Shivers (30 page)

Harry Faulkin was dead, sprawled out on the road like a hit-and-run victim.

It must have been a heart attack,
thought Adele, staring at the still figure in disbelief.

For Harry Faulkin’s body was
untouched.

Silence reigned in the decrepit Berkley Arms Hotel. The old drunks who congregated in the halls had long since passed into sweet oblivion. Tomorrow was soon enough for them to once more face the harsh reality of daytime. The crazy lady in the lobby had stopped her swearing and complaining and finally gone to bed. The oldsters who could not sleep, the aging night people, lay in their cots and stared into space, read yellow-stained books, or prayed. Mrs. MacGruder, however, had turned off her light, put her face to the pillow, and dozed off peacefully. It was still night when she awoke, blinking and rubbing her eyes so that they would adjust to the darkness.

She often woke up early initially, drifting back to sleep for an hour or two more until she rose for her morning coffee and hot, buttered bun. But it was
way
before her usual wakeup time. Something had disturbed her sleep. Some uncanny sound, like distant wailing, but close, too close to come from outside. The noise was coming from inside the building. Near. She got up and turned on the light.

She stood by her door and listened.

The sound seemed to be coming from out in the hall, although it was muffled. That must mean that it was coming from one of the rooms! Mr. Peterson’s room? The old woman opened the door carefully and stepped out into the corridor. She walked down to room 919 and listened at the doorway.

Yes. The moaning was definitely coming from inside Room 919.
What could it be?

Peterson? Had her dear friend Mr. Peterson returned at last?

She knocked on the door. Two small, inoffensive taps.

Nothing. The sound inside had stopped.

She rapped again, louder. “Mr. Peterson—are you there? It’s me. Mrs. MacGruder.”

Nothing.

She was scared. Perhaps he was injured, unable to cry for help. Perhaps he needed a doctor!

Her fingers closed over the knob. As she gave it a twist, she noticed that it felt funny, as if someone had forced the door open and in so doing had snapped the lock. It swung open faster than she had anticipated. She stepped back with a start.

As the door completed its arc toward the wall, the scene inside was revealed. A black-haired man was crouching near the spot where the stain had been scraped off of the wall. Mrs. MacGruder did not recognize him as Ernest Hendon; she only knew he looked pathetic and deranged.

Ernest was pounding the wall, licking it, trying to
gnaw
his way through. Foam was gathering at the sides of his mouth. Now and then he would look up at the elderly woman, but her presence had no effect on him. He started moaning as he had been doing before Mrs. MacGruder had seen it all—crazy people, loonies, drug-crazed maniacs, blitzed and bellicose winos and alkies. But never,
never
had she seen anything like this. The man seemed more animal than human.

Finally, his voice rising to a high-pitched scream, Ernest stood up and began banging his head against the wall, over and over again, harder and harder and harder.

Mrs. MacGruder was repulsed, but her compassion took over. She ran forward and tried to constrain him. It didn’t work. He was too strong. She ran out again to call the police.

“I touched it,” Hendon whispered to no one. “I touched it. . . it told me to come here. I must get out . . . the
walls . . .
”

When the police finally arrived, Ernest Hendon was dead. He was on the floor, arms spread out, his head in the center of a grisly, widening lake of blood.

It was dark and it was cold and it was wet.

Eric Thorne wondered how long he’d been there, crouching in the darkness. He was in some kind of conduit, an underground tunnel, one of the miles of tunnels that were part of New York’s subway and sewer system. He had no idea where he was exactly. He’d been running from them, it seemed, for hours.

It started when his light had gone out and the heavy door opened. Suddenly he was being examined by hordes of unseen fingers. He smelled sour breath on his face. He felt like an H.G. Wells hero surrounded by
morlocks
as an outpour of slimy, furry half-men streamed out of the opened portal.

These abominable creatures grabbed him and pulled him through the door, which was then shut firmly behind him. He felt that
presence
in his brain relinquishing some of its hold. Apparently it felt that since Eric had been captured he was now beneath its notice.

