The Sleepwalkers (37 page)

“Morle finally landed in San Francisco where he was accepted at the University of California, Berkeley. Fellow students characterized him as handsome, pale, distracted, articulate, and punctual. He was three years into a degree in psychology when the law once again caught up with him. This time, since the sea no longer seemed safe for him, he chose the most desolate place he could think of within the United States. He moved to a small town a hundred miles west of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and took the only job he could find working as a rodeo clown.”

“The director,” says Caleb.

The voice continues: “He lived there for three years. Locals didn’t say much about him, except that he read a lot of books and kept to himself. He rented an abandoned trailer on the outskirts of town and never seemed to leave except on rodeo days. That went on for almost two years, until one day he was gored in the head by a bull and nearly killed.

“After that, he disappeared. He didn’t surface again for a long time.

Most of the police who had been pursuing him had long since given up the chase by now. But not one. Finally, that detective’s persistence paid off. Morle turned up in Chicago, this time under an assumed name. He had received a law degree from the University of Chicago. But just as he began his first job with one of Chicago’s top law firms, friends began to see a change in him. Maybe it was due to head trauma from the rodeo days and maybe something else, but Morle— though they knew him by another name—became more and more reclusive. Soon he wouldn’t leave his apartment. He would simply sit in his room, surrounded with his collection of clocks, and not move for days. Following a suicide attempt, he was institutionalized. It was just after he was released that he learned the detective was on his trail again, closer than ever. So he fled to Florida and checked himself into a mental hospital in a small town called Hudsonville, again under an assumed name. It was there the detective finally caught up to him. But by then it was too late.”

Thunder rolls suddenly, like great, terrible drums shaking the ground under Caleb’s feet.

“The detective infiltrated the asylum, posing as another inmate, hoping to befriend Morle, hoping to coax a confession out of him. What that detective didn’t know was what a powerful manipulator Morle was. You see, he already had everyone in the asylum under his control. He had taught them his little secret with the clocks, how they could tune your ear to the voices of the dead. And when the dead spoke, do you know what they said? They said ‘you’d better help John Morle.’ And that’s what everyone did. What they didn’t know was that even Morle was a slave to the spirits, and the spirits, they were slaves to something else.

“Strange, all Morle really wanted was to die. He wanted the suffering of his life to end, according to his doctors. He tried to kill himself fifteen times at the asylum. Every time he failed. I guess some weeds are just impossible to kill. And the detective never got his confession.”

“You were the detective,” says Caleb.

The laugh sounds mechanical, fake. “Once upon a time.”

The voice is silent for a moment. All Caleb hears is a strange crackling sound, then the gentle clang of chains, way too close. When the voice returns, it sounds strangely garbled, as if the speaker, this devil in the basement, were choking. The first words Caleb understands are:

“—the asylum closed, the inmates scattered to the wind or hid their identities, and so did John Morle. But they came back to town a few years ago. Hell, a lot of them never even left. One became a doctor, one became the sheriff, one became the mayor of the town. And they came back to finish what they had started. To help Morle, as the spirits commanded them.”

“What does he want?”

“Sixty-six souls, according to Morle, and his pact with the devil is finished. The end comes. The devil awakens.”

“What do I do to stop him?”

The clangor of chains alone makes its reply.

“And what happened to you after the asylum closed and you were set free?” Caleb asks. “How long have you been here?”

Thunder pounds and wind howls above, but here in the dark there’s only silence.

“I know who you are . . . Dad? You were the detective once, right?

Then you became a lawyer, so you could put people like Morle behind bars, right? And they killed you for it.”

Thunder breaks, hard enough to crack the world in half. Caleb takes a step forward, his hand outstretched.

“Dad?”

And lightning floods through the cellar door in one flash-frame instant, blazing away every ounce of shadow with eerie white fire.

