He kept his eyes open, listening in the dark for the sounds of her sleep.
Chapter Fourteen
Sterne was out of shape. If he hadn't known it before, he knew it by the time he reached the house. It was slightly less than a mile from the cabin, but it was uphill all the way and took him over ten minutes. Once he got in sight of the huge stone building, he tried to call Monckton's name, but all that emerged from his aching throat was a dry croak. He stumbled on, falling once and bruising his knee against some loose stones. When he saw that the doors and windows were secure, he breathed a sigh of relief and relaxed, bending his body in the middle to try to comfort the side stitches that seemed to be eating their way through him. Straightening up, he called Monckton's name loudly, but received no reply. He began to walk around the house, his eyes sweeping the high grass of the lawn, searching for a larger mound amid the clumps of wind-twisted grass and leaves. The chill air stung his overworked lungs and he paused, resting again until his breathing came more slowly. Then he moved on around the west wing toward the back of the house.
He noticed the ladder immediately. It was lying half on the walk, half on the lawn, like some toy flung away by a giant. Then he looked up and saw the arm dangling over the edge of the balcony.
"Oh, Christ!" he muttered. "Oh, you asshole … " Tears of frustrated rage welled up in his eyes. He ran to the ladder, picking it up and propping it against the wall, then climbed up it as quickly as he could.
He found a shattered Monckton lying on the tiles, legs impossibly awry, blood coming from one of them. There were also slow trickles of blood from both nostrils. Sterne gingerly picked up a wrist and felt for a pulse. It was there, faint but steady. The idea struck Sterne of running to the front door of The Pines and banging on it for help, but behind the door, he remembered, was a steel plate. And even if he could have gotten in, there would have been no way to get help from Wilmer—there was no phone.
Down the mountain, he thought wildly. I'll get him down the mountain and then Renault will never know he was here. He could have fallen off the cabin roof, out of a tree. . . . He wondered if he could get Monckton down the ladder, then put his hands beneath Monckton's armpits and exerted slight pressure.
There was a dull pop and a feel of something giving beneath his hands, and he quickly let the body slump back to the balcony floor. He swallowed painfully and looked around in panic, but there was no one to help him. The perspiration was soaking through his underclothes, and he wrenched off the down-filled jacket, tossing it on the tiles. Manhandling Monckton down the mountain could very well kill him, of that much he was certain. Even if he survived, how could he explain away the injuries—and would Monckton even back him up when he regained consciousness?
If he regained consciousness.
Sterne licked his lips nervously as he wondered whether or not the plan would work.
Simon, Monckton's gone …
I don't know. The noise of the Jeep woke me, but by the time I looked out he was gone.
He'd been acting strangely, Simon. Saying funny things about the house. I'm not sure, but I think he might have been planning to leave for a while.
I can handle it by myself until you send someone up. No problem.
Renault couldn't have Monckton searched for—it was Monckton's Jeep. The worst that had been done was breach of contract. And once the month was up, nine days from now, they would find Monckton, and it would be a shame.
It would work. It would clear Sterne, it would shut Monckton's mouth, no one would ever know that Sterne had let Monckton go up to the house.
Sterne decided to let the man die.
"I warned you," he said, kneeling down as though Monckton could hear him. "It's not like I didn't warn you. You'd probably be dead before help could get here anyway."
At that moment Monckton's eyes jerked open spasmodically. They were tired, pained, but clear, and they recognized Sterne. Some blood had dried on Monckton's lips, and the chill wind had chapped them further, so that when he opened them, they made a sound like softly ripping parchment.
"Ster . . ." He struggled to speak, but stopped, a cough shuddering through his body. It started his nose bleeding again, but he seemed unaware of it. "Sterne," he got out breathily. "Dead . . . dead."
Sterne could barely hear the words over the rush of wind. "What? Dead? Someone's dead?"
Monckton nodded, grimacing at the pressure his muscles placed on his shattered shoulder.
"Who? Who's dead?"
"Cum-mings." He said the name in two distinct syllables, as if to make sure Sterne would understand.
"Cummings? Seth Cummings?"
It was less painful to speak than to nod. "Yeah. 'N Neville."
Sterne's eyes widened. "Neville? David Neville?”
“Yeah."
Sterne grabbed Monckton's head between his hands, ignoring the man's sharp cry of pain. "How do you know? How do you know that?"
"I—I saw. Saw them . . ."
"Shit!" Sterne spat out, letting go of Monckton and leaping to his feet in one motion. Neville dead? But how? If Monckton had been responsible . . . Sterne knelt again and looked into Monckton's eyes. "You saw," he said with a sneer. "How could you see? This place is shut tight!"
Monckton started to shake his head; instead, croaked out, "No …"
"What do you mean no?" Sterne wanted to grab Monckton, wanted to take him and shake him like a rat, but if he did he knew he might lose him as a source of information completely. Then he remembered he hadn't seen the windows and doors on the east wing of the house. It might be possible that one of them had been forced, that Monckton had gotten in that way.
Then why had he been apparently trying to get to the roof?
