Poltergeist (15 page)

“Have you experienced this before?” Lesh asked anybody.

“First time,” breathed Diane.

“Me too.”

The mist rose and fell like a tide. Random flashes ignited in its substance, like tiny exploding lights or alien nerve cells discharging electrically. Almost as if the mist were thinking.

“This is . . . awesome,” Lesh murmured.

“This is nothin’ compared to what I been through in the kitchen,” rasped Marty.

But nobody was listening to Marty—they were all transfixed. The vapor roamed about like luminescent breath, sea-green now, sparking and fuming. Exploring the living room, it seemed sentient, somehow, yet lost. Seeking something, unable to find its way out.

Lesh backed away from a tendril that curled near her. “Don’t let it touch you,” she whispered. “But try not to disturb it. I think—I feel—it wants something . . . but isn’t certain what.”

“You’re . . . just projecting, Dr. Lesh,” Ryan squeaked. He stood stock-still as the smoke coiled around his legs, up along his back and down again. “See?” he choked out as the thing left him. “I’m okay. Nothing happened to me.” He hoped dearly that saying it made it so.

Marty was near the end of his rope, after first decomposing beside the refrigerator and now watching this living fume in the living room. Slowly, he backed down the hallway, out of the fog’s path, toward the small guest bathroom.

Diane still clutched Robbie tightly. She’d never seen anything like this . . . fog . . . before, and was uncertain how to react. It was wondrous, whatever it was, even dazzling. Yet it was all tied up in her child’s disappearance—was somehow dangerous, and frightening as well. But she didn’t want to do the wrong thing: perhaps how she behaved or responded to this—whatever it was—would determine the fate of her baby. Maybe she needed to be brave, or be brassy. Or humble. Or . . . what? She was virtually paralyzed with possibilities, so she just stood there, ready for anything, holding her son.

Steve was both more scared than Diane was, and more angry. He was a meat-and-potatoes man by nature, and this fantasy-come-real was just not in his universe. It was way out of bounds. He almost couldn’t believe he was seeing what he was seeing—but there it was. He was seeing it.

So Steve’s emotional state was as much a function of this disruption of the natural order of things as it was related to his missing child and unsettled household. He was wary of this lingering mist, and furious at it. And finally, his anger and his wariness made him believe it existed.

But the crawling mist wasn’t the most fantastic occurrence Steve had to accept before the night was over. For at that moment, a series of sparkles glittered in the air near the ceiling, where the jewelry had materialized previously, and something new appeared.

Something. A darkness, without shape. A formless damping of light. Its dimensions kept changing. And the darkness moved.

Floated through the air, paused, hovered, rose, circled, paused again. Like—very like—a creature of shadow, examining a new place.

Lesh felt an icy, cold fear run through her for the first time that night. She’d never seen or read of anything like this shadowy shapelessness in her life, but she’d heard of it only yesterday. From Tangina. Something the psychic had seen in her dream . . . what had she said?—
One is a shadow. A darkling creature I cannot comprehend. He is himself a conduit to another plane
.

So here it was now. To Lesh, it had the sickening, terrible sense of déjà vu about it. Half remembered, half repressed. It was a sinking feeling, like falling in space. This creature was the mouth to nowhere.

“Stay away from it,” Lesh whispered with desperate urgency. “Don’t let it near you. It’s . . . I think it’s a tunnel to a different universe.”

Fear instantly crackled, static, electric.

Ryan tensed. “You mean . . . like a black hole? Black holes don’t move like that—this thing is alive. Besides, if a black hole was that big, it would have sucked in half the state by now.”

“I don’t know what a black hole is, and I don’t know what
this
is,” Lesh said carefully. “But Tangina said it was a ‘conduit to another plane,’ and I don’t like it.”

Nobody liked it. It was cold; it was unfathomable. It moved. It even seemed to have a certain sound about it, or perhaps it was an absence of sound. A sort of un-laughter.

It moved to a chair. It settled on the cushion. It moved on to the dining room table. The chair cushion was gone.

Vanished from where it had been sitting, as if it had been absorbed by the shadow-creature. Eaten.

The shadow-creature left the area of the dining room table. It began to migrate toward Diane.

“No!” she whispered, immediately almost out of control. Her face pulled taut; she gripped Robbie frantically. She couldn’t move a step. “No,” she whimpered.

