The cold, hard smile of a skull crossed his face as he strode purposefully out of the fire chamber and across the dimly lit cellar.
Where are you going?
Up.
No. Wait. They will come down.
I want to see him when I kill him. I want to see him die.
But I want to kill him in the light.
McNeely paused at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at the yellow rectangle the open kitchen door made, smelling the smoke above.
Yes. Do it there. If you like. Then bring her down. Save her. We will make her see.
He went up the steps three at a time, fluidly and without effort, as though his legs belonged to someone else far stronger than he. At the same time he swung through the kitchen door, the door to the hall opened, and he saw framed there Wickstrom and Gabrielle, their pale, frightened faces lit starkly by the bright light in the kitchen. McNeely stepped toward them, the hate he felt for them advancing before him like a palpable force. He saw them tremble, and he smiled.
Wickstrom spoke quickly. "The house is on fire, George. We"ve got to go down." The big man"s muscles tensed as though he were ready to spring backward, but he did not move, nor did Gabrielle, who stood at his side. McNeely stopped barely a foot away from them, looked into Wickstrom"s face, and shook his head. "No, Kelly," he said. "Not you. Gabrielle, but not you." He thrust out a hand and grasped Gabrielle by the wrist, wrenching her away from Wickstrom"s side and flinging her toward the cellar door. She gasped in pain and surprise.
Hurt, b.i.t.c.h? he thought. It"ll hurt worse before I"m done.
Then McNeely turned his back on Wickstrom and started toward the door and Gabrielle. "Wait a minute!" Wickstrom growled, closing the distance between them. McNeely felt the hand on his shoulder and whirled around. Wickstrom"s arm shot up defensively, but McNeely did not strike. Wickstrom was shaking with rage. "What the h.e.l.l"s wrong with you?"
"Not with me, Kelly," McNeely replied with the calmness of the killer who has the only gun. "With you. You"re crazy. It"s been building since the first day you came here. If I let you down there, you"d kill us both (Kill them both, McNeely thought). I"m afraid of you, afraid for Gabrielle. Try to get past me and I"ll kill you, I swear it. You can take your chances."
"Let him in!" McNeely"s legs suddenly shot out from under him, and he fell heavily on top of Gabrielle, who had tackled him clumsily from behind. The air went out of her for a second, but she was able to cry out to Wickstrom. "Run! Past him!"
By the time McNeely was on his feet, Wickstrom was in the doorway extending a hand to Gabrielle, who scuttled crablike across the floor to reach it. McNeely did not have to run. He moved toward the door, thinking how much he would like to kick her in the stomach, picturing her rising from the floor with the force of his heavy foot.
But instead, he grasped her ankle with a steely grip, pulling her away from Wickstrom, and sliding her across the smooth kitchen floor as easily as if she were a child. When he released her, she continued to slide helplessly, like a cat with all its claws out, until she came up against the door to the hall.
Wickstrom left the safety of the cellar doorway to help her, but McNeely whirled, grabbing the man at his neck and groin so that Wickstrom went white, all his strength vanished. McNeely breathed hotly into his face.
"I"ve got to kill you, Kelly. I"ve got to kill you now."
He hurled Wickstrom across the room. Wickstrom"s arms flailed, and his fingers caught the edge of a huge wooden cupboard, pulling it over. Cans rattled and jars shattered on the smooth floor, spreading their contents like gouts of blood from a wounded beast. Wickstrom struggled among the broken shelves, shards of gla.s.s slicing him as he tried to right himself. Gabrielle knelt near him, her chest rising and falling in fury mixed with terror.
McNeely grinned at them both, his breath hissing raggedly between his clenched teeth. He raised a fist and smashed it into the wall, shattering the plaster. He could feel the blood start to ooze from the knife edge of his hand. Blood, he thought. And now, their blood.
"Leave him alone!" Gabrielle sobbed.
You b.i.t.c.h, how I hate you, you Kill him. Kill Kelly Wickstrom. The voice was shaking, barely in control.
McNeely took a step across the slippery floor, his shoes crunching the tiny daggers of gla.s.s. "I warned you, Kelly, but you wouldn"t listen. Now I"ve got to kill you."
The more Wickstrom tried to rise, the more he floundered, like a swimmer in a dream. He began to whimper.
