Soulstorm

by Chet Williamson

  Bursting.

  A hiss left Cummings's lungs, and a new smile contorted the face on the head that dangled from a few strands of flesh and stringy muscle, and McNeely knew with queasy certainty that if the throat had been whole, he would have heard a laugh.

  Bursting …

  Neville's tongue protruded farther than McNeely had thought possible, and blood began to arc from his nose, stream from his ears.

  And still McNeely could not break Cummings's grasp.

  McNeely went berserk then. He smashed at Cummings's back with fists clenched together, hammer blows that might have splintered the spine of any other human, but Cummings squeezed on.

  McNeely kicked with the sharp edge of his shoe, taking running starts that crunched against Cummings's forearm and elbow like the blade of a pickax, but Cummings squeezed on.

  Then McNeely wrapped his arms around Cummings's body and sought to lift him by brute force, to pick up both men if necessary and fling them to the stone floor in the hope of dividing them. But it was like trying to move Pine Mountain itself.

  Cummings squeezed on . . . pressed on.

  Press on! Press on, men!

  (Colonel Ortega . . . the only English he knew)

  Press on! Press on!

  (he called, just before the shell hit him full in the chest, turning him into a pink cloud in the jungle)

  Press on!

  McNeely screamed and grasped Cummings's head, jerking and wrenching again and again until the few shards of tissue ripped loose and he fell over backward, striking the base of his skull on the stones, as the head rolled into darkness and monstrous arms tightened in a final spasm and the upper half of David Neville's body did what the balloon and the toothpaste tube and everything that can hold no more always has to do.

  Part III

  Whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

  —Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche,

  Beyond Good and Evil

  Chapter Eight

  George McNeely was swimming.

  He knew it was a dream, but that didn't keep him from enjoying it. He needed something like this after what he'd been through. Though he couldn't remember what it was, he did know it had been very unpleasant, it had made him hurt, and it had made him think he might be crazy.

  So it was good to swim like this, to float on his back and have the cool water wrap around him and feel the warmth of the sun edge through it to touch his bare skin. He looked across the sparkling ripples at the shore and saw Jeff there, hands on his hips and a smile in place under his thick brown moustache. McNeely waved, but as he did so, he sank beneath the water, feeling no panic, but only a little sadness that he would have to wake up now.

  When he did, the pain came back. The back of his head was throbbing, and when he touched it, his fingers came away wet. It was too dark to see if the wetness was blood, but he felt sure it was. For a moment he really didn't know where he was, but slowly that grim knowledge returned.

  The Pines.

  Oh, yes, The Godforsaken Goddamned Pines. And the fight with that giant from a ten-year-old's nightmare. And Neville being crushed by those immovable arms. He had tried to save him. He had done his duty. But where was Neville now?

  McNeely shook his head and blinked his eyes savagely to dispel the blurriness that plagued them, but scent was the next sense to return. The air was sharp with the smell of feces, rank with the sweet scent of blood. He remembered the head tearing loose, the heart pumping furiously, sending the geysers of red spewing aloft as he had sunk into darkness. Now, slowly, his vision cleared, and he saw the huge shape of Cummings's body lying a few yards away.

  McNeely staggered to his feet. He was sore, but the head wound seemed to be the only real damage. He walked shakily over to the corpse, not seeing Neville, thinking, hoping that he'd recovered and gone upstairs to get help. Then he saw the thin leg sticking out from beneath the lump of death that was Cummings.

  A cry escaped him, a tiny whimper of pain and frustration that seemed an incongruous coda to the titanic struggle that had been waged. He sank to his knees and pushed the great bulk over so that it struck the stone floor with an elephantine, blood-wet slap.

  George McNeely had only vomited twice in his life from non-physiological causes. The first time was at eighteen, five minutes before he was to face his first live fire. The second time was ten minutes later, after he was forced to gut a man from scrotum to heart so the man would not do the same to him. Not once, after that first kill, did his stomach ever turn at the sight of violence again.

