Soulstorm

by Chet Williamson

  "I asked you before. Who are you?"

  Why do you wish to know?

  "To . . . to call you by name, maybe. Do you have a name?"

  We have many names. Millions of names.

  (We. Millions of names. What the hell was this?) "Are there millions of you, then?" he asked.

  The face moved up and down. Nodding. Yes. All in one.

  "You mean you're composed of many. . . intelligences?"

  Oh yes. There was pride in the tone. Many.

  He made a connection, hazarded a guess. "The lights in the sky . . . the lights at night . . . are they from you?"

  They are to us. New ones. New ones coming all the time.

  "Then Gabrielle was right. This place is a lodestone. Drawing what? Souls?"

  Souls. What are souls? Some things survive, others do not. What needs to survive survives. What is content to sleep sleeps.

  "But you're not content to sleep?"

  No.

  "Why not?"

  There are things to be done.

  McNeely felt suddenly weary, drained of vitality. Yet he did not feel he should sit down in front of the thing that confronted him. "Now, let me . . . let me clarify this if I can. Do you mean to say that you—and by you I mean all the . . . the people that create you—that you are all dead?"

  We are. We were.

  "And that those of you who have survived come here?"

  Yes.

  "You come here of your own free will?"

  We are drawn here.

  The lodestone again, McNeely thought. "Can you leave?"

  The thing started to say something. McNeely could hear the vibrations in his head preliminary to a "word"—but nothing happened. Then came a long sigh and a single word accompanied by an almost pleading look from the pale eyes.

  Perhaps.

  McNeely swallowed, but his throat still held a shapeless lump dead center. "I can help you," he said softly.

  You can.

  "You want to leave?"

  We do.

  "Why?"

  There are things to be done.

  "You said that before!" McNeely was starting to lose control now, starting to break. "What kind of things?"

  Things not for your knowing.

  "If I'm going to help you, don't you think I'd better decide that?"

  You are growing frightened. Think of what we have said and done. Think of what we can give you still. It smiled benignly. We will speak again.

  The face faded. In less than three seconds it had vanished. McNeely listened, but the voice was gone. "Are you there?"

  There was only silence. He sighed, turned, and left the room.

  As he crossed the stone floor to the staircase, there was a faint sound on the edge of hearing that he could have sworn came from the wine cellar. Rats, he thought, and frowned at the picture of what they might be doing to the two bodies behind the door.

  But then he remembered there were no rats in The Pines, no animal life at all, and paused mid-stride, looking with narrowed eyes toward the door. If not rats, then what?

  Don't be a fool. They're dead, both of them.

  Still, he did not step nearer to the door. He only listened, and heard nothing more. Isn't it enough? he asked himself. Isn't what you've already seen here enough? Must you reanimate corpses too?

  He laughed at himself, a small warm laugh that drove some of the chill from the damp cellar as he started to climb the steps, started to go back upstairs to Gabrielle, carrying his newfound sexuality like a trophy.

  The cellar light went out, the kitchen door closed, and in the darkness from behind the wooden door came the sound once again, a light pattering of fingers on stone beneath a stained tablecloth. Unheard by living ears, the fingers continued their spastic chattering, then fell silent all at once, as if a larger, stronger hand had come down atop them.

  ~*~

  She was sleeping when he climbed into the bed, and the close warmth of her aroused him. He moved her into a moaning wakefulness with his hands and they made love, she leisurely, contentedly, he assuredly and forcefully, driving her climax before him like a dog drives a sheep. They came together and drifted back into sleep. Later he had a dream that his semen had turned to blood, and he awoke in a damp sweat, confused and alarmed at first by the wet stickiness on his thighs. Then he remembered his first nocturnal emission. He had been eleven, and had awakened in a sleeping bag next to his father's. They were camping with the Scouts and were sharing a pup tent. McNeely had awakened as the spasm passed, to find his pajamas and sleeping bag sopping wet. His cry of fear woke his father, and he'd whispered, "Blood, blood, Dad, I'm cut, oh, I'm cut!" and his father had grabbed a flashlight and opened the sleeping bag.

