You wouldn't want to, a whispery, ominous UFO voice advised her.
But I have to talk to it--have to establish contact, Jessie thought, and immediately responded to herself in a nervous, scolding voice that felt like Ruth and Goody mixed together: Don't think of it as an it, Jessie--think of it as a he. Think of it as a man, someone who's maybe been lost in the woods, someone who's as scared as you are.
Good advice, perhaps, but Jessie found she couldn't think of the figure in the corner as a he, any more than she was able to think of the stray as a he. Nor did she think the creature in the shadows was either lost or frightened. What she felt coming from the corner were long, slow waves of malevolence.
That's stupid! Talk to it, Jessie! Talk to him!
She tried to clear her throat and discovered there was nothing to clear--it was as dry as a desert and as smooth as a soapstone. Now she could feel her heart pounding in her chest, its beat very light, very fast, very irregular.
The wind gusted. The shadows blew white-and-black patterns across the walls and the ceiling, making her feel like a woman trapped inside a kaleidoscope for the colorblind. For just a moment she thought she saw a nose--thin and long and white--below those black, motionless eyes.
"Who--"
At first she could manage only that one tiny whisper which couldn't have been heard on the far side of the bed, let alone across the room. She stopped, licked her lips, and tried again. She was aware that her hands were clamped into painfully tight balls, and she forced her fingers to loosen.
"Who are you?" Still a whisper, but a little better than before.
The figure didn't answer, only stood there with its narrow white hands dangling by its knees, and Jessie thought: Its knees? Knees? Not possible, Jess--when a person's hands are hanging at his sides, they stop at the upper thighs.
Ruth responded, her voice so hushed and fearful Jessie almost didn't recognize it. A normal person's hands stop at the upper thighs, isn's that what you mean? But do you thinka normalperson would creep into someone's house in the middle of the night, then just stand in the corner, watching, when he finds the lady of the manor chained to the bed? Just stand there and nothing more?
Then it did move one leg ... or perhaps it was only the distracting motion of the shadows again, this time picked up by the lower quadrant of her vision. The combination of shadows and moonlight and wind lent a terrible ambiguity to this entire episode, and again Jessie found herself doubting the visitor's reality. The possibility that she was still sleeping occurred to her, that her dream of Will's birthday party had simply veered off in some strange new direction ... but she didn't really believe it. She was awake, all right.
Whether or not the leg actually did move (or even if there was a leg), Jessie's gaze was momentarily drawn downward. She thought she saw some black object sitting on the floor between the creature's feet. It was impossible to tell what it might be because the bureau's shadow rendered that the darkest part of the room, but her mind suddenly returned to that afternoon, when she had been trying to persuade Gerald that she really meant what she was saying. The only sounds had been the wind, the banging door, the barking dog, the loon, and ...
The thing sitting on the floor between her visitor's feet was a chainsaw.
Jessie was instantly sure of this. Her visitor had been using it earlier, but not to cut firewood. It was people he had been cutting up, and the dog had run because it had smelled the approach of this madman, who had come up the lake path swinging his blood-spattered Stihl saw in one gloved hand--
Stop it! Goody shouted angrily. Stop this foolishness right this minute and get a grip on yourself!
But she discovered she couldn't stop it, because this was no dream and also because she had become increasingly sure that the figure standing in the corner, as silent as Frankenstein's monster before the lightning-bolts, was real. But even if it was, it hadn't spent the afternoon turning people into pork-chops with a chainsaw. Of course not--that was nothing but a movie-inspired variation of the simple, gruesome summer-camp tales that seemed so funny when you were gathered around the fire, roasting marshmallows with the rest of the girls, and so awful later on, when you lay shivering in your sleeping ig, believing that each snapping twig signalled the approach of the Lakeview Man, that legendary brain-blasted survivor of the Korean War.
The thing standing in the corner wasn't the Lakeview Man, and it wasn't a chainsaw murderer, either. There was something on the floor (at least she was pretty sure there was), and Jessie supposed it could be a chainsaw, but it could also be a suitcase ... a backpack ... a salesman's sample case ...
