Night Things: A Novel of Supernatural Terror

by Talbot, Michael

  He prided himself on being a person who kept his word, and it was true—the thing had never in any way harmed him. Still, he never expected to find himself in a situation this grave. His mother was downstairs, tied to a chair by a lunatic who might kill her at any moment. He feared that if he did not tell Gordon what he knew, he might be giving up their only hope of getting out of the house alive.

  Finally, he started to cry, and he decided to divulge his terrible secret. “Yes, something did happen to me,” he said between sobs, his body racked with chills.

  He proceeded to tell Gordon everything, and halfway through his account the lights flickered off and on once again. When Garrett finished, Gordon sat down on the bed and laced his fingers into a church as he contemplated Garrett’s story.

  “Is that all you know about the thing?” he pressed.

  Garrett nodded.

  Gordon looked at him sharply. “And this thing, it didn’t tell you anything about the house itself? It didn’t give you any clue about what the house’s true purpose was?”

  “No, it got angry whenever I asked it anything.”

  Gordon got up from the bed and began to pace. Finally, he stopped. “Then you and I have got to try to find out what this house really is.”

  “But how?”

  “We’ve just got to do some exploring.” He started for the door, and Garrett followed. When they reached the hall the lights went off and on again.

  “Shouldn’t we take a flashlight?” Garrett suggested.

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right,” Gordon returned. “I’ve got one in my backpack.” He started back toward the bedroom, but Garrett raced ahead of him.

  “I’ll get it!”

  For a moment Garrett almost got the sense that Gordon was going to try to stop him, but then he apparently decided against the idea as Garrett lifted the flap of the bag and rifled through its contents. He quickly found the flashlight Gordon had been using as a bicycle light, and when he did he took it out and clicked it on. But just as he was about to stand he noticed something else in the bag, something that at first confused him.

  It was a chain attached to a box containing a little ball, all carved out of a single piece of wood. It was Mr. Foley’s whittling.

  He looked back at Gordon, the ramifications of the discovery too numbing, too utterly terrifying, for him to fully absorb. The lights went off again, and on instinct ht jumped away from the bag and pointed the flashlight back at Gordon.

  And when he did, Gordon’s eyes lit up like flaming embers, glittering and emerald-green.

  Panicking, Garrett tried to run, but Gordon caught him at once and twisted his arm behind his back. Then he guided him brusquely downstairs. When they reached the drawing room, he pushed Garrett rudely inside, and Lauren looked up with alarm.

  “The jig’s up, Elton,” Gordon hissed. “The boy knows.”

  “Knows what?” Lauren asked confusedly, looking first at Garrett and then back at Gordon.

  But as she watched, Gordon underwent a strange transformation. Like a man who had held his stomach in for the duration of an important meeting, he seemed to relax somehow, and with a strange little suspiration the stress and tension seemed to drain from his body. And as they did, his body changed. The smooth skin of his face and hands instantly became covered by a fine web of wrinkles—not the pronounced, deeply hewn wrinkles of someone who has spent a lot of time in the sun, but a much finer, more delicate kind. These made him appear both youthful and oddly ancient at one and the same time.

  Even more dramatic changes followed. With a creaking sound, his fingers grew longer, as did his nails, which curled and became sharper as they clouded over with a sickly grayish-yellow cast. His flesh began to bulge slightly in places and became concave in others until it had rearranged itself into a physique that was gaunt and grotesque. Like seedlings in some monstrously growing rain forest, his teeth became longer and stretched into rapierlike points.

  But the most remarkable change took place in his eyes, for as his body shifted and sculpted itself into its true shape, they started to emit a greenish light—not just any light, but a lurid, otherworldly candescence that seemed to grow stronger with each tremor that passed through him. The brighter they became, the emptier they seemed, until they had become unspeakably terrifying voids.

  Lauren knew instantly that these were the eyes she had seen watching her from the fog. But still she did not understand what was happening and why Gordon and Fugate suddenly seemed so familiar.

  “What’s going on?” she implored. “What are you?”

  As she asked the question, Fugate began to prance around and clap his hands gleefully like an ecstatic and depraved Rumpelstiltskin.

  But Gordon only smiled unctuously, threateningly. “But Mrs. Ransom, I thought you would have figured it out by now. I’m the one Elton as been telling you about. I’m the Master.”

  III

  And there appeared to me two men very tall, such as I have never seen on earth. And these men said to me: “Be of good cheer, Enoch, be not afraid; the everlasting God hath sent us to thee, and, lo! today thou shalt ascend with us into heaven.” And it came to pass that these men took me on their wings and placed me on the clouds. And lo! the clouds moved. And then I looked and saw many things, what has happened before on the earth and what has been left behind. I have seen forces unimaginable to man, and other things... the treasuries of the snow and ice and the angels who guard the terrible store-places.

  —The Book of the Secrets of Enoch

  She shook her head slowly, unable to believe what her eyes were telling her. “But I thought...”

  By now Gordon’s transformation was complete, and in his full glory he was so horrible that Garrett ran over to his mother’s side.

  A trace of a smile played over Gordon’s pale and vampirish face. “You thought the Master was only a madman’s delusion?”

