by Jack Martin
The cutting blows made no sound at all.
Chapter Eleven
Was there someone outside?
"Finally," said Jill.
The old man was resting again. She opened. the door and hurried out.
Laurie's door was just now winding shut.
Was that the sound of dragging feet at the end of the corridor?
Jill ignored it and ducked immediately into Laurie's room.
"Dr. Mixter? Mrs. Alves? Did Jimmy tell—?"
Laurie's bed was ripped apart. Sheets were scattered on the floor.
There was no one in the room.
She checked the bathroom. Empty.
Then she noticed what had happened to the bed. The pillows. They were rearranged down the middle of the mattress in a crude approximation of a human form.
They had been—what? Cut open? Yes. The pillowcases were slashed to ribbons. Feathers were everywhere.
The first snow of winter had come to Haddonfield.
Jill ran to the desk. She rang every number she could think of. There was no answer.
She could not get an outside line.
"Jimmy," she said, "oh Jimmy, where did you go."
She was halfway back down the hall when the phone rang.
She came close to ignoring it.
"Jill? I still can't find, Mrs. Alves What did Dr. Mixter say?"
"I don't know, Jimmy. He's still not here. Listen—"
"How's Laurie doing? Any change?"
"That's just it! She's not here! She's gone!"
A moment of stunned silence.
"Jimmy, something really weird is going on. I went to her room and—and now I can't find her! I—"
"That's impossible!"
"I know. I don't understand it, either. She must have come to while I was in Mr. Cornfort's room."
"We've got to find her. We've got to! You take the east wing. I'll meet you in the lounge in five minutes. And see if you can dig up Garrett while you're at it!"
* * *
On a closed-circuit TV screen which no one was watching, a gray figure crouched in a hall.
The figure's right hand and foot were bandaged. As it crawled forward on hands and knees the bandages unrolled across the linoleum like antennae.
Had the TV monitor been equipped for it, there would have been a delicate whisking sound.
And a rasping of breath in and out of a dry throat.
Nothing else.
A zoom-in would have revealed her lips moving to form words. Words that were thoughts. Thoughts without sound.
She was thinking, I'm sorry! I didn't mean to see you. I tried to forget, just like they told me to. I honestly did. I thought I had till now. Except for the dreams. I even tried to stop them. But I couldn't.
You have been with me all along, no matter what, haven't you?
Like in the middle of winter, when the days were short and the hours turned so slowly. There was nothing to do except play inside and then go to bed early. Was it like that for you, too, where you were?
They said you were safe. I heard them say that through the door at the end of the upstairs hall. Do you remember that hall, with the floor furnace and the grate that creaked as if it would collapse if you walked on it? I asked them about you exactly twice. I remember; each time I was whipped for the only times in my life and told not to speak of you again. And I never did. I couldn't speak at all sometimes. Not unless I made absolutely sure that somewhere in the back of my mind I was not thinking of you, that your name could not possibly pass my lips.
It never did.
I made sure not to let myself talk when the memory of you crossed my mind like a shadow. At those times I couldn't talk at all, because I was sure that if I did I would be punished and die. Father beat me that badly, did you know that? Would you have cared?
No.
And now you are here, with me again, inside of me and outside of me, and my throat is stopped. For that I should at least be grateful. Because if I were to speak out now, I would be punished, wouldn't I? Punished so severely I would die.
By you, Michael, by you.
It was always you. They punished me in your name, though they never said so. They were your protectors and your substitutes. They lived in fear, and passed that along to me. In your name.
Did you kill them, too, for speaking out? Or was it really an accident?
I'll bet it happened coming back from seeing you that last time. I remember the day. I was left behind, at the Strodes'. I remember it all now, whether I want to or not. Mr. and Mrs. Strode's love was not enough to block the memory. I thought it was, but it wasn't.
What did you do that day at Smith's Grove, Michael, that could make them so upset they would drive off the road? Daddy was always a good driver. He never drank. At least I don't think he did. Oh, you must have done something.
Did you speak to them?
It would have been the first time.
Or did you keep your perfect silence?
I have kept it too, Michael, as have Mother and Father. You have been our master in exile, in our life and our death. We have all served you better than you or we imagined in our darkest hour. . . .
She was crawling on all fours now, like a dog.
She slid to a door. The knob was high, as it had been for her as a child. It was still too high to reach. She strained upward.
The scene grew fuzzy before her, in and out of focus.
I want to scream for help, she thought. But I can't.
They taught me that, Michael. They taught me not to speak when I thought of you. And I can't now, not even to save myself. They taught me better than they knew.
In your name.
It was really you teaching me all those years, wasn't it? So that I would never escape you, not even when my life depends on it. Most especially not then.
But you know something, Michael? You have taught me a more valuable lesson than you intended.
For now there will be no sound, not even a whisper to pass my lips that will help anyone—not even you—to find me. You will have to do that on your own.
