668, page 12
Bog-Muggoth, he prayed with head momentarily bowed and even though he knew the Older Deities hated casual contact, if You know what’s going on here, I wish You’d tell me so Marsha doesn’t get her girdle all in a bunch, You know how she is about things not going as planned.
He waited.
There was no answer.
Kthulkucuth, are you listening? Sazrihanaz? Azmedium? Ghiumoshikh?
Nothing.
He sighed and straightened his cuffs.
As always, the Older Deities were leaving such trivial matters to him to take care of. As always. Even when Howmaster had been alive and foaming, it had been none other than John who had to make sure the street didn’t know what was happening under its very collective nose; it had been none other than John who had used his masculine wiles to see to it that the women didn’t fuss about womanly things instead of tilings that really mattered; and it had been good old reliable John who had clubbed his former wife over her head and released the hand brake that sent that little sports coupe plummeting into the ravine to explode in a ball of flame that—
Stop! he ordered; stop!
“John, dear?”
He smiled at his wife, touched his jacket to be sure the perfect weapon was still there, noticed that the others were touching themselves in curious places too, and took a deep breath to gather his resources.
“My friends,” he said with a satiric smile, “I do believe I’m hungry.”
“Damn right,” Dr. Smith growled.
“Perhaps Mr. Montana…” His smile became a feral grin. “Perhaps Mr. Montana is ready now to receive us.” He climbed the steps and looked at Wally. “Mr. Putney, if you would be so kind as to open the door?”
Wally nodded at the honor, took the knob in hand, braced himself, and turned it.
“It’s locked,” he said.
“I see,” said John. Lord, he was so weary of all these puny obstacles. “Then perhaps you would be so kind as to break one of the windows there, climb in, come around, and unlock the door so that we might enter in the proper manner?”
Wally tenderly disengaged his wife’s clinging hand from his arm, walked over to one of the high windows, and said, “The shade’s down.”
“Yes,” John said, “it is.”
“There might be a trap on the other side.”
“It’s entirely possible, Wallace, entirely possible. Mr. Montana, for all that he is an actor, albeit a Scots Baron, is clearly not a stupid man.”
“I mean, John, that since he is, we’ve all agreed, a clever man, there could be a guillotine blade in there, or broken glass all over the floor, or a shotgun tied to the back of a chair or something like that.”
Dr. Smith hugged his black bag to his chest. “Jesus, just break the glass, Wally. Go for it.”
“Easy for you to say. You’ve got the bandages.”
John fluttered his eyes shut and prayed for strength as only the rich can when faced with people who were also rich, but stupid too.
Then, from out of nowhere:
“Be … ware.”
They turned as one, the women gasping as usual, the men scowling.
Ivan Vlaskovich, ironing board at the ready, pointed a quivering, half-gloved finger at them. “Be … ware the door locked from the inside, for that door is locked and shall not be opened.”
“We know that,” said John coldly.
“Ah.”
“And it’s locked.”
Ivan shrugged expressively. “Told you that already. You wouldn’t listen. Not my problem.” He wandered away, into the night, into the patchy fog.
There was a silence again.
“Well,” said the familiar stranger with Pilandra Eddye, “I hope you won’t mind if I break it in then?”
John shook his head.
The familiar stranger moved away from the door, braced his arm against his side, aimed his shoulder, and fairly vibrated with the energy he sent thrumming into his powerful legs as he prepared to launch himself at the door’s center.
“Someone’s coming,” Marsha said, her ear to the door, her eye on the familiar stranger so she could duck away in time not to get smashed.
The familiar stranger launched.
The door opened.
Ivan walked by in the other direction and called out to John: “I could have told you that, too. You don’t listen, that’s not my problem.”
And Chita Juarel, looking down the hall toward the blond blur now approaching the kitchen, said, “Hey, who was that patched man?”
