by James Kahn
His face turned pale, his body began to shake.
Her love grew stronger with concern. “Steven? Steven! Oh, God, what’s the matter with you? What is it, honey?”
He was convulsing violently, still standing up. He pushed her away, fear on his face. He gagged once and jolted forward, bent over as if he were going to vomit.
He gagged again; his mouth opened.
And it began to come out.
A thick, translucent, gelatinous, snakelike thing started slithering from his mouth.
Diane screamed and backed off.
The thing kept coming, writhing, dripping mucus, grayish-pink, thick as an arm at first, then bursting with knobbly, tumorous lumps the longer it grew; like a deformed embryo, pulsing, the size of a small dog by the time it was extruded completely on the carpet.
Steve collapsed in a heap as the thing wriggled under the bed. The trail of slime it left behind smoked like an acid pit.
Under the bed, it visibly began to grow.
Diane knelt beside Steve, trying to revive him. The puddle of ooze where the thing had first been spit up smelled so foul, it made her gag. She pulled Steve away a couple of feet and shook him. “Steven—Steven—wake up!”
The thing crawled out from under the bed. It was twice as big now, like a huge, mutant fetus: bloated, viscous chest, its ribs exposed and dripping matter; tiny, flipperlike arms; a torso that tapered off to no legs at all, but a slippery, malformed, stubbly tail; and a head that was nearly human, with eyes like Kane’s, a decayed nose-hole, a drooling smile, and rotted brain tissue spilling down its forehead.
A face of primitive evil.
It stared at Diane momentarily, then slithered out the door.
“Steven, wake up! Please!” she screamed, and shook him. Then, louder: “Robbie! Carol Anne! Run! Run away!”
She stood and ran to the doorway and shouted after the thing. “Stop, you bastard! Leave us alone!”
But the door slammed in her face, flinging her back into the room. To the floor, beside Steve.
He opened his eyes groggily. He looked over at Diane, whimpering bitterly beside him.
“Diane,” he whispered.
They embraced.
Steven had renounced the Beast, and he and Diane were together.
“The kids,” she said.
He stood up shakily and tried to open the door. It wouldn’t budge. He tried again, and it snapped open suddenly on an empty hallway. Slowly, cautiously, Steve and Diane stepped out onto the landing.
They looked down the hall. Empty. Over the railing to the ground floor. Silent. Timidly they inched toward the children’s room. The thing seemed to have disappeared.
But the reason they didn’t see it was that it was hanging from the ceiling. And an instant later it dropped to the floor, directly before them—a monster so hideous, its appearance alone made them shrink back toward the bedroom in primal loathing.
It was fully ten feet tall now, its vile head nearly touching the ceiling. But it no longer had just one head—it had several, all partly emerging from the thing’s torso, all with different faces that kept molding and remolding, dripping oily humors, gnashing and slavering, all of them repeating in whispers, “She’s mine . . . Join us—”
Steve made an inarticulate groan and threw a chair at it, unmindful any longer of his own safety. The chair sailed right through the thing, though, and clattered down the stairs.
The Beast roared and snapped its jaws, spittle foaming. Wormlike appendages began sprouting from its head; its intestines were exposed, dripping. Unable to tolerate even the sight of the thing a moment longer, Diane pulled Steve into the bedroom and slammed the door shut—if only for a second, just to gather her resources away from the thing’s obscene cackling.
A second was all she had. The Beast’s claw smashed through the door, splitting it in half. It wrapped its glistening talons around Steve’s throat, jerking him off his feet and out of the bedroom. Diane tried to pull him back, but the thing’s strength was unearthly.
Steve felt himself yanked bodily through the air, held in a vise grip by the neck, hauled up to the gaping mouth of the Beast. He heard, in the distance, Diane screaming “No!” but he couldn’t see her, everything was becoming murky, everything except the black clarity of the demon’s yawning gullet, its jaws on the verge of taking Steve’s head off.