  But he had never before seen a human being squeezed in two.

  He closed his eyes and let the feeling sweep over him, knowing that there was no other way to respond, not for any man who would cling to the semblance of humanity, to the most infinitesimal touch of sensitivity. He emptied his stomach on the stones, then made himself look back, and brought up the little that was left. Afterward, he looked again. And again.

  Finally he could look at it without feeling the peristaltic muscles twitch at all, and he knew he could do what had to be done.

  His legs stronger now, he walked up the cellar stairs into the cheerily lit kitchen. Opening a drawer by the sink, he removed four damask tablecloths. There was nothing of lesser quality, and he thought it ironically fitting that these should be the shrouds of millionaires. He took them back into the cellar and covered Neville's body with one of them. He found Cummings's head, made himself pick it up, and placed it between the legs of the body. It took the remaining three tablecloths to cover Cummings's hummock of flesh. Then McNeely went upstairs to join Wickstrom and Gabrielle Neville.

  He knocked at the door of his suite and called out, "It's me." His voice was choked, husky. His mouth tasted bitter.

  The door clicked open. "George," Wickstrom said softly. "Jesus . . ."

  Wickstrom was looking at him in horror, and McNeely realized he'd done nothing to hide the effects of the tight. He looked down at himself.

  He was bathed in blood, like an uncaring butcher after a long day's work. His shirt was sodden, his arms were coated. He knew that he must smell terrible. "Oh, shit," he said. "Oh, God, I can't . . . I've got to wash."

  McNeely turned away, shaking his head, but Wickstrom put his hand on McNeely's shoulder, oblivious to the soft squelching noise the shirt made. "Wait! Are you hurt?"

  "No, no, not my blood." McNeely was tired. To find somewhere to sleep again, to sleep and dream about swimming, that would be very nice.

  "Whose blood then? What happened, for Christ's sake?"

  McNeely heard a slight cry and turned. Gabrielle Neville stood inside the doorway, just behind Wickstrom. "George …” she said, her face going white.

  McNeely nodded at her. "It's over. Cummings is dead." He closed his eyes, squeezing them shut in the pain of failed trust. Then he opened them and looked straight at Gabrielle. "David's dead too. Cummings killed him before I could stop him."

  Her pale face grew taut, the muscles contracting the skin over the bone so that she looked as she might when she was seventy. McNeely saw no tears, only that terrible tension of the features. She turned and faded back into the room.

  "Look after her," McNeely told Wickstrom. "Don't go anywhere. Just stay with her until I come back." Wickstrom nodded and went to comfort Gabrielle Neville.

  McNeely walked down the hall. He decided to use Cummings's bathroom, as he didn't want to have to pass by Gabrielle to get to his own. He didn't want her to see him again with her husband's blood on him. Looking down, he saw the dark trail he was leaving. There would be time to clean it up, he thought. With only three people alive, there would be no leaving. There was all the time in the world to clean up the blood.

  In the bathroom he peeled off his clothes and flung them into the shower stall. Then he stepped in and turned on the spray. After several minutes of standing there, letting the almost unbearably hot wate
r rinse off the dried and coated blood, he plucked with his foot at the wet pile of clothes, dragging them beneath the spray. He stamped on them slowly, like a primitive washerwoman pounding rags on stones. The blood passed from the cloth with each step, and pink water swirled and eddied its way down the drain, a tiny whirlpool of shed life.

  McNeely closed his eyes and tried to forget the scene in the cellar, but found it impossible. It had been a scene of blood, of violence, of battle, and he had come out unscathed. Such an experience would have normally electrified him, but there was no battle joy, none of the feeling of healthy catharsis that usually resulted.

  He had let Neville get himself killed, and that was bad enough. But there was something worse, and that was the extra strength he had felt, the extra time he had had when he'd delivered that near decapitating blow.

  That there was such a thing as increased strength under stress he knew. He'd felt it himself—that adrenaline pump, that extra oxygen that made normal muscles strong and strong ones superhuman. The phenomenon had saved his life several times. But this time it had been different. It hadn't been he who kicked Cummings. He simply was not capable of that kind of blow under any circumstances.