  In the light that reflected off the mud-brown canvas walls, he'd seen his father's expression turn from one of alarm to a puckered look of disgust. "Oh, Christ," he'd said. "Go clean yourself up." The boy had gone down to the creek and washed, confused and scared. When he'd returned to the tent, his father was feigning sleep, his back to McNeely. The sleeping bag was stiffening where his father had wiped most of the fluid away with a handkerchief. He said nothing to McNeely about it that night, the next day, or ever again. For weeks the boy thought he'd been bleeding white blood and was going to die, until a friend a year older told him what it really was.

  And now so many years later he lay in another bed, feeling the stiffness like starchy paste against his legs, like the blood he'd spilled and had had spilled on too many humid battlegrounds, and thought of his father and the Boy Scouts and the damp sleeping bag for the first time in twenty years, and wondered why, why did the memory come back now?

  ~*~

  When he awoke again, Gabrielle was looking down into his face, her breasts nudging his forearm.

  "You were shivering," she said. "I thought it was another bad dream."

  He smiled. "If it was, I don't remember it." He touched her breasts and joyed in the turgid response he felt. “Sorry I woke you up earlier."

  "I'm not," she said, and kissed him. "I am anxious for a shower though. We smell like a whorehouse.”

  “When did you ever smell a whorehouse?"

  "Hmm. How do you think I got rich?"

  He laughed and smacked her lightly on the bottom as she stood up.

  "Come on," she said, "I'm starved."

  "Insatiable, aren't you?" he growled as she giggled her way to the bathroom. He sat up and stretched. Good God, but he felt good. Whole again. Though he couldn't see outside, he was certain the sun was shining, the sky was the blue of lovers' eyes, birds were singing.

  Birds. No, there would be no birds, would there? There were no birds at The Pines, no rats either.

  So what had scuttled on the floor behind the oaken …

  Stop it. That was not a worry now. He had no worries, only happiness. He was with Gabrielle again, really with her, and that was all that mattered. He heard the water in the shower blast into life, and thought how good it would feel to join her under the spray. It . . . they had done it, had restored to him what he had hungered for. But through the joy, the thought kept beating like a tinny drum high up in an attic room—what will I have to do for them?

  No such thing as a free lunch—there was nothing new in that. Deals, everybody made deals. The heroine of Rumpelstiltskin made a deal—her firstborn for the ability to spin straw into gold. Only she had welshed and gotten away with it. He wondered if he could be so lucky. And even so, could there be that much harm in helping them leave?

  But he would play it safe, find out why they wanted out, and what those "things to be done" really were. They couldn't buy him with power. The only bargaining point they had was something they'd already given him, something they wouldn't take back. So what did he have to lose?

  He began to smile again as he walked toward the bathroom.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was dark on the balcony. Whitey Monckton eased his arm up and looked at the glowing LED crystals. 3:24, 10-25. He had trouble
deciding what the numbers meant, and then it came to him. Six days. Six days and nights until something inside that house went click and doors and windows would open and people would come. He tried to remember how long he had been up here. Two days maybe? Three at most. The pains in his body had receded to little more than dull aches that never slept. Now the real pain was in his stomach, a sharpness as though the steel ball of a mace were rolling around inside, sending its spikes into every area of his midsection. His thirst had been quenched by the rainwater that had gathered in depressions where the tiles were chipped and broken, but the hunger was growing worse: From time to time he eyed the ladder with longing, but knew he could never use his shattered legs and shoulder to take him down it. And if he could, what then? Drive the Jeep with his teeth? Crawl the mile to the cabin by dragging himself on one arm? Forget it, I probably couldn't even clear the railing.

