Invisible, the bear watched and waited.
It was patient, as patient as the centuries had taught it to be. It waited until Susie, unable to sleep, went down to the cafeteria for another cup of vending machine coffee. Her daughter was asleep, if uneasily. Susie and Hank had agreed to rotate nights on the cot the hospital let them set up in Maureen’s room. Hank had missed too many days from work, so Susie had taken the first night. Already it was endless.
It was 1:45 A.M.
At the other end of the corridor a plump, middle-aged woman sat behind the nurses’ station desk. Nurse McGibney was reading a Sidney Sheldon novel and smoking a unfiltered cigarette. That was against regulations, but who was going to care? The night watchman? He was in the boiler room, getting sloshed. The night supervisor? She smoked, too. Pediatrics was only half full tonight, and only one child, that McDonald kid, had orders for fifteen-minute checks. She’d just looked in, and everything had been fine. Tonight was going to be a skate, McGibney could just tell.
Maureen smelled the bear before she saw it, before she was awake.
A rotted vegetable odor, like potatoes left too long in a root cellar. It filled her sleep, not warning her, just quietly—but with a growing insistence—announcing its presence. After more than a week the bear was back. She didn’t have to see it to know that it was back, just as it had promised it would be.
What unsatisfying sleep there had been evaporated. Her eyes snapped open, and there it was, its black fur completely filling the room, its teeth shiny and white and oh, so sharp.
It had followed her here.
“Well, of course I did,” it said, knowing, as it always did, what she was thinking. “I will follow you no matter where you go, didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I tell you there’s nowhere to hide, not in your room, not in the hospital, not anywhere? Why, they could take you to a police station or a church, and I would still come. I gave you my word, and real bears always keep their word.”
It spoke, but not in words. Not words you could hear. Maureen had learned that the bear always got inside her head when it had something to say. It could do that, it had told her, because it could do anything. It had to do that, it had said, so none of these pesky grown-ups would hear it. Because grown-ups don’t believe in talking bears, do they, Maureen?
“Go ‘way,” Maureen said, and her words were audible, but only barely; her body was too drained to be forceful. At her station Nurse McGibney turned the page of her book, tamped out her cigarette, and immediately lit another.
“Go ‘way.”
“Goodness, we seem to be unusually out of sorts tonight, don’t we?” the bear said, feeling her resistance, recoiling from it. So the little creep still had some fight left in her after all. It wasn’t turning out to be as easy as He had predicted it would be. But the day would come. Soon. Very soon. The bear smelled it in the air. They would have to endure only a little longer, and she, the first, would be theirs. The floodgates would open wide, and the torrent that would be unleashed would bring them souls without end.
“Go ‘way,” Maureen repeated, concentrating what tiny bit of strength she had in the command. The disease had sapped her, but it had not defeated her. Not yet.
“But don’t you want to come with me, Maureen? You’ll like it where I take you. I’ve told you that. You’ll like it very much.”
“No,” she shouted at the monster. “Nooo!”
“Shhhh,” the bear urged. “They’ll hear you. And you know what Mommy and Daddy think when you start in like that. They think you’re being naughty. They think you’re making things up—or even worse, that you’re having some kind of head problem. Goodness. You wouldn’t want Mommy upset again, would you? She’s already so upset. And imagine what the nurse would think! Just imagine, Maureen. They only talk nice. Underneath they’re terrible meanies. Oh, yes, they really are. They like sticking little girls with needles. Big giant needles that they twist around!”
The bear breathed fire. A small lick of blue flame, as much as the cramped hospital room would permit. It shot toward Maureen. She pulled the sheet over her head so she didn’t have to see. “No,” she whimpered. “No . . . please . . . go ‘way . . .”
She was not afraid. Not as much as the first few times, anyway, when the bear had been such a shock. Then she had panicked. Wet the bed. Screamed every time until her mother or father or both had come running in. The normal range of reactions. But after the fifth time, or the sixth, or the seventh, she had started to wonder. The bear breathed fire, but the fire had never harmed her. The bear talked of taking her away somewhere, but it had never tried to kidnap her, although it was certainly powerful and clever enough to make off with her if it was really serious, she knew.
