Tangina shouted at the top of her voice. “The girl is just at the mouth of the corridor! Tell her to stop! Tell her not to move into the light!”
“Carol Anne!” screamed Diane. “Listen to me. Do not go into the light! Stop where you are. Turn away from it! Don’t look at it!”
Tangina sat up. “Where is the rope?” she yelled.
Steve handed it to her, but she only shook her head. “I’m not strong enough! You’ll have to do it!”
“Do what?”
“Throw one end into the light! Throw it in hard! It has to make it through!”
Steve nodded understanding, though certainly not with any degree of comprehension. He took one end of the rope, coiled it into a knot at the end to give it some weight, pulled a few yards of at up behind him to give himself some slack, and stepped up against the blasting light of the closet door. With both hands, he heaved the knot into the pit, utilizing every muscle he could muster.
An instant later there was a flash in the living room, and the end of the rope dropped into Ryan’s hands. “Got it!” he yelled.
Tangina clenched her teeth. With Steve at her back, she paid out the rope into the closet until the red ribbon was just at the door.
“Tell him to take up the slack downstairs. Tell him to pull gently and yell when he sees the ribbon.”
As this message was relayed from Steve to Diane to Ryan, Tangina took the lipstick, and began marking off inches on the rope, starting with the red ribbon tied to its midpoint. In a minute, Ryan started pulling. When Tangina felt the rope go taut at her end, she methodically fed it into the closet, one inch at a time. First the ribbon disappeared, then mark after red mark, into the vibrant light.
It wasn’t long before they could hear Ryan’s excited call, above the booming wind. “It’s through! It’s through! I see the flag!”
Instantly Tangina stopped feeding rope into the pit. She squinted at the last lipstick calibration peeking around the door jamb. “Only thirty-six inches wide. Not much room in there. Diane! Dr. Lesh! Come in here!”
The two rattled women entered the room on hands and knees, then stood.
“Martha! May I call you Martha? I want you to go downstairs and take the rope with Ryan. I want you to pull with him, when I say, as hard and fast as you can. But only when I say!”
Martha ran out without another word, ran downstairs to join Ryan.
Tangina looked grimly at Diane. “My dear—you must enter the closet!”
A look of raw horror paled Diane’s face in the wash of the yellow-blue light.
“You must do this!” Tangina went on. “She will only come to you! This is your test! But you must do it right now! We’ll tie the rope around you!”
An especially violent gust of wind centered directly on Diane, ramming her into the wall. Steve began tying the rope around his own waist, but Tangina stopped him. “This is for her to do! Besides, I need you to hold the rope!”
Diane crawled back to them, a little dazed, but unhurt. She took the rope and wrapped it around her waist. Steve tied it in place with two clove hitches. They faced each other in the blazing storm.
“I love you!” screamed Diane.
“I love you!” Steve roared.
They kissed, the wind roiling all about. Then Steve took the end of the rope.
Diane moved toward the closet, threw a last look over her shoulder. “Don’t let go, you guys!”
“Never!”
In the next second, the light swallowed her up.
Tangina helped Steve feed in more rope until the calibrations passed the eighteen-inch mark, indicating that Diane was just at the center of the infinite void.
Downstairs, Lesh and Ryan took up the foot-and-a-half more slack that rolled out, then stood there, holding the rope taut, tensely waiting, almost afraid to breathe.
Likewise, Steve stood, legs set. Tangina yelled to him. “I’m going to join them now—to send my spirit—to guide them! There is still great danger! Timing is of the essence! Do nothing unless I tell you! Do not try to help me! Don’t even listen to me unless I address you! Do you understand?”
“How will I know when Diane’s got her?”
“I will know.”
Tangina lay down on the floor. Her breathing became irregular; she began to perspire. The wind howled like a wounded beast.
Tangina stiffened, convulsed, lay still. In her mind, all sound and light melted away. Across the filmy diaphragm, into the limbo place.
Into the void. A dull red glow permeated this zone of nothing. All the lost souls ranged about. Beyond them, the brilliant, burning light. Beside the light, Tangina could see Diane, the rope around her waist, going nowhere, coming from nowhere. Standing alone in the silent, directionless wind.
