Soulstorm. Part 6

KELLY! KELLY!.

Wickstrom's eyes jerked open.

"Kelly!" McNeely called again, driving short sharp slaps onto his pale cheeks. Wickstrom's hand sprang up and grabbed McNeely's wrist. McNeely tensed as if about to pull away, but instead, he smiled and ignored the pressure of Wickstrom's iron grip. "You've been dreaming."

Wickstrom looked at him, not recognizing McNeely at first. When he did, he let his grip relax and wiped beads of sweat from his forehead and beneath his eyes.

"It must have been a beauty," said McNeely.

Wickstrom shook his head dully. "It . . ." The words locked in his throat and he cleared it roughly. "It was horrible."

"I didn't know if you were going to come out of it or not. I called your name a couple of times but couldn't wake you."

"Yeah. Yeah. I heard you, but it sounded like something else in the dream," and he told McNeely all he could remember.

"Tekeli-li," McNeely repeated thoughtfully. "That's from Poe. Arthur Gordon Pym."

"About . . . about the cannibals?" Wickstrom's face was strained, reaching for a memory.

"Yes," McNeely nodded. "A sea voyage. There's cannibalism among the survivors of a wreck. You've read Pym?"

"Long ago. Oh, Christ, it must have been high school. Junior high. I remember though. I haven't thought about that in years. That last part . . . they're in the Arctic..."

"Antarctic, I think."

"Yeah, okay. Anyway, it's all white . . . and those birds-yeah, the birds are saying that Tekeli-li thing, and I remember it scared the s.h.i.+t out of me because I thought-" He paused.

"You thought they were calling your name."

Wickstrom looked up and nodded. The fear was still in his eyes. "And that thing," he said softly.

"Thing?"

"The big thing that they saw at the very end. The big white thing that stood up in front of them.: "Yes?"

"You never knew what it was. Because the story stopped there. With that white thing in front of them." Wickstrom shuddered and hugged himself. "I dreamed about that thing for weeks. If you hadn't woken me up, I think I would've dreamed about it again." He looked at McNeely. "And I think I would have known what it was this time."

"Forget it," McNeely said more heartily than he felt. "Frosty the Snowman, probably. It's only natural that this place'll work on our heads a little. Give us some frights we'd forgotten about. But even if it can do that, that's all it can do." He paused, thinking. "Do open s.p.a.ces bother you?"

"Hah. d.a.m.n right they do. I guess that's a city boy for you. 'Nam really got to me. If I wasn't hunkered down in a hole, I was miserable. I just felt so f.u.c.king vulnerable all the time."

"I know what you mean. I feel the same way about enclosed s.p.a.ces."

As soon as he said it, McNeely wondered what the h.e.l.l he was doing. That was one of the things he never told anyone, not even Jeff. Reveal your weaknesses and people can use them against you. Yet he'd blurted it out like a California executive dripping all over an a.n.a.lyst's couch. Why?

"You're kidding," said Wickstrom. "How in h.e.l.l can you stand being locked up in this place?"

"I'm not locked up," said McNeely with a smile, hoping that Wickstrom would think he had been kidding. "Like I told our host, all I have to do to get out is to cut off everyone else's heads." He laughed, and Wickstrom laughed with him.

"Jesus, I hope it doesn't come to that," Wickstrom said, rising and chalking his cue.

Jesus, thought McNeely, I hope it doesn't either.

Gabrielle was sleeping. Neville watched her small b.r.e.a.s.t.s rise and fall beneath the thin coverlet. Her breathing was slow and easy, and he knew she would sleep for a long time if she was not disturbed. He let his hand rest for a moment on the soft flatness of her stomach, and then he rose quietly from her side. At another time he might have caressed her until she stirred from her sleep, and then made love to her, but that was before a great many things had occurred, and he wondered if before the month was up he might make love to her once again.

As he stood watching her, his hand went down to touch himself. There was no response. He bit back tears and walked through the living room of their suite into the hall.

It seemed alive.

And life was what he needed. For so long now his thoughts had been on death. Every waking moment it walked with him, a dark shadow at his side. Only in dreams could he escape its companions.h.i.+p. His dreams, ever since he had known of his illness and its final and fatal denouement, had been clear and clean and happy, and so he slept more and more, changing his schedule from seven hours a night to ten or more, with frequent naps in the afternoons. It was the only way to relax his churning mind, give ease to his sympathetic body. He hoped he would die in the middle of a dream so that it would never end, and he would never have to face the parting.

But now, standing in the hall of The Pines, he could forget death. For whatever was there had transcended it, beaten it down, shown it in its reality as a miserable faker. Death be not proud, he thought, and for the first time he meant it. It became more than Donne's sacred rationalization-now it was a battle cry that his mind and body, crazed and sane cells alike, shrieked in silent triumph through The Pines.

