Waiting

by Stephen Jones

  When she drew her hand out again, the light of her aura slightly dimmed, but on her finger I saw a ring.

  It was Mr. Hughes’s pinky ring—the one he was always fiddling with. I recognized the crazy hybrid-creature etched in the thick gold.

  Now that gold was glowing, and the ruby eyes blazed with fury.

  And the creature was somehow emerging from the metal.

  It is not possible to explain what this . . . being was. I had no eyes to see it, nor ears to hear, but I knew it deep in my soul (as I knew in that moment, for the first time in my life, that I actually had a soul).

  It was light. It was power.

  It was . . . majesty.

  The creature leapt into the glowing orb of black.

  There are no words to capture the struggle that ensued between the light and the dark, only feelings—terror, grief, pain, tendresse, anger, ecstasy, hunger, despair, orgasm.

  Yes, it was like ejaculating excrement.

  For a moment, the light deepened and took over the chamber.

  Then the dark grew again and that soul I’d only just shaken hands with shriveled.

  “We are lost,” V cried.

  I wanted to, had to, do something. I didn’t know what. I was nothing against the cosmic vastness. I am no warrior: I had no skills, no abilities, no weapons.

  Like a fool, I patted myself down, reached into pockets. I had some coins and keys, a monogrammed hankie, and a pigskin wallet.

  And one other thing.

  (Yes, something said.)

  Letting loose a scream that bloodied the inside of my throat—but which was less than a pin dropping on mile-thick carpet to the roaring chaos in front of me—I plunged my hand, and the tiny item it held, into the pulsating blackness.

  I heard a real scream then—it was the dying scream of universes.

  It burned me to a cinder.

  There is nothing in this life duller than having to listen to someone talk about their dreams. So I won’t detail what I experienced. Except to say . . . they weren’t nice.

  Then: a voice.

  “What’s cookin’ good lookin’?”

  Faith Domergue, naked as that wonderful, proverbial jaybird, approached and straddled me. She gave Little Arty the bestest birthday present any boy ever had and then she got really dirty. Holy, Lady of the Angels!

  Okay, that was a dream. But at least it wasn’t dull.

  I opened my eyes.

  I looked around.

  I saw airplanes. And breasts.

  “Mr. Hughes’s office,” I croaked.

  I managed to raise my head enough to see that I was lying on his great leather sofa. I had to suppress a shudder thinking about the fluids that must have befouled it over the years.

  “Hello, Arty.”

  V. I quite literally knew that voice inside and out now.

  “Mr. Hughes won’t like this,” I said. “He’ll have the sofa burned. And me with it.”

  “He isn’t here,” she said. She came over and sat beside me. She reached down and stroked my hair. “He’s . . . gone away.”

  “That’s nice,” I said. I meant the stroking.

  “He’s fought a long, hard battle.”

  “He’s fought a battle?”

  “He’s been at it for years. It has cost him dearly.”

  I raised a finger and gestured at the luxurious surroundings. “Not exactly a shotgun shack,” I said.

  “I don’t mean money. He’s paid a price with his mind. The war has left him damaged. Beyond repair, I fear. He’s been taken someplace to try to help him recover. But giving up Winfield’s ring . . . that was all that held him together. Without its binding force, I see little hope for his future. He will probably sell the studio now. Sad. But he has been valiant.”

  “V . . . ,” I began.

  She pressed a finger to my lips.

  “Best not to ask too many questions, lest you walk the path of your Mr. Hughes. The battle was won. The dark things, the Old Ones, have been . . . deterred.”

  “But not defeated.”

  “No,” she said. “Defeat is not a possibility, and there will be greater battles to come. But this is a victory even so.”

  I pondered that a while.

  “Can I ask you a question, Arty?”

  “I’m spoken for,” I said. “But if you really want to . . .”

  She rapped my forehead with a steel knuckle. It hurt.

  “What was in your hand?”

  “Howzat?”

