The Dark: A Collection (Point Horror) (10 page)

"We keep each other
brave."

He was about to kiss
her. Suddenly a big black car rammed into their back bumper. The
impact knocked them both hard against the dashboard.

Harry spun around. He
slammed his foot down on the gas pedal. The Rambler took off with a
lurch.

Bianca barely had
time to clutch on to the seat to keep herself from being knocked
about. "What's — what's happening?"

Gone was the hurt
look. Harry was biting down on his lip in concentration as he tried
to make the old Rambler speed up.

She glanced over her
shoulder. The other car was following them all too closely. She
remembered thinking that she'd heard a car behind them a long way
back.

"Harry, I've got
to tell you something." She was overwhelmed by a panicky feeling as
he passed the turn off to her house on the left in his attempt to
escape. "Maybe you'd better let me out. That car is after me, not
you." There were certain things that she hadn't gotten around to
telling Harry during their true confessions.

"What on earth are
you talking about?" He kept his eyes fixed on the road.

"The killer
cornered me in the ladies' lounge at the theater and turned the
lights out. He threatened to kill me if I told anybody. He thinks I'm
starting to remember that night two years ago. It's true. I am."
She swallowed hard. "He says it would be easy to kill me now that
he's already killed Mrs. Ingersoll."

Harry gaped at her in
shock. "I knew that Marianna was after you, teasing and harassing.
I saw her walking through the lobby, going into the ladies' room.
That's what I meant when I told the theater manager that his joint
wasn't safe to work in any more. I had no idea that there might be
somebody else. I didn't see anybody. They might have climbed
through the ladies' room window from the outside. But—"

"You don't have
to get involved. It's between the killer and me," she confessed.
"He's probably been watching me for the past two years, just
waiting. And yes, it could be Marianna."

"You and I are a
team now. There's no way I'm not involved." He gave her a
reassuring pat on the thigh.

The road was so
narrow that they were having a hard time staying on it. Harry was
driving straight down the middle. Overhanging branches of the live
oak trees were brushing against the roof. Spanish moss covered the
windshield and blocked their view without warning. The ends of the
longest branches scraped against the sides of the car, like long arms
with claws reaching out for them.

Branches draped with
green leaves and gray-green, prickly Spanish moss, laden with nasty,
crawling bugs, thrust themselves in the windows. Bianca had to duck.
Harry hunkered down against the steering wheel. Bugs landed in her
hair and crawled down her neck. Prickly stuff scratched her face.

The other vehicle
kept on playing bumper cars and trying to push them off the road.

"They put in a V-8
engine when they built this baby. They don't make cars like that
any more. Hold on to your seat. I'm going to rip!"

Harry floored it.
Branches were hitting them hard. It was as if they were under attack,
and bombs were falling from the skies. A branch whacked the
windshield. It shattered. Harry barely kept his wheels on the road.
He turned into curves at the last minute.

Lining both sides of
Old Church Road were black swamps. The green muck growing on top
appeared in their headlights, only to disappear right away. The
swamps were filled with insects that could eat you alive and
cottonmouth snakes that swam silently through the dark water until
they bit you. In unpredictable places, there was quicksand. It was
impossible to see where you might land if you veered off the road in
the dark.

The dark . . . yes,
the dark. . . It was swirling around, reaching out its arms to wrap
around her and suffocate her to death. The night air was blowing
through the windows, smacking Bianca's face. The night mists were
closing in, forming an impenetrable, gray-black fog.

Harry's high beams
were hardly illuminating the road several yards in front of him. He
was heading into the blackness and the void. His high beams lighted
up a sign: Danger! Dead end. Road ends 500 feet ahead.

Harry lurched sharply
to the left. His car left the road. It hit a wrought iron fence and
rolled over on its side.

Everything was still
. . . dead still.

Chapter 8

"C'mon, we've
got to get out of here!" Harry was barely able to force his
driver's side door open and yank her out.

They were standing in
the cemetery at Christ's Church. They wouldn't have been able to
recognize it in the dense fog, except that it was the only church on
the island, the only cemetery. They couldn't be any place else.

