Soulstorm. Part 17

"It's not even cold," he said. "Just about room temperature."

"Room temperature didn't do this," Wickstrom said, showing the square inch of seeping redness at the heel of his left hand.

"The same thing as when you had the bar, George," said Gabrielle. "You were the only one who could feel the change in it, the only one it harmed."

"We're stuck, chillun," Wickstrom said with a laugh. "We ain't gettin' out of here nohow noway. The b.a.s.t.a.r.d's got us where it wants us now. Christ, if it's up there"-he pointed toward the attic above-"then it's all around."

"Let's go down to the kitchen," said Gabrielle, despair in her voice. "There's ointment in the first aid kit for your burns, George, and we can bandage your hand, Kelly." She looked up at the gaping hole in the ceiling. "And afterward we can cover that up."

If either of the men thought such a gesture would be foolish, they didn't say so.

Chapter Eleven.

"We've got to make plans now," McNeely said after Gabrielle had treated and bandaged their wounds. They were sitting around the huge fireplace in the Great Hall. Every light in the room was on, and Kelly was tossing one last log onto the fire they'd built. They'd talked briefly during the wound dressing about the chimney escape and had decided, after what had happened on the third floor, not to attempt it. Even if there were a way to get up and into the attic, what was to guarantee that the copper would not become instantaneously hot enough to fry the climber? So they had built a fire, Gabrielle had made cocoa, and the three of them sat closely together, watching the flames dance on the broad stone stage of the fireplace.

"Well, we'd planned to escape," Wickstrom said dryly. "If our other plans work as well, we'll all be dead by sunrise. Whenever it is."

Gabrielle ignored the jibe. "What kind of plans, George?"

"We're here for a reason," McNeely said, concentrating on each word. "Here because it wants us here, because it can't let us go, because it needs us somehow."

"You don't know that," Wickstrom grunted.

"If you can come up with something better, let me know," said McNeely without anger. "Now, it got hold of c.u.mmings when he was alone. And it'll probably try to do the same to us. So I think we ought to try to spend as much time together as we can . . . short of sleep time and personal needs of course."

"Sure we shouldn't have a permanent buddy system, George?" asked Wickstrom. "It might try to get us in the john, y'know."

"That might be truer than you think. It could approach us anywhere. And even being together is no guarantee as far as I'm concerned. I don't think we'll be approached when we're together, but I don't know either."

Gabrielle opened her mouth to speak, then took a sip of cocoa instead.

"What is it?" McNeely asked.

"I was just wondering, how strong can this thing really be? I mean, could it destroy us all if it wanted to?"

McNeely shook his head. "Not physically, I'm betting. But what it can do to our minds is another story. I don't know why, but I keep thinking that will has an awful lot to do with it. If we refuse to have anything to do with these things, then maybe there isn't that much that they can do to harm us."

"That's a lot of guessing and not much knowing," Wickstrom said with a trace of petulance. "Let's face it, George, Gabrielle, we don't really know s.h.i.+t about what's here. h.e.l.l, maybe it could turn us all into jelly in the next second for all we know. Maybe . . ."

"No," said Gabrielle. "It couldn't do that."

"Why the h.e.l.l not?"

"If it could, it wouldn't be playing cat and mouse with us. It would simply make us do what it wanted."

"Oh, come on! How do you know it's even sane enough to know the difference between cat and mouse and bash 'em on the head? I mean, I can't make any sense at all of what's been happening here, and you two are already writing a book!"

"Look," said McNeely, holding up his hands, "we probably don't have enough input to make any real sense of what's been happening, so we can only theorize, Kelly. But we've got to start somewhere."

"Why? What's so f.u.c.king important that we know? I don't think we can know. Why don't we just stick together as much as we can, and try to get through the next week or so without going crazy? I don't know about you, but I just want to forget all this stuff and concentrate on other things, like how I'm gonna spend my money when I get out-think pleasant thoughts, y'know? What my mother used to tell me when I'd have a nightmare, and Christ knows this's been a nightmare all right. So if you think we oughta stick together, George, well f.u.c.kin'-A with me. I hate being in this place alone." He stopped talking at last. His face had gotten red, and his frantic gestures had worked the adhesive tape loose from the gauze that covered his ripped hand. "Okay," he said, "okay, that's enough of a speech. I'll do whatever you two want to do as long as it keeps us safe and sane. All right?"

