01. When the Changewinds Blow (7 page)

"Call 'em. Just look up in the sky or towards the horizon and just sort of like
think them
to come. Just tell 'em, 'Here's Sam Buell! If you want me come and get me!' Do it over and over for a few minutes and see if anything develops. Either it works or it don't. If it don't you're home free."

Sam looked up at the very pale sky with perhaps no more than an hour's light left in it. She had real problems with this because she was not at all convinced that it was all in her head, but, damn it, Charley was right She had to
know,
and this time ' somebody else was watching, too.

She stared at the clouds, took a deep breath, then closed her eyes and thought, hard,
Who are you? What do you want with me? I'm sick of naming from you! If you want me come here, now, and have it out, or get away forever and let me alone!

She tensed, then after a few moments opened her eyes. It all looked the same. Nothing had changed. She felt, suddenly, very emotional, even angry, and tears welted up inside her.
"You bastards!"
she screamed at the sky.
"You storms and shadow men! Come and get me! Now! Or the hell with you!"

Very slowly, the wind began to pick up. The temperature was certainly dropping, at least in wind chill, and what had felt pleasant at die start now began to feel pretty cold. Still, nothing else had changed and the wind was more natural than the calm had been.

"Come on," Charley muttered. "My fingers are turnin' blue. Let's get back up to the cabin and thaw out."

Sam nodded, and they started back up the road toward the cabin. "I dunno if I feel happy or sad," Sam muttered. "On the one hand, this proves nothin'.
They
always picked the time and nine out of ten times it was after dark. Only the shadow man was daytime, and he only scared the shit outta me, followin', waitin'-until dark, maybe. Still and all, it's lookin' more and more like I'm really a nut case and that don't 'zactly make me wanna shout 'Hallaluja.'"

"Yeah, well, it proves
something,
anyways. Look, we'll do one more night even if we have to sleep on them sheets. If no thin' happens, then you come home with me tomorrow. Man! That wind is really pickin' up." She looked over her shoulder and up at the sky.
"Oh my god!"

Sam froze just before the door of the cabin and turned to look and saw immediately what Charley was seeing.

The sky was alive!

The thin, wispy clouds were now suddenly in motion, rapid motion, and they were moving in a circular pattern around a broad arc of sky, moving outward to form a circular collection barrier around an invisible blue center, thickening every second, growing dense and ugly with every increase in speed. It was as if they were at the point where the eye of a hurricane formed, the motion violent and building all around them.

The circle of thick clouds now began to grow inward, toward the center, in a spiral pattern. Charley stared at it in sheer terror, for the first time experiencing what Sam surely must have felt. "Sam! Send it away!" she screamed as the noise grew and the ominous, distant rumbling of thunder sounded.
"Send it away!"

"Back off!" Sam screamed at the sky. "Get away! I called you, I send you back!
Get away from me!"

For a second the entire sky seemed to freeze and there was a momentary stillness that was almost as frightening as the spectacle, but then enormous claps of thunder answered the frightened girl and it started up again. "It's too strong! Damn you, Charley! Why didn't you
believe
me?"

Charley was too stunned and frightened for any rational response. Sam took her hard by the hand and pulled her. "Come on! Get inside the cabin! It'll give us
some
protection!"

They got inside as the storm continued to build. Charley was shaking and Sam wasn't much better, but she was more accepting of what was happening and trying to think fast.

"The car!" Charley muttered. "I'll get the keys! We can try and outrun it-"

"No!
That's how they killed that-other-girl!"

"We can't stay
here!
It'll suck up this whole cabin and make pieces out of it and us!"

Even now the cabin was shaking and things were rattling and foiling all over the place, and Sam realized that Charley was right. They had no damned chance at all in here.
"Under
the car!" she shouted. "Ain't that where you hide if you get into a big storm? No storm cellar!"

