But before the sound of his voice had stopped ringing in the corridor, he was horrified at what he had said.
But it was too late.
Like a runaway locomotive, the thing came charging at him.
He screamed, stumbling backward, as it placed its massive arms on either side of him and pinned him against the wall. At such proximity the tingle of its presence was so powerful that it felt as if an electrical current were coursing through him. It leaned down and looked into his face, and he saw with astonishment that the vapory billows composing it actually possessed a complex and delicate cellular structure. In what he thought were the last milliseconds of his life, he became mesmerized by the microcosms of design contained within the thing, and was seized with wonder that something so insubstantial could possess what seemed to amount to a biological structure.
But then, just when he was certain the thing was going to kill him, it spoke instead. And more surprising, its voice was even and measured.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
The incongruously reasonable tone of its delivery baffled him.
“Why?” he asked, his cringing diminishing a fraction.
“Because something terrible is going to happen in this house, and if you keep your promise to me, I will protect you,” it replied, continuing to speak in a slow, even-tempered manner.
This answer only added to his dismay and confusion. Was it telling him the truth, or was it only leading him on, baiting him with yet another layer of lies and deceptions so that it could continue to control him?
“Will you protect my mother also?” he asked, wondering what its answer would be.
“Yes.”
“What is this terrible thing that’s going to happen?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why?”
“Because I too am bound by a promise,” it said enigmatically.
“And what happens if I do tell anyone about you?” he asked, half expecting it once again to fly into a rage.
“Then I could no longer promise you your safety,” it returned simply. And then, without saying anything else, it moved away from him and started to drift back down the hall.
“Wait!” he yelled after it, his mind still swimming with questions.
But it ignored him.
“Will you please just wait a minute!” he entreated, but still it just glided on until it was swallowed once again by the gloom of the house.
But even before he had regained his composure, he realized it had left him in the worst of all possible positions, for now he was at a complete loss as to what to do. Every time he considered not telling his mother about it and keeping his promise, a voice in him told him he was falling for yet another of the thing’s cunning tactics, and he should not waste another second before relating to her everything that he knew. But when he considered breaking his promise, he remembered the thing’s warning and was once again haunted by the possibility that it was telling the truth, so if he betrayed its trust he was actually sealing not only his own doom, but his mother’s as well. He was trapped in an insidious deadlock. As he returned to his room he prayed that somehow something would happen that would show him a way out of his impasse.
After the line rang four times, an elderly woman’s voice sounded amid the static.
“Hello?”
“Hello,” Lauren said. “Is Amy there?”
“Pardon me? I think we have a bad connection.”
“Is Amy there?” she shouted again.
“Oh, just a moment, please.”
After a thirty-second wait, Amy came on the phone. “Hello?”
“Hello, Amy, this is Lauren Montgomery.” The phone crackled. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes, I can hear you.”
“You may not remember me. I came into your shop a few days back. I’m the woman who moved into Lake House—”
“I remember,” Amy chirped.
“Well, I’ve been doing some reading in this book I bought there, Great Camps of the Adirondacks, and according to it, it seems that Lake House has quite a reputation for murder and bloodshed.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone, punctuated by still more static.
“Did you know anything about that?”
“Yes, I knew,” Amy said sheepishly. “Just about everyone does.”
Lauren could no longer control herself. “Well, why didn’t you tell me?” she cried in a voice that was half accusation, half anguish.
Amy started to flounder. “Well, gee, seeing as how you just moved in and everything, and you got so upset when I told you about the murder of Sarah Balfram’s fiancé and that guy when Mae Norman lived in the house, I just didn’t want to make you any more upset.”
The answer filled Lauren with rage. “Don’t you realize what you’ve done to me now?”
Amy started to cry. “Why, what have I done?” she exclaimed in innocent dismay.
“You let us just continue to live here without warning us how dangerous it was!”
“I’m sorry,” Amy blubbered, too cowed by Lauren’s angry tone to question the legitimacy of the accusations.
“Well, is there anything else you haven’t told me that I should know about the house?”
“No, nothing. I mean, I know there have been a lot of murders in the house, but I don’t know the people’s names. But I guess the book you have can tell you that.”
Lauren still could not believe that the house’s dire history could have been kept from her so completely.
“And you say that everyone around here knows about the house’s reputation for bloodshed?”
Amy said something, but her voice was drowned out by the crackling.
“What?” Lauren said, “I couldn’t hear you.”
Again Amy spoke, but still her voice remained indecipherable.
“What?” Lauren shouted.
“Yes,” Amy sobbed repentantly, her voice drifting in and out. “Everyone knows about Lake House. In fact, people have a saying around here. They say Lake House draws evil like a magnet.”
And with that the phone went dead.
