The Waiting
Page 25
Evan stumbled on the stairs, hitting the landing and almost falling to his knees. He wiped at the stinging acid on his lips and flipped the next switch, lighting his way with the same urine glow.
“Shaun? Selena?”
Again the hope that she would answer and make this a waking fever dream. He would take insanity now, take it and call it his own with a smile. Anything compared to the anticipation of what reality had in store for him.
A small scuffling sound came from near the worktable, and his heart lost a beat.
“Shaun?”
He moved closer, his shoes rasping on the concrete, his eyes twitching to the clock, to the floor, to the stairs behind him. A silver strip lay on the concrete, and when he tilted his head down, he saw it was tape—the duct tape from the doll’s mouth.
The sound again, louder.
Evan slowly walked, rounded the end of the table, and saw the doll standing at the base of the clock. Its head tilted up as its mouth cracked open with a popping sound.
“Go back.”
He heaved in a breath to scream, as the doll fell backward, its legs and arms bursting from its plastic sockets. Its head rolled away, its blue eyes flashing, gone, flashing, gone, until it came to rest against the far wall. Evan shuddered, the strength sapped from his legs, his arms cold. His breath plumed out before him.
“Where’s my son!”
A small click answered, and the center door of the clock swung open a few inches. The light bulbs began to hiss, and their luminance dipped before flaring. The three bulbs burst, one after another, snap, snap, snap. Glass rained down, and Evan sidestepped some of the shards that came his way. Darkness, except for the sallow glow from the stairway, claimed the basement. Silence rushed in.
Evan inched forward, waiting for the dismembered doll to spring into life again. It lay still, and he moved around it, gripping the clock’s open door in one hand. Until then he hadn’t noticed, but now he saw with utter clarity that the weights were all wound to the highest position, hanging like alien eggs waiting to hatch.
With a last deep breath, he pushed the pendulum aside, ducked his head, and stepped into the clock.
27
The first thing he noticed was that it was much larger inside.
Evan knew his left shoulder should be rubbing against the clock’s interior wall, but it wasn’t. He put out a hand to keep from running into the back panel, but it met only empty air. His footsteps clacked and rang out, reverberating as though he stood not in a three-foot-by-three-foot space but in an empty auditorium. A quiet snick issued from behind him, and though he could see nothing when he turned, he knew the door had closed behind him.
“Shaun?”
His voice bounced back to him, coming from too far away. Impossibly far. The darkness around him was complete, like he’d never known before. He imagined this was what an astronaut felt like staring into the void of space—no end, only pitch black to eat up an eternity in every direction. At least he could still feel the floor.
Something touched his back.
Evan spun, swinging a fist through the darkness before he wondered if it could be Shaun.
“Shaun?”
A slithering sound came from his left, the direction of the door, he thought. It sounded like something long crawling through dead leaves, a snake burrowing into a carcass to feed.
“Who’s there?”
Nothing. Another caress from the dark, this time on his right side, toward the back wall of the clock. It felt like a bony hand running down the length of his arm. Evan swung again, this time his knuckles encountering some resistance, but only momentarily. A warm draft of air, then cold.
His dream from the night before came back to him. The darkness alive around him, touching, picking, tasting him. He moved backward, turning in a circle, losing all sense of direction.
“Shaun!”
His yell echoed back to him from a thousand feet, ten thousand. His foot struck something in the dark, and he heard the rustle again, a susurration, and then quiet.
Evan.
The voice came from everywhere at once—the walls, if there were any, spoke his name, as well as the floor. Worst of all, he heard it in his head. Not the normal musings of his internal voice but a foreign communication.
“Who’s there?” he asked again, hoping for and dreading a reply.
Evan.
The voice sounded synthetic, a miasmic blending of tones and depth, not human in the least. The space brightened, lit by a shape behind and above him. Evan turned toward it, squinting at the source until it became clear.
