Chapter 25

The four of us flung ourselves into my bedroom and I slammed the door behind us and locked it. Phil grabbed the dresser and I took the other end, trying to maneuver it around the bed so we could wedge it against the door. I know for a fact that it weighed a ton, but I barely felt it. There was so much adrenaline in my veins that I could probably have lifted the entire bed.

"All right," I gasped when the door was barricaded. "All right. Hopefully that'll keep them out for a little bit."

"Gail!" cried Mom. "What happened to your arm?"

"One bit me," said Gail. Blood soaked the front of her shirt, turning the cartoon banana slug into a grisly horror. "It's pretty bad."

Mom snatched the doily off the dresser. "Give me your arm," she ordered.

Gail held out her arm. I leveled the flashlight on it so that Mom could see what she was doing, caught a sickening glimpse of bone, and had to look away. "Jesus, Gail!"

"Hurts like hell," she admitted. "Was afraid I was going to pass out."

"Well, don't," said Mom.

"I'm working on it."

Mom wrapped it hurriedly. She was halfway through when we heard a noise that echoed as loud as a gunshot.

A small wooden crunch came from the door, and then, faintly, a mew of distaste.

Then another crunch.

"Fuck," said Phil, from the bottom of his heart. "What are those things?"

"The underground children," I said. "Our grandmother used to threaten us with them, like the boogeyman. You know, that they'd come get us if we were bad. But, uh, they seem to be real. Apparently her father made them." I grabbed the nightstand and began wrestling it on top of the dresser. If they could gnaw through the wood, maybe the extra weight would slow them down. "Remember that bit I read you? About the sorcerer in Pasadena who was trying to make a magic baby? And Elgar kept telling him that it was a terrible idea because he'd tried it and it went bad?" I jerked my head toward the crunching noises. "I'm pretty sure that's them."

"So how do we stop them?"

I spread my hands helplessly. "I don't know! Elgar didn't know! Gran Mae was keeping them out, I guess, with jars of teeth or some shit, but I dug up the jar and it stopped whatever she was doing!"

"A circle of protection," said Gail, leaning against the wall. The white fabric around her arm was only a few shades whiter than her skin. I wondered how much blood she had lost. "The roses and the teeth. It was to keep them out. The roses said, stay away. And she poured everything she had into the roses." Her laugh was barely more than a gasp. "So much power that it kept going long after she was dead. And I'd watched her do it for years, and had no idea."

"Was that why she was haunting the place?" Mom asked. "To protect us?"

Gail closed her eyes. "I'm sorry, Edie," she said. I think she was trying to be gentle, but didn't have the strength for it. "I don't think she planned it. I think she just didn't die as completely as she expected. And the circle just kept going all that time."

"Myeeuu?" whispered one of the children at the door, a starving kitten noise. "Meu?"

"Can you do something?" I asked Gail.

"Like what?"

"I don't know! Something magicky!"

"I'm an herb-witch who talks to vultures! I've never dealt with anything like this before!"

I clutched my head. "Can you just put the circle back up?"

"This isn't like rebooting your computer! I can't just turn magic off and back on again!"

"Well, what can you do?"

"Against these things? Do you have a week or two to wait while I research it?"

A splintering crunch heralded the demise of more of the door. I caught a glimpse of something white floundering around at the base as one got an arm through.

"I don't think we've got a week," said Phil, and shoved the screen out of the window.

"Is going outside really the best idea?" asked Mom. "Won't there be more of them out there?"

"If you have a better idea, I'm all ears," Phil said.

The door rattled violently in the frame. A half dozen tiny mews went up from the hallway, as if the underground children were having a conference about how to get inside.

"So, the roof," said Mom.

Phil handed her and Gail out the window, then turned to me. My build was not exactly optimal for climbing out windows three feet off the floor, but it's amazing what you can do when you're hearing the door to the room be eaten away behind you. Phil grabbed me around the hips and lifted and shoved and I half-fell onto the porch roof under the window.

The asphalt shingles were rough and felt like they took half the skin off my arms. I got to my feet and swept the flashlight into the dark, trying to find shapes that I could recognize. It was still black as tar out and the air was close and still.

"Are we in a cave?" asked Mom, as Phil joined us on the roof.

None of us said anything like, "How could we possibly be in a cave?" Phil and I scanned the landscape with our flashlights again. The dirt was only a few feet below us. There were no walls that I could see, but it felt like a cave, enclosed somehow.

Perhaps it's just a very small alternate universe,I thought, and fought the urge to giggle.

I looked over at Mom. She was propping up Gail, who had her eyes closed and an expression of deep concentration on her face. Doing something magicky, as I'd asked? Or just trying not to faint? Blood had already soaked through the bandage on her arm.

