Breathing in short gasps, Alice took a step forward, and the snake raised its head several inches higher.
“CARLISLE you fucking mutt, come here!” she screamed, again with no effect.
Taking a deep breath, Alice rushed in, reaching for the dog just as the rattler uncoiled. Carlisle jumped in the air, and Alice saw in a flash the curved fangs unfold and thrust forward in its wide-open jaws as they flew past her face. She screamed as the rattler’s jaws fastened on Carlisle’s neck, and both fell flopping on the ground at her feet. Without another thought, she punched at the snake’s head, screaming and kicking at its body. It released the old hound and, with a swish of scales in the grass, disappeared under the house.
“No, NO!” Alice was beside herself, holding Carlisle’s head as his tongue lolled out. He was panting fast, his front feet jerking as the venom coursed through his carotid artery. Her face bathed in sweat, Alice wiped away tears and dashed up the porch steps and into the house.
“Hal! Carlisle’s been bitten! Hal, we have to get him to a vet!” She stood in the living room for the briefest of seconds, waiting for an answer. Where was he? The room was shrouded in darkness, the final rays of sunset obscured by thunderclouds. Fumbling around for the wall light switch, she clicked it on, but nothing happened.
“Hell!” Alice felt her way to the kitchen and looked through the window toward the neighbor’s houses; all were dark, which meant the storm must have knocked out the power. She had no idea where Hal and Suzanne kept their flashlights, but she did remember that there was an oil lamp shaped like a dolphin on a shelf near the sink. She found it and the box of matches beside it, then by its flickering light she went to the kitchen phone and paged through the phone book, looking for animal hospital listings. She found several, including one with a circle drawn around it, which she assumed must be a vet Suzanne had used. She called, but got their after-hours message advising her that they were closed for the day.
Fighting back tears, Alice picked up the lamp and went back into the living room. “Hal? Are you here?”
A muffled voice came from upstairs, where his study was located. “In the bathroom … down in a minute.”
“There’s a huge rattler under the house! It bit Carlisle! I think he might die …”
Alice put down the lamp and went back outside to the old hound lying flat in the sandy yard. It was almost dark now; the rain had stopped, and a stiff breeze was blowing the shards of clouds away toward the northeast.
She bent down to lift Carlisle’s torso, and his head fell back. “Don’t die on me, dammit,” she cried, massaging his chest, but she knew he was gone.
Stricken, she sat down on the wet ground and pulled him into her lap, holding him tightly against her face. All her grief and anger and sense of loss and loneliness tied to Suzanne and her poor old dog poured out of her in wracking sobs, raking her throat and blinding her eyes. Alice cried as she had never cried in her life, with complete abandon and a sense of desolation that went far beyond the death of one dog. The pain in her throat and chest left her breathless, and yet she couldn’t stop.
Gradually coming to her senses, she wiped her eyes and smoothed Carlisle’s silky fur, wishing him farewell. She laid him carefully back on the ground, and went to face Hal. This would be a blow to him as well, since he’d planned on taking the dog with him to Miami.
She hurried back inside, wary of what lay under the porch steps, and picked up the oil lamp; it cast long misshapen shadows across the living room and over the stairwell.
“Hal? I-I’m sorry…” she called toward the stairs.
She waited, but there was no answer. What on earth, didn’t he even care about his damn dog? “Hal, this is Alice. Are you all right?” More silence.
Then she heard his muffled voice again. “Alice? … not feeling well … power’s off. Could you come up and help me?”
“What’s wrong? Should I call nine-one-one?”
“I need your help to get down the stairs.”
“All right, I’ll come up, just sit tight.” Alice frowned. She heard a thump upstairs and what might have been a couple of shuffling footsteps. That was worrisome. Hal wore a pacemaker and had weathered several past heart attacks. She imagined the worst.
Because Hal’s study was basically a conversion of the attic space, the stairs went up at a steep pitch to a landing that opened onto one large room. Under the slanted ceiling its single small window looked south toward the Gulf. Shelves and storage cabinets lined the walls to left and right as one stepped off the stairs up onto the attic floor.
