Poltergeist (28 page)

The sounds were too horrible to ignore completely, though. “Well. I don’t care, I’m gonna call the police,” Mr. Tuthill asserted. He turned with a determined frown, and walked back toward his own house. Mrs. Tuthill caught up with him, holding the umbrella over their heads.

Diane charged up the stairway. The door to the children’s room was shut, the ultra-bright light streaming from under the jamb. She opened it . . . and was immediately sucked in.

Inside, the room was like a hurricane. Robbie and Carol Anne were holding onto their bedposts with the strength of terror, their bodies almost horizontal in the wind. Everything else was flying through the air in wild revolutions, then getting sucked one by one into the relentless closet.

“Robbie! Take my hand!”

The boy reached one hand out to Diane, still holding onto his bed with the other. She moved closer, an inch at a time, into the wall of wind that blew against her. With a crash, the chair surrendered to the closet’s draw; the beds, too, started moving toward it. Something like saliva began to overflow in the corners of the bright cavernous well.

Diane lurched one more step, and got hold of Robbie’s wrist.

“Take your sister’s hand, Robbie! Take it!” She held onto her son’s hand in the blasting squall with the nearly superhuman strength not unknown to a mother whose children are in mortal danger.

Robbie and Carol Anne reached for each other; their fingers almost touched. The closet let loose a great stridorous inhalation—the beds shot out from under the children and plunged into the pit . . . just as Robbie’s and Carol Anne’s hands locked, and Diane dragged them both from the room.

She carried and pushed them ahead of her to the staircase. Halfway down, the stairs began rolling, buckling as in an earthquake, knocking the three off balance. They ended up face down on the landing.

Diane’s left eyebrow was cut, bleeding. Through a slow-motion haze, she led the kids toward the front door, as a tremendous head wind kept forcing them back. Noise was all around, as if the air itself were screaming.

Just then Teague’s Bronco pulled up into the Freeling driveway. Steve and Teague emerged from the car to this apocalyptic vision: the house radiating a powerful light from the upper window, the exterior walls beginning to crack, smoke leaking from the roof, a weird, horrific noise emanating from the building, the ground all around it shaking in continuous tremor. Teague’s mouth dropped open. Steve ran to the front steps.

As he approached the door, Diane threw it open from the inside, the children beside her. Before she could step out, though, the cement of the front porch cracked wide, the ground exploded—out shot an ornate casket, amidst a geyser of dirt, splinters, and stones—and the door slammed shut again. Steve covered his head under the shower of debris. Diane backed into the house.

She ran with the children down the hall, toward the kitchen. Just as she entered the eating area, the floor bulged, buckled . . . and split open with a horrific moan. Two more coffins shot up through the shattering tile. Their lids blew off as they erupted, spewing rotten, rotting corpses into the kitchen. One pitched forward onto Diane.

She pulled the children around this impasse, toward the back door. Suddenly the entire back wall burst inward, almost crushing them with rubble—burst inward from the impact of the face of the Beast. Diane ran right past it with the children, through the gaping wall, under the sagging rafters, into the wailing night.

Steve, meanwhile, had begun racing around the side of the house, to try to get in through the back. An explosion of bones, mud, and decaying flesh knocked him off his feet as he rounded the first corner. As he clawed his way out of this pile of necrosis, he looked up to see Teague standing there, unmoving, gawking incredulously.

“You moved the cemetery!” screamed Steve. “But you left the bodies, didn’t you! You son-of-a-bitch, you left the bodies and only moved the headstones!”

Another car pulled up at that moment. Dana got out with two young men. The three of them stood there with mouths agape.

The rain was stopping now, and neighbors were coming out on their porches to see what the commotion was. The commotion was increasing.

All the windows of the Freeling place blew outward at once, blasted with gigantic gusts of light. The house itself began to moan.

Diane and the children came running around the side of the house, toward the driveway. Two more coffins were regurgitated from the earth, blocking their path. Diane sidestepped the cascading bodies and scrambled with her youngsters toward the parked stationwagon.

Steve saw where they were headed, and called to Dana. She jumped in the back seat, as Steve slid in behind the wheel. The others joined them in a moment. Steve started the engine and threw the car into reverse, just as another coffin blasted up in front of them, through the cement of the driveway.

He screeched back, plowing into the tail end of Teague’s Bronco, shoving it into the street. Then he threw the wagon into forward gear and gunned it, skidding past Teague, who still stood there.

Teague didn’t stand there much longer, however. A casket shot up beside him, bursting from the lawn, ripping up electrical wires and cables with it, causing shorts and sparks all around. A decayed cadaver spilled forward on top of him, and together they tumbled into a black, muddy hole.

Three more coffins exploded into Tuthill’s VW, knocking it into the street, causing Steve to swerve the stationwagon around it, losing control of the car. He squealed to a halt just in time, as more corpses were expelled from the ground around a fire hydrant, once again blocking his path. He jumped out of the car to clear the way, mud, bones, and water running down on him from the now-gushing hydrant. Behind him an incredible gurgling noise began building to an ear-shattering crescendo. He turned to look. It was his house.

The window of the children’s room glowed with an almost radioactive intensity. The entire house began to suck itself inward, the implosion focusing on the children’s room—on the all-consuming closet.

Steve stared, motionless, stunned.

A concussion of awesome power blew all the shingles off the roof, as a cloud of thin, blue ectoplasmic vapor reached up like fingers toward the sky, and disappeared. Moments later, the rest of the house was suctioned inward to a point in space fourteen feet above the ground—where the children’s closet had been—until it was totally consumed. Empty space, now, where the house had recently existed. Suddenly, all was quiet.

In a daze, Steve got back in his car. Carol Anne and Robbie were still crying hysterically; Diane was trying to comfort them; Dana stared out the back window in utter disbelief.

The street was in chaos. Neighbors were streaming from their houses; cars were careening out of driveways. The police arrived. A gas main was broken, high tension wires sparked dramatically, water spurted thirty feet into the air from the broken hydrant, corpses and coffins and bones and putrefaction lay everywhere.

Only the Freeling lot sat still and dark at the center of the mêlée.

Steven veered his car around the casket blocking his way, drove to the end of the block, and turned the corner. The hysteria inside the car slowly died down as Steve took them farther and farther from the scene of the . . . whatever it was.

The night was clearing. The moon peeped from behind a cloud as the Freeling car passed the last sign, at the outskirts of the city: You are now leaving beautiful Cuesta Verde Estates. Please Drive Carefully.

The entire family slowly climbed the outside steps to the second-floor room of the Holiday Inn. It was an hour later. They’d just kept driving until they’d quieted down, then stopped at the first place they came to. They were exhausted, but they were together, and it was over.

They entered the room, closed the door.

A minute later, the door opened again. Steve walked out onto the balcony, pushing the big color television on its wheeled stand. With a look of triumphant determination, he gave it a long, send-off shove down along the balcony terrace. Then he turned and reentered his room without looking back. He closed the door behind him.

The television just kept on rolling.

J
AMES
K
AHN
is a physician specializing in Emergency Room medicine in a Los Angeles hospital. He has written two science fiction novels for Del Rey books—WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME and TIME’S DARK LAUGHTER—as well as the novelizations of POLTERGEIST, RETURN OF THE JEDI, and INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM.