“Good-by, Sam,” and she slid into the car and slammed the door. When Marc automatically bent over for the emergency brake, she held up a hand to stall him. The police car waited in front for just over a minute, then barreled onto the highway, heedless of the traffic, gravel from its spinning rear wheels spitting against the Olds’ grille. Its taillights vanished into the mist as she rubbed her feet under the heater’s warm blast. Marc’s silence soothed, and when she leaned her head back on the seat, his hand gathered in both of hers and squeezed. Her eyes closed, and the tears finally found the way out, stinging her cheeks where the cold still pricked. Her hair felt heavy, pressing her skull more firmly into the vinyl, and the ache expanded to furrow her brow.
“I went to the office,” she said as he pulled carefully onto the road. “A woman there said you’d gone to Harley.”
“Almost,” he said. “Until I figured it might be a way to keep me from going to the party tonight.”
“I saw your sketch.”
“Pretty, wasn’t it? Toal’s got them all. Everyone of them.”
“Yeah,” she said. Then, “Slaw down, Marc, the traffic light’s up ahead.”
He leaned toward the wheel and shook his head. “I can’t see it at all. Nothing but road straight to Canada.”
“All right,” and she talked him into the turn, nervously as it left Mainland, relaxing only when he sped up the Pike.
And it was sudden. In the silence she felt as though she was a child, small and vulnerable to the attacks from an adult world she didn’t understand. Where rules should have been, there was only Toal; where people should have been friends and lovers and comforters, there was only hostility and a sinister blacking of the soul; and nothing at all was as it should have been.
Her arms pressed to her sides, and she felt the book stiff against her hip. It would be so easy, she thought, to take it out and tear up the pages one by one and dump the pieces into the gutter. It would be so easy, and then I could die and sleep and never feel tired again. So easy. So ... easy.
“Natalie?”
“Hmmm?”
“You still want to go?”
They swept by the church, its stained-glass windows eternally dark, the mold on its stone black and shimmering in the starlight.
“Yes,” she said. “And I’ve got something
for you to read.”
* * *
Chapter 13
It was a strange shade of melancholy that settled on Natalie’s shoulders as she rode toward the party, a melancholy that hinted at a grieving for the death of a holiday.
September grade school, and the cutouts the teachers would have them paste in the windows, of pumpkins and witches and moons with great shining faces; the burned cork on her nose and cheeks, the over-sized jacket her father had unearthed from some cobwebbed trunk in the attic; the pillow case for the candy, the apples, the gleaming new pennies.
High school, and the parties where she and her friends had made unknowing fools of themselves sipping at contraband beer, nearly drowning while bobbing for apples, had spent the darker hours in bravado fearful gropings toward their first sexual experience.
The horror movies that flooded television, the gimmick films that opened in theaters, electric shocks and three dimension and canvas skeletons that clanked on rusted rails over the heads of the audience.
It had been a night for taking salt with the supernatural, and allowing the shadows to frighten as much as they had the children.
But it had always ended with the coming of the dawn.
This time, however, nothing would end. No matter what she and Marc accomplished at the mansion this night, no matter what force/power/horror they met, Halloween would always be now the hour of the Oxrun dead.
She wore her caftan again, with several alterations suggested by Marc and her facetious comments to Arlene in the library. The hood was up now and draped carefully over her face. On her feet were heavy wooden sandals Ben had fashioned when they’d been the vogue. The wide white band had been replaced by a length of new clothesline, and her hands she tucked into the voluminous sleeves Mandarin-style. Around her neck, a black braided cord from which hung a gift from Marc-a fair-sized gold ankh that weighed heavily against her chest.
Marc had taken some sheeting from the linen closet and with several safety pins and a deft hand with a needle had managed to create a passable toga, this too with a hood. “It was the custom of the Romans, according to the gospel of Shakespeare,” he said when she questioned the addition, “to throw the hood over their faces when shame came upon them.”
“And are you shamed?” she’d asked.
“For not throwing you into bed instead of doing this? You’re absolutely right I am.”
