Night Things: A Novel of Supernatural Terror (18 page)

But finally he drew close to the very window itself, and as he did so Fugate’s ranting became clearer.

“... why?” he implored. “Why do you have to do this to me?... I don’t want to... it’s not me...”

Garrett leaned forward so he could see the room a little better. It was even more filthy and cluttered than it had appeared through the telescope. Here and there on the crumbling plasterboard walls were great swathes of dirt and grimy handprints, and there was such a thick accumulation of garbage and moldering refuse on the floor that Fugate had been forced to carve several trenches through it just so he could still walk through the room. There was also a smell, faint but gagging, like the stench of an animal den, save that it was disturbingly human, with traces of urine, sweat, and feces.

The smell revolted Garrett, but before he had time to think about what it meant, Fugate suddenly passed so close to the window Garrett was forced to jerk his head back to keep from being seen. Even so, as Fugate passed, Garrett caught a good enough glimpse of him to tell that he was just as dirty and unkempt as the cabin he lived in. His hair was greasy and matted, and his skin was white and beaded with perspiration. His eyes looked as though he had not slept in days. They were so reddened and desperate that Garrett was doubly convinced that the secret Fugate harbored was not of this earth.

Seeing that Fugate once again had his back toward him, he leaned forward again. But still Fugate’s adversary remained just out of his sight. Finally, Fugate stopped and buried his face in his hands, apparently replaying precisely the same scene Garrett had witnessed through the telescope the night before. Garrett felt a thrill of anticipation, for he knew that any moment Fugate would begin to scuffle with his mysterious captive, and Garrett would see once and for all what sort of being or creature it was.

True to form, Fugate screamed and lunged, and wrestled his opponent into view. To Garrett’s horror, Fugate was not only tussling with it, but strangling it, viciously, and Garrett’s concern for the hapless creature nearly caused him to cry out. Until he saw what the thing was. For it was not a space being, or even something living, that Fugate was choking, but some sort of grotesque doll or manikin of a woman. The reason it had looked so awkward to him through the telescope was that it was completely rigid and appeared to be constructed out of vinyl and inflated like a beach ball. It was also naked and possessed a frowsy and garishly made-up face and had scruffy patches of lurid yellow hair on both its head and its pubic area.

A ring of grime had built up around the doll’s neck, and it was clear from the layers of black fingerprints that Fugate had performed this bizarre strangulation in effigy countless times before.

The sight filled Garrett with such shock and disquiet that he stumbled backward and tripped over the rake behind him, causing it to fall and crash against the ground. In a flash, he pinned himself up against a pile of planks leaning against the cabin, hoping Fugate had not heard him.

“What the...?” he heard the man exclaim inside.

Even at his distorted angle he could see Fugate pressing his face up against the glass and scanning the landscape to try to see what had made the sound. For several seconds Garrett remained motionless, hoping against hope that Fugate would just chalk up the sounds to some prowling animal. But suddenly Fugate’s eyes met his, and his hopes were dashed.

Fugate let out a gravelly and gurgling scream of rage, and instantly Garrett broke into a run, charging back down the drive as fast as his legs would carry him.

To his horror he heard the door to the cabin burst open behind him, and he looked back briefly to see Fugate, still screaming like some crazed demon, bounding out into the darkness after him. Garrett ran as he had never run before, his feet hitting the ground with such force that every bone in his body felt as if it were being jarred out of its socket.

He had gotten a considerable head start on Fugate, but even as the cabin vanished in the distance behind him he could tell from the impact of Fugate’s footsteps that he was closing on him. Blind with terror and not knowing what else to do, he turned off the drive and dashed into the forest. As he did so, memories of all the dangers Mr. Foley had warned him about—blackwater swamps, hemlock bogs, snakes, and other sundry menaces—all came rushing back to him. But he did not care,
could
not care, for even as he managed to negotiate an unusually dense and bramble-infested thicket, he could tell by the crashing sounds in the distance that Fugate had turned off the drive and was following him into the woods.