  His strength had returned slowly after the accident. He had slept in spite of the pain and was surprised on awaking to find that he was still alive. Surprised and disappointed. At first he did not see how he could stay alive until someone came to help, but the bleeding had stopped and he was not coughing or passing blood. He urinated and defecated where he lay, pulling his pants down one-handed when the urge took him. After a while he would drag himself farther along the wall.

  He could not hear any trace of the thing that lived there, that had toppled him from the ladder. Strangely enough, he held no malice toward it for that. If a bear you're hunting attacks you, do you hate the bear for it? No, he'd gone to The Pines intending to fight, and had been beaten. The thing would leave him alone now, and turn its attention back to those inside, those who still survived. That he hadn't been able to help them made him sad, particularly when he thought of Gabrielle Neville. But McNeely and Wickstrom were strong men. Perhaps they could still come out alive.

  He wondered then if he would, and shivered with the cold, praying for the dawn to come soon.

  Chapter Seventeen

  "I'm sick of Dostoevsky," McNeely growled, tossing down the book. Wickstrom and Gabrielle looked up in surprise. "I'm sorry," he went on, "it's just so damned . . . oppressive all of a sudden."

  Wickstrom shrugged. "Okay with me. I don't think I've been getting it anyway. Besides, we're not even a third of the way through. No way we'd finish it before we leave, right?"

  Gabrielle touched her tongue thoughtfully to the end of her brush. "Are you feeling all right, George? You look a bit pale."

  He shook his head testily. "I'm fine. Just . . . I don't know what it is. I suppose I'm eager to leave."

  "Nothing new there." Wickstrom smiled. "I've been eager to do that ever since we came here." He nodded toward Gabrielle. "Maybe you oughta take up painting, George. Get your mind off things."

  McNeely glanced up quickly at Wickstrom, but the man's face was innocent. No way he would know, McNeely thought. No way he could possibly know. But what did he mean, get your mind off things? What things?

  It was unlike McNeely to feel paranoia, and he struggled to hurl it from him. He stood up and crossed to Gabrielle's easel. Her painting was nearly completed, as perfect as any work he'd ever seen. The detail was superb, the texture exquisite, and the use of light rivaled the Flemish masters. "If I could paint like this," he said, "I would take it up."

  "Have you ever tried?" Gabrielle asked. He shook his head no. "Here," she said, handing him a charcoal pencil and a sketch pad. "Try a drawing of Kelly."

  He laughed and held the materials out to her. "No use," he said. "I nearly flunked art in high school."

  "Aw, come on," said Wickstrom. "It's easy. Two circles for eyes, one for the nose, a line for the mouth. I won't move."

  "Oh, hell, all right." He felt a little irritated at their prodding, but decided that it might take his mind off thoughts of the entity, thoughts that had been plaguing him despite his facile rationalizations. So he sat and started to sketch, and before too long he realized that what was taking form beneath his fingers was not the bunch of crude blocky lines he had expected, but a carefully rendered, technically flawless drawing of Kelly Wickstrom's head. His hand moved like quicksilver, shading, rubbing, finding just the right thickness of line; his head twitched from pad to subject, his eyes unmistakably sending the messages to those clever darting fingers to put the face on paper.

  And George McNeely knew he was doing none of it himself. He sat amazed, watching his fingers move, pulled by phantom muscles, ghostly will, though it was still his hand, his muscles that performed the actual motion. It was as though he knew, knew all that Dürer and Rembrandt and Goya had known (especially Goya, oh yes!), and now he was finished, the hand was his again, and he looked down at the drawing he had not made.

  "My God," Gabrielle said softly.

  "What?" Wickstrom hopped to his feet. "Done already?" He whistled when he saw the sketch. "I thought you said you flunked art."

  "I, uh . . . I used to do some sketching like this," he lied. "That's all. I guess you never lose your talent completely, huh?"

  Gabrielle stared at him, her forehead etched with disbelief.

  "What's wrong?" he asked her.

  "Nothing. I just . . . find out more about you all the time."

