"All right, Nick," he said, leading him outside. "Do your thing. Where are they?"
Nick stood blinking in the light. Thin, and paler than ever, he didn't look well. And he'd crawled back into himself.
Bill scanned the ground, looking for the shards Nick had said he'd seen. It was like river-bottom here, fist-sized stones jumbling down a gentle slope to a sluggish stream. Bill looked to his right up at the mountains soaring skyward behind the keep. This gorge was probably all water in early spring when the snows melted. Half a century had passed since the sword blade had shattered here. How could anything be left? How could they hope to find the remnants even if any still existed?
"Well, Nick?" he said. "Where are they?"
Nick said nothing, only stared ahead.
Desperate, Bill knelt and picked among the stones and gravel. This was impossible. He'd never find anything this way.
He straightened up and brushed off his hands. It had been earlier, in the dark, when Nick had said he'd seen the pieces, glowing "with bright blue fire."
Maybe he could only see them at night.
"Damn!"
He'd risked their lives rushing to get here so he could get back to Ploiesti as soon as possible so they could start their homeward journey in the light. Now he was going to have to wait until dark.
He turned and aimed a kick at the tower's granite-block hem. The keep, a dark, brooding, lithic presence looming over him, took no notice.
Bill led Nick back inside the tower to a gloom as deep and dark as his spirits. The delay meant it would be Wednesday before he got back to Carol. He wondered how she was doing, and if she'd heard from Hank?
Where had he run off to, anyway?
The Movie Channel
Joe Bob Briggs' Drive-In Movie—A Special All-Day Edition.
Eaten Alive (1976) New World
Day Of The Nightmare (1965) Herts-Lion
Nightwing (1979) Columbia
Raw Meat (1972) AIP
The Devils of Darkness (1965) Twentieth Century Fox
Tentacles (1977) AIP
Phase IV (1974) Paramount
It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958) United Artists
They Came From Beyond Space (1967) Amicus
The Last Days Of Planet Earth (1974) Toho
The Flesh Eaters (1964) CDA
They Came From Within (1975) Trans America
The Earth Dies Screaming (1964) Lippert/Twentieth Century Fox
THE NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE
Hank wasn't sure if he was awake or dreaming. He seemed to be awake. He was aware of noises around him, of a stale, sour odor, of growing light beyond his eyelids, but he could not get those eyelids to move. And he could feel nothing. For all he knew, he no longer had a body. Where was he? What—?
And then he remembered. The millipedes…their queen…a scream bubbled up in his throat but died stillborn. How can you scream when you can't open your mouth?
No. That had been a dream. It had all been a dream—the holes, the flying horrors, storing up the food, deserted by Carol, the rest stop, the trooper, the gun, the bullet, the millipedes—a long, horrible nightmare. But finally it was at an end. He was waking up now.
If he could just open his eyes he'd see the familiar cracks in the ceiling of their bedroom. And then he'd be free of the nightmare. He'd be able to move then, to reach out an arm and touch Carol.
The eyes. They were the key. He concentrated on the lids, focusing all his will, all his energy into them. And slowly they began to move. He didn't feel the motion but he saw a knife-slit streak of light open across his eyes, pale light, like the glow on the horizon at the approach of dawn.
Encouraged, he doubled his efforts. Light widened around the horizon as the edges of his lids stretched the gummy substance that bound them, then burst through as they broke apart. Not the blaze of the rising sun, but a wan, diffuse sort of light. He forced his lids to separate further and the light began to take form through the narrow opening, breaking down into shapes and color. Vague shapes. A paucity of color. Mostly grays. His pupils constricted, bringing the images into sharper focus.
He was looking down along a body. His own body, lying in bed, naked atop the sheets. Hazy, but he knew his own body. Thank God, it had all been a dream. He tried to turn his head to the left, toward the light, but it wouldn't move. Why couldn't he move? He was awake now. He should be able to move. He slid his eyeballs leftward. The bedroom window was over there somewhere. If he could just—
Wait…the walls—rounded. The ceiling—convex. Concrete. Concrete everywhere. And the light. It came from above. He forced his eyelids open another millimeter. No window—the light was coming through a grate in the concrete ceiling.
The stillborn scream from a moment ago came alive again and rammed up against his throat, pounding at his larynx, crying to be free.
This wasn't the bedroom. It was the pipe—the drainage pipe! It hadn't been a dream. It was real. Real!
Hank fought the panic, beat it down, and tried to think. He was still alive. He had to remember that. He was still alive and it was daytime. The things from the holes were quiet in the daylight hours. They hid from the light. He had to think, had to plan. He'd always been good at planning.
He shifted his eyes down to his body. His vision was clearer now. He saw the gentle tidal rise and fall of his sparsely haired chest, and further down, on his belly, he spotted the bloody wound where the queen millipede had spiked him and injected him with her poison. The neurotoxin was still working, obviously, paralyzing his voluntary muscles while it let his heart and lungs go on moving. But it didn't have complete control of him. He'd managed to open his eyes, hadn't he? He could move his eyeballs, couldn't he? What else could he move?
