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  A DARKNESS IS COMING.…

  A figure stood inside the elevator, silhouetted by fluorescent light. Grace blinked against the sterile glare. The sounds of the Emergency Department receded into the distance, yet her pulse throbbed in her ears, mixed with the thrum of a hundred other heartbeats, as if the very air had become a stethoscope transmitting the life and sudden fear of all those around her. The figure stepped out of the elevator.

  It was him. The man she had pronounced dead three hours ago. He was naked, his skin mushroom pale. With mindless deliberation, the man with the iron heart walked forward, his bare feet slapping against the tile floor.

  Sound rushed back into the ED. Screams sliced the air in all directions as people scrambled to get out of the dead man’s way. Grace backed up against a wall. She knew she should run, but it was a dull knowledge, and could not connect with the nerves and muscles of her limbs.…

  This edition contains the complete text

  of the original hardcover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  BEYOND THE PALE

  A Bantam Spectra Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam Spectra trade paperback edition published November 1998

  Bantam Spectra paperback edition / November 1999

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1998 by Mark Anthony.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-19550.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79540-3

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, New York, New York.

  v3.1

  For Carla Montgomery—

  who has the Touch.

  For Christopher Brown—

  a true Knight Protector.

  And for Sean A. Moore—

  who understood the magic of Circles.

  For a thousand years the Pale King lay mantled in dark, enchanted slumber, imprisoned in his desolate dominion of Imbrifale.

  And then …

  Two worlds draw near.

  The spell is broken.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue: Brother Cy’s Apocalyptic Traveling Salvation Show

  Part One - A Coming Darkness

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part Two - Eldh

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Part Three - Calavere Bound

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Part Four - Circles of Stone

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Part Five - The Gates of Winter

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Postscript

  About the Author

  The derelict school bus blew into town with the last midnight gale of October.

  Weary brakes whined in complaint as the vehicle pulled off a stretch of Colorado mountain two-lane and into an open field. Beneath a patina of highway grime that spoke of countless days and countless miles, the bus’s slapdash jacket of white paint—a shade called Pearly Gates, just five-ninety-nine a gallon at the Ace Hardware in downtown Leavenworth, Kansas—glowed like bones in the phantasmal light of the setting horned moon. The bus’s folding door squeaked open, and two painted-over stop signs flopped out from the vehicle’s sides like stunted angel wings. One sign admonished Repent Your Sins Now, while the other advertised Two for the Price of One.

  A figure stepped from the bus. Wind hissed through dry grass around his ankles and plucked with cold fingers at his black mortician’s suit. He reached up a quick, long hand to keep his broad-brimmed pastor’s hat planted on his head, then gazed into the darkness with dark eyes.

  “Yes, this will do fine,” he whispered in his steel-rasp and Southern-honey-pecan voice. “This will do just fine.”

  Then the man—who had been called many names in the past, but who these days went by the moniker of Brother Cy—leaned his scarecrow frame toward the bus, like a lodgepole pine bending before the storm, and called through the open door.

  “We have arrived!”

  A chorus of excited voices answered him. Someone flicked on the bus’s high beams, and two cones of light cut through the night. The rear emergency door swung open, hinges creaking, and a dozen shadowy forms leaped out. They dragged a heavy bundle into the field and unrolled it with deft movements. More dim figures scurried from the back of the bus, wrangling poles and rope, and hurried to join the others. Brother Cy stalked to the center of the field and paced a wide circle, digging the heel of his worn black boot into the turf at measured intervals. When the circle wa
s complete, he stood back and looked on in satisfaction. Here would stand his fortress.

  Canvas snapped like a sail.

  “Blast and damnation, watch that pole!” Brother Cy shouted as his workers strained to stand a length of wood as tall and thick as a tree on end. A billowing shape rose up before him, like an elephant lumbering to its feet. Brother Cy prowled around it: the hungry lion.

  “Stake down that wall!” he roared. “Untangle those lines. Get a rope through that tackle. Now pull! Pull, or you’ll think the Dark One’s domain a sweet paradise compared to the hell I’ll show you!” Brother Cy thrust his lanky arms above his head. “Pull!”

  A score of dim forms strained. The mound heaved itself higher into the air, and higher yet, like a mountain being birthed. At last its pointed peak reached the top of the high pole. Ropes were lashed around wooden posts and tied off, stray edges of canvas were skewered to the ground, lengths of cord were tucked away. Where minutes before there had been empty moonlight there now stood a tent. It was an old-fashioned circus tent, what in days gone by had been called a big top, torn and patched in so many places it looked as if it had been sewn from the trousers of a hundred penniless clowns.

  Brother Cy clapped his big hands together and laughed like thunder.

  “Now, let the show begin!”

  Like wraiths in the half-light, the shadowy roustabouts bustled in and out of the tent. Parti-colored banners were unfurled. Collapsible bleachers were pulled from the back of the bus. Fire sprang to life in dozens of punched-tin lanterns, carried inside in a glowing procession until the tent shone gold in the night. Last of all a sign was planted in the earth before the tent’s entrance. It proclaimed in bold, Gothic letters:

  BROTHER CY’S APOCALYPTIC TRAVELING

  SALVATION SHOW

  Ailments Cured—Faith Restored—Souls Redeemed

  And below that, scrawled in crude script like an afterthought:

  Come on in—we want to save you!

  Brother Cy stepped back, crossed his arms, and surveyed his domain.

  “Does all go well?” a clear voice asked behind him.

  He whirled around, and a cadaverous grin split his gaunt face.

  “Indeed it does, Sister Mirrim.” He reached out to help a woman down the steps of the bus. “Do you see? Our citadel stands once more.”

