The Waiting: A Supernatural Thriller (34 page)

A dark shape emerged from the fog
, and Evan swerved hard, sure that he’d run up to another boat. Then he saw it was his own dock, as the rest of the island materialized in a looming, grandeur way he would have found majestic any other day. Now, it made him cringe.

Evan didn’t bother tying the pontoon to the
dock. He ran the boat onto land, rocks and sand playing a horrid symphony on the aluminum pontoons. When he leapt out of the boat, his right ankle turned and he sprawled, a cry of pain coming from him as he braced his hands on rocks and pine needles. His face scraped what he thought was ground, but when he looked up, he saw it was Selena’s canoe.

Except it was different.

The canoe had been old before, its hide stained and worn by years and years in the water. Something to be expected from being handed down two generations. The thing that lay before him now would never float. Its sides were broken, with white fungus growing from the cracks. The bottom had a long gouge in it, revealing a smile of darkness. A few dry pine branches, looking like peeled bones, lay on top of it.

“Oh God.
”

Evan limped up the hill to the house and went inside, the dimmes
t ember of hope glowing feebly.

“Shaun! Shaun!”

He stumbled across the living room, knocking over a floor lamp on his way through.

“Shaun!”

Sobbing, he opened the door to Shaun’s room, the ember inside dying at the sight of the empty bed. Evan staggered to his own room, barely pausing to sweep it with his eyes before continuing to the kitchen.

“Shaun?” A plea now, a prayer.

The kitchen was empty. When he turned toward the basement, any surprise he should have felt bled out of him with the air in his lungs. The door stood partially open, waiting, beckoning.

Come see, come see, I can’t wait to show you.

Evan could hold it no longer. He bent at the waist and threw up on the kitchen floor. Runners of snot hung from his nose, and he fell to his knees, wetting them in his mess. He gagged again, feeling something tickling the base of his throat. Knowing already, he heaved again, his stomach crumpling like an accordion inside him and—

—
forcing the wet lengths of white hair out onto the floor. He let out a shriek and skidded away from the pile of vomit, watching the clumps of hair soak into the bile. He slid to the nearest wall and managed to stand, and forced the basement door open.

Pure darkness held sway, blacker than a mine at midnight. Evan took the first
steps and then remembered the light switch. Flipping it on produced nothing like the glow earlier that morning. It looked like the bulbs were less than half power, flickering below him, their light a sickly yellow that barely drove the shadows down.

Evan
stumbled on the stairs, hitting the landing and almost falling to his knees. He wiped at the stinging acid on his lips and flipped the next switch, lighting his way with the same urine glow.

“Shaun? Selena?”

Again the hope that she would answer and make this a waking fever dream. He would take insanity now, take it and call it his own with a smile. Anything compared to the anticipation of what reality had in store for him.

A small scuffling sound came from near the worktable
, and his heart lost a beat.

“Shaun?”

He moved closer, his shoes rasping on the concrete, his eyes twitching to the clock, to the floor, to the stairs behind him. A silver strip lay on the concrete, and when he tilted his head down, he saw it was tape—the duct tape from the doll’s mouth.

The sound again, louder.

Evan slowly walked, rounded the end of the table, and saw the doll standing at the base of the clock. Its head tilted up as its mouth cracked open with a popping sound.

“
Go back.”

He
heaved in a breath to scream, as the doll fell backward, its legs and arms bursting from its plastic sockets. Its head rolled away, its blue eyes flashing, gone, flashing, gone, until it came to rest against the far wall. Evan shuddered, the strength sapped from his legs, his arms cold. His breath plumed out before him.

“Where’s my son!”

A small click answered, and the center door of the clock swung open a few inches. The light bulbs began to hiss, and their luminance dipped before flaring. The three bulbs burst, one after another,
snap, snap, snap
. Glass rained down, and Evan sidestepped some of the shards that came his way. Darkness, except for the sallow glow from the stairway, claimed the basement. Silence rushed in.

Evan
inched forward, waiting for the dismembered doll to spring into life again. It lay still, and he moved around it, gripping the clock’s open door in one hand. Until then he hadn’t noticed, but now he saw with utter clarity that the weights were all wound to the highest position, hanging like alien eggs waiting to hatch.

With a last deep breath,
he pushed the pendulum aside, ducked his head, and stepped into the clock.

27

The first thing he noticed was that it was much larger inside.

Evan knew his left shoulder should be rubbing against the clock’s interior wall, but it wasn’t. He put out a hand to keep from running into
the back panel, but it met only empty air. His footsteps clacked and rang out, reverberating as though he stood not in a three-foot-by-three-foot space but in an empty auditorium. A quiet snick issued from behind him, and though he could see nothing when he turned, he knew the door had closed behind him.

“Shaun?”

His voice bounced back to him, coming from too far away. Impossibly far. The darkness around him was complete, like he’d never known before. He imagined this was what an astronaut felt like staring into the void of space—no end, only pitch black to eat up an eternity in every direction. At least he could still feel the floor.

Something touched his back.

Evan spun, swinging a fist through the darkness before he wondered if it could be Shaun.

“Shaun?”

A slithering sound came from his left, the direction of the door, he thought. It sounded like something long crawling through dead leaves, a snake burrowing into a carcass to feed.

“Who’s there?”

