Nightmare Journey

by Dean R. Koontz

  Once, by pretending to give up and then launching after her with even greater fervor, he caught her in his arms and tried to draw her toward him. His hands slid over heavy breasts, along slick skin, then lost her.

  “Over here!” she shouted.

  He turned and saw her at the other side of the pool.

  “Slippery eel!” he called.

  He went after her.

  She dived out of sight.

  A moment later she grabbed his feet and pulled him under, let him go when he began to fight back.

  He surfaced, spluttering, listening to her delighted laughter.

  “You'll pay, “he said.

  This time he caught her more easily, drew her in until her hard nipples poked against his chest and her pelvis was glued to his, their legs brushing provocatively beneath the crystal water. Without realizing that he had intended to do this all along, he bent and kissed her, licked her lips and accepted her tongue in return.

  Her arms went around him.

  He nuzzled her neck membranes, smelled the tangy odor of her flesh, aware that she was tainted, that she was daughter to the Ruiner, but not caring in the least, not at that moment.

  “I want you,'' he said. His voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else, throaty and ready to crack. He heard himself say, amazedly, “I think I love you, Mellie.”

  Tell me again, she 'pathed.

  Suddenly all of their brief conversations flashed through his mind. The countless hours, in only six days, in which they had been together became more than hours, stretched until they seemed like years. This time, without any qualifications, he said, “I love you.”

  Her hand strayed between his legs, encircled his erection. She 'pathed, Again, Jask. Tell me again.

  “I love you, Melopina.”

  Again!

  “I love you!”

  Tell me with your power. Don't use your voice. Tell me again.

  He hesitated and…

  … lost her.

  She jerked away from him as she sensed his reluctance to make the commitment, rolled onto her back and swam away. At the steps, she pulled herself from the water and stood on the paved patio, squeezing the water out of her hair. Her nipples were dark blue, her pubic bush black. She was the most desirable creature he had ever seen.

  He stepped onto the patio and said, “Doesn't it mean anything…? I thought you felt something too, that you—”

  She tossed her hair back.

  Her neck membranes wavered, shone with droplets of water like tiny spheres of mercury.

  She said, ''I can't give my body to you if you won't have my mind as well. I couldn't be half a wife to you.”

  “Melopina, I—”

  She grabbed her clothes and walked off. At the bottom of the steps she dressed, looked back once, and went back up to the grove and the wagon where the others waited.

  As he watched her go, Jask wondered if this erotic encounter had simply grown out of her playful mood and her intense love of the water — or whether it had been carefully staged in order to break down his last defenses. Strangely enough, even if they had plotted against him, he could not be angry. What he had told Melopina was true, and more of a surprise to himself than to her: He loved her. He felt so strong about her, in fact, that the loss of her was like a physical pain as well as a spiritual agony.

  He was in love with a tainted creature, the Ruiner's handiwork. If he took her, if he surrendered to her demands that they share completely, his last untainted thoughts would become subject to her influence. He would change. He would be lost without hope. Yet he could not go on long without her. Either way, his situation had become a thousand times more unbearable than ever.

  He dressed and went up to the wagon.

  19

  On the morning of their eighth day together, as the sun climbed over the snow-capped mountains and yawned at the world below, shreds of night mist still clinging to the ground, they reached the southwest corner of the Blight, a place called Boomer's Pass. They could see their avenue of escape from the Wildlands: an old, paved roadbed, now full of weeds, stones and a great many scraggly trees, leading straight through the foothills and finally between huge slabs of black stone at the base of the Gabriel Fit Range, which towered so high that the last third of it was swathed in fat, white clouds.

  We'll set out immediately after dark, Tedesco 'pathed.

  After that brief announcement he shielded all his thoughts from Jask Zinn.

  For the others the morning passed swiftly in silent conversation. For Jask, however, it dragged. Since the incident in the pool the day before last, they had all shunned him even more assiduously than ever. He was certain that Melopina had told them what had happened. He was bitter about her quick tongue, even while he understood that there could be no secrets between espers.

  They parked beneath a stand of enormous trees, whose branches were so tightly interwoven that very little sunlight passed through to disturb the forest floor beneath. Tedesco stood the first watch from noon until two o'clock. Chaney stood guard from two until four, turning over the post to Jask, who would handle it for another two hours before waking Kiera. They had all adjusted to sleeping by day and working by night, and in the heavy shadows of the trees, they had no problems with insomnia.

  Jask sat on an overturned log near the sleepers, but faced the open road up which they had journeyed and from which they might expect to get visitors of whatever sort. Occasionally he turned around to study the sleepers, most especially Melopina. She lay on her side, near the wagon, hands pulled up against her breasts, breathing quietly, her blue-green membranes trembling slightly each time she exhaled. When he was beginning his second hour on duty, he turned for yet another glimpse of her and saw — or thought that he saw — something hanging in the air above her.

  “Mellie?” he asked softly.

  No one replied.