  Sister Mirrim gazed at the tent. Her visage was smooth, even beautiful, but her old-fashioned garb was severe. She wore a tight-bodiced dress of funereal black, as well as high-buttoned shoes, the kind that could still be found to this day in the downtown five-and-dime of any number of dusty Oklahoma towns—the kind that bespoke the unforgiving hardness of another century. Yet, even in the pale light of the crescent moon, Sister Mirrim’s long hair shone flame red and flew about her on the wind.

  A child followed Sister Mirrim down the steps, a small girl clad in a black dress that was the older woman’s in perfect miniature. Her hair, however, was the color of the night, and she regarded Brother Cy with wise purple eyes. He lifted her into his arms. She coiled a small, cool hand around his neck and pressed her soft rosebud mouth against his cheek.

  “I love you, too, Child Samanda,” Brother Cy said in bemusement.

  “But of course you do,” she murmured.

  He set her down, and hand in hand the trio approached the tent. The wind whistled through the ropes and lines, conjuring a sorrowful hymn.

  “Will they come, Brother Cy?” Sister Mirrim asked, her voice like the call of a dove. “I have been looking, but I cannot see them yet.”

  He looked past the tent, down into the valley below, to a haphazard collection of sparks that twinkled in the high-country night. Castle City. There they huddled in the warm light of their little houses, unknowing of the darkness that approached. But it was so distant, this darkness, so strange, and so terribly far away. How could they know? How could they realize that their very souls hung in the balance? Yet somehow they must. That was why the three had journeyed here.

  “They have to come,” Brother Cy said at last. “There are so many who have a part to play.”

  Sister Mirrim shook her head, her question unanswered. “But will they?”

  It was Child Samanda who spoke this time.

  “Oh, yes,” she whispered. “They will come.” She slipped her tiny doll hands from the larger grips that enclosed them and took a step nearer the lights below. “But there are two whose tasks will be far harder than those of the others. We cannot know if they will have the strength to bear their burdens.”

  Brother Cy gave a solemn nod. “Then we can pray, my little bird.”

  A chill gust rushed down from the high peaks, and the three looked up to see the tent shake under the blast. Shadows played crazily across the canvas walls, cast from within by lanterns dancing on their wires, as the roustabouts scrambled to brace the tent against the gale. Some of the silhouettes were squat as stumps, while others were oddly tall, with fingers as slender as twigs. Some of them bore what seemed antlers, branching like young saplings from their heads, while others looked as if they walked on crooked legs, tails swishing in agitation behind them. However, rippling canvas could be a twister of shadows, and a player of tricks. The wind blew itself into nothing, the tent grew still, the shadows slipped away from the walls.

  “Come, let us go inside,” Brother Cy murmured.

  “To wait for them?” Sister Mirrim asked.

  Child Samanda nodded in conviction. “Yes, to wait.”

  Hand in hand once more, they turned their backs on the night, stepped into the tent, and left the small mountain town to sleep alone in the night below.

  1.

  Sometimes the wind blowing down from the mountains made Travis Wilder feel like anything could happen.

  He could always hear it coming, long before the first telltale wisps of snow-clean air touched his face. It would begin as a distant roar far up the canyon, nearly and yet not at all like the ancient voice of a stormswept ocean. Before long he could see it, rushing in wave after wave through the forest that mantled the granite-boned ranges that encircled the valley. Lodgepole pines swayed in graceful rhythm, while cloudlike aspen shivered green, then silver, then green again. Moments later, in abandoned fields just outside of town, he could hear the witchgrass rattle a final portent as it whirled around in wild pagan circles.

  Then the wind would strike.

  It would race down Elk Street—Castle City’s broad main avenue—like an invisible ghost-herd of Indian ponies. Past McKay’s General Store. Past the Mosquito Café. Past the abandoned assay office, the Mine Shaft Saloon, the Blue Summit Earth Shop, and the faded Victorian opera house. Dogs would bark and snap at passing newspaper tumble-weeds. Strolling tourists would turn their backs and shut their eyes to dust devils that glittered with gum wrappers and cigarette-pack cellophane. Dude-ranch cowboys would hold on to black hats with turquoise-ringed hands while their dusters flew out behind them like rawhide wings.

  Maybe he was the only one in town crazy enough, but Travis loved the wind. He always had. He would step outside the buckshot-speckled door of the Mine Shaft Saloon, which he had the dubious distinction of owning these days, and lean over the boardwalk rail to face the gale full-on. There was no way to know from where the wind had journeyed, he reasoned, or just what it might blow his way. He would breathe the quickening air, sharp with the scents of cold mountain stone and sun-warmed pine, and wonder whose lungs it had filled last—where they lived, what language they spoke, what gods they courted, if they courted any at all, and what dreams they dared dream behind eyes of a hundred different shapes and hues.

  It was a feeling that had first struck him the day he stepped off a mud-spattered bus—a flatland kid raised between the straight and hazy horizons of Illinois—and drank in his virgin sight of Castle City. In the seven years since, the sensation had come to him with surprising and comforting regularity, never lessening in potency with time. Facing into the wind always left him with an ache of wordless longing in
his chest, and a feeling that he didn’t have to choose between anything, because everything was possible.

  Still, despite his many musings, there was no way Travis could have imagined, on a chill evening caught in the gray time between the gold-and-azure days of fall and the frozen purple of winter night, just exactly what the wind would blow into Castle City, and into his life. Later, looking back with the empty clarity of hindsight, he would sift through all the strange and unexpected events to pinpoint the precise moment when things began to change. It had been a small happening, so small that he might not have remembered it had it not been for the fact that afterward things would never—could never—be the same again.