FURNACE

by Muriel Gray

  It was a thick sound, like a clumsily slaughtered animal’s death rattle, rasped through a syrup of mucus. And yet despite the distortion and the effort that was plain in its making, the sound was unmistakable.

  It was trying to say his name.

  Josh straightened up slowly, turning his head in the direction of the unbearable noise. But before his darting eyes could register the source, the noise came again, and this time whatever was making it did a better job of working its hellish mouth around the single syllabic. There was an intelligence in the sound, a mocking, insolent imitation of human language that communicated centuries of unfathomable hatred.

  Almost as if the sound of his name had been a trigger. Josh found himself crouching like defensive prey.

  The street was wide and dark and empty, the houses unlit and sleeping at a luxuriously long distance from the sidewalk. Josh wiped his mouth and looked ahead. Her street was the next on the left. He was almost sure.

  He peered up at the biggest tree in the line of closely planted chestnuts and took an unconscious sideways step away. Like most elderly chestnuts, the tightly packed branches made its nighttime shape black and complex, but the more he stared unblinking at it, the more its branches appeared to have a random motion other than the gentle stirring of breeze.

  He watched as that shape, the shape that should have merely been the snarl of old wood, untangled itself slowly. There was a glimpse, no more, of details. Black matted hair on skin that glistened, sharp-angled limbs from which smoke curled like steam from a pie, a flash of something that could have been outsized yellowed teeth or claws.

  And then with a speed that was fluid and reptilian, it began to descent. The branches rustled heavily in protest and Josh started to run. He stuck his jaw forward, willing his body to keep pace with it as his legs slammed on the sidewalk and his arms pummelled the air at his sides. He ran until his eyes had stopped rolling like those of a frightened horse and his lungs felt as if they were going to burst like balloons in his chest.

  Loping to a stop at the T junction. Josh bent forward again, fighting for breath, fighting for the courage just to stand upright. Because right now, he wanted to huddle like a foetus on the sidewalk and lie there until Judgment Day.

  And as he stared at the ground with eyes still wide and his breathing still agony, he suddenly found something—if not courage, then its close relation, anger—growing from the very heart of him.

  Standing up and turning to the dark and empty street behind him, Josh Spiller filled his lungs and bellowed with a shout to wake the dead.

  “Sunrise! You fucking bastard! You don’t feed until sunrise! You hear me?”

  If the shape in the trees, now no longer visible, was insensible to the shout, then the residents of Muir Avenue were not. Like the end credits of The Flintstones, lights began to come on behind windows in a random patchwork along the street. Josh stood panting, his arms hanging limply at his sides, and then slowly looked around as if he had arrived in this place from another planet. For a moment he thought he had. It was familiar. The street, the feeling, the weight on his heart. He was outside again. Outside and alone again, in a prosperous avenue of big silent houses. Behind those lit windows were people who didn’t want him there. Wiping his mouth, he turned away, increasing his stride as if strength of purpose gave him immunity from madness.

  “Wheeeaaa. Wheeeea.” He stopped dead, and from his lips a small, helpless plea piped thinly into the night air. “No.”

  It was spinning slowly in the cold breeze and the air was full of the unlubricated labours of its revolutions.

  There was no doubt that it was the sign. It stood in almost exactly the same spot on Nelly McFarlane’s street as it had on that uncrossable boundary to Carnegie. But this time there were no shouts of children, no sounds of mowers and invisible picnics. This time there were only the dry rustling of the trees and the sound of metal grinding on metal. He was frozen to the spot, staring dumbly and with terror at nothing more than a circular piece of tin selling ice cream. It was directly under the streetlamp, and the faces of the children were illuminated clear and fresh as though it had been painted yesterday.

  But there was no Tanner’s ice cream anymore.

  So he wasn’t seeing it. That was the explanation. It quite simply wasn’t there. He started to move forward. He would walk past it and keep walking to her house, and the sign would just have to join this week’s long list of things that couldn’t, shouldn’t be happening.