McNeely nodded. "We'll set up a schedule. We'll eat together, be together as much as possible when we're awake." He looked at Gabrielle, a question in his eyes. She read it immediately and nodded. "Kelly, there's another thing. A complication you should know about."

Wickstrom smiled tensely. "I think I know already. You two ... you two are more than, uh, just friends, right?"

McNeely was surprised, and tried in vain to hide it. "Yes. Yes, that's true. But how did you ..."

Wickstrom chuckled and relaxed a bit. "You hide most things real well, George, but that one was obvious." He glanced at Gabrielle and was amazed to find a splash, of pink on the sophisticated cheeks. "It doesn't matter, okay? I don't need to know any more than I already know."

"It must look awful," Gabrielle said. "So soon after David."

"You don't owe me any explanation. And you don't owe your husband an apology. It's just the way things are."

And the three of them sat there with their separate thoughts, Wickstrom's about another wife who'd been unfaithful, Gabrielle's about another lover with whom she'd cheated a living husband, and McNeely's about an unfamiliar weakness that at last let his features betray his thoughts.

They spent as much time together as was realistically possible. McNeely and Gabrielle, except for bathroom privacies, were never apart, and Wickstrom was with them except when they all slept. Gabrielle had moved into the Whitetail Suite with McNeely, so the three of them all occupied the west wing only. They ate together, played games together, read books together-McNeely was reading aloud The Brothers Karamazov, which neither Wickstrom nor Gabrielle had read-and when one was tired, the others usually were as well. If Wickstrom awoke first, he would rap softly on the door of McNeely and Gabrielle's suite. If there was no answer, he would return to his own rooms and read, and within a short time they would knock on his door. Then they would have breakfast together.

Wickstrom had been concerned that he would be approached the first time he was alone again in his rooms, but nothing happened. He had slept soundly and dreamlessly, or at least he had thought until he opened his eyes from sleep and saw another face gazing down into his.

It was not the same face that he had seen before at that time in that position. This one was a pale face with straw-colored hair and sky-blue eyes, a young face with features so fair that it was all the more shocking to see the unmistakable stamp of madness on them.

But it vanished as quickly and completely as the other had, leaving him with a pounding heart and the thought that it must be only the least unforgotten fragment of a dream. And since it was a dream, he saw no point in telling the others.

Just as the others saw no point in telling him or each other about the faces they saw on awakening.

Several sleeps later the three of them sat in the white playroom on the third floor. Breakfast was far enough removed so that they no longer felt full, but recent enough so that there was no hunger in any of them for the next meal. Like savages, they lived by their stomachs. McNeely was in the middle of one of a row of Edgar Wallace thrillers he'd discovered in the library, and Wickstrom was doing a crossword puzzle, working his way through a paperback book full of them, throwing away each page as he completed it. Though McNeely's attention was held fast by Wallace's prose, Wickstrom glanced up from his puzzle frequently to check Gabrielle's progress with her still life.

She'd resumed her drawing six sleeps previously, had finished her preliminary sketches, and was now putting the finis.h.i.+ng touches on the large blue bound volumes she'd positioned on the table. Wickstrom had marveled at her ability to turn pigment into the reproduction of realism that was forming on the canvas, and now, as she brought more and more tone and shading to what had been only bare outlines, he was finding it impossible to deal with his puzzle at all.

Finally the last bit of color left her brush to settle on the canvas, and there were the books, burnished leather gleaming in the light, every pore of the binding pulsing with energy as though it were once more the living skin of the beast it had clothed.

"My G.o.d," he said in awe. "Gabrielle, that is incredible."

McNeely glanced up from his book. His eyes widened as he saw the painting, and then narrowed in intense scrutiny. "It's clearer than a photograph," he said. "It makes the superrealists look like Monet. And yet," he went on, rising and crossing to the easel, "there's more to it than that. It looks more than real."