And I have plenty of experience, Michael. I have fled you in dreams through the nights and the years in ways you could not know about. I have learned the most secret refuges of my mind, the spaces between waking and sleeping where even you cannot enter. I know where to go inside that you can't get in, not you and not anyone else, the places that are always here when there is no place left to run.
She grasped the doorknob.
It opened.
She dragged herself inside, leaned against the wall, and passed out.
Come and get me, Michael. I dare you.
Trick or treat.
On the next video monitor screen, a shape came walking.
It passed the door behind which Laurie was hiding.
It looked like nothing so much as a character in another horror movie, tall and dark and moving stiffly in a familiar unstoppable rhythm.
And so it was now, one more rerun on the Late, Late, Very Late Show on Halloween night in this particular town, acting out the last reels of its relentless stalking of the heart of the American dream. It was always so. Variations of figures like it had come again and again to towns exactly like this all across the country, and would continue to come in endless variety and profusion whenever the days grew short and the horror of an unburied past returned to haunt the long night of the human soul. They would come to movie theatres and TV screens over and over in untiring replays for as long as people turned away and pretended it was not really there; that very refusal gave it unopposed entrance to their most inner lives. Nothing ever stopped its coming and nothing ever would stop it, not for as long as people deferred the issue of its existence to the realm of fantasy fiction, that elaborate system of popular mythology which provided the essence of its beachhead.
For now, it came on and on.
The shape left one television screen and entered another.
Down another corridor.
* * *
Jill appeared on the last monitor. She was moving so fast she left an electron trail across the tube.
She reached the security center, room 25.
"Mr. Garrett?"
She raised her hand to knock, then pushed inside.
"Mr. Garrett, we need you. Where are—?"
From behind her in the hallway, a hand settled on her shoulder.
Jill gasped.
"I'm sorry," said Jimmy. His brow was knitted tight between his eyes and his face muscles were no longer relaxed. "I can't find
anybody. Bud's gone, Mrs. Alves is gone . . ."
"So is Mr. Garrett," said Jill.
"What the hell is going on?"
"You're asking me that question?"
"We've got to find Laurie."
"We've got to find somebody."
"All right, look. If you don't find anybody, I want you to get in your car and drive out to the Sheriffs Station and get somebody out here."
Jill nodded, wide-eyed. "Okay."
"I'll keep looking." He left her there.
She rubbed her arms and shivered.
Her transit of the room, around the desk and out the door was accomplished swiftly, with no wasted motions and her eyes impatiently on the exit. Jill left the banked video
screens to do their mindless surveillance, useless now that there was no one to observe their scan; she glanced only in passing at their hazy gray-and-white fisheyes. They depicted some of the same desolate interiors she had seen at her own monitors, the dimmed-out interstices of the hospital's once-bright and optimistic asepsis.
Had someone or something been lurking in the byways of the wings, she would not have known the difference. The images were too dingy to read. For all she knew a drink machine might as easily have been a laundry hamper, a figure in a chair the back of an empty dressing gown, the eye at the end of the hall another camera, staring back through its own circuitry into infinity. She groped in the pocket of her uniform for her keys, and exited to the perimeter of the lot.
It was not that much different on the outside.
The blacktop glittered under a descending fog. The placement of the light poles smudged along indistinct lines, the bulbs at the tops glowing like mushrooms about to spread radioactive spores into a diffused sky. The horizon—and who knew where that began?—was radiant with moonlight.
As she walked, the first car in line gained substance. It was a yellow '57 Chevy. Its tail surfaced like a shark's fin outfitted in chrome.
She hurried on.
A red Mustang, Karen's, top down. She passed its sodden upholstery, blinking moisture out of her lashes.
"Come on, Bug, where did I put you?"
She noted that her skin was a sickly, infected green under the sodium lights, as though she were in another world. Now her uniform was suddenly pink, with matching shoes; the misting air itself was suffused with an unnatural blush. The aluminum stripping on a car to her left wavered and began to drip the same color, as if bleeding rust.
She paused to get her bearings.
There was the canvas hood of her VW convertible. She sighed gratefully and separated her keys.
She unlocked the driver's door and slid inside.
An electronic whine reminded her that the door was not closed.
She slammed it and pressed down the button.
She inserted her key in the scratched ignition slot and twisted.
The starter ground once and quit.
"Oh no. . . ."
She bounced her head against the seat in frustration. The windows were steaming up from her breath. She rolled down the window and stuck her head out.
"Hey, anybody! Is anybody out there?"
No answer. Only the steady, soft light. She turned her head.
The back window was occluded vinyl, almost impenetrable. As a result the space behind her seat fell away sharply into darkness.
She leaned forward, away from it, keyed the ignition again and again. Nothing. Only a clicking. She climbed out.
"What am I supposed to do now, Jimmy?" The soft, pink haze enfolded her.
Now her footsteps were muted. Was the mist beginning to absorb sound?
She looked down.
A sticky tendril of dark liquid was flowing out from under her VW.
