Thought Forms

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Ray’s finger didn’t struggle with fear, doubts; it didn’t need to pump itself up with chants and hatred—it was there already, tight and calm on the trigger. It answered to cold primitive instinct, not Ray’s wishy-washy stumbling conscience. It knew what had to be done.

  But the rest of him had a good start when he heard the pounding on the back door to the second floor apartment. The floor beneath him was the ceiling to those rooms. God…he hadn’t even heard them climb the stairs.

  Crack. Smack of the door flying open. They were through.

  Okay. Okay.

  They more than likely would come up the way he’d come; doors didn’t seem to dissuade them. But they might come the front way, or both.

  He could be sandwiched, pinned down. Well, it wasn’t inconceivable that he could jump from the window at the end of this tunnel onto the roof of the garage.

  Some banging down there, moving sounds, but no voices. Another sliding door slammed open, this closer sound sharper, making for a greater flinch. Jesus, he didn’t dare move, not a molecule. They might hear the boards creak above their heads.

  He felt certain that they didn’t have guns with them, but what if they had found one or more of his guns? And even worse, in a way, there were knives in both apartments. Lots of them. In the open. Jesus Christ…

  How many had there been of them in the dream? Maybe twelve?

  Eleven with one dead? That wasn’t so bad. Eleven.

  Eleven knives. Coming for him.

  Thirteen. Had to be. Thirteen people in a coven, right? This was some kind of coven, wasn’t it? So twelve left, he speculated. Thirty bullets on his person alone. He had the power. Had to stay confidant, surf that wave of confidence and make sure to get them all before it was spent.

  He waited to hear the shed door open, the stairs creak. To hear the old trunk wobbling, being slid away from the hole in the nailed door. The temptation of course would be to lunge out and open up then and there, nail the first one while he was wedged and helpless, but Ray thought it would be better to let three or four squeeze up before he burst out and let them have it, trapped in the narrow hall, no time to squeeze back through or even dive out the wind…

  …oh.

  A creak, and Ray’s eyes had flicked to the left, down the opposite end of the tunnel where it opened into the old apartment. Ray could see the man out there, an animated silhouette barely visible in the dim blue light from the windows, like a figure walking on the bottom of an ocean. Even in this murk Ray witnessed the shadow being’s purposeful stealth. It was coming toward him, but paused twice as he watched it, either looking elsewhere around it or straining harder to peer down this tunnel. Ray had to struggle not to recoil further from its silent intensity. No bumbling group to be cornered and easily slaughtered. A black leopard.

  Lone. Stalking. Intent on every sound. If he burst out it would either flee or be on him before he could bring the gun into play. It would pounce…

  No. He could still take it down. He had to let it in closer. Too close to flee, but not close enough to pounce.

  It was in the threshold to the tunnel. Paused yet again. Listened.

  Waited.

  Ray was sure it would hear his heart, booming as they had boomed on the doors to come in, though his heart wanted out, to scamper off yip-ping with its tail between its legs.

  It stepped through the threshold.

  Let it past the chimney at least, Ray bargained with his fear, at least past the chimney. It could hide behind the chimney. Let it move out of the sort of intermediate room where the chimney was and a bathroom had been, between the apartment and tunnel…let it into the tunnel proper. No more than that. A little ways more…

  The figure—darker now, out of the light, but making close, enclosed crunching sounds—passed the chimney, which skewered up through the house and out the roof.

  No muttered curses, no breathing sounds, no smell of approaching cologne. No smell of anything. Just the crunching, the groaning boards, the sound contained and vivid in this narrow area.

  Where were the rest, dammit, to come blundering in and distract this too cunning creature? Then he would strike. Ray realized that he hadn’t been hearing any more sounds from below.

  Wait for it to move again. Wait for it to step…

  It seemed to be cocking its head. It heard his heart. It smelled him. It had to.

  “Yaaaaaaah!”

  Ray had already propelled himself out from behind the bed of springs before he even recognized his actions consciously, as if the spring themselves had somehow launched him with their coiled energy. The figure froze before him, not ten feet away, and made the only sound Ray would ever hear from one of them.

  “Yaaaaaaah!”

