No more, she thought determinedly; no more, it’s over.

  “Roz, damnit—”

  She yanked her arm, and when he wouldn’t release her, she shocked herself by slapping him, hard, and broke away when the grip eased.

  Uneasy silence filled the downstairs room.

  “Kyle …”

  She shook her head and marched to the stairs. On the first step she leaned over the railing and glowered at them, and almost lost her resolve when she saw the stricken look on Kyle’s face, and the terror in Melanie’s eyes.

  Almost, but not quite.

  “Roz?” Melanie said.

  She managed a brief forgive me smile, sprinted up to the door, and slammed it shut before they realized what she was doing. Then she turned the doorknob lock and ran through the house, listening to them shouting, pounding, swearing at her and begging her not to do this.

  At the front door she paused and closed her eyes briefly.

  She heard them call her name.

  She saw Lynda lying on the cold damp ground.

  Then she zipped her jacket halfway up to hide the hammer’s head and stepped outside.

  She took a deep breath to calm herself, but failed as she sought for the next step in the plan that didn’t exist.

  She found it almost immediately.

  It wouldn’t do any good just to walk around town, keeping to empty streets in hopes that he’d come to her.

  That would take too much time, and there was no guarantee he’d appear.

  No, that wouldn’t do.

  She had to go where she knew he would be for sure. She had to go where he had been born of her own desperation not to let him leave.

  She had to go to Midnight Place.

  Twelve

  Roz stood at the end of her block with her back to the Grove, and looked up toward her house. A yellow bulb burned warmly over the front door. There was also a light in the attic bedroom window, and another one in the living room where her father was undoubtedly watching a baseball game. Her mother would be in the kitchen, fussing, or she’d be watching TV with her father.

  She sighed. Everything was as it should be on an ordinary spring night.

  Almost everything, she amended sadly, regretfully, almost everything.

  Behind her the pines whispered gently, the boughs shifted in a breeze barely felt.

  She touched the bulge of her windbreaker to be sure the heavy hammer was still there, then reached around and drew the sharpened screwdriver from her pocket. She held it up to her eyes. The rounded metal shaft caught a streetlamp’s glow and made the scoured tip glint like the blade of a freshly honed knife. She stared at it for a long moment before putting it back and patting it once for luck.

  Now or never, she told herself. It’s now or never.

  She turned and ducked into the trees, immediately stepping into darkness not even the rising moon could relieve.

  There were no paths that she could find. She had to wind around the gnarled trunks and low-hanging branches, moving cautiously because she could barely see the ground. Because of the thickness of the Grove, underbrush was scarce, but what bushes there were tried to snare her jeans and scratch the backs of her hands as she slapped the twigs and thorns aside with her fists and forearms. The ground too was uneven, and several times she almost turned an ankle when she stepped blindly into a shallow depression she thought was just a shadow.

  It unnerved her, this place; it didn’t seem natural.

  There was no sound but the sound of the branches husking overhead, her own labored, anxious breathing, and her feet crunching softly over the covering of dead needles that lay across the rocky earth. There was no light but a few stray slants of bright dusty silver from the moon, a light that only served to increase the depth of the shadows and make the going more difficult; and there was the sharp scent of the pines, and pine sap, with an underlying stench of things rotting in the ground.

  Ashford didn’t exist.

  There was only the Grove.

  “This is crazy,” she whispered as she tripped over an exposed root and nearly fell. She wished now she had listened to the others. She wished Kyle were here, and Melanie, too. She wished she hadn’t been so stubborn.

  And as she moved on what amazed and unsettled her most was how deep the Grove actually was. On a map it was only a thin line of green that poked into town for just a couple of blocks. Being in it, Roz couldn’t believe civilization was only a few yards away.

  If, a sudden thought suggested slyly, it was really still there.

  “Crazy,” she whispered again.

  She almost fell into the creek before she realized it was there, yelping her surprise when she came upon it without warning, and windmilling her arms frantically to keep her balance so she wouldn’t tumble in. The trees had parted suddenly, leaving a narrow strip of night sky above and allowing the moon to highlight the swiftly moving water.

  She crouched and stared at it, trying to see just how deep it was. The banks on either side were two or three feet high and not sloped at all, while the creek itself appeared to be no more than nine or ten feet wide in the small area she could see. Farther east, she knew it dipped underground just before the Grove ended; but the water here was black, and despite the occasional glints and stars of silver that rode it, she couldn’t see the bottom.

  Something skittered through the high branches to her right, and she froze, held her breath, staring hard into the dark until she convinced herself it had only been a restless night bird, or a hungry raccoon on the prowl.

  What else could it be?

  Her left hand fumbled along the damp spongy ground until it found a thin dead branch. She poked at the water as far out as she could reach and smiled grimly. It was only a few inches deep, probably no more than a foot or so out there in the middle, and it felt as though the bed was covered with rocks and pebbles. She tested it again in several places before tossing the branch aside; then she rose and dusted her hands on her jeans. She would have to wade, unless … there! A few feet west she discovered a triangular flat-topped rock settled in the creek’s center. It looked darkly slick, but if she timed it right, she’d be on the other side before anything could happen.

