Greely's Cove

by Gideon, John

  God, her arms! How can she still be alive?

  She was Teri Zolten.

  Carl shivered and trembled, fought to hang on to his sanity, to keep from screaming at the top of his lungs. These were the missing people of Greely’s Cove, or at least some of them—the ones who had not yet been totally consumed by whatever lurked in the dark maw beyond the arch. By some unnatural magic they had survived wounds that should have killed them several times over, possessed powers to float through the air and do God only knew what else.

  A hand settled on Carl’s shoulder, and this time he did scream. He whirled to stare into the wrecked face of Sandy Cunningham Zolten, once his favorite cheerleader at Su-quamish High. Her left cheek had been taken by someone else’s teeth, leaving her own exposed to the air, along with her fungoid gums. Her rusty hair was ragged and crazy, her jumpsuit shredded to reveal the savaging that her once pretty body had taken.

  “Oh, Carl, I can’t tell you how good it is to see you,” she said with what should have been a smile. “I followed you around upstairs, wondering if I dare talk to you. But since you’re here...” Her voice was rough and gurgly, which could have been due to the holes in her throat. Her speech was misshapen for lack of half a lip.

  “S-S-Sandy?” Carl’s own voice had nearly fled, and he pressed his back into the corner of stone wall and wooden door, a pathetic effort to move away. “Sandy, I—I—”

  “There’s no need to whisper,” she said, cocking her head and allowing the stalk of a severed vessel to pop through a gap in her face. “They can’t hear us in there. They’re in a trance—something to do with Jeremy’s final initiation, I guess.”

  She drew even closer to him.

  “I sensed you were coming, Carl. And I was glad. I suppose you know that I’ve always had a crush on you, even after high school. You must’ve known.”

  She insinuated a tattered arm over his shoulder, causing him nearly to retch.

  “Sandy, what’s happened to you?” he croaked, nodding toward the door. “To them? Is it Craslowe? Has he done this to you?”

  “Oh, let’s forget about him, since he won’t be awake for hours yet. That means we have some time before you go to the Feast. We should make good use of it.”

  “What feast? What’s going on in there?” He grabbed the viscous skin of her arm and tried to force it away from his neck.

  “It’s like a graduation or something. Jeremy is becoming like Hadrian, a steward to the Giver of Dreams. But that doesn’t concern you or me—or us. Let’s make the most of—” Carl summoned all his strength and wits, dragged his mind back from the brink of blubbering lunacy, and shoved Sandy away. When she came back at him, he kicked her hard in the midriff. She staggered backward and then faced him squarely, breathing with a growling hiss. Her eyes began to show from within, and Carl nearly fainted with fright.

  “What’s the matter, aren’t I good enough for you, Carl? .Aren’t I high enough on the social ladder to be your girl?”

  “Sandy, stay away from me!”

  “Do you think I don’t know what you and Renzy have been doing with your fucking cameras, taking pictures of me when I’m leading cheers, when I’m kicking? How do you think that makes me feel, Carl? Do you think I like the thought of having my picture in your wallet, so you can show it around the boys’ locker room?”

  “Sandy, I mean it! Stay away!”

  “Or you’ll do what, Carl? You’re not thinking of leaving, are you? I can prevent that, you know. I have powers now, and I can make you do whatever I want. Besides, you don’t want to miss the Feast.”

  Carl made a move along the stone wall, thinking to flee back toward the stairway, but Sandy Zolten laughed out loud with a voice that turned his blood to jelly. Numbness soaked into his arms and legs and torso, staggering him. He fell against the wall and just managed to stay on his feet.

  “See what I mean?” said Sandy, coming toward him again. “I have power, Carl, and I’m going to take you to the Feast. There’ll be some pain and a few minutes of terror, but you’ll surrender to the Giver, and when you’ve done that, the dreaming will start. And oh, you’ll dream the most incredible things! You’ll move through time and taste the most exquisite miseries, Carl, the most beautiful atrocities that mankind has ever conceived. You’ll experience hungers that you never knew you had, and you’ll be able to quench them with every imaginable kind of sin. But first—”

  Another wave of numbness gripped Carl, and he nearly fell to the stone floor, heaving and gagging. Sandy was very close now, and he could smell her.