The steel crescent-moon dial had increased in size, along with the rest of the clock. It was now several yards across, and shone with a vague opalescence mixing with the darkness so that the light shifted and moved like a tide through the air. At one moment it would be on his left, and then would flow gradually to the right, all the while the crescent moon grinned its malicious smile down on him as its eye pinned him to the ground.
“What is this?” His voice resounded for a second and then stopped as though crushed in midair.
Your destiny, Evan.
He clutched his ears, the voice bubbling through his skull with a paralytic touch of violation.
You’ve come through the years to this time and place, and I’ve been waiting, patiently waiting.
Evan blinked, his vision hazy with the rolling light of the steel moon. The floor he stood on remained black despite the touch of light, and no defining features were revealed in its glow.
“Where’s my son?”
Here, Evan. Everyone is here, can’t you feel them?
“Who are you?”
I am one and many. I am the creator. I am the time and the soul.
His knees unhinged, and he dropped to the ground, feeling something begin to drip from his nose. Hearing the voice was like standing inside a giant speaker, with a smaller speaker in his head. The noise of it was everywhere and nowhere.
“Stop, stop, get out of my head,” he said, bracing a hand against the floor.
More blood fell from his nose, splashing to his hand. It looked like tar in the moon’s sick light.
Is this better?
The voice now came from directly in front of him, and something stood there, just outside the moonbeam’s reach. Something rumpled and hunched. Manlike, but so wrong he couldn’t find words to describe it.
“Where’s Shaun?”
His head felt huge, heavy on his neck, but the nosebleed had stopped, a faucet shut off within his skull. He stood and wiped away the blood drying on his upper lip. The man-shape was gone. He pivoted slowly, trying to distinguish his position within the cavernous space.
“Who are you?”
Evan caught movement off to his right and turned as the figure walked toward him, the moon’s light finally illuminating it.
It looked vaguely human, but it wasn’t, he was sure of it. It wore a swirling suit of darkness that continued to move even after it stopped walking. Its cloak twisted and crawled with life of its own. Shining eyes inspected Evan from various places on its body and then melded with the rest of the darkness. Its face had no continuity, a wax blur of features without structure. It flowed, melted, a nose erupting and then receding, a mouth blooming, teeth flashing, then gone. Hair grew and shrunk, while eyes, sometimes one, sometimes three, blinked and then sank away. It was then that he realized it did not wear the darkness—its skin was the darkness.
Evan took a step back and something crunched beneath his heel. He nearly stumbled but managed to keep his feet as he looked down at the pile of bones he’d tripped over. The skeleton wore a faded pair of women’s slacks, their original color no longer discernable. A blouse, thin and flowing, lay around the sunken rib cage like a deflated balloon. Curly strands of gray hair sat in piles above the grinning skull.
They never found my grandma. Jason’s voice came back to him, the memory nudged either by seeing the bones on the floor or by the thing standing nearby.
The swirling moon’s light shifted and shone on another rumpled mass a few paces from Maggie’s remains. This corpse had some flesh still covering its bones, but death had taken its eyes away, along with its lips, so that it smiled, its teeth bright ivory.
Bob Garrison. He was the first in many years.
Evan gazed at the body and recognized Bob, even in death. He looked back to the figure to watch it shift again, taking on the form he’d seen on the Internet while researching the former caretaker’s past. Bob sneered at him, his eyes sharpened points.
The light swirled, washing past Bob’s rotting corpse. It coursed over the floor, illuminating the unmistakable hind-leg bones of a dog, and then brightened a spot where another full skeleton lay, this one blinding white through tattered suit pants and a limp jacket.
The figure melted again, a long nose and two cold eyes solidifying in a sallow face. The suit pants and jacket came into focus and hung like a loose skin on the man’s frame, although they looked brand-new. The man’s lips moved when he spoke, but there was a delay as the words crossed the air between them.
I am Abel Kluge.
