Soulstorm

by Chet Williamson

  The others forced smiles, but didn't speak.

  "Come on, folks," said Wickstrom with a weak chuckle, "don't make me play with myself. Boardwalk's pretty lonely without friends."

  Gabrielle set down her palette and untied her apron. "My painting will keep." She ruffled McNeely's hair. "And you can find out who killed Colonel Appleyard later."

  "His name's not Appleyard, and I already know," said McNeely.

  "Well, if you know, what do you read it for?”

  “For the excitement."

  "For the excitement?" boomed Wickstrom. "Jesus!"

  They laughed their way into the hall, and they kept laughing through the Monopoly game. Despite the unease that Wickstrom's suggestion had caused, the simple act of his going down the hall for a drink without incident was more influential. It seemed that much time had gone by without any strange occurrences, and after the next sleep, all of them awoke without seeing any disembodied heads over their beds. They began to feel more confident, and two sleeps later George McNeely awoke before Gabrielle and went down to the kitchen alone to eat a piece of toast. He didn't wake her to join him or to tell her where he was going.

  It was just what The Pines had been waiting for.

  Chapter Twelve

  The caretaker's workroom was thick with dust. It had not been opened when the recent renovations were made, nor at any time during the previous fifty years. It was merely an annex behind and attached to the six-car garage. Its door was secured by a rusted lock that Whitey Monckton's booted foot easily snapped from the brittle wood. The light did not work, so he depended on the morning sunlight that was reflected into the room. It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the dimness, but when his pupils had expanded fully, he found the light sufficient.

  The room was larger than he had thought, roughly twenty by thirty, and seemed as temporary as The Pines itself was permanent. The floor was dirt, and he could see patches of light against the east wall where rain and wind had dug their way inside over the years. A workbench and three long tables occupied the room, and rusty tools hung from brown tenpenny nails driven into the opposite wall. A small wooden box of magazines with titles like All-Story and Adventure sat beside one of the tables, and Monckton picked up a few. They fell apart in his hands in large damp flakes, sending up a stale musty odor. He grimaced, and wiped the clinging gray dust from his fingers.

  Dust was over everything; it was not a dry dust that could be blown away, but a thick dust that hugged whatever it coated like a sickly mildew. Monckton fancied he could almost see it growing its way over his boot tops. Absurd, but it made him keep moving, walking across the rough earth floor. As he looked at the filthy array of tools lying haphazardly on the table and hanging from the nails, as if their owner had had little affection for his charges, he catalogued them mentally.

  Hammer … chisel … saw … crowbar … He could scarcely believe that these things were still here, waiting for his practiced hand. Glancing at his watch, he wondered if he would have any time to begin, or if he should get back to the cabin a mile below. Monckton had been driving up every morning for days now, staying longer on every visit, with Sterne getting more and more pissed each time.

  "What in hell are you doing?" he'd cried the morning after Renault had called. "Good Christ, I covered for you once, but that doesn't mean I can keep doing it! What if Renault calls again?"

  Monckton had calmed him and told him that Renault would not call again, and that he'd probably felt dumb calling the first time. Fortunately, he'd been more right than he thought. Renault hadn't called since, but that did nothing to ease Sterne's paranoia.

  "Look," he'd said after Monckton had returned from his second visit, "what if Simon had called? He didn't, but what if he had? What am I supposed to say if he really wants to talk to you?"

  "He won't."

  "Goddamnit! Monckton, why the fuck do you wanta go up there anyway?"

  "I'm psychic." It was out of his mouth before he'd even thought of it, but when he heard himself say it, he knew it was the truth. He didn't know if it would be the truth back in New York, or in Frisco, or in Glamis Castle, or in any other place on earth, but here in Pine Mountain, Pennsylvania, he was without a doubt mother-fucking sure-as-shit psychic. Whatever the hell that meant.

