Nebulon Horror (22 page)

Seven had called. As he turned to the police radio to carry out Doc Broderick's suggestion, the phone on his desk rang again and it was yet another parent. He wrote down the name of the child, noting it was not one of the names Doc had given him but a new one.
This thing is growing
, he thought apprehensively.

He talked to his men and determined that Worth Blair in Car Three and Leonard Quigley on his motorcycle were the two nearest the nursery. "Get over there and check it out," he told them.

Alone in Car Three, Blair was closer but was heading away from the target. He made a forbidden U-turn, driving up over the grassy center strip to do so. Then he turned on his siren but almost immediately decided the noise was uncalled for and turned it off again.

He was not a very good policeman, he suspected. Maybe college did not prepare a man to be a good policeman. He had been feeling inadequate ever since the start of Nebulon's troubles.

That business of the books in Gustave's study, for instance. There was something about them. He knew it but could not put his finger on it. With the chief's permission he had gone back there, and Miss Peckham had let him into the study again. He had taken those books off the shelves, each and every one of them, and examined them with the greatest of care.

They were, as he had known before from their titles, books about spiritualism, life after death, reincarnation, that sort of thing. Even the two published by the almost-unknown company to which, in vain, he had sent his poetry. But not a clue in the lot of them.

One thing he had carefully searched for was the diagram. Raymond Hostetter had drawn that mysterious symbol in the school yard. Jerri Jansen—probably Jerri Jansen—had repeated it at the nursery. Both children were members of the group that played at the Peckham house. But there were no diagrams in Gustave's books. Not one.

Yet there was something. Deep down inside him he was certain of it. The books had a secret to tell him if he could just stop being so stupid. It was like trying to catch a fly that wouldn't light.

Heading toward the Wilding Nursery on the same road but from the opposite direction was Leonard Quigley on his motorcycle. "Check it out, both of you," the chief had said, and Quigley was determined to reach the nursery before Worth Blair did. His cycle bored through the dark with a deafening roar as he ripped the speed limit to shreds. He had no wish to work with a college man. College men were not meant to be cops. The wind whipped against Quigley's face and made it even redder.

Ahead of him was a small truck poking along at thirty miles an hour too swiftly to see the face of the driver in the dimly lighted cab, but assumed it was Keith Wilding.

He ought to stop, he supposed. From Wilding he could probably get the information the chief wanted without going any farther. He did slow down for a moment. But then he thought of something.

Olive Jansen and her daughter had gone to the nursery cottage after their apartment was stoned last night. For the time being they were living there. He had read Blair's report of the incident; Blair was great at writing reports. And that bastard who had molested the little girl at the concert in the park, that Vincent Otto, was there with them.

I want some words with that one, Quigley thought, and gunned his cycle again.

At the wheel of the pickup, on his way back to the nursery after moving the last load of furniture from Olive's apartment to the newly rented house, Vin Otto wondered where the motorcycle cop was headed for at such speed.

"S
omeone's coming," Keith Wilding said.

He knelt at a front window, peering out. For the past quarter hour he had stationed himself there, visible to the others in the glare from the burning cars outside. Melanie Skipworth and Olive Jansen were on their feet farther back in the cottage living room, mere shadows in the room's darkness now that the fires were dying down. Jerri Jansen huddled in a chair, her eyes glowing faintly in the gloom.

Olive said fearfully, "Is it Vin?"

"I don't think so. There's only one headlight. Listen."

There had been a fury of sound as the two cars burned outside. Explosions. Metal and glass bursting. The fierce roar of gasoline-fed flames reaching as high as the highest treetops. It was a mere crackling now, and through it came the growl of a speeding motorcycle.

"Must be a cop," Keith said. "Leonard Quigley, maybe." He put his face against the glass to see out better.

The cycle's single headlight came rapidly in from the highway, weaving like a moon gone mad along the twisting main drive of the nursery. It was unreal, and so was the noise accompanying it. No one else in Nebulon rode a motorcycle the way Leonard Quigley
did, Keith thought. The man had been shattering the town's eardrums and endangering the lives of its people since his high-school days. Watching his headlight approach now, as it kept appearing and disappearing through the trees was like watching a fireworks display.

"Oh-oh," Keith said then.

Something was happening closer to the house, just beyond the smoldering ruins of the two cars. It was where he had placed the potted jaboticabas in a row along the walkway near the office.

The trees were about five feet tall, in wooden tubs, occupying a strip of grass between the path and the road down which the cycle was speeding. There were nine of them. Part of his idea in placing them there had been that motorists coming in would see them.

The dying glow from the burned-out cars just reached them, just enough to reveal sly movements of shadows among them. All at once Keith realized what was going to happen.

He lurched up from the window and in half a dozen strides reached the front door. He jerked the door open. "Quigley, stop!" he yelled. "Stop!" But of course it was breath wasted. No man on a motorcycle making that much noise could have heard a mere voice over such a distance.

It happened even while Keith stood yelling in the doorway. The overturned jaboticabas rolled into the roadway like tenpins knocked helter-skelter by a bowling ball. The onrushing cycle crashed into them and went soaring. At the apex of its wild flight it flipped upside down. Rider and cycle parted company. The last Keith saw of the rider, he was a scarecrow figure hurtling through the cycle's headlight beam into darkness.

Out at the highway a pair of headlights turned
onto the same nursery road, boring through the dark toward the same disaster. The pickup, Keith thought. Aware that red eyes were now staring in his direction —that their owners must be aware he was standing there with the door half open—he shut the door. "Where's that flashlight?" he said. They had located a lone flashlight since lighting the candles, a powerful one with good batteries.

