Part 13 (1/2)

So it was good to swim like this, to float on his back and have the cool water wrap around him and feel the warmth of the sun edge through it to touch his bare skin. He looked across the sparkling ripples at the sh.o.r.e and saw Jeff there, hands on his hips and a smile in place under his thick brown moustache. McNeely waved, but as he did so, he sank beneath the water, feeling no panic, but only a little sadness that he would have to wake up now.

When he did, the pain came back. The back of his head was throbbing, and when he touched it, his fingers came away wet. It was too dark to see if the wetness was blood, but he felt sure it was. For a moment he really didn't know where he was, but slowly that grim knowledge returned.

The Pines.

Oh, yes, The G.o.dforsaken G.o.dd.a.m.ned Pines. And the fight with that giant from a ten-year-old's nightmare. And Neville being crushed by those immovable arms. He had tried to save him. He had done his duty. But where was Neville now?

McNeely shook his head and blinked his eyes savagely to dispel the blurriness that plagued them, but scent was the next sense to return. The air was sharp with the smell of feces, rank with the sweet scent of blood. He remembered the head tearing loose, the heart pumping furiously, sending the geysers of red spewing aloft as he had sunk into darkness. Now, slowly, his vision cleared, and he saw the huge shape of c.u.mmings's body lying a few yards away.

McNeely staggered to his feet. He was sore, but the head wound seemed to be the only real damage. He walked shakily over to the corpse, not seeing Neville, thinking, hoping that he'd recovered and gone upstairs to get help. Then he saw the thin leg sticking out from beneath the lump of death that was c.u.mmings.

A cry escaped him, a tiny whimper of pain and frustration that seemed an incongruous coda to the t.i.tanic struggle that had been waged. He sank to his knees and pushed the great bulk over so that it struck the stone floor with an elephantine, blood-wet slap.

George McNeely had only vomited twice in his life from non-physiological causes. The first time was at eighteen, five minutes before he was to face his first live fire. The second time was ten minutes later, after he was forced to gut a man from s.c.r.o.t.u.m to heart so the man would not do the same to him. Not once, after that first kill, did his stomach ever turn at the sight of violence again.

But he had never before seen a human being squeezed in two.

He closed his eyes and let the feeling sweep over him, knowing that there was no other way to respond, not for any man who would cling to the semblance of humanity, to the most infinitesimal touch of sensitivity. He emptied his stomach on the stones, then made himself look back, and brought up the little that was left. Afterward, he looked again. And again.

Finally he could look at it without feeling the peristaltic muscles twitch at all, and he knew he could do what had to be done.

His legs stronger now, he walked up the cellar stairs into the cheerily lit kitchen. Opening a drawer by the sink, he removed four damask tablecloths. There was nothing of lesser quality, and he thought it ironically fitting that these should be the shrouds of millionaires. He took them back into the cellar and covered Neville's body with one of them. He found c.u.mmings's head, made himself pick it up, and placed it between the legs of the body. It took the remaining three tablecloths to cover c.u.mmings's hummock of flesh. Then McNeely went upstairs to join Wickstrom and Gabrielle Neville.

He knocked at the door of his suite and called out, ”It's me.” His voice was choked, husky. His mouth tasted bitter.

The door clicked open. ”George,” Wickstrom said softly. ”Jesus . . .”

Wickstrom was looking at him in horror, and McNeely realized he'd done nothing to hide the effects of the tight. He looked down at himself.

He was bathed in blood, like an uncaring butcher after a long day's work. His s.h.i.+rt was sodden, his arms were coated. He knew that he must smell terrible. ”Oh, s.h.i.+t,” he said. ”Oh, G.o.d, I can't . . . I've got to wash.”

McNeely turned away, shaking his head, but Wickstrom put his hand on McNeely's shoulder, oblivious to the soft squelching noise the s.h.i.+rt made. ”Wait! Are you hurt?”

”No, no, not my blood.” McNeely was tired. To find somewhere to sleep again, to sleep and dream about swimming, that would be very nice.

”Whose blood then? What happened, for Christ's sake?”

McNeely heard a slight cry and turned. Gabrielle Neville stood inside the doorway, just behind Wickstrom. ”George ...” she said, her face going white.

McNeely nodded at her. ”It's over. c.u.mmings is dead.” He closed his eyes, squeezing them shut in the pain of failed trust. Then he opened them and looked straight at Gabrielle. ”David's dead too. c.u.mmings killed him before I could stop him.”

Her pale face grew taut, the muscles contracting the skin over the bone so that she looked as she might when she was seventy. McNeely saw no tears, only that terrible tension of the features. She turned and faded back into the room.

”Look after her,” McNeely told Wickstrom. ”Don't go anywhere. Just stay with her until I come back.” Wickstrom nodded and went to comfort Gabrielle Neville.

McNeely walked down the hall. He decided to use c.u.mmings's bathroom, as he didn't want to have to pa.s.s by Gabrielle to get to his own. He didn't want her to see him again with her husband's blood on him. Looking down, he saw the dark trail he was leaving. There would be time to clean it up, he thought. With only three people alive, there would be no leaving. There was all the time in the world to clean up the blood.

