Soulstorm

by Chet Williamson

  "Sorry, Kelly. I guess I've seen too many horror movies. The monster hardly ever comes out unless the victim's alone, you know?" McNeely waved a hand. "Oh, go ahead. Just yell if you need help."

  "My feets are very capable of doing they stuff, thank you," Wickstrom joked as he stepped into the hall.

  As soon as the door closed behind him, he wished he'd listened to McNeely. He couldn't ever remember feeling so alone. It was worse, far worse, than being in his bedroom with George and Gabrielle across the hall. Since there were two of them, they'd always seen him to his rooms first, then gone into theirs. And, too, the rooms were his—he felt safe in them. Nothing had ever happened there, nothing except seeing the nightmare faces that he felt sure were his own creations.

  But now he felt naked, exposed, like an ant fallen onto a spider's web in which all the strands but one were sticky, and if he could scuttle quickly and silently across that single strand and back again, everything would be fine. But if he made a noise, or stepped too hard, or went too slowly, the spider would hurtle down, his massive bulk knocking him against one of the sticky strands, where his struggles to get free would only entangle him further. And the spider would laugh a deep roaring laugh before it began at last to feed.

  Go on, dummy! he told himself. What was it, eighty feet? Twenty to the Great Hall, another forty across the balcony, and a final twenty to the door of the lounge. That was all. Eighty feet.

  And back again.

  And inside the lounge, where he'd heard Seth Cummings shambling in the darkness. And back again.

  Had heard was right. Seth Cummings was dead as dead could be. He wasn't going to be there waiting for someone to push the door wide and turn on the lights and see …

  Seth Cummings standing by the bar with his head stuck on one of the spigots …

  Shit. Just do it. Just walk. If it's gonna get me, it's gonna get me one way or another. Walk.

  Wickstrom walked to the lounge. He didn't look to the side; he didn't look in back of him. He stared straight ahead and walked down the hall. He didn't look over the balcony rail when he passed it because he knew that if he did, he'd see all those people down below looking up at him, those people just like Seth Cummings, and there would be dozens of them, maybe even hundreds standing down there looking up at Kelly Wickstrom, not saying anything, not having to, because he knew what they wanted, what they wanted to do to him. Or maybe they'd all be dancing down there around the big fireplace with a chimney that didn't go out into the clean air but recirculated its smoky essence so that the air got harder and harder to breathe. Dead air. Dead like everything and everybody else in here but the three of them, and he would not look down over that railing.

  He was past it now, he was by the stairs, and he had only another twenty feet to go. But the feet stretched to yards and the yards became backyards with a psychic fence between each to climb over. He climbed and walked as though through the thick jelly of dreams. The stairway on his right was hunched in shadow, the steps like slanted fingers ready to reach up and smash the ant that scurried forever across the dry strand of Oriental runner. The vacant rooms just past the stairs (past the stairs, yes, I am moving) were suddenly filled with terrors that the closed fists of the doors threatened to release and scatter like a boy scatters the lightning bugs he's captured on a windless summer night. They would dart about the hapless ant, blinding him with their fiery white phosphorescence so that he stepped off the single strand of safety, so that one leg touched that wet stickiness that held him tight, and without wanting to, he twitched and pulled at the strand.

  And woke the spider.

  The lounge door stood open before him, and the light glowed, inside. He walked through the doorway into the warmth of the room, and felt as though the trek there had taken hours, but now he was back to normal again, crossing the floor to the bar and pouring three fingers of bourbon as he muttered, "Fuck the water."

  The liquor burned its way into his stomach and he sighed in relief and delight at feeling a sensation other than fear. What the hell had come over him? There was no point to his terror, none at all. He had seen and heard nothing, all the imagined horrors being exactly that—imagined. "Get a hold of yourself, man," he quoted in an old school tone of voice. But instead of amusing himself, the words chilled him as he wondered who else might be hearing them. He propped himself on a barstool and looked around the room. It was closetless, and there were no other cubbyholes behind or inside of which anything large enough to be harmful could hide. But still…

  "Hello," he said, not at all tentatively, but forcefully, as if he expected to be answered. "Hello, hello, hello. Nice to be here." He swallowed heavily, antithetical to his manner. "I'm starving for conversation," he went on. "Isn't anybody going to talk to me?"

