“By what?”
“Something . . . something . . . I don’t know.”
“Well,” she said, “if I dreamed anything like that, I don’t remember it.” She popped the bit of egg-soaked toast into her mouth, chewed, swallowed. “So we’re both having bad dreams. It doesn’t have to be . . . prophetic. Lord knows, we’ve got good reason not to sleep well. Tension. Anxiety. Considering where we’re headed, we’re bound to have bad dreams. Doesn’t mean a thing.”
After breakfast we put in a long day on the road. We did not even stop for lunch but picked up some crackers and candy bars at a Mobile station when we stopped for gasoline.
Gradually we left the subtropical heat behind, but the weather improved. By the time we were halfway through South Carolina, the skies were cloudless.
Curiously—or not—the high blue day seemed, to me at least, no brighter than the storm-sullied afternoon during which we had departed the Gulf. A darkness waited in the pine forests that, for some distance, lined both sides of the highway, and the gloom seemed to be alive and observant, as if it were patiently waiting for an opportunity to rush forth, envelop us, and feed on our bones. Even where the hard, brassy glare of sunshine fell in full weight, I saw the shadows to come, saw the inevitability of nightfall. I was not in high spirits.
Late Wednesday night we stopped in Maryland at a better motel than the one in Georgia: a good bed, carpet on the floor, and no skittering water bugs.
We were even wearier than we had been the previous night, but we did not immediately seek sleep. Instead, somewhat to our surprise, we made love. Even more surprising: we were insatiable. It began with sweet, languorous flexings, with long and easy thrusts, with soft contractions and lazy expansions of the muscles, an almost slow-motion rising and falling and stroking, as of lovers in an art film, which had a sweetness and an odd shyness, as if we were joined for the very first time. But after a while we brought a passion and energy to the act that was unexpected and at first inexplicable in light of the long hours of driving that we had just endured. Rya’s exquisite body had never felt more elegantly and sensuously sculpted, ripe and full, never warmer or more supple, never more silken—never more precious. The rhythm of her quickening breath, her small cries of pleasure, her sudden gasps and little moans, and the urgency with which her hands explored my body and then pulled me against her—those expressions of her growing excitement fed my own excitement. I began literally to shudder with pleasure, and each delicious shudder passed like an electric current from me to her. She climbed a stairway of climaxes toward breathless heights, and in spite of a powerful eruption that seemed to empty me of blood and bone marrow as well as semen, I did not experience the slightest loss of tumescence but remained with her, ascending toward a peak of erotic and emotional pleasure that I had never known.
As we had done before—though never with such intensity and power as this—we were making ardent love in order to forget, to deny, to evade the very existence of hooded, scythe-packing Death. We were trying to scorn and abjure the real dangers ahead and the real fears already with us. In flesh we sought solace, temporary peace, and strength through sharing. Perhaps we also hoped to exhaust ourselves so completely that neither of us would dream.
But we dreamed.
I found myself within the poorly lit tunnel again, running in terror from something I could not see. Panic took voice in the hard, flat echo of my footsteps on a stone floor.
Rya dreamed, too, waking with a scream near dawn, after I had been awake for hours. I held her. She was shuddering again but not with pleasure this time. She recalled scraps of the nightmare: dim, flickering amber lamps; pools of sooty darkness; a tunnel. . . .
Something very bad was going to happen to us in a tunnel. When, where, what, why—those were things we could not yet foresee.
Thursday I took the wheel and drove north into Pennsylvania, while Rya took charge of the radio. The sky closed up again behind steel-gray clouds, charred black at the edges, like the war-hammered doors of a celestial armory.
We left the interstate for a narrower highway.
Officially spring was only days away, but in these northeast mountains, nature had little regard for the calendar. Winter was still an unchallenged king and would remain on his throne through the end of the month, if not longer.
The snow-covered land rose, gently at first, then with greater determination, and the banks of snow grew higher along the state route. The road became twistier by the mile, and as I followed its serpentine course I also snaked back through my memory to the day when Jelly Jordan, Luke Bendingo, and I had driven to Yontsdown to pass out free tickets and cash to county officials, hoping to grease the rails for the Sombra Brothers Carnival.
The land had no less of an ominous quality now than it possessed the previous summer. Irrationally but undeniably, the mountains themselves seemed evil, as if earth and stone and forest could somehow evolve, nurture, and contain malevolent attitudes and intentions. Weathered formations of rock, poking up here and there through blankets of snow and soil, resembled the half-rotten teeth of some ascending leviathan that swam in the earth instead of the sea. In other places, longer formations made me think of the serrated spines of giant reptiles. The bleak gray daylight created no distinct shadows, but it plated an ashen hue to every object, until it seemed as if we had entered an alternate world where colors—other than gray, black, and white—did not exist. The tall evergreens thrust up like spikes on the armored fist of a villainous knight. The leafless maples and birches did not exactly resemble trees but might have been the fossilized skeletons of an ancient prehuman race. An uncanny number of the winter-stripped oaks were gnarled and misshapen by fungus.
