Night Things: A Novel of Supernatural Terror

by Talbot, Michael

  Both Lauren and Garrett screamed—Garrett because he was convinced the man was Fugate and Lauren because she was convinced that the man, whoever he was, meant to do them harm.

  But then Garrett stopped screaming when he saw the man was not Fugate.

  And Lauren stopped when she realized the man was screaming also.

  “Good God!” the man cried, placing his hand over his heart. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Who the hell are you?” Lauren countered angrily, and then, because she was still not certain the man was harmless, she pulled Garrett up protectively against her.

  “My name is Gordon, Harry Gordon, and I—” he started with terse indignation, but then he looked up at the house and back at them, and repeated the double take. “Hey, wait a minute. You don’t live here or something, do you?”

  “We most certainly do,” Lauren returned with her own version of terse indignation. From the man’s behavior thus far she half expected him to continue his aggressive questioning, but instead, on hearing her words his face became bright scarlet.

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I didn’t know anyone was living here.” He started to back away. “Listen, I’m really sorry.”

  “Well, wait a minute,” she said sharply. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  He stopped, and as he fidgeted with what seemed to be sincere embarrassment, she examined his features more closely. He appeared to be in his middle to late thirties and had sandy blond hair and soulful hazel eyes. She noticed also that he was pleasant-looking, although not exactly handsome, and his clothing was clean but rumpled in a way that seemed charmingly boyish. In fact, he reminded her a little of Gary Cooper.

  “I just wanted to see the house,” he explained. He shifted his weight nervously, and in spite of his earlier aggressiveness, she noticed that there was actually something quite gentle and unassuming about him. “You see, I’m a writer. A newspaper reporter, actually. I work for the Albany Courier. They sent me up here to do a story, and, well, I’ve read so much about Lake House over the years, since I was in the area I decided to come over and take a look at the place.”

  A wave of relief passed through her, but not wanting to seem too friendly, she tried to conceal how overjoyed she was at seeing another human being. “Well, you’ll forgive me, Mr. Gordon, for being so short with you, but you really did give us quite a jolt.”

  Gordon began to loosen up a little also. “I’m really sorry. It really is all my fault.”

  “Oh, that’s okay. We were a little jumpy anyway. You see, we’ve just discovered a little mystery. We’ve just found out that one of our workers has disappeared.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s probably nothing. By the way, my name is Lauren Ransom.” She extended her hand. “And this is my son, Garrett. We were just going to go up to the veranda to have some lemonade. Would you like to join us?” She had suddenly begun to perceive Mr. Gordon as a ray of hope, and the notion that he might leave as quickly as he had appeared began to alarm her.

  “Oh, that’s okay. I’ve really intruded on you much more than I should have already.”

  “Oh, it’s no intrusion, really,” she said, hoping her eagerness was not too apparent.

  He stuck his hands in his trouser pockets, and for a moment she was convinced he was still going to decline. But then suddenly their eyes locked, and although the look that passed between them was not quite flirtatious—for Lauren was still far too shellshocked from her debacle with Stephen to even begin to muster the wherewithal to flirt with someone—it contained enough of a spark, a pop of emotional electricity, to tilt the balance and persuade him to accept.

  “Sure. Why not?” he said.

  “How did you get up here?” she asked. “We didn’t hear a car drive up.”

  “Oh, I rode a bicycle,” he returned, the sheepish Gary Cooper part of his personality coming out again as he pointed toward a clump of bushes in the distance. “I’ve got a car back at the lodge I’m staying at, but whenever I travel I always bring my bike along so I can get in some exercise. You don’t get much exercise sitting at a typewriter all day.”

  Lauren looked and saw that leaning up against the clump of bushes was a blue Schwinn ten-speed. She also noticed for the first time that he was wearing a backpack and hiking boots.

  “What lodge are you staying at?” she inquired as they walked up toward the house.

