Part 3 (2/2)

The raving seer then hiked up his T-s.h.i.+rt to his chest. What Ricky, from behind, saw there was like a blow to his own chest, an impact of terror and dizziness, for Andre's thorax on its left side was normal, gauntly fleshed and sinewed, but along its right side, his spine was denuded bone, and midriff was there none, and just below his hoisted s.h.i.+rt-hem, a lathed bracket looped down: a fleshless rib, as clean and bare as sculpture . . . .

His rapt audience recoiled like a single person, some lifting their arms convulsively, as in a reflex of self-protection, or acclaim . . . .

Ricky dropped the Mustang into gear and launched it from the curb, but in that selfsame instant Andre dropped into his seat again and slammed his door, and so he was s.n.a.t.c.hed deftly away, as if he were a prize that Ricky treasured, and not a horror that Ricky had been trying to flee.

Moon-silvered, lightless blocks floated past, yet Ricky never took his eyes from the gaunt shape whose T-s.h.i.+rt he could now, uncomprehending, read: CTHULHU RULES CTHULHU RULES.

Somehow he drove and, shortly, pulled again to a more deserted curb, and killed the engine. On this block, a sole dim streetlight shone. Half the houses were doorless, windowless . . .

He sat with only silence between himself and a man who had, at the least, submitted to a grave surgical mutilation in the service of his deity. Ricky looked into Andre's eyes.

That was the first challenge, to establish that he dared to look into Andre's eyes-and he found that he did dare.

”For all you've lost,” Ricky said, queasily referencing the gruesome marvel, ”. . . you seem very. . . alive.”

”I'm more alive than you will ever be, and when I'm all consumed, I'll be far more more alive, and I will live forever!” alive, and I will live forever!”

Ricky fingered the little bale of cash in his hand. ”If you want me to go on, you have to tell me this. Why Why do you have to have a witness?” do you have to have a witness?”

”Because the One I'm gonna see wants someone new to see Him. He doesn't wanna know you. He wants you you to know to know Him.” Him.” In the darkness, Andre's polished eyes seemed to burn with this thing that he knew, and Ricky did not. In the darkness, Andre's polished eyes seemed to burn with this thing that he knew, and Ricky did not.

”He wants me to know him. And then?”

”And then it's up to you. To walk away, or to see him like I do.”

”And how is that? How do you see him?”

”All the way.”

Ricky's hand absently stroked the gears.h.i.+ft k.n.o.b. ”The choice is absolutely mine?”

”Your will is your own! Only your knowledge will be changed!”

Ricky slipped the Mustang into gear, and once more the blue beast growled onward. ”Take a right here,” purred Andre. ”We going up to the top of the hills.”

It was the longest ”couple miles” that Ricky had ever driven. The road poured down past the Mustang like time itself, a slow stream of old, and older houses, on steepening blocks gapped by vacant lots, or by derelict cottages whose windows and doors were coffined in grafittied plywood.

They began to wind, and a rising sense of peril woke in Ricky. He was charging up into the sinister unknown! There was just too much missing from this man's body! You couldn't lose all that and still walk around, still fight with knives . . . could you?

But you could. Just look at him.

The houses thinned out even more, big old trees half-shrouding them. Dead cars slept under drifts of leaves, and dim bedroom lights showed life just barely hanging on, here in the hungry heights.

As they mounted this shoulder of the hills, Ricky saw glimpses of other ridges to the right and left, rooftop-and-tree-encrusted like this one. All these crestlines converged toward the same summit, and when Ricky looked behind, it seemed that these ridges poured down like a spill of t.i.tanic tentacles. They plunged far below into a thick, surprisingly deep fog that drowned and dimmed the jeweled python of the Hood.

Near the summit, their road entered a deepening gully. At the apex stood a munic.i.p.al watertank, the dull gloss of its squat cylinder half-sunk in trees and houses.

”We goin to that house there right upside the tank. See that big gray roof pokin from the trees? The driveway goes down through the trees, it's steep an dark. Just roll down slow and easy, kill the engine, an let me get out first an talk to her.”

”Her?”

Andre didn't answer. The road briefly crested before plunging, and Ricky had a last glimpse below of the tentacular hills rooted in the fogbank-and rooted beyond that, he imagined, more deeply still into the black floor of the Bay, as if the tentacles rummaged there for their deep-sunk food . . . .

”Right there,” said Andre, pointing ahead. ”See the gap in the bushes?”

The Mustang crept muttering down the dark leafy tunnel, just as a wind rose, rattling dry oak foliage all around them.

A dim grotto of gra.s.sy ground opened below. There was a squat house on it, so dark it was almost a shadow-house. It showed one dim yellow light on the floor of its porch. A lantern, it looked like. A large dark shape loomed on one side of this lantern, and a smaller dark shape lay on the other.

Ricky cut his engine. Andre drew a long, slow breath and got out. Leaves whispered in the silence. Andre's feet crackled across the yard. Ricky could hear the creak of his weight on the porch steps as he climbed them, halfway up to the two dark shapes and their dim shared light. And Ricky could also hear. . . a growly breathing, wasn't it? Yes . . . a slow, phlegmy purr of big lungs.

Andre's voice was a new one to Ricky: low and implacable. ”I'm back again, Mamma Hagg. I got the toll. I got the witness.” Then he looked back and said, ”Stand on out here . . . what's your name again?”