It was dark in the forest—the moonlight came through only in patches, and when it did it seemed abnormally bright and unearthly—but still Garrett pressed on. Calling on every instinct and sense of bearing he possessed, he tried to head in the direction of the highway. And finally, to his amazement and relief, he made it.

When he did, he stopped and listened carefully, but suddenly the night seemed eerily silent and portentous. He did not know if that meant Fugate was no longer following him, or if it meant instead that Fugate had only temporarily lost his bearings and had stopped to listen until he had once again determined Garrett’s precise location. Terrorized by the notion that the latter might be the case, Garrett decided to remain hidden for a while until he was certain that he had actually lost Fugate. And although the highway ahead of him gleamed temptingly in the moonlight, he dropped to his haunches behind a clump of bushes at the edge of the road. And he listened and waited.

As the wind picked up, once again the house began to creak and moan, setting Lauren’s already frazzled nerves even more on edge. In her unhinged state she decided that if she did not do something to try to get her mind off her worries she might snap completely. Having been reminded of her purchases at Clearwater Lodge by Garrett’s request for the book on hiking trails, she went over to the occasional table and picked up the book on the great camps of the Adirondacks. So many things had happened since she had bought it that she hadn’t even had a chance to look at it, and she hoped that it might provide some distraction.

She turned to the table of contents and saw that each chapter was devoted to a different great camp, and Clearwater Lodge was one of the names listed. She also noticed with surprise that there were more great camps in the Adirondacks than she had suspected. As she read down the list she marveled at the strangeness of some of their names: Cathead Hall, Gunga D’inn, The Willows, St. Regis Point. And Chapter 21 in the book covered none other than Lake House itself.

Flipping quickly through the pages, she located the section and began to read:

Built between the years 1884 and 1890 by Sarah Balfram, the daughter of the industrialist and railroad tycoon Josiah Balfram, Lake House is believed to be the largest of the great camps in the Adirondacks. Although no precise tally of its vital statistics exists, it is thought to contain at least 160 rooms, 1,010 doors, 129 staircases, 58 fireplaces, and over 9,500 windows and skylights.

She scanned quickly over the text, trying to determine if it contained anything she didn’t already know:

... one of the more intriguing features of the house is the peculiarity of its design... wildly Victorian... abounding with stairways that lead nowhere and miles of meandering hallways... Although no one knows what inspired Sarah Balfram to construct Lake House the way she did, it is assumed to have had something to do with her pronounced religious fanaticism.

Lauren paused, a rush of excitement passing through her at having her theory confirmed, and then she read on:

But the strangest thing about Lake House is the extraordinary amount of bloodshed that has taken place within its walls. Only months after the house’s completion, Sarah Balfram’s fiancé, Viktor Oelrich, was shot to death in the house (presumably by Sarah’s father, Josiah, although the latter subsequently disappeared and was never heard from again). In 1923, Hollywood director Desmond Hunt was stabbed to death during a party given at the house by silent-film star Mae Norman, an event which culminated in a scandal that ended Miss Norman’s career. Since then a remarkable number of other murders have occurred at the house: the Krafft family massacre in 1929, the Ponzi murders in 1937 (as well as the subsequent murder of Duke Donovan, the Pinkerton detective who investigated the Ponzi murders, also in 1937), the shooting of Ann and Marie Rouchard by an unknown assailant in 1952, the bludgeoning deaths of Wall Street commodities broker Sol Morgenthau and family in 1964, and the death by misadventure of a local teenager named Tom Pearson, who broke into the house in 1979 to do some exploring and apparently fell down a set of stairs.

Lauren read the litany with astonishment, each grisly entry only increasing her horror. When she finished, her thoughts were in such turmoil that whatever vestiges of rationality she had possessed were now completely gone. She threw the book savagely across the room, as if getting rid of it as quickly as possible might somehow defuse its shattering revelations. Absurdly, the first thing that surfaced in the jumble of her thoughts was anger at the fact that no one had told her the truth about Lake House before. And because she was already so upset with Stephen and did not know where he was, the main focus of her rancor became the shopgirl, Amy.