They had spoken little since leaving the house. There was no plan, no course of action — he had insisted they only keep their eyes and ears open and look for an opportunity to search the rest of the house; in spite of what they knew, they knew too little and anything else would lay them open for too many mistakes.
“There must be something in that book,” he said, making her jump. She glanced at his face reflecting the dashboard’s glow, and it gave him lines and hollows she wished she hadn’t seen. “In the mansion, maybe.”
“What do you mean, invisible writing? We already held it up to a light and over the stove.”
“Well, maybe not that exactly, but I can’t see wasting all those pages for nothing. The thing’s too important, obviously, and all that crap in the beginning about opening the eye and directing the lid and like that ... there’s something missing, definitely.”
She reached out to press a hand to his stomach where they had strapped the book; that it would be used as a last resort as a bargaining point for their lives did not make her feel the least bit comforted.
“You’ll be careful, right?” she said as they turned into the private lane.
“I will if you will.”
“Oh, well. Into the fray and all that jazz.”
“All for one, and us against all. Or something like that.”
“Don’t,” she whispered, and leaned over to kiss his cheek. “I love you.”
“You’ve said that already. Don’t go spoiling me into thinking I’m some kind of superman.”
She gave him a smile she didn’t feel, gasped when he opened the door and she stepped into the cold. Her prediction of snow was fast becoming a reality. The stars and moon had vanished, the mist had lifted to give halos to the lights on the veranda, and her breath puffed in front of her like the fleeing of a soul.
The butler greeted them solemnly, a ludicrous contrast to the explosions of revelry blasting from the front room. Masks were laid out on a silver table in the center of the hall, and Marc chose two-black for her, white for himself. When he slipped the elastic over his head and adjusted the eyeholes, he leaned close to her ear and whispered, “You’ll never guess who I’m supposed to be.”
“Fine, then I won’t bother,” she answered as she donned her own mask. Then, their hoods settled to cover the upper halves of their faces, they walked arm and arm into the party.
“Oh, my God,” Natalie said in amazement. “If the Masque of the Red Death comes walking in now, I won’t be in the least surprised.”
“You,” Marc said, “are a prude.”
He led her across the massive room, threading his way between pirates and ghosts and Egyptian queens, Lords and football players and Adam and Eve with only their leaves. The women were either overdressed or pinkly, fleshily straining for the erotic; the men were flexing what muscles they had, unashamed of the preponderance of middle age that bloated their waists and sagged their breasts. All were masked, all were drinking, and their faces beneath the stiff plastic bands were grotesquely incomplete. They swirled around a huge barrel in which Natalie saw apples floating, and the aroma from the dark liquid told her one bite and she’d be drunk for a week; they screamed laughter at a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, where the donkey was a woman and the
tail her nipples. The walls had been stripped of their portraits, replaced by speakers sounding the clarion of a band in the adjoining room, and lights that glared in no discernible patterns; they were in fact the only sources of illumination.
“Look,” Marc shouted, and pointed above them where she could see huge fish nets holding back hundreds of balloons and rainbow streamers. “For the unmasking at midnight,” he added unnecessarily.
“I don’t think I’ll live that long.”
A Satan rushed up to them, carrying a tray of champagne glasses. Marc accepted for the both of them. “Drink up, Father,” he said with a grin. “ You’ve got dispensation for the night.”
“Cheers,” she said and emptied the glass, then grabbed Marc’s hand and followed him into the next room, a mirror of the first but twice as large, and had on the back wall a kaleidoscopic slide show whose theme, Natalie decided when her breath came back, was sex in the sixties, fifties, forties, and any other time they could have fornicated in front of a camera.
“Brother,” Marc said, “will you look at that?”
Natalie laughed and pulled him away. “You try it and you’ll have cramps for a year.”
“Yeah, but what a way — ”
The words were lost in a renewed burst from the band. Natalie turned until she was dizzy, but couldn’t locate the musicians; there was dancing, but only where there was room and the inclination; singing along, but only when someone didn’t order the singers to move someplace else.