  Although Lauren said nothing, from her expression it was clear that he had anticipated her question correctly.

  “No, I’m quite real. You see, I was very far away from here when I first sensed Elton’s presence, sensed how special he was.”

  Fugate beamed like a proud disciple.

  The Master stalked a little deeper into the room, his long and powerful arms now held in a strangely insectlike pose at his sides. “But because I sensed that he had the potential to be even more special, to understand the meaning of true evil, I reached out with my mind, insinuated myself into his thoughts, until I could travel the thousands of miles that separated us.”

  The Master sat down slowly on the couch and smiled at Fugate affectionately. “But at first he resisted me and perceived my communications only as headaches. Until finally I won his trust and was able to hold on to him and make my way here.”

  “What are you?” Lauren asked.

  “I am just one of the things that walks the earth.”

  “But what kind of thing?”

  “Careful,” the Master purred. “I have feelings too, you know. And I take offense easily.”

  Lauren swallowed hard as a chill passed through her, but still she was driven to find out more. “Where do you come from?”

  The Master looked almost wistful. “That’s the kicker.

  I don’t know. You see, my memory is fitful. I tend to remember the peaks, the moments in my life when I have been truly exalted by evil, but everything else... well, fades. I know that I am ancient. I remember when the Romans destroyed Carthage.” His eyes glowed a little brighter. “I have never seen so much blood, and for so long.” He paused. “I think I remember Ashumasirpal. At least I remember a place long ago, a desert, and a lot of carnage that seems of his style. And, of course, I remember quite a few of my disciples, I think, the various men and women I have encountered throughout my wanderings and whom I have deemed promising enough to take under my tutelage.” He again looked fondly at Fugate. “But I don’t remember my birth, my actual origin, any more than you do yours, although I think it likely that I wa
s somehow a product of that great war we talked about.”

  “But what do you want with us? Why are you here?”

  “Well, it’s this house, isn’t it?” the Master said, standing and looking at the oak baulks of the vaulted ceiling overhead. “As I was telling your son earlier, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Sarah Balfram chose one of the most powerful and ancient spots in the country—this lake—on which to erect her house. It’s clear from the way the house is built and that enticing palindrome over the door that the house is some kind of puzzle, a gauntlet thrown down at the feet of any who are discerning enough to perceive it. But I think it’s more than just a puzzle.”

  “I know,” Lauren said resignedly. “It’s some kind of window, a passageway between dimensions.”

  “Well, not a passageway really,” the Master returned unexpectedly. “At least, not in the sense that it was intended to allow free concourse back and forth between the two dimensions.”

  “Then what?”

  He strolled through the room, still looking up at the baulks of the ceiling. “More of a vault, I should think. A means of concealing something.”

  “Concealing what?”

  “Ah, that’s the question.”

  “I’m sure you have an answer.”

  “Oh, I do, I do.” He held one of his bony fingers aloft. “At least I have a theory. You see, the Watcher Angels are not the only thing Enoch mentions without fully explaining. After the angels finished taking him on a tour of heaven and showing him visions of the great war, he says they took him and showed him something else. From the way he wrote about it it’s obvious he knew he was being shown something of extreme importance. But for some reason, perhaps because he was sworn to secrecy, when he wrote down his experiences, he decided to describe what he had seen in only one brief and very cryptic line. He said only that the angels had shown him ‘the treasuries of the snow and ice and the angels who guard the terrible store-places.’”

  The words made another shiver pass up through Lauren’s spine. “And what do you think he was talking about? What are the terrible store-places?”

  “Well, think about it,” the Master countered. “Enoch had just been shown a vision of the great war and had learned that the powers of light had won and expunged the forces of darkness from the earth. And immediately thereafter he was shown a series of places where something terrible is stored. I think what he was shown was where the losers of that great war were imprisoned. I think the terrible store-places were where the powers of darkness that had been defeated in that war were locked away.”

  “But this house was only built in the nineteenth century. How could it be one of the terrible store-places?”

  “Technically speaking, it’s not the house that is the store-place. It’s the window area, the dimensional weak spot that has existed in this region since time immemorial. The house is only the doorway, the porthole as it were, that has allowed this world to connect with that other.”

  “But how did Sarah Balfram know how to design a house that would do that? And how did she go about building such a house? I mean, what did she say to the workmen who put this place together—‘Here’s a dimensional doorway; build me a house around it’?”

  The Master shook his head wearily as if the answers to her questions were so manifest they almost weren’t worth the effort of a reply. “First of all, it’s obvious from the fact that she had visions as a child that something came to her and told her how to build the house. And as for how the house managed to punch through to the terrible store-place that existed here, I suspect it accomplished that feat by virtue of its shape.”

  She looked at him perplexedly.

  “There are many ancient systems that talk about the sacredness of geometry and how different shapes are supposed to change and alter the space within and around them. I think the house is the ultimate product of one of those ancient and sacred geometries, a mathematical lens that by virtue of the twistings and turnings of its architecture has managed to open up a doorway between dimensions. Indeed, I imagine that hole punched between dimensions—which no doubt lies hidden somewhere deep in the heart of the house—did not even exist until the house was completed. Like a lens constructed in piecemeal fashion, it was probably not able to perform its function as a focuser until it existed in its whole and proper shape.”

