by Gene Lazuta
“I can’t say as I blame him,” someone responded, darkly. “But Conway’ll have his balls for sure.”
Another car started.
And the sheriff appeared, squinting.
“Get out and find it,” he said to the deputy standing closest to the stairs. Then he turned to Norris and added, “You…park ranger. This way.”
Norris could feel the eyes of the sheriff’s men on his back, and Cooper’s presence at his heels as he followed Conway into the gloom…
And into the smell.
The air was heavy with it: a swirling mix of gun smoke and gore that wafted from a hall that was even darker than this living room/kitchenette, with its stained linoleum and ragged carpets. It permeated the place in sweet-and-sour waves, insinuating itself deep into Norris’ stomach by climbing down his throat, nauseating his body while stimulating his mind with the first specific memory in that faceless group that had been teasing at him from the past…
He’d seen this already!
He’d dreamt it!
This had been the dream from which Cooper’s telephone call had summoned him not five hours before. This room, this place, and this fear—all were familiar…all were as they had been when…
“No,” he whispered, his feet stalling on the floor and his hands working out before him.
There would be eyes next!
He’d seen them!
Eyes!
Conway’s face filled his vision.
“He said that you’d know without knowing,” the sheriff said, holding the notebook under Norris’ nose. “What did he mean by that?”
The younger man’s lips moved, but no words came out.
Two very large deputies emerged from the hall at the sheriff’s back and stood, bouncing their rifles in their hands and staring at Norris with expressionless eyes. Their presence seemed to add a new and more immediately threatening atmosphere to the room that motivated Cooper into taking a step forward and saying, “Listen, you can’t just threaten this man like a criminal.”
But Conway cut him off by raising his open palm and looking Norris straight in the eye.
“I knew you were coming,” he said, inflecting his words with a tone of conspiratorial menace that seemed to color the very air. “I could feel it. When the first of it started, I knew, like I do sometimes. We lost some animals…and then we lost a lot more than that. It weren’t like a normal winter comin’ on, when the dogs out in the Retreat get all starved and go a little crazy, maybe get a little mean and start killing food, ‘stead’a waitin’ for it to die on its own. Something told me that this time things were different, right from the first. Something told me that this time Bobby Norris was coming home.”
Norris’ hand returned to his pocket.
“And here you are,” the sheriff said. “And here we are…and there Mrs. Cray is, lying in her own blood. What done it to her, Bobby? In your brother’s book, he says you’d know.”
Norris could feel his face beginning to twitch. It was a condition he had suffered since childhood: when he got really upset, the muscles around his mouth and eyes tensed up and started to spasm, producing little puckers in his expression that looked as if he were about to cry. He could feel those twitches starting now, but he couldn’t stop them. He couldn’t even bring himself to try. Instead, he squeezed his fist around the hot ball in his jacket pocket, felt a wire of heat twist up his arm, and saw, in the pit of his brain, a brilliant white flash that seemed to detonate when that heat hit the base of his skull.
“He used the shotgun,” he stammered, unthinking, as a sudden blare sounded in the parking lot, followed by the roar of a truck’s engine leading to a terrible crash. “He put it…in her mouth.”
The two deputies at the bedroom door lunged forward, brushing past Norris on either side and knocking him back. He bobbed like a puppet, his eyes fixed ahead as his lips moved and the sheriff’s expression darkened to a deep, almost purple red.
Outside, men were shouting.
Someone ran past a window.
Two shots were fired.
And Cooper turned to follow the deputies out of the room.
“The shotgun,” Norris whispered, taking a zombie-like step forward as the eye in his pocket pulsated and the light in his head obscured everything but the images dancing there.
Sheriff Conway nodded fiercely, his fixed attention livid as he spit, “It’s true! After all these years, that son of a bitch was right: you can see it!”
Norris wasn’t listening—he’d entered the hall leading to Ernie Cray’s bedroom…the hall, so dark and threatening, through which he felt as if he were passing from one world to another, like a birth…
Or a death.
