The Sleepwalkers Part 29

"We'll fix all this," says Caleb, only half believing his own words. Then: "What is it?"

Christine stares hard at nothing. Finally, she says: "The voices-I can't hear them anymore."

"They're gone?" he asks.

"No. Still here, but . . . quiet. Like they're waiting for something. For the end."

"Then let's finish it."

They help each other off the dew-soaked ground. The Spanish moss hanging from ancient, dying oak trees, the strangling kudzu, the serpentine tendrils of mist creeping from the forest all around them: everything is a shroud. Hiding the truth. Hiding the future. Hiding any chance they might have had at a pleasant life full of denial and the appearance of happiness, a normal life. Now, even if they perform a miracle and somehow make it out of this ghost town alive, they'll be forever haunted. Maybe figuratively, maybe literally.

They listen to the squeal of bats overhead. They enter the circle of light cast from the windows of the squat little trailer, mount the steps-still splattered here and there with blood and bits of bone. They open the screen door. And Caleb freezes, listening.

There is a moaning sound, so soft it could be the creak of a tree trunk in the wind. Except it's not.

He grabs Christine's arm. "Do you hear it?"

She's still for a moment.

"I think we should go inside," she says. "It's not safe out here."

But Caleb is already ignoring her, already heading down the steps, around the corner, to the dark side of the trailer where the moonlight won't even go.

And he stops in front of the cellar door.

"It's coming from in here," he says.

"Don't open it, Caleb. I'm serious. I have a really bad feeling. The dead are screaming not to open it." Pain is in her voice, and she has her hands clamped to her ears-but Caleb is deaf to her, his eyes transfixed by the door. From its latch, a big, rusting padlock hangs.

He turns, looking for something, anything that might help him break the lock, then sees it. A hatchet waits, stuck in a log on the far side of the lawn, framed in moonlight, and Caleb brushes past Christine. Now he's running to the hatchet, yanking it free, now shrugging off Christine's restraining hand.

And chopping at the lock on the door.

"Billy, no!" Christine says. "It has to stay locked."

Why should I trust her? he thinks suddenly. She, who just tried to kill Ron. This could be a trick, a ploy. His father could be locked up in there.

"Everyone calls me Caleb now," Billy says.

And he chops.

"The voices say the devil is in there! They say you'll set him free!"

Caleb growls, eyes narrowed: "The voices make people disappear, Christine. You think we can trust them?"

"They also saved our lives," she says.

Caleb is chopping.

He says: "And can you tell the difference between the ones that want to help and the ones that hurt? What if they're lying to you? You ever think of that?"

"They said you'd say that," she says, backing away from him one step. "They predicted all of this. They said you'd betray us!"

Caleb stays his hand for a moment, looks at her.

"Who's down in this bas.e.m.e.nt? Do you know?"

She just stares at him.

"Why are you trying to stop me? Your mother locked somebody in here. Who?"

"I don't know."

"Then we have to find out. It could be anybody. Could be a kid, for Christ's sake!"

"That's not what the voices say."

"It could be my dad!"

Caleb starts hacking at the lock again.

"Billy," Christine says, "they all say you'll help him bring about the end. They say you're the one who'll make it happen."

"I would never do that, Christine."

"Maybe you already are."

Silence settles between them, one more black shroud.

Sparks fall, and the hammering blows of the hatchet fill the forest. The moon pa.s.ses behind a cloud, the lock falls, and Christine walks away.

Caleb doesn't notice her leave. He's pulling on the rusted handle, pulling back the peeling wood cellar door, smelling the rot and must behind it.

Inside, an abyss.

He's terrified to look into the blackness, terrified to look away. He has no light. But something makes him take the first step down into the dank cellar. Something makes him take the second. And he wonders suddenly if he's being drawn down by his own will, or the will of a thousand malevolent demons. The urge to run fills him suddenly with the urgency of vomit rising in the throat.

But he will not run.

It's too late, anyway. He's in the dark now.

The wet, sickly smell of decay surrounds him, making him s.h.i.+ver. He reaches the bottom of the stairs and steps into liquid up to his ankles.

