by Gideon, John
On the ceiling was painted a huge seven-pointed star in white, the Kabbalistic symbol of the Divine Essence, and on the floor a five-pointed one in red, the Eternal Pentagram. In the center of the pentagram stood the table on waxen blocks that were inscribed with the long-forgotten letters of an ancient language. On the wooden table itself was yet another pentagram rendered in chalk around yet another waxen block. Resting atop this block was a small hinged box of glossy wood that contained a pewter mounting and a palm-sized disk of lustrous obsidian—a scrying mirror, a witch’s tool that was nearly as old as Hannie herself.
Her dry lips, leathery with age and still bearing a smear of outlandish lipstick, recited the words of the old ritual. The words were all-important, the givers of power to the mirror, of sight to her eyes. Her bony shoulders twitched and swayed as she spoke, and her haggard breasts brushed over the cold surface of the table in short pendulum strokes. She leaned forward in her chair until her face hung directly over the obsidian disk, and her watery stare bore deep into the black surface, fetching out the images that floated there, absorbing the meaning and the truth that the old words had brought to life.
Suddenly she gasped and sat bolt upright, her teary eyes gleaming in the stuttering candlelight. She clapped an osteal hand over her mouth. Evil was afoot. Not the common, everyday sort of evil that generates familiar headlines, nor the kind that causes a desperate addict to steal a stereo out of a car, or the young father to break the skull of his infant daughter, or the congressman to vote for massive funds to build ballistic missiles while cutting off aid to the hungry and jobless. This was evil of a purer sort, the kind she had tilted with all her life, the kind that had drawn her to Greely’s Cove—an evil of a species that human words cannot name.
Fighting nausea, she forced herself to peer again into the scrying mirror, to mouth the powerful words that would enable her to see the truth, or at least a portion of it. The full truth of evil, she knew, could never be seen, which was perhaps fortunate, for a mortal’s eyes could not bear the whole of it.
The vision formed again, and Hannie knew instantly that her suppositions of the previous weeks had been wrong. The evil was stronger than ever. It was reaching out again to the realm of the normal, seeking yet another human life to scar with its evil. The trance deepened, and she saw the face of a friend, a weary one with wide, frightened eyes and hair of fiery red—the face of a victim.
Hannie tore herself away from the mirror, inflicting on her mind a brutal psychic wound that she could have avoided by taking time to recite the proper parting words. But there was no time. Already Sandy Zolten was feeling the icy tendrils of a predator, and the only chance of saving her lay in instant action. No time now for chants and ritual, no time for casting spells.
She darted from the candlelit chamber into her bedroom and snatched clothing from her closet, her blond wig from the headform on her dresser, underwear from her drawers. She stuffed her misshapen old feet into a pair of sneakers and threw on whatever she had in her hands. By the time she flitted out the door into the garage, where waited her Jaguar, she was wheezing and coughing from exertion, almost too dizzy to drive.
Sandy Zolten stood like a statue in the lobby of the Old Schooner, taxing her eyes against the darkness that had exploded so suddenly, a darkness that seemed to have weight and texture, that bore down on the muscles of her body like a velvet boulder.
A breaker switch or a fuse? she wondered.
Sparse ambient light filtered through the plate-glass windows of the lobby, meaning that the utility lamps and the all-night signs of Frontage Street were still burning. Not a general outage, then, but merely an overloaded circuit here at the motel. Strange. The Zoltens had never experienced any such problems before.
The thing to do, Sandy told herself, was to find the breaker box and flip the switches (Would it be up or down! She could never remember which way was on.), as any other normal, rational adult would do. If the breakers snapped off again, there was a wiring problem somewhere, or maybe something as simple as a pair of motel guests using their curling irons at the same time. But first she would need a flashlight, and she remembered that Ken kept one in a drawer under the counter. She turned to fetch it, and—
The smell.
It assailed her again, blasting into her nostrils and nasal passages, a stink that choked and gagged, that generated mental images of bloating corpses with maggots in their eyes. Sandy staggered against the near wall, her stomach lurching. Her mind whirled and swirled with a blizzard of dreads, vile images from childhood nightmares, visions of night things and unborn animals who could talk—
O God! The smell!
