“Has it happened before?” Constance asked, very calm now. Perhaps too calm, Charlie thought.
“A couple of times, less intense than this one, not as real or as long.”
“What about the onset? What starts it?”
He reached over and rested his hand on her thigh, the way she did with him when he drove. She covered his hand with hers for a moment, returned it to the steering wheel. She rarely drove with one hand on the wheel; he did most of the time. His hand on her leg now told her he did not want her to speak in her professional voice, not to him. She swallowed hard and glanced at him.
“Charlie, can you talk about it? How it starts, how it ends, anything?”
He patted her leg, but kept his hand there. “You’ve known,” he said slowly. “I’ve caught you watching me.”
“I knew something was wrong,” she admitted. She was speeding and made herself slow down. The roadhouse was ahead, but she had no intention now of stopping anywhere. Home, she kept thinking, go home.
“Yeah, you knew. Okay. I’m doing something, it doesn’t seem to matter what, like driving just now, talking. Then there’s another feeling of being somewhere else, cramped, in a dark space. Both feelings are there together. One doesn’t interfere with the other one. It just happens all at once. Nothing goes with the feeling. No need to do anything about it, go anywhere. It’s almost like a memory of being there, wherever it is. Then it’s gone. Again, no warning, no fading away, just not there.”
He was facing straight ahead, no longer looking frightened, and that was right, Constance thought, because she had taken all the fear into herself. It lay coiled over her heart, squeezing.
She drove them home too fast, now and then remembering not to speed, then finding herself edging back up to seventy-five, eighty. It started to snow lightly during the last half hour, a fine dry snow that could accumulate to a depth of several inches before morning. She parked in the garage and they went inside their house, where Charlie went to the kitchen and mixed hot buttered rum. The cats stalked around him indignantly, as if to demand a stop to the nonsense, coming and going at all hours, making it snow. Charlie muttered as he danced around them to make drinks.
“When I come back, I want to be a cat,” he said, pushing Brutus out of the way with his
foot. Candy cuffed Ashcan on her way to weave
infinity patterns around his feet. He pushed her away too, and she walked stiffly out of the room, grumbling. “Tomorrow,” he went on, “they’ll sit in the window and watch me shovel
snow, use the snow blower, freeze my ass while
they complain about not enough yeast on their food, or not enough chicken liver. What a life!”
“Well, I’ll sit inside and let you play with snow, too,” Constance said. “You know I want to hire one of the Mitchum boys to take care of it.”
“Nope. My job. You don’t complain about not enough chicken liver or yeast on your food, and that, my darling, makes all the difference.”
“Charlie,” she started, but he caught her in a tight embrace, buried his mouth and nose in her hair and drew in a breath.
“We’ll talk about it,” he said into her hair. “Tomorrow. Tonight we’ll have our nice hot drinks and go to bed. Okay?”
She pulled back and shook her head vigorously. “Not tomorrow. We’ll talk about it now. Charlie, you are not going mad. You have nothing to worry about as far as brain damage is concerned. You wouldn’t function if you had the kind of brain injury the others showed.”
“Good,” he said. “So let’s have our drinks and go to bed.”
“Charlie, look at me! Stop this!”
His face was set in hard ridges and lines. She trailed her finger across his cheek, down his chin. “Charlie, please. I don’t know what’s happening to you, but it isn’t like the others. You know it isn’t.”
His facial muscles relaxed a bit and he nodded. “I know.”
Over the next two weeks they both pored over the accounts of insanity, the terrible effects the thing had had on others. Constance made her special Christmas cookies, and they both shopped, bought and decorated a tree, and welcomed their daughter home for a week during the holidays. And they waited. Charlie had another attack, no worse than before.
There was the damn cramped space, darkness, a feeling of being hemmed in, and during it he was perfectly aware of his actual surroundings.
He called John Loesser, invited him out.
“Can you come to dinner? Any time. Or we can meet you in the city.”