  “Clearwater Lodge. Have you heard of it?”

  She nodded.

  Garrett, however, ignored the exchange. He was too captivated by Gordon’s passing reference to a car, for he realized that it provided them with a possible way of avoiding staying even one more night at the house.

  He waited until Gordon had ambled ahead of them a few feet and then tugged surreptitiously on Lauren’s arm. “Let’s ask Mr. Gordon if he’ll give us a ride back to New York,” he whispered.

  Lauren shushed him with mock annoyance and then, fearing that Gordon might turn around and see them furtively conferring, quickly extracted herself from his grasp. However, Gordon’s mention of owning a car had not passed by her unnoticed either. Unfortunately, she did not perceive it as the same solution to their problem as Garrett did. Not only was there the little matter of getting the three of them together in the same location as the car—with a bicycle as the only current mode of transportation—but even if she did come up with the courage to forsake all semblance of social etiquette and ask Gordon to drop whatever he was doing and volunteer to be their car service, she was not sure she wanted to. Despite what she had said to Garrett earlier about trusting people, she discovered that, for the time being at least, she really wasn’t ready to trust anyone. And although Gordon had not given them even the slightest reason to doubt his character, she would not feel comfortable asking for his help until she knew a little more about him.

  When they reached the veranda, Lauren gestured for Gordon to have a seat and then went into the kitchen to get them some lemonade.

  “Your son tells me that you write for People Beat,” Gordon commented when she returned.

  “I used to,” she said, serving them and then sitting down. “Boy, I wish I could write for a publication like that.”

  “Why, aren’t you happy writing for the Albany Courier?”

  “Oh, sure, but when you work for a regional publication like the Courier, working for a national publication just seems more exciting.”

  “Only because the grass is always greener on the other side. Believe me, I know lots of writers at People Beat who sit around and dream about moving out of Manhattan and working for some less hectic regional publication. I mean, look at me. I’m not writing for anyone right now, but I left.”

  “I guess you’re right,” he said, smiling, and again she noticed that despite his ease at making conversation, he still seemed a bit nervous around her. This pleased her, for she had been feeling rather ugly as of late and it reconfirmed for her that she had not lost her touch and was still attractive to men.

  She took a sip of her lemonade. “You said the Courier sent you up to this area to do a story. Do you mind if I ask about what?”

  Again he blushed. “Oh, I always feel a little funny talking about what I write about.”

  “Why?”

  “Because my area of specialty is a bit strange. You see, I write about weird phenomena: haunted houses, people who claim to have been abducted by UFOs, that kind of stuff. But when I talk about it, sometimes people get a little uneasy. You know, they think that if you’re into that, you must be some kind of a nut.”

  Garrett looked as if someone had just given him a B-12 shot. “Cool!” he squealed.

  But Lauren was somewhat less than thrilled. “And are you?” she asked.

  “Am I what?”

  “Some kind of nut?” she finished, offering the question in as light and nonchalant a voice as she could muster. But the revelation had ruffled her a little.

  For the first time a bit of fire flashed through Gordon’s eyes. “No, I�
��m not a nut. Believe me, I’m a pretty average and normal guy in just about every other way. I drink Budweiser. I love my mother. It’s just that I think there are some pretty strange things going on in this world that haven’t been explained yet, and I happen to believe it’s important we try to understand them.”

  “Right!” Garrett agreed, nodding seriously.

  Gordon instantly reverted to his more soft-spoken self. “Looks like your son here might be into a few of the things I’m talking about,” he said to Lauren, tossing Garrett a smile.

  “I am,” Garrett said in the most thoughtful and adult voice he could affect.

  But Lauren scarcely noticed. “So what was the story the Courier sent you up here to cover?” she asked with a trace of dread in her voice.

  “Are you sure you want to know?” Gordon asked gently. “Yes,” she said unconvincingly.