  He turned away from the bright sun beyond the trees and stared hard at the air just above her. In a minute his eyes adjusted, and he saw that he had not been imagining things: a spiderlike insect, fully as large as a grown woman, hung from glistening gray-white threads, its ugly black legs pistoning slowly over the girl. From its bulbous stomach a dark, wicked stinger protruded directly toward her neck, the top of it no more than twenty inches from her soft skin.

  Jask stood up.

  The spider quivered, did not strike the girl, waiting for some condition of the atmosphere that only it could understand.

  Jask raised his rifle and was about to pull off a shot, then slowly lowered it as he remembered how many rounds it had taken to subdue the crab in that ancient church. If his shot did not kill the insect instantly, it might leap forward and spear Melopina's neck.

  He 'pathed, Mellie…

  Who—?

  Wake up, but don't move, don't open your eyes and don't make the least breath of a sound.

  Clearer then: Jask?

  Do you understand what I've said?

  Yes, but why—

  He 'pathed her the situation.

  Why can't I open my eyes?

  It may have some way of registering that. You may precipitate a strike. And I'm afraid that you'd cry out involuntarily when you got a look at it. It isn't pretty.

  What will you do?

  Kill it.

  How?

  With my esp power. Now, wait and be still.

  He sat down on the ground, because he knew that such a tapping of his esp could make him physically weak, and he did not want to fall over halfway through the job.

  He sensed out, searching for the nimbus of the spider's primitive mind, found it, oozed carefully into it, running mental fingers over the slimy texture of those thought fragments and shattered energy pulses. He found the complex nerve clusters that regulated its reaction to fear, and he put pressure on these, trying to ignore the horrid beat of its dark desires, which thrummed all around him like singing wires ready to snap.

  The spider quaked on its threads, drew its stinger back to
ward its black belly.

  Jask did not know whether this movement meant the beast was merely cocking its device prior to discharging it into the girl's neck, or whether his psionic attack was beginning to have some effect. He put his hands to his temples and concentrated harder.

  The spider rose slightly on its threads.

  Jask built up bolts of mental power and, suddenly, began to feed them into the fear center of the spider's brain, one after the other, like hot blades.

  The spider withdrew its stinger altogether and started slowly back up the threads, reluctant to leave such a juicy morsel as Melopina but forced into retreat by a power it couldn't understand.

  Jask doubled his efforts, his arms dropping to his sides as he lost the ability to hold them up any longer.

  The spider put on more speed, making for the intense shadows in the tree branches. Halfway up, it scrabbled at its silken wires, kicked loose against its will and, wriggling, fell.

  Move, Mellie!

  The girl rolled out of the way.

  The spider landed, came up on its feet, all its black legs locked straight to give it maximum height, the maw in its gut opening and closing, dripping thick saliva on the place where Melopina had lain.

  Fear… fear… terror… panic… Jask worked at projecting the proper patterns.

  The spider tottered.

  Fear… death… terror…

  It caught sight of Mellie and, gaining some last bit of courage and strength, it reared back and skittered toward her, making no sound itself but causing the leaves beneath its feet to rustle quietly.

  She screamed.

  Jask leaped up, pouring out all of his reserves of power, his mind bleached white, drained empty in a gush of esp.

  The spider rose over the girl on four of its eight legs, its maw snapping open and shut, open and shut, as it prepared to fall upon her and—

  It burst into flame!

  Rather than falling forward, the creature rolled back, wailing in its death agonies, many legs kicking off sparks, the darkness under the trees illuminated by it, the air soured by the smell of burning flesh. It rolled halfway across the floor of the woods before it stopped, and then it was very still. The flames died away, leaving nothing more than a smoking hulk a third as big as the thing had been in life.

  Did I do that? Jask asked, stunned.

  No, Melopina said. I did.

  I didn't know you could kill like that, by setting things aflame.

  And I didn't know that you could kill with your power. How were you affecting it? I couldn't tell.

  The same way I killed the men who imprisoned me in my enclave — I was frightening it to death.

  The girl joined him a few meters from the charred corpse, looking into the blackened mouth that still opened and closed, after death, across the width of its gut. The other espers had been awakened by the spider's cries, and they now stood behind Jask and the girl.

  It would have killed me if you hadn't seen it in time, she 'pathed.

  He had a neat, brief image of what it would have done to her, and the thought of Melopina dead forever struck him hard, like a blow to the chest. He turned away from them, staggered a few steps to the side of the insect corpse and vomited up his lunch.

  She 'pathed, Are you all right?

  He could not speak just yet.

  She said, “Jask? Are you all right?”

  In a few moments he 'pathed, No need to revert to speech. I want you to 'path me from now on. I'm getting tired of having no one to talk to.

  She 'pathed, Me, too.

  20

  They used lengths of cloth, dry grass and sturdy branches to manufacture several hand torches, which they lighted and held high overhead, inspecting the tightly laced branches and leaves that roofed them in. At first all was quiet above. But as the smoke from the torches rose and found its way through chinks in the ceiling, other spiders began to move, scuttling along the branches, visible here and there as they hurried through gaps in the foliage.

  Must be a couple dozen of them, Chaney 'pathed.

