Creature

by John Saul

  He paused across the street from Phil Collins’s house, huddling close to the trunk of a large cedar tree, watching not only the coach’s house, but the houses on either side as well.

  The buzzing of insects seemed amplified in his ears, and in his paranoia he couldn’t imagine how anyone could sleep through the din. Yet all the houses on the block were dark, nor could he see signs of movement on the streets.

  Perhaps, after all, they weren’t looking for him yet.

  He crouched for a moment, then darted across the street and around to the back of the coach’s house. He tapped softly at the back door, then harder.

  Instantly, the house came alive with the sound of a dog barking, and a second later lights came on. Then the door opened a crack and Jeff recognized the coach’s familiar face peering out at him.

  “It’s me, Coach,” he said, his voice trembling. “I—I’m in trouble. Can I come in?”

  The door closed for a second, and Jeff heard Collins mumble something to the dog, then the door opened wide and Jeff stepped into the kitchen of Collins’s little house. The big German shepherd crouched at its master’s feet, its teeth bared, a low growl rattling in its throat.

  “Easy, Sparks,” Phil Collins said. “Take it easy.” The dog visibly relaxed, then slunk forward to sniff at Jeff’s hand.

  Jeff sank into the single battered chair that stood next to the kitchen table and held his head in his hands.

  “I—I hit my mother,” he said, his eyes avoiding the coach’s. “I don’t know what happened. But—Well, sometimes it’s like I just go crazy.” Finally he looked up, his expression beseeching. “What’s wrong with me?” he asked. “I get so mad sometimes I just can’t control myself. All I want to do is start hitting things. I just want to start hitting, and I don’t care what happens.”

  Collins placed his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Now, just take it easy,” he said, unconsciously repeating the same words he’d used to the dog only a moment before. “There’s nothing wrong with you, Jeff. You’re just going through a tough time in your life, that’s all. Now just try to tell me what happened.”

  Half sobbing, Jeff did his best to tell Collins what had happened that evening, from the time he’d started talking to Linda Harris until the moment hours later when he’d suddenly, without thinking about it, struck his mother. But in the end he knew the story didn’t make much sense—there were a lot of blank spots, times when he couldn’t remember where he’d been or what he’d been doing. To his relief, the coach didn’t seem too upset by what he’d done.

  “Sounds to me like you just had an overreaction to breaking up with your girlfriend,” he said. “Happens all the time with kids your age—hormones are flying all over your body and you never know what they’re going to do to you. Tell you what,” he went on. “I’ll call Marty Ames and we’ll take you out there and have him look you over. Believe me,” he added with a wink, “if you’re cracking up, Marty will be able to spot it in a minute. But you’re not,” he added quickly, as Jeff paled. “I’ll bet he says the same thing I just said.”

  “But what about my folks?” Jeff asked, his voice anxious. “After what I did to my mom, my dad’s going to kill me!”

  “No, he’s not,” Collins assured him. “If we need to, I’ll talk to him, or Marty Ames will. But I’ll bet we won’t even have to do that. Your old man’s pretty proud of you, Jeff. And he’s sure not going to turn against you now. He’s not, and your mom’s not.”

  As Jeff seemed to calm down, the coach went to the phone and made a quick call. A quarter of an hour later, with Jeff sitting next to him, Collins pulled his car to a stop in front of the clinic gates and rolled the window down to speak to the guard who was waiting for them. The guard pressed a remote control and the front gates swung slowly inward to let Collins drive through.

  Martin Ames was waiting for them in the lobby of the sprawling main building and immediately led Jeff back to the examination room. “Strip down to your shorts,” he told the frightened boy, “and let’s have a look at you.” He turned to Collins. “Tell me what happened.” While Jeff peeled off his clothes, Collins briefly repeated what Jeff had told him earlier. “Okay,” Ames said when Collins was done. “Let’s get started.”

  It was as Ames began checking the reflexes in his legs, tapping his knees with the small rubber mallet, that the rage suddenly began to build in Jeff again. He could feel it coming on but could do nothing about it. And yet there was no reason for it—he’d been through this procedure hundreds of times before and it had never bothered him. But not this time.

