Greely's Cove (25 page)

Sandy’s will stretched to the point of snapping. That she had clapped her hands to her ears mattered nothing: The obscenities that issued from the Teri-thing could not be shut out. The voices danced in her ears like crystalline music, and she sobbed until even sobbing became impossible.

“It’s the
dreaming
that makes it all worthwhile, Mom, the
dreaming.
We can go now, you and me. We won’t even have to walk—look! I can take us on the air! See how strong I am?”

Sandy began to ascend off the floor, out of the puddle of vomit into which she had crumbled. Her arms and legs flew out, and her hands grabbled for a hold with which to drag herself to earth again but failed. Her lungs managed yet one more cry of terror.

“See?” squealed the Teri-thing, like a child who has discovered an exquisite new toy. “All you have to do is let yourself go, Mother! I’ll take us to the Giver of Dreams, and we’ll go to the Feast. You’ll love it, I know you will. Oh, you’ll be scared at first, just like I was, and you’ll fight and scream, but then all your strength will be gone, and the Giver of Dreams will take you just like he took me, and we’ll dream together!”

Sandy Zolten’s will snapped, which the Teri-thing knew instantly. The closet door swung open, and mother and daughter floated through it, out the rear entry way of the motel office, into the cold night and the relentless rain. Sandy Zolten was a limp rag of a woman who had given up her short fight for sanity, who saw nothing particularly outlandish about floating through the alleys and backstreets of Greely’s Cove, bound in the viselike embrace of the Teri-thing.

They kept always to the deep dark, thumping now and again into dumpsters and utility poles, or—on the edge of the town, where civilization gave way to thick forest—butting into rough-limbed trees that bruised and welted Sandy’s wet skin. She no longer rebelled at images of rats and Barbarossa’s whores. She accepted as inevitable the inane truth that
this
should be her reward for suffering the sweet agony of birthing a wonderful little daughter, for sacrificing and worrying and praying and mucking through all the other ordeals of parenthood.

No, it was not particularly outlandish that she should be moving through the forest as though floating on a cloud, knowing vaguely that she was going to a feast, which seemed not altogether bad. She had vomited up her dinner, after all, and was feeling just a little hungry.

Hannabeth Hazelford’s Jaguar swerved into the drive of the Old Schooner, where it braked to a halt with a screech of rubber on damp asphalt. She bounded out of the car, leaving lights on and motor running, and hustled to the front door of the lobby. All was dark, the neon sign and the interior lights dead, which she knew was not normal. She pushed through the plate-glass door.

The smell assailed her immediately, and her aged bones shuddered with an old familiar terror. The stink of the Giver of Dreams was unmistakable.

She moved toward a faint shard of light in the distant dark, a flashlight that lay on the carpet at the end of a short corridor, casting its beam in a parabolic arc against a wall. To one side a closet door stood open, and a little farther was another open door, which led out to the night.

“Sandy?”

Hannie heard her own voice, weak with age and fear, hardly the voice of the self-assured English gentlewoman she had taken to portraying.

“Ken? Is anyone here?”

Only silence.

She forced herself toward the light. Reached it. Picked up the flashlight with frail, quivering hands, and swept its beam around. A lake of vomit lay on the tiled floor of the closet. On the interior surface of the door were smears of filth and the marks of desperate fingernails.

Whoever had retched should have left foul footprints on the carpet, but there were none, and Hannie knew why: Whoever had retched had not
walked
away.

That tears flowed down her cheeks amazed her, because she had long ago assumed that her old eyes were no longer capable of weeping, that her soul had become calloused to the sorrows inflicted by the Giver of Dreams. She cried not merely for Sandy Zolten, but for the countless others who had suffered this abominable evil. For herself, too, grown old and weak—having become too willing to believe that the evil could simply run its course and wear itself down, that despite the symptoms so glaringly apparent in Greely’s Cove, the evil might be dying.

As mortals die.

Her mind, still paining from the psychic wound she had inflicted upon it minutes ago with the scrying mirror, sorted through the realities that she had earlier avoided: The evil was growing stronger, maturing through its cycle of hunger and feeding, moving with practiced diligence toward the most unspeakable of its goals.

Reproduction.

