by Dean Koontz
He couldn’t possibly stay on his feet when his heartbeat was so slow, the blood supply to his brain so diminished. He ought to be either in severe shock or unconscious. His perceptions must be untrustworthy. Perhaps the throbbing had escalated to match the pace of his hammering heart.
Curiously, he was no longer aware of the frigid air. Yet no heat accompanied the enigmatic light. He was neither hot nor cold.
He couldn’t feel the earth under his feet. No sense of gravity, weight, or weariness of muscle. Might as well have been floating.
The odors of the winter were no longer perceptible. Gone was the faint, crisp, ozone-like scent of snow. Gone, the fresh smell of the pine forest that rose just in front of him. Gone, the faint sour stink of his own icy sweat.
No taste on his tongue. That was the weirdest of all. He had never before realized there was always an endless and subtly changing series of tastes in his mouth even when he wasn’t eating anything. Now a blandness. Neither sweet nor sour. Neither salty nor bitter. Not even a blandness. Beyond blandness. Nothing. Nada. He worked his mouth, felt saliva flooding it, but still no taste.
All of his powers of sensory perception seemed to be focused solely on the ghost light shining from within the trees and on the punishing, insistent sound. He no longer felt the throbbing bass washing in cold waves across his body; rather, the sound was coming from within him now, and it surged out of him in the same way that it issued from the trees.
Suddenly he was standing at the edge of the woods, on ground as effulgent as molten lava. Inside the phenomenon. Gazing down, he saw that his feet seemed to be planted on a sheet of glass beneath which a sea of fire churned, a sea as deep as the stars were distant. The extent of that abyss made him cry out in panic, although no thinnest whisper escaped him.
Fearfully and reluctantly, yet wonderingly, Eduardo looked at his legs and body, and saw that the amber light also radiated from him and was riddled with bursts of red. He appeared to be a man from another world, filled with alien energy, or a holy Indian spirit that had walked out of the high mountains in search of the ancient nations once in dominion over the vast Montana wilderness but long lost: Blackfeet, Crow, Sioux, Assiniboin, Cheyenne.
He raised his left hand to examine it more closely. His skin was transparent, his flesh translucent. At first he could see the bones of his hand and fingers, well-articulated gray-red forms within the molten amber substance of which he seemed to be made. Even as he watched, his bones became transparent too, and he was entirely a man of glass, no substance to him at all any more; he had become a window through which could be seen an unearthly fire, just as the ground under him was a window, just as the stones and trees were windows.
The crashing waves of sound and the electronic squeal arose from within the currents of fire, ever more insistent. As on that night in March, he had an almost clairvoyant perception of something straining against confinement, struggling to break out of a prison or through a barrier.
Something trying to force open a door.
He was standing in the intended doorway.
On the threshold.
He was seized by the bizarre conviction that if the door opened while he was standing in the way, he would shatter into disassociated atoms as if he’d never existed. He would become the door. An unknown caller would enter through him, out of the fire and through him.
Jesus, help me, he prayed, though he wasn’t a religious man.
He tried to move.
Paralyzed.
Within his raised hand, within his entire body, within the trees and stones and earth, the fire grew less amber, more red, hotter, entirely red, scarlet, seething. Abruptly it was marbled with blue-white veins to rival the consuming brightness at the very heart of a star. The malevolent pulsations swelled, exploded, swelled, exploded, like the pounding of colossal pistons, booming, booming, pistons in the perpetual engines that drove the universe itself, harder, harder, pressure escalating, his glass body vibrating, fragile as crystal, pressure, expanding, demanding, hammering, fire and thunder, fire and thunder, fireandthunder—
Blackness.
Silence.
Cold.
When he woke, he was lying at the perimeter of the forest, in the light of a quarter moon. Above him, the trees stood sentinel, dark and still.
