“I don’t see a thing, Nick.”
“Right there. They glow with bright blue fire. Are you blind?”
Bill strained to see but could find only darkness below.
“I guess so. But as long as one of us can see them, we’re in business.”
Bill was congratulating himself on how smoothly this mission was going when the rear window cracked and bellied inward as one of the bigger bugs hit it like a cinder block. It held, but for how long? Because suddenly they were under full-scale attack as the bugs launched a blitzkrieg on the rover, scraping, gnawing, pounding, and slapping against every square inch of the vehicle’s surface, as if the approach of dawn had driven them into one final feeding frenzy before they’d be forced to return to their hole.
Bill hesitated to release the clutch. He couldn’t see. With all the chew wasps, belly flies, spearheads, men-of-war, and other things clustered against the windshield and the other windows, the outer world had become a squirming mass of gnashing jaws, writhing tentacles, and acid-filled sacs. He’d be driving blind. No guardrail, and fifty feet of empty air awaiting them if the rover strayed more than three feet left or right.
Then the rear window bulged farther inward with the weight of the onslaught and he knew he had no choice. Even going over the side was preferable to sitting here and being eaten alive when that window gave way.
Taking a deep breath, Bill eased up on the clutch and they started to move. He found that by looking down through the very bottom of his side window he could catch an occasional glimpse of the causeway’s edge. He used that as a guide.
As they rolled forward, he heard a noise, faint and indistinct at first, but growing steadily in volume. It sounded almost like human voices—cheering voices. It was. The sound reached into the rover and touched him, warmed him. Using it as a beacon, he increased his speed, homing in on it.
And suddenly—like driving under an overpass in the heart of a cloudburst—the bugs were gone. Swept away, every last one of them. Silence in the rover. Except for the voices. Instead of bugs the vehicle was now surrounded by cheering people. Men and women, middle aged and older with rugged peasant faces, coarse clothing, sheepskin vests, woolly hats. They pulled open the rover’s door and helped him out, all the while shaking his hand and slapping his back. Bill returned the smiles and the handshakes, then glanced back along the causeway. The bugs crowded the air outside the arch of the gateway, but not one ventured through.
He turned back to the people and saw children and goats wandering around behind them. And beyond those, on the stone block walls, crosses. Hundreds of crosses. Thousands of crosses.
What sort of place was this? And why did he feel as if somehow he’d returned home after a long journey?
With the coming of day the bugs fled back to the darkness where they lived and the peasants trooped out of the keep with their children and animals, crossing the causeway to what was left of the real world, leaving Bill and Nick and their vehicle behind with the ashes of the night fire.
He knew he and Nick should head down into the gorge to search for the shards of the shattered sword, but he could not leave this place. Not just yet. The keep took him in, wrapped him in the arms of its walls, and demanded his attention.
The crosses … how could he spend two thirds of his life in the priesthood and not be taken in by a place so thoroughly studded with crosses? Not dull, dreary, run-of-the-mill Latin crosses, but strange thick ones, with brass uprights and nickel crosspieces set high, almost at the top. Like a tau cross or what was called St. Anthony’s cross.
Not all of the villagers had left. An ancient, white-bearded gent—eighty if he was a day—named Alexandru remained behind. He spoke as much English as Bill did Romanian, but they found common ground in German. Bill had studied the language in high school and college and had been fluent enough to read Faust in the original text. He found he’d retained enough to communicate with Alexandru.
The old man showed him around the structure. His father, also named Alexandru, had been the keep’s last caretaker in the days before World War Two. It could have used a caretaker now—a whole crew of them. Snow, wind, rain, drought, heat, and cold had left their marks on the keep. All the upper floors within the tower had collapsed, leaving nothing but a giant, rubble-choked stone cylinder. Yet although crumbling and in sad disrepair, it still exuded a certain power.
“It used to be a bad place,” Alexandru said. “Now it is a good place. The little monsters will not come here. All around they fly, but never in here.”
