by Peter Straub
“Still couldn’t hit anything. That’s how I know I’m not much of a shot.” Graham said. “But in those days I was young enough to think that if I bought something, it ought to be the best.”
Richard was already pushing the kitchen window up just far enough to slide the Purdy’s barrels through. Then he cocked one of them, knelt down, and waited for the dog to trot into his sights.
4
At six-thirty that evening, just about the time Richard Allbee was taking his second futile shot at a giant dog, Tabby Smithfield and Patsy McCloud were standing immediately inside the gates of Wren Van Horne’s property. Here were no fields of flowers. The trees beneath which Gary Starbuck had parked his van shielded them from the house—for a moment Tabby saw all the windows in the long white facade as eyes, and was afraid that he would disgrace himself by being too terrified to move. Tabby made himself remember his father standing confused in the kitchen while a long wing of flame whickered toward him; then he made himself remember his father’s screams. Tabby bent down and picked up a gnarled stick about a foot and a half long from the packed, needle-littered earth beneath a spruce. Then he turned to Patsy and smiled whatever reassurance he could at her.
“How are we going to do this, exactly?” Patsy asked.
“Just remember Graham’s story,” he said. “Somehow, when we need it . . .”
“Yes,” Patsy said. “So it’s simple as that. We knock on his door, and when Dr. Van Horne opens it, you’ll cut him in half with this sword you’ll suddenly be holding.”
“Something like that,” Tabby said. “I don’t think we knock on his door, though. There must be a way to sneak into his house.” He saw the faint lines about her mouth slightly deepen. “Are you making fun of me? You’re really a strange woman, you know.”
“You don’t know the half of it, dear one.”
“I can’t believe we’re standing here joking around when we could be dead in twenty minutes.”
Now Patsy gave a real smile. “I can believe it. I’m scared to death. Do you think we’ll have as long as twenty minutes?”
“Maybe nineteen,” Tabby said.
“You and that silly stick,” she said. “I know. I’ll ring the bell. Then you jump out of the bushes and saw him in half with your stick.”
“Weird,” Tabby said.
“Or maybe I just shoot him in the heart.”
“Shoot him?”
Patsy nodded, putting her right hand into the waistband of her trousers. When she brought the hand back out from under her loose shirt—one of her husband’s, Tabby irrelevantly thought—it held a small pistol.
“Maybe you’re not so weird after all,” he said. “Should we go?”
“We couldn’t maybe give ourselves another thirty seconds?”
“We’re going to put his head on a plate, remember?”
For a second they just looked at each other, tasting their own fear and seeing it in the other’s face.
okay, champ. take it away
no more sobbin’
They left the shelter of the spruces together. As if by agreement they went slowly up the far left side of the property, out of the direct line of sight of the front windows. Tabby made no effort to conceal himself behind the various trees he walked past, nor did he crouch; Patsy, not sobbin’, followed a step behind. He was aware of her as a fluttering presence in his own mind, a warm companionate buzz of emotions.
When Tabby went up the last little rise, he did crouch, and then ran toward the side of the house. Squatting down with his back against the long white boards, he saw Patsy just slipping up beside him. She took several short sharp breaths. The pistol was still in her hands.
now where?
around back
Patsy half-stood, bending over so that she could go beneath the two ground-floor windows on this side, and crept to the corner of the building. Then she looked back at Tabby and nodded. He crept toward her, seeing the Sound behind her grow longer and more massive as he approached the edge of the bluff. Patsy was looking at him questioningly, and when he was beside her at last she pointed to a green bulkhead door set in the ground. He nodded. Anyone in the house would have to be looking right at the door to see them breaking in.
beautiful
locked?
let’s see
Tabby slipped around Patsy and ducked into the little screen of bushes around the bulkhead. These continued down the rear of the house to the long wall of windows. He went down on his knees before the door. From the dense, spiky bushes came an odor of sap and green nuts. Tabby put his hands on the bulkhead and leaned forward to try the handle. It turned in his grasp, and he experimentally pulled upward on it. The green door creaked and lifted. He put his feet under him and leaned forward again and swung the door fully open. Just as Tabby was about to turn triumphantly to Patsy, something huge raised itself from behind the bushes and clamped down on his wrist. Tabby went pale with shock. His wrist was in the grip of an enormous and filthy hand. He looked up over his shoulder and saw the dead face of Dicky Norman scowling down at him.
