Nebulon Horror

by Cave, Hugh

  "I bet they still do it in bed sometimes," the younger people of Nebulon speculated, smiling back at them. If they but knew, Nino and Anna Ianucci did it every night, and slept serenely the rest of the night in each other's arms.

  They lived three miles out of town in a house on the fifty acres of orange trees. And on Saturday morning they were found there in bed with their throats cut, staring eyeless at the ceiling.

  16

  Keith Wilding awoke and heard rain falling and was glad. In more than a week there had been only one good shower—the one that had obliterated the diagram in the nursery path and the shoeprints among the uprooted exotics. The rain fell on the roof now with a quiet drumming noise. It would be dropping on all the growing things in the nursery. For days he had been using the sprinklers. Today, Sunday, he would not have to.

  Was it Sunday yet? He turned over in bed, quietly so as not to disturb the girl sleeping beside him. He looked at the glowing face of the clock on the dresser.

  Yes, it was Sunday. It was twenty minutes to three, Sunday morning. He turned onto his back and looked at the ceiling and listened to the rain.

  Because of the dry weather, he had lost many of the exotics pulled up by Jerri Jansen. Fewer than half of the Durantas and tulip trees had caught again after being replanted. A handful of lipstick trees. None of the akees. He was especially sad about the akees. With their bright scarlet fruit they would have been popular with his customers, he was sure.

  Why had Jerri done it? He and Melanie had talked about it at some length last evening, and about the many other puzzling things that had been happening. Had Raymond Hostetter killed old Ranney and the Italian couple? If so, why? And where was he now?

  Yesterday afternoon Chief Lighthill had come around to ask for the photo. The negative, rather, because Jerri had burned the photo and Keith had not yet had another print made. The chief was a worried man, relentlessly driving himself and getting too little sleep. The photo was a last resort. "It won't do any good. I know it won't. But I have to try."

  The rain continued, sweet, cooling rain, heavy enough to give all the plants a needed drink, not so hard it would abrade the soil. At Keith's side Melanie Skipworth breathed softly in deep sleep. They had gone to bed early and made love. She always slept profoundly after making love. But there was another sound now. He raised his head above the muffling effect of the pillow. Straining to hear made him squint his eyes and scowl.

  Footsteps. In the front room.

  He hesitated. Should he arouse Mel and risk having her wake with a sound that would warn the intruder? If he tried to slide unnoticed out of bed, she might make an even louder sound. He turned and draped an arm across her body. They often did that during the night. She stirred, snuggling back against him. With his mouth touching her ear he whispered all but inaudibly, "Wake up. Don't speak. There is someone in the front room."

  She took in a breath and silently sat up, her pale body just visible in the darkness. In the front room someone was moving about very slowly and cautiously, making barely enough noise to be heard above the sound of the rain. Melanie reached for Keith's hand.

  He gave her fingers a squeeze and her leg a soft warning pat, and eased himself off the bed. Like her he was naked. It was not a comfortable feeling to be naked at such a moment; had there been something handy to put on, he would have donned it. There was nothing within reach. He walked slowly on the balls of his feet to the bedroom door and halted with a hand on the knob.

  On the other side of the door was a brief hall, but the footsteps were not in the hall; they were in the living room beyond. He opened the door a few inches and listened again. It was hard to distinguish the rain sound from the other. Alert for trouble, he went silently along the hall to the living room doorway.

  That room was lighter than the bedroom he had come from. It had more windows and, besides, the front door was open. He must have left the door unlocked. It was a habit of his, a bad one, based on the probably false assumption that because the house was deep inside the nursery, it was safe from intruders.

  For a moment he was puzzled. He stood there in the doorway trying to see who or what had made the noise. He could see nothing.

  Then he became aware of a movement at the other end of the room. Something small and pale was there, partly hidden by the desk at which he took care of his personal correspondence. It was an old desk, an antique, with drawers and pigeonholes; he had a modern flat-topped one in his office for the business of the nursery. Frowning, he watched the prowler step fully into view and begin searching for something.

