by D A Fowler
An eternity later they approached the hazy outline of a two-story house. Vikael led him up the porch steps and through the front door. The world came sharply into focus for Dennis, almost to the point of being surrealistic. He stared at his surroundings with vague wonderment. Most of the furniture was old, but not old enough to be given the prestige of being called antique. Just outdated, worn, a sad tribute to the fifties. The couch was green vinyl with cracks along the seams revealing yellowed foam padding. The blond tiered end tables on either side of it were crammed full of magazines, TV Guides, folded newspapers showing the crossword section, the puzzles never to be completed. Next to the six-hundred-pound console television was a tarnished brass floor lamp with three bulbs of varied height, all glowing through brass colander shades. The hearth was fake and contained a mechanical pile of burning logs. It was not turned on. The pictures on the wall were mostly faded prints of floral arrangements, some of fruit. It was the living room of someone who refused to change with the times, and who was as miserly as he was stubborn, which was precisely why Albert Montgomery’s wife had left him.
There was an uncarpeted staircase on the left. Vikael led Dennis up the creaking steps. When they reached the landing, they turned to the right and were greeted by two figures stepping out of a doorway. Dennis looked up and recognized Montgomery. Dr. Doom. The nickname seemed more than appropriate now; he might have just walked out of makeup to perform a role in a horror movie. But Dennis didn’t react. He simply stared with genuine apathy at the cheesy skin turned brown in spots, the sagging nostrils, and the hint of two small lumps on either side of the upper forehead. Nephyrcai spread its palms in a gesture of welcome, and in doing so drew Dennis’s attention to its hands. The fingernails were nearly an inch thick and grew to sharp points, giving them the appearance of bear claws. Its voice had become deep, echoing static.
“Ah, I see you’ve brought a friend over for a visit. How lovely. We must introduce him to our other guests.”
“I believe they have already met.” Vikael sneered, and Dennis turned to look down at the demon’s face. He’d never noticed Marla was green before.
“What in God’s name is this?” Beth’s features were arranged in an expression of total disgust as she lifted the black fabric from her daughter’s bottom dresser drawer. “I knew I smelled something bad here. This is it. Now what the hell is it and where did she get it?”
Her husband threw up his hands. “Damnit, I don’t know. It looks like a cloak of some kind. What difference does it make? It doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that she’s gone.”
Beth dropped the garment on the floor and kicked it toward the doorway with her foot. “Are you so sure? I overheard a little gossip going on at the hospital; they didn’t know I was standing just around the corner. What I heard made me angry, of course, but I really didn’t dwell on it. Crazy rumors get started all the time, and they always die out. Go making a scene denying them and you’ll just fan the fire. So I forgot about it. But now. .
“But now what?” Roger asked irritably. He had aged ten years in the last forty eight hours. Nancy was his only child. He’d have much preferred she’d been a boy, but she was doing him proud. Going to Princeton in the fall. Yes, she was one hell of a kid.
“That thing,” Beth said, pointing to the cape with a shaky finger, “it smells…like something dead. The rumor I overheard was that Nancy had taken something from that tomb on Beacon Hill. Oh, my God…”
She suddenly put it together, her mind getting crushed in the process. “Remember…oh God, remember she asked if we’d taken anything from her room? An old book? Jesus, Roger, that’s what they said she took.”
“So that tells us where she is?”
“It might,” she quivered. “Roger, we’ve got to go up there.”
“For Chrissakes, why? Besides, we’re not going anywhere until that fog clears up. We’d end up in Canada.”
“You can do what you want, but I’m going. This is the only lead we’ve got.”
Roger blew out a shallow breath and nodded bleakly. “We’d better wear our coats. We’ll have to walk.”
They sat across from each other at the kitchen table exchanging glares. Harold took another swig of black coffee and raised an eyebrow. “So where the hell is she? You look like you’re hiding something. Is this some little scheme you two cooked up to make me feel guilty for jumping her ass? Well, you’re wasting your time.”
