“What is it, someone beat up your son in school? Nothing could be so bad as to throw away a career for it, Freeling. I mean, what’s it all about, anyway? You work, you strive, you do what you have to do. That’s the law of evolution, man—you don’t do that, and you’re just passing on bad genes. Know what I mean?”
“Well, no, not exactly . . .” Steve stared into his beer.
“Look, all I’m saying is, you’re a real model in this community. A pillar. And we’re proud of you, Steve. Why, you moved into the very first house we built here. You were the ground-breaker—and don’t you ever think that’s gone unnoticed . . .”
Steve smiled bitterly into his glass.
“And man,” Teague continued, “you sure can sell that real estate!”
Steve looked around the room. Velour walls, plush carpeting, overstuffed leather cushions, dark lighting. The good life. He wondered whose grave he was drinking over now.
“Like I say, Frank—thanks, but no thanks.”
Teague nodded curtly. He knew when to stop wasting breath on a sale. “Okay, have it your way. As I told you yesterday, the company is willing to buy the place back from you, but with the market the way it is, you’re going to have to carry some paper . . .”
Teague went on talking the specifics of the deal. Steve nodded in the right places, but his mind was elsewhere. He stared out the western wall of the bar—all glass, it overlooked the entire expanse of Cuesta Verde, nestled comfortably in the valley below. The lights of the houses glittered and jumped out of the cool night, like embers on a black velvet robe. He thought he picked out the glint that was his house, but then he shifted in his seat and saw he’d only been looking at a reflection in the plate glass window cast by one of the tiny white bud-lights over the bar. Funny, the way things sometimes seemed.
Diane stood up, out of the tub, onto the rug, and began to dry off. Her dripping woke E. Buzz, who raised his head, perked up his ears. Diane blew him a kiss. He wagged his tail.
She walked into the bedroom, slipped one of Steve’s old huge football T-shirts over her head—it fit her like a potato sack—and sat down at the vanity. E. Buzz lay at her feet. Slowly, she began taking the pins from her hair, letting it down in the mirror.
With her hair down, she looked at herself a moment. Prematurely gray. Lots of new character. Like a seasoned ship battered by unseasonable weather. She felt as if she’d been round the cape on this one. How strange life was—to have given her so much, such comfort, a loving family—and then thrashed it all around in a four-day nightmare . . . and then returned to its normal state of grace. Total order to total disorder in one easy lesson. Like fifty-two card pick-up. How strange.
So. A return to order. She picked up her brush and firmly pulled it through her hair. One hundred times—now, there was a comforting ritual. Over the scalp, down through the tangles; she almost cried with happiness. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .
At fifty, she threw her head forward so all the hair in back came over to cover her face. She hung her head down and continued stroking, starting at the back of the neck, bringing the brush up and forward across her scalp, then down in front of her forehead. Over and over, breaking through the tiny knots, leaving her hair smooth, silky.
Finally satisfied, she flipped her head straight back, so all the hair would fly back around her shoulders. In the mirror, she watched as the shiny gray-brown strands flew straight up into the air, reached their full height . . . and froze there.
Her long hair stood straight up, on end, and didn’t come down.
It gave her a horrible, gut-wrenching feeling to see her face in the mirror like that . . . like a creature. Her heart—her mind—jolted.
E. Buzz yelped and ran out of the room. Diane’s hair remained up—like spikes. She felt faint. Her eyes began to roll up . . . when suddenly she was seized.
Invisible hands held her arms against her sides. In the mirror, she saw—and felt—four deep impressions collapse her cheek unevenly against her jaw. The left side of her mouth was pressed against her front teeth; her whole head started twisting back, pulled by unseen, malevolent fingers.
She moaned in fear. She tried to rise, could not. Her lips were pressed flat against her gums, now, mushed in violent counterclockwise circles; something foul was kissing her.
All at once her hair fell down around her shoulders, and she toppled back to the floor. Something snagged her ankle, but she struggled free with a burst of wild strength and half ran, half crawled toward the open door.
The door slammed shut.
The noise woke Robbie. He’d been hardly asleep anyway, but now something had jarred him wide awake, and he didn’t know what. He looked over at Carol Anne; she was out like a light. He looked out the window, where the tree used to be—only gray-black night, now, chilly and dense. Thunder growled like a waking bear.