There, in front of Caleb’s outstretched hand, hang four chains, and bound in those chains are the four wilted limbs of a long-dead corpse. One bloated, rotting hand almost touches Caleb’s fingers before he jerks his hand back. The mouth hangs open, the eyes stare into a black puddle below. On a table next to the corpse, an old, dusty radio crackles.

Caleb tries to scream, but nothing comes out.

In the next instant, the lightning is gone and he’s back in darkness.

He wheels and takes off for where the light came from, where the door must be, but the voice, that electric, fake, dead voice follows him.

“Aw, Billy, don’t run away—”

Caleb trips, falls on his face. Dark, stagnant water splashes into his eyes, into his mouth. The stench yanks at his gut muscles, almost jerking them into vomiting. Caleb’s hand slips on the slimy cement, but he manages to get to his feet and runs on, blindly. Then he sees a little light come through the door—a glimpse of the moon or more lightning, he doesn’t know which—and he’s pounding up the steps and into the open, with that maniacal voice following him from the radio, from the basement, screaming:

“Kid, what you don’t know could fill a warehouse! You’d better listen! You’d better not—”

And Caleb slams the basement door shut and leans on it, his face in his hands.

“Caleb?” It’s Christine; she’s there. “What’s wrong?” She comes forward through the rain, reaching out to Caleb, seeing his distress, but draws up when she glimpses the hatchet still clutched in his hand. He looks down at its sharp, curved edge. He had completely forgotten about it. By now Christine’s hesitation has passed. She puts her arms around his neck and squeezes him tight. Caleb hugs her back, but he holds on to the hatchet, too.

“What was down there?” asks Christine.

“Nothing,” he replies.

Inside, when they step out of the rain, they find the witch staring out the window with a burning cigarette in one hand and burning sage in the other.

“Aw, Mom,” says Christine, “we just cleaned the floor. You’re getting ashes all over it.” She goes to the linen closet and gets a towel for herself and one for Caleb. As he towels off his hair, he confronts her.

“Christine, did you know who was down there?”

She stops drying herself and gives him a quizzical look. “I never went down there before. It was always locked up. Mom said she didn’t have the key. Why? What did you find?”

Caleb turns to the witch. “Mrs. Zikry?”

She sings under her breath:
“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the
coming of the morn . . .”

“Mrs. Zikry!” he says louder.

“From the deep and darkest water great Lucifer is born. When six
and sixty souls are dead he’ll blow his mighty horn . . .”

“Hey!” says Caleb, grabbing her shoulder and spinning her toward him. “What did you do to my father?”

Her face is a grin full of gray, crooked teeth.
“. . . and hell is marching
on!”
she finishes with raucous laughter.

He throws her down on the couch with one hand and grips the hatchet tighter with the other.

“Billy!” Christine says. “Don’t! She’s just crazy.”

“That was my father down there, Christine! He’s dead! He was chained up like a dog.” Tears are hot on his cheeks now; it’s too late to try to stop them, too late to be ashamed.

He turns back to the witch.

“Why?” he screams, “You’d better answer me! Why did you do it?”

The witch just laughs and hums to herself. She takes a bottle out from under a couch cushion and takes a swig.

“You’ll pay for what you did,” he says flatly.

“Billy, don’t hurt her,” says Christine. She’s close behind him now, with a gentle hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t hurt her. She isn’t well, you can see that. I never told you this, I never told anyone, but she was in the asylum once. I found some papers in her dresser one time. She isn’t well.”

“Ticktock, ticktock,” says the witch.

“She was in the asylum?” says Caleb.

“Yes,” says Christine. “I never told you because—”

But he’s already turned on the witch again.

“You!” he says. “Put down that bottle and look at me, or I swear to God I’ll chop you in half!”

The witch raises the bottle to her eye and looks at him through it, laughing soundlessly.

“Why did you lock him up down there?” he says, trying to appear calm now. “Just tell me and I won’t hurt you.”

She drops the bottle and looks at Caleb squarely.

