—While the voice of the thing inside him cried out as though it were wounded
No! You love her, love her, love …
The voice shook, rocked, trembled, seemed to bubble insanely as if somehow shifting from speaker to speaker, and suddenly the voice was gone, and a new voice filled McNeely's head, filled the room itself, so that the battling woman and the man struggling to his feet heard it as well, and shivered at the rawness of it.
"HATE her! HATE her! Kill them! Kill them both!"
The beasts had escaped. The savage elements of the entity, held so long at bay, had been prodded and tormented by McNeely's thoughts of violence until they had overwhelmed the part of themselves that had made them captive. The needs were free. The hunger, so long checked, had to be fed.
It was just what McNeely had wanted.
What he had thought, he had thought deliberately, and the eyes inside him had seen it as one more violent fantasy; but they had not seen the final act, because McNeely had kept it hidden even from himself. It did not require conscious thought, for he knew what it would be. Self-destruction, and with his own death perhaps the death of what dwelled within him as well. Perhaps. It had been the only chance for Gabrielle.
But now there was another.
And while the graveled voice of the pit gibbered and cackled and squalled in its triumph, he allowed himself one more conscious thought, a thought he had never had before and would never have again.
Oh God, forgive me.
"Kill them both! Now!" The voice echoed like thunder, and Wickstrom and Gabrielle groaned in agony, their hands trying to shut out the sound that penetrated their very souls. "HATE! KILL THEM!"
McNeely held out his arms in front of him. "Then give me your power!" he cried aloud.
"Yes!"
His arms began to tingle, his chest started to swell. He could feel his body begin to grow outward as the force rushed into him.
"All your power!" he shrieked. "Fill me! All of your power. All!"
"Yes! ALL! ALL!"
Cloth ripped, and pain shot through him as his body expanded, as the power of a million millions entered him, as all the strengths of the evil of eternity made his flesh their home.
And, astonishingly, as they possessed his body fully, his mind felt suddenly free, as if the entity, in forgetting its apocalyptic plan, had forgotten the human keystone of that plan as well. The thing was beyond rational plots, beyond reason itself. Only madness remained, and ruled.
As through a reddened glass, McNeely saw Wickstrom and Gabrielle standing together, staring at him, their eyes wide, and it seemed that they were smaller than before, until he realized that it was he who had grown. He straightened, and felt his hair, now thinned into sparse patches by the expansion of his skull, brush roughly against the ceiling. The thing within him shrieked in triumph and rage and hatred, as he thrust his massive arms above his head, his fists piercing the wood and plaster ceiling like buckets of nails through glass, then descending to splinter the kitchen table, from which a leg shot off, catching the cowering Wickstrom and Gabrielle chest-high.
The pain awakened them from the trance in which McNeely's transformation had bound them, and they turned and pushed through the doorway into the hall, the door swinging closed behind them.
"Run!" McNeely half-laughed, half-bellowed, kicking the rubble of the table ceiling-high as he crossed the kitchen on huge-chewed legs. "You can't escape!"
NO! echoed the overpowering voice of hell. Can't escape!
He didn't try to go through the suddenly tiny door. Instead, he battered his forearms against the top of the frame so that the wall splintered and fell, and he pushed the flimsy door aside like a curtain.
The heat hit him in a wave. He looked down the hall of the east wing and saw only a rolling mass of smoke, with fingers of yellow flame barely discernible at the end, faraway candles in a foggy night. A glance to his right told him the west wing was, if not as thickly dark, at least as deadly.
The Great Hall then. There was nowhere else they could go.
He howled with laughter, hearing it re-echo innumerable times from the throats of those within him. Then, his craggy head now scraping the higher ceiling of the east wing hall, he slouched around the corner and found at last that he could stand erect, there in the towering expanse of the Great Hall. The beams high above were hidden in clouds of drifting gray smoke, but all else was clear, and McNeely saw plainly the man and woman standing at the southern end, standing because they could run no farther, because there was no place left to which to run. They stood at the entrance to the small space between the cloak rooms, directly in the center of the hall. They stood as if waiting for death. They stood
"Trapped!" screamed George McNeely.