The area near the window contained comfortable furniture suitable for a man’s study. Sturdy desk, storage credenza doubling as a computer desk, lateral file cabinet, and bookcases, all in polished cherry. The few times Alice had been up in Hal’s study, it had seemed a lamp-lit, cozy place redolent of leather and pipe tobacco, mixed with other smells coming from the home improvement supplies stacked in boxes and cans in the storage areas. Some pine paneling had been installed on the south wall, but the work was unfinished and building materials lay stacked up to the low end of the ceiling.
Alice came up the narrow stairs, watching her step in the yellow lamplight, not knowing what she might find. If Hal were ill or actually having a heart attack, there was no way she could get him down the stairs to the car. She’d have to call paramedics or the sheriff’s office to transport him to a hospital. Gull Harbor wasn’t strictly rural, but it was beachfront property and sparsely built up in the area where Dunescape and other large vacation homes nestled among the sand hills. It could easily take an ambulance or other emergency responder twenty to thirty minutes to get to them.
Reaching the top of the stairs, Alice could see nothing amiss. She stepped onto the attic floor and looked across the room, holding the lamp up above her head.
Her uncle’s desk chair was empty, but he might be in the bathroom. She walked across the darkened study and knocked on the closed door. “Hal?” she said softly. “Are you in there?” The door swung open at her touch, and when she held the oil lamp up high, she saw that he wasn’t there, either.
Slowly, Alice’s shocked brain worked its way around to the realization that Hal couldn’t have called down the stairs to her because clearly he wasn’t here. But something had spoken to her, and she was beginning to suspect. Her blood ran cold as she looked around the attic, with its sloping roof and shadowy shelves. She was shaking, wondering where the damned thing was hiding.
She went back to Hal’s desk and saw a large envelope with the Gull Harbor Regional Bank logo in the corner and Alice’s name in Hal’s handwriting across the front. She reached for it, folded it once, and tucked it into her back pocket.
Then Hal’s not-quite-right voice spoke to her from the shadows just beyond the stairs.
“Dear Uncle Hal is indisposed, I’m afraid. He didn’t like my new look, scared him to death, quite literally. Didn’t even have to touch him. He wasn’t edible, either, too old and shriveled for my taste.” A shuffling, bumping noise came from the area beside a stack of boxes containing the plastic branches of Suzanne’s dismembered Christmas tree.
“I sent a friend to deal with the dog. Did you find him, I wonder?”
Alice ground her teeth. “You know I did.”
A shape darkened the space at the head of the stairs, and she caught her breath.
“Shall I show myself to you? The lovely Margaret didn’t much care for this form, but it didn’t frighten her quite as much as it did the old man.” The voice had taken on a dry, papery sound with an unpleasant click at the end of each word.
Alice was shaking uncontrollably, trying to collect her wits. She knew that blind panic wouldn’t save her, but the shape-shifter’s mention of Margaret shocked her nearly senseless.
“Why do you want to harm us? What have we ever done to you?” Alice asked, her voice breaking.
“Well, mate, that’s the big question, innit?” said the voice, adopting an Aussie accent on top of its clic
king squeak. “Y’know, I thought Black Harrow would straighten things out once you opened the door for him, finding his book of spells and all that, but look what happened—whole freakin’ Sky Home comes calling. Now you can’t even find a smear of him on the landscape. What Margaret would call epic failure, I believe. His fault I’m stuck between here and there, and now, of course, it’s yours.”
“H-how?” Alice said. Her eyes searched the area of the desk and credenza for anything that might serve as a weapon. Hal’s ornate letter opener lay close by, but Alice had no intention of getting close enough to the creature for the sharp point to do any damage. The only thing available was the oil lamp in her hand, and a straw wastebasket full of crumpled papers, plastic bags, and an empty Kleenex box.
