The drive seemed inordinately long to her. The roadside scenery, mostly trees, was lost to the shapeless gloom of lampless roads. It was a little surreal, actually, how featureless Dingmans Turnpike was just then, and then Maple Street and then Oak Street, both of which should have had the faint orange glow of streetlamps and porch lights, but didn’t. Beyond the curbs and slivers of sidewalks, the night had engulfed everything. Partial outlines of homes, parked cars, and signs were a blur, though she didn’t think Sheriff Cole was driving so very fast. It made her feel isolated, near and yet not close enough to landmarks of familiarity and civilization. It was as if they were driving down phantom streets disconnected from reality and the rest of Zarephath. She sucked in a breath, convinced that they were getting farther and farther away from Cicely’s house. They would end up lost on narrow ribbons of road that cut a path through nightmare lands of total shadow. When they finally ran out of gas, the unseen, unformed things with teeth would swarm out of the void around them and….
She shivered. Were they still so far from Cicely’s house? Her instincts told her they should have been just about there, but it was hard to tell. She was about to turn away from the window and ask the sheriff when Cicely popped into view; the headlights caught her in their glare and then let her fall away, back into the dark.
“Wait! Stop the car!”
“Oh, come on—”
“It’s her!”
“Are you sure?”
“Please, back up. I just saw her.”
Grumbling, Sheriff Cole put the car in reverse and slowly backed the car up, searching the sidewalk for what Kari had seen. Even at that creeping pace, it was hard to make out anything recognizable. The moon had abandoned that stretch of road, and faint silhouettes served as the only suggestion that anything at all existed beyond the bounds of the car.
Suddenly, Cicely Robinson came into view again. She was standing on the side of the road in the near–pitch-dark. She looked disoriented, unsure which way to go, and so was shuffling a few feet in one direction before pausing, turning, and shuffling back the way she’d come.
“Cicely!” Kari cried through the window. She pounded on it to get the woman’s attention. “Cicely!”
Sheriff Cole put the car in park and got out. Cicely only then seemed to notice them. She looked flustered as the sheriff approached her, explained something Kari couldn’t quite catch, and then opened Kari’s door. Kari slid over to let Cicely in.
“Oh my God! Cicely, are you okay? Why were you wandering around out here in the dark?”
“Reggie,” Cicely murmured. “He was at the house.”
“Jesus,” Kari said as Sheriff Cole got back in the car.
“You ladies okay?” he asked, pulling away from the curb. “Mrs. Robinson? You all right?”
“Ms.,” Cicely corrected him, still dazed. “I’m all right. I had to get out of the house.”
“What happened?” Kari gently touched her friend’s arm.
Cicely shivered under Kari’s touch. “Well, I was in my kitchen, making a cup of tea—decaf, mind you, to relax me so I could go to sleep. I haven’t been sleeping well, as you know.” She smoothed the wrinkles on her pants nervously. “I thought I heard a noise upstairs. Well, maybe heard isn’t right. I thought there was something wrong with the electricity. There was kind of an electrical hum coming from upstairs, do you know what I mean? The kind that makes those little hairs stand up and gives you a slight headache?”
“I know what you mean,” Kari said.
“I figured maybe I left something on,” Cicely continued. “The TV in the bedroom, most likely. It makes this sort of hum when it’s in sleep mode. So I didn’t think much about going upstairs to turn it off. But it wasn’t the TV.”
She hugged herself and shivered again. “I should have known it wasn’t the TV.”
Kari felt a pang of guilt in anticipation. Cicely was a good woman, a smart woman. She didn’t deserve whatever she was remembering behind those eyes.
“I climbed the stairs,” Cicely went on, “and saw a light on under my bedroom door, a sort of flickering bluish-green light. The hum was stronger on the second floor, but it…I know this sounds weird, but it distorted other sounds. Like my footsteps on the stairs or my own voice—it was like the hum ate into them, dampened them or something.