The shadow came closer.

Suddenly there was another profusion of sparks near the ceiling . . . and a flame appeared. Appeared and grew, until it was the size, and vaguely the shape, of a man. A flame-creature, orange, pulsing, liquid. It soared down into the dining room like a fireball. It confronted the shadow.

They danced. At least, it looked like a dance. They touched, they parted, they spun, they entwined. The flame-creature chattered in some ethereal flame-language, like a burning wind; perhaps it was a song.

They all stared at the scene, unutterably riveted. The room had become a stage for this inconceivable performance.

Softly, Lesh spoke. “Tangina
saw
this.”

Diane was dizzy with trying to grasp meanings. “These are Carol Anne’s dreams,” she puzzled. “Carol Anne’s dreams have come to life.”

Lesh shook her head. “I think they were already alive when Carol Anne dreamed of them.”

“What should we
do
?” Ryan pressed.

“Do?” Lesh raised her brow. “What an arrogant thought.” She redirected her attention to the dancers.

The flame-being changed colors, from orange to red to yellow to white, to blue-white, to green-white, to orange-white. His shape changed intermittently, too: now he resembled a wing, now a meteorite. Now a shower of flames. He talked in fire-babble to the darksome thing; the shadow-creature answered in shadow-laugh.

And all during the dance, the green mist kept circling the floor—wandering aimlessly, settling in corners, redoubling on itself.

The dance grew wilder. The fire blazed, the umbra darkened. The room was becoming febrile with excitement, when all at once the shadow snuffed out the whirling conflagration . . . and everything was dark and still and quiet—save the phosphorescent mist that oozed along the floor, and the heartless shadow-laughing of the shadow.

But in a moment the quenchless flame-thing reerupted, just behind the lightless creature, and, throwing such an intense brightness, the fire almost defined a silhouette around the shadow, almost something like a shape revealed. At once, the two were off and reeling, though, mysterious as ever.

“I wonder who does their choreography,” Ryan managed to joke. He said it to try to relieve his own tension. It only served to cue his next cause for dismay.

With yet another flourish of tiny flashes near the ceiling, another creature materialized. Thick, solid, it looked arguably like the trunk of a gnarled tree. Dense, knobbly bark covered it from bottom, where it seemed to be growing out of the floor, to top, where it seemed to be growing into the ceiling. Half a dozen branches groped blindly into the room; ancient, garbled sounds hovered about its incrustations.

Robbie screamed, certain this was his fearsome oak tree, returned to snag him again. Perhaps it was. In any case, the boy’s wail was cut short by the flame-creature, who broke from his shadow-partner to attack the tree.

The flame-creature soared in and out among the branches, igniting them anew with each pass. The fire-song sounded full of anger, now, a sucking blast-furnace noise. The burning tree limbs writhed and moaned, and twisted and tore at their singed twigs. The flame flew in again, and embraced the trunk. Muffled groans issued from the tree; when finally it was able to break from the fire’s forced caress, it was seared black on one side, and smoking.

The shadow raced forward and engulfed the smoke—absorbed it, claimed it for its own. The tree growled, then contorted, cracking the ceiling.

The iridescent vapor still meandered on the floor.

The stunned humans were by now far too rattled to speak, or even move.

The tree, flame, and shadow continued their drama, toward what conclusion the stars, perhaps, knew.

Marty made it safely into the bathroom at the end of the hall and huddled there, panting. That glistening green mist creeping all over was the last straw for him. No more. He was surprised he hadn’t already died of fright. This was carrying on-the-job training too far, as far as he was concerned. Green flashing fog, right. He would just stay exactly where he was for the rest of the night, say thank-you-very-much in the
A.M
., and write his memoirs on the plane home.

He turned on the light, put the lid down on the john, and sat there until his breathing regularized. There, that was better. Strange noises filtered through from the living room, but he didn’t want to know what they were. He shut the bathroom door. And locked it.

Now what? He looked around the small, clean room. White porcelain sink, white porcelain toilet, white semigloss walls, white tiled floor, white toilet paper, white Ivory soap, white ceiling fixture. On one wall hung a picture, a watercolor of red California poppies, framed and under glass. Over the sink was a wall mirror hiding a medicine cabinet—but Marty wasn’t about to look in any more mirrors tonight. He just smiled and sat, waiting for morning to arrive.

