Greely's Cove (24 page)

Sandy would have shaken off these incredible notions, blaming them on her battered emotional state, if the lights had not suddenly gone out.

Hannabeth Hazelford’s cottage stood in the oldest residential quarter of Greely’s Cove—a stately, woody neighborhood called Torgaard Hill. In the early days the Hill had been a bastion of old money, where sea captains and shipping executives had built dignified Victorian and Tudor houses with views of the Puget Sound. Hannie’s cottage boasted a lavishly landscaped yard with towering cedars and sprawling madronas, beds of rosebushes and manicured clumps of azaleas.

At the tick of 1:00 a.m. on February 19, 1986, Hannie’s place was dark, as was the rest of the neighborhood. This was a weeknight, and the modern-day residents of Torgaard Hill were either retirees or working people who needed their sleep. But Hannie was not sleeping. In a corner room of her quaint house, behind shuttered and curtained windows that allowed not a trace of candlelight to escape into the rainy night, she sat alone at a special table, naked and scrawny as an elderly reptile. Had any of her neighbors or friends been present, they would not have recognized her, for she was without her elaborate blond wig and turquoise contact lenses. She had washed away her thick makeup, having no need to hide the embrangled wrinkles and creases in her face. Her ancient skull was shiny and splotchy, only faintly haired with gauzy wisps of white. Clipped to her nose was a shiny set of pince-nez with thick lenses that magnified her watery eyes beyond grotesquerie.

On the ceiling was painted a huge seven-pointed star in white, the Kabbalistic symbol of the Divine Essence, and on the floor a five-pointed one in red, the Eternal Pentagram. In the center of the pentagram stood the table on waxen blocks that were inscribed with the long-forgotten letters of an ancient language. On the wooden table itself was yet another pentagram rendered in chalk around yet another waxen block. Resting atop this block was a small hinged box of glossy wood that contained a pewter mounting and a palm-sized disk of lustrous obsidian—a
scrying mirror
, a witch’s tool that was nearly as old as Hannie herself.

Her dry lips, leathery with age and still bearing a smear of outlandish lipstick, recited the words of the old ritual. The words were all-important, the givers of power to the mirror, of sight to her eyes. Her bony shoulders twitched and swayed as she spoke, and her haggard breasts brushed over the cold surface of the table in short pendulum strokes. She leaned forward in her chair until her face hung directly over the obsidian disk, and her watery stare bore deep into the black surface, fetching out the images that floated there, absorbing the meaning and the truth that the old words had brought to life.

Suddenly she gasped and sat bolt upright, her teary eyes gleaming in the stuttering candlelight. She clapped an osteal hand over her mouth. Evil was afoot. Not the common, everyday sort of evil that generates familiar headlines, nor the kind that causes a desperate addict to steal a stereo out of a car, or the young father to break the skull of his infant daughter, or the congressman to vote for massive funds to build ballistic missiles while cutting off aid to the hungry and jobless. This was evil of a purer sort, the kind she had tilted with all her life, the kind that had drawn her to Greely’s Cove—an evil of a species that human words cannot name.

Fighting nausea, she forced herself to peer again into the scrying mirror, to mouth the powerful words that would enable her to see the truth, or at least a portion of it. The
full
truth of evil, she knew, could never be seen, which was perhaps fortunate, for a mortal’s eyes could not bear the whole of it.

The vision formed again, and Hannie knew instantly that her suppositions of the previous weeks had been wrong. The evil was stronger than ever. It was reaching out again to the realm of the normal, seeking yet another human life to scar with its evil. The trance deepened, and she saw the face of a friend, a weary one with wide, frightened eyes and hair of fiery red—the face of a victim.

Hannie tore herself away from the mirror, inflicting on her mind a brutal psychic wound that she could have avoided by taking time to recite the proper parting words. But there was no time. Already Sandy Zolten was feeling the icy tendrils of a predator, and the only chance of saving her lay in instant action. No time now for chants and ritual, no time for casting spells.

She darted from the candlelit chamber into her bedroom and snatched clothing from her closet, her blond wig from the headform on her dresser, underwear from her drawers. She stuffed her misshapen old feet into a pair of sneakers and threw on whatever she had in her hands. By the time she flitted out the door into the garage, where waited her Jaguar, she was wheezing and coughing from exertion, almost too dizzy to drive.

