Mystery Walk

by Robert R. McCammon

  “Yes. I can.”

  “That remains to be seen. I’m a born skeptic, Mr. Creekmore. If you say a traffic light’s red, I’ll say it’s purple, just for the sake of an interesting argument.” Her eyes had taken on a shine. “If I decide you’re worth being here, you might rue the day you ever walked through the gate. I’ll throw every test I can think of at you. I’ll take your brain apart and put it back together again, more or less as it was. In two or three days you’ll hate me, but I’m used to that. You’ll have a room the size of a closet to sleep in, and you’ll be expected to work around here like everyone else. It’s no free ride. Sound like fun?”

  “No.”

  “Now you’ve got the idea!” She smiled cautiously. “Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock you’ll be right here, telling me your life story. I want to hear about your mother, and the black auras and the entities and…what was it? A shape changer? Indeed. Dinner’s in fifteen minutes, and I hope you like Polish sausage. Why don’t you go get your suitcase?”

  Billy rose from his chair, feeling confused about the whole thing. It was still at the back of his mind that he should leave this place, and he had enough money for a return ticket home. But he’d come this far, and he could stick out whatever was in store for him for at least three days. He didn’t know whether to thank the woman or curse her, so he left without saying a word.

  Dr. Hillburn looked at her wristwatch. She was already late getting home, and her husband would be waiting. But she took the time to read Merkle’s letters again. A pulse of excitement had quickened within her. Is this boy from Alabama the one? she asked herself—the same question she asked when any new subject came to the institute.

  Is Billy Creekmore the one who’ll show proof positive of life after death? She had no way of knowing, but she could hope. After a moment of reflection, she stood up and took her coat from a rack beside the desk.

  48

  WAYNE FALCONER’S SCREAM CRACKED the silence that had fallen over the Krepsin estate.

  It was just after two o’clock in the morning. When George Hodges reached Wayne’s bedroom—one of the few rooms in the strange house that had windows—he found Niles already there, pressing a cold washcloth to Wayne’s forehead. Wayne was curled up on the bed, his eyes feverish with fear. Niles was still dressed as if he’d just stepped out of a business meeting.

  “A nightmare,” Niles explained. “I was walking along the hall when I heard him. He was just about to tell me what it was, weren’t you, Wayne?”

  Henry Bragg came in, rubbing his eyes. “Who screamed? Wayne? What the hell’s…”

  “Wayne’s fine,” Niles said. “Tell me your dream, and then I’ll get you something for that headache.”

  Hodges didn’t like the sound of that. Had Wayne gone through his Percodan and codeine capsules yet again?

  In a halting voice, Wayne told them what he’d dreamed. It was a hellish vision of Jimmy Jed, a skeleton in a yellow suit gone green and rotten with grave dirt, screaming that the witch of Hawthorne had sent him to Hell where he would burn forever if Wayne didn’t free him. When he was finished, a terrible groan came from Wayne’s throat, and tears glittered in his eyes. “She knows where I am!” he whispered. “She’s out there in the night, and she won’t let my daddy come to me anymore!”

  Bragg had gone a sick gray. Wayne’s obsession with his dead father was getting worse, Hodges realized. For the past four nights, Wayne had been awakened with nightmares of Jimmy Jed and the Creekmores. Last night, he’d even sworn that he’d seen the Creekmore boy’s pallid face grinning through the window at him. Wayne was coming to pieces, Hodges thought, right out here on the sunny Coast.

  “I can’t sleep,” Wayne gripped Niles’s smooth white hand. “Please…my daddy’s rotted, and I…can’t make him all right again…”

  Niles said softly, “Everything’s going to be fine. There’s no need for you to be afraid, not while you’re in Mr. Krepsin’s house. This is the safest place in the world for you. Why don’t you put on your robe and slippers? I’ll take you to see Mr. Krepsin. He can give you something to calm your nerves—”

  “Now just one damned minute!” Hodges said angrily. “I don’t like all these late-night ‘visits’ Wayne’s been having with Krepsin! What’s going on? We came here for a business conference and so far all we’ve done is hang around this crazy house! Wayne’s got other obligations. And I don’t want him taking any more pills!”

