by Cave, Hugh
THE NEBULON HORROR
Hugh B. Cave
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
© 2011 / The estate of Hugh B. Cave
Copy-edited by: Patricia Lee Macomber
Cover Design By:David Dodd
Background Images provided by: http://robinon.deviantart.com/gallery/
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Serpents in the Sun
Conquering Kilmarni
The Cross on the Drum
Lucifer's Eye
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1
"He was touching me! He was grabbing at me! I had to make him stop!"
Her screams dying to a whimper, the hysterical child hid her face in her hands for a moment. But only for a moment. The hands flew apart again. One of them shot out to aim a rigid finger at the man she was accusing. Once more her screaming filled the park.
"He was trying to get his fingers inside me! He tried and tried! So I scratched him and bit him, and I hope he bleeds!"
The accused man stared at her with unbelieving eyes while the crowd of concert-goers began to close in on him, muttering. Only moments before, the same people had been peacefully listening to the final number of a Sunday evening performance by the town's band: a Scott Joplin medley that had most of them nodding to its lively ragtime rhythms.
Now the music was forgotten. The crowd was shocked and hostile.
"I had to do it! I just had to! He was feeling me!"
On the edge of the crowd that filled the parking lot, Keith Wilding abruptly halted on the way to his car. The girl at his side stopped with him, an attractive girl with soft, full lips that frowned now. She let go his hand and turned with him to peer in the direction of the disturbance.
As the child's screams reached them, Melanie Skipworth said in bewilderment, "Keith! Isn't that—?”
"It's Jerri Jansen. Of course it is." He stretched himself to his full height to see over the mass of moving heads. "And my God, Mel! That's Vin she's accusing! Vin! Here—hold this."
He thrust into her arms the folded-up blanket he was carrying, a blanket they had sat on through the concert for protection against chiggers and other mid-Florida crawlies. "Wait here for me!" he yelled back as he surged forward, forcing people to make way for him even though most of them, too, were intent on reaching the center of the disturbance.
Keith Wilding was not big or especially athletic. At college he had gone in for the social sciences, not football. But the hoarse voice he heard now, crying out denials of the child's charges as the threatening crowd closed in, was that of a man who worked for him. A man who was also a friend. Those in the crowd who failed to get out of his way must have been black and blue in the morning.
He reached the car against which the man stood facing his small accuser. It was an old car because twenty-eight-year-old Vincent Otto did not receive a large salary. The Wilding Nursery didn't bring in money enough yet. The car glistened, though. It ran like a watch, Keith knew. Vin Otto was a hard-working, loyal, decent man who believed in looking after what he owned.
Using hands and elbows, Keith won through to the man's side. The little girl was still pointing, still screaming. "I had to do it to stop him touching me! I'm not sorry! I'm glad I hurt him!"
Glad I hurt him? Where in God's name had little Jerri Jansen found the strength to tear a man's face like that? A wildcat could scarcely have done more damage.
Streaks of crimson extended from Vin Otto's forehead to his chin—parallel grooves, four on each side of his face, from which all the skin and deep tracks of flesh had been gouged away. The face was a red mess. The eyes, miraculously unharmed, gazed at Keith in an agony of shock.
The bloody lips opened and said faintly, "Keith, I did not. I swear I did not. I do not know what she is talking about." Born in New England of European-born parents, Vin Otto spoke an oddly formal kind of English, at least for this rural Florida town where speech was usually as informal as an old shoe.
"Get in the car, Vin." When under pressure, Keith Wilding had a habit of talking softly. Shoving his assistant toward the machine, he suddenly realized that Melanie Skipworth had not waited for him at the crowd's edge but was at his side, determined to help. He expressed his gratitude with a nod and reached for the child.
"Come on, Jerri. I'll take you home."
"He was feeling me! He had his hands under my—"
"All right, but later. Not here. Come." Halting before her, he bent his knees and extended his arms. She hesitated, suspiciously staring at him. Reaching out a little farther, he caught her. Then, pulling her toward him, he wondered at the coolness of what he touched.
Shouldn't a child be perspiring at such a time? She wasn't perspiring. She wasn't even warm.
"Jerri?" he said when she hung back and glowered at him. "You hear, Jerri? I'll take you home to your mother." Then, puzzled even more: "You know me, Jerri Jansen. I'm Keith Wilding. I'm your friend."
"Oh." The child suddenly seemed disoriented, unaware of where she was or what was happening. She looked around, apparently confused by the crowd of people watching her every movement.
"Come." Lifting her, Keith turned to the car and passed her to Melanie, who was on the front seat with the door open, waiting. Vin Otto was in back with his door shut, his body slumped and his bloody face hidden behind his hands.
Coldly indifferent to the crowd, which had become silent now, Keith circled the front of the car and slid in behind the wheel. When he started and raced the engine, people in the path of the machine scrambled out of the way, apparently afraid he might run them down.
He drove out of the parking area slowly, with care. When the crowd was well behind, he slowed the car to a crawl and turned his head. They were still within the park. "You all right, Vin? We can take Jerri home before getting you to the hospital?"
