Dreamthorp

by Williamson, Chet

  He was starting to seriously consider the possibility. "So what do you do then?"

  "You make up new rules," she told him.

  He walked to the screen door and looked out. "Where is everybody?" he asked. "They had to hear the shots, and if the other houses were doing what ours were . . ."

  "There are only four other houses with people in them," she reminded him.

  "Where's Charlie, then?" He looked back at her. "God, I wonder if he's okay."

  "Let's see," Laura said, and together they went out into the night. "I bet Gilbert cut the phone lines," she said as they walked up the steps to Charlie's porch. "With so few people here, no one might notice for a long time."

  "The phone company will notice. They'll have someone out soon." Tom knocked on the door, but there was no answer, no sound at all except for a steady tick . . . tick . . . tick over and over again. "Charlie?" Tom called.

  "Let's go in."

  They found him lying halfway up the staircase. The steps were as bent and twisted as in a funhouse, and the knurled balusters had split in two, skewering Charlie in half a dozen places. He lay with his face away from them. "Aw . . ." Tom said. "Aw, Charlie . . ."

  Amazingly, the figure on the stairs moved. The head turned in their direction just enough for Tom and Laura to see the pools of blood that Charlie's eyes had become. His voice rasped. "Better late . . . than never . . ."

  Tom gave half a sob, half a laugh, and sat on the steps next to his friend. "We'll get help, Charlie. You'll be okay."

  "Bullshit," Charlie said, and Tom knew that every word must be causing excruciating pain. "I've bled . . . to death already. I'm just . . . too mean to die yet . . . or too dumb."

  "Charlie . . ."

  "We . . . were wrong . . . was a guy . . . real live guy. Stabbed me. He . . . did it all . . . ."

  "We know, Charlie," Tom said, tears rolling down his face. "But he's dead. He's dead now. It's over."

  "Dead, huh?" Charlie coughed blood. "Lil' bastard. You have no idea . . . how much . . . that cheers me up . . ." Charlie gave a final sigh, and his breath whistled away.

  "Good-bye, Charlie," Laura said, and touched the man's hand.

  Tom wiped his eyes, then looked at Laura. "Maybe you're right, Laura. Charlie seemed to think so." He looked back at Charlie's blind face. "Maybe we were both as full of bullshit as he thought we were sometimes. But if you are right, I just hope to hell that whatever that man unleashed, or whatever he was, is as dead as he looks."

  Laura frowned. Death destroys, she thought. But sometimes don't we speak of death as . . .

  . . . freeing?

  It was as though a tornado had struck the house. The lintels and sideposts of the doorways trembled, then fell crashing to the floor, which buckled in an even more savage manner than Laura's floor had done. The banister rail bent and split, hurling the shrapnel of the remaining balusters into the living room, while the stairs ripped themselves upward one by one like giant piano keys, sending Laura and Tom toppling down them.

  "Laura!" Tom cried, grasping her arm and trying to keep his balance on the twisting surface of pine boards. "The door!"

  They strove to reach it, while the ceiling and walls shuddered around them and the floor bucked beneath. The door's glass pane had shattered, but its ornately carved wood moved only in sympathy to the wood of its frame, and Laura remembered that Charlie had told her it had been carved in Germany.

  Tom grabbed the knob and yanked, but one of the floorboards was jammed against the bottom. Laura stamped on it with all her weight, and it sank below the level of the floor. She wrenched out her heel from the hole she had made and grabbed the edge of the door with Tom. Together they forced it open and dashed out onto the porch.

  Dreamthorp had gone mad. Every cottage the length of Emerson Street was tensing, flexing, rearing its boards like the talons of giant beasts. Wooden sidings rattled, the boards breaking free, one by one, of the nails that had held them captive nearly a hundred years. Cornices ripped loose and plunged through the treetops like javelins, coming to rest in the soft loam beneath the dry surface of pine needles.

  "Come on!" Tom yelled over the dry roar of splintering wood. "Out into the street!"

