More dark forms swept into the glade. Elizabeth's mind couldn't process the information being fed into her eyes. Large dark shapes moving through the air could be bats or herons, but these were far too large, the size of people, and now one of them was running toward her and swinging an un-bat-like fist at her head. Elizabeth ducked, but not fast enough and she found herself sprawled on the ground with the wind knocked out of her. She gasped as her lungs struggled to fill with air.
Through the milling bodies, she saw a tall shape at the altar. Whoever it was struck a light and the small array of celebratory objects burst into flame.
"We, the Sisters of Sycorax, hereby rend the veil between the worlds and call forth the spirits of darkness, the shadows cast by the loathsome, the souls of those who died by anger and violence," a gravelly voice intoned.
A low roar swelled above the sounds of the rushing rapids in the river, and the trees at the opening of the glade were lit by a dim glow coming from the direction of the old graveyard they had passed on their way to the clearing.
Elizabeth cringed. This can't be happening.
She saw her sister with Miss Price. The scarf had fallen from Alice's hair, which gleamed like a banner in the growing light. Miss Price was slowly sitting up.
The light and the noise grew louder. Elizabeth finally identified the sound as an approaching vehicle, just as a truck reached the clearing. It stopped and a long narrow bar across the roof erupted with flashes of blue light. The side doors popped open and the beams of high-power flashlights swept over the group in the clearing.
"All right, everybody freeze," a man shouted.
Nobody froze.
Everybody, the coven and their attackers, scattered like chickens. Elizabeth backed into the fringe of low trees and brush at the foot of the granite cliff which hung over the clearing. She kept backing up until she hit stone. She saw Alice, supporting Miss Price, scurry off to the side of the clearing, but they were among the first caught by the police.
Elizabeth felt her way along the granite, hoping that none of the plants she pushed through was poison ivy. She reached a point where the stones sank into the dirt hillside and she felt roots protruding from hard packed earth. Using the roots as handholds, she pulled herself up the hillside and soon found herself on a steep trail. She crawled carefully up the hill.
The police grabbed whomever they could easily catch and shoved them into the van, and then returned to the clearing where they played their flashlights over the ground and the trees. One of them stomped out the fire which had consumed the altar.
Whenever the police ventured towards where she made her laborious way up the steep and narrow trail, Elizabeth jammed her fists into her pockets and hunched her shoulders so that her face was mostly hidden by the upturned collar of her coat. She tried to stay as still as possible; the only part of her body that moved was her toes, clenching and unclenching in little fists of terror.
In the pocket of her coat, an icy cold object pressed against her knuckles. She released her fingers slightly and they closed around a heavy, smooth ring. On the inside of the band her thumb detected a spidery roughness that had to be some kind of engraving. She rubbed her thumb absently around the inner surface of the ring while she made a fervent wish for the police to overlook her.
Out in the clearing, the police officers wound up their anti-trespassing operation. One of them made a final circuit and directed his flashlight deep into the fringes of the clearing and up the trail where Elizabeth clung to a tree that stood out at an improbable angle from the hillside. She twitched in spite of her resolve to remain still, and her thumb plunged through the ring. The flashlight swept across her face and into her eyes, blinding her.
"Hurry up, Joe," an officer called from over by the van.
"I'm done. I thought I heard something over here, but there's nothing," the officer over by Elizabeth, evidently Joe, called back.
He returned to the van. As the last door of the van slammed shut and it pulled away in a spray of gravel, Elizabeth breathed a huge sigh of relief. She couldn't quite believe that the officer had not seen her, and wondered at her luck as she shoved the ring further onto her thumb. Then she wondered how she was going to get off the island.
Dirk had disappeared along with his knapsack. He was either arrested or hiding out somewhere, probably with Fox, so she did not have the safety harness and she did not dare creep around the security gate on the footbridge without it. She would have laid odds that by now the police were lying in wait at both ends of the bridge anyway. There had to be another bridge over to the island in order for the police van to have made it out there, but Elizabeth had no idea where that was, and again, it was likely to have police on it.
The third way off the island was to cross the river on foot. She had done that many times as a child, in broad daylight and with her father walking along ahead to help her over spots where the gaps between the rocks were a little too wide for her short legs, or the stones were too slick. They had always been careful to stay out of the water because of the spots where the currents ran swift and deep, and because of the chemical spill warnings. Elizabeth was reluctant to repeat those journeys in the dark of night.
