Nightmare Child (15 page)

"He's there now."

"Yes. And that's why you've got to stop me."

"Stop you?"

Jenny nodded. "If you don't stop me, I won't…be in control, Aunt Diane. There's something inside me that—"

It was all so crazy. Diane wasn't even sure she was quite awake yet. Wind slammed at the windows. The digital clock made faint ratcheting sounds as it turned over its big luminous numbers. Diane reached out for Jenny and started to speak; but then a voice that could not possibly be Jenny's issued from the young girl's mouth.

"It's too late," the voice said. "It's too late."

And then a sound not unlike throaty laughter issued from Jenny's mouth, and Diane, screaming, fell back on the bed.

After beating him, they put him in the closet, promising him that he would prove useful later. The naked Mindy, touching her breasts as she spoke, seemed especially eager to see Clark again. It had been she who'd stopped Jeff from stabbing the police Chief to death.

The closet: utter, unyielding darkness, except for a thin line of moonlight between door and floor; dust motes that made him sneeze a few times; the hems of women's dresses brushing his shoulders.

He had no idea how long he'd been in there. Twenty minutes…two hours. It could easily be either.

He wondered where they had gone, shuddering as he thought about them: their open sores, their crazed eyes, their psychotic laughter. He knew now that whatever Diane had told him about this house was true…

Down the hall he heard distant, muffled sounds, but what they were he could not tell from there.

He sat forward, the clothesline binding his wrists and ankles together, pulling tight, cutting into his skin.

He slammed his head against the louvered closet door. It was the only way he was going to get it open. He had slammed his head three times when he heard the wailing start…

At first, it sounded as if an animal had been mortally wounded. The one thing that kept Clark from being a hunter was the suffering he'd seen animals go through. This sound was like that…an animal on a tightrope across the dark abyss of death…Only gradually did he learn that the sound was human.

Moonlight fell through the louvered door, casting faint bars on his face. Sweat in beads stood on his forehead. His bulky jaw muscles contracted as he listened to the wailing and the shrieking grow even worse.

Abruptly, footsteps began slapping down the hall toward this room, toward this closet…

"Oh, God! Help me! Help me!" A female voice screamed over and over.

He heard her fall through the door, cracking bones as she slammed to the floor.

"Oh, God!" She said, again and again, helpless curse, helpless prayer.

She began sobbing then, and all he could liken it to was the mother he'd had to inform one lovely July afternoon that both her young sons had drowned in a sandpit. He hadn't thought he'd ever get the woman to stop crying—she had literally torn out handfuls of her own hair—or to sit inside the squad car while he summoned an ambulance as much for her as for the dead boys…

She flung herself against the closet door, shattering it.

"Help me! Help me!" she cried.

Mindy tore the door away in pieces and stood there before him, naked, her body still covered with wounds and sores, but her ghoulishness was gone.

"Help me!" She screamed.

"I can't." He tried to show her the clothesline they'd lashed to his body.

"Oh, God!" she said, and fell to the floor, starting to untie him immediately.

She smelled so badly that he had to hold his breath. He cringed when some of the juices from her wounds sprayed across his face.

"I'm sorry we did this to you," she said. "It wasn't…us. It was Jenny."

"Jenny?"

"I know you don't believe that right now. But you will, you will."

Finished untying him, she helped him to his feet. They stood in a bedroom made silver by moonlight. When he stood away from her, he could smell sweet sachet on a dressing table.

"I don't know what to do," she said, walking around in frustrated circles. "I can't call the emergency ward. They'll send somebody out and—"

"You need to calm down and tell me what's wrong."

"It's Jeff. He's…going into one of his seizures she puts him in."

"Who puts him in?"

She glared at him as if he were the crazy one. "Why, Jenny, of course."

"Little Jenny—the one I saw tonight?"

She laughed bitterly. "Little Jenny. Oh, that's a good one. You'll have to tell that one to Jeff."

Just then there was a scream from down the hall that raised goose bumps on Clark's arms.

"Jeff!" she cried.

"Come on," Clark said, and ran out of the room and into the dark hall.

Mindy, sobbing, said, "We've got to help him before Jenny gets back here. She plans to kill us tonight—including you."

Her words only made Clark run that much faster.

It began as spasms, Jenny shaking uncontrollably as she stood in the dim light coming through the curtains.

Diane, dressed now in jeans and a sweat shirt and Reeboks, went immediately to Jenny and started to put her arms around her.

"Jenny, let me help you."

The voice that came from the small girl's mouth was no longer her own. It was masculine and throaty and ugly. "It's starting, Aunt Diane. The demon—"

Despite the warning, Diane threw her arms around Jenny and drew the girl to her. Even though her voice had changed, her frail body was familiar, and Diane hugged her.

"Do you remember when you used to come over and watch me make cookies?" Diane said, hoping that her recollection of more pleasant times would help Jenny. "And when you used to come over and sit on my lap and I'd read you Nancy Drew? I don't think you really understood Nancy, but you wanted me to keep on reading anyway. Do you remember that, Jenny?"

Diane had started to cry, the tears warm and full on her cheeks, because she could feel, there in her arms, a terrible transformation take place.

The demon was taking Jenny.

Diane, holding all the tighter, said, "Is there anything I can do, Jenny?"

"Pray for me, pray for me," Jenny said in her terrible, deep voice.

Before, her flesh had been cold. Now it was warm, almost fever-hot.

Diane began praying, random Hail Mary's, Our Fathers, holding Jenny as hard as she could.

