It wasn’t just a mound. In the middle, under the thatch of vines and leaves, he could see the black circle of the hole. A hole about four feet across.
It was the well. The snake well. Overgrown with vines and crawlers but still gaping. Lurking underneath was the hole, the sides slick with algae, the bottom so deep that it reflected neither the moon nor the stars.
He took a few steps toward it. DON’T LOOK. DON’T GO ANY CLOSER. But despite the voice screaming at him inside his head, Larry stood there by the edge of the well, staring down through the gaps in the covering vines. His mouth open, his throat dry, he held his breath, listening...listening if he could hear them down there at the bottom of the well, the water moccasins, and in his mind’s eye he could see them, coil upon slimy coil, their bodies entangled and knotted, their eyes like the eyes he had looked into that day by the river, eyes that peered out at him from another world, like creatures that had slithered out of the first nightmare.
And all at once it went through Larry’s head. This is it. This is what you always wondered about before, all those times you would lie awake in the middle of the night, staring up at the ceiling, hearing Hattie’s words drift down, remembering her warning. This is your worst nightmare. The worst there could ever be for you. The one Hattie said was waiting for you, waiting to come down to you from Jacob’s ladder. Only it’s just starting. It’s just—
That was when he heard it. Something was snapping loose. He looked at the vines all around the mouth of the well. They were snapping loose from the edge of it, moving down. And suddenly Larry understood what was making them. There was something underneath them, something in the well that was clutching up at them, struggling to pull itself up the slick sides of the well, clinging to the vines.
Then he heard a different sound. It was a voice. A human voice muffled in the darkness of the well. A boy’s voice. “Help me,” it said to him with a whimper, shuddering with terror. “Help me, Larry.”
Larry felt his knees nearly give way beneath him. “Jamey?”
“Help me.”
RUN! Even if it’s Jamey, RUN!
But he couldn’t move. He watched as more and more of the vines were being sucked down, faster now, as if all the vines on the well were connected up with all the other vines and crawlers on the floor of the woods around, as if something wanted to pull the whole dark forest back down into the bottom of the well.
“Help me.”
A hand. There was a hand clutching one of the vines. It let go and reached up, the fingers opening, feeling the darkness, reached up toward Larry, and the voice beneath it said with a whimper, “I’m slipping back down, Larry.”
Larry stared at the hand, white in the patch of moonlight. Severed at the wrist by a wedge of shadow, it looked unconnected to anything, floating up above the vines. “Hurry, Larry. I’m slipping. I’m...”
And Larry watched as the hand began to sink down into the shadows. “JAMEY!” he shouted and, leaning over the well, he took hold of the hand. It was cold. Cold and slimy like the sides of the well. He pulled on it, expecting to have to struggle to bring the boy back up, but the hand rose with sickening, dizzying ease. And before Larry could utter a sound, it was there.
The face looked up at him through the tangle of vines. And all around it were other hands reaching up through them, their fingers wiggling, clutching, pulling. The face was Jamey’s. Had once been Jamey’s. The eves opened. They were the eyes Larry had stared into at the river’s edge that day. Larry tried to jerk away, but his hand was caught, squeezed tight by the hand of the thing that once had been Jamey. The mouth twisted and grinned and Larry watched as the forked nib of tongue slithered out between the lips, the thin strip of tongue rising straight up from out of the boy’s teeth, the same tongue that had flicked from the jaws of the water moccasin, only longer, twisting upward farther and farther.
The mouth was opening wider now, and Larry could see something dark inside it, something where the tongue should have been. Suddenly the jaws began to rip, unsnap along the cheek, until the mouth was wide enough for what was inside to show in the moonlight, and Larry saw what was at the end of the narrow, wiggling tongue as the eyes of the moccasin began to gleam inside the gaping mouth, its head pushing its way up from the back of the throat, and then quickly its body followed, coil on coil slithering out between the teeth. The eyes were open. The pupils seemed to be dilating, wider and wider, sucking the irises into them, and then, somehow, they got wider still, until what was left were two empty black holes.
’’NO!’’ Larry yelled and with all his might yanked his hand back, freeing it from the thing that had held him. Still screaming, he turned and ran wildly, desperately toward the slope at the edge of the clearing. But he had gone no more than ten feet when he was jerked to the ground, face first.
“GODDAMNIT!” he cried as he felt the thing get tight around his ankle. Twisting around, he went to strike at whatever had gotten hold of him, but when he looked up, he saw nothing. And yet something kept tightening around his ankle.
It was a vine. His foot had just gotten caught in a loop of a ground crawler, just as it had several times already that night. He went to pull his foot loose when he suddenly realized something. Before, when the vine had tightened, he thought it was because he had been pulling against it. But now, keeping his foot still, he saw that something else was doing it. Something was pulling on the vine from the other end, from the end that went down into the well. Larry, his chest heaving, tried to free his foot, but the knot was too tight. Grabbing hold of some other vines around him, he tried to keep from moving, but, looking up, he saw that they were all being pulled back toward the well, the whole floor of the woods around him being sucked back toward it. Choking back the tears, Larry screamed at the top of his lungs, grasping desperately for anything but feeling everything slipping backward, back toward what was waiting for him in the darkness of the well.