Vin Otto lowered his hands from his mutilated face, and now the hands too were sticky and red. "I do not need the hospital, Keith. Please."
"Doc Broderick, then. You need some professional patching up."
"Very well. Doctor Broderick."
Out of the park, Keith turned onto the smooth blacktop road that led through town. Seven-year-old Jerri lived with her divorced mother, Olive Jansen, in a midtown apartment. To reach Doc Broderick's house he would have to pass there. That answered one problem. "We'll just stop at the apartment and let Mel and Jerri off," he said over his shoulder to the injured man. And to Melanie: "That all right with you, hon?"
"Of course," she said quickly.
Traffic was light. It would increase when the flow of cars from the weekly concert picked up again after the interruption. Keith looked at the girl beside him—the girl he had been going with now for more than two years—and was grateful again for her quiet courage and loyalty. To his surprise, he saw that the child in her lap was asleep. Speaking over his shoulder again, he said, "What happened, Vin?"
"Keith, I do not know. I led her back to the car before the concert ended because the hour was growing late and I
wished to escape the crowd coming out. We were only sitting there, listening to the music, and—"
"You touched her, she said. If you did, I know damned well you didn't mean anything by it."
"I did not touch her. I was merely sitting there trying to think where I could find a house for the three of us to live in, because both my place and Olive's are too small." For months Vin Otto had been dating Olive Jansen. Now they were planning to marry. "In my mind," Vin said, "I was driving up and down the roads in the northwest part of town, because I knew I had seen some houses for rent there. Then the music came to an end and I was about to start the car, and all at once without a word of warning Jerri hurled herself upon me like a cat gone crazy."
Patting his torn face with a handkerchief, Vin leaned forward to frown at the child. "And now look at her, please. She sleeps like a baby. Will you tell me what is going on?"
Melanie said, glancing at Keith, "Maybe we should go straight to Doc's, since she's sleeping. What do you think? Shouldn't Doc look at her, too?"
Running a business in a small town had taught Keith more about dealing with people than his sociology courses at college ever had. He vetoed the suggestion with a headshake. "We'd need Olive's okay to do that, hon. She'll be upset enough about this without giving her a reason to be more so." To Vin he said, "How come Olive isn't with you tonight?"
"She said she was tired and had things to do. She—"
"Wait," Melanie said. "Jerri's awake,"
The youngster had opened her eyes and now squirmed to a more comfortable position in Melanie's lap. Seemingly puzzled, she looked at Melanie, then across at Keith behind the wheel. "Hello," she said. "Is the concert over?"
"Don't you know it's over?" Melanie asked.
"Well, I guess . . . No, I don't remember. How am I with you and Mister Wilding? Where's Vin?"
"I am here, baby," the man in back said.
The child turned toward his familiar voice and her blue eyes almost doubled in size. She caught her breath convulsively. "Vin!" At his insistence she had long ago stopped calling him Mr. Otto. "Oh, gosh, Vin—what happened to your face?"
"Somebody—ah—scratched me. You do not remember?"
Still staring at him with what appeared to be genuine horror, Jerri shook her head.
"You do not remember anything, baby?"
The head-wagging became more emphatic.
"Well, that is something to be thankful for, I think." Vin exhaled heavily. "All right, little one. We are taking you home and we will soon be there. Please, just relax now."
2
The apartment house in which Jerri Jansen and her mother lived was not the best such building in the town of Nebulon. Still, in an aging, need-of-paint way it was respectable enough. The car stopped at the curb and Melanie Skipworth got out, drawing the child after her. Keith drove off again as the two went along the uneven red-brick walk.
Melanie pressed a button in the entrance cubicle and a buzzer sounded above in the Jansen apartment, where Olive Jansen stood at an ironing board in the small living room, pressing a dark green work shirt that belonged to Vin Otto. She didn't have to iron his work shirts, Vin kept telling her. But she insisted he had a job with a real future at the Wilding Nursery and ought to look neat.
Since her divorce Olive herself had worked as a waitress in the town's one really good restaurant. Before that she had helped her husband at a health spa he managed. She was a pretty, well-proportioned girl. At the spa she had worked hard but her real contribution had been simply being there where customers could look at her and yearn to be equally pretty and well proportioned. She was now twenty-six years old. Her hair was the same light yellow as her daughter's.
When the buzzer sounded she stopped ironing and glanced at the apartment door, puzzled because she was expecting only Vin and her daughter, and Vin had a key. He must have forgotten it tonight. He did sometimes.
Olive walked lightly across the worn green carpet to the door and pressed a button to release the lock downstairs. She did this without bothering to use the door-phone to ask who was there. Nebulon was that kind of town. With the door ajar she waited on the threshold to greet her daughter and husband-to-be, pleasantly anticipating a kiss from each. Though she looked a little tired, as she had earlier told Vin she was, she also had the appearance of a woman content with life and-confident in her future. This was a distinct change from the way she had felt a year ago when struggling to make up her mind about leaving her husband.
