21 Winter in Hell I cursed aloud because, although I was exceeding the speed limit by only two or three miles an hour, I was certain that even a minor infraction would be sufficient to incur official wrath in this demon-ruled town. I glanced worriedly at the rearview mirror. On the roof of the black-and-white, the red emergency beacons began to flash, pulses of bloody light rippling across the morgue-white snowscape; he was going to come after us, which was not a promising beginning to our clandestine mission. "Damn," Rya said, twisting around in her seat to look out the back window. But before the cruiser could pull onto the roadway, another car-a mud-spattered yellow Buick-rounded the bend, going faster than I was, and the goblin-policeman's attention shifted to that more flagrant violator. We drove on, unmolested, as the cop stopped the Buick in our wake. A sudden gust of wind pulled a billion threads of snow off the ground, instantly wove them into a silver-gray curtain, and whipped the curtain across the road behind us, concealing the Buick and the hapless motorist and the goblin policeman from my view. "Close," I said. Rya said nothing. Ahead and slightly below us lay Yontsdown. She faced forward again, biting her lower lip as she studied the city into which we descended. The previous summer, Yontsdown had appeared grim and medieval. Now, in the frigid clutch of winter, it was even less appealing than it had been on the August day when I'd first seen it. In the murky distance the vomitous smoke and steam rising from the stacks of the filthy steel mill were darker and more heavily laden with pollutants than before, like columns of ejaculate from smoldering volcanoes. A few hundred feet up, the gray steam thinned and was torn to rags by the winter wind, but the sulfurous smoke spread from mountain peak to mountain peak. The combination of darkish clouds and sour yellow fumes gave the heavens a bruised look. And if the skies were bruised, then the city below was battered, lacerated, mortally wounded: It seemed to be not only a dying com munity but a community of the dying, a city-sized.cemetery. The row houses-many of them shabby, all of them sheathed in a film of gray dust-and the larger brick and granite buildings had previously made me think of medieval structures. They still possessed that anachronistic quality, though this time-with soot-discolored snow on some rooftops, with dirty icicles hanging from eaves, with icterous frost marbelizing many window-they also seemed, somehow, like rank after serried rank of headstones in a graveyard for giants. And from a distance the train cars in the rail yards might have been enormous coffins. I felt as if I were awash in psychic emanations, and nearly every current in that Stygian sea was dark, cold, and frightening. We crossed the bridge over the now frozen river, where huge slabs of jagged ice thrust up in jumbled profusion beneath the metal-grid floor and beyond the heavy iron railings. The tires did not seem to sing this time but instead emitted a shrill one-note scream. On the far side of the bridge, I abruptly pulled the station wagon to the curb and stopped. "What're you doing?" Rya asked, looking at the sleazy bar and grill in front of which I had parked. It was a cement-block building painted bile-green. Faded red enamel was peeling off the front door, and though the windows were free of frost, they were heavily streaked with grease and grime. She said, "What do you want here?" "Nothing," I said. "I . . . I just want to switch places with you. The emanations . . . all around me . . . pouring off everything. . . . No matter where I look, I see . . . strange and terrible shadows that aren't real, shadows of death and destruction to come. . . . I don't think I should drive just now." "The town didn't affect you like this before." "Yeah. It did. When I first came in with Luke and Jelly. Not this bad. And I pretty quickly got in control of myself. I'll get used to it again, too, in a little while. But right now I feel . . . battered. While Rya slid across the seat to take the steering wheel, I got out of the car and walked unsteadily around-to the other side. The air was bitterly cold; it smelled of oil, coal dust, gasoline fumes, frying meat from the grill of the nearby barroom-and (I could have sworn) brimstone. I got into the passenger's seat, slammed the door, and Rya pulled away from the curb, steering the car smoothly back into traffic. "Where to?" she asked. "Drive across town to the outskirts." "And?" "Find a quiet motel." I could not explain the dramatic worsening of the city's effect on me, although I had a few ideas. Perhaps, for reasons unknown, my psychic powers had become stronger, my paranormal perceptions more sensitive. Or perhaps the city's load of grief and terror had grown immeasurably heavier since my last visit. Or maybe I was more afraid of returning to this demonic place than I had realized, in which case my nerves were rubbed raw and were therefore extraordinarily receptive to the dark energy and formless but hideous images that radiated from buildings, cars, people, and miscellaneous objects on all sides. Or, by means of the special vision that my Twilight Eyes provided, perhaps I sensed that either I or Rya-or maybe both of us.