  She hoped.

  The branches rustled again, louder. This time she gave it no heed.

  She stepped back as far as the trees would permit. She took several breaths, ran, jumped, and struck the rock with her left foot, pushing off just as she felt herself slipping. Her landing on the far bank was clumsy, and she fell to her hands and knees in the high grass, the head of the hammer jabbing dully into her stomach. She winced but made no noise and instantly pushed to her feet again, wiping her hands on her jacket as she plunged back into the pines.

  The silence continued; the dark seemed much darker.

  The street should be just ahead, yet she could see no lights from any houses, no glow from any streetlamps, and once again she couldn’t help feeling that some kind of force had stolen the town away while she’d been in here.

  She shivered and zipped the windbreaker all the way to her throat, snuggling her chin against the smooth fabric until the chill passed.

  A bird warbled quietly, sleepily, above her.

  She almost screamed.

  Then she saw the first light.

  At first she thought it was a star, winking at her through the slow swaying branches; but a few minutes later she realized it was too low, and she smiled grimly. She had made it without breaking a leg or an ankle; now the hard part would begin.

  Moving even slower was exasperating and maddening, but she had no other real choice. She didn’t want anyone to know she was coming—assuming, of course, there was someone over there to hear.

  Especially the Black Rider.

  Her eyes strained to find a steady gap in the foliage, and when she found it, she strained even harder to see some sign of life—a house, a car, anything that would tell her Ashford hadn’t disappeared.

  As she stepped around a fat oak, she nearly fell over as the sight of the full street took her by surprise.

  Quickly she glanced behind her, just to see if the trees were still there. Then she eased back into the shadows, crouching beneath a heavy pine bough so she could take stock and figure out what to do next.

  She had found Midnight Place.

  It was a single block so long, she couldn’t make out the far end, and because most of the streetlamps were smashed, extinguished, or too dim, it was difficult to see even the homes that lined it. The ones she could spot, however, were darkened for the most part, quietly sitting back in the night, waiting for her to pass. Some were large, some small, some brick and some wood. But all had a curious aura of tremendous age about them.

  A wind kicked at her from behind, nudging her into moving down a gentle slope to the beginning of the tarmac.

  A pebble skittered away when she kicked it. Branches clacked and rattled as the wind picked up strength and blew her hair into her eyes. A dust devil rose in the gutter about forty feet away, dancing in the faint light of an angled streetlamp before collapsing upon itself and dropping the leaves that had been trapped inside it.

  She started walking down the center of the street—slowly, very slowly.

  Where are you? she asked silently. Come on, where the hell are you?

  Though she knew she wasn’t making much noise at all, her footsteps sounded like gunshots, and she soon found herself rising onto the balls of her feet, not realizing she had done so until her legs protested and she eased down again.

  Where are you?

  She reached the spot where the dust devil had died, and stopped. She glanced back again at the black thicket she’d just come through and pulled the screwdriver from her hip pocket. She had no idea what she was going to do with it, or with the hammer, but she had a feeling that if she could only knock the Black Rider from his seat, he wouldn’t be quite so terrifying, or quite so invulnerable.

  Something small and dark slipped across a lawn on her right, and she backed away from it automatically. It was a one-eared tomcat, drifting into the faint light, its narrow eyes flaring red, its tail switching nervously back and forth.

  They stared at each other for a long second before the cat abruptly bounded away and left her alone.

  The wind died.

  It’s like a ghost town, she thought when a shutter banged against a wall she couldn’t see.

  All the buildings are still here, but it seems like there’s no one home.

  There’s no one here at all.

  A question came unbidden: What kind of person would live on a street like this?

  The answer came swiftly and unpleasantly: Not the kind of person I’d want to know, I think.

  And that, she knew, was one of the dumbest things she’d ever come up with in her life. There was nothing wrong with Midnight Place, and all the stories were only stories. It was a street like any other street in Ashford, and she couldn’t prevent herself from feeling, rather abruptly, like a complete and utter jackass.

  Until she saw him.

  Thirteen

  The Black Rider waited at the far end of the block, barely touched by the feeble reach of a streetlamp behind him. As before, there were no highlights, no glints, no reflections—just him, and the black he carried with him.

  She had no idea how long he’d been sitting there, or where he had been hiding. It made no difference to the way she felt. Suddenly all those stories of Midnight Place she’d derided only a few seconds ago were no longer jokes, no longer tales to tell to easily scared youngsters.

  They were true.

  All of them were true.

  Fear caught in her throat then like a jagged lump of ice, forcing her lips to part so she could breathe through her mouth. It was a rasping, ragged breathing that made her sound as if she were drowning. She wanted to run to the nearest house, bang on the door, and beg them to let her in; or run back to the safety and protection of the Grove.

  She didn’t.

  Her fingers loosened, then tightened around the screwdriver’s beveled handle, and her left hand pulled the windbreaker’s zipper down to her abdomen.

