Eight of the thick, snake-like appendages came out of a center that had the tightly wrinkled appearance of an anus.
This thing was in no way normal. It wasn't even something you'd find in the tropical rain forest, not as far as she knew, and she felt sure she'd know about anything this odd. They'd have them in zoos, or stuffed in museums.
To get the thing out, she was going to have to pick it up in her bare hands. She was going to have to touch it, and she didn't know if that was possible. Again, she shoved it with her foot. It was upside down now, still totally motionless.
But it had come in here. So it could move if it wanted to. It wasn't dead, and she must not allow herself to forget that. On the one hand, she had to be careful. On the other, if it slipped away down the mine, then what was probably the story of a lifetime would have slipped through her fingers. Not to mention the danger, and there was no doubt in her mind that this thing represented danger.
She reached down, grabbed the two most prominent coils like handles and lifted the thing. There was a lot of weight, more than ten pounds. But this was gold, proof absolute, the most valuable scientific specimen in the world, the biggest story.
Staggering, she carried the thing up out of the mine, lurched through the hole in the brick wall, and dropped it onto the floor of the root cellar itself.
Catching her breath, she shone her light upward. Soon she found the place where she'd come down. She would have to shove the thing up, then grab roots and haul herself hand over hand to the surface. Too bad she hadn't kept up her aerobics. She was going to need every bit of strength she possessed.
But when she picked the thing up and held it overhead, she realized that she was going to need more than strength. She had miscalculated the depth of the root cellar.
When she saw that she was trapped, she cried out, a brief shout, stifled almost at once.
Frantic, she cast her light around, looking for a hanging root, maybe a ladder.
The piles of bricks—she could build up a platform.
It took time, and she discovered that the bricks were soft, old and of poor quality.
As she worked, she watched the coiled creature, which never once moved, never an inch.
In fifteen minutes she had a platform three feet high. When she stood on it, her head was pressed up into the tangle of brush and roots above.
She picked up the coiled creature and put it onto the flat surface. It landed with a wet sound, and seemed to quiver a bit. Getting up onto the platform, she heaved the thing upward, gripping its slick, cool coils in her dusty hands.
The roots and briars overhead seemed almost to come alive, fighting its passage to the surface. She struggled, found that she couldn't get it quite to the edge of the hole. She had to wedge it in among the roots, then climb up herself.
As she climbed, it slipped, falling toward her, and she caught it against her chest. She pulled up with her arms, struggling desperately now, her feet seeking purchase, not finding it. The thing was knobby and knotted, as hard within as wood, but the surface was taut and felt as if there was a muscular fascia immediately beneath the skin. It was slippery and, she realized, also beginning to flex. She kicked, slipped back, kicked again.
The smell that had hurt her throat was strong now, and easily identifiable: the thing was sweating urine, and she was being soaked in it. The wetter it got, the more slippery the skin became.
She could feel the wetness soaking through her blouse, running along her midriff, tickling down her belly and inner thighs. A wave of nausea rocked her, making her gobble back her own gorge. Then she slipped, felt the thing collapse down on her shoulders, felt the urine running down her face and neck.
She grappled for purchase, slipped, slipped more—then found a long loop of root. As she straightened her leg she burst to the surface. The bundle in her arms fell to the ground and she sprawled out beside it.
She sat up. She had the damn thing. Immediately she gathered it into her arms, embracing it to prevent its slipping back into the hole. The surface of the thing was now covered with a sort of mucus, as slippery as boiled okra Moonlight flooded down, glimmering on the ooze that covered her hands. She raised her head, trying to escape the stink.
She went off toward her car, charging fast. She got it into the front seat, pushed it down onto the floor under the dash.
The next and urgent step was to get herself cleaned off. Coxon Kill wasn't far from here, running clean and fresh. The urine was so acidic that her skin was beginning to sting.
