by Dean Koontz
All of those things, including the Christmas figures that were suspended from the ceiling, were objects that any church might wish to store. Not, of course, in a fake parsonage; that part of it didn’t make any sense at all. But those goods were perfectly legitimate.
Then she found other things that seemed out of place and more than a little strange.
Three entire, sixty-foot-long walls of boxes and crates—as many as two or three thousand containers—were filled with clothes. The labels told a curious story. The first hundred or so were all marked the same:
U.S. FASHIONS
WOMEN’S DRESSES
1960-1964
(KENNEDY ERA)
A smaller number of containers were labeled:
U.S. FASHIONS
MEN’S SUITS AND TIES
1960-1964
(KENNEDY ERA)
There were a lot of women’s clothes, some men’s clothes, and a few boxes of children’s clothes from every subsequent fashion era through the late Seventies. There were even clusters of boxes in which the clothing of various subcultures was stored.
U.S. FASHIONS
MALE ATTIRE—MIXED
HIPPIE SUBCULTURE
All of this was not simply evidence of an ambitious clothing drive to benefit the church’s overseas missions. It was clearly a long-term storage program.
Susan was also convinced that it wasn’t merely some ambitious historical preservation project. These weren’t museum samples of American clothing styles; these were entire wardrobes, sufficient to clothe hundreds upon hundreds of people in virtually any fashion period from the past twenty years.
It appeared as if the people of Willawauk were so extraordinarily thrifty—every man, woman and child of them—that they had joined en masse to preserve their out-of-date clothing, just in case old styles came back into fashion some day and could be used again. It was wise and admirable to attempt to circumvent the expensive tyranny of fashion designers. But in a throwaway culture like America’s, where virtually everything was designed to be disposable, what kind of people, what kind of community, could organize and so perfectly execute an enormous storage program like this one?
A community of robots, perhaps.
A community of ants.
Susan continued to prowl through the stacks, her confusion increasing. She found scores of boxes labeled INFORMAL HOLIDAYS: HALLOWEEN. She peeled the tape off one of those boxes and opened it. It was crammed full of masks: goblins, witches, gnomes, vampires, the Frankenstein monster, werewolves, alien creatures, and assorted ghouls. She opened another box and found Halloween party decorations: orange and black paper streamers, plastic jack-o’-lanterns, bundles of real Indian corn, black paper cutouts of cats and ghosts. This huge collection of Halloween gear was not just for parties at St. John’s Church; there was enough stuff here to decorate the entire town and to costume all of its children.
She moved along the aisles, reading labels on some of the hundreds of other containers:
INFORMAL HOLIDAYS: VALENTINE’S DAY
FORMAL HOLIDAYS: CHRISTMAS
FORMAL HOLIDAYS: NEW YEAR’S EVE
FORMAL HOLIDAYS: INDEPENDENCE DAY
FORMAL HOLIDAYS: THANKSGIVING
PRIVATE PARTIES: BABY SHOWER
PRIVATE PARTIES: BIRTHDAY
PRIVATE PARTIES: WEDDING ANNIVERSARY
PRIVATE PARTIES: BAR MITZVAH
PRIVATE PARTIES: BACHELOR/STAG
Susan finally stopped examining the boxes and the cabinets because she realized there were no answers to be found among them. They only raised new questions about Willawauk. In fact, the more she probed through this place, the more confused and disoriented and depressed she became. She felt as if she had chased a white rabbit and had fallen down a hole into a bizarre and considerably less than friendly Wonderland. Why were bar mitzvah decorations stored in St. John’s Lutheran Church? And wasn’t it strange for a church to store supplies for a stag party? Dirty movies, posters of naked women, party napkins bearing obscene cartoons—that sort of stuff kept in a church? Why wasn’t the parsonage really a parsonage? Was there a Reverend Potter B. Kinfield, or was he only a fictitious character, a name on a gate plaque? If he existed, where did he live, if not in the parsonage? Was Willawauk inhabited by four thousand or more pack rats who never threw anything away? What was going on in this town? At a glance, everything appeared to be normal. But on closer inspection, there hadn’t been a single thing about Willawauk that hadn’t turned out to be strange.
How many other buildings in town were not what they appeared to be?
She walked wearily out of the storage aisles and returned to the front door. She was growing increasingly shaky. She wondered if there was any chance at all that she would eventually be able to climb out of the rabbit hole, back into the real world.
Probably not.
Outside again, she could barely stay on her feet. Her rain-sodden clothes felt as if they weighed a couple of thousand pounds. The impact of the raindrops was incredible, and the wind struck with sledgehammer blows that threatened to drive her to her knees.
She knew that Harch and the others would come for her, sooner or later, and until they did, she just wanted to sit where it was warm. All hope of escape had left her.
The church might be warm. At least it would be dry, and she would be out of the cold wind. That is—if the church was real. If it wasn’t just a facade, like a false-front set on a Hollywood backlot.
There was light in the church, anyway. Maybe that was a good sign; maybe there would be heat, too.
She climbed the dozen brick steps toward the heavy, hand-carved oak doors, hoping they were unlocked.