  “—there’s the little matter of this.”

  She began to wriggle out of her tattered jumpsuit, pushing it down from her horribly mutilated shoulders, down past the only breast she had left, down with the remnants of her ravaged undergarments, exposing great gapes where gouts of flesh had been eaten away.

  When naked, she came to him and wrapped her filthy arms around his neck, pushing her encrusted face into his.

  “Time to fuck, Carl. Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted, a chance to fuck me? Isn’t that why you took all those pictures, so you could see up past my panties? Well, here I am. You want it, you know you do, and so do I.”

  Carl felt that at any moment his revulsion would kill him, that his heart would simply refuse to go on beating. Sandy was digging into his jacket, tearing away the buttons of his flannel shirt, trying to force a hand into his belt. Carl was smothering, dying, when Sandy’s body suddenly stiffened, and her hands flew to her throat. The numbness left Carl instantly.

  He saw a tight leather strap around her neck, which she clawed with her hands, her luminous eyes bulging and her tongue thrusting horribly out of her mouth, the wounds in her neck sucking and whistling wetly. Behind her was Ianthe Pauling, who was strangling her with what appeared to be a belt, and doing so expertly. Minutes passed before it was over, before the tragic existence of Sandy Zolten ended and the salacious light left her eyes. The body that had once belonged to a beautiful young woman slapped to the stones in an obscene heap.

  Carl cried as Ianthe Pauling led him away from the undercroft, actually shed huge tears that flowed down his face as she pulled him, urged him, drove him up the coiling staircase, forcing him to leave Jeremy behind. He cried for his son, for Sandy Zolten. He cried for his sanity, for all the poor souls on whom Hadrian Craslowe’s evil had feasted. He scarcely believed his eyes when at last they beheld the light of the winter afternoon, when he discovered that the world still existed.

  27

  Lindsay Moreland left the library of the University of Washington and headed for the parking lot and her Saab. On any other day she might have enjoyed the memories stirred by the sights and sounds of campus life, having spent nearly six years in this place, pursuing her B.A. and M.B.A. and virtually living in the library for weeks at a time. But today she was oblivious to the bustling students and the familiar landmarks. In her hand she carried a folded slip of paper on which a helpful assistant librarian had jotted the name and address of a small shop in Seattle’s International District: The Man-Arid-Magic Bookstore.

  The dashboard clock told her it was nearly two hours past lunchtime, but strangely, she was not the slightest bit hungry. She had spent the past four hours wading through volumes about the occult, scouring the indexes and tables of contents for any reference to Hadrian Craslowe, by that or any similar spelling. Though she had not found the name, she had come across numerous references to several books that were purportedly complete encyclopedias of noteworthy characters throughout the history of the occult. But the university library did not stock those particular books. They could be ordered, of course, the librarian had said, but that might take days.

  “Try this place,” he had advised, scribbling on a notepad. “It’s a little store off Jackson Street—wait, I’ll look up the address for you. It’s supposed to have everything there is on the occult: encyclopedias, histories, how-tos, the whole nine yards. If you don’t find them there, you won’t find
them anywhere.”

  Lindsay had thanked the guy and left, feeling just a little foolish for having dedicated a precious morning to scratching a mental itch, a little guilty for playing hooky from the brokerage, but no less determined to find out—

  Find out what? Whether Hannie Hazelford’s ravings had contained a grain of truth? The implications of that possibility were too outrageous, so Lindsay suppressed them and concentrated instead on getting across the Washington Ship Canal to Highway 520, and from there to 1-5 South, which would take her to the International District.

  “Robbie, wake up. We have work to do.”

  Hannie was shaking him with her bony hand. Reluctantly he opened his eyes, to discover that he had fallen asleep in an armchair in her living room. He sat up straight and saw that Hannie was naked, her pince-nez perched on her nose, meaning that she had been scrying again.