  They leaped off the porch to avoid the steps, landed and rolled on the soft ground. "Stay beneath the trees!" Laura shouted as they got to their feet, for she had noticed that the Living trees were not moving and would provide shelter from the projectiles the cottages were making of their own substance. Using the pines as protection, they scurried toward Elm Road.

  Laura gasped as she saw the oculus window of the Shaeffer's cottage on Channing just below burst outward, its cross frame whirling toward them in a dark blur. She threw herself to the earth, pulling Tom with her, and one sharp end of the frame bit into the trunk of the tree a foot above her head. Once again they pushed themselves to their feet and ran.

  "Your car," Tom said as they passed her cottage, which was pulsing like a giant heart, pieces leaping off with every beat. "Do you have your keys?"

  "They're in the cottage . . . I'll look, though." She yanked open the car door, but the keys were not in the ignition. What was there, however, sitting in the concavity of the console, was a box of the small wooden matches with which Trudy Doyle lit her cigarettes. Laura grabbed them and slammed the car door shut.

  They kept running, and the houses kept throbbing, spewing random pieces at a terrifying pace. As they passed Alice Penworth's cottage, the entire front door facing flew outward twenty yards and struck Tom in the ankle. He moaned and went down. Laura knelt to help him up, when she saw that the casing, only a few feet away, was moving, shifting sinuously toward them.

  She grasped Tom under his arm and helped him to his feet, hearing but not allowing herself to respond to his groan of agony. "Come on," she said. "Come on!"

  They staggered away from the still-vibrating piece of wood, which had moved scarcely an inch since it had landed. Vibration, Laura thought. Once it's away from the house, it can move only by some inner vibration. "Shit, that's good to know," she whispered mockingly to herself.

  "What?" Tom asked through clenched teeth.

  "Nothing," Laura said. "We're almost there. . . ."

  In another minute they had reached Elm Road, which was twice as wide as Emerson, and they ran and hobbled down its center. On either side the houses of Dreamthorp shrieked and split and hurled their pieces at them, as if furious that Tom and Laura had come this far on their path of escape. Whole walls broke apart, sending the sharp missiles of their boards toward the two fleeing people, as Gilbert had sent his hate.

  But as Tom and Laura neared the main road, the activity of the houses diminished, then ceased altogether, and Laura realized that these were the cottages that had been built in the forties and fifties, when the timbering in the grove had long since ceased.

  "We made it," she panted, as exhausted from holding up Tom as from her own exertions. "Oh, Tom, we made it. . . ."

  "Ted's . . ." Tom said. "Let's go to Ted's. Phone booth there . . . on a different line from the town."

  It was another hundred yards to Ted's Mobil, but they reached the gas station unmolested. Ted's was silent and still, and the white light over the phone booth gleamed like a beacon of safety. Tom leaned against the glass, while Laura stepped inside and took the receiver from the hook. She nearly laughed when she heard the clear hum of the dial tone, and had just raised her finger to push 0 when she stopped, and looked into the darkness across the road in the direction of the cottages, looked and saw a figure moving slowly, painfully, away from the malevolent houses of Dreamthorp and toward Tom and her.

  "Tom?" she said. "There's someone over there . . . oh God, someone else got out. . . ." She hung up the receiver, stepped out of the booth, and stood beside Tom, ready to help the survivor but somehow frightened of what she could not see.

  She was right to be frightened. Out of the darkness, into the pale pool of light cast by the telephone booth light, staggered a thing
of nightmare.

  "Gilbert . . ." she whispered.

  It was not Gilbert, yet it was, for it was everything that she and Tom Brewer, who created it, had ever imagined Gilbert Rodman to be.

  It was huge and hulking, and the hollow pits of its carved eyes were black with hatred. Its arms came up with a grinding of the wood from which it was made, and reached toward Laura with blocklike, stubby fingers on hands of strong pine.

  Suddenly something came between it and Laura, and she heard the sharp sound of iron on wood. It was Tom, swinging a metal rod several feet long at the creature he had made. He did not knock it down or even make it stagger, but it hesitated, as though its dull intellect was trying to make sense out of this annoyance that had come between it and what it wished to destroy. Tom, the wound in his leg forgotten, beat at the thing like a woodsman swinging an axe.