-would die here at the hands of the goblins; however, if that clairvoyant message was trying to get through to me, I was evidently emotionally incapable of reading and accepting it. I could imagine it, but I could not actually bring myself to "see" the details of such a pointless and horrifying destiny..Approaching the two-story brick school where seven children had burned to death in a heating-oil explosion and fire, I saw that the flame-charred wing had been rebuilt since the previous summer, the slate roof repaired. Even now school was in session: Children were visible at a few of the windows. As before, a massive wave of clairvoyant impressions surged off the walls of that structure and rushed toward me with dismaying power and substance-occult substance but deadly nonetheless, as real to me as a murderous tidal wave. Here, as nowhere else I had ever seen, human suffering and anguish and terror could be measured almost as the ocean depth might be gauged: in tens, hundreds, even thousands of fathoms. A thin, cold spray preceded the murderous wave: disjointed augural images splashing across the surface of my mind. I saw walls and ceilings bursting into flame..... windows exploding in ten thousand deadly splinters..... whips of fire lashing through the classrooms on in-rushing currents of air . . . terrified children with their clothes aflame . . . a screaming teacher with her hair on fire . . . the blackened and peeling corpse of another teacher slumped in a corner, his body fat sizzling and bubbling as if it were bacon on a griddle. . . . The last time I had seen the school, I had received visions of both the fire that had already transpired and of the worse fire to come. But this time I saw only the future fire, as yet unlit, perhaps because the oncoming disaster was now closer in time than the blaze that had already done its work. The extrasensory pictures that sprayed over me were shockingly more vivid and more hideous than any I had ever known, each like a drop of sulfuric acid rather than water, painfully searing its way into my memory and soul: children in mortal agony; flesh blistering and bubbling and burning like tallow; grinning skulls appearing through the smoking, melting tissues that once had concealed them; eye sockets blackened and emptied by hungry flames. "What's wrong?" Rya asked worriedly. I realized that I was gasping, shuddering. "Slim?" She was letting up on the accelerator; the station wagon was slowing. "Keep driving," I said, then cried out as the pain of the dying children became, to a small degree, my pain as well. "You're hurting," she said. "Visions." "Of what?" "For God's sake . . . keep . driving." "But-" "Get past . . . the school!" To expel those words, I'd had to surface from the acid mist of psychic emanations, which was nearly as difficult as struggling up through a real cloud of dense and suffocating fumes. Now I tumbled back down into that shadowy inner realm of unwanted necromantic sight where the unspeakably gruesome and tragic future of the Yontsdown Elementary School pressed insistently upon me in grisly, blood-drenched detail. I closed my eyes because, when looking upon the school, I was somehow soliciting the release of the pictures of oncoming destruction that were locked in its walls, an infinite store of occult images like a great charge of potential energy that was at the critical point of kinetic transformation. However, by closing my eyes, I cut the number of visions only slightly and reduced the power of them not at all. The main wave of psychic radiation now towered over me and began to crash down; I was the shore on which this tsunami would break, and w