The making of another of its kind.

Hannie Hazelford wept. For lost friends like Lorna Trosper and Sandy Zolten. For herself. For the people of Greely’s Cove.

She let drop the flashlight and retreated to her car, knowing that she could do no good here.

Carl Trosper stood in the empty dining room of his Wisconsin Avenue condominium in Washington, D.C., watching two beefy men load the last of his household goods aboard a hand truck for transport to the moving van. A third man, the foreman of the crew, gave him some forms to sign—verification of destination, an insurance policy, one or two others—which he signed and handed back.

As the foreman closed the door behind him, Carl stood in the yawning silence of his home, his hands pocketed in grungy Levi’s, lamenting the stark emptiness of the place. The walls were bare of his treasured books and beloved Matisse prints, now crated in cardboard and entrusted to people he did not even know. Gone were his Roche-Bobois leather furniture and Fisher stereo system, as were his television and VCR, his collection of antique chess sets and most of his clothes.

The home itself would soon pass from his ownership. The previous day a realtor had presented him a buy-sell agreement, which he had executed on the spot. The nation’s capital would soon officially lose Carl Trosper as a resident.

He had flown back to Washington two days after Lorna’s funeral, leaving Jeremy in the care of a committee: his old boyhood buddies, Stu Bromton and Renzy Dawkins, and his former mother-in-law, Nora Moreland, who had somewhat hesitatingly offered to stay with the boy in the Trosper bungalow on Second Avenue. Carl had verged on declining Nora’s offer, for he had sensed her unease about staying in the house where Lorna had lived and died. More than once he had overheard her remark about not sleeping well there. But when it came down to brass tacks, he had little choice but to accept.

He had assured Nora that he would not be away for more than two weeks, that in his absence both Stu and Renzy would look in on Jeremy daily. As would Lindsay: Apparently in an effort to shore up the new spirit of détente she had effected with Carl, she’d volunteered to take the boy to his therapy sessions every Tuesday and Friday.

Two weeks. A fortnight. Half a month in which to clip the bonds to the city that had been his home for more than nine years.

Closing bank accounts, charge accounts. Filling out change-of-address cards. Cancelling utility service and memberships in the sailing club and health club and country club. Packing cardboard boxes with virtually everything he owned.

These were the comparatively easy things.

Not so easy was the confrontation with his colleagues at J. Howard Maynard and Associates, who had counted him among the strongest in their stable of high-horsepower political consultants. After hearing Carl’s revelation that he intended to quit the firm and move back to the provinces, the senior partner had “gone ballistic” and rattled the windows of his plush office with his anger. How in the hell could Carl
do
this to them? he had demanded to know. The congressional elections were a mere nine months away, and the firm had accepted lucrative campaign-management contracts based on Carl’s experience and brains, not to mention the assurance of his presence in the firm. Didn’t he feel any sense of responsibility to his clients and colleagues? How in the fucking blue blazes did he expect the firm to fill his shoes on such short notice?

His carefully rehearsed answers to these questions had sounded shallow and unconvincing. His son needed him. For medical reasons his son needed to be in Greely’s Cove—not Washington, D.C., the city that boasted the finest medical facilities in the world. But Greely’s Cove, a foggy little backwater on the shore of the Puget Sound, where lived the only doctor in the galaxy who could help. Right.

Still worse had been his confrontation with Melanie Kraft, the chestnut-haired lawyer with whom he had shared most of his free hours during the three months before Lorna’s death. Over drinks in a dusky cubicle of the lounge in the Hay Adams Hotel, he had told her point-blank that he was quitting Washington for the quietude of a cedar-shingle law practice in his old hometown. Their relationship—good as it had been—must end. Jeremy needed his father, and Carl himself needed the healing simplicity of Greely’s Cove. There was atoning to be done. There were debts of guilt to be paid, old wounds to be mended. Could she understand this?

Yes, she could, and this is what made the confrontation all the more wrenching: She understood perfectly. With her brown eyes brimming, Melanie had agreed that Carl should do exactly as his heart dictated.

Thus it was over between them, without eruptions of venom or wounded pride. In the aftermath Carl felt hollow, having underestimated both the intensity of Melanie’s love for him and its importance to his life, a love he had neatly rejected in order to pursue better things. This realization had a disturbingly familiar ring.

