by James Kahn
“But . . . but . . . how did you get here?” Lesh finally managed to blurt out.
“In a taxi, what else? I don’t drive, myself, you know, and there certainly aren’t any buses at this time of . . .”
“But how did you know where . . .”
“Cuesta Verde, you said. The Freelings of Cuesta Verde. I hardly needed to be psychic to locate . . .”
“But this is impossible. You must leave.” Lesh was getting a hold on herself once more, remembering her role here. “You’re in no condition to . . .”
“I’m in no condition not to, Doctor. I’m needed here; that is quite apparent. Moreover, if putting an end to this thing is the only way I can get any rest, I think you would do well to help me end it.”
Lesh looked at Tangina in the dark of the dreadful night. The small woman appeared actually quite powerful—her hair neat, her clothes pressed, she looked to Lesh suddenly like a mystical, potent, suburban warrior. In spite of the mirthless circumstances, Dr. Lesh laughed.
“And what shall we do?”
Tangina smiled craftily—this was, after all was said and done, her craft. “First you shall take me inside. I must meet the inhabitants. I must sense the house. Already I am overpowered by the dualities—great good and great evil abide herein.”
“Good. Evil. These terms are relative to a scientist. They have little to do with physical reality—with the phenomena of the universe. Still, I have reached my limit. I will do as you ask.”
“We are entering the sphere of the soul, now; Doctor; here good and evil have strong realities. Here there are no scientists.”
“Ah, but to a scientist, Tangina, there will always be electromagnetic waves.”
“Your invisible waves are but the turbulent surface on a vast ocean, Doctor—an ocean of greater depth and darkness than either of us can hope to penetrate. We can only hope to float.”
Lesh smiled resignedly, then noticed something in Tangina’s face. She held her light up to it. “What happened to your eyes?” she whispered. Tangina’s eyes were red, puffy, bruised.
“Tonight I met the Beast.” She squinted. “I will spare you knowledge of his name. We did battle, this ancient one and I, and we both of us have felt the other’s mark.” She grinned slyly. “Neither won for good and all. But he’ll think twice before crossing my path again. We were locked in a clutch of death—and I’m not certain he couldn’t have won. But at the moment we were both in extremis, the Lady of that plane passed across our field of battle, with her coterie, and bustled all around him, jostling us thoroughly out of his concentration and mine. I let go, and he wheezed me clear away. She saved my life and soul, the spirit-woman, though if she knew it I cannot tell.”
Lesh rubbed her temples, trying to comprehend the crossing purposes. “It was She Who Waits.”
Tangina looked jolted a second, then softened her expression to one of gentle admiration. “You surprise me at times, Lesh; I am impressed. Yes, it was the Woman of Waiting—though more I cannot see.”
Lesh smiled. “It’s been a waking nightmare, from start to—and, still not finished. I think we need a Jungian analyst to interpret the meaning of these visions.” She checked her glasses. “And televisions.”
“You don’t need a Jungian analyst, my dear. You need me. And by God, you have me.” Tangina put her hand on Martha’s shoulder. “So come on, then. Let’s get this poor child back to her parents. One thing I can tell you—that Beast won’t be so quick to want to see me again.” She winked; then shrugged, adding, “Nor I, him.”
Dr. Lesh stood, with Tangina’s help. The night was getting colder. They walked side by side toward the house.
“One other thing, before we go in.” Tangina paused on the patio. “The Beast—it’s sniffing after the woman now.”
CHAPTER 8
“Steve, Diane—this is Tangina Barrons. You saw each other briefly the other morning, actually, but neither of you were in any condition for introductions, as I recall.”
They all shook hands and said hello. The house had grown unsettlingly still since Lesh had gone out into the yard to investigate the noise. Now that she was back, the internal wind was gone, the television voice had disappeared, the oppressive atmosphere was no more.
“I’m sorry to drop in on you so unexpectedly,” Tangina said brightly. “But don’t worry, I’ve eaten.”
