The Forbidden Zone

by Whitley Strieber

  Oscola passing the windows, a doll's town, the gingerbread trim on the porches, the arched windows of the Excelsior Tower, the flowers in the town common: a doll's town, full of secrets, dolls concealing secrets in their glassy blue eyes.

  He saw where Bob had gone, down the hole of madness. He could go there, too, go and set up shop, build himself a little cottage of chocolate cement and candy.

  He could attract the children of the world to his oven and bake them into obscure and terrible forms.

  "I want to get home," Loi said.

  He realized that he'd been driving up and down the streets of Oscola. He turned down Main, past the town square with its bandstand and its monument to Oscola's dead from four wars. "I was thinking," he said. "Trying to understand."

  She made a small sound. Was it derision, or just impatience?

  They drove out Kelly Farm Road, turned into the driveway. "When will you rebuild our house?" she asked.

  He felt anger flare in him, then felt it transform itself, become something else. "Soon, Loi. As soon as I can."

  4.

  They got to the trailer, went inside. The boys were asleep in the tiny second bedroom that would one day soon belong to Brian Ky Kelly.

  When she was comfortable again Loi made coffee and gave him some. He noted that it had milk in it. She sat across the kitchen table from him, drinking her own. "My name is not Loi Ky," she said suddenly.

  He was astonished.

  "That's my whore's name."

  "Your whore's name?"

  "Easy for the white-eyes to say."

  "What's your real name?"

  She regarded him. "I'm used to Loi Ky by now."

  "Please tell me."

  She smiled in a secret, inner way. "Someday I will. When all is well again." She kissed his forehead.

  He spent the afternoon sitting on the front porch trying to come up with some useful ideas. He had a yellow pad, and he tried to do some equations, but he couldn't make anything work. The jump from his original work to the present mess was just too great.

  The shadows lengthened, and he found that he was not looking forward to the night.

  When the sun was turning gold and the voices of the larks were echoing in the sky, he put his work down. This wasn't about his theories. It was about something so far beyond his theories that he simply couldn't see it.

  Evening brought sheet lightning, and wind heaved through the old trees around his ruined house. But the storm did not break. He wondered if there even was a storm out in the mountains, in the conventional sense. Maybe the lightning represented another sort of cataclysm altogether, too big to simply break of an evening and slip away by dawn.

  Bob's boys were playing in the gloaming, their voices shrill in the shadows.

  The TV went on, and Brian heard the familiar music that announced the Yankees' pregame show. The boys heard it, too, and went racing inside to watch.

  The wind began flowing down from the mountains. It swept across the back fifty with its tall stands of white pine, whispering in the needles. When it reached the barn it moaned in its eaves, then splashed up against the trailer and Brian on the porch, and made him follow the boys into the bright living room.

  Loi was reading, her eyes tight with concentration. She looked up at him. "Brian, listen." She read: "Why do you tremble at my doorway? A man of many hearts does not need me."

  "What's that from?" He tried not to sound wary.

  She held up the book. "Anne Sexton." She laughed a little.

  "This man needs you."

  She smiled, but he knew that she was still struggling to heal the pain that he had inflicted on her with his carelessness.

  Silently, she handed him the book. The poem she'd been reading was called "The Interrogation of the Man of Many Hearts." In his wife's eyes he saw something entirely new.

  "You shudder, Brian."

  A roar came from the TV. "Line drive right into the glove of Mattingly," the announcer yelled.

  Brian went down onto the couch. Chris leaned against his shoulder. He drew Chris closer, and tried to get caught up in the baseball game.

  Soon, though, he sank into a black study, staring at the television and returning to the flow of theory that might have led him astray.

  He thought that he must have inadvertently discovered a great poison, the most terrible of all poisons. He still didn't fully understand. But whoever had removed his equipment, then sealed his facility with steel-reinforced concrete understood.