  Then the closed attic space was loud with gunfire. Ray pulled the trigger eight times, trying to raise a hurricane of lead to blow this apparition away. Maybe three or four bullets missed, the others seeming to vanish in the black hole framed by the pointed hood, an extra-dimensional maw in this dark. The robed being danced back like a convulsing marionette, danced backwards into the intermediate room where it fell beside the chimney.

  When it had fallen, Ray saw another figure beyond it. The .22 was still shouldered; he simply jerked the barrel after it as it turned to flee.

  Crack, crack, crack. He was sure he’d seen it jolt and almost go down on one knee before it escaped from his sight.

  Ray surged forward.

  He didn’t stop to examine the one by the chimney, but he didn’t get too close as he skipped past, either. The attic apartment seemed almost well lit to him as he entered it, and spacious. No one out here.

  Ray heard it on the stairs, going down the front way. It was having some trouble.

  Ray transferred the rifle to his left hand alone while rushing to the stairs. He tugged the .38 from his pocket, held the .22 vertical and close to him. The front stairs into the attic were narrow and took two sharp turns—if the rifle barrel preceded him it could be seized by someone around a corner. It was a sound, militaristic decision to switch weaponry.

  Nothing around the first corner. Too dark to see blood. Ray heard it hit the carpeted curving staircase from the second floor to the front hall. He made the next turn, leaped to the head of the carpeted flight of stairs. They had pulled the light on in the hall—they needed light as much as he did.

  The robed being was halfway down, hand on the thick banister for support.

  It twisted half around to hiss soundlessly up at him, a pale white face twisted with cat-like fury and fear. So they weren’t all black—they weren’t all anything, except robed and silent. Ray only took the face in for a moment before he was blasting at it with the down-pointed little .38 snub.

  The short-barreled revolver was inaccurate, but Ray was close, and in his anxiousness he wasn’t thinking to conserve ammunition—he blasted off three of his five rounds in rapid succession, the pistol kicking. Though the chest would have been a broader target he wanted to smash to pieces that hideous snarling face. He did. Two bullets tore into it, like two whacks from a great pick-axe that crashed on out the back of the skull. A spray of blood spattered across the translucent glass of the lamp shade and across the wallpaper, the clenching pallid hand was torn from the bannister, and the black-wrapped man went backwards-somersaulting down the remainder of the stairs to sprawl bonelessly at their foot.

  Ray shoved the gun in his pocket, darted back upstairs, exhilarated and terrified and somehow as numb as a machine. Nothing sprang out at his return; the thing from beside the chimney wasn’t there to float at him with outstretched arms. Ray moved directly to the windows in the apartment room, overlooking his yard. The driveway was well lit. He saw two of them at his car, as he had thought he might, bashing at the windshield and driver’s side window with boards from the open garage as makeshift bats. Awkward weapons. The windshield only had one spidery indentation thus far. Thank God for their primitiveness. Ray slid open the dusty attic window, squatted and leaned out with the
rifle pressed to his cheek.

  They didn’t stand a chance, even with the cave-like garage so near—they were like bottles lined up for him from his sniper’s high vantage point. Again, he sprayed as many bullets as his finger could release without regard for his limited reserve, so intent was he on making survival or escape impossible. The one whacking the windshield fell almost comically on its rear. Ray switched to the other one and a moment later it was walking backward a half dozen steps, the board dropping from its hand, and falling on its back into the wild untended bushes beside the driveway, at which point Ray returned his attention to the first one. It had rolled onto hands and knees and was crawling pathetically. Ray’s bullets drove it down flat on it face like savage lethal kicks. In his drunken hatred, his bullets felt as personally delivered and passionate as punches and kicks.

  He wasn’t sure how many empty casings had cascaded beside him, but he was rational enough to know that he had to get downstairs to his bullets and his other guns while he still had enough ammo left to reach his apartment alive.

  As he rose and walked to the stairs, again pulling out the revolver, he fought to tally up his body count thus far. One…three…five. Five.

  That left…what? Eight. Eight, according to his estimations. God, only five so far.

