Whitley Strieber Read online

  “Wrong.”

  George went close to her. There were two ways to characterize this little witch: one, she was delicious and delightful; two, she was one stubborn lady. At night she swam through his senses. But only in fantasy. She wouldn't take her old professor seriously. “Even in the animal room you smell like an angel.” She smiled. “Bonnie, you know what this means to me. I'm past fifty, darling.”

  “I'm well aware of that.”

  “Aside from making me as sexually interesting to you as it so obviously does, it means that I will die a sad old man if I don't succeed with this experiment. You're young, you have your life ahead of you. This is my last throw, honey. After this, sunset and bye-bye.”

  She put the frog back into its terrarium. “George Walker, you are a hypocrite, a charmer, and a bastard. If I gave you a thousand, it would be out of other people's money. Their happiness money. And they would be so mad if they couldn't get high. Mad at me.”

  “What do I have to do, go down on bended knee?” Even as he spoke, his eyes went to the two rhesus monkeys in their big cage. They stared back at him, sullen and bored. He could sense their hatred.

  “It might be fun to watch but it wouldn't help.”

  George went over to the rhesus cage. He was tempted to make a face back at the ugly beasts. “How much smaller is Tess than Gort?”

  “Tess is eighteen pounds. Gort's twenty-two.”

  “I mean in body mass?”

  “Tess is 56.75 cubic centimeters of monkey. She's approximately 77 percent ofGort's mass. What are you getting at?”

  “Tess might fit into a three-foot field. That's only nine more coils. You wouldn't have to give any money.”

  “Good. My customers would kill me very, very slowly if I stole their money. And that's what it would amount to. I've got about sixty dollars of my own.”

  George put his hands on her trim hips. She did not move away and she did not respond. She simply became very still. Such plans he had for this slip of a girl! If the rhesus phase succeeded, she was next. Dear little Bonnie was going to be the first person to die and live to tell about it. Assuming he could convince her. Assuming the mere suggestion didn't send her running for the nearest bus depot. But the problem of convincing her didn't need to be faced just yet.

  George wrote out a purchase order for the coils. When they were delivered, Tess, poor dear, would have a most extraordinary experience. Oblivious to her future, she sat in her cage delousing her mate and rolling her lips back. If George worked at it, he could probably get Techtronics to deliver before noon today. They had trucks up to the college all the time.

  Dear little Tess. Not a big rhesus, not a scared rhesus. Not yet.

  Chapter 4

  Mandy didn't need a map to find her way to the Collier estate.

  It took up the whole southwestern comer of the Maywell township and went beyond. The lands of the original grant included Stone and Storm mountains and the valley between them, an area of eighty thousand acres in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Mandy drove down Bridge Street toward the entrance to the estate.

  A stillness filled the morning air. Red and yellow and orange trees overhung the old brick street. Here and there children dawdled past on their way to school. Beside Bridge Street and sometimes beneath it Maywell Brook shimmered in the sunlight. Autumn was the slow season for water, and the brook sighed along its gouged, muddy bed. It was all so familiar, so peaceful, as if she had left only a few hours ago. But the years had changed the familiarity of Maywell. Once this place had been, simply, life. Now it hurt to be here.

  Mandy glanced at her watch. 9:20. She was due to meet the great lady in ten minutes. The great and dangerous lady. As a child Mandy had been cautioned never to speak to Constance Collier—not that she ever had. Except for her occasional forbidden intrusions onto the estate with other kids to watch witch rituals, she had only once or twice glimpsed the legendary figure sitting regally in the back of her enormous old Cadillac limousine, driven to some local function by one of her earnest acolytes.

  On one memorable occasion she and Constance had locked gazes, as the old lady was driven slowly down Maple in her big black car. That was when life at the Walker house was entering the deepest level of hell. A quart bottle of gin went into the garbage every two days, and the arguments made Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf sound like a Marx Brothers film.

  High up in her maple, Mandy had observed the car. It was moving very slowly. As it drew near she realized that the old woman was watching her carefully.

  Sometimes she dreamed of that car, coming unlit down the night street, and sometimes of the old lady drifting out of it like mist which would slip across the lawn, beneath the shadow of the maple tree. . . and then she would see the tall, severe shadow in the hall, or feel a bony hand on her forehead. . .

  Once she heard her father screaming in the basement, and there was a low, sharp voice between the screams, and little Mandy had thought. She's in the house. Constance Collier is in the house.

  In the morning she had decided that it had to have been a dream.

  In those days Constance had seemed frightening. Now the fact that she was a witch was a matter of indifference to Mandy. What she was interested in was this illustration assignment. There was no reason Amanda Walker couldn't become the next Michael Hague or even the next Arthur Rackham. Beyond that, though, illustrating a Grimm's offered her a chance to express her craft to the fullest.

