Night Movies Page 13
The city man was a curiosity in that rural part of New England, to be sure. It was more than just the deeply tanned skin, an exotic cast that suggested Italian, Greek, or possibly Hispanic heritage. It was more than just his city clothes and city hair, impeccable and careful, as if necessary tools in an arsenal of efficiency and charm. It was something of the fact that he entered town on foot, taking the mile or so of Main Street with purpose and a kind of unobtrusive grace that made him seem inarguable, somehow necessary to whatever place and time found him. Mostly, when Sam thought back on it, it was his book which had made an impression on folks, before even the cover or a hint of the pages’ contents had been seen. It was big, and would have been unwieldy in anyone else’s hands, but the strange city man carried it lightly and easily, used to its contours and corners.
He slowed as he approached Nellie’s place, glancing up at the hand-painted bed-and-breakfast sign on the post at the end of the driveway, then made his way to the door. Before knocking, he tucked the book into a large bag he carried over one shoulder. Nellie let him in after a cursory sizing-up of his person, and the two disappeared behind the closed door.
* * * * *
Across the valley, the sky had grown swollen and tight, an edematous angry pink. This would fade, as it did most evenings, to a corpseskin haze overhead. In Faulkesville below, most of the colors of the day already had been bled into the ground, leeched by corpulent shadows. Ultimately, the whole place would decay into night for pinpoint stars to feast on. It was under such a sky that Chuck McCauley drove the last leg of windy, field-flanked rural road to Becker’s farm. The old man hadn’t answered a phone or a door in over a week, nor had the locals seen him at his usual watering holes in town, and his daughter out in Boston was worried. Since Chuck was Becker’s nearest neighbor, and since young Katy Becker had sounded so worried, Chuck had agreed to drive out and look in on him. Old goat was tough as iron, Chuck knew, but if it made the girl feel better, Chuck was up to the task. Chuck didn’t expect to find much out of the ordinary, though. His dog, Hunter, yawned in the passenger seat beside him and offered a look that questioned the necessity of driving out to Faulkesville during what should have been TV time.
“I know, ol’ boy,” he said, patting his dog on the head with his free hand. “I know. We’ll just take a quick look around, see what we see. We’ll be home in time for our shows, I promise.”
Chuck wasn’t much one given to fancy, his inclinations toward the supernatural hovering weakly in the realm of rote acceptance of the minister’s descriptions of demons and angels, God and the Devil. That skepticism largely did not apply to the woods out by Becker’s farm. Chuck had lived and farmed in that New England valley which encompassed Willowhill, Faulkesville, Ayersville, and Colby for going on 56 years, and he’d have guessed there wasn’t an old-timer in the valley that didn’t believe there was something wrong with those Faulkesville woods. Often, it had been intimated in harsh whispers over children’s heads and in disjointed tavern conversations that ended abruptly at the approach of outsiders. There were rumors of strange growing things choking whole trees dead on those off seasons when the weather was unpredictable and strange. The rivers ran muddy then, choked with the ruddy undersilt of their beds so that from certain angles, it looked as if those rivers carried away blood from the woods’ interior. Those nights, usually too cool and especially windy for the time of year, carried low, musical, unnatural sounds that got inside one’s head, even one’s chest, and weighed heavily there.
There was also that thing that he and Hank Jedsoe and Ted Larsson had shot that one night back in ‘33, that they never talked about – the thing that Chuck swore had walked like a tall, gaunt man, but possessed a skeletal, bestial face with shark’s eyes, a thing that jerked once as the bullet tore through the rags covering its body and then continued walking into the deep black between the trees....
Chuck patted Hunter absently on the head, vaguely aware that feeling the dog’s realness, his normalcy, was comforting. That he’d worked himself up at all to the point of needing even the smallest comfort was more than he cared to acknowledge.