  Then what was it? He was afraid that it was the same thing that had given Cummings his strength.

  Am I next? Dear Jesus, am I next?

  He struggled to calm himself, to tell himself that Cummings must have wanted it to happen that way. What did I say to Gabrielle? he thought. It's not whether there are ghosts or not, it's how we respond to them that counts.

  How did Cummings respond?

  McNeely turned off the shower. There were no towels on Cummings's rack, so he lay down on the bed, letting the air and the spread share the task of drying him. He stared at the ceiling and thought it through.

  If McNeely could accept what Cummings had said as at least partially true, and not just insane ravings, Cummings had been approached by something, something he'd called the Master. The Master, then, had changed Cummings, had given him power, but in a cruel and ghastly way. Perhaps the Master was insane himself, or perhaps Cummings was not capable of controlling the power.

  Wait, said a corner of logic in McNeely's brain, What if there were a natural explanation, no matter how farfetched? Wouldn't it make more sense to accept that than to imagine a supernatural origin?

  Of course it would, if this were a natural place on the earth. However, to give logic the benefit of the doubt, he conjectured upon what diseases could have so wrenched Cummings's body. Acromegaly? It was the only disfiguring disease he was familiar with. He'd known a young merc who'd had it—a kid from Michigan who hadn't been able to join the Army because of it. He became a soldier anyway, and died at twenty-two in Africa, sliced in half by machine-gun fire. It gave him a kinder death than the disease would have. McNeely sighed as he remembered the boy, the ugliest human being he'd ever seen—beetling brows, large ridges of pouched flesh that contorted his muscles painfully, puffy sacks around his eyes that still couldn't prevent him from being a crack shot. "Call me Beast," he'd said when he joined them, as a black man might call himself "nigger"—to use it so it lost all power to hurt. He'd talk often about Rondo Hatton, a grade-Z movie actor of the forties who'd had acromegaly, and had made a living grunting and menacing maidens in the dark castles of second-run features. Everybody had their heroes—even the acromegalics.

  But the kid had had it for a long time. It had come on slowly, not in a matter of hours. Radioactivity then. Maybe they were on a big lump of uranium, or maybe Grandpa Neville sold part of the mountain back to Teddy Roosevelt, and the government secretly dumped plutonium in a hidden cave far beneath the mountain.

  Sure. And maybe Cummings was a changeling. Maybe he'd sold his soul to Satan and this was collection day. Maybe it was just too many vitamins.

  Maybe. Maybe. Shit.

  He wrapped a bedspread around himself toga-style and went down the hall to his suite. The bedroom door in the hall was locked, so he rapped on it and called for Wickstrom, who opened it a few moments later. "I didn't want to disturb her," McNeely explained as he entered the room and took some clothes from the drawers. "How is she?"

  "She'll be all right. I gave her a drink."

  "Oh, great," McNeely sighed. "That's all we need.”

  “How are you?"

  "Bruised. Nothing worse."

  "What the hell happened?"

  McNeely told him, leaving out only the part about the extra strength in his kick. By the time he was finished, he was fully dressed. "The thing now," he concluded, "is to decide what to do with the bodies. I want to get them somewhere where she won't have to see . . ."

  Wickstrom's expression was grim. "That's right. We're trapped here. There's no getting out, is there?"

  "No. We've got the keys, but only three people to turn them."

  "Maybe we could rig something up," Wickstrom said. "I'll see if I can find any scrap wood."

  "In the meantime, we've got to do something with those bodies. I don't know how long we've been here, but you can bet that if we don't get out on our own, there are going to be some pretty bad smells in here before those steel panels open. I don't want Gabrielle to . . . experience that."

  Wickstrom bit his lower lip. "What about the fire chamber?" he asked. "It seems pretty tight. We could put them in there."

