HELLz BELLz (22 page)

A rumble of distant thunder eclipsed the peals of the bell on Holy Cross Hill.

“Was that thunder, or another explosion?” asked Suzie.

“Thunder,” Joe said. “The heat’s cooked up a thunderstorm. Maybe it’ll cool things down.”

“Don’t count on it,” John said.

Joe tried the radio. Got only static and intermittent hissing crashes from lightning in the approaching storm.

“Everything’s dead,” said Woolrich. “Phones, radio, TV, Internet access. We’re completely cut off from the outside world now. And that’s the way it wants us. That’s why I don’t believe it will let us leave town.”

“And by
it,
you mean God?”

“Possibly.”

“I don’t believe in God,” said Joe. “I think you should revise your theory. Whatever’s doing this, it’s got nothing to do with God. I think it’s some kind of secret psychological warfare test that went real wrong.”

“You think?” Suzie leaned up from the back seat, not wishing to be left out of the discussion. She said, “Or it could be Arab terrorists. They’ve got all that oil money backing ’em.”

“If you knew the history of the old iron bell,” John said, “you’d find it harder to dismiss a supernatural explanation.”

“It wasn’t God who killed the Pakistani storekeeper,” argued Joe. “It wasn’t God who raped a guy with a broomstick. People did all the craziness and violence we’ve seen tonight, not the hand of God. That’s why I’d feel a hell of a lot better if we had a gun or two. Especially if we’re going downtown to take down the bell.” Joe snapped his fingers. “We’ll borrow some guns.”

Suzie said, “You mean
steal?
”

“Yeah, why not? There’s a sporting goods store a block from my shop. There’s a regular arsenal in there, unless it’s already been looted.”

“Doyle’s,” said Suzie. “I was in there once with Gary. He fancied himself a deer hunter.”

“All the guns and ammo we need.”

Woolrich said, “And we could break into that ice cream parlor for a sweet little pick-me-up.”

Lightning flashed to the east. The first few drops of rain dotted the dirty windshield.

“It was a dark and stormy night,” Woolrich said in mock melodrama.

* * *

The shadow-man came on.

Sara kept him in the pistol’s sights.

Her mind wandered the dark-edged contours of the night’s illusion, stealing glances at the shadowy world behind reality’s curtain. What she saw in those forbidden places chilled her like a wintry wind, but she had to look, had to
see
the stuff the world was made of and get a glimpse of the furtive entities that inhabited that realm. She knew—or thought she did—that she was connected to them, made up of the same cosmic building blocks. Though they frightened her, she didn’t think they would do her harm. The bell and the cosmic force ringing it wanted her to see and understand, but beyond that, she didn’t know why she had been chosen for this honor. Maybe she would understand when the curtain finally opened all the way. Then she would know what they had in store for her and learn the meaning of her connection to them.

She’d seen flashes of their skeletal forms and was in awe of the entities with their otherworldly glow. Devils or angels, it didn’t matter. They were
there,
where good and evil meant nothing. They were more real than anything she had ever seen. And they were watching her, honing in on her with fierce resolve. It was only a matter of time now before they would fully reveal themselves to her and declare their intentions.

But the gangly shadow-man walking toward her down the middle of the street was becoming more than a distraction; he was becoming a threat. Sara sensed something demonic in his awkward movements. For the time being, she was still
here,
where good and evil did matter. She could not allow him to interfere with her impending enlightenment and admission to the clockwork realm behind the illusory world of mundane existence. The nuts and bolts, the very guts of the universe were about to open to her. No way was she going to let this shambling shadow-man—this demon in human guise—queer the deal.

She cocked the hammer of her husband’s Colt .38 and waited for the demon to come a little closer. The tolling of the church bell found resonance within the barrel of the gun, and its seductive vibrations sent tingles up her arm and all through her body. Raindrops made concentric ripples in the windshield.

