Gary Brandner

by Doomstalker (v2. 0) (epub)

  He never felt it when his head hit the boards.

  "It's all right, Brian," said Dr. Protius. "You're feeling fine. You can see clearly. Nothing can hurt you. You can look in that window now and you can see what was hidden from you before. You can see anything you want. Go and look, Brian. Look in the window again."

  The boy rose from the porch, walked back and looked. His father stood again facing the transformed Mr. Riggio. His right arm was held straight out, his hand gripped something ... something made of polished red stone. Energy pulsed from the object his father held. The pizza man cowered back from it. His face began to change color.

  The voice of Dr. Protius: "What do you see, Brian?"

  "My father."

  "What is he doing?"

  "He's fighting with the pizza man. And he's holding something in his hand. Holding it out in front of him." Kettering felt his own arm raise in a thirty-years-later imitation of the gesture.

  "What is he holding?"

  The sun glinted from the polished surface, making the boy on the porch shade his eyes.

  "I ... I can't tell. It makes my eyes hurt."

  The muscles in Kettering's arm began to jump.

  "Relax, Brian. You can put your arm down now. You're feeling very relaxed. Very comfortable."

  And so he was. How could Doc Protius always tell what he was feeling?

  "You are still on the porch, Brian. Still six years old."

  No he wasn't, but if Doc Protius wanted to pretend, he would go along with it.

  "What is happening now, Brian?"

  "I don't know. I'm scrunched down where I can't see. I hear a noise inside, like a bang. I hear my dad yell."

  "Do you go into the house now, Brian?"

  "Yes. I go in."

  "What do you see?"

  "I see my dad lying on the floor."

  "Where is the other man?"

  "I don't know. Mr. Riggio is gone. There's just some ashes on the rug."

  "What do you do?"

  "I ... I take it out of my dad's hand."

  "You take what, Brian?"

  "The thing. The red stone thing he used to burn Mr. Riggio."

  "What does it look like? The thing you took from your dad's hand?"

  "It ... it ... I don't know. It has kind of a face. A long nose like a fox. Pointy ears. It's a man, but not a man." Kettering twisted in the chair.

  "What do you do with it?"

  "I take it with me in my pocket. Later I put it in my box of toys. Down in the bottom where nobody will find it."

  "You never told anyone about it?"

  "No. It was my dad's. It was secret."

  "And after that did you ever take it out of the box to look at it or anything?"

  "No, I never."

  "You never saw it again?"

  "I never looked."

  There was a silence. Then Dr. Protius said, "All right, Brian, that's good. That's a very good job. Now you're going to come back. Gently, softly, like the sea gull, you are floating back here to us. You are going to remember everything that happened. Everything we talked about. Will you remember, Brian?"

  "I'll remember."

  "I'm going to count to five now, and when I get to five you are going to be wide awake, feeling fine. Very refreshed. One. Two. Starting to awaken now. Three. A little more. Four. Almost awake now. Feeling fine. Feeling rested. Refreshed and ready to go. Five."

  Kettering grinned at the print of the schooner with the sea gull just over the bow. He looked over at Charity, who smiled back encouragingly. He turned toward the desk where Dr. Protius sat cleaning his nails with a letter opener.

  "Doc, you're all right. That didn't hurt a bit."

  "How are you feeling?"

  "Fine. Rested. Like I just had a good night's sleep."

  "And do you remember everything we did?"

  Kettering grew serious. "Yes. Sure. Why wouldn't I? Like you said, I wasn't really asleep. I never went under."

  "Of course you didn't. Maybe you'll spread the word now that I don't really do magic tricks down here."

  "I'll do a testimonial if you want, Doc." He turned back to Charity, who still sat over by the far wall. "Did you hear all that?"

  She was excited. "I heard. The toy box."

  "That's where I put it. That's probably where it still is."

  "Have you any idea where that box is now?"

  "Unless my aunt Alice has changed a whole lot from the time when I lived with her, I know exactly where it is."

