As Sam watched, mystified, the enormous column of dark vapor writhed into the hallway. He thought he glimpsed hands in there ... a face ... legs. No, he was not seeing this. This was, absolutely, another demented illusion.
Because a giant-sized man materialized from the smoke itself.
“Hello, Samuel,” the man said.
Sam froze.
The intruder was a lean, very tall man dressed in a black tuxedo, black bow tie, black top hat, and shiny black shoes. A cape flowed from his shoulders in a silky black wave. Strikingly handsome, with chestnut-brown skin, he tapped the carpet with a black cane, smiling at Sam like a guest who had arrived late for the holiday cookout.
“Who the hell are you?” Sam said. “I am Mr. Magic.” He smiled pleasantly. “I’ve come to kill you.”
As Sam gaped at him, Mr. Magic drew back his cane and swung at Sam’s head.
Sam raised his arms protectively and lurched backward. The cane slashed like a saber through empty space, leaving ribbons of air in its wake.
Although he had missed Sam, Mr. Magic laughed. He began to march into the bathroom.
Sam did not know who this man was, what he was, or why he wanted to kill him, but he knew what he had to do next: get his .357 out of the gun case under the bed and blow this bastard away. In this age of random, senseless violence, he had prepared for an attack in his home—though nothing could have readied him for a threat quite like this Mr. Magic character. Illusion or not, Sam had something for him.
Since this was the master bathroom, it had two doors: one opened to the hall; the other led to the master bedroom. As Mr. Magic charged inside, blocking the hallway exit, Sam spun around, yanked open the second door, hustled through, and slammed the door shut behind him and locked it before Mr. Magic could follow.
On the other side, Mr. Magic chuckled.
“I’ll give you something to laugh about.” Sam ran across the dark bedroom. He clicked on the bedside lamp and reached underneath the bed; his hand found the cool wood of the gun case. He pulled out the case and gratefully removed the polished, loaded .357.
He rose, the weapon trembling a little in his hands. He rushed to the other bedroom door that opened to the hallway, and slammed and locked that one, too.
He moved beside the bed, watching both doorways warily.
Rain drummed on the roof.
Grinding wheels of thunder drove across the night.
Just when he thought Mr. Magic had decided to enter by another route, black smoke, drifting under the door that led to the bathroom, slithered into the room.
“I’m ready for you this time,” Sam said as waves of smoke poured inside. “Come on.”
In spite of his tough words, the gun shook badly in his clammy hands. He realized—or, perhaps, accepted—that these were not hallucinations. The truth, which was far worse, was that he was up against something unearthly, some kind of supernatural fiend. He was a skeptic on such matters, but like everyone, he had witnessed incidents in his life that defied rational explanation. Although he had never seen anything on the scale of an entity like this, the universe was full of mysteries both wonderful and monstrous, and he would never attain complete knowledge of God’s creation. This Mr. Magic character, though, seemed less like something from God and more like the spawn of the devil.
Quickly, the tower of smoke metamorphosed into the well-attired demon.
Lord, help me, Sam thought. Please give your servant the strength.
Mr. Magic stalked toward Sam.
“You take one step closer, and I’ll blow your head off,” Sam said. He aimed the revolver at him, hands still shaky. “I may be old, but I’ll be damned if I roll over and die for you.”
“Such tenacity,” Mr. Magic said. “I like that. I had not anticipated much resistance from a doddering old man like you. You have piqued my interest, Samuel. I will enjoy murdering you.”
“Go to hell,” Sam said. He pulled the trigger.
The gun boomed, the recoil snapping painfully through Sam’s wrists. A round blasted Mr. Magic’s chest, but he did not bleed, scream, or even grimace.
Refusing to accept that the gun was useless, Sam squeezed the trigger twice more. Both rounds plowed into Mr. Magic’s torso, but neither of them had any harmful effect. Mr. Magic strode forward, raised his cane in the air, and cast it upon the bed.
