David couldn’t think of a good comeback, so offered her what he hoped was his most charming and most polite smile. It seemed to please her. Then he turned his attention to Clair and said, “Mrs. Bartley, I don’t know if you remember me. I was speaking to your husband the other day—”
“David! David Hammond. Of course I remember you. My, you’re all grown up now.”
“I’d like you to meet Anna Braddon.”
Wilma looked as if she had been wondering why the girl was so familiar. She opened up her mouth wide, gasped for a second or two, then screamed: “Of course! Ladies, it’s Anna Braddon. I’ve seen her on TV. The Exclusive girl.”
Clair and Eleanor recognized her then, and also started to gush. David realized that now there was little chance for him to ask about George, or to make an appointment with Clair’s husband. At least Anna didn’t seem discomforted by all the attention.
“Oh, you’re even more beautiful in person,” Wilma said. “I love those ads you do. They’re so—so liberating.” Wilma was clearly taken with Anna’s outfit, too, a bright white pants suit worn with a gold belt and necklace.
“I’m glad you enjoy the ads,” Anna replied. “I have fun doing them.”
David waited for a few minutes until there was a break in the conversation, after Anna had assured the women that her life was as exciting and glamorous as it seemed to be. He dove in during the pause. “Have you heard from George, Mrs. Bartley?”
There was silence for some time, while everyone waited for Clair to respond, to compose herself. The question seemed to have upset her, and she seemed confused and unsure of what to say. “George? Oh, he’s out West now. Visiting friends. He doesn’t come to Hillsboro very often.”
“But—” David stopped himself. He could tell that the woman was reacting a preplanned story, and he had no wish to embarrass her. He began to realize that Anna’s theory had been the correct one. It had been George in his apartment. Now the shame of the Bartley family, George had been packed away and sent off to an institution, a sanitarium. The Clair Bartley he remembered from his youth would have been mortified had such a thing become common knowledge. Not because she was snobbish, or stiffened by uppercrust superiority, but because she had always seemed to genuinely love her son. What mother likes to tell people that her child has come to a bad end? David would spare her further humiliation; perhaps even these friends of hers didn’t know the full extent of the story.
“George has always wanted to travel,” Clair continued. “Even as a boy he had the wanderlust.” David looked down at the other two women; they were looking away awkwardly, staring down at their hands or at the drinks on the table. Obviously they knew that the subject of her son was a touchy one with Clair. David wished he had never brought it up. Mr. Bartley had said George was “away” on an errand. His errand could have taken him “out West.” But somehow David thought things were not as simple as that.
“Well,” he said. “If you talk to him, tell him I said hello.”
“Of course, David.”
Anna saved the day. “We have to be going now.”
“Sure you can’t join us?” Wilma looked quite disappointed by their abrupt departure. “We could pull up two more chairs.”
“No. We have a busy day tomorrow.”
Wilma smiled almost lewdly and giggled. “Well, have a nice time.”
David and Anna said goodbye to the other women and started for the exit.
Clair Bartley stared dully into her gimlet, idly stirring it with the little plastic swizzle stick. Then she put her head down in her hands and started sobbing. Wilma and Eleanor looked at each other for a moment, then began to console their friend. “There, there, dear,” Wilma said, stroking her hair tenderly. “Everything will be all right. Just wait and see.”
After a moment, Clair lifted her head proudly, dug into her purse and started dabbing at the wet spots near her eyes with a handkerchief. “I’ll be all right,” she said. Eleanor and Wilma exchanged looks again, looks full both of pity and relief.
Clair lifted her arm and caught Jeanine’s attention. “Another round, please,” she said.
Jeremy Waters at fifteen was a melancholic figure. He sat on his bed, surrounded by plastic kits and clay statues which he had either built or created himself. His mother was fond of saying that he had magic fingers, and that someday his work would grace the finest parks, the exhibit rooms in the best museums. “Maybe they’ll hire you to sculpt another big thing of Lincoln, like they got in Washington, someday. That one just be getting old and wrinkled by now.”
