Poltergeist II - The Other Side (11 page)

Images flashed through Steve’s mind: of Taylor and Robbie embracing, of Taylor and Diane touching. He wavered but held. “No,” he gasped.

“He has fooled many people,” Kane chided. “You do not know who he is”—innuendo filled his smile—“but your wife does.”

Implications lay heavily upon Steve. “What do you mean by that?”

“Please,” Kane begged. “Let me in.”

“No,” Steve shook his head. But he was hesitating.

“Now!” Kane commanded. “Before it’s too late!” As if it were already too late, he began pushing open the door.

Steve didn’t know what to think or feel or do, but he pushed the door shut somehow and even held it. It seemed to take all his strength to do so. “No,” he whispered hoarsely, with his last energy.

“What kind of man are you?!” Kane snarled. “Your wife and that Indian . . . making a fool of you. Your children dote on him—they can’t wait until you leave the house, they laugh about you, and then your wife and that big, bad Indian . . .”

Steve half slumped against the door, sweating, nearly fainting, his sheer weight holding it closed.

Kane yanked the door back and forth violently, but it wouldn’t budge. He began screaming: “You’re going to die in there! All of you! You’re going to die!”

This jerked Steve out of his stupor, giving him new wind. He stood straight and shouted back, “Get the hell out of here! Get the hell away from my door!”

Kane looked startled a moment, then smiled slowly, calm once again. “Sorry to see you’re still unconvinced,” he said softly and with genuine regret.

Then he turned and stepped off the porch, back into the rain. “A pleasure visiting with you,” he allowed.

He walked down the driveway, singing sweetly, “He is in His Holy Temple,” and by the time he reached the street he seemed to have disappeared altogether.

And then, as suddenly as it had started, the rain vanished as well.

Steve leaned at the door a few seconds longer, still a bit stunned. When he turned, finally, to retreat further into the house, he found Taylor standing behind him.

Taylor was grinning. “You did good,” he said.

“Why?” said Steve. “You know that guy?
He
seemed to know
you.”

“That’s no guy,” said Taylor. “That’s
him.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Steve. But he knew.

“It was a test of power,” Taylor confirmed. “He can come in other forms, but that was him.” He handed Steve an eagle feather. “Now you are hooked.” He smiled, walking toward his truck.

“Hooked?” Couldn’t this Indian ever talk plain American?

“You are on the path of a warrior.”

Steve stared in some perplexity at the eagle feather. “So what’s the story on this bird feather, anyway? And can’t you ever finish a conversation?”

Taylor stopped and turned. “Your confrontation with him was a drain on your power. He was testing you. You did good, but you must become stronger. The feather of the eagle is a good lightning rod for power—it will help you become stronger. But the Warrior’s Path is a long one, and we don’t have much time. Come. We must prepare.”

“Prepare what?” said Steve. But he followed Taylor out to the curb. Then, midway across the lawn, he stopped and shouted up at the house, “Diane!”

She stuck her head out the bedroom window. She still looked a little shaky. “Where are you going?”

“I’m going out with Taylor for a little while. Keep the doors locked, okay?”

“Do you have to go?” she said. She didn’t want to be alone.

Taylor answered her. “Yes,” he assured. “It is important.”

She nodded. “Don’t be long,” she added.

Steve and Taylor reached the blue pickup. Taylor got in, and Steve called up to Diane once more: “You okay?”

She smiled weakly and nodded once.

“Love you,” he called, and got in the car.

Taylor started the truck and revved the engine. “The most important thing you did”—he began the lesson—“was not to ask him in. Evil cannot claim you unless you ask it in to your heart.”

Steve raised one eyebrow, a little miffed. “So where were you with all this handy information when I could’ve used some backup?”

“In the end,” said Taylor, “you must fight your own battles with your own resources.” Then his face lost its sternness. “But in the beginning, too, I think.”

He put the truck in gear and, burning oil to blue smoke, rattled off down the street.