Storming into the coachmen’s waiting room, she picked up the telephone and dialed Clearwater Lodge. At first, static clouded the line, but then it cleared and the line rang. When a male voice answered, she asked for Amy.

“I’m sorry, Amy’s gone home for the day,” the male voice returned amid a crackle of intense static. “Can I help you with something?”

“No!” Lauren shouted. “I need to speak to Amy!”

The voice on the other end of the line paused. “Well, could I take a message then and have Amy call you back tomorrow?”

Outside the wind picked up, and deep within the house there came the familiar long and baleful groaning of timbers.

“No!” Lauren gasped, now nearly whimpering. “It’s very important I speak to her now. Can’t you give me her home phone number?”

“I’m sorry, we’re not allowed to give employees’ telephone numbers out to guests—”

“I’m not a guest!” she shrieked, and the desperation in her voice finally convinced him.

“Okay, okay, I’ll give it to you.” There was the sound of papers shuffling and then he came back on the telephone and gave her the number.

“Thank you,” she said weakly and then hung up. But before she could dial the number there was another long crackle of static and she had to wait for almost a minute before it cleared. When it did, she dialed the number quickly, for she realized from the way the telephone was acting that it was definitely not reliable.

After waiting for half an hour and hearing nothing to indicate Fugate was anywhere nearby, Garrett decided to risk pushing on, and he crept quietly out from behind the bushes where he was hiding. When he reached the highway he stopped and listened again, just to make certain Fugate was not crashing out of the underbrush after him. But still hearing nothing, he tore off down the road as fast as he could run.

He ran until it felt as if his lungs were going to burst, and then he ran some more. At first as he ran he was still too gripped by fear to think about anything. But as he put more and more distance between himself and Fugate’s cabin, he began to ponder the implications of what he had seen. Now he knew his theory about Fugate’s harboring some sort of friend or ally to the thing was wrong, so he was again in the dark as to why it had been so anxious to learn what was going on in Fugate’s cabin. Indeed, given how wrong he had been in his assessment of the situation, suddenly all of his assumptions were upset, and as his wits slowly returned to him, he was besieged by other questions. Had the thing suspected from the beginning that Fugate was unbalanced? And if so, what was it about Fugate’s madness that it found so intriguing? And even more important, if it had suspected Fugate’s insanity from the beginning, why hadn’t it warned him to be careful?

These questions circled around and around in his head. A part of him resisted believing the thing had known about Fugate beforehand, but another part of him gave way increasingly to anger and the vague but growing feeling that somehow he had been betrayed. As his anger deepened, he began to confront the most difficult issue of all. Perhaps the thing was not an extraterrestrial or galactic castaway at all, but something far more inexplicable and sinister.

It seemed like an eternity before he finally reached the house, and when he did he was hyperventilating in great, hungry gulps. Fearful that the loudness of his breathing might attract his mother’s attention, he used every ounce of his will to quell his gasping as he stealthily opened the front door.

Once inside he heard his mother talking animatedly on the telephone in the coachmen’s waiting room. Locking the door quietly behind him, he tiptoed past and crept upstairs. When he reached his bedroom he once again allowed his lungs to continue their hungry gulping, but instead of going into his room he went past it until he came to the end of the hall. His mind was in such a ferment he felt he would explode if he did not get some answers to his questions, and rather than waiting for the thing to come to him, he decided to seek it out instead.

Turning left, he started down the hallway which ran along the eastern side of the house. Its right wall was dotted with windows, and its furnishings appeared ghostly blue in the moonlight. It also extended so far back into the house that its end seemed to vanish in the gloom, and for a moment he considered turning the lights on. But not wanting to do anything that might dissuade the thing from coming, he decided against the idea.

After walking far enough down the hallway that his mother could no longer hear him, he stopped, and then with a force and intensity of emotion that surprised even him, he shouted:

“Where are you?”

At first he sensed nothing, and he shouted again. But then, slowly, his skin began to prickle as he felt the thing approach.