Night Of The Beast (22 page)

He
believed
.

Jason caused Vargas to awaken, aroused but unfulfilled. The man was furious, very nearly out of control. Jason withdrew, leaving madness in his wake.

Peter Rourke kept straining to steer his mind away from the horror he had skulled up on the mountain. He knew he had to make a decision, at least to stay in Two Trees or leave; knew he was postponing the inevitable, but he simply couldn't do anything but block. Something unutterably wicked had touched him, and Rourke felt lucky to have escaped with his soul. The presence was always there, like some flicker of movement caught from the corner of his mind's eye. A warped power, growing stronger each day — as if it were feeding on fear.

The image of a fetish of human arm and finger bones wrapped in horse hair kept returning. Then Peter saw a cold, alien visage peering out through a black hole in space. Somehow he knew that its dark hunger was insatiable; a lust for blood, bone and pain. He wanted desperately to be wrong. Green things still grew, the sun rose and set, clouds shaped and re-shaped themselves. How could such a thing be? Yet his own unwillingness to go near that imaginary door was enough to prove that the danger had substance. Whatever it was, it had scared the hell out of him.

Then, hours later, his talent left again and with it went the blind, unreasoning panic he'd been carrying around. Rourke gained perspective and some courage. Maybe it had moved on, whatever it was, to do evil somewhere else. Perhaps the problem would solve itself, somehow. One could always hope. Or maybe it had just decided to leave him alone for the time being.

Human bones; forearms, clustered together with the wrists bent and the fingers spread like talons, wrapped in horse hair. He knew he had seen that totem before, but where? And then it came to him. When Rourke was a boy, he and his cousin Rod had been exploring the low cliffs perhaps four miles outside of Two Trees to the west. They had come upon some Native American artifacts near the mouth of a cave. One was a cluster of bleached bones with a hand at the top.

He remembered Rod asking: "I wonder how they kept them together."

It was as if he were possessed. Rourke locked Monday in the cabin, but took the hunting rifle and a flashlight. He got in the vehicle and sped down the hill, his chest tight and his mind racing. The drive down the mountain to the desert floor went by in a blur, reality flickering in and out like a strobe light. He turned right on the highway and searched for the correct trail. He tried to probe, but his talent had gone dormant again. He was on his own.

The land hadn't altered much in twenty-five years. The cliffs were the same, and the dark, low cave entrances still there; the first two, however, had long-ago collapsed. Rourke wiped perspiration from his brow, shifted the rifle to his right hand and moved higher up into the rocks. He shaded his eyes and looked around. A wooden shack of some kind had anchored itself in the sand perhaps a quarter of a mile away. It was the only building in sight, and seemed to be deserted. Peter skipped from boulder to boulder and looked around again. He was about to give up when he accidentally kicked some sage with his boot. The large clump rolled away to reveal a cave opening.

Rourke dropped to one knee. When he leaned forward into the cool darkness, a fly buzzed his face, startling him. He swallowed and tried to relax. It seemed like the same cave. He remembered, now, that he and his cousin Rod had painted a skull and crossbones on the railroad trestle in honor of the cluster of those bones. He couldn't recall why no one from Two Trees had ever gone up to investigate their discovery; he supposed that the two little boys had simply not been believed. The bones they'd found were probably thought to have been from an animal, and the hand the overactive imagination of two young teenagers with too much time to kill on a hot summer day.

He knew he had remembered for a reason, and that the skulling had brought him back to this place. Rourke fingered the rifle and considered driving back down to locate Glen Bates. But what the hell could he tell the Sheriff at this point, that he'd had some kind of a vision?

Peter sighed and crawled into the mouth of the cave. He didn't know what he was looking for, but the vision he'd had on the mountain had contained something from this place. Perhaps a look around would tell him why. He inched forward on his forearms, trying not to imagine his
own
arms being chopped off and bound together with the bony fingers extended. Trying not to wonder if the victim had been alive and aware when this was done.

Claustrophobia took him immediately, and his heart kicked like an angry mare. He closed his eyes and waited for them to adjust to the darkness. When he opened them again, he could still see very little. He used the flashlight, and noted with irritation that the batteries were weak. He crawled forward.

Now that he was a grown man, the cave seemed tiny. It was hard to believe he'd ever crawled through it with a spirit of adventure. As the light behind him faded, he felt small and defenseless. The rifle was trapped at his side; using it in such a confined space would probably deafen him anyway. He turned the flashlight off to preserve it. He moved further into the dark.

What is that smell?
He stopped, struggling to control his breathing, which now seemed absurdly loud and a bit too rapid.

Shit, and not from cattle or birds. The shit of a meat eater, a predator.

Or man.

Rourke didn't want to ponder who or what might have been living in such a place, or risk a meeting. He shook his head at his own foolishness, decided to edge backwards toward the daylight. On impulse, he used the flashlight one last time. The shadows on the far wall seemed deeper, as though the cave expanded at that point. He ran the beam of light along the dirty floor. Thought:
What are those?

Symbols of some kind. The odd designs were scratched and scrawled on the floor and the far walls of the cave. The characters were entirely unfamiliar to Rourke, and seemed ridiculously out of place. They were from another time and culture, perhaps a kind of Aramic or even Egyptian. But one looked exactly like the totem he had seen as a child; a bundle of human bones with a hand sticking out, wrapped around with hair.

God, that
stench.

And then it finally hit him. He moved the beam around. The designs were drawn everywhere, all over the cave, the ceiling walls and floor. And they were not scrawled in mud or dirt, but excrement. Probably human excrement.

