Nebulon Horror

by Cave, Hugh

  "And the dog?" Doc pressed.

  "It bit him one day when he was passing, that's all. But Gustave remembered such things."

  Each day when Doc dropped by the woman in the bed was noticeably better. Her body was mending; her mind was sharper. She told him one night that Gustave, having gained control over the children, gave them certain powers to compensate for those he himself had lost as he aged. "He died almost blind, as you know, so when they became his puppets he gave them special powers of sight. They could see in the dark. Their eyes became weapons. My eyes became weapons, as you saw for yourself."

  Vin Otto had testified to that. "When she—or was it Gustave?—looked at me in that way, I felt I had to die," he told Chief Lighthill. "I mean I had to make myself die. It is certainly not difficult for me to believe that those children killed Raymond Hostetter without leaving a mark on him."

  The children were at home now. In the beginning they had been held under guard, for observation, at a county children's home some distance from Nebulon. Doc had visited them there and talked with them, but had little to do with deciding their fate.

  Expert psychiatrists summoned from as far away as Boston and Los Angeles had done that. In the end it was agreed the children could be allowed to try returning to a normal life, though subject to continuing tests and observations. Jerri Jansen was now living with her mother and Vin Otto in the house Vin had rented. The other children were back with their parents. Teresa Crosser alone had been denied permission to go home. Under no circumstances, the psychiatrists said, must she set foot again in the house where the presence of Gustave, real or imagined, had exerted such an influence upon her. In any case, the child could not have returned to the old Nebulon house with Elizabeth still in the hospital. Old Dr. Yambor found a temporary home for her with a woman in Glendevon who had known her parents.

  But as Elizabeth improved, Doc Broderick noticed a new kind of change in her and asked her about it. "Gustave left me when he thought I was dying," she said. "I have lain here for three weeks thinking of almost nothing else, and I am convinced of it. When Chief Lighthill shot me, I thought I would die. Gustave must have believed so too. Now it is clear that I will not die. So tell me . . . what is to keep him from returning?"

  "You think he can do that? Without your going through the ritual and drawing the vèvè again?"

  "I don't know. But I am apprehensive."

  A few evenings later Doc was invited to dinner at the Ottos'. Vin and Olive had been married but were skipping a honeymoon, they said, because of Jerri. They couldn't take the child with them on a wedding trip and were not sure it would be wise to leave her with anyone just yet. Keith Wilding and Melanie Skipworth were also invited.

  "This is our fling," Vin said, "a dinner party for our three best friends in our new home, with a drop of champagne."

  That was fine with Doc, but at about eleven, just when he was beginning to acquire a pleasant glow after a truly handsome repast, the telephone rang; it was the hospital calling him.

  "It has to be me?" he said. "No one else will do?"

  What they told him sent him hurrying out to his car with only the briefest of explanations. He drove at a speed that should have earned him a ticket. Even so, when he brought his vehicle to a lurching halt in the hospital driveway, Chief Lighthill's car was already there, and the chief was one of a gesticulating group in the lobby.

  "Where is she?" Doc demanded.

  "In surgery," someone said. "Doctor Wallingford and Doctor Kern are trying to save her."

  Doc went striding down the corridor to surgery and peered through the door-glass. There was nothing he could do at that point. Both Wallingford and Kern were better surgeons than he, and he could only consider himself lucky they had been available. He returned to the lobby. "How did it happen?" he asked the chief.

  "All I know is, she jumped out the window. I don't know why. Terry here was on guard duty outside her door. He says he heard her yelling."

  "Yelling?" Doc scowled at Terry Hinson, who was not a man given to flights of imagination. "Yelling what?"

  "Well, I can't swear to it, but I think she was yelling 'No, no!' And then I think she said 'I won't! I'll kill myself first!' " Hinson rubbed his jaw. "I'm pretty sure of that last part about killing herself. I was at the door by then."

  "And when you opened the door?"

  "She was out of bed and had the window open, struggling to climb out."

  "Struggling to climb out?" Doc said.

