Then, after nearly three minutes, he began to inhale slowly. The ritual, practiced and automatic, occurred without effort and with great concentration. As he inhaled, he took in more than the musty air. With it came the pulsations of life and spirit that had lingered for untold years in the atmosphere of the ancient house. The stark white letters — Cortney Dare — gradually turned to smoke before his closed eyes; his ears detected faint syllables, like a distant station on a poorly tuned radio.
He had made contact! There could be no doubt. But there would be no dialogue, no conversation — his powers were not yet that highly developed — just the communication of a single thought, a single image across time and space.
And then the picture was there behind his eyes, sculpted from the churning smoke that had once spelled Cortney Dare.
It was the final piece of the puzzle.
At last, for the first time in a long life of study and frustration, Professor Sheldon Hathaway would experience power.
5
“Get in that fuckin’ Scout.” Cliff waved the shotgun. “You drive, fella. Christ, I gotta get the fuck outa here!”
Cliff crawled into the back seat. Obediently, Harrison followed Nancy into the front. Harrison took the wheel.
“Now don’t go losin’ your head, lover boy, or the little lady is gonna lose hers — an’ I ain’t shittin’.” Cliff rested the barrel of the shotgun on the back of Nancy’s seat, its muzzle in firm contact with her spine. To prove he wasn’t shittin’, he pushed the metal hard against her vertebrae. She lurched forward, crying out in pain and surprise.
Harrison was convinced of the helplessness of their situation. Any false move, any show of noncooperation would cause aggression toward Nancy. Even if their captor was truly insane, there was no reason to believe he was a liar.
Looking out of the comer of his eye, without turning his head, Harrison saw Nancy cowering in the passenger’s seat, her shoulder and head pressed firmly against the window. Her hands were locked tightly together, knuckles white, the tip of her right thumb clenched in her teeth. She was obviously scared to death.
He could not recall ever feeling so frightened and powerless. But he was surprised to feel something else: somewhere below his trembling limbs and chattering teeth there was a calm spot in his mind, a spot where thought processes were going on very clearly. He couldn’t take time to think about it; he couldn’t analyze it or debate whether he might ultimately prove to be a coward. He just continued, rationally, to assess their situation, knowing that he was nowhere near as terrified as the man in the back seat.
Harrison knew the next move could be his. It would have to be a careful move, well timed, planned and perfect. Maybe he could regain control.
“I’ll do whatever you say,” he told his captor.
“Get this fuckin’ thing movin’.”
“Where to?”
“Drive to… drive to my house. No! Shit! She’ll look for me there. Gotta hide. Gotta git off the friggin’ island.”
Harrison backed up the Scout, turned around, and headed down the road toward the bridge to North Hero.
“NO!” shouted Cliff. “They could be waiting for me at the bridge. A boat! I’ll have to get a boat.”
“What are you so scared of, man?”
“Scared? Christ, you don’t know what she can do!”
“What who can do?”
“She can git inside your head. Make you do things. Anything.”
With those words a dreadful realization seized Harrison. It removed forever any possibility of doubt: the man was insane, completely out of touch with reality. Harrison thought of the gun on the wall at home, the fireplace poker, the knives in the kitchen, the hatchet he used to shave wood for kindling.
“Let’s go to my house,” he said. “It’s on the other end of the island. No one would look for you there.”
“Yeah. Yeah, okay,” Cliff said emphatically. “Drive.”
6
The hidden drawer in the bottom of the wooden file cabinet contained about thirty or forty pages of handwritten manuscript. The ink was faded and brown. The tiny, cramped, and crablike script, scratched onto each yellowing page with a fountain pen, caused the professor to squint uncomfortably. He would have to get it home, where he could study it under direct light and with a magnifying glass.
As he rose and started down the stairs, he heard the poorly muffled roar of an engine. Stopping on the landing on the second floor, he peeked out between the shutters and saw three people pull up in a decrepit-looking Scout. It was a familiar vehicle, one he had often seen around the island.
Visitors, no doubt. They would not find Harrison at home and they would quickly leave.
To be sure that the house appeared empty, he stepped back, closed the door at the bottom of the attic stairs and returned to the safety of the loft. He would hide until he heard the growling engine again as the visitors left.
Although he waited in suspense for many long minutes, he felt completely safe and protected.
But too much time passed.
Apparently the guests had decided to wait a while for Harrison to return. They might be waiting in the Scout, but probably not. More likely they had exercised the age-old island custom of walking right in and making themselves “to home.” It would be easy to enter; the professor knew the door was unlocked.
Better stay right here, he thought. May as well do a little reading.
Huddled below a dusty attic window, he brought out the manuscript and began to examine it in the failing light.
…and above all, the ancestry is most interesting. There is evidence of an unbroken record of psychic power extending over several generations. The grandmother four times removed was sentenced, if not hanged as a witch, in the infamous Salem trials of 1692. My own research corroborates at least the former after a careful study of trial records and the genealogical linkage.
There are as many living now who would design to take a similar position with the mediums, and so the mother, who was herself strongly psychic and perhaps equally as shrewd, masked those powers over which she could exercise control so successfully that she was married to a simple rustic who had no idea of his spouse’s well-concealed talents.
