by John Shirley
Gradually, the train thunkachunked to a stop, and they were alone in the darkness of the tunnel.
That boy, she thought. Somehow he broke the last car loose. But he’s such a little boy, he must have had help.
And now she couldn’t tell the children apart, in the murk.
She turned to try and organize the children into a group. “Quiet down, please, children, we’re going to be all right. There’s something built into the track that tells people we’re lost from the train and they’ll send someone—”
She stopped, looking around, peering through the darkness. The car was moving again. Very slowly.
Who was that crawling down the walls?
The children had gathered near Mrs. Chilroy, and some of them clung to her; they hid their faces in her skirt when they saw the blue-white rubbery men outside the windows. Naked men. There were dozens of them. And children, too, discernible in the light given off by the rubbery men—the rubbery men seemed to glow faintly in the dark. You could see through them, but they were solid, and their fingers, leaving slick trails on the train’s windows, moved independently of one another. Like worms. Their heads were below the window, now—their hands reached up to rake the glass. Pushing.
They were pushing the car into a side tunnel.
And now they were opening the doors. Forcing them open with their glowworm fingers as the children screamed. But Donny didn’t scream, nor did Ben, nor did—there he was, Everett. Donny and Ben and Everett helped press the doors aside.
And then they—they, with their white fingers leaving glowing smears on the window, with their peanutshell-shaped heads, and the human children beside them—they who were recognized from nightmares, who could not be wearing masks because you could see the dank bricks of the opposite wall through them…they climbed up, into the car.
The children they brought with them surrounded her own and began to herd them out. Some of her own children began to giggle, and others continued screaming, and some gaped in horror—but all of them screamed when they saw the rubbery see-through men up close, very close, and felt their sticky touch.
She looked into the black-button eyes of the rubbery men, and she looked at the dead-white flesh of the grimy children painted with geometric symbols, some nude, some dressed in rags, their fingers caked with blood—whose blood?—and she felt them surround her, tugging and pulling her to the door, and some deep-rooted instinct, awakened by the semidarkness of the subway tunnel (so like a cave, like a place where her ancestors had cowered and sacrificed and worshipped) told her that she had been ensnared by the bottomline basis of all evil, and that it was, really, Everett’s fault, there was no one else to blame. And before she lost herself to babbling she felt in her purse till her fingers closed around a long, sharp nail file. And just before they pushed her down onto the gravel—she caught a glimpse of one of the children, her favorite, redheaded Marlene who wanted to be a singer when she grew up, Marlene running, trying to get away, the children with the painted faces tackling her, pitching her against the third rail, whooping and slapping palms as they watched her spasm, watched her sparking and smoking, charring—she gripped the nail file firmly and thrust the shiny metal sliver deep into one of Everett’s laughing eyes. He crumpled, and she supposed that he was dead, and she felt glad about that. And then she felt some other things, because of what the rubbery men did to her. That’s when she started babbling.
Never mind what they did to her.
FOURTEEN
WHEN CARL LANYARD was a boy, not long after he stopped listening to the Voices, just two weeks, in fact, after the bigger boys had left him face down in the dirt of the playing field, his parents had taken him to visit his Uncle at Bert and Mandy’s farm just east of San Diego.
It was a hot day at the end of fall, and they’d all gone down to the pond for a swim.
Carl had felt craven, since that day on the school playing field, and he brooded, saying very little. The trip was supposed to “put the bloom back in his cheeks,” as his mother said. But Carl spent the whole time sulking, unable to explain why he was withdrawn, but enjoying the attention his quiet misery brought him. His cousins and his parents and Uncle Bert splashed in the shallows of the broad green rush-bordered pond, under a dusty blue sky and a hot, yellow sun. They dived off the old, weathered dock and Carl watched, shrugging and trying to seem mysteriously tragic when they called for him to join them. “I wouldn’t go in neither,” said his youngest cousin, Clemmy, coming up behind. Clemmy was seven, tanned, his red hair always mussed, his blue eyes always wild, his mouth always popping open and shut as if he were singing without sound.