He looked at the new clock, the new toys, the new posters. Everything seemed so unfamiliar. Almost threatening. He looked at the new rocking chair. It was empty.
Robbie sat up in bed, suddenly scared. He looked all over for the clown doll. He even peered over the edge of the bed to the floor. It was nowhere to be seen.
His breathing quickened. The doll had been in the chair, he was certain, and now it wasn’t. With a grinding of his teeth, he shifted closer to the edge of the bed. He knew where he had to look.
He rolled over onto his belly and slowly lowered himself, head first, to the floor, readying himself to look under the bed. Delicately, he lifted the dust ruffle; softly, his head touched the rug. Upside down like this, he peered into the darkness under the bed.
The clown was there, smiling sardonically.
Robbie gasped, but before he could move, the doll’s arms rapidly elongated, stretched out toward the boy, and began to wrap themselves tightly around his neck. Around and around they wrapped, four times around his neck, cutting off his air.
Then, with the strength of a maniac, the doll dragged him, struggling, under the bed.
Carol Anne jumped awake, unaccountably frightened. She looked over at her brother’s bed, but he wasn’t there. A breeze rose up, ruffling her hair. She looked, with a premonitory dismay, at the closet.
The closet light was growing brighter.
When the door slammed in her face, Diane turned to run for the window. Before she’d taken two steps, though, something nearly tore her arm out of its socket, and flung her to the floor.
For a moment, she just sat there, panting. Nothing happened. She tried to think. This couldn’t be happening. This was a clean house, now, Tangina had said so.
With a shock she was thrown to her back; something sat upon her chest. She tried to squirm free, but couldn’t. She started becoming hysterical.
Her T-shirt pulled suddenly all out of shape; hulking finger-impressions sank deeply into her flesh, kneaded and flattened her breasts, lifted her and slammed her to the floor . . .
Then it stopped. She lay on the rug, pasty pale, sweating, hyperventilating. All quiet. Tentatively, she crawled to the door. She reached for the knob.
She was pulled to her feet like a rag doll. Her toes barely touching the floor, she was dragged across the room, onto the bed, against the wall at the head of the bed . . . and up the wall. Dragged up the wall and onto the ceiling.
Her back arched. Her head was yanked forcibly to the side, held invisibly by the hair. The thing dragged her back and forth across the ceiling; periodically it bit her—at least, that’s what it felt like. She quickly stopped resisting. She was half unconscious. After a minute of this, she was dragged to the opposite wall, down the wall, and dumped to the floor.
Again, all was quiet. Her legs like water, she pulled herself frantically across the room to the door. She reached, strained, sobbed—and it opened, mercifully opened.
“Robbie! Carol Anne! Get out of here! Run! Run! Run!”
She stumbled from the room, shutting the door behind her. She crawled on her hands and knees toward the children’s room.
In the children’s room, Robbie and Carol Anne heard Diane’s screams. The closet door suddenly slammed shut, as Robbie rolled across the floor, enmeshed in the clown doll’s arms. He made it to the hall door, reached up a thrashing hand to the knob, and pulled. The door wouldn’t open. Just outside, he could hear his mother halfway down the hall, crawling on the floor and shouting.
Carol Anne sat upright in bed, paralyzed with fear, staring mesmerized at the closet: the dazzling light was pouring out from under the closet door. And now, along the door frame: sinuous, blue veins were starting to grow, pulse, and curl into the edges, around the hinges, over the jamb.
Outside, Diane inched closer to her baby’s room—she could hear chaos mounting inside; she could hear one of the children rattling the doorknob, trying to get out. She was almost there.
From beneath the door of Diane’s room, a cloud of ectoplasmic smoke rushed snaking down the hall ahead of her, cutting her off from access to Robbie and Carol Anne. She stopped short, emitting a small sound from her throat.
The cloud hovered in front of the bedroom door, forming an eerie blockade. Slowly it began to manifest. Like congealing ether, it took form: the eyeless face, flowing hair, flowing arms, flowing gown—it was the Waiting Woman. She stood there, willowy, insubstantial, floating like a phantom queen above Diane—unseeing, unsmiling, unbeing.
“Help,” rasped Diane thickly. “Help me. Please.”
