Chapter Four
Flames washed over Moon Face, who charged like a raging bull. Silas backed against a table that didn’t move. He tried to pivot, finding he couldn’t escape because dancers had crowded in too close. He couldn’t toss people aside as easily as the flaming madman’s twins.
A great splash of water hit the charging man in the chest and face, extinguishing the flames. He stopped and snorted as the water dripped from his face.
His suit was scorched and still smoldering, but Silas noted that not a hair on his head was singed, not an eyebrow or any part of his bizarrely coifed black hair. This was the Seeming at work. Moon Face wasn’t a man at all. Dammit, why did every good-paying job have to involve Silas in Other America?
He missed stock car racing.
Hell, he missed running moonshine.
The music started blasting again, an assault on the senses with staccato lights raggedly following the beat. Silas grabbed a chair, raised it, and advanced on the brute. Moon Face was only a few paces away when he abruptly turned and raced off to Silas’s left. His twin brothers followed close on his heels, ducking and diving through the crowd. The three of them vanished into the foyer.
“Huh.” They had had Silas dead to rights. They weren’t hurt. Where were they going? After the girl? He glanced back at the booth. She was gone, and the box with her. Good riddance. He’d find a pay phone, call the bookie, and get another job.
He shook his head. His ears rang like a bell, and the big goon had hardly touched him in the altercation.
Then Stacy was standing right in front of him. “I need your help. You have to get me to San Francisco. You’re only one who can do it by Sunday night. And I was told I needed you to protect me, and now you can see that I was correct.”
“What?” Silas put a hand to his aching head. He moved his ear closer to her mouth to hear her against the thundering music. Her breath was warm and sultry. He had to fight to resist the intoxicating scent of her perfume as his eyes searched the triangular foyer. He expected the goons to come charging back inside any moment. “What did you say?”
“I only have five days to deliver the deck. I can’t fly, I need you to drive me there. You can see what I’m up against. You saw those men. They were monsters.”
Silas tried not to roll his eyes. If only she knew. “I don’t know why they ran off like that.” He looked over his shoulder, to see if they were about to reenter the ballroom.
Stacy said, “I think they saw a girl who looked like me and they are chasing her out the front door. You and I can go out the back, to your car. I was told you’ve got a fast car.”
“I don’t take—”
Stacy put a finger to his lips. “I know, but if you don’t break a rule, they are gonna get me and I don’t want to think about what they would do.”
She smelled good.
Silas took a deep breath. The insane drumbeat matched his heart as well as his throbbing head. Everything screamed at him that this was a bad idea, but he couldn’t leave her to the goons. “Come with me,” he said, taking her hand and leading her out the back door of the club.
They shuffled through the throng of people. Twice they were pushed and pulled, and he thought the goons had found them, but it was just the bustle of the hedgerow of the mad throng dancing.
They passed the stink of the restrooms and burst through the back door, where Silas looked up and down a dark alley for any sign of their foes. Nothing.
He held Stacy’s hand, pulling her none too gently as they rushed to the street and then scampered across to the GTO, gleaming dark red under a yellow streetlamp. “Couple ground rules. You can’t sit in the back, got it?” He unlocked the door and glanced toward the club. How had they not discovered that she hadn’t gone out the front?
She raised an eyebrow at him. “Am I allowed to ride shotgun? Or are you suggesting the trunk?”
“Shotgun all the way. I just don’t want you thinking you can take a nap in the back seat. You can’t.”
“I get tired, I put a sweater on and sleep in shotgun,” she answered sourly. Then she threw her handbag into the back seat.
“Hey! What did I just say? Keep it up front with you, will you?”
“I didn’t see anything back there except for that burn mark on the floor. What’s the problem?”
He looked over the top of the car at her and explained with his hands. “I’m not trying to be a grump, I just have a certain way of doing things. And if things don’t go like I say, people get hurt.”
Stacy rolled her eyes. “You a grump? Naw, but you do make Archie Bunker look like Mr. Sunshine.”