She and Hayden Jansen had been sweethearts through high school. Even before that. Growing up together in Nebulon, where she was the prettiest girl in her high-school class and he the star athlete, they had seemed preordained to end up as man and wife. In fact, they had married less than a month after graduation when Hayden was offered a job at the spa. A young man with his looks and reputation would bring in customers, the owner felt.
That had been the trouble, of course. Women found him attractive, and he welcomed their attentions. At first Olive thought he would grow out of it. After all, he was only a boy just out of high school—not even an ordinary boy just out of high school but one who had been reading about himself all this time in the sports columns of the local paper.
But she was wrong. He did not grow out of it, even when he became a father. His work at the spa daily brought him into close contact with eager females under circumstances that made everything too easy. When the delighted owner made him manager, the marriage hadn't a chance.
She looked down the hall now to the head of the stairs, awaiting her first glimpse of Vin Otto as she heard the ascending footsteps. Being Vin's wife would be different. She was sure of it. Vin wasn't handsome. He hadn't a false sense of his own importance. In fact, having come to Florida only eighteen months before, when his father died in Boston, he still felt himself an outsider. But he was faithful, he was caring, he was considerate. Jerri already loved him more than she did her own father, Olive was certain.
But it was Melanie Skipworth, not Vin, who appeared with Jerri at the top of the stairs. At once Olive felt a touch of alarm that interfered with her breathing. Since her divorce with all its mental strain, unexpected events often frightened her. Running forward with one hand outthrust, she cried, "Where's Vin?"
"It's all right, Olive." In contrast to the other's always shrill voice, Melanie's was low and musical even under strain. "He's with Keith."
"But—"
"There was a slight accident. I'll tell you about it. Just to be on the safe side, they've gone over to Doc Broderick's." Knowing Olive well—having, in fact, been like a sister to her through the tensions of the divorce—Melanie put an arm around the other's waist now and walked her into the apartment. At the same time she carefully held little Jerri's hand. Only when they were safely inside, with the door shut, did she let the child go.
I ought to talk to Olive alone, she thought. But how can I? If I take her into the bedroom, Jerri may run away or something. If I ask her to send Jerri into the bedroom, the child may resent it and do some other strange thing.
She saw only one solution to the problem. "Sit down, Olive." And to the child: "You too, honey." Then, facing them both, she said, "Something happened to Jerri at the concert, Olive. She doesn't remember it, so it's no good asking her for an explanation. She—well, for no apparent reason she just suddenly turned on Vin and scratched him. Scratched his face."
"What?"
"Then she began screaming that he'd molested her."
"My God," Olive said. Woodenly she turned to stare at her daughter. "I can't believe . . ." Suddenly her voice became shrill. "What do you mean, he molested you?"
"Hold on," Melanie said. "That was my word, not hers. She called it 'touching,' I think. Something like that. Anyway, Vin denies it. And a little while ago after falling asleep in the car on the way here, she didn't even remember accusing him. Or scratching him."
"Oh, my God," Olive repeated almost inaudibly.
"You'll have to get the rest from Vin. I'm n
o good at this kind of thing. I'm only trying to tell you why he's gone to Doc's."
"You mean she really scratched him?"
Melanie nodded.
Olive turned to her daughter again, a woman staring angrily at a miniature of her own attractive self complete with golden hair, aquamarine eyes, even the same classical bow-shaped upper lip. "What do you mean, he touched you?" she demanded, all but spelling the words out.
Squirming on her chair, the child looked down at her clasped hands. "I don't remember, Mommy."
"You don't remember sayin' it?"
"No, Mommy."
"Did he touch you?"
"I don't remember."
"Oh, my God," Olive said and looked at Melanie again. "What'll I do, Mel?"
"This hasn't happened before? Anything like this?"
"Course not!"
"I don't mean Vin touching her. I mean her turning on him, accusing him. You've always said she's crazy about him. If she has some secret feeling the other way, you'd better find out."
Olive Jansen only said, "How bad is Vin hurt? The truth, Mel."
"I can't say. I'm not a doctor."
"It can't be too bad. She's just a little girl."
They both looked again at Jerri, and the child sat there staring down at her hands. The hands, Melanie thought, that just a short while ago had made a horror of Vin Otto's face.
"Jerri," Olive said.
The child looked at her.
"You love Vin?"
Jerri nodded. Tears glistened in her blue eyes and the little bow-shaped mouth trembled.
Olive seemed satisfied. "All right. It's time you went to bed. Go on now." When the youngster obediently slid from her chair, she herself stood up and turned toward the kitchen. "I'll make us some coffee," she said to Melanie over her shoulder.
It was quiet in the apartment then. The child undressed in the bedroom she shared with her mother, went to the bathroom, returned to the bedroom, and shut the door. In the kitchen the kettle came to a boil and whistled for a second, and Olive made small noises as she mixed two cups of instant coffee. In the living room Melanie sat on the sofa and took up a Pink Swan restaurant menu from a lamp table, glancing at it without interest. The Pink Swan was where Olive worked as a waitress every day but Sunday.
