Night Things: A Novel of Supernatural Terror (24 page)

He was just about to get on his bicycle when suddenly he stopped and stared intently into the distance.

“I’m not sure, but I think there’s someone standing in the bushes over there,” he said unexpectedly.

Alarmed, Lauren looked in the direction in which he was staring. “Where?” she asked nervously. “I don’t see anything.”

“Over there,” Gordon said, pointing.

But before she had a chance to say anything further, he called out. “Hey, you! What are you doing in there? We can see you, so you might as well come out!”

To Lauren’s surprise, although she still saw nothing, suddenly the bushes started to move and a man stepped out into the drive.

As he walked slowly toward them she felt a tide of gooseflesh move up her arms and across the back of her neck. But when he got near enough for her to see who it was, she breathed a sigh of relief.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said, realizing it was one of the men who had applied for the job of running the generators. “Have you come to replace Mr. Foley? He seems to have disappeared and left us without anyone to run the generators.”

“I...” Elton Fugate stammered. “Yeah... I’ve come to replace him.” For a moment he appeared almost nonplussed, but then a strange sort of astonished amusement seemed to creep into his expression.

“You know this man?” Gordon asked sharply.

“Yes,” Lauren said, nodding. “He’s one of the men my husband interviewed to work here.” She looked back sternly at Fugate. “So where is Mr. Foley, anyway? Why did he leave us in the lurch like this?”

Fugate’s amusement was once again replaced by nervousness. “He had to leave,” he said without elaboration. “He asked me to come.”

“Well, I assume my husband showed you where everything is?” she said in a businesslike voice.

“Yup.” He gave a twitch and then smiled.

“Then you might as well go on up. The generators are already acting up, and I think you’d better get to work on them right away.”

He gave a funny, jerky little nod of compliance and then shuffled by them.

As he ambled past, Lauren noticed that Gordon was still watching him intently, and for a second she almost thought that he perceived something in the man’s manner or appearance that troubled him. But then he appeared to dismiss whatever it was and looked back at her.

“It’s going to be dark soon. I guess I’d better get going.” His mention of the impending darkness brought another question to her mind. “You’re going to ride your bicycle in the dark? Isn’t that a little dangerous?”

“I’ve got a light,” he said, pointing to a little flashlight thing he had strapped on his leg. “Besides, there really aren’t that many cars on these roads. You’re pretty isolated up here. In fact, I’ll be surprised if I see any.”

He got up onto his bike. “Well, nice meeting you. So long.”

“So long,” she said, waving after him as he started down the drive.

As she walked back up toward the house, she still felt a good deal of regret at Gordon’s departure, but all of his talk about strange beings and men with glowing eyes had spooked her somewhat, and she was relieved that she did not have to hear any more of it. She took solace in the unexpected arrival of the man to run the generators. (What was his name? She realized suddenly that she had forgotten to ask.) At least that potential nightmare had worked itself out.

Indeed, for a time, the idea that they might have to spend their last night in the house without electricity had outweighed all her other fears. As she headed back toward the house, she dared to think that perhaps things were going to be all right after all.

Her good spirits were short-lived. Once she was back inside the house, back inside the somber and all-embracing aura of its power, the dark and tingling depression that had gripped her earlier in the day started to return.

Fearful of succumbing once again to its debilitating power, she resolved that perhaps just being in the company of another human being might help her maintain a more even keel, and she decided to look for Garrett.

She found him in the drawing room. Although the television was on, he was gazing despairingly off into space. “Garrett, what is it?” she asked.

“Why didn’t you ask him to go get his car and come pick us up?” he rasped.

“I just didn’t feel right about it, Garrett. I—”

“Well you should have!” he retorted angrily, his mood taking a precipitous turn for the worse. “I don’t understand why you didn’t!”

Her first impulse was to reprimand him for his rudeness, but then, realizing that the last twenty-four hours had no doubt been hard on him as well, she controlled her anger and reached out to try to comfort him.

But he only darted away.

“Garrett!”

She followed him through the entrance hall and into the wicker-furnished sun porch, and when she caught up with him she grabbed him by the shoulders. “Garrett, listen to me. It’s going to be all right. The car is coming for us tomorrow.”

“But you should have asked him,” he whined, on the verge of tears.

For a moment she remained mystified. But then it finally hit her. He was upset about more than just her not asking Gordon for a ride. Something else was bothering him.

“Garrett, what is it?” she demanded. “What’s really the matter?”

From the evasive look in his eyes she knew she was right, but still he refused to confide in her. “Nothing,” he said.

“Come on, Garrett, you can tell me. Now what is it?”

She saw his eyes dart back and forth as he searched every curve and hollow of her face, could almost feel how badly he wanted to tell her. But still he kept whatever it was inside him.

“It’s nothing,” he repeated weakly. “There’s nothing else bothering me.” But from the sudden solemnity of his manner she realized that instead of telling her he had decided merely to keep whatever it was to himself. He pulled away from her listlessly.

“Garrett, I know it’s something. Won’t you please just tell me?”

“No, you don’t know,” he said, but something about the way he phrased the sentence made her realize that it was more than just a denial. From the oddly tortured and belligerent mien he had assumed she realized also that whatever chance she had had of prying the secret out of him had now passed. She knew from experience that when he made up his mind to hold something in, nothing, not even the threat of punishment, could get him to open up.

