Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Page 57

  "So far so good," Lonnie said.

  "Yes, it's--" she began, and that was when the low moaning arose.

  They both stopped. The moaning was coming almost directly from their right, where a high hedge ran around a small yard. Lonnie started toward the sound, and she grasped his arm. "Lonnie, no!"

  "What do you mean, no?" he asked. "Someone's hurt."

  She stepped after him nervously. The hedge was high but thin. He was able to brush it aside and reveal a small square of lawn outlined with flowers. The lawn was very green. In the center of it was a black, smoking patch--or at least that was her first impression. When she peered around Lonnie's shoulder again--his shoulder was too high for her to peer over it--she saw it was a hole, vaguely man-shaped. The tendrils of smoke were emanating from it.

  SIXTY LOST IN UNDERGROUND HORROR, she thought abruptly.

  The moaning was coming from the hole, and Lonnie began to force himself through the hedge toward it.

  "Lonnie," she said, "please, don't."

  "Someone's hurt," he repeated, and pushed himself the rest of the way through with a bristly tearing sound. She saw him going toward the hole, and then the hedge snapped back, leaving her nothing but a vague impression of his shape as he moved forward. She tried to push through after him and was scratched by the short, stiff branches of the hedge for her trouble. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse.

  "Lonnie!" she called, suddenly very afraid. "Lonnie, come back!"

  "Just a minute, hon!"

  The house looked at her impassively over the top of the hedge.

  The moaning sounds continued, but now they sounded lower--guttural, somehow gleeful. Couldn't Lonnie hear that?

  "Hey, is somebody down there?" she heard Lonnie ask. "Is there--oh! Hey! Jesus!" And suddenly Lonnie screamed. She had never heard him scream before, and her legs seemed to turn to waterbags at the sound. She looked wildly for a break in the hedge, a path, and couldn't see one anywhere. Images swirled before her eyes--the bikers who had looked like rats for a moment, the cat with the pink chewed face, the boy with the claw-hand.

  Lonnie! she tried to scream, but no words came out.

  Now there were sounds of a struggle. The moaning had stopped. But there were wet, sloshing sounds from the other side of the hedge. Then, suddenly, Lonnie came flying back through the stiff dusty-green bristles as if he had been given a tremendous push. The left arm of his suit-coat was torn, and it was splattered with runnels of black stuff that seemed to be smoking, as the pit in the lawn had been smoking.

  "Doris, run!"

  "Lonnie, what--"

  "Run!" His face pale as cheese.

  Doris looked around wildly for a cop. For anyone. But Hillfield Avenue might have been a part of some great deserted city for all the life or movement she saw. Then she glanced back at the hedge and saw something else was moving behind there, something that was more than black; it seemed ebony, the antithesis of light.

  And it was sloshing.

  A moment later, the short, stiff branches of the hedge began to rustle. She stared, hypnotized. She might have stood there forever (so she told Vetter and Farnham) if Lonnie hadn't grabbed her arm roughly and shrieked at her--yes, Lonnie, who never even raised his voice at the kids, had shrieked--she might have been standing there yet. Standing there, or . . .

  But they ran.

  Where? Farnham had asked, but she didn't know. Lonnie was totally undone, in a hysteria of panic and revulsion--that was all she really knew. He clamped his fingers over her wrist like a handcuff and they ran from the house looming over the hedge, and from the smoking hole in the lawn. She knew those things for sure; all the rest was only a chain of vague impressions.

  At first it had been hard to run, and then it got easier because they were going downhill. They turned, then turned again. Gray houses with high stoops and drawn green shades seemed to stare at them like blind pensioners. She remembered Lonnie pulling off his jacket, which had been splattered with that black goo, and throwing it away. At last they came to a wider street.

  "Stop," she panted. "Stop, I can't keep up!" Her free hand was pressed to her side, where a red-hot spike seemed to have been planted.

  And he did stop. They had come out of the residential area and were standing at the corner of Crouch Lane and Norris Road. A sign on the far side of Norris Road proclaimed that they were but one mile from Slaughter Towen.

  Town? Vetter suggested.

  No, Doris Freeman said. Slaughter Towen, with an "e."

