Restless Dead

by Cave, Hugh

  Of the crayons Verna had given him, he found that a black one made marks most easily seen on the glass. Starting at the lower left corner of the bottom pane, he drew a straight line to the middle of the top, another from there to the lower right corner, a third to a point two-thirds of the way up the left-hand side, a fourth across to a corresponding point on the right-hand side, a fifth back to the starting point. The result was a black five-pointed star with its dominant point at the top.

  Stepping back to survey his handiwork, he was satisfied with what he had created. This was a much neater pentagram than the one he had drawn last night with his fingertip in the pane's coating of dust. Stepping to it again, he drew a circle around the star.

  When he had done this to every other pane of glass in the room, he removed his shirt and stood before a mirror. With the same black crayon he drew a final star-in-circle on his own bare chest, then put the shirt back on. Tonight he would not be donning the pajamas Everett had lent him. Would not be going to bed. After a final inspection of the room, he sat on a chair to wait.

  Would what he had done protect him? Even without the circle it had last night. What else could have deterred that monstrous snake's head from crashing through the window as Ethel's vulture had done? After all, the belief in the power of the blazing star to thwart evil went back at least as far as pre-Christian times. Perhaps it went all the way back past man's beginnings to a time when Florida was inhabited only by the creatures that now seemed bent on destroying the people of this house.

  For it to be effective, though, he must make it a thing of the mind as well. Must project it as an astral aura with himself at the center. Seated on his chair, he shut his eyes and concentrated on doing that.

  And waited.

  Time crawled. There came a sound of wind and rain, the raindrops few but noisy as they drummed the glass of the windows. The intrusion caused his concentration to waver, and from time to time he found himself thinking of Verna Clark, of Verna's missing sister, and, strangely, of Earl Watson and Earl's unattractive wife, Marj. Each time the wavering occurred, he found it harder to reconstruct the aura he knew was so important. Each struggle left him more fearful of falling asleep.

  He lifted his left wrist to look at his watch, then remembered it had been stolen from him while he was unconscious in his wrecked car. The time? It was after midnight now, surely, but how long after? You lost track of the hours when you had to concentrate so fiercely on more important things. Except for the sound of the rain, the house was as silent as a tomb.

  Then he heard something. From somewhere outside in the rain and dark came a noise that evoked a mental picture of a four-legged animal sitting on its rump with its gaze on the sky and its mouth agape. A wolf. Howling.

  A wolf in Florida?

  Again the sound, this time closer. And again. And yet again.

  Had he in fact ever heard a wolf howl, except perhaps on television or in a movie? He could not remember. But whether from experience or some inherited memory, he knew for certain what he was hearing.

  It made his skin crawl. Made the hair rise at the back of his neck. With his gaze glued to the window where he had seen the snake, he sat rigid except for the sudden trembling of his lips and hands.

  He saw what was making the sound then. It was not a seated wolf howling at a nonexistent moon, as his mind had suggested, but a shadowy figure loping toward the house through the rain and darkness. A shadowy figure with eerie, glowing eyes.

  Around the eyes a head took form as the creature drew closer. The head of a huge gray wolf. Only the head was distinct, though. The darkness and rain still blurred the rest as the animal raced forward.

  For a few seconds the whole of the thing's head was visible. But those oncoming eyes were like the headlights of a speeding car. Almost at once the window became too small a frame for the picture; and he knew that had he not been awake and watching from the beginning- — had he been awakened from sleep only when it was there at the window—he could not have been sure what he was looking at when the glass, or what he had drawn on the glass, caused it to stop. How could he possibly have known that what looked like stalactites and stalagmites in a cave were actually the gleaming white fangs of a monstrous wolf?

  Behind those fangs, what looked like a subway tunnel was in fact the creature's throat, scarlet near the glass and darkening to black in its depths.

  If that huge head came at him the way the vulture must have hurled itself at Jacob, it would smash through the wall as easily as an army tank. Fighting back his fear, Jeff forced his mind to concentrate on the aura he hoped was still around him.

