Twilight Eyes (51 page)

I did not make it easier for her. I told her about Twilight Eyes, about Rya's lesser psychic abilities, and a little about the quiet war (thus far, quiet) that we were waging.

Her green eyes glazed over, though not because she was tuning me out or going into information overload. Instead she had reached that state in which her uncomplicated, rational view of the world had been turned so completely upside down and inside out—and with such force—that her resistance to a belief in “impossible” things was virtually destroyed. She was stunned into receptivity. The glazed eyes were merely a sign of how furiously her well-educated mind was working to fit all these new pieces into her drastically revised comprehension of reality.

When I finished, she blinked and shook her head wonderingly and said, “But now...”

“What?” I asked.

“How do I just go back to teaching literature? Now that I know of these things, how do I possibly lead an ordinary life?”

I looked at Rya, wondering if she had an answer to that one, and she said, “It probably won't be possible.”

Cathy frowned and started to speak, but a strange sound cut her off. A sudden, shrill cry—partly an infantile whine, partly a piggish screech, partly an insectile trilling—disturbed the peace of the studiedly Colonial living room. It was not a sound I associated with goblins, but it was certainly neither human in origin nor the cry of any animal I had ever encountered.

I knew this keening could not be related to the pair of goblins that we had just killed. They were unquestionably dead—at least for now. Perhaps, left with their heads attached to their shoulders, they would find their way back to the land of the living but not for days or weeks or months.

Rya rose from her chair in a wink, groping for something that was not at her side—the tire iron, I suppose. “What's that noise?”

I was on my feet, as well, knife in hand.

The weird, ululating cry, as of many voices, had an alchemizing power to transmute blood into ice water. If Evil personified walked the earth either in the form of Satan or some other singular devil, this was surely its voice, wordless but malevolent, the voice of all that was not good and was not right. It was coming from another room, though I could not immediately decide if the source was on this floor or upstairs.

Cathy Osborn was slower to rise, as if reluctant to deal with yet another terror. She said, “I . . . I've heard that very sound before, when I was handcuffed in that room, when they first started to torment me. But so much happened so fast that . . . I forgot about it.”

Rya looked at the floor in front of her.

I also looked down, for I realized that the shrill noise—almost like an oscillating electronic wail, though ever so much stranger—was coming from the cellar.

The cop, now lying dead in his own bloodstained abattoir, had carried a regulation service revolver—a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum. I armed myself with it before going into the kitchen and opening the door at the head of the cellar steps.

The eerie warbling pule echoed up from that shadowy hole, and in a crude way it conveyed meaning: urgency, anger—
hunger
. That sound was so vile that it seemed to possess a tactile quality; I imagined I could feel the cry itself, like damp spectral hands, sliding over my face and body, a cool and clammy sensation.

The subterranean chamber was not entirely dark. Soft, lambent light, perhaps that of candles, flickered in an unseen corner.

Cathy Osborn and Rya insisted on accompanying me. Rya would not, of course, allow me to face the unknown threat alone, and Cathy was afraid to remain in the living room by herself.

Just inside the door, I found the switch. Clicked it. Below, amber light appeared, brighter and steadier than the candleglow.

The yowling stopped.

Remembering the psychic vapor of long-ago human suffering that still steamed off the cellar walls of the house that we had rented on Apple Lane, I reached out with my sixth sense as best I could, seeking similar foul emanations in this place. Though I did indeed perceive images and feelings of a clairvoyant nature, they were not what I had expected—and were unlike anything I had previously encountered. I could not make sense of them: half-seen, bizarre, shadowy forms that I was unable to identify, all in black and white and shades of gray, now leaping in harsh and frantic rhythms—but now undulating with a slow, sickening, serpentine motion; and sudden bursts of colored light in ominous hues, without apparent meaning or source.

I was aware of unusually strong emotions pouring from a deeply troubled mind, like sewage from a broken pipe. They were not human emotions but were more twisted and dark than the aberrant dreams and desires of even the worst of men. Yet it was not precisely like the aura of a goblin, either. This was the emotional equivalent of pustulant, gangrenous flesh; I perceived that I was wading into the cesspool of a homicidal lunatic's chaotic inner world. The insanity—and underlying blood lust—was so repulsive that I had to withdraw from it and try quickly to shutter my sixth sense as much as possible to protect myself from the unwelcome radiation.

I must have swayed a bit on the landing because, from behind me, Rya put a hand on my shoulder and whispered, “Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

The single flight of stairs was steep. Most of the cellar lay out of sight to the left, and I could see only a small, bare patch of the gray concrete floor.

Cautiously I descended.

Rya and Cathy followed me, and our boots made a hollow
tonk-tonktonk
on the wooden steps.

A thin but noxious odor increased as we went down. Urine, feces, stale sweat.

At the bottom we found a large basement devoid of all the things one might ordinarily expect in such a place—no tools, no lumber for the husband's current carpentry project, no containers of varnish or paint or stain, no home-canned fruits or vegetables. Instead part of the space was used for an altar and part of it was occupied by a large, sturdy cage made of iron bars set five inches apart and running from floor to ceiling.

Though silent and staring now, the hideous occupants of the cage were undoubtedly the source of the caterwauling that had brought us down into this godforsaken hole. Three of them. Each a little more than four feet tall. Young goblins. Pre-adolescent. They were clearly members of that demonic species—yet different. Unclothed, striped with shadow and smoky amber light, they peered from between the bars, and as they peered, their bodies and faces underwent slow, continuous changes. Initially I sensed the difference in them without understanding what it was, but then I quickly realized that their metamorphic talent was running out of control. They seemed to be permanently trapped in a twilight state of endless flux, their bodies half goblin and half human, bones and flesh transforming again and again, ceaselessly, in what seemed to be a random pattern. They could not lock themselves into one form or the other. One of them had a human foot at the end of a mostly goblinlike leg, and hands on which some fingers were those of a goblin and some those of a human child. Even as I watched, a couple of the Homo sapien fingers began to change into four-knuckled digits with vicious claws while some of the goblin fingers began to melt into a more human design. One of the two other creatures blinked at us with hard, mean, but entirely human eyes in a countenance that was otherwise monstrous; however, as I stared in disgust at that unnerving combination, the face began to seek another form that combined human and goblin features in a new—and even more horrendous—way.