The kids were napping quietly upstairs when Diane heard the knocking. She jumped and just stood in the kitchen for half a minute, motionless, listening. Like a deep thud, toward the front of the house . . . it happened again.

She froze; she didn’t know what to do. It was the man in black again—she was sure of it—that unsettling, skeletal-looking . . . or maybe it was the supernatural knocking again, the noise that had driven them from the bouse last night, the rumbling, shaking . . .

But this wasn’t that pervasive; this thumping was coming very specifically from the front of the house. From the front door, in fact.

Knock, knock.

She should really go look, at least, to see what it was. Steve would want to know. Taylor might need to know. She picked at a cuticle. She checked the back door to make sure it was locked.

She walked to the front door.

The knocking returned. Diane seized her courage, opened the viewing latch in the door, and peered out. The knocking stopped.

No one there.

The knocking returned.

“Who is it?” Diane whispered.

A voice said: “It’s me—Tangina.”

Diane pulled the door wide and looked down; there, below the viewing field of the peephole, was Tangina Barrons—dwarf and psychic extraordinaire.

“Tangina!” Diane exclaimed, ushering her in and stooping to hug her all in one motion.

“Sorry to come unannounced, sweetie,” said Tangina, “but I need to speak with you.”

“I’m so glad you’re here,” whispered Diane, choking back tears. This woman of small stature and grand spirit had saved them four years ago—saved Carol Anne from the horrors of the void, saved the entire family from destruction by the Beast. Diane was glad with all her heart that Tangina was there, and she prayed that the insanity was over now.

“I’m glad you’re glad,” said Tangina. “Because we’re running out of time.”

Tangina Barrons was hanging on by her fingernails at the end of a rocky four years, for if a salesman on the skids hits the bottle, then a psychic dwarf hits the brink; and Tangina was at the brink of everything, waiting for the boot-heel to fall.

The beginning of the end had come for her the day after she’d talked Diane Freeling through the astral plane, to save Carol Anne from the clutches of the Beast. She’d told the Freelings then: “This house is clean.”

But it wasn’t.

It was in fact so befouled by that sick spirit that the next night they were all nearly destroyed; and the house itself
was
destroyed.

And so was Tangina’s self-confidence.

How could she have been so wrong? she wondered. Had the Beast deceived her so completely? Had her senses been so distorted?

Or was she somehow, subconsciously, in
collusion
with the Evil One?

It was this last question, a doubt of her own soul, that was her undoing.

She began to lose her ability to have visions, yet at the same time she was visited by
pavor nocturnis:
night terrors. She would awaken screaming, but with a blackness of memory, a veil she could not penetrate. She became afraid to sleep; consequently, she avoided sleep.

To regain her visions, she returned to the place from which she felt her nightmares must be emanating—Cuesta Verde Estates. More specifically, the Freeling property.

It was a house no longer, of course. A splintered floor, a foundation, a few feet of crawl space—that was all. The city had come, during the intervening weeks, to fill in the half-dug swimming pool that had been the site of so many cadaverous eruptions from the cemetery over which the house was centered.

But the crawl space was all Tangina needed: the remnants of the floor provided an adequate roof for her; she carved out a few nesting placed in the earth beneath it, lined her grottos with tarp, rug, and blanket, and moved in.

She became a creature of the night. She was, as noted, afraid to sleep during the time of shadows, in any case; but in addition, she felt it was the best time to explore the haunted site, to chase down the spirits that stalked her slumber. So at night she dug and she wandered.

She dug directly between the Freeling foundation posts, enlarging the crawl space she was inhabiting, burrowing tunnels straight down or sloping away beneath the concrete. She dug initially with a small hand shovel, wherever her instincts led her, creating an ever more intricate series of shafts, caves, and connecting tunnels. As if she were mining for ghosts.

And she shored up her subterranean excavations with scrap wood, pipes, paint cans . . .

That’s how her wandering started.