The doors of a church were supposed to remain unlocked at all times, twenty-four hours a day, every day, so that you could go inside to pray or to be comforted whenever you needed to escape from the pain of life. That’s the way it was supposed to be, but you could never be sure of anything in good old Willawauk, Oregon.
She reached the doors. There were four doors, two sets of two. She tried the one on the extreme right. It was unlocked.
At least something in Willawauk was as it should be.
Pulling open the door, about to step into the building, she heard an engine in the street behind her. The hiss of tires on the wet pavement. The squeal of brakes.
She turned and looked down the steps.
An ambulance had drawn up to the curb in front of the church. Three words were painted on the side of it: WILLAWAUK COUNTY HOSPITAL.
“There is no such goddamned thing,” Susan said, surprised to find a drop of anger remaining in her vast pool of resignation and depression.
Jellicoe and Parker got out of the ambulance and looked up at her. They were no longer dressed as sheriff’s deputies. They were wearing white raincoats and white rain hats, black boots. They were playing hospital orderlies again.
Susan didn’t intend to run from them. She couldn’t. Her strength and her will power were gone, used up.
On the other hand, she wasn’t going to walk down the steps and into their arms, either. They would have to come and get her and carry her back to the ambulance.
Meanwhile, she would go inside where it was warm, go as far toward the front of the church as her legs would take her, so that Jellicoe and Parker would have to carry her that much farther when they took her out to the ambulance. It was a small, perhaps meaningless protest. Pathetic, really. But passive resistance was the only kind of which she was still capable.
The church was warm. It felt wonderful.
She shuffled through the vestibule. Into the church proper. Down the center aisle. Toward the altar.
It was a pretty church. Lots of wood, marble, and brass. During the day, when light was coming in through the stained-glass windows, painting everything in bright hues, it would be beautiful.
She heard Carl Jellicoe and Herbert Parker enter the church behind her.
Her aching, quivering legs supported her all the way to the front p
ew, but she knew they would crumple under her if she took another step.
“Hey, slut,” Jellicoe said from the back of the church.
She refused to turn and face them, refused to acknowledge her fear of them.
She sat down on the first, highly polished pew.
“Hey, bitch.”
Susan faced forward, staring at the large brass cross behind the altar. She wished she were a religious woman, wished she were able to take comfort from the sight of the cross.
At the front of the church, to the left of the altar, the door to the sacristy opened. Two men came out.
Ernest Harch.
Randy Lee Quince.
The extent to which she had been manipulated was clear now. Her escape hadn’t been her own idea. It had been their idea, part of their game. They had been teasing her the way a cat will sometimes tease a captured mouse: letting it think there’s a real hope of freedom, letting it squirm away, letting it run a few steps, then snatching it back again, brutally. The mezuzah hadn’t been dropped accidentally in the bathroom. It had been left there on purpose, to nudge her toward an escape again, so that the cats could have their bit of fun.
She’d never really had a chance.
Harch and Quince descended the altar steps and moved to the communion railing.
Jellicoe and Parker appeared in the aisle at her side. They were both grinning.
She was limp. She couldn’t even raise a hand to protect herself let alone to strike out against them.
“Has it been as much fun for you as it’s been for us?” Carl Jellicoe asked her.
Parker laughed.
Susan said nothing. Stared straight ahead.
Harch and Quince opened a gate in the communion railing and walked up to the first pew, where Susan sat. They stared down at her, smiling. All of them smiling.
She stared between Quince and Harch, trying to keep her eyes fixed steadily on the cross. She didn’t want them to see her quaking with fear; she was determined to deny them that pleasure, at least this one time.
Harch stooped down, squarely in front of her, forcing her to look at him.
“Poor baby,” he said, his raspy voice making a mockery of any attempt at sympathy. “Is our poor little bitch tired? Did she run her little butt off tonight?”
Susan wanted to close her eyes and fall back into the darkness that waited within her. She wanted to go away inside herself for a long, long time.
But she fought that urge. She met Harch’s hateful, frost-gray eyes, and her stomach churned, but she didn’t look away.
“Cat got your tongue?”
“I hope not,” Quince said. “I wanted to cut her tongue out myself!”
Jellicoe giggled.
To Susan, Harch said, “You want to know what’s going on?”
She didn’t respond.
“Do you want to know what this is all about, Susan?”
She glared at him.
“Oh, you’re so tough,” he said mockingly. “The strong, silent type. I love the strong, silent type.”
The other three men laughed.
Harch said, “I’m sure you want to know what’s going on, Susan. In fact I’m sure you’re dying to know.”
“Dying,” Jellicoe said, giggling.
The others laughed, sharing a secret joke.
“The car accident you had,” Harch said. “Two miles south of the turnoff to the Viewtop Inn. That part was true.”
She refused to be prodded into speaking.
“You rolled the car over an embankment,” Harch said. “Slammed it into a couple of big trees. We weren’t lying about that. The rest of it, of course, was all untrue.”
“We’re all shameless fibbers,” Jellicoe said, giggling.
“You didn’t spend three weeks in a coma,” Harch told her. “And the hospital was a fake, of course. All of it was lies, deceptions, a clever little game, a chance to have some fun with you.”
