Blue World (7 page)

The Invisible Man Returns,

I’m telling you!“

“Yeah. Well, I guess we can send this thing back to where it belongs.” Mullinax tapped his finger on the black makeup case. “You say a horror actor owned it?”

“Sure did. A long time ago. Now I guess all that stuff is junk, huh.” He smiled faintly. “The stuff dreams are made of, right? I saw most of that guy’s flicks twice, when I was a kid. Like the one about the Invisible Man. And there was another one he did that was really something too, called… let’s see…

The Man Who Shrank.

Now, that was a classic.“

“I don’t know so much about horror films,” Mullinax said. He ran a finger over the silver claw. “They give me the creeps. Why don’t you stay up here with our dead friend and I’ll radio for the morgue wagon, okay?” He took a couple of steps forward and then stopped. Something was odd. He leaned against the shattered doorjamb and looked at the sole of his shoe. “Ugh!” he said. “What’d I step on?”

Doom City

He awakened with the memory of thunder in his bones.

The house was quiet. The alarm clock hadn’t gone off. Late for work! he realized, struck by a bolt of desperate terror. But no, no… wait a minute; he blinked the fog from his eyes and his mind gradually cleared too. He could still taste the onions in last night’s meatloaf. Friday night was meatloaf night. Today was Saturday. No office work today, thank God. Ah, he thought, settle down… settle down…

Lord, what a nightmare he’d had! It was fading now, all jumbled up and incoherent but leaving its weird essence behind like a snakeskin. There’d been a thunderstorm last night--Brad was sure of that, because he’d awakened to see the garish white flash of it and to hear the gut-wrenching growl of a real boomer pounding at the bedroom wall. But whatever the nightmare had been, he couldn’t recall now; he felt dizzy and disoriented, like he’d just stepped off a carnival ride gone crazy. He did recall that he’d sat up and seen that lightning, so bright it had made his eyes buzz blue in the dark. And he remembered Sarah saying something too, but now he didn’t know what it was…

Damn, he thought as he stared across the bedroom at the window that looked down on Baylor Street. Damn, that light looks strange. Not like June at all. More like a white winter light. Ghostly. Kind of made his eyes hurt a little.

Brad got out of bed and walked across the room. He pushed aside the white curtain and peered out, squinting.

What appeared to be a gray, faintly luminous fog hung in the trees and over the roofs of the houses on Baylor Street. It looked like the color had been sucked out of everything, and the fog lay motionless for as far as he could see up and down the street. He looked up, trying to find the sun. It was up there somewhere, burning like a dim bulb behind dirty cotton. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and Brad Forbes said, “Sarah? Honey? Take a look at this.”

She didn’t reply, nor did she stir. He glanced at her, saw the wave of her brown hair above the sheet that was pulled up over her like a shroud. “Sarah?” he said again, and took a step toward the bed.

And suddenly Brad remembered what she’d said last night, when he’d sat up in a sleepy daze to watch the lightning crackle.

I’m cold, I’m cold.

He grasped the edge of the sheet and pulled it back.

A skeleton with tendrils of brittle brown hair attached to its skull lay where his wife had been sleeping last night.

The skeleton was wearing Sarah’s pale blue nightgown, and what looked like dried-up pieces of tree bark--skin, he realized, yes… her… skin--lay all around, on and between the white bones. The teeth grinned, and from the bed there was the bittersweet odor of a damp graveyard.

“Oh…” he whispered, and he stood staring down at what was left of his wife as his eyes began to bulge from their sockets and a pressure like his brain was about to explode grew in his head and blood trickled down from his lower lip where his teeth had pierced.

I’m cold, she’d said, in a voice that had sounded like a whimper of pain.

I’m cold.

And then Brad heard himself moan, and he let go of the sheet and staggered back across the room, tripped over a pair of his tennis shoes, and went down hard on the floor. The sheet settled back over the skeleton like a sigh.

Thunder rumbled outside, muffled by the fog. Brad stared at one skeletal foot that protruded from the lower end of the sheet, and he saw flakes of dried, dead flesh float down from it to the Sears deep-pile aqua-blue carpet.

He didn’t know how long he sat there just staring. He thought he might have giggled, or sobbed, or made some combination of both. He almost threw up, and he wanted to curl up into a ball and go back to sleep again; he did close his eyes for a few seconds, but when he opened them again the skeleton of his wife was still lying in the bed and the sound of thunder was nearer.