  A stride brought him within reach of a wall switch, and suddenly the room was ablaze with light. The intruder voiced a sharp gasp and whirled toward the click of the switch. She whirled again, this time toward the door. She took two small, stumbling steps and halted, apparently convinced she had no chance of escaping.

  Keith strode forward, regretting his nakedness but unable to do anything about it. He caught her by the wrist and held her, peering at her in astonishment. She wore pink pajamas that were soaked through by the rain. Her fluffy slippers were supposed to look like white rabbits but were black with mud.

  "Jerri Jansen," he said, "what are you doing here at this hour?"

  He needn't have asked. The object of her nocturnal visit was clutched in her free hand: the envelope from Willard Ellstrom's photo studio. He took it from her, remembering he had left it on the desk after giving Chief Lighthill the negative. At that point Melanie Skipworth, in a house coat, came from the bedroom and draped a bathrobe around him.

  "You may think I'm crazy, but I had a feeling something like this might happen," she said. "I'd better phone Olive."

  Keith nodded.

  Melanie went to the telephone while Keith lifted the child and sat her on a chair. He made sure to place himself between the chair and the door. Backing up, he put a hand behind him and shut the door and locked it without taking his gaze off her.

  He heard Melanie say, "Olive? Mel, at Keith's house. Did I wake you? . . . I see. You don't know your daughter isn't there, then. . . No, she isn't; she's right here. Must have slipped out without waking you and walked over here . . . What? No, no, she's all right, just wet up a little is all . . . We'll bring her back as soon as we've cleaned her up and got her into something dry. . . What? Well, my guess is she came for the negative of that picture she burned. You know what you told us, how she was eavesdropping when Doc wanted to borrow it, and Vin said he had to turn it over to Keith. What I'm thinking . . ."

  "Mel," Keith interrupted gently, "maybe that can wait till we get over there? I'm not exactly up on bathing and dressing small females."

  "Sorry. I'm dumb." She said good-bye to Olive and hung up. Taking Jerri by the hand, she said in her low, musical voice, "Come on, it's into a warm bath with you, young lady." Keith followed into the bathroom. The child seemed completely subdued.

  Wondering if she might be contrite enough to answer questions, Keith asked a few while Melanie bathed her. "What do you want the negative for, Jerri?"

  She pretended not to have heard. Seated in the tub, she concentrated on watching Melanie's hands as they scooped the warm soapy water and let it run over her body.

  "Did you want to burn it, Jerri?"

  The child was deaf.

  Keith noticed something else, then. Moving away from the bathroom wall against which he was leaning, he bent over Melanie, on her knees, and put his lips close to her ear. "Her eyes," he said for only her to hear. "Look at them."

  "Yes," she said aloud. "I wonder if that touch of color has anything to do with special powers."

  "Powers?"

  "Such as a cat is supposed to have. Doesn't it seem strange to you that"—she frowned, obviously reaching for words Jerri would not understand—"that the objective was so easily and quickly reached despite the lack of illumination?"

  "We don't know how long she was on the scene before I heard her."

  "Well, yes, there's that." Melanie finished bathing
the child and lifted her from the tub. "Now let's get you dry, baby."

  "I've something to tell you, Jerri," Keith said. "The negative you came for is not in that envelope anymore."

  The child refused to look at him.

  "It isn't even in this house, so don't plan on coming here again for it. I gave it to Chief Lighthill today."

  The head jerked up and the small naked body all at once became rigid. The oddly reddish eyes focused on Keith's face. "W—why?"

  "The picture is going to be in the paper tomorrow. Today, that is. Sunday. The chief thinks it has something to do with the things that have been happening, and since you won't tell us what the diagram means, he's going to ask the people if they know."

  The child's rigid body went limp. Slipping out of Melanie's hands, she slumped into a sitting position on the floor. Then she turned and, gripping the edge of the tub with both hands, laid her face on the backs of her wrists and began to sob.

