Part 3 (1/2)
d.a.m.n Janet! d.a.m.n the doctors! b.i.t.c.hing him about his emotional stability. So he drank more than he used to! So he maybe threw a scene or two, maybe felt a little differently about things now! Well, it was a different world! A man was ent.i.tled to make adjustments. Maybe he needed a little more time...
No! It wasn't his fault!
The gla.s.s slipped from his shaking fist, smashed on the floor. Gerry p.a.w.ned at it clumsily, cursing the spilled liquor. He'd fix another and clean up tomorrow. Dully he noticed another broken gla.s.s. When had he...?
It was late when Gerry finally drifted off to sleep, as had become his habit. Smiling, he welcomed Renee when she came to him. How strange to be dreaming, he mused, and yet know that it's a dream.
”Here again, darling?” There was secret humor in her grave smile. ”And looking so sad again. What are we to do with you, Gerry? I so hate to see you all alone in a blue funk every night! The wife?”
”Janet. The b.i.t.c.h!” he mumbled thickly. ”She wants me to leave you!
Renee was dismayed. ”Leave? When I'm just getting so fond of you? Hey, lover, that sounds pretty grim!”
Brokenly, Gerry blurted out his anger, his pain. Told her of the lies and insinuations. Told her how hard it was to get through each day, how only a stiff drink and the memory of her smile could calm his nerves each night.
Renee listened in silence, only nodding to show she understood, until he finished and sat quivering with anger. ”It sounds to me like you've finally realized Janet has only been a nagging obstruction in your life,” she observed. ”Surely you've never loved her.”
Gerry nodded vehemently. ”I hate her!”
She smiled lazily and snuggled closer, her lips only inches from his own. ”What about me, Gerry? Do you love your Renee?”
His Renee! ”With all my soul!” he whispered huskily.
”Mmmmm. That's sweet.” Renee held him with her glowing eyes. ”So you love Renee more than Janet?”
”Yes! Of course I do!”
”And would you like to be rid of Janet so you could be with me?”
”G.o.d, how I wish that!”
Her smile burned more confident. ”What if she died? Would you want Janet dead?”
Bitterness poisoned his spirit. ”Janet dead? Yes! That would be perfect! I wish she were dead so we could be together!”
”Oh, sweetheart!” Renee squeezed him delightedly. ”You really do love me, don't you! Let's kiss on our bargain!”
Somewhere in her kiss the dream dissolved to blackness.
From upstairs a shriek of black terror shattered the stillness of the night.
He started awake sometime later, groggily rubbed his head while trying to collect his thoughts. What had happened? The dream... He remembered... And suddenly he had the feeling that something was wrong, dreadfully wrong. Strangely frightened, he staggered up the stairs. ”Janet?” he called, his voice unnatural.
Moonlight spilled through the rusty screen and highlighted the crumpled figure who lay in one corner of the room. A small patch of darkness glistened on the wood. Strange how small that pool of blood.
”Janet!” he groaned in disbelieving horror. ”Oh, my G.o.d!”
Her eyes were wide and staring; her face set in a death grimace of utmost loathing, insane dread. Whatever had killed Janet had first driven her mad with terror.
It had not been an easy death. Her throat was a jagged gash-too ragged a tear for the knife that lay beside her. A Barlow knife. His.
”Janet!” he sobbed, grief slamming him like a sledge. ”Who could have done this thing!”
”Don't you know, lover?”
Gerry whirled, cried out in fear. ”Renee. You're alive!”
She laughed at him from the shadow, triumph alight in her eyes. She was just as he had seen her in the painting, in the dreams. Green silk frock, bobbed auburn hair, eyes that held dark secrets. Only now her lips were far more crimson, and scarlet trickled across her chin.
”Yes, Gerry. I'm alive and Janet is dead. Just the way you wished. Or have you forgotten? ” Mockery was harsh in her voice.
”Impossible!” he moaned. ”You've been dead for years! Ghosts can't exist! Not here! Not today!”
But Renee stepped forward, gripped his hand with fingers like frozen steel. Her nails stabbed his wrist. ”You know better.”
Gerry stared at her in revulsion. ”I don't believe in you! You have no power over me!”
”But you do believe in me.”
”G.o.d, help me! Help me!” he sobbed, mind reeling with nightmare.
Contempt lined her face. ”Too late for that.”
She pulled his arm, drew him to the door. ”Come now, lover! We have a sealed bargain!”
He protested-willed himself not to follow. Struggled to awaken from the nightmare. In vain. Helplessly he followed the creature he himself had given substance.
Out into the pines Renee led him. The pines whose incessant whisper told of black knowledge and secret loneliness. Through the desolate pines they walked into the night. Past endless columns of dark sentinel trunks. Swaying, whispering an ancient rhythm with the night wind.
Until they came to a grove Gerard Randall now found familiar. Where the darkness was deeper. Where the whisper was louder and resonant with doom. Where the pines drew back about a circle of earth in which nothing grew.
Where tonight yawned a pit, and he knew where Renee's unhallowed grave lay hidden.
”Is this madness?” he asked with sudden hope.
”No. This is death.”
And the illusion of beauty slipped from Renee, revealed the cavern-eyed lich in rotting silk, who pulled him down into the grave like a bride enticing a bashful groom. And in that final moment Gerard Randall understood the whispered litany of the merciless pines.
Sticks.
*I*
The lashed-together framework of sticks jutted from a small cairn alongside the stream. Colin Leverett studied it in perplexity-half a dozen odd lengths of branch, wired together at cross angles for no fathomable purpose. It reminded him unpleasantly of some bizarre crucifix, and he wondered what might lie beneath the cairn.
It was spring of 1942-the kind of day to make the War seem distant and unreal, although the draft notice waited on his desk. In a few days Leverett would lock his rural studio, wonder if he would see it again-be able to use its pens and brushes and carving tools when he did return. It was good-bye to the woods and streams of upstate New York, too. No fly rods, no tramps through the countryside in Hitler's Europe. No point in putting off fis.h.i.+ng that trout stream he had driven past once, exploring back roads of the Otselic Valley.