He pulled his gaze away from his abdominal wound and searched for his hands. They lay flopped out on either side, palms up. He checked out his lower limbs. They were intact, slightly spread with the toes angled outward. He could have been a sun bather. His body was the picture of relaxation…the relaxation of complete paralysis. He returned his gaze to his arm and followed it down to the hand. If he could move a finger—
And then he noticed the webbing. It was all around him, running in all directions, crisscrossed like gauze. It curved away from each arm and leg like heavy-duty spiderweb and ran out to the wall of the drain pipe where it melted into a glob of some sticky looking gelatin smeared on the concrete. He looked down as much as his slit perspective would permit and realized that he wasn't lying in the pipe, he was suspended in it. From the horizontal lie of his body he guessed that he was resting on a hammock of web across the diameter of the pipe.
Hank marveled at the coolness of his mind as it analyzed his position. He was trapped—not only paralyzed, but effectively and securely bound in position. The web hammock, however, was not entirely without its advantages. Long, uninterrupted contact with the cold concrete would have made it difficult for his body to maintain its temperature; the webbing also kept him out of the water, thereby preventing his flesh from breaking down in the constant moisture.
So in a very real sense he was high and dry, but also bound, gagged, and paralyzed.
Hung up like a side of beef.
That last thought impacted with the force of a sledgehammer. That was it! He was food! They'd shot him full of preservatives and stored him away alive so he wouldn't decompose. So when pickings got slim above ground, they could come down here and devour him at their leisure.
He willed down the rising panic. Panic wouldn't help here. They'd already paralyzed his body. Allowing fear to paralyze his mind would only make matters worse. But that one cold hard fact battered relentlessly at his defenses.
I'm food!
That rogue cop lieutenant would get a good laugh out of that: The hoarder becomes the hoard. Even Carol would probably appreciate the irony.
But I'm alive, he told himself. And I can beat these bugs.
He knew their pattern. They'd probably stay dormant all day and crawl up
to the surface to hunt during the dark hours. That was when he'd get free.
But first he had to regain control of his body. He already controlled his eyeballs and eyelids. Next was his hands. If he was to get free he'd need them the most. A finger. He'd start with the pointer on his right hand, concentrate all his will and energy into that one digit until he got it to move. Then he'd proceed to the next, and the next, until he could make a fist. Then he'd switch to his left.
He glared at his index finger, narrowing his vision, his entire world to that single digit, channeling all his power into it.
And then it moved.
Or had it? The twitch had been almost imperceptible, so slight it might have been a trick of the light. Or wishful thinking.
But it had moved. He had to hold onto that thought. It had moved. He was regaining control. He was going to get out of here.
With climbing spirits, he redoubled his concentration on the reluctant digit.
WFAN-AM
dead air
MONROE VILLAGE, LONG ISLAND
Alan rolled his wheelchair along the network of cement paths that encircled Toad Hall, heading from the back yard to the front. Off to his left, to the west, he saw smoke rising over the trees. Not near smoke, from the Shore Drive neighborhood, but further away. From downtown Monroe, most likely. He'd heard stories of roving gangs, looting, burning, raping. They hadn't shown up out here, but perhaps that was just a matter of time.
Strange how things had worked out. He'd always imagined that if the world ever descended into anarchic nihilism, the violence and chaos and mob madness would occur at night, screams and flames hurtling into a dark, unseeing sky. But given the current situation, human violence was confined to the daylight hours. The night was reserved for inhuman violence.
Alan turned from the smoke and inspected Toad Hall. The old mansion had absorbed another merciless pummeling last night but, like the valiant, indomitable champion that she was, she remained on her feet.
The injuries were accumulating at an alarming rate, however. Her flanks were cut and bruised and splintered, her scalp showed through where her shingles had been torn up. She could still open her eyes to the dwindling daylight, though. Most of them, at least.
Which was why Alan was out here now. A couple of the storm shutters had refused to roll up this morning. Even from the inside Alan could see that they were deeply dented, more deeply that he'd have thought possible from a bug attack, at least from any of the bugs he'd seen so far.
Which meant there might be something new under the moon, something bigger than its hellish predecessors and consequently more dangerous to the little fortress Toad Hall had become. He coasted to a halt and stared as he rounded to the front.
The dents in the steel shutters were deeper than he'd realized. And they'd been scored by something sharp and heavy, with the weight and density of a steel spike.
But it was the rhododendrons under the shuttered windows that bothered him more.
They'd been trampled flat.
Alan rolled across the grass for a closer look. These were old rhodos, maybe fifty years old, with heavy trunks and sturdy branches, kept thick with healthy deep green leaves through Ba's magical ministrations. Tough wood. Alan remembered that from the times he'd cut back the rhodos around his old house before it burned down.
These hadn't been cut, though. The trunks and branches had been crushed, and their splinters pressed into the ground. Something awful big and heavy—or a number of big and heavy somethings—had been outside these windows last night banging and scraping at the shutters.
But they hadn't got in. That was the important thing.