He went to the gate and gestured off to the left. Bill’s gaze followed the pointing arm to a black circular area, hundreds of feet across, marring the verdant floor of the pass.
A hole.
“That is where they come from, the little monsters.”
“I know. The holes are everywhere.”
Alexandru then led him to the keep’s cellar and showed him the opening in the stone floor there. He told of how the Germans had camped in the keep in the spring of 1941 and nearly wrecked the place, of how something immeasurably evil had awakened and slaughtered all the soldiers, of how it had almost escaped before it was destroyed.
Alexandru looked at Bill with watery blue eyes.
“At least we thought it was destroyed. Now I am not so sure.”
“How was it destroyed?”
“A redheaded stranger came and slew it with a magic sword—”
… a magic sword …
“—then he limped off with a Jewish woman from Bucharest and was never seen again. I wonder whatever happened to him.”
“He’s old and gray now like you,” Bill said, wondering what Glaeken had looked like in his prime. He must have been magnificent. “And he and the woman are still together.”
Alexandru nodded and smiled. “I am glad. He was a brave man, but terrible to see when he was angry.”
With the aid of Alexandru’s directions, Glaeken’s notes, and a flashlight, Bill led Nick down through the utter blackness of the subcellar to the lower segment of the tower. A narrow stairway wound down to the base where some of the foundation had crumbled. Alexandru had said something about a strange American named Dmitri Menelaus who had carted off many of the loose stones years ago. Light seeped through the opening into the base of the tower.
“All right, Nick,” he said, leading him outside. “Do your thing. Where are they?”
Nick stood blinking in the light. Thin, and paler than ever, he didn’t look well. And he’d crawled back into himself.
Bill scanned the ground, looking for the shards Nick had said he’d seen. It was like river-bottom here, fist-sized stones jumbling down a gentle slope to a sluggish stream. He looked up to his right at the mountains soaring behind the keep. This gorge was probably all water in early spring when the snows melted. Half a century had passed since the sword blade had shattered here. How could anything be left? How could they hope to find the remnants even if any still existed?
“Well, Nick? Where are they?”
Nick said nothing, only stared ahead.
Desperate, Bill knelt and picked among the stones and gravel. This was impossible. He’d never find anything this way.
He straightened up and brushed off his hands. Earlier, in the dark, Nick had said he’d seen the pieces, glowing “with bright blue fire.”
Maybe he could see them only at night.
“Damn!”
He’d risked their lives rushing to get here so he could return to Ploiesti as soon as possible and start their homeward journey in the light. Now he was going to have to wait until dark.
He turned and aimed a kick at the tower’s granite-block hem. The keep, a dark, brooding, lithic presence looming over him, took no notice.
Bill led Nick back inside the tower to a gloom as deep and dark as his spirits. The delay meant it would be Wednesday before he got back to Carol. He wondered how she was doing.
The Horror Channel’s Drive-In Theatre—Special All-Day Edition
Eaten Alive (1976
) New World
Day of the Nightmare (1965) Herts-Lion
Nightwing (1979) Columbia
Raw Meat (1972) AIP
The Devils of Darkness (1965) 20th Century Fox
Tentacles (1977) AIP
Phase IV (1974) Paramount
It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) United Artists
They Came from Beyond Space (1967) Amicus
The Last Days of Planet Earth (1974) Toho
The Flesh Eaters (1964) CDA
They Came from Within (1975) TransAmerica
The Earth Dies Screaming (1964) Lippert/20th Century Fox
New Jersey Turnpike
Hank wasn’t sure if he was awake or dreaming. He seemed to be awake. He was aware of noises around him, of a stale, sour odor, of growing light beyond his eyelids, but he could not get those eyelids to move. And he could feel nothing. For all he knew, he no longer had a body. Where was he? What—?