John would come out by train, he decided. Patrick was ill, probably would be admitted to the hospital again for treatment. New people were due at the home, to relieve Patrick of his duties. It was time to move on, but first he would visit.
It snowed again the day John was due. The yard was like a postcard scene, with snow piled high on sweeping branches of the blue spruces, and banked against the front of the house up to the windowsills. Constance tended her bird feeders and looked at the lovely world with troubled eyes. Cardinals and chickadees waited for her to move on so they could eat; the cats watched them broodingly, too lazy and warm inside the house to be a serious threat, but wistful. Constance shivered and hugged her parka closer around her. It was her fault, she thought suddenly, remembering the day they had picked apples, remembering that Charlie had taken the arson case only because she had been so busy, going here and there, speaking, publishing. She shook her head and hurried back inside, denying the thought as hard as she could. She and Charlie both went to pick up John. Charlie did not do any driving now.
Her dinner was not up to John’s standards, but he was too polite to mention that, and, in fact, was very complimentary. They had coffee and Cognac in the living room before the fire, each of them with a cat. Ashcan had been stuck with the stranger and for several seconds had hesitated, sniffing his shoes, then his trousers, finally a hand, before he eased himself onto John’s lap where he curled up and started to purr.
“Tell me about those doors,” Charlie said then without preamble. No mention had been made until now of the strange happenings or fires.
John nodded. “Right. A blackness that filled the doorway. I walked around it in one of the buildings, looked at it from the other side, two connecting rooms with that… that void in between, exactly the same on both sides; just a void, an absence of light.”
“Did you toss something in besides the rock you mentioned? Especially at Orick?”
Now John looked startled. “Yeah. Twice. Once was at Orick. The first time was at Moscow, Idaho. I made a Molotov cocktail—I thought that was appropriate—and threw it into the blackness. The fire burst out all around and I ran out. Period. I couldn’t tell if it went all the way through, or got stuck, or bounced back into the room. So I tried again at Orick. This time I made a time bomb, sort of. Not as well as you would have done, I guess, but I tried. I rigged up a cardboard box, propped it up with newspapers, and put a wine bottle on top of it. I found one of those corks with a hole through it, the kind that wine makers use, and I put a cotton cord through it into the bottle, filled it with gas, and used the twine as a wick. When the fire reached the paper holding the box up, it was supposed to burn it, let the bottle roll down into the void, the blackness, taking the burning wick with it, and soon the whole thing should have caught. I didn’t hang around to see if it worked.”
“Something worked,” Charlie murmured. “One of the firemen out there said there was an implosion. He was pretty sure of the word he used.”
John shrugged. “It didn’t work enough to slow them down.”
“Maybe it didn’t go in far enough,” Charlie said absently. “Or it wasn’t a big enough charge for the job. Or something else.”
Charlie always knew when Constance was signaling him. It wasn’t anything that he could demonstrate or prove; usually neither of them would even talk about it, but there was something. When he was feeling jovial about it, he said she scratched him between his shoulder blades with invisible fingers; when he was bothered by it, he said she turned her witch eye
on him. Whatever it was, he knew. And she was
signaling now. He glanced at her.
“You can’t go near it again,” she said. “Charlie, you know you can’t go near it again.”
He did know, but he also knew that it had touched him, that something was in him that had not been there last month. He regarded her soberly and did not agree, but did not dispute her either; in fact, he did not acknowledge her in any way. For a moment she looked foreign, alien, unknowable. He shook his head and turned back to John Loesser.
“Several people have gone through the doorway, haven’t they? And returned? Some of the people who disappeared. Very thorough searches were made of the hotels, and yet their remains turned up in the ashes. Probably two in Orick.”
“They turned up dead,” John said bluntly. “No one’s gone through and come back to talk about it.”
“Let’s hope that pattern is not invariable,” Charlie said after a moment, and then he smiled, his usual warm, somewhat skeptical grin that took many years off his age and made him look vulnerable.
