The Tea Party - A Novel of Horror

by Charles L. Grant

Archie yelled.

  Dirk saw a red blossom rise and fall, and heard a spongy thud, another, saw a yellow blossom lash forward and come back up, dripping red.

  Archie was screaming, begging for help.

  The flowers, Dirk thought in numb astonishment, holy shit, they’re killing him!

  He lunged forward, pushing hard with his foot off the trunk behind him, and grunted in surprise when he discovered that he couldn’t slip out between the boles of the cage the way he had slipped in. There was no time for figuring it out, though. Archie’s screams were filling his ears and making his head hurt, and tears were in his eyes as he spun around and tried to get out another way.

  Above him, the leaves clattered together; around him the trunks moved slowly inward.

  He put his back to one and grabbed another in both hands. And pushed. Red-faced, sweating, spittle bubbling out of his mouth. He pushed again, harder, and his elbows bent inward. Archie screamed. Dirk closed his eyes, lowered his head, and pushed. Pushed. Felt his upper arms sliding back along his ribs, felt his legs straighten as the trunks pressed against his knees.

  The leaves clattered and fell around him, bouncing off his head and stunning him not with their weight but with their number, leaves of stone cutting his hair, his scalp, rasping the skin from his nose and cleaving his chin.

  “Keith!” he shrieked. “Keith! Help, Keith!”

  Archie screamed.

  The tops of the three birches merged and spilled their leaves, and the trunks began to wind around each other from the crown, turning slowly, grinding, while Dirk shrieked and wept and the ground beneath him rumbled, while the slick stone bark rubbed the skin from his muscle, rubbed the muscle from his bone, and finally closed tightly, leaving only an arm dangling from the center, only a leg kicking at the ground, two inches above it.

  A leaf landed on Dirk’s shoe, and bounced off, and shattered.

  Ian began screaming the moment Dirk did. He jumped around and waved his arms because he didn’t know which direction he should take. Archie was out there dying, and Dirk was over there dying, and he couldn’t think of anything to do but shout and shake his hands and wonder why Keith was just standing there, staring at him like that.

  “Keith,” he sobbed. “Keith, we gotta—”

  “Shut the hell up,” Keith said with a snarl, picking a stone off the ground and shaking it in his face. “Shut up, shrimp, before I bash your head in.”

  But he couldn’t shut up, he had to keep talking, had to keep yelling or else he would hear Dirk and Archie and the way they were crying and the way they were begging and this wasn’t the way the Mohawks were supposed to be, this wasn’t the way Keith said it would be at all.

  Keith threw the stone anyway, and it bounced off his chest, making him stagger back and clutch his shirt. His glasses flew off when the next one came too close to his head and he had to jerk away.

  “Keith! Keith, stop it!”

  Keith told him to shut up, and though he could barely see, Ian knew it didn’t sound very much like his friend. It was a different voice, and he even looked sort of different, and when he picked up another stone, Ian started to run.

  There was no trail to follow, but he was always proud of the way he would never get lost because he had what his mother said was a great sense of direction. So he ran, dodging around the trees, listening to Keith shouting at him to come back, come back, it was all right, he wouldn’t get hurt if he would only come back.

  He ran anyway, shouting until he was hoarse, crying until his eyes dried up and there were only knife-blade sobs that made his chest hurt and made his stomach hurt and made him stumble into the trees that were made of stone.

  The ground began to shake then.

  He faltered—there’s no such thing as an earthquake here, move, move, move!—and ran on, scrubbing the backs of his hands over his eyes so he could see better, not looking back because he knew Keith was chasing him, looking for big stones he could throw that would hurt him. He ran around what was supposed to be a birch tree, and as he passed heard it craaaack in half and thunder to the ground just after he left it.

  Another one, big and dark, falling right beside him, a branch sandpapering down the length of his back, ripping his shirt into gleaming pink tatters, into flapping bloodied ribbons, making him fall onto the grass because the pain was so bad and he could feel the running wet spreading over his back.

