Greely's Cove (48 page)

Carl’s nose wrinkled, tickled by a whiff of the smell he had detected moments earlier near the top of the stairs. He moved through the archway and gasped, for the vault door was standing open, a yawning rectangle of flickering light from a sooty kerosene lantern hanging just inside. Actually
open,
the same door that throughout his boyhood had stayed locked against the prying fingers of curious little boys! The stink densified as he moved toward the opening, but he hardly noticed, and he bowed his head to step inside.

The room was small and empty, walled with rough-hewn stone that gleamed wetly here and there in the muddy lamplight. At the far end was another brick archway, this one barred by a weighty-looking door of dark, very old wood. Something from his boyhood drove Carl toward the door, a rekindled hunger to know secrets that someone had seen fit to lock away. He gripped the cold brass handle that time and dankness had corroded and pulled it open, fully expecting a groan from the rusty hinges. But it yielded smoothly, silently, revealing a circular stone stairway that coiled downward into a well of dim candlelight.

Carl grimaced against the onslaught of odor that wafted up the stairway, for it carried the tang of disease and decomposition. He fought his recoiling senses and went forward, his palms outstretched toward the narrow, curving walls. He moved downward, ever downward, at least a score of steps and then a dozen more, passing candles in wrought-iron holders that were mounded over with gnarly wax. He listened for sound,
any
sound, but heard only his own breathing and the scuff of his boat shoes on stone.

The stairs ended in a long passageway that Carl figured lay at least two stories beneath the basement of Whiteleather Place. At ten-foot intervals were heavy oak timbers that shored up the ceiling and walls, as in a mine shaft. The passageway stretched onward in a straight line for perhaps fifty feet, unlit but for a faint patch of yellow light at the far end. As he moved closer, he saw another wooden door. Light was escaping around the edges of a small shutter that was not quite closed.

So the local rumors about old Captain Whiteleather’s treasure chamber were true, he told himself, as he trudged toward the door. This was probably where the skipper stored the ill-gotten booty of his Pacific adventures, the stolen antiquities from the temples of Sumatra or Java or Malaysia, gold and jade and priceless ceremonial masks. What a field day the Greely’s Cove Historical Society might have had in this place, if only they had been able to get beyond the steel door.

These thoughts evaporated with the onset of
sound
, a ululating chant from a deep male voice that reverberated low against the surrounding stone walls, oddly rhythmic and yet somber, punctuated now and again by the voice of a boy that overlaid the first voice in a kind of liturgical counterpoint.

The nape of Carl’s neck pringled, for he was certain that the second voice belonged to Jeremy.

He pushed himself onward through the thickening stench, which had become nearly unbearable now. The voices grew louder as he neared the door with its small hinged shutter. He raised his hand to the shutter and nudged it open, and the voices seemed very close. He edged close to the rectangle of light and peered in.

His lungs seized up. His heart missed a beat, missed another, then started to pound in his chest like a jackhammer. Beyond the door was a spacious undercroft with walls of stone and a vaulted ceiling hung with torches in mounts of filigreed metal. In the wall directly to his front was a gaping archway that led into a maw of blackness that seemed impervious to the torchlight, and somehow alive. It seemed
hungry.

Much worse was the spectacle taking place on the threshold of the blackness, the sight of Jeremy floating unsupported in the air, rigid and naked, with his arms splayed wide. Craslowe stood over him, clad in flowing robes of black and crimson, his own feet well off the ground. From the old man’s mouth issued a staccato stream of alien words that rose and fell in pitch, that crescendoed and ebbed in rhythmic cycles. At regular intervals Jeremy’s voice overlapped Craslowe’s, reciting back the exact syllables with a rapidity that seemed impossible for a human tongue.

Carl wanted to believe that this was a dream or a hallucination. But the details were too real, too solid to be made of dream stuff: the fiery glint off Hadrian Craslowe’s steel-rimmed spectacles; the silvery array of chalices on the ebony table beneath Jeremy’s floating body; the Kabbalistic symbols carved into the stone walls.

Even more real than the solid sights and sounds was the pall of evil that hung in the air, a vaporous presence that flowed from the furrows of Craslowe’s long face, from his oily eyes, from his spittle-slick lips. Carl sensed that the evil was flowing from Craslowe into Jeremy, that the boy’s lank body was a vessel into which the old man poured power and will and knowledge.