He didn’t argue with her. His mother, Wilma Waters, was a plump and lovable figure of fifty-three, who managed to stay solvent, balanced and chipper in spite of the increasing bills, the hard work she had to do each day, and the trial of raising a son without a husband to help her. Jeremy tried hard not to think about his father, who had died when Jeremy was seven.
Some deaths are so brutal and so shocking that news of them can only incite numbness in the listener’s ears, only the worst possible kind of chill, a truly piercing horror that cuts right through the bone marrow. Jeremy’s father had had that kind of death. There had been an explosion out at the plant. The best anyone could reconstruct it was that the force of the blast lifted Jim Waters—who was a bulky, but well-constructed man—right off his feet, and blew him with hurricane force against the brick wall, smashing him to pulp.
They’d had to scrape him off the wall.
Jeremy had always been somewhat shy and reserved, but the loss of his father had made him even worse in those respects, and his mother—in spite of her natural survival instincts and ebullience—was not able to draw him entirely out of his self-imposed, self-restricting shell. She simply loved him as best and as much as she could, and hoped that all would turn out right in the end.
Jeremy and his mother lived in a two-story house on the outskirts of town. Besides the garage, they had a small toolshed out back, a tree house that had been neglected since Jeremy’s eleventh birthday, and two acres of not-very-well-tended ground. The upper rooms in the house were unused except for when relatives came to stay. They had a rickety old picket fence surrounding the front half of the property, and a long clothesline which was always full of wet, flapping things like sheets and towels.
In his bedroom Jeremy scrunched down further in his pillow, messing his longish, wavy brown hair. He had an innocent, sweet-looking face and was built along slender lines. Whatever muscles he had came from swimming alone in a pond three-quarters of a mile down the road which his mother’s friends owned. He was tall for his age, almost gangly.
Jeremy never talked about much besides his models and sculptures, so his mother would have been surprised at the content of the book he was reading. It was a study of astral projection, otherwise known as out-of-the-body experiences, when a person’s intangible astral body could detach itself from the physical body and float around in the astral plane, meeting other live astral travelers as well as the “spirits” of dead people. He had first heard of it in a movie or a comic book, then had found a few books on the subject at the local library. He found it all quite fascinating.
It was said that people had out-of-the-body experiences while they were asleep, and that part of their dreams were actually memories from their travels. It was much harder to travel on the astral plane while conscious, however, and this is what Jeremy was hoping to achieve—the ability to step out of his own body while fully awake. There were certain techniques, practices one could develop, to make the transition easier.
It wasn’t so much that he hoped to find his father in the astral plane, to communicate with him, to feel his love from that lost land that lay beyond death; perhaps it was more than he might finally be able to deal with the facts of his father’s death if he knew, without a doubt, that there was something else after this mortal life was finished. Not a heaven or hell, not something measured in religious terms, but rather in scientific ones. It was not necessarily his soul that woul
d separate from his body, but a non-physical form, an aura perhaps, that could travel anywhere freely, through all barriers, without restrictions of distance or place. He could find death so much more acceptable, so much less frightening, if he knew that there was more to existence afterwards. How much nicer his world would seem, this world where people were shot and stabbed and blown apart, decapitated in auto crashes and bus accidents—so many truly horrible ways to die—how much nicer it would seem if he knew that the people who died (especially those who died in that way, that bloody, terrible manner like his father had), if they had a place to go after it was through, a place without pain, without suffering, where one’s body—if that was what you could call it—would be whole again and without imperfection or flaw.
So he read and he studied and he read and he studied. It was near ten when he gave it his first shot. First he had to lie still, very still, on the bed. Oh, he hoped it worked. He hoped he wouldn’t fall asleep. He had to be awake, had to be conscious, and then he would know. Then he would really know.
Yes, yes, he was tingling. Did that mean anything, or was he fooling himself? Was he just getting sleepy, or initially preparing to pass over? Would it happen. Still, lie still!
