Laurie sat at her desk in the upstairs bedroom, working on her home computer, only half aware of the chill that had crept into the house. She tried to busy herself with answering a few e-mails and balancing the check book, anything to keep her mind occupied. The thought of what had happened in the house next door, and the idea of what Marty Slater had done to himself just wouldn’t stop nagging at her thoughts.
Harry hadn’t exactly been generous with the details of what he’d found in Slater’s basement, or even regarding the condition in which he’d found their neighbor, but what little information he had shared was enough to make her feel sick to her stomach. How could such a thing happen so close to home? How could the man have lived so many years in such a small, close-knit community and not reveal—even accidentally—his private darkness?
If she’d known how closely her thoughts on the matter mirrored Harry’s, she would have felt only mildly surprised. Over the years, she’d become used to how often they’d shared the same thoughts and feelings at the exact same time, or how many times they’d completed each other’s sentences. She supposed it happened with any couple who’d been so close for so many years; after a while, once you got to know each other well enough, it only made sense that you would think along the same wavelengths.
Still, there was that new tension between them lately. It crept up in their conversations over dinner; it reared its head every time they talked about cutting back and tightening the monthly budget. And what only seemed to make matters worse was the fact that she could understand his reluctance to start a family; from a practical and economic standpoint, his argument was a sound one. How exactly could they hope to provide for a child—and pay all the medical expenses that came along with childbirth—when they were barely keeping their own heads above water? How would they pay the mortgage and utility bills with the added strain on their budget that a child would inevitably introduce?
She couldn’t answer those questions, and she recognized their validity. And she understood the need to ask them and properly address them. But understanding Harry’s feelings on the subject and accepting those feelings were two very different things. She could even accept his reluctance to talk about it; it was no surprise that he viewed their financial problems as some sort of failure on his part. A failure to provide for his family, a failure to put enough food on the table or enough fuel in the oil tank for the winter. But as much as she tried to explain to him that he couldn’t place the blame on himself, he continued to do just that. She’d told him time and again that he couldn’t be held responsible for the poor economy. She’d told him that she understood the importance of his career and why they couldn’t just move away to greener financial pastures. She’d even told him point blank that she knew in her heart that he was doing the absolute best he could with what he had.
And yet he couldn’t find it in himself to let some of the burden of blame slip from his shoulders. Maybe it was a question of pride, or maybe he saw it as a challenge to his male ego, but lately, he’d become so hung up on it that he wouldn’t even discuss the matter with her anymore. In all the years they’d been married, it had become the only subject that he’d refused to consider. There was a time when they’d been able to discuss anything, no matter how serious or how trivial it might be. Now, lately . . . well, there were nights when they barely talked at all.
A chill touched her neck again and she shivered. How had it gotten so cold in the house? She’d turned the heat up ten minutes before, but now it felt as if an icy draft had found its way into the room. She rubbed the back of her neck, turning towards the window. It was closed and locked.
She leaned over the back of the chair, facing the doorway and the dark hallway beyond. Had Harry finally made it home? She hadn’t heard the front door, but if he’d just opened it, that would explain the draft she could feel coming from the hall.
“Harry? That you?”
The icy contact came again, this time more insistently. Her back arched in a reflexive attempt to break the touch, but there was no escaping it.
All at once she felt uncomfortable, like someone was watching her. Not just watching her, either, but studying her. Glaring at her. She looked over her shoulder again, trying to tell herself she was alone in the room, letting her eyes prove that no one else was there. And yet the sensation of someone nearby refused to go away. In fact, it only grew stronger. If she closed her eyes, it would have been easy to imagine someone standing over her, directly behind her chair, arms reaching out to touch her. To harm her.
Because all at once her nerve endings seemed to catch fire, sending danger signals through her nervous system. There was something terribly wrong here. Something that meant to do her great harm, and although she couldn’t see it, every fiber of her being told her to get out of the room, to leave the house immediately.
She tried to stand, and it was at that moment that her feelings were confirmed. An unseen hand seemed to close around her throat, cutting her breath to little more than a series of shallow gasps. It forced her back into the chair and she reached out for the desk, hoping to push herself backwards, to maybe throw this intruder off balance.
Her hands found the computer’s keyboard and suddenly began to spasm, her fingers splayed, blindly pounding out an insane rhythm across the keys. She tried to raise her hands to her throat, but couldn’t. Her fingers danced over the keys, filling the screen with line after line of nonsense, deleting everything she had already entered.
And all the while the grip on her throat only tightened, squeezing off her supply of air. Flashes of light flickered before her eyes, darkness infringing at the edges of her vision. She was only vaguely aware now that the computer’s printer had come to life, spitting out page after page onto the desk.
She struggled against whatever it was that was holding her down; she knew if she couldn’t break away, and if she didn’t do it soon, she was sure to lose consciousness. After that, she didn’t stand a chance.
