Twilight Eyes (46 page)

“What does it mean, Slim?”

Worried and weary, I did not respond for a minute. I gave myself time to think, but taking time to think didn't really help. Finally I sighed and said, “I don't know. The emanations that poured off the truck . . . they didn't knock the stuffing out of me, yet in their own way they were even more horrible than the forthcoming fire I sensed at the school. But I'm not sure what it meant, what exactly it
was
that I saw. Except that somehow . . . through the Lightning Coal Company, I think we'll be able to learn why so many goblins are concentrated in this damn town.”

“That's the focus?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

Of course, I was in no condition to begin an investigation of the Lightning Coal Company until tomorrow morning. I felt almost as gray as the winter sky, and no more solid than the ragged beards of mist that hung down from the ominous faces—warriors and monsters—that an imaginative eye could discern in the storm clouds. I needed time to rest, regain my strength, and learn to tune my mind away from at least some of the continuous background static of clairvoyant images that crackled and sparked off the buildings and streets and people of Yontsdown.

Twenty minutes later, day gave way to darkness. You might have thought that night would cast a concealing cloak over the meanness of that wretched and noisome city, bringing it at least a small measure of respectability, but that was not the case. In Yontsdown the night was not stage makeup, as it might have been elsewhere. Somehow it emphasized the grubby, smudgy, smoky, foul, and fulsome details of the streets and drew attention to the grim, medieval quality of much of the architecture.

We were sure that we had lost the goblins in the Peterbilt, so we pulled into another motel—the Van Winkle Motor Inn, which was not half as cute as its name. This was about four times the size of the Traveler's Rest, two stories. Some rooms opened onto the courtyard, and others opened onto a promenade—iron posts painted black but rust-pocked and peeling, an aluminum awning—that circled the back of the building's four wings. Claiming exhaustion after our long journey, we requested quiet rooms at the rear of the inn, as far from the traffic noise as possible, and the desk clerk obliged. Thus we not only enjoyed quietude but also we could park the station wagon out of sight of the street, as insurance against its being accidentally spotted by one of the Lightning Coal Company's goblin employees from whom we had fled, an improbable but by no means impossible danger.

Our room was a beige-walled box with cheap, sturdy furniture and two inexpensive prints of clipper ships knifing through choppy seas, their sails all set and made full-bellied by a bracing wind. The dresser and nightstands were scarred with old cigarette burns, and the bathroom mirror was spotted with age, and the shower was not as hot as we would have liked, but we intended to stay there only one night. In the morning we would find a small house to rent where we could have greater privacy to plot against the goblins.

After showering. I felt relaxed enough to venture out into the city again—as long as Rya remained at my side, and only as far as the nearest coffee shop, where we had a good though unremarkable dinner. We saw nine goblins among the customers during the time we were there. I had to keep my attention fixed squarely on Rya, for the sight of their porcine snouts, bloody eyes, and flickering reptilian tongues would have ruined my appetite.

Even though I did not look at them, I could
feel
their evil, which was as palpable to me as cold vapor rising off blocks of dry ice. Enduring those frigid emanations of inhuman hatred and rage, I slowly learned to filter out the background hum and hiss of psychic radiation that was now such a part of Yontsdown, and by the time we left the coffee shop, I was feeling better than I had since we had entered this city of the damned.

Back at the Van Winkle Motor Inn, we moved the canvas bags of guns, explosives, and other illegal items into the room with us, for fear that gear would be stolen from the station wagon during the night.

For a long time, in bed and darkness, we held each other, neither speaking nor making love, just holding, holding fast. Closeness was an antidote for fear, a medicine for despair.

Rya finally slept.

I listened to the night.

In this place the wind sounded unlike any other wind: predatory. Now and then I could hear the distant laboring of big trucks carrying heavy loads, and I wondered if the Lightning Coal Company hauled its product out of the nearby mines at all hours of the day. And if so—why? It also seemed to me that night in Yontsdown was more often disturbed by the wailing sirens of police cars and ambulances than in any other town or city I had ever known.

