Night Things: A Novel of Supernatural Terror (6 page)

“But that won’t take long, will it?”

He grinned sheepishly. “I hope not. But you know how Marty is.”

Once the plan no longer included Stephen, Garrett became more amenable to Lauren’s suggestion, and after she finished cleaning up they went out onto the veranda to sit. To Lauren’s delight the night was now alive with the stridulations of insects and the cool mountain air was even more redolent with the smell of pines than before, but all of this seemed lost on Garrett. He remained as withdrawn as ever, so much so that by the time she tucked him in that night, leaving him to contend with the darkness of the house armed with no more than a First Alert flashlight, she had grown quite concerned.

When she entered the master bedroom, her own flashlight clenched tightly in her hand, she saw Stephen had left only one large candelabrum burning on a nightstand and was already in bed.

“So how did your phone call go?” she asked.

“Fine.”

“Did you get the ad withdrawn?”

“No, I got the junior exec fired.”

She looked at him with surprise. “Over one mistake? Isn’t that a bit drastic?”

He smiled at her gently. “Honey, that’s the way the game is played. Part of the reason I’ve gotten where I am today is that I’ve controlled my image very carefully. The only way I can maintain that sort of control is to run a tight ship. I just can’t afford to allow slipups like that.” She understood his reasoning, but the severity of his action seemed a little extreme. Finally, realizing she had much more pressing concerns than worrying about the fate of the junior exec, she returned her attention to the matter at hand.

“Stephen, I’m worried about Garrett,” she said as she slipped off her shoes.

He rolled over in the sheets, his face half eclipsed in the circle of light cast by the candelabrum. “Why?”

She clicked off the flashlight and started to unbutton her blouse.

“I don’t know... after the way the evening ended I just felt a little funny leaving him all alone in a strange house without electricity.”

“He’s not all alone.”

“You know what I mean,” she said as she slipped out of her dress.

Stephen snorted and then reached out to pull her into the bed. As he did so he pulled free from the sheets. The golden sheen of the candlelight on his naked and wellmuscled torso was arousing, but she avoided his grasp.

He seemed to get the point and sat up in the bed. “Okay, so did Garrett say he was afraid?”

“Nooo,” she drawled as she took off the last of her clothing and put on a light silk robe.

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that I’m not so sure he would tell me if he was afraid. He can be a very proud little boy. Sometimes its like trying to pry secrets out of the devil to get him to talk.”

Stephen exhaled loudly. “So what do you suggest we do?”

She looked at him, a trifle irritated, then suddenly it hit her that perhaps he had been more unnerved by what Garrett had said than she had realized. “Garrett’s little talk about getting aboard UFOs really got to you, didn’t it?”

“Sort of,” he conceded. “Didn’t it bother you a bit?”

“A bit, but it’s all part of being a little boy.”

“I understand,” he said too quickly, and something in the tone of his voice seemed unconvincing. “Well, why did
you
get upset by what he said about UFOs?”

The question intrigued her. In fact, she had been puzzling over its various and possible answers all night and had finally started to form an opinion about it. “I think it might be because of the time period I was raised in,” she said enigmatically.

Her answer confused him. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you know, when we were growing up all the monsters and alien spacemen in the movies were bad. Now they’re all good guys. If you see a movie in which a kid meets something coming out of a spaceship, you know it’s going to be his best friend. I guess it’s just a different way of looking at things.”

“But is it a good way of looking at things?” Stephen countered.

Lauren gazed meditatively off into the distance, the cogs of her writer’s mind now turning. “I don’t know. At some level of the collective human psyche we seem to have decided it’s a good way of looking at things. At least that’s the attitude we’re allowing to surface in our modern myths, our movies. But is it a good way of looking at things? I mean, if we really were to learn that a flying saucer was approaching the earth, should we ignore the possibility it might be hostile and allow it to land without interference? Or should we deem that too great a risk to take and shoot first and ask questions later?”

Stephen snorted. “Sounds safer to shoot first, I think.”

“But what if it
was
friendly?” she asked. “What if it possessed the knowledge and wisdom to propel us light-years ahead in our evolution and welcoming it with open arms turned out to be the best decision we ever made?”

“That’s a long shot.”

“But how can you be so sure?”

“They’ll probably be from the extraterrestrial equivalent of Hollywood, so by nature they’ll be aggressive.” He laughed.

“Oh, Stephen!”

“Oh, what?”

She was just about to say something else when he reached for her again and this time managed to catch hold of her and pull her onto the massive canopied bed.

“Stephen!” she objected with surprise, but before she could say anything else he had drawn up over her and was staring at her with such intensity she fell silent. She wanted to talk some more, but as she looked at the way the candlelight gleamed on his hair and the musculature of his shoulders she felt her resolve slipping away. An amused glint came into his eyes as he seemed to sense the power he had over her, and with one deft move he pushed her robe back over her shoulders. With mesmerizing grace he traced his finger down her neck and along the side of her breast as he started to kiss her, first gently, but then more roughly.

Becoming increasingly aroused, she grabbed his chest and moved her hands down the sides of his rib cage, but when she reached the well-defined muscles of his legs and then went to reach between them, he stopped her. “Don’t worry about me,” he whispered as he kissed down the side of her neck. “Tonight I only want you to be happy.” He gently eased her back into the pillows as he continued to move down her body, kissing first her breasts and then her stomach as his hand moved up the inner surface of her thigh.