She reached out and shoved the computer’s keyboard off of the desk. Her fingers drummed across the blotter, their movements slackening now that the keyboard was no longer in reach. The pressure around her throat seemed to subside as well, but whether it was a result of her action, she had no idea.
She twisted in her chair, shrugging out of the stranglehold, its grasp barely registering now. And just as quickly as they had seized her, the unseen hands left off their work and released her.
The coldness lingered for another moment and then it, too, began to subside. She had the unmistakable sensation that something was moving away from her, something was stepping slowly across the room to leave her alone, and it was taking the coldness away with it.
She sat there shaking, staring suspiciously into every corner of the room.
Laurie rose slowly to her feet, bending to retrieve the fallen keyboard. She laid it carefully back on the desk, rubbing her throat, wincing at its tenderness. Her eyes flicked to the shuffle of papers beside the printer and she froze, the fear she’d felt a moment ago returning in a sudden flare of realization.
Any attempt at reasoning out what had happened to her was swept away now by what she saw in the closely printed sheets upon the desk. The words were nonsense to her, as impossible to unravel as the most complex genetic formula. And yet she knew for certain that they were actual words, that they were not comprised of random gibberish.
There was a language there, among the strange jumble of lines and phrases, but none that she’d ever seen before. The spacing between the words was too precise, too carefully measured to be accidental. That, and the way specific words—sometimes only certain roots of letters—could be spotted several times throughout the text.
Taking a deep breath, Laurie bent and picked up the pages. There were five of them in all, each of them different from the last, but all composed in that unknown, foreign tongue.
She swung her gaze towards the monitor. Her text was still intact there, black letters against a dead white background, not a s
ingle word altered or deleted, as far as she could tell. Worse still, a quick glance at the printer confirmed another suspicion: it had never even been switched on. Even now, its display lights remained dark.
Laurie lowered herself back into the chair, trying to put her thoughts in order, trying to understand what had just happened. There seemed to be no logic to it, no rational explanation she could readily apply. But the evidence was right there, five pages of words she couldn’t interpret, words she hadn’t consciously typed.
And in the center of the third page, standing out now in her confused stare, she spotted a single word of English, one she couldn’t recall seeing just a moment before.
. . . coming . . .
She shuddered, cold all over now, wondering how such a simple, common word could fill her with such sudden fear.
By the time the plane touched down at Logan Airport in Boston, Massachsetts, John had managed to reconstruct a bit more of the short communication he’d uttered in the vision, some of it with the help of the woman in the seat beside him, but most of it from the depths of his own memory.
Of course, he hadn’t confessed to her the true meaning of the words he’d spoken in his native tongue. He’d told her Atae was his grandfather’s name and he must have been dreaming of his childhood. He couldn’t imagine what she might have thought if he’d been completely honest with her.
Now, shouldering his way through the crowded terminal towards the rental car booths, he mulled over the true meaning of what he’d said in his sleep.
One string of words in particular preyed on his thoughts, one that had come back to him just before the plane had touched down. “Jhuk katta iti hittut.” Roughly translated, the words meant “It begins with death,” a cryptic omen John was trying his best to interpret.
As if that wasn’t unsettling enough in itself, he was still unclear on whether the grim warning was intended for him or for the police officer he’d seen in the vision.
Either way, the words were cause for concern, and he would not take them lightly. It was rare these days for John to speak in the language of his people. The last opportunity to do so had been at the old man’s bedside; before that he couldn’t honestly recall. Anything he’d said in the grip of the dream would have to be viewed not only as very important but—possibly—prophetic as well.
In many ways he still felt foolish, placing his faith in the messages he’d culled from what might have been nothing more than a simple dream. But if his years of study had taught him anything, it was that one was best served by keeping an open mind, no matter how unlikely the circumstances. Until something could be reliably disproved, he believed, it should at least be considered a possibility.
John stepped up to a rental counter, pushing his thoughts away, at least for the moment. He would have plenty of time to think on the road, without the distraction of the shuffling crowd around him. He rented a mid-sized car, and after completing the insurance form, he held up the map he’d found in Mahuk’s bag. He’d folded it in upon itself to expose the tiny words that read Glen Forest, the town that had obviously become his destination.
“Tell me something,” he said as the clerk counted out his change, “what’s the fastest way to—”
Once again, he consulted the map. “—Route 93 North?”
Chapter Ten
Harry returned home at just past seven that evening, stepping into his house with a long, slow sigh of relief. He’d made one final stop at the crime scene next door, pleased to see the State Police had posted a pair of officers to watch over things for the night. After a short exchange, he’d left them to their work and trudged through the cold evening breeze to his house.
Laurie was seated at the far end of the couch, wrapped in a blanket and shuffling through a small pile of paper. An empty wineglass stood on the table beside the couch. Her expression was troubled, and something about her body language bothered him immediately. She wasn’t one to scare easily, or to let small matters get under her skin. He couldn’t imagine that what had happened at Slater’s house that morning—as disturbing as it had been—wouldn’t still be affecting her quite so seriously, so many hours later.
