Nebulon Horror (26 page)

Vin Otto, the chief, and those who had come with him all saw what happened then. They saw it clearly
because Blair, after the weapon went off, wiped his hand down the wall by the door in search of a light switch, and the room turned bright.

The eyes of the crone on her knees lost their fire. The redness faded and went out. As Doc Broderick stepped forward and took her under the arms to keep her from collapsing, another change came over her. A thing of smoke or mist disengaged itself from her slumping form and swirled toward the blurred dia
gram. It hovered over the diagram, over Vin Otto who lay there still struggling to reach the seemingly hyp
notized child in its center. The writhing mist seemed to try several times to find an opening and at last, after twisting itself into a barely visible thread, disappeared as though into the floor.

Doc lifted Elizabeth to her feet and looked at her face and said, "My God," because her face was chang
ing. It had been a mass of wrinkles but these were fading and her skin was becoming smooth again. She had been a creature of old age that looked more male than female. Now she was again a woman in her thirties. He had noticed her yellow teeth. They were
white now and without a blemish. He had no idea what was happening.

He knew she was hurt, though. No matter how confused he might be about the rest of it, he could see she needed help. The chief's revolver had put a bullet below her rib cage and blood was oozing from the hole in her dress. He took time to look at Vin Otto and saw that Vin appeared to be recovering. Then he moved Elizabeth away from the diagram and eased her to the floor.

Her eyes were filled with pain instead of red fire now, he noticed. The old-crone look of hate and ferocity was gone and her reborn face was convulsed with suffering. Using the bloody gaps made by the bullet, he tore open her dress and slip and was examining the ugly wound in the right side of her abdomen when Chief Lighthill said, "Did I kill her, Doc?"

"I don't think so. You didn't do her insides any good, though." Doc looked up and beckoned to Keith Wilding. "Can you help me get her to a bed somewhere? We're crowded here." When Keith stepped forward, he added, "Be careful now or we could make things worse," then showed him how they were to lift the woman. Together they carried her from the room, Doc peering down into pain-filled eyes that returned his scrutiny and seemed to beg for mercy. Worth Blair said, "Her bedroom is down there at the end," and, in passing, found a light switch that lit up the hall for them.

In the now brightly lit ritual room Chief Lighthill turned to face the crescent of children. Since the bullet from his gun had felled Elizabeth, they had not moved except to let Doc and Keith carry the woman out. The chief found himself coupling names and faces: Carl Boland, Paul Massey, Trudy Ensinger, and others. And, of course, Teresa Crosser,
who was obviously the one they looked to for leader
ship. Remembering his unsuccessful attempt to get information out of her on his last visit to this house, he was not surprised to learn she was their leader.

But they stood before him now like manikins in a children's clothing shop. The red in their eyes had faded. They made him think of wilted flowers.

He turned from them. He saw Jerri Jansen still standing in the middle of the partly rubbed-out diagram or symbol. Vin Otto was on his knees beside her, with his arms around her, pressing her to him. There was a look of such relief on Vin's face that his features seemed ready to flow like melted wax.

The child's face had changed too. She was coming out of her trance, it seemed. She put her arms around Vin's head and hugged him, and the chief had a feeling they were both going to recover.

He turned back to the children. "All right, sit down," he said. "All of you, right where you are, sit!" When they obeyed him and he felt reasonably sure he had nothing more to fear from them, he looked at Worth Blair. "You think it's safe for me to be here alone with this crowd while you go downstairs?" he
asked.

Blair gazed speculatively at the children and said, "I think so, now."

"And with this?" the chief asked, turning to scowl
at what was left of the diagram.

"Maybe we should finish what Vin started."

"Do it, will you?"

Blair went to the diagram. Before touching it, he helped Vin Otto to his feet and motioned him and Jerri to stand clear. Then after a quick glance at the chief and an eloquent shrug of his shoulders, he tentatively touched one of the white lines with his foot. Nothing happened, and with a noisy exhalation of breath he rubbed out the rest of the diagram. "You'll notice," he said to Lighthill, "if we were to sweep this floor now, there would be some of this stuff left in the cracks."

"It isn't glowing now," the chief said. "It was glowing when we came in."

"Yes."

"Like the eyes of these kids. And her eyes."

"Yes, Chief."

"Go down and tell Terry to call the station, will you?" Terry Hinson, the man on stakeout, had been
left in the chief's car to insure against any possible surprise. "Tell him to get everyone over here they can spare."

Blair hurried from the room and. the chief glanced at Vin Otto, standing with Jerri by the wall. The child was hugging Vin's leg and staring at the other children, but no longer with fear. The chief felt he could give the others his full attention at last. Scowling, he squatted on his heels and faced them. "All right," he said in a voice filled with bitterness for those who had turned his peaceful town into a nightmare. "Now let's find out what you little hyenas can tell me about all this."

E
lizabeth Peckham occupied a private room on the top floor of Nebulon's hospital. The building was four stories high, and her window overlooked the park. Outside the door a guard was stationed twenty-four hours a day.

"I don't know what we'll be charging her with," Chief Lighthill said with a shrug. "We're waiting for legal advice. But there's bound to be a charge of some sort, if only because of the well."

"Teresa mentioned a well," Vin Otto had said while telling them what had taken place before their arrival at the attempted killing of Olive Jansen's Jerri. "That woman asked the kids how they got there to the house, and Teresa said they came in the back way, past the well."

The chief himself led the search of the yard, and there was a well. A very old one, all but hidden by weeds, in a far corner of the property. It was covered with old, half-rotten boards.

The chief and his men removed the boards. They aimed powerful lights into the well's depths and saw a small white hand amid the debris at the bottom. The fire department was called on for help, and firemen went down a ladder and brought up the body of Raymond Hostetter.

