Gothic, page 20
“I think we’ve heard enough of this,” Tyson mumbles. “Get out of my house.”
For the first time, Diana seems thrown off. Her confidence shaken. “Mr. Parks, I don’t think you understand…”
“I said enough!” Tyson roars, slamming a hand on the table and standing so abruptly he bangs the edge with his hip, knocking over the empty wine bottle, which Billy expertly catches and rights. “It’s been super-wild, honey, and insanely entertaining, but now it’s time for you to go.”
“Dad…” Violet stands as well, her face pleading. “Dad, we should think about this.”
Tyson glares at his daughter, incredulous. “What? No. NO.”
Billy looks from face-to-face, as if trying to figure out which one is making the most sense. Sarah hasn’t moved. She just sits, staring blankly at the table.
“Let’s go, lady,” Tyson says roughly. “Out! Now!”
Diana rises gracefully, unhurried. She nods to Tyson and picks up her bag from the floor. She takes a step toward the living room, then stops and tilts her head downward, eyes on the floor rather than the people behind her, as if she knows the futility of her words. “Perhaps… if I came back, gave you time to discuss it…”
“If I see you at my door again, I’ll call the police,” Tyson says, breathing heavily. “I’ll tell them you’re just another shit-bird fanatic who won’t stop harassing me. And know this, lady. The cops around here? They know me. They like me. I’ve contributed handsomely to their causes, and they’ve taken care of screwballs like you before, and I’m sure they’ll gladly do it again. Now, let’s go, baby. Crazy called and they want you home.”
Diana walks another few steps toward the door, and this time when she stops, she turns all the way around, her face serene, head slightly bowed, servile. “I promise I won’t bother you again, Mr. Parks. I did not mean to offend or upset you or your lovely family. What’s yours is yours. You are not thieves. You had no idea what you were getting into. If anything, I feel sorry for you.” She glances back to the table, where Billy and Sarah still sit, and beyond which Violet stands, arms wrapped around herself protectively. “For all of you.”
She takes a step toward Tyson, rests a hand on his forearm, gazes into his eyes.
“Could I ask one small favor before I leave? I’ve come a long way, after all.”
Tyson rolls his eyes, clenches his hands into fists. “What?”
“May I please, just… see it?” she asks, focusing her penetrating black eyes on his.
Like the eyes of Argus, he thinks, and feels himself weakening.
“Fine,” he says, and is the most surprised person in the room to hear the word leave his mouth. “I guess. If it will get you out of here, then what the hell.” He shakes his head, frustrated, confused. “Come on, then,” he says, and starts toward the hall. “Let’s make this quick.”
Part Eight
Violent Ends
Forty-two
Tyson leads Diana to his office. He opens the door and steps inside.
“Hang on a second,” he says, and walks through the rectangle of light slanting across the floor, disappears into the dark.
Diana stands in the light of the hallway and waits, murmured voices like the whispers of ghosts filter into the hallway from the kitchen.
After a moment, the standing lamp at the far side of the room clicks on and a pool of amber light coats a leather club chair, a burgundy rug bleeding out from beneath.
Tyson hears Diana give a small gasp but pays her no mind. He walks across the office and turns on the desk lamp, the light from which fills the area well enough to see the details of the desk’s design.
“There it is. Terrifying, isn’t it?” His tone is teasing, but part of him secretly prays the damned thing will behave itself. That the old man—Signor Croce, I presume—will not appear, all bulging white eyes and that raspy, broken record voice. He feels the slightest tickle against the bottom of his wrist, one of the small vines giving him a secret greeting. He smiles, thinking about the moment when the bitch will be gone, when they’ll all be gone, and it will just be him and the desk again, alone, doing the glorious work.
Diana takes two hesitant steps into the office and drops her large bag onto the reading chair, startling Tyson. He removes his hand from the desk, swatting away the loose tendril, all his focus now on her.
“That’s it, all right,” she says. She has her back to him.
He waits as she rummages for something inside her bag.
“It’s obvious you’ve become quite attached,” she says. “I’m so very sorry.”