Charley finally got some wits about her and grabbed her purse. "Not
under!
Inside! It's grounded!" There were sheets of rain coming down now, and wind so great it felt tike the cabin was going to shake apart, yet they both hesitated. Suddenly there was a horrible, gut-wrenching, tearing sound near the bed and a small section of roof just broke off like ripped by some giant hand.

It took both of them to get the door even open, and then they ran for the car. The storm itself had only a superficial resemblance to a natural storm now; it contained not only the grays of its violence but seemed to seethe with electrical power, pulsing like a living beast, each poise a different, color-crimson, violet, emerald green, yellow-there was no end to it.

Outside it was a sea of mud in a tropical storm; even the air temperature had warmed incredibly and it felt now like a muggy summer day. Sam made it to the car and had her hand on the door when she heard Charley scream and turned and saw her friend fall forward into the mud. Sam rushed back to her fallen friend and pulled her up. They both just made it to the car when a strong finger of lightning came down and struck the very area where Charley had fallen, sending up a short burst of smoke and mud.

They got inside the car and automatically locked the doors. Charley was a mass of mud and Sam was drenched. Charley had lost her purse in the fall and she disregarded the mud and pushed open the glove compartment knob. "There's a spare key in mere! We gotta get out of here!"

"No! Don't touch nothin' metal, not even the keys! Lightning strikes the car and you'll fry even if me and the car don't! You think it won't follow us no matter where we go anyways? If it can't get the wind to blow us over . . ."

"Damn it, we got to do
something!"
Lightning was striking all around them with the regularity of a piston engine and the
car
was being rocked by the wind as if it were under assault by some powerful yet invisible monster.

"We hang on if we can! I had the dreams, remember! They can't keep this up real long! If they could they'd'a had me long ago! They ain't God-just the next thing to it!"

They both suddenly shrieked as a bolt hit the car and they could feel the electricity crackling in the air and even see it dancing around the hood of the car. A few loose metal objects-keys, an old film can, a loose part of a seat-flew up to the roof and stuck there as if magnetized.

The radio crackled and buzzed, although there was no automobile power being fed to it. Suddenly a clear voice in American English said, somewhat tinnily out of the speaker, "If you want to live, then calm down, shut up, and listen to me!"

"It's
him!"

"Who? The one with the horns?"

"No! The other one! The one that thinks I'm a lab animal!"

"I'm moving the damned magnets on this thing by external force but I can't maintain it for long with all this damned storm interference, so listen up!" snapped the man on the radio through numerous and loud snaps, crackles, and pops.

"You called him. He'll never have you as exposed as this again," the voice noted. "He can't keep this up for long but he can hurl trees at you and smash in that car and overturn it and get you exposed before he runs out of steam. I want to save your life. You must believe that, and it's him or me. The other girl-I don't know who you are but he can't tell you apart in this mess so you're in this, too. Now, listen up! Hold hands, close your eyes! Lean back! Clear your minds as much as you can and will yourself to come to me! You'll feel the pull. Don't resist it-and don't let go of each other if you both want to wind up alive and in the same place!"

The car shook so violently that the entire left side rose a few inches and came crashing back down. There was a sudden, violent pounding all around and they saw the front and back windshields begin to crack under hail the size of oranges. Even the roof seemed ready to cave in, and the hailstones were like iron balls against the hood.

Charley looked at Sam in fear and anguish. Sam grabbed her hand tightly and shouted above the roar, "Let's do it! I don't know about him but it's better than any chance we got here!"

It was impossible to ignore the terrors being visited on the car or suppress the fear, but, somehow, through it all, they both seemed to see something in their minds, a tiny point of bright light that grew larger and larger by the second. There was the sound of shattered glass and Sam felt pain in her teg, but at that moment the light, which seemed to be enormous and approaching them, somehow, reached and engulfed mem.

The sound abruptly ceased with a silence so deafening that it was in many ways as scary as the storm had been. Sam couldn't stand it; she opened her eyes, and almost immediately shut them again.