  He shifted in his chair. “Well, please understand that I don’t necessarily endorse what I’m about to tell you. I mean, I’ve talked to a few people who allege to have seen it, but I still don’t know quite what to think about it.”

  “Think about what?” she pressed impatiently. “Apparently people have been seeing something pretty strange on the highways up here lately. We keep getting reports from drivers who say they’ve passed a hitchhiker on the road at night. Only the weird thing is, when they pass this guy, they say his eyes glow in the beams of their headlights. You know, glow like the eyes of an animal.” Lauren’s blood ran cold.

  “Hey, my mom saw something like that!” Garrett exclaimed.

  Gordon’s head jerked abruptly in Lauren’s direction. “You mean you’ve passed this guy also?”

  “Not exactly,” she stammered.

  “She didn’t see him on the road. She saw him out here in the yard!” Garrett announced.

  The news seemed to disconcert even Gordon. “Is this true, Mrs. Ransom?”

  Lauren nodded, but was still too busy assimilating the information to speak.

  “Well, you know, it’s very strange for a human being’s eyes to glow like that. Usually, only animals that hunt at night have eyes that glow in reflected light. That’s because things with night vision have—”

  “—an extra layer of cells behind their retinas to help them collect more light,” Garrett said, speaking simultaneously with Gordon and using almost exactly the same words. This caused each to look at the other with the jubilation of a kindred spirit.

  “I know, I know!” Lauren shot back testily.

  Seeing how edgy she was becoming, Gordon instantly backed down.

  “Listen, we don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.”

  “No, it’s okay,” she said, calming down a little. Gordon looked down nervously into his lemonade. “Do you think you might tell me a little more about exactly what it was that you saw? It would help me immensely with the story I’m putting together.”

  “You can’t use anything I tell you,” she interjected quickly. “I mean, you can use it, but please don’t identify either me or the house.”

  “No, that’s fine,” he said, reaching down into his backpack and pulling out a pad and pencil.

  She told him everything she remembered about the figure she had seen standing in the fog, and after she finished, he fell into a long and meditative silence.

  “Well, what do you think it was I saw out here the other night?” she asked.

  He hesitated.

  “Mr. Gordon, please, I’ve got to know.”

  “This is just my opinion, but to be quite honest with you, Mrs. Ransom, I think you probably saw what I call an Incomprehensible,” he said solemnly. “By Incomprehensible, I mean a creature or being that cannot be explained by our current scientific understanding.”

  “You mean you think I saw something supernatural?”

  “Quite possibly.

  “Come on.”

  He took hold of both ends of his pencil and twirled it between his fingers as he leaned back in his chair. “Listen, there are some very strange things roaming the surface of this planet, things that our common sense tells us just aren’t possible. But they’re there nonetheless. Have you ever heard of Spring-Heeled Jack?”

  She shook her head.

  “Spring-Heeled Jack was a very famous Incomprehensible sighted frequently roaming the moonlit streets of London throughout the nineteenth century. The first account we have of him is from the 1830s when a young woman rushed into a police station one night and reported that she had been attacked by a man whose eyes glowed like balls of fire. As she described it, her bizarre assailant was also wearing some kind of helmet and a tight-fitting costume made out of oilskin, and in addition to his volcanic eyes, he was hideously ugly, had fingers that ended in claws, and spat blue-and-white fire.

  “Needless to say, her story was greeted with skepticism until the man attacked another person, and then another. In the years that followed he was seen by dozens of different people, sometimes even by large groups of people. But whenever his astonished onlookers tried to run him down and corner him, he would laugh and escape by leaping over whatever building he happened to be nearest to, which is of course why he came to be dubbed Spring-Heeled Jack. His physical strength was so extraordinary and he terrorized London for so long that in the 1870s Queen Victoria even ordered the army to roam the streets at night and try to capture him. But it was to no avail. Reports of encounters with Spring-Heeled Jack continued to roll in until 1904, almost seventy years after his initial sighting. But then, for reasons unknown, the sightings stopped, and Spring-Heeled Jack was never heard from again.”