"TRAPPED!" screamed the millions so loudly that the stones shook, the smoke far above billowed and rolled.
Then George McNeely, and the millions, and The Pines itself gave one last, deafening, inarticulate cry, and George McNeely began to run. Straight down the center of the Great Hall he ran, gaining speed with each step of his ponderous legs, arms up, elbows out, fists together, his forearms an impassable bar, the whole of his body an engine to crush flesh and shatter bone. And as he ran, he remembered his dream, and again the Great Hall shrank, growing smaller and smaller to crush him once more, but this time it was not the Great Hall shrinking, but he who was growing, growing with every step, and he would not be crushed this time, no, this time he would grow out and out and break the shell of stone, break the shell.
And be born.
The man and the woman stood before his onslaught, their eyes filled with the knowledge of death, and now they fell to their knees, awaiting the final blow, the last murderous step of the behemoth. But the step never came.
In that last breath of a moment, with the speed of a thought, the will of George McNeely drove those impossible legs down and up and over the prey, and flung the iron torso, the metal arms, directly at the top of the steel plate that made the house a prison.
The steel did not shatter. But the mortar that held it did.
The plate shivered and bent, and the first rocks began to fall. The keystones gone, their mortar crumbled, the southern wall trembled, sighed, and collapsed, its fragments raining down, burying the titanic and unmoving form of George McNeely beneath the cold gray stones of The Pines.
Part V
And there, there overhead, there, there, hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes . . .
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.
—Archibald MacLeish,
"The End of the World"
Chapter Twenty-eight
The snow was falling so heavily that Renault did not see the flames that roofed The Pines until the rental car came out of the thick trees and into the open area around the house. He did not curse nor cry out. He only held his breath for a moment as he felt his heart race even faster than before. When he saw the police car, its headlights on but the flashers off, he released his breath in the minor relief that he had not been the first to arrive, and told his driver to pull up behind the other car.
Renault lumbered out of the passenger side like a bear from a too small cave. Before he took a half dozen steps through the snow, a stocky, bearded man in a uniform was next to him, coat unbuttoned, apparently oblivious to the elements. He carried a huge flashlight in his right hand. “Mr. Renault? I'm Chief Lowry."
"What in the name of God is happening here?" Renault demanded. "Where are the people? This … this fire! What is being done?"
"Fire department's on its way. Hell, I didn't know this was happening till I got, here."
But the people? The Nevilles?"
"Just found two people. One of them's dead, the other damn near."
"Where?"
"Around the back." Lowry turned, and Renault followed him around the west wing. "Didn't want to move the one guy till the ambulance got here," the chief puf
fed as they trotted, their path illuminated by the ribbons of flame that waved above. "But we had to a little, just to get him away from the house. Not much heat, but pieces keep blowing down off the roof. All these stone walls, it's like a big goddamned chimney. There they are."
Two forms lay side by side, another uniformed man, clean-shaven, squatting next to them. Renault stopped, panting with the exertion, and looked down at the still, battered face. "Monckton," he breathed, then turned toward the other. "Uncover his face," he told the squatting man. Despite the discoloration, Renault recognized the dead man instantly. "Sterne. But the Nevilles!" he roared, his strength returned. "And the others! Where are they?"
"Where were they? Inside?"
"Yes."
"Then they're still there. Danny and me tried to get in, but this place is like a fort."
Renault thought frantically. "My God, the keys. We can open it from the cabin! Quickly! Search them!" He knelt painfully by Monckton. "There will be two large keys, they each should have one. . . ." His mind whirled as he went through Monckton's clothing, trying to be gentle but swift, scarcely noticing the blood or the strange angles at which the man's limbs lay. The roof of the Great Hall had not yet been afire, he was sure of that. They may have gotten to the fire chamber in time, but he was not as confident of Monckton's handiwork as David had been. Suppose that something had gone wrong, the same way something had most certainly gone wrong with the escape system. Fail-safe, Renault thought in disgust as he turned the last pocket inside out. Stupid word. Nothing was fail-safe, nothing foolproof. "Nothing," he spat.