VII
The Guiding Light
1
There were any number of repugnant and repulsive aspects to basements throughout the civilized world; so many, in fact, that Kent was at least as unenchanted by them as he was by attics; perhaps more so. Basements brought to mind dungeons. Dungeons brought to mind the cold and rainy winter afternoon he had explored the one he’d discovered below the basement of his family manse. He had been quite young then, and unaware that getting into the dungeon from the basement had been altogether far too easy for one of such tender years.
He almost didn’t get out.
And when he did get out, his astonished nanny punished him for soiling his clothes by crawling around the basement without permission. What she did was lock him in the dungeon. Harsh, perhaps, but the stay stood him in good stead in future since it enabled him to practice his escaping skills to such an extent that, by the time he was nine, his mother had given up all hope and had the dungeon walled up except for the secret door beneath the roses in the greenhouse.
Thus, although no one noticed, it was a far, far better thing that Kent did, standing in the basement by himself and not screaming, than he had ever done before, which was scream.
He stood now in front of the ominously innocuous refrigerator and stared at the door stained with stains that defied identification, although he had a pretty good idea what some of them were. Chita had closed it before she’d gone upstairs; he didn’t want to reopen it. Nothing good ever happened when you opened a refrigerator when you weren’t supposed to. Even when you’re a kid, you open a refrigerator door to see what’s inside that you might want to snack on and all the cold gets out, your mother wants to know if you’re trying to air-condition the kitchen, and before you can think of a decent excuse it’s a weekend back in the dungeon with milk, stale biscuits, and Nanny to show you how the Iron Maiden works; not that she was all that pliable herself.
But if he didn’t go in there, and without further delay, uncover the source of the pulsing green light, then find the dreaded, legendary Bingomomicron and bum it, he would have to return upstairs and meet the new neighbors gathering on the porch. From the sounds of it, they weren’t in a terribly good mood. Even if they had been in a rousing good mood, he reminded himself as he reached for the handle, he probably wouldn’t want to meet them anyway because they wanted to kill him.
It was so difficult sometimes to understand Americans.
Nevertheless, it was one of those times for a major decision which, with any luck, he wouldn’t have to make.
Quentin hovered uncertainly at the foot of the staircase. “Are you sure you want to go?”
“Bloody hell, of course I don’t want to go,” Kent snapped irritably.
The young man shrugged as if he didn’t see any problem, moral or otherwise. “Then don’t go.”
“Oh, yes,” Sheila agreed. “Don’t.”
They make a lot of sense, he thought.
An abrupt burst of thundering footsteps above made him glance in alarm toward the rough-hewn, rotting beams; a sudden crash and tinkling of shattered glass made him stare at the basement door; a subsequent stream of freshwater curses that made Sheila blush, clear as they were through the floor and the door, made him decide that he did not want to meet the man who had done whatever had been done up there. Oddly enough, his state of mind—extreme emotional turmoil and immoderate unease—made the ruckus sound as if some drunken fool had run at top speed through the length of the building and smashed through the back door, but something like that only happened in the movies. Chita, he reckoned, had probably beat the shit out of someone who had tried to play house with its keeper.
More footsteps.
Chita’s muffled voice in a query, and someone responding rather formally.
The ghost of the unearthly chilled wind he had felt so clearly in the upstairs hall just before he discovered that there wasn’t anything in the attic making all that noise drifted through the basement, swaying cobwebs and emotions, and raising gooseflesh on his arms.
A glistening fat spider paused on a narrow splintered beam overhead and checked him out for possible suburban renewal. Without any entomological training at all, he noticed that the plump-bodied, long-limbed arachnid was green. Neon green. Like the one he had spotted in the back parlor earlier that evening. This one, however, had a much more aggressive stance, a red stripe across its bulbous head, and protruding black eyeballs that seemed to watch him with such intensity that he was instantly reminded of one of his babysitters, the fat hairy one with the cape and tight pants who had been imported from the north of Spain, and who wanted to play bullfight with him and kept trying to get him to say “Moo.” Kent, already wise to the ways of his imported babysitters, fashioned a pair of horns from Cook’s carving set. The fat hairy Spaniard lasted less than a week, and the stains were out of the carpet by Thursday.