  “In the chamber in the mountain. When all seemed lost, you thrust your hand into the nothing. It held something that saved us, but I couldn’t make it out. What was it?”

  I thought about it for a moment, not sure what to say about the little pink flower that Faith had given me on the studio lot.

  “It was . . . a token.”

  “What?”

  “More than that, I suppose. Call it . . . an obscure object of desire. Though quite a pretty one. It was just a flower, V.”

  She tilted her head back and laughed the loudest, most heartfelt laugh I’d ever heard.

  “Beautiful,” she said when she stopped laughing. “Perfect.”

  “Perfect?”

  “Life, beauty, desire—humanity. All wrapped up in the smallest of organic packages. There could have been no better weapon against the dark. How did you think of it?”

  “The only other thing I had on me was a cherry Lifesaver,” I confessed.

  “You, Arthur Burns, are a great warrior.” She started laughing again.

  “Not just a pawn, then?”

  She stopped laughing. “I knew there was more to you than first appeared,” she said. “Something in the blood, perhaps in your genes. Your line has been touched, I think. I was wrong about you.”

  “Everyone is. How do you mean?”

  “You’re not a pawn at all, but are transformed—you have become a knight.”

  “Really?”

  “You know how they move on chessboards? All aslant? That is definitely you.”

  “And knights have big lances, right?”

  She shook her head at me. She leaned over and gave me a kiss on the lips, so soft it might have been the tap of a butterfly’s wing.

  “I think our paths may cross again,” she said and made for the door. She paused and turned to study at me again. “Or if not you, perhaps your heirs.”

  “Heirs? Say what?” I tried to get up to stop her, but I just couldn’t move.

  Then I was alone in the room. I stared at the model airplanes for a while and thought again about Howard Hughes. Who could have imagined? I let my gaze drift to the photos on the walls: the starlets all at their peak-a-boo bests. Backs arched, lips moistened, eyebrows plucked, skin shimmering like the sea’s surface under a full moon.

  One of the smaller glossies hung in a slightly darker corner of the room. After a while I managed to get up, limp over to it and take it down. I laid it flat on Mr. Hughes’s desk and stared at it for a while. Little Arty came to look too.

  Trying my luck, I punched the button on the intercom. Hughes’s haughty secretary asked if she could help.

  “Faith Domergue,” I said. “Could you see if she’s on the lot? Ask her to come up to the office if she is?”

  The secretary said she would see what she could do.

  Me too.

  NINE

  Arkham House on Haunted Hill

  IVERSON HOUSE WAS A hideous sight, even from a distance. It squatted on the misshapen hill like a huge malevolent toad, looming over the town of Arkham below, gray against an even grayer sky.

  Once Frank was past the clutching arms of the skeletal trees and onto the crumbling path leading up to the house, he could finally see it properly. The compact, boxy structure looked as though it was drowning in the shadows that cloaked its walls. Even the air above it was host to a murky miasma that made it look diseased.

  From where he stood, the place just looked like solid brick, dull and rust-colored, cold and comfor
tless, without a window in sight. He couldn’t imagine what the architect must have been thinking, designing something so unapologetically ugly—and then actually building it.

  There were several hills dotting the rural Massachusetts landscape— larger, higher, and more picturesque. Why choose the smallest, most malformed one on which to build this horror?

  He was so distracted he stepped off the path. His foot squelched into mud the color of dying flesh. With a muttered curse, he jumped back onto the cracked paving stones and stared in dismay at his ruined shoe. It felt like an omen, a sign of bad things to come. Not that he believed in such things.

  For a moment he considered turning back, but then abandoned the idea. He’d been hired to do a job and he wasn’t the kind of man to let someone down. Especially not a man like Arthur Leland. And especially not for the kind of money he was being paid: $5,000 up front and another $5,000 on completion of a week’s stay in the house. That was no small amount.