  But what it meant to him was that something was up there in that house on the mountaintop, something big and powerful, something that had already done something (he didn't know what) to someone (he didn't know who), and that something worse was going to happen if they didn't get their asses out or somebody else didn't get their ass in, and he was afraid that he was elected.

  One catch though: there was no way in. To release the steel plates would take two of them. The plan was that if there were an unforeseen emergency, and the fail-safe system in The Pines failed to open the plates, he and Sterne were each supposed to turn a key in an override system in the cabin, which would allow the occupants to escape. But Monckton knew that short of that unimaginable emergency, there was no way Sterne would agree to free those inside. Such an act would be against Renault/Neville's (he'd started to think of the two men as a single unit) express orders, and Sterne would be horrified at the thought. God keep me from ever kissing ass that deep, Monckton thought. He could smell the fear on Sterne—not any kind of sensible fear, but the fear of displeasing his superiors.

  Monckton never thought of himself as having any superiors—just people he worked for for a while. If they didn't like him, or vice versa, there was always another client looking for his kind of thinking. But Sterne was a sycophant who would most likely smother a baby if Renault had told him to, the kind of man who was more afraid of a disapproving frown from Renault than of all the horrors The Pines might hold. He was the right man for this job, that was sure. Monckton wasn't and knew it. He used his own judgment too much and valued it too highly, though not to the extreme of refusing to listen to the advice of those who knew more than he did about a certain subject.

  But on the subject of The Pines he felt he knew as much as anyone, except perhaps for the five who'd gone in there on the first of October.

  He started to look about the room again. There was at least one more thing he would need, and finally, on the floor against the far wall beneath a rotting tarpaulin, he found it—an extension ladder. It was crusted with mold, but Monckton knew that once he cleaned it up, it would be serviceable. The rungs were still tightly secured to the uprights and the extension hooks seemed in good shape. He guessed that extended it would be forty feet high, not long enough to reach the roof from the ground, but enough to reach the second floor balconies of either suite in the rear of the house.

  Monckton glanced at his watch in the half darkness of the shed and cursed. He'd already been gone nearly an hour, longer than ever before. Sterne would …

  Fuck Sterne, he thought grimly as he disentangled the tattered tarp from the ladder and dragged it out into the sunlight. He grabbed handfuls of leaves and began to scrub the rungs with them, trying to wipe off the dust and mold. But the leaves merely splintered and stuck to the old damp wood, and after some experimentation, he found that the high grass at the edge of the yard made a sturdier abrasive. In fifteen minutes the rungs were clean and dry enough so that he felt fairly sure his boots would not slip on them.

  He dragged the ladder over beneath the balcony of the Eagle Suite, and set its base firmly on the ground, tamping the uprights a half inch into the damp earth. Then he raised the extension until it locked in the highest position, and leaned it against the wrought iron of the balcony above. He shook it a few times, but it seemed fully as sturdy as he had thought. But before he began to climb, he listened.

  He had no illusions that whatever lived in The Pines would welcome an intruder, and he had no wish to climb partway up the ladder only to be hurled down again. So he listened for the roar of power, the dynamo of life he had heard on his first visit but had not heard since.

  It was nearly silent. The only sound beside the wind in th
e needles and the dead and dying leaves was a low hum, like a generator, far above his head. But he knew it was no generator. It was the aural embodiment of the thing he had heard before, only now it was low, so very low that he could barely hear it at all, like the muffled snore of a hibernating bear in a dark cave.

  He started up the ladder, pausing every few rungs to touch and to listen, but nothing out of the ordinary occurred. The dull humming was still there, and he wondered if it wasn't indeed the ventilating system in the attic, soundproofed or not. At last he swung his leg over the railing and stood on the balcony. Walking over to the French doors of the Eagle Suite, he pressed his ear against the steel plate that covered them. He'd expected to hear nothing, and was not disappointed. Even the hum was gone, drowned out by the wind that had continually been growing stronger all that morning.

