Primal Fear (20 page)

“They sacrificed their own children so that the rest of their people might survive.”

“That’s insane, John.  What kind of person—”

“They weren’t savages, if that’s what you’re thinking.  They were doing whatever they felt they had to do to survive.”

“So you condone that, what they did?”

“No.  I never said that.  But think of what someone might be driven to do if the survival of their entire village was at stake.”

“So it begins with death,” Harry whispered, “with the death of those children two hundred years ago.” 

“But I also think Mahuk’s warning was meant to point us toward the truth behind the legend: that when he dies, the demon’s presence on earth will begin again.”  John paused.  “Does that answer your question?”

Harry nodded, letting the subject pass to move on to another.   

And John graciously fielded one question after another, each time giving the impression that he was becoming more comfortable in Harry’s presence.

As for Harry, his earlier skepticism was all but gone, and each question he posed was formed out of genuine interest.  Though he found it difficult to believe in every part of the legend, a position John not only openly supported but admitted to sharing, he could no longer doubt that something much more powerful than his own understanding of reality was at work around them. 

And yet the more he learned, the less certain he felt there was anything that either of them could do to stop it.

Finally, as exhaustion began to overwhelm his fascination, Harry rose to his feet and stretched.  “I think it’s time we called it a night,” he said, yawning.  He walked over to the sliding glass door and pulled back the drapes, flicking on the outside spotlight.

Eight inches of snow covered the deck.  It was falling faster now, the wind pushing it violently past the window, the thousands of flakes dancing wildly through the bright circle thrown by the spotlight.

“If this keeps up, I’m going to call off the search,” Harry muttered.  “At least ‘til the storm passes.”

John moved in beside him, gazing out at the storm.

“One way or another,” he said, “we have to go back to that cave tomorrow.  By morning we may have no choice.”

Harry flipped off the light, letting the drapes fall back into place.  “I can’t make any promises.  We’ll do what we can, but that’s all I can say until I see what it’s like in the morning.”

“I could go myself, if you’d rather—”

“No one is going out there alone,” Harry said, his tone suggesting that there would be no further discussion on the topic.  He motioned for John to follow him, making his way to the bottom of the stairs.  The spare bedroom was just off to his right.

“Laurie made up the bed earlier.  There’s a towel hanging in the bathroom for you if you want to take a shower before turning in.  And feel free to help yourself to anything in the fridge.  Make yourself at home.”

“Thanks, Harry.  I owe you.”

“No problem.  Now get some sleep.  First thing tomorrow morning, I want you to call up that doctor friend of yours, find out how the old man is doing.  We’ll make our plans according to that.”

“Sounds good to me.  Good night.”

John disappeared into the spare bedroom, his duffel bag clutched tightly in his fist.  Climbing the stairs, Harry wondered if either of them would manage to sleep, considering the details of their long discussion.

In the end, however, it was his fatigue that won out, and barely ten minutes after settling into bed, Harry was deep in the arms of sleep.

Chapter Seventeen

It was the sudden cold that pulled Harry from sleep, and an instinctive sense that something was wrong brought him to an instant state of alertness.  Laurie was already awake; he could feel her hand on his shoulder as he peered towards the windows at the far end of the darkened room. 

“Christ, it’s freezing in here,” he hissed.  His gaze settled on the alarm clock beside the bed.

3:11 A.M.

He flung back the covers, intent on making the trip to the cellar to check out the furnace, but Laurie stopped him.

“Listen,” she whispered.  “Can you hear that?  Downstairs.  Somebody’s talking.”

Harry listened carefully, but he could hear nothing beyond the wind as it rushed through the trees beside the house.  He was about to tell her she must have imagined it, but then his ears detected the sound of a low moan.  It had definitely come from downstairs, just as she had said, from the spare bedroom just below their own.

“John must be having a nightmare,” he said.  “It wouldn’t surprise me, considering all the shit we talked about.”

He climbed out of bed, a more familiar sound reaching his ears as he crossed the room to check the windows: the steady hum of the furnace, far below them in the corner of the basement.

Both windows were closed and locked.  Crouching by the dresser that stood between them, Harry ran his hand along the baseboard.  It was warm to the touch.  Whatever the source of the sudden coldness in the house, it certainly had nothing to do with the heating system.

He pulled open a drawer and grabbed a sweatshirt, tugging it over his head to fight the chill.  “Stay here,” he whispered.  “I’ll check the downstairs windows.”

“Be careful.”

From the stairs, he could make out the soft sound of someone whispering, and could see a dim line of light shining along the bottom of the closed door to the spare bedroom.  He turned on the hallway lights and descended quickly.  The cold was more intense here and he could see his breath, wafting out from his face in tiny white puffs of vapor.