  “What time is it?” he rasped, unable to focus on his watch just yet.

  “It’s early afternoon, and time’s a-wasting. Here, I’ll help you with your boots.” She exuded an English sense of urgency.

  “I can’t believe I fell asleep,” said the Texan. “After last night’s little go-around with that Craslowe fella, I doubted that I’d ever sleep again.”

  “Be thankful that you were able to rest. Now come.”

  “Aren’t you gonna put somethin’ on, hon? I s’pect you will freeze if you go out like that.”

  “Oh, I’ll put something on,” she answered, as though Robbie had been serious, “but I must first cast a protective spell for you. I doubt that you’ll need it in the broad daylight, but it’s better to be safe than sorry, wouldn’t you say?” Her energy level had apparently returned to near normal, which Robbie was glad to see.

  “I’m not so sure I like that idea, Hannie. The last time you hung something around my neck, it blew up and burned the holy you-know-what out of me.”

  “Really, Robbie, I haven’t time to argue with you. There’s a young man who needs our help, and he needs it desperately. I saw him just now, while scrying Whiteleather Place. It’s Jeremy’s father. I told you about him, I think.”

  Robbie’s face grew serious as he pulled himself up and onto his crutches. “Yeah, you did. And I saw him during your scrying last night. He was lookin’ for his boy, drivin’ around the streets, up and down alleys. He wasn’t a happy man.”

  “He’s even less happy now, I fear. He’s actually gotten inside the mansion and gone down to the undercroft where the Giver of Dreams resides. I’m happy to say that he’s safe for the moment, but his sanity has worn a trifle thin, and he needs our guidance. We must go to him. Now come along, and roll up your sleeve, if you please, because I’ll need some more of your blood.”

  “Aw, come on, darlin’, you can’t be fixin’ to cut me with that knife again! Shoot, I’ve got a big scab where Monty Pirtz took a chunk out of my wrist, another one where you cut me last night, a blister on my chest the size of a half-dollar, even a gouge in my hairdo—”

  “Will you please stop behaving like a child and roll up your sleeve! This won’t hurt, I promise you.”

  But of course it did hurt. It hurt like the frigging blue blazes.

  “Are you certain you’re well enough to drive?” asked Ianthe Pauling, staring at Carl with her huge almond eyes. “It would be no trouble at all to drive you home.”

  He leaned forward in the passenger seat of Hadrian Craslowe’s Lincoln, in which the mysterious Mrs. Pauling had whisked him away from Whiteleather Place to the spot where he had parked the Roadmaster.

  “I’m fine now,” he lied. “I can drive.”

  In truth he still felt shaky, as though his equilibrium had evaporated through his ears, as much because of the incredible things Mrs. Pauling had told him as the ordeal he had suffered at the undercroft.

  “Very well, then. I shan’t keep you any longer.” She touched a button that unlocked the doors with an electrical thud, and Carl flinched.

  “Mrs. Pauling—” His voice cracked, and he coughed to clear his vocal chords. “Ianthe, are you sure there’s no way I can get Jeremy out of there? It just seems so—so insane to leave him.”

  “As I’ve told you, Mr. Trosper, there’s absolutely nothing you can do for your son. He’s lost to you forever. Any attempt by you to get him back would only result in your own death, which would be prolonged and excruciating beyond belief. You already have gotten a taste of what I mean. You’ve seen the victims of the Giver of Dreams, so you know what would lie in store.”

  Once again Carl felt heat rising from his chest to his throat, the fire of grief and rage. He held back what would have been a most unmanly sob.

  “But he’s my son! He’s my own flesh and blood!”

