by Dean Koontz
Chewbacca had gotten to his feet and was growling in the back of his throat. Christine was surprised the dog could stand up, but he was far from recovered; he looked sick and wobbly. He wouldn’t be able to do much fighting or protect Joey.
She spotted the knife from the mess kit, which lay between Joey and Charlie, at the far end of the room. She asked Joey to bring it to her, but he only stared, unmoving, and would not be coaxed into helping.
“No more ammo?” Charlie asked.
“None.”
From outside: “Give us the boy!”
Charlie tried to inch toward the knife, but he was too weak and too tortured by pain to accomplish the task. The effort made him wheeze, and the wheezing developed into a wracking cough, and the cough left him limp with exhaustion—and with bloody saliva on his lips.
Christine had a frantic sense of time running out like sand pouring from the bottom of a funnel.
“Give us the Antichrist!”
Although Christine couldn’t move fast, she began to make her way to the other end of the room, following the wall and bracing herself against it, hopping on her uninjured leg. If she could get to the knife, then return to this end of the chamber, she could wait just this side of the passageway, around the corner, and when they came in she might be able to lurch forward and stab one of them.
She finally reached the supplies and bent down and picked up the knife—and realized how short the blade was. She turned it over and over in her hand, trying to convince herself that it was just the weapon she needed. But it would have to penetrate a parka and the clothes underneath before doing any damage, and it wasn’t long enough. If she had a chance to stab at their faces . . . but they would have guns, and she didn’t have much hope of carrying out a successful frontal assault.
Damn.
She threw the knife down in disgust.
“Fire,” Charlie said.
At first she didn’t understand.
He raised one hand to his mouth and wiped at the bloody saliva that he continued to cough up. “Fire. It’s . . . a good . . . weapon.”
Of course. Fire. Better than a knife with a stubby little blade.
Suddenly she thought of something that, used in conjunction with a burning brand, would be almost as effective as a gun.
In her wounded leg, a dull pain had begun to throb in time with her rapid pulse, but she gritted her teeth and stooped down beside the pile of supplies. Stooping was not easy, an involved and painful maneuver, and she dreaded having to stand up again, even though she had the wall against which to support herself. She poked through the items she had emptied out of the backpack yesterday, and in a few seconds she turned up the squeeze-can of lighter fluid, which they had bought in case they had trouble starting a fire in the fireplace at the cabin. She stashed the can in the right-hand pocket of her pants.
When she stood, the stone floor rolled under her. She grabbed the edge of the raised hearth and waited until the dizziness passed.
She turned to the fire, snatched a burning branch from between two larger logs, afraid it would sputter out when she removed it from the blaze, but the branch continued to burn, a bright torch.
Joey did not move or speak, but he watched with interest. He was depending on her. His life was entirely in her hands now.
She hadn’t heard any shouting from outside in quite some time. That silence wasn’t welcome. It might mean Spivey and the giant were on their way inside, already in the Z-shaped passage . . .
She embarked upon a return trip around the room, past Charlie, toward the passageway through which the Twilighters might come at any moment, taking the long route because in her condition it was safest. She was agonizingly aware of the precious seconds she was wasting, but she couldn’t risk going straight across the room because if she fell she might pass out or extinguish the torch. She held the burning brand in her left hand, using the other to steady herself against the wall, limping instead of hopping because limping was faster, daring to use the injured leg a little, though pain shot all through her when she put much weight on her right foot. And although the pain still throbbed in sympathy with her pounding pulse, it was no longer dull; it was a burning-stinging-stabbing-pinching-twisting pain that was getting worse with each punishing beat of her heart.
She briefly wondered how much blood she was losing, but she told herself it didn’t matter. If she wasn’t losing a lot, she might be able to take one last stand against the Twilighters. If she was losing too much, if it was pouring from a major vein or spurting from a nicked artery, there was no use checking on it, anyway, because a tourniquet would not save her, not out here, miles from the nearest medical assistance.
By the time she made her way to the far end of the chamber and stopped next to the mouth of the entrance tunnel, she was light-headed and nauseated. She gagged and tasted vomit at the back of her throat, but she managed to choke it down. The rippling light of the fire, lapping at the walls, imparted an amorphous feeling to the cave, as if the chamber’s dimensions and contours were in a constant state of flux, as if the stone were not stone at all but some strange plastic that continuously melted and reformed: the walls receded, now drew closer, too close, now receded again; a convexity of rock suddenly appeared where there had been a concavity; the ceiling bulged downward until it almost touched her head, then snapped back to its former height; the floor churned and rose and then slid down until it seemed it would drop out from under her completely.
In desperation she closed her eyes, squeezed them tight, bit her lip, and breathed deeply until she felt less faint. When she opened her eyes again, the chamber was solid, unchanging. She felt relatively stable, but she knew it was a fragile stability.
She pressed against the wall, into a shallow depression to one side of the passageway. Holding the torch in her left hand, she fumbled in her pocket with her right hand and withdrew the squeeze-can of lighter fluid. Gripping it with three fingers and her palm, she used her thumb and forefinger to screw off the cap, uncovering the rigid plastic nozzle. She was ready. She had a plan. A good plan. It had to be good because it was the only plan she could come up with.