No, she didn’t know what to think anymore. She knew the bear was for real, no matter what any grown-up said, and she knew it was very familiar with her and everything about her, but beyond that . . . she just didn’t know. She did not connect her illness with the bear’s appearance because no one had ever made that connection for her. She did not know anything about an evil spirit named Hobbamock because the bear had been explicitly instructed never to mention its master’s name. She did not know that the crazy old neighbor who’d been killed in the fire had unwittingly unleashed the bear, pursuing his fool’s dream for gold inside Thunder Rise.
All she knew was she wanted the bear to go away forever. “Go ‘way,” she whimpered.
“But wouldn’t you like to come with me?”
“No! Just go ‘way. Please go ‘way. Please, please, please . . .”
“I will,” the bear said smugly. “Because there is other business to attend to tonight. Other little boys and girls I must see. Boys and girls who are glad to see me.”
Maureen heard the sound of her mother’s footsteps in the corridor. They stopped at the nurses’ station. A muffled conversation, punctuated by weary laughter, drifted her way. Then the footsteps started again.
“I will be back,” the bear promised before slipping away. “You can count on it, Maureen. And maybe next time you’ll be coming with me. I’ll have to think that one over. Now good-bye.”
In the blink of an eye it was gone.
“You’re awake, honey,” Susie said, slipping into the room. Susie sniffed the air. There was a foul odor she hadn’t detected before. It was laced with another smell, an industrial kind of smell that reminded her of Hank soldering pipes. Perhaps a sewer line had backed up in the basement somewhere, and an emergency crew was working on it. If it lingered, she’d have to complain to the nurse.
“How do you feel, sweetheart?” she said, running cold water on a facecloth and pressing it to her daughter’s brow, pale and hot. “Would you like a cold drink?”
Maureen shook her head and started to cry, more from an overwhelming sensation of futility than from fright.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Wednesday, November 5
Charlie sat in his favorite chair, the lantern light casting restless shadows across his face. He had a cigarette in one hand. The fingers of the other were curled tightly around a coffee mug containing half an inch of a colorless, odorless liquid. The wood stove was full of wood, the damper closed to a crack; the fire would burn all night. Outside, the wind moaned under a sky studded with stars. Frost patterns were forming on the window.
He was about to take a drink.
And he was scared. He did not want to begin the ceremony of the pniese.
His father had outlined the ritual, but Charlie had never attempted it. There’d never been any situation to justify such a risk. George had told him of men, some very wise and mighty men included, who’d been permanently changed by it. Gone away somewhere, and never come all the way back, the way some hippies in the sixties had dropped too much acid and never returned to themselves.
But the time was past when Charlie had any choice. He had to have truth—for the children’s sake as well as his own.
Two nights ago he’d been to dinner at his sister’s. He’d driven over in th
e brand-new car he’d promised her (a black Oldsmobile Cutlass), and for perhaps fifteen minutes she and Jimmy had been beside themselves. They’d run their fingers over the upholstery, inhaled that leathery new-car smell, marveled at the air conditioning and cruise control, fiddled with the ultra-electronic radio and the power windows and locks. Ginny had taken them all for a cushioned, sinfully comfortable ride. Her Escort couldn’t compare, she bubbled. It was like the difference between a hang glider and the Concorde.
Within half an hour the Ellises’ excitement had trailed away, exposing an underlying, unyielding anxiety that deeply disturbed Charlie.
These were two people on the verge of breakdown. People with fears that were never more than a few feet outside the door, no matter what they did. Neither Jimmy nor Ginny mentioned nightmares, but
Charlie knew instinctively he was having them. Worse was the low-grade fever Jimmy’d been running for two weeks. No vomiting or night sweats, just a stubborn 100.8 degree fever. The same beginning signs as the last time he really turned sick. Just like Maureen McDonald, who was in her third day at the hospital, according to Ginny. Just like the other kids Ginny knew about from school.
