by Brian Hodge
They caught him. He'd left a trail of cigarette butts and Coke cans and his prints were all over them and it turned out he'd done this before, it wasn't the first time. They asked him why. Because we were lesbians he said. Dykes. Because he saw us kissing. Because he couldn't stand to see that.
Two people. In love.
– thanks to Chris Golden
THE FORBIDDEN ZONE
By Whitley Strieber
This book is dedicated with heartfelt appreciation to H. P. Lovecraft, the old one.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to acknowledge the patient and determined help of my editor, Kevin Mulroy, the often surprising insights of Elaine Koster, publisher of Dutton Books, the careful attention of my friend and longtime reader Michael J. P. Smith and most especially the inspiration and editorial skills of my wife, Anne Mattocks Strieber, who has struggled with me through twenty-three books.
The Forbidden Zone: An area around an extremely energetic object which normally cannot—and must not—be entered. But once it is entered, then time, movement, all events stop, everything changes. Within such a forbidden zone lies a state beyond mere destruction. It is a condition of chaos, absolute derangement.
—William N. Holmes, Ph.D.
“Large-Scale Transitions and Quantum Derangements,”
The Journal of the Physical World
Chapter 1
1
To the middle of a perfect summer afternoon came a long, trembling scream. Because it was so faint, Brian Kelly feared at first that it was a memory. It could have been, certainly. His young and pregnant wife, who was lying in the grass beside him, didn’t seem to hear it. He would have looked to his dog for reaction, but she was off on a wild chase after a rabbit.
The scream died away. He sat up and gazed out across the wide view. Perhaps he would see a column of smoke from a burning house, or a wrecked car on a roadside. But Oscola seemed quiet, and the southern range of the Adirondacks that rose beyond the town dreamed innocently in the blue haze of summer.
He could see past Judge terBroeck’s house down Mound Road and on up Main into the center of town. In the other direction, he could follow Mound almost to its intersection with Route 303, which wound off toward Ludlum thirty miles distant.
In all of this expansive view, nothing was amiss. Maybe it had been an animal or a bird, or the wind.
The sun was warm, and he soon closed his eyes, letting the quiet of the hour transport him toward a nap. Time possessed him, that strange substance that had been the focus of his career and his life… time, his beloved mystery.
In the past he would come here with Mary. But she never cared for the mound. She was an indoor person, an intellectual—a genius, really, the best physicist he had ever known.
Her young death, with work and life unfinished, had left so many echoes.
He kept listening, worrying that he was going to start hearing her death screams yet again, and that they were indeed going to be like the scars on his chest, with him forever.
He reassured himself that this little mound was not a place for dangerous memories. People in Oscola had been coming here on summer afternoons for generations. Kids sledded here in the winter, always had. Judge terBroeck, who owned the place, didn’t approve of casual trespass, but the town had long ago become indifferent to his many dislikes.
Ever since Mary and Kate had been killed, Brian had been hearing screams. His doctor had been the first one to speculate that he might hear them for the rest of his life. Initially, this link with his loved ones had seemed in a strange way reassuring. But once he found a new love, it had come to be an imprisonment. For his own sake and for Loi’s—and for the sake of their baby—he had to let his dead family go.
Trying to escape, he found a state remembered from boyhood afternoons lying in this very spot. “I can almost feel the earth turning,” he said. Loi answered with a contented murmur.
Every time she heard his voice, looked at him, touched him or felt his passion, she reminded herself of her good fortune. For a woman whose life had been almost entirely unfortunate, finding him was a great piece of luck. He meant escape from the past, the dreadful memories of the Chu Chi tunnels, the soul-breaking anguish of the Blue Moon Bar in Bangkok. There was nothing in Vietnam, and very little in the rest of Asia, for a woman born of a G.I. father and a French-Vietnamese mother.
Before Brian, she had felt that a brutal life had robbed her of the ability to feel joy. But his gentle, persistent ways, his blazing, devoted love, had planted a new seed in the brown dust of her heart.
