Where the Summer Ends - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,143
his new chapter to leave the material in his office. Instead he brings his notes home and works on the manuscript until time to leave. Had anyone thought to check his study?
Someone would soon—if they hadn’t already. Climbing the stairs to his bedroom, Russ fumbled through his dresser. There it was—in a box crammed mostly with cufflinks, tie-tacs and spare keys. The key to his house that Stryker had given him once when the author left for several months knocking about Mexico.
A look of angry resolve on his black-stubbled jaw, Mandarin snatched up the key and stalked to the garage. The battery was low in the old GTO that he’d kept because it had been Alicia’s favorite car, but the engine caught at the last moment. With an echo of throaty exhaust, he backed out of the garage.
His plans were only half formulated, as he carefully steered the rumbling Pontiac through the downtown streets. He meant to check Stryker’s study immediately, however. If the chapter manuscripts were there, he’d take it to read, and Brooke Hamilton could go to hell. And if he didn’t find the manuscript— maybe that would be because somebody had already broken into the house. A horrid grin twisted Mandarin’s face. He’d like for that to be the case. Like to show the evidence to Saunders, place charges against Brooke Hamilton for stealing from a dead man.
It was past 11, and traffic was thinning out—for which Russ was grateful. With far more caution than was his custom, he overcame his impatience and made the short drive out Lyons View Pike without mishap.
He turned into the empty drive and cut his lights. Stryker’s house, an old brick farmhouse laid out in a T, hunched dark beneath huge white pines. The windows were black against the brick from the front; the remainder of the house was shadowed by the looming pines from what little moonlight the clouds hadn’t kept.
Mandarin remembered a flashlight in the glove compartment and dug it out. The beam was yellow and weak, but enough to see by. Suspiciously he played the light across the front of the house. Seeing nothing untoward, he started around back.
The front of the house was two storeys and contained living quarters. Like the stem of a T, the rear section came out perpendicularly from the rest—a single-storey wing that housed kitchen and storage. A side porch came off from one side of the kitchen wing, where Stryker and Russ had spent many a summer evening, slouched in wooden rockers and with something cold to drink.
Having seen nothing out of the ordinary, Russ crossed the unscreened porch to the kitchen door, jabbed his key at the lock. As he fumbled for the knob, the door nudged open.
Mandarin brought up his flashlight. The old-fashioned latch had been forced.
He breathed a silent curse. Stealthily he pushed open the door, stepped inside.
Thunder spat flame from across the room. Russ pitched backward onto the porch, and the flame burst across his skull.
•VIII•
She was the most beautiful, and at the same time the most frightening, woman Mandarin had ever seen. She danced in a whirl of blue, how could his heart forget? Blue were the skies, and blue were her eyes, just like the blue skirt she wore...
And she whispered to him as she waltzed, and the things she whispered to him were beautiful, and Mandarin wanted to hear more, even though her whispers terrified him.
And the more she danced and whispered and sang, the worse his vertigo became, and he was dizzy and falling, and he was clutching at her blue skirt to keep from falling, and she kept dancing away from him, and he cried out to her to come back...
He didn’t understand...
But he had to understand...
“Come back!” he screamed. His voice was a tortured rasp.
The blue light became a lance of blue flame, searing his brain. And her hands of coldest ice pierced through him and seized upon his soul, and the blue lady was drawing him away, pulling him through the darkness...
Dimly, through the haze of throbbing pain, Mandarin became aware of the man bending over him.
Gritting his teeth, he forced his eyes to focus. It was hard. A bright beam of light bored into his face.
“Christ! He’s coming around, Sid!”
The light swept away.
Mandarin struggled to rise—groaned and fell back. Bright flashes of pain rippled from the numbing ache of his skull.
“Just stay put, buddy. Jesus! We thought you were...”
Russ’s vision was clearing. Blotchy green afterimages swam across his eyes. But