He began to tap his fingers against the side of the bowl. He hummed a little tune. Queer sounds crept under the door; he hummed louder. It seemed to be getting chilly; there was a draft, or something. He pulled his collar up around his neck, then went back to tapping out a rhythm on the porcelain. Oops—he tapped his index finger against something sticky on the edge of the toilet.
Nice going, Marty, right on target
. He touched his finger to his thumb to get a better feel: very sticky. With a sickly smile, he brought his hand up to his face, to see what the stuff was.

His hand was melting.

He jumped back so hard he knocked the top off the tank of the toilet; it clattered to the floor. With primal horror, he stared at his hands: both were melting slowly, the fingers elongating, the skin dripping, waxen, puddling on the tile. Marty began to pant again. He slid off the toilet seat and landed, with a bump, on the linoleum.

Wild-eyed, he swiveled his head, looking from corner to corner for a clue to his predicament. No clues. Eerily, his forearms began to stretch, as if they were made of putty. Longer, and thinner; three times their normal length, so that when he rested his knuckles on the floor beside him, his elbows stuck high in the air, higher than his head, almost like huge spider legs.

That gave him a momentary horrific image, and he looked down—but no, he was not a spider.

Yet he did feel . . . strange. Sort of . . . powerful, actually. Totally alert, mind speeding along like a razor, like he’d just done half a gram of coke. Marty smiled slyly, brought his knees up to his chest, leaned back against the wall. He wasn’t certain, but it sure felt like he was getting bigger. Maybe a lot bigger. He heard the seam of his pants rip down the back. He smiled again. A well of saliva brimmed over his lower lip, drooled in a long string down to the floor, collected there in a pool. He bent his head down and licked the spittle off the floor. That was easy, for his neck had become longer, and angled forward somewhat, and his jaws protruded a bit, in a kind of snout. So it was easy to lean down and lick up the spit. Easy, and he liked it.

His shirt tore open. This made Marty laugh, but only a hissing sound came out. He delighted in the sound. Khhhhhhhh. He expanded again; his clothes fell off in shreds. They thought they could hide him in clothes, the fools. They would soon see their folly. He would show them his face.

He looked around the room. What did he want? Something. He lifted the toilet lid beside him with his four-inch talons. He lowered his head into the bowl and lapped a few times. No, something else.

He looked up at the mirror on the wall. Rage suddenly roared through him like a flash fire: he hated mirrors. With a single movement, he rose and smashed the glass with the back of his reptilian hand. It shattered into pieces, shards flying everywhere. He breathed heavily a minute, then picked up one of the larger slivers and ate it. The glass was good.

Marty ate all the medicine bottles in the cabinet. He tore the picture off the wall, ate pieces of the picture. He felt better now. He scratched himself, vaguely excited. Noises from the front of the house attracted his attention. He pulled the bathroom door open without bothering to unlock it, and walked his hobbling walk down the hall toward the living room.

In the living room, the flame and shadow circled the tree, while the people watched, enrapt. All at once, a low snarling sound attracted everyone’s attention to the hallway: in the darkness there, a figure was approaching.

The tree, flame, and shadow beings saw it at the same time—and appeared to go into a frenzy. The flame leaped into the shadow, and was gone; the shadow engulfed the tree, which disappeared; and then the shadow sailed up the stairwell, and vanished . . . into the shadows.

Lesh and the others stared at the hallway, where the shape was coming closer. It rapidly emerged into the half-light of the television glare: there, naked, slobbering, waddling like an orangutan . . . was Marty. Back from metamorphosis.

Marty stopped when he reached the group, stood erect, and looked confused. “Why’s everyone staring at me?” he demanded.

Before anyone could give an answer, something magnificent happened—the most magnificent happening of all this strange and awefull night. A woman appeared on the stairs.

The apparition of a woman. Tall, graceful, in a majestic turn-of-the-century gown, she floated down the stairs, surrounded by twenty hovering, gleaming lights. Magnificent because she was so beautiful; though none could exactly have described her face, and her eyes were dark as another time. Magnificent because she was so real—just who were bold might have reached out and touched her; though none were so bold. Magnificent, because she was a ghost.