The Tea Party - A Novel of Horror

by Charles L. Grant

  Nothing happened.

  A shed appeared in the middle of the yard.

  Maggie called out, turning on her hind legs and catching Keith on his shoulder. He fell, and Maggie snorted, pawing at the ground while Heather screamed and held the reins to keep from tumbling from the saddle.

  Doug relit the lighter and tossed it over the sill, hoping to catch some of the fuel spilled on the floor.

  Maggie reared, and crushed Keith’s skull, reared again and began to trample him.

  Doug didn’t wait. Liz had already started to run away as best she could over the rolling ground, and he followed, trying not to hear Judy screaming for help, trying not to imagine he heard the house join her.

  They ran toward the mare, averting their eyes from what had once been Liz’s son, and he boosted her into the saddle, took the reins and began to run.

  The clouds boiled and parted, and a drenching rain fell, a gale wind blew and nearly knocked him off his feet.

  Maggie stumbled once, Liz grabbed her daughter’s waist and reached forward for the reins. But the buckskin seemed to find a rhythm in the earth’s turbulence and ran with it, calling, dragging Doug along behind her.

  Then the wind stopped, and the rain and quaking—a sudden vacuum that made him look over his shoulder.

  The stillness continued.

  And ended with a roar that made his ears pop, made him stagger as air rushed toward the mansion, fed the fire, and exploded. Within seconds, the entire house was covered in flame, bellowing at the clouds now shifting away, reaching higher and drowning the lawn in snapping red light.

  He saw it then.

  Behind the flames, an anguished face that writhed and breathed fire, that glared and charred and peeled away burning flesh that fell to the burning ground like gobbets of molten hail.

  The face of Eban Parrish.

  A tower of fire erupted and billowed out of the low hill opposite them, and they swerved away; patches of fire lifted from the grass, disks of fire spun into the air and chased after them, fell short and rolled on their rims until they sagged into the ground. Like a beam pulled in half, a gap opened screaming in the trough between two mounds and filled itself with fire, forcing them back in the other direction; a tree sprang from a hollow, a torch that crashed and shed sparks picked up by the wind.

  Doug ran, dodging flame, ducking spirals, calling to Maggie to keep her calm. Finally, he tore off his jacket and handed it to Liz, gesturing as best he could with one hand. She nodded and leaned over Heather to drape it over the buckskin’s eyes. The horse bucked, and he talked to her; she trampled around in a panicked circle, and he pleaded with her, scolded her, took the reins and pulled until she followed him again.

  The house burned; and beyond it, the wall.

  Toward the north, the wall in flames.

  Toward Cleary’s, the wall and some of the trees.

  They raced for the corner, and stopped. The wall here was burning as well, though it was far enough away for the trees not to be touched, and low enough still not to endanger them yet.

  Firelight streaked across the grass, flickering, sapping, and Doug inched toward the low barrier, shaking his head.

  Behind them a boulder rose, a boulder of writhing flame that began to roll toward them.

  When Doug saw it, he grabbed Heather’s shoulder and pulled her roughly to him, told her what she had to do in spite of the fire, and though she was wide-eyed with terror, her tongue licking away tears, she nodded. Snatching the reins away, she gave a wild shout when Doug slapped Maggie’s flank.

  The horse bolted forward.

  Doug stumbled after.

  Liz clung to Heather’s back, looking back once to where her son had been lying, then looked away when Maggie gathered herself at Heather’s command and lifted . . . sailed . . . Doug weeping and praying until the horse was over and galloping through the trees.

  The boulder closed hard on him, and he swerved, leapt away from the crackling it left in its wake, and stared as it crashed into the wall. It hesitated, and began rolling the other way. Flames spit sideways, skyward, bored into the ground as it thundered back toward him.

  Almost the entire estate was afire, and he had only one way to run.

  He charged the wall where the boulder had struck it, wrapped his hands around his face and leapt through the flames. Burning scored his lungs, searing scorched his hair and the backs of his hands, and he felt the boulder reach the boundary only a few steps behind him, and shatter. A violent explosion that showered flaming rock on his shoulders, on the trees, and made him scream until he broke into the open and saw his house just ahead.

