by Tom Deitz
Why didn’t Mike move?
Why didn’t he do something? But Don knew, with a pang of resignation: because he could not move. If Don, who was awake, had fallen under that spell, Mike stood no chance at all.
But Allison was moving, and Don wished he didn’t have to watch that, wished he could close his eyes tight (for he could no longer move even that much), because he certainly did not want to see the smile of relish that crossed his sister’s face as she wiggled that finger around inside his friend’s body for a while, and then, very slowly, dragged out a hunk of something dark and shiny, something that she let dangle from her fingers before lowering it into her mouth, whereupon she sucked it down with a sickening slurpy noise and swallowed.
Three times Don had to watch that grisly rite repeated, and all the while he fought the paralysis, and all the while it held, though he could feel it slip a little from time to time, but not enough to help.
Finally Allison was sated. She stood, turned—and then stared right at the place where Don was standing, just looked right at him with those eyes as cold as stone.
“You I will hunt,” she mumbled slowly, as if she were not familiar with English. “I have pumped your liver full of fear, and it will taste even better than this simple fare—but not now. Farewell, Don Scott—and live in fear, for when I will, I will find you.”
And with that she turned and strolled back into the woods.
Don did not move—could not move. He had just heard his death pronounced and he knew it. He only became aware that the numbness was gone when he abruptly lunged forward onto the ground, as muscle fibers finally found themselves able to twitch again and did so all at once.
He screamed. It was true: Allison wasn’t Allison but some kind of monster, and she’d done something awful to his best friend.
“Mike!” he yelled, and scrambled forward to embrace his buddy, but the instant Don touched him he knew he was too late.
Michael Chadwick’s skin was already cooling, his body far too limp. And he was a light enough sleeper that having his head yanked up and his cheeks slapped around by an hysterical, sobbing friend would have awakened him fast enough—and probably earned Don a wrestling match in the bargain.
But he did none of these things.
He was dead.
Which meant that Allison might be too, ’cause something had sure happened to her. But Allison had been at home when Don had left her, sleeping off her ordeal (so he supposed) in her room.
Which meant…
“Mom!” Don cried, and leapt to his feet. He had already run a half-dozen yards down the trail that led home when he discovered that he was still in his drawers, and that he probably shouldn’t leave Mike unprotected like that. Impatience nearly consumed him as he made desperately short work of zipping his friend all the way into his sleeping bag, and of getting dressed more or less on the fly.
In less than a minute he was stumbling through the dark forest, a shape of silver and midnight blue where moonlight and shadow grappled endlessly for him.
Run run. That was all he could think. Gotta help Mom, gotta help Mom, gotta save Mom. Oh God, don’t let me be too late.
Branches dragged at him, fallen limbs tripped him, Spanish moss captured him in itchy silver-gray nets. He fell, scraped himself against trees, got dirt in his already-streaming eyes.
But he made it home in what surely would have been record time.
Which was just in time to see a Sheriff’s Department car drive away with what looked like his mother hunched over in the passenger seat.
“Mom!” he screamed once more, ineffectually, and then simply stood there at the edge of the no-longer-friendly forest, stood with his hands clenched and his heart pounding and his eyes streaming like a baby’s.
“Mom! Oh God, no!”
And with that he sprinted toward the house. If he couldn’t catch her one way, then, by God, he’d call somebody and warn her.
Warn her about what? Not to come back? That Allison was not Allison? That something had sung Michael Chadwick to death and eaten his liver?
Or maybe that hadn’t even been his mother. Maybe whatever it was had gotten home ahead of him (and he should have passed it in the forest, he realized in retrospect).
He was on the patio by then, dashing up the back steps, fumbling for his key.
Inside—and what would he do?
Call, yeah, that was it. Just call, find out what was going on, warn his mom. Warn Mike’s dad. Call…who first?
But then he saw the sheet of notebook paper on the kitchen table.
He picked it up shakily, stared at it through blurring eyes as he wiped his nose on a filthy hand. The writing was wobbly, the paper damp in a place or two as if tears had fallen upon it, but it was his mother’s script all right.
Don,
Something’s awful’s happened to Allison, and I’ve gone with Robert to try to find out what. I don’t know when I’ll be back, but if you find this, give the sheriff’s office a call and they’ll tell you. I can’t.
Love,
Mom
P.S. I wanted to come get you, but Robert said it was urgent and that there wasn’t anything you could do anyway, so we’d just as well leave you happy.
Sorry,
Mom
Don crumpled the sheet in his hand and trotted across the kitchen to reach for the phone. His fingers had just brushed the plastic when he saw something out the adjoining window that made his blood freeze all over again.
For as he gazed out into the moonlit backyard—across the newly mown grass, the patio, the neat octagonal concrete flagstones that led back to the wading pool and the flower garden—he saw what he first took to be the world’s largest molehill slowly forming not five feet from the edge of the patio.
The thrumming was back too, and rising in intensity. He wondered whether or not it had been present when he’d been running through the woods, ’cause it seemed to be in some way connected with…whatever-it-was.