Seconds passed.
The spider waved a hairy leg and scrambled away.
Kent experienced no relief; he knew this was only another harbinger, one of those damn portent things that portended bigger, uglier, deadlier spiders to come.
All right, all right, make up your mind, man, he ordered himself sternly; dithering is one of your strong points, but it won’t save your life this time.
And having finally made up his mind, he wished he hadn’t but there was no turning back now. The Thespian had given way; the Baron was now in charge. The idiot.
He waited for the organ.
It played not a single note.
Nuts; it would have been a nice touch. Fanfare in B-flat for Titled Moron and Funeral.
“Quentin,” he said, using all the bravado and bluster he could muster under the about to be dire circumstances, “stay down here, if you would, please. Make sure no one follows me into the refrigerator. Bash them if they try.”
Quentin was clearly awed. “But sir, surely you’re being needlessly brave.”
Tell me about it, he thought grumpily; but I don’t see you volunteering to be the Hamtucket idiot.
“But I’ll do my best.”
“All I can ask,” Kent told him.
Quentin barely managed a smile.
Kent adjusted his cardigan, hitched up his belt, polished his boots on the back of his jeans.
“It’s been an honor to meet you, sir.”
Kent glanced at him and nodded. “I’m not dead yet, you know.”
Quentin blinked in confusion. “Oh, I didn’t mean that. Really. I was just saying that it’s been an honor to meet you, that’s all.”
“Okay.”
Kent pulled out the gun, and checked to be sure it was loaded.
“Just in case … you know.”
“Cork it,” Kent said quietly as he hefted the cleaver several times to be sure it hadn’t suddenly turned into rubber.
“Can I have your suitcase?”
Kent glared.
Quentin backed away hastily, mimed zipping his lips shut, and bowed his head.
Praising himself for great strength of character that left the boy still breathing without artificial means, Kent turned away, puffed his cheeks, blew a breath, whispered an ancient Gaelic prayer for strength and a clearly marked exit, and slowly, gingerly, opened the refrigerator door, bracing himself for a lord-like leap into the middle of Connecticut in case some awful, indescribable monster charged him from the uncharted depths of the freezer compartment.
There was nothing in there, however, but the omnipresent green light, pulsing preternaturally into the room, turning everything within its reach an ominous shade of red.
He noted instantly that the light wasn’t nearly as strong as it had been when Chita had first discovered it, nor did there seem to be anything shifting and sneaking around in there, setting up a monstrous ambush. In fact, when he leaned closer and examined the way more carefully, all he could see was a crude, plank-and-beam supported, hand-excavated tunnel beginning where the back of the refrigerator ought to be. It appeared to be fairly straight, if a bit rugged, and because the light emanated from the as yet invisible far end, he could see just about everything in between, including the bleached bones of small animals scattered on the dirt floor, and the homed skull of a charging rhino loosely nailed to one wall. At that point he regretted not bringing the family claymore as well, but it was difficult enough getting it into the suitcase’s secret compartment, much less hauling it through airport security. They tended to question things like that these days, more’s the pity.
I do not want to go in there, he told anyone who may have been psychically eavesdropping; I have seen places like this before, and they fall down on people just when they least expect it, burying them forever in an unmarked tomb of dust and rock. They even write songs about them.
A muffled thumping and scraping from above distracted him, and he glanced over his shoulder. “Sheila, go up and help Chita deal with those people.”
“Who?”
“Chita.”
“Chita who?”
“Chita Juarel,” he answered patiently. “The one who used to have brown hair and now has black hair? Kind of curly?” He waited. “She has an accent?” He waited. “The housekeeper?” The young woman wrinkled her brow in puzzlement, looked at Quentin, and nodded. “Oh. Miss Kerwin.”
