Dark on the Other Side (29 page)

They made their way through the darkened kitchen, with
its vagrant gleams of chrome, and down the hallways. Wide double doors
admitted them to a part of the house Michael had never seen. At the end
of a long corridor, flanked by closed doors on either side, the tower
steps led up. One window gave a scant light—a narrow, mullioned window
half obscured by tendrils of ivy through which the moonlight slid in
surreptitious trickles, casting more shadows than it relieved.

Linda stopped. It was so dark Michael could not see her
face. Not until he put a steadying hand on her shoulder did he realize
that she was shaking from head to foot.

His hand was struck down.

“Don’t touch her,” Galen hissed in his ear. “Linda. Go
on. Up the stairs.”

Michael didn’t need to touch her to feel her resistance.
It was a painful thing to witness, for the struggle was mute and
confined. Galen’s command broke her will instead of calming it. She
shivered violently, and went on.

They were almost at the top of the stairs before Michael
heard the sound. Its faintness made it worse, for it seemed to come
from the inner chambers of his brain instead of an outside source.

Michael half recognized it, and wondered why his mind
should reject the attempt at identification so violently. A picture
formed in his mind, to match the sound: a high-vaulted place, great
expanses of marbled flooring, adorned with columns…the walls a blend of
colors and shapes…and the high, pure, sexless voices filling the
echoing heights of the…

“God!” he said, involuntarily, and heard Galen’s hand
thrust heavily against the panels of the door.

The entire picture came at him in a single vast
blasphemy; it was much later before he could isolate the details, and
by that time he was already trying to forget them. Lights all around
the room, burning with the clear softness of wax. Lights on the
black-draped, table like object at the far side of the circular
chamber. Black candles. Black hangings, draping walls and ceiling.
Briggs stood before the altar; and as Michael’s mind had denied the
parody of the ritual music, it rejected the obscene caricature of
priestly vestments that adorned Briggs’s fat body and set off the
pallor of the pale, epicene face. The reek of incense he had expected
was present; some of it came from the golden censer in Briggs’s hand.
It was mixed with another smell. Michael averted his eyes from the
thing that lay, mercifully motionless now, on the table.

Even Galen was struck dumb and motionless; and while the
two men stood frozen, Linda moved past them, out into the room. Michael
made a futile grab at her. Before he could move again, Briggs spoke.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “pray don’t be hasty.”

He had a gun. Michael repeated the words incredulously to
himself. Proud Satan’s aide, allied with the powers of Hell—Briggs had
a gun. A pretty little pearl-handled job, which he held as demurely as
a woman might fondle a flower. It seemed innocuous after the things
Michael had imagined.

It was enough to stop him, though, even without the
restraint of Galen’s outflung arm.

“Linda,” he said helplessly, knowing he could not reach
her.

She had advanced into the center of the room. The hood of
the cloak had fallen back over her shoulders, and her hair streamed
down around her face. It had the pure pallor of a saint’s image as she
stopped, facing the man who stood in the middle of an elaborately
figured, colored carpet. Behind him the black draperies billowed, and
Michael realized there must be a window there, or a door, leading to
the outside stairs.

Unlike his coactor, Gordon was not in costume. He had
discarded coat and tie; his shirt was open at the throat and his
sleeves were rolled up. Hands and bare forearms were splashed with
drying stains. His handsome, tanned face was calm. Michael was struck
with a realization of the man’s power—physical strength and beauty,
combined with enormous will, and with another quality that Michael had
not recognized until he saw the slender, submissive figure of Gordon’s
wife facing him with bowed head. A surge of hate rose up and nearly
choked him. He would have moved then, forgetting the gun, if Galen’s
arm had not barred his way.

“You’d better come in and close the door,” Gordon said
calmly. “There. That’s far enough.”

He lifted both hands in a convoluted, ritual gesture.

He believes it, Michael thought. He really believes he
can stop us, like that…. Glancing at Briggs, he felt sure that the
secretary had no such faith. His narrowed eyes were as cynical as his
gun. He was leaning back against the table; the plump pink feet and
calves were bare.

