“Yeah. I know the place. Didn't realize it was so run down, though.”
The breath stilled in Michael's lungs. His heart took a hesitant pause. This wasn't the vague recollection that Marjorie and the waitress had. Ginsler was sure. Last night's scene with Jillian played over in Michael's mind, along with pictures of Susan Barnes, of that first night he had picked her up and she had told him her name was Scooter.
“You don't . . . you don't know the name of the family that owns it, do you?”
Ginsler shook his head. “Can't help you there. But the house is on Wildwood Road.”
Michael frowned. He didn't remember any Wildwood Road on the map he had in the car. Ginsler apparently noticed his confusion, for the man began to nod.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm sure there's no sign. Just like there isn't one on this street. This is Ledgewood. The whole area used to be called Juniper Hill, at least when I was a kid, but nobody really calls it that anymore. Not since all the new developments started going in during the nineties, down by Route Twelve.
“Anyway, if you take a left coming out of Ledgewood and keep on for a couple hundred yards, the road starts to curve. It'll be on your left. It comes away from the road at an angle, so it's easy to miss. But it's there.” He handed the illustration back to Michael. “This place is all the way at the top of the hill, in the circle.”
Barely able to form words, Michael managed to thank him and hurried back to his car. He pulled out of the driveway. By the time he glanced back as he was making the left back onto the winding road, Bill Ginsler was gone.
Michael followed his instructions. He did not so much drive as he did steer those two hundred yards, letting the transmission roll the car along. When the street began to curve he stared into the trees off to his left. There were no houses here. But there were also no breaks in the tree line. No Wildwood Road. Not even a dirt path.
Assuming Ginsler had misjudged, he drove on a bit further and at the next curve he did the same thing, examining the woods as he passed. But still there was no road. Michael drove another quarter of a mile before he came to a well-marked intersection, where Nixon Road led into a neighborhood of well-kept ranches and split-levels from the sixties and seventies.
He turned around.
As he completed the turn, he saw movement in his peripheral vision. A figure in a raincoat.
Michael hit the brakes. He swung around to get a better look and only when he saw the German shepherd the man was leading on a leash did he relax. He felt like he had never been closer to finding the house. If those pale, twisted women wanted him to stay away, now was the time that he would see them.
His hand went to his throat and he swallowed. It felt as though something was lodged there. He wondered if it would always feel that way.
“This is crazy,” he said, his voice too loud in the car. Then he drove back the way he'd come, watching the woods on his right for any hint of a road or path there. When he reached the curve where Ginsler had said he would find Wildwood Road, there was still no sign of it so he pulled the car as far onto the shoulder as he could manage, killed the engine and got out.
Michael stood on the side of the road, staring into the woods. He craned his neck back, trying to get an idea of how near the top of Juniper Hill he was.
He recalled the hatred in Jilly's eyes. The venom. And the huddle of figures who had surrounded his wife, tearing at her like pigs at a trough. As though they were feeding off of her.
“Fuck this,” he whispered.
Michael pressed the button on his keychain that locked the car. It beeped quietly, but he did not even turn to look at it. He went right into the woods, moving in amongst the trees, and began climbing.
The ground in the forest was blanketed with fallen leaves; they were wet and slippery from the rain. There were many bare trees in there—maple and oak and birch—but plenty of evergreens as well. Yet even with the fallen leaves, it was still dark in the woods. Only a few feet from the road it seemed as though dusk had arrived, with only the weakest, palest light reaching him.
The hill grew steeper very quickly. Michael gritted his teeth. This was where Wildwood Road was supposed to be. If it wasn't here, it was near here. He would climb to the top of Juniper Hill and he would find that road. That house.
His feet slipped constantly and he had to grab bare branches to keep himself from falling. All along he kept his focus upward, searching for a break in the woods, for a clearing that might mean the road was ahead. His hands were scratched. The trees grew closer together and he had to duck under branches to pass.
In the dusky gloom, his own hands looked gray. Once, as a boy, he had been swimming at a lake in Upton with his cousins. Some guy had gotten drunk and tried to swim across the lake. Tried and failed. When they dragged him in, Michael and his cousins had gotten a glimpse as they tried to hustle him out of the water and to the waiting ambulance. His skin had been gray like this.
The ambulance had not been in any hurry when it drove away. No lights. No siren. No rush.
The memory was vivid, now. The very air around him seemed leeched of light and color.
He slipped on wet leaves. His fingers tried to grasp a branch but he could not hold on, and it scrapped his flesh raw. Michael went down on one knee, and the moisture from the day's rain soaked through his jeans.
After taking a moment to compose himself, he grabbed hold of the trunk of the nearest tree and began to get back up. Once more he turned his gaze upward, searching for a clearing.
There was movement in the trees.
For a moment his eyes struggled to adjust. In the gloom of the forest, that absence of color, they were almost invisible. But they were moving, and as they did he found he could make them out more clearly. Shifting behind trees and moving nearer and nearer, they were uncannily nimble.