Suffocating, Steve looked into the abyss. Was this the end, then? To become incorporated into this thing of horror, to help perpetuate the horror on other poor souls? It disgusted him, finally, though, more than it terrified him—and that disgust made him realize Carol Anne couldn’t yet be a part of this thing, or he would have felt more pity for it. And he felt no pity.
He was about to be pulled into it when he expelled the power smoke he’d taken in from Taylor—expelled it into the creature’s core.
It screamed—a sound of betrayal and agony he would never forget, though he would often wish to. Screamed and recoiled . . . and a demonic head suddenly shot out of the thing’s esophagus, out of its mouth, and dispersed into the walls.
And everything was quiet again. Diane raced up to Steve, who was slumped on the floor, stunned, hurt, shaken.
She helped him up. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.”
They stumbled from room to room upstairs, but the kids were nowhere to be found.
As they started downstairs, Diane stopped Steve for a moment and smiled dearly. “You were quite brave,” she said, and kissed him. And then they went down.
The downstairs hall was filled with shadows of furniture and imagination. “Robbie?” Diane called. “Carol Anne?”
No answer. They started into the kitchen and the living room lights went out. They started into the living room and strange sounds began emanating from the ceiling—moaning sounds, slapping sounds, breathing sounds—the sounds of something alive.
Steve and Diane ran from room to room frantically, calling out, opening doors, turning on lights, pulling open drawers, pounding on walls.
The walls pounded back.
Finally, in the den, Diane saw Carol Anne’s blanket sticking out from under a closet door. With a gasp she wrenched the door open and was deluged by falling vacuum cleaners and appliances that Steve had piled high in there the day before.
They plowed through the remaining household conveniences, tossing boxes wildly into the middle of the room to get to the back of the closet.
But no Carol Anne.
Steve ran to the kitchen again to look in the cabinets under the sink while Diane opened the door to the hall closet.
Dozens of groping hands reached out at her from the darkness of the closet, the faces looming behind them depraved, insistent. They grabbed her, tried to pull her in. Like the hands that had pulled her into the earth in her dream, they were rotted, cold, clinging, but she extricated herself with a yelp, and they shrank in dismay. They were, finally, merely pitiable. Diane slammed the door on them, muffling their wails.
She heard another noise in the storage space beneath the stairs. Shaking half with fear and half with fury, she swung it open on the momentum of her adrenaline, and a flying shape leapt at her, was on her—
It was Robbie, clutching for safety.
She hugged him forcefully, wanting not to let go. “You okay, baby? You’re all right, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, Mom, I’m okay. Really, You okay?”
Steve ran in to join them, relief on his face as he saw his son safe, then fear again. “Where’s Carol Anne?”
“Dunno, Dad.”
There was a sudden grinding sound and they all looked up. The plaster in the ceiling was beginning to crack.
They ran into the kitchen. “Carol Anne!” Diane yelled. “Answer me right now!”
“Over there!” shouted Robbie. They looked to where he was pointing. Through the window they could see E. Buzz standing at the garage door, barking.
With a thunderous ripping, as if the whole house was being physically torn in ha
lf, the crack in the living room ceiling split into a fissure and ran down the hall, into the kitchen. Plaster rained down on their heads.
They ran for the back door. A huge bulge appeared in the ceiling, as if a giant fist were smashing it from above. Great chunks of plaster and beam collapsed as they made it through the back door, into the yard, into the garage with E. Buzz.
And there was Carol Anne, sitting in the car, holding her Katrina doll, quaking.
Steve tried the door handle, but it was locked. “You okay, honey?” he shouted through the glass. He saw the car keys in the ignition.
Carol Anne just kept staring straight ahead. Diane and Robbie ran around to check the doors on the other side.
Steve spoke softer. “Open the door, honey. It’s okay now.”
But it wasn’t. And at that moment the toys and tools piled against the walls came alive.
The jack-in-the-box sprang out and began repeatedly striking Steve in the leg. A stuffed monkey started throwing things at the car and the family—screwdrivers, nails, chunks of cement.