Using her flashlight, she crossed the road and dashed into the woods, went at an angle to the mound, toward the place where the kill turned and crossed the meadow where she'd originally been chased. Soon she heard the burbling of the stream. She threw off her wet shirt and sat down beside it, splashing herself with water. She splashed furiously, rubbed, then soaked her shirt. She rubbed it along the bottom stones, squeezed it, then drew it soaking out of the black water and sluiced herself, her face, her chest, her abdomen. As the freezing cold water poured down her, the stinging diminished. This was the second time that water had delivered her. She decided that she loved Coxon Kill.
Cold as it was, she got her shirt back on. Now she had to do one more thing, and that was to get Brian and get this thing to the authorities. He'd know scientists who would do the right thing with it. She wasn't ready to turn it over to the state police, not without knowing how they would approach the investigation.
She reached the edge of the woods and stepped into the road. Darkness, silence. She began to walk, her heart slowing, her breath coming more easily. Her car was fifty feet away, and she started feeling in her pocket for her keys.
The Viper, when it came, came like fury, its engine pulverizing the silence. She leaped back, falling into a clump of weeds, feeling briars dig into her back.
At once there was a screech of brakes, the sound of tires wailing in protest, a red shadow turning in the dark, then the cruel, rising snarl of the engine.
She was still rolling but she wasn't going to be fast enough;
the car was going to kill her. As she rolled, her flashlight flew to pieces around her.
As the moon went behind clouds the car shrieked past not three inches from her twisting body. She was jerked hard by its slipstream, it had come that close. Then she was in the woods, a big pine with sticky resin on its trunk shielding her.
Clawing at the tree to steady herself, she fought back the panic. The engine guttered, began idling.
Terrified now, she peered around the trunk. It was pitch-black, almost impossible to see. A wave of fear and frustration brought hot tears to her eyes. The Viper was right beside her Duster.
But it looked empty. She could see no movement. But she had a distinct impression—a taste, really—of somebody. It was easy to think that she was being watched by baleful, cunning eyes.
Evil. Horribly so. She was stunned at the power of it, and at the sense of there being an actual personality behind it, as if the whole array of terrors was being orchestrated by a single individual.
She could smell him, taste his foulness.
Another sound came, a sharp curl of breeze... or a whisper. She listened. There it was again—a definite whisper in the woods behind her. She couldn't make out the words. She cupped her hands behind her ears, faced the sound.
Another whisper. My God, it was coming right down on her. It seemed to know exactly where she was standing.
And it wasn't alone: there was now a chorus of quiet whispers.
When the moon came out again, it cast mottled gray shadows on the forest floor. But it also made it possible to see, at least a little.
She tried to remember how the roads went. She had to cross Mound and try to sneak out through the woods to Queen's Road, then double back to her place.
She heard another sound, intimate, growing. Slithery. Something huge was slithering toward her through the leaves.
The moonlight disappeared, but even so she ran. Almost instantly she car
eened off a tree trunk, tumbled cursing into the dead leaves of the forest floor. It hurt, but also brought her to her senses. She wasn't going to get away by running, not in a forest this dark. Why wouldn't the moon stay out, just for ten minutes?
Two careful steps later she fell again, tripped by a low branch. There was a flash in her head, a pain, the momentary sense that the ground was on top of her.
The slithering came again, something brushed against her thigh. That did it: she scrambled to her feet and slogged off, all sense of direction gone, blundering and crashing aimlessly.
She hit the road so suddenly that she almost fell flat. She stopped, peered up and down the strip of tarmac. Mound? Main? She trotted along, her side flaring with a stitch, her breath coming in hot gasps.
At last the moon returned, sailing majestically from behind an angry tumble of cloud. She was horrified to see a dark, familiar shape on the immediate horizon—the mound. And off to the right, the judge's place.
This was Mound Road and she'd gone in a circle.
She crossed it, began to double back. But then light flickered in her eye, followed by a shudder of pleasure that made her heart jump. Just across the road were a dozen dots of purple light, a hissing like a gasoline lantern.
