Poltergeist

by James Kahn

  Ryan read one of his course books—Dunne’s classic, if convoluted, treatise on the nature of time and its relation to precognition. Marty perused a Popular Mechanics, a couple of People magazines, a TV Guide. About three o’clock, his stomach growled, startling him out of the haze he was beginning to fade into. He looked over his shoulder into the kitchen.

  Hungry, sleepy. He stood up, shook himself awake, motioned to Ryan for Ryan to cover his instruments while Marty went for a stretch in the direction of the supplies. Ryan nodded, cursorily checked over all the readouts, and lowered his gaze once more into the difficult prose of J. W. Dunne. Marty walked into the kitchen. The kitchen was dark.

  He couldn’t locate the light switch, so he turned on his flashlight to find the refrigerator. He found that quickly enough. He opened the door to the big Amana, and the fridge light went on, bathing Marty in a cold white glow.

  He ate a little salad directly from the bowl on the shelf, but the crunching sounded too loud. He didn’t want to wake the house, so he looked for something else.

  He pulled out a chicken leg, which he held between his teeth, and a piece of steak in plastic wrap, which he put down on the counter. He shut the refrigerator door, throwing the room once again into darkness. He flipped on his flashlight and began opening drawers, looking for a knife and fork.

  Spare utensils, rubber bands and pencils, the sound of each drawer opening, its contents rattling, drawer closing with a soft knock, then Marty’s feet shuffling to the next drawer. The beam of the flashlight swung randomly across the glossy room, throwing stark shadows in odd places. Marty stopped, and tilted his head. He’d heard a sound.

  A strange, uncharacterizable sound: gushy, bubbling. A crawling sound. It was coming from the area where he’d just laid the steak. He turned quickly, in time to see a shape moving there. He raised his light to illuminate the counter.

  The steak was alive. Alive with death. Grotesquely, it crawled along the counter and over itself, growing, bubbling with cancerous tumors, caseous blebs. Undulating, foul, it came.

  Marty gagged, and, in so doing, realized he still held the chicken leg in his mouth. Furiously, he spit it onto the floor. With a gasp he shined his light on it.

  A thousand maggots writhed on the chicken, then crazily began wriggling off it, onto the floor all around Marty’s feet, into all the dark and hidden corners of the kitchen. Marty retched, and stumbled into the utility room in back.

  His head fumbled along the wall as he bent over the sink, vomiting stomach bile. Finally, his fingers came to the light switch; he flicked it on.

  Still leaning over the sink, he slowly regularized his breathing, slowly quieted his gag reflex. He felt weak and faint. Slowly, he lifted his head up to look in the wall mirror, to check his pallor. The reflection of his face in the mirror was of a rotting corpse. Its hair streamed insanely, its mouth dangled open. Horrified, out of control, Marty raised his hands and plunged his fingers into the putrescent flesh of his own face. The image in the glass mimicked his action—his hands tore into necrotic muscle, pulling chunks of tissue off oozing bone. Teeth hung by leathery threads, clots of slime ran down, covering his arms. He screamed, but no sound came.

  The bare bulb over the mirror changed hue in rapid succession—white, yellow, orange, pink—rendering the psychotic cadaver in the mirror even more surreal, more demonic. The bulb sparked and exploded with an intense shower of light. Marty turned and ran back toward the living room.

  But somewhere on his way through the kitchen, time began to alter.

  He started to feel himself moving slower and slower, as if he were trying to run through water. As if the density of his body and the density of the air were similar. As if his feet had no traction on the ground. As if, somehow, he kept halving the distance between himself and the doorway, but could never get all the way to breach that final fraction.

  Slower and slower. His legs began to ache with the effort; he was barely able to draw breath. A sound, like time stretching, surrounded him, filled his head to cracking . . . and then, he stopped altogether.

  Froze completely. He stood in mid-stride, one leg up, mouth open, frozen solid. Immobile as stone. And everything around him seemed equally rigid, as if someone had taken a picture of the room with him walking across it, and this was the picture.

  He could see; he could not move his eyes. He could hear, but the silence of deep space enclosed him. He could think—but what was he to think of all this? Was he going mad? Had he fallen into the postulated black hole?

