“In the big fucking fire!” swore Hennings. “That mean we can’t get out?”
“Wait,” said Lori, pushing past them all and walking slowly, fearfully toward the dully gleaming great doors.
“What’s she going to do?” hissed J.B. “Lean her tits on it?”
“Shut up, Dix,” warned Krysty. “Looks like the kid knows something we don’t.”
About six feet from the portal, Lori hesitated, then took two more long strides forward, her little spurs tinkling.
At first nothing seemed to happen.
Then like a metallic giant unclenching his fists, the doors began to slide ponderously back, letting in a waft of humid air that made all seven of them gasp. The doorway was nearly forty feet wide, and when the doors finally stopped moving, a stretch of corridor, around two hundred paces in length, was revealed. At its end was a steel wall with an ordinary-sized door set in it.
“Come,” said Lori, stepping briskly forward, followed by the others with varying degrees of reluctance.
On the right-hand wall someone had neatly stenciled the word Goodbye .
“How d’you know just to walk up to it like that?” shouted Ryan, his words ringing out above the echoes of boot-heels.
Turning her head over her shoulder, Lori answered, “Back door out home. Quint show me. Earth slip and cover it. Look same. Eyes see us and open door. Eyes of dead men.”
“Mebbe boobied, girl,” called Hennings, running past her, stopping at the door and pushing cautiously at the handle. “Locked!” he bellowed.
“No,” said the girl, moving him aside and taking the handle in her right hand. She pulled it slowly toward herself.
It was unlocked.
Henn followed the tall blond girl out into the daylight. Ryan came next, with the others at his heels. He stood on the threshold of the building, staring out. The light was oddly diffused, with shifting green shadows moving in the doorway. He drew a deep breath, filling his lungs, tasting the air, savoring it like a connoisseur.
Ryan Cawdor had visited many parts of the continent. He had walked the cracked avenues of New York City, through the groves of whispering vegetation with poisonous flowers and berries on every corner. Gazed across the oily brew of chemicals to the charred stump of what had once been a mighty statue. Something the locals mostly called Libberlady.
He’d been in the cold and ice of the north and down in the glowing rad-crazy wastes of the southern deserts, where chem clouds flamed from east to west. If J.B. was right, and they were in the southeast, then it was new territory for him.
“Some ozone,” he muttered. “Can taste gas. Mebbe in the ground or water. Fireblast, but it’s hot and wet here.”
Already he was sweating, a trickle of perspiration running down the small of his back. From habit he glanced behind him, seeing to his surprise that virtually all of the gateway was below ground. Creepers twined all about the shallow concrete single-story building, covering it with an impenetrable mat of gray-green foliage. His first guess was that this superb natural camouflage was the main reason the gateway hadn’t been entered and despoiled.
“Here we come,” said Finnegan, staring out at the unbelievable landscape around them.
Krysty shuddered. Within the deeps of the limitless swamp that stretched all around them, she sensed a slow stirring.
It was not a good feeling.
Chapter Two
THE BLIND WOMAN SAT trembling on a large wooden chair, leaning against the high quilted back, arms folded across her breasts. She wore a thin cotton dress, with a dark brown stain on the right hip. Her right hand fiddled with the slim silver knife, sheathed on a cord around her neck. Every few seconds her pink tongue flicked nervously over her dry lips.
All around her, in the lobby of what had once been the Best Western Snowy Egret Inn of West Lowellton, near Lafayette, Louisiana, men bustled about their business. Not one of them looked directly at her. If Mother Midnight had been summoned by their lord, then it was best to avoid any entanglement. The scar-faced woman was notorious as one of the most cunning of the witches. The magicians of the day were known as houngons, and were frightening enough. But Mother Midnight was one of the dark wizards, called bocors.