The Tea Party - A Novel of Horror

by Charles L. Grant

  From the back cover

  “ONE OF THE PREMIER HORROR WRITERS OF THIS OR ANY OTHER GENERATION.” —Stephen King

  Deerfield. A sleepy village untouched by

  time, full of quaint antiques, charming sights and friendly neighbors.

  But outside of Deerfield, nature is still. No children play around the great stone house of Winterrest; no birds fly over its ancient trees . . . and tales of witches and demons fill the dreams of Deerfield’s children.

  Now the great house is stirring, stretching, hungry. Now the huge doors

  open, inviting unwary victims deep inside. The warm stone walls are heaving, the floors are pulsing . . . now the frenzied ritual must begin . . .

  DEATH ON A DARE

  After his blinking eyes adjusted, Keith could see that there were no windows in the shed; it was dark, but dusty light slipped through the doorway—until the stone door slammed shut, screaming on its hinges.

  “Hey, let me out! C’mon, you guys, this isn’t funny.”

  The shed groaned.

  Keith reached out blindly for the door—and felt the stone moving.

  It rippled.

  It shifted like the back of a large animal leaving sleep and stretching.

  It grew awfully warm.

  Keith screamed.

  The shed was shrinking . . .

  Books by Charles L. Grant

  The Nestling

  Night Songs

  The Tea Party

  Published by POCKET BOOKS

  Most Pocket Books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums or fund raising. Special books or book excerpts can also be created to fit specific needs.

  For details write the office of the Vice President of Special Markets, Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Another Original publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

  Copyright © 1985 by Charles L. Grant

  Cover artwork copyright © 1985 Lisa Falkenstern

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

  ISBN: 0-671-50522-X

  First Pocket Books printing May, 1985

  10 987654321

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  To Doug, who knows a good suit when he sees one;

  And Lynne, whose fetish of the month is Doug;

  For knowing, and caring, and for coming to the party.

  PART ONE

  THE HOST

  The fog had been there from the beginning.

  When the Appalachians rose in dark volcanic flame and the sea slid back boiling, when the centuries-old glaciers gouged and ground and crushed their way through to pulverize the land and create the narrow valleys, when the lakes filled with rain and the beasts returned to prowl the forests, the fog was there, barely shifting, seldom rising; when the trees finally grew and the land became fertile, when the birds returned to roost and Man was born, the fog was there, breath of the night and mirror of the moon, scuttling to shadow ahead of the sun, returning at dusk to reclaim its place.

  It settled in a rolling meadow much longer than it was deep, a meadow boxed on three sides by a low wooded hill, bordered on the south by the dry shallow grave of a long-dead creek.

  With the sun high the fog dissipated, strands and arms of it lifting toward the sky, pierced by the wind, faded and scattered by the light; strands and arms of it fleeing to the forest, finding burrows and caves and hollows in trunks, settling and waiting like air before a storm. With the sun lowering it grew again, seemingly out of the ground, out of the branches, out of the rock—white blades of grass that stretched into white vines that wove themselves swiftly back into a slow tumbling cloud.

  Unbroken by trees, untouched by passing creatures, unnoticed except for the Indians who avoided the meadow by taking their hunting elsewhere, and by the colonists who decided that the valleys beyond were somehow better places to establish their farms and their mines.

  There were no stories of ghosts or demons or giants; there were no spells cast or curses leveled or monsters reputed to keep their lairs there.

  There was only the fog that had been there from the beginning—grey-white, always moving, always shifting, never still . . . until a man and his family came with their lives strapped and bound in their road-battered wagons. They stopped there in spring, on the last day before summer, stopped on the creek bed now turned to a rutted road, and watched the fog writhing under the sun’s morning light.

  No trees, no creatures, but every so often the shifting moving white was broken by the backs of large grey boulders, like stolid, patient sea-things lurking beneath a constantly changing surface. The man was a stonemason, his family numbered ten, and when the fog cleared and the meadow was revealed, this, he decided, was where he would stay.

  There was no argument from the family; they were weary of travel and anxious for a place they could finally call their own. The fog vanished by noon. The land was claimed shortly after.

  The mother of the family’s eight children was fortunate enough to be clever, and within a month of their arrival she had learned the language of the Lene-Lenape, who taught the family much about survival, since the area’s white residents wanted little to do with them. No reason for this is known, yet the family remained, undaunted and proud and determined not to be bested by either Man or Nature.

  By the end of 1690 they had established a crude working farm and were, if not thriving, at least holding their own.

  By the end of 1691 six of the eight children were dead.

  A smallpox epidemic swept that section of the colony during early May, and the four middle offspring were the only ones touched of the stonemason’s brood. They burned with high fever, thrashing and screaming in their sleep, and lost so much weight that their arms became sticks, their faces hollow skulls; their hair turned brittle and fell out in dried clumps, and though as much was done for them as could be, they died one by one, coughing and vomiting, gurgling as if they were drowning in a well.

