Читать книгу Gemini Rising - Brian McNaughton - Страница 8

CHAPTER FIVE

A piercing scream wrenched Marcia into awareness.

“Whuzz?” Ken grunted. She hadn’t heard him come to bed.

“Go back to sleep,” she snapped as she sat upright, listening hard, and the bed sagged beside her as Ken complied.

In the darkness, her feet found the slippers beside the bed. A light rain pattered against the windows. The glowing green dial of the bedside clock said four. Ken snored softly, scenting the air with gin.

“No no, no!”

That was Melody, and Marcia was on her feet and through the door before the scream reached its hysterical peak. She assumed it was merely a nightmare, because she hadn’t heard Lucifer bark. She was halfway to her daughter’s door before she remembered that Lucifer was gone, that a flesh-and-blood menace might await her. The thought didn’t slow her down.

But the blast of light as Marcia flipped the switch revealed Melody alone, crouching in a corner of her room, staring wide-eyed and frightened at her wildly tangled bed.

“Melody!”

“No, don’t touch me—no!”

Marcia didn’t know what to do, but she followed her instinct without question and tried to shake her daughter into full consciousness. Melody fought against her for only an instant, then sagged limply into her arms.

“It was a dream, honey. It was only a dream. Come lie down.”

“No!” Melody almost screamed. Her whole body tensed like a steel spring at the breaking point as she thrust Marcia from her. “Sleep…it’s worse than dying. It’s like there’s nobody home, it’s like going out and leaving a door unlocked, and anything can come in and take you over.…”

Marcia’s neck prickled at this morbid fantasy, at the conviction in Melody’s tone as she spoke.

“Honey, it’s all right. You’re safe. Those things don’t happen, except in dreams. You were having a bad dream. It wasn’t real.”

Melody was wide-awake now and well on her way toward composing the inscrutable, cat-like mask that she presented to the waking world. But Marcia could see that even now, wide-awake, her daughter was still terrified.

“It was a nightmare,” Marcia insisted. “It’s what you get for watching all those horror flicks on TV. Nothing can take over your body while you sleep. It just doesn’t happen.”

Melody smiled shyly as she apparently came to realize the foolishness of her fantasy.

“It was one hell of a dream,” she said softly. I can remember it now as if I’d really been there.”

“Sit up and tell me about it, if you want to,” Marcia urged, drawing her to her feet. “I’ll make your bed for you.”

Marcia was momentarily shocked by the condition of the sheets. They were soaking wet. As a child, Melody had never wet the bed. Then she realized that they must be soaked with sweat. Melody’s nightgown was wet, too, and her hair hung dark and limp with perspiration. She went to feel the girl’s forehead, but she had no fever. Her skin was cool, even clammy.

Marcia stripped the bed and wrestled the damp mattress over to present its dry side. She thought of suggesting that Melody take a shower, but that was ridiculous. The important thing was to get her settled down for sleep again quickly. Maybe it would be a good idea to keep her home from school in the morning. Well, that decision could be postponed. She wanted to get some more sleep herself before morning.

“Change your nightgown, dear,” she said, handing her a fresh one from the dresser. “I’ll get clean sheets.”

In the hallway, Marcia paused at the door of the linen closet and listened to the rain. She was drawn to the window at the end of the hall. It was raining much harder. She peered into the blackness. Would the rain wash out scents that might help Lucifer find his way home?

She returned to find Melody nude, in the act of reaching for her clean nightgown. Embarrassed, she delayed her entrance, but she couldn’t help watching, touched by a confusing mixture of motherly admiration and—could it be envy? Melody had passed beyond the trembling brink of adolescence to full womanhood. Her breasts and buttocks were taut with youthful musculature. She was fitted as snugly as possible into her healthily glowing skin. Probably this newly acquired nubility was the cause of her late-night hysterics. Marcia’s emotion changed to sadness at the passing of Melody’s childhood, not untinged with sadness at the passing of her own youth.

“Tell me about your dream, sweetheart,” she said, entering briskly with the crisp sheets.

“I had this brother,” Melody began thoughtfully, smoothing her nightdress as she perched on the arm of the easy chair by the window. “Only not exactly a brother. I can’t explain that very well, but I understood it in the dream. And he lived in, like, another world. Another planet, maybe, because everything was different in a crazy way that I can’t really find the words for.”

Marcia only half heard her. The details of the dream were unimportant; the important thing was to encourage Melody to talk. Meanwhile, her mind was chewing on a question she had put aside earlier: why had Ken dressed with such casual elegance to go looking for a stray dog?

“…like in this world, we just take for granted that angles are put together in a certain way, as they taught us in Geometry. Only in that other world, the angles are all fucked up—”

“Melody!”

“Sorry. The angles are all different, you know? Like you turn a corner, and instead of being where you expect to be, you wind up in the middle of the next block. My brother understood all this; he was used to it, and he tried to calm me down and explain it. And I said walking, I think, but that’s wrong, too, because we got from one place to another by…a different way. I can’t explain that.”

Ken was forty-two years old, further than she was from youth; perhaps foolish enough to try to recapture it by pretense. Marcia made the sheet crack vigorously as she floated it above the bed, then slid it to rest in position.

“There were mountains that went up so high you had to bend your head way back to see the tops of them, like jagged black fangs against an icy-green sky. And there was a lake of cold fire, only when I scooped it up, it wasn’t fire, or water, either, it was some stuff that broke apart in a million little diamonds and clung to my arms.”

“What did this brother of yours look like?” Marcia asked, when Melody had remained silent for a time.

