The Complete Adversary Cycle: The Keep, the Tomb, the Touch, Reborn, Reprisal, Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack)

by F. Paul Wilson

  He went to the gate and gestured off to the left. Bill’s gaze followed the pointing arm to a black circular area, hundreds of feet across, marring the verdant floor of the pass.

  A hole.

  “That is where they come from, the little monsters.”

  “I know. The holes are everywhere.”

  Alexandru then led him to the keep’s cellar and showed him the opening in the stone floor there. He told of how the Germans had camped in the keep in the spring of 1941 and nearly wrecked the place, of how something immeasurably evil had awakened and slaughtered all the soldiers, of how it had almost escaped before it was destroyed.

  Alexandru looked at Bill with watery blue eyes.

  “At least we thought it was destroyed. Now I am not so sure.”

  “How was it destroyed?”

  “A redheaded stranger came and slew it with a magic sword—”

  … a magic sword …

  “—then he limped off with a Jewish woman from Bucharest and was never seen again. I wonder whatever happened to him.”

  “He’s old and gray now like you,” Bill said, wondering what Glaeken had looked like in his prime. He must have been magnificent. “And he and the woman are still together.”

  Alexandru nodded and smiled. “I am glad. He was a brave man, but terrible to see when he was angry.”

  With the aid of Alexandru’s directions, Glaeken’s notes, and a flashlight, Bill led Nick down through the utter blackness of the subcellar to the lower segment of the tower. A narrow stairway wound down to the base where some of the foundation had crumbled. Alexandru had said something about a strange American named Dmitri Menelaus who had carted off many of the loose stones years ago. Light seeped through the opening into the base of the tower.

  “All right, Nick,” he said, leading him outside. “Do your thing. Where are they?”

  Nick stood blinking in the light. Thin, and paler than ever, he didn’t look well. And he’d crawled back into himself.

  Bill scanned the ground, looking for the shards Nick had said he’d seen. It was like river-bottom here, fist-sized stones jumbling down a gentle slope to a sluggish stream. He looked up to his right at the mountains soaring behind the keep. This gorge was probably all water in early spring when the snows melted. Half a century had passed since the sword blade had shattered here. How could anything be left? How could they hope to find the remnants even if any still existed?

  “Well, Nick? Where are they?”

  Nick said nothing, only stared ahead.

  Desperate, Bill knelt and picked among the stones and gravel. This was impossible. He’d never find anything this way.

  He straightened up and brushed off his hands. Earlier, in the dark, Nick had said he’d seen the pieces, glowing “with bright blue fire.”

  Maybe he could see them only at night.

  “Damn!”

  He’d risked their lives rushing to get here so he could return to Ploiesti as soon as possible and start their homeward journey in the light. Now he was going to have to wait until dark.

  He turned and aimed a kick at the tower’s granite-block hem. The keep, a dark, brooding, lithic presence looming over him, took no notice.

  Bill led Nick back inside the tower to a gloom as deep and dark as his spirits. The delay meant it would be Wednesday before he got back to Carol. He wondered how she was doing.

  The Horror Channel’s Drive-In Theatre—Special All-Day Edition

  Eaten Alive (1976) New World

  Day of the Nightmare (1965) Herts-Lion

  Nightwing (1979) Columbia

  Raw Meat (1972) AIP

  The Devils of Darkness (1965) 20th Century Fox

  Tentacles (1977) AIP

  Phase IV (1974) Paramount

  It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) United Artists

  They Came from Beyond Space (1967) Amicus

  The Last Days of Planet Earth (1974) Toho

  The Flesh Eaters (1964) CDA

  They Came from Within (1975) TransAmerica

  The Earth Dies Screaming (1964) Lippert/20th Century Fox

  New Jersey Turnpike

  Hank wasn’t sure if he was awake or dreaming. He seemed to be awake. He was aware of noises around him, of a stale, sour odor, of growing light beyond his eyelids, but he could not get those eyelids to move. And he could feel nothing. For all he knew, he no longer had a body. Where was he? What—?