  He fell, and rolled in case his clothes had caught fire, rolled and listened to the fire, listened to his whimpers, felt the oddly cool grass beneath his back and legs.

  Then he stopped, and stared at the suddenly cloudless dark sky.

  And gasped when a dark figure stood over him, and snorted.

  Liz laughed almost hysterically when Maggie peered down at her master. When the shock was over and he joined her, she pushed the animal to one side wearily and, weeping now, dropped down beside him. Heather was quiet, arms crossed over her chest while she held her own shoulders.

  Maggie nudged him, and snorted again.

  “You,” Doug said, “are a pain in the ass.”

  PART FIVE

  DESSERT

  The elaborately long camper, and the horse trailer behind it, was parked on the side of the road. Liz in a faded red tube-top and cut-off jeans sat in the driver’s seat, her exasperation clear as she waited for Doug to puzzle over the map. Finally, with a loud sigh, Heather reached over his shoulder and took it from him, snapped it fully open and, after a moment’s concentration, stabbed a finger at a thin blue line.

  “Here,” she said. “This is where we are.”

  Liz shook her head and looked at him, an eyebrow raised, a faint smile at her lips. “I thought you were supposed to be able to read things like that.”

  He shrugged. “Blueprints, yes. Maps, on the other hand, belong to a far-flung alien race devoted solely and single-mindedly to the utter confusion and eventual complete lostness of the human race.”

  “There’s no such word as lostness,” Heather declared as she handed the map back, another jab of her finger to show them the direction they should take.

  He laughed, looked at Liz and was pleased to see that she was laughing too. Such delicate moments were few and far between, and he treasured them, tried to store them accurately in his memory—between the slots his mind stubbornly reserved for lingering fragments of the nightmare.

  It was October, and they were in New Mexico, trying to beat the crowds to Albuquerque in time to find a place to stay for the annual hot air balloon festival. They had left Deerford the day after the . . .

  No, he thought; just . . . the day after. There was no other word. They had left before dawn, not bothering to check on the town; they had taken what clothes they could grab and left as fast as they could in the Jeep.

  Neither mentioned the green grass where the mansion had been, or the grass that had taken the place of the wall.

  It was all gone, and they kept on moving, and did their best to explain to Heather what had happened, and why.

  And as they talked—in stretches of five, ten, fifteen minutes before turning away, the road slipping beneath them, the sky unchanging above—he found most of the pieces to fill in the gaps.

  Deerford had been seeded with a score or more people who belonged only to Winterrest. They were alive—perhaps—and every time the mansion needed nourishment again, they offered themselves to it in order to stay alive longer. If they aged, he didn’t know it; if they eventually died, he suspected it was because whatever the house found it needed in them they didn’t have anymore in the quantities it required. They were little more than willing fodder in exchange for not dying.

  And when they were lost to it, it found others.

  It searched for them in the changing, real people
who lived there, people who loved the town and would not surrender their lives and their homes there for any inducement—himself, Liz, Bud, and Ollie.

  As for Eban Parrish—Doug told them he was Winterrest itself.

  “An extension of it,” he said, scarcely believing it himself, and wouldn’t have at all had he not seen the photographs and heard the man himself. “It needed a contact, and it created one. Parrish was never human. He was—”

  “A demon,” Heather suggested.

  “Yes,” he said, thinking of poor Piper, hoping someone had taken his hounds. “Sure, that’s close enough.”

  He never said a word about Judith; but Liz knew. Judith worked with Parrish because she held onto life longer than most. When she had been born, they didn’t know; when she died, it was when Winterrest did. But when she was . . . alive, she wanted Doug because she didn’t want to spend her eternity alone. She wanted company she loved; she picked Doug; he turned her down.

  They bought the camper in Sparta and drove west with the idea of never returning to the East Coast again.

