Soulstorm

by Chet Williamson

  David Neville and Seth Cummings.

  Monckton screamed. It was a scream so intense, so piercing, that it brought him the peace of unconsciousness while it filled his throat with blood. It was a scream so great that it carried down Pine Mountain, unchallenged by sound of bird or insect, so powerful that inside the caretaker's cabin a mile away, Sterne heard its dim echo through the window he had cracked open to relieve the stuffiness the wood stove had caused. He heard, and stiffened, and rose, looking fearfully toward the door and more fearfully toward the black telephone that sat by the overstuffed couch. He sighed and cursed and left the cabin, pausing only long enough to grab a thick down-filled parka from the coat tree by the door.

  Then he started running, running through the bristling brown and gold leaves and dead needles that layered the dirt road up Pine Mountain.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The marmalade was good. Fresh fruit was long gone, but the marmalade was sugared lightly enough that McNeely could taste the tartness of the oranges on his tongue. He popped the last morsel into his mouth and put another slice of wheat bread into the toaster, pressing the lever down with a sharp click. He smiled slightly and dipped a finger into the jar, then transferred the sweet orange stickiness to his mouth. His mother would have killed him if he'd ever done that at the dining room table in Larchmont. In fact, he would never have done it had there been another person in the room. But Gabrielle was still sleeping upstairs, and so probably was Wickstrom. And no one else was there.

  No one else was there.

  He was beginning to believe that. For what must have been days, none of them had experienced anything abnormal. It was like what he had thought it would be at the beginning of the month. Waiting. Playing games, reading, and waiting for the month to end and the steel plates to shoot up, letting five people leave, three of them a million dollars richer.

  Those five people were only three now, but those three would leave. He had told Gabrielle that after they had made love, just before this past sleep.

  "I think we're free of them now," he'd said. "We'll walk out of here together."

  "I keep wondering," she had said, snuggling closer against him, "what if we couldn't get out. What if they forgot us or left us here on purpose or the plates didn't open when they were supposed to?"

  "That won't happen."

  "What if it does? What if it did, George? We don't know. What if we've already been here a month? What if it's November now? We could never tell."

  "I could tell."

  "You couldn't."

  "I've got a great internal timer. Actually it's now 9:37, the evening of October twenty-fourth."

  "Oh, bullshit." She'd laughed. "Be serious."

  "All right. We will get out of here. The plates will open when they're supposed to, and if they don't, Monckton and Sterne will have the Marines up here to cut their way in with lasers. We'll get out." He had kissed her then on both eyes, and reached across her to turn out the light.

  He'd been on the edge of sleep when he'd heard her speak. "I love you, George." It had been the first time she'd said it. She let her hand trail down his body. "I love you, my poor George. So many scars."

  He'd smiled in the darkness. "Do you love my scars too?"

  “I love you all. All of you."

  "Do you know that I love you too?"

  "I'd hoped so."

  "If you had to give up your whole fortune to be with me, would you?"

  "Why? Do I have to?"

  "You answer first."

  "I don't have to give it up. That's the wonderful thing, isn't it? We can live happily ever after after all."

  He'd thought of Jeff then. "Did you know," he'd said, "that I had . . . have a roommate?"

  She'd been silent for a moment, and he'd noticed an almost imperceptible stiffening. "David mentioned that."

  Just say it. Get it out and it can never hurt you again. "Did he add that my roommate and I were lovers?"

  "No. Not in so many words. But I assumed as much. Most men over thirty as well off as you don't take roommates out of financial necessity."

  "That's true."

  "Are you bisexual?"

  "No. I . . . was gay."

  "Then why—"

  "I don't know," he'd interrupted, and turned to face her in the blackness. "I don't know. All I know is that I love you. Anything I felt before, did before . . . it's like some faraway dream."

  At fast a chill had gone through him when he'd felt her body shake. He'd thought that it might be laughter. But another second and her arms were around him, her face pressed closely to his so that he felt her tears against his cheek, and he was crying, too, and when the tears were gone and the promises made, they had slept.