  Only five? He’d only killed five people? Jesus, he’d already killed more people than Perry Smith, and was only short one death of David Berkowitz’s known kill score. Ray had always wanted to be read about, to be famous. He vaguely wondered if this night was finally what he would be remembered for, and his artwork only assessed as nightmarish predictions of what was to come. One of his favorite writers was the tur-bulent Yukio Mishima, who had committed hara-kiri in 1970, but Ray had only read several of his short stories, none of his acclaimed novels.

  Mishima’s dramatic life, culminating in the storming of a military academy, the seizing of an important hostage, warding off cadets with his samurai sword, the speech he gave to a derisive, hostile crowd, and his ritual suicide (hara-kiri was difficult to accomplish perfectly—the pressures inside the body fought to push the blade out, yet Mishima succeeded) overshadowed all his works, for Ray. Through the years Mishima’s stories had predicted violence, passionate and sexual in its release, had prophesied his suicide. The man had lived out his art and had become his own final artistic statement.

  Well, so be it. It wasn’t cheating. Van Gogh had his ear and his Japanese inspirations drove him to commit hara-kiri by firing a gun into his mid-section. Ray would paint this, his cumulative masterwork, with guns for brushes and blood for paint. And he would throw enough paint to make Jackson Pollack’s ugly paintings seem mild and conservative, to make the one painting he loved by Picasso, the bristling, agonized Guernica, seem passive.

  233

  Chapter

  10

  ..Nothing—the same.” Abby slammed down the phone.

  “Why did I ever come to work here?” Maureen moaned, drifting out of the tiny office hugging her arms to be nearer to Paul.

  Paul couldn’t help but snort and smile humorlessly at that, wag his head. “Yeah, well, you never know what kinds of extra-dimensional creatures you’re going to run into at factories these days.”

  “Very funny. It’s probably your fault, anyway.”

  Paul glared at her. “What?”

  “You and your witchcraft, man! Your necklace! You probably made that thing come and follow you here! Maybe not on purpose, but…”

  “My necklace is keeping it away!”

  “Yeah—right! So why would it be afraid of your necklace if it wasn’t some kind of devil thing?”

  “I don’t conjure devils—I don’t believe in devils! New religions always turn the old gods into devils to discredit them…the Horned God was a Nature deity, the symbol of male fertility; the horns are phallic symbols of maleness. A deer or a goat isn’t evil. Christians made it evil, they made the Horned God into Satan out of spiteful deliberate politics. There is no Satan, just warped people who invented him to blackmail people into becoming Christian robots.”

  “It sounds warped to me to believe in some magic deer god.” But Maureen said this a bit meekly, almost backed up to the wall of hardened black foam. Paul recognized her new wariness of him and it infuriated him; only minutes ago he had been her protector. He knew she was desperately afraid but this hardly tempered his insulted anger.

  “I don’t believe in some giant flesh and blood deer,” he snarled.

  “Well you said it might be some kind of spirit thing, right? You think you know what it is. But you said you don’t believe in devils!”

  “Not pointy-eared devils committed to evil. Spirits; good, bad or indifferent. There’s a big difference.”

  “Well how do you know you didn’t accidentally let some evil kind of spirit in somehow?”

  “I don’t, okay? I don’t! Maybe I did, who the fuck knows? But I didn’t do it on purpose if I did! Do you think I wanted to kill all these people and myself?”

  “You shouldn’t be fucking with that stuff.”

  “That stuff? I shouldn’t be worshipping the beauty of Nature, trees and plants and sky? Maybe I should be a wholesome Christian and kill nine million suspected witches like they did—more people than the Nazis gassed. Huh?”

  “That was a long time ago, right? Hundreds of years.”

  “And Jesus lived a longer time ago…two thousand years. Why don’t we all forget that, then? Just a thing of the past.”

  “I’m not a fucking nun, Paul, I’m just saying you don’t know what you’re dealing with! Isn’t there something you can do to try and send it back?”

  “I’m doing what I can do. I’ll cast a protective circle, okay? But I can’t send it back when I don’t know where it came from, can I? Want me to send it to New Jersey? What am I, fuckin’ Merlin the magician?”

  “I still don’t think any of this would’ve happened if you hadn’t gotten involved in that witchcraft shit.” Maureen hugged her arms tighter.