  Monckton pulled the ladder up onto the balcony and leaned it against the top eave of the house. With its base wedged against the balcony, its top just touched the overhang of the roof, and Monckton swallowed heavily as he looked up the ladder's length. There was little room for error. If the ladder should sag while he climbed it, he might lose those extra few inches, sending the top thudding against the side of the house. He wondered if he could hold on, or if the shock would jar him loose, throwing him thirty feet to the tile floor of the balcony. But then he realized that the caretaker had had to get to the roof somehow, and this was the only ladder available, so odds were it was the one he had used, and in just this way. There was, he remembered, no trapdoor from the attic to the roof.

  Just the same, he decided to climb up without the added weight of the tools. If the climb were uneventful, he could always get them later. He stepped up onto the balcony railing, took a deep breath, and started to climb.

  There was a bad moment halfway up, when he felt the ladder sway slightly and dip, as though its rigidity were failing and it was slowly becoming elastic. He froze at first, then looked up in panic at the roof edge to see scarcely an inch overlap of the top of the ladder where there had been two inches before. It was sagging, and as he stared, the ladder seemed to shrink even further. He sobbed, and jerked with his hands on the uprights in an attempt to straighten the wood, to pull the ladder back from its fatal sag. Everything he knew about physics told him that it should not work, that in fact it should put more stress on the weakest point in the ladder, but to his astonishment, it did work. Though the two-inch safety margin did not fully return, he lost no more space at the top, and soon had his arms over the roof edge and was pulling himself up onto the black slate.

  The roof had absorbed enough of the morning sun to bear a slight warmth, and he lay on his back for a while until he felt it permeate his light jacket and shirt. His exertion had warmed him before, but now he could sense the first true chill of winter in the whirling winds that raced over the unprotected roof, and the warm slate felt good.

  After a bit he sat up and looked around. The roof was on a level with the surrounding treetops, and he could see the horizon far away to every side, though the trees prevented him from seeing the closer topography. Through the shaking uppermost branches to the north, he could glimpse the small town of Wilmer twenty miles distant, though it appeared to be no more than a patch of grayish-white in a sea of dark reds, flat greens, and muddy browns.

  A short walk over the roof verified what he had already guessed—there was no method of entering the house from the roof. No readily accessible method, at any rate. He knelt down and tried to fit his fingers beneath one of the black slates. It was easier than he had thought. The slate seemed to crumble in his grasp, and, pulling it away, he saw the dark wood beneath. One-by-eights, he thought. As solidly as the place was built, two-by-eights wouldn't have surprised him. A keyhole saw would be ideal, but he didn't have one. He'd have to gouge his way through.

  Sitting down once more, he looked out at the horizon and wondered if he really was crazy to be trying to get inside a house from which any sane man would be fleeing in terror. He didn't owe anything to the people inside—why not leave them alone with whatever they'd gone in there to meet?

  But he couldn't do that. He was the only one in the world who could save them, assuming there were any left to save. The thought that he might get inside and find them safe and well and angry at being disturbed did not even occur to him. That they wanted out was certain. That they were not able to get out was even more certain. And perhaps he could free them.

  Yet underlying his mission of mercy was another urge that he himself could not fully understand. Curiosity was too mild a term for it, obsession too strong. One is neither curious nor obsessed when the telephone rings or the doorbell chimes; one simply picks up the receiver or opens the door. Monckton was in his own mind merely opening the door, responding to the knock, so that getting the people out was secondary to his own goal of getting in. He didn't think about it much, because there was so little to actually think about. It lay beyond that, in the misty realm of feeling.

  A dull roar rumbled in his ears, and he thought at first it was the house awakening, but instead it was a plane, so high that he could barely make out its shape. He looked at his watch once more and frowned. There would be no time to try to get in today. He was surprised that Sterne was not already firing one of their rifles into the air to beckon him back down to the cabin. Perhaps tonight, when Sterne was sleeping soundly, he would come back up with a rope and flashlight and probably a pistol, and try to get in through the roof with the crowbar and hammer and chisel in the bright moonlight.

