Nebulon Horror (23 page)

Keith took the flashlight and went striding out to where he had last seen Leonard Quigley's body falling from its flight like a shot bird. But he was careful to watch for those glowing red eyes as he braved the darkness.

He came upon Quigley just about where he had expected to, in a plot of night-blooming jasmine bushes where the scent of flowers was almost overwhelming. Crouching to examine the peculiar twist of the man's thick neck, he became aware that one of the women back at the cottage was filling the night with a sound of fear or anguish.

He rose from his crouch and raced back to the house. In the candlelit living room Olive Jansen stood with her eyes closed, screaming. Vin Otto and Melanie Skipworth had left the room. Worth Blair stood by little Debbie Voight on the sofa, looking helpless.

"Now what's the matter?" Keith demanded.

Olive stopped screaming. She lifted her hands and pressed them to the sides of her head and swayed as though about to fall. Vin Otto came running from the kitchen and gripped her shoulders to steady her. "Now do not worry," he said, "We will find her." Melanie came walking out of the bedroom that Olive, Vin, and Jerri had used last night. Tonelessly she said, "A window is open in there."

Again Keith said, "What's the matter?"

"Jerri is gone," Melanie said.

"What?"

"Jerri is gone!" Olive wailed. Her voice betrayed the fact that she could not stand much more. "You went to look for Quigley. I turned to tell her we'd be
leavin' soon, and she wasn't here. Only a minute before, she was starin' at me with those eyes. Oh God, those eyes! Now she's gone!"

"There's a window open in the bedroom," Melanie repeated. "Did you lock the windows in there? You looked after that room."

"Did I lock them? Oh, my God, I don't know if I locked them. I thought I did, but I may be goin' crazy. Maybe she went out to those kids because she wanted to. How do we know what's happenin' any
more?"

Vin Otto said to Blair, "Do you have a flashlight I can borrow, please?"

"In my car. Where you going? Out there to look for her?"

"Yes."

"Both of us," Keith said. "She must be in the nursery somewhere. We'll find her."

"With those kids out there?"

"Maybe they've left."

Blair looked undecided again, and then took in a breath. "All right. Help should be here any minute. I'll stay here with the women till it comes."

Armed with flashlights, Keith and Vin searched the premises. Before they had gone far into the darkness they heard two cars on the nursery road and saw a blue light flashing. Only one blue light; the other vehicle must be the ambulance, Vin said. Presently a second police car turned in from the highway, and a third.

With the help of the police, Keith and Vin continued searching for an hour. The ambulance departed with the Voight girl and Leonard Quigley. At the cottage, Olive Jansen became hysterical for a time, then simply sat on the sofa and stared into space.

In the end the searchers returned to the house
without having found any trace of Jerri or the red-eyed children.

Keith locked the house then. He and Vin, Melanie and Olive rode to the station in the police cars. From there Melanie took Olive to her lakeside apartment and put her to bed, leaving Keith and Vin at the station to work with Lorin Lighthill's men.

It was to be a long night.

E
arlier, Chief Lighthill had been hopeful. There had been the call from Doc that caused him to send Blair and Quigley to the nursery. The missing children were at the nursery, apparently all of them together in one place. That was something.

Now Quigley was in the hospital morgue and Blair was just another policeman chasing phantoms. The kids had vanished and young Jerri Jansen had disappeared with them, either willingly or a captive. It seemed there were at least twelve kids involved. That many had now been reported missing by parents made frantic by earlier events in Nebulon. Where could that many youngsters be holed up in a town the size of Nebulon without being noticed by somebody?

But as time went on it became apparent the kids were not holed up. They were on the prowl.

A Mrs. Nelson Upton telephoned at 10:17 to report that her aged German Shepherd had been doused with gasoline and set afire. Police arriving there less than five minutes later found her kneeling on the front lawn, weeping over the dog's charred and contorted remains. She had been napping, she moaned through her tears. The dog's voice, making a kind of sound she hoped never to hear again, had awakened her. The monsters responsible for the deed had lingered until the last minute, she'd told them, watching the
animal die in agony, and had fled only when she rushed into the yard. Even then they had found time to dig the dying animal's eyes out with a stake snatched from her rose garden.

At 1:34 a neighbor of prominent churchwoman Mrs. Maude Vetel telephoned the fire department to report a fire at the Vetel home. Fire and police personnel responded and found the place an inferno, with half the neighborhood residents standing around watching it burn. Mrs. Vetel must be inside, people said. They had heard screaming. But the police found the woman in her nightgown under a hedge at the back of the yard, surrounded by an assortment of stones of various shapes and sizes. Apparently she had tried to flee from the burning building and the stones had brought her down with uncanny accuracy, all but reducing her head to a pulp in the process. Her eyes had been removed and placed on her bared breasts, where they looked like swollen extra nipples smeared with blood.

The chief said to Worth Blair, "They set fire to the house to force her out. Are we really dealing with a bunch of second-graders?"

"I doubt it."

"They're smart, Worth. Maybe too smart for us."

After the murder of the churchwoman, things seemed to quiet down. Two or three more calls did come in. People reported unusual sounds in their yards or on the streets. And, of course, the parents of the missing children kept phoning, becoming more and more alarmed as time passed. Still, it might have been worse.

The hospital called to report that little Debbie Voight was expected to live and maybe in a few hours the police might be able to question her. "Good," Chief Lighthill said. He hoped Debbie could tell him
why the children were terrorizing the town. But she probably wouldn't even if she could, he told himself glumly.

