by Gideon, John
A third time the whine sliced through the night, rising both in pitch and volume until it pained Mitch’s eardrums, an insistent, demanding screech that raised the hairs on his neck. Jeremy’s face broke into a demonic grin. He stood upright, rose well off the floor to hang unsupported in the air, and turned slowly to face the door that gave onto the stairway. He began to move toward it, but en route he paused to look back at Mitch, his eyes glowering with hot glee.
Mitch cowered, not believing what he saw, wanting desperately to scrabble to his feet and bolt through the front door, but lacking the strength to do anything except sit transfixed and helpless.
“It’s time for my new brother’s first feeding,” said the boy, cradling the kitten in his arms. “This will be your job for the next few weeks, Mitchell—a simple one that should give you no trouble.”
He reached for the doorknob with a hand that seemed overly large and somehow deformed, like Hadrian Craslowe’s hands, which Mitch remembered from the rare occasions he’d glimpsed them. The door opened, and Jeremy tossed the limp but seemingly conscious kitten onto the stairs, then pushed the door closed again. The screeching from above immediately subsided, giving way to thumps and scrapes that suggested movement across the splintery floor to the stairway.
Robbie braked to a halt just inside the deteriorating gateposts of Whiteleather Place, switched off the headlights, and stared through the bleary windshield at the mansion, a dinosaurian hulk whose one yellow eye—a porch light—peered weakly through the secretive fog. Though dark and indistinct, the very sight of the place caused his guts to cramp, and he farted loudly.
“Catch that one and paint it green,” he said aloud, possibly to Katharine but more probably to himself, a locker-room quip dredged up from his boyhood.
The huge dog was unimpressed by this little show of juvenile bravado and said as much with a nervous whimper. Robbie had read somewhere that dogs have much stronger psychic powers than most humans do, and he half-believed this, having occasionally noticed that Katharine seemed to know what he was thinking. Sometimes she grew excited and joyful before he even suggested a ride in the van, while he was still only thinking about making an offer. He wondered now whether she sensed the threat nearby, as he himself did, whether her canine nerves were throbbing with psychic warning.
Robbie’s own nerves were not in the best of shape. Every sixty seconds or so he asked himself just what the hell he was trying to prove (and to whom?), driving out to this horrible place in the forest, braving fog and drizzle and slick roads in the black of night.
Why not do the sensible thing and notify Stu Bromton that the answers to the riddles of Greely’s Cove lay here, at Whiteleather Place, and let the wheels of the criminal justice system roll? Robbie was no cop, after all, and was ill-equipped to deal with even the least-dangerous felon, much less what lay in the house. He had no gun, no knife, not so much as a nightstick or a pair of handcuffs, though he doubted that such utensils could be of much use tonight.
Yet, he felt a strange tingling of power that he relished, a sharp sensation of being alive and in control of himself, having bested the dread that had paralyzed him earlier. He had discovered and experienced the truth of an old axiom: that courage is not the absence of fear but only the ability to beat it.
He was afraid, more so than he could have dreamed possible, but he was no longer a slave to fear, no longer a quivering little varmint who scuttered for a hole at the first sign of trouble. He was standing up to the dread, staring it straight in the eye and daring it to do its worst.
Which it probably would.
“Well, this is it, old girl,” he said, shutting off the engine. “No sense puttin’ it off any longer.”
Katharine whined disapprovingly, as though to ask why?
“Good question. I’m not sure I know the answer. Maybe I’ve got somethin’ to prove—to myself, if nobody else. Or”—he stumped out his cigar butt in the ashtray—“maybe I’m just curious.”
Or just stupid. Some guys, he reminded himself, confuse stupidity with bravery, and history is littered with their broken bodies.
He opened the door, letting in a fenny night smell, and lowered himself to the ground, cringing from the electrical noise of the wheelchair lift. After alighting, he stood and leaned against the van, then collected a pair of metal crutches from their holder behind the driver’s seat—the ones with the broad, flat rubber tips, which were useful on soft ground. He buzzed the chair back to its place behind the wheel, shushed Katharine’s whining, and nudged the door shut as quietly as he could, locking it.
