The bullet caught Hans Mueller in the left shoulder and spun his torso halfway around. His feet remained firmly planted on the concrete floor.
He turned back slowly to face Ernst Vielstich, a shark-like grin on his face. His eyes flashed. No blood came from the wound.
"I told you, old fool!" he exulted. "You're too late!"
Vielstich merely smiled his familiar half-smile through the smoke rising from the barrel of his automatic.
"No, I don't think so."
Mueller stared at him, the offense showing in his face that this little wizened man wasn't acknowledging obvious defeat. He glared at him so intensely, he didn't see something that I saw from my position on the floor.
Something was wisping out of the bullet hole in his shoulder.
Steam? Almost. But though it wavered in the wind that was swirling around the doorway in the center of the floor, it didn't dissipate. It writhed, and stretched, like tentacles of mist. It groped.
It intruded on Mueller's attention, and he stared down at it, his jaw falling to his chest.
"You see," Vielstich continued conversationally, "the forces and powers of two existences are being drawn to the contact point. The doorway you made. There are very strong currents here, and the herald must keep itself out of them or they will carry it back. And all it takes, at the right moment, is a puncture of the herald's shell."
The wisps of vapor leaking from Mueller's bullet wound were thicker now, flailing the air as the whirlwind drew them out. He clutched at his chest, trying to hold them in, but it was like trying to grab smoke. The tendrils of smoky ectoplasm were caught in the spinning air and spiraled in toward the doorway, mimicking in the air the path that the sacrificed skinhead's blood had taken on the floor. Despite all he could do, the essence of the herald spirit that had guided him this far was being sucked out of him.
My eyes followed the path of the ectoplasmic wisps to the doorway, where the gossamer barrier between our world and another was bulging inward under the weight of the dreaded and immense Something. Where the smokiness touched the barrier, sparks glittered, accompanied by snapping noises that sounded like far-off handclaps through the throb of the wind.
"No! Not now!" Mueller screamed. He tried to follow the vapor, to snatch at its tail like a boy chasing a kite, but he stumbled. The last of the ectoplasm leaked from the bullet hole, followed by a healthy, delayed spurt of blood. With a groan, he wrenched himself back to his feet and half-ran, half-fell toward the center of the circle, aided by the wind that was sucking itself into the doorway.
The last tail of the tendrils of the herald were swallowed up by the doorway, and suddenly the hazy gray barrier snapped flat like a sheet of rubber bouncing back. There was a roar, a deep subsonic bellow of frustration that vibrated the frame of the doorway and rumbled through the concrete floor; I sensed it more with my tailbone than my ears. The herald was no longer Its anchor.
The wind immediately started to die, centrifugal force maintaining the vortex as the power driving it died out. Hans Mueller stood in front of the doorway, clutching the wound that soaked his white T-shirt crimson. The hazy layer of spiderweb between the posts and lintel of the doorway started to fade; I could make out the far side of the warehouse through the mirage-like shimmer.
Mueller roared, spittle flying from his throat. He turned toward Vielstich. His eyes no longer possessed a supernatural glow, but the all-too-human rage there was terrible enough. With his bloodsoaked good hand he pulled the straight razor from his back pocket. And he charged.
The side of my head exploded with the report from Sammy's .38, which he held in front of him with a swollen, rope-burned hand. A new wound blossomed in the center of Mueller's chest, and his forward momentum instantly reversed direction. His body involuntarily dove backward, directly into the doorway.
The remaining layer of haze grabbed him, pulled at him like pitch, and pulled him through the doorway – and out of our world. He faded instantly in the neutral shimmer.
There was another rumbling through the concrete floor, the sound of an unleashing of collected power.
Then the doorway exploded in a belch of charred lumber and blue-black smoke.
My ears popped. Bits of blackened wood hailed down on our heads.
In the sudden stillness, Ernst Vielstich made his brittle way across the floor to where the straight razor had fallen from Mueller's hand. He picked it up and brought it over to us.
"By the way," he said to the skinheads who were huddled against the wall, almost forgotten, "you should go home now."
They scrambled to their feet and skittered across the floor of the warehouse like startled cockroaches, giving a wide berth to the mystic circle spraypainted on the floor and the blackened patch in the center. In a few seconds, we heard the loading area doors go up, and several vehicles squeal out of their parking spaces.
Sammy wormed the other hand out of the now-loose electrical cord that had bound his hands and gingerly felt the livid spot on his jaw where Mueller had kicked him. I craned my head and looked across at Philip Castler on the other side of Sammy. He was staring at the spot on the floor where the doorway had been. He looked like he'd never blink again.
Vielstich sliced through the twine that held my wrists, then I took over and sawed through the bonds at our ankles and those holding Castler's wrists together.
"How did you get here?" I asked Vielstich as I helped Castler to his unsteady feet.
"I borrowed the car of the Gordell sisters," he said. "It has been a number of years since I owned an automobile, so I drove very cautiously. I am afraid I was almost too late."
I finally focused on the 9mm in his hand. "Hey!" I said, almost dropping Castler. "That's my gun! My spare!"
"Yes," he said. "Beth knew where you kept it."
"And it had a combination trigger lock on it!"
Vielstich shrugged. "I asked Beth her birthday." He pulled the holster from his pocket and holstered the gun. "You may have it back."
"I've got my hands full right now," I said. "You hold onto it for a minute."
"As you wish," he said, sliding it back into his jacket pocket. "Now if you'll excuse me, I will regain possession of my book."
He walked across the floor to where Mueller had dropped the heavy volume earlier and picked it up with some strain and slow breathing.
"I'm glad you knew that book better than you thought," I said.
His half-smile returned. "To be absolutely truthful," he said, "I wasn't entirely sure that I was not remembering information from an unrelated part of the book, or from another book entirely. I am getting old."
And with that, he walked out ahead of us, jauntily humming something vaguely Teutonic.
** ** **
Sammy drove Vielstich back to my place in his truck. I took Castler back to his home in the Gordell sisters' car. The whole ride, he stared out the window at the darkness which, given what we had seen tonight, didn't seem so dark anymore.
His house was unlit when we arrived. He unlocked the door, and I stepped inside with him as he turned on the light and listened to the emptiness.
"You should call your wife," I said. "Tell her that she and the kid can come home now."
"Yeah," he said mechanically. "I should."
He collapsed into the chair beside the phone and stared at it. He made no move to pick it up.
I left him in that position, sitting beneath the beatific gaze of the portrait of Adolf Hitler on his wall.
** ** **
Before Sammy left to go home and soak his arms in epsom salts, we discussed any lingering cleanup responsibilities. Reporting the murder of the sacrificial skinhead didn't seem like a priority right then, since his killer was beyond the reach of the legal system.
Ernst Vielstich spent the night at our house. He was the perfect guest, and in the morning claimed that he had not heard Beth screaming in her nightmares.
The super at his apartment building called just before noon to announce that the new door had been fitted on his apartment. I drove him home after he promised the imploring Gordell sisters that he would indeed accept an invitation to lunch in the near future.
On the way back home, I stopped at a payphone and called in an anonymous tip about the dead skinhead. A block farther, I tossed Mueller's straight razor in the dumpster behind an Italian sandwich shop.
Early the next week, I returned to Vielstich's apartment with my typed-up case notes and my final billing, and waited while he wrote out a check for the amount owing above the retainer in his thin, precise handwriting.
It wasn't until I was back in my car and pulling out into traffic that I realized that I had never learned the title of the book.
