Poltergeist II - The Other Side (15 page)

“Steven, what’s going on?” Diane said, walking back into the master bedroom. She sounded upset—she
was
upset, with Carol Anne so fragile, everything so crazy, Steve reeking of alcohol . . .

“I just wanted us to be alone,” said Steve. He came up behind her at the closet door and began to rub her neck. “That feel good?”

“Yes . . .
”
she said ambivalently. She wasn’t in the mood to feel good, though; she had too much on her mind.

“Good.” Steve continued, working his hands down lower on her back.

“But I want to get back to Carol Anne . . .” Diane tried to pull away gently.

Gently, he held her. “The kids are safe,” he whispered, his voice getting husky. He kissed her on the neck, brought his hands around to the front of her chest.

Diane twisted away. “Come on, not now.”

He got cold in a hurry. “Okay—when? When this . . . this whatever-it-is is out of our lives? What if that takes years? Huh? What should I do? Put the marriage on hold until then?” There was a viciousness to his tone she’d never heard before.

“Steven, please.” She winced.

“Hey, listen, I have needs, too, you know,” he kept hammering.

“Your needs seem to be fulfilled by the bottle tonight,” she countered.

He laughed, a hollow, hurtful laugh. “Oh, Diane. What are you doing now? Accusing me of being a drunk? Is that it?”

“I’m not accusing you of anything,” she said frostily.

“No?”

“No.” This was the last straw, though. She’d never seen this side of his alcoholism—it usually made him maudlin, or ineffectual, or even pathetic, but not brutal like this.

The last interchange had gotten loud enough to draw Carol Anne’s attention. She walked softly down the hall to spy at her parents’ bedroom door.

Steve was saying, “You don’t think I know what’s going on with you, is that it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Diane snapped.

“I know you so well,” Steve baited her. “I know what you’ve been thinking.”

“Spare me, Steven.” She was just about ready to walk.

“For instance, I know that the other day, the morning after your mother died, you remembered helping her plant flowers in the garden when you were seven . . . you saw it clearly.” He smiled almost vindictively at the stunned effect this change of tack had on Diane.

“Steven.” She blanched. “How did you know—”

“Because I’m smaaaaaart,” he mocked. And suddenly she heard a new change in his voice—a change to a register that was disturbingly familiar, but a little too high . . . or something. It made her look at his eyes. He kept on talking: “ ‘Mummy Jess, Mummy Jess,’ ” he mimicked. Then, angry again: “So sweet. That’s how I know these things.”

Carol Anne, peeking through the crack in the door, was growing more upset. But she wasn’t even remotely prepared for what she heard next.

Steven had never sounded so base. “You also wished we’d never given birth to Carol Anne,” he hissed. “You wished she’d never been born.”

Diane looked horrified and was utterly speechless. Steve continued. “Our troubles are because of her. You’ve thought that, haven’t you? You didn’t want Carol Anne.” His head turned slightly, to make sure Carol Anne was listening.

Diane walked around the bed. She just couldn’t deal with this kind of abuse.

Steve followed her closely, though, whispering after her. “You’ve thought about it, you’ve thought about it,” he gloated.

That was all Carol Anne could take; her last refuge was self-destructing. Now she had . . . nothing. She ran back to her room, closing the door.

Steve cackled hoarsely.

Diane burst into tears, trying to run from this maniac she thought she knew. He caught her by the arm, though, and pulled her close. “See? I know you pretty well, don’t I?” He breathed heavily on her face. His breath was pungent, fetid. “So what about it?” he said suggestively. His thick hand roughly groped at her breast.

The thought of his hand on her now made her physically sick. She pushed him away. “Don’t touch me!” she shrieked.

He moved on her, raised his arm. But then a thought struck him, and he paused: Forget her, was his thought.

It was the child he wanted.

His lip curled. “I’m going to leave you. I’m going to leave you alone, Diane. That’s what you want, and that’s what you’re going to get.”

He turned and headed for the door.

And suddenly that’s just what she felt—all alone.

And she couldn’t do it all alone.

She didn’t know what had gotten into Steve, but he was probably just cracking up from the same stresses she was under. He was just coming unglued faster. More than ever, it seemed this was a time they had to draw together, not collapse. They’d made it through horrible times before—they could get through this one. They
had
to.