hen it.broke and receded, the shoreline might be changed forever beyond recognition. I was desperately afraid that immersion in those nightmarish visions would leave me emotionally and mentally broken, even insane, so I chose to defend myself in the same manner as I had done last summer. I squeezed my hands into fists, gritted my teeth, pulled my head down, and with a monumental effort of will I turned my mind away from those scenes of firey death and concentrated on good memories of Rya: the love for me that I saw in her clear, direct eyes; the lovely lines of her face; the perfection of her body, the lovemaking we had shared; the sweet pleasure of just holding her hand, of just sitting with her and watching television during a long evening together....... The wave fell down toward me, down, down....... I clung to thoughts of Rya. The wave hitJesus! -with crushing impact. I cried out. "Slim!" a far-off voice called urgently. I was pinned against the seat. I was assaulted, beaten, pounded, hammered. "Slim!" Rya . . . Rya . . . my only salvation. I was in the blaze, there with the dying children, over whelmed by visions of scorched and fire-eaten faces, withered and blackened limbs, a thousand terrified eyes in which reflected flames writhed and flickered . . . smoke, blinding smoke pouring up through the hot and creaking floor . . . and I smelled their burning hair and their cooking flesh, dodged falling ceilings and other debris . . . I heard the pitiful wails and screams that were so numerous and of such volume that they wove together in an eerie music that chilled me to the core in spite of the fire in which I found myself . . . and those poor doomed souls stumbled by me-frantic teachers and children-seeking escape but finding doors inexplicably closed and blocked, and now, dear God, every child in sight-scores of them-suddenly burst into flames, and I ran to the nearest of them, tried to smother him beneath me and put him out, but I was as a ghost in that place, unaffected by the fire and unable to change what was happening, so my phantom hands passed straight through the burning boy, straight through the little girl toward whom I turned next, and as their screams of pain and terror rose, I began to scream, too, I bellowed and shrieked in rage and in frustration, I wept and cursed, and finally I fell away, out of the inferno, down into darkness, silence, deepness, stillness like a marble shroud. Up. Slowly up. Into light. Gray, blurry. Mysterious shapes. Then it all cleared. I was slumped in my seat, damp and chilled with sweat. The station wagon was stopped, parked. Rya was leaning over me, one cool hand on my brow. Through her luminous eyes, emotions darted like schooling fish: fear, curiosity, sympathy, compassion, love. I straightened up a bit, and she eased back. I felt weak and still somewhat disoriented. We were in an Acme Supermarket parking lot. Rows of cars, dra bly.dressed in winter grime, were divided by low walls of soot-streaked snow shoved into place by plows during the most recent storm. A few shoppers shuffled or scurried across the open pavement, their hair and scarves and coattails flapping in a wind more brisk than it had been before I had passed out. Some of them were pushing wobbly-wheeled shopping carts that they used not only to transport groceries but for support when they slipped on the treacherous ice-spotted pavement. "Tell me," Rya said. My mouth was dry. I could taste the bitter ashes of the promised-but as yet unfulfilled-disaster. My tongue kept sticking to the roof of my mouth, and it felt thick. Nevertheless, slightly slurring my words and in a voice pressed flat by a massive weight of weariness, I told her about the holocaust that would someday wipe out an ungodly number of Yontsdown's elementary-school children. Rya was already pale with concern for me, but as I spoke, she grew paler still. When I finished she was whiter than Yontsdown's polluted snow, and shadowy smudges had appeared around her eyes. The intensity of her horror reminded me that she had personal experience of the goblins' torture of children from the days when she had clung to a precarious existence in an orphanage overseen by them. She said, "What can we do?" "I don't know." "Can we stop it from happening?" "I don't think so. The death energy pouring off that building is so strong . . . overwhelming. The fire seems inevitable. I don't think we can do anything to stop it." "We can try," she said fiercely. I nodded without enthusiasm. "We must try," she said. "Yes, all right. But first . . . a motel, somewhere we can crawl in and shut the door and block out the sight of this hateful town for a little while." She found a suitable place just two miles from the supermarket, at the corner of a not-too-busy intersection. The Traveler's Rest Motel. She parked in front of the office. Single-story, about twenty units. Built in a U-shape, with parking in the middle. The late-afternoon gloom was so deep that the big orange-and-green neon sign was already switched on; the last three letters of MOTEL were burned out, and the neon outline of a cartoonish, yawning