I ran around the corner out of the empty office to the front door. The inner side was also painted with a round-armed swastika that wasn't quite the same; as my fingers fumbled with the lock, the unoccupied portion of my mind noted that this symbol was "left-handed" -- the arms ran counter-clockwise, the opposite of what was painted on the outside of the door.
Philip Castler dashed in first, followed by Sammy Moapa, who slammed the door shut and threw the bolt across with a satisfying clunk. He and I peered through the wired glass of the window as a beat-up red Silverado rolled around the corner a block distant. Behind it was another pickup, and behind that a VW van.
"Mueller's brought company," I said.
Castler immediately ducked into the office to hide.
"Not in there," I said. "The window's the only way out, and I don't think either of you guys could fit through. Come on."
The front door was in the corner of the loading area. Opposite the door were a half-dozen concrete steps, leading up to the wide floor of the warehouse space. I led the way up.
The smell of motor oil and pigeon droppings hung thick in the air. The main floor of the warehouse was mostly empty, except for something recently constructed in the dead center, illuminated by high-set windows and a skylight.
"Hang on a sec," I said, and changed course.
What it was, very clearly, was a doorway. A frame of two-by-fours stood probably twelve feet high and eight across, buttressed for balance. The side joists were at irregular intervals with solid sections of copper wiring, and between the copper sections I could see symbols drawn on the wood with something black, probably a Magic Marker. Some of them were recognizable -- squared circles, many-pointed stars. Others looked like a fever-dream amalgam of Mayan and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
I stopped myself just before I stepped over the edge of a complex circle, or sequence of circles, spraypainted on the floor in several different colors and connected by other looping, curving lines. The floor for thirty feet around the doorway was being prepared for the invocation.
"Rennie," said Sammy. "We gotta get hid."
He was right. I could hear tires crunching on the gravel out front.
Behind Sammy was another staircase that led to a second level, almost a mezzanine, built over the back portion of the office area. Castler was already at the top, and Sammy had joined him by the time I got to the stairs.
From the undisturbed dust, Mueller had apparently found no use for this space, which was lucky for us. There were a couple of empty cardboard boxes stacked against the rail around the edge. We all dropped to our stomachs on the grimy floor, and with no light above or around us, were practically invisible from the floor of the warehouse proper.
The lock clunked back and the front door opened, and there was Hans Mueller, disturbingly all-American in his white T-shirt and denims with a satchel over his shoulder, topped with his blond crewcut. He moved to each of the accordioning garage doors, unlocked them with his key ring, and shoved them up creaking on their runners. In drove all three vehicles, and the passengers got out.
Skinheads. A full dozen young neo-Nazis -- pierced, tattooed, stubble-scalped and scowling. Just the kind of young punks that Philip Castler had decried earlier in the afternoon: Congenitally angry, using racism as a convenient way to put a face on a target that stood in for all of their own inadequacies and injustices. When the white supremacists with whom he had begun his conjurer's journey had come to lines that even they wouldn't cross, Mueller had found an even lower and less discriminating breed. And all came ready-tattooed with the very protective sigils that made them perfect assistants in Mueller's intended summoning.
Some used the stairs to come up to the warehouse floor; the more spry among them simply vaulted up from the loading area. Mueller headed for a pile of extra lumber and tools, and didn't bother to turn around as he spoke to them:
"We've got maybe four hours, tops. You've all got jobs to do. If you run out of things to do, I'll give you something."
It was the first time I'd heard his voice, aside from the single syllable hissed at Castler in Ernst Vielstich's apartment before he's attacked. Castler had told me how persuasive Mueller was, but I didn't realize how well Nature had set him up for his calling; his voice was a commanding baritone, the kind envied by counselors and radio hosts, and it filled the airspace effortlessly as if the warehouse acoustics had been designed expressly for him.
The skinheads grabbed boards and other building materials, and as they scuttled around the construction like cockroaches, I saw something I hadn't from floor level. The buttresses of the doorway were more than just that; they fanned out in very deliberate directions like stylized spider's legs, interlocking with the pattern spraypainted on the concrete. It was a third dimension added to the circles on the floor, the doorway a perfect functional metaphor for something crossing from one plane to another.
As the skinheads added boards to complete the pattern, Mueller moved from one spot to another. He wrote glyphs on the wood as if it were his birth language. He wrapped sections in copper wiring, leather thongs, and strips of white cloth. Every now and again, he got down at a joint where two boards had been thumbnailed or laminated together and spit on the seam. He was the spell caster, and the eager Nazi youth were his many hands.
"Um, Rennie," Sammy breathed. "What exactly is the plan here?"
Suddenly I realized that I had been watching the goings-on as if it were all a fascinating documentary on a twisted version of the Discovery Channel. But what we were watching was the very thing we had come to stop: The construction of a ritual gate designed to summon something awful.
So, how were the three of us supposed to stop them?
The obvious answer was to draw a bead and shoot Mueller dead. But despite the clinical utility of that, I could easily see Mueller himself acting exactly that way. Somehow, the image didn't make me want to follow that course. There was also the related probability that we would find ourselves outnumbered and outgunned at that point, and I had a client waiting at home to whom I wanted to report back at the end of the evening. And a daughter.
"Maybe we could start a fire," I replied. "Burn the doorway and get everyone running. There's all that lumber, and we've got these boxes here to start with... Anybody got a light? Philip, you smoke?"
Castler shook his head. "My wife made me give it up," he said, his voice trembling.
I tried to see if there was any way off the mezzanine level. It looked like we had ended up someplace at least as escape-free as the office would have been. There was a plywood panel in the middle of our floor which probably covered a hatch leading down into the office, but that wouldn't get us that much closer to the door; we'd be better off just standing up and running for the exit from where we were.
"Hey!" someone shouted. A skinhead we hadn't been watching came out of the office.
"Hans!" he said. "I went in here looking for extra nails and shit, and there's glass on the floor from the window. Somebody's broken in here, man!"
Hans watched the speaker impassively. He then turned slowly, as if tracking the sound of a voice.
His eyes, clear and merciless like a shark's, came and rested on us as if the shadow in which we hid weren't even there.
And then he pointed up at us.
