Shivers (34 page)

Twenty minutes later she realized she had somehow turned a wrong corner at some point and lost her way.
Great start, Una darling.
She must have been going in the wrong direction for the
longest
time. Not only was she no longer under the elevated subway—the darn thing was nowhere in sight. She now stood on the right side of a lonely road in an isolated warehouse district. Worse—directly ahead of her was a cemetery. The road she was walking on divided the cemetery into two equally ominous sections.

A cemetery. What an omen!

She had always hated cemeteries. Hated those little cubicles of death that people were placed in upon expiration. She wrapped her arms around herself to keep out the cold and slapped her wrists to keep warm. She checked her watch-for the time. It was barely eight
P.M
but it was so dark it might as well have been midnight. The watch was the nicest present Brock had ever given her. Expensive too. It lit up in the dark when she pressed the tiny button on the side. Instead of hands, the time was told in numbers with the day and date in smaller numerals above. This was the only nice thing she owned that she’d never, ever hock. No matter how hungry she got.

There was no point in retracing her steps since she’d no idea where she’d gone off the track in the first place. She’d continue on until she reached a residential district and found some friendly stranger who could give her directions.

She walked briskly past the silent rows of tombstones.
Brrr.
She looked ahead and tried to see how long the block was, wanting to estimate the time it would take her to reach more pleasant surroundings. This was a big cemetery, but something about its vastness and peacefulness was almost comforting.

She had walked a distance about equal to half a block when she heard what she first assumed was music—a strange, plaintive melody with vaguely sinister undertones. Where had she heard it before? She turned around and saw figures in the background, hidden in the darkness behind the streetlight. When had they snuck up behind her? She stopped, suddenly feeling a chill which came not from the dark, and waited to see who or what they were. She prayed they weren’t gang members. As she stood there she realized it was voices—not music—that she had heard.

It seemed to be a bunch of people, singing, chanting rather, as they walked up from the corner where the cemetery began. They must have come from around the block. The group of darkened figures walked directly into the path of the streetlight, and Lina gasped when she saw what they were.

Strange shapes, hideous visages, all decked out in gruesome colors and macabre costumes.

Then she laughed.

Of course! The high-pitched, child-like voices. The devilish outfits. Children! Children out trick-or-treating. She could see now that the distant figures were all quite short, that they were carrying little orange and black shopping bags, waving their tiny arms up and down with frenzied anticipation. How silly she was, getting frightened by a bunch of schoolchildren! She laughed again, and continued on her way. Children. Just children!

Funny, she hadn’t realized it was Halloween.

She walked along the cemetery at a slower pace, her dislike of children at war with the hope that they would overtake her and provide company as she traversed this lonely and isolated area. The headstones had been replaced by large, gray vaults which contained, she imagined, many different piles of dust and bones. Whole families gone to ashes.

Remembering something, she stopped and turned around again. What was it she wanted to check? How odd that there were no adults accompanying the children. How could their parents let them walk alone in this neighborhood at this time of night? Unfit as she might have been had she been a mother, she’d never have let a small child out of her sight in
this
city. There were enough lunatics on the streets on a regular night.
Tonight
every nutcase that could walk, crawl, or wiggle would be on the loose.

Wait a minute!
Now
she remembered. She pressed the button on her watch again. The tiny red numbers lit up obligingly and she checked the date. She was certain it was correct. According to the timepiece, tonight
couldn’t
be Halloween. It was only October 20th! Halloween was over a week away! Then what were those children doing? They were not chanting trick-or-treat any longer, but something else, something obscene and repulsive, something deranged. She remembered where she had heard that “melody” before.

It had been on another Halloween many years ago. She’d been a child, a young girl still in grade school. She’d wanted to go trick-or-treating, but her mother wouldn’t let her go out on her own. She’d had a fight with her friends in school— those jealous nitwits—and didn’t want to go with them. Her mother couldn’t be bothered dragging her around the neighborhood. She had a party to go to. She left Lina home alone.