  And then he remembered. The millipedes … their queen … a scream bubbled up in his throat but died stillborn. How can you scream when you can’t open your mouth?

  No. That had been a dream. It had all been a dream—the holes, the flying horrors, the rest stop, the trooper, the gun, the bullet, the millipedes—a long, horrible nightmare. But finally at an end. He was waking up now.

  If he could just open his eyes he’d see the familiar ceiling of his bedroom. And then he’d be free of the nightmare. He’d be able to move then.

  The eyes. They were the key. He concentrated on the lids, focusing all his will, all his energy into them. And slowly they began to move. He didn’t feel the motion but saw a knife-slit streak appear, pale light, like the glow on the horizon at the approach of dawn.

  Encouraged, he doubled his efforts. Light widened around the horizon as the edges of his lids stretched the gummy substance that bound them, then burst through as they broke apart. Not the blaze of the rising sun, but a wan, diffuse sort of light. He forced his lids to separate further and the light began to take form through the narrow opening, breaking down into shapes and color. Vague shapes. A paucity of color. Mostly grays. His pupils constricted, bringing the images into sharper focus.

  He was looking down along a body. His own body, lying in bed, naked atop the sheets. Hazy, but he knew his own body. Thank God, it had all been a dream. He tried to turn his head to the left, toward the light, but it wouldn’t move. Why couldn’t he move? He was awake now. He should be able to move. He slid his eyeballs leftward. The bedroom window was over there somewhere. If he could just—

  Wait … the walls—rounded. The ceiling—convex. Concrete. Concrete everywhere. And the light. It came from above. He forced his eyelids open another millimeter. No window—the light filtered through a grate in the concrete ceiling.

  The stillborn scream from a moment ago came alive again and rammed up against his throat, pounding at his larynx, crying to be free.

  This wasn’t the bedroom. He was in the pipe—the drainage pipe! It hadn’t been a dream. It was real. Real!

  Hank fought the panic, beat it down, and tried to think. He was still alive. He had to remember that. Still alive and it was daytime. The things from the holes were quiet in the daylight hours. They hid from the light. He had to think, had to plan. He’d always been good at planning.

  He shifted his eyes down to his body. His vision was clearer now. He saw the gentle tidal rise and fall of his hairy chest, and farther down, on his belly, he spotted the bloody wound where the queen millipede had spiked him and injected him with her poison. The neurotoxin was still in effect, obviously, paralyzing his voluntary muscles while it let his heart and lungs go on working. But it didn’t have complete control. He’d managed to open his eyes, hadn’t he? He could move his eyeballs, couldn’t he? What else could he move?

  He pulled his gaze away from his abdominal wound and searched for his hands. They lay flopped out on either side, palms up. He checked out his legs. They were intact, slightly spread with the toes angled outward. He could have been a sunbather. His body was the picture of relaxation … the relaxation of complete paralysis. He returned his gaze to his arm and followed it down to the hand. If he could move a finger—

  And then he noticed the webbing—surrounding him, running in all directions, crisscrossed like gauze. It curved away from each arm and leg like heavy-duty spiderweb and ran out to the wall of the drainpipe where it melted into a glob of some sticky-looking gelatin smeared on the concrete. He looked down as much as his slit perspective would permit and re
alized that he wasn’t lying in the pipe, he was suspended in it. From the horizontal lie of his body he guessed that he was resting on a hammock of web across the diameter.

  Hank marveled at the coolness of his mind as it analyzed his position. He was trapped—not only paralyzed, but effectively and securely bound in position. The web hammock, however, was not entirely without its advantages. Long, uninterrupted contact with the cold concrete would have made it difficult for his body to maintain its temperature; the webbing also kept him out of the water, thereby preventing his flesh from breaking down in the constant moisture.

  So in a very real sense he was high and dry, but also bound, gagged, and paralyzed.

  Reminded him of his days as a slaughterhouse worker. Here he was, hung up like a side of—

  Beef.