He was in possession of all his senses again. He smelled the ozone crispness of snow, dense masses of pines, his own sweat—and urine. He had lost control of his bladder. The taste in his mouth was unpleasant but familiar: blood. In his terror or when he’d fallen, he must have bitten his tongue.
Evidently, the door in the night had not opened.
CHAPTER EIGHT
That same night, Eduardo removed the weapons from the cabinet in the study and reloaded them. He distributed them throughout the house, so one firearm or another would always be within reach.
The following morning, April fourth, he drove into Eagle’s Roost, but he didn’t go to the sheriff’s substation. He still had no evidence to back up his story.
He went, instead, to Custer’s Appliance. Custer’s was housed in a yellow-brick building dating from about 1920, and the glittering high-tech merchandise in its display windows was as anachronistic as tennis shoes on a Neanderthal. Eduardo purchased a videocassette recorder, a video camera, and half a dozen blank tapes.
The salesman was a long-haired young man who looked like Mozart, in boots, jeans, a decoratively stitched cowboy shirt, and a string tie with a turquoise clasp. He kept up a continuous chatter about the multitude of features the equipment offered, using so much jargon that he seemed to be speaking a foreign language.
Eduardo just wanted to record and play back. Nothing more. He didn’t care if he could watch one show while taping another, or whether the damned gadgets could cook his dinner, make his bed, and give him a pedicure.
The ranch already had a television capable of receiving a lot of channels, because shortly before his death, Mr. Quartermass had installed a satellite dish behind the stables. Eduardo seldom watched a program, maybe three or four times a year, but he knew the TV worked.
From the appliance store he went to the library. He checked out a stack of novels by Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, plus collections of stories by H. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, and M. R. James.
He felt no less a fool than if he had selected lurid volumes of flapdoodle purporting to be nonfiction accounts of the Abominable Snowman, the Loch Ness Monster, the Lost Continent of Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle, and the true story of Elvis Presley’s faked death and sex-change operation. He fully expected the librarian to sneer at him or at least favor him with a pitying and patronizing smile, but she processed the books as if she found nothing frivolous about his taste in fiction.
After stopping at the supermarket as well, he returned to the ranch and unpacked his purchases.
He needed two full days and more beers than he would ordinarily have allowed himself in order to get the hang of the video system. The damned equipment had more buttons and switches and readouts than the cockpit of an airliner, and at times it seemed the manufacturers had complicated their products for no good reason, out of a sheer love of complication. The instruction books read as if they’d been written by someone for whom English was a second language—which was very likely the case, as both the VCR and the camcorder were made by the Japanese.
“Either I’m getting feebleminded,” he groused aloud in one fit of frustration, “or the world’s going to hell in a handbasket.”
Maybe both.
Warmer weather arrived sooner than usual. April was often a winter month at that latitude and altitude, but this year the daytime temperatures rose into the forties. The season-long accumulation of snow melted, and gurgling freshets filled every gully and declivity.
The nights remained peaceful.
Eduardo read most of the books he’d borrowed from the library. Blackwood and especially James wrote in a style that was far too mannered for his taste, heavy on atmo
sphere and light on substance. They were purveyors of ghost stories, and he had trouble suspending disbelief long enough to become involved in their tales.
If hell existed, he supposed the unknown entity trying to open a door in the fabric of the night might have been a damned soul or a demon forcing its way out of that fiery realm. But that was the sticking point: he didn’t believe hell existed, at least not as the carnival-gaudy kingdom of evil portrayed in cheap films and books.
To his surprise, he found Heinlein and Clarke to be entertaining and thought-provoking. He preferred the crustiness of the former to the sometimes naive humanism of the latter, but they both had value.
He wasn’t sure what he hoped to discover in their books that would help him to deal with the phenomenon in the woods. Had he harbored, in the back of his mind, the absurd expectation that one of these writers had produced a story about an old man who lived in an isolated place and who made contact with something not of this earth? If such was the case, then he was so far around the bend that he would meet himself coming the other way at any moment.