Wraiths floated by, without time or purpose. Some passed near Diane; none took any notice. Some wept, some smiled, many had no expression, some bled. A few ran, fumbling, distracted. One, not far from the light, was Carol Anne.
And not far from Carol Anne, the shadow of the Beast darkened the mist.
Tangina fought to keep focused, to maintain harmony within her self, to stay centered, in balance. Boldly, she called out. “Cross over, children. You are all welcome. All welcome. Go into the light. There is peace in the light.”
Nothing happened initially. Tangina repeated her directive several times. Then, slowly, the atmosphere seemed to shimmer, like ripples on a pond. Like ripples on a pond, the vagrant apparitions began to order their movement—subtly, at first, almost imperceptibly, then unmistakably: they drifted toward Carol Anne. Toward Carol Anne, and the light.
“Cross over, children.” Tangina’s thought took on power. “Enter the light.”
Carol Anne, among the many, felt the pull, let her tired spirit accept the gentle tugging of the luminescent well behind her.
But then a somber dimness descended, an obscure anger. It was the Beast, beginning to rage.
It saw its minions disappearing into the light, and loosed a grisly scream into the silence. The noise alone was enough to scatter hundreds of the pitiable shapes. Others, the Beast assaulted, threw back, tore into wispy fragments.
Still, some continued to seep into the light—and these the Beast didn’t stop, for it feared the light too much itself to go very close. In its wild spasms from one ghost to the next, it momentarily lost track of Carol Anne. With a silent gasp, Diane saw her child approaching the light—to reach it, Carol Anne would pass within a few feet of where Diane stood. Desperately, the anguished woman extended her arms.
“Cross over, children,” Tangina’s message resounded. The confused spirits regrouped, pressed in again. Again the Beast screamed its ghoulish scream.
Then it saw Tangina, hovering above the light now. The Beast foamed and hissed and railed. It approached her, but she was so near the light, it paused, held its clawed hand before its eyes, stepped carefully closer. He hated the light, but crazed violence made him bold.
He approached: Tangina above the light, Diane beside it, Carol Anne floating in a daze like a mote of dust passing through the dense beam’s cone. And the others all around, masses of weeping spectres, dancing in the light, crossing in front of each other, rushing, floating . . . Diane stretching her hands out, straining . . .
“Cross over, children!” Tangina’s call pealed like chimes. “All are welcome! Go into the light! There is peace in the light!”
The Waiting Woman floated by, surrounded by her attendant throng. She paused, directly above the spectral flare.
Tangina called to her. “The light! There is the light! You can go. That is the way. Be free. You can escape. Your Intended rests on the other side. You can rest with him there, forever. You can go!”
The spirit-woman almost smiled, almost paused a little longer. But she moved on. “I can stay,” she whispered. “I will wait.”
Other souls found an end to waiting, though. They stumbled, drifted, or rushed into the glowing mouth.
The Beast could contain himself no more. Much as he hated the light, he hated more the idea of losing the spirits he controlled to its radiance, and hated still more this shouting presence who lured them.
With an inarticulate noise that nearly tore apart the very stuff of the ether, he threw himself at Tangina’s resounding form, gnashing his fangs, biting himself in demented fury.
Hovering above the luminous corridor, Tangina closed her eyes, leaned forward, and changed into a mirror. The intense brilliance reflected off her face and exploded full into gHalâ’s eyes, blinding him. He rolled, flailing, into a collection of milling spirits, scattering them violently in a dozen different directions, and tumbled himself off into the nether mists.
“Cross over, children!” Tangina roared, again in her own form—roared defiantly. “Go into the light! There is peace in the light!”
Carol Anne came closer still, nearer the spectral window. She was only feet from Diane, now, and feet from the lip of the well.
“Here I am, baby!” Diane wailed. “Come to Mommy!” Carol Anne’s attention flickered. Dazedly, she kept moving.
“Go into the light!” Tangina cried. Scores of spirits converged on the source. Some knocked into the little girl, rushing ahead of her. “There is peace in the light!”
In the howl of the storming bedroom, Tangina’s words rang out to Steve:
Go into the light!
To Steve, this was mad betrayal. “No!” he shouted to her small, prostrate body. “You said no! You said to stay out of the light!”
In his terror and frustration and waiting, he thought he’d missed a beat—he suddenly envisioned Tangina leading his wife and daughter
into
the dreaded light . . . and beyond. Betrayed and lost!
