Poltergeist II - The Other Side

IS THERE NO
GETTING AWAY FROM IT?

POLTERGEIST II
THE OTHER SIDE

The Freeling family has moved to Phoenix, far away from their Cuesta Verde home, which was the site of so much mayhem. But they are haunted again, by . . . An angry voice . . . a swarm of bees . . . slime-oozing beasts . . . a walking dead man.

They seek help to free themselves from the unknown terror that haunts them—and find themselves in an adventure no one ever could have dreamed of.

A FREDDIE FIELDS
Presentation of
A VICTOR-GRAIS PRODUCTION

Starring
JOBETH WILLIAMS • CRAIG T. NELSON

POLTERGEIST II
THE OTHER SIDE

HEATHER O’ROURKE • OLIVER ROBINS
JULIAN BECK • ZELDA RUBINSTEIN
WILL SAMPSON • GERALDINE FITZGERALD
Music by
JERRY GOLDSMITH
Director of Photography
ANDREW LASZLO, A.S.C.
Visual Effects Supervisor
RICHARD EDLUND
Executive Producer
FREDDIE FIELDS
Written and Produced by
MICHAEL GRAIS
&
MARK VICTOR
Directed by
BRIAN GIBSON

A Del Rey Book
Published by Ballantine Books

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as "unsold or destroyed" and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.

ISBN 0-345-33382-9
First printing June 1986

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A strong Santa Ana blew over the brush-covered hills and down the canyons of Cuesta Verde, California. The tract houses were spaced so regularly along the roads, they created more of a wind tunnel than a blind, so that the blue pickup truck, on turning into the housing development, seemed almost to be pulled of its own accord—or perhaps with the accord of other, less familiar forces. The man driving the blue pickup was Taylor. A man of less familiar forces.

Taylor was part Hopi, part Anglo, part Navajo—and full brother to the spirits of the earth. Broad in the shoulder, he was yet tall enough to appear wiry; the brown-red weathered furrows of his face seemed sufficiently deep nearly to hide his eyes—just as the dry gullies of the land where he lived sometimes hid flecks of opal, fire agate, or bright obsidian. And such were the colors of his eyes.

But still, a gentle face. A face of many smiles, many sorrows.

In years, he was fifty, though in wisdom twice fifty; and in visions twice that again. It was his custom to wear faded denim, the color of the sky before an autumn rain; and a tan Stetson hat, the color of the same sky clouded by sandstorm; and the feather of an eagle in the hatband; and his black-and-moonlight hair braided in the manner of his people.

He drove the old dented flatbed past a sign that read:
WELCOME TO CUESTA VERDE
—
WHERE DREAMS COME TRUE.
This made him smile and nod.
Bad
dreams, he thought, and fingered his medicine bag.

He drove past house after house, scanning the terrain. It looked unremarkable at first, like any suburban housing development. Except, Taylor remarked, there were no people. The houses were abandoned—some windows boarded, some broken. The lawns were overgrown with crabgrass, dandelions, tall weeds, dead gardens. There were no dogs, no tricycles, no cars. FOR SALE signs flapped in the dry desert wind, their paint peeling after a dozen seasons of sun, rain, dust, and neglect.

It was a modern, middle-class ghost town.

For just a moment, Taylor heard music. Dangerous music, spirit music, like the nocturne of madmen, reedy, full of harmonics. He turned up the next street to follow the sound, but it disappeared. Perhaps it was only the Santa Anas gusting. Still, he knew he was close. Again he touched the amulet he wore around his neck, his rawhide bag of totems.

And then a new sound rose with the dust on the wind: the sound of distant motors, engines in the earth. Taylor drove toward the sound. The sound grew louder.

He reached a cul-de-sac, stopped his truck, took off his hat, got out. The rumbling was palpable; dust swirled thickly all around, almost like smoke, unsettled by the vibrations in the ground, snatched up by the wind.

Taylor walked toward an empty lot between two houses that was surrounded by a high chain-link fence. Lights flashed across his face, bright enough in this twilight to make him squint momentarily—though he was all inside his head now and couldn’t have said whether these lights came from the earthly plane or the other.