And he might have sat there until doomsday if the telephone beside the bed hadn’t started ringing.

Somehow, he was up and had the receiver in his hand. Tried not to look down at the brown-haired skull and remember how beautiful his wife--just twenty-eight years old, for God’s sake!--had been.

“Hello,” he said in a dead voice.

There was no reply. Brad could hear circuits clicking and humming deep in the wires.

“Hello?”

No answer. Except now there might have been--might have been--a soft, silken breathing.

“Hello?”

Brad shrieked into the phone. “Say something, damn you!”

Another series of clicks; then a tinny, disembodied voice: “We’re sorry, but we cannot place your call at this time. All lines are busy. Please hang up and try again later. Thank you. This is a recording…”

He slammed the receiver back into its cradle, and the motion of the air made flakes of skin fly from the skull’s cheekbones.

Brad ran out of the bedroom, barefoot and in only his pajama bottoms; he ran to the stairs, went down them screaming, “Help! Help me! Somebody!” He missed a step, slammed against the wall, and caught the banister before he broke his neck. Still screaming for help, he burst through the front door and out into the yard, where his feet crunched on dead leaves.

He stopped. The sound of his voice went echoing down Baylor Street. The air was still and wet, thick and stifling. He stared down at all the dead leaves around him, covering brown grass that had been green the day before. And then the wind suddenly moved, and more dead leaves swirled around him; he looked up, and saw bare gray branches where living oak trees had stood before he’d closed his eyes to sleep last night.

“Help me!” he screamed.

“Somebody please help me!”

But there was no answer; not from the house where the Pates lived, not from the Walkers’ house, not from the Crawfords’ or the Lehmans‘. Nothing human moved on Baylor Street, and as he stood amid the falling leaves on the seventh day of June, he felt something fall into his hair. He reached up, plucked it out, and looked at what he held in his hand.

The skeleton of a bird, with a few colorless feathers sticking to the bones.

He shook it from his hand and frantically wiped his palm on his pajamas--and then he heard the telephone ringing again in his house.

He ran to the downstairs phone, back in the kitchen, picked up the receiver, and said, “Help me! Please… I’m on Baylor Street! Please help--”

He stopped babbling, because he heard the clicking circuits and a sound like searching wind, and down deep inside the wires there might have been a silken breathing.

He was silent too, and the silence stretched. Finally he could stand it no longer. “Who is this?” he asked in a strained whisper. “Who’s on this phone?”

Click.

Buzzzzzz…

Brad punched the O. Almost at once that same terrible voice came on the line: “We’re sorry, but we cannot place your call at--” He smashed his fist down on the phone’s two prongs, dialed 911. “We’re sorry, but we cannot--” His fist went down again; he dialed the number of the Pates next door, screwed up, and started twice more. “We’re sorry, but--” His fingers went down on about five numbers at once. “We’re sorry--”

He screamed and wrenched the telephone from the wall, threw it across the kitchen, and it broke the window over the sink. Dead leaves began to drift in, and through the glass panes of the back door Brad saw something lying out in the fenced-in backyard. He went out there, his heart pounding and cold sweat beading on his face and chest.

Lying amid dead leaves, very close to its doghouse, was the skeleton of their collie, Socks. The dog looked as if it might have been stripped to the bone in mid-stride, and hunks of hair lay about the bones like snow.

In the roaring silence, Brad heard the upstairs phone begin to ring.

He ran.

Away from the house this time. Out through the backyard gate, up onto the Pates’ front porch. He hammered at the door, hollering for help until his voice was about to give out. Then he smashed a glass pane of the door with his fist and, heedless of the pain and blood, reached in and unsnapped the lock.

With his first step into the house, he smelled the graveyard reek. Like something had died a long time ago, and been mummified.

He found the skeletons in the master bedroom upstairs; they were clinging to each other. A third skeleton--Davy Pate, once a tow-headed twelve-year-old boy--lay on the bed in the room with posters of Prince and Quiet Riot tacked to the walls. In a fish tank on the far side of the room there were little bones lying in the red gravel on the bottom.

It was clear to him then. Yes, very clear. He knew what had happened, and he almost sank to his knees in Davy Pate’s mausoleum.

Death had come in the night. And stripped bare everyone and everything but him.

But if that were so… then who--or what--had dialed the telephone? What had been listening on the other end? What… oh, dear God, what?

