Greely's Cove

by Gideon, John

  The raddled old face faded to ashen, took on a reptilian texture that the layers of makeup could not hide. Hannie actually shivered.

  “And then, you must do exactly as I say.”

  Against her good judgment, and fighting back the urge to show the old woman the door, Lindsay Moreland listened. She listened in stunned silence without interrupting, for more than an hour.

  19

  The night was far from over.

  Robinson Sparhawk sat on the bed in his room at the West Cove Motor Inn, elbows propped on his knees and face buried in his hands, arguing with himself as he had been doing throughout most of the afternoon. Katharine the Great Dane lay curled at his feet, sometimes raising her head to stare at him with regretful eyes, now and then whining in sympathy.

  Robbie let his hands drop into his lap and gazed into the huge dog’s face.

  “Man’s best friend,” he murmured, as much to himself as to Katharine. “’Cept your best friend ain’t much of a man, is he, girl?”

  There was a sadness in the way he cuffed her ear. She felt it and acknowledged it with a whimper and a lick.

  “Yeah, I know,” said Robbie, as though the dog had replied in English, “I’m a good dude, in spite of the yellow streak up my back, right?”

  He gathered his crutches from the floor beside the bed and hobbled into the bathroom, where he splashed his face with cold water and gargled with Scope to banish the mouth-funk of the cheroots he had smoked all day and into the night. The psychic sickness that had swept over him that morning at the police station—the nausea that had landed him briefly in the emergency room in Poulsbo—was long gone. Physically he felt himself again, but emotionally, spiritually, he felt leprous and weak and small. He felt ashamed.

  “It ain’t right, high-tailin’ it away, leavin’ these folks to cope with it alone. And besides that, I’m not sure I can live with myself if I run away again. I’ve got to take a stand, Kate, to show some guts....”

  Talk is easy, talk is cheap. Talk takes no courage. So Robinson Sparhawk acted, pretending that he possessed the heart of a lion, the courage of a young bull.

  Five minutes later he was showing Katharine into the cargo hold of his VW Vanagon, which Stu Bromton had sent over from the police station early in the afternoon. Then came the ritual of boarding the vehicle himself, pushing buttons to activate the motorized lift, settling his crippled body into the wheelchair, riding it up and into the cab, locking it into place.

  He started the engine, flicked on the headlights and wipers, and maneuvered the van out of the motel parking lot and onto the main street of Greely’s Cove. He turned left, heading south toward Sockeye Drive.

  “You must think I’m plumb nuts, huh, Kate?” he remarked, not taking his eyes from the deserted street ahead. “Since when do we go lookin’ for trouble, is that what you’re wondering? And what’re we gonna do with it when we find it?”

  Not if we find the trouble, but when.

  Robbie’s fists tightened on the wheel as he fought back a resurgence of dread. From the very moment he had pulled the lid off a petri dish at the police station, the Gift had been in high gear, purring like a well-oiled engine, pumping steel-hard images into his brain. He saw a hulking Victorian mansion, amorphous in its shroud of forest fog—a dead place, guarded by trees with twisted, seemingly arthritic limbs. A tortuous road wound through dank woods until ending in a clearing, at a rusted-away gate with posts of crumbly brick—the threshold of Whiteleather Place. Yes, he even knew the name. And he knew where it was, knew how to get there.

  “Funny, ain’t it, girl? A man gets into his fifties before he wakes up and sees that he’s missin’ a big piece of himself.” He gulped, almost dropping the burning cigar from his clenched teeth. He was talking again, talking; trying vainly to distract himself from the terror of the thing from which, as a matter of policy, he had always run; trying to convince himself with out-loud words that he had manly guts.

  But the effort was failing. The fear was winning.

  He halted at the lonely intersection of Frontage Street and Sockeye Drive, signaling a right turn but not yet turning. He listened to the swipe of the wipers and the whir of the defroster, staring through the windshield at the conical shafts of his headlights in the miasmal fog.

