668, page 7
And Wally Putney smiled smugly to himself.
“You know, Caroline,” he said as they stepped into the brisk October night, “I almost feel sorry for that Kent Montana.” He chuckled and hugged her arm to his side. “Almost. But not quite.”
“Oh … Rex,” she breathed.
“Rex?”
“Wally!”
“I’m sorry, darling. It’s the fog. Messes up my ears.”
But she didn’t see the look that crossed his face.
And he didn’t see the first step.
“Wally!” she scolded after he had hit the bottom.
And Wally Putney, for the first time in his life, almost glared.
Meanwhile…
Dr. Kenilworth Smith paced his cluttered living room apprehensively and not very carefully. Tables had been knocked askew, a chair had toppled, and his bottle of bourbon, empty though it was, had broken on the hearth.
The problem, however, was not the room’s disarray; it was his black bag.
He didn’t know if he should bring it or not.
While there was bound to be a lot of blood and abrasions and lacerations and contusions and missing limbs, if he walked into Number 668 with the tell-tale bag in hand, Kent Montana might suspect something. And if he suspected something, something might go wrong. And if something went wrong, it might all go wrong and what the hell would they do then, the Older Deities coming and all.
He cleared his throat; he scratched his cheek; he paced once more and knocked over the grandfather clock his grandfather had brought over from the Old Country. The subsequent bedlam of dented chimes and sprung springs forced him to a decision:
He would bring the bag.
If anyone was to be so gauche as to ask, he could say that he had brought it with him to Omaha and hadn’t had a chance to drop it off at the house before coming over. Although Caroline would certainly see through the ruse instantly, he knew he could deal with her later. It was Montana he was concerned about.
Maybe he should leave it; it might be more trouble than it was worth.
He scowled at the darkened room, scowled at his vacillating indecision, and finally, decisively, stomped into his office and grabbed the bag.
The hell with it.
If they made a fuss, he would expose them all and be damned to them. Except for Rex. He had no idea who the hell Rex was, but he had the distinct feeling that exposing Rex wouldn’t be such a good idea. He didn’t know why; he called it physician’s instinct, and save for the time when he had treated Pilandra Eddye for that persistent chest cold last summer in Hawaii, his instinct was never wrong.
A few adjustments were made to the bag’s contents, and ten minutes later he stood at attention at the living room window, watched the pre-Halloween wind tousle the last of the dead leaves in the trees, watched the fog drift languidly up and down the street, and hefted the bag in both hands, just to be sure he could feel the reassuring weight of the weapon hiding under all those drugs.
He smiled.
A little dog howled.
Well, Mr. Montana whoever you are, he thought gleefully, it’s time to get you up on the old examination table and see what you’re made of.
“Heh,” he chuckled evilly to the empty room. “Heh. Heh. Heh.”
Rex Regal, as he was known to the inhabitants of Langford Place, hid in the shadows under an oak tree at the north end of the street. His tuxedo was so perfectly tailored that it was impossible to see the change when he pulled the eye patch from his pocket and settled it over his left eye; nor did the tuxedo betray the weapon he carried in his inside, left breast pocket.
From his hip pocket he pulled a jeweled compact and, using the streetlamp for light, checked his disguise.
He nodded satisfaction.
He straightened his spine.
He took the first step down the street and smiled when he realized that momentous journeys such as this always begin with the first step, that tonight was the first night of the first day of the rest of his life, that all things come to he who waits.
That Kent Montana was a dead man and didn’t know it.
His laugh was short and sharp.
Simultaneously …
“Rex?” said Kent Montana, halfway up the attic steps.
Meanwhile…
“Son,” said Pilandra Eddye as she escorted her son to the door, “I’m very proud of you.”
“Mom, I still feel like a jerk.”
She winked playfully. “But you’re a cute jerk, you jerk. Now get out there and … knock ‘em dead.”
He kissed her cheek.
She kissed his cheek and pushed him playfully out the door.
She waved until the fog and wind swallowed him.
She closed the door and leaned against it.
“Bog-Muggoth,” she said, “you screw me around this time, I’ll have your spacial balls.”
Then she hastened into the kitchen where she was boiling water so that she could, if called upon, deliver Sheila Verlin’s illegitimate baby; unless it was Caroline’s. All these years, she’d never been able to keep them straight.
Except, of course, for Rex.
She giggled.
She sighed her relief. At least he wouldn’t be a party to the party that night.
She froze.
My god, suppose he was there. Never in his life had he been able to pass up a party.
My god, suppose he saw … Quentin!
My god.
Sheila Verlin, who had just turned twenty a few months ago, stood forlornly at the front window of her struggling home and watched through the intermittent gaps in the fog and the wind as the primary elite of Langford Place prepared to gather for entrance into Number 668.
When she spotted Quentin in his breath-taking seersucker Sunday best crossing the street, waving cheerily to kindly Dr. Smith, who was standing on his porch and ugly enough to keep the fog and wind at bay and prevent her darling Quentin from tripping into the gutters, her impressionable heart leapt high and she choked with suppressed emotion. Then her pulse raced until she caught up with it and whirled to the others strewn pathetically about the room.
