Night Terror

by Chandler McGrew

  “Me?”

  “Well, not everyone takes to men. Marg is different in a different way.”

  “You can say that again,” said Babs, studying Doris’s face. “I’m wearing you out. I’ll go.”

  “No,” said Doris, gripping Babs’s hand with the little strength she possessed. “Stay long enough to pray with me.”

  “Sure.”

  They prayed aloud, both asking for forgiveness for their sins. Requesting eternal salvation in the sweet arms of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, and when they were done Babs found that she did feel better.

  “Thank-you, Doris,” she said, leaning and kissing Doris lightly on the forehead. “We’ll meet again very soon. I’m sure of it now.”

  “Me too.”

  “Give my love to Virgil.”

  The walk home went better than the walk over. The late afternoon sunlight no longer seemed filtered through a silken cloak of gloom. It had a nearly optimistic edge to it. Babs didn’t doubt her coming demise any more than she had when leaving home, but Doris’s unquestioning faith had shored up her own. Whatever was coming, she was ready to face it.

  But stepping into the candlelit house once more, she felt her resolve bending just a little. It was one thing to accept your fate. It was another to move toward it blindly, waiting for a freight train roaring down the karmic path in your direction. She went straight to the cards and read them once again.

  The cards told her that she was not going to be alone when she died. That bothered her. She couldn’t be certain from the reading whether it meant she would have friends close by or that someone else would die with her. The final clue that was revealed in each of the separate readings confused her the most, and troubled her more than all the others. It hinted at something she had been wondering about for years. Dreaming about. And fearing to the very depths of her soul.

  The card showed an unknown woman, linked with death.

  And though the cards played themselves close to the chest, she knew somehow that the woman was the same one that was such a force in Audrey Bock’s reading. But how could that be? She’d never met Audrey before that day and, as far as she knew, they had no mutual acquaintances.

  Her hand kept straying to The Hanged Man, with its incongruous image of the woman peering down into the murky pool. Something in the woman’s face was disconcerting for her. Was the woman seeing things in the future or in the past? Was she searching for salvation or casting a spell of death? Babs sensed that the woman was a focal point, drawing in a twisted web of lines that attached to people and events she couldn’t begin to understand, but people and events that were destined to come together in a terrifying conclusion.

  But was that before or after she was dead?

  Cooder hadn’t made it more than a hundred yards in the hours since the man and woman had passed him. In that time, several other cars and trucks had come along. A couple honked and waved and Cooder studied them as they passed, uncertain as always if he knew the people, if they were strangers being friendly or someone making fun of him. Not that it mattered. He always got around to waving long after a car was out of sight anyway.

  He stood now in the gathering gloom, watching the moon rise over the rear of the old farmhouse. Backlit, the meandering building looked even more menacing, with only two downstairs windows emitting the vaguest of light, like the eyes of a weasel in a dark woods.

  The house seemed to be tugging at him and it stroked his natural curiosity. He studied the ramshackle structure, wondering what it was about the place that touched him so. He’d passed a million old farmhouses in his day. Full of dusty corners they were. Empty rooms a lot of them. Funny, withered-looking sunlight beating its way in through dirty glass, turning into dusty beams in gray spaces filled with falling wallpaper and the smell of wood so dry it clogged the nose. He’d explored them before.

  With one foot on the gravel shoulder, the other balanced in the grass that dropped off to the old galvanized drainage culvert, he angled his head, squinting his eyes. Cool wind soughed through the branches of a thick stand of spruce behind him. Other than the breeze, the early evening was unusually quiet, and in that silence, Cooder felt himself slipping even further away.

  It wasn’t a frightful sensation. He’d experienced it countless times before. He gave himself up to it, knowing immediately what was happening. He’d found his guide inside the house. He was seeing through other eyes. Using the senses of another, smaller creature. He felt curiosity, and hunger. And he felt a terrible, tiny heart thumping fearfully in his chest.

