Night Howl (21 page)

“Mom!”

“Mom!”

They walked toward the bedrooms.

Lisa stopped at the basement door. Like Carlson, she was curious about the lights being on. She, too, suspected that because her mother was down there, she hadn’t heard their bus arrival and entrance. This possibility quickly brought a sense of welcome relief. Without realizing it, she had been holding her breath as she and Bobby started down the hallway.

“Mommy down there?” Bobby asked, pushing past her.

“Probably. Probably in the utility room.”

“Mom,”
Bobby called after peering down the stairs. They both waited for an answer.

It came in the form of a low growl as Phantom stepped out from behind the doorway of Bobby’s room. The dog stopped about fifteen feet from them and raised his head. His body seemed to vibrate as a result of his own heavy breathing. He lowered his jaw so his tongue could be fully exposed. It dangled over the bottom teeth. It was dark pink and thick, the sandpapery roughness of which they could see, even from this distance.

The children stared in amazement.

“That’s not King,” Bobby said. The dog seemed to be laughing. It moved a few inches forward, lowering its head like a hound stalking a chicken. “Whose dog is it?”

“I don’t know,” Lisa whispered. She was surprised she was able to make any sounds at all. All the strength in her body drained in a flash. She didn’t think she’d be able to move, but she understood that she and her little brother were in danger. She had to act quickly.

She brought Bobby up in front of her and placed her hands on both his shoulders, staring ahead at the dog that stared back at them all the while. The instinctive fear that had come alive within her was amplified by the look in the dog’s eyes.

She had seen other watchdogs bark their warnings and growl their admonition, but this was a far different thing. They didn’t have death written so clearly in their eyes. She was positive that within the next few moments, this dog would attack them. Neither their shouts nor their gestures would dissuade it and, worst
of all, a safe flight back out of the house was obviously impossible. They would barely get to the beginning of the corridor before the dog was on them. What would Lisa do if the dog seized Bobby first? She couldn’t leave him and she couldn’t beat off such a large animal.

“Where’s Mommy?” Bobby whispered, his voice hardly audible. He didn’t turn back to her to ask the question. He was unable to move his gaze from the dog.

Where was their mother? Lisa wondered. Surely the dog couldn’t have gotten into the house without Clara’s knowing it, and by now she would have heard them. The dog had already done something to her; Lisa was sure of it. This knowledge crumpled the little composure she had been able to muster. She felt panic rush over her. It was like walking on a frozen lake and falling through the thin ice.

“Downstairs!”
she screamed and turned Bobby so abruptly toward the basement door and stairs that he nearly fell forward, head over heels down the steps. The moment she took the action, the dog leaped, but Lisa clung to a semblance of logic as she bailed out of the hallway with her brother. She took hold of the basement door and slammed it shut behind them. The sound of the dog’s body hitting the closed door sped her flight downward, but Bobby’s ungodly scream stopped her midway. It was as though he had torn out his vocal cords with the effort.

They both stared at the bodies below. The gruesome sight of the strange, mutilated dead man crumpled beside their unconscious mother worked like an electrical overload. The circuit breakers in their minds snapped off. All thought came to a stop; even instinctive action shut down. Zombielike, they stared ahead, unable to move, unable to speak. When Lisa had stopped her descent, she had pressed her body against
Bobby’s. Now they were conjoined, glued together by their mutual sense of horror. Their hearts beat as one, synchronized in the speed at which they raced the blood around their bodies. Neither could speak. Even the attempt at sound seemed beyond them. They didn’t hear the noise behind them as the dog placed its front paws against the door and brought its mouth to the knob.

Neatly stored on the shelves of his mind, packaged like oranges in a crate, were the different new thoughts and new awarenesses Phantom had developed since his escape from the institute. He had handled every original idea carefully, rolling it over and over gently until it became something within his comprehension. To do so, he usually related the new things to old things. Such was the case with the children.