“We can still turn back,” Rya said quietly.
“Do you want to?”
She sighed. “No.”
“And really . . . can we?”
“No.”
Even the snow lent no sparkle to those malignant mountains. It seemed different from other snow in more benign regions. It was not the snow of Christmas—or of skiing, sleighs, snowmen, and snowball battles. It crusted on the trunks and limbs of the barren trees, but that only emphasized the black, skeletal aspect of them. More than anything else, this snow made me think of white-tiled morgue rooms where cold, dead bodies were dissected in search of the cause and the meaning of death.
We passed landmarks that were familiar from the summer past: the abandoned mine head, the half-demolished tipple, the rusting hulks of automobiles perched on concrete blocks. The snow concealed some portions of those objects but in no way diminished their contribution to the pervading atmosphere of despair, gloom, and senescence.
The three-lane macadam state route was gritty with cinders and sand, mottled with white patches of salt spread by road-maintenance crews after the last big storm. The pavement was utterly free of ice and snow, and driving conditions were fine.
As we passed the road sign that marked the Yontsdown city limits, Rya said, “Slim, better slow down.”
I glanced at the speedometer and discovered that I was scooting along at more than fifteen miles an hour over the legal limit, as if I unconsciously intended to rocket straight through the city and out the other side.
I eased up on the accelerator, rounded a bend, and saw a police car parked along the road, right there at the blind end of the curve. The driver’s window was open a crack, just enough for a radar unit to be hung from it.
As we sailed past, still moving a few miles faster than the limit, I saw that the cop behind the wheel was a goblin.
chapter twenty-one
WINTER IN HELL
I cursed aloud because, although I was exceeding the speed limit by only two or three miles an hour, I was certain that even a minor infraction would be sufficient to incur official wrath in this demon-ruled town. I glanced worriedly at the rearview mirror. On the roof of the black-and-white, the red emergency beacons began to flash, pulses of bloody light rippling across the morgue-white snowscape; he
was going to come after us, which was not a promising beginning to our clandestine mission.
“Damn,” Rya said, twisting around in her seat to look out the back window.
But before the cruiser could pull onto the roadway, another car—a mud-spattered yellow Buick—rounded the bend, going faster than I was, and the goblin-policeman’s attention shifted to that more flagrant violator. We drove on, unmolested, as the cop stopped the Buick in our wake.
A sudden gust of wind pulled a billion threads of snow off the ground, instantly wove them into a silver-gray curtain, and whipped the curtain across the road behind us, concealing the Buick and the hapless motorist and the goblin policeman from my view.
“Close,” I said.
Rya said nothing. Ahead and slightly below us lay Yontsdown. She faced forward again, biting her lower lip as she studied the city into which we descended.
The previous summer, Yontsdown had appeared grim and medieval. Now, in the frigid clutch of winter, it was even less appealing than it had been on the August day when I’d first seen it. In the murky distance the vomitous smoke and steam rising from the stacks of the filthy steel mill were darker and more heavily laden with pollutants than before, like columns of ejaculate from smoldering volcanoes. A few hundred feet up, the gray steam thinned and was torn to rags by the winter wind, but the sulfurous smoke spread from mountain peak to mountain peak. The combination of darkish clouds and sour yellow fumes gave the heavens a bruised look. And if the skies were bruised, then the city below was battered, lacerated, mortally wounded: It seemed to be not only a dying community but a community of the dying, a city-sized cemetery. The row houses—many of them shabby, all of them sheathed in a film of gray dust—and the larger brick and granite buildings had previously made me think of medieval structures. They still possessed that anachronistic quality, though this time—with soot-discolored snow on some rooftops, with dirty icicles hanging from eaves, with icterous frost marbelizing many windows—they also seemed, somehow, like rank after serried rank of headstones in a graveyard for giants. And from a distance the train cars in the rail yards might have been enormous coffins.
I felt as if I were awash in psychic emanations, and nearly every current in that Stygian sea was dark, cold, and frightening.
We crossed the bridge over the now frozen river, where huge slabs of jagged ice thrust up in jumbled profusion beneath the metal-grid floor and beyond the heavy iron railings. The tires did not seem to sing this time but instead emitted a shrill one-note scream.
On the far side of the bridge, I abruptly pulled the station wagon to the curb and stopped.
“What’re you doing?” Rya asked, looking at the sleazy bar and grill in front of which I had parked.