Feeling too weak to pursue the matter any further, she collapsed onto one of the wicker sofas. As she stared at him in frustration, he once again began to practice holding his breath while he paced out the length of the sun porch. And as she watched him sublimate his panic by indulging in this strange, hyperactive ritual, she herself began to pace, only mentally. Deeper and deeper she sank into an endless vortex of tracking back over everything Gordon had told them, and then every conceivable reason she could come up with to explain Garrett’s perturbed silence.

As she did so, she felt herself falling. To pull herself back to reality she decided to attempt cooking them some dinner. She got up and was just about to start for the kitchen when she thought of yet another trivial domestic chore she could do to help keep herself anchored to sanity.

“Garrett, I left the plate with the cookies out on the veranda. Do you think you could get them for me? I’m going to do the dishes.”

Without saying a word, he marched off toward the front of the house to do as she requested.

Lauren left the sun porch and went down a hallway leading into the kitchen. When she reached it, she immediately clicked on all the lights and went over to the sink. Glancing out the window, she saw that the first faint strains of twilight had tinged the sky, and an evening breeze had started to rustle through the pines.

She turned on the faucets and filled the sink with a thundering stream of water. However, it wasn’t until she had finished washing the breakfast dishes that Garrett finally came in with the plate of cookies. And when he did she noticed instantly that his moodiness had been replaced by a new look, an expression of sudden and total bewilderment.

“Garrett, what is it?”

He looked up at her, and she noticed that he seemed less frightened and more uncertain, as if he wasn’t sure whether whatever it was that had happened to him during the fetching of the cookies was even worth mentioning.

“I went to get the cookies like you asked,” he started.

“Yes?”

“Well, when I went outside I decided to see how far around the house I could get while holding my breath.”

“And?”

He shifted his weight hesitantly. “When I went by the outside of the part of the house where the sun porch is I found that I could hold my breath all the way across.”

He stopped as if he had just conveyed something of profound importance to her.

“So?” she asked, confused.

“So, I can’t do that inside the house. Inside the house I can’t make it all the way across.”

A strange flutter came in the pit of her stomach, but her intellect still lagged behind.

“I don’t understand, Garrett. So what are you trying to tell me?”

“Mommm,” he groused impatiently, “don’t you see? The sun porch is longer on the inside than it is on the outside. I even counted out the paces just to make sure. On the inside it takes fifty paces to get from one end to the other, but on the outside it takes only forty-one.”

The import of what he was saying finally started to seep through to her, but she refused to believe it. “Oh, come on, Garrett, that’s impossible.”

“Mommm. I paced it out twice just to make sure.”

She felt almost giddy as she tumbled what he was saying around in her mind. “Then you must have made a mistake!” she said, still unable to accept it. “Come on and I’ll show you.”

She tramped out of the room, and when they reached the sun porch she counted out loud as she paced it out briskly.

“Thirty-six,” she announced when she reached the end. “I guess that’s because my steps are longer than yours.”

They went outside.

But even when she neared the end of the sun porch’s outer wall and tried desperately to ration her strides and make them equal the figure she had obtained on the inside, she realized she was not going to make it.

“Twenty-eight,” she mumbled disconcertedly.

“See?” Garrett said.

“Oh, come on, Garrett. I must have done something wrong.” She pivoted around and stubbornly paced out the length of the exterior wall again. “Ah ha! Twenty-nine!” she declared, convinced that the slightly larger figure indicated that she was gaining ground on the discrepancy.

They rushed back in and she repaced the length of the porch’s interior, but as she neared the end of the room, her frown returned. “Thirty-five,” she muttered with queasy disbelief.

In a vain attempt to stave off the panic growing within her, she considered going through the entire process yet a third time. But then slowly, reluctantly, she looked up at the house and faced the implications of the disparity in measurements.

The sun porch was larger on the inside than it was on the outside.

The house creaked somewhere deep inside.

“What does it mean?” Garrett entreated.

“I don’t know!” Lauren said testily as the enormity of the discovery continued to reel through her.

But she did know. Or at least she knew partially.

For if the sun porch was larger on the inside than it was on the outside it meant that the house was also larger, that despite the impossibility of such a state of affairs, it possessed more space on the inside, more volume, than its external dimensions could account for.

And that meant that the strange bent of its architecture, the often dizzying twists and turns of its design, were more than just surface flourishes. It meant that there was actually some sort of spatial distortion taking place within the house, that somehow space was being warped within its confines.

But how? she wondered. And why?

And then suddenly, like a series of silent explosions, the pieces fell together in her mind and she knew.

“Garrett, I don’t think this means anything,” she lied.

“But Mom, you just—”

“I know, but you know what I think is happening here?”

His attention remained glued on her.

“I think this is just another one of the house’s tricks. You know, like the rooms upstairs that are designed to make you feel dizzy when you walk through them. I think somehow we’re just being fooled again.” She paused to see how completely he had bought the fabrication, and after noting that he seemed to accept it, she went on.

“Listen, I think I have something in my bedroom upstairs that will enable us to decide whether I’m right or not. Why don’t you go into the drawing room and watch some TV and I’ll go up and get it.”

“No, I want to go with you.”

“No, honey, I’m going to change my clothes while I’m at it. I’ll be right down.”

“But I—”

But before he could argue with her any further she scooted him in the direction of the drawing room.

Then she went upstairs.

When she reached her bedroom she went in only long enough to retrieve a flashlight and then left and started back down the hall in the direction from which she had come.