Poltergeist II - The Other Side (16 page)

But it wasn’t. And at that moment the toys and tools piled against the walls came alive.

The jack-in-the-box sprang out and began repeatedly striking Steve in the leg. A stuffed monkey started throwing things at the car and the family—screwdrivers, nails, chunks of cement.

Screws spun out of the walls, hurling themselves like missiles.

The chainsaw on the workbench roared to life.

Steve put his face to the window. “Please, honey, open the door.” The jack-in-the-box was hammering his foot; he kicked it away, but it started lurching back.

“Sweetpea?” he said.

“Yes, Dad?” She finally turned her head. Diane and Robbie were dodging salvos, knocking on the other windows.

Steve suddenly had a flash about the nature of Carol Anne’s reticence. “Sweetpea, that wasn’t Dad talking up in the bedroom. You know that, don’t you?”

“I know,” she said. At least, she thought it was something like that. Still, it was nice to hear him say it, in his own voice again.

“Good, then open the door quickly, Sweetpea.”

So she opened the doors, and everyone piled in as the garage debris really started to fly—nails, nuts and bolts, pipe joints, hurtling into the car, denting the metal.

Steve turned on the ignition. Cans of paint on the shelves began exploding, splattering over the windshield. The chainsaw on the workbench levitated and started floating toward them.

The car wouldn’t start. Battery low.

A pile of snow chains whipped over the front bumper.

“Come on!” shouted Diane, and Robbie began screaming.

Carol Anne buried her face in her mother’s chest.

The chainsaw started ripping through the hood.

Steve turned to see Robbie’s clown staring at him through the driver’s window. Suddenly it smashed its head against the glass, cracking the windshield from end to end.

The engine finally caught, turned over. Steve put it in reverse, slamming on the gas.

The car didn’t move.

The wheels were spinning, burning rubber, but the chains on the front bumper were wrapped around a supporting pillar. So nobody was going anywhere.

The chainsaw buzzed into the roof, narrowly missing Steve’s head. Robbie screamed again and kept screaming.

Tires smoking. A rafter fell from the roof, crashing into the door. The chainsaw moved toward Diane and Carol Anne, and their screams joined Robbie’s.

“Damn it!” Steve roared at the car, “Move!”

With a final burst of power, the car tore loose of its bound bumper and squealed backward through the garage door amid flying splinters of wood, glass, rakes, and hoes.

He screeched out of the driveway, sending the chainsaw spinning off into the garden.

And he peeled off down the street in a car full of cries and whimpers.

And the last thing he saw, looking back at his demolished garage, was the figure of Henry Kane.

Driving the anonymous midnight freeway, passing lights, passing darkness.

Carol Anne and E. Buzz dozed in the back seat beside Robbie, who slept deeply, gripping the baseball bat Taylor had made potent with magic designs and left for him here in the car.

Steve drove silently, unblinking, tense, chewing the inside of his lip, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.

Diane, now that they seemed to be out of immediate danger, felt a certain kind of calm resolve—resolving what, she didn’t know; only that they couldn’t go back to that house, they had to go on. Ahead, to the future, whatever it was.

And she knew she loved Steve. Whatever his faults and weaknesses had been over the past few years, he’d shown tonight what he was. Courageous, resourceful, vulnerable, supportive . . . and
with
them. Whatever happened, they would do this thing together.

She smiled at the multicolored streaks of paint on the edges of the window where the windshield wipers hadn’t reached and put her head down on Steve’s shoulder “Looks just like the day-glo you painted your van to impress Cookie Gurnich,” she said sweetly. “You do this just to impress
me!”

“Who else?” He smirked, his gloom breaking a little.

There was more silence, more comfortable now. Then she said, “You know where you’re going?”

“Cuesta Verde,” he answered, flinching only slightly. “Diane, we’ve got to attack this thing head-on.”

She agreed intuitively but wanted to talk it out. “Steve . . . what about the kids?”

“Taylor told me that we’ve got to go back . . . together. All of us.” He looked less than certain but more than resigned. “You believe him?”

She didn’t know what to think. She knew what to feel, though. She felt Taylor was right.

She heard a rustling in the back. “Honey, you still up?”