It was not a pretty thing, Raymond's body. The well
contained a certain amount of water from the recent rains, and also, obviously, a number of crawling or slithering things that looked upon human flesh as food. Moreover, the corpse had been there long enough for decomposition to have begun. The up-thrust hand first discerned by the firemen was reasonably unchanged, but the rest of Raymond Hostetter, especially his half-eaten face, was not a thing his discoverers cared to look at longer than they had to. "Not even the mother of the baby he drowned could be happy about this," Worth Blair remarked.

Chief Lighthill angrily demanded, "Why wasn't this well discovered before? Quigley and two others searched this yard long ago, damn it!"

One of the two who had searched the yard with Quigley said, "We divided the yard up, Chief. It was his idea. He took this section himself."

The firemen brought up something else then. It too had been a body, but it had been in the well much longer than Raymond Hostetter and was now only a collection of bones. An autopsy on the mayor's son revealed no evidence of violence, but this other occupant of the well, a man in his thirties, had been killed by a bullet fired into the back of his head. Nebulon being a small town, his dental work easily established his identity. He was a cobbler named Louis Neibert, who had disappeared from home some years before, after being accused of molesting children.

"I'd like to ask Quigley why he didn't find that well," Chief Lighthill said darkly. "Too bad he isn't here to give us an answer."

He said this to Worth Blair. Because of the younger man's part in clearing up the mystery of what people now referred to as the Gustave Nebulon affair, the chief felt completely comfortable with Blair despite the difference in their backgrounds. The feeling was
reciprocated, too. Theirs was now almost a father-son relationship.

Worth Blair said, "I wasn't on the force when Neibert disappeared, Chief, but some of us in town had an idea Quigley was involved. If you remember, he joined one of those groups of 'concerned citizens,' or whatever they called themselves. I seem to recall old Gustave, too, was a concerned citizen." Blair shrugged. "Men like that too often feel they have a right to appoint themselves judge, jury, and executioner."

"If we'd known the Hostetter boy was in that well, we probably could have closed this case before anyone else was killed," the chief said, then corrected himself. "Well, no. We wouldn't have saved Tom Ranney or Ruby Fortuna's baby. Raymond himself killed those. But we'd have saved the Ianuccis and Mrs. Vetel."

"Yes," Blair said. "But of course if I'd remembered about the books sooner, or we'd found that other book when we first searched the house . . ."

The "other" book referred to was one he himself had discovered after Elizabeth was taken to the hospital. Determined to find some explanation of the diagram, he had gone back to the house and all but turned it inside out. In doing so he had discovered the key that finally opened Elizabeth's lips after a week of obdurate silence.

In her bedroom, under her mattress, Blair had come upon a small, thin volume of diagrams or symbols
printed years ago in Germany. Inside it was a single sheet of heavy white paper on which was drawn, in India ink, the diagram found in the school yard, in the nursery, in the ritual room of that same house the night Elizabeth had sustained her injury. With the diagram were directions for reproducing it—exactly where to begin and how to proceed—written in a hand that turned out, when compared with documents in the study, to be that of Gustave.

Confronted with this, Elizabeth had seemed to realize that continued silence would be pointless. "Yes," she said, "I was looking at it that night, to be sure I would not make any mistakes: I usually did. That is why it was under the mattress. At other times I kept it hidden in a specially designed picture frame on the wall. Gustave drew the diagram and designed the hiding place."

She was talking to both Chief Lighthill and Doc Broderick when she said this, and Doc said, "So it was Gustave who showed you how to 'open the door' as you call it."

"Yes. And once I had opened it, he would not let it close." An expression of sadness came over Elizabeth's face. "And the tragedy is, I was not trying to open it for him. I wanted to talk to my sister."

During the last months of his life, she explained, when Gustave had become obsessed with his dread of dying and immersed himself in his study of life after death, he had talked to her by the hour about his plans. There was this door. All his research indicated the reality of its existence. He would discover how to open it and leave the secret with her, leave her his house, too, so she would have a quiet place to live and he would have a safe haven to return to. Only she would be able to manipulate the door, he felt, not he from that side. So she would open it and he would return . . . not a feeble old man nearly blind, but a man reborn and full of strength. "He said he had things to do," Elizabeth told Doc and the chief. "He was so bitter about his blindness. So full of hate for Nebulon for not giving him the homage he felt was due him. So very, very angry."

Doc nodded. "I heard about that from old Yambor."

"Doctor Yambor talked to you about Gustave and me?" Elizabeth bristled with indignation.

"In a way. Mostly about Gustave."

"Then I am glad he is no longer my doctor!"

She had wanted Victor Yambor to look after her when she was brought to the hospital. He came when sent for, too. But bullets in the belly were not his line, he had told her. He was too old for Wild West medicine. "Let Norman here look after you," he said, meaning Doc. "He can use the experience. Besides, he lives nearer than I do." Exit Victor Yambor.

Continuing her confession, if it could be called that, Elizabeth said, "Yes, he was bitter. I felt sorry for him. But I loathed him, too, for his ill manners, his uncouth speech. Especially for his disgusting attempts to win my affection."

"Then you weren't his girlfriend?" Doc said.

"I, the mistress of a man such as that? Don't be offensive!"

"What did you want from him, then?"

"Money. A decent house to dwell in. Security."

She was an amazing woman, Doc decided as he came to know her better. Talking to her became practically a hobby with him. Almost every day he found time to stop by the hospital and ride up to the fourth floor to sit beside her bed. Often Chief Lighthill would be there too, trying to make a neatly-tied bundle of the Nebulon affair.