It was a cement-block building painted bile-green. Faded red enamel was peeling off the front door, and though the windows were free of frost, they were heavily streaked with grease and grime.
She said, “What do you want here?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I . . . I just want to switch places with you. The emanations . . . all around me . . . pouring off everything. . . . No matter where I look, I see . . . strange and terrible shadows that aren’t real, shadows of death and destruction to come. . . . I don’t think I should drive just now.”
“The town didn’t affect you like this before.”
“Yeah. It did. When I first came in with Luke and Jelly. Not this bad. And I pretty quickly got in control of myself. I’ll get used to it again, too, in a little while. But right now . . . I feel . . . battered.”
While Rya slid across the seat to take the steering wheel, I got out of the car and walked unsteadily around to the other side. The air was bitterly cold; it smelled of oil, coal dust, gasoline fumes, frying meat from the grill of the nearby barroom—and (I could have sworn) brimstone. I got into the passenger’s seat, slammed the door, and Rya pulled away from the curb, steering the car smoothly back into traffic.
“Where to?” she asked.
“Drive across town to the outskirts.”
“And?”
“Find a quiet motel.”
I could not explain the dramatic worsening of the city’s effect on me, although I had a few ideas. Perhaps, for reasons unknown, my psychic powers had become stronger, my paranormal perceptions more sensitive. Or perhaps the city’s load of grief and terror had grown immeasurably heavier since my last visit. Or maybe I was more afraid of returning to this demonic place than I had realized, in which case my nerves were rubbed raw and were therefore extraordinarily receptive to the dark energy and formless but hideous images that radiated from buildings, cars, people, and miscellaneous objects on all sides. Or, by means of the special vision that my Twilight Eyes provided, perhaps I sensed that either I or Rya—or maybe both of us—would die here at the hands of the goblins; however, if that clairvoyant message was trying to get through to me, I was evidently emotionally incapable of reading and accepting it. I could imagine it, but I could not actually bring myself to “see” the details of such a pointless and horrifying destiny.
Approaching the two-story brick school where seven children had burned to death in a heating-oil explosion and fire, I saw that the flame-charred wing had been rebuilt since the previous summer, the slate roof repaired. Even now school was in session: Children were visible at a few of the windows.
As before, a massive wave of clairvoyant impressions surged off the walls of that structure and rushed toward me with dismaying power and substance—occult substance but deadly nonetheless, as real to me as a murderous tidal wave. Here, as nowhere else I had ever seen, human suffering and anguish and terror could be measured almost as the ocean depth might be gauged: in tens, hundreds, even thousands of fathoms. A thin, cold spray preceded the murderous wave: disjointed augural images splashing across the surface of my mind. I saw walls and ceilings bursting into flame . . . windows exploding in ten thousand deadly splinters . . . whips of fire lashing through the classrooms on in-rushing currents of air . . . terrified children with their clothes aflame . . . a screaming teacher with her hair on fire . . . the blackened and peeling corpse of another teacher slumped in a corner, his body fat sizzling and bubbling as if it were bacon on a griddle. . . .
The last time I had seen the school, I had received visions of both the fire that had already transpired and of the worse fire to come. But this time I saw only the future fire, as yet unlit, perhaps because the oncoming disaster was now closer in time than the blaze that had already done its work. The extrasensory pictures that sprayed over me were shockingly more vivid and more hideous than any I had ever known, each like a drop of sulfuric acid rather than water, painfully searing its way into my memory and soul: children in mortal agony; flesh blistering and bubbling and burning like tallow; grinning skulls appearing through the smoking, melting tissues that once had concealed them; eye sockets blackened and emptied by hungry flames.
“What’s wrong?” Rya asked worriedly.
I realized that I was gasping, shuddering.
“Slim?”
She was letting up on the accelerator; the station wagon was slowing.
“Keep driving,” I said, then cried out as the pain of the dying children became, to a small degree, my pain as well.
“You’re hurting,” she said.
“Visions.”
“Of what?”
“For God’s sake . . . keep . . . driving.”
“But—”
“Get past . . . the school!”
To expel those words, I’d had to surface from the acid mist of psychic emanations, which was nearly as difficult as struggling up through a real cloud of dense and suffocating fumes. Now I tumbled back down into that shadowy inner realm of unwanted necromantic sight where the unspeakably gruesome and tragic future of the Yontsdown Elementary School pressed insistently upon me in grisly, blood-drenched detail.