  He was deep in thought when Loi got up and went to the door. He hadn't heard the tap that had announced the visitor. "Your friend is here," Loi said, stepping aside as Ellen's striding entrance brought him to his feet.

  She came straight into the room, and she came straight to the point, too. "I'm at a dead end," she said. "I've played out every lead. The judge has ordered me off his property at the point of a gun." She locked eyes with Brian. "Midnight. His root cellar. Breaking and entering."

  She stood there in the light, her flawless skin glowing, her soft round eyes sharpened by determination, her lips a rigid line.

  Loi's eyes widened. "We have been in this man's house as guests. We won't go as thieves."

  Ellen knew that she had to be very careful here.

  She sat down in the big easy chair, crossed her legs and took out a cigarette. "May I?" Loi went into the kitchen, returned with an ashtray. "Look, Loi, I know that you don't want him to do this. I don't blame you. I don't want either one of us to do it! But it's my obligation to discover the truth of what's happening here and tell the public. Brian has an obligation, too, because he's a scientist."

  "Didn't Nate Harris tell you that he'd gone through that place? You don't need Brian to help you do something the police have already done."

  "The insects come out of the same hole Nate said was clean. Therefore it is not clean."

  Concerned lest the boys overhear upsetting talk, Loi sent them off to their room. She pulled their door closed. "I know something's crazy," she said quietly. "But I don't see where my husband has to get in the middle of it. Skulking around playing robber! What use is it, Brian? What will you accomplish? Let me tell you, the more you place yourself in their way, the more you tempt them. Eventually, they will strike again."

  "Just for a second open your mind to the idea that this isn't demons," Ellen said. "Consider the idea that it's something so completely different that we can hardly even begin to understand it. Something totally new."

  "I know about demons from a long time."

  On the television, the crowd roared. First baseman Don Mattingly had just hit a stand-up triple. Chris peeked out of the bedroom. "Can we come back out, Auntie Loi?"

  "Yeah, boys," she said. "We're finished with the private stuff." She gave Ellen a guarded look. "We keep it Reader's Digest from now on, OK?"

  "Brian, we can get our evidence, I know we can! It's down in that root cellar, I'm sure of it. That's the lair."

  Loi put her arms around Brian.

  Ellen wanted to yell at her, but there was nothing to say, nothing she could say. Finally she let out a long exhalation of smoke, slumped. "Brian—"

  "I know what it is! And I'm not going back in there."

  "You went in?"

  "Fell."

  "And—"

  "I'm not going back. I can't."

  "You're a funny kind of a coward."

  "We need more information. The direct approach is too much of a risk."

  "It's all we have!"

  "People are getting killed!"

  Little Joey began to cry. "Stop this," Loi said. "Both of you, shut up!"

  Ellen got up and left without another word.

  "She's a damned fool," Brian said into the sudden quiet.

  Their eyes met. They had both felt the faint, deep vibration that could have been a big truck out on the road, or maybe the engine of Ellen's old car starting roughly. And they both knew that it could have been something else.

  Ellen lingered a mo
ment on their porch, furious at them and at herself. Here the vibration was too small to be noticed. She peered out into the night, which was rushing with wet wind and not a bit pleasant. She'd come to hate the hours between dusk and dawn.

  She'd searched the woods looking for strange nests. She'd even searched her house trying to find where the thing she'd put in the jar had gotten out. Eventually she'd located a neatly burned hole in the top of the bathroom screen, and she'd patched it with a square of duct tape.

  She walked down the stone path into the sleepy argument of katydids and the deep rhythm of frogs. Her car was a shabby ghost in the driveway. She turned around, and the light flowing from the windows of the trailer seemed to her to possess a special gold.

  Down in the woods she could see lightning bugs. She tensed, watched.

  They were ordinary.