“Just get in the car.”
They climbed inside. “You’ve got a CB radio?” she asked, ogling his setup.
He nodded. “Gotta stay ahead of the smokies.”
“It’s a beaut. What is this, a ’68 GTO?”
“It’s Betty. Call the car Betty,” Silas said as started the engine.
“Stop right there!” A heavy man in pinstripes lurched into place behind the car. He pressed his massive hands down on the trunk, and Betty sagged under his four hundred pounds.
“Does he have a gun?” Stacy asked.
“He doesn’t need one.” Silas looked in the rearview mirror, which revealed that the big pin-striped goon was not a man at all, but a stone-faced gargoyle. Almost four feet wide and seven feet tall, not including the batlike wings folded behind him.
That explained why the fire hadn’t fazed him.
“Get out of the car!” the gargoyle demanded. His jaw, a massive wedge of stone, barely moved as he spoke.
Stacy did a double take, looking out the rear window and then back to the rearview mirror. “What is that?”
Silas slammed Betty into reverse, knocking the gargoyle to the ground and running over his arm. In the rearview mirror, he saw the goon’s companions racing after them—all gargoyles. Throwing the Pontiac into first, then second and third, in an instant, they were already a block away.
He stomped the gas pedal, almost flying across the Bowery and then along Washington Square Park before turning. Racing up Sixth Avenue, making their way toward the Lincoln Tunnel and New Jersey, Silas kept looking in the rearview. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.
“I accept your apology,” Stacy said.
“I wasn’t apologizing to you.”
“Huh?”
“It was to Betty.”
“The car?” she asked.
Silas hesitated. “Not exactly. Yes.”
“You’re crazy.” Stacy tied her hair back, then glanced behind them. Headlights were following them, mimicking Silas’s wild changing of lanes through traffic as he weaved left and right to gain as much ground as possible and hit all the yellow lights. “What was that thing back there? Are they coming?”
“You saw that?”
“Of course I did!”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said as he raced through a busy intersection.
“I thought I saw a monster,” Stacy said. “You saw it, too.”
“Did I?”
The car following them ran a red light.
Silas shook his head. “They’re determined, I’ll give them that.”
Stacy glanced in the rearview mirror and gasped. She spun and looked at the back seat.
“What?” Silas grunted.
“I thought I saw someone in the back seat, but…she’s not there now.”
Silas grunted and tilted the mirror away from Stacy. He took a hard left, making the wheels screech as he banked and slid the rear end hard toward oncoming traffic before burning rubber and correcting.
He floored it for two long blocks and then turned right on Eighth equally fast and hard. Cars slammed their brakes and honked at him, left far behind already.
“You always this reckless?”
“Reckless? We’re being tailed by your goons. Why do you think people told you I was the best?”
“They didn’t tell me that. They told me you’d get me there on time, and safe.”
Silas snorted. “Same difference.”
She turned in her seat, watched out the rearview mirror, and breathed a sigh of relief. “You lost them, you can ease up now.”
He stifled a chuckle. “What makes you think we lost them?”
“I don’t see anyone behind us like that anymore. Now what was that monster that grabbed the car? It looked like a gargoyle.”
“See all those headlights?” Silas pushed her. “You think gar…those goons can’t drive?”
She swept hair out of her face and looked again. “I see them. Now what was that thing? You don’t seem as surprised as you should be.”
She didn’t seem that surprised, either. Silas tried to keep his face expressionless. “I guess I’ve seen a few things.”
“What kind of things? What is all of this?”
“You’re the one who called them gargoyles. They want you and your package. Who knows what else is hiding behind the Seeming?”
She fidgeted in her seat. “The Seeming? What are you talking about? Did you slip me a Mickey? Is that why I thought I saw a monster?”
Was she actually ignorant, or just playing dumb? “You saw them, same as me. I didn’t slip you anything.”
Stacy shook her head. “My father said monsters were real, but he couldn’t have meant like this.”
“Yes, Virginia, there are monsters out there.”
“It’s Stacy,” she corrected him.
