“
No. I was over there yesterday.”
Cliff licked his wind-chapped lips.
“What…what did you find?”
Luke
almost told him, but at the last moment he just couldn’t. He didn’t have the guts. He was in denial. It gave him comfort. Like a little kid, maybe if he pretended certain things weren’t so, they’d just go away.
“
Anne’s dead, isn’t she?” Cliff said.
“
Yeah, she’s been gone a couple weeks.”
“
I knew it.”
Luke wondered if he had seen them
stealing her away into the night. He supposed it didn’t really matter, yet he felt like some sinner keeping a dark and criminal secret.
“
Nicole kept dreaming about her. That’s what she told me. Every night she was dreaming about Anne.”
Luke
’s mouth went dry and he could barely swallow. “The fever. It gives them weird dreams. Sonja was like that, too.”
“
Sure.” Cliff nodded, a very strange look in his eyes. “They were real vivid, real vivid. Nicole said Anne was standing outside in the snow calling to her. She said she was in her room at night, standing over her. Ain’t that strange?”
“
Yeah. The fever.”
Cliff ignored that.
“She said Anne was wearing a blue dress. Funny how she’d remember a detail like that. She was wearing a blue dress and her hands were really cold. Like ice, Nicole said.”
A blue dress.
Maybe in Nicole’s feverish state it had
looked
like a blue dress, but it was probably a royal blue bathrobe. The same one Anne was wearing when we took her out to Salem Cross. The same one she was wearing yesterday as she lay in state on her bed across the street.
“
Some of these things happening…I don’t know, but they make a guy almost afraid to sleep at night,” Cliff said.
By that point, Luke
was barely even listening. All he could think about was Anne and what he was going to do about her.
33
Belief, like true faith, i
s never an easy thing to acquire. And especially for a guy like Luke who was a diehard agnostic that only believed in that which he could see and touch. Guys like him needed to have a truth rubbed in their faces before they could accept it. He knew this to be true and made no apologies for it. It had gotten him this far, but he knew he was at the point where he had to begin accepting that there were forces at work in the dimly lit corners of the world that no man could really know or understand.
After he left Cliff Corbett and Bob, he
went home and tried to sort it all out in his head. He tried to make sense of the senseless. He tried to encapsulate those things he knew and those things he feared and vaguely suspected, and apply some real world concrete logic to them in hopes of disproving them once and for all. But even as he did so, he knew he would need definite proof before he would start to believe in certain things. The problem was that gathering proof on the existence or nonexistence of the undead was a very dangerous gambit. It was like trying to prove that a rattlesnake would indeed bite you by sticking your hand in its lair or proving that a bullet would indeed kill you by firing one through your head.
All day long he fought against him
self.
He sipped whiskey and his hands shook and his heart pounded. He balled his
hands into fists and swore under his breath. The part of him that was inclined towards belief (and this on very circumstantial evidence) proclaimed that the only proof he needed was over at the Stericki house. It was lying upstairs in bed, a leech that had destroyed her own husband and was now working her way through the neighborhood. A leech that, perhaps, had hastened the death of Sonja and Megan and surely brought about that of Nicole Corbett. If he wanted proof, real proof, all he had to do was go over to the Stericki’s. Anne—or something that looked like her—would be there and if he looked up in the attic and poked around under beds and in closets, he would find Alger, too, waiting for the sun to set.
The rational, logical part of him
laughed at this, of course. It was TV crap, horror movie nonsense and comic book shit.
Vampires? Really, Luke, REALLY? I thought you grew out of that shit. I’m embarrassed for you, pal, I really am.
This was the practical, real world Luke Barrows, a guy who’d gotten by on his wits, had gone to college and served in the Marines and worked a job and gotten married and raised a kid and never, ever once had seen a shred of evidence concerning the supernatural or bogeymen in the night. This was his hardheaded self. It wanted to take the other part of him, the part that believed, out in the alley and kick the shit out of it until it started making sense and started living in the real world.
His
rational mind was in denial, complete denial.
His
instinct was living in fear of what it felt creeping ever closer.
The former told
him to get real and the latter told him he better wake up and smell the fucking coffee or he was going to end up with a set of fangs in his throat one night.
By sunset, he
was wired like a fusebox, just sick to death of fighting against himself. Belief and disbelief were battling for control of his soul and he was caught in the middle of their well-trodden battlefield. By around ten he couldn’t take it anymore. So, it was not that surprising that he did the first fool thing that he thought of. The first impulsive, suicidal thing that jumped into his wee little agnostic brain.
He
was going to face his fear.
He
was going to give it the old acid test.
He was going to find out whether
or not he had any reason to be a weak-minded superstitious peasant.
34
H
e bundled up, grabbed the prybar, a flashlight, his Marlin 12-guage, and jumped into the truck. He sat there in the driveway trying to talk himself out of what he had in mind while the snow began to come down and pile up on the windshield. He duct-taped the flashlight to the barrel of the shotgun so he would be able to keep both hands on it. He wasn’t sure why he thought that might be important, but he did. They were in the teeth of another storm and it was so much like the night Alger and he had gone out to Salem Cross it filled his belly with a light and fluttery fear.
You don
’t need to do this.
But, the thing was, he did. He very much needed to.
There were already two inches of fresh powder blowing in the streets by the time he turned onto Cherry Hill Road. Although most houses were dark, he saw several with every light on like they were trying to chase away the shadows. He passed the King’s house and the sight of it brought an involuntary chill to him.
Down towards the end of Cherry, drifts cut across the road like ramparts, looking like white waves crashing ashore on some frozen headland.