  Lauren knew from what she had already discovered about the house that he was almost certainly correct. But that left one important question. “Why was Sarah Balfram instructed to build the house? What purpose does it serve now?”

  The Master laced his fingers together as he paced through the room. “Now we come to the meat of the matter.”

  Fugate shifted his weight excitedly, and the Master continued. “You are no doubt unaware of this fact, but to those of us who have recognized the beauty of evil, who have surrendered our hearts completely to the unutterable darkness, the house has a voice. It calls to us, beckons us, pulls us. Elton here has heard the house calling. I have heard it, felt its tugging, and that is why I am here.” A tremor passed through him as he suddenly pulsed with energy. “You see, throughout my life, my long, long life, I have wondered why I was here, why I was one of the few of my kind to survive only to be doomed to wander endlessly on this darkness-forsaken world of petty, chirping souls. I knew that part of my purpose was to teach, to pass on my wisdom to receptive students like Elton, but still I knew there had to be more. It wasn’t until I discovered this house and came to realize that it led to the terrible store-place that I comprehended what my destiny was. You see, I think it was the forces of darkness who came to Sarah Balfram and told her to build this house here. I think that by using her as an instrument they managed to place a kind of sword in the stone here, a Gordian knot to be stumbled upon by a warrior powerful enough for the cause. Then it is to be cleaved, to allow all those things imprisoned here to be released upon the world once again.”

  His eyes were now glowing so fierily that Lauren and Garrett could scarcely bear to look him in the face.

  “I think that is why the house as been drawing things evil to it lo these many years. It’s been searching for exactly the right leader to launch this new offensive, panning through the dross for the gold.” He raised his clenched hand to the ceiling. “Well, it has found its leader now. I can feel it, feel it in my bones. This house is my destiny. I know it. I am the one it has been searching for all along.”

  Outside, the wind picked up, and the house creaked again.

  “But if you figured that out a while ago, why didn’t you come into the house then? Why wait until we came?”

  The Master looked at her archly. “I have not survived for so long by being a fool. I wanted you to test the waters first, make sure there were no preliminary pitfalls or booby traps.”

  The lights went out and remained off. Nevertheless, the room was illuminated by the powerful green beams of the Master’s eyes.

  “But once you knew that, why did you then go through the charade of pretending to be a reporter? Why not just barge in and overpower us to begin with?”

  The Master snorted. “Because I had hoped to gain your assistance in helping me find the doorway and avoiding the traps without your knowing my real purpose. I felt it was the easiest route to take.” He looked at Garrett. “Besides, I had reason to believe that at least one of you had been sworn to secrecy about the house, and as it turns out my suspicions were quite correct.”

  Lauren looked confusedly at Garrett and then back at the Master. “What do you mean?”

  The Master took a step closer to Garrett, training his glowing eyes on him. “You may be interested to know, Mrs. Ransom, that there’s a Watcher Angel somewhere in this house. You may be even more interested to learn that it has been keeping company with your son here, using your son to help it get the information it needs.”

  She looked at Garrett with alarm. “Is this true, Garrett?” He squirmed nervously.

  “But what does it want? Why is it here?
”

  The Master smiled, but his eyes narrowed. “That’s the problem. None of us seems to know.”

  Garrett looked up at the Master with surprise and spoke for the first time. “You don’t know?”

  The Master’s eyes became mere slits. “No, I don’t.” He looked up with irritation at the house. “Oh, I’ve sensed its presence here. I sense it even now. I’m not quite sure where it is, but I can feel that it’s somewhere in the labyrinth of the house. Lurking. Waiting for something. But its energy is too ambivalent for me to tell whether it’s good or evil. I can sense that it was once evil, extraordinarily evil. But it also has yearnings toward the good.” He shook his head. “But I have no idea which side of it is the strongest. They are too evenly mixed for me to tell. I think that’s why it’s here. It’s the wild card in all of this. It may be that its purpose is to assist in the opening of the doorway, or to ensure that only the most suitable candidate succeeds in unleashing the store-place. Or it may have been placed here by the forces of light to protect the store-place, to do battle with anyone who tries to release its contents. I don’t know.”

  His expression filled with venom. “But one thing I do know: the time for talk has ended. Now it’s time for action.” He nodded at Fugate, and Fugate moved closer to Lauren, the straight razor poised in his hand.

  As he did so, the Master went and jerked Garrett over to his side. “Now, boy, you’re going to tell me where that doorway is.”

  Garrett looked at him aghast. “But I don’t know!”

  The Master loomed closer to him. “No! There’ll be no more excuses. If you don’t tell me I’m going to have Elton here cut off all your mother’s fingers.” He tossed Fugate a smile. “He’ll start with her little finger.”

  Reaching behind the chair, Fugate untied Lauren’s hands, and then he forced her to place her right hand on the arm of the chair and held the straight razor over her little finger. “One by one,” the Master repeated calmly.