  Josh kept walking, and the sign kept turning. Their tongues were licking their cones, and their half-moon eyes registered the pleasure of it. In and out, the tiny tongues, darting over tiny teeth. Sunny smiles that, as the sign seemed to gather speed, were growing wider. Saliva tickled down the back of Josh’s throat, reminding him to swallow or breathe. He did both.

  The mouths of the boy and girl were starting to stretch into grotesque wide slashes, splitting their faces in two, and as he watched, those tiny white teeth were growing into something else. Their eyes were alive with malice, not pleasure, and they stared out at him like unworldly beasts from their tin circle.

  Could he shout at this? Was he sure that this was merely a sick illusion to feed the fire of his terror? He was sure of nothing anymore. His world was a dark and hateful maze of fear, in which every dark passage led only to the centre of something unmapped and inescapable.

  The tongues had now changed. Impossibly elongated, livid, red forked membranes slithering across long, reeking teeth. And they seemed to be able to leave the confines of the sign. Josh was no longer looking at a picture. The faces were standing apart from the tin, the tongues darting out over the sidewalk, unquestionably looking to find contact with Josh.

  He stumbled more than ran, and as he fell forward in a series of swaying dives, he whimpered like a child, saliva leaking from the corners of his lips. Red darts flew at him as he fell past, and above the screaming of the spinning sign he could hear a reptilian hiss of irritation as the tongues failed to meet their target. Falling to his knees, he crawled for a few feet until he found the balance to stand. The hissing was louder, with a growing undercurrent of vibrating resonance that suggested something larger was emerging from the three-dimensional horror than those two small, pointed faces. Unable even to make the sounds of fear now, he merely gasped as he pushed himself up. Lifting his head he saw a figure two houses away standing on the lawn, hands on hips, legs apart. Josh wanted to raise an arm and call for help, but there was too much that was familiar about that stance. His legs gave way and he crumpled onto the ground like a broken puppet.

  There were voices now. He could hear a man and a woman talking. And then footsteps, clicking along the sidewalk towards him. There was no strength in him to resist. He lifted his head and looked up like a puppy at the two people walking towards him. The woman’s voice spoke first. Quietly, and with great concern.

  “Mr. Spiller? Is that you?”

  The man bent to Josh’s level and took him by the shoulder. “Can you stand?”

  Josh didn’t reply, but he found himself being helped to his feet. He blinked at the faces swimming in front of him, and when Nelly McFarlane said softly, “I think you’d better come inside,” he went like a lamb.

  30

  Sim’s bed was no more than a narrow series of wooden slats, topped with a thin horsehair mattress. But mostly it afforded him great comfort. He liked to lie in it on his back, his face turned to the peach-painted ceiling that was Josh’s study floor. He’d worked long hours all his life, from the first day he’d arrived in this country that was as hard to live in as it was easy, and to Sim the chance to lie in bed with nothing pressing on his time was a luxury he felt justified in savouring. Tonight, however, he lay in bed on his side, his face towards the door, thin knees drawn up to his waist.

  Elizabeth thought him mad, and perhaps he was. The images that had filled his head when the phone rang had been so terrible, so beyond anything the sane mind could conjure that he felt sick
at their memory. And now, in the dark of the night, still they wouldn’t depart. He could force his fists into his face, and there, moving behind his tightly closed lids as though his eyes were open to a bright flame, were sights and sensations of such grotesque evil he wondered how long he could bear it.

  It was the hunger that was the worst of it. That thing that was all around Josh was so very hungry. And Josh. He’d been there, all right, shouting as one would over a storm, without knowing that the dreadful thing was blocking his contact and revelling in his isolation.

  How could such things exist? He had lived the best part of seventy years and only once, as a child, had he experienced any hint that there was anything in the world more harmful than men.