There was to be no similar refuge for the less fortunate Abby. The psychic phenomena used to follow her everywhere and repeatedly manifested themselves involuntarily. In the schoolroom she would excite the reviling of the ignorant little barbarians around her.
At home, when young Abby fell into a trance, her father, an unjust and religious brute, would pour boiling water over her legs and once placed a red-hot coal upon her hand, leaving an indelible scar. The girl fortunately slept on.
The same ignorant zealot who turned the girl’s home into a hell upon earth later tried to make some money out of the very powers which he had once so brutally discouraged, and hired the girl out as a medium. It was under these wretched circumstances that I first made her acquaintance.
No one has to this date made public or adequately described the tortures which public mediums occasionally undergo at the hands of idiotic investigators and cruel skeptics. I myself have witnessed the girl’s arms and hands grooved with marks of ligatures and scarred with burning oil or wax. I have seen where pieces of flesh were pinched out by handcuffs. And, although I have not witnessed the atrocity, I have no doubt that her claim of blood oozing out from below her fingernails from the compression of arteries is absolutely tree.
It required little additional provocation for me to relieve the opportunistic brute of the burden of fatherhood. Our escape to Vermont was without event and, I believe, went completely unobserved by anyone in authority.
She proves a far more satisfactory subject than anyone else to date, and in the accepting atmosphere of the colony she has rapidly learned not to be afraid of her talents and, upon occasion, to display them with pride.
At first, upon the initial introduction to several members of the colony, I observed her unconscious effect upon
them. With no effort of will she is able to cause confusion among those who surround her. Perhaps it is a psychic projection of the confusion she herself experienced in unfamiliar surroundings amid a group of doting though hitherto unknown individuals. Perhaps the consequences that befell Peveral Holmes are the most illustrative. Upon making the acquaintance of the girl, he began to become muddled in his normally eloquent speech. Apparently believing himself to be back at university, he commenced chanting the conjugation of certain Latin verbs. The reaction of the others, though less dramatic, was illustrated by their indifference to Holmes’s condition. I might add that the condition vanished when Holmes was led from the room.
It should be noted here that her influence upon many was much less marked and upon a few was not at all. I myself find that I am immune to her intentional and unintentional persuasion. There seems to be no explanation that will account for who is affected and who is not. It is my intention to investigate this further.
As I have said at great length on previous pages, I abhor the neo-Christian cults that are asserting to become the religion of the future.
The term “spiritualism” and even Doyle’s patronizing term “psychic religion” are destined to do the science a great disservice.
The church and its many tentacles, like the body and legs of the black widow, will surely poison the science and suck out its essence before it grows to benefit mankind as a new—
Here Professor Hathaway flipped a few pages, looking for something more interesting. He heard sounds from downstairs: doors slamming, feet pounding on floorboards, the drone of muffled conversation. Ignoring the noise, he continued reading:
…to aid the girl in her training. My research supports the following conclusion. I postulate thusly: If human evolution were in fact initiated by the perverse coupling of higher with lower primitive “humans,” then a subsequent rung of the evolutionary ladder may be attained with the union of a suitably adept human female and a superior being of another plane. Since communication with these beings is impossible for all but a select few, it must be one of these who encourages the union. This will be my task for Abby.
Ah! This was exactly what he wanted.
But Professor Hathaway’s eyes were beginning to hurt as they strained in the faded light. The cramped handwriting became blurred and impossible to read. He had been so engrossed in the manuscript that he’d failed to notice how uncomfortable he had become in his awkward position below the window. The circulation in his right leg had been cut off; a numb, prickling sensation threatened to become painful.
He stretched his legs out in front of him, trying hard not to make any noise that might betray his presence to the unknown guests waiting below.
His heavy right leg scraped across the wooden floor.
The impact of what he had just read was staggering. Was the seemingly idiotic Jabez Snowdon the product of an experiment in the bizarre union of a gifted psychic and — what was the term? — a cryptosentient being? Was Jabez in fact an experiment that failed? An earthbound body with a mind trapped uselessly on another plane? Or did the boy in some way contribute to the strange hold that Abigail Snowdon — surely the “Abby” of the manuscript — had over the islanders?
What, exactly, was the nature of this mysterious hold she exercised over them? What was the true source of her enigmatic power? Professor Hathaway had always known better than to ask the islanders any of these questions. But his patience had paid off; now he knew that the answer was at hand.
He was eager to return to his house to read the rest of the papers in a more comfortable environment.
If only the people downstairs would leave!
But then again, he had waited this long, a bit longer would do no harm. It would not even be unreasonable to spend the night in the dusty attic, if that was what he had to do.
He settled back, a bit more comfortably now, his legs stretched out before him. With the diversion of reading no longer possible, he began to wait again as the attic’s darkness became complete.
7
Even in the cool living room, Harrison could see that the man was sweating profusely. His eyes darted back and forth, and all too frequently he jumped up, weapon in hand, and paced from window to window, looking out over the fields or at the road that ended in front of Harrison’s house.
