Late at Night (34 page)

The voice in Andrea’s brain continued: “I had to pretend, playact, and at times I almost believed it. I was really falling for Anton, you know. But after what he said, I knew not even he would be spared. I
reveled
in his death agony, Andrea. Reveled in it. He paid … he paid for what he did.

“I had such fun, Andrea. I showed myself—my demonic self—to poor Mrs. Plushing. But she was
so
sick—too sick to tell anyone, though she tried to. My human side was repulsed by what I did. It was so messy … I had to leave the room before it began. I have such a vivid imagination. Always have. Even I don’t know quite where the imagination, the hallucinations, ended, and reality began.

“All I know is I had fun closing my eyes and killing them all, making them
dead
just by wishing it.
Fun.”

“Why
are you doing this, Betty?”

The creature was moving forward, slowly, carefully.

“I sensed the presence of the mystical object, the book, as soon as I stepped onto the boat that took us over here. Lynn must have had it in her luggage. It’s a very special book, as I’m sure you know. I’ve read Lynn’s mind and now understand where it came from. There are great forces on this island, Andrea, the life energies of souls trapped, dying, screaming for help. Those energies can never die; they exist for all time. I have become one with this creature I called from the void as magicians in the days of old called demons—what they thought were demons—from the pit. It has great knowledge, this creature, great power. With its aid, I will gather the psychic forces of the island, through the focal point, the book—and then all the psychic forces in the
world.

“There won’t be any silence anymore. No one will hurt me. Whatever I want I can have just by thinking it. Unlimited power. Think of it, Andrea. Unlimited. I’ll do what I please with the world, and the world’s sole obsession will be to satisfy me.”

Andrea prepared herself. Betty was utterly mad. And she remembered what a professor had once told her. Madness is the only true strength.

The creature rushed her. Andrea got out of its way, ran towards the hall. She felt images, sights and sounds, invading her mind. So, Betty was going to fight on a psychic level, too. Andrea tried to fight it all off, each wave of the mental assault. She saw her dead parents standing out in the hall looking at her beseechingly, and her heart wanted to run to them and embrace them. She saw a child at her feet, begging for food, affection. She saw a huge wave of black water rushing down the corridor about to engulf her.

Not there, Andrea. None of it is really there.

Snakes, she was covered with writhing, twisting, biting snakes. She closed her eyes, opened them. The snakes were gone.

There were rats skittering across her feet; she felt herself falling, falling, down a long tunnel, the hall had changed into an endless pit.

Andrea concentrated. The pit was gone.

Only the rats were real.

Betty was using every power at her disposal.

Andrea felt something grab the upper part of her right arm. She felt burning, aching pain. The claws, the clawed fingers had gotten her. The Betty-creature had caught up with Andrea while she’d been fighting off the psychic attack, kicking away the scurrying rats at her feet.

Andrea looked up into that innocent-horrible face. She reached into her jacket pocket, got out the scissors she had thought to bring—stabbed the creature again and again in the face.

Betty howled, dropped Andrea’s arm, backed off.

The very walls of the house were beginning to crack, to topple. Was it real? Was it hallucination? Andrea didn’t know. The floors were buckling, and she saw hawks and eagles and bugs and bats and horrible zombie-like creatures shuffling through a fetid mist. There were loud, ear-splitting screams coming from everywhere, echoing through each chamber of the house.

She saw Ernie bending before the cabinet. Ernie, where she had told him to go.

Ernie was going to die again, right before her eyes. Betty was going to torment her, show Andrea how she had made Ernest Thesinger die.

No! Fight it. You must fight back.

Andrea turned away, squeezed shut her eyes, tried to separate illusion from reality.

There! The mists, the cracking walls, the false image of Ernest Thesinger, the flood and bugs and pleading relatives were gone. All that remained were the Betty-creature and a few rats, skittering in terror, delirious with freedom, around her feet. They would not harm her if she kept Betty too busy to send them against her. If Betty could tap into the psychic forces of the island, so could she.
Keep them at bay.

