Nightshade
Authors: John Saul
NIGHT SHADE
JOHN SAUL
BALLANTINE BOOKS
·
NEW YORK
Contents
About this Title
Full of horror and psychological suspense, this book shows how the happy life of teenager Matthew Moore turns into a nightmare, his present clashing with the dead secrets of the past. Struggling between reality and illusion, he is the only one left to unmask the killer of his father and grandmother–his demented mother, Joan or his Aunt, Cynthia who has been dead for fifteen long years.
FOR COCO VERA AND MICHAEL ALEXANDER
Welcome to our World!
PROLOGUE
THE CHILD LAY still; anyone observing it would have been certain it was sound asleep. But it was not, for long ago — so long ago that there was no memory of how it began — the child’s mind had learned to defend itself from the agony that the body it inhabited was forced to bear. Someday — in a future so far away that the barely formed mind could not even begin to comprehend it — it might be able to defend the body too.
But not yet.
For now, all the mind could do was retreat from the enemy, hiding deep inside the body, leaving the body to bear the pain as best it could.
Now the child’s mind hovered on the fringe of consciousness, neither fully awake nor fully asleep, but lurking furtively in some shadowy nether region, ready to drop back into unconsciousness if it sensed that the enemy was near.
Beyond the eyelids — which the mind had learned very early to keep carefully closed — a growing brightness hinted that the terrors of the night would soon succumb to the onset of dawn.
But what about the terrors of the day?
The mind shifted its attention to the ears, sifting through the sounds, sorting them, searching for signals of danger.
Nothing threatened: only a voice, laughing; a bird, singing.
The mind ventured slightly closer to full consciousness.
It allowed the eyes to open — just the tiniest crack.
Brilliant yellow light flowed through the single small window.
The mind edged further into wakefulness.
Then a new sound — the creaking of an unoiled hinge on a sagging door — rasped in the child’s ears, and the mind darted back, shying instinctively away from the noise that so often signaled approaching danger.
It closed the eyes again, lest they betray the mind’s presence.
The creaking sound stopped, but the mind cowered where it was, ready to retreat into the black safety of unconsciousness at any moment.
Another sound came.
. . . click-click-click . . .
The mind hesitated, still waiting, warily listening.
The sound came again.
. . . click-click-click . . .
The sound drew closer and closer, and the mind, uncertain, waited.
The
click-click-click
stopped, and a familiar scent filled the child’s nostrils, a scent that instantly eased some of the fear in the child’s mind.
“Doggie,” the mind let the child whisper as the animal’s tongue lapped at its face.
The furry mass of one of the animal’s forepaws left the cracked cement floor upon which its claws had been clicking and gently prodded the child.
The child’s eyes opened, and its arms wrapped around the animal’s neck.
“Nice doggie,” the child whispered as it peered into the dog’s great brown eyes.
The dog whimpered, its tongue slurping across the child’s face again.
The child giggled as its fingers stroked the animal’s fur, but a second later the happy sound died on its lips and its fingers jerked away as if they’d been burned as the door at the top of the stairs was suddenly slammed open, crashing against the wall behind it.
“Out!” a voice commanded, the single word lashing down the steep flight of stairs like a snaking whip.
The child’s body reflexively recoiled from the lash of the voice, and as the dog darted up the stairs, the child’s mind began to retreat.
“How dare you?” the voice demanded, but even as the words rained down on the child, its mind began rejecting the signals that were funneling in through the ears and turning away from the bright sunlight the eyes perceived, retreating into the dark quiet safety of unconsciousness.
Too late. Despite the mind’s effort to reject them, the furious words filtered through. “How many times have I told you not to touch that animal? Do you want me to make it go away forever? I can do that, you know! I made your father go away!” The mind felt the child trying to curl up, trying to make itself small.
Don’t,
the mind commanded.
Lie still. Be asleep.
But it was far too late, for the mistake had already been made and for the child’s body there was no longer any way to escape from the fury that hovered above.
“I’ll teach you!” the voice rasped.
