Poltergeist II - The Other Side (2 page)

Taylor was on the move again. The cave narrowed and dipped; the path was soon blocked by a dark pool of water. Half out of the water, half embedded in the stuff of the cave wall, was a decayed human skeleton. Taylor began wading into the pool.

“Hey, you don’t know how deep that thing is,” one of the workmen warned. He was starting to feel a little sick himself. Taylor took the man’s flashlight and continued slowly into the pool.

“Why not wait until we pump the water out?” said the second workmen.

“Yeah,” the first agreed. Then: “Taylor?”

Taylor was moving, though; he wasn’t listening. He had to concentrate on this thing before him, this thing . . .

The water rose to his thigh gradually, then quickly there was a step-off, and he was chest-deep. It was cold. Still he advanced, shining the light before him, shuffling his boots along the slick stone basin. Slowly the water receded as he waded to the opposite shore.

This cavern was lower than the previous one, but the acoustics were different, so the wind that trickled in through the tunnels from the outer world curled around the walls with a pitiful moaning sound.

Bones littered the ground. Human skeletons, arms outstretched, sprawled in agony and isolation or huddled, the skulls of adults nestled with those of children. Unending death lived here; even Taylor had to breathe with care.

He walked to the top of a low rise where a silted-over, mummified corpse seemed to hold court over these ruins. Its face was rotted, grinning, its arms upraised. It seemed almost alive.

Taylor stared but did not go near. Instead, he walked back to the stagnant pool. Tangina was there, and the other two—they had carried her across. She was shivering badly, though. She looked at Taylor and then up at the laughing cadaver upon whom Taylor still had his gaze fixed.

“I have seen him,” said Taylor. “In dreams.”

Tangina nodded. “I, too.”

Taylor looked up at the ceiling of the cavern
—through
the ceiling, the rock, the earth, the graves, the concrete foundation—to where a house had once stood but stood no more. “Where is the family now?”

The wind rose, not quite to a howl.

“Phoenix,” Tangina told him, for good or ill.

Saturday morning at the Mesa Mall, about twenty miles outside Phoenix, Robbie Freeling stood in front of the Adobe Videotronics Trading Post watching ten television sets through the window. Four were tuned to the Dodger game, three to music video shows, two to a toy company’s stop-motion cartoon about space aliens, and one to an old Three Stooges movie. Robbie, now almost thirteen, had been culturally deprived of TV by his parents since the age of nine, so watching four shows on ten sets was about as close to the angels as Robbie was likely to get without dying. He took his chances in public places.

Robbie was like a lot of boys, in most ways: he had braces, which he hated, which sometimes caught his lip and painfully pinched it, and which withered his smile in self-conscious mortification; he liked baseball, didn’t like school, understood video games, didn’t understand girls.

But there was a uniqueness about Robbie, too, something unshared with his peers. A separateness. A loneliness he seemed to nurture like an old friend. In fact, he didn’t really have any friends, except his sister Carol Anne; and she was somehow more than a friend.

They were nearly inseparable, almost as if they were afraid of letting each other out of sight. They played together, read together, did nothing together. They were quite a pair.

Carol Anne emerged now from the adjoining pet store with their mother, Diane. And if Robbie was a little different, Carol Anne was positively irregular. She wore a fey, secret smile most of the time, as if she were a million miles away. The smile faded if someone tried to intrude on it, though; she was afraid of people, by and large. Especially strangers.

She had dreams that frightened her, though she couldn’t remember them when she awoke. Her mother had taken her to therapists for years but had finally given up. She simply comforted the child when possible or did some unstructured art therapy with her in the evenings.

Carol Anne liked drawing pictures. Often she did pictures of her dreams, which felt good at times and creepy at other times; she could never predict which it was going to be.

She frequently understood what animals were saying, too—or at least what they wanted. But no one believed her about that any more than they believed her dreams were real, so she usually didn’t talk about it.

And finally, though she was going on nine, she looked hardly older than she’d looked over three years before, when her family had left Cuesta Verde to come live with Gramma Jess near Phoenix. In fact, Robbie, too, seemed younger than his years—as if something had happened to arrest his development at a point in time, some suffocation of spirit.

