The Tea Party - A Novel of Horror (20 page)

“Mr. Hallman,” Parrish interrupted smoothly, “my friend is, to put it bluntly, rich. He is also generous to a fault, something I have often chided him about, alas to no avail. But I don’t believe I’d be very far off the mark if I said that one hundred dollars for fifteen minutes of your time would not be entirely unthinkable.”

“A hundred bucks? Are you shittin—are you pulling my leg, Mr. Parrish?”

There was silence, and Bernie gave up trying to see Parrish in his lair.

“All right, I guess I could make it. But I, uh, don’t see a car anywhere, Mr. Parrish. You’ll have to give me directions to where your friend is stuck.”

“No directions needed, Mr. Hallman. You’ll find my friend and his vehicle waiting for you at Winterrest.”

8

“See?” Keith said as though she should have trusted him all along. “There’s nobody here. We can go right over and I can show you that place.”

Heather was doubtful. Standing at the wooden gate, she could see the bulk of the mansion, the beautiful lawn flat in front and rolling behind, and the tops of large greystones poking up here and there through the grass. It looked okay, but her mother’s frequent admonitions were as strong as the temptation Keith dangled in front of her. She shook her head, not refusing, not agreeing.

“C’mon, Heather, what can happen?”

What could happen was that someone could drive by and see them sneaking around, know they weren’t supposed to be there because no one was ever supposed to be there except maybe for Mr. Parrish, and it wouldn’t be long after that before their mother found out. And if she did, Heather would be grounded for so long she’d practically graduate high school before she would be allowed to go out again.

“I . . . I don’t know.”

Keith sneered at her nervousness and climbed up onto the wall. His balance was precarious and she felt her heart leap, skip, stutter as his arms flailed wildly.

“Keith!”

“It’s okay,” he said absently, intent on finding the proper distribution of his weight. And when he had, he strutted up and down, stopping at the gate, daring her to dare him to try to jump to the other side. When she didn’t rise to the bait, he rolled his eyes skyward, and marched a hundred feet westward, returning with knees high and arms swinging as if he were a drum major and the band was right behind him.

“See?” he said, standing over her with hands on his hips. “See? It’s easy.”

She looked up, and the sky was glaring behind him, shading his features, a cardboard cutout wavering in the breeze.

“God, it’s not gonna fall down, y’know.”

“Well, I know that,” she snapped, and to prove she wasn’t entirely frightened to death, she took a bold step closer and put a hand on the stone. It was cold. Much colder than it should have been under the July sun, and she snatched her hand away.

“Cluck,” said Keith, and he jumped to the ground on the other side. “Cluck, cluck, cluck.”

Nervously, she glanced up and down the highway. “Keith, you better get out of there. Now.”

“I thought you were goin with me?”

She looked away haughtily. “I’ve changed my mind. This whole thing is silly. It’s for kids.” A groping, then, for the ultimate insult: “It’s something that stupid gang of yours would do.”

“But what about the little house?” he said, paying no attention to the jibe.

She leaned her elbows on the wall and stared at him. “I thought you said it was a shed.”

“Well, a shed’s sorta like a little house.”

A raspberry made him jump back. “I know what a shed looks like, Keith, and it’s not a little house. It’s like a shed, and that’s all.”

Finally exasperated at her intransigence, Keith flung up his hands and started to walk away, stopping ten paces beyond the wall and turning. “God, the Gang isn’t chicken like you, y’know. The Mohawks come here all the time and they aren’t afraid.”

Her expression told him what she thought of his gang. “And I’m not afraid, either. I’m just being careful.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Keith, this isn’t right and you know it.”

He took a long step back. “Well?”

“No,” she said, retreating nervously to the shoulder. The house was dark in spite of the sun, the panes reflecting nothing but the grass—a dozen green eyes, cats’ eyes looking right down at her, right through her own eyes and into her mind. Her left arm was chilled, and she rubbed warmth back into it, her gaze flicking from the house to her brother and back again.

And when a sudden stiff breeze raced across the lawn, the green rippled and danced.

Keith picked up a stone and tossed it up, caught it, tossed it up, caught it. He was smiling, but she saw nothing funny about the green eyes he had suddenly, where the light caught them just wrong and the green rippled, like all the windows.