  The snap of the toaster startled him, and he brought his thoughts back to the present long enough to spread butter and marmalade on the toast. As he sat nibbling at it, he wondered what had happened to him that had made him feel this way about Gabrielle. Then he smiled. Maybe Gabrielle had happened to him. Maybe it was that simple.

  No.

  The word echoed in his mind with perfect clarity, as though his brainpan were an open pool and someone had dropped a diamond into it. It was not his word, not his thought. It was alien, and it had entered his consciousness not through his ears, but through his mind alone.

  I was a fool to come down here alone, he thought.

  No.

  It came again, with a distinctness that made his heart leap. Then, in a tone of unsurpassed calmness, he heard—Do not be afraid. Whatever you see or hear, do not be afraid.

  Light began to glow in front of him, near the refrigerator. It was a white light of the purity of a nun's surplice, and a strange peace came upon him at the sight of it. There was a moment in which he began to tense as the face started to form, and he thought it might be one of the faces he had seen on awakening from sleep.

  But as it took form and he could glimpse the lineaments of it as through a mesh, he could see that there was nothing of the bestial in it. It was as pure as the whiteness that surrounded it. The skin was fair and unmarked, the brow high and crowned by what seemed a skullcap of white silk. The mouth was straight, the lips thin, the nose long and well-shaped. But it was the eyes that held him. They were the young-old eyes of the very wise. A god would have eyes like that.

  Do not be afraid.

  "No," McNeely whispered. "No, I won't."

  He heard no more for a moment. The face merely watched his own. It was as if it were reading his thoughts, probing into his brain with a million tiny waves of power. He could swear that the inside of his head was buzzing.

  I am touching you.

  "Yes. Yes, I can feel it."

  I must know what you are thinking if I am to help you.

  "Help me?"

  As I have already helped you.

  "As you've . . ."

  With the woman.

  The peace fled. The chill came into McNeely's heart. The face trembled slightly, as if it sensed the sudden change.

  It was what you wished. We knew it was.

  McNeely started to shake, first his fingers, then his whole body. The face began to lose its tranquility.

  Do not be afraid. Why are you doing this? We cannot feel why.

  McNeely jerked his head away and looked down, but still the white light streamed peripherally into his vision. He pressed his eyes shut, and the image of the face, now puzzled, was impressed upon the inside of his lids. "No," he said, his voice breaking, "no."

  It was what you wanted. The voice seemed petulant now.

  "No, you're lying."

  We changed you, gave you what you asked for. Angry at its own lack of understanding.

  "Please . . ."

  Asked for way in the back of your mind, far, far back.

  "Get out," he moaned.

  It was what you wanted.

  He screamed, each word a hammer. "Get out of my head!"

  The light dimmed and vanished, the voice fading with it.

&
nbsp; It was what you wanted. . .

  He ran out the kitchen door, sobbing with pain and rage, ran up the stairway to find Gabrielle, a robe thrown about her, just coming out the door to the suite. He clutched her and buried his face in her neck, not noticing through his teary eyes how white and drawn her face had grown at the sight of him. He pressed against her, his hands passing over her back, down to her buttocks, his lips against the coolness of her neck, searching for the heat that he knew, he knew was there, listening, feeling for the response in his body and mind that would tell him it was not true, it was she who had made him what he wished to be, and what he wished with all his will to remain.

  He listened. He felt. He could not find it.

  ~*~

  She was next to him when he awoke. For a moment he hoped that it might have all been a dream—the kitchen, the face, the realization that nothing had truly changed. But then he remembered what had happened afterward in the hallway, how Wickstrom's alarmed face had peered out of his door, of holding Gabrielle tighter and tighter until she moaned with pain, of Wickstrom pulling him away from her, of lying on the hall floor while Gabrielle cradled his head and Wickstrom poured a shot of whiskey that burned his throat, then Gabrielle and Wickstrom carrying him like a drunken man into the bedroom, and sleep coming again, deep, welcoming sleep that allowed him to forget, to pretend in darkness that what he had heard and felt and known were lies.