“Food,” she said suddenly, the noise beginning to reach down and drag up her headache. “Come on, lecher.”
Marc stopped ogling a glistening Amazon and reluctantly joined her at a table set against the east wall. Several times on the way they were questioned, but cautiously, the rules seemingly against revealing identities; and from her cover under the hood, and the way guests seemed to shy awkwardly away from her fingering of the ankh, she was able to observe without too many interruptions.
“I have this feeling,” Marc told her as he pressed a brimming plate into her hands, “your costume is going to be something of a wet blanket hereabouts.”
“Are you complaining?”
He grinned, then lowered his head so she had to lean close. “No, Nat, but we’re both too easy to spot. I wish I’d known handkerchiefs were going to be the uniform of the day.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, squeezing his hand, and he smiled and stuffed an olive into her mouth.
For an hour they wandered the four connecting rooms of the party, Natalie too stunned by the noise and growing abandonment to reply to his comments. She was hot, and perspiration was making her squirm as it trickled down her stomach and legs. Several times she had to lean against a wall, feeling the thudding bass from the speakers pound into her spine. The lights made her eyes sting, but she couldn’t avoid them, couldn’t escape the spastic shadows their frequency spawned. A fight broke out between a Beau Brummel and a Musketeer, neither of whom could stand on his feet for more than a couple of swings; they ended the brawl leaning back to back and toasting the legs of a feathered chorus girl. She blessed them mockingly.
Finally, Marc pulled her into an unoccupied comer. “Hey, I haven’t seen anyone, have you?”
She shook her head. “There are so many people, though, I don’t know. I thought I saw Hall a few minutes back, in some kind of white hunter thing.”
“No,” Marc said, “I don’t think it was him.”
He pushed back his hood and rubbed at his hair, the ends damp and plastered darkly against his skin. Then he pointed toward the front. Now or never, he mouthed, and she allowed him to lead her through the crowds, past the drunken groping of a hundred hands, the one startled yelp of surprise when a Hercules discovered she was a woman.
Once in the hall, now as crowded as the rest of the first floor, they maneuvered toward the stairs, climbed and leaned for a moment against the top railing.
Like children we’ll be, Toal had said in the park. Some children, Natalie thought.
The corridor was much less pressing. Couples and singles drifted from the rooms whose doors remained opened, and through one Natalie saw the setups for gambling. At the end, she nodded to her right. “That’s where I hid in that room,” she said, and lifted a hand to mop the perspiration from his face. He grinned, and kissed her palm.
“Maybe,” he said, “we should go the opposite way, just to check.”
“But why go blind, Marc? I think we ought to start with what we know. What I know, anyway. We go down there and we could get ourselves lost.”
Marc turned to look back at the stairs, and the guests who ignored them. “Okay. You lead the way, MacDuff.”
Slower now, they passed under sconces with imitation gold gaslights. The sounds of the party had dimmed, and she guessed most of them had moved in to the back rooms, away from the windows that looked out onto the cold. She stumbled, and Marc snared her wrist. The light was dim, as though they’d breached a grey veil. The shadows were hazy, and the ceiling-high drapes that masked the rear windows in dark greens and browns moved sluggishly as drafts pushed weakly from behind.
“Where?” Marc asked quietly, and she tried to remember which of the heavy paneled doors had been her salvation the first time. The first or the second: each was twenty feet apart, and she didn’t run that far, didn’t recall having the time. She chewed on a fingernail, then pointed to the second. Marc nodded, puffed his chest with a lung clearing breath and indicated with hand signs that she should watch the center hall while he stood close to the door and wrapped his hand around the glass knob.
And when it turned, she wanted to run. Suddenly, there was ice on the floor, ice in the air, and she pressed a trembling hand against her chest, feeling the light chain that hung there and the ring that dangled between her breasts. It had been Marc’s idea to wear it. Protection. Against ... something.
He hissed and she spun around, saw him vanish into the room. Quickly, she patted the ring for luck, and followed.