  A neighbour, a man called Nringar who had been openly stealing from Sim’s father, had terrified him one day by revealing what he called his “other faces.” Sim was cleverer than the rest of the stupid villagers, the man had told him. He would be able to see them if he looked. He’d concentrated, as instructed, flattered by the compliment, and what he’d seen made him unable to sleep soundly or walk alone for the rest of his time in the village.

  Of course as the years passed, and a modern American life replaced the Korean one he’d left, he had passed it off as childish fantasy, no more than the infectious disease of superstition that affected all those who lived as they had, in isolated jungle villages.

  Now, he was no longer sure. His gift for guessing the identity of callers he’d regarded as no more than a parlour trick. If it was, then he was a madman, conjuring up things from a dark crack of his soul that no civilized man would comprehend. And if it was more than a trick, a real gift that let him know more than a man should, then he was wrong about most things in his life. Man was a known quantity: dangerous and evil, arrogant and foolish, destructive beyond his own ability to repair, full of vengeance and powerful with malice. But the terrors of mankind at its worst were nothing as compared with the unholy, predatory force that Sim had sensed guarding Josh.

  Sim bunched his fists tighter. That was it. The nightmare had been guarding him. Not in the sense of protecting Josh, but the very opposite. Guarding its prey, the way a cat plays with a mouse.

  He curled tighter in his hard little bed. When, he wondered, would the cat lift its paw and open its mouth?

  Ethan and Noah. Even forming those sweet, simple syllables in his mind made Sheriff John Pace ache with the love of them. He sat on the long porch of his eight-bedroom house, feeling the cold night air rasp at his skin, and wondered why it had taken him this long to address their future. He wanted to believe it was because everything had been so easy, like being in a dream, that he had neglected the reality. But it wasn’t true. It hadn’t been easy. It had been getting more difficult with every passing day. Maybe it had been different for his father, but somehow Pace didn’t think so. He’d watched him grow prematurely old with the strain of it all, and for what? For this? A big fancy house and three cars? Were his family really such underachievers that they were forced to stoop to…

  His eye caught the Stars and Stripes, stuck into an earthenware pot on the patio, blowing gently in the breeze, and the word “murder” fluttered like a trapped insect in his heart as though to echo the flapping silk.

  Those two men had only been serving that flag. And he; what had he been serving when he’d handed those men, guilty of nothing more than the poor pretence of being tourists, the booklets on “Camper Safety in the Appalachians,” with two strips of potent dried flesh hidden between their pages?

  Pace closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the cushioned headrest of the porch chair. Only three years old, and yet Ethan Pace had taken the hand of his big brother. Noah, a week ago and asked his father if the bad things Mrs. McKlintoch talked about at school, the things that came and took away boys and girls tried to look as if it was nonsense, but his eyes were pleading for his father to confirm they were safe.

  Were they? Could their father promise that? He gripped the arms of his beechwood chair as the memory of what he’d seen pushed its way past the honeyed image of his children’s faces.

  “Don’t be there, John.”

  It was said so simply and solicitously.

  “Nobody needs to be there. It’s better. In fact, that’s the whole point, don’t you see? And what’s more, until their time, it’s still dangerous for you.”

  But he had been there. He’d followed them during their last hour, watching their speeding camper-van swing erratically around the road as they tried to escape the inescapable. Had he hoped he could reverse what he’d taken part in? No. That wasn’t it. The truth of admitting it was hideous, but he forced himself to face it. John Pace had simply been curious.

  And though she could have, McFarlane hadn’t stopped him. Because there was no better warning to the curious than to let them have that curiosity sated.

  They had run from the van, the taller of the two men with his gun drawn, waving it wildly in the air at nothing. At least nothing Pace could see. The other man followed, panting, falling into the woods as though the tightly packed oaks would protect them from what was coming. The men ran as far as five or six trees deep, and he thought he would lose sight of them. Just as his hand reached reluctantly for the door handle he saw something, deeper in the woods than the men had penetrated, and it made him take his hand from the door and sink lower back into his seat. The dawn was bright, the rays of the sun just appearing over the top of a thick blanket of scarlet leaves.