She released her hold on the tree to which she clung and took a tentative step down the hillside. As she did so, dark shadows erupted from the edges of the glade and started talking to each other, expressing the same sort of relief that Elizabeth had felt at not getting arrested. She did not recognize any of their voices, except for the rough voice she recognized as that belonging to the person who had burned the altar.
So these were the attackers, not a few members of Alice's coven who had also managed to evade the police. Instead of stumbling down the hillside and into their arms, she crept back up the hill. Caution forced her to interpret every rustling sound behind her as a sign of pursuit and hampered her progress. She scrambled up as quickly as she could to a narrow ridge topped with (Surprise!) a small boardwalk. When her feet encountered the edge of the unexpected boardwalk, she tripped and fell right over it and down the hill on the far side. Expecting to tumble thirty feet down to the foot of another granite cliff, she curled up in a ball of fatality, but her fall was immediately arrested. She lay at the bottom of a shallow and unnaturally circular leaf-filled depression.
She burrowed into the leaves and considered her options while she rubbed the ankle she had banged on the boardwalk. Today had been quite warm, but the night was already cold and she did not want to sleep in the leaves. If she could get to a telephone, she could call Bob and he would come and get her, always assuming that he wasn't down at the police station bailing out Alice. Even if she had a cell phone, she would still have to get off the island because Bob could hardly come out here to get her, which brought her back to her three options: the footbridge, the vehicular bridge, or the rocks. The rocks were looking like her best chance to get off the island without getting incarcerated. All she had to do was make her way down the hill and across the island to the dimly remembered concrete structure of the derelict hydroelectric power plant. She would have to cross the water intake structure to climb down to the boulders in the river bed.
She hoped that the "Sisters of Sycorax" (And where had she heard that before? It sounded familiar.) were not planning on taking the same route off the island. She crawled up to the rim of the depression and across the boardwalk. She could see nothing of the clearing below, and she strained her ears for any sounds from the evil witches, as she now thought of them. She heard nothing but the river.
In fits and starts, and freezing at every imaginary sound, she made her way back down the hill to the clearing and out to the trail that they and the police van had used earlier. Keeping to the side of the trail where she could easily fade into the trees should any menacing figures appear, she continued to walk, not back towards the footbridge, but counterclockwise on around the island.
The trail was dappled with moonlight and she walked easily along, tripping occasionally on the odd rock. Soon she was rounding the head of the island and working her way down the south side. When she thought she might be approaching the place where she would need to start looking for the path to the water intake, she slowed her pace and watched carefully for signs of a branching trail.
A vehicle approached and she ducked behind a tree. The police van roared out of the night, the headlights casting two long funnels of light far down the trail. After it passed, Elizabeth had to wait for a few minutes for her eyes to readjust to the darkness. Once she could again make out the trail and the trees, she stepped out from her hiding place and moved on.
A group of teenage boys popped out from the woods and spilled onto the trail before her. They were laughing and congratulating themselves on successfully hiding from the police. Cans of spray paint rattled in their hands. They didn't seem to see the Elizabeth at all.
Dumbfounded, she stopped in her tracks and watched them punch each other's shoulders and chortle.
One of the more cautious members of the group finally said, "We'd better get out of here."
The others harassed him good-naturedly before turning their backs to Elizabeth and moving on the direction in which she had been walking. She let them get a little ways ahead and then followed them. If her luck held, they would lead her off the island.
A hundred yards down the trail, the boys turned off and so did Elizabeth. She hung back while they made their way across the top of the concrete structure holding the grille that once filtered large solid objects out of the water flowing to the turbines, but now served no function except to create an obstruction in the river. When Elizabeth was a child, the grille had been completely blocked with a dangerous tangle of trees, tires, and other debris. It could only have gotten worse over the past decade. She bet there were rats.
Once the boys crossed to the other side, they dropped from sight one after the other and she remembered the metal ladder to the river and the rocks below. When the last boy had climbed down, she walked out after them, although she felt terribly exposed as she left the trees behind and stood in the bright moonlight.
Even in the dim light, the water intake structure was much wider than the frightening concrete balance beam she remembered from her childhood. She walked across and felt no sense of vertigo despite the sheer drop of twelve feet or more to one side and the tree trunks that were piled together like pick-up sticks on the other. When she reached the narrowest spot, she looked down and lost her balance.
She fell and cracked her knee on the concrete, but managed to cling to the structure, her legs kicking out over the drop. Once her mind stopped reeling, she managed to pull herself all the way onto the concrete, where she sprawled gasping like a fish.