He left the flashlight on and backed out of the cave mouth as rapidly as possible. Someone had gone completely insane, out here all alone. Perhaps a hobo, a paranoid shizophrenic lost in his own world of filth and madness. Rourke didn't breath easily until he was outside again, in the oppressive sunshine. His clothing was soaked through with sweat.
That must be what I saw,
he thought.
Someone demented, seriously ill, living out here in the middle of nowhere. I skulled his madness and paranoia.

The thought brought him some comfort for the first time in hours. Of course that's all that had happened. He had momentarily entered the mind of a madman. It was only natural that he'd been shaken, even overwhelmed. Perhaps he'd tell the Sheriff the next time he saw him; let Bates know that someone had taken up residence out at the edge of the flats. Someone who, though probably harmless enough, was quite mad.

On the way back up the hill, he found himself smiling. By the time he hit the dirt trail up into the mountains he was singing, comforted by having found a reasonable explanation.

He was sitting on his haunches in the grass, stroking Monday, when the old-fashioned wall phone jangled. Two longs and one short, his code on the town's archaic party-line. Peter went inside to answer, stumbled over a chair and banged his knee against the coffee table. He swore as he limped over to the phone.

"Peter? Gladys. How are you?"

"Fine, Gladys."

"You don't sound fine, Peter. Are you well?"

"I just hit my goddamn knee."

"Don't swear," she admonished. "It's Sunday. Peter Rourke, I demand to know why you haven't stopped by to see me."

" I apologize, Gladys. I've been writing."

"So? You never stop?"

He grinned. "I guess this means I'd best drive on in this afternoon and explain myself."

"Darn right," she chuckled.

"Carrot cake?"

"Carrot cake, Peter. All you can eat."

"You've got a date, honey."

She giggled. "Don't say things like that. At my age the reaction could be fatal!"

Rourke laughed, choked and froze. His talent had stirred.
Oh, no. There. Again
. Soft, and as difficult to ignore as a lover's insistent whisper. He tried to brush it aside. Wise words, Gladys. Reactions can indeed prove fatal, but age is not necessarily a critical factor. He let the conversation drag. They traded lame jokes and clumsy pleasantries.

Another twinge, low but powerful.

He had to get off the telephone. Fast. What if it ballooned, just erupted and took over the way it had when he was a kid? Peter had no idea what he might do or say. He had never actually lost control in someone else's presence.

But as he and Gladys exchanged goodbyes, the restless murmur faded away. Rourke went to the kitchen sink and threw cold water on his face. He began to accept the maddening truth.

Things had reversed themselves, and his talent was probably back to stay. Well, if that was the case then would have to work with it; teach himself to handle it again. He really had no choice, regardless of what had triggered it after so long a time and despite the omnipresent fear.
Maybe this is why I had to come back here. Why I felt I had to come home again.

How strange. While the uneasy sensation had passed like the distant thunder of a wayward storm, it had almost seemed... alive.

Two Trees was quiet, still enough to be painful.

Old Anthony Martoni rested his elbows on the meat counter and sighed. His eyes wandered to the front window of his grocery store, where swirling dust wove geometric patterns in the scorched air. Martoni was wishing that the little bell above his door would ring, that someone would come in. That something, anything, would happen.

I feel dizzy, he thought. Gotta try and get some more sleep. Jeez, but all these horny dreams out of nowhere. Too much for an old fart like me to handle.

The grocer opened his top drawer. A handful of greenbacks covered the tall stack of I.O.U. notes. He shifted the small pile of bills to one side and took out a faded, black-and-white photo of Helena.

She was wincing at the camera, the sun's glare causing her to crinkle the little folds of skin at the outer edges of her eyes. Martoni's wife had been a diminutive, shy woman who hated to have her picture taken. Once, during the War in Europe, he had received a photograph. It was folded in newspaper and bent in four places. Helena had allowed her father to take it. There she stood, stiff and pale in a knee-length black dress, brown hair pulled back into a tight, modest bun. Her eyes were closed, and her smile looked like she'd practiced in front of the mirror for days.

He had treasured that photograph for what it must have cost her. He'd lost it when he was wounded for the third time, but by then it didn't matter. They sent him home.

Helena's phobic reaction to cameras had been a running joke throughout their twenty-five years of marriage. Full of beer at a picnic, more than a decade ago, he had snapped another picture. Martoni had sent it away to be developed; then hid it, intending to surprise Helena on their anniversary. She'd had her stroke and it was too late. Helena just slipped away, as quiet as ever, still no trouble to anyone. Helena, the human being he'd valued more than life itself.

All that time together,
he thought
. And yet when you come right down to it, I barely got to know you.

He replaced the photo and closed the drawer, feeling very much alone. Martoni sat back and closed his eyes. Just another old man, napping. His last thought before dropping off to sleep was sad. A moment of utter clarity, within which he truly comprehended how much of life gets wasted. Why dissect a mistake when it's already been made, he thought. Or worry about a future you can't possibly predict? We never seem to learn to live in the present, while there's still some future left.

Martoni slept. He had a dream, and in that dream the past became the present. He clasped it, held onto it. Anthony Martoni was young again; with Helena, and happy. They made love urgently, over and over again, and never got tired.

Martoni was unaware of the incredibly large horde of flies that suddenly gathered on his screen door as if sent for him. The crowd of crawling, buzzing insects continued to grow until it blocked the light of the sun. A black-robed ominous chorus, come to whisper a warning.

Martoni slumbered on, contented.

So the flies flew away. They stayed low to the ground in a dense cluster, as if sharing one mind. There was a sinister tone to the sound of their wings, a ragged whine — the howl of a surgeon's bonesaw splitting the top of a skull.

The formation began to collapse just as it reached the Interstate a few miles outside of town. Whatever had controlled the flies abruptly released them, left them milling about in confusion and veering toward all points of the compass…

…If the insects had remained in a cloud for a few moments longer, Vargas would have seen them. He would have considered it a sign meant for him.