[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Ginny controlled herself with an effort I could feel. "Aren't you acting rather high-handed?"
"The circumstances require it, Mrs. Matuchek," he said.
She bit her lip and nodded.
"What's this about?" I begged.
The hardness departed from Shining Knife. "We're confirming what your wife evidently suspects," he
said with a compassion that made me wonder if he had a daughter of his own. "She's a witch and would
know, but wouldn't care to admit it till every hope of a less terrible answer was gone. This is no ordinary
kidnapping."
"Well, of course -- !"
"Wait. I doubt if it's technically any kind of kidnapping. My bureau may have no jurisdiction.
However, as your wife said the case may well involve the national security. I'll have to communicate with
Washington and let them decide. In the last analysis, the President will. Meanwhile, we don't dare rock
the boat."
I looked from him to Ginny to the horror that was again without form, not a thing to be fought but a
condition of nightmare. "Please, I whispered.
Shining Knife's mouth contorted too for an instant. He spoke flatly and fast: "we've ascertained the
blood is entirely the cat's. There are some faint indications of ichor, chemical stains which may have been
caused by it, but none of the stuff itself. We got better clues from scratches and gouges in floor and
furnishings. Those marks weren't left by anything we can identify, natural or paranatural; and believe me,
our gang is good at identifications."
"The biggest fact is that the house was never en-tered. Not any way we can check for-and, again, we
know a lot of different ones. Nothing was broken, forced, or picked. Nothing had affected the guardian
signs and objects; their fields were at full strength, properly meshed and aligned, completely undisturbed.
Therefore nothing flew down the chimney, or oozed through a crack, or dematerialized past the
walls, or compelled the babysitter to let it in. 3
"The fact that no one in the neighborhood was alerted is equally significant. Remember how common,
hex alarms and second-sighted watchdogs are. Some thing paranatural and hostile in the street would
touched off a racket to wake everybody for three blocks around. Instead, we've only got the Delacorts
next door, who heard what they thought was a catfight."
He paused. "Sure," he finished, "we don't everything about goetics. But we do know enough about its
felonious uses to be sure this was no forced entry."
"What, then?" I cried.
Ginny said it for him: "It came in from the hell universe."
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
"Theoretically, could have been an entity from Heaven." Shining Knife's grin was brief and stiff. "But
that's psychologically-spiritually-impossible. The M.O. is diabolic.
Ginny sat forward. Her features were emptied of expression, her chin rested on a fist, her eyes were
half-shut, the other hand drooped loosely over a knee. She murmured as if in a dream:
"The changeling fits your theory quite well, doesn't it? To the best of our knowledge, matter can't be
transferred from one space-time plenum to another in violation of the conservation laws of physics.
Psychic influences can go, yes. Visions, temptations, inspira-tions, that sort of thing. The uncertainty
principle allows them. But not an actual object. If you want to take it from its proper universe to your
own, you have to replace it with an identical amount of matter, whose configuration has to be fairly similar
to preserve mo-mentum. You may remember Villegas suggested this was the reason angels take more or
less anthropomorphic shapes on earth."
Shining Knife looked uneasy. "This is no time to be unfriends with the Most High," he muttered.
"I've no such intention," Ginny said in her sleep-walker's tone. "He can do all things. But His servants
are finite. They must often find it easier to let trans-ferred matter fall into the shape it naturally wants to,
rather than solve a problem involving the velocities of ten to the umpteenth atoms in order to give it
another form. And the inhabitants of the Low Continuum probably can't. They aren't creative. Or so the
Petrine churches claim. I understand the Johannine doctrine includes Manichaean elements.
"A demon could go from his universe to a point in ours that was inside this house. Because his own
natural form is chaotic, he wouldn't have to counter -- transfer anything but dirt, dust, trash, rubbish, stuff
in a high-entropy condition. After he finished his task, he'd presumably return that material in the course
of returning himself. It'd presumably show effects. I know things got generally upset in the fight, Mr.
Shining Knife, but you might run a lab check on what was in the garbage can, the catbox, and so forth."
The FBI man bowed. "We thought of that, and noticed its homogenized condition," he said. "If you
could think of it, under these circumstances -- "
Her eyes opened fully. Her speech became like slowly drawn steel: "Our daughter is in hell, sir. We
mean to get her back."
I thought of Valeria, alone amidst cruelty and clamor and unnamable distortions, screaming for a
Daddy and a Mother who did not come. I sat there on the bed, in the night which has no ending, and
heard my lady speak as if she were across a light-years-wide abyss:
"Let's not waste time on emotions. I'll continue outlining the event as I reconstruct it; check me out.
The demon -- could have been more than one, but I'll assume a singleton -- entered our cosmos as a
scattered mass of material but pulled it together at once. By simple transformation, he assumed the shape
he wanted. The fact that neither the Adversary nor any of his minions can create -- if the Petrine tradition
is correct -- wouldn't handicap him. He could borrow any existing shape. The fact that you can't identify
it means nothing. It could be a creature of some obscure human mythology, or some imaginative drawing
some where, or even another planet.
"This is not a devout household. It'd be hypocrisy, and therefore useless, for us to keep religious
symbols around that we don't love. Besides, in spite of previous experience with a demon or two, we
didn't expect one to invade a middle-class suburban home. No authenticated case of that was on record.
So the final possible barrier to his appearance was absent.
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
"He had only a few pounds of mass available to him. Any human who kept his or her head could
have coped with him-if nothing else, kept him on the run, too busy to do his dirty work, while phoning for
an exorcist. But on this one night, no human was here. Svartalf can't talk, and he obviously never got the
chance to call in help by different means. He may have outweighed the demon, but not by enough to
prevail against a thing all teeth, claws, spines, and armor plate. In the end, when Svartalf lay beaten, the
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]