Greely's Cove (60 page)

“No, Jeremy!” Her eyes roll hideously, and she wraps her thin arms over her chest, trembling.

He is close now, so very close. Lorna’s reason is wearing thin, stretched to the point of breakage. Time for the piece de resistance, the final hammer stroke that will finish the job. Carl shuts his hazel eyes tight, concentrates, gathers himself to launch a bolt of psychic power. He has been saving this for just the right moment.

God in heaven, I’m not Jeremy! I know what this is!

The walls begin to vibrate and the whole house shudders and squeaks. Sawdust and flecks of plaster seep down from cracks in the ceiling. A riot of wind tears at Lorna’s clothing, twists her around to face the interior of her studio, where the walls are hung with a score of her paintings. One by one the wind assaults the mountings, shattering the glass, warping the frames, shredding the paper. Hundreds of hours worth of loving work explode into wreckage before her terrified eyes. When the last painting meets its end, the wind moves on to the other rooms of the house, to other walls where Lorna’s art hangs: landscapes, seascapes, still lifes, portraits. Rumbling blows from an invisible sledgehammer. Ripping. Tinkling. Splintering.

“That’s what I think of your
art,
Mother,” says Carl in the dead-quiet aftermath. Lorna stands before him like a worn-out mannequin, a cold and lifeless woman-image ready for the dumpster. “You’ll never paint again, of course. I’ll see to that. You have nothing left now, do you? Surely there’s no reason to—”

She comes suddenly alive and shakes her head as though to deny the atrocity she has just witnessed. Her hand goes to the light switch on the wall and snaps it off. Darkness floods the room, and Carl catches the desperate words in her mind. She needs darkness. Lorna Trosper needs darkness.

“Come now, Mother.” He giggles. “You can’t make all this go away by simply dousing the lights.” He launches a mental hand and snaps the switch on again.

And his mother turns it off.

And he turns it on.

She wheels out of the studio and into the hallway, then into her bedroom, where a light still burns. She shuts it off and falls against the wall, sobbing. Carl snaps it on without touching it, relishing this little game.

She flees to the living room, turns out the light.

And Carl—

Jeremy, it’s you, isn’t it? Stop it, you fucking little bastard! Stop it! I won’t let you!

Lorna lurches from room to room, shutting off the lights, only to have them snap on again, but still she moves on, wanting only darkness. Only darkness. She pauses a moment to stare at herself in the hall mirror, shrieks and tears at her hair, stumbles into the kitchen. Amid the clutter of garbage and broken dishes she spies a butcher knife, and for a hellish second she considers seizing it and whirling to attack her son. Carl chuckles with amusement, knowing that she cannot possibly harm him.

She moves to a drawer, scrabbles for a pen and pad, scribbles something, and stuffs the torn slip into her smock. She makes for the door to the garage, and Carl knows now that he has succeeded, that victory is his. He sops up the fumy air of terror that radiates from his mother like heat from a stove, inhales it and savors the spicy taste of her pain. He takes strength from the evil, glories in it, giggles obscenely as he hears the engine of the old Subaru station wagon coughing to life. This is what he was made for.

He groped frantically through the depths of his consciousness in search of that glimmering shard of his own identity, that small surviving piece of Carl Trosper that the demon could not devour. Suddenly it flared bright behind his eyes.

“...
Poison, dread Poison to the Dream Giver
...”

And he clung to it with his mental arms and hands, clung to that floating spar in a rearing sea of evil, clung to that remnant of goodness. In a heartbeat his shoulder was on fire again, his eyes flooded with bloody tears, his body a vessel of pain.

Mitch Nistler stared in horror at the robed figure of Jeremy,
who
was now coming at him, eyes ablaze and face a gargoyle of killing hatred. The lad’s hands would have closed around Mitch’s neck, had not some force intervened, some protective power born of the unclean meat Mitch had eaten right here in this undercroft.

Or rather
there,
in the maw beyond the arch.

While in the hypnotic trances inflicted by Craslowe, Mitch had gorged himself repeatedly on that stinking, living meat, burying his face in the putrid breast of the monster. The meals had given him hungers—and the ability to sate them, which he had done with the poor, savaged corpse of Lorna Trosper. But the meals had also made him
of the flesh,
of the same stuff as the Giver of Dreams. Jeremy could not kill him, could not even touch him.