5
Richard braced himself between the floor and the windowsill when he saw the giant dog come to the far end of its circuit and turn back toward him. “Try to get a head shot,” Graham said. “Hit him where it’ll do the most damage.”
“Have you thought about the possibility that that thing isn’t even there?” Richard gently put his finger against the trigger. In his sights was the narrow stippled trunk of a sapling.
“It’s real enough for me,” Graham said. “It did a fair bit of damage to that door.”
“It’s real enough to do that, all right,” Richard said, “but I wonder if anyone but ourselves could see it.”
“Here he comes now,” Graham said, pulling on his sweatshirt out of excitement. “Cock both those barrels, sonny. We mean business.”
Richard cocked the other barrel and put his finger over both triggers. The black head pushed into his sights, and Richard saw the dog instantly register the fact of the gun. It ceased pacing and lowered its head and trotted toward him.
“He’s after the gun! Richard, he’s after the gun! Shoot!”
Richard was already pulling back the triggers.
The explosion, loud as a bomb in the kitchen, pushed him back into a chair. Richard felt as if he had been kicked in the shoulder. He looked up as he pulled the shotgun safely inside, hoping to see the animal fall.
The enraged dog threw itself against the window. Richard heard wood splintering—the animal had cracked the frame. The dog retreated, and Richard saw where his shots had gone. At the base of the dog’s neck, a spiral of gray smoke curled from a sizzling wound.
“It isn’t even bleeding,” Richard said, looking up at Graham. “I don’t think the Purdy is going to get us out of this one.”
“Try for his eyes,” Graham said.
The dog threw itself against the window again, cracking the bottom pane. Both Richard and Graham saw the wall bulge in as the heavy body smashed into it.
“For God’s sake, reload,” Graham said. “Try to get both barrels in his eyes.”
6
The vast face swam toward Tabby, dead rubbery skin and eyes that looked as if their color came from swamp water. Another hand locked onto his shoulder. For a terrible second Tabby thought that Dicky Norman was going to take a bite out of his face. He sensed Patsy’s almost equal shock and terror booming at him from the side of the house, but could not even tell her to run—his mind was frozen.
“You’re a good little fucker, Tabs,” Dicky said. “I knew you’d come here. I knew you’d help.”
“Help,” Tabby managed to get out, and then realized that this monster was holding him with two hands. Dicky had lost an arm on the night of his death. The bloated dirty face before him was inhaling, then blowing out foul air. The dead would have no need to breathe. “Bruce?” he said.
“Yeah, sure,” the vast face said, and
Patsy don’t shoot don’t sh
oot Tabby sent out as loud as he could.
“Who’s that?” Patsy asked, lowering the pistol as she came into his vision behind Bruce’s enormous arm. He had stopped her a second before she would have put a bullet into the back of Bruce’s head, and she still looked as though she thought that was a good idea.
“It’s Bruce Norman,” Tabby said. “The Dragon killed his brother.”
Bruce’s eyes moved incuriously to Patsy and took in the pistol she was still pointing at him. He released Tabby’s wrist and gently closed his hand around the gun. Patsy backed away from his touch. Bruce had hardly seemed to see her at all. He returned his gaze to Tabby. “Good little fucker,” he said.
Tabby gestured with his head. “Let’s get around the side, Bruce. Where he won’t see us.”
Still clamping down on Tabby’s shoulder, Bruce Norman allowed himself to be led to the side of the house. The three of them knelt down on the dry grass. “You came to kill Van Horne?” Tabby asked.
“I been following you,” Bruce said. “You never saw me, did you? Not once. I knew you’d come back here, Tabs. We gotta kill him.”
“Dr. Van Horne killed your brother?” Patsy asked. Bruce made no response: the question just sank into his skin.