Brian would have thought nothing more of the scream if there hadn’t been another—this one hard and loud and long. It was the kind that made you sick inside, a scream touched by death agony. But his wife still didn’t stir. “Loi, did you hear that?”
She opened her eyes. “I was just dozing off.”
He raised himself on one arm. “I’m definitely hearing screams again.”
She turned to him, her stomach shifting heavily. Despite her grace of body, eight months of pregnancy had made her clumsy. “Oh, my poor Brian.” She kissed him, hoping that the unfortunate ghosts of his Mary and Caitlin would finally go to their rest.
“I think they were real.”
Dutifully, she listened. “There’s nothing, Brian. You must try to forget the past.”
“I am, Loi.”
“Maybe I can help you.” She shifted herself again, took him to her and embraced him. Very deliberately this time, she kissed him.
How she could kiss, he thought. She did it with a combination of attention and sensuality that never failed to thrill him. Her kisses were so careful, yet so hungry. For a rumpled old physicist, and a damaged one, she was quite an extraordinary catch.
Mary, also, had been considered a catch. Poor Mary had burned alive.
Loi could tell by his stillness that his mind had retreated to the tragedy. She broke gently away. “You used to come here a lot?” If her predecessor had made love to him here, she must be very careful or her own efforts would only strengthen the power of the ghost.
“Not often enough. Mary wasn’t an outdoor person.”
She stretched luxuriously. “I love it so much outdoors.”
He watched a smile envelop her face. As it did there emerged in her black eyes the trembling glance of a girl. Normally, her face—the neat, sad mouth, the hints of wrinkling under her eyes—communicated hurt. But these smiles when they came were miraculous.
He knew that she’d had a terrible life: her very refusal to say much about it revealed this. And yet, somehow, the tight little woman he’d met while she was waitressing at the Waywonda Inn had become this fabulous lover, tender and vulnerable and passionate.
There was a crash in the brittle summer brush, and Apple Sally came bounding up barking. “Hey, Sal.” She sat on her haunches, whined. She was not happy, which was very strange. “Sal? C’mon, babe, take it easy.” His tone quelled her nervousness, and she lay down with her big face between her paws.
There came another cry, one of total despair. It stopped abruptly, as if stifled.
Loi sat up. She’d heard that, all right. A look of agony came into her poor husband’s eyes. As he dragged in a frightened breath, she took his hand. “These screams are real.”
He felt a great familiar vise enclose his chest and begin to squeeze.
Mary shrieked, and then she turned and she was burning—
Another cry erupted, this one as clear and sharp as the crack of ice on a winter night. “We go for help, Brian!”
Apple Sally started digging, her claws ticking against stones, throwing back earth and bits of grass and flowers.
Brian leaped to his feet, stared down. “Jesus, they’re coming from inside the mound!”
Loi could hear that it was true. There was certainly somebody in there. But who, and where? It was just an earthen mound, hardly even a hill. Could Mary be in there, she wondered, her ghost still suffering from the flames of her death?
Brian ran the twenty feet to the mound’s bare summit. He peered around, pitifully trying to find some kind of an opening. His face was twisted, his eyes glistening.
“We have to get Bob,” Loi called. His best friend was a state trooper. She started off down the hillside as fast as she could go.
When she saw Brian lean toward the ground, she returned. From below there came a long, echoing scream, lost in despair, indeed a cry from hell. “Brian, come.” She tugged on his shoulder.
Sweat was pouring out of him. He was shaking like an old tree rattled by the monsoon. “Brian, we get help!”
The next scream spoke of absolute, almost inconceivable suffering.
“We’ve got to go!”
Beside him Apple Sally dug with the fury of the possessed. Maybe she could smell the poor woman, Brian thought, maybe she was actually close to the surface. Brian joined the dog, yanking up tufts of grass, trying to drag back the heavy, unyielding soil.