  He was bathed in darkness thicker than night. He reached out with both hands, but his fingers felt weird, feeble and thin. A door, so huge it seemed to disappear overhead, slowly opened.

  A man stood silhouetted in the golden light from the doorway and—as always—it took Cooder a moment to realize that the man wasn’t a giant. He was little. The man passed him and spoke in a soft and tender tone.

  “Come on, Zach. Time to get out for a little.”

  Zach! That was the name! In the corner, a child rose to his feet, shielding his eyes. The giant glanced toward Cooder and froze.

  “Goddamned rat!”

  Cooder saw a boot sole the size of a refrigerator dropping toward him and he scurried around the wall, underneath the child’s bunk and back inside a crevice in the foundation. The man kicked at the wall and the sound was like thunder, the giant boot sole blocking out the light as it struck the wall. Cooder shivered against the stone, the rat’s thick whiskers picking up every vibration like an insect’s antennae. The boot hammered down at his cave opening like a guided missile, over and over, until finally he heard heavy breathing and the kicking had stopped.

  “I’ll get him later, Zach. Don’t worry.”

  Cooder peered shakily out of the hole as the giant turned and walked out, followed by the boy. Cooder focused, forcing the rat to follow, skittering along the baseboard, its whiskers flicking like swords, testing the air, every muscle tensed lest the boy or the man glance over their shoulder. But Cooder knew that the last thing the man would think of was the rat getting up the guts to tag along.

  The giant strode down a long, dimly lit corridor, with thin carpet and concrete block walls. Through a heavy metal door they came to a wooden stair, and the boy took the man’s hand and followed him upward. Cooder felt every quivering clawnail as the rat shimmied up the open treads behind the booted feet. The rat struggled to regain control of its body, terrified by the light, the open air, and the giant man hulking over it, but Cooder wouldn’t let go.

  At the top, rather than a landing, a trapdoor apparatus blocked their path. The man reached up and lifted it easily, still guiding the boy with his hand. He raised the youngster above his head and followed him out, with the rat scurrying after. The shaking animal dropped onto the concrete floor of the large dark room, just as the man flipped a switch turning on a couple of bare bulbs high overhead. But even then, the area was so large that the dusty fixtures gave off only the barest of light. The ceiling disappeared in deep black shadows and, when the rat glanced in his direction, the man had vanished as well. But the boy didn’t move.

  The rat slunk back into the shadows and watched. There was a rustling sound and in a moment the man returned carrying a child’s bike.

  “Here,” he said.

  The boy climbed on and pedaled around the shadowed perimeter of the room. Over and over. In tighter and tighter circles. Faster and faster. Until he was out of breath and the man lifted him off the bike and left with the bike once again. The boy stood in the center of the giant room then, glancing toward the far end of the building, but the rat could not see that far, its eyes were made for small dark spaces.

  “Sorry,” said the man, returning and shepherding the boy back toward the hidden entrance. “We can’t stay up long tonight. Trouble’s coming.”

  Cooder knew the man was right. He could sense the trouble, in the basement and in the forest around his real self. It was coming right now. Right h
ere. He took two steps backward and dropped over the lip of the road, landing on his hands and knees on the steep slope and sliding roughly to the bottom. He buried his face in the tall grass and listened as tires hummed across asphalt and then the exhaust thrummed away around the far curve. And all that time— as the car neared and then drew away—he sensed the danger the way a rabbit senses a coyote lying just outside its burrow. Danger so terrible that the boy and the giant and the rat were completely forgotten in the rumbling of his own heart and the chill sweat that trickled down his brow.

  She’s back.

  The words flashed across his mind a full minute before he understood them. He had the feeling a small child gets, hiding beneath the covers, listening to footsteps in his bedroom in the middle of the night. His mouth went dry and he shivered, sharp pebbles cutting into his palms and his cheeks as he clutched at the slope.

  “Try a little harder!”