The huge moon face lolled before Tabby, gray with fatigue and layered with streaks and splashes of dirt. In Bruce’s open mouth yellowing teeth stuck up like fenceposts. Particles of earth, fragments of dead leaves, matted his long Indian hair. “I keep hearing him, Tabs,” Bruce said. “You know? It’s like Dicky sometimes was right in the trailer with me. I could hear him moving around in the living room. Finally it spooked me so bad I had to sleep outside—I been doin’ that for weeks now. And I seen some funny stuff, Tabs, I sure have seen some funny . . .” Bruce’s eyes slipped out of focus. “I saw a snake the size of a house come along and swallow a little boy, Tabs, he just opened up this huge fuckin’ mouth and picked the kid right up and swallowed him down . . . When I slept on the beach I saw dead kids come out of the water . . . and, Tabs, all this shit is comin’ from him. He’s makin’ it all happen.” Bruce’s eyes darkened. “Finally I wound up sleeping on Dicky’s grave, right in the cemetery. That’s where I go at night now. Just go to sleep right on Dicky’s grave there.”
“Does Dicky . . . ?” Tabby began, and then stopped. He did not want to know if Bruce conversed with his brother during the nights in Gravesend Cemetery. Bruce Norman, Tabby now almost unwillingly saw, was what Graham Williams must have been like when he had killed Bates Krell. Everything he had undergone had given him an authority that was undeniable but not sane. This degree of reality had left sanity far behind it.
“So let’s go do it,” he said to Bruce. The massive dreamy face before him acknowledged Tabby’s readiness with a smile.
* * *
Bruce led them down the bulkhead stairs into the cellar, and Tabby quietly closed the metal door behind them. In semi-darkness he went the rest of the way down to find the others. The Van Horne cellar was a warren of small rooms and chambers, some of them seemingly filled with stacked wood and others still containing the hooked rugs and headboards of the servants who had once slept in them. Tabby found Bruce Norman confusedly moving through the narrow corridors, and gave him a push around a corner. “Tabs, we got to find the stairs,” Bruce uttered in a stage whisper.
“They’re right here,” Patsy called softly, and Bruce and Tabby turned toward her voice.
In the middle of the vast cellar space stood an incongruously small oil furnace on a circle of bricks that had once supported a multiarmed giant. Overhead, copper pipes and shiny boxy vents cut through a spaghetti of electrical wiring stapled to the joists. Patsy was standing just to the side of a wide straight staircase which came to an end five feet before the little furnace.
Bruce grunted, and they went past the furnace toward the stairs.
Then suddenly Bruce stopped moving. Tabby bumped right into him and felt as though he had collided with a structure made of concrete and angle irons instead of flesh. “What?” he said.
“Tabby,” Patsy said from the other side of Bruce. “Look at the gun. It’s like what happened to Graham—I think it really is like what Graham said.”
Tabby moved around Bruce’s side and immediately saw the twisting knot of light coiling and darting on his open palm. A silvery radiance played over Patsy’s little pistol, flickering out, then surging into a wide dazzling beam that swept across the busy ceiling of the cellar like a searchlight. “My God,” Patsy said.
Tabby could not speak—he was caught between awe and joy, between jealousy and impatience too. He took in the expression of single-minded pleasure on the face of Bruce Norman. “It’s going to work,” he said, almost as if he had not believed in Graham’s account until that moment. The dazzling bar of light flashed out again and for a moment, for something less than a second, seemed to be irradiated with a rainbow of colors: and in that same fraction of a second, something glittering and golden flickered around Bruce Norman.
Then it was gone. The little pistol seemed to suck all the light into itself and shrink it down to a last failing gleam against the barrel.
“I’m gonna kill him,” Bruce said, and Patsy got out of his way as he tottered toward the staircase.
They came up into an empty hall. The three of them stood indecisively before the open door, each looking a different direction. Tabby realized that he was still holding the gnarled stick from beneath the spruce tree, and gripped it in a more businesslike manner. Bruce Norman was staring heavily down the length of hall toward the big room at the back; Patsy seemed suddenly unsure of herself—Tabby watched her nervously scanning their surroundings.