The attempt at levity failed miserably, and put a further strain on everyone’s jangled nerves. Tangina was instantly aware of the pall she’d created, and softened her tone. “I’m sorry. I was only trying to put you at ease, and now I’ve put you off. Please—I’m here to help you.”
“Steve . . . Diane . . . truly, Tangina can help. Do not resist her. Her arrival tonight is unorthodox, but I assure you—to me, at least—welcome. Trust her as you would me.” Lesh hoped Tangina would earn that trust more than she herself had.
“We’ll do anything at this point,” Diane murmured, with a thin smile. She shifted her shoulders uncomfortably: painful scratches had appeared across her back sometime during the afternoon, for no apparent reason. She felt on the verge of crying.
“Why don’t we go into the living room?” suggested Tangina. “You can tell me everything there.”
They shuffled into the front room in a pack, and sat down amidst the rubble of instruments and broken furniture. In a monotone of masked emotion, Steve elaborated the series of events that had befallen them. Tangina listened quietly, without interrupting. In the background, the television hissed.
When he’d finished the story, Tangina sat for a moment, then stood rubbing her hands together. “I’d like to examine the house,” she said earnestly. She’d resisted this moment, resisted with all her heart this final confrontation—it carried with it so much pain and horror, this disease of which she’d been striving so hard for cure, this malignant empathy from which she suffered, this fulminant para-psychotic sensitivity to the spirits of the living and the dead—resisted this final hour so passionately . . . and yet, now that she was here, she was completely here. In the thick of what it had been given her to do. Like a mercenary soldier, she knew her trade well—and when it wasn’t torturing her soul, she reveled in it.
“Of course,” said Steve. He got up, and, a second later, so did Diane.
Tangina raised her hand. “Alone, if I may.”
The Freelings sat down uncertainly. Tangina walked off into the reaches of the house.
Lesh spoke kindly to Diane. “Believe me, she’s a benevolent soul. It was she who led us here in the first place.”
“She and the oscilloscope,” added Ryan. With Marty gone, he’d begun to assume a proprietary relationship to the apparatus conglomeration in the room.
Lesh smiled. “Yes. The marriage of technology and spirit. There lies a lesson for us, but I don’t know where.”
Tangina quickly dispatched the downstairs rooms—kitchen, dining room, living room, den, hallway, utility room, porch. There were, it was true, some areas of interest—the corridor and the back of the kitchen, specifically—but they were minor concerns, concentrations of gloom, as opposed to essential gall. Without wasting time here, she climbed the deepening stairs.
Dana’s room, similarly, was unremarkable. Next, Tangina walked down the long dark hallway to the master bedroom. The place fairly reeked.
On the wall above the head of the bed, visible to Tangina’s second sight, was a stain—an oozing, living mark, its purulent core radiating spokes in every direction. A tarantula stain. It made Tangina gag.
The bed itself was bad, too. A muddy color suffused it, and a muddy smell. Something dead and long-undiscovered had lain here recently, as she well knew; lain here and left its fetid secretions. Tangina knew enough of this room.
She exited deliberately, tried the next room down the hall. The door was closed and locked.
She called down the stairs: “Why is this door locked, Mr. Freeling?”
Steve looked up the stairs. He began to answer, then had another i
dea. Steadily, he closed his eyes and concentrated.
“Answer her,” Diane whispered.
“I am,” he whispered back. He continued focusing inward.
After a moment, Tangina appeared at the top of the stairs. “I am addressing the living?” she called down again, patiently.
Steve relaxed, opened his eyes. “Sorry,” he called back. “That’s the room my son and daughter occupy.”
“We believe it’s the heart of the house,” added Dr. Lesh.
“This house has many hearts,” said Tangina, turning back into darkness.
Steve approached Dr. Lesh and spoke softly. “I was trying to answer with my mind, but she couldn’t hear me. I thought you said she was an extraordinary clairvoyant.”
From far upstairs, they heard Tangina roar out: “You must not doubt me! That is essential!”