  "Well, it was queer. Even though she was out of her mind, she must have known it was wrong and imagined somebody was holding her back. She actually seemed to be struggling to break loose and kept sobbing 'Let me go! Let me go!' Before I could reach her she did break loose—from whatever she thought was trying to hold her, I mean—and threw herself out. "

  The chief said to Doc, "Nurse Thomas here says she saw the struggle at the window too."

  Doc turned to scowl at Nurse Thomas, who would have been in charge of the fourth floor at that time. She was a rock-steady, no-nonsense woman of forty. "That's how it happened, Mary?"

  "That's how it happened, Doctor. There can be no question about the struggle and what she cried out. Officer Hinson and I were both in the room then."

  "Let's have a look at that room, Chief," Doc said.

  "I already have, But if you think it'll do any good . . .

  They went up to the fourth floor and entered Elizabeth Peckham's room together. Doc walked to the still-open window and looked down, then stepped back shaking his head. He began to walk about, peering at the floor.

  "There's nothing," the chief said. "I've been over it inch by inch."

  "You think she could have imagined a visitation?"

  "Hell, don't ask me. You're the doctor. I'm just a cop."

  "Let's hope she just imagined it," Doc said. "Let's hang onto that much, anyway."

  At two o'clock that morning Elizabeth Peckham died of her injuries.

  28

  Eight hours after Elizabeth Peckham's departure from life, Doc Broderick answered his telephone and found himself talking to old Victor Yambor in Glendevon. "Can you come over here, Norman?" Yambor said. "It's important."

  Doc hurried to his car.

  As before, Yambor was on his porch when Doc drove into the yard. Descending the steps, he opened the door of the car and bent himself into it without waiting to explain his behavior. "Back out and turn right, Norman. Then take your second left. And I'm not going to talk to you. I don't want to influence your thinking."

  They came eventually to one of the town's older houses half a mile distant. A police car was parked at the curb, and two Glendevon policemen guarded the front door. Yambor nodded to the men. "This is Doctor Broderick from Nebulon. Knows the whole story. I want him to see what's in there."

  The men stepped aside.

  "Her name was Emily Morgan," Yambor said to Doc as he led the way into the house. "She was related to Teresa's father, actually. His aunt. That's how I got her to take the child in." He walked Doc along a short hall into a small, plain bedroom. "A Mrs. Jackvony, who lives next door, found her here in bed when she came over this morning. Seems they took turns visiting each other for breakfast. The Jackvony woman called me."

  Finding himself gazing at a dead woman about sixty years old on a bed, Doc leaned over for a closer look at her face. There was something strange about it. Her mouth was open in such a contorted, unnatural way that he could almost hear a scream shrilling out of it. Her eyes were enormously wide, as though gazing in sheer terror at something no human eyes ought to be confronted with. Even the sight of her hands, lying outside the white summer blanket, caused Doc to feel suddenly cold inside and induced in him a prolonged shiver of apprehension. The fingers of both hands were spread as wide as they could go, as though to ward off an attacker.

  "What happened to her?" Doc said at last in a voice no louder than a whisper.

  "God knows. She was alive when I got here, but almost gone, and could
barely speak to me. I didn't get much of what she said. Something about Teresa coming into the room at about three in the morning, in the dark, and staring at her in some strange way with glowing eyes. Something about the child's eyes having some awful power. That's why I called you. It was the red eyes of the Nebulon kids that brought you to me; remember? She died before I could do anything. I looked her over but couldn't find a mark on her. There'll be an autopsy, of course. Maybe that will turn up something."

  "I wonder," Doc said tonelessly.

  "What?"

  "Elizabeth Peckham died this morning, Victor."

  "What? But I thought she—"

  "At two o'clock. And you say Teresa came into this room about three." He glanced at a clock on the bedside table. "I don't know what it means, but it sure as hell scares me."

  There was a moment of silence. Then old Doctor Yambor said quietly, "Come with me, Norman," and walked out of the room.

  Doc followed him across the hall and into another bedroom.

  "This was Teresa's," Yambor said. "She's gone now. Disappeared completely. No one in the neighborhood has seen her. But look here."

  Taking hold of Doc's arm, he pulled him around the bed and pointed to the floor. And there it was on the carpet, drawn with a white substance that appeared to be flour. The symbol. The vévé. The diagram.

  Gustave's door.