“I don’t care,” she announced defiantly, her delicate hands fisted petitely at her sides. “You can take care of yourselves for one night, do you hear me? This night is mine! This is my life! This is my song of independence. This,” she declared, “is where I get off!”
“Darling?” her long-suffering father croaked from his seven-position hospital bed in front of the large-screen television. “Would you mind changing my oxygen tank first?”
“Sweetheart?” gasped her mother from her motorized wheelchair beside the hospital bed in front of the large-screen television set. “Would you please fetch my I’ll-have-a-heart-attack-and-die-if-I-don’t-take-them pills before you go?”
Her sister waddled pregnantly into the room. “I think it’s time.”
Her brother withdrew into a corner of his cage and whimpered about the sky falling and wasn’t anybody paying attention to his needs for a change?
Sheila stared angrily at them all. If she left, they would be helpless; if she stayed, she would miss out meeting this mysterious Montana Quentin spoke so often about; if she left, they might all perish or get in pretty bad shape; if she stayed, she’d miss out messing around with Quentin’s seersucker; if she left; if she stayed.
She whirled back to the window and watched a sleek taxi pull up in front of Number 697 to wait for the Lastes. Oh Lord, she thought, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz and get me the hell out of here?
“Darling?”
“Sweetheart?”
“Sister?”
“Whimper.”
God, she thought irreverently, I hate being a saint.
Later, but not by much …
The marble winged woman flexed her wings again and dropped the vase.
“Damn,” she said.
The water boiled in the marble bowl.
IV
Another World
Out in space, where no one can hear you scream because if they were in a position to do so they’d be just as dead as you were about to be even before you had a chance to scream, something awfully sinister and large and suspicious moved around the misty edges of the Crab Nebula, just two and a half parsecs from the spiraling fringe of the Moon-Bog Nebula. It might have been mites, but reputable astronomers doubted it. Rather, it seemed to be movement of a kind none of them had ever observed before, in space.
It appeared to be a great, spreading, thick, lightless, undulating black cloud.
Or one hell of a large malleable spaceship.
Within minutes of the first verifiable sightings, telephones began ringing frantically in various civilian and military offices around the world; cautionary telegrams were sent between heads of state; excited conversations exploded excitedly in executive cafeterias and hallways, private parking lots and public bars; infrared, photo-spectronic, stop-motion, and space photographs were taken and developed, hasty sketches were made in trembling freehand, and boring verbal descriptions were recorded for oral history.
That this black … thing … seemed to be heading for Earth was not debatable; what it would do when it got here, on the other hand, was something none of the astronomers wanted to consider. That was something for their bosses, their governments, and their cheap-labor graduate assistants to worry about. All they, the astronomers, wanted was an opportunity for a little pure science just to liven things up.
It never occurred to any of them that the steadily increasing numbers of people chanting and wailing and prostrating and humbling and flagellating themselves in the streets and alleys and strip malls of every major capital in the world except Paris were more right than they would ever know. At least the prostrated ones were—they wouldn’t have to fall down when they were squashed by the undulating shadow out of space.
Stars began to vanish as the black … thing … approached.
Ambient light waves refracted back upon themselves for a second look.
Sound waves were muffled.
One Siberian scientist, visiting the exotic hinterlands of Washington State with his zaftig teenage niece, suggested rather timidly to his skeptical colleagues that the black … thing … seemed almost… alive.
Another scientist in Edinburgh suggested the same thing to his wife.
Still another, in Athens, was so bold as to proclaim it.
Nobody, however, took them seriously.
Too bad.
V
The Romance of Helen Trent
1
She met this guy who looked pretty much like Rex Regal, except that it wasn’t, fell in love, had lots of troubles, solved most of them and ignored the others, had lots of children who gave her lots of joy and more troubles, and a whole passel of grandchildren.
Then she died.
The end.
VI
The Gathering Storm
1
Kent was not enamored of attics, nor did he like them very much. In his experience, not counting the time his nanny had locked him in one with a ravenous boar, they were usually filled with lots of musty dead clothes hanging in cracked plastic cocoons from hooks pounded into rafters, dead steamer trunks filled with dead clothes smelling like stale lavender and moldy bread, dead cardboard boxes and orange crates filled with dead artifacts of forgotten childhoods and previous marriages, piles of dead magazines and newspapers and letters, and lots of invisible things that weren’t dead crawling around among all the dead things. There was also dust and cobwebs and the dried husks of invisible things that finally died among all the dead things.
Thus, when his flashlight beam swept boldly through the attic of Number 668, he allowed himself a modicum of suspicious surprise when he perceived that there was nothing in the attic that looked even remotely dead, musty, or rotting, except for the mummy case. In fact, except for the mummy case, there wasn’t anything in the attic at all.
He frowned.
Curious.
Nevertheless, he made a guarded but thorough circumnavigation of the huge, almost empty room just in case some dead things of significance were lurking in the corners which, he noted with another modicum of mild surprise, there weren’t any of since the attic was round even though the outside of the attic, including the roof, wasn’t.
