The Fall of Never (55 page)

My parents’ house,
she suddenly understood.
This is the same floor in the front hall of my parents’ house.

“Are you coming?” Simon said from behind her, his voice now very real and very exact. Still on her hands and knees, Kelly spun around to catch a glimpse of the monster, but it was too dark. She could hardly make out his shape in front of her. Simon laughed at her persistence. “What a waste if you choose to sit around on the floor all evening…”

She pushed herself up. Her body protested, a barrage of aches and pains exploding in every joint.

“I remember it all,” she said, her voice faltering. “I know what’s next. It’s the dog again, isn’t it? Only this, too, you’ve improved on. Am I right? This is something bigger, just like all…all these innocent…”

“You have no idea,” Simon breathed…and she saw his shape begin to weave in and out of the darkness. She followed, her shoes clacking loudly against the floor—her
parents’
floor. In the distance, she could see the dull, throbbing red light radiating up through the floorboards like a nuclear silo. And she could hear it now, too, and feel its beat reverberating throughout her body.

The heart of Never,
she marveled.
Oh my God, it’s real. I can feel it and it’s real.

She imagined the entire forest valley and hillside, including the Kellow Compound, as the camouflaged carapace of some supernatural basilisk now just moments away from exhuming itself from the earth and standing upright for the first time in ten thousand years. And not just the valley and hillside, but all of Spires itself—the schools and tiny houses, the village square and the confused jumble of diners on the outskirts near the highway. All of it. All part of some irrational, awakened beast…some monster that had existed here since forever.

And did I bring it all to life?
She couldn’t help wonder.

As the red light grew stronger, Kelly was able to make out Simon’s grotesque, shuffling shape in the gloom. Over the passage of years, and in seeming defiance of Kelly’s struggle to heal, Simple Simon the imaginary boy was now a deformed, troll-like adult. His body suggested a human being in only the most rudimentary ways: two arms, two legs, a head. The knots of his elbow and knee joints had grown to obscene excess, and instilled on him significant lameness. He walked like an elderly woman…although something deep down inside Kelly told her that she was not being permitted to see all there was, and that this creature was only appearing to her this way because he chose to.

She stalled and Simon urged her on, pausing slightly and waving his right hand in a beckoning gesture. She caught a glimpse of the hand in the red light: it was more a web than a hand, the fingers practically twisted and fused together.

Don’t think about it. Don’t think about anything.

As had happened so many years ago, her legs now seemed to be propelled by some extraneous force, urging her along the dark room like a dummy being controlled by a puppeteer. Beneath her feet she could hear the floorboards creak and pop—but not from her footsteps: the heart was slowly pushing up through the floor, starving for exposure and freedom, splintering the manicured floorboards down the middle like balsa wood. Each beat, elucidated by a tremendous throb of red, burning light, caused her entire body to shake, right down to the center of her bones. It was alive, she knew: the house, the forest, the hillside, Spires. And Simon. Somehow, despite everything he’d done, that rhythmic cadence beneath the floor solidified Simple Simon’s existence more than anything.

A shape lay slumped against the far wall, in the exact same spot the injured dog had been bound to so many years back. But this wasn’t the shape of a dog; like the rest, this was the shape of a person. Details were impossible to perceive in the blackness of the room, but of its form she had no doubt. A person, another dead person…

His head turning slightly over his finlike shoulder, Simon passed between the slumped figure and the light, his eyes aglow with a preternatural omnipotence. He watched Kelly with a frightening sense of hunger, of mastery, waiting for her own expression to falter and change—waiting for her to reach that final plateau and look up, only to realize there was no place left to go, and that the body slouched against the wall—wrists tied, hands dangling from pegs, legs spread akimbo—was her precious Gabriel Farmer, now as dead and as pale as the creature she’d created from her imagination.

And she saw this. And she felt the world turn to ice, felt it crystallize all around her, threatening to fracture and break apart on itself immediately afterward. Gabriel. The name no longer made sense, as if the abrupt comprehension of his demise somehow rendered those three syllables meaningless.
Gabriel!
Her mind screamed this with authority, yet the name’s uselessness did not falter.
Gabriel! Gabriel! Gabriel!

“This was the one,” Simon muttered from the darkness, “that I enjoyed the most. This one. This one who dared come and interrupt, to come between anything we had; anything we
still
have.”

“No!” she sobbed. “No! We have nothing! Nothing! You
killed—”

“I did what—”

“You fucking
killed
him!”

She ran to Gabriel in slow motion, her muscles working as if under water. As she drew closer, the obscenity of Gabriel’s form hit her—his face, crooked and broken; jaw shattered; eyes swollen shut, the lids a dark purple. Crying freely now, Kelly dropped to her knees just inches from the body. Wanting to touch him, too overwrought to know how, she oscillated between placing her hands on him, and pulling his lifeless body into her lap.

“God…”

Images flashed before her eyes: Gabriel as a child; Gabriel wearing his glasses while sketching pictures by the brook; Gabriel’s skinned knees poking through twin tears in his pants. These images whipped by with lifelike clarity, so deep inside her head that if she concentrated long enough she found she could actually
go
to them, become part of them and live there in the past inside her own head for the rest of her life.

I’m sorry, Gabriel.

It’s okay.

I’m so, so sorry.

Do what you have to do. Finish this.

“You can’t live inside that head of yours,” Simon said from behind her. She spun around and glared at him through the darkness, her hands trembling, her eyes fierce. “He was the best,” the monster continued, “because he truly
cared
for you. And it felt so good to end all that.” She could hear his skin crack as he grinned. “So good.”

“How can you expect me to give in to you now?” Despite her tremors, her voice was strong, defiant. “How can you expect me to follow you one goddamn step further into this hell?”

“Oh,” Simon whispered, “you will.”