“Steven!” she shouted. “Damn you!” She ran up and grabbed his arm. “Steven, we’ve
got
to stick together. If we don’t—if we fall apart—it
all
falls apart.” He was ignoring her but moving toward the door at a slower rate. She kept talking, pleading. “I’m just human, Steven, just like you. I’m not perfect. And I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you, but . . .” But what? She didn’t know what else to say. He was pulling away from her, and she wanted to tell him it would all be okay, they’d work it out. “I love you,” she rasped.

He stopped cold, as if he’d been hit by a hammer.

She said it again. “I do, I love you, believe me.”

His face turned pale, his body began to shake.

Her love grew stronger with concern. “Steven? Steven! Oh, God, what’s the matter with you? What is it, honey?”

He was convulsing violently, still standing up. He pushed her away, fear on his face. He gagged once and jolted forward, bent over as if he were going to vomit.

He gagged again; his mouth opened.

And it began to come out.

A thick, translucent, gelatinous, snakelike
thing
started slithering from his mouth.

Diane screamed and backed off.

The thing kept coming, writhing, dripping mucus, grayish-pink, thick as an arm at first, then bursting with knobbly, tumorous lumps the longer it grew; like a deformed embryo, pulsing, the size of a small dog by the time it was extruded completely on the carpet.

Steve collapsed in a heap as the thing wriggled under the bed. The trail of slime it left behind smoked like an acid pit.

Under the bed, it visibly began to grow.

Diane knelt beside Steve, trying to revive him. The puddle of ooze where the thing had first been spit up smelled so foul, it made her gag. She pulled Steve away a couple of feet and shook him. “Steven—Steven—wake up!”

The thing crawled out from under the bed. It was twice as big now, like a huge, mutant fetus: bloated, viscous chest, its ribs exposed and dripping matter; tiny, flipperlike arms; a torso that tapered off to no legs at all, but a slippery, malformed, stubbly tail; and a head that was nearly human, with eyes like Kane’s, a decayed nose-hole, a drooling smile, and rotted brain tissue spilling down its forehead.

A face of primitive evil.

It stared at Diane momentarily, then slithered out the door.

“Steven, wake up! Please!” she screamed, and shook him. Then, louder: “Robbie! Carol Anne! Run! Run away!”

She stood and ran to the doorway and shouted after the thing. “Stop, you bastard! Leave us alone!”

But the door slammed in her face, flinging her back into the room. To the floor, beside Steve.

He opened his eyes groggily. He looked over at Diane, whimpering bitterly beside him.

“Diane,” he whispered.

They embraced.

Steven had renounced the Beast, and he and Diane were together.

“The kids,” she said.

He stood up shakily and tried to open the door. It wouldn’t budge. He tried again, and it snapped open suddenly on an empty hallway. Slowly, cautiously, Steve and Diane stepped out onto the landing.

They looked down the hall. Empty. Over the railing to the ground floor. Silent. Timidly they inched toward the children’s room. The thing seemed to have disappeared.

But the reason they didn’t see it was that it was hanging from the ceiling. And an instant later it dropped to the floor, directly before them—a monster so hideous, its appearance alone made them shrink back toward the bedroom in primal loathing.

It was fully ten feet tall now, its vile head nearly touching the ceiling. But it no longer had just one head—it had several, all partly emerging from the thing’s torso, all with different faces that kept molding and remolding, dripping oily humors, gnashing and slavering, all of them repeating in whispers, “She’s mine . . . Join us—”

Steve made an inarticulate groan and threw a chair at it, unmindful any longer of his own safety. The chair sailed right
through
the thing, though, and clattered down the stairs.

The Beast roared and snapped its jaws, spittle foaming. Wormlike appendages began sprouting from its head; its intestines were exposed, dripping. Unable to tolerate even the sight of the thing a moment longer, Diane pulled Steve into the bedroom and slammed the door shut—if only for a second, just to gather her resources away from the thing’s obscene cackling.

A second was all she had. The Beast’s claw smashed through the door, splitting it in half. It wrapped its glistening talons around Steve’s throat, jerking him off his feet and out of the bedroom. Diane tried to pull him back, but the thing’s strength was unearthly.