“Her name isn’t Kerwin. It’s Juarel. Remember?”
“Okay, whatever,” she said brightly, kissed Quentin’s cheek cheerily, and skipped up the steps. Paused at the door and said, “What am I supposed to do to help her?”
He looked at his gun, at the edge of the cleaver’s blade, and reminded himself that what he was thinking about doing just wasn’t done. Well, it was done, but it wasn’t legal. “Serve the food, make them laugh, how the bloody hell should I know? just don’t let them down here, do you understand? No matter what, keep them upstairs.”
“Then what am I doing here?” Quentin wanted to know, hefting a dull hatchet he’d discovered rusting on a bench at the back of the room.
“Protecting my back,” Kent said, “in case someone comes down.”
“What?” Sheila pouted and stamped her foot in a fit of pique she scraped off daintily on the step. “You just told me not to let anyone down here, didn’t you? What’s the matter, don’t you trust me to follow a simple instruction like don’t let anybody down here?” She shook her head wearily. “He doesn’t trust me, Quentin, I can tell. I don’t know why I bother. All the work and no thanks, that’s what I always get. Sheila do this, Sheila do that. Like the time Father tried to ignite—”
“Darling, he trusts you, honestly,” Quentin assured her quickly. “Don’t you trust her, Kent? Of course he does. I can see that. Really.”
“Then,” she said, brightening, while someone else shattered something else up there in the kitchen, “why don’t you come with me?”
“Because I have to stay here.”
Immediately, Kent bent over and stepped hastily into the potentially treacherous, unused refrigeration unit, less because he wanted to and more because if he didn’t, he’d probably do something drastic enough to put him behind bars for an unnaturally long time. As it was, he could still hear them debating their positions relative to the possible end of the universe and the basement staircase as he moved warily out of the refrigerator’s porcelain bowels and into the tunnel, his eyes protesting the waning strength of the green glow, his gun hand twitching every time he thought he heard a noise.
Then, less than ten feet away from the entrance at Number 668, he was abruptly enveloped in silence. No voices, no breaking of whatever had been broken, and nothing even slightly hinting at unnamable horrors from ahead.
He supposed it was a good sign; he supposed he ought to have his head examined.
He moved on.
Moisture dripped in cold droplets from the ceiling. Puddles formed darkly on the uneven floor. Scurrying dark things scurried in and out of shadows formed by the bulks of great jagged boulders protruding at odd angles from the walls. He imagined there were rats in the walls as well, and couldn’t help a violent shudder. He didn’t like rats. They revolted him. It stemmed from the time some years ago when his mother had imported a herd of them from Norway and tried to train them to bring grenades into his bedroom during the night. Luckily, the little buggers kept playing with the pins she’d smeared with fresh cheese, thus saving his life on more than one occasion, but wreaking havoc and holes on the family manse foundation.
He moved on.
A faint rumbling rumbled train-like through the tunnel, and he froze as bits and clots of moist dirt pattered softly from the ceiling. The green light flickered. He prayed that whatever caused it wouldn’t lose power. If it did, he’d be in the dark; not that he fully understood everything anyway, but dark is dark when there is no light, and he’d just as soon forgo the experience.
The rumbling stopped; he moved on.
And when he finally saw the outline of the end of the tunnel, he began to wish he had more than one life to live, just in case; and, simultaneously, another way to put it. One life had a decidedly macabre and permanent ring to it. For some reason it made him think of a fragile soap bubble, bouncing briefly in the breeze before bursting and vanishing.
Charming, he thought; keep it up, then cut your throat, why not.
He moved on.
Sheila marveled at the way Chita, or Hester, adroitly assembled the guests in the back parlor without bruising their egos or thighs. Though they stared a little disconcertedly at the little folding chairs with the stenciled robins and chickadees, and silently questioned Chita’s snug jeans and ruffled shirt, they said nothing as they took their assigned places; why, it’s almost as if it had all been rehearsed.