“Why wouldn’t you go in?” asked Carl vaguely, shading his eyes to look over the olive expanse of water. The water was unruffled, and somberly reflected the yellowing transplanted stand of birch trees on the far side. Here and there it rippled when a frog surfaced to snap at a fly. The water looked friendly, and Carl was uncomfortably hot; he wanted very much to go in. But swimming and splashing were not part of his No One Understands Me scenario. Most introspective children go through a No One Understands Me phase, but Carl’s was unusual: He was right. No one understood him. He had the Gift, and they didn’t understand it. Now, it was pressed down deep inside him, at the muddy bottom of his own mirror-surfaced pond.
“I wouldn’t go in that pond,” Clemmy was saying, “because that’s where my mom is.”
Carl turned to stare at him. And then he remembered. Mandy had disappeared, and it was generally agreed that she had left Bert for a rancher up the valley who went bankrupt and sold his own wife’s jewelry to run off to Mexico, taking Mandy with him. It was a story Carl was not supposed to know. But maybe that story was wrong. Maybe Clemmy had seen her drown herself in the pond. “What makes you think she’s in there?” Carl asked softly.
“There’s a slimy thing in there that grabs you and pulls you down. It took her and et her.” There was very little grief in Clemmy’s tone. He seemed to relish the notion. Mandy had been a notoriously bad mother.
But now Carl looked at the pond with new interest. It had become a symbol of tragedy, its mystery redoubled.
For a moment, he was tempted to listen, in the inward way, to see if he could hear Mandy’s voice. Maybe she was haunting the pond.
But he seemed to feel the weight of two vicious boys on his back, and he shook his head, hard.
Clemmy walked away…and Carl trotted down to the dock. He ignored the children diving off the piles, his mother throwing a beach ball at his father in the muddy shallows. He went instead to a narrow gray wooden raft, cobbled together of two-by-fours and half a barn door, floating on the shady side of the dock. He untied the raft, lay out on it flat, belly down, and began to paddle out toward the middle of the pond.
“Carl? Where you goin’, boy?” Bert’s voice.
“Gonna dive off the raft out in the middle. I’ll be okay. I can swim good,” he called over his shoulder. Already his arms were aching. The sun drew moisture from the back of his legs—he wore ragged cut-off jeans, T-shirt, and tennis shoes.
He’d felt a coward, since the day he’d been crushed at the playing field. Maybe now he could regain himself. Show he had some nerve. Not that his family would understand.
He ignored their calls for his return. His arms chafed against the wood as he paddled, and his chest heaved against the nail-studded boards. He squinted as he moved into the open pond, where the sun reflected brilliantly.
Near the center of the pond, almost winded, he got carefully to his knees; the motion brought water slopping over the edge of the raft. Determined not to hesitate, not to stop to think, he stripped off his T-shirt and shoes, took a deep breath, shut his eyes, and dived in.
He was amazed at how cold the water was. It had felt warm against his arms…and then he realized that the sun only warmed the upper foot or so of the pond. The deeper he dove, the colder it got. Colder, and darker. He swam down till the glow of sunlight was completely swallowed up, and the pressure
made his head feel near bursting. And then he opened his eyes.
He might have been floating in interstellar space. No stars here, no moon above, a glimmer of light, a few wavering rays slanting down. He heard a long, low sound like chuckling. Probably noises from the shore, or frog croakings, deranged by the water. He had reached the lowest point of his dive, and for a moment he floated, going neither up nor down—so far as he could tell—his head pointing to the surface, his feet dipping to try and touch the bottom and withdrawing from layers of slimy chill. His movements disturbed something, so that bubbles streamed up, crawling past his legs; some of them, along with the cold water, seeping under the cuffs of his cutoffs, nuzzling horribly at his genitals. And suddenly he had to be away from there. He needed air. Light. He needed light.
He kicked upward. But he couldn’t be sure he was making headway. The surface seemed to get no nearer. His lungs begged—begged with fiery aching, pounding—to let go.
Panic closed in on him. He remembered stories that some ponds had connections to underground grottoes, causing people to be sucked down into a kind of whirlpool, drowned by a current no one would expect to find there.
