“Sure. You mean the psi talent,” she said sweetly, feeling as if love were taking her over for the first time in her life.
“It’s like I know it’s in me, and I have to be real careful. It gets out when I lose control. So I can’t lose control. I can’t get mad, not at other people. It might get awful if I do. And if I’m happy—I mean really happy—well, something strange happens. You don’t know about the time with the butterflies, do you?”
“Butterflies?”
“At least Dr. Fleetwood doesn’t tell everybody everything. Nice to know. When I was making love for the first time in my life, all these butterflies showed up—they just flew out of nowhere, and they covered me. They just covered me like they wanted to take me with them. Out into the sky or something. It sounds crazy now, but it happened. And people thought I was a freak. The girl I loved back then, she thought it was freaky. A year ago, I got married, but you know, I never had ... well, I never had relations with her. I couldn’t. I was afraid of what might happen. I was afraid she’d see what a freak I was.”
“I understand that,” Cali said, remembering the night with Det when something else took over—some residue from the homicide scene. “Completely. I guess we’re abnormalities in this world. But somewhere, we’re probably perfectly normal. Who knows? Maybe a thousand years from now, there’ll be more of us.”
“Naw,” Chet said sadly. “There won’t be. I think people like us lived centuries ago and died out. We’re mutants now, that’s all. We’re .. .”
He leaned over and looked at her face, as if seeing it for the first time.
Oh, God, Cali thought. My heart’s racing. He’s going to kiss me again and it’s going to go further. This nineteen-year-old is going to kiss me. Please don’t, Chet. Please don’t kiss me. If you do, I may ... I may want to kiss you back. I may want to take this all the way to sex, and then that’ll screw everything up for us. Let’s keep it on low flame, please. Let’s both keep it warm but not hot.
The next kiss arrived, and it was sweet and filled with its own kind of juice, fire burned in it; and she tasted his sadness and his happiness in equal measure; she kissed him and her mind went into a kind of blankness; their kisses became stronger and blotted out their surroundings—they were no longer in the construction area with the rafters and the holes in the roof and the wet snow coming down in a shaft of hazy light. They were joining in some way that felt warm and homelike, as if Cali had known that Chet would be the one who would fit her right, would taste right as she pressed her lips to his, as their bodies moved together. Their clothes were minor obstacles; their wills bent; their sense of right and wrong seemed to melt as they drew their flesh together in a perfect rhythm, a genuine union. Then the sound began.
18
It started as a whirring kind of noise, followed by a gentle cooing—Cali opened her eyes—in the light from the ragged hole in the roof, doves were flying—flying together as if they’d been nesting in the rafters and had just been disturbed; Chefs eyes remained closed as his passion grew, and she kissed his forehead as he pressed his lips to her throat, as their bodies moved together in a final press, but she could not take her eyes off the white birds as they flew, flapping against each other in the same lazy circles that the snow made as it fell.
Finally, she whispered, “Chet, my God,” and she drew back from him.
In his eyes there was nothing but love and innocence, and the doves flew maddeningly close, until they were around his shoulders, cooing and flying, their feathers drifting with the snow.
“It’s happening,” she whispered, with more shock than tenderness in her voice, and Chet craned his neck around and a small yelp came from him, and when he turned to face her there were tears in his eyes. “Love me,” he said. “Please. Someone has to love me. You understand me.” Tears flowed down his face. “Please. We’re both freaks, but right now, I want you and I want you to want me. I don’t want to live my life afraid that. .. things will happen.”
“I know,” Cali whispered, and then closed her eyes to the doves that circled the air, the white doves that had come from nowhere except the snow-filled sky, and she felt his tears burn against her cheek as she allowed herself to love for the moment, and to love for a reason.
And it was the greatest heat she had ever had in her life, and she didn’t want to let go of the man who held her.
19
And then Cali felt it inside her.
After she and Chet had spent their hour together, with the doves circling among the snowflakes, the doves becoming snow, and the snow becoming a kind of whiteness that took over the shadows of this part of Harrow, as it seemed to fall apart around her.
Cali whispered to Chet, “Oh my God. Chet, dear God, it’s not the house. It’s us.”
“Huh?” he asked sleepily.
“The house. The haunting. It’s not about us waking it up. We came in here and our abilities were gone.”
“True,” he said, his lips against her neck.
“It took them. It’s using our talent.” She pulled away from him and looked up among the lazily flapping plastic sheet, the exposed woodwork, the hole in the roof. “This is where she died.”
“Who?”
“Quincy Allen. Oh my God, I can feel it. She was here. She was here in this place. The girl who died. She had an ability. Jack told me he was sure. She had an ability and she became part of a ritual. This is where she died. This is where she saw it.”
“It?”
“Look.” Cali pointed to something that seemed impossibly blurry, and it wasn’t quite snow and it wasn’t quite doves flying in lazy circles. It was a whirlwind of whiteness—no, not whiteness, but emptiness, as if part of the world were being erased right before her eyes, leaving a dead white background, a nothing. The streak of emptiness began moving like liquid dripping from the sky, moving toward the two of them as they lay there. “We haven’t been waking the house up. Dear God,” she said. “We’ve been feeding it.”