The man’s nervousness was infectious.
Harrison knew he’d have to be extremely careful not to alarm or provoke him. He noticed that Nancy was looking at the man strangely, almost with a kind of recognition. But the time had not yet been right to question her about it.
“Listen,” said Harrison, “can I offer you a drink, some coffee or something?”
“Got any beer? I could use a beer.”
“No beer. I have some bourbon.”
“Yeah, great. I’ll have a shot.”
With glass in hand, and calmed somewhat by the humane exchange, the man seemed to relax a bit. He sat down in the easy chair by the fireplace, the shotgun across his knees. Harrison and Nancy sat close together on the couch nearby.
Secretly, Harrison stole a glance at the antique shotgun mounted on the wall above the mantel.
“Look,” said Harrison, trying to sound as reasonable as possible, “I really don’t know what this is all about, but I want to help you if I can. The thing that happened back there in the monastery, you had nothing to do with it. We both saw that it wasn’t you. Maybe we couldn’t see who it was that killed your friend, but we saw it wasn’t you.”
“Listen, you don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. And the only fuckin’ thing you can do for me is to get me off this friggin’ island. None of us can do nothin’ about what happened back there. Nothin’.”
“But what are you so afraid of? Do you think whoever it was will come back for you?”
“Look, mister, you don’t know nothin’ about it. An’ you don’t wanna know, believe me you don’t.”
“But you’re not in any trouble. We saw that you didn’t hurt your friend. It can’t be the police you’re afraid of—”
“I AIN’T AFRAID!” Cliff wiped the back of a trembling hand across his mouth. “I ain’t afraid. I’m jest bein’ careful, that’s all.”
“But if you level with me, maybe I can help you. Look, we were attacked by a maniac, all of us. But it was your friend who got hurt. The cops’ll take our word for it. Think about it: if there’s a crazy man on the island, they ought to be out looking for him. Nancy and I can clear you. We can all tell the same story about what happened.”
“It’s got nothin’ to do with the friggin’ cops,” Cliff shouted. He stood up quickly, like a soldier snapping to attention. Then he walked over to where the couple sat, towering over them, weapon across his chest. “Look, I don’t know why the fuck that happened to Stubby, and I don’t know who done it, okay? But I got a pretty good idea where they come from. An’ I’ll tell you somethin’ more; ain’t none of us here is safe — not you, not me, not the schoolteacher here. An’ they’s nothin’ you can do to help me. An’ nothin’ I can do to help you. So I want you — I want both of you — to jes’ fuckin’ set there an’ shut up an’ let me think.”
At that moment, as if on cue, there was a noise from upstairs, the grating squeak of a board as if under the weight of a man’s foot.
Instantly Cliff went white, his eyes widened with a fear approaching panic. He backed up against the wall, his weapon ready for action.
“She’s here,” he muttered. “She’s here. Oh, Christ, she’s found me. Oh, shit, oh, shit, she knows I’m here, she—”
“Who?” Harrison pressed, holding Nancy’s hand tightly. “Who are you talking about?”
“The ol’ woman — who the fuck do you think? The ol’ witch woman. The one who—” Cliff turned abruptly, his frightened eyes met Nancy’s. “You two ain’t from around’ here. You don’t know what she is, what she can do. You don’t even know what she done to you already, an’ what she’s gonna do when she gets here. Christ, I think s
he’s here already. I think she’s upstairs!”
“That was just a noise. This old house is full of them. Go on up and look.”
“Fuck you, ‘go up an’ look.’”
Still, the man seemed to calm down a little. Chancing a careful walk to the foot of the stairs, he looked up. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am gettin’ awful goddamn jumpy. I gotta think this thing through. If she don’t know I’m here, then she, or maybe Jabe, is prob’ly waitin’ for me at my house or on the bridge or—”
Cliff walked back to the chair and sat down. His posture was stiff, erect, and the weapon was always ready. His eyes darted between the window and the front door, then toward the stairs.
“If I don’t show up at neither place, then they’re gonna come lookin’ for me, that’s for sure. Now, how’ll they find me? How? Is there any way they can know I’m here?”
“Your car,” said Nancy meekly, her tiny voice cracking with the effort of speech.
“Fuck, yes! Stub’s goddamn Scout! We gotta get the fuckin’ thing outa sight.” He jumped up and charged to the window. “Christ, I might as well have my fuckin’ name on the mailbox.”
“I can move it,” Harrison offered.
“Yup. Yup, you can. That’ll be your job. You jes’ drive it down south an’ hide it in the bushes all the way down on The Jaw. An’ do it quiet. Don’t turn on the lights or nothin’. An’ if you’re back within ten minutes, I won’t do nothin’ to your girlfriend here, you unnerstan’?”
Harrison nodded.
The message was absolutely clear to him.
Harrison left the dark house, Cliff at the front window watching every move. He jumped into the Scout. When he turned the ignition key, the engine roared to life.
8
When he heard the car pull away, Professor Hathaway thought he was again alone in the old house. Never thinking that someone might have remained, he hurried down the stairs, giving no heed to the clatter of his leather boots on the wooden steps.
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