Free The Gathering Dark by Christopher Golden

air remained, yet it made her even more nauseous somehow. Keomany had remained silent save for small utterings of fear and astonishment. There had been dark things in motion out on the street, and in the back of her mind she had feared drawing their attention.
    Now, though, she could remain silent no longer. She could see that everything was as she had left it, the shoppe clean and orderly, despite that its interior was only barely lit by the rotten pumpkin orange sunlight leeching through the display windows. But it was wrong. All wrong.
    Her place had been marked by something just as surely as if a pack of wolves had broken in and pissed all over the floor to tag their territory.
    “Paul!”
    Her gaze swung toward the door that led into the back room. She ran to it, her footfalls too loud now, echoing like her voice. A certainty grew in her that every step, every shout was a beacon to those jagged shadows flitting about outside but she called his name again as she ran to the door to the back. Beside it there was a double switch plate. Keomany switched on the lights for the front and the back room with one slip of her hand.
    There was a spark and the sound of something sizzling for a second, then nothing. It surprised her not at all. Her throat was dry and yet her lips were salty and only as she ran her tongue over them did she realize that she was crying. One hand fluttered to her face and she smeared her tears across her cheeks.
    “Oh my God,” she whispered.
    The taste of her own tears, that salt on her tongue, made it all real. She had known it was, of course, but the queer texture of the world had insinuated that it might all be some hallucination, some hyperreal dream. Hell, it had occurred to her that she might have fallen asleep at the wheel and died.
    But no, this was not death. Not yet.
    Then Keomany laughed, a lunatic chuckle that she had called upon God, now and back when she thought she was going to crash her car. There might be a God, she was willing to allow that. But she had dedicated her life since the age of sixteen to another worship entirely, to earth magick, to the goddess all around her.
    But not here , Keomany thought with a chill. She’s not here now, not in this place. Because it isn’t natural at all.
    “Paul!” she cried a third time and she stepped through the door to the back room and peered into the shifting darkness and again she froze. Any one of those shadows, black upon black, might have been one of the furtive shadow things she had seen out on the street.
    She narrowed her gaze and bit her lip hard enough that she could taste the copper tang of her own blood. Like her tears, though, it crystallized the truth of her surroundings for her. Keomany took three more steps into the pitch black room but would go no further.
    “Paul?” she asked, hesitant now.
    His face loomed out of the darkness, pale as the moon.
    “Keomany? Tell me it’s you. Are you real?” he rasped in the tiniest little-boy voice.
    Her tears. Her blood. Keomany felt the truth of it inside her just as she felt the filthiness of her surroundings on her skin, breathed it in through her nose with utter revulsion.
    “Yes, Paul.” What happened here? What’s going on? Did I see . . . things out there? She wanted to ask all of those questions but that was for later, in the car, after they’d picked up her parents and gotten to the police.
    Not the Wickham police, she decided, but elsewhere. The next town. Or the one after that. Maybe even all the way to Montpelier.
    “Come with me,” Keomany told him, and she began to turn.
    “No,” Paul said curtly, little-boy voice turning shrill. “You stay.”
    It seemed as though the very air trapped her then, becoming like taffy, tugging at her arms and her hips and her legs. She was moving through something with substance that slowed her as she turned to look at him again, to see what the change in his voice had wrought in his expression. His face, however, was the