  This time it infuriated him.

  “Stop that, goddamn it!” he shouted. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Kicking the tiny mallet in Ames’s hand aside, Jeff jumped off the examination table, his eyes blazing with fury, his hands clenching into fists.

  Ames took a quick step backward and glanced at Collins, who instantly threw his arms around Jeff in a powerful bear hug. In the brief moment before Jeff could recover from the sudden action, Ames jabbed his arm with a hypodermic needle and pressed the plunger. Jeff froze in Collins’s grasp, and as the drug began to take effect, felt his rage ease and his body relax. As Collins released him, Jeff sank back onto the treatment table.

  The last thing he heard as he drifted into unconsciousness was the sound of Ames’s voice telling Collins to call his parents and explain to them where he was. He was going to be all right, Ames said, but he would have to spend the rest of the night at the clinic.

  But was he going to be all right?

  Martin Ames didn’t know.

  He knew it was a nightmare, knew it had to be. Surely what was happening to him couldn’t be real.

  His entire body was racked with pain, blinding, searing pain that tore at the depths of his soul.

  He seemed to be surrounded by darkness, and yet, even in the pitch-black of the torture chamber, he could see perfectly.

  He was not alone.

  He could see the others, some of them chained to the walls, others strapped to the rack in the center of the floor. And he could hear their cries—agonized shrieks that bellowed from the depth of their souls, reverberating through the stone room but never fading away, only being built upon by more screams, more pitiful wails.

  The chamber masters were there, too, oblivious to the keening pleas of their victims, each of them carrying a different tool of torture. One of them was approaching Jeff now, a red-hot branding iron balanced delicately in his hands. He seemed to smile at Jeff for a moment, and through the cacophony, Jeff almost imagined he could hear the man laugh before he pressed the glowing metal against his thigh.

  The sweet smell of burning flesh filled his nostrils then, his gorge rising as a wave of nausea swept over him. “Nooo!” he wailed, and his whole body jerked and thrashed against the chains that bound him to the metal table on which he lay. “Nooo!”

  It was his own scream that finally released him from the grip of the terrible dream, and he sat bolt upright.

  A blinding stream of white light shone in his eyes. He blinked several times and his vision began to clear.

  He was breathing hard; his lungs felt as if they might explode as he gasped for air.

  There were people around him, and for a moment the dream closed around him again and he opened his mouth to scream out once more. But then he caught hold of himself.

  They weren’t the torturers. These men were real, and they wore white coats—as white as the room in which he sat.

  Hospital.

  He was in a hospital.

  Then, slowly, it came back to him, and as his memory returned in bits and pieces, he began to calm down.

  He was at the sports clinic. The coach had brought him here, and Dr. Ames was taking care of him. So he was going to be all right.

  He looked around now.

  There were three attendants, three men he recognized immediately.

  They were part of the staff; his friends.

  But they were l
ooking at him strangely, almost as if afraid of him.

  He raised his hand to shield his eyes against the brilliance of the light, and it was then that he saw the leather strap.

  It was buckled tightly around his wrist, but the free end was torn and ragged, almost as if …

  As if he’d been strapped down and managed somehow to rip himself free.

  He swallowed hard and felt a soreness in his throat, the kind of rawness he always felt after he’d spent an afternoon shouting at a football game.

  Puzzled, he tried to swing his legs off the table and sit up straight, but found that he couldn’t. And when he looked down at his feet, he saw that his ankles, too, were wrapped in leather straps.

  Just as in the nightmare, he was bound to a metal table.

  A wave of anger built up inside him, and he gathered himself together to jerk his legs free.

  Once more a needle was plunged into his arm and he quickly felt himself sink back into the strange, soft darkness of unconsciousness.

  Mercifully, the nightmare did not come back to haunt him.