  “Herbal medicine.” Niles held Wayne’s robe for him. “Mr. Krepsin believes in the healing power of Nature. And I’m sure Wayne will agree that you’re free to go anytime you please.”

  “What? And leave him here with you? Wayne, listen to me! We’ve got to get back to Fayette! This whole thing is as shady as the dark side of the moon!”

  Wayne tied his robe and stared at him. “My daddy said I was to trust Mr. Krepsin. I want to stay here for a while longer. If you want to go, you can.”

  Hodges saw that the young man’s eyes looked blurry and dazed. His grip on reality was lost, Hodges knew…and just what kind of pills was Wayne being given? “I’m begging you,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

  “Jim Coombs is going to take me up in the Challenger tomorrow,” Wayne said. “He says I can learn to fly it, no trouble at all.”

  “But what about the Crusade?”

  Wayne shook his head. “I’m tired, George. I hurt inside. I am the Crusade, and where I go, that’s where the Crusade goes too. Isn’t that right?” He looked at Henry Bragg.

  The lawyer’s smile was tight and strained. “Sure. Anything you say, Wayne. I’m behind you one hundred percent.”

  “You gentlemen needn’t stay up,” Niles said, taking Wayne’s elbow and leading him toward the door. “I’ll see that Wayne gets his sleep…”

  And suddenly George Hodges’s face reddened with anger, and he was crossing the room to clamp his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Listen to me, you—”

  Niles twisted around in a blur, and for an instant there were two fingers pressing rigidly against the hollow of Hodges’s throat. Hodges felt a brief, dizzying pain that almost buckled his knees, and then Niles’s hand dropped to his side. A low fire burned in the man’s pale gray eyes. Hodges coughed and backed away, his heart pounding.

  “I’m sorry,” Niles said. “But you must never touch me like that again.”

  “You…you tried to kill me!” Hodges croaked. “I’ve got witnesses! By God, I’ll sue you for everything you’ve got! I’m getting out of here right now!” He stalked past them and out of the room, his hand pressed to his throat.

  Niles glanced back at Bragg. “Will you see to your friend, Mr. Bragg? There’s no way for him to leave tonight, because the house is kept sealed by hydraulic pressure on the doors and the first-floor windows. I reacted hastily, and I regret it.”

  “Oh…sure. Well, no harm done. I mean, George is…kind of upset.”

  “Exactly. I’m sure you can calm him down. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  “Right,” Bragg said, and managed a weak smile.

  Augustus Krepsin was waiting in his huge bedroom one floor up and on the other side of the house. When Wayne had first seen it, he’d been reminded of a hospital room: the walls were an off-white, with a blue sky and clouds painted on the ceiling. There was a sunken living area with a sofa, a coffee table, and a few leather chairs. Persian rugs in soft colors covered the floor, and track lights delivered a delicate golden illumination. The large bed, complete with a console that controlled lighting, humidity, and temperature and contained several small closed-circuit television screens, was surrounded with a plastic curtain like an oxygen tent. An oxygen tank and mask were mounted next to the bed.

  The chess game was still on the long teak coffee table, where it had been left the night before. Krepsin, dressed in a long white robe, sat over it, his small eyes pondering options as Niles brought Wayne in; he was wearing his cotton booties and surgical gloves. His bulk was stuffed into a specially suppo
rted Angus steerhide chair.

  “Another nightmare?” he asked Wayne after Niles had left.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Come sit down. Let’s pick up the game where we left off.”

  Wayne took his chair. Krepsin had been teaching him the fundamentals of the game; Wayne was losing badly, but the knights and pawns and rooks and whatever-they-weres took his mind off the bad dreams.

  “They can be so real, can’t they?” Krepsin said. “I think nightmares are more…true than ordinary dreams, don’t you?” He motioned toward the two pills—one pink, one white—and the cup of herbal tea that was set in front of Wayne.

  Without hesitation Wayne swallowed the pills and drank the tea. They helped relax him, helped smooth out the throbbing pain in his head, and when he did sleep, toward morning, he knew he would have wonderful dreams of when he was a child playing with Toby. In those drug-induced dreams everything was bright and happy, and Evil couldn’t find its way into his head.

  “A little man fears inconsequential things, but only a man of great character feels true horror. I enjoy our talks, Wayne. Don’t you?”