The creature stepped aside, allowing the full heat of the red light to wash over Kelly’s body. Instantaneously, her flesh broke out in beads of sweat. The heat was potent enough to sting the serration at her forehead and feel the heat course through her lifeblood, though she was in a place beyond pain and did not notice.

“Beats,” Simon muttered, no longer looking at Kelly. He had stepped around the floor, allowing the pulsing red heart in the floor to beat between the two of them. “Beats the heart.”

One of the floorboards sprung up at a forty-five degree angle. She heard wood splinter and crack. A plume of dust exploded from beneath it, tinged red from the light beneath the floor. With a crunch, a second board wrenched free of the floor, crossing over with the first to make an X. A welt of steam billowed from the crevice, tinged red from the light. As if there were a busted steam pipe down there. For one wild instant, the vapor appeared to assemble and solidify in midair, creating a meshed veil between her and Simon. In that instant, only the ghost-boy’s eyes were visible through the shroud, alight with wicked desperation. Between them, the floor continued to split apart, to widen; floorboards like spears shot across the room, whizzing through the darkness and landing soundlessly in the black. With a sound like tearing cloth, Kelly could see jagged lightening bolt zigzags weave across the floor, spreading out like runnels of blood in every possible direction.

Around her, the walls began to shake. A cry caught in her throat. She pushed herself back against the wall, struck Gabriel’s lifeless body, and screamed into the confusion. Her eyes moved up and through the rising steam, which was now dispersing through the atmosphere like mist on a lake, and saw that Simon’s eyes were no longer there, staring at her. She couldn’t see him at all.

With a sound like crashing thunder, a number of floorboards exploded from the widening hole in the floor and shot into the air. Immediately, the red light blinded her and she brought her arms up before her face. The heat was oppressive and unparalleled. The stink of sulfur burned her sinuses.

Simon appeared at her side, his face so close now she could smell the acrid fumes of his breath, could make out every minute pock and nick and furrow in his fishlike flesh. His eyes were suspended in deep, black hollows in his skull, the skin around them purple and flaking. His lips were peeling and crusted with dried saliva; his teeth were like the heads of rusted spades.

“Beats,” he breathed over her. Repulsed, she recoiled, her body still wracked with sobs. “Disappointing. You were stronger when you were a child.”

She felt his presence float around her, shift, and move in front of her. Even with her eyes closed she could see him moving across the floor like a phantom, his pale and sickly skin meshing seamlessly with the evaporating steam all around them. She opened her eyes and saw him creep to the edge of the hole in the floor, stare down into the blinding red glow. The light did not affect him: he looked straight at it without wincing. It reflected in his eyes, gleamed in the moisture on his lips and on the surface of his teeth. She felt herself begin to slide across the floor. Her feet skidded against the flooring but did not stop her.

“Get out of my head!” she screamed.

“My head, too,” Simon muttered without facing her. He seemed entranced staring into that gaping maw at his feet. “It’s my head too.”

Kelly’s body shuddered and came to a stop beside Simon. The toes of her sneakers broke over the edge of the hole in the floor, and she felt a blast of heat and steam rush up and over her. Sweat ran down her temples, her neck. Her shirt clung wetly to her chest.

“Look down,” he told her. But he didn’t have to say anything; she’d already dropped her head to look.

She saw the surface of a massive, pumping organ—a heart—slick with membrane and embedded with a network of enormous veins and arteries, each twisted and tangled about one another. White pustules clung to its surface in patchy clusters, like wild mushrooms. At the top of the heart was a large, fleshy, muscular value that opened and closed like a mouth. It was from within this valve, this opening, the red light issued. With each closing of the valve, the light was cut off, though it was strong enough to radiate at half its potency through the walls of the organ; subsequently, each time the valve opened, the red light broke out and flooded the room amidst a billowing waft of steam. It was like an engine, Kelly thought—a living engine, thriving beneath the floor and buried deep within the ground…

The heart of Never,
she thought.

“Do you know what the heart is?” Simon whispered beside her. She could hardly hear him now, her mind too focused on the steady pulsation in the pit just beyond her feet. “Do you know what the true heart of Never really is, Kellerella?”

It’s life,
she thought.
It’s the originator of this whole mess, the catalyst for all this insanity. It beats…

The valve suddenly seized, stretched, and folded back on itself like a sleeve. The intensity of the light seemed to grow. The steady rise in heat caused the splintered ends of the overhanging floorboards to blacken and curl. Tendrils of black smoke spiraled to the ceiling.

Kelly felt a thousand cold hands at her back. Again, she was consumed by the feeling that Simon was all around her—even a part of her—and that he was struggling to control her. She struggled harder to fight his control.

“In,” Simon said.

She could feel her feet sliding toward the mouth of the pit, the hair on her head now being blown back by the tremendous heat pouring from the heart. In her mind she forced herself to remain still, but Simon was too strong. There was truth to all he said: that over time, he’d become stronger while she’d grown weaker. And was there any way of refusing him now? Any way of beating him?

Heart,
she thought.
Heart.

“Do you know what the heart is?” he asked again. “Do you really understand it all?”

And for one outrageous instant, she thought she understood—that she almost grasped what the heart actually symbolized—but the notion was fleeting, and too quick for her to retain.

“In,” Simon repeated, his voice now infused with a million other voices, a million hands still at Kelly’s back. “Cross through the dream world, Kelly.”

And he shoved her.

The world spun in slow motion. Up and down repositioned perspectives. She saw bright, soundless flashes of memories whip through her mind like subliminal codes, each punctuating a certain moment of her descent. In the air—in the air—in the air—the world turning and turning and turning about her.

She felt a swarming heat overtake her, followed by the cushioned embrace of unconsciousness. Her last thoughts before falling into the black were of hopelessness.