Charlie looked at his nephew and sister, and he saw two people convinced the sky was about to fall.
He believed in Hobbamock. That much he was sure of. But could Hobbamock really be loose?
The possibility had been gnawing at him since the incident with Jimmy and the snare, worming and boring into his head until it occupied the meridian of his thoughts. Night or day he couldn’t shake it. He’d lost his own interest in hunting, fishing, being in the woods, all the normal pursuits. In Morgantown what was normal anymore anyway? Too much was happening too fast. The kids’ nightmares. The sickness. Strange twists and turns in the weather. Stories the old-timers downtown were telling about animals acting queerly. His own dreams . . . He had come to dread the night.
Did he believe Hobbamock was responsible?
In the days when his ancestors ruled the land, there would have been no such thing as a crisis of faith, and in his darkest moments he prayed that’s all this was. Then there could have been only one interpretation: Somehow Hobbamock had been released, perhaps even busted free on his own, a quantum leap in possibility that Charlie would not allow himself to entertain.
Did he really believe?
Modern Man wouldn’t. People like Brad Gale, so arrogant in their rationalism and orderly lives. People who worshiped science and technology, and held the smug belief that the Creator had intended His greatest creation to be master of His universe. People who dwelt in a world of blacks and whites, but precious few grays, the predominant color of Quidneck philosophy.
Charlie lived in that world, too. Mrs. Fitzpatrick had tried her darnedest to raise her only son in the purified faith of the motherland, Ireland, but the seeds of his father’s beliefs ultimately had found more fertile ground. As a teenager Charlie had consciously embraced Quidneck pantheism, in which spirits and gods were everywhere, in the trees, the birds, the snow, the sun and the moon and the stars. He chose to believe that the good god, Cautantowwit, had created man, and that the bad god, Hobbamock, ceaselessly sought to destroy him. He believed that when he died, a man’s soul made a great journey into the spirit world—like the Christian afterlife, potentially a world of great punishment, but also great promise. A world a man might enter, but only at great risk, while he was still alive.
Charlie believed as the Quidnecks had . . . or rather, wanted to believe.
Was Hobbamock loose?
He needed an answer.
The pniese—a Quidneck word that translated roughly as “journey past the spirit barrier”—might provide one.
And it might transport him somewhere only to strand him there forever.
Charlie contemplated the clear liquid in the cup, waiting for the final impulse to swallow it.
This afternoon, as the day was fading, he’d pressed it from a plant whose name—to his knowledge—was known only to the Quidneck. His father said it grew only on Thunder Rise, and it was true Charlie had never seen it anywhere else. Nor had he found it in botany books, although he had looked more than once. It was a delicate, tiny plant, similar in appearance to a lady’s slipper, although it apparently did not flower. George had called it Eagle’s Beak, a name whose origin was lost in time.
Charlie took a deep breath and drank.
He recoiled from the acid taste, which was like biting into a fresh-cut lemon. Charlie fought the impulse to spit it out. In one gulp the cup was empty.
In preparation Charlie had fasted for two days, and his stomach churned in one vast, queasy wave as the liquid trickled down into it. He was instantly nauseated, and it was all he could do not to vomit. It’s too late now to turn back, he thought, but he was not remorseful or even upset. He was, instead, almost relieved that he had finally taken the plunge.
The initial jolt was the worst; within five minutes, as the liquid circulated, his stomach had settled down, and the aftertaste had begun to moderate. Charlie arranged himself cross-legged in his La-Z-Boy and closed his eyes.
There was no particular trick to meditation. In the old days a Quidneck attempting the pniese would have worn ceremonial garb, and his brothers might have built a blazing fire and surrounded it and him with dance and whooping, but George had told him those were mere accessories, more show than substance. The key was not gaudy exuberance, but blind concentration. As if it were some kind of spiritual sluice, the mind had to be forced open. It had to be cleansed of its skepticism and worldliness. Like a child, it had to be prepared to accept—no, intuit—things unimaginable.
