The Croning (36 page)

After the horrors in the unknown caves of Mystery Mountain, Don had lost his mind completely, had withdrawn into a shell and submerged the atrocities in the primordial muck of his subconscious. Such trivialities as speculation about Frick and Frack, cryptic warnings and photographs no longer concerned him. He became mild and sedate, compelled solely by his research and an ever-strengthening devotion to his wife and children.

Mystery Mountain was a half-glimpsed story on late-night TV.

Yes, the company line went that Wolverton vanished in an unrelated hiking incident, while Dr. Noonan and several others were lost after falling into a sinkhole in the mountains. Don turned up disoriented and amnesiac, for the second time in his life, wandering the river valley near camp. Theory was methane or some other noxious gas damaged his brain. AstraCorp had plenty of money to bankroll any medical or legal cover-up that ensued. Don accepted what conciliatory company reps told him about his missing time; he accepted what Michelle told him as well. He curdled and atrophied and became a mild, toothless old man who feared the night and suffered fugues and delusions for the rest of his life.

Barry Rourke had once told him the degradation of memory was a side-effect of exposure to the Dark. As he weaved through the woods, ragged and traumatized, Don figured the low-grade amnesia was also equal parts self-preservation. His consciousness had evaluated the threat posed by these affronts to sanity and decided to dim the lights and flip the sign to OUT OF SERVICE.

It had been more than the incident at Mystery Mountain. There were also the incidents in Mexico and at the Wolverton Mansion, and Lord knew where else. An entire reservoir of suppressed memories could easily await him, burbling and seething below the surface of his placid consciousness. There was, for one, the matter of Michelle’s accident in Siberia; the Jeep rollover that left her hospitalized in critical condition and scarred for life. He’d received the bad news shortly following his rescue from the wilds of the Olympics. They came to him while he was wrapped in an insulated blanket and sitting on the tailgate of a park service emergency vehicle, hands shaking so much he couldn’t get the foam cup of cocoa to his lips.

The ranger who delivered the message was an older, laconic gentleman with no bedside manner whatsoever. The man grunted and smoothed the brim of his tall hat and said something along the lines of,
Mr. Miller, your wife was in a car accident. The doctors said it’s grim. Here’s the number of the Consulate.
Don was sufficiently traumatized from his adventures in the hills that the gravity of the message didn’t really dawn on him until he awoke in the night, panicked and crying for Michelle.

It was his turn to fly to her side. Strange, though, that even in the depths of his grief for her condition and numbed by the deluge of malign events, the sight of his wife lying inert at the heart of a shining white bed, her cocooned form tangled in a skein of wires and pulleys awakened in him a momentary callousness, an instant of wary appraisal as of an animal approaching a watering hole on the savanna. For despite Michelle’s wounds, her fragile state and its trappings seemed almost contrived; props elaborately staged to create a particular atmosphere and to elicit unquestioning sympathy…to eclipse his rational thought and replace it with instinct. This moment of clarity was a spurt of ice water into his veins, then quickly gone as the clouds rolled in and left scant room for anything other than fear and mourning.

Pausing to catch his breath, Don patted the big dog. “Thule, my faithful friend, what do you suppose is happening in Turkey? What’s happening to poor Holly?” He imagined unspeakable atrocities visited upon his daughter. Holly was fifty, the exact age Michelle had been the year she received those permanently disfiguring marks. He had visions of cowled supplicants brandishing knives as they danced around a mighty bonfire while Holly writhed on an altar of obsidian. “There wasn’t any damned truck crash in Siberia. My loving wife has lied to me since forever. They carved her with stone knives, flayed her alive.”

Later, after returning to the U.S. and healing well enough to totter around on a cane, she refused to speak of anything that transpired during the journey across the taiga and into the mountains. She didn’t write a report of any kind that he was aware of. The university must’ve gotten
some
valuable data as she was feted and promoted, albeit sans fanfare. Possibly this is what Frick and Frack meant when they said she was an “untouchable,” a select member of the herd who trafficked with the Dark Ones, protected from interference by government agencies. Or, more likely, abetted by those agencies. The cow handing the butcher his knife and apron, as it were.

