The Sleepwalkers (41 page)

The smoke is so thick he sees nothing. He knows where he is only by the feel of his hand on the railing. He reaches the landing, gropes and finds the door. The heat is almost unbearable now. He reels and almost falls, almost blacks out, but fights his way out of it. He finds the doorknob.

And it turns. He steps into the coolness and slams the door on the swirling flames behind him.

In the blackness, there is no sound but the ticking of clocks.

Caleb steps into the room, blind.

The only light is a bar of orange coming from beneath the closed door at his back.

He steps forward, gripping the hatchet tightly.

The sound of ticking is all around him, maddening as the buzzing of a million mosquitoes. He reaches out, groping in oblivion.

“I don’t need to see you,” says a deep voice. “They will tell me where you are.”

Caleb jerks his head in the direction of the sound, but echoes jumble his perception, and he just winds up spinning around, lost.

There’s laughter. He knows it’s the voice of the director, Morle, but in the shadows he can almost hear hundreds of other voices laughing too.

“I could snap your neck at any moment. This is what surrender feels like.”

“I’m not scared of you,” Caleb lies.

There’s no answer, not even the laughter Caleb expected. Then there’s the sound of something whipping through the air, and the hatchet disappears, yanked from his hand.

The lasso.

“Now do you believe me?” says the voice.

Caleb tries to catch his breath. His mind is racing. “What do you want from me?”

“Nothing you won’t give freely.”

“I won’t help you make the world end.”

“That’s exactly what you’ve come here to do.”

He can’t tell if he’s imagining it or not, but the ticking seems to speed up. The heat is maddening. Sweat runs into his eyes.

Then he gets an idea. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the little radio. He puts on the headphones. At first only white noise greets his ears.

Please, Anna. Come on. Be there.

The only sound is the rush of nothing and the ticking of the clocks.

“You should be enjoying these moments. The spirits of a million dead are chanting your name, do you hear it?” the voice says. It seems to be coming from everywhere at once. “For decades, witches, sorcerers, Satanists, a few enlightened Druids, have all ached for this moment.”

Caleb’s throat is so dry he can barely croak a reply. “Why?”

He can hear the fire crackling behind the door now, hear the door bowing in its frame from the heat.

“Because the followers of Lucifer have no place in heaven. But once they’ve awakened their master, they’ll be able to create their own place here, on earth.”

“What about the rest of us?”

“Those who survive will be enslaved. The rest will simply be gone.”

“And you expect me to help you?”

“Aren’t you listening? You already are. We couldn’t do it without you, Billy.”

Caleb is lost in the dark. He simply keeps spinning around, trying to pinpoint the source of the voice.

Come on, Anna, talk to me! Help me save your sister!

Only static answers his plea.

“Where’s Christine?” Caleb barks.

“You will be reunited soon, rest assured.”

“And what do you get? What’s your reward for all this? You get to be the devil’s right-hand man, or what?”

“No, no. Not me. I never wanted such glory. I don’t even know if I believe in the devil, frankly. All I’m telling you is what the spirits told me. When the end comes, I’ll finally get to sleep. They’ve promised me. The end of the world, to me, is rest. Escape. But first, I must finish my work. And we must hurry, tick, tick, tick.”

The ticking has grown now, not only in speed, but in volume. Caleb grits his teeth against the onslaught of noise. He turns the static in the headphones up to drown it out. And in the sea of rushing silence he hears a tiny child’s voice.

it says

Caleb turns and faces the darkness to his left. Now he can feel the presence there, almost smell the stale breath.

“Well, what if I don’t help? What if I run back through that door and burn myself alive?”

“You can’t,” says the voice.

“Wanna bet?” says Caleb, and he’s sprinting for the bar of orange he knows is the door. He grabs the handle but recoils instantly. The knob is scalding.

says Anna.

Caleb drops to his knees and hears the lasso whip above his head. If his neck were caught in that loop, he’s sure the director could snap it easily.

Caleb does as Anna instructs, and two lamps on the far side of the room spring to life. But the director is already gone, the door on the far wall swinging shut behind him. Caleb runs toward it. Hundreds of clocks line the room. He knocks a few down as he barrels through, just for spite.

On the floor in the corner of the room, he sees it. He snatches it up and shoves through the door. The next room or hallway—Caleb can’t tell which—is utterly without light. He enters tentatively.

He does as he’s instructed, running carefully yet clumsily at first, then at an all-out sprint.

There’s a turn, right, now. good, now run; the hallway is empty, run!>

For all Caleb can tell, he could be running in outer space. The feeling of sprinting through darkness is the feeling of immortality.

He does, and the lasso whips over his head again, closer this time.

And Caleb does.

Through the hiss of static, Caleb can barely hear Johnny Morle’s footfalls as he runs through the darkness ahead.

Finally, after traversing a complex series of blind turns and going through several sets of doors, Anna tells him to stop at one last heavy door. He heaves it open.

When he steps through, he’s surprised to feel rain on his face.

He looks up. High above him rain pours through a broken-out skylight. Leading up to it, a ladder.

says Anna.

“Up there? He could just push the ladder down,” he says aloud.

So Caleb tucks the hatchet in his belt and goes.

The rungs are slippery, and more than once his foot slips and he almost falls. Finally, tentatively, he peeks out and scans the rooftop, trying to see through the rainy darkness.

Somehow, Caleb knows she means he’s behind a large, greenhouse-like structure almost a hundred yards away.

He climbs up and steps onto the gravel of the roof.