But today was a day of shopping with Mom at the mall. And that was always just pure fun.

Carol Anne was pleading as she exited the pet shop with Diane. “But Mom—I
talked
to the kittens. They
wanna
come home with us.”

“I know, sweetheart, but E. Buzz would get upset.” E. Buzz was the family dog. “Robbie, come on.”

Robbie didn’t budge as Carol Anne and Diane moved slowly along the walkway toward the stairwell—this would be his last moment of TV for at least another week, and he wanted to savor it, to make it last.

Mother and daughter continued their debate. “But why?” said Carol Anne.

“Because E. Buzz isn’t used to having other pets around,” explained Diane. “How would you like it if I brought home a new baby?” She looked around at Robbie, still glued to the window. “Robbie!” she called.

Carol Anne thought about her mother’s proposal. “I’d love it, Mom,” she replied, beaming.

“Robbie—we’re going!” Diane raised her voice again. Then, to Carol Anne: “We’ll ask your dad.”

This was an unexpected concession. “Wow, you really think he’ll let us bring home a new baby?”

Diane looked confused—this conversation had suddenly left her behind. Best to stick with things you understand, she thought. So she ordered, “Robbie! This instant!” And he came.

The three of them jostled past shoppers until they reached the stairway to the lower level, where Diane brought the company to a halt in order to reorganize her packages before descending. Robbie took one of the smaller bags as Carol Anne looked over the railing to the hundreds of milling people below. That’s when she saw him.

A man. Tall he was, and so thin that Carol Anne looked quickly from him to her own fingers and then back again to see which was thinner. He wore a black broad-brimmed hat, a long black linen coat, threadbare black pants, and black leather shoes that laced up high. Old-timey clothes, they looked like. History book clothes. It made Carol Anne think he must be an old preacher.

Or maybe that was the music in her head. Like an old hymn—it sounded as if the man was humming it, though Carol Anne knew she couldn’t have heard from that far away. The music was familiar, too. She’d heard it before; she just couldn’t place it. Familiar and scary. Then the man looked straight at her.

It made her tighten up all over. She knew him, but she didn’t know from where. A hollow man, full of shadow things. He smiled at her, a chilly smile, and began walking toward the stairs . . . and walked through one of the people in his way.

Through him and out the other side, and on toward the stairs.

Carol Anne jumped. “Mom!” she whispered. “Look.”

Diane looked down to where her daughter was pointing, but all she saw was Saturday shoppers. “What is it?” she asked the girl.

The man was lost in the crowd, though. “I don’t know,” said Carol Anne, unsure now. “Someone . . . gone now.”

Diane looked a bit concerned. She didn’t like it when Carol Anne saw things Diane couldn’t. The girl’s imagination was altogether too vivid. “Well, come on, then,” she said, and took the kids downstairs.

Carol Anne kept looking around behind her, but the man seemed to have disappeared. Still, she’d hear fragments of that song and turn to find it . . . but it would fade into the chattering bustle of the crowd.

Diane stopped in front of a store that held little interest for kids. “I’ve gotta pick something up,” she instructed. “You can wait out here if you promise to stay put. Okay?”

“I’ll watch her, Mom,” said Robbie.

“Carol Anne?” Diane prodded. She didn’t like leaving the girl alone, but at the same time she knew she had to let go a little. Release them into the world. They had to grow up, like anybody else.

“Promise,” said Carol Anne. She actually liked it when her mother left her alone—she saw things more clearly, usually.

“Okay, I’ll be right back” said Diane, and entered the lingerie store.

Robbie moved to the adjacent window to ogle a rack of BB guns while Carol Anne turned toward a sound at her back.

It was the preacher man, standing right behind her. He was reaching out for her.

She backed up rapidly half a dozen steps into the crowd. She didn’t want to be touched by this man; his teeth were yellow, and the air around him was damp.

She looked for Robbie, but she’d gotten turned around and so looked in the wrong direction. When she looked back at the man in black he was becoming transparent, and he quickly vanished. She ran to look for Robbie, but she couldn’t see him. She heard him, though. “Mom!” he was calling.