At last I slept and, sleeping, dreamed. The frightening tunnel again. Inconstant amber lights. Oily pools of shadows lying between the lamps. A low, sometimes jagged ceiling. Strange smells. The echoes of running footsteps. A shout, a screech. Mysterious keening. Suddenly the ear-shattering
whoop-whoop-whoooooop
of an alarm. A breathless, heart-hammering certainty that I was being pursued—

When I awoke, with a mucous-wet scream caught in my throat, Rya awoke simultaneously, gasping for breath and throwing off the covers as if she were freeing herself from the grasping hands of her enemies.

“Slim!”

“Here.”

“Oh, God.”

“Just a dream.”

We held each other again.

“The tunnel,” she said.

“Me too.”

“And now I know what it was.”

“Me too.”

“A mine.”

“Yes.”

“A coal mine.”

“Yes.”

“The Lightning Coal Company.”

“Yes.”

“We were there.”

“Deep underground,” I said.

“And they
knew
we were there.”

“They were hunting us.”

“And we had no way out,” she said with a shudder.

We both fell silent.

Far away: a howling dog. And occasionally we were brought scraps of another wind-torn sound that might have been the agonized weeping of a woman.

In time Rya said, “I'm scared.”

“I know,” I said softly, holding her closer, tighter. “I know. I know.”

The next morning, Friday, we rented a house on Apple Lane, in a rural district at the very fringes of the city, in the drab foothills of the ancient eastern mountains, not far from the county's major coal mines. It was set back more than two hundred feet from the lane at the end of a gravel driveway crusted with ice and choked with snow. The real-estate agent advised us to get chains on our tires, as he had on his. Trees—mostly pine and spruce, but more than a few winter-stripped maples and birches and laurels—came down from the steep slopes above, closing around three sides of the white-mantled yard. On that somber, gray day there was no direct sunlight to pry into the perimeter of the forest; therefore a disquietingly deep darkness began immediately beyond the line of trees and filled the woods wherever I looked, as if night itself, condensed, had taken refuge there with dawn ascendant. The house, which came furnished, had three small bedrooms, one bath, a living room, dining room, and a kitchen inside a two-story clapboard shell, under an asphalt-shingle roof—and above a shadowy, damp, low-ceilinged basement in which stood an oil-fired furnace.

Unspeakable atrocities had occurred in that subterranean chamber. With my sixth sense I perceived a psychic residue of torture, pain, murder, insanity, and savagery the moment that the real-estate agent, Jim Garwood, opened the door at the head of the cellar steps. Evil welled up, throbbing and dark, as blood from a wound. I did not care to descend into that loathsome place.

But Jim Garwood, a soft-spoken and earnest middle-aged man with a sallow complexion, wanted us to have a close look at the furnace and receive instruction in its operation, and I could think of no way to refuse without arousing his curiosity. Reluctantly I followed him and Rya down into that pit of human suffering, holding fast to the rickety stair railing, trying hard not to gag on the stench of blood and bile and burning flesh that only I could smell, seething odors of another time. At the bottom of the steps I walked with a conscious flat-footedness in order to keep from reeling in horror at the long-ago events that, for me at least, almost seemed to be transpiring
now
.

Gesturing at the cupboards and shelves that lined one wall of the room, not aware of the death stench that I perceived and not even mentioning the current unpleasant odors—black mildew, fungus, mold—Garwood said, “Plenty of storage space down here.”

“I see,” Rya said.

What
I
saw was a bleeding and terrified woman, naked and chained to a coal-fired furnace that had stood on the same concrete pad where the new oil-fired version was now anchored. Her body was covered with lacerations and contusions. One of her eyes was blackened and swollen shut. I perceived that her name was Dora Penfield and that she was afraid her sister-in-law's husband, Klaus Orkenwold, was going to dismember her and feed her body piece by piece into the flames of the furnace while her children looked on in terror. Indeed, that was what had happened to her, although I strained desperately and successfully to block out the clairvoyant images of her actual death.