  In October, while hunting for wild turkey, the eldest son slipped crossing a stream and struck his head on a rock. He drowned while struggling back to consciousness.

  In 1692 a sixth child, a girl seven years old, was brutally mauled by a female bobcat surprised in her lair shortly after giving birth to the season’s first litter. The dying child stumbled and crawled ahead of the wake of her own blood, two miles back to the temporary log cabin before collapsing at the gate. She had no strength to scream or call out, and so her mother, working in the garden not fifty yards away, never knew what happened until she came to the wall to look for her baby.

  Despite these tragedies, the stonemason persisted in using his skills to build a more permanent home. He ignored his neighbors when he wasn’t working for them, in spite of the fact that they warned he was staying on long-cursed land.

  The house was completed in 1699.

  It was christened Winterrest, to celebrate the protection it would offer from that harshest of seasons, and because the last stone was laid the day of the year’s first heavy snowfall.

  The family—which now included, aside from husban
d and wife, the eldest surviving son and his wife and two children, and the youngest son with his spouse and three children—moved in their possessions shortly before Christmas.

  Their neighbors, after swallowing their objections both to the place and to the people, tried visiting them before the turn of the year and received no response for their knocking. They left, relieved of their responsibility by the hostile silence they faced.

  A year later a tinker passed the estate. He later claimed that just as he reached for the gate-latch, he heard agonized screams from within the house. A group of farmers, fearing the family had been slaughtered by brigands and that they might be next, went to Winterrest armed and angry.

  But the house was empty.

  There was no sign of struggle, no blood, no corpses. There were no foot- or hoofprints in the grass, no way of telling how many had entered and how many had left the large grey mansion.

  In 1702, one mile farther east, Deerford village was founded.

  The fog never returned.

  But Winterrest was its color.

  PART TWO

  THE GUESTS

  ONE

  1

  The season was summer, not known for dying.

  The weather was stifling, with no sign of storms.

  The densely wooded hills were low and unimposing, the thick heavy foliage a slow-fading green. The hazed, white-hot sun had bleached the blue from the sky for well over a week, yet the streams were still deep enough for trout to hide in the shallows. Crows with talons, hooks and beaks open circled low, hunting carrion on the roads; hawks with eyes hooded, talons tucked, coasted high, hunting anything that moved. A blue jay stared at an acorn on the ground. An aged copperhead dozed on a bed of exposed slate. Pasture-land cleared the slopes in uneven arcs where dairy cattle grazed and alfalfa grew for hay and an occasional yellow tractor belched black exhaust into the grey dust clouding the horizon. The contour-hugging, two-lane roads that once were cowpaths were dull ebony and deserted. No breeze touched the ponds. The dogs that watched the farms lay in deceptive shifting shade, panting, dreaming, ignoring the swarming flies.

  But under the trees that had lost their spring’s shine it was cooler, though not cool, and the buckskin mare that picked her cautious way along the dirt trail seemed less weary than ambling, once in a while reaching for a tempting moist leaf, her heavy black tail switching flies from her rump. She skirted the few deadfalls without having to be guided, tossed her head and snorted whenever she caught the sharp scent of the greenland in the valley.

  The trail followed the hill’s contour halfway up its southern slope, dipping only when it had to around huge boulders or sudden hollows. Her rider knew it well; the buckskin knew it better.

  Douglas Muir slumped comfortably in the tooled western saddle, left hand holding the reins, right hand flat along his thigh. He wore brown boots a season too old, jeans patched and faded, and a loose blue plaid shirt that let his skin breathe. His hat was a rumpled Stetson, once a startling white until the day he’d brought it home, dropped it on the living room floor and kicked it around with his bare feet until the stiffness was gone and the color less sterile.

  He shifted, and the saddle creaked—the blue jay squawked and vanished, the copperhead tested the air with its tongue, uncoiled and slipped beneath a dark copse of briar.

  He massaged his knee, the back of his neck, checked his watch and smiled. It was nearly four, almost suppertime, something his stomach had already told him. He began to whistle randomly, not quite on key, until he settled on a spirited rendition of “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” which he preferred to remember as the theme from The Green Hornet. The buckskin tossed her head and whickered a protest. Doug laughed and urged her forward—faster now, until the trail aimed straight down the eastern slope, flattened, and the trees stopped.

  A tug at the reins, and the horse paused blowing at the clearing’s shaded edge.

  They were on the left side of a two-acre expanse of grass, a nonprofessional but functional paddock enclosed by a greyed split-rail fence whose two upper corners were hidden by stands of thick-boled oak. Not twenty feet from the fence, at the back and on the far side, the hill rose again, almost vertically nearly two hundred feet; most of the trees there were white birch and spruce, and the underbrush gave way to stacks and stairs of boulders.

