Twilight Eyes (32 page)

And, finally, I hesitated to sound the alarm because if I was disbelieved—as would inevitably be the case—I would have done nothing but alert Uncle Denton to the danger that I posed to his kind. If I was
not
hallucinating, if he
was
a deadly beast, the last thing I wanted to do was call attention to myself, put myself in a position where I stood alone and defenseless, to be murdered at his leisure.

The wedding was held, and Denton adopted Kerry, and for months Paula and Kerry were happier than anyone had ever seen them. The goblin remained in Denton, but I began to wonder if it was in essence an evil creature or merely . . .
different
from us.

While the Harkenfield family prospered, an unusual amount of tragedy and disaster was visited upon many of their neighbors in that Siskiyou valley, but it took me a long time to realize that Uncle Denton was the source of this uncanny run of bad luck. The Whitborn family, half a mile from us, a mile from the Harkenfield place, were burned out of their home when their oil furnace exploded; of the six Whitborn children, three perished in the fire. A few months later, out on Goshawkan Lane, all but one of the five members of the Jenerette family died of carbon monoxide poisoning when a vent on
their
furnace became inexplicably clogged, filling the house with deadly fumes in the middle of the night. And Rebecca Norfron, the thirteen-year-old daughter of Miles and Hannah Norfron, disappeared while on a walk with her little dog, Hoppy; she turned up a week later, over at the county seat, twenty miles away, in an abandoned house; not only had she been killed but also tortured, and at length. Hoppy was never found.

Then trouble moved closer to home. My grandmother fell down the cellar stairs at her place, broke her neck, and lay undiscovered for almost a day. I did not go into Grandma's house after her death, which probably delayed my discovery that Denton Harkenfield was the source of many of the valleys' miseries; if I had stood at the top of those cellar steps, had gone to the bottom to kneel at the spot where they had found Grandma's body, I would have sensed Uncle Denton's contribution to her demise, and perhaps I could have stopped him before he caused more pain. At Grandmother Stanfeuss's funeral, with her body three days dead and its invisible robes of psychic energy therefore somewhat depleted, I was nonetheless so afflicted with clairvoyant perceptions of unspecific violence that I collapsed and had to be taken home. They thought it was grief that brought me down, but it was the shocking knowledge that somehow Grandma had been murdered and had died in terror. But I did not know who had killed her, and I did not even have a shred of evidence to suggest that murder had been done, and I was only fourteen, an age when
no one
listens to you, and I was already considered strange, so I kept my mouth shut.

I knew Uncle Denton was something more—or less—than human, but I did not immediately suspect him of murder. I was still confused about him because Aunt Paula and Kerry loved him so much and because he was nice to me, always making jokes with me and showing what seemed to be a genuine interest in my achievements at school and on the junior varsity wrestling team. He and Aunt Paula gave me wonderful Christmas presents, and on my birthday he gave me several novels by Robert Heinlein and A. E. van Vogt
plus
a crisp new five-dollar bill. I had seen him do nothing but good, and although I sensed that he virtually
seethed
with hatred, I wondered whether I was imagining the rage and loathing that I perceived within him. If an ordinary human being had been committing wholesale slaughter, a psychic residue of that villainy would have clung to him, and I would have detected it sooner or later, but goblins radiate nothing but hatred, and because I perceived no specific guilt in Uncle Denton's aura, I did not suspect that he was my grandmother's killer.

I
did
notice that when anyone died, Denton spent more time visiting at the funeral parlor than did any other friend or member of the family. He was always solicitous, sympathetic, providing the most convenient shoulder to cry on, running errands for the bereaved, helping in any way he could, and he usually paid frequent visits to survivors after their loved ones had been buried, just to see how they were getting along and to inquire if there was any favor he could perform. He was widely lauded for his empathy, humanity, and charity, but he modestly turned aside such praise. This only confused me the more. It was especially confusing when I could see the goblin within him, which invariably grinned most wickedly on those occasions of grief and even seemed to take sustenance from the misery of the mourners. Which was the true Uncle Denton: the gloating beast within or the good neighbor and concerned friend?