These many years after the fact of Michelle’s alleged accident, as he trundled half-blind through the brush, he revisited that theatre scene at the hospital, relived his instant of grim clarity that marionette strings extending from his back gleamed in his comatose wife’s fist, that every step he’d taken since they met at that fateful art show in 1950 was the jig and jog of a dance she called with small twitches of those wires, that his future promised more of the same. His so-called future, his so-called past, were puppet shows.

Who pulls
your
strings, my dear?

Frick and Frack had tried to tell him. Wolverton and Rourke had also laid it all out, and still Don felt as if he was merely glimpsing the surface of a dense and convoluted pattern. If he stared long enough the fuzzy shapes would resolve into a nightmare image of sufficient potency to smash his mind completely. He suspected that the multitudinous designs, the layers and textures, really were minute oscillations of perfect, illimitable darkness. Neither light nor heat could withstand it; to gaze into that nullity and to comprehend its scope was to have one’s humanity snuffed.

Only the inhuman thrived in out there in deep black.

3.

Reality contracted, then dilated, rhythmically as a pulse. Don floated, a helmetless astronaut, across a landscape he no longer comprehended.

An alien sun swung low across the rim of the hills and the shadows glowed purple and red. Stars hung in a belt of crushed glass where the sky darkened from blue-white to seared iron. The house waited, cool and formless in the lee of the twin maples. Kurt and Argyle’s vehicles were parked in the driveway. Shiny steel and glass curved backward into invisibility and already seemed well-maintained relics in a museum of humanity, ages after humanity had been blotted from existence. Don was a shambling wreck, but his brain was recording everything and executing a sequence of increasingly dire calculations.

Husks of leaves covered the gravel and muffled the crunch of Don’s footsteps as he approached the backdoor. His heart thumped in his ears. This place hadn’t felt safe in the past, and now…He went through the door into the unknown, Thule at his heel.

The kitchen was a cave gallery suffused with the dim purple light.

Normal sounds were hushed or suspended entirely—the tip-tap of water dripping somewhere, the creaks and groans of subsidence, the cries of birds in the yard, all muted or absent. The atmosphere was gravid with the electricity of a building storm and he had the impression that the forces of darkness gathered around him.

Through this preternatural hush, a fly batted and whined against the window pane over the sink. The voices of a million doomed souls diminished to a strident drone as they gazed over a city skyline as doom slouched toward them from the depths of space. Their ghostly faces were quite vivid to him until he blinked them away and went to the window and, after a moment’s deliberation, crushed the trapped fly and ended a million miseries in one stroke.

“Why you, sweetheart?” he said to the smear on the glass. “Of all the primates on our wobbly ball of dirt, what is it about you Mocks anyway?” He drank water from the tap that went down like acid and looked around the place, ready for the next shoe to drop, the next sign, the arrival of whatever was surely descending upon him. And saw that the cellar door was ajar by three inches. He smiled grimly and walked over and pulled it wide open and stared through the threshold into the musty gloom and its mysteries.

“For the love of Christ, don’t do it, Pop,” Kurt said. He stood near the kitchen table, hair wild, eyes bulging, clothes in tatters as if he’d tumbled down the side of a mountain. He was covered in blood and dirt. His left arm dangled, broken. “Get the fuck away from that fucking door.”

As Don glanced back at his son, he swayed a little, feeling the gravity well of the stairs dragging him toward a swan dive. He caught the frame and steadied himself, and took a breath. “You’re alive. Where’s Argyle?”

“Alive, yeah. Argyle’s…Uncle’s gone. The bastards took him.” Kurt went toward the pantry. He was missing a shoe and he left a bloody smear like the fly on the window.

Don longed to go to him, extend a comforting hand, but it was all he could do to grip the door frame and hold on for dear life as the proboscis of the cosmos sucked at him. “What happened out there?”

Kurt’s shoulders hitched as he laughed silently and took a slug from a bottle of sherry left over from the last dinner party. He gained control of himself with visible effort and said, “They came from inside the trees and took him. Argyle couldn’t run, Dad. His hip. He didn’t really try. Stood there waving his cane and shouting. I left him. Fuckers didn’t follow me. We paid the blood price for trespassing in their territory and that was it. If they were coming here it’d be curtains for us already.” There were tears in his eyes and he took another huge gulp from the bottle. “Running won’t help, anyway. I don’t imagine there’s any safety in town, or a bunker. Monsters go wherever monsters wanna go.”