And then he remembered. The millipedes … their queen … a scream bubbled up in his throat but died stillborn. How can you scream when you can’t open your mouth?
No. That had been a dream. It had all been a dream—the holes, the flying horrors, the rest stop, the trooper, the gun, the bullet, the millipedes—a long, horrible nightmare. But finally at an end. He was waking up now.
If he could just open his eyes he’d see the familiar ceiling of his bedroom. And then he’d be free of the nightmare. He’d be able to move then.
The eyes. They were the key. He concentrated on the lids, focusing all his will, all his energy into them. And slowly they began to move. He didn’t feel the motion but saw a knife-slit streak appear, pale light, like the glow on the horizon at the approach of dawn.
Encouraged, he doubled his efforts. Light widened around the horizon as the edges of his lids stretched the gummy substance that bound them, then burst through as they broke apart. Not the blaze of the rising sun, but a wan, diffuse sort of light. He forced his lids to separate further and the light began to take form through the narrow opening, breaking down into shapes and color. Vague shapes. A paucity of color. Mostly grays. His pupils constricted, bringing the images into sharper focus.
He was looking down along a body. His own body, lying in bed, naked atop the sheets. Hazy, but he knew his own body. Thank God, it had all been a dream. He tried to turn his head to the left, toward the light, but it wouldn’t move. Why couldn’t he move? He was awake now. He should be able to move. He slid his eyeballs leftward. The bedroom window was over there somewhere. If he could just—
Wait … the walls—rounded. The ceiling—convex. Concrete. Concrete everywhere. And the light. It came from above. He forced his eyelids open another millimeter. No window—the light filtered through a grate in the concrete ceiling.
The stillborn scream from a moment ago came alive again and rammed up against his throat, pounding at his larynx, crying to be free.
This wasn’t the bedroom. He was in the pipe—the drainage pipe! It hadn’t been a dream. It was real. Real!
Hank fought the panic, beat it down, and tried to think. He was still alive. He had to remember that. Still alive and it was daytime. The things from the holes were quiet in the daylight hours. They hid from the light. He had to think, had to plan. He’d always been good at planning.
He shifted his eyes down to his body. His vision was clearer now. He saw the gentle tidal rise and fall of his hairy chest, and farther down, on his belly, he spotted the bloody wound where the queen millipede had spiked him and injected him with her poison. The neurotoxin was still in effect, obviously, paralyzing his voluntary muscles while it let his heart and lungs go on working. But it didn’t have complete control. He’d managed to open his eyes, hadn’t he? He could move his eyeballs, couldn’t he? What else could he move?
He pulled his gaze away from his abdominal wound and searched for his hands. They lay flopped out on either side, palms up. He checked out his legs. They were intact, slightly spread with the toes angled outward. He could have been a sunbather. His body was the picture of relaxation … the relaxation of complete paralysis. He returned his gaze to his arm and followed it down to the hand. If he could move a finger—
And then he noticed the webbing—surrounding him, running in all directions, crisscrossed like gauze. It curved away from each arm and leg like heavy-duty spiderweb and ran out to the wall of the drainpipe where it melted into a glob of some sticky-looking gelatin smeared on the concrete. He looked down as much as his slit perspective would permit and realized that he wasn’t lying in the pipe, he was suspended in it. From the horizontal lie of his body he guessed that he was resting on a hammock of web across the diameter.
Hank marveled at the coolness of his mind as it analyzed his position. He was trapped—not only paralyzed, but effectively and securely bound in position. The web hammock, however, was not entirely without its advantages. Long, uninterrupted contact with the cold concrete would have made it difficult for his body to maintain its temperature; the webbing also kept him out of the water, thereby preventing his flesh from breaking down in the constant moisture.
So in a very real sense he was high and dry, but also bound, gagged, and paralyzed.
Reminded him of his days as a slaughterhouse worker. Here he was, hung up like a side of—
Beef.