  He paused then, listening, watching, eyes roving recklessly over the room, fearing to stop at one place for too long.

  "Well, all right then." As he heard his words, he knew his voice was wrong. Nonchalance should not tremble; sarcasm should not shake. "I hate to drink alone, but you've had your chance." He finished the drink and put the glass into the small sink, running water into it, then turning it upside down. He opened his mouth to say more, but thought better of it, and made himself walk out into the hall. He stood there, his eyes on the closed door of the vacant room directly across from the lounge. The decision made, he crossed to it and turned the knob.

  But doubt beat him down as he prepared to push, and he could only stand statuelike, hand on doorknob, frozen in a scene he'd played in a dozen busts in a dozen dingy apartment halls. And what good would it do to shout "hold it, police" to a room empty of all but phantoms? He didn't even have a backup.

  So he let go of the knob and turned away, the door unopened. At the balcony he stopped and listened. The only sound was the infrequent dull pop of the few logs left from their last fire, engaged in a slow destruction in which no visible flames chewed and bit at the fuel. Instead, they turned slowly, invisibly, to ash, the combustion working its way into the core of the log inch by inch, so slowly as to be unnoticeable to a watcher. But in the silence of The Pines he could hear it three floors below, could hear the cancer of oxidation turning the hard wood from brown to charred black to the gray powder that dropped off speck by speck. Then he looked down.

  The space below was empty. There were no grinning specters, no malformed monsters, no quasi-Quasimodos beckoning to him to join their throng. Except for the few pieces of furniture that dotted it, the Great Hall was bare. He smiled as manfully as he could, then walked the rest of the way to the playroom.

  As he entered, Gabrielle looked up from her canvas and smiled. "That was fast."

  "Fast?"

  "You've barely been gone," she said. "I didn't even have time to worry about you."

  "No worry," Wickstrom answered, confused at the dichotomy of their individual perceptions of time. "Didn't see a thing." He sat and picked up his puzzle book. McNeely had only glanced up when he'd entered, and seemed enthralled in the blue quarto volume he held in his lap. "What're the books, George?" Wickstrom asked.

  "Oh," McNeely answered, distracted, "the ones Gabrielle was painting."

  "I know that," he said. "I mean what's in them?"

  McNeely looked up in slight exasperation. "Astronomical notebooks. These are the ones old Robert D'Neuville kept the summers he spent here." He looked back at the pages. "I wish to hell that dome were open. We might see quite a show."

  "A show?"

  "It's strange," McNeely said almost to himself. "D'Neuville had literally hundreds of meteors recorded—”

  “Oh, yeah? Like meteor showers?"

  "So it seems, but meteor showers are generally predictable. He seems to have seen them nearly all the time. In the summer the Perseids are prominent, but there's no sign of them here."

  Generally meteors would have bored Wickstrom, as did anything of a scientific nature, but in the captivity of The Pines, the mention of them stirred his interest. "What kind of meteors?
I mean, I don't even know what they are, really."

  "I'm no astronomer," said McNeely, "but I think they're outer space debris, pieces of comets' tails that are caught by the earth's gravitational pull. When they enter our atmosphere, they ignite. Most of them burn up before they hit the surface. But if these were meteors, they sure as hell behaved oddly. Listen to this." He read:

  June 12th. Started to observe at 8:45 P.M. While searching for Mercury low in the east, I became aware of a pinpoint of light moving into my field. I followed it and traced its journey from above the eastern horizon, where I first saw it, upward approximately seven degrees. There it seemed to stop and increase in brightness to roughly — 3.00 magnitude, at which point it seemed to break apart into a cloudy luminescence. I have seen nothing like this before. I was so amazed that I went and told Smith, who has a bit of a layman's interest in astronomy. He suggested that it might be a phenomenon similar to an aurora, but I doubt it. It did not appear auroral in nature, more meteoric actually, only what kind of meteor sails upward from the horizon?

  McNeely looked up from the book. "That was only the first of them. When he started observing again, he saw them everywhere. Listen to this observation a few days later."