With his first hobbling steps toward the dark house came an overwhelming sense of aloneness, a feeling of naked exposure and vulnerability that nearly drove him back to the protective steel shell of the Vanagon and the loving company of Katharine. But he fought it and plodded on, keeping to the edge of the circular drive, carefully planting the rubber tips of his crutches onto the rock-chipped surface and testing for traction before swinging his weight forward, step after cautious step. Though the rain had stopped and the fog had begun to thin, his eyebrows and lashes were already picking up wetness from the humid air. The cold lay heavy against his face. He saw and heard no sign of life in or around the house that loomed ahead, except for the lonely light that glimmered under the arched ceiling of the enormous wooden porch—a beacon, it seemed, to warn away the foolish and unwary. Still he kept on, straining his eyes to glean details in the dark, drawing ever closer.
He became aware of the state of decay around him: the deadness of the trees with their twisted, holly-choked limbs. The tangled and brittle wreckage of shrubbery. The warped and sagging timbers of the porch that swept around the mansion.
Hanging in the air was the reek of rotting bark and noxious weeds, mingled with a hint of putrescence. More troubling than these physical sensations, though, were the psychic alarms that were clanging in his head, the equivalents of pulsating lights and blaring Klaxons.
He shook off the warnings, surprising himself with a display of renewed courage. He was crossing thresholds tonight, discovering new things about himself. He was not a spineless coward after all. His mind was no longer closed to the realities of the unseen world that his witchy friend, Mona Kleiman, endlessly spoke of. Robbie marveled now that he could have denied those realities, that he had gotten a small taste of them years earlier at a place called Carlyle Lake and still dismissed Mona’s wisdom as the fanciful drivel of a sweet old crackpot.
He halted before the steps that ascended to the great yawning porch and gazed upward at the massive oak doors, wondering whether his newly found courage was strong enough to propel him up the steps. Briefly he considered going around to the rear of the house and testing the back door, with the rationale that slipping in from the rear might be wiser than a frontal attack. That idea caved in, however. The thing that waited inside was already conscious of his presence; of this Robbie was certain. A sneak attack was out of the question. Here, at least, he had the smirchy glow of the porch light, which seemed preferable to the darkness that lay outside its reach. Here, at least, he would be able to see whatever menace lay in wait.
He undertook the chore of climbing the steps—no small one for a man on crutches, bigger still for a man whose withered legs could support his full weight only for a few seconds at a time. It was a chore that required concentration, timing, and planning. He counted the steps as he went, bending his knees to plant his feet firmly on the step above while the tips of the crutches remained on the level below, then tilting his weight forward and raising the crutches to follow—one: regain balance, lean forward again, raise feet, repeat; two—and yet again.
Five.
Six.
And finally, eight, the last step, which placed him inside the maw of the porch, with its arched ceilings and warped terra-cotta filigree.
The air was inexplicably cold. He stood a few paces from the oak doors, staring into the hard, scowling eyes of a tarnished brass lion’s head, the door knocker, fee
ling as though he had set foot on a distant planet.
Suddenly a shroud of blankness fell over his psychic senses, like a stage curtain crashing down. His stomach lurched and his mind swirled. He staggered backward, barely catching his balance to prevent a headlong plunge down the stone steps that he had just climbed. He steadied himself against the balustrade and took deep breaths to quench the dizziness, to regroup.
Something was fighting him, something that possessed enormous psychic power—the evil beyond the door, no doubt, the conscious life-force that had detected his presence. It had sent out a blast of energy meant to thwart Robbie’s own Gift, to numb him and render him defenseless.
Defenseless.
His mental gears rolled furiously. The blast that he had just felt had surely been an act of defense, which meant that the evil that lay beyond the door felt threatened somehow—that’s right, threatened—by an aging cripple who carried nothing more lethal than a set of car keys. Could this mean that—
The overhead porch light blinked off, plunging him into blackness. The cold air stirred and penetrated his sheepskin jacket to his flesh, inflicting a chill that set his teeth to chattering. Yellow light spilled from a widening crack between the two oak doors, now groaning on their hinges, separating and pulling inward, setting free a vaporous stench that choked him.