By two in the morning all was reasonably quiet. Police cars checked in on schedule from the sectors
assigned to them. To Lighthill's surprise there were even occasional reports from the highway patrol and county sheriff's people. Of course, the
_-
welcome spell of inactivity wasn't solving any problems. It wasn't finding the mayor's still-missing son. It wasn't pro
viding a solution to the mystery of why five of the town's residents had been slain in such a grisly way.

It was simply a reprieve. Nevertheless, Lighthill welcomed it. He was tired. His men, to judge by their voices when they called in, were even more tired. No one anticipated any sleep.

The chief looked across his desk at Keith Wilding. Keith had tipped his chair back against the wall and
was simply waiting for something to happen that might concern him—or something he could put a hand to, at least. The chief said, "Where did Otto go, you know?"

"Over to Melanie Skipworth's, to check on Olive."

"It must be hell on Olive, having her daughter disappear like that. The uncertainty. Not knowing
whether the kids broke in and took her or she opened the window herself."

"Yes."

"What do
you
think happened? She was just waiting for a chance to break away and join them?"

"I don't want to think," Keith said. "But she drew that diagram in the nursery. No one else."

"And we haven't a clue to what it means," Lighthill said glumly.

About that time in the home of Willard Ellstrom the telephone rang. Willard and his wife Lois were
in bed. They slept in the same room but in separate beds, and it was Lois who awoke first. She reached out and gave Willard's bed a push. When she heard his snoring cease, she said, "The phone's ringing, dear."

Willard listened for a few seconds and wondered who in his right mind could be calling in the middle of the night. The glowing dial of the bedroom clock radio said two-something. He got out of bed and searched for his slippers, but decided it would take too long to put them on. He padded barefoot into the hall and picked up the phone and said, "Yes?"

"Willard, this is John Holden."

"John Holden. In Oregon. I've just been talking to my secretary. She said it was most urgent I call you."

Willard Ellstrom collected his wits and realized it was not two-something A.M. in Oregon; it was still a reasonable evening hour for someone like Professor John Holden. Into his mind came also a recollection of the day he had lunched with Holden in Coconut Grove. "Of course," he said. "Of course, John. The diagram."

"I take it you're still having trouble there in your town or you wouldn't have told my secretary to have me call you."

"A lot of trouble, John. I can't begin to bring you up to date."

"Well, I'm not sure I'm going to be any help," Holden said, "but I've shown your diagram to a number of people here at the conference. Quite a few of them are up on esoteric art and practices, cabala and so forth."

Willard Ellstrom voiced an exaggerated moan of protest and said, "Such words at two in the morning."

"Two? Oh, good Lord, do you know I'd completely
forgotten the difference in time? No wonder my secretary sounded woozy when I called her. I'm sorry, old man. You must have been sound asleep."

"I'm not now," Willard said. "I'm battling those words. But go ahead, John. Maybe I'll get the sense of it, at least."

"The, thing is enormously interesting," the man in Oregon said. "One thing everybody's agreed, on: It's a diagram with a purpose, not just an idle drawing. It's meant to accomplish something, Willard—such as to establish some kind of contact with the spirit world, like a voodoo
vèvè.
Some of the interwoven signs or symbols are almost certainly runes."

"Are what?"

"Runes. Old-time things. Their origin is obscure, maybe old Latin or Greek, and they were employed years ago as magic signs and secret writing. As I say, this diagram of yours almost certainly contains runes, and they're in it for a purpose. It's cabalistic too, some of us think. Has to do definitely with occultism, mystery, mystic art. The fact is, one man here says point-blank this is an attempt to open the age-old mystic door and get through to the dead. Do I make any sense?"

"Did you say 'door'?"

"Yes. That's always been a goal of people who play around in esoterica, of course—to find some means of opening the door and establishing contact."

"Doc Broderick talked about a door," Willard said.

"Who's he?"

"You don't know him. Never mind. I believe I'll call him about this. Is there anything more you can tell me, John?"

"I think not. But I'll give you the number here in case you want to call me back. I'll be here another day or two."

Willard Ellstrom took down the number, thanked his caller, and hung up. He went into the bedroom to tell Lois what had happened, partly to satisfy the curiosity he knew must be consuming her and partly to put straight in his mind the somewhat obscure things Holden had told him. Then he telephoned Doc, who responded as sleepily as he himself had done when answering Holden's call. More so, in fact, for Doc had been at the hospital until after one, helping to patch up the Voight girl.

"I've heard from Professor Holden, Norman. The man we tried to call at the university, remember?"

"About the diagram," Doc said. "What's he say?"

"Quite a lot, I'm afraid, and I'm not sure I can repeat it without garbling it. But you recall what you told me when
you
came over here and looked at my photos of old Gustave's house? About the little Jansen girl and the door she talked about? You were wondering which of the doors in that upper hall it might be, as I recall."

"Yes?'

"John Holden spoke of a different kind of door, Norman, one that would provide a contact with the spirit world. He said he and his colleagues had a feeling the diagram is an effort to open that kind of door."

"I'd say it sounds crazy," Doc said, "except so many way-out things have actually been happening. To open a door, hey? You know what I'm thinking of? That light-struck photo you have."

"Yes. Remember what you suggested? I ought to say in the book that the old house is haunted and I have a picture of Gustave's ghost to prove it."