  By the end of the story Garrett had become so enthralled by what Gordon was saying that he was barely even blinking. Lauren, however, was only disturbed.

  After a long paused she said: “But things like that don’t happen today.”

  “Sure they do,” Gordon replied, now so swept up with his subject that he no longer seemed to notice her anxiety. “Take, for example, West Virginia’s Mothman. In the late 1960s two couples were out driving late one night when they saw a strange-looking creature standing by the road and watching them. The thing was nearly seven feet tall, was winged, and had two huge red eyes that looked like automobile reflectors. At first they thought it might be some weirdo in some sort of Halloween getup or something, but then the thing lifted into the air and started flying after them. Even when they pushed the accelerator all the way to the floor, it kept up with them effortlessly, flying just a few feet behind the car and grinning at them like a demon through their rear window all the way into town.

  “From that day on, sightings of the thing started to pour in, and when the police were called in to investigate it even chased the patrol cars. Over the next several years literally hundreds of reputable witnesses saw the Mothman. And then, in the early 1970s, the reports just trickled to a stop.”

  “But this just can’t be,” Lauren argued. “If these things were really happening, we would know about them. Scientists would be investigating them.”

  He shook his head. “But that’s just it. Science doesn’t investigate these things. What you’ve got to understand is that science doesn’t like things that don’t fit neatly into its theories, things that defy its accepted logic. It just sweeps this kind of stuff under the rug. But it’s not for lack of evidence that something very strange is going on on this planet. I mean, when you start to delve into the subject you find that the history books are filled with accounts of human encounters with Incomprehensibles. According to Arab texts, in the latter part of the eighth century a veritable army of gigantic and unearthly doglike creatures, with bristles along their backs and huge batlike ears, appeared out of nowhere and ravaged villages throughout the Middle East for several decades. Then there’s the well-known Beast of Gevaudan, a huge, wolflike creature with cloven feet that stalked the French countryside for several years during the eighteenth century. Despite the Beast of Gevaudan’s short reign it still brutally murdered three dozen people and seriously wou
nded over a hundred others before a company of cavalry dispatched by King Louis XV hunted it down and killed it. But believe me, these are only a few examples. There are many more. I could go on for hours.”

  “But where do these things come from?” Lauren asked. “That’s one of the most interesting aspects of the phenomenon,” Gordon replied. “You see, when you go back through the history books and really start to delve into the old accounts you quickly discover that there are certain areas around the world where these things have popped up again and again. Haunted places. In fact, if you find a place where someone has had a really extraordinary encounter with an Incomprehensible, you can be pretty sure that if you dig back twenty or thirty years you’ll find that someone else had a similar encounter in roughly the same geographic area. It may have been a different kind of Incomprehensible, a doglike creature instead of a manlike creature, but it will be something inexplicable and out of the ordinary. Researchers who study this sort of thing call these places ‘window’ areas, and although no one knows exactly what they are, many believe that they’re some kind of coordinate point, a weak spot or doorway between different dimensions. In fact, although you may not be aware of it, the Adirondack Mountains themselves are quite a well-known window area and have quite a rich history of UFO sightings, lake monsters, encounters with Bigfoot, and a host of other assorted oddities. That’s why I wasn’t so surprised when this man with glowing eyes popped up. Even the Indians knew that this part of upper New York was a haunted place.” He waved his hand at the lake. “In fact, even the name of this lake, Lake Ketcimanitowa, means ‘place of great supernatural power’ in Algonquin.”

  “I knew about this being a place where you see a lot of strange things!” Garrett exclaimed excitedly. “I’ve got a book upstairs that talks about that.”

  By now Lauren was so riveted she had no choice but to go on. “So what you’re saying is that these things are somehow popping in from other dimensions?”

  “It seems that at least some of them are.”