Then Carl’s gaze alighted on Jeremy’s hands, and he bit his tongue. The index finger on each hand was at least an inch longer than the other fingers.

Carl wanted to vomit: Small wonder that Jeremy nearly always kept his hands in his pockets or out of sight under workman’s gloves—to hide this hideous deformity.

Craslowe raised his arms in a gesture required by the hellish ritual, and Carl saw that
his
hands were similarly deformed, but much more radically. Craslowe’s index fingers were easily twice the normal length, topped with sharp black nails that hooked inward like talons. He knew now why the good doctor never offered to shake hands.

Carl’s intellect switched off, overloaded by contradictions of the sane, rational world in which he had lived until this moment, of all that he had known as truth. Rage took over, tensing his muscles and knotting his fists in preparation to lunge through the door. Battle would ensue—good, old-fashioned physical battle, fueled by a father’s righteous rage against a perverted old monster who had corrupted an innocent boy. His fists would smash that loathsome old face, shatter the spectacles and inflict great pain. He meant to crush and rip and shatter that grotesque old body, then snatch his son away and flee the stinking undercroft, back to where the sun shone. He was drawing up to launch himself when—

This could not be.

—human figures began to emerge from the maw of darkness behind Craslowe. Or
almost
human figures. Their flesh hung in ragged tangles from their bones, as though eaten away. Their eyes glowed. Some walked on what was left of their feet, while others floated in the air. One man actually sat in a wheelchair that made an electrical hiss as it rolled along the stone floor. Half a dozen strong, they formed a circle around Craslowe and Jeremy, their faces turned inward, their palms upward in a gesture of obscene worship. Carl’s jaw dropped as realization flowed into him. One of the hideous acolytes was old Elvira Cashmore, the woman whose yard he had cared for as a boy. Now she was a barely recognizable scarecrow of exposed bone and rot. Next to her stood the ruinous figure of a young girl with red hair, her Army field jacket ripped and clawed to shreds, her face a third gone, and her arms—

God, her arms! How can she still be alive?

She was Teri Zolten.

Carl shivered and trembled, fought to hang on to his sanity, to keep from screaming at the top of his lungs. These were the missing people of Greely’s Cove, or at least some of them—the ones who had not yet been totally consumed by whatever lurked in the dark maw beyond the arch. By some unnatural magic they had survived wounds that should have killed them several times over, possessed powers to float through the air and do God only knew what else.

A hand settled on Carl’s shoulder, and this time he
did
scream. He whirled to stare into the wrecked face of Sandy Cunningham Zolten, once his favorite cheerleader at Su-quamish High. Her left cheek had been taken by someone else’s teeth, leaving her own exposed to the air, along with her fungoid gums. Her rusty hair was ragged and crazy, her jumpsuit shredded to reveal the savaging that her once pretty body had taken.

“Oh, Carl, I can’t tell you how good it is to see you,” she said with what should have been a smile. “I followed you around upstairs, wondering if I dare talk to you. But since you’re here...” Her voice was rough and gurgly, which could have been due to the holes in her throat. Her speech was misshapen for lack of half a lip.

“
S-S-Sandy?
” Carl’s own voice had nearly fled, and he pressed his back into the corner of stone wall and wooden door, a pathetic effort to move away. “Sandy, I—I—”

“There’s no need to whisper,” she said, cocking her head and allowing the stalk of a severed vessel to pop through a gap in her face. “They can’t hear us in there. They’re in a trance—something to do with Jeremy’s final initiation, I guess.”

She drew even closer to him.

“I sensed you were coming, Carl. And I was glad. I suppose you know that I’ve always had a crush on you, even after high school. You must’ve known.”

She insinuated a tattered arm over his shoulder, causing him nearly to retch.

“Sandy, what’s happened to you?” he croaked, nodding toward the door. “To
them?
Is it Craslowe? Has
he
done this to you?”

“Oh, let’s forget about him, since he won’t be awake for hours yet. That means we have some time before you go to the Feast. We should make good use of it.”

“What feast? What’s going on in there?” He grabbed the viscous skin of her arm and tried to force it away from his neck.