  But even so, the interior of the forest was as dark as twilight. And from it a sickly light was growing, flickering like a guttering candle, making a new forest of dancing shadows amongst the tree trunks. In its light, Pace could see the silhouettes of the two men, and as he watched, his eyes only just above the rim of the car window, both figures dropped to their knees before the light as if it were their executioner. Even now, although the picture he saw was burned into his brain like a brand, he was unable fully to comprehend the hideous shapes it had made in the trees.

  The speed. That anything could move as swiftly and effortlessly through such thick undergrowth was unthinkable. But it had come at the two figures with an almost mechanical velocity. And the animalistic choreography of its slaughter. Dear God, that had been the worst. Slick, fluid yet random movements. Sometimes tearing and ripping, sometimes pulling and tossing. But not an animal. No. Not even close to an animal. The concentration of its gait and posture almost suggested an elegance of human toil, a master slaughterer excelling at its work, comprehending, savouring and analysing the destruction in a way no animal ever could.

  As the last of the screams died, screams that had caused a hot sheet of urine to soak the car seat beneath him, he glimpsed the face of the creature through the tendrils of smoke that curled from its flesh, its muscular, pulsating body crouching as it turned to look at him through the gaps in the trees.

  From such a distance he could barely make out its features, and yet he had no doubt that the two crimson slits of hatred and cunning that served as its eyes were boring into him and had known of his presence all along. Even from the cowed position in his car, he had read them. It was longing for him, aching to consume him as it had consumed the two Washington men, but Pace knew in his frozen heart that it was unable to, and he closed his eyes against the horror of it.

  He’d stayed like that for God knows how long, huddled, wet and terrified, until a numbness in his joints made him shift and dare to open his eyes.

  The woods were still and gloomy, and slowly he’d slid up in his seat and started to scan the undergrowth for movement. There was none.

  He should have driven away, but he couldn’t. The self-loathing and disbelief at what he’d participated in was stronger at that moment than his fear, and in a numb trance he’d opened the car door and started to walk towards the woods.

  There was silence. No birdsong or distant deer broke the still-hot air, and as he walked between the first two oaks, the noise of his feet on the dry tw
igs of the forest floor was like firecrackers going off.

  Sheriff Pace had attended the scene of almost every kind of human carnage you could name: car crashes that looked like an explosion in a butcher’s shop window; a knifing in one of the backwood cabins that had left the victim alive and twitching, but without ears, nose or lips; and a sawmill accident that had taken off a man’s head and shoulders. He expected worse here. He had seen many acts of violence, and he steeled himself.

  A perfect murder. There was nothing. No pieces of flesh or tattered cloth. No burnt remains or blood-soaked earth. Only smells. And the first smell that hit him would have been almost delicious, the same smell firemen know but never discuss when collecting burnt bodies, that can make a hungry man think of chicken with herbs. But the secondary odour lingering in the trees was stronger than burnt human flesh. It was an unspeakable concoction of rot and disease, of faecal matter and bile. He’d turned and walked to his car, chewing at the insides of vomit-coated cheeks to prevent his scream.

  Pace couldn’t remember how he’d got back to Furnace. He must have driven, but his recollection stopped after getting into his car and quietly closing the door.

  Ethan and Noah.

  He opened his eyes again and breathed the night air in through flaring nostrils. Bobby Hendry had strayed away from Jesus. He must have. But he’d been a cheat. He’d blown his brains out before the thing that Mrs. McKlintoch was warning his children about could come and take him away.

  John Pace suddenly knew, with a certainty that was as strong as his love for his family, that the only way to be a real father, a real man, was not to provide a house and cars, deluxe health insurance or riding lessons. It was to be able to look his sons in the eyes and tell them with sure and certain knowledge that nothing would ever come loping through the trees looking for them. Never.

  Now all he had to figure out was how a man in a town like this could keep a promise like that.