  *

  Raymond crushed out the cigarette he had cadged from Farnham. "I'm off," he announced, and then looked more closely at Farnham. "My poppet should take better care of himself. He's got big dark circles under his eyes. Any hair on your palms to go with it, my pet?" He laughed uproariously.

  "Ever hear of a Crouch Lane?" Farnham asked.

  "Crouch Hill Road, you mean."

  "No, I mean Crouch Lane."

  "Never heard of it."

  "What about Norris Road?"

  "There's the one cuts off from the high street in Basingstoke--"

  "No, here."

  "No--not here, poppet."

  For some reason he couldn't understand--the woman was obviously buzzed--Farnham persisted. "What about Slaughter Towen?"

  "Towen, you said? Not Town?"

  "Yes, that's right."

  "Never heard of it, but if I do, I believe I'll steer clear."

  "Why's that?"

  "Because in the old Druid lingo, a touen or towen was a place of ritual sacrifice--where they abstracted your liver and lights, in other words." And zipping up his windcheater, Raymond glided out.

  Farnham looked after him uneasily. He made that last up, he told himself. What a hard copper like Sid Raymond knows about the Druids you could carve on the head of a pin and still have room for the Lord's Prayer.

  Right. And even if he had picked up a piece of information like that, it didn't change the fact that the woman was . . .

  *

  "Must be going crazy," Lonnie said, and laughed shakily.

  Doris had looked at her watch earlier and saw that somehow it had gotten to be quarter of eight. The light had changed; from a clear orange it had gone to a thick, murky red that glared off the windows of the shops in Norris Road and seemed to face a church steeple across the way in clotted blood. The sun was an oblate sphere on the horizon.

  "What happened back there?" Doris asked. "What was it, Lonnie?"

  "Lost my jacket, too. Hell of a note."

  "You didn't lose it, you took it off. It was covered with--"

  "Don't be a fool!" he snapped at her. But his eyes were not snappish; they were soft, shocked, wandering. "I lost it, that's all."

  "Lonnie, what happened when you went through the hedge?"

  "Nothing. Let's not talk about it. Where are we?"

  "Lonnie--"

  "I can't remember," he said more softly. "It's all a blank. We were there . . . we heard a sound . . . then I was running. That's all I can remember." And then he added in a frighteningly childish voice: "Why would I throw my jacket away? I liked that one. It matched the pants." He threw back his head, gave voice to a frightening loonlike laugh, and Doris suddenly realized that whatever he had seen beyond the hedge had at least partially unhinged him. She was not sure the same wouldn't have happened to her . . . if she had seen. It didn't matter. They had to get out of here. Get back to the hotel where the kids were.

  "Let's get a cab. I want to go home."

  "But John--" he began.

  "Never mind John!" she cried. "It's wrong, everything here is wrong, and I want to get a cab and go home!"

  "Yes, all right. Okay." Lonnie passed a shaking hand across his forehead. "I'm with you. The only problem is, there aren't any."

  There was, in fact, no traffic at all on Norris Road, which was wide and cobbled. Directly down the center of it ran a set of old tram tracks. On the other side, in front of a flower shop, an ancient three-wheeled D-car was parked. Fa
rther down on their own side, a Yamaha motorbike stood aslant on its kickstand. That was all. They could hear cats, but the sound was faraway, diffuse.

  "Maybe the street's closed for repairs," Lonnie muttered, and then had done a strange thing . . . strange, at least, for him, who was ordinarily so easy and self-assured. He looked back over his shoulder as if afraid they had been followed.

  "We'll walk," she said.

  "Where?"

  "Anywhere. Away from Crouch End. We can get a taxi if we get away from here." She was suddenly positive of that, if of nothing else.

  "All right." Now he seemed perfectly willing to entrust the leadership of the whole matter to her.

  They began walking along Norris Road toward the setting sun. The faraway hum of the traffic remained constant, not seeming to diminish, not seeming to grow any, either. It was like the constant push of the wind. The desertion was beginning to nibble at her nerves. She felt they were being watched, tried to dismiss the feeling, and found that she couldn't. The sound of their footfalls

  (SIXTY LOST IN UNDERGROUND HORROR)

  echoed back to them. The business at the hedge played on her mind more and more, and finally she had to ask again.