  The stillness was incomprehensible. It pervaded the very air he . . . didn’t breathe. Inert. The fixedness went on, and on, and on . . . how long is a time of no time? No time, no motion, no sound . . . but wait. There was a sound. A sound was coming.

  A scrabbling sound of the finest timbre, almost inaudible at first, almost the hallucination of sound. But then it came louder, louder, but no less fine. The sound of dragonfly wings scraping over sandpaper, or dry leaves blown across soft earth, or spider feet tapping over a lineoleum floor. Marty looked straight ahead, in the only direction his fixed gaze allowed him to look. Spiders were coming.

  Only a few at first, walking tentatively on the hard waxed floor. Each spider lifted one leg, tested the strange slippery surface before it, advanced a centimeter, lifted the next leg. Only a few, of different sizes, approaching slowly. In Marty’s entire universe, now, the only moving things were these spiders.

  He tried to scream, or run, or flail at them; but, of course, could not. They came slowly, at first, these few, and shortly were joined by several more. Different sizes, different shapes, different colors. Some were hairy, with thick, deliberate legs, and a coarse mat of black bristles. Some were shiny hard, with a body almost like a carapace. Some had thin, spindly legs, some had pincerlike jaws, some had prickles. Some scurried.

  More spiders arrived. Still slowly, they came forward, black and yellow ones, brown fuzzy ones with violin markings on their backs, polished black ones with red hourglass designs. Puffball spiders that could hardly walk across the flat surface without wobbling back and forth, wolf spiders, daddy-longlegs, glistening spiders moist with spider slime, trapdoor spiders, tarantulas. A green-spotted African Loxosceles.

  Dozens of them now, slowly advancing. Some were a little quicker than others; they climbed over the spiders in front of them. In one or two places, fights erupted: spiders clenched, rolling, sixteen legs wrapped frantically around deathly, glossy bodies, fangs piercing, venom flowing . . . and then one, or both, lay puckering on the floor, first spasmodic and then still, as the horde inched ahead.

  Toward Marty. His mind twisted in the throes of violent terror; his body was a statue. Still, the spiders came. Like a swarm.

  Suddenly, one of the nearest ones darted ahead—seized by spider-lust—and was quickly out of Marty’s field of vision. He couldn’t move his eyes, couldn’t look down, couldn’t see where this creeper was racing to so urgently, but then he knew that he could not only see and hear, he could feel, as well. He felt the spider crawling on his left foot.

  Over the front of his ankle . . . pause . . . up the inside of his leg, inside his pants. It paused again around his knee.

  If only he could scream. He wished to God he could scream. Hundreds of spiders flooded in the door, now, writhing over each other, bumping into each other, advancing. The first wave of them disappeared beneath the lower edge of Marty’s peripheral visual field, coming steadily closer. He felt the spider at his left knee crawl gradually higher, up the inside of his thigh.

  He prayed to lose consciousness.

  Two more spiders suddenly skittered up his right leg. The shock was excruciating. A dozen more groped around his cuffs . . . and then they were countless, climbing, inside and outside his clothes. Over his back, now; up his neck. In his hair. They crawled, God, no, over his most sensitive recesses, exploring, leaving sticky trails of spittle, biting, defecating, masticating; some weaving webs, some falling off back down to the floor, on
ly to climb again.

  One burrowed into his right nostril, curled up into a ball, attacked any others who ventured into the same opening. They crawled into his mouth, under his tongue, into the depths of his throat. They lay eggs there.

  The horror was overpowering—but Marty could not faint, could not die. The horror was at its infinite limit. And then the rats came.

  The floor was thick with spiders, but the rats ran right over them, right up to Marty. They began chewing through his shoes—quickly accomplished—and then went on to gnawing his toes.

  The pain was unbelievable, but somehow sensing that seemed to stir the rats into a greater frenzy. They nibbled up his shins, devoured his flesh, feasted on the torn skin and oozing muscle until he was nothing but an articulated skeleton of bloody, greasy bones. Then, for a long time, the rats lapped the bones.