  That last thought impacted with the force of a sledgehammer. That was it! He was food! They’d shot him full of preservatives and stored him away alive so he wouldn’t decompose. So when pickings got slim above, they could come down here and devour him at their leisure.

  He willed down the rising panic. Panic wouldn’t help here. They’d already paralyzed his body. Allowing fear to paralyze his mind would only make matters worse. But that one cold hard fact battered relentlessly at his defenses.

  I’m food!

  But I’m alive. I came up from nothing, I wrote Kick! and I started the Kicker Evolution. I can beat these bugs.

  He knew their pattern. They’d probably stay dormant all day and crawl up to the surface to hunt during the dark hours. That was when he’d get free.

  But first he had to regain control of his body. He already controlled his eyeballs and eyelids. Next—his hands. If he was to get free he’d need them the most. A finger. He’d start with the pointer on his right hand, concentrate all his will and energy into that one digit until he got it to move. Then he’d proceed to the next, and the next, until he could make a fist. Then he’d switch to his left.

  He glared at his index finger, narrowing his vision, his entire world to that single digit, channeling all his power into it.

  And then it moved.

  Or had it? The twitch had been almost imperceptible, so slight it might have been a trick of the light. Or wishful thinking.

  But it had moved. He had to hold on to that thought. It had moved. He was regaining control. He was going to get out of here.

  With climbing spirits, he redoubled his concentration on the reluctant digit.

  WFAN-AM

 

  Monroe Village, Long Island

  Alan rolled his wheelchair along the network of cement paths that encircled Toad Hall, heading from the backyard to the front. Off to his left, to the west, he saw smoke rising over the trees. Not near smoke, not from the Shore Drive neighborhood, but farther away. From downtown Monroe, most likely. He’d heard stories of roving gangs, looting, burning, raping. They hadn’t shown up out here, but perhaps that was simply a matter of time.

  Strange how things had worked out. He’d always imagined that if the world ever descended into anarchic nihilism, the violence and chaos and mob madness would occur at night, screams and flames hurtling into a dark, unseeing sky. But given the current situation, human violence was confined to the daylight hours. The night was reserved for unhuman violence.

  Alan turned from the smoke and inspected Toad Hall. The old mansion had absorbed another merciless pummeling last night, but like the valiant, indomitable champion she was, she remained on her feet.

  Her injuries were accumulating at an alarming rate, however. Her flanks were cut and bruised and splintered, her scalp showed through where her shingles had been torn up. She could still open her eyes to the dwindling daylight, though. Most of them, at least.

  Which was why Alan was out here now. A couple of the storm shutters had refused to roll up this morning. Even from the inside Alan could see they were deeply dented, more deeply than he’d have thought possible from a bug attack, at least from any of the bugs he’d seen so far.

  Which meant there might be something new under the new moon, something bigger than its hellish predecessors and consequently more dangerous to the little fortress Toad Hall had become. He coasted to a halt and stared as he rounded to the front.

  The damage to the steel shutters was worse than he’d realized. They’d been scored by something sharp and heavy, with the weight and density of a steel spike.

  But the remains of the rhododendrons under the shuttered windows bothered him more.

  They’d been trampled flat.

  Alan rolled across the grass for a closer look. These were old rhodos, maybe fifty years or better, with heavy trunks and sturdy branches, thick with healthy deep-green leaves through Ba’s magical ministrations. Tough wood. Alan remembered that from the times he’d cut back the rhodos around his old house before it had burned down.

  These hadn’t been cut, though. The trunks and branches had been crushed, and their splinters pressed into the ground. Something awfully big and heavy—or a number of big and heavy somethings—had attacked these windows last night, banging and scraping at the shutters.

  But they hadn’t gotten in. That was the important thing.

  As Alan pushed his left wheel forward and pulled the right backward to turn and roll back to the path, he saw the depression in the lawn. His stomach lurched. He’d been too intent on the shutters and the ruined rhodos to notice before. But from this angle you couldn’t miss it.