“John?” he called, turning his ear to the door and listening intently.  There was no mistaking John’s voice from within the room, speaking quietly and slowly, and though he struggled to hear, Harry couldn’t make out any significant words.  He tried again, this time rapping his knuckles on the door.  “John?  You okay in there?”

Again, there was no answer. 

John rattled on, although this time Harry thought he could perceive a different tone in his voice, a sudden intensity in the cadence of his words.  And something else about him sounded different, too, something Harry had trouble putting his finger on.  It left him with the impression that someone much older than John was speaking to him from the other room, speaking softly in the kind of world-weary tone one could detect in the voice of the elderly.

An alarm went off in the back of Harry’s mind, an association made that he struggled to pin down in his thoughts.  And then a string of words from beyond the door reached his ears and he suddenly felt as though his blood had turned to ice.

“Iti Atae jhi kint atala.”

They were some of the words Slater had uttered in the heat of his attack, words John had later told him were a part of the ritual of summoning.

Harry twisted the knob, shoving the door open with his shoulder and turning to stare into the room.  The bedside lamp had been knocked onto its side, its bulb still burning but flickering intermittently.

John was on his feet beside the bed, clad only in his underwear and moving back and forth in rhythmic succession.  He was turned away from Harry, facing the far corner of the room, the muscles in his back tensed and rippling with effort.

The temperature in the bedroom was close to freezing, though Harry could already see that both windows were tightly closed.  And despite the cold, John’s body was awash in sweat.  It glistened on his back and shoulders, and his hair was plastered to his skull.

Harry’s first instinct was to reach out and turn on the ceiling light, to flood the room with brightness and confront John face to face.  But he couldn’t bring himself to do it, not just yet.  Something in the way John’s back was twisted, and something in the unsettling way in which he was rocking from foot to foot told Harry that he didn’t want to see the young man’s face.

If he turned around, Harry believed it wouldn’t be John staring back at him.  It’d be something else.  Something unnatural.

Harry took a deep breath, trying to shake off his fear.  He took two steps forward, moving slowly towards John but otherwise uncertain what course to take.

“John?  Are you all right?”

John didn’t turn around, his strange litany going on undisturbed.  His hands rose into the air, began transcribing carefully formed patterns in the frigid space in front of him.  From side to side, and then crossing slowly, never touching but clearly a part of the ceremony that he seemed to be performing. 

“Atae!” he called out.

Harry jumped involuntarily at the sound.  From upstairs, he heard the creak of bedsprings and then Laurie’s footsteps as she crossed the room to the doorway.  A moment later, her voice floated down the stairs, filled with concern.

“Harry?  Is everything all right?”

Harry didn’t move, not sure if he should call out to her.  Would John become disturbed if he raised his voice?  The decision was made a second later as he heard Laurie beginning to make her way down the stairs. 

He had no choice now.

“Honey, don’t come down here,” he called, trying to keep his own fear out of his voice.  “Go back upstairs.”

“Are you okay?” she asked.

John stiffened and began to turn slowly towards him.  His hands continued to move, their motions growing faster and more complex.

“Oh shit,” Harry whispered, genuine fear gnawing at his belly.

The overturned lamp flickered twice and then died.  A moment later, the power went out in the rest of the house, leaving Harry in complete blackness just as John’s face was about to swim into view.  Harry listened carefully, trying to determine if John was moving toward him, trying to remain alert in case of a sudden attack.

“I’m not exactly sure what’s going on down here,” he shouted.  “Just go back upstairs and close the bedroom door.”

“Should I call someone?”

He could tell by the pitch of her voice that she was frightened.  But she was doing what he’d told her, turning back towards the relative safety of the bedroom.

Harry considered her question, came to a decision.  “Not yet.”

He heard the bedroom door close upstairs and felt a measure of relief.  The darkness seemed to close in on him, and the temperature dropped even further, leaving him in an icy void that challenged his senses.

He thought he could make out a faint shuffling sound to his left, the same sound John’s bare feet had been making on the carpet only a minute before.  The urge to turn in that direction was terribly strong, but Harry held his ground.  In the dark, he knew, it could be very difficult to pinpoint the exact source of a sound.

He struggled to let his instincts tell him what his senses could not, trying to second guess John’s intentions, to predict his movements.  But nothing came.  Nothing he could act on, in any case.  How could he hope to formulate a plan of defense when he didn’t fully understand what John was up to in the first place?

To his right, closer now, he heard the sound of someone whispering.

