The Servants of Twilight

by Dean Koontz

  The trees thinned out in the neighborhood of the caves because the land became extremely rocky. It sloped up in uneven steps of stone, in humps and knobs and ledges and setbacks. Because there were fewer trees, more snow found its way in here, and there were some formidable drifts at the base of the slope and at many points higher up, where a setback or a narrower ledge provided accommodation. But there was more wind, too, whistling down from the tops of the surrounding trees, and large areas of rock were swept bare of snow. She could see the dark mouths of three caves in the lower formations, where she and Charlie might be able to climb, and there were half a dozen others visible in the upper formations, but those were out of reach. There might be more openings, now drifted shut and hidden, because this portion of the valley wall appeared to be a honeycomb of tunnels, caves, and caverns.

  She carried Joey to a jumble of boulders at the bottom of the slope and put him down, out of the wind.

  Chewbacca limped after them and slumped wearily beside his master. It was astonishing that the dog had made it all this way, but it was clear he would not be able to go much farther.

  With a grateful sigh and a gasp of pain, Charlie lowered himself to the ground beside Joey and the dog.

  The look of him scared Christine as much as Joey’s tortured face. His bloodshot eyes were fevered, two hot coals in his burnt-out face. She was afraid she was going to wind up alone out here with the bodies of the only two people she loved, caretaker of a wilderness graveyard that would eventually become her own final resting place.

  “I’ll look in these caves,” she told Charlie, shouting to be heard now that they were more or less in the open again. “I’ll see which is the best for us.”

  He nodded, and Joey didn’t react, and she turned away from them, clambered over the rocky terrain toward the first dark gap in the face of the slope.

  She wasn’t sure if this part of the valley wall was limestone or granite, but it didn’t matter because, not being a spelunker, she didn’t know which kind of rock made for the safest caves, anyway. Besides, even if these were unsafe, she would have to make use of them; she had nowhere else to go.

  The first cave had a low, narrow entrance. She took the flashlight out of her backpack and went into that hole in the ground. She was forced to crawl on her hands and knees, and in some places the passage was tight enough to require some agile squirming. After ten or twelve feet, the tunnel opened into a room about fifteen feet on a side, with a low ceiling barely high enough to allow her to stand up. It was big enough to house them, but far from ideal. Other passages led off the room, deeper into the hillside, perhaps to larger chambers, but none of them was of sufficient diameter to let her through. She went out into the wind and snow again.

  The second cave wasn’t suitable, either, but the third was as close to ideal as she could expect to find. The initial passageway was high enough so she didn’t have to crawl to enter, wide enough so she didn’t have to squeeze. There was a small drift at the opening, but she stamped through it with no difficulty. Five feet into the hillside, the passage turned sharply to the right, and in another six feet it turned just as sharply back to the left, a double baffle that kept the wind out. The first chamber was about twenty feet wide and thirty or thirty-five feet long, as much as twelve to fifteen feet high at the near end, with a smooth floor, walls that were fractured and jagged in some places and water-smoothed in others.

  To her right, another chamber opened off this one. It was smaller, with a lower ceiling. There were several stalactites and stalagmites that looked as if they had been formed from melted gray wax, and in a few places they met at the middle of the room to form wasp-waisted pillars. She shone the flashlight beam around, saw a passage at the far end of the second room and guessed it led to yet a third cavern, but that was all she needed to know.

  The first room had everything they required. Toward the back, the floor rose and the ceiling dropped down, and in the last five feet the floor shelved up abruptly, forming a ledge five feet deep and twenty feet wide, only four feet below the ceiling. Exploring this raised niche with her flashlight, Christine discovered a two-foot-wide hole in the rock above it, boring up into darkness, and she realized she had found a huge, natural fireplace with its own flue. The hole must lead into another cave farther up the hillside, and either that chamber or another beyond it would eventually vent to the outside; smoke would rise naturally toward the distant promise of open air.