  His gaze drifted leftward to an island of electric light that seemed to float in the algid darkness: the dim bulk of City Hall, lit feebly by a trio of arc lamps atop utility poles. In the bowel of that building was the headquarters of the Greely’s Cove Police Department, a musty, cement-smelling place, where perhaps even now—at this very moment, conceivably—sat Chief Stu Bromton, alone behind his paper-strewn metal desk. Robbie visualized the big man’s haggard face, saw the scars of shattered hopes in his sleepless eyes, felt a tweak of guilt.

  “Goddamn it, Kate, I can’t run out on these people,” he muttered through his teeth, “not this time. For once in my life I’ve got to face up to—”

  Face up to what?

  Facing him now, in the fifty-second year of his life, was the unclean something that he had glimpsed years ago while leaning over the transom of a boat on Carlyle Lake—the same black threat, perhaps, that Mona Kleiman had called from New York to warn him about, a hungry life-force whose essence had poured forth from a smear of slime in the bottom of a petri dish.

  “Okay, no more talk. We’re gonna make the crossing, girl, you and me together. If we get through it with both halves of our asses together, fine and dandy. If we don’t, what the hell? At least we’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”

  Katharine whimpered her agreement and lay down on her blanket in the rear of the van. Robbie completed his right turn onto Sockeye Drive and drove gingerly through the night, humming with a lightheartedness that he did not feel, keeping his eyes peeled for a sign that said Whiteleather Place.

  Mitch Nistler lay between his grungy sheets and trembled in the darkness of his bedroom, while the rattletrap refrigerator in the kitchen filled the house with a grinding whir. Often he had cursed that sound when it had awakened him in the night, and just as often he had vowed to start putting aside booze money for a new fridge—a nice quiet Westinghouse that did not vibrate and ruckle the floorboards whenever the motor kicked on.

  But tonight he welcomed the noise and prayed that it would never end, at least not until the sun had risen safely.

  As though his prayer had been heard in hell and not in heaven, the motor kicked off, leaving an inane silence in which seconds became centuries, every wheezing breath an avalanche, each heartbeat a sledgehammer. He waited, hoping that the stirrings above his head had ended—or better still, that they had not really happened at all, that the scrapes and thumps and gurgling moans had only been figments of his own sick imagination. The silence grew, got heavier, blacker.

  The sounds started again.

  Mitch’s teeth clamped down on his tongue, igniting coppery pain and drawing blood that he tried not to swallow. He battled the urge to leap wildly from his bed and flee the house as he had done the previous night, after the bloating corpse of Lorna Trosper had opened it eyes and stared squarely into his own.

  After he had awakened on the porch of Cannibal Strecker’s crack lab, cold and quaking with fever, the need for food and warmth had been critical. He had forced himself back into his stench-filled house, and even managed a hot shower and a bowl of Dinty Moore’s before collapsing in a heap onto his sorry bed. While drifting into croupy sleep he had vowed to deal later with the swelling monstrosity in the upstairs bedroom, as soon as he had mustered both the strength and courage—to bury the thing, burn the sheet that had surrounded it, scour the floor onto which it had leeched filth, air out the place.

  Afternoon had become night and with night had come the sounds again, just as they had been coming every night for the past week, nudging Mitch out of torpid sleep. The sounds were so real, so immediate, so close.

  Lorna Trosper could not be alive, much less pregnant with his child. He had embalmed her, for God�
�s sake! The noises from above could not possibly be those of a woman giving birth. A woman needs nine months, say the laws of nature. But suppose—just suppose, for the sake of argument—that Lorna had been pregnant before she killed herself...

  Madness, carped the rational side of Mitch’s brain. She had killed herself, and even if through some unholy miracle she had failed but had merely inflicted on herself a coma deep enough to fool a medical examiner and a mortician, Mitch had finished the job she had started, had drained away her blood and injected her with a potent formaldehyde solution, had punctured all her vital organs with a trocar and sucked out their contents. Nobody could possibly live through that!

  No doubt about it, Lorna Trosper was dead, dead, dead. And dead women don’t get pregnant or thrash about on squeaky old beds, or pace the creaky floors, or moan and groan with the pain of labor.

  Or scream.

  Which someone or something did in the upstairs bedroom, searing Mitch Nistler’s soul, freezing the breath in his throat and jelling the blood in his veins—a mind-shattering scream that shredded the velvety blackness, a razor-sharp keen of agony and terror.