“He…he didn’t like for me to see him. That business with the angles had something to do with it. He was very clever about standing in just the right place so that I could never look at him directly. Like someone who stands right behind your shoulder, only it was more complicated than that. I got a glimpse, though, when I got used to the way things were set up. It was…well, he was pretty awful. Kind of stretched-out in a funny way, all long legs and skinny arms. Hairy, all covered with fur, like an animal.”

“Sounds pretty disgusting.”

“No. That was the funny part. He was disgusting by our standards, sure, but that didn’t bother me. I could sense that he was really very fond of me, that he knew me from way back, that we’d always been—well, brother and sister. And in the dream, I just accepted the way he was; I didn’t even question it.”

Marcia stepped back from the bed. “You ought to lie down now.”

Melody shook her head quickly. “Not yet. The really awful part of the dream…see, I was in this crazy world, this dream world; only, all the time I was in it, I knew that the real world existed, that my bedroom was here, that I was actually lying asleep in my bed. Did you ever know things like that when you were dreaming?”

Marcia considered. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“It was the first time I ever had a dream like that, knowing those things, and it scared me. Then—in the dream, still—I was lying in my bed, and my brother was trying to get into this world through me, sort of. He was trying to get inside my head and take me over, so that he could be in this world.”

Marcia was satisfied that her earlier guess had been correct. Melody’s dream had been blatantly, outrageously sexual. The elongated arms and legs, the tall mountains, the lake, the fear of penetration—it was a virgin’s nightmare. She smiled softly to herself.

Melody startled her by abruptly changing the subject and asking, “What do you suppose ever happened to the ghost?”

Marcia shook her head in mock exasperation. “Do you realize that it’s five o’clock in the morning, miss? The ghost didn’t have anything to do with your nightmare, so let’s not start setting you up for another one.”

Melody walked listlessly to the bed, apparently ready for sleep again. “This brother I had in the dream—something about the way I felt reminded me of the way I used to feel when the ghost was around. I can’t pin it down any better than that, but it was the same kind of feeling.”

“The unknown, that’s all,” Marcia suggested. “The unfamiliar. That’s all they have in common. Both scary in the same way.”

“Maybe,” Melody said dubiously, slipping between the sheets.

“No more nightmares, okay?” Marcia kissed her on the forehead. “Shall I leave a light on?”

“I’m not a baby,” Melody said with a touch of vexation. More softly, she said, “I’m sorry I woke you, Mom.”

Marcia wanted to run back and hug her, hard. Instead, she said lightly, “Don’t mention it. That’s what mothers are for.”

After determining that the other children were sleeping soundly—with Karen now in Roger’s bed—Marcia went down to the kitchen. She turned on no lights at first, but gazed through the sliding doors at the pale glow in the sky and wondered if it were the dawn, or the glow of reflected lights on low clouds. She wanted to step out onto the wet grass and feel the rain touching her face, but some impulse toward matronly propriety restrained her.

The ghost. She had been thinking about that earlier this evening. They had all called it the ghost, although it had apparently been a more academically respectable and well-documented phenomenon: a poltergeist.

Whatever it was, it had driven Ken right up the wall. Here was this showpiece he had built, this testimonial to his skill as an architect—and it had a ghost in it. He had denied its existence. He had accused Melody—bitterly, at times—of faking its manifestations. He had tried to suppress publicity with paranoid zeal.

The ghost had stayed with them for six months, approximately two years ago. Windows had shattered spontaneously. Objects had been hurled across rooms with explosive force—in one instance, a desk that Melody couldn’t possibly have lifted, much less thrown across a room. Monstrous footfalls had been heard. Everyone had taken it rather well except Lucifer, who had been totally demoralized; and of course Ken, who had seen it as an obscure practical joke reflecting on his professional ability.

The story had leaked out. A team of researchers from a prestigious university had worn down Ken’s opposition and turned the house into an electronics laboratory for a week or so. The ghost had disappointed them, not stirring a finger while they were here. Once they were gone, it indulged in a final orgy of china-smashing and table-toppling. Then it had disappeared, apparently for good.

Melody had been absolved early of any direct responsibility; but one of the researchers had told Marcia that adolescent girls were often to be found in the neighborhood of such phenomena. He had theorized—with many qualifications—that an unconscious, uncontrolled outburst of psychic energy from such an adolescent was at the root of the trouble.

While standing at the kitchen door, Marcia had been aware of a strange noise for some time, and now it began to register on her consciousness. It was a kind of whistle, so high-pitched as to be almost inaudible, coming and going with a predictable regularity. She took an involuntary step back from the glass door as a shadow fell on it. The noise became ever so slightly louder and deeper: It was unmistakably a whimper: the anguished sound of a creature that desperately wanted to call for help without drawing too much attention to itself.

“Lucy?” she cried, struggling with the catch of the door. “Lucy!”

The door and the screen slid open, and almost simultaneously, a hard wet body bolted in, nearly knocking her off her feet. She heard a frenzied scrabble of claws as Lucifer dove under the kitchen table, a thud as his head hit the wall.

“For God’s sake, Lucy!” she cried, snapping on the kitchen light. “You scared us all half to death. Where on earth have you been?”

Under the table, Lucifer’s huge black-and-tan body shuddered in uncontrollable spasms. He was soaked and muddy. His dark, liquid eyes seemed to plead for mercy.

“What happened, Lucy? You’re a good boy. There’s a good doggie. You’re safe.…”

She reached under the table.

A deep growl rumbled in Lucifer’s massive chest.