Twilight Eyes (44 page)

The land had no less of an ominous quality now than it possessed the previous summer. Irrationally but undeniably, the mountains themselves seemed evil, as if earth and stone and forest could somehow evolve, nurture, and contain malevolent attitudes and intentions. Weathered formations of rock, poking up here and there through blankets of snow and soil, resembled the half-rotten teeth of some ascending leviathan that swam in the earth instead of the sea. In other places, longer formations made me think of the serrated spines of giant reptiles. The bleak gray daylight created no distinct shadows, but it plated an ashen hue to every object, until it seemed as if we had entered an alternate world where colors—other than gray, black, and white—did not exist. The tall evergreens thrust up like spikes on the armored fist of a villainous knight. The leafless maples and birches did not exactly resemble trees but might have been the fossilized skeletons of an ancient prehuman race. An uncanny number of the winter-stripped oaks were gnarled and misshapen by fungus.

“We can still turn back,” Rya said quietly.

“Do you want to?”

She sighed. “No.”

“And really . . . can we?”

“No.”

Even the snow lent no sparkle to those malignant mountains. It seemed different from other snow in more benign regions. It was not the snow of Christmas—or of skiing, sleighs, snowmen, and snowball battles. It crusted on the trunks and limbs of the barren trees, but that only emphasized the black, skeletal aspect of them. More than anything else, this snow made me think of white-tiled morgue rooms where cold, dead bodies were dissected in search of the cause and the meaning of death.

We passed landmarks that were familiar from the summer past: the abandoned mine head, the half-demolished tipple, the rusting hulks of automobiles perched on concrete blocks. The snow concealed some portions of those objects but in no way diminished their contribution to the pervading atmosphere of despair, gloom, and senescence.

The three-lane macadam state route was gritty with cinders and sand, mottled with white patches of salt spread by road-maintenance crews after the last big storm. The pavement was utterly free of ice and snow, and driving conditions were fine.

As we passed the road sign that marked the Yontsdown city limits, Rya said, “Slim, better slow down.”

I glanced at the speedometer and discovered that I was scooting along at more than fifteen miles an hour over the legal limit, as if I unconsciously intended to rocket straight through the city and out the other side.

I eased up on the accelerator, rounded a bend, and saw a police car parked along the road, right there at the blind end of the curve. The driver’s window was open a crack, just enough for a radar unit to be hung from it.

As we sailed past, still moving a few miles faster than the limit, I saw that the cop behind the wheel was a goblin.

I cursed aloud because, although I was exceeding the speed limit by only two or three miles an hour, I was certain that even a minor infraction would be sufficient to incur official wrath in this demon-ruled town. I glanced worriedly at the rearview mirror. On the roof of the black-and-white, the red emergency beacons began to flash, pulses of bloody light rippling across the morgue-white snowscape; he was going to come after us, which was not a promising beginning to our clandestine mission.

“Damn,” Rya said, twisting around in her seat to look out the back window.

But before the cruiser could pull onto the roadway, another car—a mud-spattered yellow Buick—rounded the bend, going faster than I was, and the goblin-policeman’s attention shifted to that more flagrant violator. We drove on, unmolested, as the cop stopped the Buick in our wake.

A sudden gust of wind pulled a billion threads of snow off the ground, instantly wove them into a silver-gray curtain, and whipped the curtain across the road behind us, concealing the Buick and the hapless motorist and the goblin policeman from my view.

“Close,” I said.

Rya said nothing. Ahead and slightly below us lay Yontsdown. She faced forward again, biting her lower lip as she studied the city into which we descended.