  Now, as the memory came back to him on awakening, he wished that he had remained asleep, or that time had stopped when he and Gabrielle were making love, or that he had died then. Anything but awakening to see the woman that he had loved looking down at him, and being unable to feel anything for her that touched the physical. He wanted her with every thought, every desire he held, but knew that it would be useless. Nevertheless, he held his arms out to her and she entered them, leaving her chair to lie beside him.

  "What happened? What happened to you?" Her voice was soft, soothing, but edged with fear.

  He shook his head. He could never tell her, could not let her know that he was as he had been before. "I—it was nothing, really. I suppose I … had a dream."

  “A dream?"

  "I went downstairs for a bite. And then …" His mind was juggling lies, looking for the right one to pull from the air. "Then I went into the library. I was still tired, and I sat in the big chair and fell asleep. I dreamed … " He could not condemn the house to her. The dream could not be about the house. He must not slur the house.

  He needed the house.

  It was a barely formed thought, a thin green stalk just beginning to push aside the soil of consciousness. He could not then have even admitted it to himself, let alone the woman, but it was there, and his subconscious made straight the way before it. He needed the house.

  "I dreamed of when I was a little boy," he said, and she believed him. "There was"—his words stumbled, lying came hard to him—"a cellar in my grandfather's house. I thought there were men down there. And I dreamed my cousin locked me down there, and the men started to come out of the shadows toward me. Then I … I woke up and didn't know where I was, and I ran out of the room and up the stairs and you were there," he finished feebly.

  "This house," she grated, "this damned house."

  "It wasn't the house!" he said. "No, it wasn't the house. It was me, that's all!" She looked at him oddly, and he laughed in discomfort. "Just me. And a silly nightmare. "

  She touched his face. "You shouldn't have gone off by yourself."

  He laughed again, hollowly. "That had nothing to do with it. It's something that I've carried for years, a stupid fear. And it just picked now to come out, that's all." He smiled at her and kept smiling until she smiled too. "Where's Kelly?"

  She cocked her head to indicate the adjoining living room. "He wanted to stay close until you came out of it."

  "Ah!" he nodded. "Good. That was good." He looked down, then back up at her still concerned face. "I'm sorry about this. I feel like an ass."

  "Don't be sorry. Let's get dressed and start the day."

  He watched her as she took off her robe and thin nightgown, watched as the soft lamplight shone on her naked body, let his gaze trail down her swanlike neck, over her small breasts with the large roseate nipples, across the flatness of her stomach onto the smooth rondure of her hips, the sloping cleft of her mons. But his were the eyes not of a lover, but of a clinician, examining for the sake of reaction, checking the stimuli to see if a response was caused.

  There was no reaction until she turned her back to him and he saw her lower back and buttocks in the half-darkness, small and compact like the tight body of a young man. It made him think of Jeff, and he felt a warm stirring. He sighed painfully and closed his eyes to drive out the vision.

  "What is it?" Gabrielle asked.

  "Nothing. Headache."

  "Shall we go out?" she asked him.

  "You go."

  "I won't leave you alone again."

  "Just for a minute. You're right in the next room.”

  “Why?"

  "I just want to be alone for a minute, that's all. I just want to . . . to think the dream out." She didn't move. "Please. I love you."

  She looked at him with sad eyes. "Just for a minute then." Leaning over to where he sat on the bed, she kissed his cheek. "I don't want to lose you." Then she was gone.