She needed materials to reinforce her tunnels, so she began raiding the garages and backyards of Cuesta Verde Estates by night. She garnered many useful items this way: children’s swing sets furnished good structural supports, as did short lengths of outdoor water pipes; table-tops made good underground archways; workbenches provided useful tools, including hammers for chipping away at bedrock and pipe wrenches for liberating the plumbing that shored up the earth so well.

Of course, neighbors were less than pleased to wake up any given morning to find a favorite trellis dismantled, its struts missing; or a major water leak in the back shed, where a four-foot length of three-inch pipe had simply disappeared.

They connected the disturbances, of course, with the poltergeist that was said to have been the curse of the Freeling household; and some, quick to take warning, put their houses up for sale. Others, more worldly, believing less supernatural forces to be the likely culprits, merely increased security measures: they build fences, bought dogs, installed burglar alarms, hired private patrols.

None of these steps took adequate account of the determination and cunning of a desperate, sleep-deprived, psychic, achondropiastic dwarf.

The vandalism (so-called) and pilfering increased. Furthermore, people were beginning to see things—shadowy forms scampering across the lawn at night—and reports of elves, trolls, hants, and goblins flooded the local police department. Arrests were made, but nothing ever stood up in court; and, in any case, the “disturbances” continued.

More houses went up for sale.

Tangina, on her part, was becoming more gaunt and more driven. By day, she fitfully half slept in her kingdom of catacombs; by night, she tunneled and gathered. Her tunnels led her under adjoining houses, across streets, into natural caverns, into tombs and graves. And the conversations she had with these withered corpses—both in the moment and in her sparse, fragmented dreams—led her further still into obsession, toward madness.

She would go for days without food, then break into someone’s kitchen and gobble up whatever was in the refrigerator—cold hot dogs, ginger, ale, milk, Velveeta cheese, beer, carrots—and skulk off again into the starlight to steal furnishings for her dreamland-beneath-the-surface. It went on for months like this before she discovered the first petroglyph.

It was etched on the rock face at the entrance to a natural cavern. It was Indian in origin, and she didn’t know what it meant, exactly, except that its psychic impact was so great that it hurled her across the floor and against another wall. She was unconscious for many hours.

When she awoke she knew only that this was the beginning of the portal she’d sought for so long—the entrance to the place that haunted her dreams and distorted her visions. Trembling, she approached the cave drawing and stared at it: it was the likeness of a man with a serpent crawling from his mouth.

She shuddered, retreated up to her original crawl space, and wondered what to do. Fear almost paralyzed her, self-doubt was a willing accomplice. She remained in that earthen cove without food or water for three days.

On the fourth night, hunger and thirst tore her from her warren. She broke in the back door of her downfall: the home of the insomniac local secretary of the American Rifle Association, who had midnight cravings of his own. Hearing rattles in the refrigerator, he tiptoed barefoot into the kitchen, brandishing his favorite twelve-gauge six-shell pump gun. Even so, he wasn’t prepared for the vision that confronted him—that of an emaciated three-foot scavenger with a demented look in her eye and ravioli dribbling from her mouth—and his shot went wide.

Tangina was out the door in a flash, but the gunshot aroused the attention of a passing patrol car, and the officers gave chase. Tangina, debilitated and slightly disoriented from malnutrition and dehydration, ran not to her hideaway but to a skateboard park with only one entrance. She was caught.

She admitted nothing; she
said
nothing. For two weeks the public housed and fed her in the jail ward of the county hospital. And it must be said that during that period the citizens of Cuesta Verde Estates
continued
to experience and report strange happenings in their homes—chandeliers crashing to the floor, air conditioner panels flying across the room, lamps going on and off—so one might surmise that Tangina’s tunnelings beneath these various houses had liberated or awakened a host of spirits from whatever slumber they’d enjoyed before her arrival. In any case, she wasn’t responsible for
all
the mischief the authorities had attributed to her, making her arrest a somewhat less successful police action than had initially been hoped.