On the other side of the door it was lighter. The light was low, but enough for him to see by. His captors were humans like himself—dirty, dressed in rags, covered in filth and soot, smelling of excrement. Humans! Tramps, bums, male and female. He even noticed a middle-aged lady in a torn Givenchy gown. Who
were
these people?

He had to get away from them.

His eyes locked into the eyes of one of these samples of human debris. A short white man with pasty, unshaven skin and hollow pits for eyes. He caught a name, the man’s name:
Ronnie.
He’d been a friend of . . . Haupster, was that it?—Haupster, the man Eric had talked to at the subway stop on Wednesday, the derelict whose psychic powers had started it
all.
Eric’s part in it anyway.

From Eric to Haupster to Johnny to . . . “the master,” they called it. That’s how the master had come to know of Eric’s existence. Everyone who served it was part of a gigantic, unnatural chain of information that was passed along the currents of the brain.

Some of these people were normal people from normal homes. Missing Persons. All of them. Snatched in subways and streets by Ronnie and others of his ilk. Ronnie had snatched Haupster—but the experience had been too much for the man; Haupster had died. That very night that Eric had talked to him, looked for him—he’d died.

Eric broke free and ran past steaming pipes and overstuffed trash cans, through one conduit after another, wading through muddy odorous liquid and ducking under metal obstructions. He dashed from one chamber to another—resisting
its
control—successfully eluding his mentally subjugated pursuers.

He was inside a little maintenance tunnel that was barely large enough for a man to stand comfortably. The odor was almost unbearable. His feet were soaked with all manner of slime. He hugged the wall, shivering from the cold. The padding footsteps of those horrible creatures had finally faded away into the distance. He had time to rest, time to plan his escape. Time to decipher the bits and pieces of data he’d picked up from the minds of his almost-captors.

He and Hammond had been completely wrong. True, the master, the force, they were dealing with
was
inhuman, was—as far as he was concerned—evil, was from a world other than their own. But it was not from an astral plane, a mystical dimension, the supernatural ether.

It was from another world.

It was not demon or devil. It was simply a sentient lifeform from
another planet!
An alien! An extraterrestrial with mental powers and abilities that made its mastery over humans almost a matter of course.

How did it get here and what was it doing?

What
form
did it take?

Eric finally understood the significance of the “white rectangle growing larger,” the swaying, the naked people herded together. It
was
a subway car they were in, as he had suspected that morning when he had traveled to work with Hammond. For some ungodly purpose those derelicts and drunks were transported from spot to spot beneath the city in abandoned subway cars. Why? Were they
building
something? What could it be?

The white rectangle . . . one of the chambers these people were transported to as seen from the front of a subway car. Just as he had seen it that morning with Hammond. But where exactly was this chamber, and did it have special significance?

He’d also seen that door, the entrance to the underworld, in his mind. HGC—what did the letters mean? He had to find out as much as he could before he got out and went to the authorities. Assuming they could help. How many people of prominence were already under “the master’s” control?

He heard scuttling sounds in the distance. He Intel more to fear from his subjugated fellow humans than he did from the alien itself. At least for now—while he sensed its attention was elsewhere, gathering its strength for some supreme final act that would insure the end of humankind’s domination of Earth for centuries to come.

What was going to happen?

An image flashed through Eric’s mind.

A young man. Blond. Handsome. About twenty or twenty-one. Who was he ? How did he figure into it?

As long as the alien’s monstrous mentality was directed elsewhere, as long as Eric could resist its subsequently weakened mental suggestions, he would have a chance. If only he could continue to elude its frenzied slaves.

He got up from his crouch, prepared to look for his way out of the tunnels. It was now or never. The path seemed clear.

A dirt-stained hand reached out from the darkness and grabbed Eric’s wrist.

PART V

October 20th Sabbath Day

ELEVEN

B
Y TEN O’CLOCK
Sunday morning it had stopped snowing. The trucks and snowplows were out, trying to clean the streets and avenues, but as it was not a work day—for most people—things proceeded slowly. It was slow going on sidewalks too—rush-hour pedestrians hadn’t stomped down the snows as they would have had it been a weekday.