They regarded each other sheepishly. A minute later, the extraordinary clairvoyant shouted down again. “Dr. Lesh, will you accompany me up here, please?”
The doctor excused herself and headed upstairs. Steve and Diane huddled in front of the television, while Ryan sat checking periodic readouts.
Lesh and Tangina stood outside the children’s bedroom. The door was open now. Inside, the room was dark and still.
“This is the room,” said Tangina.
Lesh nodded. “It’s quiet, now.”
“The Beast is a little wary of me.” Tangina winked. “Not a great deal, to be sure, but as I say, I have given him pause.”
Lesh raised her eyebrows. “Can you describe it more for me?”
“Ah yes, we became quite conversant before we actually locked horns.”
“And what is its nature?”
“It is protean, this Beast. Once, I think, it was human—now, it loves its twisted existence. It would neither come back nor go on, if it could. It is obsessed with its wicked self. I have seen it before, in other forms. And now I have seen it again.”
“How did you come to confront it? What did it say?” Lesh was intrigued, fascinated. This was out of her realm, but, after all she’d seen, she no longer felt qualified to glimpse the truth. She was purely an observer, now.
“It wouldn’t come to me.” Tangina nodded Cannily. “It has become too self-satisfied. It guards its lost spirits like a miser in a cave. It tries to grasp too much, though—that will be its downfall. It won’t release that which it hoards, even to save itself. We took each other’s measure—and I tell you, he is formidable.” Her eye creases wrinkled. “But so am I.”
“And how do we proceed with this Beast?”
“We shall see. There are several possible approaches. It depends on these people.” She gestured downstairs.
“They are strong.”
Tangina nodded noncommittally. “Then we shall see.”
Together, they walked downstairs. Tangina pulled Diane to her knees from where she’d been slumped against a chair.
“Give me your hand, child.”
Diane hesitated, looked to Dr. Lesh.
“Come on, I won’t bite,” the psychic went on. Diane was at eye level with her. She put her hands in Tangina’s.
Softly, so that only Diane could hear, Tangina said, “Your daughter is alive in this house.”
Diane sobbed, kept on sobbing: the grievous joy of having her dire hopes confirmed by another. Tangina hugged her, patted the back of her head. Steve started toward them, but Tangina motioned him away. “. . . a glass of water,” she whispered. He disappeared into the kitchen.
“Where have the materializations been taking place?” Tangina asked Lesh. “The bilocation episodes.”
Lesh pointed to the air a few feet from Tangina’s head.
Tangina nodded. “I have my strongest feeling the point of origin is inside the child’s closet. Upstairs.”
Diane bobbed her head up and down. “Yes. I feel that, too.”
“Now, child,” said the clairvoyant, holding Diane at arm’s length. “Are you going to be strong for me? For your daughter? I can do absolutely nothing without your faith in this world and your love for the children.”
“I will. Believe me, I will.”
“Will you do anything I say? Even if it comes contrary to your beliefs, to all you believe?”
“Yes. Oh yes. Please.”
Tangina waited a moment, considering. She spoke first just to Diane, then to the group. “Carol Anne is not like . . . them. She’s a living presence in their spiritual but earth-bound plane. They’re attracted to the one part of her that is different from themselves: her life force. It is very strong. It gives off its own illumination. It’s a light that implies life—the memory of love, and home, and earthly pleasures—things they desperately desire, but can’t have anymore.”
“The Lady of Waiting,” murmured Lesh. “The mother of their longing. The spirit-woman.”
Tangina nodded. “Almost I could believe that woman is a distillation of all their unfulfilled yearnings. Right now, though, your daughter is the closest thing they have to the light of love they remember so dimly, yet so strongly. And her light is so bright to them, it’s a distraction from the true light that has actually come for them—yes, I witnessed it once, in my journeys to that place. The fight that is the door to final rest for them. They are unaware of it, though; it has been kept hidden from them. And now they are distracted, as well. Do you understand me? These souls—who are for whatever reason not at rest—are also not aware they have passed on.”