They were floating in air, in the center of the storm, with the swirling, charged, multicolored clouds of violent energy all around them as far as the eye could see, not only on all sides and above them but also below. There had been nothing, no place at all.

Sam opened her eyes again, and after a few moments of vertigo got used to it. She looked over at Charley and saw her friend's eyes tightly shut, lips quivering.
"Char-leeeee . .
. !" she called, the sound thin and echoing into infinity.

Charley was in the grips of total, unreasoned terror, the only rational thought in her head, going 'round and 'round in a never-ending loop, was G
od damn all fucking radio psychologists!

"Charleee . . . Open your eyes! It's-
beautiful!"

"
I-I
can't!"
But after a moment she did so, since she was suddenly hearing nothing but Sam's voice and did not feel any other sensations, not even wind. When she saw the maelstrom it almost took her breath away. She tightened her already solid grip on Sam's hand.
"Are we-are we dead?"

"You're too damned filthy to be dead and I'm too wet!"
Charley responded, the eerie echoes of their voices almost mixing in the distance. "
I
think we're moving, though. Down!"

It was true. The storm was no storm anymore, if it had ever been, but rather it seemed to be a long tube, or perhaps a giant funnel would be a better term for it. It had such a uniformity of broad bands of lighter cloud, or whatever it was, separated by thin bands of darker stuff that it was hard to really tell movement. Charley looked down once and decided she didn't want to anymore, but she could look straight ahead, at the bands, and when she had looked long enough she began to see, or thought she saw, a scene, a picture, that flipped every second or so to become slightly different, like viewing a movie one frame at a time.

Woods . . . clearing . . . paved road beyond . . . even telephone poles, all against a stormy-looking sky. It was looking out from the car's position-it was the cabin land! But there was no car and no cabin and the image was ghostly, two dimensional, not at all real.

Dark band.
Same scene, but suddenly the telephone poles were gone.
Dark band.
A few differences in trees, subtle differences as each band came floating by. Slowly, ever so slowly, the road was dirt now, then a track, a there trail. Trees changed subtly, not only in number and position but in shape and kind. And now it was a true winter scene, with snow suspended in air while the ground was getting progressively covered.

"Stare straight ahead and watch!"
Charley called, pointing but not taking her eyes off the scene.

There was something now in and among the trees. It emerged after a white-time had no meaning in this long descent but it seemed to be going on forever-as some sort of deer, maybe an elk, clear in the stormy twilight and making tracks, one snapshot at a time, in the snow. They watched it walk, but as it did, with each still frame, it, too, subtly changed. The antlers became horns and then bony plates, the dark brown skin changed to tough and leathery, the short tail grew long and thick, the legs thickened and became three-toed and clawed rather than hooved. All this took time-hundreds, maybe thousands of snapshots-and each time the creature looked complete and whole, not in the midst of any transformation.

Now it was no elk nor anything like an elk, but rather a creature like a dragon, larger and meaner looking than anything they had ever seen, and it was no longer walking in snow at all but across a swampy region, the trees now more Amazonian jungle than west Texas woodland and hills. Now it, too, was gone from view and the tend continued to change. Unfortunately it also continued to darken, and soon there was nothing left of the scene but a few fleeting impressions of things that stood out in the storm clouds and the night.

The storm itself had now grown dark and ominous once more, the walls closing in on them where at the start the thing had seemed a mile across. But the stonn was still alive; red, pupilless eyes like burning coals started suddenly out at them from below, then leaped out into the maelstrom itself, floating as they were floating but maneuvering toward them.

They were ugly, horrible beasts, three in number; monstrous creatures, resembling dogs, that seemed almost as big as they were, with gaping mouths dripping something yellow. They were still well below, but they were coming, charging toward them as they fell to meet the things. Both girls screamed and tried to flee in horror, but there was no way to break this fall. The creatures had to be even larger than they appeared;
huge
in fact, because they were growing as they approached yet there was still some distance between the three beasts and their obvious prey.