by Ray Garton
Farther back, Dexter made his pig-like squeal again. He was getting closer.
I rounded a corner, ducked through a narrow archway, and found myself in a small room with a lamp glowing in the corner. Two people were seated on a sofa watching television. I did not look at them, did not want to see them.
There was no way out of the room except the archway through which I’d come.
But there were pale yellow curtains drawn over a window. As the two people on the sofa stood and hurried out, frightened, I tore the curtains open. A large rectangular window looked out on the night. Without hesitation, I grabbed a wooden straight back chair against the wall, held it by its back, and swung it in an arc at the window. The shattering sound was deafening and a scream rose from just outside the room. With two more quick sweeps of the chair, I knocked the large, jagged shards of glass that pointed upward like transparent fangs from the frame. Tossed the chair aside and threw myself into the darkness outside.
To my left, the house continued up the side of the mountain like a giant, curved, meandering staircase. Filled with people conceived in ways no one was meant to be conceived, bearing the hideous marks of their genetics.
I heard wet snorting behind me, another squeal. Running blindly in the rainy dark, I clicked on the flashlight, and the beam sparkled through the heavily pouring rain. It fell on a black pond not three feet in front of me. Raindrops danced on its glossy, lumpy surface between groups of lily pads growing thick in the water. I tried to turn, but my feet slipped through the thick, loose mud and I went in.
After the splash, there was a moment of pleasant, throbbing silence. Trouble-free and safe. When my head broke the surface and I stood in the water—it came halfway up my abdomen and smelled and tasted foul—I heard Dexter’s ragged cry and turned.
He had launched himself into the air again and was headed straight for me, a pale, fleshy, screaming missile. I backed up in the water as quickly as I could, rising out of the pond as the bottom slanted sharply upward on the side opposite where I had fallen in. But I was not fast enough. Dexter hit me hard in the chest and knocked me backward into the water. My instinct was to gasp for breath because the impact had emptied my lungs, but I could not get my face above water.
Dexter’s hands closed on my shoulders with amazing strength and his claws pierced my shirt. I heard my own panicked voice in my head as it bubbled out of my mouth in the black water. My hands tangled in the lily pads as I struggled. The instant Dexter fell off me, I lifted my head out of the water. I coughed, sucked air deep into my lungs, then coughed some more as I got to my feet and climbed up and out of the pond.
Dexter was near the edge, waist-deep in the pond. His up-and-down mouth yawned open as he released a hitching, throaty wail. He clapped his clawed, mutated hands together and jumped up and down on his tail in the water.
He lunged out of the water, straight for me, arms outstretched, still making that high-pitched staccato sound—
…he only wants to play, assall.
—mouth open wide, all those teeth gleaming wetly.
Holding it by the still-lit end with both hands, I swung the flashlight like a baseball bat as Dexter closed in, filling my field of vision. It struck his large, overhanging forehead with a horrible crack, and the light fluttered as Dexter tumbled backward into the water. If any damage had been done, it was only to my Mag-Lite. My hands ached from the impact with Dexter’s large round forehead. It was like striking a boulder.
I turned around and tried to run up the slope on this side of the pond. Like a comically frightened character in a Scooby-Doo cartoon, I ran in place for a moment, my feet sliding through the mud.
Dexter splashed in the pond behind me. Once I gained some traction and started putting distance between us, he let out a ululating bawl.
From the corner of my eye, I could see Bollinger sitting in his wheelchair on the other side of the broken window, watching me. A black, hunkering silhouette against the room’s pale light.
Running through the dark, the flashlight’s flickering beam danced ahead of me, bobbing and sweeping. Although it trembled weakly, the beam kept me from slamming into a fence with a crooked gate. As I fumbled with its rusted metal latch, Dexter’s bare feet slapped in the mud behind me. Closer, closer, unfazed by the blow I had landed with the Mag-Lite.
I threw the latch and pulled the gate open, tried to pull it closed behind me. On the other side, a gravel path ran along an outer wall of the house. I kicked up small rocks behind me as I ran. As wet as I was, I should have been cold, but I felt nothing.
My body was numb, and my mind was focused on only one thing: getting to my car.
With gravel crunching under his feet behind me, Dexter repeated a series of grunting, gurgling sounds. I tried to ignore them as I rounded the front corner of the house, jumped over some low shrubs. But they were more than just sounds. It almost sounded as if he were trying to speak. Perhaps he was, but I could not understand him and was not interested.
The Beetle was in sight, still parked in the circular drive between the front steps and the dead gargoyle fountain. I ran faster as Dexter’s footsteps grew closer. I wondered if that was the last sound Carla had heard before her death: Dexter closing in behind her.
As I neared the car, I hoped I had not locked the door. It was another habit Grandma had ingrained in me. I put the flashlight in my left hand and wriggled the fingers of my right into the soaking wet pocket of my jeans. Hooked one finger in the key ring and pulled it out.
I hurried around the rear of the car, grabbed the handle. The door opened. I threw the flashlight in ahead of me, slammed the door and locked it with my elbow as I stabbed the key at the ignition. It missed the first time, the second.