“What the ...” Sam’s words guttered into silence as he saw that the thing that had been the cane was now alive, squirming on the bed. Long and black, gleaming like some kind of snake, but with dozens of tiny legs along its body, and bubble-like eyes and needle-sharp fangs. It hissed malevolently.
Operating on pure instinct, Sam trained the revolver on the creature and fired. But the serpent beast was fast. As the bullet plowed into the bedsheets, cotton exploding in the air, the snake-thing scurried forward and launched itself at Sam.
Crying out, Sam swung the gun to bat away the serpent, but it attached itself to him. Its tiny legs, slick with slime, wrapped around his entire arm, and it must have had suction-type feet, because they pressed against his skin and started sucking, leeching the blood out of him.
‘Jesus, Jesus, get off me!” Whirling his arm around, Sam felt blood draining out of him, the thing’s repulsively warm body pressed tight against his skin. The creature sank its fangs into the back of his hand. A bolt of pain shot through him, and the gun dropped out of his fingers. He howled in agony.
Across the room, Mr. Magic laughed.
Filled with revulsion, yet determined, Sam seized the snake-centipede by the back of its slimy neck. It hissed and writhed, but he would not let it go. As if swinging a baseball bat, he whipped the creature’s head against the bed post. The thing’s skull snapped, and it fell away from his arm and onto the floor, leaving a residue of ooze and blood on his skin.
“Bravo,” Mr. Magic said. He clapped his long, thin hands.
Lord, Sam thought. He was panting. Please, let me survive this. Deliver me.
Deliverance might be as close as the nearest door.
His heart feeling as though it would seize up and never throb again, Sam fled to the hallway door. He popped the lock and twisted the knob—but the door would not open. It seemed to be glued to the door frame.
Impossible! Sam thought. Open up, damn it!
A hand fell on his shoulder.
“Sammy,” an eerily familiar voice said.
Sam turned.
The Lena-thing leered in his face.
He screamed. He shoved aside the damnable thing and ran, but it caught him by the back of his shirt. It jerked him toward it and wrapped its arms around his waist, hugging him from behind. Struggling to escape, he flailed his arms and stumbled forward a few steps, and then he hit the side of the bed and fell onto it.
The Lena-thing laughed. It crawled on top of him.
He grabbed fistfuls of the bedspread, straining to crawl away.
The Lena-thing roughly turned him over, forcing him to lie on his back. Sitting on his thighs, it lifted his shirt. It slid its hand underneath and touched his belly.
Its fingers were cold.
Repulsed, Sam squirmed, but he could not move from underneath the monster. It had him pinned in place.
“Gonna touch you the way I used to,” the creature said, sounding exactly like his dead wife. It smiled. “Gonna make you feel so good.”
The Lena-thing, balanced on his knees, moved its frigid hand in slow circles across his stomach.
“Get off me,” Sam said, weakly. The creature’s icy touch drove numbing chills to the core of his body.
“You’ve been looking forward to this for so long, ain’t you, baby?” It grabbed one of his nipples in its freezing fingers, squeezed, and twisted. Sam cried out. The monster laughed.
Oh, Jesus, what a nightmare this was. Sam wanted to awake into the comforting, familiar world of family cookouts, breakfast with his grandson, reading good books by the fireplace, golf with his buddies, and church services. Without warning, for an ine
xplicable purpose, someone had pitched him into hell.
A spasm corkscrewed through his heart.
No, Sam thought. Another razor of agony cut across his chest.
It was the event that he had dreaded for years, ever since Lena had succumbed to the same fate: a heart attack. Above him, crooning wordlessly, the Lena-thing unzipped his jeans.
“I’m gonna make it real good for you, Sammy,” the Lena-thing said. It began to roll down his pants.
Sam ordered himself to fight against this monster’s violation of his body, but his muscles did not obey; another flash of agony seared through his heart, and then he felt himself drifting away, sliding out of his body as though his skin were only a light jacket. The walls of the bedroom dissolved. The demon vanished. Sam found himself in a vast, grassy field warmed by a golden sun.