Sandy Zolten stood like a statue in the lobby of the Old Schooner, taxing her eyes against the darkness that had exploded so suddenly, a darkness that seemed to have weight and texture, that bore down on the muscles of her body like a velvet boulder.

A breaker switch or a fuse?
she wondered.

Sparse ambient light filtered through the plate-glass windows of the lobby, meaning that the utility lamps and the all-night signs of Frontage Street were still burning. Not a general outage, then, but merely an overloaded circuit here at the motel. Strange. The Zoltens had never experienced any such problems before.

The thing to do, Sandy told herself, was to find the breaker box and flip the switches (Would it be
up
or
down!
She could never remember which way was on.), as any other normal, rational adult would do. If the breakers snapped off again, there was a wiring problem somewhere, or maybe something as simple as a pair of motel guests using their curling irons at the same time. But first she would need a flashlight, and she remembered that Ken kept one in a drawer under the counter. She turned to fetch it, and—

The
smell.

It assailed her again, blasting into her nostrils and nasal passages, a stink that choked and gagged, that generated mental images of bloating corpses with maggots in their eyes. Sandy staggered against the near wall, her stomach lurching. Her mind whirled and swirled with a blizzard of dreads, vile images from childhood nightmares, visions of night things and unborn animals who could talk—

O
God! The smell!

She collected herself and staggered forward, feeling her way through a blackness made worse by a torrent of stinging tears, to the drawer that held the flashlight. The drawer came easily open, and her hands rummaged through a clutter of pens, paper clips, and credit-card forms until finding the cool aluminum cylinder. She switched it on, and it became a glaring wand that cast dancing shadows across the counter, the ceiling, the walls.

Now be cool,
she told herself, heaving in lungfuls of air.
There’s absolutely nothing to be afraid of.
An overloaded electrical circuit was no reason for hysteria. So what if she had been overwrought and jumpy? Any mother who has suffered the loss of a child is entitled to a little fit of insanity now and then.

Back through the counter gate into the lobby. Back to the mouth of the short corridor that led to the rear door. Back through a tunnel of thickening stink that forced her to breathe through her mouth.

At the end of the corridor was a utility closet in which she and Ken kept cleaning supplies, the vacuum cleaner, the buffer—the home of the breaker box. She would open the door of the closet, shine the flashlight inside to locate the box, pop it open, and flip the switches. The lights would come on again, and the world would return to normal. Nothing could be simpler.

She completed the black pilgrimage from the front lobby to the closet door and beamed the light against it. Her hand gripped the knob so tightly her knuckles screamed. Something prevented her from twisting the knob and pulling the door open, something like fire bells and air-raid sirens and warnings from your mom never to get into a car with a stranger, something—

“
Oh, Mother, what are you waiting for?
”

Sandy Zolten’s heart thundered at three times its normal rate, unleashing drums in her ears and cannon in her temples. Her flesh went cold.

Teri’s voice
—whether inside her head or on the other side of the door, she could not know.
Teri’s voice
, clear and sweet, the voice of the happy little girl for whom she had sewn dresses and jumpsuits, given birthday parties, baked cakes, shed hot tears of anguish. Sandy wobbled, and her hand fell away from the doorknob.

“
Well if you’re not going to open it, I’ll do it myself
The door opened, though untouched by any hand.

In Sandy’s brain, as in the brain of every other human, was an emergency circuit-breaker that trips when the senses are flooded with a reality too vile to be admitted.

Her limbs went flaccid. The flashlight tumbled from her fingers and dropped onto the carpet, where it rolled between her feet. Her daughter stood in the rear of the closet amid shelves stacked with bottles of Formula 409 and rolls of paper towels, smiling so tightly that the whites of her eyes shone all around her incandescent pupils.

Sandy’s mental breaker tripped. Her brain did not register the sight of Teri’s mutilated face with its left cheek nearly eaten away, the stems of blood vessels pulsing through gaping bites out of her flesh. Or the cloudy reek that billowed out of the closet to enfold her. Or the grin that stretched Teri’s lips gruesomely away from her teeth in a silent laugh that could not possibly have any love in it.

Sandy’s mind substituted.

‘ She saw what she wanted to see. Teri with healthy skin all aglow, not mottled and scabby and wet with slime. Not swollen and horribly ravaged by some hideous mouth equipped with flesh-eating teeth.