“Stop thinking like a damn lawyer, Harold,” Pamela growled. “I don’t know where she is.”
“Then what’s the big secret?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But she was unable to say it making eye contact, and averted her gaze, ostensibly to check for tarnish spots on her sterling silver spoon. Harold, professionally attuned to body language, knew instantly she was lying through her teeth.
“The hell you don’t. Is it the drinking? Hell, I’ve known about that for quite a while; no great revelation there.”
“My drinking has nothing to do with it,” Pamela spat, realizing too late that she’d just made a confession. Her cheeks colored.
“Then what does it have to do with, Pam? Is it the reason Marla took off into that blasted cloud before anyone else got up this morning?”
Pamela shook her head violently. “No! Just drop it, Harold. My my mother lost her soul head is splitting and I’m in no mood lost it for nothing for a damn argument.”
“I don’t care if your head falls off. I’ve got all the time in the world right now, seeing as how I left all my paperwork at the office, and I want to talk about this. You’re making me extremely curious. People normally don’t take a defensive position if there’s nothing to defend.”
“Go screw yourself, Harold.”
The game was on. He feigned shock at her language. “I see you’ve added some new words to your vocabulary. Sounds terribly vulgar, dear, such expletives coming from the mouth of a refined lady like yourself.”
She gripped her spoon with rage. “Don’t push me, Harold. I know what you’re doing. We’re in a courtroom, right? And I’m a hostile witness on the stand, and you plan to badger the hell out of me until you get what you want. Until I get so damn mad I’ll hit you with it like a baseball bat, at which point you win. Forget it. I won’t let you do this to me.”
Harold loved a challenge. “Is it your mother? This rumor shit wasn’t started by Marla—it was started by your mother. Maybe you’re just mad as hell at her for getting old on you, eh? You can’t take it out on her, so you bury it, let it bum in your guts. Then all this shit hits the fan and the fire gets out of control. You have to lash out at someone. The alcohol isn’t doing its job very well. Did you take it out on Marla? Sure, I jumped on her, but I didn’t say anything that would make her want to run away. God knows what you might have said.”
No, but the Devil knows the Devil knows…
Pamela saw red. She couldn’t believe he would sink so low as to bring her dead in Hell! mother into this. Her husband was colder than she’d ever imagined. And she knew, then, that he was going to get exactly what he wanted. “You’re nothing but prestigious scum, Harold. A giant maggot walking around in a three-piece suit. You want to know why Marla left? That secret I’m so viciously guarding? She found out I was healed by a witch having an affair with Roger Snell.”
The wooden spoon cracked into Harold’s skull, shattering his objectivity. “You worthless whore! I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised—what can’t you put past an alcoholic? But your best friend’s husband? And I’m scum?”
If there had been a gun in Pamela’s hand, she was certain she would have shot him right between the eyes. The charade was over anyway; a little murder conviction wouldn’t make that much difference. At least she would have something to look back on with a smile.
Then she remembered there was a gun, in the library, behind some envelope boxes in the lef
t bottom drawer of the desk. She calmly got up and left the table.
“I’m not through talking to you,” Harold called after her. “I’d like to hear more about your tawdry little affair with Roger. Have you had him in my bed, you sleazy whore? Have you?”
“As a matter of fact, I have,” Pamela answered several seconds later from the library. “Would you like me to draw you pictures of all the positions we tried?”
Harold felt his face flushing from the rage boiling up within him. He stood, knocking over his chair in the process. He’d never hit a woman before, but he was about to introduce himself to the experience. He began skirting the table to follow his unfaithful tramp of a wife to the library, but she reappeared in the kitchen after he’d taken only a few steps, his .45-caliber Smith & Wesson held steadily in both hands.