In the distance, he spotted a familiar figure in a yellow dress, steadily drifting closer.
The dream about Lena, he remembered. The real Lena, his love for all time.
He traveled toward her, carried by wings of air.
Jason, he thought, hoping his final, desperate message would reach his grandson by some kind of telepathy. He loved many of his family and friends, but he and Jason shared a special relationship, and he yearned to send the boy one last piece of his heart before he left him. I want you to know that I’m proud of you. Remember that forever ...
Thomas and Linda reached the garage. Along the way, they found nothing to suggest that anyone had invaded their house; neither did they find any clues indicating where Jason had gone. Cold sweat had begun to soak Thomas’s shirt. The longer this disturbing ordeal lasted, the higher his anxiety climbed.
He was grateful to have Linda beside him. The touch of her warm hand on his arm gave him strength. He held up the .38; she held up him.
She flicked on the garage light switch. Large fluorescent tubes blazed into life.
The incessant clamor of rain, wind, and thunder echoed in the large chamber.
Their cars, his Buick and her Nissan, sat seemingly undisturbed in their spaces. Shining a flashlight through the windows, they checked inside each vehicle. Both of them were empty.
They got inside the Buick. Thomas removed the cellular telephone from the glove compartment.
“What’s the plan if the phone doesn’t work?” Linda said.
“It’ll work. It isn’t connected to the house lines.”
“True. But what if it still doesn’t work?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know, I haven’t thought about that. Why are you worried about things that won’t happen?”
“I’m a writer, remember? Always wondering ‘what if?’ is second nature to me.”
“Okay, well, try not to worry. Everything’s gonna be fine. Let’s take this one step at a time.”
He pressed the phone’s ON button. The green power light on the handset brightened.
“See?” he said. ‘We’re in business. What’s his buddy’s number?”
She had written the phone numbers of Jason’s friends on a slip of paper. She read one of them to Thomas. He punched in the digits and pushed SEND.
Before the line could ring once, the power indicator blinked out.
“No.” He checked the battery, found it properly connected to the phone. Once more, he pushed ON. But the green button remained dark, and the handset issued only flat silence.
“This is nuts,” he said. “How can it malfunction? It worked a second ago.”
“Plug it up to the car’s battery and see what happens.” She handed him the device to connect the phone to the cigarette lighter.
He plugged in the cord. The cell phone still did not work. Fearing that the car battery might be dead, too, he twisted the key in the ignition. The Buick started.
“I don’t get it.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t make any damned sense.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with these phones,” she said. “But I say we stop wasting time trying to use them. Let’s go to Darren’s house. His place is closer than Mike’s. We might find Jason there.”
“Good idea.” He shifted into reverse.
When they backed out of the garage, rain avalanched onto the car with a jarring crash, blurring the windows. Thomas clicked on the windshield wipers. But the wipers could not keep up with the frenetic rainfall.
Linda turned around in her seat, gaping. “This is incredible. Any minute now, we should see Noah’s Ark.”
“Tell me about it.” He backed down the driveway and into the street. “I’ve never seen it rain like this.”
She switched on the radio, presumably to muffle the roaring downpour. No noise came from the speakers. She raised the volume, changed from station to station. Nothing but silence.
Driving carefully, he said, “Something must be wrong with the communication systems around here. No phones, no radio, and probably no TV, either. A communications breakdown.”
“How could that happen?” she said. “All of them operate independently of one another. They aren’t gathered in a single building that could be blown up or something.”
“I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe it’s the storm, maybe it’s an alien invasion, or maybe God got sick of our noise and decided to shut us up for a while. Linda, I have no idea, and I don’t really care. I only want to get our boy.”