He had been exposed to children in different ways. When he was much younger, he had been placed in a human home environment for a short period of time, his every action restricted, all of his behavior carefully recorded. It was the home of one of the scientists. In many ways that short stay had been the happiest time of his life. He had experienced affection and had seen that humans could be soft and gentle. There were a boy and a girl there too, only the boy was bigger than the girl. They inflicted no pain on him and the tasks that they had him do were far from difficult.

For a long time after he had been taken away from them, he missed them. Whenever a door opened in the lab or a new voice was heard, he perked up in expectation. But a return was not in the design. That portion of the experiment was over; it had served its purpose and those in control of him saw no reason to continue it.

Just for a few moments, when he came out into the hallway and confronted these children, he was thrown back to that time. The images that played on the
screen of his memory confused him. All of the recalled stimuli were pleasant and attractive. He half expected the children to come forward and pet him. He listened for the softness in their voices and looked for the pleasure in their faces. But none of this was visible and this wasn’t why he had emerged.

Their obvious hesitation and fear ended his reverie. It was natural and logical for him to distrust anything that distrusted him, and it was justification and motive enough for him to go on with his original intentions—to take down the children just as he had taken down the others. When they were able to get behind that basement door before he reached them, he smashed against it, frustrated, and angry at himself for having hesitated. This affection he had recalled, this desire for warm, human contact, was weakness. All that was natural and primitive in him had taught him that survival of the fittest was predicated on an absence of compassion.

Compassion was a human thing, imposed on him only during his short stay within that household. Intelligence had no emotional requisites. He had been developed to seek only clear, logical thought. Because he hadn’t moved quickly, he had missed an opportunity. That was an error. Once again he was matched against children in a maze of sorts. Round one was over and the children were ahead. The children would get the reward; he would get the punishment.

They had taught him to be aggressive; they wanted him to want to win. They wanted him to make greater and greater demands on his potential intelligence. This is what he had been taught to do; this is what he would do now.

Right after he had slammed himself against the closed door, he sat back and considered the situation. He knew what was behind the door, what the room
below was like and what the exits and entrances were. This was not too dissimilar from a maze in which he had been tested a few times. A small rabbit had been trained to go through a maze that had more than one entrance and exit. He was set loose to catch it.

The maze was very much like others he had been in, except for the extra door. He charged through it after the rabbit, expecting the rabbit to be trapped at the end, with no way out but past him. When he got there, he was surprised that the rabbit was gone. He looked up. There was never a roof on any of the mazes. The scientists stood on a ramp above the maze and watched his actions. They offered no solutions.

He backtracked, sniffing along the rabbit’s path, and found the second entrance. He nosed it open and peered out, now understanding how the rabbit had escaped. He was placed in the maze again, only this time he took a different path and arrived at the second door before the rabbit did. When it appeared, he seized it quickly and cut its neck open with a single bite.

It occurred to him that the children could escape through the doorway through which he had first entered the house. He considered going outside and around to it but opted instead to pursue them this way. Even if they did exit through that doorway, he felt confident that he could exit that way as well and catch up to them before they got far from the house. If he moved quickly enough now, he might get to them before they reached that door. In any case, he felt certain they would head in that direction.

Escape from the house didn’t enter the minds of either of the children as they stood staring down from the stairway. Instead, they looked for some sign of hope in the yet still body of their mother. When Lisa finally heard the sounds of the dog behind them, she
moved slowly down the remaining steps and stepped over the body of the dead policeman. Bobby followed cautiously, afraid even to permit his feet to graze the corpse of the I.D. man.

Lisa knelt beside her mother and shook her body by pushing on her left shoulder.

“Mommy?” she said.

“Mommy, wake up,” Bobby said.

Lisa lifted her mother’s upper body toward her. Clara Kaufman’s eyelids fluttered.

“Mommy,” Lisa said again. Both she and Bobby turned and looked up the stairs as the knob on the basement door clicked open.

Clara Kaufman groaned.

