8
Heather had gone to bed earlier than usual. She had not drawn attention to the fact. She had just taken a bath and gone to bed. However, both of her parents had inquired about her health. They were a little concerned about this unusual behavior on her part.
“I'm fine,” she told them. “Just a little tired, that's all. It's been a really . . . interesting day.”
Too much sun, the mother and father concluded.
But sleep would not come to Heather. Her mind was too busy, too full of the horrible scenes she had witnessed. She tossed in her canopied bed and tried to will sleep to come, but the arms of Morpheus would not embrace her.
A noise just outside her open window brought her upright in bed, her heart pounding, fear making her mouth cotton-dry.
She waited silently, but the noise was not repeated.
Finally, she lay down, her eyes wide open. The button eyes of the teddy bears and the glass eyes of the dolls sitting in neat rows on shelves across the room, seemed to glare at her, a different kind of light in their dead eyes.
Or were they dead?
Heather stared at the neat rows.
The dolls and teddy bears stared back.
One blinked its eyes. Then another.
Heather closed her eyes. “No way,” she whispered into the darkness of the room. “I'm dreaming.”
As she opened her eyes, a toy soldier was standing up, pointing a toy rifle at her. Heather ducked just as the rifleman fired. She screamed. But no footsteps sounded on the hall outside the bedroom door.
She smelled gunsmoke. She looked at her pillow. Faintly revealed by the pale glow of the night light was a tiny black hole in the white pillowcase.
Heather heard a clicking sound. She looked at the toy soldier. He was pulling back the hammer on his musket. Heather jerked up the pillow and threw it at the toy. The pillow struck the soldier, knocking it backward, then covering it with its soft bulk.
The dolls and teddy bears continued to blink and stare at her.
The noise came again from outside her bedroom window. Something was definitely moving out there. She didn't know what to do.
She thought about slipping under the covers and pretending this was all just a bad dream. But she knew it wasn't.
She considered getting under the bed. Then the story Marc had told her about something under there waiting to grab you came to her mind.
Marc, why did you tell me that?
Then the night light went out, plunging the room into darkness, the only illumination coming from the street lamp on the corner. Wild panic struck Heather and she screamed as loudly as she could.
But her parents did not come to the door. The house was as silent as death.
Don't think about that! Heather's mind screamed silently.
“Yeah, really!” Heather muttered.
She jumped out of bed and ran to the door. But it was locked. Locked! How could that be? There wasn't any lock on her bedroom door . . . but it was locked.
She ran back to the bed and jumped into the middle of it. She looked around as laughter filled the bedroom. Her clown doll was laughing and dancing and spinning around.
“Stop it!” Heather screamed.
The wild, frenzied laughter grew louder. The clown doll spun around and around.
The face of the mask came to her in the darkness of the room. She could see the cruel mouth, the twisted nose, the wild insane eyes.
Something brushed against the side of the house. Heather looked at the open window. The street lamp suddenly went dark. Heather experienced almost a mindless numbing fear.
A silhouette fell across the bed. A deformed shadow vaguely manlike. Heather froze in the center of the bed, her heart pounding with fear. Her eyes swung to a strange glow materializing in the yard. The light was round and oddly jagged around the edges. The man moved away from her window and Heather watched him walk toward the light. She slipped from her bed and crouched by the open window, wondering what in the world was going on and if she were really asleep and dreaming all this?
But she knew she was wide awake.
The man stood for a moment in front of the ball of light, hovering several feet off the ground. Heather was sure the man was somehow communicating with the glowing sphere, but no sound of any kind â other than a low humming â reached her ears.
Then the man turned away from the ball of light and looked straight at Heather. It was not a man, she discovered, but a teenage boy.
Heather had seen him around town, but she didn't know his name. She knew he was some kind of local sports hero.
Suddenly the name came to her.
Van Bishop.
He was walking toward Heather's bedroom. She ran to the door, forgetting that it was somehow locked, and then whirled around as the room was suddenly flooded with light, light unlike any light Heather had ever seen. It was Technicolor and 3-D and black and white â surrealistic â and it frightened Heather half out of her mind.
She opened her mouth to scream. No sound came. Her throat felt tight, almost closed shut.
A strange humming sound entered the room, filling it with odd vibrations.
She looked toward her floor-to-ceiling bookcase. Her dolls and teddy bears were grinning at her . . . and they were
moving.
They were waving their arms and moving their legs. And the smiles of the dolls and teddy bears were grotesquely evil.
The girl looked at her bed. The sheets and the one remaining pillow were jumping, wavy lines moving through them. The canopy over her bed was flapping like a loose sail in a strong wind . . . but it produced no sound.
The humming ceased. An eerie silence fell over the room.
Heather turned away from the ball of light hovering at her window and tried to pound on the door. But the door had changed into thick canvas pads.
Where had she seen pads like these?
Her small fists made no sound as they struck the thick pads.
She whirled around, her back pressing against the padding now covering the door. She did not attempt to scream. She now realized that was useless.
Van was removing the screen. He looked up, grinning at her, and his grimace was horrible; a cruel curving of his lips. The light behind him â Heather could not understand why the light had not attracted the attention of the neighbors, or what had happened to her parents â had transformed the handsome boy into a monster. His face was chalk white, his hair wild and tangled, his lips appeared bloody and slick with saliva, and his eyes were filled with madness.
Van laughed insanely as he pulled the screen away and dropped it to the grass. He stuck his arm inside, his fingers waggling and reaching for Heather, even though she was all the way across the room.
“Mother!”
Heather cried.
“Daddy!
Help me. Somebody please help me!”
Then she heard a wet, smushing sound, a groan, and Van fell from the window to land in a heap on the ground beneath the sill.