“What
are
they?” Rya asked, and shuddered.

“I think they're . . . deformed offspring,” I said, moving closer to the cage, though not close enough for one of the occupants to reach through the bars and snag me.

The creatures remained silent, tense, watchful.

“Freaks. Genetic breakdowns,” I said. “All the goblins have a metamorphic gene that allows them to switch at will from man to goblin and back again. But these damn things . . . they were probably born with imperfect metamorphic genes, an entire litter of freaks. They can't control their form. Their tissues are always in a state of flux. So their parents locked them away down here, just like people in other centuries used to hide their idiot children in cellars and attics.”

Behind the bars, one of the gnarly miscreations hissed at me, and the other two took it up at once and with enthusiasm—a low, sibilant, threatening sound.

“Dear God,” Cathy Osborn said.

“It's not just physical deformity,” I said. “They're completely insane, as well—insane by either human
or
goblin standards. Insane and very, very dangerous.”

“You sense this . . . psychically?” Rya asked.

I nodded.

Just speaking of their madness, I had made myself vulnerable to the psychic outpouring of their deranged minds, which I had first apprehended upstairs, at the open cellar door. I sensed desires and urges in them that, although too strange for me to understand, were nevertheless comprehendably perverse, bloody-minded, and repulsive. Twisted lusts, dark and demented needs, disgusting and frightening hungers . . . Again, as best I could, I damped my sixth sense in much the way that I might have cut off the draft to a furnace or fireplace, and the furious blaze of psychotic emanations slowly subsided to a barely tolerable little fire.

They stopped hissing.

With a crisp, crackling noise their human eyes blistered, flared red-hot, became the luminous eyes of goblins.

A piggish snout began to push out of an otherwise normal human face, accompanied by the squishing-crunching sounds of reformation—but halted halfway through its development, then shrank back into the human visage.

One of them made a thick, mucous-wet, hacking noise in the back of its throat, and I suspected this was laughter of a sort, vicious and chilling but laughter nonetheless.

Here, fangs sprang out of human mouths.

There, a canine jawline began to build up, heavy and savage.

And here, a perfect human thumb abruptly blossomed into a four-knuckled stiletto.

Ceaseless lycanthropic activity. The purpose of the changes was never fully achieved, so the very act of transformation became its own purpose and meaning. Genetic madness.

One of the nightmarish triplets snaked its grotesquely knotted arm between the iron bars, reaching out as far as it could manage. In the hand a closed nest of fingers—some human, some not—opened. They began to stroke the reeking air, somewhat in the manner of a caress though mostly as if the beast were trying to wring something out of the ether. The spider-quick fingers alternately curled and poked and wriggled: strange gesticulations without meaning.

The other two demon spawn began moving rapidly through their big cage, dashing left, darting right, climbing the bars, dropping to the filthy floor again, as if they were frantic monkeys careening around just for the hell of it, though with none of the joy you see in the acrobatic antics of monkeys. Due to their inability to achieve full goblin status, they were not as agile as the demonkind that we had killed in the abattoir upstairs.

“They give me the creeps,” Rya said. “Do you think this happens often—litters of freaks like this? Is it a problem for the goblins?”

“Maybe. I don't know.”

“I mean, their genetic makeup might be deteriorating generation by generation. Maybe every new generation brings a greater number of births like these. After all, they weren't originally designed to reproduce; if what we know of their origins is true, fertility was a long-shot mutation. So maybe now they're losing the ability to procreate . . . losing it through mutation, as they gained it in the first place. Is it possible? Or is what we see here just a rarity?”

“I don't know,” I repeated. “You may be right. It'd sure be nice to think they're dying out and that in time, maybe a couple of hundred years, they'll have dwindled to just a handful.”

“A couple of hundred years won't do me and you any good, will it?” Cathy Osborn said miserably.

“There's the problem,” I agreed. “It would take hundreds of years for them to cease to exist. And I don't think they'll just resign themselves to fading away. With that much time to make plans, they'll find a means of taking all of humanity down into the grave with them.”

Suddenly, the boldest of the freaks snatched its arm back into the cage and, with its misbegotten companions, began to wail as we had heard them wailing when we were upstairs. The shrill ululation rebounded from the concrete-block walls, two-note music suitable for nightmares, a monotonous song of insane desires that one might have expected to hear echoing along the halls of Bedlam.

That noise, combined with the odors of urine and feces, made the cellar almost intolerable. But I was not going to leave until I had investigated the other matter of interest: the altar.

I had no way of knowing for sure that it was, in fact, an altar, but that was precisely what it appeared to be. In the corner of the basement farthest from the stairs, and from the cage of miscreations, stood a sturdy table draped with a blue velvet cloth. Two unusual oil lamps—coppertinted glass spheres filled with liquid fuel and floating wicks—flanked what appeared to be a venerated icon that was elevated above the table on a three-inch-high, one-foot-square, polished stone tablet. The icon was ceramic—a rectangle measuring approximately eight inches high, six inches wide, four inches thick, rather like an odd-sized brick—with a lustrous glaze that imparted considerable depth (and a mysterious quality) to its midnight-dark sheen. In the center of the black rectangle was a white ceramic circle about four inches in diameter, and the circle was bisected by a highly stylized bolt of black lightning.