I still had not arrived at an answer to that question when eight months later my father was crushed to death beneath his John Deere tractor. He had been using the tractor to pull up large stones in the new field that he was preparing for cultivation, a twenty-acre parcel hidden from our house and barn by an intruding arm of the forest that reached down from the Siskiyous. My sisters found him when they went to see why he had not come to the house at dinnertime, and I did not find out about it until I came home from a wrestling match at school a couple of hours later. (“Oh, Carl,” my sister Jenny had said to me, hugging me tight, “his poor face, his poor face, all black and dead, his poor face!”) By then Aunt Paula and Uncle Denton were at our place, and he was the rock to which my mother and sisters clung. He tried to comfort me as well, and he seemed sincere in both his grief and his offer of sympathy, but I could see the goblin leering within and fixing me with hot, red eyes. Although I half believed that the hidden demon was a figure of my imagination or even proof of my growing madness, I nevertheless withdrew from Denton and avoided him as much as I could.

At first the county sheriff was suspicious of the death, for there seemed to be wounds on my father that could not be explained by the toppling of the tractor. But as no one had a motive for murdering my dad, and as there was no other evidence whatsoever to point toward foul play, the sheriff eventually arrived at the conclusion that Dad had not been killed immediately when the tractor fell over on him, that he had struggled for some time, and that his other injuries resulted from those struggles. At the funeral I fell down in a swoon, as I had done at the services for my grandmother the previous year, and for the same reason: A punishing wave of psychic energy, a formless surging tide of violence smashed over me, and I knew that my father had been murdered, too, but I did not know why or by whom.

Two months later I finally found the courage to go to the field where Dad had had his accident. There I moved inexorably toward the very spot where he had perished, drawn by occult forces, and when I knelt on the earth that had received his blood, I had a vision of Uncle Denton striking him along the side of the head with a length of pipe, knocking him unconscious, then rolling the tractor on top of him. My father had regained consciousness and had lived five minutes, straining against the weight of the tractor, while Denton Harkenfield had stood over him, watching, enjoying. The horror of it overwhelmed me, and I passed out, waking some minutes later with a bad headache and hands squeezed tightly around clumps of moist earth.

I spent the next couple of months in secret detective work. My grandmother's house was sold soon after her death, but I returned there when the new owners were away, and I let myself in through a basement window that I knew had no latch. When I stood at the foot and then at the head of the cellar steps, I received vague but unmistakable psychic impressions that convinced me Denton had pushed her and then had come down the steps and had snapped her neck when the fall had not done the job as planned. I began to think about the unusually long run of misfortune that people in our valley had experienced for the past couple of years. I visited the rubble-strewn site of the fire-blasted Whitborn place where three children had succumbed to flames, and while the people who had purchased the old Jenerette house were away, I let myself into their place and laid my hands upon the furnace that had spewed killing fumes, and in both instances I received strong clairvoyant impressions of Denton Harkenfield's involvement. When Mom went into the county seat one Saturday to do some shopping, I rode along with her, and while she visited several stores I went to the abandoned house where Rebecca Norfron's tortured and mutilated corpse had been discovered. There, too, the stain of Denton Harkenfield was visible to the psychic eye.

For all of that, I had no evidence whatsoever. My tale of goblins would be no more believable now than when I had first recognized Denton Harkenfield for what he was, more than two years before. If I publicly accused him without having the means to insure his arrest, I would certainly be the next “accident” victim in the valley. I had to have proof, and I hoped to obtain it by anticipating him with a precognitive flash of his next crime. If I knew where he would strike, I could be there to interrupt him in some dramatic fashion, after which his intended victim—spared only by my intervention—would testify against him, and he would be put in prison. I dreaded such a confrontation, afraid that I would botch it and wind up dead alongside the victim I had meant to save, but I could see no hope in any other course of action.