  He bolted from his bed and clambered on watery legs out of his bedroom, flailing wildly against the smothering dark; he collided painfully with a doorjamb and knocked a rickety bed table to the floor; he grabbled his way like a blind rodent in flight from a monstrous black cat.

  Groping and thrashing, pursued and surrounded by the hellish scream, he lunged into the pitch-blackness of the living room and careened over his battered old armchair, sprawled on the floor, and scrambled crablike toward the front door, wanting only to be away, away. Suddenly the screaming ended, and just as suddenly his head crunched against unyielding wood—the door, much closer than he had supposed. His mind exploded in a fountain of sparks that cascaded and whirled behind his eyes. He bounced downward. Somehow he rolled to his front and planted his palms on the dirty floor, struggled to regain his sense of up and down, to gather in his stuttering limbs.

  A light came oil.

  Yellowness, filtered through a dirty lamp shade, invaded his swimming brain and inflicted another dose of terror. Seated on the tattered sofa was Jeremy Trosper, angelically blond and bright-eyed, as serene in the muddy lamplight as he must have been before the light snapped on, unruffled by the scream that just seconds earlier had reverberated through the house. Mitch gasped and sank back to the floor, horrified by the glint of relish in the boy’s eyes, the power and control in his face.

  Whole minutes passed while Mitch teetered on the edge of a swoon, as half-remembered images flitted into and out of his head.

  Anubis, the god of embalmers, with the head of a dog and horrible red eyes.

  Mitch himself, an artist of the silvery scalpel, a master embalmer and priest of the god.

  A submental cavern, cold and black and stinking, where Hadrian Craslowe was the host, the hypnotist, the server of an unholy feast.

  The images evaporated, and he managed to right himself finally, to lean his back against the wall and face the insanity on the sofa. Another shuddering minute passed as his eyes digested the rest of the scene, for he was without his glasses, which added the handicap of nearsightedness to dizziness and terror.

  Jeremy had not come alone. In his lap lay a mound of orange fur, scarcely bigger than a man’s two fists—a kitten. Next to him on the sofa lay another one, silvery gray and slightly larger, curled close against his blue jeans. On the carpet at his feet sat three dogs, all nondescript mongrels, none of which looked fully grown. The animals seemed strangely lifeless and inert, as though drugged, and Mitch got the feeling that they were incapable of movement on their own, of even breathing without Jeremy’s permission; that the silken creature on the sofa held them in an unseen grip.

  Suddenly Mitch felt totally bloodless, too exhausted to flee whatever atrocity lay in store, beyond caring what else might happen to him. His head lolled and thudded against the ragged wallpaper. He closed his eyes in resignation, waiting like a condemned criminal for the whisper of the ax or the surge of 50,000 volts or the first sweet whiff of cyanide.

  Jeremy spoke at last, ending the heavy silence.

  “There now, that’s the spirit. You’ll feel much better in a moment, believe me, and we’ll be able to get on with our business.”

  The boy’s oddly deep voice and aristocratic British accent sent another tremor of fear up Mitch’s spine: Jeremy could actually hear his thoughts.

  “You really should take better care of yourself, you know. That’s a nasty rash you have, and I’d say you’re on the brink of pneumonia, from the sound of that cough.”

  Mitch had not realized he was hacking up thick phlegm, or that his breathing was a continuous, whistling wheeze. These were discomforts that paled next to the realities of the screamer upstairs and the smiling boy who sat a few feet away, surrounded by entranced animals.

  But just as Jeremy had promised, Mitch did start to feel better, having settled deep into resignation and given up the fight against the madness that was loose around him. Somehow he managed to speak around his bitten tongue, to coax words from the chaos in his head.

  “What’s happening here—to me? Why are you—doing this? Why—”

  “Oh, come now, Mitchell, you can’t possibly be that thick! Surely you must have some idea of what all this means. After all, you’ve been groomed for this moment since your early boyhood, just as I have—or shall I say prepared, since the term groomed seems somewhat inappropriate for a creature such as yourself.” The boy giggled at his own wit. “You should consider yourself fortunate to be a part of it—if you don’t mind my saying so—inasmuch as this is a very historic occasion. Only rarely are all the conditions right: the proper season, the new moon rising precisely six days after the start of Imbolc, all that sort of thing.”

