Night Things: A Novel of Supernatural Terror

by Talbot, Michael

  Garrett started to cry as he searched the Master’s face beseechingly. “But I don’t know! Really I don’t!”

  The Master remained unmoved. “Okay, Elton, cut off her pinky.”

  As Fugate started to lower the straight razor over her little finger, Lauren shut her eyes. She knew that Garrett didn’t know the location of the doorway. She knew. But she knew also that no matter what they did to her she could never be a party to the releasing of what was inside.

  She felt the straight razor cut through the top layer of her skin, and Garrett started to scream.

  “No, please! Please! I don’t know! Don’t hurt my mother!” Lauren’s every instinct was to pull her hand away, but she knew it was no use. She was tied to the chair. If she jerked away she would only be prolonging the ordeal. With a cool, oddly painless tingle she felt the surgically sharp razor slice into her skin.

  Garrett went wild and tried to wrench away from the Master’s viselike grip. “I don’t know! I don’t know!”

  “Wait a minute, Elton,” the Master said placidly.

  With great reluctance Fugate stopped, but Lauren was too terrified to open her eyes and see how deeply her finger had been sliced. Finally, she mustered the courage to look and saw that although her hand was bleeding profusely, the cut did not seem to have done any irreparable damage. She twitched her pinky and was relieved that she could still move it.

  “Why?” Fugate groused.

  “Because I think Garrett here might be telling us the truth.” With lightning speed he pushed Garrett stomach-down on the couch and pinned him against the cushions. “Let’s cut off his fingers and see what Mrs. Ransom has to tell us.”

  As Fugate let go of her and started toward Garrett, she felt a sinking feeling, for she knew that she did not have the willpower to sit by and allow them to harm her child. No matter how terrible the consequences she knew she had to tell the Master where the door was located.

  “No, wait!” she said just as Fugate was lowering the straight razor over Garrett’s hand. “I’ll tell you where it is.”

  “Ohhh,” Fugate groaned.

  But the Master smiled. “Very impressive, Mrs. Ransom. You withstood all that pain just to keep your secret from me? You are a woman of much more substance than I suspected. Untie her, Elton.”

  Fugate did as he was told. “Next time I’m going to be quicker,” he grumbled as he cut the twine away from her ankles.

  Garrett ran to his mother’s side.

  “All right,” the Master continued. “Now, before we begin, I wonder if there is a large silver serving tray in the house. It must be round and it must be made of silver.”

  Recalling the large collection of Georgian silver in the butler’s pantry, she nodded. “But why on earth—?”

  “Just show us where it is,” the Master said, stopping her in midsentence.

  She took them to the butler’s pantry and searched through the cupboards until she found a tray that fit his specifications.

  “Yes, this will do nicely,” he said, admiring the heavy silver tray. The lights blinked several times in succession.

  “If there are any flashlights within reaching distance you might want to get those also,” he added.

  She retrieved several flashlights from a closet just outside the butler’s pantry, and after taking one for herself and giving both Garrett and Fugate one, she offered the Master one.

  He smiled at her patronizingly. “You forget, I see quite well in the dark without such things. Just lead on.”

  She took them back through the drawing room and up the stairs. Then she led them through the series of ever more treacherously distorted rooms and corridors and into the forgotten hallway. When they reached it she felt another surge of guilt and horror at the consequences of what she was doing, but she could not endure seeing Garrett tortured, and knew she had no choice.

  She opened the twisted door at the end of the forgotten hallway and showed the Master the passage leading to the store-place. “In there,” she said.

  “You first,” he countered.

  She stepped inside, and when they reached the massive and heavily bolted door the Master seemed almost in ecstasy.

  The house creaked and rattled around them.

  “So long,” he murmured, raising both his skeletal hands as if in prayer. “I’ve waited so long for this.”

  He leaned the silver tray up against the wall and then turned to Fugate. “Give me the razor.”

  Lauren went rigid as Fugate obliged, fearing some fiendish sacrifice was about to take place.

  But instead of harming them he reached out and drew the blade quickly across Fugate’s arm, cutting deep.

  Fugate let out a yelp. “Why did you do that?” he roared.

  “Shut up!” the Master returned. “You’ll be all right. It’s blood for the cause.” He pulled Fugate’s bleeding arm closer to him and collected a palmful of the trickling blood. He handed the straight razor back to Fugate. “Now tie something around that and keep an eye on them.”

  Next the Master knelt in front of the silver tray and, using his finger as a paintbrush, quickly sketched a series of cryptic symbols around its surface; and as soon as he finished the last one a sudden strange calm fell over the house. It did not stop creaking. The sense of awesome and foreboding power that pervaded the large and heavily reinforced hallway did not vanish. But something changed. The quality or aura of the house was different. Quieter.

  “What’s happened?” Lauren asked nervously.

  “I’ve just done something that has nullified the power of our friend the Watcher,” the Master replied. “Now it no longer has any power to move or operate anywhere in the house.”

  “Where did you learn to do that?” she gasped.

  He looked at her tiredly. “I’m old, Mrs. Ransom. I’ve got powers you’ve never dreamed of.”

  And then he turned away from her.