face was noseless. Traveler's Rest was slightly shabbier than the general shabbiness of Yontsdown, but we were not looking for posh quarters and luxury; anonymity was our primary need, even more important than reliable heat and cleanliness, and Traveler's Rest looked as if it could provide precisely what we sought. Still drained by the ordeal which I had endured merely by passing the elementary school, feeling parched and weak ever so weak-from the debilitating heat of those foreseen flames, I had some difficulty pulling myself out of the car. The arctic wind seemed even colder than it actually was, for it contrasted sharply with the memory of fire that continued to hiss and flicker within me, vesicating heart and soul. I leaned against the open door, dragging in quenching breaths of moist March air, which should have helped but did not. When I slammed the door, I almost fell backward. I gasped, swayed precariously, got my balance, and leaned against the station wagon, dizzy, a strange grayness seeping in at the edges of my vision..Rya came around the car to assist me. "More psychic images?" "No. It's just . . . the after affects of the ones I already told you about." "After effects? But I've never seen you like this before." "I've never felt like this before," I said. "They were that bad)" "That bad. I feel . . ."blasted, crushed . . . as if I left a part of me back there in that burning schoolhouse." She put one arm around me for support, slipped her other hand under my arm. There was, as usual, great strength in her. I felt foolish, melodramatic, but my bone-deep exhaustion and rag-limp legs were real. To avoid destroying myself emotionally and psychologically, piece by piece, I would have to stay far away from the school, take routes through the city that kept those brick walls out of sight. In this case, as in no other, my clairvoyant vision was stronger than my capacity to endure the perceived pain of others. If ever it became necessary to enter that building to prevent the future tragedy that I had glimpsed, Rya might have to go inside by herself. That possibility did not bear consideration. Step by step, as she helped me around the car and across the pavement to the motel office, my legs firmed up. My strength slowly returned. The neon sign, hung on metal pins between two poles, squeaked in the polar wind. In a brief moment of relative silence that befell the street, I could hear the leafless branches of the ice-jacketed shrubs clicking against one another and scraping the walls of the building. When we were a few feet from the door to the office, when I was just about able to proceed under my own power again, we heard a dragon-deep roar in the street behind us. A large, powerful truck-a mud-brown Peterbilt cab pulling a long open-bed trailer heaped full of coal-was turning the nearest corner. We both glanced at it, and although Rya evidently noticed nothing unusual about the vehicle, I was instantly riveted by the company name and logo painted on the door: a white circle surrounding a black lightning bolt on a black background, and the Words LIGHTNING COAL COMPANY. With my Twilight Eyes I perceived emanations of a unique, disquieting nature. They were neither as specific nor as shattering as the grim clairvoyant images of death that had poured off the elementary-school building, but in spite of their lack of specificity and explosive effect, they had a disturbing power all their own. They chilled me so completely that I felt as if needle-fine spicules of ice were forming in my blood and were adhering to the walls of arteries and veins. A psychic and prophetic coldness, infinitely worse than the frigid winter air of March, radiated from the logo and name of that coal company. I sensed that here was a key to unlocking the mystery of the goblin nest that had been establis
hed in Yontsdown. "Slim?" Rya said. "Wait . "What's wrong?" "Don't know." "You're shaking." "Something . . . something . As I stared at the truck, it shimmered and appeared translucent, then almost transparent. Through it, beyond, I saw a strange, vast emptiness, a lightless and terrible void. I could still see the truck perfectly well, but at the same time I seemed to be staring straight through that vehicle at an infinite darkness that was deeper than night and emptier than the airless reaches between distant stars..I grew colder. From the fire at the school to ' the sudden arctic chill pouring off the truck, Yontsdown was welcoming me with the psychic equivalent of a brass band, albeit a band that played only tenebrous, decadent, and distressing music. Though I could not understand why the Lightning Coal Company affected me so powerfully, I was