The kids had come to the house and stood outside on the lawn. Wearing their gaily colored costumes and fright masks; they started to sing instead of ringing the bell and shouting trick or treat. They sang: Lina Hobler is a freak Her mother picks up men on the street Lina Hobler is ugly and poor The whole town knows her mother’s a whore It had been something like that—not exactly the same, Lina’s memory was so bad—but similar.

The children had scrawled dirty words on the walls of the house with crayons. Lina had screamed from the window for them to stop— and they’d threatened to come into the house and beat her up.

Her mother had come home and found her hiding in a closet, sobbing in misery.

Lina turned about and saw that the “trick-or-treaters” were less than one half block away and gaining, their tiny bodies dangerously close to catching up to her. Lina was seized by a feeling of icy terror—children had always been her enemies; why hadn’t she remembered that? She started running up the street as fast as she could go.

Even before she heard the louder patter of their feet on the pavement, the sick, giggling noises coming from their mouths, she knew that they had started running after her.

A few yards ahead to her right she saw the gate across the entrance to the cemetery. It was closed at this hour, but perhaps someone was working inside. She darted over to the gate, wrapped her hands around the bars, and tugged. The chain that held its two sections together rattled noisily.

“Help me! Help me!” she screamed. She pulled frantically at the gate, but at best it would yield only a few inches. “Help, please! Please help me!”

There was no one there to help her. No one walking amidst the gravesites, no one on the street, no cars passing by. As the children approached from behind, they began to extract long, sharp cutlery from inside their shopping bags. From behind the monstrous masks came demented, delighted laughter.

Lina started screaming, her hands still pulling on the iron bars of the gate.

The first thick blade was thrust up into the space between her shoulders.

As Lina cried out, slipping down messily toward the ground, a flood of crimson liquid poured out from the wound. More of the phantom knives in her mind slashed out, cutting into her back, her ribs, her neck.

“Help! Help me! Please help . . . help . . . he . . .”

She tried to get up, tried to shield her face from the attack, but they were surrounding her, were all over her, those little hideous faces laughing and chanting while they hacked away at her body.
They’d come into the house as they threatened to and were beating her up as she always knew they would. Mommy—where are you?

As they sliced her face to ribbons, the blood welled up in her eyes.

A delirious bloodstained Cinderella holding a carving knife in her hands was cackling.

Lina reached up her hand and pulled off the Cinderella’s mask. She wanted to see its face.

As her heart stopped, as the mask that had never been there dematerialized in her hands, she saw that the little Cinderella’s face was
her own.

TWELVE

T
HE HAND WAS
still on his shoulder.

Even before he turned around, he knew who it was.

He recognized the smell of him, that certain way he would breath, that strong, unmistakable grip that had held him so fast in childhood.

“Father?” Steven said, still not turning around.

This was crazy. Some mugger or thief, some junkie, had climbed in through a window and was trying to freak him out. That was all it was. Or else it was a ghost—or was he going out of his mind?

“Steven. You must believe it’s me.”

No! His father was dead! He had seen the burned wreckage of the car he’d been trapped in. He had gone to his funeral.

“Steven, it’s your father!”

Steven was Afraid to turn around and look. He wasn’t sure which scared him more—that it wasn’t his father or that it
was.

“Steven. Turn around and face me.
Look at me!”

He did.

It was his father, all right. Steven’s eyes had adjusted enough to the comparative darkness to be sure of it. He saw the high forehead, the wide brow, the brownish gray mustache, the prominent cheekbones. He saw the full, determined lips, the worn wrinkled face of a handsome sixty-eight-year-old man.

Steven felt as if his whole world had gone topsy-turvy. Suddenly he could no longer believe in anything or anyone. Nothing made sense. There was no up or down. No right or wrong. Just a horrible feeling of utter helplessness in the pit of his stomach.

He longed for the security of a womb.

“Yes, Steven. It’s me.”