To keep back the scream she jammed her fist in her mouth. She forced herself to retreat... back toward the woods where she'd heard the slithering.
She took a step, then another. Behind her she was aware of more flashes.
Where the light touched exposed skin—the back of her neck, her arms—it left a rich, seductive tingle, like the slowly drawn finger of a gentle and subtle man.
She plunged off into the woods, crying out when she was slapped by limbs, smashed into tree trunks.
Ahead was a gleam.
"Dear God—"
But it wasn't purple, it looked like the moon on a metal surface. She crouched, moved forward as slowly as she dared. Everything she did made noise—her feet crackled leaves, her breath rattled, she bumped loudly into trunks.
It was a car in the woods. She became cautious, barely moving. It must be the Viper.
She was fifteen feet away when she recognized her own car. She was thunderstruck. This was worse than being in a funhouse. You just did not get anywhere, not one damn inch!
It was right there where she'd left it, seemingly unmolested, seemingly empty. The Viper was nowhere to be seen.
Had she escaped, or was this a trap? Was the car really in the same place? She moved toward it. The keys—she got them out of her pocket. She reached the door. Feeling blindly, she found the lock.
At that moment the moonlight again disappeared. But it was no matter—the interior light would come on when she opened the door. She got the key in the lock, turned it, heard a click, pulled at the door.
No interior light.
There was a stink in the car so horrible that it knocked her head back, made her gag. It was like pressing your face into the underarm of a corpse. She looked down into the dark beneath the glove compartment. There was a thickness there, very still. Maybe the thing had died.
Holding her breath, she moved toward the open door. She rolled down the driver's window, then reached inside and lowered the one behind it.
She got into the driver's seat, reached over and opened the window opposite. Fresh air came in. This was better, she was going to be able to handle it. She put the key in the ignition, stretched her foot out to the gas pedal.
A black arm snaked up the dash. At the end of it she thought she could see a narrow hand.
Then the moonlight returned and she saw that the hand was to all appearances human. Before she could so much as cry out in amazement the fingers spread and the black, clawlike nails dug into the thick plastic dashboard, cutting it as if it was modeling clay.
Another hand came creeping up her inner thigh. It was cool and damp, its palm as soft as deerskin. Razor nails tickled her flesh.
She kicked, momentarily popping her right leg loose. The response was a flash of purple light, a spangle of pleasure.
Her skin crawled, she was almost drowned in a wave of the warmest, sweetest, most delicious sensations, wonderful little tickling penetrations that went deeper in her than she'd thought delight could reach.
The hands got their grip on the dash, the arms rippled with muscular contractions. Under her feet there commenced a flopping and heaving so great that the car began to shake.
The moonlight disappeared.
With all her might she smashed her foot down into the muscular, writhing mass. Again she kicked, again and again.
A third hand shot out, barely visible in the gloom. She heard its claws sink into the back of the front seat with a popping rip of leatherette.
She wanted to close her thighs, but the claw tips pressed into the tender inner flesh.
Some deep instinct she knew nothing about sent a rush of white-hot adrenaline into her blood. Her muscles turned to steel, she reared back on the seat. The three hands all detached themselves from their various moorings and came clawing toward her at once.
With a great boneless flopping and writhing, two of the hands grasped for purchase, one clawing the ceiling and ripping it down, the other popping holes right through the metal door.
She was so stunned by the violence, by the bizarre ugliness of what she was witnessing, that she lost consciousness in the middle of lunging back away from the thing between her legs. This caused her to fall limp, and the sweeping, grasping hands clutched air barely an inch from her neck.
The impact of falling against the ground brought her back to consciousness just as a fleshy coil poured out the door. She pushed away from the car, leaped up and started running blind, her arms windmilling before her.
She blundered into brush, into trees, arms flailing. As she skittered away, pushing herself with her heels, her whole being contracted into a dot of savage terror. Ellen Maas wasn't there anymore, she had been torn from her moorings. An animal was all that remained, a terrified animal.