Tyson opens his mouth to protest, to explain there’s nothing to be sorry about. That she’s had her peek and now it’s time to go and sell her insane stories to the tourists and street bums.
Then she turns, and he sees the gun.
His initial response is confusion. “What…”
There’s a flash and a crack, like the sound of a heavy book dropped onto a wooden floor, and Tyson is punched hard in the hip, as if clipped by a speeding car. The blow spins him around, knocks him off his feet and sends him, arms spiraling, into the bookcase behind him. He grasps for a shelf, a handhold, but finds none. He slumps, breathless, to the floor.
Diana watches him a moment, a vile expression of pity on her face.
Then she turns and strides briskly out the door.
He tries to move. He badly wants to move, to run after her, tackle her, stop her from… where is she going? Oh God, where is she GOING?
Tyson hears Sarah yell something indecipherable, then Violet screams—a loud, shrill, terrified scream. She has time to call out for him. “Dad!”
Billy’s voice, strangled and terrified. “NO!”
The CRACK of another gunshot, this time from the kitchen. Violet shrieks. Something breaks. Crashes. A plate, perhaps. Or a wine bottle.
There’s a second shot, followed immediately by a third.
Billy screams, “Violet, RUN!”
Loud footsteps. Something heavy—a body, perhaps—thumps into the wall outside his office, slamming hard enough to shake the books on the shelves.
Tyson lifts the hand he had pressed to his wound. It drips blood. “OH GOD, PLEASE STOP!”
The gun fires twice more in quick succession—CRACK CRACK—and the sound is horribly loud in the tight corridor.
More footsteps, lighter footsteps, moving fast—running—for the stairway that leads to the upper floors. They pound up—higher, higher—and then there is one final shot, this one close to the open office door. Near the bottom of the stairs.
The running footsteps stop.
All the screaming stops.
“NO!” Tyson roars, and slides an arm beneath him, tries to leverage himself to his knees so he can… What? Save them? Save WHO? That fucking madwoman just killed your best friend. Your family!
NOW GET THE FUCK UP!
Tyson rolls over and pushes his suddenly very heavy body onto one elbow. His hip burns in agony, and the broken bones in there crunch and crackle as he tries to swivel onto his ass, to confront her, to do something.
Instead, he watches, helplessly, as she walks slowly, casually, back into the office, her movements controlled and smooth, her face stoic, as if bored. The gun is held at her side, and Tyson can almost imagine a stream of death slipping from the tip of its barrel like smoke. She walks toward him, past the desk, stopping a few feet away. Just out of his reach.
She stares down, her face still expressionless.
“You miserable, psychotic bitch,” he says, tears flowing down his cheeks.
“Not really. Not quite. If you’d only taken the money, this could have been avoided. But it’s obvious you’re in too deep, Mr. Parks. It’s using you, and the damage needs to be controlled. You need to be stopped before you can do more harm. I was hoping for a different outcome, and I’m sorry I found you so late, but to be frank, you shouldn’t have been so accepting. I blame your naked greed, your imbecilic manhood.” She says this bitterly, as if scolding him for having bet on the wrong horse in the sixth race. “All this death,” she continues, looking around at figurative bodies and blood, as if wondering how it had all come about, as if she were simply a bystander who stumbled unawares into a scene rife with violence and gore.
She raises the gun and points it steadily at his chest. He wants to speak, to offer a counterargument… but is momentarily distracted by movement from behind her.
The desk.
It’s reaching for her.
At the last second, a moment before she pulled the trigger and finalized her business, Tyson thinks maybe she sensed what was happening.
Too late, of course.
Much too late.
The first black tendril shoots out with blinding speed, like an arrow sprung from a longbow, and winds itself through the trigger of the gun, coiling around the fingers she holds it with. Tyson can see her trying to pull the trigger once, twice, again and again, her teeth bared in frustration and, he’d guess, a lot of surprise. The coil of wood squeezes, and he hears the snap of her fingers as they break.
“No!” she screams.