“Yes, Mom,” said Carol Anne.

“Was real smart of you to hide in the car.”

“Oh, it wasn’t my idea,” said Carol Anne. “Taylor told me to.”

“Told you to get out of the house?”

“He said he was making Dad’s car a safe place to hide in but that it wouldn’t run very well.”

Steve half laughed. “Good thing we didn’t have to get it started in a hurry,” he muttered.

Robbie was awake now, yawning. “Are you angry at Taylor, Dad?”

“No, I’m not angry at him.” He was angry at
himself
for living in a coma the past four years.

Diane looked around at her little family—little knights on a little crusade. “Steven . . . I believe Taylor,” she said. “And I trust you.”

The car limped through the desert night—dented, painted, sawed, and torn—to the outskirts of Los Angeles, up around its northern perimeter, to the housing development once known as Cuesta Verde Estates.

The Freelings became intensely silent as they drove slowly through their old haunts. Curving avenues, once-manicured lawns.

C
UESTA
V
ERDE
—W
HERE
D
REAMS
C
OME
T
RUE.

The houses were boarded; the dreams were dead.

All but one nightmare that refused to die.

Steve pulled the car to a stop in front of the lot on which their house had once stood. Just dusty clay now, surrounded by a high chain-link fence. Off to the side, a bulldozer slept its spiritless sleep.

They just sat inside the car, watching, for a long time. Painful memories resided here still, waiting to be roused.

The Freelings walked toward the excavation site. It was lit only by the moon, though sodium-vapor overhead arc lamps still stood, dark, ready to be disassembled tomorrow, when the site would be closed by authorities. At the moment, these light poles looked like giant insects, standing with their glassy eyes until the right moment to pounce.

Steve, Diane, Carol Anne, and Robbie edged past the gate to the rim of the pit. The wind blew dust into their faces; the moon went behind a cloudbank. Darkness became substance.

Suddenly there was a loud
GCHNNKK!
and the arc lights flared on with blinding intensity, filling the excavation with an orange radiance, throwing the tunnels and landfalls into dark relief, casting ominous shadows from the piles of earth and rock.

Squinting, Steve could barely see the hunched-over figure that sidled up on his left.

“Looks kinda like hell, don’t it?” said Tangina, pointing her flashlight toward the shaft they were to descend.

“Thank God it’s you,” breathed Diane, bending down to hug their diminutive champion.

“I knew you’d be here,” said Tangina, “so I had to be here, too.”

“We had to come,” Steve began to explain, but he didn’t know how.

“I know.” Tangina looked sad. “But there are many dangers you must consider, Steven.”

“We know that, Tangina,” said Diane. This was hard for her. If this didn’t work—and she had no plan of attack or any reason to believe it
would
work, other than sheer desperation—then they’d lose everything. “This is our last hope, Tangina. We’ve got to try to free ourselves.”

Tangina nodded. “Follow me,” she said.

She led them to the manhole that plunged to the caverns below and climbed down the ladder. The others followed.

Once they were below ground, the light of the brilliant arc lamps disappeared immediately, and it was dark as a tomb. Tangina kept her flashlight on the ladder until everyone had made it safely to the stone floor, then she turned off even that feeble glow.

“It was so bright up top,” she whispered, “I want to give your eyes a chance to get used to the dark.”

Their other senses were quickly heightened: the cool, musty smells; the damp walls; the deadened sounds of distant water dripping; the taste of fear.

After a minute she flipped the switch on again. The beam illuminated a series of cavernous pathways, twisting down into the bedrock. “Now listen to me carefully,” said Tangina. “Stay together, no matter what happens. The worlds of this life and the Other Side have met here before. If we are taken beyond this dimension, we have only one chance. We must separate the beast from his flock and show them where the Light is—some of them made it through to the Light the last time you were there, but many remain with him, herded by the fear of his terrible wrath.” She spoke with a special conviction that echoed of its own fears. “But be careful,” she went on, “and don’t go too far. For if
you
cross over into the Light, you won’t be able to return.”

Robbie crowded his father’s side. “Dad . . . I’m scared.”