  Still, he found the assignment curious. He’d told Mr. Leland quite emphatically that he didn’t believe in ghosts or anything to do with the supernatural. In fact, he’d confessed, he wasn’t even a Christian. But Leland had insisted. He wanted an architect in the group, and he had chosen Frank’s firm. Frank had known why, of course.

  Twenty years ago, at the beginning of his apprenticeship, he’d been witness to a strange event. He had only helped draw up the blueprints for the little shop, so it was sheer coincidence that he was at the building site at all that day. That was to say, he had no special connection to the place—or the events.

  The sky had suddenly darkened, plunging the framework of studs, beams, and girders into shadow. The plastic sheeting over the unfinished walls had begun to crackle and billow even though there wasn’t a breath of wind. Suddenly there came a thunderous boom, like an explosion. And then the upright posts had collapsed like dominoes and the entire structure, scaffolding and all, had come tumbling down. Several men had been standing in the middle of the building site, including Frank, and it was a miracle no one was killed. At the time, the local paper had marveled at the occurrence and called it “inexplicable,” but never went so far as to suggest that ghosts were responsible.

  Leland had questioned him about the event, of course. And Frank had given the old man the same answers he’d given everyone else all those years ago. Sometimes these things just happened. As far as he was concerned, there was always a rational explanation; it was just that people often didn’t look hard enough for it.

  But Leland didn’t care whether Frank believed or not. “I have to know what’s in that old house,” he’d said. “Grant a dying man his final wish.”

  Well, who was Frank to argue with that? More to the point, who was he to turn down $10,000? For that kind of money he was happy to play along. Hell, he might even be tempted to embellish his report with something just as “inexplicable” as what he’d witnessed all those years ago.

  “Would you hurry up?” Gregory urged.

  Val looked up to see that he had already started up the path with the suitcases, leaving her behind to struggle with the smaller bags. They’d parked halfway up the hill on the crooked little outcrop that served as a forecourt, but the path leading up to the house was at least another hundred yards long. Even with just a bag of groceries it would feel like a mile.

  “I’m hurrying,” she shot back. “You’re always rushing me!” She yanked at the bag but it wouldn’t come free of whatever it was snagged on in the car’s trunk.

  “Because you’re always so sloooow.”

  “Well, I could move a lot faster if you’d help me!”

  With a sigh, Gregory turned back and made a big show of setting down the cases and unlooping the shoulder strap of her bag from where it had caught on the tire iron. He deposited it at her feet with a thud. “There. Are you happy now?”

  Val rolled her eyes and picked it up, hauling it over her shoulder with the two other satchels she was already loaded down with. “No thanks to you.”

  “Hey, don’t throw a double duck fit. Those are heavy.” He jerked his chin at the cases. She could see sweat stains blooming under the arms of his white T-shirt. “If you didn’t have to pack everything you own . . .”

  She crossed her arms and waited for him to finish.

  But he trailed off as he met her exasperated expression. “Are we going to argue all week?”

  After a moment she relented. “No,” she said. It had been a long drive from New Jersey and they were both tired and cranky. “I’m sorry.”

  He slammed shut the trunk of the Buick and gave his beloved car an affectionate pat before heading along the winding path with Val.

  When the monstrous house became visible through the trees, Val felt a flutter of unease in the pit of her stomach.

  “Ugh,” she said, “it doesn’t look very nice.”

  Gregory smiled. “A spook house shouldn’t look nice. Come on, it’s what we’ve always wanted. Don’t chicken out on me now!”

  Val relaxed and allowed herself to smile. Yes, it was what they’d always wanted—to see an actual haunted house. And Iverson House was rumored to be the most haunted house in New England. Maybe in all of America.

  They’d never actually seen it before, not even a photograph, but they’d read newspaper articles about the unexplained phenomena recorded in the house over the years. Strange noises, screams, flickering lights. And Arthur Leland had told them even more. Three people had apparently vanished without a trace after exploring it five years ago.