“I tiptoed over to the door and listened from the other side. I was afraid in the same way I used to be afraid of him. I was scared to open my own bedroom door. There were strange noises, though, coming from inside the bedroom. The hum didn’t just dampen those noises, but seemed to stretch and snap them. They sounded almost like words, if random syllables were missing….It’s hard to explain. There’s a flow to normal sound in this world, and this just wasn’t normal sound. It was broken. A jumble of pieces of sound in the wrong order.” Cicely looked frustrated. “I don’t know how to make you both understand, but those broken, unnatural sounds got inside me. They pulled at me, and I found myself opening the bedroom door even though my brain and my hands didn’t want to. My eyes didn’t want to see whatever was on the other side. My legs wanted to run, and I couldn’t do anything but move through the door toward the sound. And that’s when I saw Reggie.”
Tears spilled down her cheeks. “That bastard was lying on the bed—my bed. Just lying there like he owned the bedroom and everything in it. He wasn’t watching TV. That was off. The screen was black. But he was watching the wall above it.” Her eyes grew big and she sank as far back as she could into the patrol-car seats. “It was like there was a big, rectangular screen on the wall—not just on it, but through it. It was a window in the world, looking out on a place the good Lord above had no part in creating. When I looked, I could see a sky with no stars, and a raging ocean, and a tall tower…then there was a static glitch—that’s what it looked like—and then the scene was replaced by faces, melting and stretching and filling the space, except I don’t think they were faces. I think they were masks. And they were screaming.”
“Cicely—” Kari began. The old woman was rambling, lost behind the trauma of what she had just experienced, and she wasn’t making a whole lot of sense.
Cicely held up her hand. “Look, I know how it sounds. But it happened just like I’m telling you. I know what I saw.”
“Okay.” Kari nodded. “What happened next?”
“Well, when I could finally turn away from those terrible shrieking faces and back to Reggie, he was staring at me. Lord, he was frightening. His hands were covering his eyes and blood was streaming from beneath his palms, but there were eyes on the backs of his hands, and those were the eyes that were watching me. And his mouth moved, but only those broken sounds came out.
“I screamed, sugar. Just like those shrieking masks inside the wall, I screamed and the sound was broken too. In the next second, Reggie was standing in front of me, face streaked with blood, and he had no eyes. It was like the lids had fused closed or…or like scar tissue had grown over where his eyes used to be. And then that spot split open—the skin just split—and it became a second mouth. He talked to me with both mouths. Both mouths moved and those broken-sound words came out, but I could understand. He said the most awful things. Told me seven years’ worth of unspeakable things he was going to do to me. His hands were gripping my shoulders so tight….” She slid the shoulder of her pink sweater down and lifted the short sleeve of her blouse. Finger-shaped bruises mottled her skin. Her tears dripped onto the wounds and she sniffed, then pulled her sweater back up.
“I brought my knee up into his man parts. I’m not proud of that, sugar, but sometimes a woman’s got to get fierce. So I kneed him and my knee sank into something cold and sort of like jelly. I panicked for a second, but it was evidently enough to make him let go of me and I ran, down the stairs and out of the house and into…this.” She waved at the dark outside the car window. “I kept running until my chest hurt and then I walked a
nd walked…and I don’t think I got more than a house or two away from my own. How—how is that even possible?”
“I don’t know, hon,” Kari murmured. “I don’t know.” She didn’t think it was wise to mention, given Cicely’s state of mind, that she also would have sworn she’d seen the old woman in the diner, at their usual booth, and that something in the ladies’ room had recognized Cicely’s name. That would have been around the same time that Cicely was lost in the dark.
An uneasy silence settled on the patrol car as each thought about what Cicely had said. Cicely finally broke it by asking, “Where are we going?”
“Heritage Center, ma’am. We’re meeting the occult expert, Kathy Ryan, and Bill Grainger and some of the other townspeople to discuss our next move.”
“And what is our next move, Sheriff?”
Sheriff Cole cleared his throat. “I suppose that’ll be up to Ms. Ryan.”