“Figure of speech.” Silas raced past a van blocking traffic, so close that the vehicles’ mirrors tapped each other. Maybe she already knew. But if not, it wasn’t Silas’s job to protect her from the true nature of the world. In fact, if he was going to carry her across the country, he preferred her not to be completely in the dark. “If you’re seeing them the same as me you might as well know, they’re real. There is a complete Other America out there, combining all the haints of the New World with a bunch of walking immigrant myths of the old. The Seeming just keeps it hidden…mostly…and most of the time.”
“There’s another America?”
“There’s Other America, capital O, capital A. Gargoyles and elves and whatnot. This has Other America painted all over it. I mean, what is that deck of cards, magical? You said it was tarot. Special tarot? Funky old stuff? Are you a witch or something?”
“No! I don’t know what any of this stuff about a Seeming means, either.”
“It’s not a Seeming, it’s the Seeming. Look, there’s Other America, right? The mirror world to ours, full of the shadows your mom always told you didn’t exist. The things that go bump in the night, it’s all real if you can see it for what it is. The Seeming is the veil.”
“The veil?”
“The spell,” Silas insisted. “The glamour, the enchantment, the cantrip, the illusion. I don’t know what the right technical word is. It’s the veil that hides Other America, it’s the mirror world to ours, the shadow your mother always told you didn’t exist. The things that go bump in the night, it’s all real if you can see it for what it is.”
“I never knew my mother,” Stacy lamented.
Silas sighed. “Sorry, just another figure of speech. But, look…the pin-stripe guys…they’re gargoyles. Did you know that? Or did you just guess lucky?”
He looked at Stacy’s face and watched her eyes get big.
“Yeah,” Silas said. “So, the gargoyles of New York. That’s a big thing in Other America. Are they after you, or after the deck of cards you’re carrying?”
“I’m still learning,” Stacy whispered. “I’m doing my best.”
“Are you in construction?”
“Do I look like the hardhat type?”
Silas shrugged. “Gargoyles control all the building in New York. It’s no accident you see so many images of gargoyles in the construction.”
“Construction cartels? I thought that was the mob?”
“Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.”
Silas grunted as he took a hard right turn and then a left at the next block, both at breakneck speed. Then they were at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. Traffic was light, and Silas was grateful as he gunned the car, roaring through the darkness.
Stacy said, “Toll’s going up to a buck fifty, they say.”
“You’ll be laughing at ’em from the San Francisco Bay.” Silas watched his mirrors as cars turned into the tunnel behind. They were big black sedans, and he thought he saw the yellow glint of the tunnel’s electric lights striking stone behind the windshield.
Nobody spoke for a long while.
On the Jersey side, he reached into the glovebox, shoved aside a mummified hand, and grabbed the last vial.
“You gonna drink now?” Stacy asked.
“I drank a lot when I was younger,” Silas said, “only it turned out I was allergic.”
“Made you break out in hives.”
“Made me break out in handcuffs.”
Stacy snorted. “What’s in the bottle, then?”
“It’s not what you think, sister,” Silas said. “We still have them goons on our tail, and I mean to lose them.”
Glancing in the rearview mirror, Silas saw his suspicions confirmed. The driver of the car behind them had the stony, big-jawed face of a gargoyle. Heavy clawed hands gripped the steering wheel of the Lincoln Continental, and gray wings jammed up the space behind the driver.
“We got the turnpike coming up, hang on.”
Betty roared as she idled up to the tollbooth. Silas threw in a handful of change, watching the two…no, three Continentals behind them to make certain none of the gargoyles jumped out of their cars to attack. Then he gunned the gas.
“Hang on, St. Christopher.” As he got up to speed again, he leaned back and dumped the contents of the bottle onto the dark spot on the floor. The hideous wail filled the car, Betty exploded into forward motion, and Stacy grabbed the dash and the door to brace herself. Her eyes widened as she looked up, down, and every which way.
“What is that?” Her breath came in squeaks.