The sky ahead seemed to grow darker much too rapidly, and the closer he got to the Becker farm, the less comfortable he felt about the whole trip. Nothing good ever happened out in Faulkesville. They’d told Becker that, stubborn old goat that he was. But Becker had been ambitious and bull-headed, seeing prime farmland that was, in his mind, absurdly shunned by rustic, superstitious locals. He’d lost a wife and a son to freak accidents on that prime farmland, and still scoffed at the idea that the grotesque aspect in those woods might somehow be tainting the land all around. Although Chuck still maintained, in his mind and to anyone who would have listened, that Jonas Becker was too tough and too stubborn to let anything out there take him down, he supposed he understood Katy Becker’s worry for her father, alone out there in that ancient farmhouse.
Chuck turned into the long driveway. The crunch of gravel beneath his tires and the chirping of crickets and tree frogs supplied the only sounds surrounding the dark farmhouse ahead. He noted the hulking black shape of Becker’s pickup ahead, but it took his mind a second or two to comprehend what was wrong with it. The license plate, he saw in the glare of his own headlights, was slanted. The whole truck, in fact, lay on its side like some great dying animal. Before he could let go of the breath he’d been holding, Hunter issued a series of whimpers from the passenger seat. Chuck glanced at the dog and saw he was trembling, his ears alert, his claws scratching at the rolled up window. As Chuck pulled to a stop, Hunter’s muzzle creased and he growled, low and menacing, at the house.
“Stay,” Chuck muttered, but Hunter paced the front seat as much as his mutt bulk allowed, alternately howling and growling at Becker’s house. Chuck felt the dog’s anxiety roll over him in waves, and it triggered a tightness in his chest and in his expression, as well as a heightening of his senses. He grabbed Hunter’s leash from the back seat and both the hand gun and the flashlight in his glove box, then led the nervous dog into the darkness.
Cautiously, he circled the overturned truck, shining the flashlight around the outside as well as inside, looking for...what? He wasn’t sure. Something amiss, he supposed – blood or dents or –
What he found surprised him, and seemed to drive Hunter to the brink of frenzy. In the bed of the truck, amidst clumps and dried splashes of mud, dead leaves, cracked twigs, and ropes that looked chewed through, he saw a greenish gray kind of ichor. Hunter growled and snapped at it, pawing the ground between himself and the truck bed with ferocious impatience. Chuck held tight to the leash, inexplicably afraid for the dog’s safety if he let it go slack, and crouched on his haunches to get a better look at the slimy substance. It took up the better part of a third of the truck bed, forming an amorphous shape that gave Chuck no clue as to its nature or origin.
That close, he thought he could smell a mix of odors either clinging to or emanating from the bizarre mottled jelly – pine sap, burnt wood, and something unwholesomely organic, something like blood and breath and fur and sweat. It was not a pleasant smell by any means, but he didn’t recoil. In fact, he might have reached out to touch it except that an incidental beam from the flashlight fell on it just then, and it moved.
Chuck jumped, falling back on his behind and scuttling away from the truck bed, his grip tighter than ever and tugging on the leash. The ichor had vibrated when the full beam of light had fallen on it, and in it, for just a second – for less than a second – Chuck had seen an endless void beyond the edge of the outermost stars, a place so far removed from even the dreams of humanity as to fill him with a frozen dread.
Becker. Becker had brought it out of the woods.
The thought assailed him as the horror thawed and the universe beyond the universe in the ichor faded away. He didn’t know what it meant but he was sure it was true, and on the heels of it, was just as sure that Katy Becker had more than a fleeting reason to be concerned for her father.
The front door was unlocked, although that was nothing particularly alarming. Becker never locked his door, his belief being that anyone with the determination and tenacity to find him all the way out there in the middle of nowhere probably deserved a little something for his troubles, anyway.
Chuck felt for the front hall light switch and flicked it on, bathing the room in perfectly normal lamp-glow. His search of the downstairs yielded nothing; Becker was nowhere to be seen. Likewise, the rooms upstairs were all empty as well. There were signs that Becker had been there recently, though – a cold and congealing cup of coffee on the kitchen counter, a damp towel on the upstairs bathroom floor outside the shower, the keys to the truck hanging on a hook by the front door. It was as if normal life had been put on pause while Becker had rushed out.