  He leapt to his feet when he heard Keith yelling.

  He spun around, but he was awake, it wasn’t a nightmare and he wasn’t home in his bed.

  He ran, swerving blindly—I can’t see, I can’t see! Ma, I can’t see!—when yet another stone tree split and splintered at its base and thundered down to crush him. It missed him by less than the breadth of a shadow. Fragments of stone chipped into the air and rained over his head, cutting him, hurting him, making him shriek, and Keith was getting closer and closer and calling his name, it’s all right, Ian, it’s all right, if you stop they won’t hurt you, stop running, they won’t hurt you.

  The thunder again, the ground shook and rumbled, and Keith suddenly sounded just as afraid as he was— and he couldn’t help it, he had to look back because that was the old Keith, the one who was his friend, not the one who wanted to hurt him.

  He stopped to look back.

  And he blinked.

  At the weeping willow behind him, growing and growing and growing and growing and all he could say was “oh” before it slammed him to the ground.

  6

  6:45

  Doug thought the screaming came from inside, then heard it again and leapt back from the stoop. He whirled to his right and saw Keith racing toward him through the odd grey light. The boy was waving frantically, his strides awkward as though exhaustion were about to drive him into the ground. He stumbled twice. The first time, Doug started for him at a hurried walk, calling out and waving a hand to show him he was there; after the second, he was spurred into running himself, seeing the boy’s fear-widened eyes and the horrid contorted features.

  They met in a collision, fifty feet from the house.

  Keith in his panic tried to swerve away, but Doug lunged to his left to snare the boy’s chest. They fell in a writhing tangle, the boy calling for help until, amid the rolling and kicking, they butted foreheads. The sharp pain dazed them both slightly, but it gave him the chance to gather Keith into an embrace and rock him until he finally quieted down.

  “What?” he said then, gently. “What happened, chief?”

  “The trees,” the boy said, sobbing again.

  Doug looked to the estate’s far corner, saw nothing but the grass and a hard-to-pierce shadow-wall where the hill behind ended its slope. There were no trees, n shrubs.

  “Keith,” he said, stroking the boy’s hair. “Keith, where’s the Gang, huh? Where’s Heather? They leave you out there all alone?”

  “Heather . . .” He fell silent for a moment, struggling to remember, then lifted his head. “Heather said she was going to feed Maggie. She said she was hungry and ought to be fed.”

  Thank god, he thought as the boy wiped his eyes and nose with a sleeve.

  “And the Gang? Where’s the Gang, chief?”

  “They . . .” Keith struggled and pushed himself away until he was kneeling in front of him. On his face were blotches of dirt, grass, a straggle of hair that put a crease on his brow. His white shirt was torn at the right shoulder.

  “It’s all right, chief, it’s all right, take it easy.” Doug smiled and brushed at the blades clinging like leeches to the shirt. “It’s okay, you hear? Just take it easy, take a deep breath and take it easy.”

  Keith swallowed, but the deep breath turned into another bout of sobbing, though now without tears. “The trees,” the boy insisted, peering over his shoulder. “They . . . Archie, Ian, Dirk . . . the trees, the flowers. It wasn’t me, it was the trees!”

  “All right,” he said, and put an arm around his shoulder, climbed to his feet and started walking him back.
“It’s okay, chief, it’s gonna be okay, you just take it easy.” A broken record, he thought; a damned broken record.

  It’s time for dinner

  They hobbled across the lawn while Keith muttered to himself and shook his head as if trying to drive something out. The house closed in on them, its amber light in rotoscopic flickering, dropping swatches of gold onto the lawn, reflecting off the underbelly of the clouds still roiling, still peeling off strips of white to test the strength of the wind.

  The kids, he thought as they staggered into the backyard, and he lowered the boy into one of the white chairs; Jesus, even the kids. The party feeds the quests, and the guests feed the house. Oh god, those poor kids!

