—a gentle tremor, as if an electric current were running through him.
He located the source of the voice in the anteroom of the Office of the Mayor: it was a radio… one of the Proctors’ radios, an enormous box of perforated metal and glowing vacuum tubes. It was plugged into a voltage converter that was plugged into the wall.
It spoke French.
“Quarante-cinq minutes.” And a continuous metallic beeping, as of a time clock, once per second. Dex looked at Linneth. “Quarante-quatre minutes,” the radio shrilled. He said, “What is this?”
“They’re counting down the time.”
There was another burst of speech, indecipherable with static, but Dex heard the word detonation. He said, “How long?”
She took his hand. “Forty-four minutes.” Quarante-trois minutes. “Forty-three.”
∞
Clifford recognized the man who came through the FIRE EXIT door. This was the Proctor the others had called Delafleur. An important man. Lukas Thibault drew a sharp breath at the sight of him.
Delafleur wore an overcoat nearly long enough to touch his ankles, and he reached into the depths of that garment and took out a gun—one of the long-barreled pistols the Proctors sometimes carried; a revolver, not an automatic weapon like the one Luke once showed him. The handle was polished wood inlaid with pearl. None of these refinements seemed to matter to Delafleur, who was sweating and breathing through his mouth.
Luke said, “Patron! Let me out of here, for God’s sake!”
Delafleur looked startled, as if he had forgotten about his prisoners. Maybe he had. “Shut up,” he said.
There was the sound of more gunfire outside the building, but was it growing more distant? Clifford thought it might be.
Delafleur stalked down the length of this basement room between the stockade cages and the wall with his long coat swinging behind him. He carried the pistol loosely in his left hand. In his right hand was a pocket watch, attached by a silver chain to his blue vest. His eyes kept traveling to the watch, as if he couldn’t resist looking at it—but he plainly didn’t like what he saw.
He pulled a wooden crate under one of the high, tiny windows, and stood on the crate in a vain attempt to look outside. But the window was too high and louvered shut. Anyway, Clifford thought, it opened at ground level. There wouldn’t be much of a view.
Delafleur seemed to arrive at the same conclusion. He sat down on the crate and fixed a baleful stare at the door where he had come in.
Luke said, “Please, Patron! Let me out!”
Delafleur turned in that direction. In a prim voice he said, “If you speak again, I’ll kill you.”
He sounded like he meant it. Luke fell silent, though if Clifford listened carefully he could hear his labored breathing.
Luke had often been silent in the last few hours. But never for very long. Would Delafleur really shoot him if he made a sound? Clifford was sure of it. The Proctor looked too frightened to make idle threats.
And if he shot Luke, would he then shoot Clifford? It was possible. Once shooting started, who could tell what might happen?
But he didn’t want to think about that. If he thought about it, the cage began to seem much smaller—as tight as a rope around his neck—and Clifford worried that he might make a sound, that the terror might leap uncontrollably from his throat.
Time passed. Delafleur looked at his watch as if he were hypnotized by it. At the sound of each fading gunshot he cocked his head.
“They’re going away,” Delafleur said once—to himself.
More fidgeting with the watch. But the Proctor seemed to regain a degree of composure as the seconds ticked past. Finally he stood up and adjusted his vest. Without looking at the cells, he began to walk toward the FIRE EXIT.
Lukas Thibault panicked. Clifford heard the soldier throw himself against the bars of his cage. “FUCK YOU!” he screamed. “DON’T YOU LEAVE ME HERE! GODDAMN YOU!”
And that was the wrong thing to say, because Clifford saw Delafleur hesitate and turn back.
The Proctor shifted the long-barreled pistol into his right hand.
Clifford cowered in the corner of his cell, as far away from the Proctor as he could force himself—which was not very far. He had ceased thinking coherently as soon as Delafleur turned back from the door.
Delafleur walked past him with a steely expression, around the L-bend to where Luke was. Both men were out of Clifford’s sight now. But he could hear them.
Lukas Thibault had stopped shouting. Now his voice was low and feverish and hoarse with panic. “Bastard! I’ll kill you, you bastard!” But it was the other way around, Clifford thought.