Screws spun out of the walls, hurling themselves like missiles.
The chainsaw on the workbench roared to life.
Steve put his face to the window. “Please, honey, open the door.” The jack-in-the-box was hammering his foot; he kicked it away, but it started lurching back.
“Sweetpea?” he said.
“Yes, Dad?” She finally turned her head. Diane and Robbie were dodging salvos, knocking on the other windows.
Steve suddenly had a flash about the nature of Carol Anne’s reticence. “Sweetpea, that wasn’t Dad talking up in the bedroom. You know that, don’t you?”
“I know,” she said. At least, she thought it was something like that. Still, it was nice to hear him say it, in his own voice again.
“Good, then open the door quickly, Sweetpea.”
So she opened the doors, and everyone piled in as the garage debris really started to fly—nails, nuts and bolts, pipe joints, hurtling into the car, denting the metal.
Steve turned on the ignition. Cans of paint on the shelves began exploding, splattering over the windshield. The chainsaw on the workbench levitated and started floating toward them.
The car wouldn’t start. Battery low.
A pile of snow chains whipped over the front bumper.
“Come on!” shouted Diane, and Robbie began screaming.
Carol Anne buried her face in her mother’s chest.
The chainsaw started ripping through the hood.
Steve turned to see Robbie’s clown staring at him through the driver’s window. Suddenly it smashed its head against the glass, cracking the windshield from end to end.
The engine finally caught, turned over. Steve put it in reverse, slamming on the gas.
The car didn’t move.
The wheels were spinning, burning rubber, but the chains on the front bumper were wrapped around a supporting pillar. So nobody was going anywhere.
The chainsaw buzzed into the roof, narrowly missing Steve’s head. Robbie screamed again and kept screaming.
Tires smoking. A rafter fell from the roof, crashing into the door. The chainsaw moved toward Diane and Carol Anne, and their screams joined Robbie’s.
“Damn it!” Steve roared at the car, “Move!”
With a final burst of power, the car tore loose of its bound bumper and squealed backward through the garage door amid flying splinters of wood, glass, rakes, and hoes.
He screeched out of the driveway, sending the chainsaw spinning off into the garden.
And he peeled off down the street in a car full of cries and whimpers.
And the last thing he saw, looking back at his demolished garage, was the figure of Henry Kane.
Driving the anonymous midnight freeway, passing lights, passing darkness.
Carol Anne and E. Buzz dozed in the back seat beside Robbie, who slept deeply, gripping the baseball bat Taylor had made potent with magic designs and left for him here in the car.
Steve drove silently, unblinking, tense, chewing the inside of his lip, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.
Diane, now that they seemed to be out of immediate danger, felt a certain kind of calm resolve—resolving what, she didn’t know; only that they couldn’t go back to that house, they had to go on. Ahead, to the future, whatever it was.
And she knew she loved Steve. Whatever his faults and weaknesses had been over the past few years, he’d shown tonight what he was. Courageous, resourceful, vulnerable, supportive . . . and with them. Whatever happened, they would do this thing together.
She smiled at the multicolored streaks of paint on the edges of the window where the windshield wipers hadn’t reached and put her head down on Steve’s shoulder “Looks just like the day-glo you painted your van to impress Cookie Gurnich,” she said sweetly. “You do this just to impress me!”
“Who else?” He smirked, his gloom breaking a little.
There was more silence, more comfortable now. Then she said, “You know where you’re going?”
“Cuesta Verde,” he answered, flinching only slightly. “Diane, we’ve got to attack this thing head-on.”
She agreed intuitively but wanted to talk it out. “Steve . . . what about the kids?”
“Taylor told me that we’ve got to go back . . . together. All of us.” He looked less than certain but more than resigned. “You believe him?”
She didn’t know what to think. She knew what to feel, though. She felt Taylor was right.
She heard a rustling in the back. “Honey, you still up?”
“Yes, Mom,” said Carol Anne.
“Was real smart of you to hide in the car.”