“Briggs,” Galen said. “Don’t be a fool. So far you’re
guilty of nothing the law can touch you for. You can’t possibly expect
to get away with murder. Put down the gun.”

“Gun?” Gordon seemed to see the weapon for the first
time. His face twisted with annoyance. “Come, now, Briggs, you know we
don’t need that. I can hold them.”

Galen ignored him.

“I’m a doctor, Briggs. This man is psychotic, and very
dangerous. If you cooperate with us, I’ll see that you get away
scot-free.”

For a second Michael thought it was going to work. The
fat man’s eyes narrowed until they almost disappeared. Briggs was
perfectly sane, in the usual sense of the word; his faith in his dark
master was almost all sham. Michael could see him weighing the
advantages: Gordon’s money and influence, the satisfaction of the
various lusts of the flesh to which Gordon’s patronage gave him access,
against—what? Freedom and immunity? Freedom to return to the cold,
hostile outer world and abandon his nice soft nest.

“Briggs,” Gordon said impatiently. “Put away that silly
toy and go on with the ceremony. Our audience has arrived. I want them
to see everything.”

“Yes, master,” Briggs said quickly. “But—can you keep
your control of them, and give your mind and heart to the offering?”

“I have bound them in the web of darkness. There they
will stand until they rot, unless my will releases them.”

Michael was dangerously close to jumping the main actor.
Briggs’s ridiculous gun had destroyed the aura of superstitious terror
that had hitherto shielded Gordon; he saw the man for what he was, half
mad, wholly evil. He felt light-headed with relief at the removal of
that greatest fear, and was inclined to dismiss the menace of the
weapon. A little thing like that, in Briggs’s pudgy, womanish
hand—hell, he probably couldn’t hit a barn door at ten paces. Two
things kept him in his place. One was his promise to Galen, silent at
his side. The other was the sight of Gordon’s big-muscled hands, so
close to Linda. He could snap her neck with one twist of those brown
hands. And he was capable of doing it, if his fantasy world was
destroyed.

Michael heard a controlled, barely audible in-take of
breath from the man beside him. Galen’s first attempt had failed.
Briggs’s weapon enforced, and reinforced, Gordon’s madness, and Briggs
was now committed. In seeming obedience he had stepped back behind the
makeshift altar, his hands outstretched over it; but the wide sleeves
of his robe, and the spacing of the candles, left those hands in
shadow, and Michael had no doubt of what they still held.

Galen knew the danger as well as he did, or better. But
his friend’s next move took Michael completely by surprise.

“I am bound in the web of darkness,” Galen said suddenly.
“But not forever. I call upon the Masters of the Great College to come
to me.”

Hands lifted, he spat out a string of strange syllables,
rich in gutturals. Michael wondered what half-forgotten adolescent
lesson he was using; but he forgot that when he saw the impact of the
words on the other listeners. Linda’s body jerked violently, as if
something had struck her. Gordon went pale. He fell back a step, and
after a moment his voice rose up, clashing with the other voice in an
equally unintelligible chant.

Galen, rock-still in his place, waved his hands and
switched to Latin.

His attention fixed on the combatants, Michael did not
see what, if anything, Briggs was doing; later, he had to admit that
Briggs might have thrown some new chemical into the smoldering bowls on
the altar. But he felt the change in the air; it smelled like the acrid
stench of burning flesh, and it made his head spin.

Backing away, step by dragging step, Gordon resembled a
fighter reeling under the blows of invisible fists. His face was no
longer pale; it was dark with fury, and swollen out of recognizable
shape. The words still poured from his distorted mouth; and Michael
imagined, insanely, that he could see them take shape in the air and
strike back, against the shapes of Galen’s incantation.

Galen had gone back to Hebrew, having exhausted his stock
of appropriate Latin and Greek. Alone in the center of the room, Linda
swayed back and forth, eyes glassy. Michael had forgotten his desire to
go to her; he was only half aware of a pudgy, dark form, creeping at
them from the direction of the altar.

Gordon was back now within a few feet of the shrouded
window, his hands writhing, his face unrecognizable. Then Galen’s
breath failed; and in the split-second lull, Gordon’s voice rose to a
howl. The curtains behind him bellied out as if in a sudden gust of
wind; the nearby candles flickered and went out. The black draperies
wrapped Gordon around like enormous sable wings. Within their shelter
he swayed, staggered, and dropped to his hands and knees.