She ran toward his voice, but after only a step, she bumped into a pair of long legs, outfitted in loose black pants and lace-up boots. She raised her eyes. It was he.

“Hi,” he purred, his voice like cream gone bad.

“Hi,” she replied in monotone, trying to give no encouragement, yet too frightened to run or yell.

In the background she could hear Robbie and Diane talking excitedly—“Mom, she’s gone, I don’t know where!” “Carol Anne?! Carol Anne!”—but she couldn’t answer them, couldn’t acknowledge them. As if in a nightmare, she couldn’t speak, couldn’t even move. Yet she heard them clearly, in a detached kind of way, while another part of her was taking the measure of this smiling, humorless man. It was as though she was two people, or the same person existing simultaneously on two different planes—the plane of this shopping center and the plane of this preacher.

He reached out to touch her.

Suddenly Diane scooped her up. “Honey, what’s the matter? You look pale as water. Why’d you run off like that? I told you I was coming right back . . .”

“I dunno . . .” Carol Anne lied, her eyes fixed on the man.

Diane turned to him now, smiling, a bit flustered. “Thanks for stopping her . . .”

“My pleasure,” said the man, removing his hat. His hair was wispy, white, the texture of mealy corn silk. His voice, Diane thought, was too high . . . or something. His eyes were like moss.

She walked off with Robbie holding her hand and Carol Anne clinging to her. Carol Anne looked back at the stranger. He put his hat on, then strolled away humming the melody that seemed to live inside her head: It made her start to cry. “I wanna go home, Mom. I don’t feel good.”

Diane, concerned without knowing exactly why, felt Carol Anne’s forehead for fever as she took her children toward the parking lot.

In the distance, Carol Anne saw the strange man walk through a closed door and disappear.

The man’s name was Henry Kane.

Grover Lane was one of the lesser streets on the outskirts of greater Phoenix. Lined mostly with succulents and an occasional juniper, it curved for only a few short blocks, connecting two main suburban arteries. Those few blocks were quiet blocks, though: residential bordering on backwater. The occupants of the homes were predominantly retirees, older couples whose children had grown and left to conquer new suburbs. Jess Williams lived here.

Her house was actually built in the style referred to as California Bungalow—built by her now deceased husband, Avery, who’d grown up in Pasadena and longed for the architecture of his childhood. It was a big old two-story wood frame house with detail in rich oak and walnut, windows of leaded glass, and a garden that blossomed with rose, honeysuckle, azalea, star jasmine, and bold cactus flowers. Blossomed with life. The garden was Jess’s domain.

After forty years out there, Avery had finally died of the chronic lung condition that had brought them to the arid land. He spent his last few nights lying on a cot Jess had set up in the garden, inhaling the perfumed memories of his youth, so that when death finally came he was at peace, and Jess felt that his spirit had simply entered the garden.

She would otherwise have moved—the kids were long gone, and she would have been so lonely knocking around the big old house all by herself—but she sensed Avery in that garden they’d shared so many years. He was in every petal, every handful of earth. So she tended the garden—nurtured it, spoke to it, loved it, filled it with her life, and took life from it. And she was content.

And then one of the kids came home, which was cause for great pleasure and comfort to Jess; great joy but for the obvious pain her child was in. Diane’s whole family, really, was close to a breakdown.

They’d lost their house, nearly lost their sanity, it seemed. And they wouldn’t talk about it. Diane would break into tears at any loud noise, Steve couldn’t hold down a steady job, Robbie and Carol Anne had nightmares. Dana, Diane’s older daughter, could do nothing but fight with everyone, so when she graduated high school the following year, it took her less than a week to pack her bags and head east for college—as far east as she could get, and don’t bother to write.

So of course Jess said they could live there. They were churning apart, trying to hold things together, and Jess foresaw that by being there for them, letting the currents of her home and her self ease them, their own boiling energy would first simmer, then cool, perhaps even jell. And to a certain extent, she was right. The nightmares receded, the arguments diminished, wild outbursts became controlled. Wounds, unhealed, were at least balmed.

What Jess
hadn’t
foreseen was the special nature of her granddaughter, Carol Anne, or the special relationship that would develop between them.