Chuck stood in the middle of the upstairs hallway, puzzled. Something had knocked over that truck, something much bigger and stronger than Becker. Could that thing have crawled away from the overturned truck and into the house? Could whatever it is have something to do with Becker’s disappearance?
It was then he heard the moaning outside. He rushed to the window looking down on the back yard but saw nothing in the gloom. The moan, however, increased in volume and pitch until it was a wail that Chuck thought would be impossible for human vocal chords to make.
He hurried down the stairs, feeling his bones creaking protest inside his skin, and slid around the banister. He ran down the hallway and out the back door. From the back porch, he could hear Hunter howling out front, but the wailing from the property line had gained such intensity that it nearly swallowed up everything else. Chuck had his gun out and pointed at the treeline designating the edge of the Becker farm, his hand trembling violently.
A moment or two later, a brief lull in the sound brought something staggering out of the woods. It took every ounce of willpower not to shoot it, and as it covered the distance between them, Chuck lent his own screams to the cacophony of the farm.
* * * * *
It was around 10 p.m., and Mr. Larsson and Mr. Jedsoe were finishing the last of the tobacco in their pipes and the bourbon in their glasses when the city man came hurrying out of Nellie’s place. Sam, who had been stretching her sleepy limbs in anticipation of the walk home, watched the man as he crossed the road and cut a direct route to their porch.
“Sam,” Mr. Larsson said half under his breath, “go inside.”
Sam edged toward the door but hovered in the doorway, her curiosity fixing her gaze on the hurrying figure that now climbed the porch steps. She noticed the corner of his book sticking out from the bag slung over his shoulder.
“Mr. Larsson? Ted Larsson? And Mr. Jedsoe, I presume,” he said a little breathlessly, offering his hand to each man in turn to shake. Reluctantly, each did. “My name is Joe Ricci, and I’m a linguist and cryptoanthropologist over at Miskatonic University in Arkham. I know it’s late, but I was wondering if I might have a quick word with you on a matter of great importance.”
“Sam,” Mr. Larsson said again, and this time, his tone left no room for debate. While he spoke, he kept his eyes on the city man, Ricci. “Go inside now. Go on.”
She did as she was told, but hung around the store counter nonetheless, trying to make words out of the furtive whispers and insistent tones from the other side of the door. She peered out the window in time to see Mr. McCauley’s pickup come careening into the parking lot of Larsson’s General Store, startling the men talking on the porch. She heard shouts and barks as Mr. McCauley swung open his door and ran around to the passenger side. When the men saw him haul Mr. Becker, looking half-conscious and badly bruised, out of his truck, they ran to help. Mr. McCauley and Mr. Ricci each took up under one of his arms and dragged the man toward the store, while Messrs. Larsson and Jedsoe made sure the way was clear.
Sam backed away from the window as the five men burst through the door. Mr. Ricci looked just as breathless as he had before, and the men beside him, with tight lips and narrowed eyes, spoke in low, anxious tones to each other. Mr. Jedsoe moved away from the others to clear yesterday’s newspaper off the small round wooden table where sometimes customers sat and enjoyed a light breakfast before going about their day. Mr. McCauley set Mr. Becker’s slumping form down on a chair, repositioned him when he started to slide, and pulled a chair nearby for himself.
“Anyone know what the hell is going on? Who did this t’ Becker? He came stumblin’ outta th’ woods all glowin’ and bleedin’ and somethin’ behind him was wailin’ like a banshee. Becker’s eyes – I could see he was skairt a’ that thing followin’ behind. And then I saw it, too...oh God, I saw it. So I grabbed him and put him in the car with Hunter, and got him outta thar.”
“Should we take ‘im to County General?” Mr. Jedsoe peered down at the unconscious man, whose narrow chest shuttered with heavy, uneven breaths.
