Night Things: A Novel of Supernatural Terror (27 page)

Gordon frowned at the light fixtures over their heads, waiting for them to click off again, but for the moment they remained lit. When he reached the master bedroom he opened the door and went inside. Then he tossed his backpack onto the floor.

“Okay,” Garrett repeated after he had followed Gordon inside. “So why did we come up here?”

Gordon knelt down in front of him so he was looking directly into Garrett’s eyes. “Okay, listen, Garrett. I want to tell you something.” He paused as if choosing his words carefully. “I’ve read a lot about this house, and I’ve been studying it for a long time. And I think I know enough to say that it’s no normal house. I mean, even if you put aside all the weird things about its architecture, I think there’s more to the house than just that.”

“Like what?” Garrett asked warily.

“You remember how we were talking about window areas and the Adirondacks being a place where a lot of unusual things happen?”

Garrett nodded.

“As I said earlier today, even the Indians knew that the land around this lake was an especially powerful place.” Gordon looked up toward the ceiling. “Well, I don’t think it was any coincidence that Sarah Balfram chose this place as the spot to build her house. I think that the house is some kind of focuser of the energy that exists in this place.

I think it’s some kind of power point.”

“So?” Garrett asked.

Gordon looked at him searchingly. “Well, earlier today when we were talking about the house I got the distinct impression that you knew more than you were saying. I think something’s happened to you in this house, something you haven’t told anyone about.” Gordon paused. “And although I’m not quite sure how, I think if you told me about it it might provide us with some means of overcoming Fugate. It might be the ace in the hole that we need to get out of this situation.”

Garrett went stiff. With horror, he suddenly realized he was in precisely the situation his mother had prophesied. How had his mother put it?
Someday you’ll want to trust someone and someone you know is going to warn you not to, and you’re going to find that it isn’t always easy to know what to do.
He remembered what the thing had told him: how something terrible was going to happen in the house and how it would protect him and his mother if he did not reveal the secret of its existence. But now, with Gordon prodding him in the other direction and trying to get him to break his pact of secrecy with the thing, he was at a loss as to what to do. He remembered Gordon’s earlier description of the Watcher Angels, and how he had instantly been convinced that the thing was a Watcher. But were the Watchers good or evil? No one knew, according to Gordon.

He prided himself on being a person who kept his word, and it was true—the thing had never in any way harmed him. Still, he never expected to find himself in a situation this grave. His mother was downstairs, tied to a chair by a lunatic who might kill her at any moment. He feared that if he did not tell Gordon what he knew, he might be giving up their only hope of getting out of the house alive.

Finally, he started to cry, and he decided to divulge his terrible secret. “Yes, something did happen to me,” he said between sobs, his body racked with chills.

He proceeded to tell Gordon everything, and halfway through his account the lights flickered off and on once again. When Garrett finished, Gordon sat down on the bed and laced his fingers into a church as he contemplated Garrett’s story.

“Is that all you know about the thing?” he pressed.

Garrett nodded.

Gordon looked at him sharply. “And this thing, it didn’t tell you anything about the house itself? It didn’t give you any clue about what the house’s true purpose was?”

“No, it got angry whenever I asked it anything.”

Gordon got up from the bed and began to pace. Finally, he stopped. “Then you and I have got to try to find out what this house really is.”

“But how?”

“We’ve just got to do some exploring.” He started for the door, and Garrett followed. When they reached the hall the lights went off and on again.

“Shouldn’t we take a flashlight?” Garrett suggested.

“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” Gordon returned. “I’ve got one in my backpack.” He started back toward the bedroom, but Garrett raced ahead of him.

“I’ll get it!”

For a moment Garrett almost got the sense that Gordon was going to try to stop him, but then he apparently decided against the idea as Garrett lifted the flap of the bag and rifled through its contents. He quickly found the flashlight Gordon had been using as a bicycle light, and when he did he took it out and clicked it on. But just as he was about to stand he noticed something else in the bag, something that at first confused him.

It was a chain attached to a box containing a little ball, all carved out of a single piece of wood. It was Mr. Foley’s whittling.

He looked back at Gordon, the ramifications of the discovery too numbing, too utterly terrifying, for him to fully absorb. The lights went off again, and on instinct ht jumped away from the bag and pointed the flashlight back at Gordon.

And when he did, Gordon’s eyes lit up like flaming embers,
glittering and emerald-green.

Panicking, Garrett tried to run, but Gordon caught him at once and twisted his arm behind his back. Then he guided him brusquely downstairs. When they reached the drawing room, he pushed Garrett rudely inside, and Lauren looked up with alarm.

“The jig’s up, Elton,” Gordon hissed. “The boy knows.”

“Knows what?” Lauren asked confusedly, looking first at Garrett and then back at Gordon.

But as she watched, Gordon underwent a strange transformation. Like a man who had held his stomach in for the duration of an important meeting, he seemed to relax somehow, and with a strange little suspiration the stress and tension seemed to drain from his body. And as they did, his body changed. The smooth skin of his face and hands instantly became covered by a fine web of wrinkles—not the pronounced, deeply hewn wrinkles of someone who has spent a lot of time in the sun, but a much finer, more delicate kind. These made him appear both youthful and oddly ancient at one and the same time.