She collected herself and staggered forward, feeling her way through a blackness made worse by a torrent of stinging tears, to the drawer that held the flashlight. The drawer came easily open, and her hands rummaged through a clutter of pens, paper clips, and credit-card forms until finding the cool aluminum cylinder. She switched it on, and it became a glaring wand that cast dancing shadows across the counter, the ceiling, the walls.
Now be cool, she told herself, heaving in lungfuls of air. There’s absolutely nothing to be afraid of. An overloaded electrical circuit was no reason for hysteria. So what if she had been overwrought and jumpy? Any mother who has suffered the loss of a child is entitled to a little fit of insanity now and then.
Back through the counter gate into the lobby. Back to the mouth of the short corridor that led to the rear door. Back through a tunnel of thickening stink that forced her to breathe through her mouth.
At the end of the corridor was a utility closet in which she and Ken kept cleaning supplies, the vacuum cleaner, the buffer—the home of the breaker box. She would open the door of the closet, shine the flashlight inside to locate the box, pop it open, and flip the switches. The lights would come on again, and the world would return to normal. Nothing could be simpler.
She completed the black pilgrimage from the front lobby to the closet door and beamed the light against it. Her hand gripped the knob so tightly her knuckles screamed. Something prevented her from twisting the knob and pulling the door open, something like fire bells and air-raid sirens and warnings from your mom never to get into a car with a stranger, something—
“Oh, Mother, what are you waiting for?”
Sandy Zolten’s heart thundered at three times its normal rate, unleashing drums in her ears and cannon in her temples. Her flesh went cold.
Teri’s voice—whether inside her head or on the other side of the door, she could not know. Teri’s voice, clear and sweet, the voice of the happy little girl for whom she had sewn dresses and jumpsuits, given birthday parties, baked cakes, shed hot tears of anguish. Sandy wobbled, and her hand fell away from the doorknob.
“Well if you’re not going to open it, I’ll do it myself The door opened, though untouched by any hand.
In Sandy’s brain, as in the brain of every other human, was an emergency circuit-breaker that trips when the senses are flooded with a reality too vile to be admitted.
Her limbs went flaccid. The flashlight tumbled from her fingers and dropped onto the carpet, where it rolled between her feet. Her daughter stood in the rear of the closet amid shelves stacked with bottles of Formula 409 and rolls of paper towels, smiling so tightly that the whites of her eyes shone all around her incandescent pupils.
Sandy’s mental breaker tripped. Her brain did not register the sight of Teri’s mutilated face with its left cheek nearly eaten away, the stems of blood vessels pulsing through gaping bites out of her flesh. Or the cloudy reek that billowed out of the closet to enfold her. Or the grin that stretched Teri’s lips gruesomely away from her teeth in a silent laugh that could not possibly have any love in it.
Sandy’s mind substituted.
‘ She saw what she wanted to see. Teri with healthy skin all aglow, not mottled and scabby and wet with slime. Not swollen and horribly ravaged by some hideous mouth equipped with flesh-eating teeth.
She saw her lit
tle girl having come home, and this was cause for tears of joy. No matter that Teri had chosen the dead of night, or that she was standing in a utility closet with fully six inches of thin air between her feet and the floor.
Sandy cried with happiness. And plunged into the closet. And embraced the gargoyle figure of her daughter, mindless of the vermin-infested, blood-stained field jacket. And the stink. And the unnatural light in Teri’s eyes. Sandy, blubbered insanely about taking Teri home, for her father and sister would be overjoyed. She would need something to eat and maybe a bath, and then a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow she could tell them all what had happened and why she had been away, and the family would be whole again, and let’s get on with it, come on, baby...
“That isn’t why I’ve come back, Mom,” said Teri, her voice rasping with phlegm.
Sandy paused in her joyful weeping, then pulled away from the embrace. She stared up into her daughter’s wild eyes.