Gabrielle was on her feet now, shoulders hunched, neck stiffened. With a scream of rage that smothered her fear, she leaped at McNeely, punching his face and neck with heavy blows. He blocked them, sending sharp slaps to her face until her head rocked with the impact, but still she fought on.
And McNeely made the hate within him rise like a red tide, made the thoughts shriek in their power- I hate you, you c.u.n.t, you b.i.t.c.h, hate you, you stupid wh.o.r.e, want to kill you kill you kill you- -While the voice of the thing inside him cried out as though it were wounded No! You love her, love her, love ...
The voice shook, rocked, trembled, seemed to bubble insanely as if somehow shifting from speaker to speaker, and suddenly the voice was gone, and a new voice filled McNeely"s head, filled the room itself, so that the battling woman and the man struggling to his feet heard it as well, and shivered at the rawness of it.
"HATE her! HATE her! Kill them! Kill them both!"
The beasts had escaped. The savage elements of the ent.i.ty, held so long at bay, had been prodded and tormented by McNeely"s thoughts of violence until they had overwhelmed the part of themselves that had made them captive. The needs were free. The hunger, so long checked, had to be fed.
It was just what McNeely had wanted.
What he had thought, he had thought deliberately, and the eyes inside him had seen it as one more violent fantasy; but they had not seen the final act, because McNeely had kept it hidden even from himself. It did not require conscious thought, for he knew what it would be. Self-destruction, and with his own death perhaps the death of what dwelled within him as well. Perhaps. It had been the only chance for Gabrielle.
But now there was another.
And while the graveled voice of the pit gibbered and cackled and squalled in its triumph, he allowed himself one more conscious thought, a thought he had never had before and would never have again.
Oh G.o.d, forgive me.
"Kill them both! Now!" The voice echoed like thunder, and Wickstrom and Gabrielle groaned in agony, their hands trying to shut out the sound that penetrated their very souls. "HATE! KILL THEM!"
McNeely held out his arms in front of him. "Then give me your power!" he cried aloud.
"Yes!"
His arms began to tingle, his chest started to swell. He could feel his body begin to grow outward as the force rushed into him.
"All your power!" he shrieked. "Fill me! All of your power. All!"
"Yes! ALL! ALL!"
Cloth ripped, and pain shot through him as his body expanded, as the power of a million millions entered him, as all the strengths of the evil of eternity made his flesh their home.
And, astonishingly, as they possessed his body fully, his mind felt suddenly free, as if the ent.i.ty, in forgetting its apocalyptic plan, had forgotten the human keystone of that plan as well. The thing was beyond rational plots, beyond reason itself. Only madness remained, and ruled.
As through a reddened gla.s.s, McNeely saw Wickstrom and Gabrielle standing together, staring at him, their eyes wide, and it seemed that they were smaller than before, until he realized that it was he who had grown. He straightened, and felt his hair, now thinned into spa.r.s.e patches by the expansion of his skull, brush roughly against the ceiling. The thing within him shrieked in triumph and rage and hatred, as he thrust his ma.s.sive arms above his head, his fists piercing the wood and plaster ceiling like buckets of nails through gla.s.s, then descending to splinter the kitchen table, from which a leg shot off, catching the cowering Wickstrom and Gabrielle chest-high.
The pain awakened them from the trance in which McNeely"s transformation had bound them, and they turned and pushed through the doorway into the hall, the door swinging closed behind them.
"Run!" McNeely half-laughed, half-bellowed, kicking the rubble of the table ceiling-high as he crossed the kitchen on huge-chewed legs. "You can"t escape!"
NO! echoed the overpowering voice of h.e.l.l. Can"t escape!
He didn"t try to go through the suddenly tiny door. Instead, he battered his forearms against the top of the frame so that the wall splintered and fell, and he pushed the flimsy door aside like a curtain.
The heat hit him in a wave. He looked down the hall of the east wing and saw only a rolling ma.s.s of smoke, with fingers of yellow flame barely discernible at the end, faraway candles in a foggy night. A glance to his right told him the west wing was, if not as thickly dark, at least as deadly.
The Great Hall then. There was nowhere else they could go.
He howled with laughter, hearing it re-echo innumerable times from the throats of those within him. Then, his craggy head now sc.r.a.ping the higher ceiling of the east wing hall, he slouched around the corner and found at last that he could stand erect, there in the towering expanse of the Great Hall. The beams high above were hidden in clouds of drifting gray smoke, but all else was clear, and McNeely saw plainly the man and woman standing at the southern end, standing because they could run no farther, because there was no place left to which to run. They stood at the entrance to the small s.p.a.ce between the cloak rooms, directly in the center of the hall. They stood as if waiting for death. They stood "Trapped!" screamed George McNeely.