  She resumed the walk to her car. What she was about to do was insane. She ought to go home and lock her door and windows and pray. Her habit now was to sleep from five a.m. until ten, never in the deep night. To keep going she floated in coffee, which made her irritable. She was smoking like hell, too, like she had when she was first starting out in the newspaper business and she thought it made her look more reporterly.

  She reached her car and got in. The Speed Graphic was on the seat, beside it the large flashlight she'd gotten from Ritter's Hardware this afternoon.

  She caressed the cold steel box of the camera, then picked up the flashlight and turned it on and off, testing it.

  Do it, woman. She had her principles, and one of them was to get to the bottom of a story.

  Quite near the car a lightning bug shone and faded. She rolled up the window with fumbling hands.

  The question was, how scared could a person be? Was fear like cold, with a final, ultimate extreme, or was it like heat, that would just keep rising forever?

  The mound, the root cellar...

  Don't think, do.

  She turned on the car, pulled out into Kelly Farm Road. Once an opossum's eyes flared like angry little torches, another time some deer were briefly caught in her headlights, but the drive to the terBroeck estate was otherwise without event.

  She drove as far down Mound Road as she dared, then cut the lights and pulled off, letting the car roll into the woods, hoping the tires wouldn't sink. She cracked her window, inhaled the fresh night air. Ahead of her stood the judge's house, as dark and quiet as a tomb. At least there were no cars here tonight, and no dance behind the curtains to the purple light from hell.

  Far off a powerful engine guttered, began to whine, then settled into a steady rumble. It echoed in the darkness, mingling with the mutter of thunder.

  There were answers out here somewhere, she could almost smell them. She clutched the steering wheel.

  Ten

  1.

  For a long time she sat without moving. Every so often a lightning bug would glow nearby. She held the flashlight, flipping it on, flipping it off, trying to gain courage. These were only ordinary lightning bugs, after all, slow, beautiful, a little mysterious.

  She watched moon shadows dance along the ground. The moon was only half full, but it shed plenty of light when it emerged from behind the rolling clouds. She fingered the door handle. This was a little like diving into a cold swimming pool. The point was to start.

  No. It would be insane to take one step out of this car. She sat, her hand on the door handle, wondering if a thirty-year-old could have a heart attack, just from fear.

  She wanted a cigarette, she wanted water, she wanted a gun. Most of all, she wanted somebody to help her.

  She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, reflecting that the Ellen Maas of even a week ago would never have come out here like this. This was somebody else, a secret Ellen Maas that she hardly even knew, a strong, determined woman who was capable of pulling this door handle like this, and shifting in the seat, and putting her feet on the ground like this, and standing up.

  She took two wide steps into the middle of Mound Road. In three minutes she could be in the judge's yard. Thirty seconds later she'd be at the root cellar.

  She stood dead still. Using her flashlight, keeping it pointed low, she tried to get a look into the woods. It wasn't hard to picture the insects waiting back in there with their little lights turned off. Could they fly without their lights, were they doing that now? Or were they coming along tunnels, ready to burst up out of the ground wherever it suited them?

  It was difficult to tell through her boots, but she had the impression that some sort of vibration was rising from below. She bent down, pressed against the road with her outspread palm. Nothing.

  When she stood up, though, a gust of breeze brought a distinct sound: somewhere in the dark, a powerful vehicle was in motion.

  More carefully, she moved forward, going down the side of the road, keeping to the shadows. Was that a crackle in the woods? Yes. Probably an animal.

  The memory of that first night she'd seen the glowing insects remained vivid. People had been dying in the judge's house, she was sure of it. She reached the edge of the property. The house was dark and quiet.

  Carloads of people had been here that night. Their cries came back to her, full of dreadful ecstasy.

  The judge had not been forthcoming, he'd ordered her off his property, he'd threatened.

  She proceeded past the house, forcing authority she did not feel into her stride. Even this close to the house, the windows were absolutely dark. Was he in there? The old Cadillac was in the garage.