Harold’s flush receded as the blood drained from his face, quickly turning his skin from pink to ivory. His eyes trailed up from the gun’s deadly barrel to Pamela’s face, where they hoped to find at least an ounce of reason. What they saw was the cool, collected look of a woman who had firmly made up her mind.
Seeing Harold so petrified gave Pamela some satisfaction, but seeing him dead would give her complete satisfaction. It would make up for all the times she’d had to endure his bland, sweaty lovemaking, all the years she’d spent living like a bird in a gilded cage, and for what he’d done a few minutes ago, cruelly dragging her mother into their petty argument.
“See you in Hell, Harold,” she said, and before he could lodge any protests, calmly raised the gun higher and squeezed the trigger. The report was deafening, and the discharged bullet made a dime-sized hole in the middle of Harold’s forehead, exiting with a tremendous spray of blood, bone fragments and brain tissue. He was dead before he hit the floor, a look of utter astonishment on his face.
Pamela stared down at the ruined mess of Harold’s head for a few minutes, enjoying her brief reward. Finally she whispered, “Here I come, Mama,” put the warm barrel into her mouth, aimed it upward, and closed her eyes. A few seconds later she pulled the trigger again.
Twenty-Seven
After an endless walk through three and a quarter miles of cloying mist, Beth and Roger finally reached the base of the hill on Parish Lane. They’d clung to each other like lovers the whole way.
“This is a nightmare,” Beth muttered under her breath as they started up the hill.
“I still don’t know what you expect to find. Surely she’s not up there. What good is this?”
She responded crisply, “It’s better than just sitting at home and waiting for a phone call. It’s doing something. And at this point, I just don’t know what else to do. She could be there, hiding. Maybe the kids from school were giving her a hard time.”
“For taking an old book out of the tomb?”
“For practicing witchcraft, Roger.”
“For what?”
“Never mind…someone just made that part up. Hey, I can see.”
As they slowly rose in altitude, the fog became thinner. At the top of the hill there were only stray wisps of white here and there, the surroundings hazy but visible. Roger pointed to some trees on the northern border of the overlook. “The path is over there.”
“I know,” she said huffily, pulling away from him. She no longer needed his reassuring contact. “I went there a million times as a kid, some of those times with you, remember? Those horrible parties we used to go to?”
“They still do it,” Roger mused, taking the lead. “They’ll be up here tonight, just after the sun goes down,
I imagine, dragging their beer kegs along. Or whatever it is they get high on these days, all dressed like their favorite monsters.”
Beth followed him, their shoes making loud crunching noises on the gravel. The rest of the universe was dead.
They were halfway down the path when, to their left, from about fifty yards away, they heard the staccato cracking of limbs. Something was coming fast in their direction.
Beth rushed forward and grabbed the back of Roger’s pea coat. “Oh my God, Roger, do you think it’s a bear?”
He started running, pulling her along with him. “I don’t know, but I’m not going to stick around to find out. We’ve got to get to the cemetery.”
When they came to the edge of it they stopped, catching their breaths, listening above thundering heartbeats for the sound of their pursuer. All they could hear was the gentle rustle of leaves.
Beth was trembling uncontrollably, her stomach threatening to empty itself on her shoes at any moment. Her teeth chattered in harmony with her knocking knees. “Oh God, Roger, where is it?”
He clenched his fists, scouring the ground for something he could use as a weapon should whatever it was present itself in an offensive manner. As far as he knew, there were no bears in their part of the hills, but the devils were known to get around from time to time. He located a thick fallen branch and broke off a club with his foot. “Maybe a bear, I don’t know; I don’t have ESP. Let’s get over to the tomb. We can get on top of it and just lay low for a while. Maybe it’ll go away.”
Joining hands, they cautiously moved toward the tomb, careful not to trip over any headstones. When they got up beside it, Roger put his club down and made a stirrup with his hands. “You go up first. You’ll have to help pull me up.”