The telephone bleeped loudly, undampened by walls bare of drapes or books or furniture. He crossed to the nearest extension and picked up the handset.

“Carl, it’s me,” said Stu Bromton’s voice in faraway Greely’s Cove, where it was still morning. “Can you talk?”

“I learned at a very early age. What’s up?”

“Carl, I think you better get back here as soon as you can.”

“What are you talking about? It’s only the twenty-first. I’m not due back for three more days, and I’ve still got a ton of stuff to do. I haven’t even sold my Porsche yet.”

“It’s about Jeremy,” said Stu, clearing his throat. “I’ve got , him here at the station house, and unless you show up soon to take custody of him, ihe county juvenile folks are going to haul him over to the youth-detention facility pending court action.” Carl felt his face beginning to flush, and a pit formed in his stomach. “Detention facility? What in the hell’s going on, Hippo? Is he under arrest or something?”

“He will be, unless I can sign him over to you, his new guardian, and real quick.”

“Do you mind telling me what this is all about? Has Jeremy done something illegal?”

“That’s a little unclear right now, but there’s a possibility that he was involved in some criminal mischief. Remember those two assholes I told you about—the kids who were out with Teri Zolten’s girlfriends on the night she disappeared ?”

“I think so. Wasn’t one of them the Tanner kid?”

“Kirk Tanner and Jason Hagstad, seniors in high school, a pair of little pukes with too much time on their hands and too much money to spend. We got Tanner on a drunk-driving charge that night, remember?”

“I remember. Are you telling me that Jeremy was involved with those guys?”

“From what I’ve got so far, it looks like they’ve been harassing the hell out of old Hannie Hazelford. Four nights ago they—”

“
Hannie Hazelford?
That cute little old English lady? Why would someone want to harass
her?
”

Stu Bromton made fidgeting sounds on his end of the line, as though he appreciated how absurd his story would sound. The facts were these: On the night of Monday, February 17, someone had slashed all four tires of Hannie’s red Jaguar, which she had locked in her garage for the night.

On the following Wednesday, sometime shortly after midnight, someone had broken into the municipal vehicle park and stolen the city garbage truck, which happened to be full of garbage awaiting hauling to the county dump the next morning. After beating in the rear door of Hannie’s boutique on Frontage Street, the thieves had shoveled the entire load of garbage into her stockroom, after which they fled in the truck.

And finally, that same someone had firebombed the front door of Hannie’s cottage on Torgaard Hill at 2:00 a.m. on Thursday, February 20. Fortunately the bomb had been a crude Molotov cocktail consisting of a Gatorade bottle filled with gasoline and stuffed with a rag. Quick action by the fire department had prevented a really serious fire, but the damage had nonetheless run into the thousands of dollars.

“Hannie was lucky it was raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock, so the fire didn’t really take hold,” said Stu, “and fortunately one of the neighbors got a look at the perpetrators’ car, which—”

“Let me guess: belonged to either Tanner or Hagstad.”

“Kirk Tanner, to be exact,” confirmed the police chief. “A black ’67 Chevy. We even got the license number. I’ve had them in custody since this morning.”

“And you think that Jeremy was somehow involved in all this madness?”

“All I know is what Tanner and Hagstad have told me,” said Stu. “They’ve both confessed to the tires, the garbage, and the bomb, and they’ve both implicated Jeremy. They say that it was all his idea, and that he somehow made them do it.”

Carl gave out a disbelieving, rebuking laugh. “And you believed them? For crying out loud, Stu, they’re seniors in high school, and Jeremy’s just a thirteen-year-old kid! Since when do seniors in high school let themselves be led around by a little boy?”

It did sound weird, admitted Stu, but Tanner and Hagstad had told the same story with minimum prompting, and separately.

A story about a tagalong kid they had met a few weeks earlier in the parking lot of Liquid Larry’s bar. A kid who had approached their car as they were firing up their crack pipes, having just bought a couple of hits from someone named Cannibal. This kid had literally charmed his way into their company, with tales about strange powers and promises of awesomely good times. He’d made them feel things they had never felt before.