  Charity leaned forward. Dr. Protius put down the letter opener. They looked at Kettering.

  "The toy box, and whatever I put in the bottom of it, is in Milwaukee in my aunt Alice's attic."

  Chapter 31

  Rain made horizontal wet streaks on the window of the DC-10 as the plane began its descent to Mitchell Field. Down below, Milwaukee looked gray and desolate under the rain.

  As a Californian of fifteen years residence, Kettering had little tolerance for rain. It baffled him how people in other parts of the country could carry on their everyday lives while under water so much of the time. Nevertheless, given a choice between standing naked on the ground in a downpour and flying in a luxury jet under ideal conditions, he would have chosen to plant his feet on earth. Flying was not one of the things he did well.

  Charity reached over from the adjacent seat and touched his hand. "Almost there."

  "'Almost' doesn't count," he said through clenched teeth. "As in 'General Custer almost got away at Little Bighorn.' Or 'The Titanic almost missed the iceberg.'" He continued to stare at this rain-distorted view of the wet landscape below.

  The big jet eased in over the runway, the tires banged the asphalt in touchdown. The huge engines roared with reverse thrust and slowed the plane, which began taxiing toward the terminal.

  Gradually Kettering released his grip on the padded armrests.

  "You'll never make the Frequent Flyer Club," Charity told him.

  "Not if I can help it," he said.

  They walked together through the collapsible tunnel into the terminal. Kettering felt displaced among the local people who were meeting planes, buckled into their rain gear. He had left his only raincoat at home buried deep in the back of the closet.

  Charity went into the gift shop to buy one of the clear plastic coats that come in compact envelopes, into which they can never again be made to fit. Kettering passed. He said he did not intend to be out in the weather long enough to get wet.

  They rented a car at the Hertz counter and waited outside under cover until the van driver pulled up to take them to the lot. Kettering turned up his collar against the wet wind. The sky, dark as a bruise, pressed down heavily.

  Before they had gone far, Kettering had to pull off the interstate and consult the Milwaukee street map provided by Hertz.

  "I thought I'd remember the way to Aunt Alice's," he said, "but things change. Landmarks, buildings, freeways."

  "And people," Charity added.

  "Sometimes."

  He put the map away and drove slowly, the windshield wipers keeping a somber rhythm with the weather outside. Thunder growled over Lake Michigan.

  "Sounds like we're in for a storm."

  "This isn't a storm?" Charity said.

  "Not in Milwaukee it isn't. Not yet."

  Kettering drove carefully, slowing almost to a stop at intersections to read street signs. Beside him Charity sat with her hands folded.

  "Tell me about your Aunt Alice," she said.

  "I haven't seen her for ten years," Kettering said. "She was my mother's older sister. Eleven years older. That would make her eighty, eighty-five now. Something like that."

  "I mean what kind of a woman is she?"

  "She was good to me when I came to live with her. It couldn't have been easy. She was fifty-something then, and widowed. I was still messed up mentally from the accident that killed my mother, and I was probably a handful for her. I thought she was too strict with me at the time, but what kid doesn't
think that?"

  "She never married again?"

  "Nope. Still lives alone in the big old house on North Forty-first Street. I get a lively letter from her every Christmas. But I don't know how much longer she'll be able to manage by herself."

  Charity was thoughtful for several blocks.

  "Maybe you ought to drop me at a motel or something," she said. "Go on by yourself."

  "What would I want to do that for?"

  "When you called your aunt from Los Angeles you didn't tell her you were bringing somebody."

  "She didn't ask."

  "Do you think it's a good idea to surprise her?"

  "I don't see where it makes any difference. We're not moving in with her."

  "I'm just thinking it might go smoother if you showed up alone."

  "Why would it?"

  "You wouldn't have to explain me, for one thing. I mean, Aunt Alice doesn't know anything about what's happening with you or your marriage, does she?"

  "I didn't bring it up."

  "And this being the midwest and all, she might not be real happy about you traveling with a strange woman."