* * *

Harry Loveless walked the rim of eldritch darkness. Yes, he was walking down the middle of this ordinary street in a residential neighborhood (not a very nice one, at that) of Druid Hills, Rhode Island, but like the Gentleman From Providence before him, Harry’s feet never completely touched ground. He walked dark roads of darkest imagination the way H. P. Lovecraft had. In fact, Harry Loveless was now certain that he himself was the reincarnation of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the undisputed master of terror. The revelation had come to him last autumn when he was standing over Lovecraft’s grave in Swan Point Cemetery in Providence. It was a cold, gray day in early October, and Harry huddled deeper into his overcoat for warmth as he sent a prayer, of sorts, to the spirit of the great man.
Mr. Lovecraft, if you can hear me, I want you to know you have changed my life and inspired me to follow in your illustrious footsteps, sir. Like you, I’ve been unhappy and reclusive, and my writings have gone unappreciated, but I haven’t given up because you were always there to encourage me by your fine example. Your
genius inspires me still. You are my muse, sir. And I thank you.

He felt a remarkable connection to the burial plot such as he’d never felt for any spot on earth. Then an eerie shaft of sunlight broke through the drab gray clouds and bathed Harry Loveless in golden warmth, and he felt the great man’s spirit moving within him. The break in the clouds closed, but Harry kept the golden light in his heart; he realized then and there that he just might be H. P. Lovecraft reborn. His prayer (to himself?) had been answered in such an unexpected way, that he was overcome with emotion and fell to his knees and shed tears on the sacred ground.

After the graveyard revelation Harry Loveless went home and wrote a masterpiece of terror, inspired by the notion that he quite possibly
was
Lovecraft reincarnated. He banged out the novel in three months. It was the best work the unpublished writer had ever done, and it read as though Lovecraft himself had written it—so Harry thought. Plenty of hack writers had imitated the great man’s style, producing painfully absurd crap, but Harry’s
Lurkers At The Edge Of Time
read like vintage Lovecraft. On the strength of his first draft, he procured a New York literary agent who waited impatiently for Harry’s final rewrite. Harry had just typed the final word of the last page when the bell started ringing from the bell tower of the stone church on Holy Cross Hill; he took it as a good omen. To celebrate the novel’s completion, he treated himself to cognac and an expensive cigar. Sitting in his threadbare armchair in the house he’d inherited from his parents, he thought up imaginary headlines for the inevitable rave reviews of his masterpiece. “Loveless The New Lovecraft?” “Druid Hills Author Channels The Spirit of Providence Master of Terror.” “New Book Reanimates H.P. Lovecraft.” And Harry’s favorite: “Loveless The Re-Animator.”

Halfway through the cognac, he set the stinking stogie in an ashtray and opened a window on the hot night so he could better hear the tolling of the bell. Why, he wondered, was a bell in an abandoned church ringing on and on? It wasn’t even Sunday. Could it actually be a sign from beyond? A chiming punctuation—exclamation point!—to the completion of his otherworldly novel?

The iron bell called him out, and Harry ventured forth. Because of the congenital hump on his back, he rarely went out in daylight, and solitary night walks were not unusual for him; darkness was like an old faithful friend. He walked the six blocks to the stone church. The closer he got to the church, the faster his mind raced. The townspeople were restless tonight, scurrying here and there in cars or on foot, and Harry began to see in their faces something sinister, as in a hideous face glimpsed from a window of a Lovecraftian shunned house. There were a lot of foreigners abroad tonight, and he began to grow uneasy.

The bell grated on his nerves.

He jumped at shadows.

Shadows jumped at him.

When the church appeared at the top of Holy Cross Hill, Harry stopped and leaned against a lamppost to catch his breath and peer up at the old church of somber stone. He wasn’t used to such prolonged physical exertion, and the sweltering night had already sapped his meager reserve of energy. A sense of terrible foreboding ballooned inside him and he began to fear for his life. Something—some unknowable force—lurked within the night shadows where timid artificial light would not go, could not penetrate. Harry Loveless began to tremble with terror. The ringing vibrations of the church bell assaulted the little metropolis, bouncing off buildings and echoing up and down streets, sharpening the edges of everything—including his perceptions; everywhere he looked, those sharp edges threatened to rip and tear the fabric of the familiar world so that the lurking force might come rushing through the gaps and cracks.