The previous summer, Yontsdown had appeared grim and medieval. Now, in the frigid clutch of winter, it was even less appealing than it had been on the August day when I’d first seen it. In the murky distance the vomitous smoke and steam rising from the stacks of the filthy steel mill were darker and more heavily laden with pollutants than before, like columns of ejaculate from smoldering volcanoes. A few hundred feet up, the gray steam thinned and was torn to rags by the winter wind, but the sulfurous smoke spread from mountain peak to mountain peak. The combination of darkish clouds and sour yellow fumes gave the heavens a bruised look. And if the skies were bruised, then the city below was battered, lacerated, mortally wounded: It seemed to be not only a dying community but a community
of
the dying, a city-sized cemetery. The row houses—many of them shabby, all of them sheathed in a film of gray dust—and the larger brick and granite buildings had previously made me think of medieval structures. They still possessed that anachronistic quality, though this time—with soot-discolored snow on some rooftops, with dirty icicles hanging from eaves, with icterous frost marbelizing many windows—they also seemed, somehow, like rank after serried rank of headstones in a graveyard for giants. And from a distance the train cars in the rail yards might have been enormous coffins.

I felt as if I were awash in psychic emanations, and nearly every current in that Stygian sea was dark, cold, and frightening.

We crossed the bridge over the now frozen river, where huge slabs of jagged ice thrust up in jumbled profusion beneath the metal-grid floor and beyond the heavy iron railings. The tires did not seem to sing this time but instead emitted a shrill one-note scream.

On the far side of the bridge, I abruptly pulled the station wagon to the curb and stopped.

“What’re you doing?” Rya asked, looking at the sleazy bar and grill in front of which I had parked.

It was a cement-block building painted bile-green. Faded red enamel was peeling off the front door, and though the windows were free of frost, they were heavily streaked with grease and grime.

She said, “What do you want here?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I . . . I just want to switch places with you. The emanations . . . all around me . . . pouring off everything. . . . No matter where I look, I see . . . strange and terrible shadows that aren’t real, shadows of death and destruction to come. . . . I don’t think I should drive just now.”

“The town didn’t affect you like this before.”

“Yeah. It did. When I first came in with Luke and Jelly. Not this bad. And I pretty quickly got in control of myself. I’ll get used to it again, too, in a little while. But right now . . . I feel . . . battered.”

While Rya slid across the seat to take the steering wheel, I got out of the car and walked unsteadily around to the other side. The air was bitterly cold; it smelled of oil, coal dust, gasoline fumes, frying meat from the grill of the nearby barroom—and (I could have sworn) brimstone. I got into the passenger’s seat, slammed the door, and Rya pulled away from the curb, steering the car smoothly back into traffic.

“Where to?” she asked.

“Drive across town to the outskirts.”

“And?”

“Find a quiet motel.”

I could not explain the dramatic worsening of the city’s effect on me, although I had a few ideas. Perhaps, for reasons unknown, my psychic powers had become stronger, my paranormal perceptions more sensitive. Or perhaps the city’s load of grief and terror had grown immeasurably heavier since my last visit. Or maybe I was more afraid of returning to this demonic place than I had realized, in which case my nerves were rubbed raw and were therefore extraordinarily receptive to the dark energy and formless but hideous images that radiated from buildings, cars, people, and miscellaneous objects on all sides. Or, by means of the special vision that my Twilight Eyes provided, perhaps I sensed that either I or Rya—or maybe both of us—would die here at the hands of the goblins; however, if that clairvoyant message was trying to get through to me, I was evidently emotionally incapable of reading and accepting it. I could
imagine
it, but I could not actually bring myself to “see” the details of such a pointless and horrifying destiny.

Approaching the two-story brick school where seven children had burned to death in a heating-oil explosion and fire, I saw that the flame-charred wing had been rebuilt since the previous summer, the slate roof repaired. Even now school was in session: Children were visible at a few of the windows.

As before, a massive wave of clairvoyant impressions surged off the walls of that structure and rushed toward me with dismaying power and substance—occult substance but deadly nonetheless, as real to me as a murderous tidal wave. Here, as nowhere else I had ever seen, human suffering and anguish and terror could be measured almost as the ocean depth might be gauged: in tens, hundreds, even thousands of fathoms. A thin, cold spray preceded the murderous wave: disjointed augural images splashing across the surface of my mind. I saw walls and ceilings bursting into flame . . . windows exploding in ten thousand deadly splinters . . . whips of fire lashing through the classrooms on in-rushing currents of air . . . terrified children with their clothes aflame . . . a screaming teacher with her hair on fire . . . the blackened and peeling corpse of another teacher slumped in a corner, his body fat sizzling and bubbling as if it were bacon on a griddle. . . .