"I will beat you," he said to the gray thing at his shoulder. "They will show me how."

He could see the shadow now, and he laughed at the look of wary concern in its dull eyes, the unaccustomed frown that banished its usual death's-head grin. It seemed to shrink away from him, as if it were at last afraid, scorned by his mockery.

"Oh, no," he whispered to it. "Stay with me. You've frightened me long enough. Death, thou shalt die!" he quoted, beckoning to it to follow him, follow and learn.

He pa.s.sed down the hall to the central stairway and walked downstairs, listening all the while. Slowly it dawned on him that it was not the whispering of the trees outside they had heard when the doors and windows had been sealed, but instead, the house itself and its residents whispering to them. He could hear it now, and could even make out, if not words, at least individual syllables. Were they trying to talk to him? Trying to tell him how to join them in immortality?

There would be time enough. Time to listen and learn to understand.

The fireplace in the Great Hall had gone cold, and Neville felt a sudden hunger gnaw at him. He'd lost his appet.i.te in the past few weeks, whether from the disease or his fear or the excitement of coming to The Pines he could not say, so the insistent growling of his stomach came as a surprise. He walked into the kitchen, intrigued with the idea of fixing himself a meal for the first time in years, and found Seth c.u.mmings sitting at the table, eating a chicken sandwich and a small green salad.

"Well, Mr. Neville." He smiled, leaping to his feet. "Felt a little hungry. I guess we have to go by our own clocks now, right?"

"I suppose so." Neville was far from happy to find c.u.mmings there, but his hunger drove away his distaste for the man's company.

"Can I get you anything?" c.u.mmings asked.

"No thanks. I'll manage." Neville opened one of the tall cupboards. Shelves full of brightly colored cans towered to the ceiling. Soups, spaghetti, stews, tinned meats, smoked oysters were all plentiful.

"There's a lot in the freezer if you don't feel like canned. And fresh meat for sandwiches in the fridge. The chicken's great. Fresh fruit and vegetables too." c.u.mmings indicated his salad. "Might as well eat them up before they go bad on us, huh?"

Neville made himself a chicken sandwich and selected a piece of fruit from the refrigerator bin.

"Do you want any milk?" c.u.mmings asked, holding up the bottle.

"No thank you. I don't like milk."

"Me neither, but with my stomach, what can you do?"

c.u.mmings's sandwich was gone, his gla.s.s nearly empty. Neville wondered why he didn't finish and leave. He didn't want to mingle with these men, and the sooner they knew that, the better. They were here for a purpose beyond their knowing, and he would deal with them when he was ready. But until that time he didn't want to know them any better than he knew them now. "Are you finished?" he said dryly, hoping c.u.mmings would take the hint.

"Oh. Yeah. I am. It's just that . . . well, it's nice to be able to talk to someone. This place is pretty lonely."

"Really," Neville said, taking a bite of sandwich and looking away from c.u.mmings.

"There's . . . another thing." Something in c.u.mmings's voice made Neville look up. "I'm fairly sure-I think I saw a ghost." He sounded embarra.s.sed.

"A ghost?"

"Two ghosts really."

"Where was this?"

The intensity with which Neville asked the question startled c.u.mmings. "Why, my room. My bedroom." c.u.mmings told exactly what he had seen. The effect on Neville was amazing. His half-smiling mouth hung open, and his eyes widened like a child entranced by a new bedtime tale.

"And you really saw it? No dream, no hallucination?"

"It was no dream. And I've never had a hallucination in my life. I saw it all right, whatever it was. Do you want to go up there with me?"

Neville started to say yes, but stopped. c.u.mmings seemed almost too eager. How did he know he was telling the truth? And even if he was, did he want to meet these ghosts c.u.mmings had described, who rutted and strangled and vanished?

No. This house was full of ghosts. He knew it. And he would wait until they sensed his need and showed themselves to him. There was time enough for that.

"No, Mr. c.u.mmings. Thank you for the invitation."

It was obvious from Neville's tone that he didn't wish to go anywhere with c.u.mmings, and the affront did not go unnoticed. You p.r.i.c.k, c.u.mmings swore inside. Okay, p.r.i.c.k, play your game. I'll find you out yet. Find what makes you tick. But he said only, "I don't blame you. It wasn't a pleasant sight."

Neville rose and left the room without saying a word. c.u.mmings watched him go. "Nice talking to you too," he said quietly to the empty kitchen. "Better be nice to me, Mr. Neville. I'm going to be the only friend you've got."

He started to finish his milk, but paused. There was something about the color of it that made him ill at ease.

He poured it down the drain.