  Laura looked around desperately, saw the pile of iron rods from which Tom had taken his weapon, and ran to it to get one of her own. The thing's head ground toward her, and its massive body turned on its ungainly legs, while Tom continued to batter away at it. All he had succeeded in doing, Laura saw as she turned back, her own rod lifted in defense, was to break off one of the monster's fingers. But it needed no fingers, she thought. It could club them both to death with its bulky arms.

  And then she remembered the matches in the pocket of her skirt.

  "Tom!" she cried. "Keep at him! Give me time!"

  Tom swung with what seemed renewed strength, drawing the thing's dim attention back to him long enough for Laura to step up to the gas pump, insert the rod in the lock, and pull on it with all her might until she heard the snap of broken metal and the ring of the lock striking the cement. She tossed down the rod, jerked the nozzle out of the boot, and flipped the reset lever, feeling relief flood through her as she heard the inner mechanisms hum. Pulling the hose as far as it would go, she shouted to the thing.

  "Here! I'm here, you bastard!"

  The thing lurched, and its arm smashed out with a speed Laura had not thought possible, dashing the metal rod from Tom's hand. It came toward her then, step by ponderous step.

  When it was only a yard away, she pulled the trigger, and gasoline began to splash out of the spout. She splashed it over the living carving, and thought hysterically that it was like watering flowers, wasn't it? Flowers and Trees. And she remembered the walking trees in that old Disney Silly Symphony, and began to giggle, backing away slowly, splashing more and more gasoline on the thing that was stalking her.

  The Rodman carving glimmered wetly now, and she released the trigger, tossed the nozzle as far as she could. The thing's arms were waving rapidly, reaching for her, but its legs were slow. Nevertheless, she realized that it was not as stupid as she had thought, and was backing her up against the garage building. Tom had picked up his rod and was smashing it against the creature's back and legs, but it paid him no mind.

  Now. She had to do it now, even if she burned too.

  Laura dug the box of matches from her pocket and opened it, spilling half of them in the process. Taking one, she held her breath and rubbed the head against the rough striker.

  She did not have to throw it. The fumes in the air ignited instantly, and the force of the explosion threw her back against the wall of the garage, stunning her. When she opened her eyes a moment later, she realized that her hair was on fire, and she pulled the back of her blouse up over her head, patting it quickly.

  Then she remembered, and saw in front of her a tall, living torch.

  The thing's arms, twin ribbons of flame, waved madly in the air, and the heavy legs, also on fire, stumbled backward toward the street. Little pools of flame burned blue on the ground around Laura, but she had thrown the nozzle far enough away so that the tank would not explode.

  Now Tom was beside her on his hands and knees, his face reddened from the singeing blast of fire. "Are you okay?" he asked her.

  She nodded, and they painfully got to their feet. By now the fiery monster was whirling in ungainly circles, the roar of the fire augmented by a faraway, roaring voice, the kind of sound that might have come from a thick, solid, wooden throat. The thing was across the road now, on the carpet of pine needles that led, unbroken, to the houses of Dreamthorp. It stopped its clumsy dance, raised what remained of its burning arms, gave one final, inarticulate roar, and toppled over like a falling tree, its impact splashing flames in a nimbus all around it.

  Laura and Tom watched as the fingers of fire rapidly spread across the surface of dry needles, reaching the first of the trees, climbing up them with the speed of frightened squirrels.

  "We've got to call, get help," Laura said, limping to the phone booth.

  "Laura . . ." She felt Tom's hand on her shoulder. "No."

  "But, Tom . . ."

  "It's the wood, Laura. It's all the wood. All rotten. All filled with hate. Let the fire have it."

  "But, Tom," she said. "Dreamthorp . . .''

  "Dreamthorp isn't here anymore. It can be anywhere we want it to be," he said softly, "but not here." He turned and looked at the fire eating the dry trees, the flames leaping from limb to limb, drawing ever closer to the little houses, those houses twitching and reeling with their own vicious life. "Not here. Let it go. Let it all go."