Expressionless, and yet their features were terrible. Elongated. Inhuman. Every one of them with her mouth open impossibly wide as though in a silent howl.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The women seemed almost to dance through the trees as they came down the hill toward Michael. With their strangely stooped forms and long coats, there was something grotesque about this swift and elegant motion. The treacherously steep grading of the hill gave them no trouble with their footing, nor did the thickness of the forest. Somehow, in spite of the darkness of those woods, their black eyes gleamed like polished ebony, or perhaps more like hot tar, for one glimpse of those eyes and it seemed to Michael that they might draw him in like quicksand.
His instinct was to run, but for several heartbeats he felt trapped by those eyes. Their faces were so unreal, like hideously contorted masks, that all the world suddenly seemed like some bit of perverse Greek tragedy.
There were nine of them by his count. They seemed to slow as they moved nearer, tilting their heads to study him like curious birds. There was something terrible about that look. One of them flowed in amongst the others, drawing his attention with a kind of twirling dance. It seemed almost to float down the hill, slipping behind trees and appearing once more as though it were putting on a show just for him.
They were still perhaps twenty feet from him when he took a step back and his foot slipped on the rain-soaked leaves. The sound of his own tread, of his weight upon the ground, hammered home an observation that he had made unconsciously and not been able to recognize in his conscious mind.
They were silent.
Their footfalls made no sound upon the wet leaves or the ground. No earth was disturbed by their passing. Yet he was certain that they had mass and solidity. These were not ghosts. But they were nothing natural, either.
They floated down toward him.
Get out of here! he thought, panic awakening his previous inaction. Somehow they were in his head, muddling up his thoughts and his reason. His mind felt fuzzy and he flashed back to that night, coming home from the masquerade, and the way he had felt then.
Nobody had drugged him at the masquerade, he realized.
He had been buzzed and sleepy, but after he had picked up Scooter, when he had begun to get disoriented and off balance, and later when he had blacked out . . . it had been them, somehow.
Now that he knew, he fought it. He shook his head, gritted his teeth and forced himself to move. Even as he took two more steps backward, trying to gauge the distance between himself and the road, his left foot slipped on wet leaves and he began to fall. He reached out and grabbed the nearest branch, looking back. The twisted women had paused, there on the hill, with their stretched, plastic faces and their crude oil eyes. The nearest was barely half a dozen feet away. Michael's heart pounded the inside of his chest so hard that it hurt. Whatever had remained of the mesmerism they had worked upon him, it was shattered now.
“Oh . . . oh shit,” he whispered, barely aware his lips had moved.
Silently, gracefully, they closed in on him.
No. He tried to stand but could not get his footing. The trees were thinner here, and the leaves were even wetter. He slipped again and his knee struck a rock. Michael cursed as the pain shot through him, clearing his mind even further. There was nothing surreal about them now. They were more real than anything he had ever experienced.
Then they were on him. Fingers as thin as the tips of branches clamped on his arms and shoulders and forced him down again. Michael started to scream and a frigid hand clamped over his mouth. One of the women came around in front of him while two others kept him on his knees. She . . . but he could not really think of this creature as she. No, it stared into his eyes with those black orbs and there was nothing for him to see in its expression; no emotion there, no question, no comment.
It reached out a finger, touched the center of his forehead, and then pushed the finger through skin and bone without breaking either. The creature's own flesh moved through his as though it was a ghost, but he knew it wasn't. It was as though it filled the spaces between his atoms, like water soaking into a sponge.
Michael shuddered, his legs and arms spasming. He felt the other hands upon him begin to push into his body as well, through his clothes and his skin. Terror raced through him and he opened his mouth in a silent scream, tears forming in his eyes.
Once more, he felt words forced to his lips. “You were warned,” the creature said with his voice, his mouth. “You have brought misery to Jillian. Her joy might have drawn us to her one day, but instead it was your foolishness that led us to her. Yet still you will not stay away. What more must we do to you? We hunger, meddlesome man, and you will not be allowed to interfere.”
Michael struggled. His muscles were rigid, frozen fast by the thing's violation of his body. He tried to clamp his jaws closed, but it used him as a puppet, spoke through him. His upper lip curled into a sneer and his eyes narrowed to slits. It was the smallest of rebellions, but the creature was, at least, not entirely in control of him.
A thousand images of Jillian flickered past in his mind. Vital moments—making love on the library roof, watching her walk the aisle toward him, the anxiety before he dared to ask her to lunch that first day—and hundreds of tiny ones. Jilly asleep in bed beside him, weeping in a darkened theater, laughing at some idiocy he had uttered. Scattered in amongst the others were less pleasant pictures. Jillian pulling her thong from her purse. Swearing and spitting at him, screaming for him to leave the house.
Even as the creature threatened him, Michael felt bitter anguish clutch his heart. He was utterly forlorn. With the thing's finger still pushed into his skull he forced his muscles to obey his will, just enough for him to shake his head slowly, sneering as he glared into its eyes.
“What did you do to my wife?” he snarled.
The other creatures flinched and backed away a step. A breeze swayed branches overhead. The malformed woman who had touched Michael so deeply now snapped rigid, just as he was, its body twitching. They were connected by that touch, by a circuit it created between them. Michael began to jitter as though an electrical current passed through him. His muscles were still not his to command, but he managed to force more words through his clenched jaw.