“Thompson Oil Company makes fuel deliveries once every three weeks during the winter,” Garwood explained, “and less often in the autumn.”

“How much does it cost to fill the tank?” Rya asked, expertly playing the role of a budget-conscious young wife.

I saw a six-year-old boy and a seven-year-old girl in various stages of cruel abuse—battered, broken. Though these heartbreakingly defenseless victims were long dead, their whimpers, cries of pain, and pitiful pleading for mercy echoed to me along the corridors of time, piercing splinters of painful sound. I had to repress the urge to weep for them.

I also saw a particularly vicious-looking goblin—Klaus Orkenwold himself—wielding a leather strap, a cattle prod, then other wicked instruments of torture. As though he were half demon and half Gestapo butcher, he strode back and forth through his makeshift dungeon, now in his human guise, now completely transformed for the added terror of his victims, his features limned by the flickering orange firelight that streamed from the open furnace door.

Somehow I kept smiling and nodding at Jim Garwood. Somehow I even managed to ask a question or two. Somehow I got out of the cellar without revealing my extreme distress, though I will never know quite how I managed to project a convincing image of equanimity while assaulted by those dark emanations.

Upstairs again, with the cellar door tightly shut, I sensed none of the murderous history of the dank lower chamber. With each long exhalation I purged my lungs of the blood-rank, bile-pungent air of those long-ago atrocities. As the house was perfectly located for our needs and provided adequate comfort and anonymity, I decided that we would take it and that I'd simply never venture down the basement steps again.

We had given Garwood phony names—Bob and Helen Barnwell of Philadelphia. To explain our lack of local employment we had a carefully prepared story about being geology students who, after receiving our bachelor's and master's degrees, were engaged upon six months of field research for our doctoral theses, which would deal with certain peculiarities of rock strata in the Appalachians. This cover was designed to explain any treks we might have to take into the mountains to reconnoiter the mine heads and work yards of the Lightning Coal Company.

I was nearly eighteen and more experienced than many men twice my age, but of course I was not old enough to have earned two degrees and to be halfway through my doctoral studies. However, I looked years older than I really was: you know the reasons.

Rya, older than I, seemed mature enough to be what she claimed. Her uncommon beauty and powerful sexuality, even with the surgical alterations in her face and the change in her hair color from blond to raven-black, lent her a sophistication that made her seem older than she was. Furthermore her difficult life, darkened by much tragedy, gave her an air of world-weariness and street wisdom far in advance of her years.

Jim Garwood showed no suspicion of us.

The previous Tuesday, back in Gibtown, Slick Eddy had provided false driver's licenses and other forged documentation that would support the Barnwell identities, although not our claimed connection with Temple University in Philadelphia. We figured Garwood would not run much of a check on us—if any—for we were only taking a six-month lease on the Apple Lane house. Besides, we were paying the entire value of the lease in advance, including a stiff security deposit—and all in cash, which made us attractive and relatively safe tenants.

These days, with computers in every office, when a TRW credit report can be obtained in hours and can reveal everything from your place of employment to your toilet habits, verification of our story would be virtually automatic. But back then, in 1964, the microchip revolution was still in the future; the information industry was still in its infancy, and people more often were taken at their face value and at their word.

Thank God, Garwood knew nothing of geology and was not able to ask telling questions.

Back at his office we signed the lease, gave him the money, and accepted the keys.

We now had a base of operations.

We moved our things into the Apple Lane place. Though the house had seemed suitable only a short while ago, I found it unsettling when we returned as the rightful tenants. I had the feeling it was somehow aware of us, that a thoroughly hostile intelligence stirred within its walls, that its lighting fixtures were omnipresent eyes, that it was welcoming us, and that in its welcome there was no goodwill, only a terrible hunger.