I closed my eyes because, when looking upon the school, I was somehow soliciting the release of the pictures of oncoming destruction that
were locked in its walls, an infinite store of occult images like a great charge of potential energy that was at the critical point of kinetic transformation. However, by closing my eyes, I cut the number of visions only slightly and reduced the power of them not at all. The main wave of psychic radiation now towered over me and began to crash down; I was the shore on which this tsunami would break, and when it broke and receded, the shoreline might be changed forever beyond recognition. I was desperately afraid that immersion in those nightmarish visions would leave me emotionally and mentally broken, even insane, so I chose to defend myself in the same manner as I had done last summer. I squeezed my hands into fists, gritted my teeth, pulled my head down, and with a monumental effort of will I turned my mind away from those scenes of fiery death and concentrated on good memories of Rya: the love for me that I saw in her clear, direct eyes; the lovely lines of her face; the perfection of her body, the lovemaking we had shared; the sweet pleasure of just holding her hand, of just sitting with her and watching television during a long evening together. . . .
The wave fell down toward me, down, down. . . .
I clung to thoughts of Rya.
The wave hit—
Jesus!
—with crushing impact.
I cried out.
“Slim!” a far-off voice called urgently.
I was pinned against the seat. I was assaulted, beaten, pounded, hammered.
“Slim!”
Rya . . . Rya . . . my only salvation.
I was in the blaze, there with the dying children, overwhelmed by visions of scorched and fire-eaten faces, withered and blackened limbs, a thousand terrified eyes in which reflected flames writhed and flickered . . . smoke, blinding smoke pouring up through the hot and creaking floor . . . and I smelled their burning hair and their cooking flesh, dodged falling ceilings and other debris . . . I heard the pitiful wails and screams that were so numerous and of such volume that they wove together in an eerie music that chilled me to the core in spite of the fire in which I found myself . . . and those poor doomed souls stumbled by me—frantic teachers and children—seeking escape but finding doors inexplicably closed and blocked, and now, dear God, every child in sight—scores of them—suddenly burst into flames, and I ran to the nearest of them, tried to smother him beneath me and put him out, but I was as a ghost in that place, unaffected by the fire and unable to change what was happening, so my phantom hands passed straight through the burning boy, straight through the little girl toward whom I turned next, and as their screams of pain and terror rose, I began to scream, too, I bellowed and shrieked in rage and in frustration, I wept and cursed, and finally I fell away, out of the inferno, down into darkness, silence, deepness, stillness like a marble shroud.
Up.
Slowly up.
Into light.
Gray, blurry.
Mysterious shapes.
Then it all cleared.
I was slumped in my seat, damp and chilled with sweat. The station wagon was stopped, parked.
Rya was leaning over me, one cool hand on my brow. Through her luminous eyes, emotions darted like schooling fish: fear, curiosity, sympathy, compassion, love.
I straightened up a bit, and she eased back. I felt weak and still somewhat disoriented.
We were in an Acme Supermarket parking lot. Rows of cars, drably dressed in winter grime, were divided by low walls of soot-streaked snow shoved into place by plows during the most recent storm. A few shoppers shuffled or scurried across the open pavement, their hair and scarves and coattails flapping in a wind more brisk than it had been before I had passed out. Some of them were pushing wobbly-wheeled shopping carts that they used not only to transport groceries but for support when they slipped on the treacherous ice-spotted pavement.
“Tell me,” Rya said.
My mouth was dry. I could taste the bitter ashes of the promised—but as yet unfulfilled—disaster. My tongue kept sticking to the roof of my mouth, and it felt thick. Nevertheless, slightly slurring my words and in a voice pressed flat by a massive weight of weariness. I told her about the holocaust that would someday wipe out an ungodly number of Yontsdown’s elementary-school children.
Rya was already pale with concern for me, but as I spoke, she grew paler still. When I finished, she was whiter than Yontsdown’s polluted snow, and shadowy smudges had appeared around her eyes. The intensity of her horror reminded me that she had personal experience of the goblins’ torture of children from the days when she had clung to a precarious existence in an orphanage overseen by them.
She said, “What can we do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can we stop it from happening?”
“I don’t think so. The death energy pouring off that building is so strong . . . overwhelming. The fire seems inevitable. I don’t think we can do anything to stop it.”
“We can try,” she said fiercely.
I nodded without enthusiasm.
“We must try,” she said.
“Yes, all right. But first . . . a motel, somewhere we can crawl in and shut the door and block out the sight of this hateful town for a little while.”
She found a suitable place just two miles from the supermarket, at the corner of a not-too-busy intersection. The Traveler’s Rest Motel. She parked in front of the office. Single-story, about twenty units. Built in a U-shape, with parking in the middle. The late-afternoon gloom was so deep that the big orange-and-green neon sign was already switched on; the last three letters of MOTEL were burned out, and the neon outline of a cartoonish, yawning face was noseless. Traveler’s Rest was slightly shabbier than the general shabbiness of Yontsdown, but we were not looking for posh quarters and luxury; anonymity was our primary need, even more important than reliable heat and cleanliness, and Traveler’s Rest looked as