He was still gripping the phone and staring foolishly when the molehill ceased to grow, and before he knew what had happened, Don Scott saw the surrogate Allison—now stark naked—push up out of the soil there.
“No way!” he cried to the empty kitchen, and before he took a second breath was out the front door.
He hesitated then, not having the vaguest notion of where to go or what to do. But he was so far gone into shock now he scarcely cared. Run, that was what he should do: get the heck out of there. But he should not do that until he knew what was going on.
Steeling himself, though his whole body was trembling and his mouth was dry as dust, he eased his way left and off the tiny porch, then turned left again so he could survey the side yard. Nothing was there, but as his gaze darted over the pair of uniformly dark windows, the farther one suddenly blinked alight. It was the den.
And he just had to have one more look, just had to see what it was that could rise up through solid earth and take Allison’s form.
Moving as silently as he ever had in his life, Don slipped around until he was under the window. Then—and it was maybe the most nerve-wracking thing he had ever done because he expected at any moment to be surprised from behind or to finally get his eyes up to level and come face-to-face with whatever-it-was staring out at him—very slowly he stretched far up on his tiptoes and lifted his head above the sill.
Fortunately there were curtains, thin though they were. And fortunately he was gazing from dark into light, not the other way around.
Yet he still felt chills race over him when he saw “Allison,” newly clad in jeans and T-shirt, pause for a moment by the light switch, then pad toward the sofa and curl up expectantly on the far end. She was gazing curiously at the television his mother had evidently forgotten to turn off in her haste to depart—but the eyes were cold as stone.
Don slumped back down against the bricks, his heart still pumping like Dixie, and his lungs like flaming bellows. He was drenched with sweat, yet he was cold. He was scared s
hitless, yet he was calm.
And he had nowhere to go. The house was out, it was in there. And when his madly darting eyes finally came to rest on his mom’s year-old Mercury Cougar, the flash of hope that ensued quickly evaporated as he realized that she always kept one set of keys with her, and the other set—and that was his luck—in the end table right beside the couch where his sister’s alter-self was lying in wait for his mother’s return.
That left one alternative:
Mike’s house was more than a mile away overland—and at that, still the closest neighbor. He’d go there. And maybe he could save a little time by cutting through the woods.
With that in mind, Don Scott once more started running.
Chapter XIII: The Lurkers in the Shadows
(east of Whidden, Georgia—just past 1 A.M.)
“Okay, kid,” Calvin whispered to himself, “time to start gettin’ your act together.”
He did not know how long he had lingered in the fringe of oaks beyond the strange stone monoliths, but it seemed an eternity. His goose was cooked for certain now, ’cause circumstantial evidence had suddenly written “serial killer” all over him. Never mind that he was innocent, even had an alibi. That kind of thing didn’t matter in little podunk towns like Whidden, Georgia. No way a local jury would believe a pair of weird-looking runaways, even if he could get Robyn and Brock to testify in his behalf—presuming, of course, that they didn’t simply split at the first sign of trouble. After all, the woods would be full of cops in no time, and Calvin didn’t know how wide they’d range in search of evidence. Brock looked to be a fairly light sleeper, too—wired kids like him usually were—so there was a good chance he’d already gotten wind of whatever was going on and urged his sister to boogie right on out of the county.
Which would leave Calvin back at ground zero. Shoot, they wouldn’t put him in jail, they’d put him under it—and that would be before the trial.
A couple of things bothered him, though. Like why the cops thought he had killed his father. He’d been dead at least half a day when they found him, they’d said. But they’d only discovered the body that morning, which would have put his death no later than Tuesday evening—and Calvin had been here then; had been having dreams and seeing visions out the wazoo, in fact. So when…?
Well, he and his friends had been by his father’s place just before sunrise Monday morning, but they hadn’t seen any sign of anything unusual then. His father’s truck had been gone, true, but that only meant he’d left for work. The dogs had been locked up properly as well, and seemed to have been fed, so presumably his father was still alive then, which meant his murder had to have happened after…
…after he and Dave and Alec and Liz had used a little clearing in the nearby woods to open a gate into another World so that he and Dave could go through to rescue Fionchadd. That had been when the shit really hit the fan. Oh, they had sprung the Faery boy, all right, and made it back intact; but in doing so they had attracted the attention of a horde of Faery warriors, who had followed him and Dave all the way into this World. Dave had rammed his car through the fence around Calvin’s dad’s dog lot then, that being the only way they could escape, since Faeries feared iron and steel. But the warriors had nevertheless pursued them in eagle form until he and Dave had found themselves with no choice but to burn uktena scales and zap off to Galunlati with Finny, while Alec and Liz continued in Dave’s car toward the coast, which had been their original destination because Alec’s ulunsuti had shown a Faery fleet massing nearby. As for his father’s place…who knew what had gone on there after Calvin’s crew had departed—or what the Faeries might have done to his father if he’d stumbled onto ’em accidentally.
But why did the cops think he had done it? Except… “Shit!” he grunted to nobody. “Yeah, of course.”