Or my imagination.
Yes. Even though she was looking right at it, whatever it was, she knew she couldn't rule out the possibility of imagination. Yet in some perverse way this only reinforced the idea that the creature itself was real, and it was becoming harder and harder to dismiss the feeling of malevolence which came crawling out of the tangle of black shadows and powdery moonlight like a constant low snarl.
It hates me, she thought. Whatever it is, it hates me. It must. Why else would it just stand there and not help me?
She looked back up at that half-seen face, at the eyes which seemed to glitter with such feverish avidity in their round black sockets, and she began to weep.
"Please, is someone there?" Her voice was humble, choked with tears. "If there is, won't you please help me? Do you see these handcuffs? The keys are right there beside you, on top of the bureau ..."
Nothing. No movement. No response. It only stood there--if it was there at all, that was--looking out at her from behind its feral mask of shadows.
"If you didn't want me to tell anyone I saw you, I wouldn't," she tried again. Her voice wavered, blurred, swooped and slid. "I sure wouldn't! And I'd be so ... so grateful ..."
It watched her.
Only that and nothing more.
Jessie felt the tears rolling slowly down her cheeks. "You're scaring me, you know," she said. "Won't you say something? Can't you talk? lf you're really there, can't you please talk to me?"
A thin, terrible hysteria seized her then and flew away with some valuable, irreplaceable part of her caught firmly in its scrawny talons. She wept and pleaded with the fearful figure standing motionless in the corner of the bedroom; she remained conscious throughout but sometimes wavered into that curious blank place reserved for those whose terror has become so great it approaches rapture. She would hear herself asking the figure in a hoarse, weepy voice to please let her out of the handcuffs, to please oh please oh please let her out of the handcuffs, and then she would drop back into that weird blank spot. She knew her mouth was still moving because she could feel it. She could also hear the sounds that were coming out of it, but while she was in the blank place, these sounds were not words but only loose blabbering torrents of sound. She could also hear the wind blowing and the dog barking, aware but not knowing, hearing but not understanding, losing everything in her horror of the half-seen shape, the awful visitor, the uninvited guest. She could not cease her contemplation of its narrow, misshapen head, its white cheeks, its slumped shoulders ... but more and more it was the creature's hands to which her eyes were drawn: those dangling, long-fingered hands that ended much farther down on the legs than normal hands had any right to do. Some unknown length of time would pass in this blank fashion (twelve-twelve-twelve, the clock on the dresser reported; no help there) and then she would come back a little, would start thinking thoughts instead of experiencing only an endless rush of incoherent images, would start hearing her lips speaking words instead of just babbling sounds. But she had moved on while she was in that blank space; her words now had nothing to do with the handcuffs or the keys on the dresser. What she heard instead was the thin, screamy whisper of a woman reduced to begging for an answer ... any answer.
"What are you?" she sobbed. "A man? A devil? What in God's name are you?"
The wind gusted.
The door banged.
Before h
er, the figure's face seemed to change ... seemed to wrinkle upward in a grin. There was something horribly familiar about that grin, and Jessie felt the core of her sanity, which had borne this assault with remarkable strength until now, at last begin to waver.
"Daddy?" she whispered. "Daddy, is that you?"
Don't be silly! the Goodwife cried, but Jessie could now feel even that sustaining voice wavering toward hysteria. Don't be a goose, Jessie! Your father has been dead since 1980!
Instead of helping, it made things worse. Much worse. Tom Mahout had been interred in the family crypt in Falmouth, and that was less than a hundred miles from here. Jessie's burning, terrified mind insisted upon showing her a hunched figure, its clothes and rotted shoes caked with blue-green mold, slinking across moon-drenched fields and hurrying through tracts of scruffy woods between suburban housing developments; she saw gravity working on the decayed muscles of its arms as it came, gradually stretching them until the hands were swinging beside the knees. It was her father. It was the man who had delighted her with rides on his shoulders at three, who had comforted her at the age of six when a capering circus clown frightened her into tears, who had told her bedtime stories until she was eight--old enough, he said, to read them on her own. Her father, who had cobbled together home-made filters on the afternoon of the eclipse and held her on his lap as the moment of totality approached, her father who had.said, Don't worry about anything... don't worry, and don't look around. But she had thought maybe he was worried, because his voice had been all thick and shaky, hardly like his usual voice at all.