Gabrielle smiled, embarra.s.sed by the praise. "It is good. It's far better than anything I've ever done." She wondered if it might be because there was no more David to make her work seem so unimportant. "But it's not finished, you know. I've still got to paint the instruments."

McNeely stepped next to the table. "May I take the books? Are you finished with them?" She nodded, reminding him not to disturb the s.e.xtant, and he picked the volumes up, bringing them back behind the easel and holding the reality up to the image. "I hate to gush," he said, "but this knocks me out."

Wickstrom looked at the comparison and shook his head in wonder. "A good thing you paint still lifes, Gabrielle. If you painted anything alive, it'd probably step down off the canvas."

"Don't say that, Kelly," McNeely joked. "In this place it probably would."

Wickstrom and Gabrielle laughed. They were all finally able to joke again, even about the house and their being trapped within it. It was the timelessness that had made it so easy. When it seemed as though things had happened either a moment or a year before, it was easier and less painful to imagine the latter. " 'We have always lived in the castle,' " McNeely had quoted once when they'd been discussing the phenomenon, and although neither Gabrielle nor Wickstrom seemed to recognize the allusion, they understood it well enough.

"I'm thirsty," Wickstrom said, turning toward the door. "Anybody want anything?"

"We'll go with you," said McNeely, setting the books on the small table by his chair. Gabrielle put down her palette.

"Look, isn't this a little silly?" Wickstrom objected mildly. "I mean, it's been quite a while now since ... the trouble, and nothing's happened. h.e.l.l, I sleep alone-if the creepy-crawlies wanted to get me, they'd get me then, right?"

"I guess, Kelly. It's just that I don't think we ought to take any chances."

"George, my chances of being grabbed while walking down the hall to the lounge for a gla.s.s of water are pretty small, wouldn't you agree?"

"Sorry, Kelly. I guess I've seen too many horror movies. The monster hardly ever comes out unless the victim's alone, you know?" McNeely waved a hand. "Oh, go ahead. Just yell if you need help."

"My feets are very capable of doing they stuff, thank you," Wickstrom joked as he stepped into the hall.

As soon as the door closed behind him, he wished he'd listened to McNeely. He couldn't ever remember feeling so alone. It was worse, far worse, than being in his bedroom with George and Gabrielle across the hall. Since there were two of them, they'd always seen him to his rooms first, then gone into theirs. And, too, the rooms were his-he felt safe in them. Nothing had ever happened there, nothing except seeing the nightmare faces that he felt sure were his own creations.

But now he felt naked, exposed, like an ant fallen onto a spider's web in which all the strands but one were sticky, and if he could scuttle quickly and silently across that single strand and back again, everything would be fine. But if he made a noise, or stepped too hard, or went too slowly, the spider would hurtle down, his ma.s.sive bulk knocking him against one of the sticky strands, where his struggles to get free would only entangle him further. And the spider would laugh a deep roaring laugh before it began at last to feed.

Go on, dummy! he told himself. What was it, eighty feet? Twenty to the Great Hall, another forty across the balcony, and a final twenty to the door of the lounge. That was all. Eighty feet.

And back again.

And inside the lounge, where he'd heard Seth c.u.mmings shambling in the darkness. And back again.

Had heard was right. Seth c.u.mmings was dead as dead could be. He wasn't going to be there waiting for someone to push the door wide and turn on the lights and see ...

Seth c.u.mmings standing by the bar with his head stuck on one of the spigots ...

s.h.i.+t. Just do it. Just walk. If it's gonna get me, it's gonna get me one way or another. Walk.

Wickstrom walked to the lounge. He didn't look to the side; he didn't look in back of him. He stared straight ahead and walked down the hall. He didn't look over the balcony rail when he pa.s.sed it because he knew that if he did, he'd see all those people down below looking up at him, those people just like Seth c.u.mmings, and there would be dozens of them, maybe even hundreds standing down there looking up at Kelly Wickstrom, not saying anything, not having to, because he knew what they wanted, what they wanted to do to him. Or maybe they'd all be dancing down there around the big fireplace with a chimney that didn't go out into the clean air but recirculated its smoky essence so that the air got harder and harder to breathe. Dead air. Dead like everything and everybody else in here but the three of them, and he would not look down over that railing.