Nevertheless, it was more likely that the presence he sensed beyond the phantom fire and pulsating sound was extraterrestrial rather than hellborn. The universe contained an infinite number of stars. An infinite number of planets, circling those stars, might have provided the right conditions for life to have arisen. That was scientific fact, not fantasy.
He might also have imagined the whole business. Hardening of the arteries that supplied blood to the brain. An Alzheimer-induced hallucination. He found it easier to believe in that explanation than in demons or aliens.
He had bought the video camera more to assuage self-doubt than to gather evidence for the authorities. If the phenomenon could be captured on tape, he wasn’t dotty, after all, and was competent to continue to live alone. Until he was killed by whatever finally opened that doorway in the night.
On the fifteenth of April, he drove into Eagle’s Roost to buy fresh milk and produce—and a Sony Discman with quality headphones.
Custer’s Appliance also had a selection of audiotapes and compact discs. Eduardo asked the Mozart look-alike for the loudest music to which teenagers were listening these days.
“Gift for your grandkid?” the clerk asked.
It was easier to agree than to explain. “That’s right.”
“Heavy metal.”
Eduardo had no idea what the man was talking about.
“Here’s a new group that’s getting really hot,” the clerk said, selecting a disc from the display bins. “Call themselves Wormheart.”
Back at the ranch, after putting away the groceries, Eduardo sat at the kitchen table to listen to the disc. He installed batteries in the Discman, inserted the disc, put on the headphones, and pressed the Play button. The blast of sound nearly burst his eardrums, and he hastily lowered the volume.
He listened for a minute or so, half convinced he’d been sold a faulty disc. But the clarity of the sound argued that he was hearing exactly what Wormheart had intended to record. He listened for another minute or two, waiting for the cacophony to become music, before realizing it apparently was music by the modern definition.
He felt old.
He remembered, as a young man, necking with Margarite to the music of Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme, Tommy Dorsey. Did young people still neck? Did they know what the word meant? Did they cuddle? Did they pet? Or did they just get naked and tear at each other straightaway?
It sure didn’t sound like music you’d play as background to lovemaking. What it sounded like, to him anyway, was music you’d play as background to violent homicide, maybe to drown out the victim’s screams.
He felt ancient.
Aside from not being able to hear music in the music, he didn’t understand why any group would call itself Wormheart. Groups should have names like The Four Freshmen, The Andrews Sisters, The Mills Brothers. He could even handle The Four Tops or James Brown and the Famous Flames. Loved James Brown. But Wormheart? It brought disgusting images to mind.
Well, he wasn’t hip and didn’t try to be. They probably didn’t even use the word “hip” any more. In fact, he was sure they didn’t. He hadn’t a clue as to what word meant “hip” these days.
Older than the sands of Egypt.
He listened to the music for another minute, then switched it off and removed the headphones.
Wormheart was exactly what he needed.
By the last day of April, the winter shroud had melted except for deeper drifts that enjoyed the protection of shadows during a large part of the day, although even they were dwindling steadily. The ground was damp but not muddy any longer. Dead brown grass, crushed and matted from the weight of the vanished snow, covered hills and fields; within a week, however, a carpet of tender green shoots would brighten every corner of the now dreary land.
Eduardo’s daily walk took him past the east end of the stables and across open fields to the south. At eleven in the morning, the day was sunny, the temperature near fifty, with a receding armada of high white clouds to the north. He wore khakis and a flannel shirt, and was so warmed by exertion that he rolled up his sleeves. On the return trip he visited the three graves that lay west of the stables.
Until recently, the State of Montana had been liberal about allowing the establishment of family cemeteries on private property. Soon after acquiring the ranch, Stanley Quartermass had decided he wanted to spend eternity there, and he had obtained a permit for as many as twelve burial plots.