Something is brus.h.i.+ng his face. He keeps swatting it away, but it keeps coming back; cobwebs, or something worse. He's suddenly about to cry; he just wants to leave, just wants to wake up from this nightmare that somewhere took a wrong turn and became real. And . . .

And he isn't alone.

Amongst the rustle of chains comes a dry, sharp whisper.

"If you've come to kill me, you're wasting your time," it says. "I'm already dead."

There's no way of telling where the voice comes from. It echoes from all around him.

Caleb opens his mouth, but terror has robbed him of his breath.

"Are you the devil?" he asks finally.

The laugh comes like the crackle of dry leaves.

"Well, I'm sure not G.o.d."

Caleb doesn't know what to say.

"You think you're a very brave boy, don't you?" says the devil.

Outside, a storm is blowing in. Rain begins pattering and builds until even from underground. Caleb can hear the drops pounding relentlessly.

"You wanted to save the world . . ."

"Who are you?" says Caleb, "If you're my father, then say so. And if you're really the devil . . . " He wants to finish, but doesn't know how. "You can't have me," he says finally.

The laughter cracks. "Certainty is like a straitjacket, kid, and you need both hands. Now stop asking questions and listen; our time is short."

Caleb s.h.i.+vers. Glancing over his shoulder, he sees nothing. All around him the darkness is total. He might be in outer s.p.a.ce or the Mariana Trench. He might not be at all. He can't see the cellar door. He can't see anything.

"Listen, if you would undo what's been done here, I'm going to tell you the story of Jonathan Morle. This is the first and the last time anyone will tell it, so pay close attention."

Caleb does.

"Morle grew up in Boston. He was a sad kid, tried killing himself several times before he was even fifteen. Maybe that's what happens to the son of a Harvard professor and a wh.o.r.e.

"After his mother died of syphilis, he broke into his father's house. He found him in his study asleep and strangled him, then hung him from a rafter. Next, he found the old professor's wife and two grandchildren, killed them with a fire poker and hung them up as well. Most of the police thought it was a murder-suicide, that the professor did it, that it was the work of a brilliant but slightly insane intellectual. But not all of the cops were convinced. And one of the detectives came after Jonathan.

"With no money and no means to flee, Morle joined the merchant marines, boarded a freight s.h.i.+p, and departed immediately for the farthest ports this world offered. He went around the globe, from Amsterdam to Cape Town, Bangkok to Sydney.

"His s.h.i.+pmates described him as a quiet man with a beautiful singing voice. He didn't drink alcohol, didn't care much for prost.i.tutes, stayed away from fights. But at every port he landed, a family was found dead, hung from the rafters of their house. n.o.body on his s.h.i.+p knew about that. It didn't even hit the local papers until they had weighed anchor and left port. The only strange thing about Jonathan Morle, his s.h.i.+pmates said, was that he seemed to collect a clock at every stop.

"Morle finally landed in San Francisco where he was accepted at the University of California, Berkeley. Fellow students characterized him as handsome, pale, distracted, articulate, and punctual. He was three years into a degree in psychology when the law once again caught up with him. This time, since the sea no longer seemed safe for him, he chose the most desolate place he could think of within the United States. He moved to a small town a hundred miles west of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and took the only job he could find working as a rodeo clown."

"The director," says Caleb.

The voice continues: "He lived there for three years. Locals didn't say much about him, except that he read a lot of books and kept to himself. He rented an abandoned trailer on the outskirts of town and never seemed to leave except on rodeo days. That went on for almost two years, until one day he was gored in the head by a bull and nearly killed.

"After that, he disappeared. He didn't surface again for a long time.

Most of the police who had been pursuing him had long since given up the chase by now. But not one. Finally, that detective's persistence paid off. Morle turned up in Chicago, this time under an a.s.sumed name. He had received a law degree from the University of Chicago. But just as he began his first job with one of Chicago's top law firms, friends began to see a change in him. Maybe it was due to head trauma from the rodeo days and maybe something else, but Morle- though they knew him by another name-became more and more reclusive. Soon he wouldn't leave his apartment. He would simply sit in his room, surrounded with his collection of clocks, and not move for days. Following a suicide attempt, he was inst.i.tutionalized. It was just after he was released that he learned the detective was on his trail again, closer than ever. So he fled to Florida and checked himself into a mental hospital in a small town called Hudsonville, again under an a.s.sumed name. It was there the detective finally caught up to him. But by then it was too late."