Galen’s voice faltered and went on; Gordon’s answered.
The droning beat of the two voices, the evil stench in the
air—untouched by the chill blast of wind—the effect of shadows and the
movement of the shaken draperies…All these, and other, equally
explicable factors, might have explained what Michael saw. The shape of
Gordon Randolph—on hands and knees, four-footed like a beast, dark head
lowered—blurred and shifted. When the outlines coalesced, they were no
longer those of a man.

He was not the only one to see it. Linda screamed and
covered her face with both hands. Michael moved, without plan, his only
motive the need to get between Linda and the thing that paced slowly
down the length of the floor toward her.

What Briggs saw, or thought he saw, they would never know
for certain. Michael heard the gun go off, at close range; the entire
magazine let loose in one undirected, hysterical burst. The bullets had
no visible effect on the dog. It came on, with the unnatural slowness
of nightmare, its padded feet making no sound on the carpet. Michael
saw something fat and black in his way; he removed it with one sweep of
his hand and then caught Linda in his arms, turning, holding her head
against his chest so that she could not see.

Another shot and another…or was it the blood pounding in
his ears? The room had gone dark—or was it because his eyes were
closed? There was only one sense left to him, but it was enough—the
feel of the warm, living body in his arms, and its response.

Galen had to shake him, hard, before he opened his eyes.
The older man’s pallor was so pronounced that he looked bleached—hair,
face, eyes.

“It’s all right,” Galen said. He laughed, shortly and
humorlessly. “What a description…”

“You got it?” Michael asked.

“Got it? What?”

“The dog…Don’t, I don’t want her to see.” He stiffened,
trying to shield Linda as Galen’s impersonal hand caught her chin and
forced her face up.

“She’s all right, too,” Galen said. “I’m sorry, Linda;
you’re entitled to a nice long bout of hysterics, but not just yet and
certainly not here. The servants must have been wakened by that
cannonade. We must leave before someone comes.”

“I don’t want her to see…” Michael repeated, with idiot
persistence.

“She had better see it.” Galen turned them both, and
Michael saw the sprawled body of Gordon Randolph. The white shirt was
no longer white. The face was as blank as a wax dummy’s.

“Dead,” Galen said. “Like any other mortal creature.”

Michael felt Linda shiver, and lifted her into his arms
as he heard the first tentative rap on the door.

“It’s locked,” Galen said softly. “But we’d better get
going. Down the outside staircase.”

When they got to the car, Michael was somehow not
surprised to see a familiar shape sitting on the roof. Galen grabbed
Napoleon, who came without protest. They were back on the main highway
before anyone spoke.

“Put about ten miles behind us and then find a place to
stop,” Galen ordered. “I’m going to put Linda to sleep. And you aren’t
fit to drive far.”

Michael nodded. He knew, better than Galen possibly
could, how unfit he was. When Galen told him to pull over, he was glad
to change places with the other man. Linda was already half asleep. She
looked so fragile that Michael was almost afraid to touch her. She
opened her eyes and gave him a wavering smile.

“…Love you….” she whispered, and drifted off.

“I wonder,” Galen said, after a time.

“Wonder what? Whether she loves me?”

“Oh, that. No, I think you’ll make out all right there.
You’re her hero, aren’t you? Fighting the powers of darkness for her
soul…What are lions compared to that?”

The familiar sardonic tones woke Michael completely. He
leaned forward, arms folded on the back of the seat.

“What did you see, Galen?”

“At the end?” Galen slowed for a blinking stop light, and
then picked up speed. “The original delusion of lycanthropy was
Randolph’s, as I suspected. He reverted completely.”

“I saw him change,” Michael said quietly. “I saw the dog.
How do you define a hallucination, Galen? If three people out of four
see one thing, and the fourth sees something else—which of them is
hallucinating?”

Galen’s silence was eloquent—of what, Michael wasn’t sure.

“How do you know Briggs saw a dog?” he asked finally.