01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

Rudy set the whimpering baby down again, muttering, "Goddam fuses." He started for the door.

Gil gasped. "Rudy, no!"

Ingold caught her arm as she moved to stop him. There was deceptive mildness in his voice as it came from the darkness. "You think it's the fuse?"

"Either that or a short someplace in the box," Rudy said. He glanced over his shoulder at them as he opened the hall door, seeing their indistinct outlines in the near-total blackness; the faint touch of filtered starlight haloed Ingold's white hair and picked out random corners of Gil's angular frame. The edge of Ingold's drawn sword glimmered, as if with a pallid light of its own.

The hall was black, pitch, utterly black, and Rudy groped his way blindly along it, telling himself that his nervousness came from being trapped in a house in the middle of nowhere with a deluded scholar and a charming and totally insane old geezer armed with a razor-sharp sword, a book of matches, and a can and a half of kerosene. After that stygian gloom, the dark kitchen seemed almost bright; he could make out the indistinct forms of the table, the counter; the thread-silver gleam on the hooked neck of the faucet; the pale, distinct glow of the windows by the door; the single one in the left with the broken pane.

Then he saw what was coming in through the broken pane.

He never knew how he got back to the bedroom, though later he found bruises on his body where he'd blundered against the walls in his flight. It seemed that one instant he was standing in the darkness of the tiny kitchen, seeing that hideous shape crawling through the window, and that next he was falling against the bedroom door to slam it shut, sobbing. "It's out there! It's out there!"

Ingold, standing over him in the gloom, scarred face outlined in the misty gleam of his sword blade, said softly, "What did you expect, Rudy? Humans?"

Firelight flared. Gil had made a kind of campfire out of splintered kindling in the middle of the cement floor and was coughing in the rank smoke. Lying on the sagging mattress, Tir was staring at the darkness with eyes huge with terror, whimpering like a beaten puppy afraid to bark. Another child would have been screaming; but, whatever atavistic memories crowded his infant brain, they warned him that to cry aloud was death.

Rudy got slowly to his feet, shaking in every limb with shock. "What are we gonna do?" he whispered. "We could get out the back, make it down to the car... "

"You think the car would start?" In the smoldery orange glare, the old man's eyes never left the door. Even as he was speaking, Rudy could see that both his hands were on the long hilt of the sword, poised to strike. "I doubt we would make it to the car in any case. And-the house limits its size."

Rudy gulped, cold with shock, seeing that thing again, small and hideous and yet rife with unspeakable terror. "You mean-it can change its size?"

"Oh, yes." Sword in hand, Ingold moved cat-footedly to the door. "The Dark are not material, as we understand material. They are only incompletely visible, and not always of the same-composition. I have seen them go from the size of your two hands to larger than this house in a matter of seconds."

Rudy wiped sweating palms on his jeans, sickened with horror and totally disoriented. "But if-if they're not material," he stammered, "what can we do? How can we fight?"

"There are ways." Firelight played redly over Ingold's patched mantle as he stood, one hand resting on the doorknob, the other holding ready the gleaming witchfire of the blade, his head bowed, listening for some sound. After a moment he spoke again, his voice barely a whisper. "Gil," he said, "I want you to take Tir and get between the bed and the wall. Rudy, how much of a fire do we have left?"

"Not much. That wood was dry as grass. It's going quick."

Ingold stepped back from the door, though he never took his attention from it. The little room was filled with smoke, the flaring fire already sinking, feebly holding at bay the encroaching ring of shadows. Without looking back, he held out his hand. "Give me the kerosene, Rudy."

Wordlessly, Rudy obeyed.