Free Midnight's Angels - 03 by Tony Richards Page B

Right out to the edges of the Universe, in fact. And I found an evil there I’d never even guessed at.”
    His eyes slid shut at the memory of it. I thought I saw his shoulders quiver. Coffee slopped across his fingers, reminding him that he was still holding the mug. He set it down. His eyelids parted slightly when he did that, and the red in his pupils was glowing far more dully than before.
    “It took me a good while to figure out what I was looking at. But finally, I understood. It was … less than nothing. A minus in the whole equation of existence. It had no shape, no form, no hue. No body and no soul. But it was there nonetheless. And then I recalled that I’d seen mention of it once before. Not in a book, but an inscription on a very ancient clay tablet that I’d once studied. I realized what I’d found. The Dweller in the Dark.”
    Those last five words … they seemed to linger on the room’s air. Hang around us, as if they had substance. The study appeared to fade a little, and the ticking of the clock downstairs could no longer be heard, the world withdrawing from us slightly.
    “Being?” I managed to ask.
    Willets threw a look at me.
    * * *
    He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, dried his fingers, then the bottom of the mug.“What was here before the Universe?” he asked the room in general. Then he answered his own question. “Not a vacuum, no. A vacuum’s simply a gap in existence. There was utter nothingness. No time. No space. And no dimensions. An utter void. The Void.”
    And we could all hear the capital letter.
    “Except there happened to be a solitary creature dwelling in it. Nature’s laws didn’t apply back then. It was also made of nothingness, but it was conscious. And it simply floated in the Void, content with its peculiar existence. It could have stayed that way throughout eternity, since time did not exist.
    “Then along we came, with an almighty blast. Abruptly, there was light and substance. And the Dweller in the Dark was forced to go away. It ran ahead of the spreading light, and finally found refuge in the dark chasms beyond the edges of reality. It’s been out there, waiting, to this very day. Staring in, resenting us with every fiber of its being. Hating all light and all life, and wanting to destroy it.”
    A chill seemed to have settled over the room, despite the narrow crack of sunlight filtering in. There was a cold glaze to the armoires now.
    Myself and the others exchanged troubled glances. We had never heard anything like this. And it was  the judge who asked the doctor the first question.
    “If I understand you correctly, then you’re saying that, however fearsome this thing is, it can’t get to us. Can’t survive on our plane of being. So what does this have to do --?”
    “When it fled,” Willets broke across him, “it left a few tiny particles behind.”
    “Three of them?” I took a guess.
    The man nodded.
    “Somehow, they adapted. Swelled in size, and took on shape. My guess is, they take on different guises with each world they visit. They cannot stand direct light. But they’ve been, for a very long time now, the Dweller’s agents here. They answer to its bidding, and they do its work.”
    “Which is?” I heard Ritchie ask.
    “Anywhere they go, they try to suck the light out. Anyone they touch, they rip out the humanity, the soul. They deliver that person into the Dweller’s influence. And I sense something else about them too,” he added carefully. “They’re here for a reason, though I can’t tell what.”
    It was a real effort to get my head around this. If the angels were as Willets had described, that was why Judge Levin had found nothing when he’d tried to sense them. There was nothing physical to sense. And if the adepts couldn’t even keep track of them … that might mean that we were in a pretty serious fix.
    “Why did they come after you ?” I asked.
    Willets harrumphed. “I suppose they knew that I’d found out