  The thing grew larger. Now the window revealed not a whole head but only a solitary eye that blazed like a sun as it peered in at him.

  Was the pentagram holding it at bay, or had it only paused like any confident predator to enjoy its victim's helplessness?

  In his mind, while waiting, he had rehearsed certain other measures he might take if attacked. There were incantations and prayers that were said to have worked sometimes against assorted evils. He dredged them up now and tried to use them while struggling to maintain the star-shaped aura around him. At the same time he knew, or thought he knew, that his life depended on what he had already done. No man facing a horror such as this could be expected to think straight.

  The eye moved sideways.

  He had been like an actor on a stage with a spotlight on him. Now the spot was gone. His sensation of relief was a sudden warmth flowing like hot new blood through his body. Still staring at the now empty window, he went limp on his chair.

  This time it had not been a dream. It had been real. He had seen a wolf. A gigantic, probably prehistoric wolf, seeking prey.

  Not a vulture. Not a serpent. A wolf.

  God in heaven, what was going on here at the Everols'? What kind of door in time had been opened? How? And by whom?

  Suddenly he snapped out of his slump and sat bolt upright, every nerve tingling again. Someone in the house was screaming. A continuing shriek of sheer, soul-wrenching terror was ripping the stillness to shreds. Like a sound produced by some fiendish machine, it shrilled through the hall outside his door. Somewhere close by, a woman was either frightened out of her mind or suffering some awful physical agony.

  He stumbled to the door and got it open. Lurched into the dark hall. The sound came along the hall from his right. Turning in that direction, he ran in search of its source.

  Whose door it was that he assaulted, he had no way of knowing. All the bedrooms in the house were on this floor, off the one long corridor. The door shuddered open and let him go lurching into a room that should have been dark but was not. At one of its windows blazed the solitary eye he had seen through the glass in his own room. The eye filled the room with an unnatural scarlet light. Then, as he stumbled toward it, tearing his shirt off, the eye suddenly grew larger.

  The window and the wall around the window exploded into the room, spraying him and the floor and the bed—and the screaming woman on the bed—with shattered wood, plaster, and glass.

  The woman still screamed as he dropped his shirt on the floor. Her voice of terror still rocked the room as he thrust his marked bare chest at the intruder. Had it been leaping, it could never have stopped. It would have destroyed him in mid-leap on the way to its screaming victim. But that final assault had not begun. Only its head was inside the room. The rest of that huge gray body was still straining to enter through the shattered wall.

  With its gaping jaws only a foot from the star on his chest, the head stopped its forward motion. Both blazing eyes focused on the pentagram. Or were they seeing that other pentagram, the astral aura he was again creating with a mind that seemed likely to snap from the demands he was placing on it?

  A sound like the rumble of an earthquake welled up in the thing's throat. As though fueled by fury, the eyes blazed more brightly as the creature backed away. Into the room stumbled Everett Everol, barefoot, in pajamas, reaching out for a light switch as
he crossed the threshold.

  The old man skidded to a halt. "Great God!" His outcry at that moment was the only sound in the room. The wolf was retreating through the shattered wall. The woman on the bed had at last stopped screaming.

  Rain and darkness reclaimed the wolf. Everett stumbled to Jeff's side. "God almighty, what was that thing?" This time his voice was only a hoarse whisper.

  Jeff picked up his shirt and turned to the bed. Everett's sister Amanda was the one who lay there. On her back as though she had fallen in a faint, silent now except for a sucking rattle in her throat as she struggled to breathe, she gazed with wide, unblinking eyes at the ceiling.

  "I think you'd better call a doctor, Mr. Everol."

  "That thing I saw... was it a wolf?"

  "I don't know what it was. Something very big, very old. Your sister needs a doctor. Can you phone for one?"

  Everett went to the bed and sat on it, leaning forward to peer at Amanda's face. "Yes, yes, a doctor. We can't get one at this hour."

  "Take her to a hospital, then. She's in shock."

