Strange Highways
Page 28

—I love you, Jack, I love you more than life itself—
—and she tore at his mental bonds with all the enthusiasm that she had shown when assisting him in therapeutic exercises for his ruined legs. Questing outward across the psychic net by which Seed linked its hosts, she found Jamie Watley—
—You're a sweet kid, Jamie, the sweetest, and I've always wanted to tell you that it doesn't matter what kind of people your parents are, doesn't matter if they're selfish mean-spirited drunks; what matters is that you have the capacity to be far better than they are; you have the capacity to lave and to learn and to know the joy of a fulfilling life—
—and Seed swarmed over her, trying to draw her consciousness back into her own body, out of the minds of the others. However, in spite of its billions of years of experience and its vast knowledge acquired from hundreds of doomed species, it found itself unequal to the task. Laura examined it and judged it inferior because it did not need love, could not give love. Its will was weaker than human will because humans could love, and in their love they found a reason to strive, a reason to seek order out of chaos, to make better lives for those whom they cherished. Love gave purpose to will and made it infinitely stronger. To some species, Seed might be a welcome master, offering the false security of a single purpose, a single law. But to humankind, Seed was anathema—
—Tommy, you can tear loose if you'll think of your sister Edna, because I know you love Edna more than anything; and you, Melissa, you must think of your father and mother because they love you so much, because they almost lost you when you were a baby (did you know that?) and losing you would have broken them; and you, Helen, you're one heck of a little girl, and I couldn't love you more if you were my own, you have such a sweet concern for others, and I know you can throw this damn thing off because you're all love from head to toe; and you, Jane Halliwell, I know you love your son and your husband because your love for Richie is so evident in the self-confidence you've given him and in the manners and courtesy you've taught him; you, Jimmy Corman, oh, yes, you talk tough and you act tough, but I know how much you love your brother Harry and how sad it makes you that Harry was born with a deformed hand, and I know that if someone made fun of poor Harry's twisted hand, you'd fight him with every bit of strength you have, so turn that love for Harry against this thing, this Seed, and destroy it, don't let it have you because if it gets you then it'll get Harry too—
—and Laura walked into the room, among the possessed, touching them, hugging this one, lovingly squeezing the hand of the next one, looking into their eyes and using the power of love to bring them to her, out of their darkness and into the light with her.
15
AS HE SHATTERED THE BONDS THAT HELD HIM, AS HE CAST OFF SEED, Jamie Watley experienced a wave of dizziness and actually blacked out for an instant, not even long enough to collapse to the floor. Blackness flickered through him, and he swayed, but he came to his senses as his knees were buckling. He grabbed the edge of Mrs. Caswell's desk and steadied himself.
When he looked around the classroom, he saw the adults and the other children in similar shaky postures. Many were looking down in disgust, and Jamie saw that they were staring at the slick, mucus-wet black substance of Seed, which had been expelled from them and which writhed in pieces on the classroom floor.
Most of the alien tissue seemed to be dying, and a few pieces were actually decomposing with an awful stench. But suddenly one lump coalesced into the shape of a football. In seconds it formed a mottled blue-green-black shell, and as if bazooka-shot, it exploded through the ceiling of the room, showering them with plaster and bits of lath. It smashed through the roof of the one-story schoolhouse and disappeared straight up into the blue October sky.
16
TEACHERS AND KIDS CAME FROM ALL OVER THE BUILDING TO FIND OUT what had happened, and later the police arrived. The following day, both uniformed air-force officers and plainclothes government men visited the Caswell house among others. Throughout, Jack would not move far from Laura. He preferred to hold her—or at least her hand—and when they had to separate for a few minutes, he held fast to a mental picture of her, as if that image were a psychic totem that guaranteed her safe return.
Eventually the furor subsided, and the reporters went away, and life returned to normal—or as close to normal as it would ever be. By Christmas, Jack's nightmares began to diminish in both frequency and vividness, though he knew that he would need years to scrub out the residue of fear that was left from Seed's possession of him.
On Christmas Eve, sitting on the floor in front of the tree, sipping wine and eating walnuts, he and Laura exchanged gifts, for Christmas Day itself was always reserved for visiting their families. When the packages had been opened, they moved to a pair of armchairs in front of the fireplace.
After sitting quietly for a while, sipping at a final glass of wine and watching the flames, Laura said, "I've got one more gift that will have to be opened soon."