And Clemmy had said, “There’s a slimy thing in there that grabs you and pulls you down. It took her and et her.”
He looked wildly around. The bubbles streamed up between-his legs, tickling his chest and neck, accompanied by the drawn-out chuckling. Just bubbles. But bubbles exhaled from what? From something rising from the darker places to take him by the ankle—and he did feel a slithery touch on his ankles. Just a tadpole. Just a frog. Just a fish Just a weed. Just the corpse of Aunt Mandy animating her rotting fingers to drag him down with her so she wouldn’t be alone.
The Voices were forever stilled in him. He’d seen to that.
But now…he thought he heard, now, from the other darkness, the dark inside his head: Carl, give to us and we give to you. Come to us. Now or later. By sacrificing or as sacrifice: you’ll come. Then he saw the face. He saw it rising up toward him out of the gloom. Coming clearer and clearer as it ascended. For a moment, in the gloom, he thought it was a pallid woman’s face. Dead Aunt Mandy. In the next moment he kicked convulsively toward the surface, trying to outreach it, as bubbles tickled up his crotch, his chest, to pry at his lips, to force his mouth open so the black water could get in—his limbs were numb from the cold, his arms and legs were leaden.
He looked down again. He saw the face more sharply this time, and the foggy outline of a skeletal blue-white body glimmering faintly with an inner phosphorescence. The head was shaped like a summer squash, but almost transparent, and its lidless black eyes were like the eyes of a flatworm, and it reached toward him with wriggling boneless fingers that trailed the sort of light given off by rotting things in swamps
He screamed soundlessly and raked water, trying to climb a ladder that wasn’t there—the air burst in a geyser of bubbles from his mouth, and the pond, with its flavor of a million growing and dying organisms, forced itself between his lips, its liquid fingers choking him—
He burst into light and air. Coughing out water, gasping, he splashed toward the raft a yard away. Sure that at any second gelatinous fingers would close around his ankles and drag him down again, he flailed, whimpering, till he dragged himself onto the rocking slab of gray wood.
Recumbent, face down in the warm air, he wondered if he’d swallowed minnows or water insects, and he wondered: How long was I under the surface? He asked his mother, later, and she said, “I watched for you after you dived. You were down, oh, no more than ten seconds.” It had seemed like ten minutes.
And after a while, after soaking up the sun for a few minutes, he managed to convince himself that the face he’d seen in the underwater gloom had been a distortion of the murky light.
Twenty years later, Carl Lanyard was fighting to ascend through the same cold gloom. This time it was entirely inside his head. He was once more trying to awaken, again mysteriously held back. His struggle for consciousness was mixed with snapshot images of his terror in the pond as a boy, the memory of the face, the livid rubbery subhuman he thought he’d seen, the bubbles tickling along his ribs, the small slimy creatures brushing him….He seemed to feel them now, as he fought to open his eyes, to sit up in the hospital bed, once more gasping for air. Clawing to escape the cold, dark, water—
He burst into light and air. But this time, instead of the friendly blue sky and the warm, rocking raft and the distant waving figures of his family on the dock—this time he saw Joey Minder and the Ivy League Juggernaut.
Lanyard was no longer in one of the temporary-assignment rooms of the emergency ward. He was in a regular hospital room, alone, with a bowl of fruit under colored cellophane on the table to his right, and beside the fruit a vase of freshly cut roses. There were windows here, the blinds drawn. “What time is it?” he asked blearily, squinting. His head spun.
He sat up, unencumbered by straps. This room was cleaner, he noticed, trying to look at anything but Joey Minder and the bodyguard.
Sitting up hurt his stomach; he felt like he’d taken a sledgehammer blow to the gut. But, just now, the Voices were silent; he was seeing no patterns of black squirming in the air.
“It’s seven AM,” said Minder. “We’ve been up all night, with one thing or another. It’s not even visiting hours. We had to bribe the desk personnel.” He chuckled. “You look half drowned, boy.”
Lanyard shuddered. What made Minder say drowned? The dream was already fading…something about a giant worm in the subway, some children…then, the pond.