  "A hospital. Yes, of course. Let me get Blanche to help me."

  "I can help, Mr. Everol."

  Everett jerked himself around, violently shaking his head. "No, no, not you. You don't even know who you are. Go back to bed. I can handle this." He stood up, his face a tangle of mixed emotions, his long-fingered hands pawing at his pajama jacket. "Just stay with her while I get my wife, will you? She's awake. The screaming woke her. I'll only be a minute." He hurried from the room.

  Jeff stood there for a moment, gazing down at the woman. She did not move. Her eyes stayed wide open. Turning away, he walked to the gaping hole in the wall where the window had been. That was no flimsy wall. Of seasoned cypress with a thick layer of old plaster on sturdy laths, it would have given a wrecker problems. The wolf-thing had crashed through it as though it were made of paper.

  Hearing voices in the hall, he turned back to the door. Everett came into the room again, followed this time by his wife and her sister Susan. "All right, mister," the old man said. "We can take care of this now."

  "I'd like to help."

  "No, no, we can handle it." He looked at the watch on his wrist. "It's after two o'clock and you have problems of your own, in case you've forgotten. You go on back to your bed."

  "Very well," Jeff said. As a guest here, what else could he say? But as he passed them on his way to the hall, he caught the eye of Everett's sister-in-law, Susan.

  Was it a warning look she was sending him? Or was it a silent plea for help?

  Chapter Eleven

  Physically and emotionally drained, his head pounding in a way that alarmed him, Jeff returned to Jacob's room and stretched out on the bed. Not to sleep. Afraid to sleep.

  You were in a car accident, buster. You still have a bump on your head to prove it. If Amanda needs a doctor—and God knows they'd better get her one—then for a different reason so do you.

  In college he hadn't been a football jock; he'd only helped edit the college magazine.

  Tomorrow, as Susan had suggested, he had better pretend to remember who he was and try to protect this whole house. But what was to prevent those prehistoric predators from seeking prey elsewhere?

  In spite of his determination not to, he fell asleep. When he awoke, the sun was shining through the grime of his marked windows. On his way to the bathroom at the end of the hall, with the razor Everett had told him he could use, he paused by the door he had all but broken down the night before.

  There was no sound from within. After glancing along the hall in both directions, he put a hand on the knob and turned it. He would not go into the room, of course. No way. But if they had taken Amanda to a doctor, her bed would be empty. It had to be empty. After her behavior last night, any doctor worth the cost of a stethoscope would want her in a hospital, under observation.

  The knob would not turn. He tried again with the same result, then stooped to peer at it. In this house the bedroom doors had locks. At least, this one did. And this door was locked.

  Well... that didn't have to mean anything, did it? There was a hole in the wall in there that you could drive a truck through. Maybe they had taken Amanda to a doctor or hospital but wanted the door locked in case the wolf-thing returned. A locked door wouldn't help much if it did, but it might give them some peace of mind, no?

  He shaved. Would have showered but felt he shouldn't take the time. Besides, he would have no clean clothes to put on until he could pick up his money at the Western Union office and buy some somewhere. When he went downstairs, wearing the same tan slacks and lightweight brown jacket he had been wearing when run off the road half a lifetime ago, he found Everett and Blanche and Susan seated in the living room, sharing what must be the morning newspaper. Was it delivered daily to the door, he wondered, or was it left in some box he hadn't noticed out near the gate?

  With a "Good morning" that included them all he, too, sat down. Their only response was a nod as they stared at him. Then the two women looked at Everett, and Everett said, "The doctor came last night when we called him. He gave Amanda some stuff to quiet her nerves and she's to rest until he comes again tomorrow. She's in one of the spare rooms, of course. Her own has to be fixed." He paused. "I knocked on your door to see if you wanted him to look at you, too, but you must've been asleep."

  Quietly Jeff said, "I've remembered who I am."

  Everett and Blanche gazed at him in silence. Little white-haired Susan said brightly, "Oh, that's wonderful! Tell us!