  Having a fire was important. They hadn’t brought their sleeping bags with them because such bulky items would have slowed them down and because they had expected to reach the lake before nightfall, in which case they wouldn’t have required bedrolls. The blizzard and the bullet hole in Charlie’s shoulder had changed their plans drastically, and now without sleeping bags to ward off the night chill and help conserve body heat, a fire was essential.

  She wasn’t worried about the smoke giving away their position. The forest would conceal it, and once it rose above the trees, it would be lost in the white whirling skirts of the storm. Besides, Spivey’s fanatics would almost certainly be searching southwest, toward the end of the valley that led to civilization.

  The chamber boasted one other feature that, at first, added to its appeal. One wall was decorated with a seven-foot-tall drawing, an Indian totem of a bear, perhaps a grizzly. It had been etched into the rock with a corrosive yellow dye of some sort. It was either crude or highly stylized; Christine didn’t know enough about Indian totems to make the fine distinction. All she knew for sure was that drawings like this were usually meant to bring good luck to the occupants of the cave; the image of the bear supposedly embodied a real spirit that would provide protection. Initially, that seemed like a good thing. She and Charlie and Joey needed all the protection they could get. But as she paused a moment to study the sulfur-yellow bear, she got the feeling there was something threatening about it. That was ridiculous, of course, an indication of her shaky state of mind, for it was nothing but a drawing on stone. Nevertheless, on reappraisal, she decided she would have preferred another drab gray wall in place of the totem.

  But she wasn’t going to look for another cave just because she didn’t like the decor of this one. The natural fireplace more than outweighed the previous occupants’ taste in art. With a fire for heat and light, the cave would provide almost as much shelter as the cabin they had left behind. It would not be as comfortable, of course, but at the moment, she wasn’t as concerned about comfort as she was worried about keeping her son, Charlie, and herself alive.

  In spite of the stone floor that served as chair and bed, Charlie was delighted with the cave, and at the moment it seemed as luxurious as any hotel suite he’d ever occupied. Just being out of the wind and snow was an incomparable blessing.

  For more than an hour, Christine gathered dead wood and crisp dry evergreen branches with which to make a fire and keep it going until morning. She returned to the cave again and again with armloads of fuel, making one stack for the logs and larger pieces of wood, another for the small stuff that would serve as tinder.

  Charlie marveled at her energy. Could such stamina spring entirely from a mother’s instinct to preserve her offspring’s life? There seemed no other explanation. She should have collapsed long ago.

  He knew he should switch the flashlight off each time she went outside, turn it on again only so she would be able to see when she came in with more wood, for he was concerned the batteries would go dead. But he left it burning, anyway, because he was afraid Joey would react badly to being plunged into total darkness.

  The boy was in bad shape. His breathing was labored. He lay motionless, silent, beside the equally depleted dog.

  As he listened to Joey’s ragged breathing, Charlie told himself that finding the cave was another good sign, an indication their luck was improving, that they would recover their strength in a day or two and then head down toward the lake. But another, grimmer voice within him wondered if the cave was, instead, a tomb, and althoug
h he didn’t want to consider that depressing possibility, he couldn’t tune it out.

  He listened, as well, to the drip-drip-drip of water in an adjacent chamber. The cold stone walls and hollow spaces amplified the humble sound and made it seem both portentous and strange, like a mechanical heartbeat or, perhaps, the tapping of one clawed finger on a sheet of glass.

  The fire cast flickering orange light on the yellow bear totem, making it shimmer, and on drab stone walls. Welcome heat poured from the blazing pile of wood. The natural flue worked as Christine had hoped, drawing the smoke up into higher caverns, leaving their air untainted. In fact, the drying action of the fire took some of the dampness out of the air and eliminated most of the vaguely unpleasant, musty odor that had been in the dank chamber since she had first entered.

  For a while they just basked in the warmth, doing nothing, saying nothing, even trying not to think.