Harry cocked his head, otherwise remaining perfectly still.  Had John moved that quickly?  That silently?  He doubted it.  John couldn’t possibly have closed in on Harry’s position so swiftly and in such utter silence.  And that meant—

Harry’s instincts came alive as a floorboard creaked directly ahead of him, from precisely the same point where John had been standing when the lights had gone dead.  He closed his eyes and listened.  A moment later, the sound came again as the weight on the loose board was taken away.

John had just made his first step in Harry’s direction.  Harry knew it like he knew his own name; every fiber of his instinct told him that it was so.

He waited for the next sound, concentrating all of his senses into the simple act of listening.  And there it was, seconds later, the shuffle of a bare foot upon the thick shag rug.

John’s second step. 

Closer.

Harry gauged the distance, estimated that John would be within reach in four or five more steps.  He would attack then, just as John’s silent approach brought him into striking distance.  The outline of a plan began to take shape in his mind.  Whatever had come over John, whether it was a spell or a trance or even the effects of some kind of unknown curse, it had to be broken. 

John’s whispering reached his ears, and Harry trimmed his estimation by a third.  Two more steps now, he calculated, and John would be within easy reach.

He opened his eyes, tensed his muscles, but another sound began to interfere with his perceptions.  It came from outside, out in the raging storm: the rumble of an approaching snow plow as it moved slowly along East Main Street.  Its racket was a distraction, growing steadily louder as it reached the crest of the small hill just half a mile from Harry’s property.

Shutting out the sound was not an option.  It was too loud, too close.  And it had prevented him from hearing John’s last footstep.  For all Harry knew, John could be standing less than a foot and a half away by now.

Outside, the plow grew steadily nearer, moving towards his house from the east, from town.  A glimmer of hope sparked in Harry’s thoughts.  The plow’s easterly approach would soon lead it along the slow curve towards Route 16, a bend in the road that was less than a tenth of a mile from Harry’s property line.  At that point, at the apex of the curve, its lights would be pointed straight at the house.  The spare bedroom would almost certainly be brightened by its approach.

Harry waited silently, his eyes searching the blackness.

The plow reached the turn, its driver downshifting.  The strobe flash of its yellow bubble lights caught the corner of Harry’s eye through one of the slots of the window blinds.  His eyes flicked in that direction involuntarily, a strategic error he identified as soon as he committed it.

He tore his gaze away, turning it once more into the darkness in front of him, but not before it recorded and transmitted a single vital piece of information.  The flashing yellow light moved out of his line of vision just as he looked away, but beyond it he could plainly see the porch lights of the house directly across the road from his own.  They were burning brightly against the gloom of the storm, and he knew for a fact that both homes were serviced by the same transformer.

The storm, for all its fury, was not the cause of the darkness in his home.

Before he could analyze this information or consider its significance, the plow reached the sharpest point of the turn.  The glare from its headlights found the far wall, creating a patch of brightness there, a pattern broken into a series of lines by the slats of the mini-blinds.  Harry held his breath as the snow-plow continued along the curve, its light beginning to slowly traverse the bedroom.

He scanned the shadows for any sign of John’s whereabouts, knowing that sooner or later the light was bound to fall upon him and reveal his position.

He would be quite close, Harry knew.  The coldness had seemed to grow worse as John had drawn closer, as if he were its epicenter.  Now it seemed almost unbearable, so profoundly frigid that Harry felt as if he’d stepped outside, into the grip of the storm. 

The light was almost upon him, slanting crazily in a diagonal path across the wall.  Harry’s eyes darted back and forth, his hands clenching into fists by his sides.  He felt uncertain now, confused by John’s absence. 

A few seconds later, the light found Harry.  He jerked his head to the left, away from the windows, trying to shield his eyes from the brightness.

John’s face hovered in the blackness in front of him, surely no more than a foot away and washed a ghastly white by the snow-plow’s headlights.  His mouth was twisted into a feral scowl, his teeth bared and glistening.  His right eye had gone completely white.  The other glared at Harry, filled with hatred, reflecting a rage that was barely under control, but was about to be let free.

Harry spun towards him.  He sensed John’s hands coming up before he actually saw them, and he reacted instantly, bringing his own arms into a position to block the younger man’s attack. 

Outside, the snow-plow passed them by completely, plunging the room into total darkness once again.  Harry used the blackness as a cover and made his move.

He launched himself at John, crashing into his chest and managing to pin his left arm to his side.  John grunted, a guttural sound that was nearly inhuman.  Harry ignored it, using his momentum to shove John towards the bed, hoping to push him off balance.

But John scarcely budged.  His free hand lashed out at Harry, catching him square in the temple.

The blow was staggering, much more powerful than Harry had anticipated.  A bright flash of stars exploded behind his eyes and he shook his head quickly, trying to clear them away.