  June 19th. I have struggled to imagine what these bits of light might be, but I can come up with nothing. Smith, at my invitation, has been observing also, and is astonished by the things. They come approximately once every three or four minutes—that is, at any certain point in the sky five degrees across. They never rise higher than twenty degrees from the horizon, at which point they brighten and seemingly disintegrate.

  June 20th. It is extraordinary. Smith and I walked out to the overlook at 10:30 this evening. There was no moon, and the stars glittered like jewels. The meteors came in profusion, and I can see there is a pattern now. From the northern horizon, and also from the west and east, come the lights. They are very dim at first as they come into view, like faraway rockets being shot off from over the edge of the world. Then as they rise in the sky, they grow in luminescence until they approach the brightness of fireflies, at which point they burst apart like fireworks, scattering their faint light over a huge area of the sky. They arrive incessantly, and at times many come at once. We saw dozens in the short time we observed. The sight is unparalleled in my experience. Although this is totally illogical and must be nothing but a twist of our perceptive sense, I could swear that Pine Mountain is the target of these lights. Other meteors I have observed elsewhere (if meteors these are) have crossed only a small portion of the overturned bowl of the night sky. But Smith and I, as observers, seem to be at the focal point of these phenomena. No matter at what point on the horizon they originate, they seem to come straight toward us. I shall make it a point to ask Wilkes at Yerkes about this.

  "Holy shit," muttered Wickstrom.

  McNeely nodded. "Curiouser and curiouser."

  "Did he keep seeing them?" Gabrielle asked, mixing the colors on her palette.

  "Don't know. I haven't gotten that far." He thumbed through the rest of the volume and then picked up the others. "A lot of gaps," he said. "Every two pages is a day, every volume a year. Only a few weeks filled in every year."

  "He spent only a few weeks here every year after his son died," Gabrielle reminded him. "I suppose the books stayed here exclusively."

  "I suppose." McNeely glanced at the spines. "The first is 1919. That's the summer his son died. Then 1920, 1921, and 1922. By '22 there are only a few days worth of notes. Suppose he lost interest?"

  "He had new toys to amuse himself, probably," said Gabrielle.

  "Oh, you idle rich."

  "Terrible, aren't we?"

  "What do the final volumes say about these . . . these lights?" Wickstrom asked.

  "Let me look." McNeely started thumbing, stopping three quarters of the way through a volume. "In 1920 D'Neuville had up this Wilkes he mentioned. Looks like Wilkes didn't know what the hell the lights were either. Listen to this. 'Wilkes feels the phenomenon may be terrestrial in origin rather than from outside our atmosphere, possibly of the nature of St. Elmo's fire.' Nice try, Wilkes, but no cigar. What's he say in '21? 'The lights are here again this year, as frequent and as bright as ever. Neither Wilkes nor the colleagues he's, told of the phenomenon have any solid idea as to what causes it. I fear it may remain unfathomable. A party from Princeton has requested a visit to observe, but I am not sure I shall grant their wish. I am beginning to think that there is more to this than science can fathom.'

  "What the hell did he mean by that?" Wickstrom mused.

  "Maybe he was getting the first tinglings himself of what this place was really like. The more we learn about The Pines, the weirder it gets."

  "Does it say," Gabrielle asked, "if he ever found out what the things were?"

  McNeely scanned through the rest of the 1921 volume and then turned to 1922. After a short time he spoke. "No. He says he was still seeing them, and that's all. Nothing about the boys from Princeton either." He let the last volume fall shut and piled it on top of the other three. "Quite a waste of journals. He could have put all that he wrote in a thirty-page looseleaf."

  "Don't worry. He could afford it," said Gabrielle. "I wonder what those things were."

  "Or maybe are," McNeely said.

  She looked up from the canvas. "You don't mean they still might be there?"

  McNeely shrugged. "Possible. Did you notice anything strange in the sky the night before we were locked in?"

  "No. Nothing unusual." She thought for a moment. "But the trees are much higher now. Far higher than they were in the twenties, most certainly."

  "Then even if they'd been here," said McNeely, "you wouldn't have seen them. According to D'Neuville, they never got that high."

  "We'll look when we get out," Gabrielle said thoughtfully.