“They knocked me out,” he said. “Wherezumwater?” Pain rebounded like a hard rubber ball inside his skull as he turned his head to look for water. The bodyguard—the man in the horn rims and neat sweater, the very man who’d dangled him over a ravening attack dog—filled a glass for him at the sink and held it out to him.
Lanyard took the water and sipped cautiously. “Uh—I feel…awful.”
Sitting on a chair beside the bed, like an old friend settling in for a convivial visit, Minder said:“You lost consciousness at Merino’s—I suppose because the power currents were too thick. They can be paralyzing. And you say someone else knocked you out? The nurses, I take it? Probably the sedative has given you a hangover, to boot. You have my sympathy.” He put his large hands on his knees and looked Lanyard in the eyes. “Lanyard—the room where you met the late Reverend Jesus Merino contained something else. Did you see?”
Lanyard nodded fractionally.
“The Blessed One would have killed you, of course”—he spoke casually, but with the verve of a sports enthusiast talking about the action of a baseball game—“if…if Madelaine hadn’t prevented it. And, for your information, it was Madelaine who told us where you were and what you were up to. She says you have Gifts, Lanyard. She monitored you for us.”
“The old man wouldn’t have told me anything. He refused.” Lanyard took another sip of water. His tongue was thick; it was difficult to talk. He felt he was in a dream; Minder wasn’t quite real. Lanyard, at that moment, had no fear of him.
“He might have changed his mind about talking to you,” said Minder reasonably, tilting his head and smiling. “And anyone who controls the power currents, who is not our ally, is our enemy. No one is neutral. You saw what happened, Lanyard. You know you weren’t hallucinating. You are a believer now.”
Lanyard was beginning to realize that this wasn’t yet another dream. It was real. And Minder could do what he liked with him.
Lanyard tensed, forgetting his aches for a moment, wondering if the door was locked. And where were his clothes? And could he dash past the Ivy League Juggernaut?
Minder was right. He was a believer now. The Voices were real.
“Where’s Madelaine?” Lanyard asked quietly, looking at both men with as friendly an expression as he could manage.
Minder smiled. “She’s waiting for you in the Temple. Just come to me, at my home, and tell me in sincerity that you wan
t to be one of us—you have talent, Carl, you could be a great help to us, you could grow with this—uh—corporation. Just come and tell me, and we’ll know if you’re sincere. And if you are, we’ll take you to her. And if you’re not, we’ll take you to her in a different way, and you’ll never see the light of day again. And if you don’t come to us—well, sacrificing or as sacrifice: you’ll come.”
Lanyard stared.
Minder stood, buttoned his overcoat, and moved toward the door; the bodyguard went ahead and opened it for him. Minder paused at the door and turned long enough to say, “You’ll be released from the hospital as soon as you feel well enough. We’ve given them all the pertinent data on you. We’ve even paid your bill. You see? We take care of you.” He grinned, and for a moment he radiated boundless love for Carl Lanyard.
“I’ll think about…what you said,” Lanyard murmured.
“Whatever your decision, Carl,” Minder said gently, “we’ll know. And if you decide the wrong way—you couldn’t possibly get out of the city.”
His aura of compassion never wavered. “I know you’ll do the right thing.”
“The right thing,” Lanyard repeated, as the door shut.
They left him in the white hospital room, alone.
SHE COULD FEEL the heat rising. The very stone exhaled it. The autumn rite was near, and His pet, the hungry one, the stalker, was pacing restlessly below, awakened by the upsurge of power currents.
She could feel the madmen, bound and caged in the asylums of the city up above, pacing restlessly, mimicking the stalker, made nervous by the upsurge of power currents. The mad could feel it too.
She knew, also, about the children gathering in the basement of their grade school, at that instant, nine PM the night before Halloween.
There were thirteen children; and they’d broken into the school easily enough, smashing a pane, unlocking a window, descending in darkness, giggling, holding hands, led by the eight-year-old black girl, Donny, and a blue-eyed boy who had killed his parents in Jersey to come here and paint his face and play in hidden places.