As Alan pushed his left wheel forward and pulled the right backward to turn and roll back to the path, he saw the depression in the lawn. His stomach lurched. He hadn't noticed it before; he'd been too intent on the shutters and the ruined rhodos. But from this angle you couldn't miss it.
The fresh spring grass, overdue now for a trimming, had been crushed in a wide swath that angled in from the front gate, around the willows, and directly to the house. Alan tried to imagine what sort of creature could leave such a trail but all he could come up with was a thirty-foot bowling ball. With teeth, most likely. Lots of them.
He shuddered and rolled back to the path. Each night it got a little rougher. One of these nights Toad Hall's defenses were going to fail. It was inevitable. Alan prayed he'd be able to persuade Sylvia to move out before that happened, or that Glaeken would be able to assemble the pieces he needed to call for help.
Alan could feel it in his bones: they were all going to need help. Lots of it. And soon. Otherwise, if the Sapir curve was correct, they had two sunrises left. Then the sun would set for the last time at three o'clock on Thursday afternoon. And the endless night would begin.
MAUI
Even the coffee tasted like fish.
Jack knew the water was pure—he'd watched Kolabati draw it from the water cooler—but it still tasted fishy. Maybe because everything smelled fishy. The air was so thick with the odor of dead sea life he swore he could taste it when he breathed.
He was standing on the lanai, forcing the coffee down, looking out at the valley below and at the great whirlpool spinning off Kahului. It would have been heart-stoppingly beautiful if not for the stench. Behind him, sounds of chopping, chipping, sawing, and hammering drifted through the door from the house's great room.
Kolabati joined him, coffee cup in hand, and leaned on the railing to his right. She wore a bright, flowered muumuu that somehow enhanced her figure instead of hiding it. Jack's eyes locked on the necklace. He tried to be casual but it wasn't easy. There it was, half the reason for this hairy trip, a couple of feet away. All he had to do was reach out and—
"My silverswords are all dead," she said, looking down at a wilted garden beneath the deck. "The salt water's killed them. I'd hoped to see them bloom."
"I'm sorry."
She gestured with her cup toward the giant maelstrom.
"There's no point to it. It sucks water and fish down all day, then shoots it miles into the air at night."
"The point," Jack said, remembering the gist of Glaeken's explanations, "is not to have a point. Except to mess with our minds, make us feel weak, impotent, useless. Make us crazy with fear and uncertainty, fear of the unknown."
Jack noticed when he said "crazy" Kolabati stole a quick glance over her shoulder at the house.
"And speaking of points," he said, "what's the point of Moki? How'd you get involved with a guy like that? He's not your type, Bati."
As far as Jack could see, Moki was nobody's type. The guy was not only out to lunch, but out to breakfast, dinner, and the midnight snack as well. A homicidal megalomaniac who truly believed he was a god, or at least possessed by one: Maui, the Polynesian Prometheus who brought fire to humanity and hoisted the Hawaiian Islands from the bottom of the sea with his fishing pole. After last night's ceremony the four of them had returned to the house where Ba and Jack spent the night in the garage, the only place in the house secure from the bugs. Moki and Bati were never bothered by the creatures—more proof of Moki's divinity. He'd kept them up most of the night elaborating on his future plans for "Greater Maui" and the rest of the remaining Hawaiian Islands. And running under it all Jack sensed a current of hatred and jealously—aimed at him. Moki seemed to see Jack as a threat, a rival suitor for Kolabati's affections. Jack hadn't planned on any of this. He spent his time wondering how he could use that jealousy to get to the necklace Moki wore, but so far, except for the simple act of putting a bullet through his skull, he'd come up blank.
"How do you know my type?" Kolabati said, eyes and nostrils flaring. "What do you know of me?"
Jack studied her face. Kolabati had changed. He wasn't sure how. Her wide, dark, almond-shaped eyes, her high, wide cheekbones, full lips, and flawless mocha skin were the same as he remembered. Maybe it was her hair. She'd let it grow since he'd last seen her. It trailed long over her near shoulder a
nd rustled in the sour wind like an ebony mane. But it wasn't the hair. It was something else, something inside.
Good question, he thought. What do I know about her?
"I know you don't hang out too long with people who don't see things your way."
She turned and stared down at the valley.
"This is not the real Moki—or at least not the Moki who shared my life up to a week ago."
Shared her life? Jack was about to make a crack about the ability of this one hundred and fifty year old woman to share anything when he saw a droplet of moisture form in the corner of her eye, grow, and spill over the lid to run down her cheek.
A tear. A tear from Kolabati.
Jack was speechless. He turned and stared though the door where Moki was feverishly working like the madman he was. But working on what? And didn't he ever sleep? He'd harangued them for hours, then he'd rushed to the upper floor where he'd gone to work on the shattered pieces of sculpture littering the great room, recutting them, fashioning a new, giant single work from the remnants of all the others. Ba was in there with him now, sitting in a corner, sipping tea and watching him in silent fascination.
"He was wonderful," Kolabati said.
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