Steve felt himself yanked bodily through the air, held in a vise grip by the neck, hauled up to the gaping mouth of the Beast. He heard, in the distance, Diane screaming “No!” but he couldn’t see her, everything was becoming murky, everything except the black clarity of the demon’s yawning gullet, its jaws on the verge of taking Steve’s head off.

Suffocating, Steve looked into the abyss. Was this the end, then? To become incorporated into this thing of horror, to help perpetuate the horror on other poor souls? It disgusted him, finally, though, more than it terrified him—and that disgust made him realize Carol Anne
couldn’t
yet be a part of this thing, or he would have felt more pity for it. And he felt no pity.

He was about to be pulled into it when he expelled the power smoke he’d taken in from Taylor—expelled it into the creature’s core.

It screamed—a sound of betrayal and agony he would never forget, though he would often wish to. Screamed and recoiled . . . and a demonic head suddenly shot out of the thing’s esophagus, out of its mouth, and dispersed into the walls.

And everything was quiet again. Diane raced up to Steve, who was slumped on the floor, stunned, hurt, shaken.

She helped him up. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.”

They stumbled from room to room upstairs, but the kids were nowhere to be found.

As they started downstairs, Diane stopped Steve for a moment and smiled dearly. “You were quite brave,” she said, and kissed him. And then they went down.

The downstairs hall was filled with shadows of furniture and imagination. “Robbie?” Diane called. “Carol Anne?”

No answer. They started into the kitchen and the living room lights went out. They started into the living room and strange sounds began emanating from the ceiling—moaning sounds, slapping sounds, breathing sounds—the sounds of something alive.

Steve and Diane ran from room to room frantically, calling out, opening doors, turning on lights, pulling open drawers, pounding on walls.

The walls pounded back.

Finally, in the den, Diane saw Carol Anne’s blanket sticking out from under a closet door. With a gasp she wrenched the door open and was deluged by falling vacuum cleaners and appliances that Steve had piled high in there the day before.

They plowed through the remaining household conveniences, tossing boxes wildly into the middle of the room to get to the back of the closet.

But no Carol Anne.

Steve ran to the kitchen again to look in the cabinets under the sink while Diane opened the door to the hall closet.

Dozens of groping hands reached out at her from the darkness of the closet, the faces looming behind them depraved, insistent. They grabbed her, tried to pull her in. Like the hands that had pulled her into the earth in her dream, they were rotted, cold, clinging, but she extricated herself with a yelp, and they shrank in dismay. They were, finally, merely pitiable. Diane slammed the door on them, muffling their wails.

She heard another noise in the storage space beneath the stairs. Shaking half with fear and half with fury, she swung it open on the momentum of her adrenaline, and a flying shape leapt at her, was on her—

It was Robbie, clutching for safety.

She hugged him forcefully, wanting not to let go. “You okay, baby? You’re all right, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, Mom, I’m okay. Really, You okay?”

Steve ran in to join them, relief on his face as he saw his son safe, then fear again. “Where’s Carol Anne?”

“Dunno, Dad.”

There was a sudden grinding sound and they all looked up. The plaster in the ceiling was beginning to crack.

They ran into the kitchen. “Carol Anne!” Diane yelled. “Answer me right now!”

“Over there!” shouted Robbie. They looked to where he was pointing. Through the window they could see E. Buzz standing at the garage door, barking.

With a thunderous ripping, as if the whole house was being physically torn in half, the crack in the living room ceiling split into a fissure and ran down the hall, into the kitchen. Plaster rained down on their heads.

They ran for the back door. A huge bulge appeared in the ceiling, as if a giant fist were smashing it from above. Great chunks of plaster and beam collapsed as they made it through the back door, into the yard, into the garage with E. Buzz.

And there was Carol Anne, sitting in the car, holding her Katrina doll, quaking.

Steve tried the door handle, but it was locked. “You okay, honey?” he shouted through the glass. He saw the car keys in the ignition.

Carol Anne just kept staring straight ahead. Diane and Robbie ran around to check the doors on the other side.

Steve spoke softer. “Open the door, honey. It’s okay now.”