Little breaks
appeared in the mists that had rolled in from the sea. Bianca caught
glimpses of the white, wooden frame structure of Christ's Church.
She made out part of the roof. She could see the pointed steeple with
the cross on top rising above all. At other times she could see only
the cross, looking disembodied, as if it were floating in a sea of
fog, isolated like a wreck on some lonely, forgotten shore.

Fog floated by in
thick clumps and patches. Breaks in the fog revealed a tombstone here
and there in wavering shafts of moonlight. The tombstone disappeared.
Bianca noticed a stone lady, covered with lichen. Moss grew out of
her nose and around her eyes. Now the lady seemed to be on top of her
century-old mausoleum. Now she floated on her back suspended in
mid-air.

A stone hand with
long, tapering fingers floated about in the graveyard. Bianca
swallowed hard and reminded herself that the hand was attached to
some crypt.

She caught glimpses
of the inscription on a tombstone. The word DEATH written large
loomed before her eyes. It made her step back, as if the tombstone
were speaking to her and DEATH was a warning.

The fog not only
distorted the shapes of things, it obscured distances. Everything
seemed strangely jumbled together. She couldn't tell if the gray
stone cross was in front of the moss-covered lady or if the tombstone
with the word DEATH was in front of that. Everything appeared only
feet away instead of yards. The crosses, tombs and the dead were
pressing in upon her.

Something seemed to
be reaching out of the fog, grabbing for Bianca. It was only the
branch of one of those live oak trees with the long, twisted,
gnarled, crooked arms brushing against her leg.

The fog was alive,
pregnant with awful possibilities. It was breathing, waiting out
there to devour her if she ventured into it.

She shook herself.
Everything was eerie and out of joint tonight. Nothing was quite
right — not since her memory had started to come back. Her memory
seemed like a bad omen.

"C'mon!" Harry
was tugging at Bianca's hand. "Let's run. We can make it. Your
house is the next subdivision behind the fence at the back of the
churchyard."

That was like saying
her house was on the far side of hell. All they had to do was take a
journey through it to reach safety. She couldn't go any farther.
Her feet were frozen in place.

"N-no! I — I
can't!" Bianca put her hand to her throat.

"Look!" Harry
reasoned with her. "Somebody's after us. We've got to get
moving. You're a brave girl. You can lick this fear of the dark.

I've seen you do it
back in the car when I was about ready to give up myself."

Harry was like nobody
else. She could do things for him that she couldn't do for anybody
else.

"All right. But
don't let go of my hand."

She took a big breath
and plunged after him into the graveyard. She'd go with Harry
anywhere, even if he told her they were walking into the real hell
itself.

The ground was soft
and squishy. It wanted to go back to being a swamp. She pictured
herself sinking down into the ooze, into the dark chambers and graves
beneath the ground, some of which were so old they didn't have
markers any more.

They hadn't gone
far when they heard footsteps. At first the footsteps were only wet,
slapping sounds. Then they got louder.

Harry catapulted her
forward.

"Hurry!" he
hissed.

Bianca heard a
toddler wailing. The wail became very clear. Then it sounded muffled,
as if someone were clapping his hand over the child's mouth.

To Bianca it wasn't
just any baby's wail. It was Little Katie!

Bianca let out a sob.
Harry clapped his hand over her mouth and backed up against a
gravestone.

"You've got to
keep your chin up," he whispered. "You won't help Katie if you
start bawling."

She nodded. Instead
she would pray.

He let her mouth go,
took her hand, and kept on tugging her along behind him. Ivy and
myrtle vines reached out from everywhere, clutching at their ankles
and curling around their shoes. They stumbled along trying to pick up
their feet and not fall flat on their faces. Long tendrils of Spanish
moss fell down from the trees around their necks like nooses. They
struggled through the interconnecting maze of live oak roots growing
together in huge clumps bulging above the ground. They ran smack into
tombstones. Their feet kept sinking down into the muck on tops of
graves.