He opened his eyes, hoping to see himself a foot away from the ceiling, with his body lying on the bed far below. He realized instead that his astral body hadn’t budged an inch.
Perhaps the problem was mental. Perhaps he really didn’t want to travel into the astral plane as a disembodied bit of ectoplasm. All the books he’d read on the subject had said that it could be a pretty scary experience when fully awake. It was said that our distorted dreams were deliberately cryptic, because if we ever clearly remembered what we saw in the astral plane while sleeping, we would go mad. Maybe Jeremy was too subconsciously scared to allow himself to float un-chaperoned through the ether. Maybe this subconscious dread was what was preventing him from leaving.
He tried to remove all traces of fear from his mind, but it wasn’t easy. He reminded himself that one really couldn’t receive injury in the astral plane, and that it was very easy to think your way back to your physical body without incurring damaging side effects from the experience. Everyone always said that ghosts couldn’t hurt you. But they were scary. If only he could rid himself of that parochial, irrational fear he had of spirits. If only he would accept that once he’d passed over—even though he was still alive—he would, in effect, become a spirit himself. What was there to be frightened of?
So he lay there and concentrated and did all the things the books had told him to do. The mental exercises. The physical preparation and conditioning. And most of all, he tried to develop the proper frame of mind. That was the most important thing. He had to truly believe, or else all was lost.
And then, at quarter of ten, something finally happened.
Jeremy fell asleep.
In his sleep he dreamed. He dreamed that he was floating, floating, lifting free of the bed, drifting down to the end of the mattress, and out onto the empty air, flowing past the bureau upon which his latest sculptures had been placed, floating, floating towards the door, through the door, which had been closed, and down the hall. He passed through solid objects, moving so fast now that he could not tell what they were; it seemed that he was in the kitchen briefly, floating, still floating, then he went through the wall of the house and was outside. He had no control over where he was going.
Suddenly he was high in the air, moving at a rapid rate, the tops of the trees racing by just beneath him, scraping against his body although he could not feel them. No pain, no sensation whatsoever. Just a dull, nagging throb of mounting fear. He tried to fight it now, afraid of what would come after he reached his destination. On the bed, Jeremy’s body twisted and shuddered, his lips formed low and anguished groans as lie tried to wake himself up from within, his dream rapidly turning into a nightmare.
And still he floated, floated. Over the trees, up high in the air, far, far away from the house, traveling toward Bannon Mountain. It seemed as if he was heading for the quarry. No—not there! Only the bravest children went there after dark. Tormented ghosts hung out in the shattered derelict buildings, the ghosts of those who had died while the quarry was in operation, the ghosts of children who had drowned in the water rising up at midnight from the bottom of the quarry to pounce upon those unsuspecting ones who came to witness their arrival. Not there! He fought and squirmed, his mind and body fighting to regain consciousness, terrified of his journey’s end.
Part of his mind thought he was having an out-of-body experience, although he also knew that he was asleep. Perhaps his experiment had only partially succeeded. He was half-conscious at any rate, aware of what was happening, of the voyaging sensation, but not entirely sure that it was not just a dream of the ordinary kind. He had been hoping so much to enter the astral plane that it would only be natural for him to dream that he had done so. Which was it? He was afraid to find out.
He was approaching the mountain. Although he seemed to be facing the sky, somehow he could see underneath himself, too, could see the houses and then-lights receding in the distance. There were few homes out this far from town. He was traveling up the mountain road, past the home of his mother’s friend, Eleanor, not far from where the whole family had been slaughtered. He hadn’t known them very well.
He was going up the road, traveling at a dizzying speed, swishing over the trees, racing through the air. This road ended at a cleared-out lookout post where kids sometimes went when they were in a romantic mood. The quarry was about a mile away, but still too close as far as he was concerned. God, this had to be a dream, just a terrible dream. Why couldn’t he wake up?