The big man would probably be the first into the cave. He would have a gun, probably the same semiautomatic rifle he had been using outside. The weapon would be thrust out in front of him, pointed straight ahead, waisthigh. That was the problem: dousing him before he could turn the muzzle on her and pull the trigger. Which was something he could do in—what?—maybe two seconds. Maybe one. The element of surprise was her best and only hope. He might be expecting gunfire, knives—but not this. If she squirted him with lighter fluid the instant he appeared, he might be sufficiently startled to lose a full second of reaction time, might lose another second or so in shock as he smelled the fluid and realized he had been sprayed with something highly flammable. That was all the time she would need to set him afire.
She held her breath, listened.
Nothing.
Even if she didn’t get any fuel on the giant’s skin, only managed to douse his parka, he would almost certainly drop the rifle in horror and panic, and slap at the fire.
She took a deep breath, held it, listened again.
Still nothing.
If she was able to squirt his face, it wouldn’t be panic alone that caused him to drop the gun. He would be rocked by intense pain as his skin blistered and peeled off, and as fire ate into his eyes.
Smoke roiled up from her torch and fanned out along the ceiling, seeking escape from the confining rock.
At the other end of the room, Charlie, Joey, and Chewbacca waited in silence. The weary dog had slumped back on his hindquarters.
Come on, Spivey! Come on, damn you.
Christine did not have unqualified faith in her ability to use the lighter fluid and the torch effectively. She figured, at best, there was only one chance in ten that she could pull it off, but she wanted them to come anyway, right now, so she could get it over with. The waiting was worse than the inevitable co
nfrontation.
Something cracked, snapped, and Christine jumped, but it was only the fire at the other end of the room, a branch crumbling in the flames.
Come on.
She wanted to peek around the corner, into the passageway, and end this suspense. She didn’t dare. She’d lose the advantage of surprise.
She thought she could hear the soft ticking of her watch. It must have been imagination, but the sound counted off the seconds, anyway: tick, tick, tick . . .
If she doused the big man and set him afire without getting herself shot, she would then have to handle Spivey. The old woman was sure to have a gun of her own.
Tick, tick . . .
If the hag was right behind the giant, maybe the flash of fire and all the screaming would disconcert her. The old woman might be confused enough for Christine to be able to strike again with more lighter fluid.
Tick, tick . . .
The natural flue sucked away the smoke from the main fire, but the smoke from Christine’s torch rose to the ceiling and formed a noxious cloud. Now the cloud was slowly settling down into the room, fouling the air they had to breathe, hitching a ride on every vagrant current but not moving away fast enough. The stink wasn’t bad yet, but in a few minutes they would start choking. The caverns were so drafty that there was little chance of suffocation, though an ordeal by smoke would only further weaken them. Yet she couldn’t extinguish the torch; it was her only weapon.
Something better happen soon, she thought. Damned soon.
Tick, tick, tick . . .
Distracted by the problem of the smoke and by the imaginary but nonetheless maddening sound of time slipping away, Christine almost didn’t react to the important sound when it came. A single click, a scraping noise. It passed before Christine realized it had to be Spivey or the big man.
She waited, tense, torch raised high, the can of lighter fluid extended in front of her, fingers poised to depress and pump the sides of the container.
More scraping noises.
A soft metallic sound.
Christine leaned forward from the shallow depression in which she had taken refuge, praying her bad leg would hold up—
—and abruptly realized the noises hadn’t come from the Z-shaped passageway but from the chamber that adjoined this one, from deeper in the hillside.
She glimpsed a hooded flashlight in the next cave, the beam spearing past a stalactite. Then it winked out.
No. This wasn’t possible!
She saw movement at the brink of darkness where the other cavern joined this one. An incredibly tall, broad-shouldered, hideously ugly man stepped from the gloom, into the edge of the wavering firelight, twelve or fourteen feet from Christine.
Too late, she understood that Spivey was coming at them through the network of caverns rather than through the more easily defended entrance tunnel. But how? How could they know which caves led toward this one? Did they have maps of the caves? Or did they trust to luck? How could they be that lucky?
It was crazy.
It wasn’t fair.
Christine lurched forward, one step, two, out of the shadows in which she had been hiding.
The giant saw her. He brought up his rifle.
She squirted the lighter fluid at him.
He was too far away. The flammable liquid arced out seven or eight feet, but then curved down and spattered onto the stone floor, two or three feet short of him.
It must have been instantly clear to him that she wouldn’t be attacking with such a crude weapon unless she had no more ammunition for the gun.
“Drop it,” he said coldly.
Her great plan suddenly seemed pathetic, foolish.
Joey. He was depending on her. She was his last defense. She tottered one step closer.
“Drop it!”
Before he could shoot, her bad leg gave out. She collapsed.
With despair and anguish hanging heavily on the single word, Charlie said, “Christine!”
The can of lighter fluid spun across the floor, away from her and Charlie and Joey, coming to rest in an inaccessible corner.
