Night Things: A Novel of Supernatural Terror (20 page)

For Elton Fugate it had started when he was an infant.

His mother, Ada Fugate, had become pregnant when she was sixteen, and the thought of having her social life hampered by a swollen abdomen had made her hate Elton from the beginning. Had she known who Elton’s father was she might have tried to get him to marry her, but because she had made herself available to any and all who wanted her since she was fourteen, she merely vented her wrath by hating Elton.

It was a family tradition.

Ada’s mother had done the same thing to her, and indeed the entire Fugate family had a lengthy history of abuse and was bound by only the loosest of familial ties.

No one in the Fugate family had had more than a fourth-grade education. No one had ever come close to living above the poverty level. No one had ever gone to church, had ever gone hunting with the other locals, or had ever been part of the social fabric in any way. The only reason Ada Fugate had had so much sex so early was that she was available. But none of the boys ever asked her out to a movie, or even consented to be seen in public with her.

She had started beating Elton almost from the moment he was born. If he cried, she slapped him. If he laughed, she slapped him. Sometimes she even made him hold hot peppers in his mouth just to try to get him to cry so she could hit him. But the cruelties did not end there. For weeks on end she would feed him nothing but cold cereal. Sometimes during the winter she would punish him by making him sleep without blankets.

And sometimes she would vanish and leave him alone for days in their little cabin—not the same cabin in which he now lived, but one that was almost as much a hovel— and although he remembered such times as frightening, he counted them among the best times of his childhood.

For Elton, a turning point had come when he was seven. Then a representative of the school board had come knocking at their door and insisted that Ada give Elton the benefit of an education. And so the necessary paperwork was done to allow Elton to enter Indian River Elementary that fall. For Elton it was a both terrifying and glorious proposition—terrifying because he had never known the company of other children and had no idea what to expect; glorious because the belief that there might be something good about the human race had not yet been completely extinguished in him. Thus he perceived going to school as a ray of hope, an indication that perhaps his miserable existence was at last about to take a turn for the better.

How wrong he had been.

For Elton, attending school proved to be almost as hellish as staying at home. He had too many counts against him, there were too many things that branded him immediately as an outcast and a pariah.

He was a head taller than all the other kindergartners.

He smelled of smoke because of the wood stove his mother used to heat their cabin.

His clothing was strange and raggedy.

His hair had a choppy look because of the crude and unmindful way his mother cut it.

Worst of all, he was dirty (his mother had never taken much stock in personal hygiene).

Any one of these blemishes was enough to place him at the bottom of the harsh pecking order of the childhood social hierarchy. Having all of them made Elton a virtual leper.

And no one can be crueler than children.

In class they complained when they were forced to sit near Elton.

During recess he was jeered at and taunted and sometimes even punched or kicked—these last only when the teacher minding the recess turned a blind eye (which was not infrequent, because some of the teachers did not like Elton any more than his classmates did).

Every day after school, rain or shine, a group of boys would chase Elton home, and about half of the time, catch him and beat him to within an inch of his life.

Until whatever humanity was left in him was completely extinguished. He became something vacant. A shell. A mere simulacrum of a human being going through the motions of life and passively accepting whatever abuse and indignities were heaped upon him.

He continued in this state into adulthood, through a dozen menial and piss-ant jobs and even after his mother’s death. But never did the storms brewing within him, the hatreds and the venoms, ever so much as produce a ripple outside his slavish and pain-benumbed consciousness.

Until he met the Master.

His first encounter with the Master had taken place entirely inside his head. It had started one morning when he awoke out of the blue with a bone-crushing headache. Nothing, not even a handful of aspirin and a half a bottle of Popov vodka, would get rid of it.

But soon the headaches evolved into a buzzing sensation.

And the buzzing became a mumbling.

And then finally the mumbling became a voice, a voice that spoke to Elton both patiently and firmly.

The voice of the Master.

At first Elton was afraid of the voice and would run screaming and babbling through the woods in a frantic attempt to drown it out. No other voice he had ever heard in his life had had anything good to say, and he assumed this new voice inside his head would be no different.

But the voice always waited him out, was always there and ready to resume whenever he became too exhausted or too hoarse to continue his occlusive chatter, until slowly, inevitably, he was forced to listen to it.

When he did, he discovered to his great surprise that the voice—which called itself the Master—was offering him encouragement instead of criticism.

In rambling discourses that would sometimes go on for hours, the Master told him why his life had been so difficult. As the Master explained, Elton had only been undergoing a test, a rite of passage, to see if he was worthy. As for what it was that he was being determined worthy of, the Master told Elton it was the ability to perceive the beauty of hatred, the hidden but sublime exquisiteness of evil.

As the Master explained, most human beings labored under the delusion that hatred was wrong, and evil, something to shun. But it took a most extraordinary human being, one in a million like Elton, to have the strength and courage to recognize that quite the opposite was true.

Evil was beautiful.

It was the ruling force in the universe.

That was why evil was so pervasive in the world.

And that was why, no matter how strenuously the good tried to stamp out all things iniquitous and depraved, evil always rose again, like a phoenix.

The only problem was that this realization was too powerful a current to run through the filament of most mortal beings. Because most human beings were so paltry and weak, the awareness of evil’s beauty burned them out, destroyed them before it had a chance to transform and empower them.