Thunder rolls suddenly, like great, terrible drums shaking the ground under Caleb's feet.

"The detective infiltrated the asylum, posing as another inmate, hoping to befriend Morle, hoping to coax a confession out of him. What that detective didn't know was what a powerful manipulator Morle was. You see, he already had everyone in the asylum under his control. He had taught them his little secret with the clocks, how they could tune your ear to the voices of the dead. And when the dead spoke, do you know what they said? They said 'you'd better help John Morle.' And that's what everyone did. What they didn't know was that even Morle was a slave to the spirits, and the spirits, they were slaves to something else.

"Strange, all Morle really wanted was to die. He wanted the suffering of his life to end, according to his doctors. He tried to kill himself fifteen times at the asylum. Every time he failed. I guess some weeds are just impossible to kill. And the detective never got his confession."

"You were the detective," says Caleb.

The laugh sounds mechanical, fake. "Once upon a time."

The voice is silent for a moment. All Caleb hears is a strange crackling sound, then the gentle clang of chains, way too close. When the voice returns, it sounds strangely garbled, as if the speaker, this devil in the bas.e.m.e.nt, were choking. The first words Caleb understands are: "-the asylum closed, the inmates scattered to the wind or hid their ident.i.ties, and so did John Morle. But they came back to town a few years ago. h.e.l.l, a lot of them never even left. One became a doctor, one became the sheriff, one became the mayor of the town. And they came back to finish what they had started. To help Morle, as the spirits commanded them."

"What does he want?"

"Sixty-six souls, according to Morle, and his pact with the devil is finished. The end comes. The devil awakens."

"What do I do to stop him?"

The clangor of chains alone makes its reply.

"And what happened to you after the asylum closed and you were set free?" Caleb asks. "How long have you been here?"

Thunder pounds and wind howls above, but here in the dark there's only silence.

"I know who you are . . . Dad? You were the detective once, right?

Then you became a lawyer, so you could put people like Morle behind bars, right? And they killed you for it."

Thunder breaks, hard enough to crack the world in half. Caleb takes a step forward, his hand outstretched.

"Dad?"

And lightning floods through the cellar door in one flash-frame instant, blazing away every ounce of shadow with eerie white fire.

There, in front of Caleb's outstretched hand, hang four chains, and bound in those chains are the four wilted limbs of a long-dead corpse. One bloated, rotting hand almost touches Caleb's fingers before he jerks his hand back. The mouth hangs open, the eyes stare into a black puddle below. On a table next to the corpse, an old, dusty radio crackles.

Caleb tries to scream, but nothing comes out.

In the next instant, the lightning is gone and he's back in darkness.

He wheels and takes off for where the light came from, where the door must be, but the voice, that electric, fake, dead voice follows him.

"Aw, Billy, don't run away-"

Caleb trips, falls on his face. Dark, stagnant water splashes into his eyes, into his mouth. The stench yanks at his gut muscles, almost jerking them into vomiting. Caleb's hand slips on the slimy cement, but he manages to get to his feet and runs on, blindly. Then he sees a little light come through the door-a glimpse of the moon or more lightning, he doesn't know which-and he's pounding up the steps and into the open, with that maniacal voice following him from the radio, from the bas.e.m.e.nt, screaming: "Kid, what you don't know could fill a warehouse! You'd better listen! You'd better not-"

And Caleb slams the bas.e.m.e.nt door shut and leans on it, his face in his hands.

"Caleb?" It's Christine; she's there. "What's wrong?" She comes forward through the rain, reaching out to Caleb, seeing his distress, but draws up when she glimpses the hatchet still clutched in his hand. He looks down at its sharp, curved edge. He had completely forgotten about it. By now Christine's hesitation has pa.s.sed. She puts her arms around his neck and squeezes him tight. Caleb hugs her back, but he holds on to the hatchet, too.

"What was down there?" asks Christine.