Melanie snatched it from a table and ran to him with it. Glancing out the window, she said in a low voice, "Who is it? Vin?"

"Yes."

"What can you—?”

He stepped to the window. There was a risk, of course. A stone flung at the glass could break it in his face, and these red-eyed kids were good with stones. He made himself as small a target as possible and aimed the light through the window at the oncoming pickup. At the same time, he passed his free hand back and forth in front of the lens, trying to flash an SOS. Maybe it was silly or childish, but he and Vin had both been Boy Scouts, even if in different parts of the country. Maybe Vin, too, had learned code when working for merit badges.

When the approaching headlights slowed, he abandoned the SOS and let the flashlight's beam shine steadily on the clutter in the road. The pickup stopped. Running to the door again, jerking it open, Keith yelled in his loudest voice, "Go back, Vin! The kids are here! Go for the police!"

He saw the pickup go into reverse, but the nursery road behind it was tortuous and long. He saw a horde of small dark shapes darting toward the vehicles and heard glass shattering as a barrage of stones pelted windshield and headlamps. The headlamps went out. Suddenly in a desperate, last-second move, Vin Otto
slammed the truck into low gear and sent it lurching forward again.

At least one of the stone throwers went down under its wheels, and there was a scream. Through the no-man's-land of overturned jaboticabas the vehicle bumped and swayed. As it passed the still glowing, burned-out automobiles, the driver was just visible as a shape hunched over the wheel.

The truck lurched over the walk in front of the house. Vin Otto flung himself out of it and staggered to the door. Keith pulled him inside and slammed the door shut.

A swarm of red eyes like fire beetles flowed menacingly toward the cottage then, but out at the highway another pair of car headlights made the turn onto the nursery road. Above this pair a blue light flashed on the car's roof. The eyes in front of the house turned to watch it as it approached. Indecision seemed to hold them for a moment. Then they and the shadows they belonged to faded away into the darkness.

All but one. That one did not move, nor did its eyes glow now. It lay where the pickup had knocked it down and passed over it. The oncoming car stopped on reaching it, and Worth Blair got out. He went down on one knee beside the child to investigate. He rose and glanced at the two charred automobiles. He frowned at the wrecked motorcycle. He had his revolver in his hand as he carefully peered into the darkness surrounding him.

Keith Wilding opened the cottage door and said, "Be careful, Worth. Those kids are all around. They were right here until they saw you coming."

"What happened to this one?"

"Vin ran it down getting past them. They tried to kill him."

Blair frowned again at the smashed motorcycle and said, "Where's Quigley?"

"Over there in the dark somewhere. They ambushed him."

Worth Blair stepped to his car and used his radio to talk to Chief Lighthill at the station. While talking, he held his revolver ready and kept turning his head, watching the darkness. He told the chief he needed help. He said, "The kids have torn this place apart and may still be here, Chief. One child is hurt, maybe dead. Quigley may be hurt or dead too; I haven't had a chance to look for him yet, but his bike is wrecked. I'll need an ambulance."

Returning to the child in the road, he looked down at her again. The first-aid manual recommended not moving an accident victim, unless it was necessary. She was so little, though, and so crushed. She ought to be in the house, not lying here like a broken doll in the dark. Anyway, with her little legs twisted like that, and her head at such a ghastly angle, she couldn't still be alive.

Keith Wilding played his flashlight on the walk as Blair came along it with the child in his arms. He stepped inside, and the policeman entered the cottage and placed the child on the sofa. Vin Otto, his face twitching, at once stepped forward and knelt to look at her.

"I did not try to hit her," Vin said in a voice filled with anguish. "They were throwing stones at me. The windshield broke in my face. I could not see." The windshield glass had gashed his cheek and it was red with blood. The earlier wound above his eye and the scratches on his face made by Jerri Jansen at the park were prominent too.

Melanie Skipworth and Olive Jansen came forward to watch with him while Blair examined the child
again. Prints of a tire tread on her light-colored dress indicated a wheel had passed over her from between her legs to a point just left of her neck, crushing and twisting her slender body but miraculously missing her head. The expression on her face was one of shock and agony. Though her eyes were open and unblinking, they were glassy and obviously saw nothing.

"Who is she?" Blair asked. "Anyone know?"

"The Voight girl. Debbie Voight," Olive said tonelessly.

"One of those reported missing. There's an ambulance coming. I think she's dead, though." He got up off his knees, obviously struggling to retain control of himself and behave as a policeman ought to. "I'd better find Quigley."

Keith said, "Let me. I think I know where he fell." It was an eerie situation, he felt. There was a dead girl here on the couch, and there was a policeman dead or badly hurt out there in the dark, and yet everyone was talking as if nothing very special had happened. Maybe it was defensive. A way to survive in spite of tortured emotions and an increasing build-up of dread. A gang of red-eyed children had smashed the greenhouse and burned two cars and wrecked a motorcycle and stoned the pickup, and yet no one was reacting as might be expected, with hysteria or even obvious terror. Even though the kids were probably still out there, waiting to strike again, no one seemed likely to crack. The only feeling he himself recognized was a determination to keep going, to beat the odds, to help others survive along with him. Maybe that explained it.

Melanie Skipworth suddenly came alive and said, "Wait! This child isn't dead. She's moaning!"

It was true. The girl on the couch was moaning and breathing. Her breath bubbled the blood on her mouth. Unsure of what to do, Worth Blair looked at his watch, as though that would tell him something. He said to Keith, "The ambulance can't be long getting here. Find Quigley, will you?"