2.
Into her view there came the vague image of two rough old boots, two jeans-clad legs.
"Ellen! Hey, Ellen!" Brian jumped away from her panicked flailing. "Hey, it's me!"
His truck was idling at the roadside, the door open, the lighted cab glowing. She was beyond the reach of words. She choked and gagged and clawed the air. He tried to stop her, but she yanked away from him.
She could see nothing, but the slithering sounds in the woods behind her held a terrible meaning. Close beside Brian she could discern movement. Her impulse was to jerk away, but when she did he tried to hold her more tightly. "Take it easy," he said.
Then the moon came out.
Two hands were quivering, fully extended, not a foot from Brian's head.
She swallowed, gasped.
"Ellen, it's gonna be OK."
The arms undulated, stretching. The hands came closer.
"Brian!"
The claws extended. To get away she threw herself backward—but he grabbed her, clutched her to him. The claws now vibrated an inch from his head. "Take it easy," he repeated, his voice shaking. She could see that the flesh of the arms was pulsating, getting thinner and longer, the fingers wriggling, now questing, now a mere breath away.
In another instant they would tear his head from his body.
She pummeled his leathery chest and bellowed, desperate at her own incoherence.
His response was to press her against him harder. "It's all right, baby, you're fine now, you're fine."
The pulsation of the arms was getting faster. They were getting thinner and thinner, jerking spasmodically. He reached back, absently brushed his head as if he thought a bug had landed there. But his strong left arm held her tight.
Other parts of the thing were swarming out the windows of the car.
No matter how hard she tried, she remained unable to control her own screaming. All she could think of was being touched again by those fingers.
Brian had come out
here largely to stop her from getting hurt or getting in trouble. Now she was having a breakdown right in his arms. He thought she was going to shatter his eardrums.
All of a sudden she gave him a vicious knee to the groin. He jackknifed, gurgling with agony as she wrenched herself free of him. Digging with her heels, sliding down the path on her back, she dragged herself toward the road.
Fortunately, she hadn't incapacitated him, and he was able to rise almost at once. As he did so something slapped the side of his head. It hit him hard enough to jar his vision. He turned toward it.
The four strangest, most lethal claws he'd ever seen were spread out in front of his face, trembling in the moonlight.
For a long second his mind was totally blank. Then he saw details: an ordinary palm. The claws had been carefully sharpened. He could see the serrations left by the fingernail file. This terrible hand was manicured.
On the finger pads were prints; the hand was so close that he could see even this tiny detail.
Another joined it. As he pulled back, the two of them closed just in front of his face with a sound like springing rat traps. Then he saw what looked like stiff cables in the moonlight, leading back from the hands all the way to Ellen's car. More writhing arms were pouring from every window.
A slight movement in the brush drew his attention to the fact that another of the appendages was staking along the ground off to his right. Then he saw a fourth, this one looking like a black fire hose reaching into the trees above the car.
A deep, visceral shock went through his body.
He thought: my shotgun, my shotgun is in my truck.
He ran so fast he caught up with Ellen, who was just clambering into the cab. He could see the barrel of the shotgun, blue in the dim light. Throwing himself past her, he dove in, grabbed the weapon.
With one hand he pushed her down. "I'm gonna shoot!" She cringed as he braced the gun against the steering wheel and pulled the trigger. The gun spat blue fire. Ellen screamed. Again he fired, and again, the thunderous reports blasting away her cries.
Then there was silence.
With a thud one of the hands dropped onto the hood. The diameter of the arm was now no thicker than that of a rope, and it seemed almost devoid of strength, able only to flop weakly forward. But then it contracted, and the claw-like nails slid right through the steel hood. Instantly the arm went tight and the truck lurched. It began to be dragged toward the deep woods, like a fish on the hook.
The Forbidden Zone Page 16