The doves seemed to not be beautiful birds anymore, but a terrible whiteness, a fury that came from the descending chill, with talons of lightning, toward the two of them.
“My God,” Cali said.
“It’s inside me,” Chet gasped.
“What?”
“The house,” he whispered. “It’s happening.”
20
Chet screamed as if he were burning from what looked like a white, drippy wax as it sprayed across his left shoulder.
Cali felt it. Something had shifted within the house, just as if there had been a minor earthquake. Something had changed.
There, in the whiteness that the world was becoming, she saw the word:
Mercy.
And then what seemed to be figures of emptiness, carved from the flesh of whiteness, drew forward, ambling toward them, and she didn’t want to let go of Chet for fear, but she felt a pulse of terror in her heart—and she tried to think of words to calm herself, ways of keeping the fear back, but it engulfed her.
The little boy named Scotty, the boy she had envisioned in the dark closet of an apartment on the Upper West Side of New York, stepped out from the whiteness, his hand reaching for her. He opened his mouth to speak, and a dove emerged bloody from his throat and flew toward her, but as it came to her, she knew that she couldn’t let it touch her, and it sailed down into her hair and began pecking and scratching at her; somewhere, perhaps miles away, Chet screamed; Cali was no longer where she had been, but in a dark closet with a little boy who told her the most terrible truths about herself and about her brother and about how life really was.
The buzzing began, and at first it sounded like Frost humming as he had downstairs, just humming, but soon it was a full-volume buzz, and she knew that it was flies, and she herself began whispering in the darkness, “Poor old lady, she swallowed a fly, I don’t know why she swallowed a fly.”
21
Chet could not help himself—they were in his hair, they were on his back, these things, these wh
ite demons, these—birds, that’s all they were, birds, but they had talons that felt like razors and his skin burned from their touch. Had they pecked out his eyes? He wasn’t sure—he was blind from blood that dripped from his forehead, and his mind raced against his own confusion. “Cali!” he cried out, “Oh my God! Make them stop! Please!” he shouted. They were like maggots on him more than birds, and they felt squishy and dead but still wriggling; they were warm and moved around his thighs like snakes and up his spine they clawed their way to the small of his back, where he tried to reach back and pull them off him.
He didn’t even know where he ran—he just moved where he could, with a sense of desperation and fear, and it was only when they seemed to be shredding his skin that he fell and knew that this must be the end of his life.
It was as if a spark had ignited the human fire within Harrow.
22
“Ivy,” Frost said.
Ivy Martin in the darkness of the tunnel below, her night vision goggles on, turned and saw nothing but the green shadows of the walls and doorway behind her.
And then she saw him.
Frost Crane, not green with the goggled light, but clearly, as if he stood in a halo of daylight.
He was naked, his flesh covered with hieroglyphs and symbols that were like the ones in the tunnel beneath the house.
In his hand, a pitchfork.
And then, she felt them—touching her—and the glow of their forms became apparent. It was like a dream she’d once had about Harrow, a dream of brambles and knives in the air, shining, and bites along her arms—for they had begun nibbling at her as if they meant to tear her flesh with their hungry mouths—
And the pitchfork gleamed brightly in the dark room as Frost brought it down, and into her flesh, and the dream seemed to take her over as she felt the puncture wounds within her flesh. Her goggles flew from her head—pulled with force from her. But still she could see them, in the darkness, they were like angels of green fire, not just a few of them, but a city of the dead surrounding her, boys and women and old men and children, and there, before them, their henchman:
Frost.
“Mercy,” she whispered, as if the word itself would save her, as if it would be understood by Frost. And by the people who appeared around her, the little girl and the woman who might or might not have been her own great-great-aunt, the beautiful woman who looked something like Ivy herself, as she formed, as Isis Claviger formed, and then Ivy knew that she had sought what she should not seek at Harrow. But she had no word for it, for these were not ghosts, nor were they hallucinations from the pain in her body where the thick tines of the pitchfork went in—these were energies and she, herself, would soon leave hers behind.
She remembered her dream of knives in the air, and of going to the house, and of feeling the bites on her skin, and knew that she had dreamed her own final moments but had dressed them up in beauty and metaphor, when, in reality, it was a cold, damp basement she would die in, and the love she would feel, the want, was from a pitchfork as it slammed into her again and again.
And then, as she fell, and as the man stood over her in the dark, she saw the only man she had ever loved, Stephen Hook, standing there, reaching for her. She made a feeble attempt to reach for him, but the pitchfork came down again and again, and her dream took her over as life bled from her.
Frost whispered, with each pitch of the fork into the dung of the woman’s body, “The Infinite is coming! Prepare the way!”
23
Mira awoke in the shed. She kicked the door back so that it creaked open. The brilliant lights from the garden poured into the darkness of the shed. What she could remember was that she’d crawled inside and had fallen asleep. An hour? Two? How long had it been?
She glanced at her watch with its neon digital numbers.
Jesus. Asleep all day. Almost six P.M. No wonder I feel like shit.