The entire car rocked as Dexter landed on the back and I dropped the keys. His claws scraped over the roof with harsh, shrill squealing sounds.
I leaned around the steering wheel and groped for the keys on the floorboard. My lungs burned and my heart felt ready to explode. My fingers were numb and couldn’t even feel the rubber mat under my feet. But I heard the keys jingle. Closed my hand on them, sat up, and screamed.
Dexter was lying on the roof of the car with his head resting on the windshield, staring at me. Upside-down, he looked even more like something from a nightmare. Tiny eyes on the bottom, horribly wrong mouth on top, drooling in the rain. He slapped his hands onto the glass and slowly closed both into three-digit fists. His pale claws dug into the glass crunchingly and sliced six white trails.
He made those sounds again, muffled now. Slower, with more clarity. Over and over, until I understood what he was saying.
I slid the key into the ignition, turned it. The Beetle sputtered to life.
Dexter did not seem to notice. He continued making those sounds, saying those words.
I put the car in gear and pushed the accelerator to the floor. The Beetle lurched forward.
Dexter did not move.
I slammed my foot on the brake pedal. The car jerked to a stop and Dexter hit the front of the car once before falling off. I put the car in reverse and backed into the shrubs. Shifted, drove forward and around the fountain.
It occurred to me, before backing up, to run over Dexter. But I could not bring myself to do that, because in spite of his age, I kept thinking of him as a child. Hideous and terrifying, but a child. Even as I sped out of the circular driveway, I could hear him behind me, saying those words.
“Come…play…wiff me! Come…play…wiff me! Come…play…wiff me!”
Eight
I drove faster that night than I had at any time in my life, faster than my poor old Beetle had ever gone, even with Amanda at the wheel. But I wasn’t sure where I was, or where I was going. I was so upset and panicky, I had been driving for about five minutes before I gave it any thought, and I realized I had turned the wrong way as I drove through the wrought iron gate of the Bollinger house. I was going up the mountain again.
The road was too narrow to make a U-turn
, and I was afraid to leave the road for fear of running into Dexter again, or some other member of the family. It was unlikely that he would be able to keep up with me on foot, but he could cover a lot of ground bounding forward on that tail. I did not want to take any chances and hoped, instead, that the road would somehow get me back on a main road that would take me into town.
I decided the best thing to do was go straight to the police station in Mount Crag and report what I had seen.
The road wound through the forest, apparently aimless in its backtracking and meandering. Going around a curve, the headlights cut between the trunks of the tall pines to fall briefly on another old house nestled in the woods. I wondered if there were any Bollingers living there, shuffling around in the dark upper floors, waiting for company. My foot pressed on the accelerator a little harder.
After about twenty minutes of driving, I began to worry that I had made a terrible mistake, that the road would take me nowhere.
A few minutes after that, the pavement ended abruptly up ahead, and I braked hard. Where the pavement stopped, mud took over and sloped downward slightly. The way tall pines and firs grew all around the end of the road, it was obvious it had never gone any further. It simply stopped.
I sat there a moment with the engine idling. Remembered Amanda driving off the road and into a ditch earlier that night. It had scared the hell out of me, because I thought she had lost control of the car, but she had not. It had been necessary to drive off the main road and through that ditch to get onto the road that led up the mountain to the main Bollinger house, as well as the others that stood dead and gray in the woods.
I wondered if it was necessary to do the same to get off that road.
Taking a deep breath, I drove forward slowly. The trees were spaced apart enough for me to wind around them. On the other side, a broad ditch ran with a roiling stream of water. Beyond that, a familiar two-lane road—Mt. Crag Pass.
I released a long, groaning sigh of relief, but I had not gotten there yet. Hoping the ditch wasn’t too deep, I drove forward slowly, cautiously, and picked up a little speed as the Beetle dipped into the ditch. It was shallow, and I put it behind me in seconds, turned right, and hit the accelerator hard.
On the pass and heading over the mountain, I felt safer, but not safe. I had no idea how many houses the Bollingers had on the mountain, or how many Bollingers there were. For all I knew, they were coming after me in cars, making their way through the woods to cut me off up ahead. I glanced nervously at the rearview mirror as I drove, tense and jumpy.
As I passed the sign that told drivers they were entering Pinecrest—Where Jesus is Lord! it claimed—headlights appeared in the rearview and drew closer fast. I started breathing so fast, trying to catch my breath, that I feared I would hyperventilate at the wheel.
The Village was dark except for the light that shone on the sign and the huge wooden crucifix in front of the college.
Suddenly, the car behind me slowed and its headlights grew smaller in the mirror.
It turned right into an apartment complex called the Mountain Arms, where many of the college’s faculty lived.
Tension rushed from my body and I went limp with relief. I drove fast through the Village and started back down the mountain, taking the sharp curves of the steep, narrow road faster than ever before.
Headlights appeared ahead of me in the other lane. For a moment, I considered the possibility that it was a Bollinger, on the look-out for my Volkswagen, ready to take me back to that rambling edifice. But I forced myself to dismiss the notion.
Up ahead, a rush of movement to the left caught my eye. Something was coming down the embankment fast. It stumbled into the middle of the road and stopped. A deer — a buck with a large rack. The tires of the approaching car squealed over the wet pavement and it went into a skid. It headed for me sideways. The deer bounded forward, in front of me.