  His gut twisted. Did he so much want to be straight? All the time he had thought he had come to terms with himself, did he really want, in the true heart of him, to be straight, to love women and not men? He remembered himself with Jeff, and with the other men before Jeff, drew up the sense memories as vividly as he could, playing them across the screen of his mind like the X-rated gay films he had gone to once and never again because there was no love in them. Gay people should not be romantic, he thought, and there, he surmised, lay his flaw. Even though nearly everyone who'd ever known him had thought of him as a hard-headed pragmatist, he was a romantic, and had looked for years until he'd found Jeff, who was just as romantic as he.

  But now, as the moving bodies writhed in his mind's eye, although he felt aroused, there was nothing of love in the acts, no tenderness. If there had been once, he was now incapable of seeing it. Coupling bodies, sweaty release, the ease of climax, relaxation of tumescence, all, all, all senses were remembered, deeply felt, even treasured.

  But where was love?

  And now he knew. All these years he'd blamed guilt for his life, but he knew that guilt was innocent.

  It was romance that had made him join the Marines, that had made him become a mercenary, the last dog soldier in these days of push-button wars.

  It was romance that had drawn him to Jeff and kept him there for years.

  It was romance that had led him to The Pines, that had pushed him into the arms of Gabrielle Neville and had pushed the love of her into his heart to stay even after the house had withdrawn what it had given him.

  And it was romance that would lead him to ask the house for it back again.

  He did not plan to do it, not consciously, but that he would was as certain as the fall of leaves from the trees outside.

  ~*~

  The three of them spent the waking time much as they'd spent every other—they ate breakfast, played some pinochle, then went up to the third floor playroom, where Gabrielle painted and the two men read. Wickstrom was working his way through Moby Dick ("I like it when something happens, but that's not very often," he'd told McNeely), and McNeely resumed his Edgar Wallace. Though he had only thirty pages of the book to finish, he took forever to reach the last page. The words were little more than black bugs on which he placed his eyes while he kept thinking about other things. And the longer he thought, the stronger the question grew, until he could ask it to himself consciously.

  How could anything that could bring me so much good be truly evil?

  After all, what had the house done? It had changed Seth Cummings into a beast, but was that the house's fault? Wasn't it more likel
y, as he'd suggested to Gabrielle, that the evil had been in Cummings and not the house, that what it had offered him in innocence—even perhaps for good—he had turned to evil because of his own lust for power? And if that were true, what else had the house done?

  It had given him the strength to kill Cummings, but that had protected them all, had saved the lives of Gabrielle and Wickstrom and himself. There were the dreams and the faces, but those could have been born of their own fears. In fact, that was a much more rational explanation than any malicious intent on the part of whatever lived here in the house. Perhaps all one really had to do to contact it was to reach out a hand. Or a mind.

  They'd been so careful, the three of them, to avoid being alone, to avoid any possibility of the house contacting them. Why? he thought almost joyfully. To approach it with good intentions, honorable intentions, might bring out the good in it. And if he sensed anything else, he could always pull back, seek the others. He had pulled back before, when he had met it in the kitchen, and it had left him when he'd wanted it to. What's more, it hadn't seemed angry, had it? Only confused. "It was what you wanted"—that was all it had said. And perhaps because of his own fright, it had grown confused enough to think it had erred, and, so thinking, had made him the way he'd been before. If that were the case, all he had to do was to ask to be changed back again.

  Simple.

  And then he remembered from somewhere an old saying that came unbidden to his mind—he who sups with the devil had best use a long spoon. He laughed it away, closed the unfinished book, and waited for their appointed night to come.

  It did, after a session in the exercise room, another meal, and more reading aloud from Dostoevsky. When they finally went to their bedrooms, he had had his excuse planned. As they lay together and her kisses grew more demanding, he sighed.

  "I'm sorry, love, but I'm just exhausted. That damned thing earlier got to me, I'm afraid." He shook his head, then touched her face tenderly. "Let's sleep a bit. Then, who knows?" He kissed her with as much passion as he could muster, heard her whispered "all right," and moved up against her when she turned her back to him so that they lay like spoons in a silverware drawer. His groin pressed her buttocks, but neither of them moved in a way that would lead to more.