Ricky got out. How dangerous it suddenly seemed to declare himself in this silence, this place! Well, s.h.i.+t. He was here. He might as well say who he was. Loudly: ”Ricky Deuce.”

When he'd said it, he found his eyes could suddenly decipher the smaller dark shape by the lantern: it was a seated black dog, a big one, with the hint of aging frost on his lower jaw, and with his red tongue hanging and gently pulsing by that frosted jaw. The dog was looking steadily back at him, its tongue a bright spoon of greedy tissue scooping up the taste of the night . . . .

It was not the brute's breathing Ricky had heard. It was Momma Hagg's, her voice deep now from the vault of her cavelike lungs: ”Then show the toll, fool.”

Andre bent slightly to hold something toward the hound. And above his bent back, the woman in her turn became visible to Ricky. Within a briar-patch of dreads as pale as mushrooms, her monolithic black face melted in its age, her eyes two tarpools in this terrain of gnarled ebony. The shadowy bulk of her body eclipsed the mighty chair she sat in, though its armrests jutted into view, dark wood intricately carven into the coils and claws and thews of two heraldic monsters. Ricky couldn't make out what they were, but they seemed to snarl beneath the fingers of Momma Hagg's immense hands.

The dog's tongue was licking what Andre held up to it- Ricky's tenspot. The mastiff sniffed and sniffed, then snorted, and licked the bill again, and licked his chops.

”Come on up,” said Momma. ”The two of you.” The big woman's voice had a strange kind of pull to it. Like surf at your legs, its growl dragged you toward her. Ricky approached. Andre mounted to the porch, and Ricky climbed after him. He had the sensation with each step up that he entered a bigger and emptier kind of s.p.a.ce. When he stood on the porch, Momma Hagg seemed farther off than he had expected. From her distance wafted the smell of her-an ashen scent like the drenched coals of a bonfire that had included flesh and bones in its fuel. The dog rose.

The porch took too long to cross as they followed the hound. His bright tongue lolling like a casually held torch, with just one back-glance of one crimson eye, the brute led them through a wide, doorless doorframe, and into a high dark interior that gusted out dank salty breath in their faces.

A cold gray light leaked in here, as if the fog that had swallowed the Hood had now climbed the hills, and its glow was seeping into this gaunt house. They trod a rambling, unpart.i.tioned s.p.a.ce, the interior all wall-less, while the outer walls were irregularly recessed in alcoves, nooks, and grottos. In some of these stood furniture, oddly forlorn, bulky antique pieces-an armchair, a setee, an escritoire crusted with ancient papers. These stranded little settings-like fossils of foregone transactions whose partic.i.p.ants had blown to dust long since-seemed to mark the pa.s.sage of generations through this rambling gloom.

Ricky had the disorienting sense they had been trekking for a long, long time. He realized that the stranded furniture had a delicately furred and crusted profile in the gray light, like tidepool rocks, and a cold tidal scent touched his nostrils. Realized too, that here and there in those recesses, there were windows. Beyond their panes lay a different shade of darkness, where weedy and barnacled shadows stirred and glinted wetly. . . .

And throughout this shadowy pa.s.sage, Ricky noted, on every stretch of wall he could discern, wooden wainscottings densely carven. The misty glow put a sheen on the sinuous saliences of this dark chiselwork, which seemed to depict bulbous, serpentine knots of tail and claw and thew-or perhaps woven cephalopodia, braided greedy tentacles, and writhing prey in ragged beaks . . . .

But now the walls had narrowed in, and here were stairs, and up these steep, worn stairs the hound, not pausing, led them. The air of this stairwell was slightly dizzying. The labor of the black beast climbing before them seemed to pull the two men after, as if the beast drew them in an executioner's tumbril. They were lifted, Ricky suddenly felt, by a might far greater than theirs, and Andre, ahead of him, seemed to s.h.i.+ver and quake in the flux of that dire energy. It gave Ricky the sensation of walking in Andre's lee, and being sheltered by his body from a terror that streamed around him like a solar wind.

From the head of the stairs, a great moldy vacancy breathed down on them. They emerged into what seemed a simpler and far older structure. High-beamed ceiling, carven walls. . . it was no more than a grand pa.s.sage ending at a high dark archway. The floorplanks faintly drummed, as if this was a bridgeway, unfoundationed. That great black arch ahead . . . it was inset in a wall that bowed. A metallic wall.

”The tank!” said Ricky. It jumped out of him. ”That's that big water tank!”

The hound halted and turned. Andre too turned, gave him eyes of wild reproof, but the hound, raising to Ricky his crimson eyes, gave him a red-tongued leer, gave him the glinty-pupiled mockery of a knowing demon. This look set the carven walls to seething, set the sculpted thews rippling, limbs lacing, beaks butchering, all brutally busy beneath their fur of dust . . . .

The hound turned again and led them on. Now they could smell the water in the great tank-an odor both metallic and marine-and the hound's breathing began to echo, to grow as cavernous as Mamma Hagg's had been. Within that archway was a blackness absolute, a darkness far more perfect than the gloom that housed them. As they closed with it, the hound's nails echoed as on a great oaken drum above a jungle wilderness. The beast dropped to its belly, lay panting, whining softly. The two men stood behind.

Within the portal, a huge glossy black surface confronted them, a great s.h.i.+eld of gla.s.s, a mirror as big as a house. There they were in it: Ricky, Andre, the hound. The brightest feature of their tiny, distorted reflection was the bright red dot of the hound's tongue.

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