“Jesus!” Bud grabbed him roughly and shoved him forward. “Then go look for yourself, damnit! The friggin wall has grown!”
He stopped himself after a dozen running steps. From here the stone looked black and shining, as if muddy water were trickling off its jagged top. Then he felt a rumbling beneath his feet and blinked his astonishment as the wall stretched even higher.
It was no illusion; the wall was growing.
“Jesus,” Bud whispered beside him. “Jesus.”
He put a fist lightly to his mouth while he tried to think, dropping the hand to rub at his chest thoughtfully while he returned to the house and leaned against it.
“What is it?” Bud asked, unable to look away from the wall.
Trapped, Doug thought; we’re being caged in.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But take a look at this while you’re at it.”
Bud stared at the place where Doug’s hand rested, frowned, and shook his head. “I don’t see anything.”
“Look again,” he insisted. “Look down this side, especially at the blocks, and where they join the windows.”
Bud balked. “Hey, Doug, what’s going on? We got a . . . a thing out there, some kind of wall that’s growing like a plant, and you want me to . . .” He stopped when he saw Doug’s expression, shrugged resignedly, and stopped to examine the grey stone blocks, the juncture at the sills, and window frames as high as he could see. His hands quivered the entire time, and with every step he glanced over his shoulder at the glistening black now rising high enough to block all but the tops of the trees on the other side of the road.
“There are no seams,” Doug said flatly.
“What?”
“Seams,” he repeated fiercely. “There are no seams there, goddamnit!”
Bud jumped, and quickly reexamined the stone— where mortar should have joined two large blocks just under the center window there was only seamless stone. He looked at Doug, looked back and checked again, this time bending to peer under the sill’s overhang. His hand rested against the frame to balance him, and it was several seconds later that he looked up in amazement.
“Doug.”
“Yeah.”
“Doug, that’s not wood, that’s stone.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“But that’s impossible, right? I mean, even for the old days, that’s not right.”
Doug nodded shortly, then turned on his heel and started for the wall. He broke into a sudden run and didn’t stop until he had to fling out his hands to prevent himself from crashing headlong into it.
It moved.
He leapt backward, spun around, and ran a few steps toward the house, then spun again and charged the wall. He jumped, and just managed to get a grip on the tooth-like projections that had sprouted along the top.
It rippled, it moved, and it tossed him to the ground.
No, he thought; no.
Bud knelt beside him, helping him to sit up. “It’s a trick, I guess,” he said, his calm desperate. “Right, Doug? Some kind of trick. Hydraulics underground, that kind of thing. A shaft the wall comes up when someone inside presses a button.” Doug lurched to his feet. “What I can’t figure, though, is what they did to the gate. Unless the wall’s hollowed out over there, see, and the gate just slides in.” He brushed manically at Doug’s shirt. “A trick. Hell of a neat one, too. Scared the shit outta me.”
Doug heard the man’s voice, but he didn’t hear the words. Instead, he began walking stiffly toward the back lawn, Bud babbling at his side, almost skipping once to keep up as Doug moved more quickly.
Once on top of the first rise, he took a minute to gaze at the far corner beyond which lay his home, then he turned and faced Winterrest.
“Hey,” Bud said, puffing up to join him, “I think I oughta go get Ollie, y’know? I mean, this is really somethin she oughta see, don’t you think? She likes stuff like this. She really does. She really oughta see . . . Doug, what the hell are you looking at?”
“There,” he said with a jerk of his head.
Above them, the overcast had begun to strip away from itself, streams of languid dead white drifting out of the black, specters of fog dancing alone with the wind. The lanterns on the tent swayed, the lights in the windows turned amber and brightened.
“There,” he whispered to himself. “There.”
Knowing now what his examination had showed him, the building altered itself to accommodate his new perspective: rather than seeing an extraordinarily skilled stonemason’s perfect cut and fit, he saw Winterrest as a single block, one massive stone out of which had been carved windows and doors; a sculptor’s masterpiece.