  "You can look," said Wickstrom, "but I'll be long gone. I don't intend to wait for night." He smiled bitterly. "I'm tired of night. Besides," he added, "I already know what those lights were."

  Gabrielle and McNeely stared at him. "What?" McNeely said. "And how would you know?"

  "You can make theories, l can make theories." He settled back in his chair and laughed softly. "They're ghosts."

  "Ghosts?"

  "Sure, what else? Ghosts from north, east, west, probably from the south too. Eskimo ghosts, white ghosts, nigger ghosts, gook ghosts, ghosts from all over the world. Sure, that's it! I finally figured it out! The Pines is a big convention hotel for ghosts!" He laughed.

  Gabrielle and McNeely laughed too, if a trifle uncomfortably.

  "I think I'm kidding," Wickstrom said with a twisted smile. "I think I'm kidding, but I don't know. Maybe I'm serious. Think about it," he said, his eyes suddenly far away. "People dying, dying all the time all over the world—how many hundreds, thousands a day. And when they die, maybe something leaves their body—spirit, soul, whatever. Where does it go? Heaven? Hell?" His words had grown so soft, the others had to strain to hear, even in the tomblike silence. "Pine Mountain?"

  Gabrielle took a step toward him. "Kelly, I …"

  He went on, not hearing her. "What if—what if Pine Mountain was like the North Pole? What if it was a big magnet, but instead of drawing compass needles, it drew ghosts?"

  The three of them sat there in the room, and in their minds they were the three loneliest people on earth. But they were not the most alone. Wickstrom's words had turned a playroom on the third floor of a large, lonely house into the focal point of attention of an endless line of watchers, watchers who stretched back through the centuries, back to when man first walked the hills and deserts of earth. They thought of the faces then, the faces that had loomed over them as they woke, faces they had believed were no more or less than nightmares—black faces, Oriental faces, white faces, faces that could have lived today and faces so primitive they were nearly bestial. Faces that could have spanned the cavalcade of man's life.

  "It's impossible," whispered McNeely.

  Wickst
rom barked a dry laugh. "Yeah," he said. "Just like what happened to Cummings was impossible."

  "The mountain drew them," said Gabrielle, "like a giant lodestone. Is that what you mean, Kelly?"

  Wickstrom shook his head back and forth, back and forth, not in answer to Gabrielle's question, but to clear his mind, to drive out all the ideas and theories and questions that were pushing down on his brain with unrelieved pressure. "I don't. No," he said finally. "I don't know what I mean. That's a . . . a crazy suggestion. Real Looney Tunes."

  "I just can't see it," said McNeely. "I mean, all these things that have been happening here—there's got to be some kind of explanation, some kind of logic behind them, even if it is a supernatural logic. But why here? If anywhere, why here?"

  "Why the North Pole?" asked Wickstrom.

  "The North Pole is in line with the earth's axis," McNeely answered.

  "My ass! Not magnetic north!"

  "Birds don't come here," said Gabrielle, "nor animals. The Indians stayed away. It's as if they all knew."

  "Something that folks more civilized forgot," Wickstrom finished.

  "No," said McNeely firmly, "it's too much." Wickstrom flushed a deep red. "Goddamnit, just because it's not your idea!"

  "Bullshit! It's not that!"

  "All right!" yelled Gabrielle, the shrillness of her voice cowing the men. "You both know the only way we're going to get out of here is to stay together—and that means our minds as well as physically. It wants us to fight. Whatever it is, I'm sure it wants that."

  "I'm sorry," Wickstrom said, and his face looked like he meant it. "I lost my temper."

  McNeely pushed his fingers through his thick hair. "Yeah. Me too."

  "Um . . . you're probably right, George. There's nothing to it, just a wacky idea. I'm grabbing at straws."

  McNeely smiled. "I thought you were the one who said before that it didn't matter.

  "Did I say that?" Wickstrom answered, returning the smile. "What I say and what I think are different. I just hate to talk about it because it makes me think about it. Look," he said, rising, "let's forget about this shit for a while. I think the best way to combat spookhouse fever—which is The Pines' form of cabin fever—is to play a hot game of Monopoly. Have I got any suckers?"