  Worms came. They crawled around Marty’s bony fingers, between the scraping vertebrae. They wriggled into the marrow of the long bones, squirmed there, sucked the marrow, spewed their worm-juice, left the bony core to fester. They wormed into the eye sockets, into the ear holes, into the brain pan.

  Somehow Marty could still feel, and see. Felt the worms wriggling in his bones. Saw his skeleton hand.

  And as he watched, he dissolved. Bone resolved into molecules of bone, which dispersed into atoms of calcium, atoms of phosphorous, atoms of carbon. Became electrons spinning high above nearly imperceptible protons, vibrating neutrons, fundamental particles of energy that oscillated in the rarefied air of the timeless kitchen until . . . Marty was no more. Invisible. Absent. Nonexistent.

  Gone.

  Ryan continued trying to read when Marty first got up to go into the kitchen, but staying awake had been a major effort for the better part of the previous hour, so within a couple of minutes, he was slipping into the hypnagogic state which is neither sleep nor wakefulness. His head lolled; a small trickle of saliva crept out the corner of his half-open mouth, down his chin; his eyelids were almost closed. He therefore wasn’t conscious of the first purr of activity on the banks of equipment before him--the single, tentative BEEP on the oscilloscope.

  Nor was Ryan aware of the vague, vibrating images on the monitors a few minutes later; the humming of readouts, the whirring of the automatically triggered tapedecks. Or of the faint glow at the top of the stairs.

  Magnometer needles were deflecting off the screen; the barometer started to fall. Ryan was in full doze now. The faint light at the top of the stairs grew brighter, became blue-green, took shape; began to descend.

  From the nether consciousness of his light sleep, Ryan became aware first that he was being awakened, then that he was being awakened by something, then that the something was a pressure on his shoulder. A hand.

  He jumped awake and swiveled around—to find Marty standing behind him. He shined his flashlight into Marty’s face: what he saw was raw wonder, pale amazement on his friend’s expression. Marty had rejuvenated, but now was in shock. Ryan turned again, to follow the direction of the technician’s wide, staring gaze—followed the gaze to where it was fixated, at the top of the stairs.

  There, halfway down by now, was a greenish, glowing, crawling mass, resembling a giant hand, its potent, searching fingers flowing down the stairs—heading directly toward Ryan and Marty. They both took two steps backward.

  Marty opened his mouth to shout, but could not find the breath. Ryan was unable to move. The air became thin, charged. The monitors were going wild. Ceaselessly, the thing came.

  Finally Ryan found his voice, in a whisper. “It’s manifesting! Look at the ’scope!”

  Marty bobbed his head. “Trip wire’s activated! Temperature’s dropping!”

  “This is for real! This is really happening!”

  “Can you breathe?”

  “Can you run?”

  “I’m workin’ on it, man.”

  The smoking fingertips reached the bottom of the stairs, then suddenly rose to the hall ceiling. A pulsing tentacle came forward, floated down again, hovered above the camera, arched like a cobra, withdrew.

  The fingers collected themselves into a fist, which slowly grew. When the hand opened again, it was twice as big. It settled to the floor once more; indistinctly, it crept forward.

  Something in Marty snapped. His mouth opened, closed, opened, closed. Then he shouted.

  Everyone in the living room sprang up. Diane grabbed Robbie and hugged him before she even saw what was happening. Dr. Lesh put on her glasses to focus on the cause of the disturbance. The cause was among them. The hand was in the living room.

  The hand wandered aimlessly, passing under tables, circling chairs. Like a mist with substance. The room was cold and damp. Nobody moved.

  “Have you experienced this before?” Lesh asked anybody.

  “First time,” breathed Diane.

  “Me too.”

  The mist rose and fell like a tide. Random flashes ignited in its substance, like tiny exploding lights or alien nerve cells discharging electrically. Almost as if the mist were thinking.

  “This is . . . awesome,” Lesh murmured.

  “This is nothin’ compared to what I been through in the kitchen,” rasped Marty.

  But nobody was listening to Marty—they were all transfixed. The vapor roamed about like luminescent breath, sea-green now, sparking and fuming. Exploring the living room, it seemed sentient, somehow, yet lost. Seeking something, unable to find its way out.