She sat up, shivering.
Christ, it’s fucking freezing.
Conan, the ever-faithful border collie mutt, was curled up near the door of the shed, just inside it. He glanced up at her, and she reached over to pet him. The dog growled, and, instinctively, she withdrew her hand.
“Conan? Baby?”
Conan rose up and stretched. Mira felt a little crazy for thinking her dog would growl at her.
“Hey, boy, you been sleeping with me all this time?” She snapped her fingers and let out a brief whistle.
The dog came over into the spear of light of the shed’s doorway.
Something’s wrong. Something’s up with Conan. He looks ... like he’s been in a fight or something.
And then her dog began whispering, or at least that’s what it seemed like. Mira giggled, the aches in her back and along her stomach subsiding. Yeah, right. Conan’s whispering to me.
“That’s right, it's me, you fucking bitch," Conan said, his muzzle moving in impossible shapes to form the words. “You’re a self-centered little bitch who thinks that everyone has to do what you want, like what you like; well, nobody is gonna play that game anymore, Miranda Fleetwood, and you better just get used to it. I know what you really need, bitch, and you’re gonna love every fucking minute of it. We’ve had this date since the moment you brought me home, since all those times when you cried into me, when you used me like a chump, but I’m gonna put it to you now, bitch, I’m gonna show you what the fuck it’s all about, what the Infinite can do to a little bitch like you.”
He approached her, a snarl still on his lips. His breath was foul, and there was a sourness to the smell of his hackled fur. His growls continued, growls and obscenities. For a moment she was sure he had a look in his eyes that was nearly human. Human and burning with an angry lust. And even worse, these were not Conan’s eyes at all, but someone else’s, someone’s she had seen before, someone’s she knew.
Frost. She was sure it was Frost.
Inside her dog. His eyes, there. His awful eyes. Watching her.
Wanting her.
I’m hallucinating. I know I am.
The dog’s spittle dribbled across her arm.
She moved farther back into the shed, feeling the spiny tips of the antlers press against her back, and in front of her, her pet dog began to whisper awful, obscene things, things that only an animal would desire.
She moved as far back in the shed as she possibly could and grabbed the antlers for some sense of protection.
Behind her dog, the shed door closed and left her in total darkness.
Goggles. Get the goggles. They’re here, somewhere. They’re here. I dropped them. They must be.
Mira slipped her goggles on, but instead of seeing the green outline of her dog, she saw several outlines.
Men, standing around her within the darkness. The green-yellow glow of their bodies pulsed as they moved toward her.
She held her breath and wished the world away.
And then someone tore the night goggles from her face.
CHAPTER TWELVE
1
Chet, inside a baseball game, took the cheers of the crowd well, even if the crowd seemed to have pointy teeth. The stadium seemed enormous and filled to capacity, so, of course, he went to get his bat because they’d been shouting “Batter up! Batter up!”
2
Frost emerged from the cellar, his naked body covered with blood, all the running sores and words on him bubbling and wriggling like delicious little parasites. He went to find the others, to tell them that Paradise was opening that day, that the Flowering of the Infinite was going to take place, and that he, Frost Crane, the Avatar of Snapping Jaws, was the one who had begun it, and his Voices told him that it was just like the time they had helped him kill the woman in the woods, that it was neither bad nor good, but just part of his infinite consciousness, part of what he had plugged into here in Harrow, the socket for his bulb.
3
After several minutes in the darkness, Mira Fleetwood emerged from the shed with what looked like a headdress of antlers upon
her forehead, and what might have been the skin of some black-and-white furry animal thrown over her shoulders. Around her mouth, a generous smear of blood.
Within her mind, a wilderness of dogs, all telling her that she was their queen.
4
Jack Fleetwood postponed calling the local police long enough—he had become worried sick about Mira and had spent the past hour going over the videotape of the rooms, when he noticed Frost, in a tape that had registered as 4 A.M., and all Frost did was go to his dresser and take out some small object. A pen-knife? Jack wasn’t sure. It was dark in the room, and the way the camera recorded in darkness was not as clear as the goggles would’ve been, but it appeared that Frost was taking his clothes off and beginning to touch his skin all over.
And then the video had shut off.
Jack rewound the tape a few times, concerned, but he figured he’d ask Frost in a bit what that was all about. Had Frost been sleepwalking?
Then he heard what sounded like a big cracking sound out in the corridor and went out to investigate.
5
In the dim, wavering light of the corridor, a man stood there that Jack Fleetwood did not at first recognize. But it was Chet. In his hand, a baseball bat. His eyes were red with blood.
6
“Chet, what’s going on?”
“It finally happened, Jack. It finally fuckin’ happened,” Chet said. “We are in the stadium of the Infinite! We are at the portal, opened wide, and ready for some sacrifices, Jack! This ain’t just any ordinary game, this is the fuckin’ World Series of games, Jack! It ain’t just a portal, this place, Jack! It’s the place itself! It seats millions and it costs a lot to get in, but man, the show is a good one, Jack!” Chet raised the bat, and Jack knew he had seconds to get out of the way.
Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite) Page 57