“That makes two of us. Drive faster. “
“I can’t go any faster. These streets are like rivers. This isn’t a powerboat. “
Immense wings of water sprouted from the sides of the Buick as it parted the churning lake that had flooded the road. Hard rain pummeled the car like a hail of bullets.
In no time, visibility had been reduced to zero. He drifted to the curb and parked.
“We can’t drive in this,” he said. “We have to wait until it calms down.”
“Let me drive,” she said.
“It’s too dangerous. Your vision might be better than mine, but driving in this weather isn’t safe. If we wait five or ten minutes, it’ll probably have slackened off some.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
“Linda, please.”
She grabbed his arm. “No, think about it, will you? What if it doesn’t? We’ve got to have a plan. Jason’s life might depend on how fast we act.”
“Come on, we aren’t in one of your books. You’re getting carried away.”
“Am I? Whose idea was it to bring the gun?”
Looking at her, seeing the determination on her beautiful face and the sharp intelligence in her eyes, made him remember why he loved her so much. She would not sit back and allow things to happen to her. She had to plan, initiate action. He never would have wished to change anything about her, but at that moment, when he felt confused and so worried he thought he might shit his pants, he wished she would just shut up.
“I brought an umbrella,” she said, pointing at the black umbrella on the floor in front of her. “I spotted another one in the backseat.”
“You want us to walk?”
“It’s safer than driving blind. Considering the road conditions, we might travel faster by foot.”
“How far away is Darren’s house?”
“About half a mile. Maybe a little farther.”
He looked out the windshield. In the deluge, he could hardly see the front of the car, and the rain showed no signs of weakening. In fact, since they had left the house, it had stepped up its intensity.
“You win,” he said. ‘We wait a few more minutes. If the weather doesn’t improve, we’ll start walking.”
“Okay. I only hope that Jason, wherever he is, can afford to wait that long.”
Brains was going on the run.
If, as he suspected, the Stranger could place psychic tags on intended victims just as a game warden could put electronic tracking devices on deer, by staying in the house he was making it far too easy for the Stranger to get a fix on his location and wipe him out. Leaving and keeping on the move might improve his chances for survival. A
dmittedly, it was a weak, unreliable plan, but he did not know what else he could do. He had decided that taking action of any kind was better than waiting to die.
Thunder bombed the night. Wind-driven rain lashed the house.
Because he would be moving fast and perhaps recklessly, Brains removed his eyeglasses and replaced them with his contact lenses, which he wore whenever he played sports. He went to the walk-in closet in his parents’ bedroom and took out his father’s raincoat. He pulled it on.
His dad owned a pair of galoshes that looked as if they would fit, too, but he opted to keep on his basketball shoes. He had to stay quick on his feet.
A big yellow flashlight stood atop the oak dresser. After verifying that it worked, Brains slid it into the raincoat pocket.
He opened the bedroom door, checked left and right. Clear. He eased outside and crept down the hall.
At the head of the stairs, he stopped. A sour smell made him cough. What was that?
Blackness swallowed the bottom of the staircase. He flicked the stairwell lamp switch.
A thick tower of ink-black smoke floated at the foot of the stairs. Slowly a figure took shape in the vapor—no, took shape from the vapor itself, as though the entity were some freak of nature.
The Stranger, he thought. It has to be the Stranger.
Brains raised the gun.
The man that formed from the smoke was lean, and tall enough to play power forward for the Bulls. He was dressed in a black tuxedo, top hat, bow tie, and shiny black shoes. In one frightfully large hand, he carried a black cane. A silky black cape billowed around him.
Was this really the Stranger? Was this the elusive entity that had terrorized them, the shape-changing beast that had murdered Mike and those kids? Was this really Jason’s long-time friend and confidant?
If the answer to all of those questions was yes—and it had to be—then this wild adventure had taken a sharp turn into truly bizarre territory.
The man began to climb the stairs.
His hands trembling, Brains cocked the .45.
“Whoever you are, stop right there, or I’ll shoot.”
Thunderland Page 24