He took his eyes off Patsy’s face and noticed the odd, slimy-looking streaks and stripes along the walls—they looked almost like the tracks of giant snails, but also as though some decaying matter had been repeatedly brushed against the walls. Tabby had time enough to register the strong sharp yeasty odor that filled the house, and then Bruce’s hand swallowed his. “He’s here,” Bruce said, and smiled loonily and turned and dragged Tabby behind him to the living room. In his other hand he held the little pistol.
They entered the long windowed room in a clattering rush, Patsy flying along behind the other two. Tabby pulled away from Bruce’s grip, confusedly thinking there’s something wrong, they had a break-in here—a chair was overturned, a lamp lay shattered on the floor. Then he saw an amoeba-shaped bloodstain six feet wide, gone rusty with age, covering the wooden floor and part of a rug. “Dicky!” Bruce bellowed, and Tabby whirled around.
The mirror in the ornate oval frame was doing something impossible. It was at this that Bruce Norman had yelled, but Tabby could certainly not see Dicky in the mirror; nor did he see a reflection of the room and the now rather streaky wall of windows. The mirror’s surface had filled with billowing smoke and lightninglike flashes of sudden brightness: and Tabby had the illusion of depth, as if he could put his hand through into this curious storm.
“Diiicky!” Bruce screeched, and everything changed.
Suddenly Tabby heard that monstrous rhythmic buzzing of a million flies he had first heard on Gravesend Beach; overlying it now were the sounds of many voices, as if a humming crowd were just outside the door. The air darkened, or Tabby’s vision went dark, and he understood that things had just slipped totally out of control, that he and Bruce Norman and Patsy McCloud had no chance against Dr. Van Horne . . . he reached out his mind for Patsy, but felt his panicky fluttery effort crash against something hard and cold.
The air was filled with flies and grasping hands and open mouths, and he had lost Patsy. Crazed, inhuman noises roared in his ears. Tabby shouted her name and could not hear his own voice.
Someone stepped into the room through the door they had just used, and Tabby jumped backward, knocking over a small glass table and dumping a statuette of a dancer to the floor. He had a glimpse, in the confusion tearing through the air, of Patsy backed up against the windows, and sta
ggered toward her.
So you’re here at last, Mr. Smithfield, someone said or thought straight into his mind. Do you like it?
A few feet away from Patsy he turned around to face the man who had addressed him. Once again he heard Bruce Norman bawl out his brother’s name: the air was clear again, and the sounds and the grasping hands were gone.
“You killed Dicky!” Bruce screamed, and lifted the gun.
Then Tabby saw for the first time that Wren Van Horne had become a “leaker.” The doctor was far advanced in the disease: his ruined skin shimmered and moved, and he was already wearing gloves on his hands.
“In a way I did,” the doctor said. “This is your little raiding party, is it?” He made a ghastly parody of a smile. “You arrive on my last night here. Excellent timing, Mr. Smithfield.”
“You’re dying,” Tabby said, still not quite believing it—that he was doomed no matter how many tricks he could play on their minds.
“Fuck that, you’re dead,” Bruce said, and aimed the pistol at the doctor’s chest. He pulled the trigger.
The explosion was quieter than Tabby had expected, the sound of a branch cracking in half; there was a little gray meander of smoke from the gun. Dr. Van Horne put his hands to his chest and took a neat, almost dancing step backward. When Bruce shot him again the doctor collapsed gracelessly to the floor.
Bruce let the gun fall and stood motionless, as if his will had taken him to the end of its designs. He was panting slightly; he opened his hand and stared without recognition or curiosity at the pistol, then let it drop to the bloodstained rug.
Tabby watched Patsy move forward to pick it up. Then, still stunned by the ease and rapidity of Van Horne’s destruction, he looked back at the doctor’s body. The right hand was scrabbling in the carpet, the fingers digging into the fibers. He realized that he felt almost cheated: monsters should not die so easily. Tabby took a step nearer the doctor, and saw the grimace on his molten face. The doctor was not dead yet, but he was surely dying.