Mitch smiled as the magic stirred within, as he realized that he had
power.
He ducked out of Jeremy’s halting grasp, launched himself through the archway into the maw, and immediately toppled over Stu Bromton’s dead body. From the blackness he heard a voice, raspy and choked with pain, crying out something about a sword. Mitch did what the voice begged: groped around the blood-soaked body of Stu Bromton until finding a short sword that suddenly glowed with a potent, pink light as his fingers closed over the handle.

He felt more stirrings of magic, heard more pleading screams from the darkness close by. Mitch scrambled to his feet, waded deeper into the stinking night of the maw, swung the sword while laughing insanely, plunged it into the mass that hunkered against the far wall. He heard shrieks that could not have been human, felt the pain
himself.

Carl once again felt the grip of the demon weaken, a skittering of agony and terror within its bulk. Summoning strength that he thought should have leaked away through the wounds in his back and shoulder, he twisted his right arm free and grabbed the leathery wing that held him. He tore at it wildly, heaved his upper body against it, and finally wrenched himself out of its grasp. He lunged forward and grabbed the sword away from Mitch, who was staggering crazily now, laughing hysterically and careening. Carl whirled and drove the blade deep into the slimy beast and saw its hideous eyes pop open with green rage—not a single set of eyes, but
hundreds,
cruel pinpoints of laser-sharp light from hundreds of tiny human heads that were not quite as big as golf balls.

Male and female heads, old and young.

Each on its separate stalk, every one an individual.

They grew like mushrooms from the mass of the creature’s neck and shoulders,‘comprising a huge reptilian skull. They screamed and squealed and cursed, arched their necks and bared their teeth at him. Somehow he knew that each represented a victim of the Giver, that each contained a piece of tortured human consciousness that could suffer, grieve,
dream.

He bit his tongue as he recognized the miniature head of Sandy Zolten amid the multitude on the brow of the beast, glaring at him and shrieking curses. And that of her daughter, Teri, near a nostril. And most enraging of all, his
own
head, lantern-jawed and bearded in silvering auburn, less discolored than the others, as though newly sprouted from the riotous mob that formed a cheekbone. His own head screamed more piercingly than all the others, writhed and trembled on its stalk, spat an odious green fluid that burned his skin.

“
You don’t really believe you can kill me, do you?
” it shrieked in a voice that was an octave above his own, but still his own. “
I’m one with you! You are one with me! As long as you live, I live!
”

Carl’s legs turned to warm jelly, and his heart nearly stopped. He forced himself to breathe, to think. “No, you’re
not
me,” he hissed. “Am I’m not
you!
You’re going to die!” The glowing sword grew heavier in his hand, and his wounded shoulder burned lividly as he drew back to strike another blow.

“
You can’t kill me, Carl! My juices have flowed into you, and our souls are fused! You dreamed with me, and once that happens, we are one!
”

“No!”

“
Oh yes, Carl. It was easy, because you actually welcomed it! Deep inside you, deep below the layer of lies you tell yourself and others, you’re like me! You’re MY kind, Carl! The dreams I gave you were from your own heart, from your own cravings! I didn’t invent them for you.
”

“You lie! You LIE. You
LIIIEEEE!
”

He plunged the sword again, this time into the scaly throat of the creature, just below the gaping jaws. The head erupted in a cacophonous choir of screeching and mewling. A leathery wing convulsed and slashed the air, connecting with Carl’s cheek. He was flung to the stone floor and nearly crushed by a thrashing leg. He clambered to his feet again, fought through scrabbling tentacles and claws to find the handle of the gleaming sword, and jerked it out again from the sucking wound.

Screaming his own curses, he drove the blade deep into the toothy gullet that mere moments ago had feasted on his own flesh, that was still bright with his own blood. Out again came the sword.
In
again—this time splitting the horrible little skull that bore his own face, shattering it into a dangling mass of blue and crimson gore. He howled above the din of the screaming heads, demanding that this loathsome’ beast suffer, that it bleed and weep and die. He struck again and again, until his arms and body were festooned with bits of sundered flesh, drenched in the creature’s fetid blood.

Until the thing keened with earsplitting pain and rage, convulsing and choking, trembling and dying.

Until its many eyes were fire spots of green panic that lit the charnel chamber like an alien noon, until its limbs ceased to thrash and its eyes to glow.