  She sobbed until every inch of her small frame shook with the violence of it. Even when Melanie pried her hands loose and put both arms around her and murmured words of comfort, the sobbing continued.

  Keith said with a frown, "If only she would tell us what she's afraid of."

  But Jerri would not. Though she eventually stopped crying, she only lapsed into an unnatural silence again. All the way through Nebulon's sleeping streets to her mother's apartment, she was silent.

  The Sunday edition of the Nebulon News carried Keith's photograph of the diagram on its front page. Below it appeared the following statement:

  Do you know what the above diagram represents, or what purpose it may serve? If so, please contact your police department at once. One of these diagrams was drawn in the school yard by Raymond Hostetter, who has disappeared. A second was drawn at the Keith Wilding Nursery by, the police think, another child to whom strange things have been happening. The police are of the opinion that this diagram or symbol is somehow connected with the unexplained recent events in Nebulon. If you know anything or have any suggestions, your cooperation is urgently requested.

  17

  Olive had planned to send her daughter to school again on Monday but now could not. Again she called Doc Broderick.

  Doc examined the girl and asked questions. The questions were either versions of "What are you afraid of?" or roundabout attempts to obtain information without seeming to. He said, "Do you want to go to school, Jerri?"

  "What would you like to do? Go out and play?"

  "A walk in the park, maybe?"

  "No. Please!"

  "You can't stay indoors the whole day."

  "I can, I can!"

  Doc talked privately to Olive. The key to the child's fear seemed to be the diagram Keith Wilding had photographed in the nursery, he suggested. There was no safe way she could be forced to tell why it frightened her. However, the picture had been published in yesterday's paper and there was at least a chance that someone who could explain it would come forward. "Let's wait a couple of days anyway," Doc said. "Keep her home. Keep her quiet. I can't find anything physically wrong, but she needs to calm down."

  For Olive it was a long day. Rain began to fall in the morning and continued through most of the afternoon. When it ceased, there was no alleviating sunlight. The sky remained almost black.

  At times during the day Jerri slept. She appeared to dream a lot and uttered small sounds of apparent discomfort. She twitched and jerked spasmodically without waking herself. At other times she sat in the living room, looking at books or magazines.

  Soon after the rain stopped she invented another diversion. She would get up and go to a window, would stand there with her hands on the sill and her face close to the glass while peering down at the yard. She went from one window to another, even to the one in the kitchen where she had to climb on a chair and lean across the sink.

  "What do you think you're lookin' for?" Olive asked.

  "Nothing."

  Olive looked out, too. The apartment occupied an end of the building, running from front to back. Much of the yard was visible from its various windows.

  Only a small portion of the yard was lawn. In years past, Nebulon's builders had left the landscape alone more than their counterparts did today. They left large trees standing for shade and used grass only to beautify bare space. The yard Olive looked down on, brooding under a black sky, consisted mostly of trees and large shrubs. It was a forest picture in a child's book of fairy tales, she thought. Watch out for the wolves.

  Wolves? Don't be silly. But something.

  She found herself going again and again to the windows in an effort to get rid of what was building up in her mind. But was it only in her mind? She had lived in this apartment since her divorce. She must have looked out these windows hundreds of times when the yard below was dark. And never before had she felt as she did now—that something was prowling about down there. Never.

  "Jerri." She and the child stood side by side at a window. "Jerri, what's down there?"

  "Nothing."

  "What are you lookin' at, then?"

  "Nothing."

  "Well, what are you lookin' for?"

  "I'm just watching it get dark. I wish it wouldn't."

  Olive directed a frown at her daughter. "That's a funny thing to say. You've never been afraid of the dark." She hadn't. She had never even asked to have a night-light in her room.

  But she was afraid now, Olive thought. Since starting to go from window to window, peering down at the yard, she had become tense. Her movements were too abrupt. That peculiar tint was in her eyes again.

  "It's gettin' dark early on account of the weather," Olive said. Taking her daughter by the hand, she drew her away from the glass. "I'm gonna pull the shades, and then we better start fixin' some supper. Keith and Mel are comin' for supper, in case you've forgot. And Vin."

