“Kerry,” Jack said. “It’s me.”
“Move into her line of vision,” Tilman said. “Look in her eyes.”
Jack did as he was told, no time to marvel at Ed Tilman’s new authority.
“Kerry,” he said, moving closer, ducking his head under her arms, coming between Kerry and the mesmerizing photo.
Bubbles of spit flecked her lips. Her left cheek was wet.
He moved to touch her cheek and something leapt in her eyes, lightning on a clear day, and she uttered a sharp hissing noise, started to stand up, stumbled.
Ed Tilman caught her. “Got you, girl,” he said.
She collapsed in his arms with a convulsive shiver; he staggered back. “Give me some help here,” he said.
They got her to the bed. Already she was coming around, moaning.
She sat up and glared at them. “Where is he?” she said.
“Kerry, are you all right?” Jack said.
“Where is he?” she shouted. Her eyes flew past the room’s occupants, disinterested, impatient—none of these was the one she sought.
She flopped back on the bed, flung a hand across her eyes, an attitude of defeat. “Of course. Not here.”
Then, without warning, she rolled off the bed, hit the floor running, and dashed through the door, already racing down the hall, moving fast, her Nikes earning their keep. Martin Pendleton was just coming through the swinging doors at the end of the hall, and he grabbed for her, got an arm around her waist, hollered, “Whoa.”
She threw herself into the air, feet kicking. Her foot found the wall and she shoved, sending Martin back against the opposite wall, knocking the wind out of him. He fell, his thrashing bundle rolling away from him.
She was free, moving like something thrown, a wind through the lobby and through the front door.
Jack was in pursuit, leaping over Martin’s legs.
“Don’t worry,” Martin shouted, “there’s nowhere for her to go.”
Even as Martin said it, Jack heard the sound of the engine wheeze into life.
In his mind, he again saw Kerry, eyes flashing with righteous anger, snatch the van keys from his hand on the night of the snowstorm.
And Jack knew that she had never returned the keys to Martin, knew without asking that Martin had more than one set of keys and had simply taken another set from his pocket when they left The Clears headquarters that night.
Jack flung open the door and watched the van bounce down the long driveway.
He returned, defeated. In her room, he found Ed Tilman gingerly studying the photo.
“Don’t touch it,” Tilman said. “I got a friend I’m gonna send it too. I’m thinking these geeks are more sophisticated than your average cult geeks.”
Jack blinked at the photo, baffled, stunned. It was a close shot of Dorian Greenway’s head. There was the pale, clean-featured face, short black hair, that supercilious gleam in the eyes. He was staring into the camera—like one of those eyeballing contests kids indulge in—leaning forward. The extreme closeness of the portrait distorted it, creating a ballooning, fish-eye study. Adding to this almost three-dimensional effect was the tongue (specifically, the color of the tongue). Dorian Greenway’s mouth was open wide and his tongue was sticking out like a Rolling Stones logo (yaaaaaaah!). Although the photo was a black-and-white print, the cult leader’s tongue was bright green.
The green was smeared somewhat now (the palm of Kerry’s hand had done that).
Ed Tilman nodded at the photo and rocked back on his heels. He was dressed jauntily, a red bow tie giving him a barbershop quartet look but his manner was grim.
“Should have recognized the signs,” he said. “Sat there in group with the girl, she fidgeting and rubbing that hand, and I didn’t get it. Just shows, I’ve lost my edge, been retired too long.”
Jack clutched the old man’s arm. “What’s going on?”
Tilman put a hand on Jack’s shoulder and squeezed. “We are talking chemical monkeyshines here. First you got something which is skin-permeable. You can transfer it with a touch. Nothing new there. We saw it happen. We stood there and watched him lick that lovely girl’s hand, didn’t we? Right after he’d taken a blast from that inhaler. What were we thinking?” Ed Tilman shook his head sadly.