  "Lonnie, what was it?"

  He answered simply: "I don't remember. And I don't want to."

  They passed a market that was closed--a pile of coconuts like shrunken heads seen back-to were piled against the window. They passed a launderette where white machines had been pulled from the washed-out pink plasterboard walls like square teeth from dying gums. They passed a soap-streaked show window with an old SHOP TO LEASE sign in the front. Something moved behind the soap streaks, and Doris saw, peering out at her, the pink and tufted battle-scarred face of a cat. The same gray tom.

  She consulted her interior workings and tickings and discovered that she was in a state of slowly building terror. She felt as if her intestines had begun to crawl sluggishly around and around within her belly. Her mouth had a sharp unpleasant taste, almost as if she had dosed with a strong mouthwash. The cobbles of Norris Road bled fresh blood in the sunset.

  They were approaching an underpass. And it was dark under there. I can't, her mind informed her matter-of-factly. I can't go under there, anything might be under there, don't ask me because I can't.

  Another part of her mind asked if she could bear for them to retrace their steps, past the empty shop with the travelling cat in it (how had it gotten from the restaurant to here? best not to ask, or even wonder about it too deeply), past the weirdly oral shambles of the launderette, past The Market of the Shrunken Heads. She didn't think she could.

  They had drawn closer to the underpass now. A strangely painted six-car train--it was bone-white--lunged over it with startling suddenness, a crazy steel bride rushing to meet her groom. The wheels kicked up bright spinners of sparks. They both leaped back involuntarily, but it was Lonnie who cried out. She looked at him and saw that in the last hour he had turned into someone she had never seen before, had never even suspected. His hair appeared somehow grayer, and while she told herself firmly--as firmly as she could--that it was just a trick of the light, it was the look of his hair that decided her. Lonnie was in no shape to go back. Therefore, the underpass.

  "Come on," she said, and took his hand. She took it brusquely so he would not feel her own trembling. "Soonest begun, soonest done." She walked forward and he followed docilely.

  They were almost out--it was a very short underpass, she thought with ridiculous relief--when the hand grasped her upper arm.

  She didn't scream. Her lungs seemed to have collapsed like small crumpled paper sacks. Her mind wanted to leave her body behind and just . . . fly. Lonnie's hand parted from her own. He seemed unaware. He walked out on the other side--she saw him for just one moment silhouetted, tall and lanky, against the bloody, furious colors of the sunset, and then he was gone.

  The hand grasping her upper arm was hairy, like an ape's hand. It turned her remorselessly toward a heavy slumped shape leaning against the sooty concrete wall. It hung there in the double shadow of two concrete supporting pillars, and the shape was all she could make out. . . the shape, and two luminous green eyes.

  "Give us a fag, love," a husky cockney voice said, and she smelled raw meat and deep-fat-fried chips and something sweet and awful, like the residue at the bottom of garbage cans.

  Those green eyes were cat's eyes. And suddenly she became horribly sure that if the slumped shape stepped out of the shadows, she would see the milky cataract of eye, the pink ridges of scar tissue, the tufts of gray hair.

  She tore free, backed up, and felt something skid through the air near her. A hand? Claws? A spitting, hissing sound--

  Another train charged overhead. The roar was huge, brain-rattling. Soot sifted down like black snow. She fled in a blind panic, for the second time that evening not knowing where . . . or for how long.

  What brought her back to herself was the realization that Lonnie was gone. She had half collapsed against a dirty brick wall, breathing in great tearing gasps. She was still in Morris Road (at least she believed herself to be, she told the two constables; the wide way was still cobbled, and the tram tracks still ran directly down the center), but the deserted, decaying shops had given way to deserted, decaying warehouses. DAW-GLISH & SONS read the soot-begrimed signboard on one. A second had the name ALHAZRED emblazoned in ancient green across the faded brickwork. Below the name was a series of Arabic pothooks and dashes.