  The child remained in the living room while she went about the apartment drawing the shades. From a bedroom window Olive peered down at the yard again.

  Something moved among the trees. Yes, it did. It darted from a thick clump of half-wild Chinese Hat bushes to a banyan tree draped with the gnarled stems of an old Thunbergia vine. She focused her gaze on the tree and dared the thing to move again and reveal itself.

  She stood there a minute, two minutes, and nothing happened. Almost nothing, anyway. In the heart of the vine two small dots of red appeared, seeming to return her stare. They could only be fire beetles. The shadowy human shape she had seen darting from cover to cover would not have bright red eyes.

  She drew the shade and returned to the living room, where she took Jerri's hand again. "We don't need to cook a whole supper. Mel is bringin' some chicken from the fried-chicken place. What we'll do is fix a big, scrumptious salad to go with it. Okay?"

  Now that's funny, she thought as the child looked at her and silently nodded. The tint in Jerri's eyes seemed to be getting brighter as evening came on.

  Keith Wilding and Vin Otto left the nursery at closing time, picked up Melanie Skipworth at her shop, and arrived at Olive's soon afterward with the promised chicken. Olive and Jerri had made a salad and coffee and set up a table in the living room.

  For a time any mention of Jerri's nocturnal visit to the nursery was carefully avoided. The talk was of the killings of Tom Ranney and the Ianuccis and the search for Raymond Hostetter. The same subjects were probably being discussed that evening in half the homes in Nebulon.

  The Hostetter boy, Keith said, appeared to have vanished from the face of the earth. Not a soul had seen him since his departure from school on Wednesday. "Wednesday to Monday. It's uncanny."

  As for the murders, the feeling throughout town was that some demented or drug-crazed vagrant must be responsible. "The truth is, we have many of that kind here in Florida," Vin said. "With our easy climate we attract drifters as flowers attract bees. Even when they are sick and destitute, survival is easy. They can sleep in the open. They can live on tropical fruit stolen from people's yards."
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  Olive said, "Has anyone come forward about the photo in the paper?"

  No one knew. "But if anyone had, it seems to me Chief Lighthill would have been in touch," Melanie said. Smiling at Jerri, she added, "And what have you been doing all day, young lady? Counting raindrops?"

  Olive said, "For the past couple of hours she's been watchin' the yard. Me too, I guess."

  They looked at her, awaiting an explanation.

  "I suppose it's my nerves, but I swear there's been someone prowlin' around down there."

  Keith got up and went to a window, where he held the drawn shade away from the glass and peered out. "Can't see much; it's too dark. Are you sure?"

  "Well, I thought I saw somethin'. And for an hour or more I've certainly had a feelin' there's somethin' down there. Jerri noticed it first."

  "This could be serious," Keith said. "You realize if we do have a weirdo in town who's responsible for Raymond's disappearance, he could be stalking other kids too?"

  Melanie's usually low voice was warningly sharp as she said, "Keith, not now!" and glanced at Jerri.

  "No, listen." Vigorously he shook his head. "This is no time to be squeamish. Vin, why don't we just have a look around down there?"

  "No!" Jerri cried.

  "I know, I know." Keith went to her and rumpled her hair. "You're scared. But Vin and I are a mite bigger than you, baby. We'll be all right."

  The child stared at them, apparently terrified.

  "Look now," Vin said, rising from the table. "Don't you girls stand at the windows. We don't want him to know what's going on."

  "Won't you need a flashlight?" Olive asked.

  "Uh-uh. At the first blink of a light, he'd fade away."

  The two women and the child sat at the table and waited. They pretended to eat their fried chicken and salad. The women kept glancing at the windows. The child was just as obviously tense and apprehensive but stared down at her food.

  Olive said at last, with a loud exhalation of breath, "Jerri, damn it, you could put an end to all this by just tellin' us what you know. I swear I'm tempted to shake it out of you!"