Or one of Piper’s demons.
Sitter’s witches.
His first thought was the most terrifying, and it tore at his throat like a burr: it’s alive.
“Now that’s crazy, man,” Bud said as he started back down the slope. “You’ve got to be kidding. It’s hydraulics, I told you. Man, you must’ve gotten some of Ollie’s stuff, right? Or you got some of your own.”
Doug realized he had spoken aloud, knew it was crazy, and knew that if Winterrest wasn’t alive, then there was something in there that was.
“Hey,” Bud called, “why the hell did somebody leave this out, huh? It’s gonna get ruined, for god’s sake.”
Doug rubbed his face hard with both hands, feeling relief as the blood rushed to his skin. A startled look around at Bud’s yell, and he saw Yardley trotting over to a dark form far to the left, where the rise sank and met the flat of the lawn. He took a step forward, and saw a tall chair sitting on the grass, ornate and massive as a throne, with lion’s paw feet and armrests that scrolled under toward thin carved panels. Bud was running now, shaking his head at the stupidity of people who didn’t know what they were doing, and Doug watched numbly.
That chair hadn’t been there before.
He would have seen it; Liz would have seen it.
And it hadn’t been there when he and Bud had climbed up here to look at the house.
Bud reached it, walked around it, threw his hands in the air and kicked at the ground. “Can you believe it, Doug?” he shouted. “I mean, can you just believe it? Jesus, this thing here is worth a fortune!”
Doug looked at the house.
“My god!” Bud exclaimed incredulously.
He looked at the chair.
“Jesus!”
“Bud, no!” he yelled.
Bud ran a loving hand over the chair’s outline, purring to it, grinning at it, finally turning with a flourish and dropping onto the seat. He continued to caress the armrests until he paused, looked at his hand and looked more closely at the chair.
“Hey, Doug,” he said, clearly puzzled. “You know something? This thing’s made of stone.”
“Bud, no!” he screamed.
He broke into a frantic shambling run, angling toward Yardley and waving his arms frantically. Bud only looked up, however, waved back, and was about to stand when his face suddenly flushed, and contorted with pain. The chair’s armrests were unscrolling, winding upward, inward, snaring his hands in a loop that pushed them toward his chest. He shrieked as his wrists snapped like dry twigs. Doug yelled helplessly, and the chair’s high, triptych top curved outward, downward, the center steeple aiming for the middle of Bud’s head.
He was thrashing now, and screaming, pleading shrilly for help, for God or Doug to save him; but Doug was slipping on the damp grass, going down on one knee, propelling himself forward, going down again while the chair began to rock, and to sink into the ground.
The steeple reached the top of Bud’s skull, and pierced it; the flanking peaks pressed against each cheek, and crushed them; his arms were folded over his ribs, and shattered them.
Doug heard the screams gurgling and sputtering into silence, saw the thin trace of blood that split from the bridge of the man’s nose. Then he fell a third time, less than five feet from the chair.
He couldn’t get up. His legs
would not hold him, his eyes would not look away as the chair quivered and rumbled and Bud stared at him, eyes red and bleeding, stared at him as the chair sank below the surface.
Staring at him.
Begging.
Until a banner of fog floated out of the black and covered the hole.
Doug threw up.
There was no stopping the violent contractions, the pockets of warm acid that boiled into his throat. He crawled away from the spot where Bud had vanished, coughed, and lost all he had drunk since arriving at the party. Tears welled and slipped over and drenched his cheeks; he crawled again, shaking his head like an animal in pain, rolling onto his back at last and staring at the sky too dark for the hour. He could feel his mind scrambling for cover, for protection against the insanity he had just witnessed, could feel his heels thumping the ground as if snapping out the last vestiges of an epileptic fit, or a violent dying. Strips of fog continued to separate from the overcast; mist tickled at his face. His mouth opened to swallow the moisture, and swallow the air that had been punched from his lungs.
Not true, he thought; not true, not true.