  He knelt and picked up the iron rod. "Step away, Laura," he said, and she did as he asked. Then he swung the rod at the pay phone over and over again, until the machine lay in pieces on the metal floor.

  "Gilbert," he said. "Gilbert did that too."

  They sat and watched the town burn, knowing that someone would soon come, but not soon enough to save Dreamthorp.

  A short time later the first of the Chalmers fire trucks arrived and screamed up Elm Road as far as it could go without being roasted. Others from nearby communities followed, and before too long a Chalmers police car pulled up in front of Ted's Mobil. Bret Walters climbed out and looked at Tom and Laura as if he could not believe what he was seeing.

  "What the hell happened here, Tom?" he asked.

  But it was Laura who answered. "There was a man, sheriff. A man who came here today. His name was Gilbert Rodman."

  "He started the fire," Tom said. "He was responsible for everything, Bret. Everything."

  "Well . . . well, where the hell is he?"

  "He's dead now," Laura said. "He's dead."

  Bret Walters looked from one to the other but saw nothing that made any sense to him. "But what the hell happened?"

  Laura looked across the road and up the hill to where the firemen watched Dreamthorp burning. "I'm not sure," she said, "but I think the old magic met the new."

  Dreamthorp is as silent as a picture, the voices of the children are mute. . . .

  —Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp

  Bret Walters drove Tom and Laura to the Lebanon County Hospital, where their wounds were dressed and they were placed in a semiprivate room for the night. Bret said he would come by to take their statements in the morning.

  After Bret and the nurse had gone, Tom and Laura got into one bed together and, careful of their hurts, lay with their arms around each other, quietly talking, then falling silent, then talking again as the thoughts came to them, as the ideas coalesced, as they tried to make out of it what sense they could.

  "Wood lived," Tom said. "And if it lived, it might have had life remaining in it. Like ghosts of men. And if Gilbert's hate for you was so strong, and if he had some power that we can't even conceive of . . ."

  "I think he did," Laura said. "In his coma . . . or whatever he was in . . . he might have found it then."

  "And that hate came ahead of him, maybe without his even knowing it, toward you, and took the form of the wood."

  "I don't know." Laura shook her head and held Tom more tightly. "Maybe the Indians did have something to do with it. Otherwise why was it just the wood from where they were buried? I meant it when I told Bret that the new magic met the old. I think Gilbert was the catalyst. He had Indian blood in him. He told me
as much when I . . . first met him." She shifted in the bed and adjusted the dressing an intern had put on her reddened forehead. "You remember what Charlie said about the Alligewi? About their dying out but that maybe some of them intermarried with tribes that survived?"

  "Yes. I remember."

  "What if Gilbert was the last of them? A descendant? And if it wasn't taking away the carving, but the power of his hate that brought the wood to life? The wood where the spirits of his ancestors still lived?"

  "A distant relation," Tom said softly. "He did do things at a distance, didn't he?"

  She sighed. "And all that wood is burning now."

  "Yes . . ."

  "But when I thought I killed him . . . all I did was free him. So will this end it? Can we be sure it's dead?"

  He didn't answer. "We'll never go back there," he finally said.

  "There's nothing to go back to. Besides, I have what I need."

  She rested her cheek against his, and after a time they both fell asleep.

  Season's End

  The dead keep their secrets, and in a little while we shall be as wise as they—and as taciturn.

  —Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp

  It rained the following afternoon, a drenching storm that seemed to hold all the moisture that had been previously denied to Dreamthorp, and the fire burned itself out at last. Its destruction had been complete. Not a cottage was left standing. All had burned to their foundations.

  The rain and the hoses of the firemen washed many of the ashes down to the creek, where they were swept away by the now quickly running stream. Several miles away, the stream joined the Susquehanna River, which flowed southeast to the Chesapeake Bay.

  Several days later, a large sunfish on the intracoastal waterway near Dares Beach, Maryland, swam through an area that had always been part of its feeding grounds. The water passed across its gills, and less than a minute later the fish was floating, dead, on the surface of the bay.