Outside in the darkness, Elton Fugate hid behind a large wisteria vine and gazed up at the windows of the house. He was quite proud of himself for the way he had hid in the woods until he heard the boy start down the highway, then followed the boy from only the sound of his footsteps against the blacktop, always hanging far enough behind so that he would not be seen. When he had seen the boy turn up the driveway to Lake House he had concluded that it was Stephen Ransom’s son who had come spying on him. But he had wanted to actually see the boy go into the house, just to be sure.
The only thing that bothered him was whether or not the boy would tell his mother what he had seen. He noticed with satisfaction that Mr. Ransom’s car was gone, that nice car, and that at least meant he didn’t have to worry about whether Ransom knew.
But Mrs. Ransom, that was another thing.
He had half a mind to go in and take care of her right then and there. And the boy too. That would be the safest thing. He sure didn’t want news of his little nightly ritual getting around to the locals—not after the way they had already treated him. But much as he disliked the idea, he knew he had to wait. It wasn’t that he was afraid. Or even that he wasn’t ready, for he knew he was ready. He had been practicing for over a year now, and he could almost taste it he was so ready.
What caused him to restrain his aching hands and turn around and start back down the driveway was that he knew he couldn’t do anything until the Master gave the go-ahead.
It had been the Master who had started the transformation in him in the first place.
It had been the Master who had given him the power to believe.
And it would be the Master who would tell him when the time was right.
II
And thy deep eyes amid the gloom
shine like jewels in a shroud.
—Longfellow
For Elton
Fugate it had started when he was an infant.
His mother, Ada Fugate, had become pregnant when she was sixteen, and the thought of having her social life hampered by a swollen abdomen had made her hate Elton from the beginning. Had she known who Elton’s father was she might have tried to get him to marry her, but because she had made herself available to any and all who wanted her since she was fourteen, she merely vented her wrath by hating Elton.
It was a family tradition.
Ada’s mother had done the same thing to her, and indeed the entire Fugate family had a lengthy history of abuse and was bound by only the loosest of familial ties.
No one in the Fugate family had had more than a fourth-grade education. No one had ever come close to living above the poverty level. No one had ever gone to church, had ever gone hunting with the other locals, or had ever been part of the social fabric in any way. The only reason Ada Fugate had had so much sex so early was that she was available. But none of the boys ever asked her out to a movie, or even consented to be seen in public with her.
She had started beating Elton almost from the moment he was born. If he cried, she slapped him. If he laughed, she slapped him. Sometimes she even made him hold hot peppers in his mouth just to try to get him to cry so she could hit him. But the cruelties did not end there. For weeks on end she would feed him nothing but cold cereal. Sometimes during the winter she would punish him by making him sleep without blankets.
And sometimes she would vanish and leave him alone for days in their little cabin—not the same cabin in which he now lived, but one that was almost as much a hovel— and although he remembered such times as frightening, he counted them among the best times of his childhood.
For Elton, a turning point had come when he was seven. Then a representative of the school board had come knocking at their door and insisted that Ada give Elton the benefit of an education. And so the necessary paperwork was done to allow Elton to enter Indian River Elementary that fall. For Elton it was a both terrifying and glorious proposition—terrifying because he had never known the company of other children and had no idea what to expect; glorious because the belief that there might be something good about the human race had not yet been completely extinguished in him. Thus he perceived going to school as a ray of hope, an indication that perhaps his miserable existence was at last about to take a turn for the better.
How wrong he had been.
For Elton, attending school proved to be almost as hellish as staying at home. He had too many counts against him, there were too many things that branded him immediately as an outcast and a pariah.
He was a head taller than all the other kindergartners.
He smelled of smoke because of the wood stove his mother used to heat their cabin.
His clothing was strange and raggedy.
His hair had a choppy look because of the crude and unmindful way his mother cut it.
Worst of all, he was dirty (his mother had never taken much stock in personal hygiene).
Any one of these blemishes was enough to place him at the bottom of the harsh pecking order of the childhood social hierarchy. Having all of them made Elton a virtual leper.
And no one can be crueler than children.
In class they complained when they were forced to sit near Elton.
During recess he was jeered at and taunted and sometimes even punched or kicked—these last only when the teacher minding the recess turned a blind eye (which was not infrequent, because some of the teachers did not like Elton any more than his classmates did).
Every day after school, rain or shine, a group of boys would chase Elton home, and about half of the time, catch him and beat him to within an inch of his life.
Until whatever humanity was left in him was completely extinguished. He became something vacant. A shell. A mere simulacrum of a human being going through the motions of life and passively accepting whatever abuse and indignities were heaped upon him.
He continued in this state into adulthood, through a dozen menial and piss-ant jobs and even after his mother’s death. But never did the storms brewing within him, the hatreds and the venoms, ever so much as produce a ripple outside his slavish and pain-benumbed consciousness.