  In Ohio, Heather wanted to know how little kids could never grow old and not have anyone see it.

  “Oh, they must have grown,” Doug said, knowing he was only guessing. “But they did it slowly. Kids can do that, you know, not grow for a while, and people figure they’ll do it all in one spurt. So when it comes time, the Winterrest people move on.”

  “Where?”

  “Flat River, Nebraska,” Liz answered for him. “Places like that.”

  Heather said nothing; in her wallet she kept a picture of Keith she cried over at night.

  They avoided the Midwest, sweeping down into Texas and finally west into New Mexico. They listened to the CB, the portable radio, once in a while watched a portable television when a signal was strong enough not to distort the picture. They read. They went to movies. They cooked inside, they ate in restaurants when they were too tired to stand.

  The dreams were still there, they held each other at night, but they slept longer, felt better, and told themselves each morning they might never forget, but they might soon begin to live.

  When they arrived at last in Albuquerque, they took two rooms at the Winrock Inn—one for Liz and Heather, one for him. Then they spent the rest of the day trying to find a place to board Maggie, locating one in a suburb near the Rio Grande. That night they decided to celebrate with dinner.

  No one spoke of the other places, the other Winter-rests. Instead, they exclaimed over the balloons seen floating over the city, of the volcanos on the horizon, of perhaps riding the tramway to the top of the mountains on the city’s east side.

  They were happy, and Doug finally knew Heather wouldn’t ask about Ollie, and was glad. He thought this was sometimes the worst of the memory—that Parrish, being old, needed special renewing. That Ollie had been chosen to give birth to him again. He had no doubt, as Judy had said, that the child would look just like Eban. The only thing he didn’t know was if it would be born full-grown.

  Dessert came, and they made pigs of themselves, later walked through the cool desert air and watched a spectacular sunset over the mesa. It was fine. It was almost normal.

  But he suspected that before the year was over they would separate. Liz and her daughter would go . . . somewhere, and try to find the pieces that would bring them back to living; and he would try to remember the places in the pictures. Try, locate, and burn every one of them down.

  Liz understood. And before they slept that night, she asked if he would follow them when it was over, if he would come back to them and be with them. He told her yes, without hesitation, and she smiled and kissed him lightly.

  He would, he thought. He had too much to lose now to abandon them forever.

  But first there was the other thing—Winterrest was dead, and still alive somewhere.

  But to find it, all of it, he would have to return to Deerford and hope his house was still in the Hollow.

  He would have to search Piper’s home, to see if the old man had left records of his travels. When they’d stopped on their way out, the man and his truck were gone. Beer cans littered the lawn, and Carmel Quinn was singing endlessly on an endlessly spinning machine.

  He would have to ask Sitter, too, and kill another dream.

  Assuming, that is, that Sitter hadn’t found his witches the way Piper had his demons.

  They slept alone that night.

  The next morning they hired a car in order to tour the city and the Sandia Mountains that rose above it; they decided that the next day they would ride north and explore a pueblo, see the Rio Grande, maybe take a look at Santa Fe and the desert between.

  Heather was excited, and Liz smiled and held Doug’s hand as they crossed the lobby for the front doors.

  Someone called his name.

  He turned, and the desk clerk beckoned.

  “Mail for you, sir.”

  Doug froze, then walked over to the counter slowly, not liking the way his feet sounded on the tiles.

  Too much like midnight.

  Too much like stone.

  “Are you sure?” Liz asked, peering at the postcard the woman held in her hand.

  “Mr. Douglas Muir, right?”

  He nodded, took the card, and looked at the picture.

  Liz pulled away with a soft cry, grabbed Heather and ran out.

  It was a greystone building in a large city, flanked by two others, its stoop filled with grinning people, every one of them facing the camera, laughing, and waving.

  Standing in the doorway, a broad smile on his face, was Eban Parrish.

  “Sir? Sir, are you all right?”

  He turned the card over, read the message, and grabbed the counter.

  Douglas,

  I Want to protect you.

  I will protect you.

  See you soon.

  Love, Judith