  Their eyes held until he tore his away. "I'm tired," he said. "Think I'll stretch out for a while." He crossed the room and lay down on the overstuffed sofa, pillowing his head on his forearm and facing the high back, but though his eyes were closed, he did not sleep. His head was too full of questions. He was certain that their strange talents were the gift of the thing. But what reason could there be for this new gift?

  ~*~

  To show you.

  McNeely stood in the cellar, watching the face. Upstairs, Wickstrom and Gabrielle lay sleeping. "Show us what?"

  What we are capable of granting. Delicacy, beauty, art. There is that in us too. Not merely the brute force you saw in Cummings.

  "What's the point?"

  The point is that we can do many things for you. And for the woman.

  "But what do you want?"

  We will tell you.

  "Will you tell me the truth?"

  The eyes of the face changed slightly, a wry cynicism invading them. It will do no harm. You would know eventually if you wished. It paused. But are you sure you wish to know?

  "I'm sure."

  We want to be away from here. We have been here for a long time.

  "How long?"

  Longer than you or any man could conceive. Beyond the memory of the race. There are those of us who wielded sticks and rocks to slay our enemies, who lived in holes in the rock and dressed in stinking skins. There are those who banded together for strength, and fashioned spears from sharp stones to pierce the hearts of those who stood against us. We are very old.

  McNeely felt as he had when Wickstrom had brought forth his theory about the lights in the sky, a theory that McNeely now knew to be at least partially correct. It was as if a great cosmic gulf opened beneath his feet, and looking down into it, he could see all the times of man, back to when man was barely man at all, a splay-footed savage pounding at his prey with hammy fists, and beyond that, deep in the abyss, blackness unbroken by the twinkling of stars.

  But we have the new in us as well. New ones all the time. We are not entirely primitive. We have great wisdom.

  "But not enough," stammered McNeely, forcing his mind back from the chasm over which it tottered, "to free yourselves."

  We know how to be free. But it is— It paused, as if deciding whether or not to reveal a secret. —difficult.

  McNeely didn't want to talk about their escape yet. He had to find out more about the creature, what it was, what it wanted. He reversed, trying to think clearly yet obtusely enough so that the thing could not easily read his thoughts. "You said new ones. Even now?"

  Even as we talk. We are always growing stronger.

  "These are people? People who are dying?"

  Who are dead. What needs to survive comes here, joins us. />
  "I still don't understand. What needs to survive?"

  A part of certain men. Like Neville.

  "Neville?" The thought dazed McNeely. "David Neville? David Neville is … part of you?"

  Part of him is part of us. The part that needed to survive.

  "What part is that?"

  The face smiled. The part that hates you. That hates Wickstrom. That hates his wife. That wants to kill you all.

  McNeely could feel the muscles in his legs quiver in fear. In another few seconds he knew they would be too rubbery to hold him. He looked away from the face that held him enthralled, concentrated his gaze on the small shelf of canned goods against the fire chamber's walls until he felt the blood coming back to his face and the dizziness desert him. He thought it through, quickly and chaotically, using the canned goods as camouflage so the thing should not know, made the visions and thoughts dance and leap in his head so that they should be secret.

  the thing that survives

  Elberta peaches

  Evil_________________________________16 oz. net weight

  hate

  corned beef hash_______________________all the hate survives

  Ingredients: Beef, potatoes,

  hate

  is made of________________________________beef stock, onions

  Ingredients:

  water, salt

  hate evil

  all the evil since time

  in saucepan, stir occasionally till

  since time began

  Hell.

  till boiling

  This place is

  over medium heat

  This thing is

  to full boil

  Hell.

  McNeely bit down on the inside of his cheek, hoping the pain would diffuse his thoughts, confuse his own mind so that the thing would stay confused as well. "The part that survives," he said in a weary voice, "is the part that seeks revenge?"

  What survives is what is strongest.

  "But you said that the part that hates survived Neville."

  That was the strongest.

  "Is that what always survives?"