Larry looked over his shoulder. His foot had hit the side of the well. And the clammy hands taking hold of his ankle, pulling him over the edge.
Suddenly everything seemed to stop. The hands slipped away easily. The vine went slack. The floor of the woods were no longer moving around him. Through his tears Larry saw someone’s foot right in front of him.
“Larry.”
He looked up slowly. A pair of khaki trousers. Panting, scarcely able to get his breath, Larry said with a gasp, “Dad?”
“You’re okay. It’s just a nightmare. Take my hands and I’ll put you out of it.”
“Quick...please!” Larry cried, struggling to get to his feet, extending his hands. “Hurry!” And as Larry reached up he felt the strong hand take hold of his wrist, pulling him, lifting him, just as easily as his father had once lifted him up into his arms when Larry had been four or five, to carry him from the sofa where he had fallen asleep back to his bed. And then he felt himself buoyed up in the cradle of the strong arms and the voice whispering, “It’ll be okay. I’ll make everything okay. Just like it used to be.” And the arms pushed Larry against the strong chest and held him there. “I can make it like it always should have been. For you. And for everyone, son.” And lying there in the powerful arms, Larry stared up and saw the night sky through the trees, a clear and cloudless night. Only there was something strange and wrong about it. Something that should have been there but wasn’t.
There were no stars. Not a single star in the cloudless sky.
“It’s better, isn’t it?”
And then Larry turned his head back toward the well. He was not going away from it. He was being carried back to it, back toward the well.
“DAD! What are you doing?”
It had his dad s face. And yet there was something wrong there, too, something missing, just as there had been something missing in the midnight sky.
“NOOOOO!”
It was a scream, but it wasn’t Larry. It came from someplac
e else.
They weren’t moving. Larry twisted around in the arms and saw that he was being held directly over the mouth of the well. And the arms were no longer holding him level, but the arm underneath his head was lowering, tilting downward, and Larry felt his body slipping out of the cradle of the arms, easing down head first, sliding toward the mouth of the well.
“NOOOOOOOOOOQOOOOO!”
Larry heard the scream again. Closer this time. He struggled, flailing, his body twisted around now so that he was staring directly down into the blackness. He kept trying desperately to push himself away from the emptiness of the well, but there was nothing but the cover of leaves to push against. And then as his hands knocked wildly against the tangle of vines he felt the other hand from down in the well take hold of his, pulling him toward them as the thing that had held him kept pushing. And in one last effort Larry grabbed at the arm of the thing pushing and he felt it, the smooth stump at the wrist.
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO—OOOOOOOOOO!”
It let go and Larry felt the sickening, blinding plunge of his body, ripping the vines. He grabbed at them and then suddenly felt something take hold of his shirt, pulling him back up, someone’s hand under his arm lifting him back to the mouth of the well, dragging him over it. He tumbled down the side and was again lifted up by someone in the darkness. Larry, his legs too weak to support him, collapsed against the other body. He looked at the arm that now had hold of him, and then at the face. “Jamey.”
“You’re okay,” Jamey reassured him as he pulled him away from the well. “You’re okay.”
A few moments later, the two boys were at the top of the rise. Larry looked back down. He was still shaky, but he could now at least walk without holding on to Jamey. In a patch of moonlight Larry could see the mouth of the well. It was still and quiet. He looked back at Jamey. “It’s gone now,” Larry said. “I thought it was my dad. It looked like my dad, Jamey.”
“He can look like anything.”
“You said my dad needed help. Where is he?”
“That wasn’t me,” Jamey said. “It was him. He just told you that to get you to come out here.”
“Then he was lying about my dad. He’s okay then, right?”
Larry looked at the other boy and waited for him to answer. But Jamey didn’t.
“Jamey?”
“Come on. Let’s go.”
Larry started to follow the other boy, but then he stopped to glance back once more at the well. “Is that it? Is that what he was going to do to me? Put me down there in the well?”
The other boy looked at him, his eyes unspeakably sad. He shook his head.
“Then what is it, Jamey?” Larry asked, his voice cracking. Jamey hesitated, then said, “We have to get out of here.”
18
“Come here quick.”
Robins jumped up from the chair and followed Lou Anne back into the hallway. “What is it?” But as he came to the door of Larry’s bedroom, he realized.
“He’s gone,” Lou Anne said.
Robins stepped into the boy’s room and saw that the screen in the window had been unfastened. “He must have sneaked out again. Check around back.”
Lou Anne shook her head. “He’s not there. He’s gone to try to find them,” she whispered. “I shouldn’t have left him alone. I should have realized what he’d do.”
Robins stared at her.
“We’ve got to find them,” she said. “We just can’t stay here and wait.”
“I’ll go.”
She grabbed his arm. “No. I’m going with you.”
But Robins shook his head. “It’s too risky.”
“Is it better for me to stay here by myself?”
Robins frowned. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “I’ll go over to old Doc’s and get my car. You wait here.”