  Lesh backed away from a tendril that curled near her. “Don’t let it touch you,” she whispered. “But try not to disturb it. I think—I feel—it wants something . . . but isn’t certain what.”

  “You’re . . . just projecting, Dr. Lesh,” Ryan squeaked. He stood stock-still as the smoke coiled around his legs, up along his back and down again. “See?” he choked out as the thing left him. “I’m okay. Nothing happened to me.” He hoped dearly that saying it made it so.

  Marty was near the end of his rope, after first decomposing beside the refrigerator and now watching this living fume in the living room. Slowly, he backed down the hallway, out of the fog’s path, toward the small guest bathroom.

  Diane still clutched Robbie tightly. She’d never seen anything like this . . . fog . . . before, and was uncertain how to react. It was wondrous, whatever it was, even dazzling. Yet it was all tied up in her child’s disappearance—was somehow dangerous, and frightening as well. But she didn’t want to do the wrong thing: perhaps how she behaved or responded to this—whatever it was—would determine the fate of her baby. Maybe she needed to be brave, or be brassy. Or humble. Or . . . what? She was virtually paralyzed with possibilities, so she just stood there, ready for anything, holding her son.

  Steve was both more scared than Diane was, and more angry. He was a meat-and-potatoes man by nature, and this fantasy-come-real was just not in his universe. It was way out of bounds. He almost couldn’t believe he was seeing what he was seeing—but there it was. He was seeing it.

  So Steve’s emotional state was as much a function of this disruption of the natural order of things as it was related to his missing child and unsettled household. He was wary of this lingering mist, and furious at it. And finally, his anger and his wariness made him believe it existed.

  But the crawling mist wasn’t the most fantastic occurrence Steve had to accept before the night was over. For at that moment, a series of sparkles glittered in the air near the ceiling, where the jewelry had materialized previously, and something new appeared.

  Something. A darkness, without shape. A formless damping of light. Its dimensions kept changing. And the darkness moved.

  Floated through the air, paused, hovered, rose, circled, paused again. Like—very like—a creature of shadow, examining a new place.

  Lesh felt an icy, cold fear run through her for the first time that night. She’d never seen or read of anything like this shadowy shapelessness in her life, but she’d heard of it only yesterday. From Tangina. Something the psychic had seen in her dr
eam . . . what had she said?—One is a shadow. A darkling creature I cannot comprehend. He is himself a conduit to another plane.

  So here it was now. To Lesh, it had the sickening, terrible sense of déjà vu about it. Half remembered, half repressed. It was a sinking feeling, like falling in space. This creature was the mouth to nowhere.

  “Stay away from it,” Lesh whispered with desperate urgency. “Don’t let it near you. It’s . . . I think it’s a tunnel to a different universe.”

  Fear instantly crackled, static, electric.

  Ryan tensed. “You mean . . . like a black hole? Black holes don’t move like that—this thing is alive. Besides, if a black hole was that big, it would have sucked in half the state by now.”

  “I don’t know what a black hole is, and I don’t know what this is,” Lesh said carefully. “But Tangina said it was a ‘conduit to another plane,’ and I don’t like it.”

  Nobody liked it. It was cold; it was unfathomable. It moved. It even seemed to have a certain sound about it, or perhaps it was an absence of sound. A sort of un-laughter.

  It moved to a chair. It settled on the cushion. It moved on to the dining room table. The chair cushion was gone.

  Vanished from where it had been sitting, as if it had been absorbed by the shadow-creature. Eaten.

  The shadow-creature left the area of the dining room table. It began to migrate toward Diane.

  “No!” she whispered, immediately almost out of control. Her face pulled taut; she gripped Robbie frantically. She couldn’t move a step. “No,” she whimpered.

  The shadow came closer.

  Suddenly there was another profusion of sparks near the ceiling . . . and a flame appeared. Appeared and grew, until it was the size, and vaguely the shape, of a man. A flame-creature, orange, pulsing, liquid. It soared down into the dining room like a fireball. It confronted the shadow.