She waited, continuing to meet his cold gaze.
“You didn’t have a chance to languish in a coma,” Harch said. “You died instantly in the crash.”
Oh, shit, she thought wearily. What are they up to now?
“Instantly,” Parker said.
“Massive brain damage,” Jellicoe said.
“Not just a little cut on the forehead,” Quince said.
“You’re dead, Susan,” Harch said.
“You’re here with us now,” Jellicoe said.
No, no, no, she thought. This is crazy. This is madness.
“You’re in Hell,” Harch said.
“With us,” Jellicoe said.
“And we’ve been assigned to entertain you,” Quince said.
“Which we’re looking forward to,” Parker said.
Quince said, “Very much.”
No!
“Never thought you’d wind up here,” Jellicoe said.
“Not a goody-goody bitch like you,” Parker said.
“Must have all sorts of secret vices,” Jellicoe said.
“We’re really glad you could make it,” Quince said.
Harch just stared at her, stared hard, his cold eyes freezing her to the core.
“We’ll have a party,” Jellicoe said.
Quince said, “An endless party.”
“Just the five of us,” Jellicoe said.
“Old friends,” Parker said.
Susan closed her eyes. She knew it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. There wasn’t such a place as Hell. No Hell or Heaven. That was what she had always believed.
And didn’t nonbelievers go to Hell?
“Let’s fuck her now, right here,” Jellicoe said.
“Yeah,” Quince said.
She opened her eyes.
Jellicoe was unzipping his pants.
Harch said, “No. Tomorrow night. The seventh anniversary of my death. I want it to have that significance for her.”
Jellicoe hesitated, his fly half undone.
“Besides,” Parker said, “we want to do it to her in the right place. This isn’t the right place.”
“Exactly,” Harch said.
Please, God, please, Susan thought, let me find my way back up the rabbit hole... or let me just go to sleep. I could just lay back here against the pew... and go to sleep... forever.
“Let’s get the bitch out of here,” Harch said. He stood, reached down, seized Susan by her sweater, dragged her to her feet. “I’ve waited a long time for this,” he said, his face close to hers.
She tried to pull away from him.
He slapped her face.
Her teeth rattled; her vision blurred. She sagged, and other hands grabbed her.
They carried her out of the church. They weren’t gentle about it.
In the ambulance, they strapped her down, and Harch began to prepare a syringe for her.
Finally, she rose out of her lethargy far enough to speak. “If this is Hell, why do you need to give me an injection to knock me out? Why don’t you just cast a spell on me?”
“Because this is so much more fun,” Harch said, grinning, and with savage glee he rammed the hypodermic needle into her arm.
She cried out in pain.
Then she slept.
17
Flickering light.
Dancing shadows.
A high, dark ceiling.
Susan was in bed. The hospital bed.
Her arm hurt where Harch had stabbed her viciously with the needle. Her entire body ached.
This wasn’t her old room. This place was cool, too cool for a hospital room. Her body was warm underneath the blankets, but her shoulders and neck and face were quite cool. This place was damp, too, and musty. Very musty.
And familiar.
Her vision was blurry. She squinted, but she still couldn’t see anything.
Squinting made her dizzy. She felt as if she were on a merry-go-round instead of a bed; she spun around, around, and down into sleep again.
Later.
Before she opened her
eyes, she lay for a moment, listening to the roar of falling water. Was it still raining outside? It sounded like a deluge, like Armageddon, another Great Flood.
She opened her eyes, and she was immediately dizzy again, although not as dizzy as before. There was flickering light, dancing shadows, as there had been the first time. But now she realized that it was candlelight, disturbed by crossdrafts.
She turned her head on the pillow and saw the candles. Ten thick cylinders of wax were arranged on the rocks and on the nearest limestone ledges and formations.
No!
She turned her head the other way, toward the roaring water, but she couldn’t see anything. The candlelight drove the darkness back only a distance of about fifteen feet. The waterfall was much farther away than that, at least eighty or a hundred feet away, but there was no doubt that it was out there, tumbling and frothing in the blackest corner of the cave.
She was in the House of Thunder.
No, no, no, she told herself. No, this must be a dream. Or I’m delirious.
She closed her eyes, shutting out the candlelight. But she couldn’t shut out the musty smell of the cavern or the thunderous noise of the underground waterfall.
She was three thousand miles away from the House of Thunder, dammit. She was in Oregon, not Pennsylvania.
Madness.
Or Hell.
Someone jerked the blankets off her, and she opened her eyes with a snap, gasping, crying out.
It was Ernest Harch. He put one hand on her leg, and she realized that she was naked. He slid his hand along her bare thigh, across her bristling pubic thatch, across her belly, to her breasts.
She went rigid at his touch.
He smiled. “No, not yet. Not yet, you sweet bitch. Not for a while yet. Tonight. That’s when I want it. Right at the hour I died in prison. Right at the minute that damned nigger stuck a knife in my throat, that’s when I’m going to stick a knife in your throat, and I’m going to be up inside you at the same time, screwing you, spurting inside you just as I push the knife deep into your pretty neck. Tonight, not now.”