The man-thing walked in a small circle around Evan, its glinting eyes studying him with calculation, a shark’s stare.
“You’re dead.” His mind tilted toward the drop-off of insanity.
Yes and no. You see, there is a purpose to everything, a reason. You are here because of it. So was your son. Every living thing provides a rung in the ladder that climbs beyond what we know.
“What are you talking about?”
Souls, Evan—or I should say time, for that is all a soul is, time. A soul is time for life, energy for living, a drop in the ever-flowing well.
“Where’s my son?” Evan said. Anger rose within him, a fury at whatever this was—hallucination or reality, he didn’t know. All he wanted was to find Shaun.
The Abel-shape ignored the question and continued its circle around him. Evan saw the rear of its head shift and warp before coming back into definition. The thing stopped and faced him again. In a split second its face broke, peeling back and reabsorbing its flesh, until long, brown hair sprouted and dropped past its shoulders. Its frame shrunk and took on curves Evan knew well.
Selena stood before him.
As if hearing his thoughts, it spoke in the same ratcheting voice that grated against his eardrums.
You know her as Selena, but her name used to be Allison. Allison Kaufman.
Evan stood stock-still, letting its words sink into him. Selena, or what hid beneath her guise, smiled at him, revealing a broken and jagged grin that righted itself instantly. Then the shape became Abel again, the skin flowing like magma until the features solidified once more.
“I don’t understand,” Evan whispered.
The Abel-thing sprang at him.
It leapt across the distance between them as though teleporting, and had both of its soggy hands around Evan’s throat before he could react. Its flesh was like a fish fillet—wet, cold, and pliant—but moved and crawled without releasing him from its hold. He opened his mouth to scream, to cry out in revulsion, and the thing holding him leaned in, touching its now-flowing forehead against his.
A rush of colors and images poured into his mind, a river of life he had only moments to discern before it plunged past. He saw Abel dancing with a woman who could only be his wife in a magnificent ballroom, and they twirl until the scene becomes a workshop in which Abel toils over a bench, gears and sprockets stacked in canted piles, assembling a small timepiece. Kluge House rising from the ground, with dozens of workers lifting, nailing, setting its structure. Selena, her eyes as well as her smile unmistakable, so seductive, before him first on a front stoop, then on a bed, her body bare, writhing beneath him. A young woman bearing a great likeness to Cecil Fenz scrubbing a floor as Abel and Selena walk by, both landing a kick to her ribs, sending her sprawling. Speckles of blood on a mirror, Abel’s reflection gazing at the mess, his eyes far away. A dark basement full of tools swaying on their hooks, Abel assembling a large frame—the clock. Abel’s hand carving ideograms in the wood, his mouth open and chanting, sweat running in streams down his face. Abel doubling up, hacking out a blob of red and black tissue onto the workbench, his eyes bulging. The master bedroom of Kluge House, Selena lying on a settee, barely breathing, her eyes staring. Abel coughing as he chants again, cutting his wrist on the edge of the clock’s swinging pendulum, his eyes alight with fever and madness. Larissa crouching in the corner of the room, her delicate hands covering her head and face from the sight. Abel dropping to his knees before the clock, his arms outstretched in supplication as the darkness within the encasement bleeds into the room. Tendrils reaching, wrapping around Abel’s wrists and waist and then yanking him into the clock’s dark belly. A shock wave of ichor shooting out in every direction, blazing a shadow against the wall. The key exploding free of its hole, burying itself in the picture across the room as the frame bubbles and welds in place. Selena convulsing and twisting in the clock’s oily embrace before spewing blood over her lips, her form slackening. Larissa’s open mouth screaming as the wave meets her, engulfs her, drives her body against the wall and then to the floor, where she lies dead, her eyes half open. The clock smoldering, vapors of heat coiling from its top as the pendulum swings, the hands running backward.