  The words echoed down the halls of his memory and he felt the electrical jolt that blasted through his brain and exited out every tortured pore in his body. And he had tried harder, but not the way she meant. There was nothing he could do to stop the pain. He could not please the voice in the darkness. In fact, he knew if he did please it, then he would surely die.

  And now she was back. The witch that had been hiding in the back of his mind, in the deep black hole of his memory all this time, had returned. Just like he always knew she would. When a car shot past in a whirr of tires and rumbling exhaust, headlights disappearing around the far bend, it was like being shot at and missed. But she was gone now and the woods were silent as death once again. Cooder’s heart took a long moment in slowing, his chest still pounding for air, but the air itself seemed fouled by the auto’s passage.

  “She’s back,” he whispered, spitting grit out onto the grass.

  38

  VIRGIL LEANED AGAINST THE HEADBOARD and stared

  blankly at the TV. He had no idea what the program was. The volume was turned off, but the flickering screen seemed to soothe Doris whenever she awakened, as she did often now. Every few minutes she would start, her eyes would pop open, and she would be as disoriented as a newly hatched duckling.

  Virgil knew the end was near. She’d be lucky to make it through the week. He couldn’t believe how fast she’d sunk in only a couple of days. She felt as light as a feather against him. Grasping her tiny wrist in his palm, bone was all he could feel.

  “Virg?” Her voice sounded like a whisper, but he didn’t think that she meant it to.

  “Yes?”

  She slipped her hand out of his and patted his thigh. “Are you all right?”

  He was glad that she was leaning back against his chest and couldn’t see his eyes. “Am I all right?”

  She nodded weakly. “You don’t look good.”

  “Yeah, sure, honey. I’m okay.”

  “I don’t have the strength to argue.”

  “I don’t want to argue.”

  “Then answer me true.”

  “All right.”

  “What are you going to do when I’m gone?”

  How could he answer that? Tell her he was going to slip his service pistol out of his holster, lie down beside her, slide the barrel between his teeth until he could feel it biting into the roof of his mouth, pull the trigger, and blow his brains all over the inlaid headboard? “Try to go on.”

  “You promised.”

  “I don’t know if I can live without you.”

  “We’ll be together again soon.”

  “I want to be together now.”

  He couldn’t tell if she was sighing or just trying to catch her breath.

  “Promise me you won’t do anything to yourself. You have unfinished business here.”

  “What business?”

  “You didn’t promise.”

  “What business?”

  “Those boys, for one thing.”

  “Someone else can work on the case.” That was the closest he’d ever come to admitting to Doris what he intended to do.

  “Why did you go out to the Bocks’ on Saturday?” she rasped.

  “Who told you about that?”

  She turned her head to him and smiled. He struggled to imagine her old face over this new one. “I still have my informants,” she said, coughing into her hand.

  He sighed. “Audrey thought she saw a Peeping Tom.”

  “Oh, my Lord. Did you find out who it was?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know if there really was one.”

  But he didn’t believe that anymore. He believed Audrey. She was too sure. And Richard backed her story. But it was the trail that had shaken Virgil, because although he had been denying it to himself, he could tell from experience it was man-made. Critters didn’t make trails like that. They went from point a to point b in a beeline, or at least the straightest path they could manage.

  “I’m worried about Babs,” said Doris.

  “Why in the world are you worried about her?”

  “She thinks she’s going to die today, you know.”

  “What? Why on earth would she think that?”

  “Babs knows things.”

  He sighed loud enough for her to hear and she dropped it and skipped to another fretful thought.

  “I’m worried about the Bock girl too.”

  “I’ll have one of the boys drive out that way every night,” he said, kissing her on the forehead.

  She tried to twist in his arms but didn’t have the strength. He had no idea what this conversation was costing her, but her breathing was as labored as though she were running a marathon. “So you are planning something.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “We won’t be together if you do.”

  The finality in her frail voice sent razors up his spine. She sounded so certain.

  “Virgil, if you hurt yourself, you won’t get to the other side. At least not to where I’m waiting. Do you want to leave me there by myself forever?”