“I got a demon in the gas tank.”
“Be serious. You just mean you’re speeding.”
“Seriously, I have a demon. Well, half a demon. Look behind us and see the flames.”
On the straight freeway, the GTO quickly hit and then passed two hundred miles per hour. Silas gave Stacy his best grin and guided Betty around other cars at ever-increasing speed, watching as the Lincolns’ lights disappeared into the mass of glowing yellow blobs behind them.
Stacy went silent as Silas concentrated on steering them around cars and even onto the shoulder to get around traffic, with the roar of the engine accompanied by the dull howl of the demon. Other cars might as well have been standing still. One state trooper hit his lights, but then gave up immediately, as if stunned into submission. On a straightaway, with no real need to break or turn, the kick from a vial of holy water lasted a good long time.
The pain he knew his sister was feeling lay in his belly like lead. He had half a mind to use the rabbi’s painkiller, only he knew he’d be inflicting more pain on Betty in the near future. He’d save the scroll for then.
When Stacy’s breathing had returned to normal, she asked, “Are we out of the woods yet?”
“The woods, sister? The woods stretch from here to the Pacific. But I think Betty left those particular goons in the dust miles ago.”
“That demon’s wail…is that what it is?”
Silas nodded.
“It’s fading, but it’s still unnerving. Can we listen to some music?”
“Sure.” Silas turned on the radio. Heavy bass and drum raged from out of the back seat as Jimmy Page’s guitars and the high-pitched cry of Robert Plant rocked from the front speakers in a steady rolling rhythm.
“I don’t like ‘Kashmir,’” she said as she changed the station. “It’s too ostinato for me.”
Silas answered, “Big word, what are you saying? You don’t like Zep?”
“I like ‘Stairway.’”
“Of course you do.”
The next spin of the dial had another heavy rock song from Bad Company. Stacy dialed again and was rewarded with Deep Purple, once more and she hit on a Black Sabbath tune. “Where are the pop stations? Disco? Oldies?”
Silas ran his hand through his mop of hair. “The demon don’t allow anything except what it likes, apparently. And it only likes hard rock.”
Stacy hit the tuner again and it fell on Steppenwolf. She sighed heavily and did it one more time. It was still rock but this time she smiled and began to sing along. “Baking carrot biscuits! Every day! Baking carrot biscuits!”
“What?!” Silas spat out. “You’re joking.”
“No, I can rock out, too. If I like the song.”
Silas managed to suppress a chuckle. “Yeah, but it’s not…you know what, never mind. You keep singing it your way. You’ve got a nice voice.”
Stacy stopped cold. “Are you laughing at me?”
“No. I might be laughing near you.”
“You don’t like the song?”
“I like it fine. I’m laughing with you.”
“I’m not laughing.”
Silas shrugged. “Maybe you should be.”
She scrutinized him and went back to singing along.
Silas let her finish and then asked, “How about we come to an understanding on something else? Let’s see what the next song is.”
“Oh, I like this one,” Stacy said as Brian May’s signature picking began.
Silas sang and Stacy joined in. One tune flew by, and then another. He watched the freeway behind them for lights; no sign of the gargoyles.
“When can we take a potty break?” she asked, three songs later.
“Potty?”
“What do you call it?”
Silas shrugged. What did he call it, around a woman? He resisted looking in the mirror. “Pit stop, I guess.”
“Well, when can we make a pit stop?”
“Soon. I need to meet a friend and get some more holy water, anyway.”
“Holy water? What for?”
Silas shook his head. “I’m thirsty.”
Stacy harrumphed. “Just when I’m starting to think you’re okay, you have to go and make snarky comments like you want to make me feel bad. I thought we were becoming friends back there, singing Queen together.”
Silas glanced into the rearview mirror and caught Betty’s terrified eye. “You’re just a job, dollface, don’t think it’s any more than that.”
“You son of a—”
“I could still make you hitchhike.”
Stacy snorted and snapped back, “I’ll just ignore you, then, and try to sleep.”
“Be my guest.”