The Beetle went off the edge and rolled down toward the stream below. It landed upside-down, wedged between two immense boulders. The oncoming car that had swerved to avoid hitting the deer went over the edge right behind me and landed on top of the Beetle. The man driving, a fifty-four year old accountant who worked in the business office at the college, was killed instantly.
I don’t remember any of that, though. The last thing I remember is seeing that other car barreling toward me, and the buck springing gracefully through the air. After that, I can recall nothing but a blackness darker than night.
Nine
When I tried to open my eyes, it seemed they had been glued closed. They were gummy, the lids heavy, and when I finally got them open, the light was too bright and painful, and I closed them again. My throat ached, and my dry mouth tasted like dirty old flannel. I was so weak, I could lift neither of my arms, and when I tried to speak, all that came out was a breathy croak.
The air was cool and smelled of…I could not put my finger on it. The only thing that came to mind was medicine. I heard a distant voice that sounded pinched, tinny, as if it were coming through a speaker: “Dr. Skinner, line two. Dr. Skinner, line two.”
I was in the hospital. Either I was wearing a large hat, or my head had been bandaged from just above my eyes on up. I guessed the latter was the case. My entire body ached—my legs, arms, chest, shoulders, back, neck—and my head pounded with a hot, heavy pain. All the pain seemed distant, as if held back for the time being. I could sense, however, that it was growing worse slowly, steadily, closing in on me like a stalker who was growing bold enough to step out of the shadows. I had an intense thirst and wanted some water, but knew I could not sit up. I shifted carefully in bed, trying to find a comfortable position.
Soft footsteps entered the room and a cheerful female voice said, “You’re awake!”
I opened my eyes a little, squinted against the painful light. A plump, middle-aged nurse hovered over me.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
I cleared my throat. “Hurt,” I said.
“Yes, I’m sure you do. Do you know why you’re here? Do you remember what happened?”
“Did I—” I cleared my throat again, licked my lips, closed my eyes. “Drink of water?”
“Sure, sweetie.”
I felt the end of a straw touch my lips. Took it in my mouth and sucked hard, gulped the water.
“Slowly, slowly,” she said, then pulled it away.
I wanted more, but decided to wait. “Did I…hit that deer?”
“You were in a car accident,” she said. “I need to let Dr. Lillianfield know you’re awake.”
I groped around in my mind for some memory of an accident, but other than the deer and the headlights of another car, I could find nothing. But there was something else there, something urgent.
Then it all came back in a flood of hideous images, remembered smells, and most importantly, the memory of Carla Firth’s purse.
I opened my eyes again, blinked a few times. “How long’ve I been here?”
“Three days.”
“Three—are you—” I tried to sit up without fully realizing what I was doing.
“No, no, no,” she said, putting a hand on my chest. “Don’t try to sit up yet.”
“I have to talk to the police. Right away.”
“Well …there’s an officer right outside your room.”
I frowned up at her. “There is? Why?”
She tucked her lower lip between her teeth thoughtfully for a moment, then said,
“You just lie back, okay? I need to call Dr. Lillianfield.”
After the nurse left, I closed my eyes and wondered why, after three days, there was a police officer waiting outside my room. Before I could consider any possible reasons, I drifted back to sleep.
When I opened my eyes again, a man in a white coat stood over me.
“I’m Dr. Lillianfield,” he said. He had black hair with strands of silver over the ears, wore wire-rimmed glasses, had a silver mustache.
“I need to talk to the police,�
� I said hoarsely.
“Yes, and they want to talk to you,” he said with a nod. “But that will have to wait, okay?”
He asked questions—how did I feel, where did I hurt, that sort of thing—and I answered them quietly.
“You’re very lucky to be alive, Andy, do you realize that?”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I didn’t.
“You weren’t wearing your seatbelt,” he said.
“I…wasn’t? But I always wear my—” I stopped and closed my eyes, remembering how desperate I had been to get away from the Bollinger house. I had been so afraid, so rushed, I had not put on my seatbelt. “Yeah. I guess I didn’t.”
“You don’t remember anything about the accident?”
I tried again to pull up some memory of what had happened, but nothing would come. I slowly shook my head and said, “No, I don’t.”
He hesitated, took a deep breath. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, Andy.”
My mind raced. Had there been someone else in the car with me? I couldn’t remember. Was the deer the only thing in the road? Had I run over someone?
“You had to be cut out of your car,” he said. “It took a while and it wasn’t easy.
You lost a lot of blood, and you have a severe concussion. Both of your legs are broken, the right one in three places. Three of your ribs were broken and your spleen was ruptured. We had to take it out. And, uh…Well, Andy, I’m very sorry, but there’s no easy way to say this. Your right arm had to be amputated in order to remove you from the wreckage.”
He kept talking, his voice droned on, but I was no longer listening. I lifted my head, ignoring the pain, and looked down at my right arm. Rather, at the place where my right arm should have been. It was gone.
I tried to scream, but all that came out was a whispering squeak.
Dr. Lillianfield was still talking when I passed out.