“Baby, what are you saying? I know why you’ve come back—”
“No, you don’t. Mom, I’ve come back for you. I want to take you somewhere—somewhere wonderful! It’s not far from here, and we can leave right now.”
Sandy’s mental circuit-breaker started to fail, and the truth of the moment began to trickle into her consciousness—slowly at first but more quickly with every passing second: mind-sickening spurts of sight and stench, then a soul-shattering debacle of horror. She saw the hell-thing that her daughter had become, smelled its evil odor, felt its demon gaze on her skin.
Sandy jerked backward and away, stumbling, flailing with uncooperative arms, only to hear the closet door slam shut behind her back, trapping her in blackness. How, then, could she still see Teri’s eyes, as though the girl’s head were a jack-o’-lantern?
She screamed from the depths of her being. Her own icy hands clawed her cheeks. She felt her bladder let go, and urine washed down the prickly skin of her legs. The green light of Teri’s eyes floated nearer, as though suspended in their own evil stench, and Sandy groped insanely for the doorknob.
“Oh, Mother, don’t be this way,” said Teri, so near now that her gangrenous breath stung Sandy’s face. “You’re making it so much worse than it has to be.”
This isn’t my daughter! screamed Sandy in her heart. The muscles of her mouth were too numb to form words.
“But I am Teri,” it said, having heard its mother’s unspoken words. “Who else could I be?”
Several times Sandy managed to ram the door open an inch or so, but each time it slammed shut again, as though someone very strong was holding the knob on the other side, fighting her, forcing her to confront this obscenity that called itself Teri.
“Oh, that’s real nice, Mom. An obscenity? Is that how you think of me?”
“Get away! Let me go!” Sandy struggled all the harder with the door. She felt the hell-thing’s arms slide around her, felt its crusty hair settling against her own.
“Just listen to me, would you, Mother?” The gurgling voice became a little girl’s. “I made the lights go off, because I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to see you and let you know that I’m okay.”
Sandy fought the arms away, dashed herself against the door, felt it give a little. “You’re not Teri! You’re not my—”
“I want to share something with you, Mom. I can’t force you to come with me—at least not yet—but if you won’t come with me tonight, I’ll be back in a few weeks, and I’ll be so much stronger then. I’ll be able to make you come then, if I want to. It’s because I love you, Mom, that I’m here tonight: You’re the very first person I came out to see.”
From terror, from revulsion, Sandy’s stomach erupted, and she felt gobbets of vomit wash over her arms and hands and feet. She sank to her knees, shuddering with every retching spasm, too weak to stand or fight.
“That’s okay, Mom, just take it easy,” said Teri with two voices, one inside her mother’s head—the silky voice of a radiant and loving little daughter—and the other belonging to the bulk that floated down to snake its arms around Sandy’s shoulders. “It won’t be so bad, really it won’t. We’re going to a wonderful place, all dark and damp, full of little mice and rats and spiders, and—O God, it’s great, Mom! The dreams are just incredible! You can go anywhere and be anybody, see and do things you didn’t even know existed. I’ve already been to the castle of the Emperor Barbarossa, and I was a whore to his soldiers. God, I never knew that fucking could be like that, Mom. I’ve seen cave people and popes and—let’s see-—oh yeah! I’ve even been to a monastery in the tenth century. I’m not sure where it was—maybe Europe or somewhere—and I was a little boy who the monks passed around and tortured and stuff. It was great!”
Sandy’s will stretched to the point of snapping. That she had clapped her hands to her ears mattered nothing: The obscenities that issued from the Teri-thing could not be shut out. The voices danced in her ears like crystalline music, and she sobbed until even sobbing became impossible.
“It’s the dreaming that makes it all worthwhile, Mom, the dreaming. We can go now, you and me. We won’t even have to walk—look! I can take us on the air! See how strong I am?”
Sandy began to ascend off the floor, out of the puddle of vomit into which she had crumbled. Her arms and legs flew out, and her hands grabbled for a hold with which to drag herself to earth again but failed. Her lungs managed yet one more cry of terror.