  Jask answered, And some are bigger than the one we killed.

  Tedesco's self-reproach was plainly evident, even without the intonation of his voice: I've been getting sloppy lately.

  We all overlooked the possibility, Kiera 'pathed.

  But I've spent so many more days in the Wildlands than you have, the bruin insisted, snorting through his blunt nose, growling softly at himself. I should have checked for something like this. But I was too concerned about Jask — about whether or not he would finally see the light. I worried about the wrong things, it appears.

  The spiders danced about, rustling the leaves above them.

  We're all to blame, Jask insisted. And when Tedesco could still not see it that way, he 'pathed, Right now, my hairy friend, you're forgetting something you've been trying to drum into my head for days.

  Oh?

  Jask 'pathed, As espers, we have opened ourselves completely to one another; we have become, in essence, a gestalt, a single organism whose parts maintain their individuality but whose sum is undeniably superior to and more desirable than any of its fragments. Therefore, our triumphs are to be shared by all, and our failures are the responsibility of everyone.

  A couple hours ago, Tedesco 'pathed, you were a nonbeliever. He was grinning, and there was humor implicit in his telepathic tone. Now you're spouting my own philosophy back to me as if you created it yourself.

  Grinning himself, Jask 'pathed, It came easily to you, to all of you. It came very hard to me, but now that I have it, I probably understand its implications better than any of you.

  Perhaps, Tedesco 'pathed. And you're right: This was everyone's fault, not only mine. Now let's get out of here before any more of those damn things come down to snoop around.

  They lifted camp ahead of schedule.

  21

  In the few hours remaining before complete darkness had set in and before they were prepared to begin their trek through Boomer's Pass, Melopina taught Jask the trick of mentally generating spontaneous combustion. It was a simple enough process, once she had carefully instructed him. He had only to key his esp output to a nonverbal level, to a narrow beam of intense force, then concentrate on images of flames until, when the power was rigidly contained within that concept of conflagration, he could let it go in one deadly fireball. Melopina could initiate a flame attack in three or four seconds. Jask required half a minute, but he knew he would eventually cut that down to a more effective firing time.

  And you've already taught the others how to do this? he 'pathed.

  Yes.

  When?

  When you slept, or when you were on guard duty.

  He could not keep at least a trace of self-pity out of his tone when he 'pathed, Why did you feel it necessary to hide this from me?

  You were not one of us yet, she 'pathed.

  And now I am?

  Now you are.

  22

  In the gypsy wagon Tedesco and Jask sat at a small table on which an antique oil lantern burned.

  Dancing shadows leaped gaily on the walls behind them.

  The minted oil gave off a pleasing aroma that had permeated every nook and cranny of the wheeled room.

  Tedesco took two books from his rucksack and placed them on the table. He looked at Jask and said, Go ahead. Open them.

  His fingers trembling. Jask drew the first book in front of him and flipped the pages. He saw photographs of alien terrain, pictures of the Earth taken from the moon, pictures of other moons taken from other worlds, glossy images of spacecraft exploding off the face of the Earth or sailing serenely through the emptiness of space.

  Tedesco turned up the lantern flame. The other book, too.

  Jask opened it. He saw cities that, he knew immediately, were not the homes of men, saw starships so unusual in design that it was clear they had been constructed to contain forms of life radically different from human beings, though evidently just as intelligent. He
saw, at last, photographs of the creatures from the stars, more alien than any human mutation could be, so basically different from mankind that the variations between the Pure and the tainted seemed insignificant.

  Why didn't you show me these right away? he 'pathed.

  I had to be sure of you before that.

  I swear, such sights as these would have convinced me!

  They would only have temporarily convinced you.

  No. I would have had to come to grasps with reality much sooner.

  Tedesco 'pathed, Until you had rejected your Pure heritage, fought and won your own moral battle, you could not be relied upon at all. He lowered the flame in the lantern. Gradually your sense of spiritual guilt would have forced you to reevaluate the photographs. Because you didn't, back then, want to believe in such things, you would have found reasons to reject them. You would have thought of ways to identify them as fakes and forgeries.

  But you could have reasoned me out of such a reaction if, indeed, I used it.

  Could I have? Tedesco 'pathed. I don't know. At that time I wanted to believe in the Black Presence, in the legends and in these photographs. Yet I had my own doubts.

  You never seemed to!

  But I did. And if you were to play a doubting Thomas, constantly rejecting the validity of these pictures, I don't know whether I could have kept going all this time.

  Jask looked at the pictures one last time, closed the books, gave them to the bruin who tucked them back into the rucksack. I owe you so much, he 'pathed, gently.

  We owe each other.

  You nursed me when I was sick, badgered me into going on when I would have given up.

  And you gave me something to occupy my mind. Raging at your Pure stupidities, I had less time to doubt the purpose of the voyage.

  Jask turned out the light. We better start out for Boomer's Pass.

  Yes, the bruin 'pathed. In another week we should reach the Black Glass.

  Do you think the Presence waits there?

  If not, we've two more maps to employ.