"TRAPPED!" screamed the millions so loudly that the stones shook, the smoke far above billowed and rolled.
Then George McNeely, and the millions, and The Pines itself gave one last, deafening, inarticulate cry, and George McNeely began to run. Straight down the center of the Great Hall he ran, gaining speed with each step of his ponderous legs, arms up, elbows out, fists together, his forearms an impa.s.sable bar, the whole of his body an engine to crush flesh and shatter bone. And as he ran, he remembered his dream, and again the Great Hall shrank, growing smaller and smaller to crush him once more, but this time it was not the Great Hall shrinking, but he who was growing, growing with every step, and he would not be crushed this time, no, this time he would grow out and out and break the sh.e.l.l of stone, break the sh.e.l.l.
And be born.
The man and the woman stood before his onslaught, their eyes filled with the knowledge of death, and now they fell to their knees, awaiting the final blow, the last murderous step of the behemoth. But the step never came.
In that last breath of a moment, with the speed of a thought, the will of George McNeely drove those impossible legs down and up and over the prey, and flung the iron torso, the metal arms, directly at the top of the steel plate that made the house a prison.
The steel did not shatter. But the mortar that held it did.
The plate shivered and bent, and the first rocks began to fall. The keystones gone, their mortar crumbled, the southern wall trembled, sighed, and collapsed, its fragments raining down, burying the t.i.tanic and unmoving form of George McNeely beneath the cold gray stones of The Pines.
Part V And there, there overhead, there, there, hung over Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes . . .
There in the sudden blackness the black pall Of nothing, nothing, nothing-nothing at all.
-Archibald MacLeish, "The End of the World"
Chapter Twenty-eight.
The snow was falling so heavily that Renault did not see the flames that roofed The Pines until the rental car came out of the thick trees and into the open area around the house. He did not curse nor cry out. He only held his breath for a moment as he felt his heart race even faster than before. When he saw the police car, its headlights on but the flashers off, he released his breath in the minor relief that he had not been the first to arrive, and told his driver to pull up behind the other car.
Renault lumbered out of the pa.s.senger side like a bear from a too small cave. Before he took a half dozen steps through the snow, a stocky, bearded man in a uniform was next to him, coat unb.u.t.toned, apparently oblivious to the elements. He carried a huge flashlight in his right hand. "Mr. Renault? I"m Chief Lowry."
"What in the name of G.o.d is happening here?" Renault demanded. "Where are the people? This ... this fire! What is being done?"
"Fire department"s on its way. h.e.l.l, I didn"t know this was happening till I got, here."
But the people? The Nevilles?"
"Just found two people. One of them"s dead, the other d.a.m.n near."
"Where?"
"Around the back." Lowry turned, and Renault followed him around the west wing. "Didn"t want to move the one guy till the ambulance got here," the chief puffed as they trotted, their path illuminated by the ribbons of flame that waved above. "But we had to a little, just to get him away from the house. Not much heat, but pieces keep blowing down off the roof. All these stone walls, it"s like a big G.o.dd.a.m.ned chimney. There they are."
Two forms lay side by side, another uniformed man, clean-shaven, squatting next to them. Renault stopped, panting with the exertion, and looked down at the still, battered face. "Monckton," he breathed, then turned toward the other. "Uncover his face," he told the squatting man. Despite the discoloration, Renault recognized the dead man instantly. "Sterne. But the Nevilles!" he roared, his strength returned. "And the others! Where are they?"
"Where were they? Inside?"
"Yes."
"Then they"re still there. Danny and me tried to get in, but this place is like a fort."
Renault thought frantically. "My G.o.d, the keys. We can open it from the cabin! Quickly! Search them!" He knelt painfully by Monckton. "There will be two large keys, they each should have one. . . ." His mind whirled as he went through Monckton"s clothing, trying to be gentle but swift, scarcely noticing the blood or the strange angles at which the man"s limbs lay. The roof of the Great Hall had not yet been afire, he was sure of that. They may have gotten to the fire chamber in time, but he was not as confident of Monckton"s handiwork as David had been. Suppose that something had gone wrong, the same way something had most certainly gone wrong with the escape system. Fail-safe, Renault thought in disgust as he turned the last pocket inside out. Stupid word. Nothing was fail-safe, nothing foolproof. "Nothing," he spat.