Cicely said something then that neither Cole nor Kari could quite make out.
“Beg your pardon, ma’am?”
Cicely looked confused for a moment, perhaps not realizing she had spoken out loud. Then she said, “I…it was something Reggie said, before I ran. Na-mor-graph-un. Va-ur-med-sef. I don’t know what it means.”
“We’ll tell Ms. Ryan. Maybe she’ll know. Maybe it can help,” Kari said. She wasn’t so sure, though, that anyone or anything was really going to help them survive what was happening.
In the quiet gloom of the patrol car, Kari thought the others felt the same.
Chapter 13
When Kathy, Bill, and Toby arrived at the Kilmeister residence, they immediately saw that the garage door was open and the interior was illuminated by a faint bluish-green glow. The garage was a detached kind at the end of a long driveway, wide enough for two cars but used instead as some kind of workshop. Kathy could see rows of carpentry tools hanging neatly on pegs along the walls. Paint cans, tucked into the front corners, stood half-covered by drop cloths. An obviously new table saw stood in the center, flanked to the left by a rough-plank sawhorse and a folding chair tucked under a board serving as some kind of counter, and to the right by a rough workbench with a wooden box on it. More drop cloths were heaped in untidy piles toward the back of the garage.
The faint glow from within was the only light on the property, or in fact, anywhere in the neighborhood, which did not escape Kathy’s notice. The Kilmeisters’ house blended into the night, a vague silhouette against the sky, as did the other houses on the street. As they got out of the car, Kathy found it hard to shake the idea that the shadows were too thick, too heavy around the houses, and most certainly, not empty.
“So, the garage, then?” Bill started for the glow and Toby grabbed his arm. Seeing Bill’s expression, he quickly let go.
“Look, I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Toby said. “I’ve seen that kind of light before—out in the woods. Before the children came.”
Bill and Kathy exchanged glances. Then Bill said, “I’d guess that’s all the more reason to go check it out.”
“Why?” Toby regarded Bill as if the latter had suggested using one of those garage tools to dig an errant eyelash out of one’s eye.
Bill gave him an impatient look. “If that glow means something from behind the Door is in that garage, be it an object we might be able to use or a critter we might be able to kill, then we best get on that before either does any harm to the Kilmeisters.”
Toby didn’t seem to have an answer. Bill turned and began walking again, with Kathy close at his side. Toby followed reluctantly behind.
The garage was surprisingly deep, more like the size of a large boathouse than a garage, and Kathy wondered briefly if the Kilmeisters had remodeled it to make it bigger. It was a pale gray, concrete in most places, organized with assorted odds and ends in jars and on shelves and pegs, though decaying into chaos toward the center of the space. As they got closer, Kathy could see that the glow was coming from the box on the workbench. It occasionally flickered, casting erratic shapes of light and shadow all over the garage. The box itself was a flimsy-looking thing, bowing along one of the sides, with a cheap lock on the front. It—or more likely, whatever was inside it—was giving off the same kind of nearly soundless hum that the Door did, and as she got near it, she felt the dull beginnings of a headache.
“Oh shit,” Toby suddenly exclaimed. Bill walked over to where Toby was standing by the drop cloths at the back of the garage, looked down, and sighed.
“Jesus,” Bill said. “Kathy, you better come over here.”
With a reluctant glance back at the box, Kathy joined the men at the back of the garage. It was obvious, once she cleared the sawhorse and table saw, that the drop cloths were draped over two bodies, a male and a female, facedown. What Kathy had mistaken for paint stains on the canvas cloths was actually dried blood, seeping up from underneath in irregular patches. The body closest to them, the male, appeared to have tried to claw his way out from under the cloth covering him from the neck down. The head was half-turned on its cheek, and Kathy could see one eye, wide and glazed in death, rolled back in its head. The mouth hung open in a crooked scream, the bottom jaw shifted too far to the left for any natural position, even in death. Most of the teeth were missing, and given the sticky pool of blood under the right eye, Kathy assumed there was some severe damage there too. Her gaze glided along the shape of the body and although the drop cloth was thick and bunched in some places, it struck her that the outlines indicated bones that were not just broken, but shoved into impossible contortions.