  It wasn’t a matter of fighting now. He had to find Ollie and Liz and get them all out of here before it was too lat,e. Later, when they were safely beyond the thing’s influence, they’d figure out a way to get rid of it if they could. Later, when the nightmare was at arm’s length.

  He started for the house, and Keith leapt from his chair, jumped around in front of him, and held out his arms.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Sit,” he ordered.

  “But where are you going?”

  “To get your mother,” he explained. “And Olivia. When I do, we’ll get out of here and go home, okay? Now stay here, Keith, please.”

  “No,” the boy said, shaking his head and backing away. “I’m not going to stay here all by myself.”

  “Then you can come—”

  “No!” Keith screamed. “No!” He spun once in a direction-seeking circle, then sprinted for the corner, disappearing around it before Doug could take a step to follow. He called out Keith’s name, called again and slapped his hands to his head. Which way now? The boy? Liz?

  The canvas tent snapped in the wind, the only sound in the yard.

  The clouds began to smooth over.

  He groaned with indecision, then raced off to the side of the house. Keith was already gone, and he realized the boy could be anywhere by now; they could end up chasing each other around the place like riding a carousel. He punched a fist against his leg, went back to the door, and shoved it again.

  The house was silent.

  The lights on the walls danced frozen in their bulbs; the corridor stretched ahead of him for what seemed like miles to the front entrance.

  There was no trace of the people he had seen step inside, no voices, no footsteps overhead. The bare flooring was unscuffed and held no signs of damp shoes or boots tracking mud or grass over it. They were gone, yet he knew that the wall outside would prevent any of them from leaving the grounds.

  “Liz! Ollie!”

  No answer but the lights mocking him peacefully on the walls.

  All right, he told himself; one step at a time.

  He could see at a glance how much smaller the place was than it appeared from the yard, consistent with the probable height of the seventeenth-century man who had built it. Yet he could not help but admire the structure of the rooms, the way the walls and floors, though somewhat irregularly canted, gave it the bulk, the size, the sense of proportion one would need if—

  He groaned, and clenched a fist until his nails almost punctured his skin.

  Winterrest was disarming him, smothering his sense of danger with a show for his love of houses and his architect’s greedy eye.

  Fuck you, he thought, and froze momentarily, as if expecting it would read his mind and kill him.

  Two paneled doors flanked him; he jerked open the right-hand one and looked into a large kitchen empty save for aluminum foil-covered trays on a wall counter, a large trash can filled to brimming, and piles of dirty glasses.

  The floor was made of tile-shaped stone.

  “Nell? Wilbur?”

  He crossed the room quickly—ignoring the sound of his heels snapping like dry twigs—to a closed door in the far wall. He hesitated only fractionally before flinging it open to face a long narrow pantry.

  “Hey, Clearys!”

  Running back to the corridor, he wondered what had happened to Piper. He hadn’t seen the old man at all since they’d talked earlier that afternoon, but there was no time to worry about it. He opened the opposite door and stepped into a square room against whose walls were tall ladder-back chairs and four walnut tables. A larger table took up most of the floor’s center, and the wall and ceiling beams were dark with age and rough-hewn.

  He didn’t need to touch them to know they were only stone simulating wood.

  “Hey, anybody! Hey!”

  The next door opened onto what was probably a study. A polished roll-top desk, spartan chair, secretary, dusty shelves on the wall. A lantern. A braided oval rug. The walls not quite true, the dusty white ceiling sloping slightly toward the center of the house.

  “Hey, is anybody here?”

  He closed his eyes as he turned to walk back and took a deep breath. The air was unmoving, nothing to it but age and the faint clammy stench of ancient moist rock. He had smelled it before, during searches of old houses for designing ideas, when he walked into a just-finished home to check to be sure that his plans had been followed—it was emptiness, a void. No one lived here, no one spent time here, nothing in the air but the materials used to build it.

  He had seen at least thirty people walk through that back door, and now it was as if they didn’t exist at all.