Chapter 16
The fire burned
low while they talked; the
wind had started to howl outside, and now and then a gust blasted its way into the chimney, swirled the blaze strangely, and blew smoke into the room. More snow, Charlie thought with resignation. A real storm was due this time; John would be a house guest for a couple of days at least.
John was explaining his problems to Constance now; until he had a new identity established, it would be difficult to get a car, a new driver’s license, any ID at all.
Charlie grimaced and made a note on a scratch pad, handed the paper to John. “If you’ve got cash, you can get a car here, license, whatever you need. No questions will be asked. Any idea where you’ll go?”
John shook his head. “Thanks for this. It didn’t occur to me that you’d know.” He leaned forward, upsetting Ashcan who protested and stalked away. “Charlie, I think the FBI is interested, after all. I’ve talked to Beatrice a couple of times; she said they’re asking questions. Some scientists from JPL are interested, too.”
Charlie shrugged, but the thought of the scientists from the Jet Propulsion Lab getting involved made him distinctly uneasy. “I thought they’d ask around. Byron’s keeping me posted with what they’re up to. So far about all he can report is that there’s no periodicity in the events, assuming, that is, that they have enough information to work with.” He stared at the quiet flames, thinking fire was the prime example of how good and evil can coexist in the same place, same time. He said, “The people Byron’s been in touch with are saying there can’t be anything to it, but if there is, it’s the find of the century. They’ve turned the big computers on to the problem of source, periodicity, probabilities of its happening again and where.” He laughed without humor. “They have a new puzzle to solve, a new game to play along with their Star Wars problems.”
“Christ,” John muttered. “They’ll be like all the others. No one believes until he sees what it can do, and then it’s too late.” He shook his head. “Maybe it’s best. They can be in position within hours, no doubt, as soon as the reports start coming in about madness anywhere near one of the hotels. Let them do whatever they want. God knows, I don’t want this to be my personal war any longer.”
“What will they do?” Charlie asked, turning to Constance. She and Byron had discussed this part, he knew.
“First, they’ll seal the area, we think,” she said. “They probably will set up equipment to measure radiation, radio signals, whatever they can think of that they know how to measure.”
John snorted. “The very instruments they use will stop whatever it is they want to find.”
“Maybe. But they don’t know it, or believe it if anyone tells them. They’ll want the scientific data. They probably will use animals for experimentation in the beginning. Birds in cages, cats in cages, dogs, maybe even chimps. And then sacrifice them to examine their brains.” Both men were gazing at her with unconcealed looks of distaste. She rolled her eyes. “I’m not making the rules, guys, just telling you the procedure if you want a scientific study. Eventually, if the thing is still contained, they’ll have to use people, of course. The dilemma is that if you protect the people, there’s nothing to find; eventually they’ll decide volunteers are in order.”
Charlie exhaled a long breath and turned his brooding gaze back to the fire. “There’s a story I came across years ago,” he said. “It’s about this missionary in Africa back around the turn of the century. He’d been out for months before any mail caught up with him, and then he had a newspaper, the first he had seen since his arrival. He read it, then read it again, over and over until he had memorized it. Finally, he put it aside and his natives snatched it up and carried it away. Such powerful magic, they thought. It had to be powerful magic, or why would he have bathed his eyes with it for so many hours?”
Constance nodded. “Think of the implications of a newspaper,” she said to John, who was looking confused. “Language, education, manufacture of paper and ink, invention of the printing press, delivery systems, systems of gathering news. … It might well be considered magic.”
“I always wondered what the natives actually did with the paper,” Charlie said. “Stared at it? Rubbed if on themselves? The ink would have come off, of course; magic ink? Rubbed their eyes with it? Could put an eye out like that, I’d guess. What will our people do with the thing in the hotel?”
That night eight inches of snow fell, and during the next day six more inches. The next afternoon Constance watched Charlie and John Loesser drawing hotel plans at the kitchen table. “Okay, this is the hall, the one up in Camden. And you think the door with the shadow must have been about here. Right?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t looking for it then,” he said. “I was acting from instinct, copying more or less the first layout. Later I began looking for it, not then. But if it was like the others, then yes, it probably was about there. I simply glanced in rooms and noticed that there were open doors that night.”