“Oh, it wasn’t my idea,” said Carol Anne. “Taylor told me to.”
“Told you to get out of the house?”
“He said he was making Dad’s car a safe place to hide in but that it wouldn’t run very well.”
Steve half laughed. “Good thing we didn’t have to get it started in a hurry,” he muttered.
Robbie was awake now, yawning. “Are you angry at Taylor, Dad?”
“No, I’m not angry at him.” He was angry at himself for living in a coma the past four years.
Diane looked around at her little family—little knights on a little crusade. “Steven . . . I believe Taylor,” she said. “And I trust you.”
The car limped through the desert night—dented, painted, sawed, and torn—to the outskirts of Los Angeles, up around its northern perimeter, to the housing development once known as Cuesta Verde Estates.
The Freelings became intensely silent as they drove slowly through their old haunts. Curving avenues, once-manicured lawns.
CUESTA VERDE—WHERE DREAMS COME TRUE.
The houses were boarded; the dreams were dead.
All but one nightmare that refused to die.
Steve pulled the car to a stop in front of the lot on which their house had once stood. Just dusty clay now, surrounded by a high chain-link fence. Off to the side, a bulldozer slept its spiritless sleep.
They just sat inside the car, watching, for a long time. Painful memories resided here still, waiting to be roused.
The Freelings walked toward the excavation site. It was lit only by the moon, though sodium-vapor overhead arc lamps still stood, dark, ready to be disassembled tomorrow, when the site would be closed by authorities. At the moment, these light poles looked like giant insects, standing with their glassy eyes until the right moment to pounce.
Steve, Diane, Carol Anne, and Robbie edged past the gate to the rim of the pit. The wind blew dust into their faces; the moon went behind a cloudbank. Darkness became substance.
Suddenly there was a loud GCHNNKK! and the arc lights flared on with blinding intensity, filling the excavation with an orange radiance, throwing the tunnels and landfalls into dark relief, casting ominous shadows from the piles of earth and rock.
Squinting, Steve could barely see the hunched-over figure that sidled up on his
left.
“Looks kinda like hell, don’t it?” said Tangina, pointing her flashlight toward the shaft they were to descend.
CHAPTER 8
“Thank God it’s you,” breathed Diane, bending down to hug their diminutive champion.
“I knew you’d be here,” said Tangina, “so I had to be here, too.”
“We had to come,” Steve began to explain, but he didn’t know how.
“I know.” Tangina looked sad. “But there are many dangers you must consider, Steven.”
“We know that, Tangina,” said Diane. This was hard for her. If this didn’t work—and she had no plan of attack or any reason to believe it would work, other than sheer desperation—then they’d lose everything. “This is our last hope, Tangina. We’ve got to try to free ourselves.”
Tangina nodded. “Follow me,” she said.
She led them to the manhole that plunged to the caverns below and climbed down the ladder. The others followed.
Once they were below ground, the light of the brilliant arc lamps disappeared immediately, and it was dark as a tomb. Tangina kept her flashlight on the ladder until everyone had made it safely to the stone floor, then she turned off even that feeble glow.
“It was so bright up top,” she whispered, “I want to give your eyes a chance to get used to the dark.”
Their other senses were quickly heightened: the cool, musty smells; the damp walls; the deadened sounds of distant water dripping; the taste of fear.
After a minute she flipped the switch on again. The beam illuminated a series of cavernous pathways, twisting down into the bedrock. “Now listen to me carefully,” said Tangina. “Stay together, no matter what happens. The worlds of this life and the Other Side have met here before. If we are taken beyond this dimension, we have only one chance. We must separate the beast from his flock and show them where the Light is—some of them made it through to the Light the last time you were there, but many remain with him, herded by the fear of his terrible wrath.” She spoke with a special conviction that echoed of its own fears. “But be careful,” she went on, “and don’t go too far. For if you cross over into the Light, you won’t be able to return.”
Robbie crowded his father’s side. “Dad . . . I’m scared.”