“He told me to.”

“Who?”

“You know who,” she says. “Johnny.”

“Jonathan Morle?” Caleb asks.

She ignores him.

“Why did Morle tell you to do that?” he presses.

“That detective was always sneaky,” she says, gesturing to the cellar. Then changing the subject: “The spirits won’t talk to me . . . ” she says sadly, then pauses and stares down into the whiskey bottle as if it were full of tea leaves. “But Johnny talks to me.”

“And you knew him in the asylum?”

“Of course.”

“And you followed his orders?”

“Of course.”

“Why?”

“Why, why, why, why? Four and twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie!” says the witch with a repulsive, childish giggle.

“And what about Anna? Did you let him take her? Or did you kill her yourself?”

“ANNA IS ALIVE!” screams the witch, and suddenly she’s on her feet. Her ritual knife has appeared from nowhere, and it’s at Caleb’s throat.

He thinks he could take her with the hatchet if he’s fast enough, even though he can already feel the sharp edge of her knife breaking the skin in tiny places. His muscles tense to strike.

“Mom, no!” yells Christine, jumping between them.

“You bad, bad, bad girl!” spits the witch. “Get back.”

“Mom! Caleb! Both of you, please, let’s just figure out how to save Mr. Bent and Margie and the other kids, if we can, and get the hell out of this town. Please,” says Christine.

Caleb and the witch exchange an icy look. She isn’t laughing anymore. “Maybe we should wait until morning,” says Caleb.

“By morning it’ll be all over,” says the witch.

“What?” says Caleb sarcastically, “the end of the world?”

The witch just smiles a slow smile and plays her fingers across the blade of her knife.

“She’s right,” says Christine. “They’ll be dead before morning, if they aren’t already.”

“We could just leave,” says Caleb. “Get as far away as we can as fast as we can. There’s no way the world is really going to end. That guy might be able to talk to ghosts, but that doesn’t mean he knows what’s really going to happen. Maybe everything will be okay.”

The witch smiles big. “Tick, tock, tick.”

Christine shakes her head. “The dead are guiding his actions,” she says. “Maybe you’re right; maybe he’s just crazy. But can we really take that chance? What if it’s true? We have to stop him.”

“If the devil walked among us, if the world ended, everybody would suffer and die . . . And we would have turned our backs on trying to stop it,” says Caleb with a sigh. He makes up his mind. “Do we have any weapons? Besides this stupid hatchet?”

Christine shakes her head. “Just the cooking knives.”

“Wait,” says the witch. She disappears into the bedroom.

Christine and Caleb exchange a look.

“Billy,” Christine says, “I’m sorry—” Tears swell in her eyes and her voice cuts off, then comes back. “I’m sorry about your dad. I swear to God I didn’t know. I wouldn’t blame you if you killed my mom; it’s just . . . she raised me. She tried. She’s just . . . broken. I’m sorry, Billy.” She puts a hand on his arm.

He sloughs it off. “Everyone calls me Caleb now,” he says.

The witch reappears from the hallway, carrying a dusty little cardboard box. She sets it on the coffee table then looks at them expectantly. Christine leans over and looks in the box. She reaches into it and pulls out a small, dust-covered revolver. It’s so old its chrome plating has worn off in places.

“Was this Dad’s?” she asks.

The witch nods.

“Why are you giving us this?” asks Caleb. “I thought you were on Morle’s side.”

The witch shrugs.

“We should go,” says Christine.

“No,” says Caleb. “I want to know why she’d give us this if she really wants Morle to win. It’s probably a trick. It doesn’t make any sense.”

He turns back to the witch. “Well?”

She smiles again, shrugs. “Johnny’s gonna win,” she says. “No matter what.”

“Caleb,” Christine says, “we should go.”

Caleb’s stare lingers on the witch as he tries to plumb the depth of her insanity. Finally, he gives up and follows Christine to the door, gun in hand.