  “Hold them back there,” he instructed, wafting his hand at Fugate.

  He stepped forward and slowly opened the door. The wind and the distant howling swept through the corridor, and for several rapt moments the Master just stood at the precipice of darkness and waited.

  But then finally his exaltation faded. “Nothing’s happening,” he complained. “They should be coming.”

  “Nothing came out when I opened the door before,” Lauren interjected.

  He looked at her unbelievingly. “You opened the door before?”

  She became frightened all over again for what she had done. “Y-yes,” she stuttered.

  “And nothing came out then either?”

  She shook her head.

  “Maybe we need the Watcher to help us after all,” Fugate offered. “Maybe it knows how to release them.”

  The wind continued to whistle. “Maybe,” he said. “But I don’t want to risk it. At least, not yet.”

  Fugate frowned. “Then what are we going to do in the meantime?”

  “We’re going to have to find out what’s keeping our friends from coming out.”

  “But how?”

  “Someone’s going to have to go in there.”

  An uneasy silence fell over the room as the Master surveyed their faces.

  “You,” he said to Lauren, and her face turned to chalk. “But how am I going to go in there? It’s nothing but empty space.”

  “There’s a staircase.”

  “I didn’t see a staircase.”

  “Believe me. I can see in the darkness much better than you can. There’s a drop of about ten feet to reach it, but it’s there.”

  The thought of entering the seemingly endless darkness made her half-crazed with fear. “No, I can’t, really. Please “You must, Mrs. Ransom. There’s no other way. And besides, if you don’t...” He glanced at Garrett.

  Her heart sank, but she knew she had no choice. She crept up to the threshold of the doorway and aimed her flashlight down. To her surprise she saw that there was a staircase, an ancient staircase made of stone, and a
s she traced the beam of the flashlight over it she saw that it seemed to descend forever into the gloom.

  Her knees started to weaken underneath her, but before she knew what was happening the Master picked her up by the arms and with superhuman strength lowered her into the darkness.

  About four feet down she hit the surface of the stone. “Mom!” she heard Garrett call overhead.

  She froze, afraid to move even so much as an inch in the total darkness, and then suddenly she realized that when he had grabbed her she had dropped the flashlight on the floor of the hallway.

  “Please, give me the flashlight!” she said to the Master. He held the flashlight out through the open rectangle above her, and she grabbed it with both hands. Then she quickly shined it around her feet to get a better grasp of her surroundings.

  The landing she was standing on was about fifteen feet square, and like the stone of the door’s threshold it was scuffed and pitted. The steps themselves were extremely wide, but because there were no railings on either side, their steepness made her head swim, and for a moment she thought she was going to faint. Positioning herself as squarely in the middle of the staircase as possible, she inched her way toward the first step.

  “Go on!” the Master ordered. “You’re going to have to move faster than that if you expect to make any progress.”

  She looked up and saw that to goad her on he had brought Garrett up to the doorway and was making him standing dangerously close to the edge.

  Breathing deeply, she started down the steps.

  Occasionally as she descended she crept to within a foot or two of the edge of the stairs and pointed the flashlight into the Stygian darkness. But invariably she saw what appeared to be a limitless drop.

  On and on she went, and the farther she traveled the stronger the wind became. Five minutes passed, and then ten, until she noticed that the doorway had dwindled into a point of light and vanished. Still she pressed on.

  As she advanced, the air became colder, icier, and acquired an odd wintery smell. Even stranger, the darkness started to become brighter. At first the difference was so subtle it was almost imperceptible, but slowly the gloom became suffused with a faint twilight glow.

  Finally, as the unearthly twilight became brighter, she realized with a jolt she had only about a hundred steps to go. Even more startling, in the bluish half-light that now pervaded everything she saw that she was once again approaching solid ground.

  But it was not familiar ground. Spreading out in all directions from the base of the stairs was a vast and seemingly endless frozen waste. In appearance, it might have been a scene from the Arctic, save that the slabs and escarpments of ice that covered it were far too smooth and regular to have been carved by natural forces. From the helter-skelter way they were piled against one another it was clear that at some point in the distant past they had been formed by some enormous and violent upheaval. But whatever the cataclysm had been, it was now echoed only in their shape, and they seemed more like tombstones, funerary monoliths disturbed only by the snow and the wind.

  As she stared at the alien landscape spreading out before her she realized something else. The strange, almost lunar terrain was also the source of the faint but vast pulsation of life she had sensed when she had first opened the doorway. Despite its barren appearance, there was something alive in this godforsaken netherworld.

  Frightened, she turned to leave, but as soon as she started up the stairs, she heard a voice.

  “Not yet, Mrs. Ransom. I must see more.”

  It was the Master, and she swung around, trying to figure out how he had accompanied her without her knowledge.

  But then she realized with horror that she had not heard him with her ears, but with her mind itself. His voice had come from inside her head.

  “No!” she screamed, cupping her hands over her ears, but as soon as she resisted, her head was racked with pain.

  “Stop!” the Master shouted, and the words echoed in the background of her thoughts. “Stop resisting me and it won’t hurt.”

  But the realization that he had entrenched himself in her mind made her feel more violated than she had ever felt in her life.