  In time Christine took off her gloves, lowered the hood of her jacket, then finally took off the jacket itself. The cave wasn’t exactly toasty, and drafts circulated through it from adjacent caverns, but her flannel shirt and long insulated underwear were now sufficient. She helped Charlie and Joey out of their jackets, too.

  She gave Charlie more Tylenol. She lifted his bandage, dusted in more powdered antibiotics and more of the anaesthetic as well.

  He said he wasn’t in much pain.

  She knew he was lying.

  The hives that afflicted Joey began, at last, to recede. The swelling subsided, and his misshapen face slowly regained its proper proportions. His nostrils opened, and he no longer needed to breathe through his mouth, although he continued to wheeze slightly, as if there was some congestion in his lungs.

  Please, God, not pneumonia, Christine thought.

  His eyes opened wider, but they were still frighteningly empty. She smiled at him, made a couple of funny faces, trying to get a reaction out of him, all to no avail. As far as she could tell he didn’t even see her.

  Charlie didn’t think he was hungry until Christine began to heat beans and Vienna sausages in the aluminum pot that was part of their compact mess kit. The aroma made his mouth water and his stomach growl, and suddenly he was shaking with hunger.

  Once he began to eat, however, he filled up fast. His stomach bloated, and he found it increasingly difficult to swallow. The very act of chewing exacerbated the pain in his head, which doubled back along the lines of pain in his neck and all the way into the shoulder wound, making that ache worse, too. Finally the food lost its flavor, then seemed bitter. He ate about a fourth of what he first thought he could put away, and even the meager meal didn’t rest well in his belly.

  “You can’t get more of it down?” Christine asked.

  “I’ll have more later.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you feel nauseous?”

  “No, no. I’m okay. Just tired.”

  She studied him in silence for a moment, and he forced a smile for her sake, and she said, “Well . . . whenever you’re ready for more, I’ll reheat it.”

  As the fluttering fire made shadows leap and cavort on the walls, Charlie watched her feed Joey. The boy was willing to eat and able to swallow, but she had to mash up the sausages and beans, and spoon the stuff into his mouth as if she were feeding an infant instead of a six-year-old.

  A grim sense of failure settled over Charlie once more.

  The boy had fled from an intolerable situation, from a world of pure hostility, into a fantasy that he found more congenial. How far had he retreated into that inner world of his? Too far ever to come back?

  Joey would take no more food. His mother was unhappy about how little he had eaten, but she couldn’t force him to swallow even one more mouthful.

  She fed the dog, too, and he had a better appetite than his master. Charlie wanted to tell her that they couldn’t waste food on Chewbacca. If this storm was followed by another, if the weather didn’t clear for a few days, they would have to ration what little provisions they had left, and they would regret every morsel that had been given to the dog. But he knew she admired the animal’s courage and perseverance, and she felt its presence helped prevent Joey from slipping all the way down into deep catatonia. He didn’t have the heart to tell her to stop feeding it. Not now. Not yet. Wait until morning. Maybe the weather would have changed by then, and maybe they would head southwest to the lake.

  Joey’s breathing worsened for a moment; his wheezing grew alarmingly loud and ragged.

  Christine quickly changed the child’s position, used her folded jacket to prop up his head. It worked. The wheezing softened.

  Watching the boy, Charlie thought: Are you hurting as bad as I am, little one? God, I hope not. You don’t deserve this. What you do deserve is a better bodyguard than I’ve been, and that’s for damned sure.

  Charlie’s own pain was far worse than he let Christine know. The new dose of Tylenol and powdered anaesthetic helped, but not quite as much as the first dose. The pain in his shoulder and arm no longer felt like a live thing trying to chew its way out of him. Now it felt as if little men from another planet were inside him, breaking his bones into smaller and smaller splinters, popping open his tendons, slicing his muscles, and pouring sulfuric acid over everything. What they wanted to do was gradually hollow him out, use acid to burn away everything inside him, until only his skin remained, and then they would inflate the limp and empty sack of skin and put him on exhibit in a museum back on their own world. That’s how it felt, anyway. Not good. Not good at all.