“So Kerry’s got this chemical buzzing round her system, making her hand itch, but it’s not doing anything, just waiting like a government mole waits for a coded message from his control. This is the message.” Ed tapped the edge of the photo with his forefinger. “This green stuff here, also skin-permeable, is a catalyst, or maybe the rest of the equation, I’m no biochemist. This stuff activates whatever preexisting condition has been created by the first, entrenched agent. Likely she got a phone call too, something to set her up, something that gave this photo significance.”
“What are you saying?” Jack said.
“I’m saying that Greenway fellow has reached out and snatched her. That’s where she’s heading. Count on it.”
Aaron let them borrow his car (an old Impala, baby blue). “That Kerry’s a sweet thing,” he said, handing over the keys. “Bring her back.”
The rescue team consisted of Martin, Jack, and a strangely revitalized Ed Tilman.
Wesley Parks had volunteered to stay with the residents and help them “process” the loss of one of their members. It didn’t take someone skilled in reading people to look at Wesley Parks and see that the idea of returning to The Clears commune scared him silly.
“What’s this ‘processin’?” Gates said. “You actin like she’s dead or something. You givin me a headache, counselor. I been watching you day in and day out, and I have come to the conclusion you couldn’t counsel a dog to bark.”
Wesley had shrugged, smiling rather than taking umbrage, the cheesy smile of someone who has been found out and knows he doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
Martin drove. “Here,” he said. This time Jack took the offered revolver. The car’s engine made a coughing, rattling noise, like a robot with a bad cold.
Ed Tilman, sitting in the backseat, checked the clip in a small black automatic pistol.
“You are not supposed to have that,” Martin said, looking up at the rearview mirror to send a scowl backward. “Residents are not supposed to have weapons at New Way. You signed a contract when you were admitted.”
Tilman looked up, blinked. A grin bloomed under his ragged mustache. “I’d be shark food in the Sargasso if it weren’t for this little baby.” He snapped the clip home with the heel of his hand.
“Does anyone have a plan?” Martin asked.
“No, but I got a suggestion,” Ed said. “I suggest we don’t just walk up the drive and knock on the front door this time.”
Martin pulled over to the side of the road, and they all studied the map. “This is an old farm road,” Martin said. “We could park here and go north through this woods, coming out here. I got a compass to hold us on course.”
It took less than an hour to hike through the woods, but Jack was winded by the time they came to the white outbuildings. He hadn’t exercised in at least a decade, and he had never been an outdoors person. The main reason for having an outdoors, Jack always maintained, was so that one could have an indoors.
“It’ll be dark soon,” Martin said. “Might as well wait.”
“What about the dogs?” Tilman said.
“What dogs?”
“Heard you telling Gates there were vicious dogs patrolling the grounds.”
Martin chuckled. “Just wanted Gates to come along without a fuss. It worked too. Aren’t really any dogs, least I never saw any or heard tell of any.”
“Hope you are right on that,” Tilman said. “Garroting a dog is work for a younger man.”
Martin unslung the shotgun and sat down. He laid the shotgun on the ground and stretched out his legs. He tilted his hat back and leaned his head against a tree trunk. Dead leaves crackled when he shifted his weight. He was looking at Tilman with a contemplative
air. “You ever garrote a dog?” he asked.
“Once in a great while.”
“What sort of work features dog garroting?”
Ed Tilman shrugged and sat down on a big gray slab of glacier-borne granite. “Any job has its unpleasant aspects. I could never tolerate the eight to five routine. I liked to travel.”
“You ever encounter anything like these Clear fellows?”
Ed shook his head. “No. I once lived with a tribe of Catholic cannibals. They were good fellows for the most part, very welcoming (our rain forest is your rainforest), but they took the whole communion thing too literally. I guess there’s no end to the mischief human beings can get up to when they contemplate the infinite.”
Jack couldn’t get comfortable against a tree. He tried lying flat on his back, but that didn’t work either. Leaves and acorns stabbed him. A bug ran across his neck. A fist-sized cloud of gnats rose up and tried to infiltrate his nose, his eyes. He swatted them away, tried to focus on Kerry.
Hang on, he thought. We’re coming.