  Like something reptilian and primeval she felt him wriggling around inside her thoughts, felt the tendrils of his influence struggling madly to access her senses.

  She resisted, and the searing pain intensified.

  Fearing she was going to black out and fall and hurt herself, she gave in.

  “There,” the Master said, sighing mentally. “Now continue until you’ve reached the bottom of the stairs. I must see more.”

  Reluctantly, she turned around, and as she descended into the midst of the icy monoliths, the feeling that she was drawing close to something alive increased. Indeed, by the time she reached the bottom of the steps, the sensation had grown so powerful that her flesh was prickling. She frantically pointed the flashlight all around her, half expecting to see some giant shape looming up next to her. But still, there was no sign of activity, and the only movement remained the occasional eddying of the snow in the wind.

  “Keep going,” the Master prodded.

  Realizing she had no choice, she crept forward. By now, the prickling of her flesh had become very powerful, and she realized that whatever the legion of things were that inhabited the place, they were close, very close. But it wasn’t until she shined the flashlight on the face of one of the slabs of ice that she saw. Entombed beneath its surface, and frozen in various bizarre and tormented postures, was a phantasmagoria of the most grotesque creatures she had ever seen. Griffins, harpies, monkeylike demons, and fierce winged dogs. Basilisks, devils of all shapes and sizes with taloned hands and huge leathery wings, flying serpents, and dwarfs with gigantic blood-red eyes.

  As she moved the flashlight quickly from one block of ice to the next she saw that each seemed to contain more creatures than the last. Some, like the numerous devils, were recognizable to her. But others were so ghastly and foreign that she gasped: strange ogreish creatures with shapeless lumps of flesh for faces, gauzy sylphlike beings with hollow sunken eyes, imps no larger than mice, things that looked burned and faceless save for their razor-sharp teeth, locusts wearing what looked like little suits of armor, and hordes of other insectlike creatures that distantly resembled houseflies, wasps, and bees, but possessed additional horrific features which clearly betrayed their demonic nature.

  The monstrous appearance of the creatures terrified Lauren, but what frightened her all the more was how mysteriously familiar they all seemed. It was as if some unconscious, ancient, and perhaps even prehuman part of her recognized them, recognized what they had represented to her genetic forebears, and although she did not know them consciously, their appearance still tugged at her, still plucked at some deep and primordial part of her being.

  Suddenly, and to her great astonishment, her terror became mingled with joy. For a moment she was baffled, wondering why she was experiencing such an inappropriate response. But then she realized. It was not her joy, but his. She was feeling the Master’s elation.

  “All right,” he told her telepathically, “I’ve seen enough. You can come back.”

  She spun around and started up the stairs, and as soon as she did it seemed to her she could almost hear the keening of the things in the ice reaching out to her, trying to call her back. With each passing step, the siren song grew more desperate and beckoning. And its meaning was clear. Despite their dormant appearance, the things wanted out. They did not want her to leave.

  It taxed her endurance to the limit, but she did not stop running until she reached the top landing. When she did the Master hauled her up the last few feet and she collapsed on the floor in exhaustion.

  “Mom!” Garrett cried, rushing over to comfort her.

  But the Master ignored her, and just continued to stare into the darkness.

  “So I was right!” he exclaimed.

  “But if they’re frozen in ice, how are we going to get them
out?” Fugate asked. “Build a fire?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” the Master said, looking at him as if it were the stupidest thing he had ever heard. “We would never be able to cart enough wood down there to melt all that ice.” He returned his attention to the darkness. “No. It was magic that put them there. And it will be magic that will set them free.”

  Realizing another display of the Master’s power was in the offing, Fugate placed the palms of his hands together excitedly and stepped back to watch.

  The Master closed his eyes and took several long deep breaths. Then he raised his arms wide like a king addressing his subjects and began to chant: “Ayperos naberrs adiram glassyalabolas. Chameron hayras ador cabuvodium.” As he intoned the words a breeze began to rustle through the hallway and the house creaked.

  “Lhavala casmiel beldor forneus. Asmoday octinimoes abravor tahr

  As soon as he finished the incantation a great rushing of air swept past them, and Lauren held on to Garrett tightly. Like an invisible locomotive the magical wind roared down the stairs, and as it collided with the various winds and air currents it met in the darkness it made a strange thrashing sound like a piece of canvas flapping in a storm.

  Lauren froze as the Master flexed his fingers and gazed excitedly into the darkness, waiting for the sound of his brethren being released.

  But instead there was only silence.

  “So what’s happening?” Fugate asked nervously.

  “I don’t know!” the Master snapped, peeved that his magic had not seemed to work.

  “But you said you had the power to—”

  “I do!” the Master cut him off. “It’s just going to take a little experimenting. I’ve just got to find the right way.” He stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Maybe something that’s a little older, a Babylonian spell...”

  He once again raised his hands up toward the darkness. “Nabu apla il apna sha. Ik iddina shaki shalu. Nabu apla il apna mardok. Shabu ish, ishali shak, sha ik ik kali sharri.” As soon as he finished the words there was a brilliant flash of blue light, followed by a piercing whistling sound.