She dropped to her knees and examined the underside of her car.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
"I don't believe this," she said. "I should have junked you a long time ago. I never should have let John talk me into buying you in the first place."
She kicked the tire.
And hurt her foot.
That was because the tire was flat, pinched down to the rim.
Instinctively she checked the other tires.
They were all flat as popped balloons.
"Thanks, kids," she said. "Trick or treat, yourselves, you little bastards!"
She hovered, disoriented. The building was somewhere back there . . . she identified the sharp fin of the Chevy.
As she made her way back, she discovered that the Chevy and the Mustang—and, as far as she could see, every other car in the parking lot—were sitting low to the ground on slashed, totally flat tires.
"Jimmy," she said, "you didn't tell me about this part. . . ."
She hugged her arms, very much alone.
Without any firm sense of direction, she began running.
Laurie woke up.
She was sitting upright against a wall in a bare room. A few feet away was a telephone on a table. The door to the hall was wide open.
She had forgotten to close it.
Footsteps were coming. Heavy, very heavy footsteps.
She grabbed her knees and huddled in the corner.
I'll lie very still, she thought, and pull the covers over my head, I won't make a sound and I won't breathe and no one will know I'm here, there will be no bogy man under the bed or in the closet or in that dark corner or coming up the stairs one step at a time. . . .
She remembered where she was.
Don't slip back, she told herself. You're grown up now, yes, you are, and there's no one to help you anymore, they're gone, gone away and never coming back. It's up to you!
But what can I do?
Her eyes searched the floor.
There was a length of bandage unrolled several yards from her foot. Back along the wall to the doorway.
The open doorway.
The heavy, heavy steps.
With the greatest care she had ever expended in her life, she reached down and with her fingers began to draw in the tail of the bandage.
The gauze jerked across the floor. Two yards, one yard, a few more inches . . .
She had it.
The shape walked by the open door.
A scalpel swung against its thigh.
Laurie's eyes racked feverishly for any kind of weapon. A pair of scissors. A knitting needle. A coathanger. Anything.
The room was bare.
The footsteps hesitated.
She held her breath until she was sure her heart would burst.
The shape walked on. Slide-thump. Slide-thump. Slide-thump.
The footsteps echoed back to her as though in a cave.
She crawled on hands and knees to the table. She took the telephone down. Her head reeled. She pushed buttons. Electronic tones struck a dissonant melody in her ear.
A voice came on the line.
"Hello? What number are you calling, please? Hello?"
Momma, screamed Laurie, he won't die! He won't die, Momma . . . !
But no sound was able to pass her lips.
"Hello?" repeated the voice on the line. A brittle, impersonal operator's voice. "Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?"
On the screen, a shadow-man explored one doorway after another.
Dark jumpsuit, dark curly hair. A namepatch. Jimmy.
"Hello?" His voice rising, about to break, like a violin string wound too tight.
<
br /> No one there.
He picked up the pace.
A sign on the next door: LADIES LOUNGE.
Jimmy knocked.
Nothing.
The hall empty as a sinking ship in both directions. He combed his fingers through his hair and opened the door an inch, two inches.
"Hello?"
He threw a glance inside, moved on. Past a red fire extinguisher. Its beaklike nozzle seemed to rotate as he passed, following his progress. But it was only an illusion of refraction. Wasn't it?
The next door was wider than the others. MAJOR SURGERY. A luminous rectangle of clean light projected through the glass inset, framing Jimmy's pale face. He pressed his eye to the glass and craned his neck.
"Jesus, Joseph and Mary," he said. His chest was heaving.
He went in.
Inside, a patient lay prepared on the table.
Strapped down, legs straight, feet arranged comfortably at the end of the operating pallet. Only someone had forgotten to remove her shoes. And her dress—it was not a starched white operating gown. it was not even white. It was cut like a uniform, but it was not white.
Not anymore.
It was wet and red, red all through, red and painted to the convolutions of her body like a clinging shroud. Her eyes were open, her hands folded over her abdomen in peaceful repose. Her head was positioned perfectly on the pillow. To be certain that she would not move it, her neck had been tied down with a soft catheter tube. Another length of tubing, an intravenous feeder, had been spiked into her arm just inside the slit cuff of her sleeve. Someone had not done a very good job with that part of it, because the veins were bruised dark as a roadmap beneath the skin, and the arm, the entire body had begun to shrink and wrinkle closer to the bones as the blood drained away, drop by thick, warm drop.
Mrs. Alves was losing her color.
Jimmy felt for a pulse at the throat.
The skin was cold as marble.
Jimmy backed off.
He couldn't move fast enough. His feet stuck to the floor. He walked in place as on a treadmill, unable to escape. His feet became heavy. They lifted and fell in slow-motion, trapped in nightmare.
Then his tennis shoes slipped out from under him. When he hit the pool under the table the back of his head struck hard, splashing blood over his face and hands. Blood soaked into his tunic, creeping up the sides of his body in capillary action, dyeing the suit purple and spongy.