Twilight had no time to preen. Its moment was short, time for a half-dozen crows to flap across the sky, silhouettes against the weak-watercolor wash of the sun.
Then it was dark.
“Let’s go,” Martin said.
They moved quickly past the white wooden buildings. These, Jack assumed, were dorms. Lights glowed from tidy square windows. Jack felt a sense of peace and fellowship, spurious, but that was the lure of the commune, the illusion of unity, of a shared vision and purpose. Too bad that, more often than not, the man at the helm was insane, whipping his poor crew into frenzied pursuit of some deadly white whale.
Still, Jack thought it would be nice to sleep with the herd, to know that like minds, as familiar as old and oft-read books, surrounded him.
You’re forgetting one thing, Jack thought. The Clear are creepy.
“Here,” Martin whispered. He had reached the back of the mansion and already sprung the latch on double doors that lay flat against the ground. Jack and Ed joined him. Martin swung the doors wide and pointed the cloaked flashlight down into the darkness. The oval of light moved like a rippling eel over the concrete steps.
“Over there,” Tilman said, and Martin and Jack looked up and followed his pointing finger to where the van was parked out in the drive. “Do you have keys?”
Martin nodded. “Yes.”
“Good,” Tilman said, “I expect we’ll have to leave in a hurry. I didn’t fancy a scramble back through the woods in the dark.”
They descended into the cellar, into darkness. Martin, in the lead, reached above him and caught a dangling chain. “Close those doors and I’ll give this a try,” he whispered.
For a moment, as Jack drew the doors shut behind them, leaving the wide night for a darker, enclosed one, panic came, like a moth in his throat. He swallowed the fear, chased it with anger (These sons of bitches have Kerry).
The bare lightbulb flared, at first illuminating nothing but itself, a circle of white surrounding a translucent egg of pale yellow. Jack squinted, ducked under the glare and moved on down the concrete steps, gritty with dirt, following Martin and Ed.
He descended into a chill atmosphere of mold and decay.
With the blazing lightbulb behind him, his eyes could now rally and profit from the light falling over his shoulder. The limits of this light made the room seem vast, bounded by nothing but shadows.
He saw Martin and Ed before him, moving with a shuffling motion (novice skaters, new to the ice). The floor was concrete and bare except for several wooden crates, a squat wooden barrel, a dozen cinder blocks scattered randomly, like dice thrown by a giant.
As they moved into the room, they moved away from the single lightbulb and so back into darkness. Martin’s flashlight beam moved in front of them, revealing a wooden table with power tools, jars of nails and bolts, cans of paint, a bale of wire on its side, a withered basketball, and a stack of old National Geographic magazines (de rigueur, Jack thought, in all the best basements).
They had come to the limits of the light when Martin found the wooden stairs. Jack looked behind him, saw the lightbulb burning like a cold sun. Foolish, this look back; turning forward again, he saw nothing but the afterimage of the glowing orb. He bumped into Ed, who whispered, “Easy,” and put a steadying hand on Jack’s shoulder.
The door above creaked open when Martin laid his shoulder against it. The sound stretched Jack’s frayed nerves. Pale light washed over them.
They came out in a wide hallway, the floor carpeted with the same curious pattern that, before, had seemed disturbingly three-dimensional. It seemed flat enough now, but Jack didn’t let his eyes linger there.
Martin Pendleton turned off the flashlight and thrust it into an overcoat pocket. He unslung the shotgun from his shoulder.
They moved cautiously down the hall. Fake Victorian gas lamps protruded from the walls, their low-wattage bulbs offering a diluted yellow light, just enough illumination to stretch Jack’s shadow into a long, grotesque apparition.