filled with horror so rich and pure that I was immobilized by it and barely able to breathe, as one might be totally disabled by a paralyzing but not deadly dose of curate. Two goblins, disguised as men, were riding in the Mack. One noticed me and stared back as if he realized there was something peculiar about the intensity with which I was studying him and his truck. As they drove past, he turned to keep his hateful crimson eyes on me. At the end of the block, the big coal-hauler went through a changing traffic light, but then it started to slow and began to pull to the side of the road. Shaking myself to fling off the disabling dread that had gripped me, I said, "Quick. Let's get out of here." Rya said, "Why?" "Them," I said, indicating the truck that had now stopped at the curb a block and a half away. "Don't run . . . don't let them see that they've spooked us . . . but quickly!" Without further questions she returned to the station wagon with me, slipped behind the wheel as I settled in the passenger's seat. Farther down the street, the coal truck was awkwardly executing a U-Turn, though its maneuvers were illegal. It was blocking traffic in both directions. "Damn, they're actually swinging back to take a closer look at us," I said. Rya started the engine, threw the station wagon in gear, and swiftly backed out of the parking space. Trying not to sound as frightened as I really was, I said, "As long as we're in their sight, don't move too fast. If possible, we want to avoid looking as if we're running away." She drove around the Traveler's Rest Motel, toward the parking-lot exit that led into the side street. As we slipped past the corner I saw that the coal truck had completed its U-Turn back there on the main thoroughfare and then it was out of sight. The instant that I could no longer see the truck, the special and terrible coldness faded. The impression of an infinite void no longer troubled me. But what had it meant? What was the formless, faultless darkness I had seen and recoiled from when I had been looking at the truck? What in God's name were the goblinkind up to at the Lightning Coal Company? "Okay," I said shakily. "Make a lot of turns, one street right after another, so they won't catch a second glimpse of us. Chances are they didn't get much of a look at the car, and I'm sure they didn't write down the license number." She did as I suggested, taking a random, winding route through the northeastern outskirts of the city, her glance flicking frequently toward the rearview mirror. "Slim, you don't think . . . did they realize you could see straight through their human masquerade?" "No. "They just . . . well, I don't know . . . I guess they just saw how intently I was staring at them . . . how shaken I was. So they.got suspicious and wanted a closer look at me. Their kind is suspicious by nature. Suspicious and paranoid." I hoped t hat was true. I had never encountered a goblin that could recognize my psychic power. If some of them had the ability to spot those of us who could see them, then we were in even deeper trouble than I had always thought, for we would lose our single, secret advantage. "What did you see this time?" she asked. I told her about the void, the image of a vast and lightless emptiness that had risen in my mind when I had looked at the truck. "What does it mean, Slim?" Worried and weary, I did not respond for a minute. I gave myself time to think, but taking time to think didn't really help. Finally I sighed and said, "I don't know. The emanations that poured off the truck . . . they didn't knock the stuffing out of me, yet in their own way they were even more horrible than the forthcoming fire I sensed at the school. But I'm not sure what it meant, what exactly it was that I saw. Except that somehow . . . through the Lightning Coal Company, I think we'll be able to learn why so many goblins are concentrated in this damn town." "That's the focus?" I nodded. "Yes." Of course, I was in no condition to begin an investigation of the Lightning Coal Company until tomorrow morning. I felt almost as gray as the winter sky, and no more solid than the ragged beards of mist that hung down from the ominous faces-warriors and monsters-that an imaginative eye could discern in the storm clouds. I needed time to rest, regain my strength, and learn to tune my mind away from at least some of the continuous background static of clairvoyant images that crackled and sparked off the buildings and streets and people of Yontsdown. Twenty minutes later, day gave way to darkness. You might have thought that night would cast a concealing cloak over the meanness of that wretched and noisome city, bringing it at least