  8

  Mark Tanner woke up early the next morning, but instead of rolling over to catch an extra ten minutes of sleep, he threw the covers off, sat up and stretched. As Chivas gazed curiously at him from his place next to the bed, he dropped to the floor and began doing push-ups, his resolve of the night before still strong within him. He kept at it, grunting with the exertion, until his arms ached. Then, though he knew it was impossible for his body to have changed yet, he glanced in the mirror. But this morning, instead of being depressed by what he saw, he only grinned at himself encouragingly. “It’ll work,” he muttered. “If it worked for Robb, it’ll work for me, too.”

  “What’ll work?” he heard Kelly’s voice ask.

  Flushing beet red, he spun around to see his sister staring at him from the door. “What are you doing?” he demanded. “If my door’s closed, you’re not supposed to come in.”

  “I had to go to the bathroom,” Kelly replied, as if that explained everything. “You were making funny noises. Are you sick?”

  “Don’t be dumb,” Mark told her. “If I were sick, wouldn’t I be in bed? Now get out of here, or I’ll tell Mom you came into my room without knocking.” Of course he knew he wouldn’t, but he also knew the threat would be enough to send Kelly scuttling back to her own room.

  As soon as she was gone, he stripped his underwear off, tossed it into the corner with the rest of his dirty laundry, then pulled on his robe and headed for the bathroom. He was already in the shower, the bathroom was clouded with steam, when he heard the door open. “That you, Dad?” he yelled over the noise of the spray.

  “Got to shave,” Blake replied, then frowned uncertainly. “What are you doing in there? Didn’t you shower last night?”

  “Uh-huh,” Mark replied. A minute later he shut off the needle spray and stepped out of the shower, grabbing a towel off the rack. “Dad?”

  Blake, his face covered with lather and his head tipped back as he drew the safety razor carefully over his neck, grunted a response and glanced at his son in the mirror.

  “Do you suppose maybe we could start practicing football again? I mean on weekends or something.”

  The razor stopped in midstroke as Blake’s gaze fixed on Mark. “I thought you didn’t want to do that,” he remarked. But as Mark flushed scarlet, his father thought he understood. “Linda Harris, right? She’s on the cheerleading squad, isn’t she?”

  Mark’s flush deepened, and he nodded.

  “How about tomorrow?” Blake asked. “Or maybe Sunday?”

  Mark hesitated. For a moment Blake thought he was going to change his mind, but then the boy nodded briefly, pulled on his robe and left the bathroom. As he went back to his morning shave, Blake felt a sense of satisfaction. Silverdale, he decided, was going to be the best thing that had ever happened to his son.

  Forty minutes later Linda Harris fell in beside Mark. They were three blocks from the school and still had plenty of time before the first bell would ring. “C-Can I talk to you about something?” Linda asked, stopping in the middle of the block and turning to face Mark.

  Mark’s heart sank. She’d already made up with Jeff LaConner and was going to break their date.

  “It—Well, it’s about last night,” Linda went on, and Mark knew he was right.

  “It’s okay,” he mumbled, his words barely audible. “If you want to go out with Jeff tonight, I don’t care.”

  “But I don’t,” Linda protested, and Mark, who had been staring uncomfortably at the ground, finally looked at her. Though her eyes looked sort of worried, she was smiling at him. “I just wanted to tell you what happened, that’s all.” As they resumed walking slowly toward the school, she told him everything that had happened after she’d left the gym with Tiffany Welch the night before. “I was really scared of him,” she said. “It just seemed like he went nuts.”

  “Did you tell your folks?” Mark asked.

  Linda shook her head. “They think Jeff’s the next thing to God,” she said, her voice trembling. “Just because he’s a big football player, they think I should be thrilled to death that he wanted to take me out.”

  “Well, you went with him, didn’t you?” Mark asked, doing his best not to let his voice betray him. “I mean, if you didn’t like him, how come you went out with him?”

  “But he was different,” Linda insisted. “He always used to be real mellow. But now …” She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know, he’s just changed, that’s all. He gets mad for no reason at all.”

  Mark couldn’t resist a slight dig. “ ’Course, telling him you’re breaking up with him isn’t any reason for him to get upset, is it?” he asked.