In the bathroom he peeled off his clothes and flung them into the shower stall. Then he stepped in and turned on the spray. After several minutes of standing there, letting the almost unbearably hot water rinse off the dried and coated blood, he plucked with his foot at the wet pile of clothes, dragging them beneath the spray. He stamped on them slowly, like a primitive washerwoman pounding rags on stones. The blood pa.s.sed from the cloth with each step, and pink water swirled and eddied its way down the drain, a tiny whirlpool of shed life.

McNeely closed his eyes and tried to forget the scene in the cellar, but found it impossible. It had been a scene of blood, of violence, of battle, and he had come out unscathed. Such an experience would have normally electrified him, but there was no battle joy, none of the feeling of healthy catharsis that usually resulted.

He had let Neville get himself killed, and that was bad enough. But there was something worse, and that was the extra strength he had felt, the extra time he had had when he'd delivered that near decapitating blow.

That there was such a thing as increased strength under stress he knew. He'd felt it himself-that adrenaline pump, that extra oxygen that made normal muscles strong and strong ones superhuman. The phenomenon had saved his life several times. But this time it had been different. It hadn't been he who kicked c.u.mmings. He simply was not capable of that kind of blow under any circ.u.mstances.

Then what was it? He was afraid that it was the same thing that had given c.u.mmings his strength.

Am I next? Dear Jesus, am I next?

He struggled to calm himself, to tell himself that c.u.mmings must have wanted it to happen that way. What did I say to Gabrielle? he thought. It's not whether there are ghosts or not, it's how we respond to them that counts.

How did c.u.mmings respond?

McNeely turned off the shower. There were no towels on c.u.mmings's rack, so he lay down on the bed, letting the air and the spread share the task of drying him. He stared at the ceiling and thought it through.

If McNeely could accept what c.u.mmings had said as at least partially true, and not just insane ravings, c.u.mmings had been approached by something, something he'd called the Master. The Master, then, had changed c.u.mmings, had given him power, but in a cruel and ghastly way. Perhaps the Master was insane himself, or perhaps c.u.mmings was not capable of controlling the power.

Wait, said a corner of logic in McNeely's brain, What if there were a natural explanation, no matter how farfetched? Wouldn't it make more sense to accept that than to imagine a supernatural origin?

Of course it would, if this were a natural place on the earth. However, to give logic the benefit of the doubt, he conjectured upon what diseases could have so wrenched c.u.mmings's body. Acromegaly? It was the only disfiguring disease he was familiar with. He'd known a young merc who'd had it-a kid from Michigan who hadn't been able to join the Army because of it. He became a soldier anyway, and died at twenty-two in Africa, sliced in half by machine-gun fire. It gave him a kinder death than the disease would have. McNeely sighed as he remembered the boy, the ugliest human being he'd ever seen-beetling brows, large ridges of pouched flesh that contorted his muscles painfully, puffy sacks around his eyes that still couldn't prevent him from being a crack shot. ”Call me Beast,” he'd said when he joined them, as a black man might call himself ”n.i.g.g.e.r”-to use it so it lost all power to hurt. He'd talk often about Rondo Hatton, a grade-Z movie actor of the forties who'd had acromegaly, and had made a living grunting and menacing maidens in the dark castles of second-run features. Everybody had their heroes-even the acromegalics.

But the kid had had it for a long time. It had come on slowly, not in a matter of hours. Radioactivity then. Maybe they were on a big lump of uranium, or maybe Grandpa Neville sold part of the mountain back to Teddy Roosevelt, and the government secretly dumped plutonium in a hidden cave far beneath the mountain.

Sure. And maybe c.u.mmings was a changeling. Maybe he'd sold his soul to Satan and this was collection day. Maybe it was just too many vitamins.

Maybe. Maybe. s.h.i.+t.

He wrapped a bedspread around himself toga-style and went down the hall to his suite. The bedroom door in the hall was locked, so he rapped on it and called for Wickstrom, who opened it a few moments later. ”I didn't want to disturb her,” McNeely explained as he entered the room and took some clothes from the drawers. ”How is she?”

”She'll be all right. I gave her a drink.”

”Oh, great,” McNeely sighed. ”That's all we need.”

”How are you?”

”Bruised. Nothing worse.”

”What the h.e.l.l happened?”

McNeely told him, leaving out only the part about the extra strength in his kick. By the time he was finished, he was fully dressed. ”The thing now,” he concluded, ”is to decide what to do with the bodies. I want to get them somewhere where she won't have to see . . .”

Wickstrom's expression was grim. ”That's right. We're trapped here. There's no getting out, is there?”

”No. We've got the keys, but only three people to turn them.”

”Maybe we could rig something up,” Wickstrom said. ”I'll see if I can find any sc.r.a.p wood.”

”In the meantime, we've got to do something with those bodies. I don't know how long we've been here, but you can bet that if we don't get out on our own, there are going to be some pretty bad smells in here before those steel panels open. I don't want Gabrielle to . . . experience that.”