The snow had reached almost six inches in certain parts of the suburbs, and rescue teams had spent the night extricating those luckless enough to get caught in the storm. Steven had had to leave his rented car at a train station and take the Long Island Railroad back to the city. He didn’t get home until early in the morning.

Steven sat in the back of the cab and listened to the radio blaring from the front seat as the driver drove up snow-covered Sixth Avenue at a snail’s pace. The city was a winter wonderland, ill right, all of its dirt and grime hidden underneath a pretty sheath of white. Yet there was something bleak about it too. Children making snowmen and flinging snowballs at each other were exotic counterpoint to the somber churchgoers on their way to worship.

On Sundays the city was dead.

The taxi pulled up in front of the office building where the Andrews Agency was located. Steven paid the driver and walked briskly into the lobby. Ralph had said on the phone that he had a lot of things to tell him. While he’d offered to give his report over the telephone, Steven had suggested they meet at the office, seeing how Ralph had already gone in in spite of the weather—”I spend more Sundays in the office than anyone should have to.” Besides, Steven wanted to get out of the house before the silence drove him to distraction.

The receptionist and the secretaries and most of the other employees were not there, but Ralph had left the front door to the suite open. He was in his office, looking through a stack of papers. He smiled when he saw Steven and motioned him to sit down. “How are you holding up?” he asked as he lit a cigarette.

Steven shrugged. “Okay, I guess. Any news?”

Ralph gave him a quick update. So far a lot of interviewing, bar canvassing, etc. had led to nothing. “That news report last night might bring us a few leads. Too bad it had to be so—”

Steven nodded. “—lipsmacking. Yes, they made it all seem so . . .
sleazy.
They practically implied that Joey was responsible for Vivian’s death.”

“Well, at least we got your brother’s picture in front of the public,” Ralph said. “Trouble is, a lot of weirdos will come out of the woodwork saying they have information. It always happens.”

Steven was very hopeful. “But maybe one of the weirdos will really have something to say.”

“Maybe. I already spoke to the station, and the police—”

Steven interrupted. “Albright?”

“No, he wasn’t around. Everyone’s promised to pass along information to me if that news story gets results.” He stopped to take a few puffs of his cigarette. “I wouldn’t count on that reporter, Job Whats-his-name, coming up with anything on his own. He’s strictly from the tabloids. A hack who does minimal work and sensationalizes it on the air so it sounds better.”

Steven agreed. “I noticed.”

“I did uncover something interesting,” Ralph said, stubbing out the cigarette in his ashtray as an afterthought. “But I’m not sure what it means.”

“Before we get to that,” Steven said, “I’d better tell you what happened last night.” Steven had been dreading this. He had been wondering exactly how he would tell Ralph about the letter and the trip to Tanton. What he’d found—or rather
not
found. He handed Ralph the letter he’d received and gave him a chance to read it.

“You went out there last night? By yourself?” Ralph asked incredulously. “Steven, why didn’t you tell me about this?”

Steven didn’t know what to say.

Ralph put the letter on his desk and shook his head. “Well, you’d better tell me everything.”

Steven gave him the whole story, what there was of it. “So you see, the guy didn’t even show up. I didn’t wait around. Seeing that gunk all over the floor—I was sick of the whole thing.”

Ralph leaned back in his chair and patted one hand with the other. “Steven, one of the most important aspects of a client-detective relationship is trust. It’s essential. If you don’t trust me, if you don’t let me handle things my own way, how can I possibly be of service? I’ve been in this business for many, many years. I’ve seen everything, handled every kind of case imaginable. I know how you feel. I can imagine what goes on in your mind. You’re no different from anyone else, Steven, believe me. You want your brother back. You’d do anything to make sure that he’s safe and sound. But that’s
my
job. You’ve got to be willing to let me handle things my own way. You can’t keep secrets from me any more. It just won’t work that way. Do you understand?”