  “No.”

  “Then promise.”

  “I promise.”

  “You’ve never broken a promise to me in your life.”

  “I promise.”

  “Good.”

  She dropped off to sleep again, and Virgil took that respite to wipe his cheeks and nose with the back of his sleeve. He’d never broken a promise to her.

  Only he didn’t think he could keep this one.

  39

  BABS SIPPED HER TEA and stared at the tarot deck on the table in front of her.

  She’d spent the day organizing the house. Every dish was washed, dried, and put away. Every linen was ironed and folded and stashed in the cedar chest. Every item of her clothing was clean as it had been the day she bought it, and hanging in the closet or folded in the dresser drawers. The carpet in every room was vacuumed, the last bag taken out of the machine, placed in the garbage, the garbage emptied into the can on the front porch awaiting pickup day. After that she’d balanced her checkbook, paid all her bills, and wrote a simple here’s-what-I-want will. It sat in a plain white envelope on the table beside her tarot cards.

  She prayed heavily, confessing her sins to every deity she could think of, and asking forgiveness. She knew that she should probably be choosing a winner, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. Regardless of what the preacher or Doris thought, the deities were just going to have to decide who got her when she got there. But at least if she was going to meet her Maker, Babs St. Clair was going to glory with a clean slate in every other way.

  One thing that bothered her was the suddenness that the tarot foretold. That was the only way she could read the cards. If she had laid them out for anyone else she would have excused herself calmly and called all her friends over to restrain the person before explaining the significance of her interpretation. Her best reading of the cards was that she was going to rise up to heaven like one of the saints.

  The reading made no sense and, if it had been only the one time
, she might have been able to dismiss it as a joke of the fates or a misshuffle on her own part.

  But not four times.

  So now she sat on the sofa, composing herself, practicing meditation, and awaiting whatever ending destiny decreed for her. She was perfectly at peace now. She knew that no matter what came, she could face it, knowing that it was only a brief instant in the scheme of things, and in the blink of an eye she would achieve eternal peace.

  She was just emerging from the depths of her meditation when the doorbell rang.

  Audrey sat in the old vinyl lawn chair, staring across the dark backyard at her garden. The drone of the television in the living room barely filtered through the screen door. Crickets chirred in the woods and somewhere in the distance an owl hooted. The occasional bat swooped across the moon, gorging on the night.

  Ever since she’d freed herself of the dulling effects of the Halcion, she had been trying to reach out and contact Zach, testing her so-called talent. Once or twice over the past two days she had thought she had something, but then the feeling drifted away like smoke. The images she and Cates had dredged up were haunting her as well. She sensed deeper truths buried beneath the images, just out of reach, and she wanted desperately to move on, to work her way through them, to get better. And if Cates was right about her talent, then—regardless of what he said—she was certain she had been in touch with Zach. He was alive somewhere and he needed her.

  The key to both problems lay in her mind, and the only way she knew to get to the answer was hypnosis. She leaned back on the chaise longue and closed her eyes, starting the sequence of counts that took her into a self-hypnotic state. She relaxed first her toes, then her ankles, her calves, her thighs, right up to her neck and head. She floated in a universe of nonbeing, her senses dulled by lack of input, until she was only a thought. She felt herself being pulled away and she realized that the tug was wrenching her, not deeper into her mind, but out of it. To some other place.

  The gloom around her formed itself slowly into a windowless room and light was coming from beneath a door. A hand reached out in front of her eyes—as though they were her own eyes, only smaller—and opened the door. At that moment she knew with every fiber of her being that she was not dreaming, not hallucinating. She was inside Zach’s head. She sensed him the way she had sensed him every time he was with her. The way she had discerned his restlessness in the night. The way she had experienced his pain the time he cut himself on a kitchen knife. She was telepathically feeling what Zach felt, seeing what he saw. He was alive! He was alive and he needed her. Her breathing quickened and she sat up stiff-backed in the chair.