  "Hey, the midwest is not all Hickville, you know. They have X-rated movies and massage parlors and cocaine. People even get divorced here now and then."

  "Yes, I know, but you're kind of like a son to this woman."

  "I'm also forty-three years old. I'm allowed to cross the street alone."

  "All right," Charity said, "but if Aunt Alice freezes up, don't say I didn't warn you."

  "Anyway, every time I go somewhere without you, something bad happens."

  She gave him a gentle squeeze on the thigh and they drove on through the rain.

  The house on North Forty-first Street where Alice Ulrich lived, where young Brian Kettering had spent his adolescent years, was more than seventy years old, as were the others along the block. It was gray clapboard, two stories high, with an attic and a basement. The windows were small, the porch was wide with hooks in the overhead beam from which a swing once hung. In the front yard was a huge, sickly elm tree.

  Kettering parked the rental car on the street and sat for a long minute looking at the old house through the rain.

  "Bring back memories?" Charity said.

  "Not so much. Memory is an off and on thing for me. Always has been since I got my head crunched in the accident."

  "Do you have to talk that way? "

  "What way?"

  "Like a bad Bogart imitation."

  "That was supposed to be John Wayne."

  They exchanged a smile, but neither was convincing.

  "We might as well go in," he said.

  A peal of thunder, louder now, sped them through the slanting rain to the shelter of the front porch. Kettering wiped at the water on his shoulders. Charity shook droplets from the plastic raincoat.

  The door bell was an old-fashioned black iron key set in the center of the door. Kettering gave it a twist. A grinding ring sounded on the other side.

  The woman who opened the door was smaller than the Aunt Alice Kettering remembered. Much smaller. She came barely to his breastbone. Her hair was white, her face pale, her forehead marked with brown age spots. The eyes behind the bifocals were still bright blue and alive. She looked at the man and woman for a moment without a sign of recognition.

  "Hi, Aunt Alice. It's me, Brian."

  "I know who it is. I'm not senile."

  "This is Charity Moline. She's a friend."

  The old woman gave Charity a quick frisk with her eyes. She did not smile.

  "Hello."

  "Nice to meet you," Charity said.

  "You might as well come in out of the wet," Aunt Alice said.

  The old woman turned and led the way. Charity dug an elbow into Kettering's ribs and gave him a what'd-I-tell-you look. Kettering frowned at her, wiped his feet, and followed his aunt into the parlor.

  Aunt Alice directed them to chairs. There they sat among the geegaws and bric-a-brac that collect in old houses. The detritus of a lifetime. Surrounded by the familiar furnishings, Kettering felt thirteen years old again. He loosened his collar so he could breathe.

  While Kettering fidgeted and Charity Moline sat quietly, Aunt Alice went to the kitchen and returned with a platter of oatmeal cookies and a pot of coffee. Midwestern custom demanded that you not launch into your business until the host has provided food.

  As soon as they had all bitten into their cookies and sipped at the coffee, Kettering said, "Did you check to make sure the box was still here? The one I asked you about?"

  "Didn't have to," Aunt Alice said. "Like I told you on the phone, nothing's been taken out of that attic since Eisenhower was president. Plenty of stuff been put in, but nothing taken out. That box will be right where it was set down when you came to live here."

  "Okay if we go up and take a look?"

  "That's what you came for, isn't it?"

  "Well ... yes." The old woman's directness was unsettling.

  Kettering forced himself to sit still while he ate another cookie and finished his coffee. Then, followed by Charity and his aunt, he led the way up the narrow stairs to the second floor of the old house.

  He paused at the end of the hall and passed his hand over the painted wood of one of the doors.

  "Your old room," Aunt Alice confirmed. "I rented it out for a while, to a couple of nice college boys, so I thought. Turned out they were doing nasty things with each other up here. Haven't used the room since."

  Opposite Kettering's old room was a smaller door. He opened it onto a dark, narrow flight of uncarpeted wooden stairs that led to the attic. He flicked a wall switch and a bare, low-wattage bulb blinked on above them.