Nothing. Another caress from the dark, this time on his right side, toward the back wall of the clock. It felt like a bony hand running down the length of his arm. Evan swung again, this time his knuckles encountering some resistance, but only momentarily. A warm draft of air, then cold.

His dream
from the night before came back to him. The darkness alive around him, touching, picking, tasting him. He moved backward, turning in a circle, losing all sense of direction.

“Shaun!”

His yell echoed back to him from a thousand feet, ten thousand. His foot struck something in the dark, and he heard the rustle again, a susurration, and then quiet.

Evan.

The voice came from everywhere at once—the walls, if there were any, spoke his name, as well as the floor. Worst of all, he heard it in his head. Not the normal musings of his internal voice but a foreign communication.

“Who’s there?”
he asked again, hoping for and dreading a reply.

Evan.

The voice sounded synthetic, a miasmic blending of tones and depth, not human in the least. The space brightened, lit by a shape behind and above him. Evan turned toward it, squinting at the source until it became clear.

Th
e steel crescent-moon dial had increased in size, along with the rest of the clock. It was now several yards across, and shone with a vague opalescence mixing with the darkness so that the light shifted and moved like a tide through the air. At one moment it would be on his left, and then would flow gradually to the right, all the while the crescent moon grinned its malicious smile down on him as its eye pinned him to the ground.

“What is this?”
His voice resounded for a second and then stopped as though crushed in midair.

Your destiny, Evan.

He clutched his ears, the voice bubbling through his skull with a paralytic touch of violation.

You’ve come through the years to this time and place, and I’ve been waiting, patiently waiting.

Evan blinked, his vision hazy with the rolling light of the steel moon. The floor he stood on remained black despite the touch of light, and no defining features were revealed in its glow.

“W
here’s my son?”

Here, Evan
. Everyone is here, can’t you feel them?

“Who are you?”

I am one and many. I am the creator. I am the time and the soul.

His
knees unhinged, and he dropped to the ground, feeling something begin to drip from his nose. Hearing the voice was like standing inside a giant speaker, with a smaller speaker in his head. The noise of it was everywhere and nowhere.

“Stop, stop, get out of my head,”
he said, bracing a hand against the floor.

More blood fell from his nose, splashing to his hand. It looked lik
e tar in the moon’s sick light.

Is this better?

The voice now came from directly in front of him, and something stood there, just outside the moonbeam’s reach. Something rumpled and hunched. Manlike, but so wrong he couldn’t find words to describe it.

“Where’s Shaun?”

His head felt huge, heavy on his neck, but the nosebleed had stopped, a faucet shut off within his skull. He stood and wiped away the blood drying on his upper lip. The man-shape was gone. He pivoted slowly, trying to distinguish his position within the cavernous space.

“Who are you?”

Evan caught movement off to his right and turned as the figure walked toward him, the moon’s light finally illuminating it.

It
looked vaguely human, but it wasn’t, he was sure of it. It wore a swirling suit of darkness that continued to move even after it stopped walking. Its cloak twisted and crawled with life of its own. Shining eyes inspected Evan from various places on its body and then melded with the rest of the darkness. Its face had no continuity, a wax blur of features without structure. It flowed, melted, a nose erupting and then receding, a mouth blooming, teeth flashing, then gone. Hair grew and shrunk, while eyes, sometimes one, sometimes three, blinked and then sank away. It was then that he realized it did not wear the darkness—its skin
was
the darkness.

Evan took a step back and
something crunched beneath his heel. He nearly stumbled but managed to keep his feet as he looked down at the pile of bones he’d tripped over. The skeleton wore a faded pair of women’s slacks, their original color no longer discernable. A blouse, thin and flowing, lay around the sunken rib cage like a deflated balloon. Curly strands of gray hair sat in piles above the grinning skull.

They never found my grandma.
Jason’s voice came back to him, the memory nudged either by seeing the bones on the floor or by the thing standing nearby.

He
tore his gaze away from the bones as the figure’s shape churned and became a kind-looking woman in her seventies who had Jason’s chin and cheekbones. She smiled at him, an upside-down grimace.

The swirling moon’s light
shifted and shone on another rumpled mass a few paces from Maggie’s remains. This corpse had some flesh still covering its bones, but death had taken its eyes away, along with its lips, so that it smiled, its teeth bright ivory.

Bob Garrison. He was the first in many years.

Evan gazed at the body and recognized Bob, even in death.
He looked back to the figure to watch it shift again, taking on the form he’d seen on the Internet while researching the former caretaker’s past. Bob sneered at him, his eyes sharpened points.

The light swirled, washing past Bob’s rotting corpse
. It coursed over the floor, illuminating the unmistakable hind-leg bones of a dog, and then brightened a spot where another full skeleton lay, this one blinding white through tattered suit pants and a limp jacket.

The figure melted
again, a long nose and two cold eyes solidifying in a sallow face. The suit pants and jacket came into focus and hung like a loose skin on the man’s frame, although they looked brand-new. The man’s lips moved when he spoke, but there was a delay as the words crossed the air between them.

I am Abel Kluge
.

The man-thing
walked in a small circle around Evan, its glinting eyes studying him with calculation, a shark’s stare.

“You’re dead.” H
is mind tilted toward the drop-off of insanity.

Yes and no
. You see, there is a purpose to everything, a reason. You are here because of it. So was your son. Every living thing provides a rung in the ladder that climbs beyond what we know.

“What are you talking about?”