“Won’t go. Last thing he said before passin’ out was ‘No hospitals.’ Very firm about that.”
“So what, then?” Mr. Larsson asked.
“Excuse me, did you say he was glowing?”
“What?” Mr. McCauley turned to Mr. Ricci impatiently, then to his friends. He gestured at the newcomer. “And who the hell is this guy?”
“Joe Ricci.” He stuck his hand out to Mr. McCauley, but dropped it a moment later beneath Mr. McCauley’s suspicious gaze. “From the university. I came here, uh, looking specifically for Mr. Becker. Well, for his farm. You see, we’ve made some, uh, discoveries regarding some things going on out there just beyond his farm limits, in what I think is commonly referred to as the Faulkesville woods?”
Mr. Ricci drew his book from his bag and plunked it down on the table. Sam crept closer, peering around Mr. Ricci, fairly confident the men were too caught up in the night’s goings-on to notice she was still there. Up close, she could see that the book was a very old, cloth-bound tome whose title had long ago faded into the fibers of its cover. However, she noticed when he opened the book that its pages indicated a kind of strange series of numbers, symbols, and sketched illustrations of the most fantastic and terrible beings. Some looked like skeletal beings in rags and others...others had limbs and eyes and mouths where such things shouldn’t be.
“See these,” he pointed to the symbols and formulae, “are distilled invocations and incantations, some taken from the archaic and sinister Pnakotic Manuscripts – a hell of a find there – and others from Liber Ivonis and De Vermis Mysteriis, some from Cultes des Ghoules and Unaussprechlichen Kulten, and some from the diabolic Necronomicon of the mad Arab – “
Seeing the look of puzzlement on the faces of the men around him, he switched gears. “They are all specifically spells, sort of, for opening a kind of floodgate to a place beyond our known universe, a place beyond stars, even. In most of the books I mentioned, there is only a fragment of the process, as even the authors found the prospect too ghastly to include in its entirety. There are supposedly...things...gods or monsters, formless and powerful, and their presence anywhere alters time and space. Opening this floodgate allows that piece of their home seat out in the starless void to pour into the caster’s home world or dimension. It pours in a little at a time, and it changes everything around it. Everything that comes through, from vegetation to...other things...it’s all unstable, deadly. Predatory. And it spreads, changing things, and then more pours through, and more changes. To date, no one has ever succeeded in letting more than a little leak in – a strange patch of woods, some wild, wrong, unwholesome patch of farmland – but we have reason to believe the situation is more serious out
beyond Mr. Becker’s farm.”
The men remained quiet for several long minutes, alternately searching Mr. Ricci’s face for truth, glancing down at the book of poisoned thoughts, and scanning the dark outside for...something. Something not right.
“Wha...Why would anyone do that?” Mr. Jedsoe finally asked with a shiver.
Mr. Ricci sighed, almost apologetically. “Supposedly, the reward for opening one of these floodgates is unlimited knowledge – so much knowledge as to allow the possessor to bend the physical properties of the world and passages of time to one’s own will.”
“Hogwash,” Mr. Larsson said with a dismissive wave, but Mr. McCauley held up a hand. In his face, Sam could see a dead seriousness and the creeping beginnings of dread. She’d never seen Mr. McCauley, one of the toughest, bravest men she knew, look like that.
“I seen things, Ted,” he said. “I don’t know if’n this man is crazy or not, with this book a’ scribbles and sech, but I do know somethin’ that ain’t right is out there in those woods. Somethin’ worse than that one time – you know the thing I mean.”
Sam didn’t, but evidently, Mr. Larsson did, judging by the look on his face. He said nothing, and Mr. McCauley nodded for the city man to continue.
“This book also has a way to stop up the floodgate out there, and maybe force whatever’s come through back to where it came from.”
Wordlessly, the men gathered up guns and assorted supplies – tobacco, water, bandages. Mr. Ricci, confused, stuttered protests until Mr. McCauley clapped a hand on his shoulder and handed him the book from the table.