He was past it now, he was by the stairs, and he had only another twenty feet to go. But the feet stretched to yards and the yards became backyards with a psychic fence between each to climb over. He climbed and walked as though through the thick jelly of dreams. The stairway on his right was hunched in shadow, the steps like slanted fingers ready to reach up and smash the ant that scurried forever across the dry strand of Oriental runner. The vacant rooms just past the stairs (past the stairs, yes, I am moving) were suddenly filled with terrors that the closed fists of the doors threatened to release and scatter like a boy scatters the lightning bugs he's captured on a windless summer night. They would dart about the hapless ant, blinding him with their fiery white phosph.o.r.escence so that he stepped off the single strand of safety, so that one leg touched that wet stickiness that held him tight, and without wanting to, he twitched and pulled at the strand.

And woke the spider.

The lounge door stood open before him, and the light glowed, inside. He walked through the doorway into the warmth of the room, and felt as though the trek there had taken hours, but now he was back to normal again, crossing the floor to the bar and pouring three fingers of bourbon as he muttered, "f.u.c.k the water."

The liquor burned its way into his stomach and he sighed in relief and delight at feeling a sensation other than fear. What the h.e.l.l had come over him? There was no point to his terror, none at all. He had seen and heard nothing, all the imagined horrors being exactly that-imagined. "Get a hold of yourself, man," he quoted in an old school tone of voice. But instead of amusing himself, the words chilled him as he wondered who else might be hearing them. He propped himself on a barstool and looked around the room. It was closetless, and there were no other cubbyholes behind or inside of which anything large enough to be harmful could hide. But still...

"h.e.l.lo," he said, not at all tentatively, but forcefully, as if he expected to be answered. "h.e.l.lo, h.e.l.lo, h.e.l.lo. Nice to be here." He swallowed heavily, ant.i.thetical to his manner. "I'm starving for conversation," he went on. "Isn't anybody going to talk to me?"

He paused then, listening, watching, eyes roving recklessly over the room, fearing to stop at one place for too long.

"Well, all right then." As he heard his words, he knew his voice was wrong. Nonchalance should not tremble; sarcasm should not shake. "I hate to drink alone, but you've had your chance." He finished the drink and put the gla.s.s into the small sink, running water into it, then turning it upside down. He opened his mouth to say more, but thought better of it, and made himself walk out into the hall. He stood there, his eyes on the closed door of the vacant room directly across from the lounge. The decision made, he crossed to it and turned the k.n.o.b.

But doubt beat him down as he prepared to push, and he could only stand statuelike, hand on doork.n.o.b, frozen in a scene he'd played in a dozen busts in a dozen dingy apartment halls. And what good would it do to shout "hold it, police" to a room empty of all but phantoms? He didn't even have a backup.

So he let go of the k.n.o.b and turned away, the door unopened. At the balcony he stopped and listened. The only sound was the infrequent dull pop of the few logs left from their last fire, engaged in a slow destruction in which no visible flames chewed and bit at the fuel. Instead, they turned slowly, invisibly, to ash, the combustion working its way into the core of the log inch by inch, so slowly as to be unnoticeable to a watcher. But in the silence of The Pines he could hear it three floors below, could hear the cancer of oxidation turning the hard wood from brown to charred black to the gray powder that dropped off speck by speck. Then he looked down.

The s.p.a.ce below was empty. There were no grinning specters, no malformed monsters, no quasi-Quasimodos beckoning to him to join their throng. Except for the few pieces of furniture that dotted it, the Great Hall was bare. He smiled as manfully as he could, then walked the rest of the way to the playroom.

As he entered, Gabrielle looked up from her canvas and smiled. "That was fast."

"Fast?"

"You've barely been gone," she said. "I didn't even have time to worry about you."