  He nodded. Already he was feeling better, his brain clearing, all the musty cobwebs of fear drifting away in what felt like a fresh summer wind. In a little while he would be laughing like a small boy, the worries and responsibilities faded away like bad dreams.

  “You can always judge a man,” Krepsin said, “by what makes him afraid. And fear can be a tool, as well; a great lever that can move the world in any direction. You of all people must know the force of fear.”

  “Me?” Wayne looked up from the board. “Why?”

  “Because in this world there are two great terrors: disease and death. Do you know how many millions of bacteria inhabit the human body? How many organisms that can suddenly become malignant with disease and leech themselves into human tissues? You know how frail flesh can be, Wayne.”

  “Yes sir,” Wayne said.

  “It’s your move.”

  Wayne studied the inlaid ivory board. He moved a bishop, but had no particular plan in mind other than to capture one of Krepsin’s black towers.

  Krepsin said, “You’ve already forgotten what I’ve told you. You must keep looking over your shoulder.” He reached across the board, his face like a bloated white moon, and moved the second of his black rooks to capture Wayne’s last bishop.

  “Why do you live like this?” Wayne asked. “Why don’t you ever go outside?”

  “I do go outside, occasionally. When I have a trip scheduled. Forty-nine seconds between the door and the limousine. Forty-six seconds between the limo and the jet. But don’t you understand what floats in the air? Every plague that ever ravaged across cities and countries, destroying hundreds and thousands, began with a tiny microorganism. A parasite, riding a sneeze or clinging to a flea on a rat’s hide.” He leaned toward Wayne, his eyes widening. “Yellow fever. Typhus. Cholera. Malaria. The Black Plague. Syphilis. Blood flukes and worms can infect your body, drain your strength, and leave you a hollow shell. The bubonic plague bacillus can lie dormant and impotent for generations, and then suddenly it can lay half the world to waste.” Small droplets of sweat glimmered on Krepsin’s skull. “Disease,” he whispered. “It’s all around us. It’s outside these walls right now, Wayne, pressed to the stones and trying to get in.”

  “But…people are immune to all those things now,” Wayne said.

  “There is no such thing as immunity!” Krepsin almost shouted. His lips worked for a few seconds before he could speak. “Levels of resistance rise and fall; diseases shift, parasites mutate and breed. Bubonic plague killed six million people in Bombay in 1898; in 1900 it broke out in San Francisco, and the same bacillus that causes plague has been found in the ground squirrel. Don’t you see? It’s waiting. There are cases of leprosy in the United States every year. Smallpox almost spread into the United States in 1948. The diseases are still out there! And there are new bacteria, new parasites evolving all the time!

  “If disease could be controlled, so could death,” Krepsin said. “What power a man would have! Not to have to…fear. That would make a man godlike, wouldn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve…never thought about it that way.” Wayne stared at Krepsin’s bulbous face. The man’s eyes were fathomless pools of ebony, the pores in his flesh as big as saucers. His face seemed to fill the entire room. Warmth coursed through Wayne, and a feeling of safety and belonging. He knew he was safe in this house, and though he might have nightmares sent by the witch-woman, she couldn’t get in at him. Nothing could get in at him: not pressures or responsibilities or fears, not any of the diseases of real life.

  Krepsin rose from his chair with a grunt like a hippo rising from dark water. He lumbered across the room, drew aside the plastic curtain ringing his bed, and pressed a couple of buttons on the command console. Instantly images appeared on the three videotape screens. Wayne squinted and grinned. They were video tapes of his television show, and there he was on the three screens, touching people in the Healing Line.

  “I’ve watched these again and again,” the huge man said. “I hope I’m watching the truth. If I am, then you’re the one person in the world who can do for me what I want.” He turned to face Wayne. “My business is very complex and demanding. I own companies from L.A. to New York, plus many in foreign countries. I make a phone call, and stocks do what I want them to. People do anything to get close to me. But I’m fifty-five years old, and I’m susceptible to diseases, and I…feel things slipping away. I don’t want that to happen, Wayne. I’ll move Heaven—or Hell—to keep things as they are.” His black eyes burned. “I want to keep death away from me,” he said.