“It’s like a graduation or something. Jeremy is becoming like Hadrian, a steward to the Giver of Dreams. But that doesn’t concern you or me—or
us.
Let’s make the most of—” Carl summoned all his strength and wits, dragged his mind back from the brink of blubbering lunacy, and shoved Sandy away. When she came back at him, he kicked her hard in the midriff. She staggered backward and then faced him squarely, breathing with a growling hiss. Her eyes began to show from within, and Carl nearly fainted with fright.

“What’s the matter, aren’t I good enough for you, Carl? .Aren’t I high enough on the social ladder to be your girl?”

“Sandy, stay away from me!”

“Do you think I don’t know what you and Renzy have been doing with your fucking cameras, taking pictures of me when I’m leading cheers, when I’m kicking? How do you think that makes me feel, Carl? Do you think I like the thought of having my picture in your wallet, so you can show it around the boys’ locker room?”

“Sandy, I mean it! Stay away!”

“Or you’ll do what, Carl? You’re not thinking of leaving, are you? I can prevent that, you know. I have
powers
now, and I can make you do whatever I want. Besides, you don’t want to miss the Feast.”

Carl made a move along the stone wall, thinking to flee back toward the stairway, but Sandy Zolten laughed out loud with a voice that turned his blood to jelly. Numbness soaked into his arms and legs and torso, staggering him. He fell against the wall and just managed to stay on his feet.

“See what I mean?” said Sandy, coming toward him again. “I have power, Carl, and I’m going to take you to the Feast. There’ll be some pain and a few minutes of terror, but you’ll surrender to the Giver, and when you’ve done that, the
dreaming
will start. And oh, you’ll dream the most incredible things! You’ll move through time and taste the most exquisite miseries, Carl, the most beautiful atrocities that mankind has ever conceived. You’ll experience hungers that you never knew you had, and you’ll be able to quench them with every imaginable kind of sin. But first—”

Another wave of numbness gripped Carl, and he nearly fell to the stone floor, heaving and gagging. Sandy was very close now, and he could smell her.

“—there’s the little matter of
this
.”

She began to wriggle out of her tattered jumpsuit, pushing it down from her horribly mutilated shoulders, down past the only breast she had left, down with the remnants of her ravaged undergarments, exposing great gapes where gouts of flesh had been eaten away.

When naked, she came to him and wrapped her filthy arms around his neck, pushing her encrusted face into his.

“Time to fuck, Carl. Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted, a chance to fuck me? Isn’t that why you took all those pictures, so you could see up past my panties? Well, here I am. You want it, you know you do, and so do I.”

Carl felt that at any moment his revulsion would kill him, that his heart would simply refuse to go on beating. Sandy was digging into his jacket, tearing away the buttons of his flannel shirt, trying to force a hand into his belt. Carl was smothering, dying, when Sandy’s body suddenly stiffened, and her hands flew to her throat. The numbness left Carl instantly.

He saw a tight leather strap around her neck, which she clawed with her hands, her luminous eyes bulging and her tongue thrusting horribly out of her mouth, the wounds in her neck sucking and whistling wetly. Behind her was Ianthe Pauling, who was strangling her with what appeared to be a belt, and doing so expertly. Minutes passed before it was over, before the tragic existence of Sandy Zolten ended and the salacious light left her eyes. The body that had once belonged to a beautiful young woman slapped to the stones in an obscene heap.

Carl cried as Ianthe Pauling led him away from the undercroft, actually shed huge tears that flowed down his face as she pulled him, urged him,
drove
him up the coiling staircase, forcing him to leave Jeremy behind. He cried for his son, for Sandy Zolten. He cried for his sanity, for all the poor souls on whom Hadrian Craslowe’s evil had feasted. He scarcely believed his eyes when at last they beheld the light of the winter afternoon, when he discovered that the world still existed.

Lindsay Moreland left the library of the University of Washington and headed for the parking lot and her Saab. On any other day she might have enjoyed the memories stirred by the sights and sounds of campus life, having spent nearly six years in this place, pursuing her B.A. and M.B.A. and virtually living in the library for weeks at a time. But today she was oblivious to the bustling students and the familiar landmarks. In her hand she carried a folded slip of paper on which a helpful assistant librarian had jotted the name and address of a small shop in Seattle’s International District:
The Man-Arid-Magic Bookstore.