He had the pickup in four-wheel drive. Even so, the ice lying beneath the snow was greasy and slick. He took it slow, the blizzard finding its teeth and sucking white death into its lungs and letting it out with gale force winds that rocked the truck. The snowbanks were so high on either side of the road it was like driving through a tunnel. They were piled up seven or eight feet and he could just barely make out the snowy roofs of houses, drooping white ice-locked tree limbs criss-crossing above. The headlights were filled with churning snowflakes the size of quarters and just as thick as pillow down. The wipers were swishing back and forth madly trying to keep the windshield clear. More than once he thought he saw shapes or forms standing in the road, but he was bouncing over drifts and potholed hardpack and it was probably just the headlights creating jumping shadows.
He took the same way he had with Alger
that night, passing the Middle School and cutting back behind St. Joe’s church on Price Avenue. Then he dropped the plow because there was no way in hell he was going to make it through the picnic grounds otherwise. By the time he pulled to a stop, about thirty feet from the back wall of Salem Cross, the blizzard descended without mercy. He had to fight to get the door open against the wind, snow spraying in his face and blinding him. The legs of his pants tucked into his Sorrels were snapping like flags. The world was lost in chaos, a howling mad white oblivion taking the picnic grounds.
He should have turned back.
Going out there in a storm with Alger was one thing, but alone it was unthinkable.
But Luke was obsessed. He had to know. And obsession does not understand the practical simplicity of common sense.
He zipped up his parka hood until he could only see out of a fur-fringed square. Even so, the wind bit into him like razor blades, stinging, cutting. He hooked the prybar through a loop in his snowpants, grabbed the Marlin, and off he went.
He pulled himself over the snow-covered stone wall and was in.
The drive was drifted over, but he kept going, a lone traveler in the marble city of the dead. Shadows danced around him. The wind screeched and the snow blew around him mercilessly. Tombstones jutted from the white sea, gray and worn. Denuded trees were black and craggy. Their boughs clicked together like castanets, ice-covered and heavy. He heard a distant, mournful clanking, but he knew it was the gate rattling against its posts on the other side of the graveyard.
The snow was up to his hips in places. He fell more than once, pounding
ever forward. The wind had stripped away the snow in places so he could just see the faces of grave markers set in the frozen earth. That and the rusty cylinders of flagholders awaiting yet another Memorial Day. He pushed on, voices of silence teasing at his brain. The cemetery seemed immense, sleeping, a soundless vacuum only disturbed by the wind, the screaming wind. He threaded and fought his way amongst snow-heaped crosses and monuments.
He had to lean into
it so it didn’t knock him flat. Now and again a fierce gust would engulf him in a spinning tempest of snow and there was nothing to do but hunker down and wait it out. Once, he threw himself into a drift behind a headboard-shaped gravestone until the shrieking wind died out again.
The storm
was even worse than the one Alger and he had fought through. And there were times when Luke didn’t think he would make it, but he did, fighting forwards, cutting a path through the deep snow. If it hadn’t been for the blizzard, it would have been pitch-black out there, but snowy nights and blizzards in general create a surreal pinkish half-light that you can see by, just as it makes the shadows that much longer and that much darker. Visibility was down to twenty feet at best and sometimes less than ten. The only thing that kept his fingers from freezing was the hand-warmers in his gloves.
He pushed past a rectangular tomb hanging with icicles, ducked through a barrage of spinning snow-devils, and then he saw it.
The mortuary.
Rising up
huge and ominous out of the blizzard, it stopped his heart for a second. An absolute superstitious terror gripping him, he went down to his knees in the snow and his breath would barely come. The mortuary was cut from discolored stone, frosted with ice, fingers of dead climbing ivy giving it an almost gothic ambience. Huge black windows mirrored the stillness within. He thought for one insane, numb second that he caught a glimpse of a white face pressed up to an icy pane.
Imagination.
He pulled himself up and the wind tried to drag him back down again, but he was more resolute than ever to do what he had come to do.
The lock had never been replaced on the green metal doors and one of them was open about three inches, held in place by a drift of snow. Luke saw a blackness seeping out from within that chilled him to the bone. He was willi
ng to bet that no one had been here since Alger and he.
He forced the door open until he could squeeze through with his bulky parka.
It was chill and dark inside, but not as bad as outside.
He turned on the flashlight.
There was a vague odor in the air—sharp, unpleasant. A faint trace memory of flowers. The noxious, morbid stink of antiseptics, cold stone, dust, and worse things. He entered the sullen, breathing blackness, his heart rapping like a trip-hammer. The shadows were absolute, clutching, clawing from every direction, blending into a solid weave of cold darkness.
Nothing had changed since the last time…yet,
yet,
he almost felt that something had. A creeping sense of anxiety lay over him like a toxic cloud.
The flashlight guided him on, the beam reflecting stone and marble and weeping memory. He
was in something of a workroom—tools hung uniformly from a pegboard above a worn bench. Lumber was stacked, dry and dusty. There were wooden biers, flowerpots, carts, shovels. All the essentials. He moved on down a blank, chilled corridor, each footfall of his heavy boots an echoing thunder. He found offices. Storage rooms. A chapel directly ahead. A wing stretched out into the murk, cavernous and empty. There were brass plates set into ivory stone walls, the names of deceased loved ones etched into them. He turned away from them and slipped down a short passage to where he needed to go and the very place he knew shouldn’t go. A raw, atavistic instinct was screaming in his mind in a black voice:
Anywhere, anywhere, but here! Don’t you know what’s in here? Don’t you know what will happen—