It was Betty who presented the most danger.
Concentrate on Betty.

The shambling horror, half-woman, half-monster, opened its mouth and emitted a serpentine hiss. The fangs in the mouth glistened with mucus. It moved forward, injured and enraged, the wounds in its face dripping a repulsive greenish slime. Andrea saw the torn portions of Betty’s scissors-ravaged face, flaps of skin hanging down, and was glad at what she’d done.

But that was only the beginning.

The thing reached out its clawed hands again, seeking to rend and tear. Andrea backed away, her fingers scrambling in her pocket for the other weapons she had brought along. A small container of lighter fluid dropped into her hand. She took it out, aimed the nozzle at the Betty-creature, and squeezed the container. The oily liquid shot out, squirting in Betty’s eyes, on the tattered remnants of her clothes which hung on the mottled gray skin of the creature she had blended with.

Betty’s eyes lit up in alarm. Too late—it saw what Andrea was doing.

Andrea got out the book of matches. Struck one. Sent it hurtling at Betty.

Betty raised up her arms to cover her face. The match hit. Everywhere the fluid was, it burned. Betty’s clothes went up in flames, her face smoked. Andrea smelled burning flesh and gagged. Betty rolled around and around on the floor, trying to extinguish the fire. The fire ignited the carpet, raced across the floor, and burst into full glory as it enveloped the drapes.

The old wood of the house would go up very easily. The whole mansion would burn down to the ground.

Blackened, sizzling, the Betty-creature raised its evil head off the floor, and cried, “Help me. Please, Andrea, help me.” Andrea was no longer looking at a hybrid monstrosity, but at a feeble human female, her old friend, Betty, harmless Betty, sweet Betty, Betty-on-fire.
Do not be fooled,
Andrea thought. As long as she was thinking, breathing, Betty was still dangerous.

Andrea felt Betty’s mind reaching out, seeking up, down, around.
If I must die,
her mind was saying,
I will take you with me, bitch.

The house was going to be consumed by the flames; there would be another terrible conflagration—but Andrea still had time to make it out the front door, just a few feet, a few seconds, away. The walls had caught fire, and the whole library was ablaze. Smoke began to irritate her eyes, enter her lungs. Betty’s body was lost in the haze. First this room would go—then the others on this floor, then the ones above. The house was doomed.

Coughing and wheezing, Andrea sped toward the front door and safety.

I’ll take you with me, bitch.

There was a tremendous vibration that shook the whole house, coming up from deep in the earth and rocking the mansion on its foundation. Immediately after, there came the thunderous boom of an incredibly powerful explosion that blew the house right off the surface of the island and out of existence. The old house was no more.

Epilogue

Lynn Overman stepped out of the shower in her apartment on Hereford Street and began to dry her body with a fluffy blue towel. Her skin felt cool, tingling, clean. She wiped with a desperate fastidiousness, afraid if she stopped for an instant the thoughts would intrude, the terrible thoughts she’d been having all day.

“I suppose it will be like this for the rest of your life,” she said out loud. She looked at herself in the mirror, put on her bathrobe, and went out into the living room. She sat down on the sofa and wondered what she could do today to keep busy, to keep from brooding. But even if she tried to think of some mind- and memory-numbing activity, the thoughts came flooding back over her and she was back on the dock at Lammerty Island almost a year and a half ago.

They’d found her there screaming, in shock, crying for all the others. Strangely, she had been able to pack her bags, to put all her possessions neatly away and wait quietly on the dock until the man came to pick them up. Only there had been no one to pick up except for her. She was hysterical, overcome by the trauma of the weekend. She’d spent all day and all night Sunday alone on the island. She’d heard the explosion, seen the fire lighting up the sky for miles around. She knew then that the terrible battle between Andrea and Betty had ended in tragedy for both, for all of them—but her. It was as if the island knew she owned it, and had protected its new mistress from harm.