That last thought impacted with the force of a sledgehammer. That was it! He was food! They’d shot him full of preservatives and stored him away alive so he wouldn’t decompose. So when pickings got slim above, they could come down here and devour him at their leisure.
He willed down the rising panic. Panic wouldn’t help here. They’d already paralyzed his body. Allowing fear to paralyze his mind would only make matters worse. But that one cold hard fact battered relentlessly at his defenses.
I’m food!
But I’m alive. I came up from nothing, I wrote Kick! and I started the Kicker Evolution. I can beat these bugs.
He knew their pattern. They’d probably stay dormant all day and crawl up to the surface to hunt during the dark hours. That was when he’d get free.
But first he had to regain control of his body. He already controlled his eyeballs and eyelids. Next—his hands. If he was to get free he’d need them the most. A finger. He’d start with the pointer on his right hand, concentrate all his will and energy into that one digit until he got it to move. Then he’d proceed to the next, and the next, until he could make a fist. Then he’d switch to his left.
He glared at his index finger, narrowing his vision, his entire world to that single digit, channeling all his power into it.
And then it moved.
Or had it? The twitch had been almost imperceptible, so slight it might have been a trick of the light. Or wishful thinking.
But it had moved. He had to hold on to that thought. It had moved. He was regaining control. He was going to get out of here.
With climbing spirits, he redoubled his concentration on the reluctant digit.
WFAN-AM
Monroe Village, Long Island
Alan rolled his wheelchair along the network of cement paths that encircled Toad Hall, heading from the backyard to the front. Off to his left, to the west, he saw smoke rising over the trees. Not near smoke, not from the Shore Drive neighborhood, but farther away. From downtown Monroe, most likely. He’d heard stories of roving gangs, looting, burning, raping. They hadn’t shown up out here, but perhaps that was simply a matter of time.
Strange how things had worked out. He’d always imagined that if the world ever descended into anarchic nihilism, the violence and chaos and mob madness would occur at night, screams and flames hurtling into a dark, unseeing sky. But given the current situation, human violence was confined to the daylight hours. The night was reserved for unhuman violence.
Alan turned from the smoke and inspected Toad Hall. The old mansion had absorbed another merciless pummeling last night, but like the valiant, indomitable champion she was, she remain
ed on her feet.
Her injuries were accumulating at an alarming rate, however. Her flanks were cut and bruised and splintered, her scalp showed through where her shingles had been torn up. She could still open her eyes to the dwindling daylight, though. Most of them, at least.
Which was why Alan was out here now. A couple of the storm shutters had refused to roll up this morning. Even from the inside Alan could see they were deeply dented, more deeply than he’d have thought possible from a bug attack, at least from any of the bugs he’d seen so far.
Which meant there might be something new under the new moon, something bigger than its hellish predecessors and consequently more dangerous to the little fortress Toad Hall had become. He coasted to a halt and stared as he rounded to the front.
The damage to the steel shutters was worse than he’d realized. They’d been scored by something sharp and heavy, with the weight and density of a steel spike.
But the remains of the rhododendrons under the shuttered windows bothered him more.
They’d been trampled flat.
Alan rolled across the grass for a closer look. These were old rhodos, maybe fifty years or better, with heavy trunks and sturdy branches, thick with healthy deep-green leaves through Ba’s magical ministrations. Tough wood. Alan remembered that from the times he’d cut back the rhodos around his old house before it had burned down.
These hadn’t been cut, though. The trunks and branches had been crushed, and their splinters pressed into the ground. Something awfully big and heavy—or a number of big and heavy somethings—had attacked these windows last night, banging and scraping at the shutters.
But they hadn’t gotten in. That was the important thing.
As Alan pushed his left wheel forward and pulled the right backward to turn and roll back to the path, he saw the depression in the lawn. His stomach lurched. He’d been too intent on the shutters and the ruined rhodos to notice before. But from this angle you couldn’t miss it.