Until he met the Master.
His first encounter with the Master had taken place entirely inside his head. It had started one morning when he awoke out of the blue with a bone-crushing headache. Nothing, not even a handful of aspirin and a half a bottle of Popov vodka, would get rid of it.
But soon the headaches evolved into a buzzing sensation.
And the buzzing became a mumbling.
And then finally the mumbling became a voice, a voice that spoke to Elton both patiently and firmly.
The voice of the Master.
At first Elton was afraid of the voice and would run screaming and babbling through the woods in a frantic attempt to drown it out. No other voice he had ever heard in his life had had anything good to say, and he assumed this new voice inside his head would be no different.
But the voice always waited him out, was always there and ready to resume whenever he became too exhausted or too hoarse to continue his occlusive chatter, until slowly, inevitably, he was forced to listen to it.
When he did, he discovered to his great surprise that the voice—which called itself the Master—was offering him encouragement instead of criticism.
In rambling discourses that would sometimes go on for hours, the Master told him why his life had been so difficult. As the Master explained, Elton had only been undergoing a test, a rite of passage, to see if he was worthy. As for what it was that he was being determined worthy of, the Master told Elton it was the ability to perceive the beauty of hatred, the hidden but sublime exquisiteness of evil.
As the Master explained, most human beings labored under the delusion that hatred was wrong, and evil, something to shun. But it took a most extraordinary human being, one in a million like Elton, to have the strength and courage to recognize that quite the opposite was true.
Evil was beautiful.
It was the ruling force in the universe.
That was why evil was so pervasive in the world.
And that was why, no matter how strenuously the good tried to stamp out all things iniquitous and depraved, evil always rose again, like a phoenix.
The only problem was that this realization was too powerful a current to run through the filament of most mortal beings. Because most human beings were so paltry and weak, the awareness of evil’s beauty burned them out, destroyed them before it had a chance to transform and empower them.
But Elton had not been destroyed. He had survived the searing winds of hatred. And that was why the Master had come to him, to groom and tutor him. To show him the way to allow the heady current of evil to course through him in full. As the Master explained to him, through his survival he had proved he was special and it was now his destiny to become the conquering Alexander of his day. Only instead of trampling geographical boundaries, he was to trample moral ones. And by bursting free from the restrictions of each social ethic in its turn, and recognizing how flimsy they all were, he was to experience fully the exuberance of iniquity.
And allow himself to become completely transformed by evil.
For Elton, it was a glorious revelation. At last his wretched existence made sense to him. All the questions, the blistering doubts and self-condemnations, that had haunted him over the years fell away like cataracts, and several times as he walked through the woods and listened as the Master told him how special he was, he actually whooped with joy.
But still he was skeptical. Not only had he had his hopes dashed before, but also, in the course of his schooling, he had done a little reading on schizophrenia. So he knew all too well the medical implications of hearing voices in one’s head.
He proceeded with the utmost caution. He spent hours questioning and challenging what the Master said, and when the Master told him to do something, such as move or speak in s
ome new way, he did so with studious and scrupulous correctness—always paying close attention to what he was doing just to make sure the Master was not trying to dupe him in some way, or show him up for a fool.
Until slowly he became convinced of the Master’s sincerity.
The old Elton died and a new one was born in his place.
And as he surrendered himself ever more to the Master’s wishes, the Master became more real and his voice was no longer confined simply to the inside of Elton’s head.
Sometimes as Elton stood in front of his cabin in the moonlight he would hear the Master speaking to him from his own shadow. As time went on, Elton began to hear the Master’s voice coming from other shadows, the shadows of large rocks, and even from the shadowy and impenetrable gloom of the forest itself.
Until finally Elton actually began to see the Master as a misty figure standing in the darkness. And eventually as a seemingly solid presence who would occasionally accompany Elton on his midnight strolls.
It was the Master who had told Elton to purchase the doll and begin practicing on it. As the Master explained, it was important for Elton to acquire the feel of killing somebody before graduating to the real thing. The Master had also warned Elton that he would have to practice long and hard on the doll before he had acquired the purity of evil necessary to begin the final phase of his transformation. And even then, the Master warned Elton that he would have to wait for a sign.
But now, Elton was convinced the sign had come.
As he returned home after gazing up at the glowing yellow windows of Lake House, he gleefully counted up the auguries.
The boy had come to him.
The boy and his mother were alone and Mr. Ransom appeared to be away on business.
And most significant of all, it was Lake House, Lake House, the house that all along he had been drawn to, had wanted desperately to become employed by.
He had been bitter when he had not gotten the job of running the generators. But now he realized it had all been part of a plan. A first taste. A prelude to what lay ahead.
Night Things: A Novel of Supernatural Terror Page 15