She landed on her wounded thigh and screamed as a hand grenade of pain went off in her leg.
Even as she was collapsing, the torch fell from her hand and landed on the trail of fluid that she had squirted at the huge, ugly man. A line of fire whooshed up, briefly filling the cave with dazzling light, then fluttered and went out, causing no harm to anyone.
Snarling, teeth bared, Chewbacca charged the big man, but the dog was too weak to be effective. He got jawsful of parka, but the giant raised the semiautomatic rifle in both hands and brought it down butt-first into the dog’s skull. Chewbacca emitted a short, sharp yelp and slumped at the giant’s feet, either unconscious or dead.
Christine clung to consciousness, though tides of blackness lapped at her.
Grinning like a creature out of an old Frankenstein movie, the big man advanced into the room.
Christine saw Joey backing into the corner at the far end of the cave.
She had failed him.
No! There must be something she could do, Jesus, some decisive action she could still take, something that would dramatically turn the tables, something that would save them. There must be something. But she couldn’t think of anything.
71
The huge man stepped farther into the cave. It was the monster Charlie had met at Spivey’s rectory, the giant with the twisted face. The one the hag had called Kyle.
As he watched Kyle swagger into the chamber, and as he watched Christine cower from the grotesque intruder, Charlie was filled with equal measures of fear and self-loathing. He was afraid because he knew he was going to die in this dank and lonely hole, and he loathed himself for his weakness and incompetence and ineffectual performance. His parents had been weak and ineffectual, had retreated into a haze of alcohol to console themselves for their inability to cope with life, and from the time he was very young Charlie had promised himself that he would never be like them. He had spent a lifetime learning to be strong, always strong. He never backed away from a challenge, largely because his parents had always backed away. And he seldom lost a battle. He hated losing, his parents were losers, not him, not Charlie Harrison of Klemet-Harrison. Losers were weak in body and mind and spirit, and weakness was the greatest sin. But he couldn’t deny his current circumstances; there was no escaping the fact that he was now half paralyzed with pain, weak as a kitten, and struggling to retain consciousness. There was no dodging the truth, which was that he had brought Christine and Joey to this place and this condition with the promise that he would help them, and his promise had been empty. They needed him, and he couldn’t do anything for them, and now he was going to end his life by failing those he loved, which didn’t make him a lot different from his alky father and his hate-riddled, drunken mother.
A part of him knew that he was being too hard on himself. He had done his best. No one could have done more. But he was always too hard on himself, and he wouldn’t relent now. What mattered was not what he had meant to do but what he had, in fact, done. And what he had done was bring them face to face with Death.
Behind Kyle, another figure moved out of the archway between this chamber and the next. A woman. For a moment she was in shadows, then revealed in the Halloween-orange light of the fire. Grace Spivey.
With effort, Charlie turned his stiff neck, blinked to clear his blurry vision, and looked at Joey. The boy was in the corner, back to the wall, hands down at his sides with his palms pressing hard against the stone behind him, as if he could will his way into the rock and out of this room. His eyes seemed to bulge. Tears glistened on his face. There was no question that he had been pulled back from the fantasy into which he had tried to escape, no doubt that his attention was now fully commanded by this world, by the chilling reality of Grace Spivey’s hateful presence.
Charlie tried to raise his arms because if he could raise his arms he might be able to sit up, and if he could sit up he
might be able to stand, and if he could stand he could fight. But he couldn’t raise his arms, neither of them, not an inch.
Spivey paused to look down at Christine.
“Don’t hurt him,” Christine said, reduced to begging. “For God’s sake, don’t hurt my little boy.”
Spivey didn’t reply. Instead, she turned toward Charlie and shuffled slowly across the room. In her eyes was a look of maniacal hatred and triumph.
Charlie was terrified and repelled by what he saw in those eyes, and he looked away from her. He searched frantically for something that could save them, for a weapon or a course of action they had overlooked.
He was suddenly certain that there was still a way out, that they were not doomed, after all. It wasn’t just wishful thinking, and it wasn’t just a fever dream. He knew his own feelings better than that; he trusted his hunches, and this one was as real and as reliable as any he’d ever had before. There was still a way out. But where, how, what?
When Christine stared into Grace Spivey’s eyes, she felt as if an ice-cold hand had plunged through her chest and had seized her heart in an arctic grip. For a moment she couldn’t blink her eyes, couldn’t swallow, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. The old woman was mad, yes, a raving lunatic, but there was power in her eyes, a perverse strength, and now Christine saw how Spivey might be able to make and hold converts to her insane crusade. Then the hag turned away from her, and Christine could breathe again, and she became aware, once more, of the searing pain in her leg.
Spivey stopped in front of Charlie and stared down at him.
She’s purposefully ignoring Joey, Christine thought. He’s the reason she has come all this way and has risked being shot, the reason she has struggled into these mountains through two blizzards, and now she’s ignoring him just to savor the moment, relish the triumph.
Christine had nurtured a black hatred for Spivey; but now it was blacker than black. It pushed everything else out of her heart; for just a few seconds it drove out even her love for Joey and became all-fulfilling, consuming.