Jack held the revolver at his side. He had grown accustomed to its weight in his hand. It seemed more of a talisman than a weapon, and as Ed Tilman eased a white door open (the first in a row on the right side of the hall), pushing with the heel of his gun hand, a practiced maneuver that suggested he’d done this before, Jack realized that this wasn’t his game at all, that he could not imagine pointing a gun at anyone and then pulling the trigger. Someone could get hurt, he thought. Martin Pendleton, standing behind Ed with a raised shotgun, was obviously indifferent to such thoughts. Jack saw a narrowing of focus, a fearful purpose in the way Martin Pendleton lifted the shotgun and in the way his eye glared balefully down the barrel. This was a man who was not going back, who was not rethinking anything now.
Ed ducked down as the door swung open revealing an empty bedroom, everything swathed in white sheets, the air of disuse palpable.
So it was with the other doors; behind them everything was shrouded and abandoned. They had surfaced in a wing shut down for months, perhaps years.
At the end of the hall, they came to a wide staircase.
“Up or down?” Martin asked.
The noise seemed to come on cue, a loud clunk! like a recalcitrant furnace activated on the first chill day, and then a hum that grew in pitch and made the house vibrate.
The noise came from below.
They ran down the stairs, less cautious now, the roaring of engines creating an unexamined need for haste.
The stairs brought them to a short hallway that ended abruptly at a gray metal door, spotted with rust, a door that looked like a steel collage, some artist’s abstract of Auschwitz, great welts of welded metal, bolts the size of a wrestler’s fist, a thick black wheel growing from an X of steel beams.
Martin laid the shotgun down and tugged at the door. The noise was coming from behind it, making the door and walls hum.
“Turn the wheel,” Ed urged.
Martin grabbed the wheel, shoulders braced for resistance, but it spun easily.
The door swung back violently, banging open like a screen door snatched from one’s hand by a gale-force wind. This door weighed, perhaps, half a ton, and if Martin hadn’t leapt back and beyond its arc, his backbone would have been shattered between wall and wheel. Instead, the wheel burst through the wall, spraying plaster, lodging there, the door stuck open, shivering, animated by a howl bigger than reason.
Jack felt himself sliding away, fading. The air was full of wetness, the scent of brackish tide pools, rotting fish. The hall’s pale blue walls grew speckled with black spots, turning to blotches, blooming quickly to a single blackness; Jack looked at his hands, saw blood, thought some airborne object had cut him, then realized that blood was in the air, a fine spume of bright red droplets.
Jack would have welcomed darkness, but he spied Martin through the bloodstorm. The man crawled slowly toward the shotgun, retrieved it, and then, still crawling on hands and knees, hiked him
self through the door into the ravenous mouth of the hurricane. Ed Tilman, also on all fours, followed.
Jack cursed this marvelous stubbornness. And followed, staggering forward at first but quickly dropping to his knees, crawling.
He came out on a narrow, railed-in catwalk overlooking a huge room dominated by a swimming pool filled with churning, black-green water.
Jack recognized the room from the movie. He distinctly remembered that the cheerleader virgin had been dragged here by the high school football coach. The coach (a character actor in a career slump) had been in thrall to malevolent gods intent on world domination.
The gymnasium-sized room was pretty much the way Jack remembered it. At the end of the room was the dark stone deity, looking like two giant squids grafted to a thirty-foot praying mantis.
As sometimes happens in moments of duress, Jack was even, magically, visited by the film’s title: Revenge of the Cheerleader Space Zombies.
Not a bad movie, actually, a funny little campy horror flick with better-than-average B-movie production values and... this was not, perhaps, the time for a film critique.
A lot was going on down there. The black-green water in the pool was in motion, and something moved beneath its surface, brown and silver and massive. The air itself was filled with black flies, which were, Jack realized, more droplets of blood. The tribe of The Clear, men and women, stood naked, hands linked, encircling the pool. They were swaying slightly in rhythmic sympathy to the undulating roar of monstrous generators. The room’s light ebbed and flowed, as though reacting to shifting power demands.
The blood cloud seemed to have as its source the dark water. Something thrashed beneath its surface, something as big as the pool itself or—Jack could not explain this thought that came with terrible conviction—bigger, some small part of a star-sized sentience caught and vexed by being summoned, shaking off this temporal splinter in its alien finger.
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