“How indeed. You figure out how to be a proper shaman,” the voice rasped from the shadows, “and release me. I’ll be gone right smart. If not, well …”
A shiny black insect-like leg stepped out of the dark into the pool of light. Something vaguely spider-shaped, but flatter and nastier, was emerging from the shadows, its tough chitinous abdomen scraping against the floorboards and humping along like a Galapagos tortoise. Alice saw the barbed mouthparts on its head in the lamplight and nearly blacked out. In that same moment, white-hot pain lasered into her ankle and up her right leg. The barb has speared through her right ankle, hooking her fast.
Dazed, Alice fell to her knees, too traumatized to even scream. The tick-Quinkan slowly pulled her leg out toward its swaying body. Finding her voice, Alice shrieked her throat raw and rammed the lamp down into the trash basket, setting the dry contents on fire within seconds. Blind with pain and terror, she hurled the burning wastebasket directly at the head of the shape-shifter. It flinched just long enough for her to rip her foot free and careen past it to the stairwell. In a daze, she stumbled down, losing her footing and nearly falling before she reached the bottom. Scrambling to her feet, she limped toward the porch, her entire leg numb and mostly useless.
She pushed open the screen door in the dark, but then froze. The buzzing rattle of the Diamondback was somewhere just in front of her. In the light of the rising moon, the rattler was barely visible, but Alice could make out its raised its head, tasting the air with its tongue. Then it struck at her, but not far enough to connect; instead, it seemed to be herding her back toward the stairs. Undulating in liquid s-curls, it came over the doorstep and into the house.
“Hell no you don’t, you sonofabitch!” she yelled, falling over a coffee table in the dark. Unable to see the snake, she coursed the sound of its buzzing tail tip, and scrambled away in the opposite direction.
Suddenly, an explosion sent flames billowing down the narrow stairwell in a sudden wall of heat and smoke. Stunned, Alice felt her way to the kitchen, emerging out onto the back patio, where she received another shock. Hal reclined in his patio chair, clutching his shirtfront just over his pacemaker. His other hand hung limp at his side, his tumbler of whiskey shattered on the terrazzo.
“Uncle Hal?”
Alice touched his shoulder, and then fell back in revulsion, tripping and dragging her injured foot. Harold Blacksburg’s corpse wore the horrified expression of a man who has looked at a walking nightmare.
Above and behind her, Alice heard window glass breaking and turned in shock as flames climbed into the air, painting the roof red. Then she remembered that other things besides Christmas decorations were stored in the attic: several kerosene heaters and jars and cans of paint, acetone, and other flammables packed in boxes under the eaves. An old gas heater connected to the same line that fed the stove in the kitchen had been installed on the wall behind Hal’s desk. It must have been the source of the explosion.
Smoke and flames burst out of that single window, and then she heard a heavy, rumbling crash, as parts of the second floor gave way. Fire licked along the eaves of the back bedroom that had been Suzanne’s—soon the entire wooden frame of the house would be completely engulfed. She could only hope it had snuffed the Quinkan and its serpentine accomplice before it could escape to wherever it went when it shifted bodies.
Alice stumbled to the front yard where Carlisle lay like a sleeping
watchdog in the moonlight, highlighted now by leaping flames orange against the sky. She made it to the car and retrieved her phone, then punched in 911 with trembling fingers. After she had given the address and a general desperate statement about fire and death, she dropped the phone, exhausted.
Alice knelt on the ground, her head swimming. In the haze of timber smoke filling the yard, it was hard to breathe. Putting her hand on Carlisle’s silky coat, she lay down beside him and shut her eyes. The roar of a forest fire played at the edge of her consciousness until she slipped into a pool of black silence. Then the disturbing noise went away.
Chapter 26
December 1969
Early morning sunlight streamed over Suzanne’s shoulder, falling on the hotel’s ivory letterhead where she’d written the date, December 11, 1969, and the salutation, Dear Brother. With the city phone book balanced in her lap as a writing desk, she chewed the end of her pen and thought about how to frame what she wanted to say. She could be conciliatory, or cheerful and informative, with a dash of local-color sightseeing info. Or she could be honest and try to describe why they were here in Queensland, in this place called Townsville on the eastern coast of Australia, and what she was feeling at the moment.
