Greely's Cove (34 page)

“I don’t know,” replied Lindsay, “but I’ll bet you have a theory on that.”

“Hardly a theory, dear girl. The fact is, Jason and Kirk feel no hostility toward me whatsoever, and they never have. It’s
Jeremy
who hates me, who wants me gone from Greely’s Cove. He used the two older boys as tools with which to direct his hatred, knowing the inadvisability of doing it himself. After all, he had no wish to be caught and punished, no wish to—”

“
Jeremy?
Do you know what you’re saying? Why on earth would Jeremy want to hurt you?”

“He knows who I am, Lindsay. He knows that I represent a threat to him in his present state. The trouble he caused was a signal to me, a demonstration of his powers, a message that I should leave him alone with his evil designs.”

Lindsay discovered that she was gripping the armrests of her chair so tightly that her knuckles hurt. “You need help, Hannie,” she said as gently as she could. “You’re living in a world that doesn’t exist, one full of fear and hallucination. I’m certainly no expert, but I consider myself your friend, and I want to help you find someone who can—”

“You promised that you would drop your silly misgivings about my sanity, if only for a little while!” barked Hannie, this time with no trace of joviality. “Kindly be true to your word, at least until you’ve heard me out!”

Lindsay started and shrank back into her chair, biting her lower lip. “Very well, I’ll hear you out—”

“Your nephew is not the only victim of the evil,” said Hannie, draining the last of her gin. “It has defiled the whole community of Greely’s Cove. Twelve innocent people have fallen prey to its hunger thus far, perhaps more. Scores of others have suffered the grief of losing loved ones—”

“Are you actually saying that Jeremy has been responsible for the disappearances?” asked Lindsay, unable to restrain herself. “Do you realize how absurd that sounds? For the love of God, Hannie, he’s just a little boy! He’s been sick most of his life! Now he’s better, and he’s getting better all the time. A sane person couldn’t possibly believe that Jeremy was involved with the disappearances. Besides that, you don’t have your facts straight: Ten people have disappeared, not twelve.”

“I’m counting all the victims I know of thus far,” answered Hannie icily, “including Jeremy himself and—” She faltered, and her turquoise eyes seemed to glaze for a moment. “And Lorna, your sister.”

“Oh, he’s responsible for Lorna’s death, too, is he? I suppose he drove his own mother to suicide, or maybe even murdered her. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Not
Jeremy!
” spat the old woman. “The evil inside him! The personality that you know as Jeremy isn’t Jeremy at all. His body and mind are only the shell, the vehicle!”

“This has gone far enough, Hannie. I feel sorry for you, I really do, but I feel sorry for myself, too. I’ve just lost my sister, and for the past week my mother has been teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown. I’ve offered to help you, and I meant it, but I refuse to sit here and listen—”

“You
must
listen, Lindsay! I beg you to think of your nephew, of your sister, and to love them as you have always loved them—”

“My sister is dead!”

“Dead, yes, but not beyond harm. If you ever loved her, if you love her still, you will force yourself to hear me. There are powers afoot in this universe that your sophisticated scientific mythology can never explain, for which death and time are not barriers, but only tools. I know of such things, Lindsay, for I am among the last of an ancient Sisterhood that possesses the skills and knowledge of the Old Truth. There may yet be a way to help your sister and nephew, both of whom need our help desperately, but first you must hear me, and then you must believe me, and then...”

The raddled old face faded to ashen, took on a reptilian texture that the layers of makeup could not hide. Hannie actually shivered.

“And then, you must do
exactly
as I say.”

Against her good judgment, and fighting back the urge to show the old woman the door, Lindsay Moreland listened. She listened in stunned silence without interrupting, for more than an hour.

The night was far from over.

Robinson Sparhawk sat on the bed in his room at the West Cove Motor Inn, elbows propped on his knees and face buried in his hands, arguing with himself as he had been doing throughout most of the afternoon. Katharine the Great Dane lay curled at his feet, sometimes raising her head to stare at him with regretful eyes, now and then whining in sympathy.

Robbie let his hands drop into his lap and gazed into the huge dog’s face.

“Man’s best friend,” he murmured, as much to himself as to Katharine. “’Cept your best friend ain’t much of a man, is he, girl?”

There was a sadness in the way he cuffed her ear. She felt it and acknowledged it with a whimper and a lick.