  Walking the central hallway was like walking down the center of a deserted road—he heard nothing but his own footsteps, and had no desire to call out to see if anyone was there. Yet he knew someone was. He could feel it in the way his skin stretched tight across his shoulders, could feel it in the way the hair on hi? nape tingled as though brushed by static electricity.

  At the foyer he found himself panting as if he’d just run a hard, fast mile. The double doors on the left had been opened, and he could see though a sparsely furnished sitting room to another room that stretched to the far corner. Low ceilings, white plastered walls, a fireplace in each room large enough to walk into, deep enough to place a narrow bench in when the winters grew too vicious.

  But that was all.

  No people.

  On the right it was the same, though the setting was more formal: a dining room dominated by a refectory table surrounded by tall chairs with throne backs and scrolled arms; beyond it a smaller room, used only by the family on ordinary occasions, for dining, for evening reading, for the men to talk about the day’s work while the women worked on their knitting, their weaving, their planning for the future.

  And still, as he stood in the foyer and peered up the shadowed, narrow stairwell to the balustrade that rimmed it on the second floor, he felt the watching again.

  It was the house.

  Winterrest was watching.

  And soft footsteps were approaching him from the room on his right.

  He spun with fists ready, and saw a woman coming toward him. He recognized her at once and almost ran to take her in his arms before he remembered.

  “Judy,” he said dully.

  She smiled. “You’ve been talking with him, I hear.”

  A tremor raced the length of his spine, and he grit his teeth against it. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette. Then a match, which he struck several times before it ignited.

  “Put it out!” she commanded sharply. “Put it out!”

  He was so startled he shook the flame out immediately and shoved the match into his pocket. But he couldn’t move fast enough to prevent her from reaching up and grabbing a handful of his hair, yanking it until he yelped, until she pulled his head down close.

  “Are you going to marry me?” she demanded, her breath ice on his lips.

  “Judy—”

  She took her free hand and ran it gently across his stomach. “Now is the time to decide, Douglas.” She leaned into him, and he could smell the must from her living room, could feel her moving beneath him on the rough, hard carpet. “You promise to marry me and I’ll protect you.” S
he kissed him, grinding her mouth against his until his teeth threatened to cut through his lips. A moment later she pulled away, chest rising, falling, perspiration on her brow. “And if you don’t, there’s nothing I can do to prevent him from making sure you don’t come back. You’ll be dead, Douglas. You’ll be dead, and buried.”

  It was ludicrous, and terrifying, and he couldn’t help it—he started to laugh.

  “Damnit, I want to protect you!” she cried. “I do, and you won’t let me!” Then, abruptly, her expression faded to dull resignation. The muscles around her eyes and mouth went slack, and for a moment there was nothing on her face at all.

  “Liz Egan.”

  He had stalled long enough. Whatever it was he was facing, whatever it was that called itself Judith Lockhart, was of less concern now than finding Liz and getting her out. He started for the stairs, was halfway to the landing when she screamed, “I love you, you goddamned son of a bitch!”

  The vehemence and language stopped him like a slap, and turned him to look. She was at the foot of the stairs, a large brass candlestick in her hand. She glared, and in a single whipping motion threw it at his head. He ducked as she raced after it, felt it graze his shoulder before crashing behind him. He snatched it up and spun just as she reached him, and there was nothing he could do but bring it down on her head. On her forehead. Splitting skin, cracking bone, reeling her backward until she fell.

  The candlestick dropped from his hand.

  The house trembled. A vague distant rumbling more sensed than felt turned him cold as he pulled himself up by the railing.

  Judy sat up.

  Oh god, he thought; dear god.

  She rose easily to her feet, paying no attention to the gap in her skull that exposed the white bone, the grey brain behind.

  “Oh Christ, Douglas,” she said sadly. “I wanted to show you I could protect you.”

  Then she took a step up, and he could see she was not bleeding.

  Dead, Parrish had told him. They were dead, and they were alive through Winterrest’s grace.

  And he had made love to the woman, to the thing coming after him up the stairs.