To Loi it appeared that he was going crazy. “That doesn’t do any good! We need help!” She ran a little way, then saw that he was still ignoring her. She wanted to pull him away, but she dared not be so disrespectful.
He dug, he struggled, again there was a scream. He began to gasp, to grunt with the strain of his useless work.
She saw that he was entering a hypnosis familiar from her childhood. When soldiers did this, their officers slapped them back to their senses.
To treat an honored husband in such a manner was unthinkable. He was no common soldier—but he was digging like the animal beside him, grunting, panting, lost.
He felt something slam into the side of his head. Stars snapped behind his eyes and then he was on his back, his hands clawing air. Loi stood over him, all five feet of her, and she shouted in a trembling, unsure voice, “We have to get help at once!”
His cheek stung, his ear was ringing. He watched her shoulders hunch, saw her take her guilty right fist into her left, squeeze it until her hands shook. “I meant no disrespect,” she whispered. “Please forgive me.”
Chiefly, he was amazed at how strong she was. He sat up, realizing that he was being incredibly stupid, on some level reliving the moment he’d tried to dig through the wall of the burning kitchen where Mary and Kate had been trapped.
Another scream came and it was terrible to hear. “You come with me now, work the car phone!” Digital technology mystified and angered her. She took his hand, forced all the authority she could into her voice. “Come with me, Brian, if we are to help.”
They went headlong down the mound, Loi rolling along with what Brian saw as all the grace of a small tank. He hurried behind her with his arms out, protective lest she take a fall. Apple Sally bounded through the grass beside them.
Loi ran because she had to run. Somebody was in agony, somebody was dying. Brian Ky Kelly bounced within her.
“Slow down, honey! Take care!”
As Brian hurried to keep up with her, his knowledge of local topography brought a frightful possibility to mind. He thought that a sinkhole might have opened up, maybe the ceiling dropped out of an old cave. Given that somebody was already inside, it was likely to be on the path. “Loi, stop!”
She ignored his cry.
“Loi!”
She shot off like a deer, racing wildly, heedless of her condition, unconscious of the danger. He dashed after her, past the clumps of daisies and dandelions, into the spreading view of Oscola, St. Paul’s church spire and the town roofs awash in the green of summer trees.
He reached the base, looked desperately for her. “Loi?”
Silence.
No, please, not again. Not another wife killed, another baby. He ran madly toward his truck; he didn’t see her in the cab. “Loi!”
Just then she sat up. She’d been bending over, pushing buttons on the phone. “It won’t make the dial tone,” she cried. He jumped in the cab, turned the phone on and punched in the number of the state police.
“Lieutenant West, please.” Bob came on the line. “There’s screaming coming out of the mound. You’d better get out here.”
“Screaming, Brian? You’re sure about this?” Bob knew all about Brian’s problems.
Brian handed the phone to his wife. “Tell him.”
“I hear it, too, Bob. And the dog, she is upset.”
Bob said he’d be there in ten minutes, and Brian put down the phone.
Instantly, the thrall of summer reclaimed the moment. Bees were working through a soft white cloud of Queen Anne’s lace in the field that led up to the judge’s ruined pear orchard. A songbird warbled in a stand of hemlocks beside the road. Brian uttered a sort of whispered groan.
“Sometimes waiting is what we have, husband.” She took his hands and began wiping them clean as best she could with some Kleenex. “Why did you do this crazy digging? Already your poor fingers are scarred.”
“It was stupid.”
She looked toward the mound. “I don’t like it anymore.”
“It’s just a little hill. Some kind of—well, a small hill. A geologically trivial feature.”
“Yes, my husband.”
“There may be a sinkhole opened up around here. We’ve got to be careful.”
“Yes.” She noticed then that his temple was flaring red where she had hit him, and longed to touch it. But her shame was too great. Let it not become a bruise, let it fade.
Finally they heard a siren. The next moment a Chevy Blazer in state police colors swerved to a stop behind them. Bob climbed down out of the cab. He was in his usual shabby, unkempt uniform, and his wide, gentle face was grave.