“See?” squealed the Teri-thing, like a child who has discovered an exquisite new toy. “All you have to do is let yourself go, Mother! I’ll take us to the Giver of Dreams, and we’ll go to the Feast. You’ll love it, I know you will. Oh, you’ll be scared at first, just like I was, and you’ll fight and scream, but then all your strength will be gone, and the Giver of Dreams will take you just like he took me, and we’ll dream together!”
Sandy Zolten’s will snapped, which the Teri-thing knew instantly. The closet door swung open, and mother and daughter floated through it, out the rear entry way of the motel office, into the cold night and the relentless rain. Sandy Zolten was a limp rag of a woman who had given up her short fight for sanity, who saw nothing particularly outlandish about floating through the alleys and backstreets of Greely’s Cove, bound in the viselike embrace of the Teri-thing.
They kept always to the deep dark, thumping now and again into dumpsters and utility poles, or—on the edge of the town, where civilization gave way to thick forest—butting into rough-limbed trees that bruised and welted Sandy’s wet skin. She no longer rebelled at images of rats and Barbarossa’s whores. She accepted as inevitable the inane truth that this should be her reward for suffering the sweet agony of birthing a wonderful little daughter, for sacrificing and worrying and praying and mucking through all the other ordeals of parenthood.
No, it was not particularly outlandish that she should be moving through the forest as though floating on a cloud, knowing vaguely that she was going to a feast, which seemed not altogether bad. She had vomited up her dinner, after all, and was feeling just a little hungry.
Hannabeth Hazelford’s Jaguar swerved into the drive of the Old Schooner, where it braked to a halt with a screech of rubber on damp asphalt. She bounded out of the car, leaving lights on and motor running, and hustled to the front door of the lobby. All was dark, the neon sign and the interior lights dead, which she knew was not normal. She pushed through the plate-glass door.
The smell assailed her immediately, and her aged bones shuddered with an old familiar terror. The stink of the Giver of Dreams was unmistakable.
She moved toward a faint shard of light in the distant dark, a flashlight that lay on the carpet at the end of a short corridor, casting its beam in a parabolic arc against a wall. To one side a closet door stood open, and a little farther was another open door, which led out to the night.
“Sandy?”
Hannie heard her own voice, weak with age and fear, hardly the voice of the self-assured English gentlewoman she had taken to portraying.
“Ken
? Is anyone here?”
Only silence.
She forced herself toward the light. Reached it. Picked up the flashlight with frail, quivering hands, and swept its beam around. A lake of vomit lay on the tiled floor of the closet. On the interior surface of the door were smears of filth and the marks of desperate fingernails.
Whoever had retched should have left foul footprints on the carpet, but there were none, and Hannie knew why: Whoever had retched had not walked away.
That tears flowed down her cheeks amazed her, because she had long ago assumed that her old eyes were no longer capable of weeping, that her soul had become calloused to the sorrows inflicted by the Giver of Dreams. She cried not merely for Sandy Zolten, but for the countless others who had suffered this abominable evil. For herself, too, grown old and weak—having become too willing to believe that the evil could simply run its course and wear itself down, that despite the symptoms so glaringly apparent in Greely’s Cove, the evil might be dying.
As mortals die.
Her mind, still paining from the psychic wound she had inflicted upon it minutes ago with the scrying mirror, sorted through the realities that she had earlier avoided: The evil was growing stronger, maturing through its cycle of hunger and feeding, moving with practiced diligence toward the most unspeakable of its goals.
Reproduction.
The making of another of its kind.
Hannie Hazelford wept. For lost friends like Lorna Trosper and Sandy Zolten. For herself. For the people of Greely’s Cove.
She let drop the flashlight and retreated to her car, knowing that she could do no good here.
13
Carl Trosper stood in the empty dining room of his Wisconsin Avenue condominium in Washington, D.C., watching two beefy men load the last of his household goods aboard a hand truck for transport to the moving van. A third man, the foreman of the crew, gave him some forms to sign—verification of destination, an insurance policy, one or two others—which he signed and handed back.