a small measure of respectability, but that was not the case. In Yontsdown the night was not stage makeup, as it might have been elsewhere. Somehow it emphasized the grubby, smudgy, smoky, foul, and fulsome details of the streets and drew attention to the grim, medieval quality of much of the architecture. We were sure that we had lost the goblins in the Peterbilt, so we pulled into another motel-the Van Winkle Motor Inn, which was not half as cute as its name. This was about four times the size of the Traveler's Rest, two stories. Some rooms opened onto the courtyard, and others opened onto a promenade-iron posts painted black but rust-pocked and peeling, an aluminum awning-that circled the back of the building's four wings. Claiming exhaustion after our long journey, we requested quiet rooms at the rear of the inn, as far from the traffic noise as possible, and the desk clerk obliged. Thus we not only enjoyed quietude but also we could park the station wagon out of sight of the street, as insurance against its being accidentally spotted by one of the Lightning Coal Company's goblin employees from whom we had fled, an improbable but by no means impossible danger. Our room was a beige-walled box with cheap, sturdy furniture and two inexpensive prints of clipper ships knifing through choppy seas, their sails all set and made full-bellied by a bracing wind. The dresser and nightstands were scarred with old cigarette burns, and the bathroom.mirror was spotted with age, and the shower was not as hot as we would have liked, but we intended to stay there only one night. In the morning we would find a small house to rent where we could have greater privacy to plot against the goblins. After showering, I felt relaxed enough to venture out into the city again long as Rya remained at my side, and only as far as the nearest coffee shop, where we had a good though unremarkable dinner. We saw nine goblins among the customers during the time we were there. I had to keep my attention fixed squarely on Rya, for the sight of their porcine snouts, bloody eyes, and flickering reptilian tongues would have ruined my appetite. Even though I did not look at them, I could feel their evil, which was as palpable to me as cold vapor rising off blocks of dry ice. Enduring those frigid emanations of inhuman hatred and rage, I slowly learned to filter out the background hum and hiss of psychic radiation that was now such a part of Yontsdown, and by the time we left the coffee shop, I was feeling better than I had since we had entered this city of the damned. Back at Van Winkle's Motor Inn, we moved the canvas bags of guns, explosives, and other illegal items into the room with us, for fear that gear would be stolen from the station wagon during the night. For a long time, in bed and darkness, we held each other, neither speaking nor making love, just holding, holding fast. Closeness was an antidote for fear, a -medicine for despair. Rya finally slept. I listened to the night. In this place the wind sounded unlike any other wind: predatory. Now and then I could hear the distant laboring of big trucks carrying heavy loads, and I wondered if the Lightning Coal Company hauled its product out of the nearby mines at all hours of the day. And if so-why? It also seemed to me that night in Yontsdown was more often disturbed by the wailing sirens of police cars and ambulances than in any other town or ci
ty I had ever known. At last I slept and, sleeping, dreamed. The frightening tunnel again. Inconstant amber lights. Oily pools of shadows lying between the lamps. A low, sometimes jagged ceiling. Strange smells. The echoes of running footsteps. A shout, a screech. Mysterious keening. Suddenly the car-shattering whoop-whoop-whoooooop of an alarm. A breathless, heart-hammering certainty that I was being pursued When I awoke, with a mucous-wet scream caught in my throat, Rya awoke simultaneously, gasping for breath and throwing off the covers as if she were freeing herself from the grasping hands of her enemies. "Slim!" "Here. "Oh, God. "Just a dream." We held each other again. "The tunnel," she said. "Me too." "And now I know what it was." "Me too." "A mine." "Yes." "A coal mine." "Yes." "The Lightning Coal Company." "Yes."."We were there." "Deep underground," I said. "And they knew we were there." "They were hunting us." "And we had no way out," she said with a shudder. We both fell silent. Far away: a howling dog. And occasionally we were brought scraps of another wind-torn sound that might have been the agonized weeping of a woman. In time Rya said, "I'm scared." "I know," I said softly, holding her closer, tighter. "I know. I know."
Dean Koontz - (1985) Page 17