  “I don’t understand. I—”

  “No, I don’t suppose you do. I sometimes overestimate people, as I have you. Still, you’ve performed rather nicely in a difficult role—that much I’ll give you. Only a few hundred men throughout the whole of human history have succeeded in doing what you’ve done, which is something you can take pride in, I should think.”

  “The body,” croaked Mitch, motioning feebly toward the ceiling, “the one upstairs—your mother. What I did to her—is that what you’re talking about?”

  “Ah, the truth dawns!”

  “But I didn’t mean to—I mean, I didn’t really want—”

  “Oh, but there’s no need to apologize, dear boy. You did exactly what you were supposed to do. Thanks to you—”

  A sound interrupted, a mewling whine that came from overhead, causing Jeremy to glance toward the ceiling and Mitch’s flesh to crawl. It had a babyish ring, but it was grossly unlike any human baby’s cry that Mitch had ever heard.

  “You’ll be happy to know,” said Jeremy, grinning broadly now, “that your involvement is nearly at its end. Even so, you can still be of use for a little while longer, and how well you perform your assigned tasks could determine whether you live or die. I assume that you wish to go on living.”

  At this point Mitch was uncertain whether life held any appeal for him, whether an existence filled with lunatic horrors was preferable to whatever lay beyond death. What was life to a man who had done the things he had done, been what he had been? The likelihood of ever smiling again seemed slim, and slimmer yet the prospect of putting behind him the memories of the past weeks and months, of living doyn the guilt for the obscenities he had committed.

  Jeremy, of course, caught these thoughts as though Mitch had spoken them aloud. He answered them, betraying anger for the first time. “I’m through coddling you, Mitchell. Now listen carefully to what I say, because it’s important.”

  The mewling whine came again from above, louder this time, more demanding. Jeremy paused to appreciate it, then continued.

  “The most loathsome thing about the human animal, Mitchell, is its conscience. Think about it: Man arrogantly assume
s that his conscience sets him apart from all other living things, that it gives him the ability to declare what’s right and wrong for all creation and everything in it. He presumes to know the difference between good and evil, saying that conscience is the source of that knowledge, all the while conveniently ignoring the fact that no two men can agree on such matters. As for yourself, you would do well to ignore whatever feelings your conscience gives you and accept yourself for what you are. If you do this, you may yet have a chance at some semblance of a life. Are you listening to me, Mitchell? Can you grasp what I’m telling you, or is it over your head?”

  “I’m not sure,” wheezed Mitch, blinking tears away. “Accept myself for what I am, you said. Just what am I, anyway?”

  “Oh my God, lad, must we go into that? You’re what you are: a human reject, a mistake. Even your parents wished that you had never been born, but surely you’ve surmised that by now. You’re unschooled and stupefyingly ignorant. An alcoholic. An ex-convict. A grimy little functionary in Corley Strecker’s cocaine enterprise—what your fellow criminals call a throwaway, if I’m not mistaken. You have no job, no prospects, you’re ugly to look at, and you’re covered with sores from having slept with a dead woman. No one will ever love you, Mitchell, because you are quite simply one of your race’s truly unlovable specimens.”

  Mitch’s chest heaved, and his throat felt as though he had swallowed a hot ball bearing. “You’re right—I’m all those things,” he managed. “So tell me, why should I want to live?” The boy ascended from the sofa, bearing the kitten in his arms, and glided close to where Mitch sat on the floor. He bent low and spoke directly into Mitch’s face, slowly, deliberately, giving punch to each word.

  “For the simple reason that you have something the vast majority of your brothers and sisters lack: a true purpose—my purpose, Mitchell. Serve that purpose and you will survive—even prosper, I can assure you. Bury your sorry excuse for a conscience, accept what you are, and you will have a life that you want to keep—not like you’ve always wished for, perhaps, and certainly not like the others of your kind, but a life nonetheless. Fail me, and I promise you a death that’s horrible beyond words, beyond your worst nightmare.”