  Linda started to say something, then saw his grin. “All right, so last night maybe he had a reason,” she admitted. “But that isn’t what I’m worried about,” she went on, her eyes growing serious.

  “Then what is it?” Mark asked.

  “I just—” Linda began, then faltered, wondering how to say it.

  “You just what?” Mark pressed. “Come on, spit it out.”

  “It’s you,” Linda finally said, her eyes avoiding him. “When he finds out about tonight, I don’t know what he might do.”

  Mark felt his face reddening, and tried to control it. “You mean he might try to pound me?” he asked.

  Linda nodded, but said nothing.

  “Well,” Mark went on, feigning a bravado he wasn’t feeling, “if he tries, I guess there isn’t much I can do about it, is there? Maybe I could just roll over and play dead,” he suggested. “Think he’d buy it?”

  In spite of herself, Linda giggled. “He’s not dumb, Mark.” Then her giggle faded away. “Anyhow, if you want to change your mind about tonight, it’s okay.”

  Mark shook his head. “What are we supposed to do, pretend we don’t like each other just because of Jeff LaConner?”

  As they approached the school, Mark stopped walking. Parked in front was a sky-blue station wagon with the words ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH emblazoned on its sides. Someone Mark didn’t recognize was behind the wheel, but Jeff LaConner was getting out of the passenger side. Mark frowned. “What’s that?” he asked.

  Linda frowned. “Rocky Mountain High—it’s the sports clinic,” she said, “and that’s one of their cars. Jeff must have been out there this morning.” Glancing nervously at Mark, she added, “M-Maybe we ought to go around to the side door.”

  But it was already too late. Jeff LaConner had seen them and, after saying something to the driver, was starting toward them. To their surprise, he was smiling. Despite Jeff’s smile, however, Mark could sense Linda’s tension as the big football player approached.

  “Hi, Linda,” Jeff said, and when she made no reply, his smile faded and was replaced by an embarrassed look. “I—Well, I wanted to apologize for last night.”

  Linda’s lips tightened, but she still said nothing.

  “I wasn’t feeling very good
,” Jeff went on. “Anyway, I shouldn’t have done what I did.”

  “No,” Linda said stiffly. “You shouldn’t have.”

  Jeff took a deep breath, but didn’t argue with her. “Anyway,” he went on, “after I got home I got worse, and finally I had to go see Dr. Ames.”

  Linda frowned uncertainly. “How come? What was wrong?”

  Jeff shrugged. “I don’t know. He gave me a shot and I spent the night at the clinic, but I’m fine now.”

  Mark had only been half listening, for he’d been preoccupied by the mark he’d noticed on Jeff’s wrist. The skin was abraded and bright red. Now he asked: “What did they do? Tie you down?”

  Jeff gazed at him curiously, and Mark nodded at the other boy’s wrist. Still not sure what Mark meant, Jeff looked down. Seeing the red mark on his right wrist, he raised his other hand, and as his arm bent, the cuff of his sleeve moved up a couple of inches. His left wrist, too, was ringed with an angry red welt.

  He stared at the marks blankly.

  He hadn’t the slightest idea where they might have come from.

  Sharon Tanner collapsed the last of the packing boxes, added it to the immense pile next to the back door, then wiped her brow with the back of her hand. “You were right,” she said, glancing at the clock over the sink. “Only eleven-thirty, and it’s all done. And dear God,” she added, dropping into the chair opposite Elaine Harris, “don’t let me have to do this again for at least five years!” She took a sip of cold coffee from the mug in front of her, grimaced, spat the coffee back into the mug, then got up and emptied the mug into the sink.

  “All it takes is organization,” Elaine replied.

  “And extra hands,” Sharon told her. “Why don’t you show me around the stores, then I’ll treat you to lunch.” She looked down at her jeans and sweatshirt and smiled ruefully. “But nowhere fancy. I just don’t feel like changing.”

  Fifteen minutes later Sharon pulled her car into the nearly empty Jot behind the Safeway store and shook her head in amazement. “Not like San Marcos. There, I’d be lucky to find a spot after cruising the lot for ten minutes.”