The graveyard was on a small knoll near the higher woods. That hallowed ground was defined only by a foot-high fieldstone wall and by a pair of four-foot-high columns at the entrance. Quartermass had not wanted to obstruct the panoramic view of the valley and mountains—as if he thought his spirit would sit upon his grave and enjoy the scenery like a ghost in that old, lighthearted movie Topper.
Only three granite headstones occupied a space designed to accommodate twelve. Quartermass. Tommy. Margarite.
Specified by the producer’s will, the inscription on the first monument read: “Here lies Stanley Quartermass / dead before his time / because he had to work / with so damned many / actors and writers”—followed by the dates of his birth and death. He had been sixty-six when his plane crashed. However, if he’d been five hundred years old, he still would have felt that his span had been too short, for he had been a man who embraced life with great energy and passion.
Tommy’s and Margarite’s stones bore no humorous epitaphs—just “beloved son” and “beloved wife.” Eduardo missed them.
The hardest blow had been the death of his son, who had been killed in the line of duty only a little more than a year ago, at the age of thirty-two. At least Eduardo and Margarite had enjoyed a long life together. It was a terrible thing for a man to outlive his own child.
He wished they were with him again. That was a wish frequently made, and the fact that it could never be fulfilled usually reduced him to a melancholy mood which he found difficult to shake. At best, longing to see his wife and son again, he drifted into nostalgic mists, reliving favorite days of years gone by.
This time, however, the familiar wish had no sooner flickered through his mind than he was inexplicably overcome by dread. A chill wind seemed to whistle through his spine as if it were hollow end to end.
Turning, he wouldn’t have been surprised to find someone looming behind him. He was alone.
The sky was entirely blue, the last of the clouds having slipped across the northern horizon, and the air was warmer than it had been at any time since last autumn. Nonetheless, the chill persisted. He rolled down his sleeves, buttoned the cuffs.
When he looked at the headstones again, Eduardo’s imagination was suddenly crowded with unwanted images of Tommy and Margarite, not as they had been in life but as they might be in their coffins: decaying, worm-riddled, eye sockets empty, lips shriveled back from yellow-toothed grins. Trembling uncontrollably, he was gripped by an absolute convictio
n that the earth in front of the granite markers was going to shift and cave inward, that the corrupted hands of their corpses were going to appear in the crumbling soil, digging fiercely, and then their faces, their eyeless faces, as they pulled themselves out of the ground.
He backed away from the graves a few steps but refused to flee. He was too old to believe in the living dead or in ghosts.
The dead brown grass and spring-thawed earth did not move. After a while he stopped expecting it to move.
When he was in full control of himself again, he walked between the low stone columns and out of the graveyard. All the way to the house, he wanted to spin around and look back. He didn’t do it.
He entered the house through the back door and locked it behind him. Ordinarily he never locked doors.
Though it was time for lunch, he had no appetite. Instead, he opened a bottle of Corona.
He was a three-beers-a-day man. That was his usual limit, not a minimum requirement. There were days when he didn’t drink at all. Though not lately. Recently, in spite of his limit, he had been downing more than three a day. Some days, a lot more.
Later that afternoon, sitting in a living-room armchair, trying to read Thomas Wolfe and sipping a third bottle of Corona, he became convinced, against his will, that the experience in the graveyard had been a vivid premonition. A warning. But a warning of what?
As April passed with no recurrence of the phenomenon in the lower woods, Eduardo had become more—not less—tense. Each of the previous events had transpired when the moon was in the same phase, a quarter full. That celestial condition seemed increasingly pertinent as the April moon waxed and waned without another disturbance. The lunar cycle might have nothing whatsoever to do with these peculiar events—yet still be a calendar by which to anticipate them.
Beginning the night of May first, which boasted a sliver of the new moon, he slept fully clothed. The .22 was in a soft leather holster on the nightstand. Beside it was the Discman with headphones, Wormheart album inserted. A loaded Remington twelve-gauge shotgun lay under the bed, within easy reach. The video camera was equipped with fresh batteries and a blank cassette. He was prepared to move fast.