“Yeah, I know,” said Robbie, as though the dog had replied in English, “I’m a good dude, in spite of the yellow streak up my back, right?”

He gathered his crutches from the floor beside the bed and hobbled into the bathroom, where he splashed his face with cold water and gargled with Scope to banish the mouth-funk of the cheroots he had smoked all day and into the night. The psychic sickness that had swept over him that morning at the police station—the nausea that had landed him briefly in the emergency room in Poulsbo—was long gone. Physically he felt himself again, but emotionally, spiritually, he felt leprous and weak and small. He felt ashamed.

“It ain’t right, high-tailin’ it away, leavin’ these folks to cope with it alone. And besides that, I’m not sure I can live with myself if I run away again. I’ve got to take a stand, Kate, to show some
guts.
...”

Talk is easy, talk is cheap. Talk takes no courage. So Robinson Sparhawk acted, pretending that he possessed the heart of a lion, the courage of a young bull.

Five minutes later he was showing Katharine into the cargo hold of his VW Vanagon, which Stu Bromton had sent over from the police station early in the afternoon. Then came the ritual of boarding the vehicle himself, pushing buttons to activate the motorized lift, settling his crippled body into the wheelchair, riding it up and into the cab, locking it into place.

He started the engine, flicked on the headlights and wipers, and maneuvered the van out of the motel parking lot and onto the main street of Greely’s Cove. He turned left, heading south toward Sockeye Drive.

“You must think I’m plumb nuts, huh, Kate?” he remarked, not taking his eyes from the deserted street ahead. “Since when do we go lookin’ for trouble, is that what you’re wondering? And what’re we gonna do with it when we find it?”

Not
if
we find the trouble, but
when.

Robbie’s fists tightened on the wheel as he fought back a resurgence of dread. From the very moment he had pulled the lid off a petri dish at the police station, the Gift had been in high gear, purring like a well-oiled engine, pumping steel-hard images into his brain. He saw a hulking Victorian mansion, amorphous in its shroud of forest fog—a dead place, guarded by trees with twisted, seemingly arthritic limbs. A tortuous road wound through dank woods until ending in a clearing, at a rusted-away gate with posts of crumbly brick—the threshold of Whiteleather Place. Yes, he even knew the name. And he knew where it was, knew how to get there.

“Funny, ain’t it, girl? A man gets into his fifties before he wakes up and sees that he’s missin’ a big piece of himself.” He gulped, almost dropping the burning cigar from his clenched teeth. He was talking again, talking; trying vainly to distract himself from the terror of the thing from which, as a matter of policy, he had always run; trying to convince himself with out-loud words that he had manly guts.

But the effort was failing. The fear was winning.

He halted at the lonely intersection of Frontage Street and Sockeye Drive, signaling a right turn but not yet turning. He listened to the swipe of the wipers and the whir of the defroster, staring through the windshield at the conical shafts of his headlights in the miasmal fog.

His gaze drifted leftward to an island of electric light that seemed to float in the algid darkness: the dim bulk of City Hall, lit feebly by a trio of arc lamps atop utility poles. In the bowel of that building was the headquarters of the Greely’s Cove Police Department, a musty, cement-smelling place, where perhaps even now—at this very moment, conceivably—sat Chief Stu Bromton, alone behind his paper-strewn metal desk. Robbie visualized the big man’s haggard face, saw the scars of shattered hopes in his sleepless eyes, felt a tweak of guilt.

“Goddamn it, Kate, I can’t run out on these people,” he muttered through his teeth, “not this time. For once in my life I’ve got to face up to—”

Face up to what?

Facing him now, in the fifty-second year of his life, was the unclean
something
that he had glimpsed years ago while leaning over the transom of a boat on Carlyle Lake—the same black threat, perhaps, that Mona Kleiman had called from New York to warn him about, a hungry life-force whose essence had poured forth from a smear of slime in the bottom of a petri dish.

“Okay, no more talk. We’re gonna make the crossing, girl, you and me together. If we get through it with both halves of our asses together, fine and dandy. If we don’t, what the hell? At least we’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”

Katharine whimpered her agreement and lay down on her blanket in the rear of the van. Robbie completed his right turn onto Sockeye Drive and drove gingerly through the night, humming with a lightheartedness that he did not feel, keeping his eyes peeled for a sign that said
Whiteleather Place.