"Something over there," said Phil.

I followed his beam and saw shapes toward the back of the house. They looked like what I'd seen before, the remains of the buried rosebushes. With both flashlights on them, I could make out the edges of leaves covered in a thick layer of dirt, as if someone had unceremoniously dumped hundreds of tons of earth into the back garden. Which, apparently, they did.

A crash from the room behind us indicated that the underground children had made it through the door.

Phil shoved the window closed, but the locks were on the inside. If they were smart enough to figure that out, we were in trouble. Well. More trouble. The glass seemed to confuse them somehow, or maybe they couldn't get a good grip on it with their toothless little mouths.

"The roses," said Gail suddenly. She opened her eyes and they glittered in her bone-white face. "We need the roses. Sam, can you feel them?"

"What?"

"The roses. They're still there, aren't they?"

"Well, yes, it looks like the whole garden came with us. They're under a lot of dirt, but I can sort of see—"

"Can you feel them?"

"How can I possibly feel them?"

"They're your grandmother's. She was in them. She's gone, but they're still there. Can't you tell?"

A few hours ago, I would have said something sarcastic. But a few hours ago, the world had been a very different place. I looked over the buried remains of the rosebushes. "Feel them?"

Could I?

"The roses said, stay away," said Gail, and I remembered Gran Mae saying that, and then the other things she had said. You gave the roses blood and demanded ladybugs. What did you think was going to happen?

Gran Mae thought that I had summoned the ladybugs. But I couldn't have. I'd cut my finger on a thorn, and then I'd said to the ladybug… said… There should be a lot more of you.

And more had come. Hundreds. Crawling into the bedroom and up the sink, trying to get closer to me, to the person who had demanded them.

Had it been the roses responding to me?

But why? How? I wasn't a witch. I didn't know the first thing about ritual magic. I was…

… the granddaughter of a sorcerer, and the great-granddaughter of the Mad Wizard of Boone.

Some things run in families.

Could I feel the roses now? If I tried?

The window rattled. I spun toward it and saw white palms pressed against the glass. Phil jammed his hands down, trying to hold it down, but there was only a thin ledge to put his weight on, and there were at least five hands on the inside of the window.

On second thought, this might not be the best time to be ruminating about my feelings.

I lunged to help Phil, throwing my weight onto the narrow window ledge. "Mom! Gail! Move!"

Mom grabbed Gail and began hauling her along the porch roof, away from the window. It wasn't a wraparound porch, so at some point they would have to get up on the main roof over the garage if they wanted to keep going. How well could the underground children climb? Was it better than two older women, one with a bad ankle and one who was trying not to go into shock?

The window moved up an inch, then slammed back down. The underground children were terrifyingly strong. The only thing saving us was that they didn't seem to understand how windows worked. If they had all pushed up together, Phil and I would have been overpowered, but instead, it seemed as if one would accidentally push up a bit, then get distracted. One of them was gnawing on the windowsill, occasionally spitting out little circles of wood. "Myeeu," it said, clearly annoyed by the inedibility of the frame. "Myeeuu!"

"What do we do?" asked Phil.

"I have no idea!" I risked lifting my hand for half a second and shoved my flashlight into my cleavage. (I couldn't have done it with a Maglite, but with the cheap little flashlight, boobs are a perfectly good holder.) The beam made a bright oval on the window and one of the children rubbed their hand across the glass, apparently fascinated. Its skin glowed like alabaster in the light.

Now that I had full use of both hands, it was a little easier to hold the window down. Unfortunately I couldn't see Mom and Gail very well. There was only a beam of light moving crazily over the porch and the sound of Mom's voice saying, "Stay with me, Gail. Talk to me."

"I'm a little busy!" Gail snapped.

"Doing what?"

"Something magicky! And bleeding."

The window slid up again, farther this time. One of the children got a hand underneath. Its fingers actually brushed my wrist, cool and moist as earth, and I nearly gagged.

Phil and I smashed the window down so hard that the glass cracked. The underground child let out a thin yowl and yanked back, its boneless arm stretching impossibly thin. It thrashed its body against the window and the crack raced across the glass with a high, crystalline chiming.

It was directly in the flashlight beam when the arm began to tear loose from its body. It seemed to have no bones at all in the upper arm, nothing like a socket. Instead, triangular stripes of skin ripped free from the segmented flesh and peeled back, oozing something clear and oily.

The underground child that had been gnawing busily at the window frame stopped, made a curious "Meuu?" sound, and latched onto the oozing wound.

They both dropped from the window. The other children followed immediately, and I heard thrashing and a thin wail of pain nearly drowned out in the satisfied sounds of feeding.

"Now!" I told Phil. "While they're distracted."