  As she came closer to the house the forest gave way to a wide lawn. The wind snatched at her hair, seeped down her collar. She increased her speed. The small hairs on the back of her neck tickled. Glancing behind her, she almost stumbled over the stones that lined the judge's driveway.

  The silence was not the silence of sleep, but of watching.

  Jagged clouds raced across the sky, pouring down from the north, and suddenly she saw coming toward her, across the hills and forest tops, a great wave of silver light. Then she was in a flood of moonlight so bright she could see the bobbing heads of dandelions in her path.

  Hurrying now, almost running, she crossed the shaggy lawn to the root cellar. Quickly she squatted, thrusting the flashlight down into the tangle of undergrowth, then turning it on. She could see an open area below, and in it long black coils.

  They were entirely motionless. Could they be roots?

  She pressed down into the undergrowth, wishing she had a stronger light.

  Then she thought that they must be a garden hose, old and tangled, long since discarded. Beyond them she could see a collapsed brick wall, and considerable evidence of work—footprints, scrape marks, bricks organized into piles.

  Ironically, the police investigation might well have destroyed vital evidence.

  She shifted, dangled her legs into the opening. The air was cool around her exposed ankles. For a long moment she hesitated. She fought to prevent her thoughts from forming into definite shape.

  But that was a battle she couldn't win. The only thing to do was drop down, and at once.

  She hit the floor of the little chamber with a jaw-snapping thud. Her light got away from her, the beam casting wildly among the roots and brush. She ran to it, grabbed it, shone it in the direction of the strange tangle she had seen from above.

  There was nothing there.

  She went to the spot where the hose had been, but there weren't even any marks in the earth. Then again, the ground was packed hard.

  Her light revealed an opening behind the collapsed wall of bricks. This must be the entrance to the iron mine that Nate Harris had talked about. She moved through the burst wall, careful to avoid dislodging any of the loose bricks still hanging overhead. If they all caved in at once, they could trap her.

  The iron mine was little more than a hole leading downward at a steep angle. There were no supporting beams, no steps, no little miner's railroad. This was an old, old mine of the kind that had been run by slave labor
back during the Colonial era, before slavery had been outlawed in the northern states. Her flashlight revealed the scars of chisels and hand drills. The granite had been penetrated with muscle and blood.

  As she moved deeper, she cast her beam first at the floor, then at the walls, then the ceiling, continually seeking the bit of wing, the dried carcass, that would prove their case.

  Within minutes she had to bow her head, then to crouch. Here the footprints of the state troopers ended. She went on, noticing that the floor of the mine had become curiously springy and soft. She reached down and felt a smooth, giving surface, cool and a little damp. It felt as if it was made of the flesh of mushrooms. But when she tried to tear some off, she found that it was extremely tough, like leather. There was an odor, too, that first tickled the back of the throat, then burned. She sneezed, recovered herself—and realized that the tangle of coils she had seen from above was now two feet in front of her.

  She backed away, suddenly very aware that she was deep underground in the middle of the night in a terrible place, and she didn't have the faintest idea what that thing was.

  It was completely inert, but from this close very obviously not a garden hose. It seemed to be the source of the acrid odor. Carefully, she peered at the tightly knotted coils. Was there a faint pattern in the surface? She couldn't be sure.

  This was something alive, and not a normal something. It was unlike anything she had ever seen or heard of, not a snake, certainly not a worm.

  She coughed, and the sound went echoing off down the mine like a shot Shaking now, feeling the sweat trickling down her face, fighting not to choke on the odor, she forced herself to go closer to the thing. The whole knotted mass of it was about two feet across, a foot high. Conceivably she could pick it up, probably even push it out through the growth above to the surface. Gingerly, she touched it with the edge of the flashlight. Then she prodded it harder. Totally inert. She pushed it with her toe. It had heft—maybe it weighed as much as ten pounds.

  Pushing harder, she shoved it onto its side. Shining her light, she could see considerably more structure underneath.