“Keith, please.”

“Cluck,” her brother said.

This wasn’t her brother. This was a stranger.

“Cluck.”

This was silly. He was only a kid, and she didn’t have to do it just because he called her a chicken. But if she didn’t, he’d be clucking at her forever and she would be totally and absolutely miserable, and she wouldn’t be able to say anything to Mother about it because then she would have to tell why, and then she’d be in just as much trouble as if she’d actually gone over the wall.

A sigh for her predicament, and another check of the road.

“Cluck.” Softly, on the breeze. “Cluck.”

So, she thought, as long as I’m gonna get in trouble anyway, it might as well be for a reason.

Not wanting to give him the satisfaction of knowing that he’d maneuvered her, she picked up a pebble and tossed it at him without much strength behind the throw. He laughed when it fell far short of the mark. She threw another one, stepping closer. A third, and she was at the wall. Keith danced away and lobbed his own missile; it struck the wall and bounced back.

“You . . . !”

The wall was low. She had no trouble vaulting it sideways and landing on her hands and knees. Keith yelled with delight and ran a few yards toward the house, picked up another rock and waited, tossing it up, catching it, tossing it, smiling.

The house seemed large over here, cats’ eyes, rippling green and black.

“Heather, come
on.”

Well, as long as she was this far.

She broke into a trot and Keith cheered, ran up and took her hand.

“Neat,” he said. “Boy, is it neat. Wait’ll you see it. Come on, let’s go.”

They were halfway to the house when she stopped, yanking him off his feet. He sprawled on the grass, rolled over, and scowled as he got up again.

“Jeez, Heather, you almost killed me!”

The house was huge now, the lines between the stones filled with shadows that crept down to the ground and over the grass toward him. She shook her head, suddenly disgusted with herself. This was dumb. This was really dumb. He and the Mohawk Gang could go to hell for all she cared; it was Saturday, and tonight Barry was going to come over and they were going to listen to records, and if she were caught now she wouldn’t see Barry again until he had a beard.

“Look!” she said, pointing sharply over his shoulder. “Wow, look at that!”

Keith followed her finger, saw nothing, and when he looked back she was already racing for the wall.

“Bye!” she shouted. “And if you don’t come with me, I’m gonna tell Mother!”

Keith watched her take the wall in a clumsy leap he. had sure skinned off half her right knee. He shook his head. His eyes were no longer green; they were black, and they were angry.

He was even angrier ten minutes later when Bernie Hallman drove up to the gate in his tow truck, saw him standing there and started yelling. He wasn’t supposed to be seen. He was supposed to be gone by now, everything done and over. Now that creep Hallman was standing there, yelling, looking around, and oh shit climbing back into the cab.

The anger drained; his eyes slowly regained their normal, placid color.

The
buzzing, whispering
he had felt in his head since morning was gone. Now he was alone, at Winterrest, and he didn’t know why Heather was gonna snitch.

Now he was gonna get it. Boy, now he was gonna get it good when Heather told Mom. He walked slowly to the wall and leaned on it, felt it moving so quietly beneath his arms that he smiled at the feelings that
rippled
and
caressed
over his skin. Gonna get it good, he thought; and he swallowed a whimper without knowing why when he saw Mr. Parrish walking toward him up the road.

9

They moved into the living room, Ollie sobbing quietly while Liz fussed with throw pillows, sat, stood, and walked back into the kitchen. Through the screen door she could see the trees, the grass, the aging rail fence; it was normal, all perfectly normal. She thought about calling Bud, about taking Ollie to the clinic at the hospital, about pouring two very stiff drinks and searching for the reason why Olivia had denied her own pregnancy all these months.

“Liz?”

She brushed her hair back and returned to the sofa.

“Liz, listen,” Ollie said eagerly, grabbing her hands and smiling tightly. “This could all be my imagination, right? I mean, this whole thing is all in our minds, okay? We . . .” She faltered, dropped her hands and sagged back into the corner. “I’m scared.”