  “It isn’t my witchcraft, and it isn’t shit! If you had as much spirit as a tadpole maybe you could understand that!”

  “Fuck you.”

  The black foam wall behind Maureen’s head shattered outward into flying fragments and the giant white hand enfolded her face like a great bony spider, jerking her back against the wall. Her legs kicked as if she ran in the air, a foot off the floor, both hands pulling uselessly at the cold unyielding fingers.

  “Jesus, Jesus, oh my God!” Abby was shrilling, paralyzed.

  A smaller version of the hand had snatched Paul’s heart but his heart struggled free. He charged with the Buck knife in his fist, goateed lower jaw thrust out and eyes bulging with frenzy in his long-haired skull.

  Careful not to hit Maureen as she thrashed against him, he drove the knife again and again against what showed of the thing’s wrist. That vis-cous green-gray sap flowed free, but the fingers didn’t give. In her panic, Maureen had let go of the hand and swung her arms crazily, striking Paul across the chest with enough force to knock him off his feet. He cracked his elbow painfully in falling.

  “The necklace, Paul!” Abby screamed.

  Jesus Christ. Of course.

  Paul scrambled to his feet. Maureen screamed, muffled, inside the palm of the hand.

  Fresh black foam, liquid and hot, came pouring liberally from the hole around the creature’s wrist, and down the entire wall as if from the ceiling, as before.

  Abby screamed again, Maureen’s seizure heightened as the hand began withdrawing into the wall, pulling her head with it. Her back arched. The foam ran like lava between her breasts, down her belly, burned on her flailing hands. The hand and Maureen’s head had vanished into the hole in the wall, and the curtain of descending liquid foam had reached her, flowed more generously onto her.

  With horrible abruptness Maureen stopped kicking, dangled limply, arms flopping to either side, foam winding around them in black tentacles.

  Paul stood helpless, h
is medallion in hand, wondering if her neck had snapped or if something terrible had happened to Maureen’s head behind that wall.

  “Oh God,” Abby was vomiting the words into the floor, her throat torn, “I can’t believe it…I can’t believe it…”

  Black tentacles wound luxuriously around Maureen’s legs, her breasts fully enveloped. Paul was staring at her hitched open bared midriff, the navel a dead eye. Foam poured down her front to hide her soft smooth skin, fill the navel. The foam flowed down between her dangling legs. Paul was mesmerized.

  His guilt was a cold numbness. The truth of Maureen’s words finally settled in him. He didn’t blame his witchcraft—that was still unthinkable.

  But the monster was his. He could recognize that now. This was not arbi-trary. There was a personal relationship here. Somehow, somehow he had conjured it. How could it be otherwise? It wasn’t his religion, it wasn’t Nature. It was him. Something in him had invited this monster here from whatever hell or void or limbo it had been born in. At the most, the forces he worshipped had merely supplied the power he had tapped into. After all, Jesus hadn’t murdered those nine million people.

  “Do something, Paul!” Abby sobbed.

  He started to whirl at her, but caught himself. “Get over here closer to me, come on. I’m going to make a protective circle around us. I’ll enlarge the circle further and further and see if I can push it back. Maybe I can push it out of the building or back where it came from.”

  Abigail came beside him hunched over in pain, whimpering. Held him around the waist, her forehead against his arm. Paul was moved and felt pity for her. He scratched her hair.

  “Don’t give up on me now, Abby, come on—you’re strong. You’re tougher than me. Come on, hold on. I need you.”

  “I’m sorry…I’m sorry.” Abby sniffled, groaned as she straightened up. She folded her arms around Paul and embraced him tightly. Paul was impressed and felt a flood of grateful warmth fill him. After several moments, during which his hands hovered disoriented, he embraced her back and nuzzled his nose against her short blond hair, inhaling it. It didn’t smell gloriously perfumed, ethereal, as he fantasized female hair should smell; it smelled like hair. Her soft large breasts were pillows squashed between them soothingly, and his hands slid up and down her back, damp through her shirt. Paul pressed one hand into the hollow of the small of her back, and trembling quietly, whispered, “It’ll be alright…I’ll get us out of here…I’ll take care of you.”