"No key on this one either," Lowry said, pulling a canvas poncho back over Sterne's face.
"They must still be down in the cabin. Come, quickly." Renault straightened with a creaking of joints, and walked as fast as he could around the west wing toward his car. "Why isn't the ambulance here?" he snapped at the police chief.
"Just radioed them fifteen minutes ago, right after we got here. Be another fifteen, twenty minutes. Maybe a half hour in this stuff," Lowry said, gesturing at the snow falling around them.
"What? I told you to send an ambulance immediately."
"Look, Mr. Renault, I'm sorry, but how the hell was I supposed to know we'd find these guys up here? And how the hell did you know?"
"I knew," Renault said grimly as they came around to the front of the house. "I also know that unless we get those people inside out, they may well die."
"Well, do we have to go down to the cabin? Maybe we could just back the cruiser into that front door, knock it down that way, and …"
"My God, man, there's a steel plate a half inch thick on the other side of that door. Nothing short of a tank could hope to …”
Both men froze as the sound reached their ears. Though a scream of steel and stone, it was strangely human as well, as if a multitude had sung of its own destruction in one mighty yet dying voice. In the same moment, the wall of the Great Hall burst outward, spewing chunks of stone and shards of wood into the snowy night. Lowry and Renault fell to the cold white earth, turning their faces toward the forest, as if not seeing the flying missiles could save them from being struck.
The forest suddenly brightened, and when the two men looked toward the house again, it was as if The Pines had grown dozens of fiery eyes. The doors and windows were once more exposed to the world, the steel plates drawn away from them with the squeal of heat-tortured metal. Windows shattered, and wooden doors and window frames burst into flames as the cold wind swept through the rooms and halls, urging on the fire to even greater heights of destruction.
Renault gaped at the sight. The inside of the house looked like a blast furnace, except for the great dark breach in the wall of the Great Hall, in which he could see, through the settling cloud of dust, a thicker cloud of black smoke, and the first traces of flame at the hall's far end. The stones had stopped falling. Or at least he thought they had. But it seemed, as he squinted into the darkness, wiping the snow roughly from his glasses and thrusting them onto his face, that some of the stones still moved, rising over the others. "Look!" he cried to Lowry. "The light! Hurry!"
Lowry, on his knees now, flicked the switch of the flashlight he had gripped like a weapon through the havoc, and turned it on The Pines, so that it shone directly on Gabrielle Neville and Kelly Wickstrom, who screamed shrilly, threw up his arms, and tumbled over the stones into the snow.
Renault moved faster than he had in years, scrambling over the snow, up onto the cyclopean blocks, his footing solid as that of a man half his years. He grasped Gabrielle in his great arms. Confused, disoriented, she tried to push away, her eyes wild. "Gabrielle," he said soothingly. "It is I, it is Simon. Come, come . . ." She gave herself over to him then, her strength gone, and he half-led, half-carried her down over the stones, then to the warmth of the rental car, to which Lowry and the driver had already taken the limping, shivering Wickstrom.
"Simon . . . Simon . . . Simon . . ." she repeated like a litany as he maneuvered her gently into the backseat next to Wickstrom, who dripped blood from a dozen cuts and held his left knee tightly, his face pale with pain.
"I got stuff in the cruiser," Lowry said, shoving the temperature control to maximum heat and turning on the fan. "Patch you up a little. Ambulance'll be here any minute. Ma'am? You okay?"
Gabrielle began, very softly, to laugh. It increased in volume and intensity until Renault sat next to her and put his arms around her and she began to cry instead. "She is all right," Renault told Lowry. "Go. Get what you need for Mr. Wickstrom."
Lowry went to the cruiser. Renault's driver leaned against the car, watching the snow fall and the house burn. The softly roaring fan filled the car with heat, and Gabrielle began to breathe quietly. Wickstrom's eyes were tightly closed. His knuckles were white.