The image behind the door was worse than anything Robbie had ever imagined, more foul than the human carnage left at the scene of any crime he had ever helped solve. Nominally, it was a man—or once had been—seated in an electric wheelchair very much like the one Robbie himself owned. It wore a filthy Army-issue T-shirt of olive drab, shredded with holes that betrayed the savaging its body had endured. The bones of its legs poked through the tattered remains of blue jeans, bare of meat but for sinewy ligaments. Likewise its arms and hands had suffered the feasting of some unthinkable carnivore. Worst of all was its face, half-gone above a neck that itself sprouted stalks of quivering veins and arteries—a face that half-grinned with fungal bone and half-sneered with the remains of cheek and lips. Its eyes were wide and lunatic, brimming with an inner light and beaming lascivious glee.
Incredibly it was alive and capable of speech, which was the grandest possibly obscenity.
“Hi there, Robbie. Welcome to Whiteleather Place.” Its voice gurgled and rasped, yet poured forth with alarming strength. “Monty Pirtz is the name, and I’d shake hands with you, but”—it chuckled appallingly—“I don’t have much of a hand left to shake. Why don’t you come in and take a load off?”
Robbie swayed on his crutches, sick with revulsion. The name, Monty Pirtz, sounded familiar.
“Well, it should sound familiar,” said the thing in the wheelchair. “I’m one of Greely’s Cove’s missing citizens, remember? The Vietnam vet who ran the appliance-repair shop on Frontage Street. I was brought here by Jennifer Spenser—little high-school girl who used to drop into my shop most every day. She’s a cute kid... uh, was a cute kid, I mean—felt sorry for me, my being crippled and alone and all, thought I needed company. Always bringing me snacks and stuff to read. When she disappeared, I thought the fuckin’ world had ended, know what I mean? But then she shows up at my bedroom window one night, and—hey! You don’t want to hear about all that, I’m sure. Come on in, damn it!”
Paralysis seized Robbie as Monty Pirtz’s wheelchair came to life with an electric hiss and moved forward, shortening the distance between them, heightening the stench.
“Hey, I know what you’re thinking,” said Pirtz, “which, by the way, you’ve probably already guessed by now—but there’s really nothing to be afraid of. A little pain, a little—uh, unpleasantness, as Hadrian calls it, but after that it’s great, believe me. Besides, you’re in no position to—”
“Stop!” screamed Robbie, not with a scream at all, but more of a croak. “I’m not going anywhere with you!”
“Oh, but you are coming with me, Robbie. You don’t have a choice. You see, I’ve got power now, and I can make things happen. I can make you—”
“No! You can’t make me do anything!”
“You’ll thank me when it’s over, dude. After you’ve had a taste of the Feast, and you’ve had all those wild and beautiful dreams, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. You’ll live for the chance to go out and bring somebody new in, just like I do.”
The chair drew within inches of where Robbie stood, and he gagged from the stench of the monstrosity that sat grinning before him, all damp with mucilaginous slime, the handiwork of the evil that he had dreaded for so long. Gone now was the intoxication of newly discovered courage.
“You and I got a lot in common, Robbie,” it said, raising a nearly fleshless talon. “We both know what it’s like to be crippled, to be on the outside looking in. I guess I was a little luckier than you, though, because I didn’t lose my manhood until I got to Vietnam—little place called Phuoc Hiep, about ten clicks northwest of Cu Chi. Stepped on a fuckin’ booby trap and ended up in this fuckin’ chair. On the other hand, maybe you were luckier than me, because you’ve never known what it’s like to take a woman’s nightie off and run your hands over her tits and feel her legs open up. I’ve known those things, and I’ve have to live without them. I—”
“Shut up! Get away from me!”
The talon closed around Robbie’s wrist and tightened horribly.