“It’s true,” Harry whispered. Everything Lovecraft had written was absolutely true. Not word-for-word literal truth, but true nonetheless. Cthulhu, the Old Ones and their ungodly offspring—all of it was Lovecraft’s idiosyncratic interpretation of the dark demesne underlying humdrum actuality. His dark stories had been meant as a warning to mankind. The man’s intuitive sense had been impeccable! And because Harry now believed he was Lovecraft reincarnated, he reckoned that the memories and discoveries of his past life were only now surfacing because it had taken him thirty-three years to overcome the psychic soul-fogging trauma of death and rebirth.

Overcoming his fear, he pushed off the lamppost and walked up the steep street toward the church, convinced that his past life and the years of his current life had been leading up to this momentous night, his night of destiny—destiny imprinted upon the stuff of his soul. Dangers of the night be damned! Harry Loveless was compelled to conclude the esoteric work begun by The Man From Providence.

But when he reached the front door of the abandoned church, Harry lost his nerve to fear. The awful tolling of the bell drove him back down the hill in shame. He fled on rubbery legs, his only thought: Get beyond the reach of the soul-ripping bell!

So now he was hobbling down the middle of a residential street near the outskirts of Druid Hills, telling himself that he’d been right to flee. His soul had been threatened with oblivion, and he owed it to his Lovecraft/Loveless self to survive so that he might record his dark revelations in written words
. That
was his destiny. Wasn’t it? But what had been revealed? It had been right in front of him, right at the edge of his awareness, but the damned bell had broken his concentration and the revelation was lost.

He walked.

He tried to clear his head.

But the piercing chimes of the bell prevented clear thinking. He moved through a dream, feverish and thirsting for forbidden knowledge, yet afraid such knowledge would annihilate him.

Shadowy things followed him, capering at the edge of his sight. Things called up from the darkness by the hexing vexing bell.

Though he was moving away from the bell, its sound was not at all diminished.

Bewitching bell! Each time it rang, it sent new tentacles reaching for him. He couldn’t see them, but he felt them whipping through the air, their puckered suckers dripping acid slime, hungry to latch onto his flesh. Soul suckers.

He tripped and fell. Skinned his palms on the asphalt. Blood. Now they would have him for sure. He pushed up and ran, hobbled by a leg cramp and by his ungainly hump.

Then he saw the woman. She was sitting behind the wheel of a small foreign car. He waved his hands in the air as if he were flagging a ride, though the car was parked beneath a tree.

“Help me!” he shouted. Certain she was his salvation, he rushed toward her.

When he saw the gun in her hand, it was too late to do anything but wait for the bullet. He was going to die, and the final draft of his literary masterpiece,
Lurkers At The Edge Of Time,
would lie undiscovered beneath the loose boards of his bedroom floor.

* * *

Sara checked her trigger finger when the man yelled for help. He was waving his arms like a magician desperate to weave a magic spell of protection—or so it seemed to her. But then she saw the unsightly hump rising up over his left shoulder and she decided to shoot him. A humpback could easily be a demon, a tricky denizen of hell, or in some way affiliated with the ringing of the bell, like the bell-ringing hunchback of Notre Dame.

She couldn’t risk being tricked by a demon hunchback, so she squeezed the trigger. The pistol bucked in her hand and the concussion of the shot rang in her ears. She looked through the neat little hole in the rain-rippled windshield (which was more solid than it had appeared moments ago) and saw the humpbacked man still standing in the street, his face a demonic mask of rage. How had she missed? She was an expert shot on the shooting range. Must’ve been the glass, she reflected.

She stepped out of the car, assumed her accustomed shooter’s stance and cocked the hammer. She aimed at the center of the man’s chest.

Raindrops smacked wet kisses on the top of her head.

The humpbacked demon bellowed: “Nooo!”

She fired.

* * *

Harry ducked just as the woman fired a second shot, and the slug thumped into his hump. There was a deep numbness where he’d been hit, and beneath that, a burning sensation—as if someone had stuck a hot needle deep into his deformed flesh.

“Sonofabitch,” he said. “Why’d you shoot me? Are you crazy?”

Of course, she was, he thought. Crazy as a June loon. He wanted to run, but he suddenly felt faint. The best he could do was to hold up his hands and beg her not to shoot him again, but that didn’t work out either. He ended up on his knees, crying like a spanked brat.