“Mommy!”
Bobby screamed. The upstairs door began to open. Bobby sat down beside Clara and pressed his body to hers. Lisa embraced her even more tightly. Clara focused on the two of them.

“Oh . . . Lisa, Bobby.” The pain returned, but she fought it and got herself into a firmer sitting position.

“The dog!”
Lisa screamed.
“He’s coming down!”

“Oh, God.”

Phantom appeared on the top two steps and gazed down at them. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. They hadn’t gone for the other maze exit after all. It would be easy for him to cut them off from it now.

To the three below, he looked even larger. Because of the angle from which they looked up at him, his size was exaggerated; he took on monstrous proportions.

Clara looked behind her into the utility room.

“We’ve got to get back in there,” she said. She thought about sliding herself along as Lisa pulled her, but Bobby was clinging to her so tightly, she could barely move. He was close to a state of shock because of what had happened with King. She knew he was reliving that terror. His sobbing became more and
more hysterical. In a matter of moments, it would be impossible to control him. He wouldn’t hear anything she said and he wouldn’t feel her hand on his neck.

Even Lisa had begun to cry harder now. The children were entrapping her within the walls of their fear. She looked at the dead policeman and fought back the wave of nausea stimulated by the bloody sight. If only he could be resurrected for a few minutes to protect them, she thought, and then she looked at the gun still in his hand.

A moment after she did so, she looked up at the slowly descending large dog. He stopped as though he realized what she was considering. She was sure that he, too, had looked at that gun. She knew her move would have to be fast and decisive, despite the pain it would bring throughout her body.

She turned and seized the dead man’s hand at the wrist and pulled it up to her. The action froze her children for a moment. Their sobbing stopped as they looked on at her effort to free the pistol from the fingers of the corpse. But it seemed glued to the hand.

The dog started a quicker descent and then hesitated when Clara folded her own hand neatly over the dead man’s, forcing her right forefinger over the hard, dead one.

Phantom saw the weapon being turned toward him and he crouched down, remembering what the other dog had looked like, how it had jerked about spasmodically after the policeman had shot it in the head.

Clara didn’t see his retreat. She thought of all the television shows and movies she had seen where guns had been used, and she vaguely recalled the pulling back of the hammer. She did so quickly and then, with her face turned away from the scene before her, she pressed as hard as she could on the dead man’s trigger finger.

Within the closed-in basement, the gun’s report was more like an explosion of dynamite. It was deafening. The pistol seemed to jump out of her hand and, with an eerie semblance of life, the dead policeman’s arm shot upward and then down. The children screamed. When Clara opened her eyes, the dog was gone from the stairs.

“Quickly,” she said when her perusal of the basement showed no signs of the animal, “let’s get back into the utility room.”

Both of her children gasped for air. Their upper bodies heaved about as though they were both in fits of epilepsy. She could see that they could offer her little assistance. She pressed down on the floor and pushed herself toward the door behind her, but Bobby, clinging to her leg, was like a dead weight.

“Hurry, Bobby, please. Let Mommy go and help get us back in there. Hurry. Lisa . . .” She turned to her daughter. Lisa looked up at the stairs fearfully and then stood up. She went around and tried to get Bobby to release his grip, but the little boy screamed and clung even more tightly.

“I can’t ... he won’t.”

“All right, baby ... all right. Just help me go back. We’ll pull him along. Take this arm,” she said, holding up her right arm, “and pull firmly but gently.” Lisa took her mother’s wrist and did so. They moved by inches, Bobby too hysterical to give them any real assistance. When they reached the doorway, Lisa looked up at the stairs again. The dog had reappeared. Clara saw him, too. “Don’t scream, just pull, pull.”

The three of them got into the utility room far enough to start to close the door behind them, just as the dog came charging down the stairs. They slammed it shut only moments before he reached it, all of them screaming at the same time. Clara pressed her body against the door so that her weight would keep the dog
from shoving it open. They heard him press his body against it on the other side. Then there was silence.