The woman seemed to smile briefly—at least, it looked like a smile. The corners of her mouth turned up; her lips stretched thin . . . and then kept stretching. Her entire face began to lengthen out, elongate forward, becoming pulled and slightly distorted in front, the cheeks stretching horribly anterior—six inches, twelve inches, as if there were a plunger behind her face, pushing it out from an infinitely expansile occiput, farther and farther out, until suddenly . . . the face ruptured open. Burst apart. Revealing, behind it: the great skull head, its eye sockets infinitely black, its pointed teeth venomous, the crater nose, protruding brow: the Beast.
It rose up, arms extending puttylike—the claws that dripped, the hiss that chilled.
Diane pushed herself backward down the hall as the thing reached out for her—got to the top of the landing and began rolling, uncontrolled, down the carpeted steps, just as the thing sent a smoky talon sizzling into the wall where her head had been.
At the bottom of the stairs she grappled for her footing, found it . . . and raced for the back door. She swung it open, hard, running full tilt into the yard. It was pouring rain.
Soaked immediately, she turned around to face the house. Walking backward, looking up at the children’s room, she began to scream.
“Steve! Anyone! Help me!”
Before she could continue, she lost her footing in the mud, and slipped into the shallow end of the unfinished swimming pool. From there she immediately slid all the way down the wet mud to the deep puddle at the deep end.
Lightning and thunder ripped the sky. Diane flopped around dizzily, trying to regain her balance in the quagmire. Suddenly a large gushing bubble exploded next to her in the mud. She gaped at it uncomprehendingly as a second bubble burst just a moment later beside the first—in each rose the leathery, rotting head of a corpse, in burial clothes: rising like an animated stalk, out of the gushing bog.
Diane screamed and stepped back. She bumped into something, swiveled around: another cadaverous face, its mouth opening wide, revealing fine wire jaw clamps that sprang and pinged like a violin tuned too tight.
A coffin oozed out of the mud beside her, its hinged lid breaking open, spilling bones and rot and burial jewelry all over Diane.
She knew she must be going mad.
Carol Anne screamed continuously as the rising wind began ceaselessly sucking everything into the closet once again. The growing, white-hot light flooded the room. Memories of the inferno.
On the floor, Robbie wrestled with the clown. Its arms still strangling him, he tore bits of stuffing from its middle, the shredded tufts of cotton flying immediately at terrifying speed into the closet opening.
And the closet opening was coming alive. Mounds of flesh began to grow all along the door frame, to puff up like undulating visibly growing fungus. Then, as if the door itself were a living, pulsing organism, fatty tissue started to form along the borders of the fleshy frame, veins rivuleted the soft pinkish skin, escaping back down into the maw of the closet until the closet itself was a giant mouth, all gums and lips and blinding light transilluminating the pink-yellow tissues, all the way back to the bottom of the mucoid pit, where a pale, oily esophagus could be seen generating its peristaltic spasms down to its abysmal depths.
Carol Anne just kept screaming.
The backyard was shaking violently with some sort of bizarre, local seismic activity, forcing dead things up from the ground as if they were bubbling out of a thick gruel. Diane was numb, almost babbling, her circuits overloaded. Time and again she tried to climb out of the steep, slick excavation; each time she slipped back into the rain and mire and slurping corpses.
Finally, she made it back to the shallow end, hand over hand like an automaton, and reached up to the level earth to pull herself out. Something grabbed her wrist. It hoisted her into the air. She held her breath.
It was Mr. Tuthill from next door.
“Look at that!” Tuthill yelled, pulling Diane up out of the hole. “Look at that! Look in your pool, my God!”
Mrs. Tuthill ran up, holding an umbrella. “Your children. Listen! What sort of sound is that?”
The screams of Robbie and Carol Anne floated down ethereally from the upstairs window, its unearthly light glaring out into the rainy night.
“I have to get them out!” Diane shouted, and began running toward the house.
Mr. Tuthill began to follow her, but his wife stopped him, shaking her head. “Don’t go in there. There’s funny things go on in there.”
“But those kids . . .” Mr. Tuthill objected.
“Leave it, I tell you,” she dourly admonished. “You don’t know
what’s
goin’ on in there. The things I’ve heard—I’m telling you. Might be junkies, or perverts; they might have a gun, you don’t know what. You keep to your own.” Subject closed.