Which is how the roomed smelled inside: like death.
“Go ahead, then! Look at what you did!” Conway said, quite loudly, as he ran out the door and into the yard, where all hell had broken loose in a din of screaming tires, shattering glass, and men shouting and shooting their guns…
But the noise didn’t matter…not to Norris…not here.
The noise…
There was always so much noise…behind him, where he had already been. Memories were the noises that he carried in his head. They followed behind as he blundered forth into the silence…
Into the trees.
He was standing alone in the doorway of an eight-by-ten room that was almost identical to the one in which his brother had died. On the bed was another body, but unlike Woodie’s, this one didn’t interest him. He’d already seen it…seen what had been done to it—in his mind, when the wire of heat emanating from Woodie’s glass eye had found his brain and brought back his dream.
He’d already seen old Mrs. Cray, in her pink flannel nightgown, her hair knotted into a hundred tiny curls that were fastened to her head by a perfect cross of two plastic-tipped bobby pins each. He’d seen the way her fat arms flopped unnaturally over the sides of the bed, all the skin between the shoulder and elbow gone on them both, and the exposed muscle thick with blackly clotting blood. He’d seen the torn flesh hanging in ribbons, and the way her eyes bulged from their sockets, seemingly fixed in death upon the crucifix hanging on the wall. He’d seen the angle at which her head was held by the barrel of an old shotgun: rammed down her throat so far that the trigger guard smashed her nose to one side. And he’d seen the incredible, insane mess that had been made of her stomach and thighs when the shotgun had been fired.
He’d seen all this earlier, and it didn’t surprise him now.
He’d seen it all…
And he’d seen the eyes!
As he moved forward, tiny pieces of something soft oozed underfoot, and a breeze disturbed the layer of smoke where it hung about four feet from the floor. The bed was on his right, and a window was on his left, its glass shattered, its view full of trees: nothing but snow-covered trees. There was a flowered chair lying on its side out there. That’s what had broken the glass: a chair, being heaved through it. There were a lot of footprints in the snow around the chair because the cops thought the killer had fled that way.
But they were wrong.
Because the killer had eyes…
Eyes that filled the sky and followed a man everywhere he went in shadowy, fleeting slivers of half-imagined memories. Eyes that seemed to define a man’s mental landscape, watching from behind the eyes of others: friends, lovers, brothers. Eyes that knew everything, but that revealed nothing.
The killer had eyes…
And the killer had not fled.
Norris stopped at the foot of the bed and watched as, three feet before him, the closet door swung open…slowly.
“Hail!” came a voice, gurgling, soft, rumbling from the depths of darkness contained in the coffin-like confines of the closet space.
Something was in there—something big, and hunched, with half of its form hidden behind limp tongues of hanging garments, and the other half obscured by shadow. All of the beast that was truly visible in that blur was the twin, matching fl
ashes of its terrible, yellow eyes.
Those eyes burned.
And seemingly in response to their fire, the eye in Norris’ pocket burned as well—so hot that he had to grit his teeth and concentrate on not letting it go.
“Hail to thee, Blood Prince!” the voice growled. “Hail to thee for thine kin!”
With these words, Norris’ knees abandoned their charge, and for the second time since his arrival in Harpersville, he collapsed.
At almost that same instant, there came a rustling, followed by a smear in his vision that he knew was the thing in the closet, moving. It happened fast—so fast! The voice—mucus-thick and bloody-slow—sounded like the auditory equivalent of a gnarled root, buried in mud. But it bore absolutely no relation to the way its possessor maneuvered itself from its hiding place. In a flowing, watery motion that, in his retched posture, Norris couldn’t even follow with his eyes, the thing was out of the darkness and up on the windowsill, where it squatted like a gargoyle, its hands gripping the frame on either side of its face, and its head thrust boldly forward.