Sterne shook his head savagely. Not a thing made sense, not a damned thing. But if there were an entrance open, if Monckton had somehow breached the defenses, and if as a result David Neville were truly dead—well, then the shit wouldn't just hit the fan, it would mean a manure truck into the windmill.
He turned and threw his leg over the railing. "Wait," Monckton groaned, "help … help me …"
"Help yourself," Sterne shot back, and started down the ladder.
It was a combination of things that made him fall, none of them preternatural in origin. The first was the fifth rung from the top that had split when the ladder had taken its two-story drop; the second was the smooth-soled shoes Sterne was wearing; the third was the haste with which he came down the ladder; and the fourth was his overall physical condition that left him unable to retain his hold when the rung snapped in two beneath his foot. The foot went through the gap, he fell backward, and rocketed headfirst down the incline, his shoes tapping a tattoo all the way down like a stick on a picket fence. He hit the bricks with the crown of his head.
On the balcony above, Whitey Monckton heard the sound of the rung breaking, and actually saw Sterne's fingers open from around the higher rung like a time-lapse flower and disappear. He wondered only for a second if Sterne was dead, only until he saw Sterne's face appear in a blaze of white, confused, frightened, and annoyed all at once before it faded into the blueness of the sky.
Monckton lay there for another hour, too tired to move, and watched overhead as the few clouds he'd noticed earlier gathered and multiplied, turning the sky to a pale gray, then to a dark slate color. When the rain began, he was able to pull himself the few feet in against the house. He did not mind the rain. The coldness of it took his mind ever so slightly off his pain, and, too, it washed away the blood. It seemed to hurt less if there was no blood. He closed his eyes and wondered how long he would have to wait.
~*~
Simon Renault looked at the receiver and frowned. He'd be damned if he'd call again. Sterne had treated him like a worrisome old woman the first time. Besides, there was no need. If something happened, Renault was sure that Sterne would call him immediately. He was insufferable at times, but efficient. And Monckton, too, seemed like a man who was always in control of himse
lf and his surroundings. Come now, Simon, he told himself. Trust them. After all, having them there is the next best thing to being there yourself.
He made himself smile, then took another sip of coffee.
Chapter Fifteen
At long last her breathing grew easy, her muscles relaxed. It was as if she had been trying to stay awake. Several times he'd heard her breathe in sharply, catching herself asleep. He was certain that if he'd been able to see her eyes, they would have been open, staring at the darkness like a lioness protecting her sleeping mate. After he thought she was asleep, he counted very slowly to five hundred, then undraped his arm from around her. When there was no response, he inched over to the edge of the bed and got up, feeling about in the dark until he located his pants and shirt.
He'd turned the lights off in the living room before they'd gone to bed so as not to wake Gabrielle when the door opened. He eased it shut now, waiting for a moment after the soft click of the latch before he fumbled for the lamp. The light was reassuring, and he crossed the room purposefully and stepped into the hall.
He wondered where he should go. The kitchen? That was where he had seen the unearthly, strangely beautiful face before. But it seemed so pedestrian, so unromantic somehow (God, there it was again!). He decided to go there nonetheless, and walked slowly down the central staircase. His emotions were ones that he remembered from long years ago—a mixture of excitement and youthful terror. It was walking up to Judy Marlowe's door the night of the junior prom, walking into the Marine induction center for his physical, climbing the stairs to a oneroom apartment with the first man he had ever picked up: exquisite foreboding, breathless anticipation.
He entered the kitchen and sat at the table as he had before, wondering how one opened oneself to the scrutiny of whatever he had seen and talked with before, and finally deciding on relaxed concentration. He closed his eyes and did the breathing that a TM freak in Angola had taught him. After a bit he opened them again and looked around. There was nothing.
He decided to try speech instead. "Are you there?" he whispered. "Is anyone there? . . . Hello? . . ."
There was no answer. Line busy? Then he remembered what Neville had said when he'd found him in the cellar: It's stronger here.
The cellar then. It was not better or worse than any other room in the house, despite what had happened there. Perhaps Neville was right. Perhaps the thing was stronger the closer to the earth it was.
It's like a lodestone, Gabrielle had said, and McNeely paused at the idea. A lodestone buried beneath the earth of Pine Mountain, drawing to it and holding fast … secrets. He opened the cellar door and started to walk down the steps.
The odor hit him instantly, and he frowned. So the wine cellar hadn't been as airtight as they'd hoped, he thought grimly. He breathed through his mouth and prayed they'd never have to come down here to stay. Even though the smell was vile, he felt far better than on his last visit, when Seth Cummings was prowling the house like some blood-mad animal. But Cummings was gone now, safe and dead behind those oak doors, with only a dark stain to mark his passing.
McNeely stood in the center of the stone floor and looked around him. He started to say "hello" again, but stopped. It would not need his voice to tell it he was there. He remembered that Neville had been inside the fire chamber, so he walked over and opened the ponderous steel door.