Even more dramatic changes followed. With a creaking sound, his fingers grew longer, as did his nails, which curled and became sharper as they clouded over with a sickly grayish-yellow cast. His flesh began to bulge slightly in places and became concave in others until it had rearranged itself into a physique that was gaunt and grotesque. Like seedlings in some monstrously growing rain forest, his teeth became longer and stretched into rapierlike points.

But the most remarkable change took place in his eyes, for as his body shifted and sculpted itself into its true shape, they started to emit a greenish light—not just any light, but a lurid, otherworldly candescence that seemed to grow stronger with each tremor that passed through him. The brighter they became, the emptier they seemed, until they had become unspeakably terrifying voids.

Lauren knew instantly that these were the eyes she had seen watching her from the fog. But still she did not understand what was happening and why Gordon and Fugate suddenly seemed so familiar.

“What’s going on?” she implored. “What are you?”

As she asked the question, Fugate began to prance around and clap his hands gleefully like an ecstatic and depraved Rumpelstiltskin.

But Gordon only smiled unctuously, threateningly. “But Mrs. Ransom, I thought you would have figured it out by now. I’m the one Elton as been telling you about. I’m the Master.”

She shook her head slowly, unable to believe what her eyes were telling her. “But I thought...”

By now Gordon’s transformation was complete, and in his full glory he was so horrible that Garrett ran over to his mother’s side.

A trace of a smile played over Gordon’s pale and vampirish face. “You thought the Master was only a madman’s delusion?”

Although Lauren said nothing, from her expression it was clear that he had anticipated her question correctly.

“No, I’m quite real. You see, I was very far away from here when I first sensed Elton’s presence, sensed how special he was.”

Fugate beamed like a proud disciple.

The Master stalked a little deeper into the room, his long and powerful arms now held in a strangely insectlike pose at his sides. “But because I sensed that he had the potential to be even more special, to understand the meaning of true evil, I reached out with my mind, insinuated myself into his thoughts, until I could travel the thousands of miles that separated us.”

The Master sat down slowly on the couch and smiled at Fugate affectionately. “But at first he resisted me and perceived my communications only as headaches. Until finally I won his trust and was able to hold on to him and make my way here.”

“What are you?” Lauren asked.

“I am just one of the things that walks the earth.”

“But what kind of thing?”

“Careful,” the Master purred. “I have feelings too, you know. And I take offense easily.”

Lauren swallowed hard as a chill passed through her, but still she was driven to find out more. “Where do you come from?”

The Master looked almost wistful. “That’s the kicker.

I don’t know. You see, my memory is fitful. I tend to remember the peaks, the moments in my life when I have been truly exalted by evil, but everything else... well, fades. I know that I am ancient. I remember when the Romans destroyed Carthage.” His eyes glowed a little brighter. “I have never seen so much blood, and for so long.” He paused. “I think I remember Ashumasirpal. At least I remember a place long ago, a desert, and a lot of carnage that seems of his style. And, of course, I remember quite a few of my disciples, I think, the various men and women I have encountered throughout my wanderings and whom I have deemed promising enough to take under my tutelage.” He again looked fondly at Fugate. “But I don’t remember my birth, my actual origin, any more than you do yours, although I think it likely that I was somehow a product of that great war we talked about.”

“But what do you want with us? Why are you here?”

“Well, it’s this house, isn’t it?” the Master said, standing and looking at the oak baulks of the vaulted ceiling overhead. “As I was telling your son earlier, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Sarah Balfram chose one of the most powerful and ancient spots in the country—this lake—on which to erect her house. It’s clear from the way the house is built and that enticing palindrome over the door that the house is some kind of puzzle, a gauntlet thrown down at the feet of any who are discerning enough to perceive it. But I think it’s more than just a puzzle.”

“I know,” Lauren said resignedly. “It’s some kind of window, a passageway between dimensions.”

“Well, not a passageway really,” the Master returned unexpectedly. “At least, not in the sense that it was intended to allow free concourse back and forth between the two dimensions.”

“Then what?”

He strolled through the room, still looking up at the baulks of the ceiling. “More of a vault, I should think. A means of concealing something.”

“Concealing what?”

“Ah, that’s the question.”

“I’m sure you have an answer.”

“Oh, I do, I do.” He held one of his bony fingers aloft. “At least I have a theory. You see, the Watcher Angels are not the only thing Enoch mentions without fully explaining. After the angels finished taking him on a tour of heaven and showing him visions of the great war, he says they took him and showed him something else. From the way he wrote about it it’s obvious he knew he was being shown something of extreme importance. But for some reason, perhaps because he was sworn to secrecy, when he wrote down his experiences, he decided to describe what he had seen in only one brief and very cryptic line. He said only that the angels had shown him ‘the treasuries of the snow and ice and the angels who guard the terrible store-places.’”