Time pa.s.sed, though none of them could say how much. McNeely tried to keep track of it by counting both his sleeps and his meals. So far the sleeps numbered four, the meals seven. But he suspected that he'd been sleeping to pa.s.s the time, and that only three, maybe even two calendar days had gone by. During that time he'd played countless games of pool with Kelly Wickstrom, had had two good workouts in the gym, and had explored the library, which he happily found stocked with old and new fiction and nonfiction alike. He had seen nothing out of the ordinary. On the contrary, his surroundings seemed almost pleasant, a reaction which came as a surprise, considering his usually claustrophobic response to being confined. He'd run into c.u.mmings twice, once in the kitchen, where they cooked a steak together, and once in the gym.

c.u.mmings, McNeely learned, was a fitness freak, having a workout shortly after every second meal, regardless of his sleep pattern. He had a gymnasium body, functional, good-looking, confident in its motions. But McNeely wondered if it would bear up to any real exertion. He'd always trusted muscles shaped by working rather than those sculpted twenty minutes a day in a gym. On his own body he could count on his legs because he used them most in his work. Then his back and stomach, and finally his arms and wrists. McNeely wasn't musclebound by any means, but the muscles were there like thin bunched wires beneath the burnished skin, and he knew he could depend on them.

c.u.mmings seemed friendly enough both times McNeely had met him, but there was a deceit about the man that would not let McNeely feel at ease. It was as if he were holding something back. c.u.mmings had talked of trivialities, never about the house or the strangeness of the situation. Such total indifference had to be studied. Any mention of the house or of ghosts that McNeely made was carefully sidestepped, and when McNeely asked c.u.mmings if he'd run into Neville at all, he'd thought for a moment too long before he answered no. Still, he'd been outwardly pleasant, and it was that which irritated McNeely the most. Better outright hostility than a man not to be trusted as either friend or enemy.

McNeely hadn't seen Neville once. It struck him as peculiar, since The Pines wasn't so big that people could avoid each other for days on end-unless, of course, Neville planned it that way, staying in his suite while the others were about, coming out only when they were sleeping, if indeed there was any way he could tell that. Coincidence probably. He'd meet him again sooner or later. Still, it seemed odd.

He pushed open the library door and entered the room. The lights were on, as they were in almost every room, in a futile effort to recreate the total lighting of day. He walked to the bookcase on the far wall, chose a volume by Wodehouse, and turned around. It was then that he saw he was not alone in the room.

At first the phantoms of his mind identified the occupant of the chair as one of the hordes of spirits rumored to haunt The Pines, and he felt in one instant as if his heart had been trapped in a cage of frigid steel. But in the next second he saw that it was only Gabrielle Neville, her head c.o.c.ked to the side in an att.i.tude of sleep, a book open on her lap. He gave a half-gasp, half-laugh of relief that in the heavy silence was enough to wake her. Her eyelids fluttered, and she gave a little cry of alarm.

"Oh!" she said in embarra.s.sment as she recognized him. "Oh, Mr. McNeely, I'm sorry, you startled me!"

"That makes two of us." McNeely smiled. "I turned around and saw you and thought..." He spread his hands.

"That I was a ghost?" she asked. "Sorry to disappoint you."

"Not at all disappointed. Happy to do without." He sat in a chair near hers.

"How do you like your vacation so far?" she said.

McNeely shrugged. "A bit dull. Thank G.o.d for the billiard room. Kelly and I've been keeping it busy. And how are you and Mr. Neville? Are you finding whatever you're looking for?"

She smiled tensely. "People look for different things, Mr. McNeely."

"All right then. You. How are you doing in your spectral search?"

"Not very well, I'm afraid. I've heard and seen nothing extraordinary since that first . . . time."

"You were going to say day."

"Yes. I was. I hate not knowing when things are."

"I'm the same way. It's very disorienting. And how is Mr. Neville?"

She smiled again, but McNeely couldn't read it at all. "He's . . . in his element, I believe. Utterly entranced by the place. Hardly sleeps at all."

"I'd been thinking it odd I hadn't run into one of you before this."

"Oh, I've been spending a lot of time in the suite reading. And I paint, and that's kept me busy."

"Really? Where do you work?"

"In the playroom on the third floor front. It's quite large, and the walls are white, so it's the brightest room in the house."

"Too bad the sun room's not open. Northern exposure, natural light . . . what do you paint?"

"Subject matter?" She laughed. "Landscapes, but that's rather difficult in here. I've been doing still lifes."

"Of what? Fresh fruit? Frozen meat pies? I've noticed fresh cut flowers aren't too plentiful in here."

"Books," she said.

"Pardon?"

"Still lifes of books." She smiled. "I know it must sound odd, but I love old bound books-the leathers, the binding cloths. It's a real challenge to get the colors right, the way the light s.h.i.+nes off that old burnished leather."

"Like painting saddles, eh?"

"You're mocking me."

"Not at all. Didn't William Harnett paint books? And N. A. Brooks?"

Her eyebrows rose. "Pretty obscure. You know your art."