An hallucinogen in the drinks, or in the food. Of course it was. It had to be.
But years ago it seemed he had touched the front wall and it had moved, and he had just tried to climb over it and it had moved, and Bud had been seduced by a wood-stone chair and had been crushed to death and dragged into the ground. That had not been his imagination; he knew it, just as he knew now that Winterrest was not populated by vengeful demons or used as a witches’ haven; there were no ghosts that haunted or spirits that possessed; he didn’t know how yet, and didn’t know why, but Piper had been closer than he knew when he’d said the place was cursed.
He dried his face with a jacket sleeve and pushed himself to his hands and knees. A sobbing gulp of air cleared his head, and he looked out over the lawn into the windows of the house.
Parrish would know.
Parrish knew it all, knew everything, and had known it from the beginning.
And Doug suspected that the beginning was at least three hundred years ago.
Swaying to his feet, he staggered across the grass, not looking back, not wanting to see where Bud had died.
Winterrest welcomes you: my god, a literal invitation?
we don’t want it to think we’re clumsy bulls in a china shop: not a slip of the tongue, and not a reference to the men supposedly interested in buying the place.
It.
The house.
Winterrest.
He reached the tent and fell against one of the poles, the lantern above banging softly against the wood. Staring at the doorway, seeing the townsfolk crossing from one room to another, he wondered if some of them knew, and if so, how could they stay so goddamned calm?
His breath came slowly, came loudly, a wondering for a moment why Bud had to die? Then his eyes opened wide: Casey? Bernie Hallman? Jesus, Piper’s Dumpling?
He couldn’t think.
Jesus, he couldn’t think!
None of this was logical, none of it rational; and he could not resist the ghastly feeling that it all made perfect sense, or would as soon as Parrish told him what the hell was going on.
He slipped a hand wearily over his eyes, dragging moisture from his brow, and looked at the house again. A dark figure stood in the doorway, backlighted in dickering gold. Using the pole for balance, he straightened, and gnawed briefly at his upper lip when Eban Parrish stepped outside and began walking toward him.
A faint rumbling like thunder, and Doug looked up and around the tent’s fringe.
It was like peering into a caldron filled with black smoke: the clouds rolled, wove, dove into themselves, every so often casting forked tongues of dull white into the wind that curled them around the chimney pots on the roof, danced them around the corners of the house.
A faint rumbling like thunder, or an animal’s growl lodged in its throat.
He pulled his gaze away to avoid a sweep of vertigo, and watched as Parrish approached. The man walked past him calmly until he was standing under the tent, a long table between them.
“Who are you?” Doug asked, his voice rasping.
Parrish, in his three-piece suit, his hair darkly plastered down on his skull, smiled and opened his hands. “I am who you see.”
He shook his head. “Bud,” he said. “Bud Yardley.”
Parrish—voice bubbling, inhaling like a man taking a breath before a dive—allowed him a smile at the corner of his mouth.
“I see.”
“Well, I don’t, damnit.”
Parrish inhaled, hissing. A shadow in spite of the lanterns above them.
“Shall I begin at the beginning?”
Doug clung to the pole to keep his legs from collapsing.
“But you know the beginning, don’t you, Mr. Muir. At least, you know some of it.”
He nodded. “The stonemason—”
“Ah yes,” Parrish said, drawing out the word and nodding to himself. “Yes. He was a bright man in many ways. Not so bright, however, when he refused to listen to his neighbors. They warned him, you know. They told him to stay away from this place, to move on, it made no difference in which direction. But he had already been driven from one home, and he was not about to be driven from yet another. Poor man, he did not believe in curses, he did not believe that life is not something restricted to flesh and bone.”
“You talk,” Doug sneered weakly, “as if you had been there.”
“Patience, Mr. Muir. Patience.”
The canvas slapped the air; the tent fringe writhed. He sagged against the pole again, and shook his head violently to clear it of Bud’s image, Bud’s pleading staring eyes.