The glowing, bobbing orb of light shot backward and faded into a baseball-size glow at the far end of the street. The dolls and teddy bears ceased their wild movements, their eyes once more lifeless. The canopy over her bed was still, so were the sheets and the pillow. She turned around. Her door was no longer covered with the thick padding. She tried the doorknob. The door opened.
“Heather!” a young voice whispered from the open window.
Her heart leaped from her chest to her throat.
“It's me, Marc. Come on, Heather. You gotta get out of there.”
“Marc.” She had found her voice. “Marc, what's happening here?” She ran to the window and looked at him. “You're in your
pajamas!”
she said.
“So are you,” he countered. “I don't usually sleep in my Sunday suit. Come on, Heather. Get out of there before the light gets big again and comes after us.”
Only then did she notice the club in Marc's hand. She leaned out of the window and looked down. Van was out cold on the ground. She could see the blood on his face.
“You hit him!”
“I sure did. Come
on,
Heather.”
“My parents â ”
“Your parents are just like mine â asleep in chairs. I couldn't get my Dad and Mom awake and my sisters are out cold. I don't know what happened. Go look if you don't believe me. But
hurry,
Heather.”
Heather ran down the hall to the den. Her mother and father were sprawled in chairs. She shook her father, then her mother. They were cold to the touch. Heather started to cry, then shook her head viciously and wiped the tears from her eyes. She couldn't afford the luxury of crying. She forced her mind to work rationally. She ran to her brother's room. He was just like her parents â out cold, and cold to the touch. Steve was lying on the floor, his eyes open, seeing nothing. She put her hand on his bare chest and felt the slow thumping of his heart.
She raced back to her room just in time to see Marc with the club raised high over his head. She noticed his hair was all messed up, as if he'd been in bed.
“Marc!”
“He's wakin' up. I gotta whack him again.”
And whack him he did. Van stirred and Marc broke the stick on the boy's head. It wasn't a very big stick but it was sturdy enough to drop Van back into unconsciousness.
Heather crawled out of the window and jumped to the ground. She faced her young friend. “Marc . . . I'm scared!”
“Yeah? Well join the club, Heather. I just about died when that Matt Bradford stuck his head in my bedroom window with that funky light shinin' behind him.”
“Matt Bradford? Him, too? How many more are in this thing? What'd you do to Matt?”
“Hit him with my baseball bat. He ran off, moaning and holding his face. I think I busted his nose. There's blood all over the place. I followed the light over to Van's house; looked in the window. His parents are out cold. Heather, I don't know what to do.”
Heather took command, playing a role she was to assume throughout the coming days â through many long, hot days and sleepless horrible nights. Days and nights of disgust, disbelief, fear, and living nightmares â of facing monstrous, seemingly indestructible beings no human could ever fully understand. She took Marc's hand.
“How'd you get over here, Marc?”
“On my bike. It's over there.” He pointed. “I dropped the baseball bat somewhere along the way”
“O.K. Look . . . we can't stay here.”
“Well, where can we go?”
“Let's go see Doctor Baldwin.”
“Yeah. O.K.”
Heather felt Marc squeeze her hand and then release it. “What's wrong, Marc?”
“I don't think we're gonna make it, Heather.”
She looked up and gasped in fright. The ball of light was enlarging and moving toward them.
Â
Jerry had leveled with Maryruth, telling her everything that had transpired that Sunday. He left nothing out.
Maryruth sat for a moment, silent, staring at him in disbelief. “Supernatural occurrences, Jerry? Vampires or werewolves or UFOs or monsters? Jerry, now come on!”
“I know, Maryruth, I know. It sounds like something out of a Hollywood set. But believe me, that autopsy was very real. And there is
no way
any human being could have done what was done to Lisa. Whatever did that left no track or footprint. And speaking quite frankly, Maryruth, putting together all that happened Saturday and today, it's got me more than a little spooked.”
She had to smile at that. “Interesting choice of words.”
“Yeah.” Jerry sighed. “You know, Lieutenant Voyles said something today that has stayed in my mind. I've been worrying it around in my head.”
“Oh? This Voyles person sounds like a real character.”
“Yes, he is that. He's a hard-working cop, but I rather like him now that I've discovered he's human. And I am very glad he's been assigned to this case.”
“Then what has you bothered?” She poured them both more coffee. It was a good thing she did, for although they didn't yet know it, this was going to be a long night.
“Voyles said he'd seen some pretty cool ol' boys in his time, but that I was the coolest. I guess he was referring to my lack of emotion concerning Lisa's death. And he's right. I don't feel anything. I guess I'm sorry she's dead; I'm not even real certain of that.”
“All right. You want to talk about it?”
He shrugged his muscular shoulders. “I don't believe Lisa and I were ever in love. I think she wanted security and went after it. We've been living in a combat zone for years. Separate bedrooms, going for days without speaking. Maryruth, we could discuss
nothing
without our exchange deteriorating into an argument. And what I have just described is just the tip of the iceberg. Ours was a mean, miserable life.”
“This, what I'm about to say, has to be said, Jerry. Have you thought about the funeral arrangements?”
“There isn't that much to think about. Lisa was an abandoned child. She has no relatives that I'm aware of. I'll speak with Jimmy at the funeral home in the morning. Lisa's body is still at the Cape. I don't even know when Doctor Finley will release the body.”
Maryruth studied the man's face â a strong face, almost sensual, with dark, brooding eyes under thick eyebrows. His slightly crooked nose gave him character instead of taking away from his looks. His chin was square and strong. She could see the faint outline of an old scar just under his lower lip, right side.
She had an overwhelming urge to reach out and touch him. He turned just at the moment her hand was reaching for his face.