  Later, Christine went out to the mouth of the cave to get some snow to melt for drinking water, and discovered that night had fallen. They hadn’t been able to hear the wind from within the cave, but it was still raging. Snow slanted down from the darkness, and the frigid, turbulent air hammered the valley wall with arctic fury.

  She returned to the cave, put the pan of snow by the fire to melt, and talked with Charlie for a while. His voice was weak. He was in more pain than he wanted her to know, but she allowed him to think he was deceiving her because there wasn’t anything she could do to make him more comfortable. In less than an hour, in spite of his pain, he was asleep, as were Joey and Chewbacca.

  She sat between her son and the man she loved, with her back to the fire, looking toward the front of the cave, watching the shadows and the reflections of the flames as they danced a frantic gavotte upon the walls. With one part of her mind she listened for unusual sounds, and with another part she monitored the respiration of the man and the boy, afraid that one of them might suddenly cease breathing.

  The loaded revolver was at her side. To her dismay, she had learned that Charlie had no more spare cartridges in his jacket pockets. The box of ammo was in his backpack, which they had abandoned at the rocky overhang where she had patched his shoulder. She was furious with herself for having forgotten it. The rifle and shotgun were gone. The handgun was their only protection, and she had only the six shells that were in it.

  The totem bear glowed on the wall.

  At 8:10, as Christine finished adding fuel to the fire, Charlie began to groan in his sleep and toss his head on the pillow she had made from his folded jacket. He had broken out in a greasy sweat.

  A hand against his forehead was enough to tell her that he had a fever. She watched him for a while, hoping he would quiet down, but he only got worse. His groans became soft cries, then less soft. He began to babble. Sometimes it was wordless nonsense. Sometimes he spat out words and disjointed, meaningless sentences.

  At last he became so agitated that she got two more Tylenol tablets from the bottle, poured a cupful of water, and attempted to wake him. Although sleep seemed to be providing no comfort for him, he wouldn’t come around at first, and when he finally did open his eyes they were bleary and unfocused. He was delirious and didn’t seem to know who she was.

  She made him take the pills, and he greedily swallowed the water, washing them down. He was asleep ag
ain even as she took the cup from his lips.

  He continued to groan and mutter for a while, and although he was sweating heavily, he also began to shiver. His teeth chattered. She wished they had some blankets. She piled more wood on the fire. The cave was relatively warm, but she figured it couldn’t be too warm right now.

  Around 10:00, Charlie grew quiet again. He stopped tossing his head, stopped sweating, slept peacefully.

  At least, she told herself it was sleep that had him. But she was afraid it might be a coma.

  Something squeaked.

  Christine grabbed the revolver and bolted to her feet as if the squeak had been a scream.

  Joey and Charlie slept undisturbed.

  She listened closely, and the squeak came again, more than one short sound this time, a whole series of squeaks, a shrill though distant chittering.

  It wasn’t a sound of stone or earth or water, not a dead sound. Something else, something alive.

  She picked up the flashlight. Heart pumping furiously, holding the revolver out in front of her, she edged toward the sound. It seemed to be coming from the cavern that adjoined this one.

  Soft as they were, the shrill cries nevertheless lifted the hairs on the back of her neck because they were so eerie, alien.

  At the entrance of the next chamber, she stopped, probing ahead with the beam of the flashlight. She saw the waxylooking stalactites and stalagmites, the damp rock walls, but nothing out of the ordinary. The noises now seemed to be coming from farther away, from a third cavern or even a fourth.

  As she cocked her head and listened more intently, Christine suddenly understood what she was hearing. Bats. A lot of them, judging by their cries.

  Evidently, they always nested in another chamber, elsewhere in the mountain, always entered and exited by another route, for there was no sign of them here, no bat corpses or droppings. Okay. She didn’t mind sharing the caves with them, just as long as they kept to their own neighborhood.