Mitch Nistler lay between his grungy sheets and trembled in the darkness of his bedroom, while the rattletrap refrigerator in the kitchen filled the house with a grinding whir. Often he had cursed that sound when it had awakened him in the night, and just as often he had vowed to start putting aside booze money for a new fridge—a nice quiet Westinghouse that did not vibrate and ruckle the floorboards whenever the motor kicked on.

But tonight he welcomed the noise and prayed that it would never end, at least not until the sun had risen safely.

As though his prayer had been heard in hell and not in heaven, the motor kicked off, leaving an inane silence in which seconds became centuries, every wheezing breath an avalanche, each heartbeat a sledgehammer. He waited, hoping that the stirrings above his head had ended—or better still, that they had not really happened at all, that the scrapes and thumps and gurgling moans had only been figments of his own sick imagination. The silence grew, got heavier, blacker.

The sounds started again.

Mitch’s teeth clamped down on his tongue, igniting coppery pain and drawing blood that he tried not to swallow. He battled the urge to leap wildly from his bed and flee the house as he had done the previous night, after the bloating corpse of Lorna Trosper had opened it eyes and stared squarely into his own.

After he had awakened on the porch of Cannibal Strecker’s crack lab, cold and quaking with fever, the need for food and warmth had been critical. He had forced himself back into his stench-filled house, and even managed a hot shower and a bowl of Dinty Moore’s before collapsing in a heap onto his sorry bed. While drifting into croupy sleep he had vowed to deal later with the swelling monstrosity in the upstairs bedroom, as soon as he had mustered both the strength and courage—to bury the thing, burn the sheet that had surrounded it, scour the floor onto which it had leeched filth, air out the place.

Afternoon had become night and with night had come the sounds again, just as they had been coming every night for the past week, nudging Mitch out of torpid sleep. The sounds were so real, so immediate, so close.

Lorna Trosper could not be
alive,
much less pregnant with his child. He had embalmed her, for God’s sake! The noises from above could not possibly be those of a woman giving birth. A woman needs nine months, say the laws of nature. But suppose—just
suppose,
for the sake of argument—that Lorna had been pregnant
before
she killed herself...

Madness
, carped the rational side of Mitch’s brain. She
had
killed herself, and even if through some unholy miracle she had failed but had merely inflicted on herself a coma deep enough to fool a medical examiner and a mortician, Mitch had finished the job she had started, had drained away her blood and injected her with a potent formaldehyde solution, had punctured all her vital organs with a trocar and sucked out their contents.
Nobody could possibly live through that!

No doubt about it, Lorna Trosper was dead, dead,
dead
. And dead women don’t get pregnant or thrash about on squeaky old beds, or pace the creaky floors, or moan and groan with the pain of labor.

Or scream.

Which someone or something did in the upstairs bedroom, searing Mitch Nistler’s soul, freezing the breath in his throat and jelling the blood in his veins—a mind-shattering scream that shredded the velvety blackness, a razor-sharp keen of agony and terror.

He bolted from his bed and clambered on watery legs out of his bedroom, flailing wildly against the smothering dark; he collided painfully with a doorjamb and knocked a rickety bed table to the floor; he grabbled his way like a blind rodent in flight from a monstrous black cat.

Groping and thrashing, pursued and surrounded by the hellish scream, he lunged into the pitch-blackness of the living room and careened over his battered old armchair, sprawled on the floor, and scrambled crablike toward the front door, wanting only to be away, away. Suddenly the screaming ended, and just as suddenly his head crunched against unyielding wood—the door, much closer than he had supposed. His mind exploded in a fountain of sparks that cascaded and whirled behind his eyes. He bounced downward. Somehow he rolled to his front and planted his palms on the dirty floor, struggled to regain his sense of up and down, to gather in his stuttering limbs.

A light came oil.

Yellowness, filtered through a dirty lamp shade, invaded his swimming brain and inflicted another dose of terror. Seated on the tattered sofa was Jeremy Trosper, angelically blond and bright-eyed, as serene in the muddy lamplight as he must have been before the light snapped on, unruffled by the scream that just seconds earlier had reverberated through the house. Mitch gasped and sank back to the floor, horrified by the glint of relish in the boy’s eyes, the power and control in his face.