  Doug slipped out of the saddle and opened a plank gate to lead the animal through. Once the gate was relatched, he and the horse walked side by side, paying no attention to the grey squirrels that bounced away, scolding.

  A second gate, the grass here worn in patches to the ground, and they were behind the garage, house, and stable.

  The house was clean and weathered, a two-story log cabin with a steeply pitched slate roof, small windows top and bottom, and a single screen door off a narrow concrete stoop. The dark red garage was to the left, the matching low stable to the right, the backyard itself less than ten yards wide. There were no rusting tools here, or lawn chairs and redwood tables beneath a suburban sun umbrella; only a raised and covered stack of drying firewood to one side of the stoop.

  The horse needed no prodding. She headed directly for the tackroom and waited patiently, eyeing Doug, who took his time crossing over and smiled when she finally pawed at the ground.

  “You’re worse than a wife, you know that, Maggie,” he said, stripping off her saddle, blanket, and bridle. And as he turned to put the gear in its place, the buckskin reared, whinnied, and raced back through the gate. She sped across the grass, bucked, called again and rolled on the ground to scratch her back and sides.

  He shook his head slowly, stepped back outside and pulled the tackroom door closed. You really have a way with animals, almost like you can talk to them, he’d been told more than once. But talking to Maggie had nothing to do with it. It was training, patience, and a damned healthy respect for a big dumb creature that could squash you flat or bite through your arm if it decided it was angry. Not to mention the hooves that could take a piece of your skull without half trying.

  Still, he thought as he headed for the house, there were times when he almost believed the twelve-year-old mare could actually read his mind.

  He had one hand on the doorknob, ready to turn it, when something made him turn around.

  Maggie was standing abnormally still, her ears pricked high and stiff, her tail snapping hard from side to side.

  He stepped down to the grass and pushed his hat back.

  Then Maggie’s ears flattened and she reared, her forelegs kicking out as if aiming for an invisible, dangerous target. Her teeth were bared, and her angry snorting punched the air like the sound of muffled gunshots.

  “Maggie,” he called, “what’s up?”

  His head cocked in bewilderment as he watched her lash out, then settle back to paw fiercely at the ground and shake her head violently.

  “Hey, Maggie?”

  She bolted suddenly, racing toward the back fence, circling once before ducking under the oaks to stand trembling behind the largest trunk.

  Worried now and perplexed, he was halfway to the gate, ready to break into a run himself, when he felt it—a stirring of the ground, a sensation of rumbling without the earth moving. He looked down, frowning, until the rumbling passed like a train beneath his feet.

  Maggie snorted, backed away, and pawed divots from the grass.

  Son of a gun, he thought, and felt something else that made his head snap up.

  The air was moving not quite in a breeze, and carrying with it a definite slice of winter. He looked around, the fingers of his left hand snapping nervously. Glancing between the stable and the house, he could not shake the feeling that whatever was coming had started on the other side of a tree-hidden wall, the northern boundary of the Winterrest estate.

  The light seemed to shimmer, blurring the foliage, making him blink to clear his vision.

  Maggie called out, defiant from behind the trees.

  He scanned the hilltops—what the hell was going on
?—and saw the trees begin to quiver, sway, give rasping voice to the breeze that quickly became a wind.

  A strong wind.

  A gale.

  A hurricane’s high keening that charged without warning around the front of the house and lifted a swirling crest of hard-edged dust and sharp dead leaves from the yard, surrounding him with it, pelting him with small stinging pebbles as he rushed back toward the door.

  He heard Maggie again.

  He hesitated, and something cracked viciously across the backs of his knees, shoving him forward with his spine arched and his head up. He whirled with a half-spoken curse and was hit again, harder, and fell face down with hands out to catch himself, turning away from the wind that howled now, grew to a shrieking, and made him gasp with the cold that sliced through his clothes, while his hat was yanked off and spun toward the garage.

  Maggie challenged—high-pitched, almost screaming.

  A knobbed section of dead wood thudded against his side and made him grunt with pain, and he quickly covered his head with his hands and curled himself into a tight ball, still kneeling, leaning to the right to keep from falling over.

  The tackroom door was thrust open, cracking over and over against the stable wall.

  Grit stung his cheeks and slipped beneath his eyelids; twigs knifed across the exposed backs of his hands; another branch slammed into the center of his spine, and he yelled in anger and surprise.

  His nostrils clogged and he opened his mouth to breathe, and it instantly filled with dust he could not spit out.

  The cold intensified, and he felt his skin tighten and split across his knuckles.

  A rock bounced off his ribs, another off his elbow, and he could feel his shirt beginning to tear along the seam on the left side. He was hard put to keep from dashing for the house, knowing that the moment he raised his head he would be pummeled unconscious.