A second strand—a long sliver of dark ivy, the longest he’d yet seen—slides quickly into her open, snarling mouth. Her beautiful dark eyes go wide. Her head jerks back violently, as if yanked by the roots of her hair. In the soft light of the desk lamp’s glow, Tyson watches her neck bulge as the branch pushes past her throat, and down.
Within seconds, more strands are reaching out for her. They wrap around her thighs, her waist, her arms and neck. As Tyson stares in a sort of numb wonder, her heels lift from the floor, her back arches and her feet twitch, as if she were having a seizure.
One black high heel clunks down onto the hardwood as she spasms and shakes in midair, a dying fly caught in the milky glue of a spider’s web. Her face lowers for one final moment, and Tyson meets the terrified eyes staring down at him. More strands of wood follow the first, plunging giddily between her lips, punching through her cheeks, so that her sagging, open mouth is filled with them, and he can’t help wonder how many made it down her throat.
Diana makes thick, liquid, gagging noises. Dense strings of blood and saliva leak from her lips. Her body is still racked by spasms, and there are sounds of fabric ripping where the points of certain branches have pushed out from within, glistening black strands breaking free from her flesh through her stomach, her throat.
Mercifully, a final tendril, slick as oil, rises like a cobra, and flashes forward, piercing her right eye. It continues, pushing itself deeper, deeper, through brain and skull, until the tip of it can be seen exiting the back of her head.
After a few moments, her body stops its movement, her eyes drifting from afraid to empty, and she slumps, lifeless, like meat on a hook, suspended by the desk’s army of limbs.
Then, just as quickly as they came, the tentacles retreat, uncoil, slip almost gently out of her body.
Diana collapses unceremoniously to the floor, legs askew, one arm folded beneath her, the other reaching for something it will never hold onto. The gun bounces against the floor, lands a couple feet away, and lays still.
Tyson watches her corpse for a moment or two, and then his world begins to fade, becoming illusory, as if his world was being swallowed by a dream.
Soon, reality is nothing more than a soft-hued, impossible fantasy.
He hardly registers the old man’s face as it lowers into his field of vision, coming to rest only inches from his own, so close that Tyson can see the whiskers on his chin, the blackheads on the fleshy nose, the bulging eyes that stare at nothing, and everything. Close enough that he could hear the wheezing of his breath, smell the foul odor of his rotten mouth.
A strong, bony hand grips Tyson’s own, pries open the fingers to reveal his palm, and place a phone receiver gently within it.
A minute later, and for the second time that week, a 911 operator receives a call from the Parks residence.
Forty-three
As Billy dies…
Slumped against the wall, a bullet in his guts. A tug at his soul.
His brain takes over in the end, offering, as it will often do with violent deaths, a sideshow. A vision to distract the dying mind when the horror and the pain prove too much for a human to bear. Typically, these are comforting scenes.
Tunnels of light. Glimpses of heaven.
Sometimes, the brain is pushed other directions. Toward truth.
In Billy’s mind, there’s a blinding flash of white and…
****
Tyson calls him into his office. The old boy has been acting strange lately, and not looking so hot. Billy’s been worried. After Sarah’s accident, he called Tyson to see if he could come by and have a drink, sit and chat about this, that and the other.
Tyson agreed and they’d spent the evening speaking about Tyson’s new book, how William Morrow had increased their offer, and things were finally looking up. Tyson told Billy how he had begun writing a new book, and he was confident it would be a giant success.
Later, they go into his office, and Tyson says he wants to show him something.
Billy notices that the windows of the office are a bright crimson, the sky the color of blood. He finds it curious, but not alarming. When Tyson calls for his attention, he forgets about the windows altogether, because what does it matter?
“It’s called The Horror, and I think it’s going to really scare some people,” Tyson says as he fiddles with the stereo behind the desk, humming to himself as he shoves in a compact disc. Billy stands by the bookcases, his eyes pulled to the books lining the shelves, reading but not registering the titles on the spines. After a few moments of this, he realizes he’s purposely avoiding looking behind him.
He doesn’t want to see that black desk, the one dominating the room.