"No worry," Wickstrom answered, confused at the dichotomy of their individual perceptions of time. "Didn't see a thing." He sat and picked up his puzzle book. McNeely had only glanced up when he'd entered, and seemed enthralled in the blue quarto volume he held in his lap. "What're the books, George?" Wickstrom asked.

"Oh," McNeely answered, distracted, "the ones Gabrielle was painting."

"I know that," he said. "I mean what's in them?"

McNeely looked up in slight exasperation. "Astronomical notebooks. These are the ones old Robert D'Neuville kept the summers he spent here." He looked back at the pages. "I wish to h.e.l.l that dome were open. We might see quite a show."

"A show?"

"It's strange," McNeely said almost to himself. "D'Neuville had literally hundreds of meteors recorded-"

"Oh, yeah? Like meteor showers?"

"So it seems, but meteor showers are generally predictable. He seems to have seen them nearly all the time. In the summer the Perseids are prominent, but there's no sign of them here."

Generally meteors would have bored Wickstrom, as did anything of a scientific nature, but in the captivity of The Pines, the mention of them stirred his interest. "What kind of meteors? I mean, I don't even know what they are, really."

"I'm no astronomer," said McNeely, "but I think they're outer s.p.a.ce debris, pieces of comets' tails that are caught by the earth's gravitational pull. When they enter our atmosphere, they ignite. Most of them burn up before they hit the surface. But if these were meteors, they sure as h.e.l.l behaved oddly. Listen to this." He read: June 12th. Started to observe at 8:45 P.M. While searching for Mercury low in the east, I became aware of a pinpoint of light moving into my field. I followed it and traced its journey from above the eastern horizon, where I first saw it, upward approximately seven degrees. There it seemed to stop and increase in brightness to roughly - 3.00 magnitude, at which point it seemed to break apart into a cloudy luminescence. I have seen nothing like this before. I was so amazed that I went and told Smith, who has a bit of a layman's interest in astronomy. He suggested that it might be a phenomenon similar to an aurora, but I doubt it. It did not appear auroral in nature, more meteoric actually, only what kind of meteor sails upward from the horizon?

McNeely looked up from the book. "That was only the first of them. When he started observing again, he saw them everywhere. Listen to this observation a few days later."

June 19th. I have struggled to imagine what these bits of light might be, but I can come up with nothing. Smith, at my invitation, has been observing also, and is astonished by the things. They come approximately once every three or four minutes-that is, at any certain point in the sky five degrees across. They never rise higher than twenty degrees from the horizon, at which point they brighten and seemingly disintegrate.

June 20th. It is extraordinary. Smith and I walked out to the overlook at 10:30 this evening. There was no moon, and the stars glittered like jewels. The meteors came in profusion, and I can see there is a pattern now. From the northern horizon, and also from the west and east, come the lights. They are very dim at first as they come into view, like faraway rockets being shot off from over the edge of the world. Then as they rise in the sky, they grow in luminescence until they approach the brightness of fireflies, at which point they burst apart like fireworks, scattering their faint light over a huge area of the sky. They arrive incessantly, and at times many come at once. We saw dozens in the short time we observed. The sight is unparalleled in my experience. Although this is totally illogical and must be nothing but a twist of our perceptive sense, I could swear that Pine Mountain is the target of these lights. Other meteors I have observed elsewhere (if meteors these are) have crossed only a small portion of the overturned bowl of the night sky. But Smith and I, as observers, seem to be at the focal point of these phenomena. No matter at what point on the horizon they originate, they seem to come straight toward us. I shall make it a point to ask Wilkes at Yerkes about this.

"Holy s.h.i.+t," muttered Wickstrom.

McNeely nodded. "Curiouser and curiouser."

"Did he keep seeing them?" Gabrielle asked, mixing the colors on her palette.

"Don't know. I haven't gotten that far." He thumbed through the rest of the volume and then picked up the others. "A lot of gaps," he said. "Every two pages is a day, every volume a year. Only a few weeks filled in every year."

"He spent only a few weeks here every year after his son died," Gabrielle reminded him. "I suppose the books stayed here exclusively."