  Wayne stared at his hands, clenched in his lap. Krepsin’s voice echoed inside his head as if he were sitting within a huge cathedral. He remembered his daddy telling him to listen hard to what Mr. Krepsin had to say, because Mr. Krepsin was a wise and just man.

  Krepsin put his hand on Wayne’s shoulder. “I’ve told you my fear,” he said. “Now I want to hear yours.”

  Reluctantly at first, Wayne began. Then he told more and more, wanting to get it all out of him and knowing Mr. Krepsin would understand. He told him about Ramona Creekmore and the boy, about how she’d cursed both of them and wished his father dead, about his Daddy’s death and rebirth, how she was making him have nightmares and how he couldn’t get her face, or the demon boy’s, out of his mind.

  “She…makes my head hurt,” Wayne said. “And that boy…sometimes I see his eyes, staring at me like…like he thinks he’s better than me…”

  Krepsin nodded. “Do you trust me to do the right thing for you, Wayne?”

  “Yes sir I do.”

  “And I’ve made you feel comfortable and safe here? And I’ve helped you sleep and forget?”

  “Yes sir I…feel like you believe me. You listen to me, and you understand. The others… I can tell they’re laughing at me, like up on the Tower…”

  “The Tower?” Krepsin asked. Wayne rubbed at his forehead but didn’t reply. “I want to show you how sincere I am, son. I want you to trust me. I can end your fear. It would be a simple thing. But…if I do this thing for you, I’ll soon ask you to do something for me in return, to show me how sincere you are. Do you understand?”

  The pills were working. The room had begun to slowly spin, colors merging together in a long rainbow scrawl. “Yes sir,” Wayne whispered. “They should burn in the fires of Hell forever. Forever.”

  “I can send them to Hell, for you.” He loomed over Wayne, squeezing his shoulder. “I’ll ask Mr. Niles to take care of it. He’s a religious man.”

  “Mr. Niles is my friend,” Wayne said. “He comes in at night and talks to me, and he brings me a glass of orange juice just before I go to bed…” Wayne blinked and tried to focus on Krepsin’s face. “I…want some of the witch’s hair. I want to hold it in my hand, so I’ll know…”

  The huge face smiled. “A simple thing,” it whispered.<
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  49

  INDIAN SUMMER HAD LINGERED late. The blue evening light was darkening as yellow leaves stirred on the trees and a few of the dead ones chattered on the roof of the Creekmore house.

  Ramona turned up the lamp wicks in the front room as darkness gathered outside. A small fire burned in the hearth, her chair pulled up so she could warm herself near it—she followed the Choctaw custom of building little fires and stepping close, instead of the white man’s belief in making a bonfire and standing back. On a table next to her a lamp burned, a metal reflector behind it, so she could read for the third time the letter she’d gotten from her son today. It was written on lined notebook paper, but the envelope had Hillburn Institute and the address in nice black print up in the left-hand corner. Billy had been in Chicago for almost two weeks, and this was the second letter he’d sent. He described what he’d seen of the city and told her all about the Hillburn Institute. He’d had long talks with Dr. Mary Hillburn, he’d said, and also with the other doctors who worked on a volunteer basis.

  Billy said he’d met some of the other people, but many of them seemed withdrawn and kept to themselves. There was a Mr. Pearlman, a Mrs. Brannon, a Puerto Rican girl named Anita, and a scruffy-looking hippie named Brian; all of them, it seemed, had had an experience with what Dr. Hillburn termed “theta agents” or “discarnate entities.” Billy also mentioned a girl named Bonnie Hailey; she was very pretty, he’d written, but she stayed apart from the others and he saw her only infrequenty.

  He was taking tests. Lots of tests. They’d punched him with needles, wired electrodes to his head and studied squiggles on long pieces of paper that came from the machines he’d been connected to. They’d asked him to guess what kind of geometric shapes were printed on something called Zener cards, and he was keeping a diary of his dreams. Dr. Hillburn was very interested in his experiences with the shape changer, and whenever they talked she took everything down on a tape recorder. She seemed more demanding of him than of the others., and she’d said that she looked forward to meeting Ramona sometime. Next week there would be hypnosis sessions and sleep deprivation, not something he particularly looked forward to.