The last time I had seen the school, I had received visions of both the fire that had already transpired and of the worse fire to come. But this time I saw only the future fire, as yet unlit, perhaps because the oncoming disaster was now closer in time than the blaze that had already done its work. The extrasensory pictures that sprayed over me were shockingly more vivid and more hideous than any I had ever known, each like a drop of sulfuric acid rather than water, painfully searing its way into my memory and soul: children in mortal agony; flesh blistering and bubbling and burning like tallow; grinning skulls appearing through the smoking, melting tissues that once had concealed them; eye sockets blackened and emptied by hungry flames.

“What’s wrong?” Rya asked worriedly.

I realized that I was gasping, shuddering.

“Slim?”

She was letting up on the accelerator; the station wagon was slowing.

“Keep driving,” I said, then cried out as the pain of the dying children became, to a small degree, my pain as well.

“You’re hurting,” she said.

“Visions.”

“Of what?”

“For God’s sake . . . keep . . . driving.”

“But—”

“Get past . . . the school!”

To expel those words, I’d had to surface from the acid mist of psychic emanations, which was nearly as difficult as struggling up through a real cloud of dense and suffocating fumes. Now I tumbled back down into that shadowy inner realm of unwanted necromantic sight where the unspeakably gruesome and tragic future of the Yontsdown Elementary School pressed insistently upon me in grisly, blood-drenched detail.

I closed my eyes because, when looking upon the school, I was somehow soliciting the release of the pictures of oncoming destruction that were locked in its walls, an infinite store of occult images like a great charge of potential energy that was at the critical point of kinetic transformation. However, by closing my eyes, I cut the number of visions only slightly and reduced the power of them not at all. The main wave of psychic radiation now towered over me and began to crash down; I was the shore on which this tsunami would break, and when it broke and receded, the shoreline might be changed forever beyond recognition. I was desperately afraid that immersion in those nightmarish visions would leave me emotionally and mentally broken, even insane, so I chose to defend myself in the same manner as I had done last summer. I squeezed my hands into fists, gritted my teeth, pulled my head down, and with a monumental effort of will I turned my mind away from those scenes of fiery death and concentrated on good memories of Rya: the love for me that I saw in her clear, direct eyes; the lovely lines of her face; the perfection of her body, the lovemaking we had shared; the sweet pleasure of just holding her hand, of just sitting with her and watching television during a long evening together. . . .

The wave fell down toward me, down, down. . . .

I clung to thoughts of Rya.

The wave hit—

—with crushing impact.

I cried out.

“Slim!” a far-off voice called urgently.

I was pinned against the seat. I was assaulted, beaten, pounded,
hammered
.

“Slim!”

Rya . . . Rya . . . my only salvation.

I was in the blaze, there with the dying children, overwhelmed by visions of scorched and fire-eaten faces, withered and blackened limbs, a thousand terrified eyes in which reflected flames writhed and flickered . . . smoke, blinding smoke pouring up through the hot and creaking floor . . . and I smelled their burning hair and their cooking flesh, dodged falling ceilings and other debris . . . I heard the pitiful wails and screams that were so numerous and of such volume that they wove together in an eerie music that chilled me to the core in spite of the fire in which I found myself . . . and those poor doomed souls stumbled by me—frantic teachers and children—seeking escape but finding doors inexplicably closed and blocked, and now, dear God, every child in sight—scores of them—suddenly
burst
into flames, and I ran to the nearest of them, tried to smother him beneath me and put him out, but I was as a ghost in that place, unaffected by the fire and unable to change what was happening, so my phantom hands passed straight through the burning boy, straight through the little girl toward whom I turned next, and as their screams of pain and terror rose, I began to scream, too, I bellowed and shrieked in rage and in frustration, I wept and cursed, and finally I fell away, out of the inferno, down into darkness, silence, deepness, stillness like a marble shroud.