  “Not anymore. He’s become like Hadrian, the manciple of the offspring. His whole existence is tied to the creature—caring for it, feeding it, keeping it safe and helping it to procreate. This will be Jeremy’s life from now on. In return he’ll have wealth and longevity, a thousand years or more, and his mind will absorb more knowledge than any human was meant to have. He’ll be a great sorcerer, and he’ll use his magic to further his ends, to create more of his kind, perhaps. Other mere mortals will serve him, just as many have served Hadrian, lured by the promise of wealth and success, both of which Jeremy will be able to provide through his magic. Or he will simply blackmail them, or hold hostage their loved ones, as Hadrian has done with me. Jeremy will thrive on evil, just as Hadrian does. He’ll take his sustenance from the agonies that he inflicts, from the fear and grief that will follow him wherever he goes. He has become an agent of Hell, Mr. Trosper, and no longer yours.”

  Carl swallowed and clinched his eyes for a moment, trying to digest the execrable things he had seen within the past hour, all that Ianthe Pauling had told him. In the space of sixty short minutes, his rational universe had toppled against a barrage of inexplicable events. He had seen them with his own eyes, heard them with his own ears. Who could possibly disbelieve, having survived the past hour?

  He opened his eyes and stared straight ahead, seeing nothing beyond the video screen of his thoughts. “This offspring that Jeremy serves,” he said miserably. “Where did it come from?” Mrs. Pauling’s silence made him turn his head toward her. When his eyes focused, he saw the turmoil in her face, the glistening tears. He tried again: “Ianthe, I asked you—”

  “I heard! There’s nothing to be gained by talking about it. Haven’t you seen enough, heard enough? For God’s sake, Mr. Trosper, go home now! Pack your things and leave this town for good. Forget about everything that has happened and make a life for yourself somewhere else. You’re a young man yet, and you still have time.”

  “But I only wanted to know—”

  “Take my advice and get out while you can! Hadrian will consider you a threat for having found out his secrets, and he’ll retaliate. He’ll send forces against you, the most appalling things imaginable. So get away from here, as far away as you possibly can, like I should have done years ago. That’s all I’m going to say.” A crystalline tear rolled down her cheek. She jerked her head forward to study the steering wheel. “Now, good afternoon, Mr. Trosper.”

  Carl opened the door and got out, but he hovered unsteadily a moment, gazing at the woman who had delivered him from something that he had never dreamed could exist.

  “Ianthe, I know this will sound inadequate. But thank you. Thank you for getting me out of there. And for telling me the truth about—about Jeremy. I owe you my life. I only wish there was something I could do for you.”

  “You can repay me by getting yourself to safety, by forgetting all this. Not that I deserve any repayment: I’ll always carry the guilt of having had a hand in making your son what he is.”

  “You didn’t have any choice in that. Craslowe has had a hold on you.” He didn’t mention her brother, who she had said was rotting away in a Welsh mental institution, a victim of Hadrian Craslowe’s magic, a hostage to guarantee her continued service. Carl shuddered as
he thought of the price she might pay for having saved his skin. “I hope that somehow things go well for you,” he managed. “Good-bye.”

  He closed the door of the Lincoln, heard her start the engine, and watched her turn back toward the mansion. The sun glinted brilliantly off the shiny skin of the car, the breeze stirred the forest that walled the road, and gauzy clouds inched across the blue sky. Carl lingered a moment in the warmth of the sun on his shoulders, trying hard not to think of the poor souls who still languished in the mephitic bowels of Whiteleather Place, and then walked toward the Roadmaster.

  “So this is where Jeremy lives,” said Robinson Sparhawk, as Hannie’s red Jaguar braked to a halt at the curb in front of the squat little bungalow at 116 Second Avenue. “Damn, it looks ordinary.”

  “Surely you can feel the presence, your being a psychic and all,” said Hannie, switching off the ignition. “Even though Jeremy is not here, the presence lingers. Just look at the lawn and the shrubbery—all dying, even those hardy old trees. It’s the effect of the evil that he partook of at Whiteleather Place. It radiates from him, poisoning the air and the elements. Green things are especially susceptible, and so are birds and animals.”

  “And people, too, apparently,” said the psychic, eyeing the ruined yard. “It drove his mother to kill herself.”

  “Indeed. But there was a purpose behind her dying, as you well know. It was premeditated, part of a plan. The death of the yard is merely incidental.”