As the mind raced toward the safety of darkness, the first blow struck. Though the mind struggled once more to keep the child from reacting, a howl of pain and fear escaped its throat, and once more the voice spoke.
“Evil child! Nasty, vile, evil child! Well, I won’t have it! Do you understand? I won’t stand for it!”
As the raging voice ranted on, the child tried to pull its body away from the blows, but there was no escape.
The mind, reacting in an instant to the agony of the blows, retreated into the blackness, closing out what was happening. It closed off the ears and the voice began to fade away until the individual words could no longer be distinguished and the only sound that filtered through was an indistinct hum.
Next came the nerves.
It doesn’t hurt,
the mind told itself.
It won’t hurt. It can’t hurt. Nothing can hurt. Nothing . . . nothing . . . nothing. . . .
The sting of the slashing blows began to fade, and the mind turned further away, retreating into the safety, darkness and silence of unconsciousness, sheltered from all the terrors the world held.
* * *
AN ETERNITY — or perhaps only a minute — passed.
The child’s mind began once more to creep out of the cavern into which it had retreated. This time, though, it was even warier than before, refusing to let the child twitch even the smallest muscle until it was certain the danger had passed.
Beyond the closed eyelids there was no glow at all, which told the mind it had been gone all day, and that night — the long darkness that held its own unique terrors — must have fallen.
From the ears came no signal at all — no creak of the door, or whimpering of the dog, or voice sharp with anger. Yet the mind sensed no safety in the silence.
The lungs expanded, and the mind, suddenly stimulated by the scent captured by the child’s nose, paused. The odor was strong, and very familiar.
And comforting.
It was the smell of the blanket that had given the child comfort long before its conscious memory had formed. Now, reacting to the deep emotions stirred by the scent, the mind let the child reach out to pull the comforting blanket more closely around its aching body. But the fingers touched nothing — the warm softness of the material was nowhere to be found.
Slowly, the mind became aware of the pain in the child’s body. But there was more than the fading sting of the hands that had struck the child. The mind had long since learned to deal with that. This time there was an ache as well — an ache that had settled so deep into the child’s legs and arms that at first the limbs refused to obey the mind’s commands. But finally — agonizingly — the child reached out into the darkness.
After moving only a few inches, the child’s fingers found something hard, something immovable.
The fingers probed in another direction; the same hardness blocked them once more.
In an instant the mind knew: it wasn’t the scent of the blanket at all, but the scent of the chest where all the blankets in the house were kept through the summer.
The cedar chest.
The cedar chest that sat against the wall below the cellar’s single tiny window.
The lungs expanded again, and the scents of cedar and mothballs filled the child’s nostrils once more. But this time, instead of reminding the child of the comfort, warmth, and softness of the blanket, the scent seemed to wrap around it like a serpent’s coils, pressing tighter every second.
Panic took over and the child thrashed and cried — sobbed and choked — as it struggled to free itself from the imprisoning walls of the chest.
But the chest was strong, the child weak.
As the terror and the blackness and the scent closed around the child’s body, the mind — as it had grown so used to doing — began once more to slip away, to disappear into a safer world.
This time, as the mind retreated into the dark haven of unconsciousness, it wondered if it would come back at all. But then, even as it dropped away into the darkness, it knew.
It would come back.
But it would be changed.
And it would strike back.
CHAPTER
1
IT WAS THE kind of perfect fall afternoon that erased even the memory of the blanket of heat and humidity that summer’s end had laid over this part of New Hampshire. The first frost had struck a week ago: the leaves of the ancient maples and oaks that lined the streets of Granite Falls were just beginning their annual transformation, their edges barely hinting at the riot of color that would develop in another couple of weeks.
As Joan Hapgood slid her Range Rover into the slot that seemed to have been left just for her only a few steps from the Rusted Rooster — whose original name had long ago given way to the condition of the sign that hung over its door —she considered the possibility of driving up to Quebec for the weekend. She’d heard of a terrific little inn with a view of the St. Lawrence, and just that much farther north the trees would already be in full regalia, their colors so brilliant as to be almost blinding. But as she glanced at her watch — exactly one minute before two, when she and Bill had agreed to meet for a late lunch — she was already beginning to catalog the reasons why they wouldn’t be able to take off for the weekend.