“Do you know the reason they’re not at rest?” Steve asked hoarsely. His thoughts were bleak with hindsight: visions of cemeteries moved, bodies uprooted. To make way for his house. His was the first.
“The reason is not important.” Tangina dismissed his question. It was irrelevant to what must be done.
Steve’s reply was almost inaudible. “I think I know.”
Tangina remained unconcerned with the why. “It is not important. What is important is the fact of these souls. They are not part of consciousness, as we know it. They linger in a perpetual dream state . . . a nightmare from which they cannot awaken. They live in the dream . . . they are the dream. Some people, some of us here—I, for one; your daughter, for another—can see them in our dreams. The dreams in which these souls exist are seen by some of us . . . as dreams. Your daughter and I, we were having the same dreams—and now she is lost in it, and we must get her back out.”
“Yes, yes, please . . .”
“So.” Tangina held up her hand for silence. “Inside this spectral light, this light which has been obfuscated for these wretched dream-wanderers, inside this light is salvation—a window to the next plane. There are other windows, in and out, to other planes, and these windows can admit all manner of creature, bright and dark—”
“We saw some of them last night,” Ryan interjected excitedly. He was enthralled by this—a coherent explanation of a totally hallucinogenic, but somehow natural, reality. It simply took his breath.
Tangina nodded gravely. “Fantabel and Sceädu emerged into our earthly plane, I have been told. They inhabit their own worlds, and venture sometimes to the spirit-world of wandering souls. But they should not have come to our dimension. It was a danger to them and to us, and I have no doubt they were goaded on by one I will speak of shortly. Windows such as these are not to be crossed lightly. The spectral light is such a window. This membrane must be crossed by the lost souls—on its other side, friends will guide them to their destinies. Carol Anne can help them to find this light. If she goes to the light, they will follow her.”
“No . . .”
“No, she mustn’t go in herself. But that is for you to tell her, Diane. She listened to me for a moment, an hour—but only the love that binds the two of you can hold her exactly where she must be. Where, and when.”
“I’ll do whatever you ask.”
“Well, hold on, dear people, there’s one thing more. A terrible presence is in there with her. So much rage . . . so much betrayal . . . I’ve rarely sensed anything
like it. It was strong enough to punch a hole into this world, and take your daughter from you. It keeps Carol Anne very close to it, and away from the spectral light. It uses her to restrain and distract the others, and to draw them away from the light, so they cannot escape his domain. It uses her, and lies to her. It says things only a child can understand. She fears it, but she fears to wander too far from it, for it’s the only one who can speak to her, and who knows her secret language. It is the Beast. It sought her from the very beginning.” Tangina cupped Diane’s face in her hands and brought it close to her own. “Let’s get on our feet and go get your daughter.”
Diane laughed with tears, and rose. Tangina likewise started to rise, then looked down. “Oh! I am on my feet.”
It was well after midnight before they’d collected all the things Tangina had instructed them to collect. She stood in the center of the living room floor, now, inventorying the lot.
“Towels, red ribbons, lipstick, numbered tennis balls . . . where’s the rope?”
Steve came trudging in with several pounds of rope strung over his shoulder. “It’s all I could find.”
The television sets were all on to snow. Long lengths of string were taped to the walls, then tied to shorter crosspieces in the middle of the room to form a suspended square of string around the area from which all the artifacts had been materializing.
Tangina looked up at Steve. “It’ll do. How’s the bath water?”
“Tub’s full. I just shut it off.”
“Then we might as well get started.” She winked at Dr. Lesh. “My equipment just has fewer moving parts than yours, that’s all.” Then, to Diane: “All right, child. Call your daughter.”
Diane walked to the middle of the room and stood there as if waiting to audition. Tangina nodded her on. Diane took a deep breath. “Carol Anne . . . Carol Anne . . . it’s Mommy. Can you hear me, baby?”