It was Liz who held hands now, shaking them, tugging at them to force her to meet her gaze. “I know you’re scared,” she said calmly. “I know that. But there’s no denying it, Ollie. I mean, it’s there, right there, and—”

“What about false pregnancy? It could be that, or hysterical pregnancy, y’know? That’s why I came over. I mean, I snuck out, left a note for Bud that I was out walking, and I came here because I thought, well, you’re a mother and all, and I thought—”

Suddenly, she tore open her shirt and lay a hand on her abdomen. A moment later she uttered a short, horrified cry and covered her eyes. Liz hesitated, reached out, and lay her palm over the swelling. The flesh was warm, taut, and it wasn’t long before she felt the distinct pressure of a child kicking.

My god, she thought; my god my god.

“You felt it,” Ollie said numbly.

She nodded.

“Yeah. Yeah.” Ollie closed her eyes slowly, seemed almost to doze before they snapped open again. “J. thought it was the dope. I thought maybe Bud was right and it was the dope.”

Liz was puzzled and showed it.

“Well, he got some for us in the city a while ago,” Ollie said, speaking as if Bud had only dropped over to the general store. “It was pretty good stuff, not bad, but. . .” She squirmed uncomfortably, pushed herself upright and scowled at her stomach. “Well, he said it might be laced with something, because of the fire yesterday, so when I woke up this morning and got in the shower and saw this . . .”

She pushed deeper into the corner, trying to get away from the swelling that terrified her so much she could hardly bring herself to say the word, or even look down.

Liz, while she sympathized, had latched onto something else. “What fire?”

Ollie seemed reluctant, but Liz prodded her, trying to get her to talk about anything but the baby until they were both thinking clearly enough to make sense of what was happening.

“Well, yesterday, after we closed the shop around four or so, we found a fire in the Retirement Room. God, it was horrible! All that smoke, I thought I was going to choke to death. But when we got it out, it wasn’t there.” The expression on Liz’s face stopped her. “Did you hear me? I said it wasn’t there. There was no fire, no smoke, even the window I broke wasn’t broken. So it was the dope, though I didn’t think so at the time. That’s why I thought the baby was the dope too. I mean, that I was hallucinating. But when I came over to tell you about it, and you looked at it. . . “

Liz felt rather than heard a faint buzzing in her left ear. She rose to her feet slowly, pulled her shirt out of her jeans to expose the faint scratch on her side. Ollie stared, and shrugged her lack of understanding.

“Oh! Yeah!” she said when Liz thrust out a hip to be sure she was watching. “Right. I was in the Depot when Bud came back. God, that must’ve been terrible, Liz, all that fuss for nothing.”

Liz leaned down until their noses were almost touching. “It was
not
for nothing. I swear that as sure as I stand here that I felt that knife go right into my side. No! Don’t say it, don’t say anything, not yet. Let me tell you something else—yesterday, around four, around the time you had that fire that wasn’t a fire, I was on my way home from the office and I was in an earthquake.”

Ollie started to laugh, cut herself off, and shook her head. “There are no earthquakes in New Jersey.”

“Exactly.” She smoothed the shirt back into place. “Exactly. Yet something out there beat the hell out of my car. “ She licked her lips, sucked noisily once between her teeth. “I called the police that morning. They said there had been an accident at the curve where it happened. There was nothing there, but they figure a large truck must have run off the road and knocked down a couple of trees.” Licked her lips. Sucked her teeth. “There wasn’t any truck. I was there. I know.”

“Oh.” Ollie put a hand to her mouth. “Oh.”

“And do you want to know something else?”

Ollie shook her head; she had had more than enough.

Liz ignored her. “Doug. I talked to him around noon today, about last night, about what happened at the Depot. Somewhere in there I mentioned the earthquake, and he said that at the same time, over at his place, there was a hurricane.”

Ollie giggled. “Now that’s really crazy. I mean, that’s wild, Liz.” She closed her eyes, making a decision. “Last night,” she whispered, “before I went to the Depot, I looked in the Retirement Room because I couldn’t believe it was the dope. There was a burn mark on a lounge Bud had found in Maryland. A big mark. It hadn’t been there that afternoon. But the fire was . . . no. No, Liz, it’s crazy.”

“Sure it is. But something happened to you, and something happened to me, and something seems to have happened to Doug. I think we’d better find him and do some more talking.”

She reached out a hand to help Ollie to her feet, but as soon as she was up Ollie dropped the hand and stood back, looking down at the arm resting over her stomach.