No way anyone could have missed the shambles Dave had made of the dog lot. It would have been pretty obvious that there’d been a car involved—and any even moderately thorough investigation would also have turned up the gear they’d abandoned in the nearby clearing—including, he’d have bet anything, his missing wallet. Worse, they’d have discovered much of the paraphernalia that allowed them to gate between Worlds, all of which their hasty departure had forced them to leave behind.
And the cops would have been sure to draw really wrong conclusions from that stuff. I’m not only a serial killer, Calvin thought grimly, I’m a patricidal Satanist as well. Only…there were holes throughout the case. Like why were the local authorities looking at him suspiciously on Tuesday, when they hadn’t found Dad’s body until the following day? And since they had obviously seen him on Tuesday, which was the most logical time for the murder to have been committed, why did they still suspect him? Did they think he’d somehow shopped at a Magic Market one afternoon, then hiked across two hundred miles of state, offed his dad, and zapped back in time to be arrested for it twenty-four hours later? Didn’t make a lot of sense to him, that was for sure. Or maybe that had merely been local paranoia.
A much more troubling thought struck him then: if the cops were smart—had matched paint samples and tread widths, say—they could have figured out what kind of car had flattened the fence, and might even have connected it to the red Mustang the State Patrol had found abandoned near Crawfordville late Monday night, which a few phone calls could link to him rather nicely. Unfortunately those calls would have led to Dave first, and might—his heart flipflopped at the thought—implicate him in this mess as well. Probably had already, in fact, since Calvin’s attempt to get in touch with him that afternoon had gone so preposterously awry.
Not that there weren’t a few points on his side, too; ’cause, depending on when the authorities finally decided the murder had been committed, there were several people who could testify to his presence elsewhere. Oh, true, as far as anyone beyond his partners-in-crime on the quest knew, he’d last been seen in or around Stone Mountain on Monday morning. (His last actual contact with anyone else prior to that had been with the clerk at a convenience store in Winder.) After that he’d been in various Otherworlds until sometime the following night (it was a little hard to tell exactly, because time ran differently in Galunlati) when he’d linked up with Uncle Dale again near Crawfordville and headed south with him to Cumberland Island, where they’d joined up with David once more. That had been Tuesday morning, and there were plenty of people around who could prove it—like the ferryman down at Cumberland, like the waitress at the seafood place, like the cashier at the Magic Market. Like the cops themselves.
So maybe there was hope after all.
The tough part, then, was going to be accounting for his whereabouts Tuesday evening.
And there were still two other questions: who or what had killed that little girl, and were his two erstwhile companions still okay?
And one thing was for sure, he’d not find any answers by hiding behind trees feeling sorry for himself and practically begging to get caught.
*
By the time he made it back to camp, Calvin had an idea and had already collected most of what he needed. It shouldn’t take long either, and that was a blessing, because he had pretty much decided that as soon as he could, he really did need to go back and check on the goings-on at the stone circle.
As quietly as he could, he slipped down into the sinkhole and snagged Brock’s empty backpack, wishing he had time to zip back to base and retrieve his own. A pause to check on the runaways and to retrieve his shirt and socks, and he was merging once more with the night.
When he was maybe ten yards out, he set his plan in motion. A stick from a cypress tree—one of the plants of vigilance—made do for a wand, and with it he began scratching a circle in the leaves and moss and undergrowth completely around the camp—far enough out, he hoped, that he would make no noise beyond the low chanting he had begun under his breath: a spell Uki had taught him the last time he’d spent any time in Galunlati.
Yuhahi, yuhahi, yuhahi, yuhahi, yuhahi,
&
nbsp; Yuhahi, yuhahi, yuhahi, yuhahi, yuhahi—Yu!
Sge! Ha-nagwa hinahunski tayi. Ha-tasti-gwu gun-skaihu. Tsutatalii-gwatina haluni. Kunigwatina dulaska galunlati-gwu witukti. Wigunyasehisi…
It was not precisely a charm of protection. Uki had told him that it had originally been used to “frighten storms.” But it had the effect of turning things aside from a certain path, and with a wording change here and there Calvin thought it would suffice to detour snoops from the camp at least long enough for him to get a better idea how the land lay back at the scene of the crime.
Fortunately, the chanting made the scribing go faster, so it was not long at all before he had completed the first part of his work. It wasn’t a perfect circle, for he had to zig around a tree or two, but it seemed adequate. The next stage was simpler: four lines leading inward from the cardinal directions, making what Uki called a Power Wheel, except that the center was incomplete. Finally, Calvin set sticks at the four points of the compass and marked them with scraps of cloth torn from his clothing: blue from his jeans for the north, white from his socks for the south, bandanna red for the east, and T-shirt black for the west.
A repetition of the chant at each quadrant, a final one for good measure, and Calvin stepped into the Wheel, feeling, to his relief, a gentle tingle of Power there.
Only one thing left to do now, and that was a thing he dreaded.
Following the by-now-monotonous procedure, Calvin removed his clothes. But instead of simply abandoning them as he’d often had to do before, he bundled them into Brock’s backpack and arranged the straps into a very wide loops around his neck—loops hopefully wide enough that they would not choke him when the change came.