In the corner, the thing's grin seemed to widen and suddenly the room was filled with that smell, that flat smell that was half-metallic and half-organic; a smell that reminded her of oysters in cream, and how your hand smelled after you'd been clutching a fistful of pennies, and the way the air smelled just before a thunderstorm.
"Daddy, is it you?" she asked the shadowy thing in the corner, and from somewhere came the distant cry of the loon. Jessie could feel the tears trickling slowly down her cheeks. And now something exceedingly odd was happening, something she never would have expected in a thousand years. As she became increasingly sure that it was her father, that it was Tom Mahout standing in the corner, twelve years gone in death or not, her terror began to leave her. She had drawn her legs up, but now she let them slip back down and fall open. As she did, a fragment of her dream recurred--DADDY'S LITTLE GIRL printed across her breasts in Peppermint Yum-Yum lipstick.
"All right, go ahead," she told the shape. Her voice was a little hoarse but otherwise steady. "It's why you came back, isn't it? So go ahead. How could I stop you, anyway? Just promise you'll unlock me afterward. That you'll unlock me and let me go."
The figure made no response of any kind. It only stood within its surreal jackstraws of moonlight and shadow, grinning at her. And as the seconds passed (twelve-twelve-twelve, the clock on the dresser said, seeming to suggest that the whole idea of time passing was an illusion, that time had in fact frozen solid), Jessie thought that perhaps she had been right in the first place, that there was really no one in here with her at all. She had begun to feel like a weathervane in the grip of those prankish, contradictory gusts of wind that sometimes blow just before a severe thunderstorm or a tornado.
Your father cannot come back from the dead, Goodwife Burlingame said in a voice that strove to be firm and failed miserably. Still, Jessie saluted her effort. Come hell or high water, the Goodwife stayed right in there and kept pitching. This isn't a horror movie or an episode of The Twilight Zone, Jess; this is real life.
But another part of her--a part which was perhaps the home of those few voices inside which were the real UFOs, not just the wiretaps her subconscious had patched into her conscious mind at some point--insisted that there was a darker truth here, something that trailed from the heels of logic like an irrational (and perhaps supernatural) shadow. This voice insisted that things changed in the dark. Things especially changed in the dark, it said, when a person was alone. When that happened, the locks fell off the cage which held the imagination, and anything--any things--might be set free.
It can be your Daddy, this essentially alien part of her whispered, and with a chill of fear Jessie recognized it as the voice of madness and reason mingled together. It can be, never doubt it. People are almost always safe from ghosts and ghouls and the living dead in daylight, and they're usually safe from them at night if they're with others, but when a person is alone in the dark, all bets are off. Men and women alone in the dark are like open doors, Jessie, and if they call out or scream for help, who knows what dread things may answer? Who knows what some men and women have seen in the hour of their solitary deaths? Is it so hard to believe that some of them may have died of fear, no matter what the words on the death certificates say?
"I don't believe that," she said in a blurry, wavering voice. She spoke louder, striving for a firmness she didn't feel. "You're not my father! I don't think you're anyone ! I think you're only made of moonlight!"
As if in answer, the figure bent forward in a kind of mocking bow, and for one moment its face--a face which seemed too real to doubt--slipped out of the shadows. Jessie uttered a rusty shriek as the pallid rays falling through the skylight painted its features with tawdry carnival gilt. It wasn't her father; compared with the evil and the lunacy she saw in the face of her visitor, she would have welcomed her father, even after twelve years in a cold coffin. Red-rimmed, hideously sparkling eyes regarded her from deep eyesockets wrapped in wrinkles. Thin lips twitched upward in a dry grin, revealing discolored molars and jagged canines which seemed almost as long as the stray dog's fangs.