  The fresh spring grass, overdue now for a trimming, had been crushed in a wide swath that angled in from the front gate, curved around the willows, and led directly to the house. Alan tried to imagine what sort of creature could leave such a trail but all he could come up with was a thirty-foot bowling ball. With teeth, most likely. Lots of them.

  He shuddered and rolled back to the path. Each night got a little rougher. Eventually Toad Hall’s defenses would fail. It was inevitable. Alan prayed he’d be able to persuade Sylvia to move out before that happened, or that Glaeken would be able to assemble the pieces he needed to call for help.

  Alan could feel it in his bones: They were all going to need help. Lots of it. And soon. Otherwise, if the Sapir curve was correct, they had two more daytimes left. Then the light would die for the last time at three o’clock on Thursday afternoon. And the endless night would begin.

  Abe’s Place

  The bugs had done their dirty work—with a vengeance.

  During the night, entombed in all that concrete and locked in behind the triple-hatched entry chimney, Gia hadn’t had a clue. But now, topside …

  All the farmhouse windows had been smashed, and everything inside had been torn up. Gia had no emotional connection to the place, but still the devastation got to her.

  “We ate breakfast here yesterday,” she said, staring at the mindless wreckage of the kitchen.

  Abe stepped in through the ruined door.

  “The barn is worse. No eggs, just scattered feathers where the chickens used to be. And still no sign of my poor Parabellum.”

  “What about the cat?” Vicky said.

  Abe shook his head. “I didn’t see him.” As Vicky’s lower lip trembled and her eyes filled, Abe hurriedly added, “But barn cats are tough. He probably found a good hiding place.”

  He glanced at Gia and she knew what he was thinking: Not likely.

  He nodded toward the rear of the house. “Let’s take a walk to the ridge. I want to show you something.”

  “The hole?”

  “Something else.”

  The hole was the same, but the valley had changed. The ground was torn up, the trees partially denuded, and …

  Gia pointed at the linear mounds radiating from the hole like spokes on a wheel.

  “What are those?”

  “I don’t know from lawns, but those look like mole hills.”

  Gia’s skin crawled as she looked at them.

  “But if those are moles, they’re as big as humans.”

  “Bigger even
. But I don’t think they’re moles. More like worms, I’ll bet. And this I hate to mention, but a lot of them are pointed this way.”

  Maui

  Even the coffee tasted like fish.

  Jack knew the water was pure—he’d watched Kolabati draw it from the cooler—but it still tasted fishy. Maybe because everything smelled fishy. The air was so thick with the odor of dead sea life he swore he could taste it when he breathed.

  He was standing on the lanai, forcing the coffee down, looking out at the valley below and the great whirlpool spinning off Kahului. It would have been heart-stoppingly beautiful if not for the stench. Behind him, sounds of chopping, chipping, sawing, and hammering drifted through the door from the house’s great room.

  He thought about Gia and Vicky, hoping they had a quiet night, wishing he had a way to check up on them.

  Kolabati joined him then, coffee cup in hand, and leaned on the railing to his right. She wore a bright flowered muumuu that somehow enhanced her figure instead of hiding it. Jack’s eyes locked on her necklace. He tried to be casual but it wasn’t easy. Half the reason for this hairy trip dangled a couple of feet away. All he had to do was reach out and—

  “My silverswords are all dead,” she said, looking down at a wilted garden beneath the deck. “The salt water’s killed them. I’d hoped to see them bloom.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She gestured with her cup toward the giant maelstrom.

  “There’s no point to it. It sucks water and fish down all day, then shoots it all miles into the air at night.”

  “The point,” Jack said, remembering the gist of Glaeken’s explanations, “is not to have a point. Except to mess with our minds, make us feel weak, impotent, useless. Make us crazy with fear and uncertainty, fear of the unknown.”

  Jack noticed when he said “crazy” Kolabati stole a quick glance over her shoulder at the house.

  “And speaking of points,” he said, “what’s the point of Moki? How’d you get involved with a guy like that? He’s not your type, Bati.”