  Kettering shivered at the damp cold beyond the door. He looked back at Charity.

  "There's no heat up here," Aunt Alice said. "No need for it."

  "Ready to go up?" Kettering said.

  Charity rubbed her arms for warmth. "This is what we came for," she said.

  He climbed the steep, splintery stairs. The odor of mildew and old clothes was thick in the cold air. Rain pounded the roof just over their heads.

  Aunt Alice was the last one up the stairs. She said, "The box you're after will be over along the far wall, behind everything else."

  Bending low to avoid hitting his head on the roof beams, Kettering crossed the gritty wooden floor to the jumble of rags, cartons, papers, and old broken furniture his aunt had pointed out. With a last look at Charity he began pulling the debris out of the way.

  It, was twenty minutes later that he uncovered the old cardboard carton with MOTOROLA printed on the sides. The corners were mashed in, the top sealed with tape, but the box was intact. It had originally contained a table-model radio that his parents kept in their bedroom. A big Philco stood in the living room. The family's first television had been a couple of years away.

  A flash of lightning outside threw a momentary blue-white light into the cramped space of the attic. In seconds it was followed by the boom of thunder.

  Kettering stripped away the tape sealing the box and sat down cross-legged on the floor. Item by item he began taking out the contents.

  There was an Ernie Banks infielder's glove, well worn, cracked with age. An electric football game with little plastic players that were supposed to move when the metal playing field vibrated. It never did work right. The remains of a Lincoln Log set. Loose bubble-gum cards of the 1955 Chicago Cubs, once secured with a rubber band. An Ohio State pennant. A plastic toy guitar with a picture of Roy Rogers. Broken models of World War II fighter planes. Cap guns, squirt guns, spring-loaded dart guns. A Daisy air rifle, broken.

  And at the bottom of the box, where six-year-old Brian Kettering had stuffed it and left it while later additions were piled on top, a tissue-wrapped object about the size of an Academy Award statuette.

  Gently he lifted it out. He looked at Charity, who waited expectantly, and Aunt Alice, who looked uneasy.

  "This is it."

 
A layer at a time he pulled away the tissue paper, stuffing the crumpled sheets back into the toy box. Outside the attic window lightning blazed and thunder boomed while rain lashed the roof.

  Kettering stripped off the last wrapping and held the object gently in his two hands. It was ten inches high, of polished red stone with a fine white grain running through it. Smooth and strangely warm to the touch, it was the figure of a man, unclothed, standing rigid with his arms at his side. The head was distinctly canine, with sharply pointed ears and muzzle. Slowly Kettering turned the figurine over and over in his hands.

  "This is it," he said again. "This is what I took from my father's hand and hid here in my toy box."

  "Do you know what it is?" Charity said in a hushed voice.

  "It looks Egyptian. There was a lot of this kind of stuff around the house when I was little. Things my father brought back from North Africa after World War Two. He gave most of it to the museum."

  "Your father was in Egypt during the war?"

  "Most of the time. He'd been there before, right out of college with some kind of scientific expedition. He spoke several Arabic dialects, so when he went into the Army as a chaplain, they sent him there to double as an interpreter." Kettering looked back down at the red stone image. "That must be where he got this."

  "I know what it is," Charity said.

  Kettering looked at her.

  "Anubis," Charity said.

  He waited for her to go on.

  "An Egyptian god. The Protector, or Guardian."

  "How do you know that?"

  Charity's intent expression softened. "Hey, what did you think, I'm just another pretty face? We learn a few things in the television-news biz."

  He turned the figure over slowly in his hands. "But what is it? What's it supposed to do?"

  "I don't know everything, Kettering."

  A windblown tree branch slashed against the windowpane. The man and woman started, then looked at each other with sheepish smiles. Kettering turned to see if Aunt Alice had reacted. He froze.

  The old woman was crouched on the floor with her frail arms crossed as though to ward off a blow. Her face was twisted into a grimace of terror.