The woman behind him had fared no better, apparently. Her clotted hair covered her downturned face entirely. The contours of her body under her makeshift death shroud ended somewhere beneath the waist. There, the cloth was completely deflated and soaked through.
“Mr. and Mrs. Kilmeister, I assume?” Kathy said.
Bill nodded, whistling low. “I’ve known Grant and Flora for decades. Sent me a card when my grandson made the police force. She used to make me chicken and rice soup. Good people. Something sure made a mess of them.”
“Something that might still be here,” Toby pointed out, and Bill glared at him.
“Bill, can you turn them over? Just so we can assess the damage?”
He nodded, grabbing a pair of rubber work gloves off the crude counter and sliding them on. He took a deep breath and threw back Grant Kilmeister’s drop cloth.
The three of them collectively shrank away from the bodies. Something certainly had made a mess of them. Although shirtless, Grant still wore jeans and a single sock, but those were a mess; his bottom half had been folded backward so the backs of his knees cupped his shoulder blades. One foot had been crushed to a pulpy mess that dangled just below his ear. The sock was still hanging onto the other, but from the shape and the stains, there was not likely to be much of a foot in there. As she took in the extent of Grant’s injuries, Kathy saw that pretty much all of the straight lines of his body were bent in one way or another, the jagged bones that had once kept them rigid now rising up out of the flesh like the tips of icebergs. Bill, crouching near the body, looked up at Kathy, then took Grant by the shoulder and rolled him over.
His jaw was definitely broken, tearing clear through the lips and cheek on that side. What few teeth were left in his head were visible through the rip in his cheek. The rest of the skin on the right half of his face was stringy, almost plastic-looking, as if held close to extreme heat. Where his eye should have been was a putty-like glob of skin, tinged with swirls of blood. A jungle of broken ribs distorted and bruised the front of his torso. His entire body was frostbite-rigid, a captured moment of death, though Kathy couldn’t begin to imagine what had caused so much damage leading up to it.
“You okay?” Bill asked her.
“I’m fine. Let’s get a look at her.”
Bill pulled back Flora’s drop cloth.
“Fuck,” Toby whispered. “What did that to her?”
Flora too was topless, but her torso faced upward, making the nasty, bruised twist of her neck so much more horrific as it disappeared beneath the hair on the back of head. Both of her arms below the elbows had begun to change, as had the lower half of her body. A mottled, leathery hide had begun to overtake her soft, fair skin, arrested in its climb upward likely by her death. The hide still quivered, though, frustrated and dying alien flesh bound to dead meat. Within that alien hide, new body parts had begun to form.
Beneath Flora’s navel, a mouth had begun to take shape in the leathery skin. It hung slack-jawed against where her pubic bone should have been. Most of the area below that was a coil of slimy, fibrous tubes that could have been entrails or tentacles. Kathy didn’t want to get close enough to find out. She and the other two flinched when the end of one of those coils snapped at the air above it, a lazy snake woken from the cozy dark beneath the drop cloth.
Bill turned Flora over and recoiled in disgust. Her face was missing entirely. The split down the middle of that blank plane of leathery skin emitted a huff of air that smelled like rancid meat. Something like a long tongue poked through and then came to rest on what used to be Flora’s chin.
Bill stood, peeling off the gloves and tossing them on the floor next to the bodies. “Now what?”
Kathy turned back to the box on the workbench. She had no doubt that the thing inside it was the cause of the Kilmeisters’ death, and the worst thing for the town would be to run the risk of that box getting lost or ending up in the wrong hands. Still, if it was capable of such visceral and brutal violence and worse, how would they transport it and where would they keep it?
“We have to take that box,” she said flatly.
The men turned to the humming, glowing thing. It was vibrating slightly. If Kathy hadn’t known better, she would have thought it was giggling with glee.
Behind the Door Page 16