“Jillian! What did you do?”
“Jillian,” he said again, but this time he had not spoken the word. It issued from his lips, but it was the twisted thing that had spoken.
Its tar pit eyes widened.
Then Michael saw nothing. His mind—all of his senses—were flooded with not merely image, but experience. Memory. Slices of childhood, moments of innocence and bliss.
But they were not moments from his own childhood.
They belonged to Jillian.
His mind was torn in half. One part of him wallowed in the horror of what the creature was doing to him, of the truth of their existence. But that part of his consciousness was nearly obscured by the other . . . the part that was, momentarily, Jillian.
Jillian at her first Communion, in her pretty white gown so much like a wedding dress, her daddy telling her how beautiful she looks. She keeps her hands pressed together and her back straight as she walks down the aisle of the church. A hundred times she has been inside this place and yet today it feels so huge, so full of peace. Suddenly she realizes she is out of step with the others and she giggles softly to herself and quickens her pace to fall into rhythm.
Laughing, she hurls snowballs at Hannah. Her little sister's face is flushed red with cold and laughter; they know that their mother will have cocoa for them when they go inside.
Seventh grade, and her heart flutters at the dance. The song is something old. Something her parents would like. But she is barely paying attention, because Billy Marcus—the cutest boy in her class, the same boy who has been her nemesis since kindergarten—is asking her to dance. And he seems embarrassed and hesitant, and though she can't put it into words, there's something wonderful about that. Something that touches her.
Building sand castles in Ogunquit with Dad and Hannah.
Homemade brownies on the back porch, watching the August sun burn down over the horizon.
The endless bus trip to Chicago that year, all the strange sights as they pass through city after city, the sunlight fading and the bus rumbling on all night, her head bouncing off the window as she tries to sleep. Loud people and funny people and the odd nighttime life in the bus stations. It is the farthest she's ever been from home, and it makes her feel as though she wants to keep traveling, keep riding that bus until she has been through every city in the world.
Mom, baking cookies and letting her stir, letting her lick the spoon.
Daddy, singing silly songs to her to get her up for school in the morning.
Michael blinked. His vision cleared for just a moment, blurry, but not so much that he could not see the elongated, ghastly face of the woman. Its hand was still up, fingers pushed through his forehead, but something was wrong with her. With it. That hideous face was twisted worse than before, contorted in pain, and withered to a haggard thinness. There were hollows around the eyes and even its body seemed to have deflated into a hunched, cadaverous figure.
Its mouth was open and a kind of hiss issued from it, like air leaking from a punctured tire, and he had the irrefutable impression that the ugly woman was hollow inside, that whatever it and the others had taken from Jillian, they took to fill that void within.
Jilly. Her memories had flowed from the thing and into Michael, yet that had obviously not been its intention. Somehow—
Then it was happening again. His vision swam and darkened, all of his senses surrendered to memory. But these were not Jillian's recollections. They were faded and ancient. A gray world coalesced around Michael's consciousness, and he could sense the age of it; the scent of the very air was different.
The sun gleams upon the blue water of the Gulf of Tunis. All of the priests of Kart-hadasht gather this morning at the Byrsa. They march with her now, though she leads. They give her that dignity, this virgin girl. She is to be honored, this day.
Tears burn her cheeks and she does not understand them. All of the land
will reap the rewards of her sacrifice. An honor.
Her lips tremble with words unspoken and her heart breaks with love unspent.
“Hush,”one of the priests snaps, his voice rough. “Do not shame yourself. You must go smiling to the Hall of Moloch, so that you are acceptable to him. If you are unsuitable, all of Kart-hadasht will suffer.”
The scene shifts. Stone columns tower all around an earthen plaza. The scent of the sea caresses the air. Birds cry warning to one another and veer away from this place, instinctively avoiding it, sensing the dark power that emanates from the stones and the earth. If not for the stone structure before her and the heavy wooden door, she could still have seen the blue water. The view is denied her.
She will never feel the warmth of the Gulf waters again.
Never feel that joy.
She will never laugh again. But she knows that there is still time for her to weep. And so she does, and the priest's warning be damned.
The susurrus of excited conversation surrounds her. The priests are there, but beyond them are thousands of others, come to see her off, come to worship Moloch with her blood, and to thank the god-king that she is not their sister or daughter, or themselves.
The doors are drawn open. The darkness yawns within. It is a tiny structure, really, for inside there are only shadows, and a set of stone stairs leading down into the earth, underneath the city. Moloch lives in the heart of Kart-hadasht. The god-king is the city's very essence.
She takes a single step, stumbles and falls to her knees. All the strength is gone from her. Her tears flow freely now and she has bitten through her lower lip. Warm blood streaks her chin, but it is the only warmth she can feel.
“Foolish girl. You shame not only yourself but your family. You face your duty now. Moloch has chosen you.”
None of it means anything to her, save the words about her family. Her destiny has arrived. There is no thought of escape. But if the priests are required to force her through those doors, to hurl her down the stone steps, it will be more humiliation than her father can bear.
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