Nebulon Horror (27 page)

"As I say," Elizabeth declared one evening, "when I at last worked up courage enough to try the ritual Gustave had taught me, I was not trying to contact him at all. I never once considered attempting to reach him. I wanted my Ellyn, who died in the fire at the hardware store. You remember her, don't you? Ellyn Crosser? Her husband Edward was drowned
one day while driving back from West Palm Beach. He had been drinking, and his car went into a canal." Doc nodded.

"Teresa is their child, of course. My poor Teresa. So smart. So much more resourceful than most children her age. But she was crying herself to sleep every night out of loneliness, and after weeks of hearing her sobbing I was willing to try anything. I refreshed my memory of what Gustave had told me by studying the books he had left and the final diagram he had drawn for me. I even bought the two new books that Mister Blair noticed, because Gustave had told me they were coming out and I should have them. Then one night when I felt I was letter perfect in everything, I shut myself up in that empty room and
well, I tried to open the door so that I might talk to Ellyn."

"And it was the wrong door?" Doc suggested.

"It was
his
door, God help me. Instead of my beloved sister in heaven, I found I had opened the gates of hell for a man bent on depravity and vengeance. Believe me, I wanted to kill myself. I was terrified. What made it so awful was that he knew I had not been trying to contact him. He knew that for months I had neglected my promises to him. He knew it was an accident. Oh, how he reviled me."

"But couldn't destroy you because you were his only means of getting back here, eh?" Doc ventured. "Why didn't you just stop going through the necessary motions?"

She shook her head. "I tried. It was no good. Once he was summoned, he never completely left. I would see him walking about the house at times. Just a shadow, a wraith, a figure made of mist. Or in the yard. He could make me do as he wished. Every so often he commanded me to go through the ritual
again—the chanting he had taught me, the drawing of the
vèvè
. .

"The what?"

"The
vèvè.
That is what he called it, from the designs drawn around the central post, the
poteau
mitan
, at a voodoo service. His diagram was much the same thing, he insisted.
Vèvès
are drawn to summon the voodoo gods to the service, his to admit the spirits of the dead."

"What was that powder you used?" asked Chief Lighthill, who was present on this occasion. "We had it tested and the report came back it was only flour."

"It was flour. It could have been cornmeal or ashes, almost anything. How you use it is the important thing."

"How did the kids get involved in this business?" Doc asked her one evening.

"He said there were things he had to do that they must help him with."

"The getting even, for instance?"

"Yes, the getting even. They would be his angels, he said. Teresa first—she would lead them for him—and then others chosen from the ones I had invited to play with her because she was so lonely. And then still others whom they would select."

"Did he have anything against those people who were murdered? Personally? What could he have had against poor old Tom Ranney?"

"Tom discovered he was going blind, and used to mock him for it in retaliation for things Gustave said when Tom was drunk."

"The Ianuccis. I'm surprised he even knew them."

"He knew them. He called on them, feeling that because they came here from a foreign country they ought to feel a bond of kinship with him. His family were foreigners who came here and founded the town,
he told them with great pride. Oh yes, he knew them. He called on them time and again. But they were gentle old people and he . . . they told him at last that they could not be his friends because they did not like him. He must have been the only person in Nebulon they did not like."

"So he had the children kill them."

"Yes."

"But it was Raymond alone who killed old Tom. That's what you said."

"Yes, Raymond. Almost from the beginning he was completely in Gustave's power, perhaps because he was such a timid boy with so little personality of his own. On his way home from school the day he defied Mrs. Ellstrom, he found old Tom drunk and helpless. Knowing Gustave hated him, he killed him. Then in the park he took that baby from the carriage and put it in the lake."

"For the same reason he stamped the marbles into the ground and abused Lois Ellstrom, eh?"

"I think so, yes. To please Gustave. All the children tried to please him, really. I'm sure Jerri Jansen, when she turned on Mister Otto at the band concert, was only doing the same."

"But for drawing the design in the school yard Raymond had to be punished?"

"He had to be punished. Though I'm sure he did it only to give himself courage. I mean he was just sitting there, wasn't he, watching the children play a game. He hadn't been asked to play with them. He was an outcast, don't you see . . . just as Gustave really was."

"How was Raymond killed? The chief says there were no significant marks on his body."

"The way Jerri Jansen was to be killed," Elizabeth said. "The children simply forced him to wish
himself dead for what he had done, and so he died." She frowned. "Now let me ask you a question. As I have said, I believe I know why Raymond drew the diagram in the school yard. But why did the Jansen girl draw hers?"

Doc had discussed that with Keith Wilding and Vin Otto. He said, "We think she was bored. She'd been left at the nursery for the day. She'd followed Vin Otto around like a puppy since morning. We think she just wanted some excitement. Then, after drawing the thing, she became just one of Gustave's little monsters and went on to tear up the plants and kill that kitten."

"Yes. You are probably right."

"Why did those kids kill Maude Vetel on their last rampage?"

"We had a meeting at the library one evening. Gustave asked Mrs. Vetel to speak because she was one of the town's most respected residents. But she didn't praise him as he had expected. She stood up and said he didn't truly care about Nebulon or he would have done something for the town's poor. He and his family should have used their wealth, she said, to build some decent houses for those who had to live in shacks. They should have given the town a hospital, a playground, a swimming pool so poor children would have a place to cool themselves in the summer heat. He was concerned only with his own image, she said."