  He looked toward the south and smiled. The moon would be high and just past full by the time Sterne slept. It would be just like daylight. He had always liked the night, bright moonlit nights in particular. It made the whole world magical with mingled planes of light and jet black pockets of shadow that no other light, bright or dim, could duplicate. It would be that way tonight, he thought. The only clouds were low on the eastern horizon—rain clouds perhaps, but too far away to worry about.

  He stood up and walked over to the ladder, then reached down and drew it up until it was almost perpendicular to the ground. It gave him an extra foot of space at the top, but if it would tip outward once, it would be gone. He toyed with it so that the supports touched the iron balcony once more, leaving only a bare two inches sticking past the edge of the roof. Inside his head he said a prayer, and swung his legs over the side onto the rungs.

  God was not listening. But something else was.

  A third of the way down, the ladder shivered, a slight tremulous shudder that Monckton would have failed to notice had he been a bit less tensely suggestible. But as it was, he froze in place, muscles locked, breathing halted, cursing his own heartbeat as it pounded in his ears. It happened again, stronger now, as if a fist had struck the uprights at the base, and slowly the ladder began to bend in the center. He sucked in the chill air as he saw the top shrink from the roof edge until his margin of safety was only an inch, then a half inch, then …

  His stomach dropped away as he saw the ladder top shoot toward the wall of the house. At first he could not understand that he was moving with it, so he was unprepared for the force with which it struck the wall, the wood ratcheting madly in his ears as it scraped against the stone. He lurched sideways, hanging on with a death grip to the rungs, throwing away the tenuous hold the ladder had maintained against the house. It was falling, tipping to the side like a child's pile of blocks stacked too high.

  The horror of his choice came upon him immediately. To hang on would mean being thrown over the side of the balcony, being smashed on the walkway below, and possibly crushed by the ladder as well. To let go would mean falling onto the rough tiles of the second floor balcony, letting the ladder slide over the edge and farther down. Logic screamed to let go and take the nearer fall, while raw survival told him to hold on to whatever he had, even though it might take him down to death. But it was the other voice, the voice that was not his own that told him to hold on to the plunging ladder, that forced hi
s decision.

  It wants me to fall! Fall all the way!

  With an outburst of air he unclenched his fingers from around the wood and tried to will his body back within the borders of the balcony railing. He was only partially successful.

  The ladder struck the iron rail at the same time Monckton did, and was bucked off and down to clatter heavily against the walk below. Monckton was luckier. His legs struck the rail, his body inside its relatively safe confines. Both legs broke, cracking like dry sticks, the bone of the left jabbing out redly through his brown wool pants and the skin beneath. He hit the balcony floor with his left shoulder, shattering the joint and snapping both clavicle and scapula. Four ribs cracked. His hip was dislocated. Since most of the weight was taken by the shoulder, his head only bounced lightly on the tile with the sharp deft sound of a cue ball breaking the rack. It caused a mild concussion, but not enough for him to lose consciousness.

  It would have been better if he had, for what followed was far worse.

  The faces were back, the faces that he had seen in the observatory. Corll, Hitler, Fish—they were all there, bathed in such a pure whiteness that he felt dizzy looking at them. He struggled to close his eyes against the light, but was powerless to. There were more now, savage faces, fiendish and brutal, that seemed to go on forever, like in hotels where there was a mirror on the door and a mirror on the wall and he could see himself, a million naked Moncktons going into the mirror forever and ever, and they would never stop coming, never stop looking at him and wanting him to be with them, to be one of them, and the faces looked and knew him, and two faces came out of the mass and four eyes looked into his, and through the pain and the blood and the tears of fear he knew them for who they were, knew them even though neither one looked like a real face at all.