Charlie shuffled through the pages of graph paper, then withdrew one. “This is the Moscow, Idaho, hotel. This is where you tried to toss a Molotov cocktail through?”
John moistened his lips. That was the first one he had actually tried to examine. He had groped his way through the echoing building, aware of rot and crumbling flooring, aware of the moan of the wind through cracks around every window that had long since been replaced by boards that had worked loose, hung crookedly. Talking about it now had brought back that night with chilling vividness. The corridor had stretched out before him, doors closed on both sides of it, like the entrance to a mine. The beam from his flashlight had been lost in the darkness. He remembered the webs, real cobwebs that had become burdened with dust, and the other webs that were not real, but were like an electrical charge that would not be brushed away, no matter how often he tried.
He became aware of Charlie’s quiet patience. He moistened his lips again. “I went up the stairs and began trying doors, first one side of the hall, then the other. About midway I found it. Connecting doors, the door missing, and the abyss in its place.”
He opened the door cautiously and the wind moaned as it forced its way through cracks in the boards at the windows, brushed him on its way to the corridor behind him. He swept his light from left to right, examining a wall, the windows, another wall, and then stopped. Where the beam of light landed on a wall, the surface appeared with faded wallpaper hanging off in long curling streamers, then the unpainted boards, the window frames with peeling paint, and then nothing. The light stopped when it touched the abyss. It reflected nothing.
“So you went out to the hall and into the next room?” Charlie prompted after a few seconds.
“Same thing. It filled the doorway, top to bottom, and it simply swallowed the light. I threw the rock from the second room and went back to the other one, but it wasn’t there.”
Constance rubbed her arms briskly; goose bumps gradually subsided.
Charlie found the plan of the Moscow, Idaho, hotel grounds, which showed the county road that wound up a hill to it and a fishing camp less than a mile away. He already had drawn a circle with the circumference of about a mile. Six people had wandered into the danger area and had gone mad; ten people had died before the hotel had burned down. Why there? Why for God’s sake there?
Suddenly he said, “That’s the wrong damn question!” Constance and John looked startled. “Why not there? That’s the question. Look, there are a number of things we know, or can assume. It likes wooden buildings. It doesn’t like electricity or mechanical things. It likes big doorways to set up shop in. It doesn’t give a damn exactly where it is as long as the place meets those criteria.”
“That’s crazy,” John said.
Charlie shook his head. “Remember the moon lander we sent up? I recall that there was a good bit of unhappiness about where it landed, not the best place for studying the lunar surface, not where the scientists wanted it, but a place where its chances of landing
safely were best. And the Martian probe? Again,
not exactly where they wanted to have a look around, but a place that met other criteria. Sort of like that old one about the guy on his hands and knees under the streetlight. A cop comes along and asks what’s up. Lost my watch, the guy says. And the cop asks where. Over there, he says pointing down the street. Then why the hell are you looking here? The light’s better, he says.”
“You don’t think our people are doing this,”
Constance said in a low voice, her goose bumps
back again.
“No. Think about the Martian probe, honey. We land a gizmo that is programmed to do certain things. It doesn’t do anything else, just what it was told a long time ago. Let’s pretend. Here’s the probe.” He pushed his coffee cup to the middle of the table and cleared an area around it. “First thing is turn on the light.” He drew a large circle around the cup. “Next, you start collecting and analyzing everything within reach. Now here are some poor little blind Martians; they can’t see the light, but they can feel something funny about the air, maybe it gives them a headache. If they wander too close, they get analyzed.” He pushed a few crumbs into the area, then scooped them up and dropped them into the cup. “Poof, gone. Never knew what hit them.”
“In time,” John said bitterly, “they’ll figure it
out, but how many crumbs have to go first?” He
held a roll over the cup and crumbled it.