“No,” she said, relieved and disappointed. “It’s not the same place. It must be the one next door.”
The room was smaller than the others she’d seen, tastefully appointed with oriental throws, massive armchairs and a writing desk set against one wall. There was a fireplace opposite them, lighted to cast wavering shadows on a small divan, a marble topped coffee table, and a wing chair embroidered black against wine. There were no other lights but the flames.
A waiting room, she thought, searching for a connecting door leading to something like a bedroom or bath. And as her eyes adjusted to the changing light, she found it between two life-sized portraits of Ambrose Toal.
“Well,” Marc said without moving. “Ambrose in riding breeches, Ambrose in aspic. Nice.”
“Thank you,” Toal said, and Natalie instantly grabbed for Marc’s arm and pulled herself close. The wing chair suddenly sprouted a head, and Toal twisted around to beckon them. “Come over and sit with me. I won’t bite you.”
Natalie shook her head, but followed Marc to the divan as Toal maneuvered the chair so he would be facing them when they sat. He was dressed in a Mandarin’s gown unembossed except for the familiar ring design in the center of his chest. His feet were bare, and his hair was wetly dark and close to his skull. On his left hand was the ring.
A feeling that she should be cowering was dismissed as she rallied in the belief that somehow she was at least momentarily in possession of the advantage. It was a temporary meeting of equals, and would remain so as long as she kept the security of the book and Ben’s ring.
Toal casually lighted a cigarette from a taper he pulled from the fire. Then he pointed to Natalie’s ankh. “Is that supposed to ward off the Devil, Mrs. Windsor?”
“You’re still sitting there, aren’t you?” she said.
He laughed and applauded once. “Oh, bravo, Mrs. Windsor! You have an astute mind. And courageous. An admirable quality so little found in this day and age. Now,” and he held out a hand, �
�the book, if you please.”
She applauded back, mockingly. “Bravo, yourself, Mr. Toal. But I’ll see you in hell first.”
“She could have said shove it,” Marc muttered, “but she’s too much of a lady.”
Toal barely maintained his jovial expression, and the obvious strain made Natalie think there was hope after all. She shifted until her back was flush against the cushions. Then she crossed her legs and pushed her hood back to her shoulders, shaking her head to free the auburn hair she knew was glinting sparks from the light of the fire.
“You owe me an explanation,” she said flatly.
Toal considered it, looked to Marc who had moved to the corner and had his arm laid across the back of the divan. Then he nodded. “Yes, I suppose I do at that.” He tented his fingers and rested his chin delicately on their tips. “It began — ”
“History I don’t need, nor do I want it, Mr. Toal,” Natalie said quickly, sensing a stall. “Just tell me what’s going on. Why are you trying to kill me?”
“And keep me from getting back into town,” Marc said, his disgust undisguised.
“Ah, two against one. Unfair, Mrs. Windsor.” He shrugged as though his case was hopeless. “But it will be as you say. For now.” He smiled. “Your late husband, Ben, was an important man to us, you see. Had he lived, in fact, he probably would have taken my place here. But,” and the full sleeves spread wide, “he fell in love with you, and he knew you would never agree with our little plan. In failing that, and in refusing to see that you were permanently removed from his area of conflict, he had to be removed. A necessity, you see, or he might have said things to you that would hardly be to our advantage. It’s a good thing you thought his ring was silly, Mrs. Windsor. A good thing.”
She nodded understanding, hiding her dismay and surging guilt feelings.
“It has always been my contention, you see,” the financier continued, “that there are ways and there are ways to get people to do what you want. You can browbeat them, impress them with their own inferiority, threaten them with physical harm. But in the long run nothing like that ever works because, in the long run, you are never in final command. You are mortal, you see, and as you age you lose the vitality you had as a youth.” He turned to Marc. “That’s why I was so disappointed in those so-called money emperors, Mr. Clayton.”
The Hour of the Oxrun Dead (Necon Classic Horror) Page 19