“Everything all right?”
She shrugged. “Wish I could say.”
“What do you mean? What happened?”
She continued to stare down at the pages in her lap, and it occurred to him then that she hadn’t looked up once since he’d come in.
“Laurie, what’s wrong? Talk to me.” Harry bent to look at the pages, but couldn’t make out anything. “What have you got there?”
“Today I was up in the . . . I was using the computer, and it got so cold . . .”
There was a childlike quality to her voice that Harry didn’t like at all. He’d heard that same tone before, when interviewing a victim of a violent crime, or speaking with an injured driver of a car accident. It was the way someone spoke when they were in shock.
He sat down beside her on the couch and reached under her chin. Her skin felt cold to the touch, and he turned her face toward him. Her eyes were red and puffy; it was clear she’d been crying. “Laurie, what’s going on? What happened to you?”
She offered a strange snort of laughter and her bottom lip shivered. “I had a little printer trouble this afternoon,” she said, a little too casually. She tried to smile but failed miserably, and then all at once she started to talk.
She began to tell him how she’d been working on the computer upstairs and how she’d felt an icy touch at the back of her neck and the stifling hand at her throat.
He listened to her in silence, remembering how he’d felt under Slater’s dead stare, how he’d felt so cold afterwards.
Finally, she handed him the printed sheets and told him how the printer had produced them without even being switched on.
“I know how crazy that sounds, but it’s the truth. It really happened.”
Harry went over the pages carefully, shaking his head. “It’s . . . I think maybe you . . .”
He broke off, unsure about how he should continue. Should he tell her what had happened to him in Del’s office? Would it be better to hold the story back, until some of the shock she was feeling had worn off? After all, she’d obviously been through enough for one day.
And besides, how could he even put what had happened into words? How could he make her believe that Slater had risen from the autopsy table and attacked him, when he could barely get his head around it?
Finally, unable to answer his own endless questions, Harry simply reached out and placed a hand on his wife’s leg. Sometimes just touching her could make him feel better. He stared at her, seeing the fear in her eyes, the confusion on her face, and he knew he couldn’t lie to her. He had to tell her what he’d seen.
“There’s something . . .” He pinched the bridge of his nose, wishing this could be easier. “Something really strange is going on here.”
“With Marty Slater? With what he did this morning?”
“No, it’s more than that. It’s . . . something happened, hon, out at Del’s office today that . . . if anybody else told me about it, I’d say they were crazy, but . . . I saw it. I saw it happen.”
“What was it?”
He hesitated once more, debating just how much he could reveal to her. He wondered what she would think of him later, how she would look at him while the story unfolded. In the end, though, he saw the worry in her eyes, the concern in her features, and finally he took a deep breath and forged ahead.
And he told her everything. He told her how Slater had climbed off of his slab in the morgue and made his way down the hall to attack him. He described the feeling of the dead man’s stiff fingers as they’d closed around his throat, and he struggled to find the words to describe the rage that had burned in Slater’s single, darkened eye. Finally, when the tale had been completed, he sat back down beside her and rubbed his face.
“God, it feels so good to tell someone.” He’d seen fear in her eyes while he’d told th
e story, and once or twice she’d looked as though she was going to start crying again. But never once did he see an expression of doubt cross her face, and for that he was grateful. The tale itself may have seemed impossible, but she apparently still believed in the man who’d told it.
“Harry, how could it have happened?” she asked. “It’s just so . . . impossible.”
He held up the pages from the printer. “Just like this. Everything that happened to you today . . . it’s all impossible too. But it must be connected in some way. It’s got to be. How else could something like this happen to both of us in the same day?”
“There has to be some kind of . . . rational explanation, right? I mean, isn’t there some way to explain all this?”
“I don’t know. I wish there was. Hell, I wish I could explain it myself. But I just don’t know what to think.”
He lapsed into an exhausted silence, staring at the pages Laurie had given him, at the single word in English that stood out from everything else.
. . . coming . . .
What the hell did that mean? Was it some kind of warning? Was someone coming to Glen Forest who meant to harm them?
It felt as though everything he’d known and believed about the world and its reality had been turned inside-out for him. And he felt filthy, as if the day’s events had permanently marked him, staining him deep beneath the surface of his skin, where no amount of bathing would ever be able to clean.
He closed his eyes and thought of Slater’s face as the body had attacked, of the dry croak of his voice as he’d tried to speak. And he considered the impossibility of the entire event, the pure absurdity of what he’d seen.
“What about Del?” Laurie asked. “What did he have to say about it?”
Harry forced a grin, but it was weak and didn’t last long. “Del just about shit his pants. His hands are probably still shaking. But he examined the body afterwards, and confirmed that Marty was still dead, and so he couldn’t explain what happened any better than I could. He said there was no medical explanation to support what we saw happen.”
Primal Fear Page 11