He pulls out the hatchet as he strides toward the greenhouse.

“This isn’t what he wanted, is it? I’m not helping him, am I?”

Caleb walks faster now. There is a strength, a purpose in his step he’s never known before.

He breaks into a jog, then a run.

“If I don’t make it, Anna,” he says between breaths, “I wanted to say I’m sorry for daring you to go in the asylum that day. I never meant for you to get hurt.”

The emptiness, the utter lack of emotion in her voice, chills him and fills him with foreboding, even fear, but he runs on.

In several places, fire has broken through the roof and is spreading fast across the tar and gravel surface.

He runs faster.

The fire seems to be running with him, following him, chasing him. It flares up on either side of him, then in front of him. He almost thinks he sees faces in the flames. He almost thinks they’re calling his name.

The fire shouldn’t be spreading this fast, not in this rain.

Unless . . . that smell. . . .

Anna answers his question before he thinks to ask it. Morle soaked the roof with gasoline. Somehow, Morle knew this would happen. He knew everything.

Caleb has reached the greenhouse. Its broken-out windows are black holes. The remaining panes are too dingy to reflect the livid red glow of the firelight. They don’t reflect it. They trap it.

Everything has been a trap.

As he rounds the corner of the greenhouse, he’s more nervous than he’s ever been in his life. He feels like a million souls are watching him. And they are. Every angel and every demon watches him right now, waiting to see his performance, his choice. Somehow, everything hangs on the next moment, and he knows it. Except he has no idea what the test is, what he’s supposed to do, what— And then he sees. He takes it all in, in an instant, all of it.

Morle is there, his white clown makeup streaked and almost completely washed away by the rain. In his hands he holds a rope. The rope runs up and over a broken, bent-down flag pole. The other end of the rope is around Christine’s neck. She hangs over the edge of the building, her feet flailing in the air. Her face is purple. Her eyes are bulging and bloodshot. Spit glistens on her chin.

“You made it,” says Morle.

This is the test. A test without an answer. Without a solution. If he kills Morle, the maniac lets go of the rope and Christine falls to her death. If he does nothing, she chokes to death. There is no answer.

There is no “right.”

“What do you want?” Caleb says quickly.

“It isn’t what
I
want,” Morle says. “It’s what
they
want. Listen to them.”

The fire is in a ring around him now. There’s no running away even if he wanted to. The world is burning.

“Anna?” he whispers desperately. “God? Anyone?”

There is no answer, only static.

He takes a few steps toward Morle.

“Just let her go,” he says. “Let her go and tell me where Ron and Margie are, and everything can be okay.”

Morle laughs. “Ron and Margie are in the dark, my boy! Two of the sixty-six glorious sacrifices. Dead.”

A wave of grief swells in Caleb’s soul, but his concern now is for Christine. “Just let Christine go and I’ll help you. I’ll do whatever you want.”

“I know you will,” Morle says, smiling. But he doesn’t move.

Caleb raises the hatchet. “I’ll kill you if you make me, I swear to God. If she has to die, I’m making sure you go with her.”

Morle just smiles back at him. With the makeup almost completely gone now, his grin looks less lurid and more—familiar. As Caleb’s brain races to come up with an impossible solution, something threatens to click, some horrible revelation.

Caleb feels the fire at his back now, prodding him forward. The noose of flame is closing in on him. He takes another step toward Morle. And he sees. He sees it all. He looks so different now, without the beard, with the streaked makeup on his face, but those eyes . . .

It can’t be. It must be . . .

Nausea cuts through his stomach. His head spins. It’s awful, impossible. . . .

“ . . . Dad?”

The rain on the director’s face is mixed with tears so he can’t tell that the man in front of him is crying until he takes another step closer. Finally, the clown speaks.

“I am so proud of you,” he says.

“But you were dead! I saw you in the basement. I saw your corpse.”

“No,” the man with the rope says. “You saw the corpse of that obsessed detective. But your loving dad is not the rotting, dead cop. The loser. No, your father is the man he hunted: the lawyer, psychiatrist, rodeo man, friend of the spirits, and Bringer of the End. The winner. I am the one they called Michael Mason, who your pretty friend here knew as the director, though in the beginning and the end I shall always be Johnny Morle—and now, my dear son, we’re together one last time. And I’m so proud.”

Caleb’s mind races to understand. At the end of the rope, Christine is moving less and less.

“Dad, why are you doing this?”

“To die,” he says simply.

“Why?”

“Because it’s all I’ve ever wanted. BECAUSE I CAN’T TAKE THIS WORLD!” he says. “I mean look at this: I have a beautiful son, and now he’s going to die in fire. Everyone’s going to die.”

“If you want to die so bad, then kill yourself, Dad, but leave Christine alone! Look at her!”

“I tried to kill myself over and over and over, and I lived! The spirits said there was only one way . . . ”

“What? WHAT WAY, DAD? Look at her—we don’t have time!”

Fire is all around, everything burns.

“They said only my son could kill me,” he says softly, “and if I helped them, they would make sure he did.”

Christine isn’t moving.

Smoke billows between father and son. The roof groans under their feet, about to give way.

“And with sixty-six souls in the darkest hole, the devil’s work is done.”

“Let her go, Dad. Everything can change. Everything can be okay—just let her go.” Billy is crying now, his teardrops falling as hard as the rain.

Behind the smoke, the man shakes his head.

“I love you, son,” he says, through tears, smiling. “Help me. Help me die.”