First, there was the opening day of hunting season, which she knew Bill wouldn’t miss. Her husband — along with nearly every one of his friends — regarded the opening day of hunting season with the same reverence most people reserved for religious holidays. But it had always been that way in Granite Falls: the hunting fervor had become so entrenched among the Granite Falls families that could trace their roots back to the seventeenth century that Joan (whose own roots went back only to her mother) suspected it was actually in their genes. But it wasn’t the kind of hunting that was fashionable in other places — in the small enclaves of old, if somewhat diminished, wealth farther south, where ducks and foxes were the favored prey.
In Granite Falls, it was deer.
“We’ve always hunted deer,”Bill Hapgood had explained. “It’s just the way it’s always been. We’re not pretentious people up here — it’s not like it is down in Connecticut and places like that. We hunt in the woods, we hunt on foot, and we eat what we shoot.”
But Joan knew that it wasn’t only the opening day of hunting season that stood in the way of their slipping away for the weekend.
There was Matt’s football game, too. He’d finally made the starting lineup last week, and Bill was — if possible — even more excited than she at the prospect of seeing Matt score for the Granite Falls team for the first time. That was one of the things she loved best about the man she’d married a decade ago — he’d always treated Matt as if her son was his own. And neither of them would miss the biggest game of Matt’s life.
But it was the next problem that was the worst, and not just for the coming weekend, but for every weekend — indeed, for every day — in the foreseeable future.
That was the problem of Joan Hapgood’s mother.
As thoughts of Emily Moore filled Joan’s mind, the exhilaration which the weather had brought her began to drain away, and as she stepped through the door of the Rusted Rooster, the closeness of its low beamed ceilings and half-timbered walls only accentuated the depression that was settling over her.
“You all right?” her husband asked, half rising from his chair as Joan sank into the one the waitress held for her.
Joan smiled thinly as she automatically scanned the menu despite the already certain knowledge that she would have the Cobb salad. “I was just fantasizing about running away for the weekend,” she sighed, holding up a hand as if to hold back the flow of objections she could already see forming on her husband’s lips. “I did say I was fantasizing,” she reminded him. “Believe me, I haven’t forgotten about hunting season.”
“And Matt’s game,” Bill added. “And, of course, your mother.” It wasn’t only the careful delivery of his last words that betrayed his defensiveness, but his tone as well. Joan stared at the menu, steeling herself against the same automatic response that had risen like a wall around her husband. When she was certain she had herself under control, she looked up from the stiff white card whose contents hadn’t changed in two generations, took a deep breath, and nodded.
No point in trying to avoid the issue.
“And my mother,” she agreed. “And I know I’m going to have to do something about her. But I can’t just . . .” Her voice trailed off, but Bill finished the sentence with the words they both knew she’d been unable to utter.
“Throw her in the home?” he asked, his aristocratic brow rising in a sardonic arch. When she made no reply, he reached out and laid his hand over hers. “That
is
what she’s always saying, isn’t it?” He screwed his face into an imitation of Emily Moore’s angriest expression, which would have been comical if it had not been quite so accurate, and his normally gentle voice took on her mother’s furious rasp. “ ‘Don’t think I don’t know!’ ” he mimicked, shaking his finger in Joan’s face. “ ‘You’re going to throw me in the home! Well, I won’t let you. And when Cyn — ’ ”
“Stop!” Joan cried, pulling her hand away and glancing around to see who might be listening.
“I wish
she’d
stop,” Bill replied, his features reverting to their usual composure, his voice to its familiar baritone. Then his lips tightened and he took a deep breath. “But we are going to have to decide what to do,” he went on. “She can’t go on living alone much longer.”
“Try telling her that,” Joan sighed. “It doesn’t matter what I say — ”
“It doesn’t matter what anyone says,” Bill cut in. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying, Joan. She has Alzheimer’s. And even before she got Alzheimer’s, she wasn’t the easiest person to get along with.”