On the bed, the trunk of Jeremy’s body wiggled and squirmed. His arms and legs were paralyzed, the body’s defense against thrashing out and hurting oneself during sleep. His mind struggled to wake up, to pull himself out of sleep. His cries were louder now.
He had arrived at the lookout point. Everything seemed so intense, so clear. The wind flapping the leaves of the trees. The warm, summer night air. He saw a car parked over near the edge of the clearing. Suddenly everything was foggy again. But he felt a strange presence and hard horrible screams. Someone, someone in the car, was screaming. A shrill panicky scream of utter horror, of shuddering revulsion. A scream high-pitched and fierce with agony.
His blood turning cold, his mind on fire, Jeremy finally awakened.
Someone was dying up there on Bannon Mountain, and only he knew!
Or had it only been a dream?
He was lying there wondering what to do when he heard his mother coming in the front door, humming to herself, causing more fuss and bother in the opening of one simple lock than most people did moving furniture. He steeled himself. As much as he loved her, she had a habit of intruding at the damnedest moments.
“Jeremy! Mother’s home!”
But the sound of her voice reminded him how good it was to have someone else near him now, in the house, especially after his frightening ordeal or nightmare or whatever it had been. He could feel her warmth radiating down the corridor, entering his room before she herself did. This time he did not scold her for not knocking.
“How’s it going?” she asked, smiling. She had been drinking, that much was obvious. He sort of liked her in these pixilated moods, although it frightened him a bit. She was still head of the household and it scared him when he was more in control than she was. He felt he was not quite ready to assume command.
“Hi Mom. Did you have a nice time?”
“Oh, yes. You’ll never guess who I met.” She came over and sat beside him on his bed. He listened while she told the story of meeting “that girl on TV” but he was only mildly interested and could not place the woman anyway. He sat there quietly and politely while his mind replayed the images he had seen in his dream, heard the screams again, felt that unseen presence in the dark.
When she finally left to pass out in bed, he kissed her on the cheek and said
, “Goodbye.”
“ ‘Goodbye’?” she laughed. “You mean ‘good night,’ little pumpkin. Never say ‘goodbye.’ “
It had been a slip. He had made up his mind to sneak out that very night and go up to the top of Bannon Mountain. He did not know why, only that he had to. The thought of it made him shiver with horror, but he had to confront whatever it was, had to find out if he really had traveled up there in his sleep. He had to know if there really was some kind of special plane, the existence of which would increase the chances of some sort of life after death. Maybe up there in the dark, he would at last come face to face with his father again.
He had told his mother “goodbye.”
He hoped his words had not been prophetic.
Clair Bartley used her key to enter the house, not sure if her husband or Mimi were still up at that hour. It was only a little after ten—she and the girls had stayed out much later than they had intended to—but Ted often retired early, and Mimi had been taking to her bed more and more often these days; work she had once breezed through five years ago was suddenly giving her fits of exhaustion. The woman was ill with something, but Mimi was not the type to discuss her private affairs with her employers.
Clair entered the foyer quietly and walked down the hall to the living room. She had had quite a bit to drink this evening, but now she found herself wanting yet another one to steady her nerves. That crying exhibition in the bar had been terrible. Normally she was such a composed, calm and clear-headed woman. But seeing that old friend of her son’s like that, his innocent question . . . Everything had come rushing back at her and she’d felt confused and dizzy, disoriented. It had all been too much for her. She tried her best to keep herself in control when it came to the subject of her son, but sometimes . . . sometimes it was difficult. Yes, she did need another drink.
First it had been a couple just to be sociable with her friends; she had never been crazy about Joey’s Bar and Grille. But then she’d needed another to recover from her impropriety, crying in public for God’s sake. Wilma and Eleanor had been so understanding. They knew something was wrong with George, only they didn’t know what and did not press her. Still, she knew she had someone to talk to when the time came, if ever; if her husband ever said it was all right.
Spawn of Hell Page 26