“What scares me,” Charlie said then, “is the possibility that they’ll learn about that damn door and try to move it to a safe place where they can explore it at leisure. I wonder what kind of programming it has to protect itself from such an eventuality. Would we lead the savage headhunters home? Why assume they might?”
“It might not even be programmed,” John said. “Maybe there’s an intelligence guiding its every move.”
“Don’t think so,” Charlie murmured. “Seems it would have caught on by now that you’re hot on its tail with a gas can and changed its
modus operandi
.”
Constance looked from one of them to the other as they spoke. The goose bumps had gone, but the chill had settled inside her, squeezing her hard and tight. “Stop it!” she cried in an unfamiliar voice, her speaking to an asinine bureaucrat voice. “You’re both acting like children,” she went on, dripping ice water with each word. “You make assumptions and then act as if each one is undisputed truth.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Charlie said then in the same tone, with the same inflection she used when he was being unreasonable. She clenched her fists and drew in a deep breath. Charlie glanced at John and said judiciously, “She likes lists. We should make a list of possibilities. You want to go first?” he asked her, gazing at her with a blandness that made her want to hit him.
“Our own government could be testing something. A scientist could have a runaway experiment. A foreign government might be doing it. Mass hysteria might have magnified a simple effect. There could be gases in those buildings. We didn’t know about radon twenty years ago. Who can predict what will be discovered next year? Mass hypnosis. Like the Indian rope trick.” Charlie was not writing. He was regarding her with great warmth and sympathy, she realized, and she stopped talking. The silence held for several seconds. She said, “Charlie, what’s wrong with you? Do you know?”
Her voice was almost inaudible, but he heard the question, knew what she meant, knew the reason for the pallor that had spread over her face, knew about the ice that had invaded her. It was within him too.
“I just have assumptions,” he said gently. She opened her lips; when no sound emerged, she nodded. “Something sends a gateway, a doorway to a building where chances are good that it will not be disturbed. Maybe it could operate just as well out in the open, but we don’t know that. Maybe it simply takes time to get things ready; we don’t know that either. When it is operational, there is an area that it can influence, a field, a pattern of some sort of radiation, something. We don’t know what it is, just that it seems to extend out for roughly a mile in all directions. Up? We don’t know. Down, into the ground? We don’t know. Some people seem to be unaffected by it, like John. About one out of four people who experience the effects of this field, radiation, whatever it is, go mad. They become murderous, or suicidal, or completely withdrawn—catatonic—or show other symptoms that we generally associate with insanity. They are incurable; their brains are destroyed by the radiation, or force. Let’s suppose they are invaded by something that riddles the brains, then departs. But whatever it is, it can also activate the various systems that make people move. It can make dead people get up and walk. It forces them through the doorway, the portal to wherever the sending mechanism is, possibly. Maybe there is more elaborate testing equipment there. We don’t know that, either. Until the building housing the doorway is destroyed, it continues to exert its influence on those it has invaded. They go back to it if they can. Dead people get up and go to it. Later, after the fires, their bones turn up in the ashes sometimes. Not always. Not all of them.”
Constance started to speak and he regarded her with a gaze that was distant and strange. “We know it’s true,” he said. “That damn building in Old West was searched from top to bottom, and after the fire the remains of two men were found in the ashes. One of them was Weston’s assistant, Mike, and he was dead before he went in. Probably the other one was too, but we don’t know. They went through the portal and came back out. They went somewhere, stayed there for days, and then showed up again. The rock John threw in, the Molotov cocktail, they went somewhere, too.”
“Why didn’t the burning gasoline destroy that ‘somewhere’?” she demanded. “You’re guessing, just guessing about all this.”
He shrugged. “All we can do is guess. Maybe there wasn’t enough air to sustain a fire. Maybe there are protective devices. Maybe there’s an interim space before you get to the actual source of the thing itself. Maybe it admits only people, not objects. But it admits people and everything they are wearing or carrying on their persons. Sheriff Maschi said one of the corpses in Old West was holding a wrench. That guy took it in and brought it back out.”