“Rachmaninoff again? How drab,” Billy teases, pulling out an early John Farris title. He studies the bizarre cover image before sliding it back into place. Finally, he turns to face Tyson—and the desk—fighting off a cramp of pain that stabs his belly. “Seriously though, quite amazing about Morrow. Sounds like Harry’s got balls of steel. Who knew?”
Tyson nods, still humming, but says nothing as he listens to the music, sliding a hand back and forth along the top of the desk. Billy clears his throat, suddenly feeling too warm. Uncomfortably so. “Did you want to discuss, you know… what happened to Sarah? Or, hell, anything else? I’ll be honest, buddy, I’m a bit worried about you.”
Tyson moves his eyes past Billy, in the direction of the reading chair that rests at the far side of the office. He smiles oddly, and it looks as if he’s about to say something—toward the chair—when his eyes dart back to his oldest friend. The smile falls, and he appears deeply troubled.
“I guess I’ll show you now,” Tyson murmurs, frowning. Pouting, even. Billy thinks he looks like a kid who’s been caught stealing a dime store candy bar. “I gotta warn you, Billy. I don’t think you’re gonna like it.”
“Okay,” Billy replies slowly. Showing confidence he doesn’t feel—and damn if my stomach doesn’t hurt like a sonofabitch—he walks across the room to face Tyson, sets his drink on the top of the desk. The glass clinks against the stone. “So, show me.”
Reluctantly, Tyson nods, then slides open the desk’s middle drawer—the long, flat one that typically holds pens and paperclips, a roll of tape, a bright pad of Post-it notes.
“Should I…” Billy asks, gesturing toward the open drawer. Tyson steps to the side and Billy walks around the large desk to inspect whatever sits inside. Goddamn, this thing is huge, he marvels, and comes to stand next to his oldest mate, his best friend. “Okay, Tyson. Here I am.”
Tyson points to the drawer, and now he does smile. Wide and toothy and feverish.
“Look,” he says.
Thinking his friend has definitely lost a few cards from the deck, but deciding to humor him regardless, Billy sighs and looks down, into the drawer.
At first, he sees only black. Then, as if from far, far away, a bright spot of brilliant blue light emerges, like the flexing of an aperture; a pinprick that grows steadily larger as it spirals toward him, growing until it consumes the width of the drawer, reaching impossible depths of unfathomable distance. Billy suddenly feels like he’s on an airplane, the bottom of which is made of glass.
Or, no, that’s not it. It’s like I’ve jumped from the plane. Like I’m skydiving.
As he looks more closely, and the scene beneath him becomes more vivid, his brain kicks into overdrive, as if he’s just snorted two monster lines of cocaine. His heart speeds up, pounding in his chest hard enough to shorten his breath, make him gasp. He begins to feel faint. The pain in his stomach is suddenly unbearable.
But even worse than the pain is what he’s looking at. He sees things down there… he sees shapes moving around this window to a nether world.
Tall, charred treetops, black oceans, an impossible sky. And… creatures.
“Oh God, what are they doing?” he moans, his face breaking out with sweat. His heart starts skipping, losing its rhythm. His head feels as if it’s filling with fluid, like it’s going to expand and expand until it explodes. “Tyson, what is this? What am I looking at?”
Tyson continues to smile, but his eyes are wide and wild behind the glass lenses, reflecting that horrible blue light from the depths of a dimension no man should ever see while still alive, let alone dead.
“I think it’s hell!” he says excitedly, and lets out a deep, broken chuckle.
Billy begins to scream. His body stiffens, as if paralyzed, but his eyes never leave the open drawer, or the world which lies beyond. He screams and screams until his throat gives out, until something pops in his head and blood rushes into his eyes. His heart squeezes as if clenched by an iron fist until it finally comes to a hard stop, like a driver doing seventy-five down a city street before slamming into a brick wall head-on.
Billy’s back arches, his fingers claw, his head jerks upward, but instead of seeing the office ceiling he sees an endless sky the color of a filthy white sheet, and the last thing his mind shows him in this life is his view from far, far below, looking up to where clouds should be floating, but are not.