We bolted down the porch. Mom had gotten onto the garage roof and was trying to hoist Gail up with minimal success. Phil got both arms under her and heaved, then turned to me. I landed a foot in the rain gutter and nearly tore it off the house, but I got up there, and we all scrambled over the peak of the roof, away from the window, toward the backyard.

It was no different on this side than it had been on the other. Dirt was mounded up past the first floor. There was no breeze. I ran the flashlight along the edge of the yard and saw the buried tips of the roses.

I couldn't feel them. No matter how hard I tried, I wasn't going to be able to feel them in some mystic sense. I was terrible at feeling things. Hell, I'd told the school counselor that when I was nine. I was only good with things that I could touch.

"Can almost reach…" whispered Gail. Her eyes were closed again. "Almost…"

I didn't know what she was trying to reach. I sure as hell couldn't reach the roses from here. The little roses along the side of the house were completely buried, and only the climber and the biggest bushes showed bent and broken twigs above the dirt.

The sound of breaking glass came from the window on the other side of the house. Would they know to climb over the peak of the roof? Were they smart enough to come after us?

"Meeuuuu? Meuoo?"

Maybe I didn't need to feel the roses, though. That wasn't how I worked.

What I had to do was touch them.

It was stupid and suicidal and if I'd suggested it to any of the others, they'd have tried to talk me out of it. But I could hear the dragging of grublike bodies across the shingles, and I knew we didn't have any more time to talk.

I launched myself off the roof, stumbling when I hit the dirt. It was much looser than it looked, and it compressed under my feet so that I had to lift my knees practically to my chest as I staggered across the remains of the backyard.

"Sam!" Mom yelled.

"Stay there!" I yelled back.

A white head lifted from the dirt a few feet away. The underground child turned its skin-eyes on me and mewed inquisitively.

Fuck.I kept moving. My flashlight beam bounced across the soil. I had thought I'd be able to sprint to the roses but this was like wading through mud. I was only halfway across the yard, and I could hear other children calling around me.

Something white squirmed under my foot as I lifted it on the next step. I flung myself forward, nearly losing my footing, and that would be death. I had to stay upright. I had to keep going.

"Meeuuuuu?" asked one of the children, right behind me. "Myeeu?"

I went three more steps and then a white hand reached out of the dirt and grabbed my ankle.

I guess this is it,I thought, as I lost my balance and the ground came at me. I'm gonna die now.

Well, shit.

It struck me as funny, as I lay full length on the ground, how casual everything seemed suddenly, as if death were one more minor catastrophe, like dropping a coffee mug and having the handle break off. I would have laughed if my chin hadn't been half-buried in dirt.

The soil was so soft that landing had barely winded me. I pushed myself up, still feeling that small hand curled around my ankle, and rolled sideways.

I really didn't expect it to do any good. I fully expected to feel a sudden flare of pain in my leg and then probably a lot more pain, and then, if I was lucky, I would lose consciousness so that I wouldn't be around for the unpleasant final moments. But it hadn't happened yet and I could still roll, so I rolled.

"Meuu?"

I scraped at my ankle with my other foot, as if the child were a glob of mud I'd stepped in. The soft, grublike body yielded and it spat its displeasure and bit at the sole of my boot.

I rolled again and something jabbed into my cheek. I swatted at it, expecting to connect with more pale flesh, but instead it felt like… twigs?

I scrabbled at the dirt, swinging the flashlight beam up, and saw stems and thorns protruding from the earth.

The roses. I'd reached the roses after all.

I plunged my hands into the dirt-encrusted leaves. Thorns stabbed at me and I nearly wept with relief. You gave the roses blood and demanded ladybugs. What did you think was going to happen?

This time, I was going to demand something very different.

The underground child prodded my shoe with its boneless hands, plucking curiously at the laces. Perhaps the taste of the rubber sole had confused it. "Meeuu?"

I found a stem and closed my left hand over it. Pain screamed up my arm. I hoped it was enough blood for this… whatever it was. Magic? Was magic as primitive as trading blood and pain for hope?

A small, toothless mouth closed over my foot and took away a mouthful of leather and the very edge of my heel. It barely registered as pain compared to the terrible throbbing in my hands.

"Get them away," I hissed to the roses. "Get these monsters away from us."

The roses say… stay away…

Nothing happened.

"No…" I whispered. "No, you were supposed to do something. You have to do something. You have to."

No one answered. I put my face against the ground and waited to die. I'm sorry, Mom. It was a bad idea, but it was the only one I could think of. I'm sorry I couldn't fix this.

Light touched my eyelids. I opened my eyes, expecting a flashlight beam, but instead I saw a brittle green light streaming away under my fingers.

Under their blanket of earth, the roses had begun to glow.