"One more? But I've nothing more for you."
"This is a gift for everyone," she said.
Her smile was so enigmatic that Jack was instantly intrigued. He leaned sideways in his chair and reached for her hand. "What're you being so mysterious about?"
"The thing healed you," she said.
His legs were propped on a hassock, as healthy and useful as they had been before his accident.
"At least some good came of it," he said.
"More than you know," she said. "During those awful moments when I was trying to expel the thing from my mind and body, while I was trying to get the kids to expel it from theirs, I was acutely aware of the creature's own mind. Heck, I was within its mind. And since I'd noticed that you were healed and figured the creature must have been responsible for knitting up your legs, I poked around in its thoughts to see how it had worked that miracle."
"You don't mean—"
"Wait," she said, pulling her hand from his. She slipped off her chair, dropped to her knees, leaned toward the fireplace, and thrust her right hand into the leaping flames.
Jack cried out, grabbed her, and pulled her back.
Grinning, Laura held up blistered fingers as raw as butchered beef, but even as Jack gasped in horror, he saw that her flesh was healing. In moments the blisters faded, the skin re-formed, and her hand was undamaged.
"The power's within all of us," she said. "We just have to learn how to use it. I've spent the past two months learning, and now I'm ready to teach others. You first, then my kids at school, then the whole darn world."
Jack stared at her in astonishment.
She laughed with delight and threw herself into his arms. "It's not easy to learn, Jackson. Oh, no! It's hard. It's hard. You don't know how many nights I've sat up while you slept, working at it, trying to apply what I learned from Seed. There were times when my head felt as if it would burst with the effort, and trying to master the healing talent leaves you physically exhausted in a way I've never been before. It hurts all the way down in your bones. There were times when I despaired. But I learned. And others can learn. No matter how hard it is, I know I can teach them. I know I can, Jack."
Regarding her with love but also with a new sense of wonder, Jack said, "Yeah, I know you can too. I know you can teach anything to anyone. You may be the greatest teacher who ever lived."
"Miss Attila the Hun," she said, and she kissed him.
DOWN IN THE DARKNESS
1
DARKNESS DWELLS WITHIN EVEN THE BEST OF US. IN THE WORST OF us, darkness not only dwells but reigns.
Although occasionally providing darkness with a habitat, I have never provided it with a kingdom. That's what I prefer to believe. I think of myself as a basically good man: a hard worker, a loving and faithful husband, a stern but doting father.
If I use the cellar again, however, I will no longer be able to pretend that I can suppress my own potential for evil. If I use the cellar again, I will exist in eternal moral eclipse and will never thereafter walk in the light.
But the temptation is great.
* * *
I first discovered the cellar door two hours after we signed the final papers, delivered a cashier's check to the escrow company to pay for the house, and received the keys. It was in the kitchen, in the corner beyond the refrigerator: a raised-panel door, stained dark like all the others in the house, with a burnished-brass lever-action handle instead of a conventional knob. I stared in disbelief, for I was certain that the door had not been there before.
Initially, I thought I had found a pantry. When I opened it, I was startled to see steps leading down through deepening shadows into pitch blackness. A windowless basement.
In Southern California, nearly all houses—virtually everything from the cheaper tract crackerboxes to those in the multimillion-dollar range—are built on concrete slabs. They have no basements. For decades this has been considered prudent design. The land is frequently sandy, with little bedrock near the surface. In country subject to earthquakes and mudslides, a basement with concrete-block walls can be a point of structural weakness into which all rooms above might collapse if the giants in the earth wake and stretch.
Our new home was neither crackerbox nor mansion, but it had a cellar. The real-estate agent never mentioned it. Until now, we had never noticed it.
Peering down the steps, I was at first curious—then uneasy. A wall switch was set just inside the doorway. I clicked it up, down, up again. No light came on below.
Leaving the door open, I went looking for Carmen. She was in the master bathroom, hugging herself, grinning, admiring the handmade emerald-green ceramic tiles and the Sherle Wagner sinks with their gold-plated fixtures.
"Oh, Jess, isn't it beautiful? Isn't it grand? When I was a little girl, I never dreamed I'd live in a house like this. My best hope was for one of those cute bungalows from the forties. But this is a palace, and I'm not sure I know how to act like a queen."