“At last you’ve come!” it leered with an obscene grin. “And bearing the stone!”
Norris’ head jerked up, and from where he knelt, he saw the twisted figure of what had once been a man, perched in the window. Darkened almost black, and fuzzed all around by the harsh, silver blades of winter sun, the creature’s limbs were thin and knobby, its skin wrinkled and strangely unfocused, as if a layer of soft, downy hair covered it in some place, while patches of a more coarse, bristling fur dripped wet and hot in others. There was something…wet…something wet that was twisted and pale on one side and red on the other…like skin…the skin from Mrs. Cray’s arms, braided around its waist like a belt, with the knot positioned just below the thing’s navel. The hair on its head hung low. Its testicles dangled brazenly between its legs. And its face was a nightmare…
It was Ernie Cray’s face.
Norris had known him, once, a really long time ago.
It looked like Ernie Cray…
Turned inside out.
“Bring out the stone,” the thing demanded, a thread of saliva crawling down its chin. “Bring out the stone, and show it to the sun.”
The twitching in Norris’ face had infected the rest of his body, and there, on his knees, he trembled uncontrollably. Inside his head an eruption was building. He could feel the molten mass of his thoughts boiling at his brain’s core, and the pressure it created crushed his lungs. He could feel his body shake, and the tears on his cheeks. He could feel his hand, withdrawing Woodie’s eye and holding it up to the light.
And he could feel the thrill of it!
The charge of sheer power!
He didn’t understand its source, or its purpose, he wasn’t even sure that it was directed at him. All he knew was that suddenly, he was in the presence of something big, and that just its proximity was enough to change him, and the world, forever.
Held between his thumb and index finger, Woodie’s eye came alive in the light, reflecting the sun’s rays in sharp, hypnotizing flashes so pure that they positively demanded attention. They burst and died in a kaleidoscopic torrent that expressed itself in unfathomable geometric patterns as he altered its angle to the light by rolling it between his fingers.
And then one reflected ray caught Woodie’s eye just right and a light-beam bridge was formed to Norris’ left pupil, driving what little breath he had left in his lungs out in a gasp and filling his head with a dazzling brilliance in which he saw…
A woman.
As if her image had been seared directly onto the tissue of his brain, he saw her face and body with such clarity that no detail went unmarked. She was tall and statuesque; beautiful, in a vaguely European way, with high cheekbones, milky skin, and incredibly long blond hair that fell down her back in a wave as thick as a horse’s tail. Her spine was arched, her feet were planted wide on the rampart of some great, old house, and her arms were at her sides, palms forward as she lifted her face to the sky. Overhead, a full moon hovered eerily in purple mist, dripping effervescent layers of light that seemed to fall from space, directly onto the woman’s skin and into her eyes.
At the sight of her, Norris felt a tremendous swelling of pure desire.
Never in his life had the image or thought of another human being affected him so completely with such a blinding, physical lust as did this woman, with her flowing grace and light-trapping flesh. He wanted her, needed her, longed for her so desperately that an ache grew in his groin that he was certain would kill him if she should elude his advances. He could feel himself reaching across the featureless depths of space itself to find her, to hold her, to possess and enfold her in himself, for she was meant to be his! and he would kill anyone who tried to keep them apart.
But then, in a staggering flash of insight, he knew with absolute certainty, that she would not elude him. That one day he would consume her, every bit—flesh, blood and bone. He’d take her into his belly and drink of the moonlight in her place, just as she was drinking now…
Because…
She wasn’t human.
She was an illusion, an artificial female shell born of evil and ripe with a violent potential that was the very essence of the animal. She radiated an aura of danger, attracting what invisible spirits there were in the surrounding air unto herself like a magnet.
And suddenly, Norris knew that the air was full of such spirits.
They danced on the moonlight, giving to his vision a sense of wholeness—an inexorable unity that made the sky, the moon, and this lady in the woods all separate pieces of one, single entity, fused solid by the milky light that tainted everything it touched in ways still secret after eons of its influence.
