Only as I looked past the people in their Christmas sweaters and the stage below them, past the cowboy, did I realize that the night had undergone a frightening change. Directly overhead, stars winked between the tattered clouds, the edges of which were aglow with a reflection of an otherwise still-shrouded moon. But beyond the evenly spaced line of tall propane torches that defined the curving shoreline, the lake had been transformed.
Previously, the placid surface had been inky, and only the torches, reflected in the water, had revealed the presence of a lake. Now the pale soil of the shore seemed to flutter in firelight, as if it were alive and trembling with expectation, but the water did not mirror the flames, as though it had drained away. Earlier, across the portion of the sky above the lake, the clouds had been faintly luminous with the refracted lights of distant Las Vegas, providing just enough contrast to see the rising land along the farther shores. Unlike the heavens directly above this property, those looming over the lake were now so perfectly black that looking at them strained the eyes. The farther land and the lake that it had defined were now invisible.
The line of torches no longer marked the edge of the lake but defined the boundary between this reality and that wasteland I had seen through the windows—and from the roof—of the old industrial building in Elsewhere. Here, that vast cold hateful darkness met our world without the bridge of Elsewhere.
On the second-floor deck, more people were gathering, at least forty now, more colorful Christmas sweaters, and their conversation grew increasingly excited but at the same time quieter, as though they were anticipating the arrival of some special guest immeasurably more prestigious than the senator with the leonine mane of salt-and-pepper hair, far more glamorous than the movie star. Their attention focused now less on one another than on the absolute blackness where the lake had been.
A chill traveled through me, and it seemed that my blood had turned cold and thick. My heart pumped not just faster but also with much greater force, as though higher pressure was required to drive the syrup of life through the arteries to every extremity. I could feel the hard strokes of my heart not merely in my chest and throbbing temples, but as well in my eyes, my vision pulsing, and in the thyroid cartilage of my Adam’s apple, my larynx vibrating with each beat, and in the deep pit of my stomach, which might have been my aorta swelling with each surge of blood. The fear that rose in me was unlike any that I’d known before, raw, primal, like a hibernating lodger that all my life had slept in my bones, that I had not known was part of me, until now it came awake.
Within that oppressive gloom where the lake had been, a presence slightly less black moved, and then more than one. I could discern no shapes, no features. I became aware of things roiling, writhing, creatures that, in their biological convolutions, by far exceeded in strangeness the strangest living things upon the earth. It seemed to me the darkness through which they moved, out of which they came, was without end, that they were many and yet somehow one, that rising toward the shore was something vast beyond measuring and grotesque beyond human comprehension.
The cowboy turned his back upon the blackness. Slowly and without apparent fear, carrying the censer, he started toward the house.
I turned away from the window.
The nightstand lamps brightened and dimmed rhythmically, and because they were not in time with my racing heart, I thought their throbbing must be real, not merely the consequence of my pulsating vision.
I drew both pistols but then holstered them. Such fear as this could inspire irrational action, which might lead me to fail not just one or two of the children, but all of them.
Whatever gate had been opened to whatever realm, whatever presence or legion had come out of the wasteland to the shore behind the house, it was not here to find me and carry me away. It was here to witness the extreme atrocities that these people intended to offer in gratitude for the power and the wealth that they had been given, for the success in their careers that came from the dark grace of their patron. They were the real threat to me.
My palms were damp with sweat.
I blotted them on my jeans.
I held my hands before my face, watching them tremble—until they didn’t.
Whatever might be out there in the night didn’t matter. The world was proving far more mysterious than even I had heretofore imagined, but that didn’t matter, either.
The task that I needed to perform was the same task that I had needed to perform since I first saw that vision of burning children earlier in the day. The thing to understand is that you have to do what you have to do, always and without complaint.
That’s the way.