"And the dog?" Doc pressed.

"It bit him one day when he was passing, that's all. But Gustave remembered such things."

Each day when Doc dropped by the woman in the bed was noticeably better. Her body was mending; her mind was sharper. She told him one night that Gustave, having gained control over the children, gave
them certain powers to compensate for those he himself had lost as he aged. "He died almost blind, as you know, so when they became his puppets he gave them special powers of sight. They could see in the dark. Their eyes became weapons. My eyes became weapons, as you saw for yourself."

Vin Otto had testified to that. "When she—or was it Gustave?—looked at me in that way, I felt I had to die," he told Chief Lighthill. "I mean I had to make myself die. It is certainly not difficult for me to believe that those children killed Raymond Hostetter without leaving a mark on him."

The children were at home now. In the beginning they had been held under guard, for observation, at a county children's home some distance from Nebulon. Doc had visited them there and talked with them, but had little to do with deciding their fate.

Expert psychiatrists summoned from as far away as Boston and Los Angeles had done that. In the end it was agreed the children could be allowed to try returning to a normal life, though subject to continuing tests and observations. Jerri Jansen was now living with her mother and Vin Otto in the house Vin had rented. The other children were back with their parents. Teresa Crosser alone had been denied permission to go home. Under no circumstances, the psychiatrists said, must she set foot again in the house where the presence of Gustave, real or imagined, had exerted such an influence upon her. In any case, the child could not have returned to the old Nebulon house with Elizabeth still in the hospital. Old Dr. Yambor found a temporary home for her with a woman in Glendevon who had known her parents.

But as Elizabeth improved, Doc Broderick noticed a new kind of change in her and asked her about it. "Gustave left me when he thought I was dying," she
said. "I have lain here for three weeks thinking of almost nothing else, and I am convinced of it. When Chief Lighthill shot me, I thought I would die. Gustave must have believed so too. Now it is clear that I will not die. So tell me . . . what is to keep him from returning?"

"You think he can do that? Without your going through the ritual and drawing the
vèvè
again?"

"I don't know. But I am apprehensive."

A few evenings later Doc was invited to dinner at the Ottos'. Vin and Olive had been married but were skipping a honeymoon, they said, because of Jerri. They couldn't take the child with them on a wedding trip and were not sure it would be wise to leave her with anyone just yet. Keith Wilding and Melanie Skipworth were also invited.

"This is our fling," Vin said, "a dinner party for our three best friends in our new home, with a drop of champagne."

That was fine with Doc, but at about eleven, just when he was beginning to acquire a pleasant glow after a truly handsome repast, the telephone rang; it was the hospital calling him.

"It has to be me?" he said. "No one else will do?"

What they told him sent him hurrying out to his car with only the briefest of explanations. He drove at a speed that should have earned him a ticket. Even so, when he brought his vehicle to a lurching halt in the hospital driveway, Chief Lighthill's car was already there, and the chief was one of a gesticulating group in the lobby.

"Where is she?" Doc demanded.

"In surgery," someone said. "Doctor Wallingford and Doctor Kern are trying to save her."

Doc went striding down the corridor to surgery and peered through the door-glass. There was nothing he could do at that point. Both Wallingford and Kern were better surgeons than he, and he could only consider himself lucky they had been available. He returned to the lobby. "How did it happen?" he asked the chief.

"All I know is, she jumped out the window. I don't know why. Terry here was on guard duty outside her door. He says he heard her yelling."

"Yelling?" Doc scowled at Terry Hinson, who was not a man given to flights of imagination. "Yelling what?"

"Well, I can't swear to it, but I think she was yelling 'No, no!' And then I think she said 'I won't! I'll kill myself first!' " Hinson rubbed his jaw. "I'm pretty sure of that last part about killing herself. I was at the door by then."

"And when you opened the door?"

"She was out of bed and had the window open, struggling to climb out."

"Struggling
to climb out?" Doc said.

"Well, it was queer. Even though she was out of her mind, she must have known it was wrong and imagined somebody was holding her back. She actually seemed to be struggling to break loose and kept sobbing 'Let me go! Let me go!' Before I could reach her she did break loose—from whatever she thought was trying to hold her, I mean—and threw herself out. "

The chief said to Doc, "Nurse Thomas here says she saw the struggle at the window too."

Doc turned to scowl at Nurse Thomas, who would have been in charge of the fourth floor at that time. She was a rock-steady, no-nonsense woman of forty. "That's how it happened, Mary?"

"That's how it happened, Doctor. There can be no
question about the struggle and what she cried out. Officer Hinson and I were both in the room then."

"Let's have a look at that room, Chief," Doc said.

"I already have, But if you think it'll do any good . . .

They went up to the fourth floor and entered Elizabeth Peckham's room together. Doc walked to the still-open window and looked down, then stepped back shaking his head. He began to walk about, peering at the floor.

"There's nothing," the chief said. "I've been over it inch by inch."

"You think she could have imagined a visitation?"

"Hell, don't ask me. You're the doctor. I'm just a
cop."

"Let's hope she just imagined it," Doc said. "Let's hang onto that much, anyway."

At two o'clock that morning Elizabeth Peckham died of her injuries.

E
ight hours after Elizabeth Peckham's departure from life, Doc Broderick answered his telephone and found himself talking to old Victor Yambor in Glendevon. "Can you come over here, Norman?" Yambor said. "It's important."