When he reached the fence he found the gate open, so he walked in. The rumbling was quite loud there, and the air was thick. He removed the red bandanna from his neck and tied it over his mouth to help him breathe. That’s when he heard the voice.

“Taylor . . . over here . . .”

He walked over a rise toward the voice. Just at the top the lights washed across his face again, but he saw it was the flashing yellow of a bulldozer just rising from a giant pit in the ground, and the flashlights of two workmen in hardhats walking beside it; in front of them, standing tense and breathless, Tangina Barrons.

She spoke again when his gaze came to rest upon her. “I think we’ve found the core,” she shouted over the noise of the bulldozer. Then, suddenly, the motor stopped, and she spoke more quietly: “This is directly below the old graveyard. Directly below . . .”

She turned and walked back into the pit as if Taylor had been standing there for hours, waiting for her pronouncement—as if he would simply follow her now, without salutation or explanation.

He followed her.

She walked to the back of the excavation, to a section where the bulldozer had actually undercut a thick shelf of earth, creating a sizable niche. Sizable, but not so high that Taylor didn’t have to stoop beneath the overhang. This wasn’t a problem for Tangina, of course; she was a dwarf.

This stratum of earth above them had once been a graveyard, and after that, the foundations upon which a house had rested. The Freeling house. Bones protruded from it now: a femur, part of a skull. They were the
recent
occupants of the defunct cemetery, though—hardly fifty years old—and of concern to neither Tangina nor Taylor.

Their concern was the core.

She stopped at a man-size hole in the ground. Here Taylor caught up with her as the two workmen shined their lights down the shaft. Taylor was struck by a sensation of putrescence—almost a smell, but less physical—like an ancient wind rising from this portal. It made Tangina stumble, but she caught herself. Taylor made no move to help her.

One of the workmen descended the ladder into the hole first, to give light and brace the rungs for the others. Tangina followed, then Taylor, then the second hardhat. When she reached the bottom of the small cavern Tangina recoiled—her breathing became labored; she sat down hard. The workmen looked concerned, but Taylor merely observed her, though he could feel with clarity, like her, what the workmen could not.

“There’s a presence,” she whispered to him, unnecessarily. “Something terrible. Too much power . . .”

Too much for her. Not, perhaps, for him. He bent on one knee beside her, touched her forehead tenderly, tried to make available to her some of his spirit.

She could still only whisper, though. “I can’t go on . . .”

It was a hard admission to make, to herself and to her old friend. But hard admissions were her only strength. As if her best armor was to declare her vulnerability out loud. “I’ll be okay,” she went on. She even smiled vaguely. She certainly didn’t want Taylor’s focus diverted because he was worrying about her. “It’s just too much for me right now,” she explained, as if to say that she would soon recover, that he should go on without her.

He nodded, understanding that she would
not
soon recover, that she had been undone by her fear . . . but that he must go on, with or without her, in any case.

He walked down the shallow grade, following the twists of the cavern as it wound deeper into the earth. After a moment’s hesitation, the workmen followed him with their lights; and finally, because she was more afraid to be left alone than she was to go deeper toward the Place, Tangina, too, crept along behind. But she felt cold inside, and she had difficulty making her legs move.

A tunnel took them lower still, to the next cave down. The darkness here was dense and all but swallowed the thin flashlight beams. Taylor felt along a damp, slippery wall, his fingers coaxing, seeing, remembering. Here. No, a little farther, and not so high. He lit a match, held it to the stone. The workmen gasped. “Wow,” one of them whispered.

What they saw were Indian drawings on the rock-face. Pictograms, signs, glyphs. One in particular caught Tangina’s eye instantly—it seemed to take her breath from her. She couldn’t inhale, yet she couldn’t look away from it, couldn’t let it go. It was a picture of a man with a snake writhing from his mouth. Tangina could almost feel the serpent, as if it were coiled down her own throat, choking off her breath, its belly pressing her tongue, its head squirming between her lips. She gagged. She looked away.