The skipper of the boat had smelled the smoke, saw the ashes floating in the air and covering everything, acres of land, and gone to see for himself. “I heard the boom last night,” he had said, “Didn’t know it had come from
here!”
He shook Lynn by the shoulders. “Were the others in the house? Answer me for God’s sake!” But she had only looked at him and wept. During the voyage to the mainland she had done nothing but moan and sob. They put her in a hospital for awhile. By the time they were ready to question her, they already knew all the answers.

Or thought they did.

Apparently there had been a cavern filled with natural gas situated directly underneath the Burrow’s mansion. As no bodies or living souls were found anywhere on the island, it was assumed that the others had been inside the old house, that somehow a fire had started, and when it hit the leakage from the cavern seeping into the subcellars of the mansion—boom! Everyone had perished. The fire had been so hot, the explosion so severe, that there was absolutely no chance of ever recovering any bodies.

Lynn just nodded her head. “Yes. I guess everyone else was inside the house. I just remember an explosion. Yes.
Yesyesyesyesyes.”

She did not tell them anything about necromancers, books, monster, demons, or murders. If she did, she knew that they would never let her out of the hospital.

But when the dreams, the nightmares, started a few days after her release, she decided to seek professional help. She told her psychologist everything. After five months of therapy, he had all but convinced her that her friends had died in an explosion, and that there had been no necromancer, no murders, no book. And most especially, no trip into the future.

When the day came, the day in which she had supposedly arrived in the future from a year in the past, she stayed in her bedroom all afternoon —and nothing happened. She had not brought that book into the house—who was left to write it now? she had no intention of doing so—and she had not seen a phantom image of herself reaching out from the misty past to grab it off the night-table.

There. She was satisfied. She had been a sick girl, a very sick woman. Delusions. She had not been psychic, only psychotic.

But she was well now. Her friends were dead-killed in a tragic explosion—and she was alive, and that was that. She had been lucky that she had stayed in the guest house that fateful night, though she couldn’t quite remember why she had done so. Probably she had been in her room recovering from a fight with John. She remembered that they had been quarreling that weekend.

And so here she was, a whole year after that same fateful day, the day she was supposed to have arrived in the future. Two years had gone by since she’d made her time trip, and she knew that she was safe, that nothing had ever happened, that there were no demons or maniacs and that the shadowy figure she had thought she’d seen in her bedroom on her journey ahead had never existed, and would never, could never possibly, do her any harm.

It was two p.m. It was around that time that she had sat down on her bed, said those magic words, prepared herself to—

Stop it,
she told herself.
You had been a silly, deluded person then, a fool. But you’re better now. This day should no longer have any special significance for you. Nothing happened last year —and that was the year you supposedly entered the future—so certainly nothing will happen this year. How could it? That whole trip into the future had been nothing but a fantasy, a ridiculous, childish fantasy.

The door bell rang.

Lynn made sure she was properly covered in her robe, and peeked through the peephole. It was a woman. Something familiar about her. An old friend from somewhere? Even talking to a saleslady would be better than spending the afternoon brooding.

Lynn opened the door. “Hello?”

“May I come in, Lynn? I have to talk to you.”

Lynn’s eyes almost popped out of their sockets. She took one good look at the face of the woman in the hall, and felt as if all her carefully structured sanity would come tumbling down in pieces.

Lynn took the chain off the door with trembling hands, stepped back, and let the woman in.

Andrea Peters stepped into the apartment and made herself at home.

“How—how can you be alive? They—they searched the island. The explosion … Everyone was killed.”

Andrea sat down on the sofa, smoothed her skirt. She looked wonderful—with a new hairstyle and bright, fashionable clothes. “Not everyone,” she said. “I managed to get out and away from the house before Betty blew the roof off.”

“The cavern of natural gas …”

“I suppose it was underneath the house, all right. Yes—I’ve read newspaper accounts of the ‘Lammerty Island Tragedy.’ But whether it was the gas or Betty’s—peculiar talents—which blew up the house—or both—I suppose we’ll never know.”

“Where have you been all these months? Why didn’t you let me know you were alive?”