“He believed,” Parrish said softly, “in the rightness of his life. He truly believed that nothing would ever harm him again if only he believed hard enough, and worked hard enough. A splendid man he was, no matter how misguided. He took the stone for his house from this very field. He loved it, the stone; for a while he was so frantic to give his family shelter that he loved the stone. It was his savior, Mr. Muir. It soon became his god.”
Doug felt the demand rise: who the hell are you?; and he knew the answer: patience, patience.
Parrish glanced idly toward the house, then clasped his hands behind his back. Rocked once on his heels.
The tent billowed and groaned softly.
“It came a time, Mr. Muir, when the stonemason would not permit anyone but himself to work on the house, or even to quarry the stone and block it. He was obsessed. He was fighting, you see, for his life on many different levels, and each night before he retired he would walk around the house and give each block he had carved his personal blessing. For him it was not blasphemous, because he did not believe in God.”
A sad shake of his head.
“He should have, you know. He really should have. For, a belief in God would have taught him, at the very least, that there are other forces in this world besides the forces of good. Any god would have done the job, and had he believed, he would have believed in places like this.
“He would have believed, you see, that there is life that blossoms, and life that is static; it is the way of things. He would have realized, in time, that his care had . . . shall we say altered the material he worked with?
“He would have seen the development of life, Mr. Muir. He would have felt the changes in the stone. He would have felt, and he would have believed.”
“Clap if you believe in fairies,” Doug said bitterly.
“If you like, Mr. Muir, if you like.”
Doug’s left hand wiped at the foul taste that had settled on his lips. An urge to spit became a swallow instead. “The stone . . . is alive,” he said.
Parrish lifted an eyebrow: if you like.
“And this place is cursed.”
“Cursed, damned, an oversight of Creation—call it what you will, Mr. Muir, but it exists. You know it exists. Life in places like this is static, and pat
ient, waiting for the right person to feed it, and to let it grow.”
“Who are you, damnit!”
Parrish winked. “The man’s name was Parrish. Eban Parrish.”
Doug had seen too much; it was impossible not to believe.
“You?”
Parrish surprised him again. “No, Mr. Muir. The name I have is only a convenience, nothing more. I am—”
He raised a hand, an old hand, over his head, curled it into a fist and smiled again. Then the hand descended sharply, smashing against the table and splintering the wood. The table collapsed, plates and cups and silverware clattering and shattering onto the grass.
When he held the hand up again, there was not even a bruise.
“I am Winterrest, Mr. Muir.”
If it grows, Doug thought, it demands to survive. And to survive it needs contact with the creatures around it. In this case, people.
Parrish nodded: very good, Mr. Muir, very good.
And . . . oh my god my god . . . if it grows, it needs nourishment and strength and therefore food. Food. Jesus, it needs to eat. All the time? No. It doesn’t move, it doesn’t travel. So, only sometimes. Every three or four decades enough to sustain it, and to let it live until the next time.
Like everything else, it just wants to live.
Parrish stepped through the rubble, and Doug shied away, keeping the pole between them.
“What else?” he said, curiously less frightened now that he knew what he was facing (though a part of him still screamed that he had finally lost his mind).
Why me? he asked silently, with his eyes.
“You love it here,” Parrish said simply. “You would not give up your house, and you would not accept a most handsome profit. You love this place as much as Eban Parrish did.” Inhale. Hissing. “You are not obsessed, naturally, but you are willing to fight to preserve. In that way, you are little different than I, don’t you think?”
“I don’t destroy innocent people!” he said, nearly yelling.
“You killed a man, Mr. Muir.”
“It was an accident, damn you!”
“Besides, Mr. Muir,” Parrish said as he walked a circle around him, his eyes focused on Doug’s, his head swiveling to keep the contact strong, “Besides, how many people do you think would live in Deerford if every so often half the population disappeared?” His lips quivered, and his sudden smile was knowing. “How many, Mr. Muir? How many would stay?”
The Tea Party - A Novel of Horror Page 25