Evan broke free of the thing’s hold, shoving as hard as he could with his muscles as well as his mind, a coiling, mental tension released. He tumbled and fell onto his back, his mouth open and gasping. He had wet himself, but couldn’t summon the energy to care. The thing that used to look like Abel remained where it was, its face no longer bearing any features. Evan sat up and scrambled away from it.
“You caught it from her, didn’t you? Tuberculosis.” Evan gasped. “The doctors you called weren’t only for her, they were for you. And when you knew you were going to die, you built this ... this thing and cursed it somehow.” He gestured to the darkness around them.
As if in reply, a ripple flowed through Abel’s entire form, a wave of skin rolling and settling.
My time was cut short unfairly, and unlike other pitiful mortal men, I didn’t succumb to my fate, I raged against it. You are correct, I built this, and it welcomed me into its womb, just as the ancient rites handed down through my bloodlines said it would. And yes, my beautiful achievement did need power. The ones that lay around us misunderstood my masterpiece for something it was not. It drew those that had regrets. It gave them hope that they could change their fates, and I waited, luring them closer until I could absorb their energy.
Evan’s mouth opened and then shut.
“You killed them all. Your wife and Allison, all the others—to fuel it.”
The list of names and faces scrolled through his mind—Jason’s grandmother and grandfather, Bob, Becky, Becky’s father.
“They were trying to warn us.”
Evan choked and coughed, feeling the strange tickling in his throat again.
“The doll, the body in the lake, everything. They were trying to scare us away before it was too late.”
Abel’s form writhed as though in ecstasy, the skin opening with sores, bleeding before healing, a scar there and then gone.
Evan slowly stood, waiting to fall back to the ground, but didn’t.
Their weak imprints meddle with my destiny, but they are only husks, hollowed out of the life I took from them. They are nothing but shadows and mist.
“The hair was from you,” Evan said, coughing again. “From Selena, or Allison. You couldn’t help leaving a little trace of your own as you guided me, kept me working and hoping I could go back.”
Every soul comes with a price.
“You give me my son back, right now.”
Evan’s voice shook, and tears sprang to his eye
s. He knew the thing before him was laying out a path, but he didn’t want to follow it, he knew where it led to. The creature advanced on him, glided toward him without walking. Its chest opened in a vertical mouth from neck to groin, the blackened ribs beneath splitting, forming teeth, its organs melding into a giant lapping tongue.
Evan retreated, his shoes squeaking on the ebony floor. The crescent moon’s shining eye spotlighted him like a star on a stage. The pendulum cut the air now as the chunking of gears and sprockets above him meshed. The clock was beginning its work.
TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK.
Time passing became the loudest sound in the world, and Evan turned to run, to flee from the gliding horror Abel had become, but tripped and fell, his hands barely catching himself before he bashed his face into the floor. He rolled, trying to regain his feet, and saw what he’d stumbled over.
Shaun lay on the floor, his eyes partially open.
Evan’s heart stopped dead in his chest; sound peeled away until silence burned in his ears. He saw nothing but Shaun lying there, one arm twisted at his side, his skin pale alabaster. Unmoving.
Evan crawled toward him, touched his skin and felt the coldness of it, the pliancy gone.
“No,” he pleaded, his throat tightening against a moan.
He ran his hand up to Shaun’s shoulder, pulling himself closer, closer to his son, his boy. He pressed his face against Shaun’s cheek, feeling the first tear break free. Reaching around, he got an arm beneath his son’s back, curling his small body into his lap. Shaun’s head lolled on his neck, and Evan cradled it, the memory of the first time he held him coming back so clean and clear he could have lived in it forever. He heard Elle saying weakly from her hospital bed to support his head, and he was. He would never let anything bad happen to him, not ever. He would die for him; he would protect him and never let him suffer.
Evan rocked as he held Shaun’s body, silent sobs racking him as he breathed in the smell of his boy’s hair, the shampoo they always used. A sound of pure agony came from deep within him, and it was a breaking, the tearing of something that couldn’t be repaired.