  When he’d interviewed them for the assignment, Mr. Leland had said he was very impressed by their enthusiasm. They didn’t have the experience of older, more seasoned investigators, but he said their youth would work in their favor. They had fewer preconceived notions and ingrained ideas, he’d told them. They were more open, more receptive.

  Val had asked whether that might make it more dangerous for them, to which Gregory had responded with a withering look.

  But Mr. Leland had merely offered her an avuncular smile and patted her hand. “Of course not,” he’d said reassuringly.

  “Gee, it sure is ugly,” Gregory said, sounding excited. “Real ugly.”

  And it was. A great hulking mass of crumbling—was it brick? Stone? It looked like something the ground had tried to swallow and brought back up.

  Val wrinkled her nose. “I sure hope it’s not full of bugs. Rats and bats I can handle, but if I see a spider like the one in New York that time . . .”

  Gregory laughed. “Don’t worry, I’ll stomp it.” And he demonstrated by bringing his boot down hard on a dry leaf, pulverizing it into dust.

  For some reason the sight made her shudder, and she suddenly realized how chilly it was. She’d only worn a light cardigan over her blouse, and her pedal pushers left her calves and ankles exposed. Once the stony path came to an end, the ground was unpleasantly soft and squishy. Thank heavens she’d worn her old saddle shoes.

  “Almost there,” Gregory said, reading her mind.

  It took them several minutes to find the door. Where a normal building would have the entrance in front, the way into Iverson House was around a corner. Val shook off the unpleasant notion that the door was hiding from them. It was tucked into an alcove that didn’t look like it belonged with the rest of the structure, as though someone had blasted a hole in the wall and covered it up with a crude porch and a slab of oak with a hinge.

  They stood staring. It did not look inviting.

  “Do we just go in?” she asked.

  “I suppose so. We are guests at this party after all.”

  The door was horrible. Warped and twisted. Like something that had been dredged up from a swamp and battered into place by cavemen. It made her skin crawl. What if the rooms inside were just as primitive?

  Gregory reached for the handle, but Val grabbed his hand. “No, wait! Let’s knock.”

  He frowned at her for a moment, then laughed. “You think we might have the wrong house? Val, for Pe
te’s sake!”

  But he hesitated anyway, standing there with his upraised knuckles inches from the wood. There was something in his expression he couldn’t hide from her. He looked just as scared as she felt.

  Frank was standing in the main room of the house when he heard the faint knocking on the door. He turned toward the sound. It hadn’t even occurred to him to knock when he’d arrived. The place was supposed to be deserted after all. Well, unless of course there really was a ghost.

  It had been a chore to pry the front door open so he could get in, and the wood squealed and juddered against the floor as he dragged it open once more. He stared in surprise at the clean-cut young couple standing on the porch, loaded down with bags. The boy had a blond crew cut and the girl wore her hair in a ponytail with a red-checked scarf tied around it. They looked like teenagers.

  “Hi,” Frank said, adopting a welcoming smile for them. “You must be Mr. and Mrs. Robinson.”

  Their smiles dissolved and they turned to each other with an expression of mutual horror.

  “Um, no,” the girl said after a moment.

  The boy shook his head. “We’re not married.”

  “Oh,” Frank said. Honestly, he didn’t see what was so shocking about that, and he was about to say so, but then they both spoke in unison, each pointing to the other.

  “He’s my brother.”

  “She’s my sister.”

  Frank covered his mouth, then allowed himself to laugh. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I thought—the shared last name. Just—” he shook his head “— come on inside, will you?”

  The boy regained his composure first. “Hey, don’t sweat it,” he said with a friendly laugh. “Honest mistake.”

  The girl gazed wide-eyed around the room as they entered. “Wow,” she breathed.

  Frank didn’t see much to inspire awe. It was a profoundly dull, empty chamber. The lopsided walls were the same muddy red as the house’s exterior, devoid of paint or wallpaper or any kind of decoration. The only furniture was a battered wooden table and four rickety chairs, sitting at odd angles on the uneven floor. It all had the air of a monastic cell, something functional but never intended for comfort.