Charlie concentrated on a clear sky in summer, focusing in on the depthless blue, finding there an endless variety of textures and shades.
If he had had any expectations, they were of muffled voices, shadows taking form and then losing form again, colors being distorted, sounds echoing and reverberating off the inside of his skull. Once, on one of his swings through the Southwest, he’d gone up into the New Mexico mountains with a Navajo brother and ingested peyote for a solid day and night. Their hallucinations, simultaneously beautiful and terrifying, had left an indelible mark on Charlie. They’d encountered spirits on that occasion, there was no question. For twenty-four hours their bodies and souls had been abuzz with energy and revelations he’d never been able to explain to anyone else.
So he did not expect to sleep.
But that’s what happened. All evening, as he’d contemplated the pniese, his muscles had been knotted and stiff, and there had been a tension-induced pressure in his chest and head. With surprising quickness, his muscles began to relax. The pressure began to lift inside his head, and he was suddenly, completely drowsy, as if he’d run a great distance and finally found a warm and welcome spot to drop. He fought the drowsiness, but even at the start his fight was halfhearted. Soon he was unable to keep his eyes open.
Not fifteen minutes after drinking the potion, Charlie Moonlight was snoring.
When he awoke—if he awoke—the television was on. The generator wasn’t running, but he understood subliminally that it didn’t have to now.
At first there was only static on the screen and no sound. Charlie pulled himself up in his recliner, the way moviegoers come to attention when the popcorn commercials have ended and the main feature is about to begin. It did not occur to him that he had not meant to watch TV, had not turned it on. He did not remember anything called Eagle’s Beak. He did not know what time or day it was, or care. He only vaguely sensed it was dark, that the lantern had gone out, that the wood stove was still throwing heat.
As he watched, the TV static began to change. It got brighter, and then the million electronic pinpoints began to assemble themselves into a pattern. The pattern was the rough outline of a face, which took on finer and finer detail: sharp eyes, black hair, sun-toughened skin, a strong chin.
It was his father.
“Son,” George said.
“Dad,”
Charlie replied. He spoke perfectly naturally, as if the last time he’d seen his father were yesterday out in the woods he so loved, not three decades ago laid out in a casket in the parlor of the Boar’s Head Inn.
“You should go back,” George said. “There is too much danger where you want to go.”
“I have no choice.”
“There are things you should not see.”
“I must.”
“I cannot change your mind?”
“No.”
“I will lead you as far as I dare. Then you will be on your own.” Charlie stood and crossed the room to the TV. On top of it was his videocassette collection, the VCR, a box of matches, a flashlight.
Perhaps he might need the flashlight and matches. He placed them in his shirt pocket and glanced again at his father.
“Here,” George said, extending his hand through the TV into the room.
Charlie took his hand. His father’s grip was warm, firm. Charlie bent down and walked into the TV.
They were outside. The sky was cloudless. The sun was scorching, the landscape treeless and flat. Like Kansas prairie, it stretched toward infinity in every direction.
Only one object disturbed the monotony of the scene: a spear, lying on the desert near Charlie’s feet.
It was a painstakingly crafted weapon, with a pink granite tip, carefully sharpened, and a handle of ash that had been painted with bright colors: red, orange, green. No ordinary warrior had ever carried such a spear. This had belonged to a war chief, probably one victorious in battle. More than one enemy’s head had been carried home on this spear.
Instinctively Charlie picked it up. For an instant he felt a surge of energy through his body. It dissipated as fast as it had come on. “Let’s go,” George said.
They walked silently across the red clay soil, baked to hardness by days, weeks, probably months of sun and no rain. Past shriveled cactus plants, the only evidence of life, they moved, their feet following a path that had been worn by the passage of unknown others. They both were soon sweating. The sweat plastered their hair, soaked their clothes, came off their faces in streams. Charlie shed his wool shirt, continuing along in dungarees and boots.
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