  McNeely shook his head. "If there were a fire, the place would be uninhabitable, even if we did have time to take out the bodies before we sealed ourselves in. The wine cellar might be our best bet. We can close it off pretty tightly."

  "What about the freezer," said Gabrielle Neville.

  Both men turned. She was standing in the doorway, the drink Wickstrom had mixed for her nearly empty in her hand. Neither of them knew how long she'd been there, how much she'd heard.

  "That's the place to keep meat, isn't it?" The words were bitter, but the voice was feeble, finally breaking over the edge into tears. She dropped the glass and sobbed heavily. Wickstrom was at her side in an instant, holding her and letting her pour out her sorrow and anger on his shoulder.

  When the tears were gone, she looked up at McNeely with a determination that pushed out her jaw, narrowed her eyes. "The wine cellar would be best," she said. "Let's put them there."

  McNeely shook his head. "You shouldn't see them. It was very ugly."

  "He was my husband."

  "It made me sick. I had to vomit. And you've no idea of what I've seen in my life."

  "He was my husband. I'm going down there with or without you."

  As they entered the cellar, McNeely was thankful for the dimness of the light he had cursed such a short time before. Cummings and Neville were no more than pale lumps at the other end of the cellar floor.

  "All right?" McNeely asked her. "Have you seen enough?"

  "No." She walked over to where Neville lay. There was no possibility of her mistaking the small mountain of Cummings's body for it. Kneeling, she drew back the tablecloth and stared into David Neville's face.

  Both Wickstrom and McNeely watched her, the tension in them building as they waited for a scream, for hysterics, for a faint. But Gabrielle Neville only leaned over the dead face and came up again, like a pilgrim drinking from a holy well, and George McNeely knew she had given her husband a parting kiss.

  She pulled the tablecloth gently over Neville's face once more, straightened up, and looked at the stunned men. "When you love someone, George, no matter what they do or what happens to them, they're never ugly." She looked back down at Neville. "I'll help you carry him into the wine cellar, but you two can handle that by yourself." She gestured toward Cummings's corpse, her face twisted with loathing. "I won't touch him."

  They carried Neville into the wine cellar, Gabrielle taking his legs, McNeely and Wickstrom holding the upper part of his body together. Then Gabrielle went upstairs to let the men struggle with the body of Cummings. When they had grunted and jerked the dead flesh into the room and closed the door, they went upstairs.
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br />   "I could use a drink," said Wickstrom. Not once had he looked under the tablecloths.

  McNeely nodded and they went up to the lounge. Gabrielle Neville was nowhere to be seen.

  "What did it?" Wickstrom asked, pouring himself a bourbon. His need was greater than ale could supply.

  "The house," answered McNeely. "It was the house, or something in the house. It sounds absurd, but it's the only thing possible."

  "You think the house turned Cummings into a monster?”

  “What other explanation is there?"

  Wickstrom shrugged helplessly. "But why? What would it want? What purpose could it have? Just to kill us all?"

  "Maybe. But I think it's smarter than that. I almost feel as though it wanted to use Cummings in some way, but he got out of control. Like he couldn't handle the power." And maybe, McNeely thought, that's why it helped me kill him.

  ~*~

  In her bedroom Gabrielle Neville lay and played with her thoughts like a child dropping marbles into a tin box. David was dead.

  He had suffered horribly in his dying.

  Yet perhaps not so horribly as he would have with the cancer.

  Cummings was dead too.

  That was good, because she hated him …

  … hated him for being a pig who thought with his crotch, who thought he could have her because he wanted her, hated him because oh goddamn it but it was true she wanted him to take her and fill her up and make her feel again and it had been so long since she'd felt anything from a man and when he came into the kitchen she had been repelled by him, terrified so much that she had withdrawn into herself, but it wasn't really for that alone, was it, Gabrielle, that you had shut the doors of your mind, wasn't it that he excited you because he was so big and virile and you could see his cock and you wanted it and if you shut your eyes you could make believe it was David whole and healthy and not David dead in a dirty cellar David was dead