"It's no palace," I said, putting an arm around her. "You've got to be a Rockefeller to afford a palace in Orange County. Anyway, so what if it was a palace—you've always had the style and bearing of a queen."
She stopped hugging herself and hugged me. "We've come a long way, haven't we?"
"And we're going even further, kid."
"I'm a little scared, you know?"
"Don't be silly."
"Jess, honey, I'm just a cook, a dishwasher, a pot scrubber, only one generation removed from a shack on the outskirts of Mexico City. We worked hard for this, sure, and a lot of years ... but now that we're here, it seems to have happened overnight."
"Trust me, kid—you could hold your own in any gathering of society ladies from Newport Beach. You have natural-born class."
I thought: God, I love her. Seventeen years of marriage, and she is still a girl to me, still fresh and surprising and sweet.
"Hey," I said, "almost forgot. You know we have a cellar?"
She blinked at me.
"It's true," I said.
Smiling, waiting for the punch line, she said, "Yeah? And what's down there? The royal vaults with all the jewels? Maybe a dungeon?"
"Come see."
She followed me into the kitchen.
The door was gone.
Staring at the blank wall, I was for a moment icebound.
"Well?" she said. "What's the joke?"
I thawed enough to say, "No joke. There was ... a door."
She pointed to the image of a kitchen window that was etched on the blank wall by the sun streaming through the glass. "You probably saw that. The square of sunlight coming through the window, falling on the wall. It's more or less in the shape of a door."
"No. No ... there was ..." Shaking my head, I put one hand on the sun-warmed plaster and lightly traced its contours, as if the seams of the door would be more apparent to the touch than to the eye.
Carmen frowned. "Jess, what's wrong?"
I looked at her and realized what she was thinking. This lovely house seemed too good to be true, and she was superstitious enough to wonder if such a great blessing could be enjoyed for long without fate throwing us a heavy weight of tragedy to balance the scales. An overworked husband, suffering from stress—or perhaps afflicted by a small brain tumor—beginning to see things that were not there, talking excitedly of nonexistent cellars ... That was just the sort of nasty turn of events with which fate too frequently evened things out.
"You're right," I said. I forced a laugh but made it sound natural. "I saw the rectangle of light on the wall and thought it was a door. Didn't even look close. Just came running for you. Now, has this new-house business got me about as crazy as a monkey or what?"
She looked at me somberly, then matched my smile. "Crazy as a monkey. But then ... you always were."
"Is that so?"
"My monkey," she said.
I said, "Ook, ook," and scratched under one arm.
I was glad I had not told her that I'd opened the door. Or that I had seen the steps beyond.
* * *
The house in Laguna Beach had five large bedrooms, four baths, and a family room with a massive stone fireplace. It also had what they call an "entertainer's kitchen," which didn't mean that either Siegfried and Roy or Barbra Streisand performed there between Vegas engagements, but referred instead to the high quality and number of appliances: double ovens, two microwaves, a warming oven for muffins and rolls, a Jenn Air cooking center, two dishwashers, and a pair of Sub Zero refrigerators of sufficient size to serve a restaurant. Lots of immense windows let in the warm California sun and framed views of the lush landscaping—bougainvillea in shades of yellow and coral, red azaleas, impatiens, palms, two imposing Indian laurels—and the rolling hills beyond. In the distance, the sun-dappled water of the Pacific glimmered enticingly, like a great treasure of silver coins.
Though not a mansion, it was unquestionably a house that said, The Gonzalez family has done well, has made a fine place for itself. My folks would have been very proud.
Maria and Ramon, my parents, were Mexican immigrants who had scratched out a new life in El Norte, the promised land. They had given me, my brothers, and my sister everything that hard work and sacrifice could provide, and we four had all earned university scholarships. Now, one of my brothers was an attorney, the other a doctor, and my sister was chairperson of the Department of English at UCLA.
I had chosen a career in business. Carmen and I owned a restaurant, for which I provided the business expertise, for which she provided the exquisite and authentic Mexican recipes, and where we both worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week. As our three children reached adolescence, they took jobs with us as waiters. It was a family affair, and every year we became more prosperous, but it was never easy. America does not promise easy wealth, only opportunity. We seized the machine of opportunity and lubricated it with oceans of perspiration, and by the time we bought the house in Laguna Beach, we were able to pay cash. Jokingly, we gave the house a name: Casa Sudor—House of Sweat.