“No. I don’t want either of us to be alone. I’ll go with you.”
Robins hestiated.
“We have to find them,” Lou Anne said. “At least, I have to.”
“Okay. Let’s go.”
19
The two boys had walked in silence for nearly forty minutes. Every so often Jamey would stop long enough for Larry to rest, and then they would start up again. Only once had Larry asked Jamey where they were going. “You’ll see,” Jamey replied softly, “just rest right now.”
Finally they came clear of the woods and stepped onto the dirt road. Larry looked around and thought he recognized it. But it wasn’t until they came to the top of the rise that he was finally certain. There, looming up in the darkness, was the Randolph house. Larry stopped, frozen, and looked at the other boy. “What are you doing, Jamey? Why are we going there?”
Jamey turned his eyes away. “Because now I know what I have to do.”
“What?” Then, before Jamey had a chance to answer, Larry blurted out, “Jamey, let me see your eyes again. Just to make sure.”
Jamey turned back around and looked right into Larry’s gaze. Larry looked at the face, at the eyes. They did not look the way they had the past few times Larry had seen Jamey. There was nothing frightened or desperate about them. In fact, Jamey’s eyes now had the same strange serenity that Larry had seen in them that day down by the river, when Jamey had confronted the water moccasin, whispering to it, staring back into its eyes, his voice so soothing, reassuring.
“See,” Jamey whispered. “It’s really me this time. And I understand now. I know what I...what we have to do now. Trust me.”
And Larry nodded. “I trust you, Jamey,” he whispered. Still he didn’t move for a moment but watched as the other boy walked down the narrow, sloping road. Then, calling out for Jamey to wait, Larry hurried after him.
They had been inside the Randolph house for the past ten minutes, groping through one dark corridor after another, Larry sticking close behind Jamey, even holding on to his t-shirt most of the time. Larry still didn’t know where Jamey was leading him, or why, but at least he knew it wasn’t back to the room upstairs, which was a relief. Suddenly, Jamey crouched down right in front of Larry and disappeared.
“Jamey? Where’d you go to?”
“Here,” the other boy said. Larry squinted. For the first time Larry could see the dim glow of moonlight filtering in from somewhere. Jamey’s hand was extended back to him through a small doorway. Larry hesitated.
“It’s all right,” Jamey told him.
Larry crouched down and took the other boy’s hand. Carefully Jamey guided him through the short passageway into the other room.
Larry righted himself and looked up. “Holy shit,” he whispered, tilting his head back and staring into the empty space above them. They were at the bottom of the towerlike cupola, the moonlight pouring in through the rows of tiny windows that circled the structure, weaving and crisscrossing it with huge phantom cobwebs of light. All around the cylindrical sides of it wound the spiral staircase, dusty and decrepit. Larry held his breath and could hear the boards of the massive tower as they groaned with the slightest touch of wind.
“Come,” Jamey said.
“Where?”
“Up there?”
“What for, Jamey?”
Jamey hesitated, then said softly, “You can see the stars from up there. I’d like to see them again. One more time.”
“One more time? What d’you mean, Jamey?”
But the other hoy had already begun to climb the steps, his hand on the creaky banister. “The steps are old, but they’ll hold us, ” Jamey told him.
Larry again followed him, stopping every now and then to look back down at the patches of moonlight on the floor below. Here and there the banister had fallen off, and at these places Jamey stopped and helped Larry with his hand. At last, to Larry’s relief, they stepped from the staircase onto the covered roof of the cupola. Larry looked over the railing and gasped. Spre
ad out all around beneath them were the woods, rising now and then into something like a hill, then descending gracefully into a valley, only to rise again in a farther hill. In the moonlight, the woods looked more tranquil and beautiful than he had ever thought they could look. As Larry gazed down at them, it was impossible for him even to imagine that these were the same woods that, less than a half hour before, had seemed like a twisting labyrinth of ground crawlers and hidden terrors.
“It all looks so quiet and peaceful from up here,” Larry said.
“Sometimes, if you get far enough away, everything does,” Jamey said. “Like the stars. Who knows what’s really out there—what people have to go through out there in all those million worlds. Looking at them from here, it’s hard to believe anyone anywhere could ever hurt.”
Larry nodded and he, too, looked at the stars, more brilliant and scattered more thickly than he had ever seen them before.
The two boys stood there for a moment and then Jamey sat down. Then Larry noticed that he was carrying something. It glinted in the moonlight. Larry stared at it, then whispered, “Where did you get that, Jamey?”
It was a gun. The gun Larry’s dad had given him and that Larry had dropped by the well.
“I picked it up.”
“What did you bring it here for?”
Jamey didn’t answer. His face was turned away, his eyes fixed on the stars.
“Jamey?”
“You saw it,” the other boy whispered. “In the well. You saw the face. You saw what Simon saw in his last vision. My face.”
“But it wasn’t you, Jamey. You’re okay. It wasn’t you, was it?”
Jamey looked down. “Not now. Not the way I am now. But the way he wants me to be.”
Larry shook his head.
Deliver Us From Evil Page 34