He continued to move over her with such skill and sensitivity that by the time they were locked together and were rocking back and forth in the feverish, almost frantic tempo of their lovemaking, she was racked with waves of pleasure.

The candles had long since burned out when they finally finished, and after he had collapsed and drifted beyond exhaustion and into sleep beside her, she lay awake for a little while longer and simply savored the memory of how he made her feel.

Stephen made love better than any man she had ever been with, even Miklos. Every time was different. Sometimes he advanced slowly, engaging in only the gentlest foreplay until she was so excited she could barely stand it. Sometimes he read poetry to her, or seduced her by arranging just the right romantic setting. And sometimes, like tonight, he was forceful, almost brutish. But always he seemed to know exactly how to go about fulfilling his own needs while still being sensitive to hers. He touched her in just the right places. He intuited when and where he needed to be gentle, and when he could be rough.

She looked at him in the moonlight. She loved him so much she almost ached. This pleased her, but it also frightened her. Every time their lovemaking reached some new height, she realized anew how much power he had over her, and sometimes she even found herself wondering how he had learned to be such a consummate lover. How many women had he known before her? She had never asked, but she knew there had to have been many. His prowess as a ladies’ man was well known, and she had seen the legions of groupies that waited for him whenever he performed. For a few seconds this thought troubled her, and she snuggled up closer to him. But she was able to reflect on it only a moment longer before she too drifted off to sleep, lulled by the plaintive and distant cries of a whippoorwill.

For Garrett, falling asleep was difficult. For several minutes after his mother tucked him in he brooded about how badly he had botched his attempt to get Stephen to reveal himself. But then slowly, as his attention shifted to the fact that he was all alone in the darkness of the room, he began to get scared. At first he tried to ignore his growing unrest. He assured himself that there was nothing to be afraid of. But as the chatter of his own thoughts quieted, he became increasingly aware of the sounds of the night, the scratch-ings of the pine needles against the sides of the house, and the
chree chree
of the katydids and other insects.

He considered sleeping with the flashlight on, but it occurred to him that if the batteries ran down before morning he might wake in the middle of the night with no light at all—a possibility too horrible even to contemplate. Next he considered calling out to his mother, but this seemed to offer only a temporary reprieve at best, and it also meant revealing his fear of the darkness to Stephen, which was simply out of the question. Finally, not knowing what else to do, he pulled the sheet, blanket, and bedspread up over his face and fashioned them into a sort of mask, leaving only an open space around his nose so that he could breathe.

Enclosed in his cocoon he resolved to make an earnest effort to fall asleep and for a few moments felt secure. But then the sounds of the night closed in on him once again. Outside he heard something splash in the lake, and the wind rustled mournfully through the pines. The house itself seemed to take on new and eerie life. Here and there it creaked and popped as if it had only been slumbering— the darkness had awakened it and urged it now to flex its sinews and its joints. Somewhere in the distance something snapped. A minute later and farther away a window rattled. And farther still, deep within the very bowels of the house, timbers creaked and moaned as if stressed by forces they were only barely able to contain.

With each new sound his fear increased until he was gripped by such panic that he thought he would have to scream. He was also starting to become unbearably hot under the weight of so many covers and wanted more than anything to kick them off. But he was too frightened to move. It seemed like an eternity before he finally drifted into the comforting oblivion of his own unconsciousness.

He did not know how long he had been asleep when something woke him.

For a moment he was disoriented and stared confusedly around the room, wondering why everything seemed so unfamiliar. But when he finally pieced together where he was, a dark tide of terror swept over him once again.

Had he heard a sound?

He listened and heard nothing save for the whispering of the pines outside.

But then, as he lay awake in bed, his hands sweating and his heart pounding, he became aware of a movement.

It was still some distance away, and the sound it made was not the sound of footsteps, nor even a faint scraping or rustling. In fact, it was not a sound at all. But somehow he knew that something was in the hall to the right of the room. He could discern the slow and measured pace of its approach. And yet the precise nature of his perception remained a mystery to him.

Was it his imagination?

No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than every fiber of his being told him it was not. Desperately he tried to decipher how or why he knew what he knew, and suddenly it occurred to him that he was
feeling
the presence of the thing, its proximity—just as one might feel the nearness of a heated object, a hot poker. Only it was not heat that he was sensing, but power. Whatever the thing was, it was so powerful that its presence could be felt even through the wall that separated his room from the hall.

And still it drew closer.

His terror growing, he considered yelling for help. But it occurred to him that perhaps the thing did not know he was there. Perhaps it was only making some routine transit of the house and by calling for help he might alert it to his presence.

Suddenly he remembered the flashlight. It was just a few feet away on the night table. If he could reach it without making the bed creak.... Perhaps he could blind the thing with the beam of light long enough to allow him to escape. His senses told him the thing was now only about twenty feet from his room and closing in fast.

He started to pull his hand out from under the covers, but the mattress springs squeaked slightly, and he stopped. He once again inched his hand upward, but he knew he had to move quickly. Now the thing was only about ten feet from his door. Finally, he pulled his hands free of the blanket and felt a rush of exhilaration, but it was too late. The door to his bedroom burst open with such force he expected to hear it bang into the wall. Only it did not. There was only an eerie silence as the thing swept into the room.

For a second he thought he had screamed. At least he felt his mouth had opened wide with terror. But then he realized his larynx, indeed every muscle in his body, was paralyzed. Only his eyes were free of the deadly spell, and in the moonlight he could see quite clearly the open door and the darkness of the hallway beyond. And for the first time he saw the intruder.