Beth had just stepped her foot in his grasp when a human growl rumbled just inside the trees fifteen yards away. Beth screamed, jamming her foot down so hard on Roger’s hands that they broke apart. “Get me up! GET ME UP, GET ME UP!” she shrieked, dancing in terror against the tomb wall.
Roger was fast deciding whether or not he had time to lift his wife to safety. Something was emerging from the dense foliage. Something very offensive. Beth pummeled him on the chest.
“Damn you! GET ME UP, IT’S COMING!”
He made a stirrup again, a surge of adrenaline enabling him to virtually toss her up on the tomb’s roof. The instant her foot left his hand, he whirled around and grabbed his weapon, clutching it in a fist of steel. He could see the outline of it now, the face…
Oh God, the face!
Looking down from above, Beth began to scream hysterically. “Roger, get up! Get up here right now! Don’t try to fight—”
But Roger didn’t have a choice. The bloody monolith was hurtling toward him like a nightmare.
Luke was bored. His mom wouldn’t let him go play outside, and the white cloud seemed so inviting. Lana was out in it somewhere, so it wasn’t fair that he couldn’t enjoy the same privilege. His room had become both refuge and prison. If he went anywhere near his mother, she nearly bit his head off for making too much noise, then would immediately apologize and get all mushy and want to hug him, which bothered him even more than bitching. He didn’t like to be touched. By anybody.
He tossed the crumpled Mad magazine which he’d been reading across the room and decided he’d had about enough of this. It was like being grounded, and he hadn’t done anything wrong. He got up and listened at the doorway. The television was on; his mother was watching one of those stupid soap operas. He wondered why those shows were called operas; he never saw fat ladies singing on one.
She wouldn’t notice him being gone. He wouldn’t stay out very long anyway. He would find his way over to Billy’s—which would be an adventure in itself—and then the two of them could play Space Invaders, using their fingers as ray guns, seeking each other out in the eerie mist of Planet Crouton. Without further ado he lifted and climbed out his window.
He had found the street and groped blindly down it for a few minutes when he became frightened. His fantasies had been far more delightful than the actual experience. He was walking in dragon’s breath. And for all he knew, he might be headed right for the gaping jaws of a monster.
He turned to go back home. He could play Dick Tracy instead and snoop through his sister’s
room, searching for clues to her mysterious disappearance. Boy was she gonna get it when she came home.
Taking baby steps on mulchy grass again, both arms extended, he walked face first into a yard lamp before seeing it. An opportune time to use the new profanity Billy had taught him. He spat out angrily, “Cocksuckin’ motherfucker!” and grinned at the feel of the words as they left his mouth. He repeated them again for the sheer pleasure of it.
He moved away from the pole, took several uncertain steps in three different directions, then began walking in a beeline, convinced that he was now heading straight for his bedroom window. Far off course, he walked through the space between his house and the Guenther’s, unable to see either structure. He began to panic when he reached the backyard without running into brick, and veered slightly to his right. Seconds later he was tumbling over a trash can, the contents spilling out beneath him. He repeated his profane catechism several more times. When he moved to pick himself up, his hand landed on something soft.
Soft like puppy fur.
Another bucketful of dread washed over him. He picked the object up and brought it around to his line of vision. A hazy Sam grinned at him with eternal blankness, his eyes shriveled like raisins. His pink tongue was black with ravenous ants. Luke tossed the head away and began to scream.
Twenty-Eight
Willard Quincy grumbled as his wife of thirty-two years urged him through the swirling fog, prattling on about the screams she thought she’d heard coming from their next-door neighbor’s house, the two-story at the end of the cul-de-sac. After three unanswered phone calls to the Montgomery residence, she’d made up her mind that something was definitely wrong over there, but she’d received only busy signals when she tried calling the police station. Willard, having neither heard nor seen anything unusual, told her to mind her own business, to which she’d replied that anything happening on Teaberry was her business, by God, and she’d promptly pulled him out the front door by his ear.