He didn’t know, but he suddenly realized that he’d told whatever it was that he was still on Baylor Street. And maybe Death had missed him last night; maybe its scythe had cleaved everyone else and missed him, and now… and now it knew he was still on Baylor Street, and it would be coming after him.

Brad fled the house, ran through the dead leaves that clogged the gutters of Baylor Street, and headed east toward the center of town. The wind moved again, sluggishly and heavily; the wet fog shifted, and Brad could see that the sky had turned the color of blood. Thunder boomed behind him like approaching footsteps, and tears of terror streamed down Brad’s cheeks.

I’m cold,

Sarah had whispered.

I’m cold.

And that was when the finger of Death had touched her, had missed Brad and gone roaming through the night.

I’m cold, she’d said, and there would never be any warming her again.

He came to two cars smashed together in the street. Skeletons in clothes lay behind the steering wheels. Further on, the bones of a large dog were almost covered by leaves. Above him, the trees creaked and moaned as the wind picked up, ripping holes in the fog and showing the bloody sky through them.

It’s the end of the world, he thought. Judgment Day. All the sinners and saints alike turned to bones overnight. Just me left alive. Just me, and Death knows I’m on Baylor Street.

Mommy!“

The sobbing voice of a child pierced him, and he stopped in his tracks, skidding on leaves.

“Mommy!” the voice repeated, echoing and warped by the low-lying fog. “Daddy! Somebody… help me!”

It was the voice of a little girl crying somewhere nearby. Brad listened, trying to peg its direction. First he thought it was to the left, then to the right. In front of him, behind him… he couldn’t be sure. “I’m here!” he shouted. “Where are you?”

The child didn’t answer, but Brad could still hear her crying. “I’m not going to hurt you!” he called. “I’m standing right in the middle of the street! Come to me if you can!”

He waited. A flurry of brown, already-decaying leaves fell from overhead--and then he saw the figure of the little girl, hesitantly approaching him through the fog on his right. She had blond hair done up in pigtails with pale blue ribbons, and her pallid face was streaked with tears and distorted by terror; she was maybe five or six years old, wearing pink pajamas and clasping a Smurf doll tightly in her arms. She stopped about fifteen feet away from him, her eyes red and swollen and maybe insane too.

“Daddy?” she whispered.

“Where’d you come from?” he asked, still shocked at hearing another voice and seeing someone else alive on this last day of the world. “What house?”

“Our house,” she answered, her lower lip trembling. Her face looked like it was about to collapse. “Over there.” She pointed through the fog at a shape with a roof; then her eyes came back to Brad.

“Anyone else alive? Your mother or father?”

The little girl just stared.

“What’s your name?”

“Kelly Burch,” she answered dazedly. “My tel’phone number is… is… 555-6949. Could… you help me find… a p’liceman, please?”

It would be so easy, Brad thought, to curl up in the leaves on Baylor Street and let himself lose his mind; but if there was one little girl still left alive, then there might be other people too. Maybe this awful thing had only happened on Baylor Street… or maybe only in this part of town; maybe it was a chemical spill, radiation, something unholy in the lightning, some kind of Army weapon that had backfired. Whatever it was, maybe its effects were only limited to a small part of town. Sure! he thought, and when he grinned, the child abruptly took two steps back. “We’re going to be all right,” he told her. “I won’t hurt you. I’m going to walk to Main Street. Do you want to go with me?”

She didn’t reply, and Brad thought she’d truly gone over the edge, but then her lips moved and she said, “I’m looking for… for my mommy and daddy. They’re gone.” She caught back a sob, but new tears ran down her cheeks. “They just… they just… left bones in their bed and they’re gone.”

“Come on.” He held out his hand to her. “Come with me, okay? Let’s see if we can find anybody else.”

Kelly didn’t come any closer. Her little knuckles were white where she gripped the smiling blue Smurf. Brad heard thunder roaming somewhere to the south, and electric-blue lightning scrawled across the crimson sky like a crack in time. Brad couldn’t wait any longer; he started walking again, stopped, and looked back. Kelly stopped too, dead leaves snagged in her hair. “We’re going to be all right,” he told her again, and he heard how utterly ridiculous he sounded. Sarah was gone; beautiful Sarah was gone, and his life might as well be over. But no, no--he had to keep going, had to at least try to make some sense out of all this. He started off once more, east toward Main Street, and he didn’t look back, but he knew Kelly was following about fifteen or twenty feet behind.