Through their hotel room window Suzanne saw bright blue sky and the gently waving tops of palm trees. Townsville was tropical and, at this time of year, warm and humid, so similar in look and feel to Miami that Suzanne was flooded with a momentary wave of homesickness. She loved travel and strange new places, but this wasn’t a honeymoon; they had a dangerous trip ahead, with a questionable outcome. Traveling up the coast toward Queensland, she hoped they were heading in the right direction, but there was no way to be sure: Ned was following his instincts and the voices in his head, which she couldn’t hear and didn’t trust.
She looked at Ned, deeply asleep in the double bed, his mouth slightly open and arm flung back over his head. He was so beautiful to her when he lay like that, serene and undisturbed. It was a shame he couldn’t just be an ordinary good-looking guy with a rather peculiar past. But that childhood, she now knew, was part of what kept him from ever being ordinary.
And she held no doubts at this point about his being truly hounded by demons or something unnatural. At first, she’d tried to rationalize his seizures as physiological and his visions as psychological, but after moving in with him, she’d seen enough to be convinced there was something that wasn’t just the effects of too much Acapulco Gold. She’d seen an alien presence in his eyes when she was straight and sober, and it had rendered her speechless. But it had not scared her away; if anything, it made her more determined to fight for him and win against whatever was trying to ruin him. He was hers now, and when she dug her feet in, Suzanne could be surprisingly stubborn.
Sighing, she put the letter aside and stood up, stretching. Her white satin nightgown slid softy against her skin in folds of molten silver, the scalloped hem pooling around her ankles. The peignoir set was an interesting combination of tastes in which the elegant simplicity of the gown with its thin shoulder straps and straight lines was eclipsed by the elaborate lace insets and pink and white roses appliquéd across the shoulders and down the breast of the matching robe. It must have been expensive as hell, and she dutifully wore it because Bailey and Paula had given it to her with such enthusiasm.
For her own taste, Suzanne would have been more comfortable sleeping in one of Ned’s well-worn T-shirts or nothing at all. She looked at him again and was tempted to crawl back under the coverlet and fit herself against his side. She loved him intensely. They were two against the world, bravely facing the unknown. What romantic rubbish, Hal would have said. What they were doing was completely mad and driven by much baser intentions than high adventure and heroic battles. Plus, it was costing them a lot of mone
y.
Suzanne worried about that. She had emptied her bank account so they would have cash for the trip, and the big purchases like the Qantas flight from L.A. to Sydney, and from there to Brisbane and on to Townsville, with the requisite hotel rooms, had all gone on her credit card. It had a high credit limit, thanks to Hal, who’d presented it to her for her trip to France, but she knew they couldn’t keep using it indefinitely. Soon it was going to hit the wall. She hated taking advantage of Hal’s generosity, but the trip was Ned’s salvation, and there was no other way to make it happen.
And so here they were. She’d convinced Ned that it would be better to rent a vehicle and drive the rest of the way from Townsville up toward Cairns and smaller towns northward. Suzanne loved to drive and was not the least bit intimidated at the prospect of getting behind the wheel of a Land Rover, even if it was located on the wrong side.
Ned moaned in his sleep and rolled over. She stood by the bed, looking down at him. Over the months of their courtship and especially after the wedding, he’d given her pieces of his history, little by little, stoned and not stoned, so that she figured he’d now told about as much of his twisted tale as he was able to share. For the moment, she was content to think she understood him better than anyone.
His mother had been one nasty piece of work as far as Suzanne was concerned. Physically and mentally abusing a child that way, it was unforgivable. Who wouldn’t have nightmares? If Suzanne and Ned ever had children, she was going to make certain they never doubted, even for a second, that they were completely loved and wanted. Suzanne smiled to herself; her period was late, and although the disruption of her menstrual cycle might be caused by the stress of travel, it could also mean something else. She hoped Ned would be pleased if she turned out to be pregnant.
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