The room's smell was flat and lifeless, though there was little trace of dampness as there was in the rest of the cellar. The few pieces of furniture sat expectantly empty, but the shelves were well stocked with provisions, and the fluorescent fixtures overhead cast a more intense light than the sickly bulb that so incompetently lit the rest of the level. The odor from the wine cellar had barely permeated the air of the shelter, and McNeely unconsciously pulled the door closed behind him to further escape the smell. With the door closed, the room was so quiet, he heard his own heartbeat, and fancied he could hear the blood rushing through his veins and arteries. The rest of the house had been quiet, but quiet like a coffin in a crypt. Now the coffin was in a crypt that lay hundreds of miles beneath the surface of the earth. It made a huge difference, if not in the silence itself, then in his perception of the silence. It was a thick cotton snake that stretched through his brain from ear to ear.
And it was because the silence was so great that the voice came as such a surprise. It seemed to fill the small room at first, unaware of its own strength, lifting his unprepared body and shaking it with sound before it could properly gauge how much power it would truly need. In fact, its first words were unintelligible to McNeely precisely because of the force with which they were delivered. After the first shock came a panicked certainty that Wickstrom and Gabrielle two floors above would hear, must hear the voice. But a second of consideration was enough to tell him that the voice had been inside his head, had been meant for his inner ear alone.
The psychic rumbling receded like an ocean wave, and the words became intelligible.
You have returned.
There was glee in the tone, and McNeely thought of himself as the Prodigal Son come home to his family's good graces.
We thought you were frightened, but you have sought us out. There was a pause. You have sought us out of your own free will?
McNeely nodded. "Yes," he said, surprised at how his voice caught in his throat. He cleared it and repeated, "Yes."
That is good. We can help you. McNeely heard a vast outpouring of winds, a titanic sigh. We tried before. A puzzle. The last two words were given no inflection, so that McNeely could not form a context. He thought perhaps that the thing was puzzled by his previous reaction when it had told him what it had done for him.
"I was frightened," he said, "frightened when you first made yourself known to me. I didn't know that I could be so . . ." He searched for the word, and heard the voice speak it in his mind just as it was about to leave his lips.
Manipulated. (Had it read his mind?) It was not manipulation. It was only making you as you most deeply wished to be. It is good for one to be as one wishes.
It was a soothing voice, a soft, deep, mellifluous baritone that touched his mind with cool word-fingers. The inflections were like music, like the voice of Dylan Thomas reading Fern Hill, but with such a quality that one would have thought the throat that formed the words was made of velvet.
Do you know now what you wish to be?
"I wish ('Oh Jeff I did love you') I wish to love a woman as I've loved men."
You are certain? It was what you wanted before, yet …
"Yes. I'm certain."
Then it is yours.
"Always?"
For the rest of your life.
McNeely shuddered when it said that, even though there was no trace of malice in the tone. Almost immediately he felt something change within him. It was not a great change; no epiphany that showed him whirling clouds and suns that blazoned "heterosexual" across the sky in letters of fire. Rather, it was a subtle reorganization, a shifting of things inside him, lasting only a second. But afterward he knew he could love Gabrielle the way he had loved her before. A thrill went through him as he thought of her body opened beneath him.
She is beautiful.
McNeely drew up with a start as he realized that it had seen precisely what he had. "You read my mind?" he asked in a tense voice.
We see thoughts.
"Always?"
When we wish.
The face began to form then, the same gentle, peaceful, godlike face that he had seen in the kitchen. It was smiling benignly. "I can see you now," McNeely said.
We did not wish to frighten you again, it said by way of explanation.
"I'm not frightened," he said, thinking as he did so that it already knew that. "Thank you. Thank you for doing … whatever you did."
You are welcome.
"Is there—" He paused, thinking that he could not ask it after all. It seemed too Mephistophelean.
You wish to know if there is anything you can do for us
in return.
He swallowed, then nodded.
Perhaps there is something. In the future.
Jesus, he thought. Why did it suddenly sound like Marion Brando in The Godfather? And with a strange glee he realized that even if it was reading his mind, it could not grasp the allusion. Perhaps that was the way to keep thoughts private—think in symbols: contemporary archetypes.
"Who are you?" he asked.
Friends.
"Are you ghosts?"
It did not answer. We can do much for you.
"But what are you?"
We can give you power.
"You gave Seth Cummings power," he said, surprised at his own boldness.
The thing was silent for a while, its face expressionless. We erred with Seth Cummings.
He laughed shortly. "Erred? Damn right, you erred!" He slapped his mouth shut then as the thought hit him that he should not antagonize this thing, that whatever it was, it had proven itself powerful beyond his comprehension.
Seth Cummings was weak. He had no strength of will. No image of himself as anything great. He thought only in terms of what we could do for him. He could not hope to cope with the power we gave him. He abused it for his own petty urges.
"And what about me? When I killed Cummings with that kick? Did you give me the power to do that?"
We did. Else he would have killed you all.
"He did kill Neville."
He was inessential.
A chill went through McNeely. It was as if he had been waiting for it to say something like that, to expose, if not its evil, its godlike insensitivity to human affairs. "Inessential to whom?" he asked, sounding braver than he felt.
To anyone. Surely he was inessential to his wife. She desired you. And if a man is inessential to those closest to him, does it not follow that he will be inessential to others as well?
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