Steven reached out his arms and held onto him, on some primitive level not knowing or caring where he had come from or why he had been gone so long. His life had been so miserable lately—his father was here to set things right.

Then he drew back. “You’re dead. I don’t understand.” He could scarcely believe the evidence of his own eyes. “It
was
you that night. Looking in through the window.”

“Yes. I only wanted to look at you, maybe tell you that everything was all right. But I hadn’t time. I felt my . . . independence weakening.”

Steven stepped away from his father and leaned back against the wall. The momentary euphoria he’d initially felt had dissipated. He had to struggle to fight back the fear. Surely he was seeing a ghost, a phantom of his imagination. He went to the china cabinet and withdrew some candles and holders, lit them. In the dim light his father’s face was ghastly, but Steven was even more certain he was who he said he was.

“I—I don’t understand, I—” Steven couldn’t think of anything else to say. “How did you get in here?”

“The door was ajar, Steven. I simply came in. I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

Steven looked over at the entrance foyer but the door itself was beyond his sightline. Well, it figured—he was so distraught and nervous and sleepy he
would
have forgotten to close and lock it.

“Look, Dad. I want some answers. You owe me that. I thought I had
buried
you.”

Something suddenly broke inside Steven and he grabbed .the man by his collar, almost wrenching him off his feet. His loving response had been replaced by doubt and curiosity.

“Steven! Please!”

“I want to know what you’re doing here. You’re supposed to be
dead.
What sort of joke is this? Why have you come back now, after all this time? Why did you let me go on thinking you were dead? You
are
dead. Burned to a crisp and buried. Why did you come back?” Steven was sobbing now, unable to hold it in.
“Why?”
He let go of his father and started wiping his eyes.

“I had no choice but to deceive you. I didn’t
want
to. I didn’t have any choice.”

“I want answers—whoever you are. I want to know the truth!” How could he be sure that this apparition, this—this doppelganger—was really his father? It could be a trick. Another part of the lousy game.

“You’ll get answers, Steven, if you calm down. I’m taking an extreme risk just by being here, you must understand that. I’ll explain everything to the best of my ability. A lot of it you’ll refuse to believe, but you have to believe, if we’re to save your brother.”

“Then Joey’s
alive!
Your coming back has something to do with him!”

“Yes. Now sit down, Steven. And I’ll tell you what happened.”

Steven did as he was told, the little boy in him responding to the paternal command. His father looked out the window. “There isn’t much time. It’s already blacked out the city. It needs the power.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We call it ‘the master.’ It’s responsible for Joey’s kidnapping, the deaths of Vivian Jessup, George Forrance—all the others.”

“
It’s
responsible. You talk as if you’re referring to some kind of
thing.
”

“In a way, I am. The master is not a human being, Steven. The master is an alien entity, neither male nor female, a bio-mechanical, computerized horror. We’ve come to refer to it as a
biocomp.”

Steven’s father walked over to him, bent down before the chair, and struggled for a few moments to transform his thoughts into words.

“It all started not long before my ‘death’— which, as you must realize by now, was a fabrication.”

So Bradford Everson told his son the story, the whole incredible story. How a futuristic capsule dating back to primeval times had been unearthed during the foundation-laying of one of Hawthorne’s chemical plants in the Midwest. How the company had greedily locked away the capsule in their main labs in New Jersey. How an assemblage of scientists in the employ of the firm—who were later to come to be called “the committee”—were gathered together to open the capsule and examine the life-form inside it.

He told Steven of their remarkable finding: The lifeform was practically indistinguishable from the technological innards of the capsule— it was a living computer, in fact, half tissue, half alloy. None of the scientists had ever imagined the
possibility
of such a life-form, let alone seen one. The capsule—of extraterrestrial origin, that much was apparent—had landed on earth centuries ago. Something had gone wrong, and the alien had remained in suspended animation —so the terrible task for which it had been created and sent to Earth had been
postponed
for ages.