“I can promise you that you’ll know the good things, dude, all the good things you’ve ever dreamed of. You’ll know women, all kinds of women: fat ones, skinny ones, old ones, young ones, from every time and place in all of history, Robbie. You’ll know what they feel like, what they taste like. You’ll know what it’s like to stick your cock in one and cut her throat at the same time, how it feels to—”
Robbie choked back the bile gorging in his throat and tried vainly to wrest free of the thing’s grip, which only tightened. A frenzy of thoughts whirled and collided in his brain. Somewhere amid the stream of his overloaded senses the Gift glimmered feebly, a remnant of the psychic power that only moments ago had blinked out under a thick, damp blanket of defensive energy. The evil had been afraid of him, had felt threatened.
“You’ll know what it’s like to run again, Robbie, to jump and dance and climb mountains. The Giver of Dreams will let you have any body you want, go anywhere in all history. Think about all you’ve read, Robbie, all the times and people and places that you’ve visited in your books, the great thinkers you could meet and talk to.”
The energy that emanated from the Pirtz-thing was brutal and strong, far stronger than the faint inklings of the Gift. Robbie felt himself sinking, giving in.
“Come to the Feast, Robbie, and know what it’s like to be rid of those sorry excuses for legs you’ve got, what it’s like to fly!”
Robinson Sparhawk felt the vitality rushing out of him, leaving a yawning and hungry void. The talon-grip tightened yet more, loosing raw pain that washed up into his shoulder, his chest, his whole being. In his heart he said good-bye to the world as he had known it, to Katharine the Great Dane, his friends in El Paso, Mona Kleiman—
“Monty, no!”
A woman’s voice rang out from somewhere in the dim background, jarring Robbie from the torpor. He tore his eyes from the nightmarish face in the wheelchair and stared into the yellow rectangle of light beyond the oak doors. A woman in black stood there, her fingers thrust into the depths of her raven hair, screaming as if all creation were ending.
“Monty, let him alone! There’s no further need!”
The talon-grip weakened ever so slightly, and the Pirtz-thing wriggled around in its chair to face the woman in the doorway. “Who are you to say that there’s no need?” growled the creature malevolently. “I need to dream! If I bring him, the Giver might take me again!”
“No, he’ll never take you again, Monty!” she answered. “You’re going to die soon, can’t you see that? He doesn’t need you anymore, and he doesn’t need this man. For the love of God, Monty, let him go. Let him go!”
Summoning strength that he did not know he had, Robbie twisted free of the creature’s grip, leaving a bloody scrap of his skin in the thing’s bony fist. As the creature turned back toward him, Robbie loosed a bolt of will, scarcely knowing how he did it or where it came from, knowing only that it was a facet of the Gift. Never in his life had he moved objects without touching them, as some claimed to be able, or gazed into the future or communed with the dead. He had doubted that such abilities were even real. Still, he knew that at times he could catch pieces of someone else’s thoughts or feelings, and he had sometimes suspected that his own Gift went deeper than he knew, that he had abilities he had yet to perfect or even explore.
In the terror of a life-and-death struggle, every creature summons power and ability that it does not normally use, and such power is sometimes awesome, if not supernormal: Witness the well-publicized case of the hysterical young mother who lifted the front end of a Cadillac to free her trapped child and simply tossed it aside. That is what Robbie did, throwing out a blast of energy like a man-sized chunk of concrete, which struck the Pirtz-thing in the chest and heaved it backward.
Robbie held it at bay while he struggled down the steps, while he hobbled at full speed over the rock-chipped drive toward his van, scarcely hearing the chasing hiss of an electric wheelchair. Somehow he managed to dig his keys out of his pocket, open the van, clamber insider without benefit of the power lift, fend off Katharine’s frenzied welcome and excited kisses, start the van, and careen around toward the road over which he had come.
The work of driving, of keeping the roaring Vanagon out of the ditch and on the road, momentarily distracted him from the task of throwing concrete slabs of will to hold back the Pirtz-thing. It caught up to him on the foggy road, an uncanny apparition of a manlike creature in a wheelchair, keeping pace with the van as it roared and lurched down a forest road at fifty miles per hour. It drew up beside the driver’s window and glared in fiendishly, hungrily. Robbie drove on with his bleeding hand. Katharine yelped and growled and barked. Not until the Vanagon turned onto Sockeye Drive did the thing fall behind, having given up its hope for another Feast, another dream.