  He waited.

  She watched him.

  At first, back there at Melanie’s, she had honestly thought she could stop him just by telling him to leave. It had seemed simple enough—if she didn’t really love Bart, and never really had, then the Black Rider, the spirit, would have no reason to exist. But now that she was here, and he had come, she knew that denial wasn’t going to work.

  She had summoned him.

  She would have to banish him.

  She saw a slight downward movement of his left arm, and the engine rumbled softly.

  Without shifting her head, she noted the open lawn on her left and the hedged lawn on her right, and the old and canted trees at curbside. A curious calm settled on her shoulders, and her lips formed a humorless brief smile. If he was going to try to take her down, she wasn’t going to make it easy.

  The engine purred.

  I can wait as long as you, she told him silently, lifting her chin defiantly. I don’t want you here, I don’t need you to protect me, but if you won’t go, I’m not going to run away.

  The engine sputtered and grew louder.

  He heard me, she thought in amazement. God, I think he really heard me.

  She took a careful step backward.

  The Rider rolled forward a yard, and stopped.

  She wondered then what the Rider would look like without his helmet, without that ebony visor hiding his eyes. Like Bart, she supposed, with a perpetual arrogant sneer on his thin lips, his right eyelid slightly drooping, a small white scar across the bridge of his twice-broken nose.

  My God, what did I see in him?

  She swallowed heavily.

  The engine rumbled, and she couldn’t help thinking of a huge black panther squatting in the road’s center, couldn’t help seeing slanted green eyes watching her tremble, couldn’t help seeing it gather its muscles for the charge at its prey.

  The Black Rider was a jungle cat, and she was more than insane for even thinking she could fight it.

  He straightened slowly, and slowly straightened his arms.

  Roz stiffened and gripped the screwdriver, feeling silly holding it, wishing she’d taken the carving knife instead.

  The engine rumbled softly.

  A wisp of gray exhaust drifted behind it, like a tail.

  Come on, she thought then. If you’re going to do it, for God’s sake, let’s get it done.

  The motorcycle rolled forward.

  She backed away a single step.

  The engine rumbled softly.

  Suddenly she realized that the Rider had been lulling her with his deceptively slow advance. Already, he had halved the distance between them, and she was so wrapped in her thoughts, in her recriminations and guilt, she hadn’t even noticed.

  But she could see the details now—the chromeless handlebars, the heavy, rough-tread tires, the shadows that floated across the face of the visor.

  It was beautiful.

  It was evil.

  It wanted to kill her.

  It charged.

  Roz blinked stupidly when the engine’s rumble became a sudden high-pitched whine, and smoke billowed from the tires as the tread sought to find its grip. But once it shot forward, she was back on the balls of her feet, shifting from side to side as she watched it race toward her, in and out of the hazy light thrown by the streetlamps.

  She eased to the left, and it swerved without slowing.

  She eased closer to the curb as the machine gained speed and arrowed straight for her.

  More than ever, then, she felt dumb for bringing the weapons she had, knowing she looked stupid as she held the long screwdriver in front of her as if it would do her any good, as if she were in a street fight and what she held was a switchblade, whipping back and forth, daring the bike to come even closer.

  It did.

  She tensed.

  And when it was less than ten feet from her and she could smell the acrid exhaust and the oil and the gasoline and the darkness that seemed to ride with it, she feinted left, then sprinted right, straight across the street. The Rider slammed into the curb, rose up on his rear wheel and spun around, landing squarely with a metallic crash and howling after her again.

  There was no time to think more than one or two steps ahead, and she looked frantically over her shoulder as the machine bore down on her, bellowing, smoking, its headlight snapping on and spearing her with its glare.

  Again she feinted left, and the machine didn’t veer. She feinted left a second time, feinted right as she ran, then flung herself headfirst over the hedge she’d noted earlier, rolled instantly to her feet, and ran in a crouch to the right, listening as the Rider skidded on the sidewalk as he applied the brakes, then slammed sideways into the hedge.

  Silently she cheered, and ran on, found a break in the hedging where it turned the lawn’s corner, and squeezed through just as the Rider looked over his shoulder and saw her.

  Without hesitating, she made for the closest tree and ducked behind it, leaning against it to catch her breath. At the same time, she could see him turning the bike slowly to face in her direction. Standoff, she thought; he can’t go through the tree, and I can stay here all night if I have to.

  But that wasn’t part of the plan that finally began to emerge. And if the Black Rider was truly Bart, or that true part of his nature, then she knew she had a chance.

  She stepped back into the street.

  “Hi,” she said, waving the screwdriver at him.

  He seemed perplexed by her boldness as she half-turned away and started walking to the other curb.

  “Nice night, huh?”

  He charged.

  She ran to another tree and whirled around it, using the trunk to whip her back into the street just as he reached it and veered sharply to avoid a collision. The next time she chose a tree closer to the Grove, and almost laughed aloud when the engine howled in frustration as the brakes squealed and the bike spun in a complete circle in its effort to stop.

 

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