But Elton had not been destroyed. He had survived the searing winds of hatred. And that was why the Master had come to him, to groom and tutor him. To show him the way to allow the heady current of evil to course through him in full. As the Master explained to him, through his survival he had proved he was special and it was now his destiny to become the conquering Alexander of his day. Only instead of trampling geographical boundaries, he was to trample moral ones. And by bursting free from the restrictions of each social ethic in its turn, and recognizing how flimsy they all were, he was to experience fully the exuberance of iniquity.

And allow himself to become completely transformed by evil.

For Elton, it was a glorious revelation. At last his wretched existence made sense to him. All the questions, the blistering doubts and self-condemnations, that had haunted him over the years fell away like cataracts, and several times as he walked through the woods and listened as the Master told him how special he was, he actually whooped with joy.

But still he was skeptical. Not only had he had his hopes dashed before, but also, in the course of his schooling, he had done a little reading on schizophrenia. So he knew all too well the medical implications of hearing voices in one’s head.

He proceeded with the utmost caution. He spent hours questioning and challenging what the Master said, and when the Master told him to do something, such as move or speak in some new way, he did so with studious and scrupulous correctness—always paying close attention to what he was doing just to make sure the Master was not trying to dupe him in some way, or show him up for a fool.

Until slowly he became convinced of the Master’s sincerity.

The old Elton died and a new one was born in his place.

And as he surrendered himself ever more to the Master’s wishes, the Master became more real and his voice was no longer confined simply to the inside of Elton’s head.

Sometimes as Elton stood in front of his cabin in the moonlight he would hear the Master speaking to him from his own shadow. As time went on, Elton began to hear the Master’s voice coming from other shadows, the shadows of large rocks, and even from the shadowy and impenetrable gloom of the forest itself.

Until finally Elton actually began to see the Master as a misty figure standing in the darkness. And eventually as a seemingly solid presence who would occasionally accompany Elton on his midnight strolls.

It was the Master who had told Elton to purchase the doll and begin practicing on it. As the Master explained, it was important for Elton to acquire the
feel
of killing somebody before graduating to the real thing. The Master had also warned Elton that he would have to practice long and hard on the doll before he had acquired the purity of evil necessary to begin the final phase of his transformation. And even then, the Master warned Elton that he would have to wait for a sign.

But now, Elton was convinced the sign had come.

As he returned home after gazing up at the glowing yellow windows of Lake House, he gleefully counted up the auguries.

The boy had come to him.

The boy and his mother were alone and Mr. Ransom appeared to be away on business.

And most significant of all, it was Lake House,
Lake House
, the house that all along he had been drawn to, had wanted desperately to become employed by.

He had been bitter when he had not gotten the job of running the generators. But now he realized it had all been part of a plan. A first taste. A prelude to what lay ahead.

Now he knew that the time when he would graduate from dolls to actual flesh and blood was imminent.

All that remained was for the Master to come to him and tell him to begin.

For some reason the chilling succinctness of Amy’s closing words finally snapped Lauren out of her stupor. She knew she and Garrett had to get away from the house as quickly as possible. But as she stared down at the dead telephone receiver in her hand, she realized the problem was how. She knew Mr. Foley did not have a car. She had come to her senses about Stephen and banished any illusion that he would be sensitive enough to fathom their plight and return to help them. Although a part of her still yearned for him and would probably not get over him for some time to come, she realized now that she had been playing the stupid and insipid girl for him; but that was over—any rescuing to be done in the situation was now completely up to her.

That left walking, a solution that was no solution, for as she recalled, driving at fifty miles an hour it had taken her the better part of half an hour to get to Clearwater Lodge. Clearwater Lodge was twenty miles away, and that was a trek she couldn’t imagine taking even in the daytime.

Going over and over the problem in her mind and bumping repeatedly into the same dead ends caused her again to become depressed. Only this time it was not a muddled and enfeebling depression, but an electrified one, stoked by the instinct to survive. She finally decided she had racked her brain enough for the evening and collapsed on one of the sofas in the drawing room to try to get some sleep. Tomorrow would have to be soon enough to cope.

When Lauren awoke, for a few brief and delightfully groggy seconds she remembered nothing of the day before. She gazed at the sunlight peeping in through the curtains, and it gave her a warm, glowing feeling inside. But as soon as she started to sit up she realized where she was and how uncomfortable she was from sleeping in her clothes, and both her memory and her troubled state of mind returned.

She remembered at once that she and Garrett had to get away from the house, and on the off chance the phone was once again working, she ran to the coachmen’s waiting room. To her delight, when she lifted the receiver she discovered that, although faint, a trace of a dial tone could be heard. However, it was so covered over with white noise she found her dialing had no effect.

Realizing she had some difficult brainstorming ahead of her, she went to the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee. When Garrett came downstairs she noticed that he too was unusually jumpy and ill at ease. Although his agitation puzzled her, she interpreted it as an empathic response to her own frazzled condition. Not wanting to upset him further, she decided to tell him about neither the entry on Lake House in
Great Camps of the Adirondacks
or her decision that they should leave—at least until she had some practical means of effecting their departure.