The room exploded in a blue fire that, in the eternity of a few dazzling seconds, consumed the obscene bulk of the Giver of Dreams, the tattered skulls and discarded bones and all the other rank detritus of its past victims, the bodies of Stu and Renzy and Mitch, even the huge old steamer trunk in which the beast had been transported. Carl lurched away, pressed himself against the wall, and cowered from the blue glory until it ended, until the room was black and still.

He staggered out through the archway and saw Craslowe gathering himself for the killing of the three figures who huddled near the door of the undercroft. Robbie looked exhausted, spent of all his psychic boulders, unable to defend Lindsay and Hannie any longer. Carl charged forward, oblivious to the agony in his shoulder, drew back the sword, which was glowing orange now, swung it in a singing arc, screamed with his last calorie of rage, and chopped off Hadrian Craslowe’s head.

The robed body shuddered, erupted gore, thrashed, and fell to the stone floor.

With the onslaught of silence Hadrian Craslowe died, his body crinkling and imploding, glowing green and blue as it dissolved into vapors and fumes, leaving only the satin robes behind.

They got as far as the crumbling gateposts on the edge of the grounds before Hannie collapsed onto the wet grass, but Lindsay caught her fall and sank to the ground with her. Robbie threw aside his crutches and laid his sheepskin jacket over her thin, misshapen frame, then took her gnarled hand in his.

Hannie had not actually gotten this far under her own power, but on the strong arms of Lindsay and Robbie. They had half-carried her, half-led her, because she was so very weak, and without her pince-nez she was nearly blind. Now she refused to go even one step farther, whether under her own power or anyone else’s.

Carl lowered the unconscious body of his son to the ground nearby, then knelt and stared a moment into the faces of the others. Lindsay’s and Robbie’s were bloodied, both exhausted and gray, the faces of refugees. Hannie’s, though, was the more troubling, because it was slack with resignation and drained of life. The skin hung tonelessly off her cheeks and jaw; the ancient eyes lacked their gleam.

Carl himself felt detached and strangely at peace, despite the oozing wounds on his back and shoulder, despite the gore that covered his ragged, shredded clothing. Stoned on my own endorphins? he wondered. He felt no pain.

“Is it dawn yet?” Hannie asked, her voice hoarse and weak. “I did so want to see the daylight one last time.” It was dawn, Robbie assured her. The rain had stopped, the eastern sun was casting yellow shafts of morning across the rolling grounds of Whiteleather Place, and birds were beginning to sing.

Yes,
birds
—here at Whiteleather Place!

“Then we have truly won,” breathed the old witch. “The birds would not return if the Giver of Dreams were still alive.” She closed her eyes a moment, as if uttering a prayer of thanks, then opened them again. “Is everyone all right? Have the rest of us survived?”

Yes, said Robbie. Even Jeremy, who had fallen unconscious at the very instant of Hadrian Craslowe’s death. Carl, though horribly wounded, had carried him out of the undercroft with his one good arm. Jeremy was here, lying only a few feet away. The old woman turned her head to confirm the news.

“And what of Mitch Nistler?” she wanted to know.

Carl moved to her side and lowered his face close to hers. “I’m not sure what happened, Hannie,” he said. “Mitch started stabbing the Giver, but then he went into hysterics, started laughing and crying at the same time, like he was in pain. I took the sword away from him and finished the job myself. When it was over, Mitch wasn’t moving. He was on the floor. Then the blue fire—”

“Yes, the fire. I know what happened now,” said Hannie. “Mitchell was
of the flesh
and, being so, was linked to the beast. When the beast died, so did Mitchell, and they were both consumed. I should have known this would happen. Such a tragedy. I’m glad, though, that his last living act was one of courage and goodness.”

“Hannie,” said Carl, “can you tell me what will happen to Jeremy? Will he be okay? I mean, will he be—”

“He will awaken soon, and he will be nothing like he was as the offspring’s manciple,” she assured. “The personality that Hadrian gave him is dead and gone, as though it never existed. What remains in Jeremy’s mind, I couldn’t say, but time will tell. I wish you every happiness with him, Carl, and the very best life can bring to you. The world owes you so much, as do I.” She gave him a wrinkly smile. “Do try to be happy, won’t you?”