The moon was evil!
Beneath its silver glow, the landscape became enlivened with a dreadful feeling of foreboding, a powerful directness of purpose simple, and yet beyond Norris’ human ability to contain…
He saw all of this in a single heartbeat…in a single, gleaming instant during which one beam of sunshine caught the smooth, hard edge of Woodie’s eye and shone into his own, straight on, so that his arm locked where it was, and his mouth dropped open.
And somehow he saw that too.
He saw himself, holding something…and it wasn’t an eye anymore. It was something old and beautiful—something that other men had held before him, for almost as long as there had been light to catch its facets. Perhaps it was a gem. Or just a stone made special by perfect polishing. Perhaps it was a piece of the brilliance it so magically reflected, a chip of the sun itself, made solid by some miraculous mistake or design and sought for centuries by men who wanted nothing more than to hold it, and to see!
And then the thing in the window aid, “Now come!” in a voice so personal that it intruded on Norris’ thoughts and left him feeling violated in some brutal, intimate way.
He blinked, and his head spun.
He drew breath, and the room swayed.
He lowered his arm, and the beast in the window pointed down at him and said, “Come to the trees, Robert Norris. You know the way. Come to the trees, and find yourself!”
Then it was gone.
Norris didn’t even see it go.
It simply disappeared, flowing with a grace and purpose so much beyond the human as to be almost absurd.
“He said that you’d ‘know without knowing,’” Sheriff Conway had said Woodie wrote in his book, and Norris suddenly understood exactly what those words meant.
If there would have been anything of substance left in his stomach, he’d have lost it in that instant. As a matter of fact, he almost regretted his inability to vomit now. He would have welcomed the sense of cleansing, the feeling of removing everything from inside himself and being left empty. Because this moment was the beginning…he knew…
Without knowing.
It was coming back.
He could hardly make himself move.
But his will was strong, and calling on e
very bit of it, he rose from the floor, and without so much as glancing at it again, he replaced Woodie’s eye in the dark folds of his jacket pocket. Then he surveyed the room for a moment, and crossed himself over the corpse of Mrs. Bernice Cray, his second victim...
Woodie had been his first.
“Blood Prince,” a shadowy face hovering over his head seemed to say in his mind.
He frowned.
Blood Prince.
Madness was a terrible thing.
Without another word, Robert Norris left the room and headed out to where he had left his Bronco…in the motel’s parking lot, where men were still shouting, shots were still being fired, and all the noise of memory remained, draining him back from the impenetrable silence of the trees.
20.
“‘It can’t be true!’ you said!” Sheriff Conway shouted as he caught up with Detective Cooper, halfway across the yard. “Well, do you believe it now?”
Cooper didn’t respond.
And how could he?
Around him, men were running toward where a pickup truck was smashed into the side of the ambulance containing Woodie Norris’ corpse. In the snow behind the truck, tire tracks led directly across the lot to the wreck, without so much as swerving, as if the driver—who was presently slumped over the steering wheel—had maneuvered his vehicle into the ambulance deliberately.
Cooper was concentrating on that man’s profile and trying to ignore the rush of thoughts flooding his mind. But inside his skull, he was hearing the insane, impossible things the sheriff had told him about Bob Norris, and the one, screaming sentence that would not stop running itself through his consciousness, over and over again.
He’d read it on the first page of Woodie’s diary. He’d read it while the awful wound on his stomach burned, and Sheriff Conway stood, aiming a flashlight and making steam in the cold night as he whispered the words that still rang in his head as the harbingers of evil.
They said:
“For you, whoever you are, this is my die-ry. Read it and die, for soon the moon will be full!”
He’d known, at that instant in which he had raised his eyes to meet Conway’s steely gaze that the sheriff knew so very much more than he did about Woodie Norris. He could see it in the man’s expression, but even now he refused to really believe all of what the sheriff had said…