"No key on this one either," Lowry said, pulling a canvas poncho back over Sterne"s face.
"They must still be down in the cabin. Come, quickly." Renault straightened with a creaking of joints, and walked as fast as he could around the west wing toward his car. "Why isn"t the ambulance here?" he snapped at the police chief.
"Just radioed them fifteen minutes ago, right after we got here. Be another fifteen, twenty minutes. Maybe a half hour in this stuff," Lowry said, gesturing at the snow falling around them.
"What? I told you to send an ambulance immediately."
"Look, Mr. Renault, I"m sorry, but how the h.e.l.l was I supposed to know we"d find these guys up here? And how the h.e.l.l did you know?"
"I knew," Renault said grimly as they came around to the front of the house. "I also know that unless we get those people inside out, they may well die."
"Well, do we have to go down to the cabin? Maybe we could just back the cruiser into that front door, knock it down that way, and ..."
"My G.o.d, man, there"s a steel plate a half inch thick on the other side of that door. Nothing short of a tank could hope to ..."
Both men froze as the sound reached their ears. Though a scream of steel and stone, it was strangely human as well, as if a mult.i.tude had sung of its own destruction in one mighty yet dying voice. In the same moment, the wall of the Great Hall burst outward, spewing chunks of stone and shards of wood into the snowy night. Lowry and Renault fell to the cold white earth, turning their faces toward the forest, as if not seeing the flying missiles could save them from being struck.
The forest suddenly brightened, and when the two men looked toward the house again, it was as if The Pines had grown dozens of fiery eyes. The doors and windows were once more exposed to the world, the steel plates drawn away from them with the squeal of heat-tortured metal. Windows shattered, and wooden doors and window frames burst into flames as the cold wind swept through the rooms and halls, urging on the fire to even greater heights of destruction.
Renault gaped at the sight. The inside of the house looked like a blast furnace, except for the great dark breach in the wall of the Great Hall, in which he could see, through the settling cloud of dust, a thicker cloud of black smoke, and the first traces of flame at the hall"s far end. The stones had stopped falling. Or at least he thought they had. But it seemed, as he squinted into the darkness, wiping the snow roughly from his gla.s.ses and thrusting them onto his face, that some of the stones still moved, rising over the others. "Look!" he cried to Lowry. "The light! Hurry!"
Lowry, on his knees now, flicked the switch of the flashlight he had gripped like a weapon through the havoc, and turned it on The Pines, so that it shone directly on Gabrielle Neville and Kelly Wickstrom, who screamed shrilly, threw up his arms, and tumbled over the stones into the snow.
Renault moved faster than he had in years, scrambling over the snow, up onto the cyclopean blocks, his footing solid as that of a man half his years. He grasped Gabrielle in his great arms. Confused, disoriented, she tried to push away, her eyes wild. "Gabrielle," he said soothingly. "It is I, it is Simon. Come, come . . ." She gave herself over to him then, her strength gone, and he half-led, half-carried her down over the stones, then to the warmth of the rental car, to which Lowry and the driver had already taken the limping, shivering Wickstrom.
"Simon . . . Simon . . . Simon . . ." she repeated like a litany as he maneuvered her gently into the backseat next to Wickstrom, who dripped blood from a dozen cuts and held his left knee tightly, his face pale with pain.
"I got stuff in the cruiser," Lowry said, shoving the temperature control to maximum heat and turning on the fan. "Patch you up a little. Ambulance"ll be here any minute. Ma"am? You okay?"
Gabrielle began, very softly, to laugh. It increased in volume and intensity until Renault sat next to her and put his arms around her and she began to cry instead. "She is all right," Renault told Lowry. "Go. Get what you need for Mr. Wickstrom."
Lowry went to the cruiser. Renault"s driver leaned against the car, watching the snow fall and the house burn. The softly roaring fan filled the car with heat, and Gabrielle began to breathe quietly. Wickstrom"s eyes were tightly closed. His knuckles were white.
"Gabrielle," Renault said. He could not keep from asking. "David?"
She shook her head. "All the others," she whispered. "All dead."
"The fire?"
"No, not the fire." She pressed her eyes shut. "Leave it alone, Simon. Take out the bodies, and leave it alone."
"All right." He nodded. "Rest now."