He frowned.
Curious.
He wondered what Hester would make of this apparent anomaly in New England housing construction, and decided that he didn’t want to know. It was enough that she believed that he believed in all this blather about Older Deities, sacrifices, the end of the world, and Howmaster Maclemmon being the cause of it all. Howie the prick had been the cause of a lot of things during his dubious lifetime, but precipitating the end of the world by outer space gods arriving in gold chariots made in Peru wasn’t one of them. It was, he was still positive, all part and parcel of the man’s plan.
The uncomfortable house, the outlandish story, the housekeeper, the spooky neighborhood—Maclemmon had obviously arranged every bit of it from the start, and had he not died so suddenly and so mysteriously and so weirdly, no doubt there would be even more.
He grinned.
Not bad, actually, Howie old son, he thought in memorial commemoration even though the man had been a thoroughgoing bastard; the organ’s a bit much though.
Of course, when he thought about it, there was the mysterious and weird death.
“Stop,” he muttered as he completed his prowling.
Howmaster, for all his faults, had always kept himself in excellent condition.
“Stop.”
And why, if this was all part of the wee bastard’s final elaborate scam and probable bilking, did his hair turn white overnight?
“Enough.”
What in fact had Howie inadvertently or otherwise set in motion that had so unnerved him that he had run screaming into the middle of the street in the middle of the night and dropped rather dead?
Kent, he scolded sternly, belt up. You’re playing right into his hands, don’t you see that? confusing yourself with a lot of heavy thinking, a lot of penetrating questions, and a lot of loose and flashy speculation, when the answers are clear as the nose on your face.
The flashlight went out.
He yelped, banged it frantically against the wall, and sagged in relief when the beam once again soared weakly across the spacious room, this time highlighting a long knotted cord hanging from a rusty hook embedded in a ceiling beam. Closer inspection proved it to be a cord filled with knots, and he realized that if he should be stupid enough to pull on it, it would release a spring-ladder which would, if he were dumb enough to climb it, take him to the roof where, no doubt, Howmaster had his telescope bolted, and probably a trap rigged to blow Kent into the next town.
Curious.
He headed back to the stairs.
Say there, m’lord, a part of him that obviously didn’t belong in a situation like this asked, aren’t you going to check that mummy case over there?
He paused.
It was, all things considered, a fair question, and one any reasonable human being would ask if they too were stupid enough to be up here.
However, in equal fairness to his lordship, there were a lot of curious things up here, and he definitely wasn’t one of them. The mummy case was indeed arresting in an exotic, deathlike sort of morbid way, but it wasn’t encased in sparkling rare jewels or banded in glittering Nile gold or etched in reflective Memphis silver or marked with an ancient Cairo curse written in cryptic hieroglyphics at the base. As a matter of fact, it had Howmaster’s pudgy face painted on top and the ensuing replica of his equally pudgy body was surrounded by all the usual Egyptian-looking things mummy cases had on them, and there was no way in hell he was going to open it.
Then it occurred to him that while the attorney had made some passing mention of Maclemmon’s funeral, a simple affair with only a handful of paid mourners, he hadn’t actually said that Howie had been buried. At least not in a cemetery. At least not in the ground.
He looked at the mummy case.
The mummy case looked back.
“No,” he whispered. “Too obvious.”
So open it.
The doorbell gonged.
Instincts in both a butler and self-preservation sense instantly swept over him, and without a backward glance at the mummy case, or the knotted cord, he hurried down to the first floor, dusted the attic’s dusty residue from his clothes as best he could, and opened the door.
“My god!” gasped an extraordinarily blond young man as he stumbled back a step at Kent’s appearance. “My god, I don’t believe it, it’s really you!”
Kent waited for the Russian to show up, unless this young man was the Russian with a shave and a seersucker suit that was, at best, a size too large. Then, as the young man attempted to compose himself, he squinted as something tingled at the back of his mind still up there with the mummy case.
“I know you, don’t I?” he said at last.
“I’m dead,” the young man answered.
There is a lesson here, Kent thought, that I am doomed not to learn.
The young man blushed handsomely in a manly sort of way, and shoved a nervous hand through his shaggy hair. “That is, I was dead when I saw you. Or you saw me. But I didn’t know you saw me, see. I was dead, see, and you …” He laughed. “That doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
Suddenly Kent smiled broadly. “A-hah! Of course! Yes! You … don’t tell me now, I’ll get it, I’m rather good at this sort of thing … you were the cousin murdered by Vanessa’s twin sister, Janine, who pinned the crime on Vanessa so that she wouldn’t marry Herbert, even though Herbert was already married to Lillian, who secretly loved you but was going to marry Herbert so that she could divorce Steve and have your child instead of Steve’s or Herbert’s, even though both Steve and Herbert would think the child was theirs.”
“Lord,” said Quentin Eddye, awe settling handsomely over his features.
“Baron will do nicely,” Kent told him kindly, and shook his hand. “So what have you been doing since you died?”