A voice came out of
the fog. "If you know what's good for you, stop! If you don't,
I'm going to do something you won't like to this little girl."

Bianca froze.

"Don't listen to
the creep!" Harry hissed, urging her on. "He doesn't mean what
he says. Katie's his meal ticket."

"How can you be so
sure?"

"It's Mike," he
gulped.

Even now she could
feel Harry's wrenching pain. She didn't want to have to say it,
but she had to. "You heard what they said on the radio. He's
armed and dangerous. He could do anything at any time."

Harry yanked Bianca
forward, nearly pulling her arm out of its socket. Bianca couldn't
explain to him how she felt about Little Katie. Katie had been the
only reason she'd survived that attack two years ago. Without Katie
she wouldn't be alive.

"Stop if you know
what's good for you!"

Suddenly a giant,
dark form leaped out of the fog, his knife blade pointed at them.
Katie was squirming in one arm while he held the knife in the other
hand.

"Up against that
tree!" Mike snarled.

Bianca and Harry
backed up against a live oak tree.

"How far do you
think you're going to get with the island swarming with
detectives?" Harry tried to reason with his brother. "They've
put out a call for your arrest over the radio."

"I'll deal with
you later, brother. It's this little missy I've got dealings with
now." Mike, carrying the squirming child, approached Bianca.

"Don't hurt
Katie! She hasn't done anything!" Bianca sobbed.

"If you don't
want me to hurt her, you're not acting smart," Mike said. "I
was at the Island Theater tonight. I saw you talking to those
policemen. How do I know you weren't telling them you ran into me
in the back of the theater?"

The back of the
theater? She strained her brain to remember him. She'd run into a
bunch of people tonight. Their faces were all a blur. But she
certainly hadn't been talking to the police about Mike Fellini!

"I was in the very
last seat all by myself. I was the big guy with the shoulders."
Mike proclaimed. "You stared right into my face. You can't tell
me you didn't."

Now she remembered!
Why, she'd fallen into his lap! He'd frowned at her and told her
to beat it with a snarl like the Frankenstein monster.

"You weren't at
the theater," Harry objected. "I'm an usher — or at least I
was. I didn't see you."

"I slipped in after
the show started, brother. Don't think I paid a red cent. Guys like
me can't afford such luxuries as ticket stubs. Let's just say I
disarmed one of the fire exits near the big screen. Your girlfriend
managed to find me anyway. She looked scared to death, like she was
running right to the coppers to snitch on me."

Bianca hadn't the
faintest idea who she'd run into!

"Why would you come
to the show right after you escaped from prison?" Harry asked.
"I've never seen you there before. I've worked there almost
every night for four years."

"Now that I'm out
of the slammer, you don't think I know which shops to rob without
some help, do you, brother? I've sort of been out of circulation
for the past three years. Two of my old informants sent me a red hot
tip in prison. I was supposed to show up at the theater this evening
if I wanted to make a buck. That's sort of why I picked today to
break out."

"But I wasn't
scared because I recognized you, Mike," Bianca tried to explain. "I
— I was just scared of the dark. I was trying to bolt from the
theater as fast as I could."

"Yeah, sure! I
wasn't born yesterday!" Mike lunged at her with the knife,
threatening to stick it in her ribs as Harry moved in front of her.
"I know when somebody doesn't like my mug. You were scared as a
rabbit. I bet you called those coppers. They showed up real quick."

It was impossible to
make Mike believe what had really happened tonight. He probably
didn't even know Doc.

Bianca took a
different tack. "What does Little Katie have to do with it, no
matter what happened at the theater?" Bianca longed to take the
child into her arms and comfort her.

Little Katie's gag
was down around her neck.

The toddler
recognized Bianca and was making little noises, holding out her arms
to her babysitter.

"I kidnapped Katie
to make a fast buck after I knocked over the liquor store that my
informants suggested. I don't have any better way to do it, do I?
Especially not with people like you snitching to the police every
time they see my face. Even those red hot tips from my informants
only bring me enough money to eat on. I want to escape this racket
for good — live on easy street for the rest of my life like the
rest of you."