One of its white hands lifted the object she had half seen and half-intuited sitting by its feet in the darkness. At first she thought it had taken Gerald's briefcase from the little room he used as a study down here, but when the creature lifted the box-shaped thing into the light, she saw it was a lot bigger than Gerald's briefcase and much older. It looked like the sort of old-fashioned sample case travelling salesmen had once carried.
"Please," she whispered in a strengthless, wheezing little voice. "Whatever you are, please don't hurt me. You don't have to let me go if you don't want to, that's all right, but please don't hurt me."
Its grin grew, and she saw tiny twinkles far back in its mouth--her visitor apparently had gold teeth or gold fillings in there, just like Gerald. It seemed to laugh soundlessly, as if gratified by her terror. Then its long fingers were unsnapping the catches of its bag
(I am dreaming, I think, now it does feel like a dream, oh thank God it does)
and holding it open to her. The case was full of bones and jewelry. She saw finger-bones and rings and teeth and bracelets and ulnae and pendants; she saw a diamond big enough to choke a rhino glittering milky trapezoids of moonlight from within the stiff, delicate curves of an infant's ribcage. She saw these things and wanted them to be a dream, yes, wanted them to be, but if it was, it was like no dream she'd ever had before. It was the situation--handcuffed to the bed while a half-seen maniac silently showed off his *treasures--that was dreamlike. The feeling, however ...
The feeling was reality. There was no getting around it. The feeling was reality.
The thing standing in the corner held the open case out for her inspection, one hand supporting the bottom. It plunged its other hand into the tangle of bones and jewelry and stirred it, producing a tenebrous click and rustle that sounded like dirt-clogged castanets. It stared at her as it did this, the somehow unformed features of its strange face wrinkled upward in amusement, its mouth gawping in that silent grin, its slumped shoulders rising and falling in strangled chuffs of laughter.
No! Jessie screamed, but no sound came out.
Suddenly she felt someone--most likely the Goodwife, and boy, had she ever underestimated the intestinal fortitude of that lady--running for the switches which governed the circuit-breakers in her head. Goody had seen tendrils of smoke starting to seep out throu
gh the cracks in the closed doors of those panels, had understood what they meant, and was making a final, desperate effort to shut down the machinery before the motors overheated and the bearings froze.
The grinning figure across the room reached deeper into the case and held out a handful of bones and gold to Jessie in the moonlight.
There was an intolerably bright flash inside her head and then the lights went out. She did not faint prettily, like the heroine in a florid. stage play, but was snapped brutally backward like a condemned murderer who has been strapped into the hotseat and has just gotten his first jolt of the juice. All the same it was an end to the horror, and for the time being that was enough. Jessie Burlingame went into the darkness without a murmur of protest.
14
She struggled briefly back to consciousness some time later, aware of only two things: the moon had made it around to the west windows, and she was terribly afraid ... of what she at first didn't know. Then it came to her: Daddy had been here, was perhaps here still. The creature hadn't looked like him, that was true, but that was only because Daddy had been wearing his eclipse face.
Jessie'struggled up, pushing with her feet so hard she shoved the coverlet down beneath her. She wasn't able to do much with her arms, however. The jittering pins and needles had stolen away while she'd been unconscious, and they had no more feeling than a couple of chair-legs. She stared into the corner by the bureau with wide, moon-silvered eyes. The wind had died and the shadows were, at least for the time being, still. There was nothing in the corner. Her dark visitor had gone.
Maybe not, Jess--maybe he's just changed location. Maybe he's hiding under the bed, how's that for a thought? If he is, he could reach up at any second and put one of his hands on your hip.
The wind stirred--onty a puff, not a gust--and the back door banged weakly. Those were the only sounds. The dog had fallen silent, and it was this more than anything else which convinced her that the stranger was gone. She had the house to herself.