A strangled moan poured from his lips; he began pulling on the near-to-snapping rope. “Diane! Carol Anne!” His scream carried above the noise of the crashing storm; it carried downstairs to the tense duo on the other end of the rope, who looked at each other in confusion. And it carried deep into Tangina’s trance, and tore her painfully back into the room. She saw Steve pulling on the rope. She screamed.
“Steven, not yet! Ryan! Pull! Ryan, pull!”
Steve kept tugging. Suddenly a flash of electrical energy exploded from the closet, dying quickly to a low rumbling growl. The growl hit the lower registers of audible sound, then grew in intensity until the room, the entire building, was shaking at its foundations.
At that moment, Steve looked up to see the face of the Beast forging slowly from the closet light.
Like a simian skull, it had huge hollow eye sockets, a protruding mandible, savage fangs. Tense, stringy muscle gave it a hideous snarl. Maniacally, it salivated. A proto-human face, yet its canine teeth were almost tusklike, its nose hole fell into raw bone.
The face filled the entire length and width of the closet door. Viciously, it opened its depraved jaws. Wretched, debased sounds blew the boards off the window, filled the room with vile gas.
The head began to emerge.
Steve froze. Doggedly, through his terror, against all reason, he held onto the rope. Held tightly—like a final act of will.
With everything they had, Ryan and Martha pulled.
Dozens of electrical discharges blossomed in the air above them as they tugged. Suddenly a primal cry, a cry of birth, rang out in the living room. A whirlpool of light arose at the bilocation point, a spinning vortex with glowing membraneous center—and suddenly Diane appeared at the pit of the maelstrom, with Carol Anne in her arms. The central membrane bulged, as from imminent embryonic eruption . . . when all at once the two figures burst through, clattering to the floor with an expulsion of gelatinous, amniotic fluid, and a shower of sparks. The swirling light vanished.
The two were covered with the pinkish, jellied ooze from head to foot. Ryan untied the rope around Diane’s waist, as Steve ran downstairs to join them. Tangina followed, weakly.
They were all crying. For a long moment they embraced passionately; then Steve picked up Diane and Carol Anne, and carried them into the bathroom. Gently, he lowered them into the tub of warm water Tangina had had him prepare earlier—so much earlier, a lifetime ago.
The water foamed and bubbled, turned bright red, gave off an acrid odor as the jelly substance dissolved off the two. They were all still crying. Ryan ran out to get his portable video equipment, to try to tape the stuff. Martha and Tangina stood in the doorway supporting each other.
“Hi, Daddy!” said Carol Anne. She’d just had a long, bad dream she would tell him about later.
“Thank God,” whispered Diane through her tears. “Oh, thank God.” Her hair was salted gray.
The three of them continued hugging in the tub.
Tangina leaned, exhausted, against the bathroom door. Now she, too, could rest. “This house is clean,” she murmured.
Lesh found it difficult to speak. “How . . . how do you know?”
“The child was the connection—as long as she remained in that astral plane, the doorway between the two worlds was kept open. Bodies could move in and out at will, where before only spirits could maneuver. She’s back, now, though, and the hole is closed. The Beast won’t come back for more, I assure you. He lost more than he ever gained by the communication he created between the two worlds—he may even have lost his sight. No, he’s gone from here, and won’t be back.” She sighed a huge sigh of weary relief—for it meant her own ordeal was over, too. “This house is clean.”
The Freelings decided to move.
Steve worked out a deal with Teague—not the best deal for Steve, considering what a good salesman he was, but Steve wanted to move quickly, and was willing to sacrifice.
Tangina went on an extended trip. She needed a long recuperation; she was finished with being studied. Her dreams, in any case, had ended, so she was content to live the life of the mindless—blind, deaf, and ordinary.
Dr. Lesh went back to the university.
Dr. Anthony Farrow, eyes twinkling, sat behind his old, oaken desk. It was piled high with journals, monographs, letters; the paraphernalia of half a century of scholarship. Opposite him sat Martha Lesh, elbow on the arm of the chair, chin in her hand.
“So that’s it,” she said into her palm. “The saga of Cuesta Verde Estates. So what am I supposed to do with it?”