Tangina, who was the same height as the boy, looked him in the eye with the comradeship of human frailty. “Me, too.” She smiled.

“And so am I,” added Steve, lest Robbie fall under the false notion that fear was the province of women and children. “But being brave is doing what you’ve got to do, despite how scared you might be. Understand?”

“Yeah, Dad,” said Robbie. “I’ll be brave.”

“Good,” whispered Steve, and hugged his son with the love of a man afraid he was about to be remembered fondly.

Diane took Carol Anne’s shoulders in her hands. “Honey, if you don’t want to do this, it’s okay. We can leave here now.”

“No, Mom—I want to.” She wasn’t sure why. It had to do with dreams and pasts, and like everyone else here, she knew it was just something she had to do.

“I love you very much,” Diane whispered proudly, almost crying. “Don’t ever forget that.” She wiped away a tear then for the innocent bravery of children. “Okay, everybody—let’s go.”

And so they went. Deeper into the cavern, Tangina in the lead, Diane bringing up the rear.

Massive old support beams balanced the earth above them as they wound to the next lower level. Here and there disintegrating corpses, half-embedded, reached out at them, eternally imploring. Carol Anne clung to her mother, Robbie was wide-eyed and tried to walk the way he imagined a man was supposed to walk in such a situation.

Steve suddenly had a funny sensation, like prickles at the back of his neck. He looked left and saw, to his dense horror, a pictogram on the wall: the figure of a bending man, arms akimbo, a snake curling out of his mouth.

The image echoed nauseatingly through Steve’s soul. He knew intimately the story being recorded here: here, how many centuries ago, a man had been invaded by the Beast and was spewing the thing out again. Just as Steve had done.

He shivered, steadied himself against the wall, labored his breathing for a few seconds. Diane came up to him, put her hands on his shoulders. “You okay?” she said.

He nodded but remained pale. He’d come so close, alone with his bottle, to total annihilation; and now, together, they’d come so far.

He shook off his chill and motioned that they should continue.

The path dipped down, became muddy—this area had been filled with water a few days ago, pumped out by the excavation crew. Now it was a slippery depression. Tangina led the Freelings up its far side, where it opened on a large cave full of skeletons.

This was the chamber Taylor had found. Scores of mummified corpsers, groping up a rise toward the silted-over carcass of a single man, grinning back down on this congregation with a soul of pure evil.

Diane stared up at the laughing cadaver with a sickening coming-together of her memories, visions, dreams. Her breathing grew shallow; shudders took hold of her body.

Steve grabbed her. “Diane? You okay?”

Tangina ran up. “What is it? What’s the matter, Diane?”

“Diane, say something,” said Steve.

“Mom?” Carol Anne called weakly.

Diane took a step back—back away from the figure on the mound. “It’s horrible,” she whispered intensely.

“What is?” said Tangina.

“They’re all . . . they’re all dying here . . .” Diane murmured.

“How?” Tangina urged.

“They . . .” She suddenly saw it all—these skeletons became young, alive people to her inner vision, their faces pleading, their hands beseeching the man on the mound, Henry Kane. He was smiling at her now, just the way he’d smiled yesterday on her front porch.

She described her vision. “They . . . they lock themselves in this cavern because he tells them the end of the world is coming . . .”

Kane placed his hand on the face of the woman reaching up to him, tears of joy streaming from her eyes. “You’re not dying here!” said Kane. “You’re not!”

Diane stared into the depths of her trance. “But the day he predicted for the end comes and goes,” she said, as if it were happening right then. “And a new day begins . . .”

Kane raised his arms to the congregation. Candles flickered in the small cavern, his underground cathedral. “Follow me to a better place,” he enjoined them. “Don’t fear. Your little ones are surrendering to me. Look at them. They’ll be reborn into a better world with me! Follow their lead. This is a beautiful day. A joyous day. Come with me to God!”

Diane continued narrating softly: “But Kane won’t let them leave. He tells them the earth has been spoiled . . . and they believe him.” She began to weep. “They begin too suffocate. No air in here. Crying . . . begging for mercy . . .”

Children gasping for air. One by one, the votive candles flickered and died. The faithful slumped. Only Kane remained erect, charged by the power of his mastery over them.