I began spending more time around Uncle Denton, though his dual identity was terrifying and repellent, for I thought that I was more likely to receive the precognitive flash in his company than away from him. But to my surprise a year passed without developments of the sort I was hoping for. I
did
sense violence building in him on a number of occasions, but I received no visions of slaughter to come, and each time that his rage and hatred seemed to have reached an unusually fierce strength, each time that it seemed he
must
strike out to relieve the pressure in him, he would go away on some piece of business or on a short vacation with Aunt Paula, and he would always return in a more stable condition, the hatred and rage still in him but temporarily weakened. I suspected that he was causing suffering wherever he went, wary of spreading an inordinate amount of misery too close to home. I could not obtain a clairvoyant vision of these crimes while in his company because, until he arrived at wherever he was going and looked over the opportunities for destruction, he did not know, himself, where he would land a blow.

Then, after our valley had known a year of peace, I began to sense that Denton intended to bring the war back to the original battleground. Worse, I perceived that he intended to kill Kerry, my cousin, his own adopted son, to whom he had given his name. If the goblin in him fed on human anguish, which I was beginning to suspect, it would enjoy a feast of surpassing richness in the aftermath of Kerry's death. Aunt Paula, having lost a husband years before and being deeply attached to her son, would be destroyed by the loss of Kerry—and the goblin would be with her not just in funeral parlors but twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, drinking of her agony and despair. As the goblin's hatred became more bitter day by day, as portents of impending violence grew increasingly obvious to my sixth sense, I became frantic, for I could not perceive the place, time, or method of the murder to come.

The night before it happened, late last April, I awoke from a nightmare in which Kerry had been dying in the Siskiyou forests, under towering spruce and pine. In the dream he was wandering in circles, lost, dying of exposure, and I kept running after him with a blanket and a thermos of hot chocolate, but for some reason he did not see or hear me, and in spite of his weakness he managed to keep ahead of me, until I awoke not in a state of sheer terror but in frustration.

I could not use my sixth sense to wring any more details from the ether, but in the morning I went to the Harkenfield place to alert Kerry to the danger. I was not sure how to lead into the subject and present my information convincingly, but I knew I must warn him immediately. On the way I must have considered and rejected a hundred approaches. However, when I got there, no one was home. I waited around for a couple of hours, and finally I headed back to our place, figuring I would return later, toward suppertime. I never saw Kerry again—alive.

Late that afternoon the word reached us that Uncle Denton and Aunt Paula were worried about Kerry. That morning, after Aunt Paula had driven in to the county seat to tend to various matters, Kerry had told Denton that he was going into the mountains, into the woods back of their place, to do a little off-season small-game hunting, and he had said he would return by two o'clock at the latest. At least that was what Denton claimed. By five o'clock there was still no sign of Kerry. I expected the worst because it just was not
like
my cousin to hunt off-season. I did not believe that he had told Denton any such thing or that he had gone up into the Siskiyous by himself. Denton had lured him there on one pretext or another and then had . . . disposed of him.

Search parties combed the foothills most of that night, without success. At first light they went out in greater force, with a pack of blood-hounds and with me. I had never before used my clairvoyance in a search of that kind. Because I could not control the power, I did not think I would be able to sense anything of value, and I did not even tell them that I intended to bring my special abilities to bear. To my surprise, in two hours, ahead of the hounds, I experienced a series of psychic flashes and found the corpse at the head of a deep and narrow draw, at the foot of a rocky slope.

Kerry was so badly battered that it was difficult to believe he had sustained all his injuries in the fall down the side of the ravine. Under other circumstances the county coroner might have found more than sufficient evidence to warrant a determination of death at the hands of another, but the corpse was in no condition to support the subtle analyses of forensic pathology, especially as practiced by a simple country physician. During the night, animals
—
raccoons, perhaps, or foxes, or wood rats, or weasels
—
had gotten at the body. Something had eaten the eyes, and something had burrowed into Kerry's guts; his face was slashed, and the tips of some fingers were nibbled off.