  "Lonnie!" she called. There was no echo, no carrying in spite of the silence (no, not complete silence, she told them; there was still the sound of traffic, and it might have been closer, but not much). The word that stood for her husband seemed to drop from her mouth and fall like a stone at her feet. The blood of sunset had been replaced by the cool gray ashes of twilight. For the first time it occurred to her that night might fall upon her here in Crouch End--if she was still indeed in Crouch End--and that thought brought fresh terror.

  She told Vetter and Farnham that there had been no reflection, no logical train of thought, on her part during the unknown length of time between their arrival at the call box and the final horror. She had simply reacted, like a frightened animal. And now she was alone. She wanted Lonnie, she was aware of that much but little else. Certainly it did not occur to her to wonder why this area, which must surely lie within five miles of Cambridge Circus, should be utterly deserted.

  Doris Freeman set off walking, calling for her husband. Her voice did not echo, but her footfalls seemed to. The shadows began to fill Norris Road. Overhead, the sky was now purple. It might have been some distorting effect of the twilight, or her own exhaustion, but the warehouses seemed to lean hungrily over the road. The windows, caked with the dirt of decades--of centuries, perhaps--seemed to be staring at her. And the names on the signboards became progressively stranger, even lunatic, at the very least, unpronounceable. The vowels were in the wrong places, and consonants had been strung together in a way that would make it impossible for any human tongue to get around them. CTHULHU KRYON read one, with more of those Arabic pothooks beneath it. YOGSOGGOTH read another. R'YELEH said yet another. There was one that she remembered particularly: NRTESN NYARLAHOTEP.

  *

  "How could you remember such gibberish?" Farnham asked her.

  Doris Freeman shook her head, slowly and tiredly. "I don't know. I really don't. It's like a nightmare you want to forget as soon as you wake up, but it won't fade away like most dreams do; it just stays and stays and stays."

  *

  Norris Road seemed to stretch on into infinity, cobbled, split by tram tracks. And although she continued to walk--she wouldn't have believed she could run, although later, she said, she did--she no longer called for Lonnie. She was in the grip of a terrible, bone-rattling fear, a fear so great she would not have believed a human being could endure it without going mad or dropping dead. It was impossible for her to articulate her fear except in one way, and even this, she said, only began t
o bridge the gulf which had opened within her mind and heart. She said it was as if she were no longer on earth but on a different planet, a place so alien that the human mind could not even begin to comprehend it. The angles seemed different, she said. The colors seemed different. The . . . but it was hopeless.

  She could only walk under a gnarled-plum sky between the eldritch bulking buildings, and hope that it would end.

  As it did.

  She became aware of two figures standing on the sidewalk ahead of her--the children she and Lonnie had seen earlier. The boy was using his claw-hand to stroke the little girl's ratty braids.

  "It's the American woman," the boy said.

  "She's lost," said the girl.

  "Lost her husband."

  "Lost her way."

  "Found the darker way."

  "The road that leads into the funnel."

  "Lost her hope."

  "Found the Whistler from the Stars--"

  "--Eater of Dimensions--"

  "--the Blind Piper--"

  Faster and faster their words came, a breathless litany, a flashing loom. Her head spun with them. The buildings leaned. The stars were out, but they were not her stars, the ones she had wished on as a girl or courted under as a young woman, these were crazed stars in lunatic constellations, and her hands went to her ears and her hands did not shut out the sounds and finally she screamed at them:

  "Where's my husband? Where's Lonnie? What have you done to him?"

  There was silence. And then the girl said: "He's gone beneath."

  The boy: "Gone to the Goat with a Thousand Young."

  The girl smiled--a malicious smile full of evil innocence. "He couldn't well not go, could he? The mark was on him. You'll go, too."

  "Lonnie! What have you done with--"

  The boy raised his hand and chanted in a high fluting language that she could not understand--but the sound of the words drove Doris Freeman nearly mad with fear.

  "The street began to move then," she told Vetter and Farnham. "The cobbles began to undulate like a carpet. They rose and fell, rose and fell. The tram tracks came loose and flew into the air--I remember that, I remember the starlight shining on them--and then the cobbles themselves began to come loose, one by one at first, and then in bunches. They just flew off into the darkness. There was a tearing sound when they came loose. A grinding, tearing sound . . . the way an earthquake must sound. And--something started to come through--"