  "My name is Jeffrey Gordon, and this house was my destination when I had my accident. Call me Jeff, please; everyone does. I'd written to you, Mr. Everol, and talked to you on the phone. You had agreed to let me try to help you. I teach at a college in Connecticut, and for some years I've been doing psychic research."

  The expression of astonishment Everett tried for did not quite come off, Jeff thought. Nor did the false gasp that preceded his, "So you're the one! We thought you'd given up on us!"

  "But how can you help us?" Blanche challenged. "You saw what happened here last night. If you remember who you are, you know what happened to Jacob and Ethel. How can anyone help us?"

  "There are things I can try, Mrs. Everol."

  "What things, for heaven's sake?"

  Taking his time about it, Jeff carefully explained what he had done to protect himself in Jacob's room, and how he could try to apply that protection to the whole house. "One thing that puzzles me, though, is that these creatures have attacked only this house. Can any of you think of an explanation for that?"

  "There aren't any others nearby," Everett said.

  "Which is the same as saying the door that's been opened must be somewhere on this property. Perhaps even in the house. The door in time, I mean, because these creatures are certainly from the distant past."

  "I wouldn't know about any door." Everett turned to scowl at his wife's sister. "Susan, why don't you take Mr. Gordon to the kitchen and fix him some breakfast." The scowl shifted to Jeff. "We've had ours, Mr. Gordon, and it's after nine. You must be hungry."

  Susan said brightly, "Of course! Come along, Jeffrey!" Again reminding Jeff of a sandpiper, she trotted ahead of him from the room.

  The kitchen was to be their place for conspiratorial get-togethers, Jeff decided a moment later. With the door shut and two eggs boiling and bread in the toaster, she sat with him at the table. "It came again last night, didn't it?" she said in a low voice. “The vulture. They said no, but I think they're lying. It was the vulture, wasn't it?"

  "No, Susan. It was a wolf."

  "I'd ask Amanda to her face, but Everett won't let me in to see her. She's in the room next to the bathroom. The one Blanche calls her guest room, except we never have any guests."

  Something in the intensity of her stare made Jeff wonder how much he should trust her. Why, really, had she chosen to disobey Everett last evening, right here in this kitchen, and tell him who he was?

  "They di
dn't call any doctor, you know," Susan said accusingly. "That was a lie Everett told you just now. They didn't call anyone—just moved her out of her room into that other one. They say she'll be all right, but I wonder. Ethel didn't get over it when she saw the vulture." The toast popped up in the toaster and she glanced at it but remained seated, in fact leaned even more strenuously across the table. "Everett isn't going to put away another sister of his, I can tell you. He's been living in shame since he put Ethel away, and he'd rather die than have two of them in a crazy house. What he's going to do is keep her here and hope she gets over it. But I don't think she will."

  "Are you suggesting I talk to him?" Jeff asked.

  "Not that. I just want you to know. Don't let on you do know, though."

  "But-—"

  "Uh-uh. If Amanda isn't crazy, she'll get over it, won't she? If she is, what difference will it make whether she's here or where Ethel is? But we should keep an eye on Everett. He needs to be watched."

  Leaving him with that to think about, she jumped up and fluttered about like a bird again, getting his breakfast to the table. Then, after pouring coffee for both of them, she again sat down and leaned toward him. "Everett did call a carpenter this morning to come and fix up Amanda's room. He'll be around today sometime. And Staley Howe called to say he'd be bringing your car around this morning. You'll be glad of that, I know. What will you do about a license plate for it?"

  "I don't know."

  "Well, let me tell you something: The plate is right here in this house. Everett took it off the car, not whoever robbed you. Like I said last evening, he thought the longer you didn't find out who you were, the longer you'd stay here and help us. I mean that's what he said he thought. What I can do now is try to persuade him to give you the plate and say he found it along the roadside where your car was."

  "It would save me a lot of trouble."

  "I'll do it, then." She finished her coffee and stood up. "You eat your breakfast while I go talk to him."