"Gabrielle," Renault said. He could not keep from asking. "David?"
She shook her head. "All the others," she whispered. "All dead."
"The fire?"
"No, not the fire." She pressed her eyes shut. "Leave it alone, Simon. Take out the bodies, and leave it alone.”
“All right." He nodded. "Rest now."
~*~
The ambulance arrived a short time later. Monckton, still unconscious, was lifted on first, followed by Wickstrom and Gabrielle. The body of Sterne would follow later.
On the way down the mountain Gabrielle became aware at one point of flashing red lights that were not the ambulance's, and a roaring engine that grew louder and then faded into silence. "What was that?" she asked the attendant.
"Fire engine and the tanker," he told her. "Probably called for a cinder truck. They can't get up the mountain. Too icy."
"Good," she said. “Good. Let it burn."
The attendant checked Monckton's vital signs once more, then sat in the front. Wickstrom turned his head and looked at Gabrielle. "I'm sorry I screamed," he said. "I saw . . . the light, so white and big, and I thought it was one of the faces . . . that it was starting all over again."
"No," Gabrielle said softly. "It's over now."
They rode for a while longer. "Did you see his face?" Wickstrom finally asked, gazing up at the whiteness of the ceiling. "Not when he was after us, but when he did it, when he . . . freed us. It was like, like he'd won, like he'd planned it that way all along, like . . . whatever it was, he beat it."
It was a long time before Gabrielle replied. "I'd like to believe that." she said. And later still, she whispered to herself, "I think I will."
Epilogue
Of human blood and stone
We build; and in a thousand years will come
Beyond the hills …
—Conrad Aiken, "The Road"
Nearly a year later Whitey Monckton rounded a sharp corner on a battered side road, and saw once more the caretaker's cabin near the foot of Pine Mountain. Smoke was drifting placidly from the chimney, and an addition had been put on the building, doubling its original size. He pulled his car up in front of the freshly painted wooden p
orch, and got out. The door of the house opened and a tall lanky man in his mid-fifties appeared, a cigarette in one hand. "Yeah?" the man said, neither friendly nor rude.
"My name's Monckton. I worked here last year."
Recognition shone on the tall man's face, and he smiled. "Sure, Mr. Monckton. I remember you now. You look a lot different. Lost weight?"
Monckton nodded. "Been spending most of my time in hospitals. Got out last week."
"Yeah, I remember they thought you were a goner. Any bones in your body that didn't break?"
"Not many." Monckton smiled. "They patched me up pretty well though."
"What can I do for you?"
Monckton hesitated, and the tall man pursed his lips. "I'd like to go up the mountain," Monckton said. "I'd like to see the place one more time."
The man shook his head. "Nothing to see. Just walls is all that's left."
"Well, I'd like to see them anyway."
"I got orders not to let anybody up there. Besides, the gate's welded shut. Nobody can drive up there now.”
“I'd walk. It's not far."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Monckton."
Monckton reached into his pocket, took out five new hundred dollar bills, and extended them to the man. "I've got no camera, nothing. You can frisk me before I go up and when I come down."
The man snorted. "Nothing to steal up there." He looked at the money for a while, then pocketed it. You stay quiet, I stay quiet."
"It's a deal." He looked at the road leading upward.
"Go ahead," said the man. "I won't stop you."
Monckton stepped around the gate and started walking up the road. At first he stopped and listened every few yards, but he heard and felt nothing strange, although there were still no sounds of insects or birds in the brush and trees. Halfway up he stopped, a small pain in his side. A half-mile walk up a steep grade was more exercise than he'd had in ages, but he knew he could make it to the top and down again. He had to. He had to find out the answer to what he'd been thinking of for a year, a year of lying in hospital beds staring at those white casts above and beside him like ghosts of limbs, a year of stretching and compressing muscles and bones to try to get them to work, if not like before, at least enough to propel him like a living man again, a year of wondering where it was, what had become of it.
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