They came from inside the trees.
Don had no trouble imagining the scene that must’ve transpired as Kurt and Argyle trudged through the forest, gradually noting the doors carved into the boles of the trees. Then, at a certain moment before sunset, those doors thrown wide and the occupants of the hollows spilling forth. As for monsters roaming willy-nilly, he decided that probably wasn’t quite correct. The Dark Ones and their servitors didn’t enjoy the light of the sun. Their gods dwelt in pitch darkness. All of them waited for Sol to dim and Terra to cool and glaciate in its twilight. These were not omnipotent entities, simply powerful ones. There was at least a sliver of hope for respite from their menace.

“I take it you didn’t find Hank,” Kurt said.

“He went into the dolmen. Begged him not to.”

“Whatever’s creeping around out there probably got him. Thought they were worms, even though that’s impossible. Worms don’t move so fast. Don’t grow so big. Not even in the ocean.” Kurt’s expression was confused as his gaze focused on a distant vista. “There’s doors in the wood. Everywhere.”

“I know.”

“We should do something.”

“Of course.”

“Call the cops, the FBI. Somebody.”

Don saw a flash of Frick and Frack screaming as blood covered them, drowned them. “I’m certain the government is at least tangentially aware of the situation. This has gone on for a while. My gut says we’re on our own.”

“Yeah.” Kurt nodded. “Mine too. Think Granddad or Luther had any inkling?”

“Doesn’t make a difference.”

“Makes one to me. I’d like to know which side they were on.”

“Again, it doesn’t matter. They’re dust and we’re stuck.”

“My world’s upside down. Be reassuring to think our kin weren’t in on it with the Mocks. Fucking collaborators. Maybe not all of them. Maybe the ones who don’t go along with the program get disappeared and that’s why we only ever met those biddies Babette and Yvonne. The rest of them…I don’t think we’ll see Holly again.”

“Let’s not throw in the towel just yet.”

“Get real, Dad. Mom took Holly to a bad scene. An evil ritual, or whatever.”

“Safe to say burning bras or celebrating menopause weren’t on the agenda. It’s no good expecting the worst, though. Could be nothing happened. She loves your sister.”

“If you can’t indoctrinate the ones you love, who can you indoctrinate? Sis is totally screwed. And if Holly does come back she won’t be my sister anymore. Mom hasn’t been Mom since I was a kid, has she? She’s been a Pod Person since 1980 at least. That’s when she found her Hollow Earth people, right? The worms.”

“The Limbless Ones,” Don said.

“What?”

“That’s what somebody called those…creatures in the trees.”

“I saw the expressions on their faces. What do
you
know about this shit? Why haven’t you told me?”

“I’d forgotten. If I’m lucky I’ll forget again. Those aren’t what we need to worry about. There are worse things.”

“Honestly, it’s Mom that scares the shit outta me. She’s the ringmaster of this circus. We need to get gone before she comes bopping home from her vacation and sees what we’ve been up to.”

Don glanced at the cellar and smiled sadly. “Too late for that, I’m afraid.”

Kurt set aside the bottle. His grubby face was slick with sweat. The broken arm must be hurting, and that pain would intensify with every passing minute as the shock and adrenaline dissipated and cold reality settled in on them. “I feel it. I feel it, all right. Something terrible is down there. You want to go, don’t you?”

“Want?” Don shook his head. “Not even remotely. I’m going down there because there’s no choice. None at all.”

“The hell you are. We’re going to hop in my rig and put the pedal to the metal.” Kurt snapped free of his daze and grabbed the phone off the wall and dialed awkwardly with his good hand, cradling the receiver with his chin. Dialing Winnie, no doubt, and Don, despite the circumstances, was morbidly curious as to precisely what his son intended to say.
Baby, creatures from Planet X are slithering through a worm hole and we got to make tracks!
There was no answer, though, and Kurt dropped the phone on the tiles in disgust. The younger man’s expression was definitely on the crazed end of the spectrum. He wore the hollow expression of someone reacting to a shelled neighborhood or a pile of corpses.