He came toward their truck, running hard. Loi watched him through the rearview mirror. When she had been a child working for the Vietcong, he had been an American soldier. His unit had pumped liquid fire down the tunnels; her worst dreams were haunted by that same fire. When he had heard her side of the story he had shed silent, unacknowledged tears. Bob was the sort of tough-tender policeman who spent his off-duty hours coaching Little League and doing charity work. One of his secrets was that he corresponded with many of the men he’d put in jail. If they wanted, he’d be there for them when they came out.
2
Apple Sally began to woof with excitement. She knew Bob, and her tail bounded against the bed of the truck.
“‘Lo, buddy,” he said into the window. He barely glanced at Loi. They’d both left parts of their souls in Vietnam, and their relationship was complex. Sometimes when their eyes met, she would see something that frightened her a little. She could not tell if it was suspicion or anger or simply part of his pain. When they’d been getting to know one another, she had wondered if they could find forgiveness in their hearts, two soldiers who had lost dear friends to each other’s armies.
“Show me where she is.”
Loi would not be left behind; she also descended from the truck.
To Bob she looked ready to explode. He’d never seen anybody so pregnant. “You’d better stay here,” he said. “Until we’ve got an idea what we’re dealing with.”
“Brian needs me,” she said, afraid he would panic again if the person in the mound continued screaming.
“He’s right, Loi. Somebody’s already fallen in.”
His tone told her that he wanted very badly for her to obey him. Normally, Brian did not insist. But when he did, she had to concede. Not to obey now would cause him loss of face. She bowed her head.
Bob was already running up the mound as she got back into the truck.
Brian put his hand on hers. “I’ll be all right, Loi. I swear.” Then he started after Bob, checking the path ahead, looking for any sign of an opening. Sal ran beside him, her dewlaps flying. They weren’t halfway up before she started baying.
“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” came Judge terBroeck’s voice from behind them. The old man must have been alerted by Bob’s siren.
Brian was surprised to notice that the judge was changed, even from a few weeks ago. Where
was his prissy, self-important way of walking, his easy arrogance? Now he dragged along, a wavering reed, his thin hair chalk white, his face all wrinkles and angles, his lips a bitter line.
As a matter of fact, he looked meaner than ever. A good deal meaner.
“There’s somebody trapped in the mound,” Brian shouted back at him.
“There’s nowhere in there to get trapped.”
“We know that, Judge! But she’s there.”
When the judge began to hurry, his spider legs pumped comically. The way he swayed reminded Brian of a great cornstalk blown by the wind. He arrived puffing hard. “My liability insurance covers me, thank God,” he gasped. “I’ve never cared for people coming here! Why do they do it? They all know it’s private.”
“It’s been part of this town forever.”
“So has everybody else’s backyard, Brian!”
With a terrific jerk Apple Sally abandoned all her years of training and ripped her leash out of Brian’s hands. “Jesus,” he cried.
Seconds later she reached the site of the original rescue attempt. She dug in a frenzy, her whole body pulsating with effort. Dirt and stones flew up around her.
As if the woman heard the sounds of renewed digging, she began to shriek again. “My God,” Bob said, “she hears us!”
“That doesn’t sound like screaming to me,” the judge announced.
Sal’s frenzy increased. She became a blur of flailing legs, her ears flapping like flags in a hurricane, her eyes bulging.
At first Brian was proud of her, but then he began to see red flecks on the stones she was throwing back. She was tearing her paws to ribbons. “C’mon, girl. C’mon, easy! Easy, Sally, back! Back!”
The wailing, pleading screams continued.
Something awful was happening to the dog. Spittle sprayed from her flapping dewlaps, and she made noises Brian had never heard her make before. “C’mon, Sal,” he shouted, “back!” He grasped the dog around the midriff and started to tug. She turned, snarling and snapping. He released her. “Goddamnit!”