"I don't want to kill Mindy and Jeff, even though they killed me," Jenny said. "Please don't let me kill them, Aunt Diane. Please stop me."

A powerful hand gripped Diane's shoulder suddenly and she was flung across the bedroom.

In Jenny's place stood a miniature crone, a witchlike creature of seething red eyes and stubby black teeth and crooked limbs. She had the shriveled, naked body of a very old woman, her breasts drooping sacks, her back bent, her fingers twisted arthritically.

She leaped at Diane now, slapping her with incredible force directly across the face, then pressing her gnarled hands to her shoulders and burning her in some method Diane did not understand. Screaming, reeling from pain, Diane smelled her own flesh sear from the witch's touch.

In the deep voice, but now grown even deeper, the witch said, "Only because the little girl loves you so much will I spare you. But don't try to stop me in any way or you will die. Do you understand?"

The hag moved toward the window, a grotesque shape in silhouette against the moonlit curtains.

She turned back toward Diane once and said, in a voice curiously softer now, "The little girl is struggling to take control again. She wants you to know how much she loves you."

Then the hag threw herself against the window, glass falling in shattered, silver pieces to the snowy ground below, and was gone in the whipping wind that came in through the smashed window frame.

Diane, sobbing now, pulled herself to her feet and began running down the stairs to the ground floor.

All she could think about was the witch's pledge to kill. And that could easily mean she would kill Robert Clark as well.

She ran out into the bitterly cold, but surprisingly bright, night, and kept on running until she reached the
McCay
house.

Jeff
McCay
lay writhing on the hallway floor. Bent over him, his wife, Mindy, kept calling his name.

Robert Clark knelt down next to her to see if he could help the man.
McCay
seemed to be choking. His hands were at his throat, as if he were trying to dislodge a piece of trapped food.

Clark took the man's hands away. Jeff
McCay
looked up at him with startled, terrified eyes. Clark had seen this kind of panic many times before in 'Nam. A man was injured and all he wanted to know from the medic was, A
m I going to live?

Gasping, grasping at air, thrashing about insanely, Jeff
McCay
looked over at his wife and started sobbing.

She leaned past Clark and took her husband in her arms.

"This is how it's been," Mindy said there in the darkness of the hall. "We know she's going to kill us because we killed her. But she punishes us. She almost made Jeff commit suicide the night he ran out of here naked. She puts spells on us, like this one where he seems to be choking to death. I had a period so bloody I had to sit in the bathtub, and twice my whole body broke out with sores. And you saw how she turns us into ghouls. That's why we could never have company—or go to the police —because every time we tried, she would do something to prevent us. All she's done since she came back is torture us."

Jeff continued to cry out and gasp in his wife's arms.

Downstairs, glass smashed in the living room.

"God, it's her!" Mindy cried, and grabbed Clark with one hand, her other holding her arm. "Please help us! Please!"

Clark got to his feet and pulled out his service revolver, already sensing that it was going to do him little if any good.

Even up there, the air was choked, fetid. He could smell the presence of a demon. A disbeliever, he'd once been called to a house where a demonic infestation had taken place. He'd remained skeptical but there was one thing he'd been unable to dismiss, and that was the peculiar and terrible odor of the place. He found himself feeling nauseated as he moved carefully down the hallway to the staircase.

Footsteps crunched into broken glass somewhere in the living room. Irregular breathing, almost wheezing, could be heard against the whistling sound of the wind.

Reaching the stairs, Clark put one hand on the banister for support and with the other raised his service revolver, ready for whatever lay ahead.

The entire house was a deep pool of shadows. He felt he was being submerged, perhaps even drowned, in them. One step at a time, he continued his descent to the first floor.

Creaking wood made him start. His entire body was instantly bathed in a sticky sweat. He'd had no idea how terrified he'd become.

Reaching the bottom of the steps, he began to scan the gloom, to see if he could find one thing wrong, one thing that would show him where Jenny might be.

Shapes of furniture, the fireplace, the heavy, closed drapes appeared. His stomach and bowels were doing terrible things as he pressed deeper into the room. This was not the kind of fear he liked to admit to himself. He felt impossibly young and helpless, as if at any moment he might drop his revolver and begin crying out for help.

A noise caused him to spin around, drop to one knee and aim his revolver.

Hammer back, ready to fire, he watched the alcove to the right of the dining room, and it was there that she appeared.

She was as he remembered her, an innocent-looking little girl with freckles and pigtails. Her prim blue dress touched her knees, and her white anklets and black patent leather shoes were perfectly cared for.

She moved toward him in the center of a soft blue glow. She put her hand out to him and smiled. "You're afraid, aren't you, Robert?"

And he heard himself—as if from a great distance—saying, "Yes, Jenny, I am."

"There's no reason to be. You're with the forces of good now."

"The forces of good?"

She raised her lovely eyes to the floor above them. "You saw what the forces of evil do to people. Now you'll be with me and everything will be all right."

"With you?" He wasn't sure what she meant. All he knew was that her voice had a peculiarly soothing effect on him, almost like a drug.

"Yes," she said, moving even closer, "with me."

She put a hand out, touched his face. He still knelt on one knee. The palm of her hand was tender and warm, comforting on his cheek.

She leaned forward and put her small, damp mouth in to kiss on his forehead.

"You'll be with me now," she said again.

And he thought of summer days and lush green foliage and clear blue mountain streams and cardinals and jays that frolicked on the soft clean air.

"With you," he repeated. "With you."