She saw her little girl having come home, and this was cause for tears of joy. No matter that Teri had chosen the dead of night, or that she was standing in a utility closet with fully six inches of thin air between her feet and the floor.

Sandy cried with happiness. And plunged into the closet. And embraced the gargoyle figure of her daughter, mindless of the vermin-infested, blood-stained field jacket. And the stink. And the unnatural light in Teri’s eyes. Sandy, blubbered insanely about taking Teri home, for her father and sister would be overjoyed. She would need something to eat and maybe a bath, and then a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow she could tell them all what had happened and why she had been away, and the family would be whole again, and let’s get
on
with it,
come on, baby...

“That isn’t why I’ve come back, Mom,” said Teri, her voice rasping with phlegm.

Sandy paused in her joyful weeping, then pulled away from the embrace. She stared up into her daughter’s wild eyes.

“Baby, what are you saying? I know why you’ve come back—”

“No, you don’t. Mom, I’ve come back for
you.
I want to take you somewhere—somewhere wonderful! It’s not far from here, and we can leave right now.”

Sandy’s mental circuit-breaker started to fail, and the truth of the moment began to trickle into her consciousness—slowly at first but more quickly with every passing second: mind-sickening spurts of sight and stench, then a soul-shattering debacle of horror. She saw the hell-thing that her daughter had become, smelled its evil odor, felt its demon gaze on her skin.

Sandy jerked backward and away, stumbling, flailing with uncooperative arms, only to hear the closet door slam shut behind her back, trapping her in blackness. How, then, could she still see Teri’s eyes, as though the girl’s head were a jack-o’-lantern?

She screamed from the depths of her being. Her own icy hands clawed her cheeks. She felt her bladder let go, and urine washed down the prickly skin of her legs. The green light of Teri’s eyes floated nearer, as though suspended in their own evil stench, and Sandy groped insanely for the doorknob.

“Oh, Mother, don’t
be
this way,” said Teri, so near now that her gangrenous breath stung Sandy’s face. “You’re making it so much worse than it has to be.”

This isn’t my daughter!
screamed Sandy in her heart. The muscles of her mouth were too numb to form words.

“But I
am
Teri,” it said, having heard its mother’s unspoken words. “Who else could I be?”

Several times Sandy managed to ram the door open an inch or so, but each time it slammed shut again, as though someone very strong was holding the knob on the other side, fighting her, forcing her to confront this obscenity that called itself Teri.

“Oh, that’s real nice, Mom. An
obscenity?
Is that how you think of me?”

“Get away! Let me go!” Sandy struggled all the harder with the door. She felt the hell-thing’s arms slide around her, felt its crusty hair settling against her own.

“Just listen to me, would you, Mother?” The gurgling voice became a little girl’s. “I made the lights go off, because I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to see you and let you know that I’m okay.”

Sandy fought the arms away, dashed herself against the door, felt it give a little. “
You’re not Teri! You’re not my
—”

“I want to share something with you, Mom. I can’t force you to come with me—at least not yet—but if you won’t come with me tonight, I’ll be back in a few weeks, and I’ll be so much stronger then. I’ll be able to
make
you come then, if I want to. It’s because I love you, Mom, that I’m here tonight: You’re the very first person I came out to see.”

From terror, from revulsion, Sandy’s stomach erupted, and she felt gobbets of vomit wash over her arms and hands and feet. She sank to her knees, shuddering with every retching spasm, too weak to stand or fight.

“That’s okay, Mom, just take it easy,” said Teri with two voices, one inside her mother’s head—the silky voice of a radiant and loving little daughter—and the other belonging to the bulk that floated down to snake its arms around Sandy’s shoulders. “It won’t be so bad, really it won’t. We’re going to a wonderful place, all dark and damp, full of little mice and rats and spiders, and—O God, it’s great, Mom! The dreams are just incredible! You can go anywhere and be anybody, see and do things you didn’t even know existed. I’ve already been to the castle of the Emperor Barbarossa, and I was a whore to his soldiers. God, I never knew that fucking could be like that, Mom. I’ve seen cave people and popes and—let’s see-—oh yeah! I’ve even been to a monastery in the tenth century. I’m not sure where it was—maybe Europe or somewhere—and I was a little boy who the monks passed around and tortured and stuff. It was great!”