Page 40 of What Happens at Nightfall

There was a grinding noise behind Adam.

Adam blundered back into a column as the statues in their niches turned, stone scraping against stone. The woman leaning on a pillar straightened. The man in his draperies reached for the sword carved against his side.

Their faces were blank, their eyes empty. That was the most terrifying bit, that those stone faces hadn’t changed. Adam wasn’t sure what scared him more, the thing in front of them or the mobile statues behind them.

“Um, Jess . . .”

“Shhh, I’m busy.” A milky light glowed inside the silver tracery of the parasol as Jess pointed it at the thing in the sky. “Whatever you are, go away. We don’t want you here.”

“Whatever you are?” Adam didn’t hear the words so much as feel them. They reverberated through his bones and buzzed in his brain like bees. Angry bees. “Don’t you know me, girl?”

It seemed to writhe and grow; it was grubs and locusts, blight and mold; it belched out foul scents of disease and decay. It was forests turned wastelands by armies of caterpillars; it was poison in the soil and cankers in the blossoms. It was smoke and flame and destruction and despair, and only the thin, milky light radiating from the parasol in Jess’s hand was keeping it from overwhelming them entirely. The pale light spread like a soap bubble, thin and shimmering and dangerously fragile.

The monk parrot in the cage was making itself crazy trying to get free. Adam didn’t blame it. He would have squawked too. He flicked the catch on the cage and the bird, after bolting into the bars out of panic, made it through the opening and shot up into the sky, winging as quickly away from the horrible boiling, roiling thing as it could

“I’ll teach you to remember me,” said the thing in the sky.

The candles winked out all at once. It was still twilight, but the monstrous cloud blotted out any hope of the sun, enveloping them in a darkness worse than night, blasted with frost and tinged with fire.

The reclining lady of the plinth half rose and moaned like the beginning of the old Masterpiece Mystery! intro sequence, when Adam was young and TV only had eight channels and marble didn’t move of its own accord. The wreath in her hand suddenly, improbably, bloomed with color, green leaves twining around each other. The scent of roses warred with the stench of decay coming from the thing in the sky.

And then, behind him, Adam heard a click. There was a click and then another, and another, as, one by one, the locks on the tomb began to turn without a key.

Behind Jess, the doors of the tomb were falling open.

“Watch out!” Adam wrapped an arm around her waist and hauled her out of the way as the doors burst open and a blast of cold, dead air rushed out.

The guide grabbed for her salt, swinging arcs of Morton’s best every which way, muttering, “Begone! Begone! I bid thee begone!”

Adam blinked, cursing, as a wild spray of extraneous seasoning hit him in the eye. Through a haze, he could just see as the pieces of the broken orb lifted themselves off the tomb floor, rising and swirling by the light of the plastic votive candles, which should have burned out a day ago but had flickered into renewed light, blinking like a disco of the damned, sending rainbow bursts of color refracting dizzyingly along the rows of Vanderwilt grave markers.

Jess gave a cry and the parasol fell to the ground with a clatter. Adam could see a series of welts rising on her palm.

“The staff! Get the staff!” The guide hurled herself across the portico, tripping on her own robe, diving for the parasol like a football player in the final quarter of a game, only to jerk back as though stung, while the thing above them reared back and howled with laughter, the sort of laughter that felled cities and sank ships.

A crackling noise, like the ice on a pond giving way, drew Adam’s panicked gaze back to the tomb. He rubbed his streaming eyes, thinking he was seeing double, hoping he was seeing double, as the stained glass portrait of Cornelia Vanderwilt detached itself from the wall, and, still two-dimensional, began to stalk toward them.

Adam wasn’t sure which one of them was screaming, but he strongly suspected he was. Lurching into motion, he shoved the door with all his might. It felt as if a hurricane were blowing from the other end, fighting him. After a moment, he felt the burden lighten and realized Jess was beside him, her singed hands flat against the door, pushing as frantically as he was. The door clanged into place with an angry screech.

Jess pressed her back against the grille, her fingers twining through the copper vines, closing around the elaborate pomegranates.

“Go away,” she repeated to the cloud in the sky. “Begone. Go hence. Avast.”

“Avaunt,” cried the guide, “you mean avaunt!” She was holding her horn-handled knife but her hand trembled so much that she was more likely to do herself an injury than anyone else.

“Right,” muttered Jess, “avast is pirates.”

The thing in the sky reared back. Adam had a vague impression of bulbous thighs and clawed hands. “Do you dare to mock me?”

The great bust of Cornelia Vanderwilt rocked on its base, toppling forward, as the world exploded in dust and flame, the pillars crashing one after the other, the roof plummeting down at them. Whatever terror he’d felt before was nothing to this. Adam grabbed Jess’s hand, pulling her with him as he ran. The ground was cracking beneath them, pitching them forward. Adam rolled toward Jess, trying to use his body to shelter her as chunks of masonry rained down around them. The grass turned to writhing snakes on either side of the path; flames licked between the cracks in the pavement, belching thick black smoke. It was Pompeii, it was Troy, the world reduced to ash.

His plants. Coughing, Adam struggled to his feet. His shrubs, his trees, his chestnuts and his oaks, his beeches and his ginkgos. He couldn’t let them burn. He could feel them there, just beyond that unnatural barrier of smoke, that foulness in the air, straining toward him, reaching for him, branches clattering, leaves rustling.

Out of nowhere, a clean, strong wind blew, driving away the smoke and sending Adam’s hair standing straight up on his head. But it wasn’t just any wind. The wind was golden with leaves, dancing and spiraling.

Next to him, Jess stirred, uncurling from her fetal position, lifting a face streaked with dirt and ash. “What is that?”

“Ginkgo leaves,” said Adam. An entire phalanx of ginkgo leaves. They swirled in the current of air, hundreds of them, thousands of them. They battered at the thing in the sky, slapping it, harrying it, making it writhe and sneeze and curse.