  Mandy was convinced that her visions of the fairy tales were original and powerful and new. Surely they would stun die art world if they were ever painted.

  All that stood between her and success was this final interview. It promised to be hard. How had Will described Constance Collier? Quixotic. Rude. Imperious. And you were never late to an appointment with her. Nol ever was the way he had put it. From her own past, Mandy could easily imagine Miss Collier to be even harder to deal with than Will had said.

  Soon the forbidding brick wall that marked the towns ide edge of the estate appeared out the right window of the Volks. It was vine-covered but in excellent repair. Iron spikes jutted up from it, hooked out at their tops. Perhaps the incursions from the town had grown more aggressive in recent years. There was no scaling that wall now and dropping over, sweaty and breathless, knees skinned and heart pounding.

  The main gate, which Mandy had never before entered, was securely closed. Mandy pulled up and got out of her car. The gate was simple, almost stark, made of wrought-iron bars topped by more spikes. It might as well have enclosed a prison. Along the top of it were the familiar brass letters, “This Land of Dark,” from a line of Constance Collier's great poem. Faery: “Entered she this land of dark, borne by the mist's own hand.”

  How very quiet this place was, and how old. The trees soared huge and silent. The only sound was that of an occasional leaf whispering to the ground.

  Beyond the gate was a narrow dirt road, curving off into a thick forest the kids had always avoided, preferring to go the long way around, by the fields.

  Mandy pulled and pushed at the gate until her feet scraped on the brick paving. The hinges didn't even creak.

  She looked left and right—and saw a small gateman's house with its iron door hanging open. Inside was a disused telephone on a frayed cord. She picked it up, put it to her ear. “Hello?” Dead. “Great.” It was now 9:30 exactly. “Marvelous.” She was getting off to a wonderful start. She would be fired before she even met her employer.

  But she mustn't be fired. This just had to work, it had to. Her alternatives were bleak: illustrating the covers of paperbacks or maybe getting into advertising. To Mandy there was no thought more horrifying than that of being forced to abandon her vision and just use her skill. She had seen such people, had even interviewed in a few ad agencies. It had chilled her to walk down the long rows of trendy offices, each with its light box and drafting table, and see the gray people huddling there in frayed designer jeans and Yves Saint Laurent shirts.

  She deliberated
climbing the gate.

  Then she saw that there was another door in the back of the gateman's house, one that led into the estate. It opened easily. As she pushed it, paper rattled. There was a note taped to the back, where it couldn't be seen from the street. “Please be sure this locks behind you, Miss Walker.”

  Obviously this was the way she had been intended to come. Nice of Will T. Turner to tell her. He really was a very marginal person.

  Once inside the estate she went around to the back of the main gate and looked for some sort of a handle. There was nothing.

  Furious that none of these procedures had been explained to her, she hurried back to her car and parked it as far off the road as possible, then dragged her precious portfolio out of the back seat and reentered the estate on foot. All of her most important work was in this worn black case, everything she had ever drawn or painted relating to Grimm's fairy tales.

  The portfolio was heavy. Mandy couldn't be too mad at Will. He tried hard. If she had been planning intelligently, she would have called Miss Collier last night to reconfirm, and found out about this hike.

  A few moments after she started off she found herself slowing her pace, despite her lateness. Finally she stopped altogether. She simply could not help it. She was in a wonderful cathedral of trees, their black trunks stretching to crowns of brilliant autumn color. Leaves littered the dirt road, marking the dust with bright splotches.

  This was awesome. Too many months in Manhattan had made her forget the passionate silence of the woods. She began to walk again, now also noticing the rich scent of the air, cleansed by autumn rot.

  This place was not only beautiful and dark and huge, it was also something else she could not quite name. The very slightest of shivers coursed through her body and she began to walk a little faster. It was as if the woods itself was not entirety unconscious.

  She had no idea how long this road might be. In any case it was longer than necessary to make her thoroughly late. She marched along lugging the portfolio, trying to hum and not succeeding.

  Her imagination was really too vivid for this. “You know I'm here, don't you,” she whispered. Leaves stirred down. The trees filtered the bright morning sun to golden haze.

  The colors here were magnificent: these must be very robust trees. Plants die gaily because they are sure of their own resurrection. Not so higher creatures. All things that share the terror of final death are brothers, from the microbe to the man.

  The road curved upward, finally cresting a hundred yards ahead. Long before she was close to the top, Mandy was breathing hard. Even so the chill of morning had vitalized her. She felt physically wonderful, her whole body singing.

  What, she wondered, was the origin of the legend of the watcher in the woods? This place was so alive, but not in a human sort of a way. Trees were enigmatic beings. She knew that man had once acknowledged this alienness by considering them the temples of his most mysterious gods, me forest spirits. Now those gods were cast low. Who once had been worshiped in the woods was today captured in fairy tales and called a troll.

  Grimm's was the net, after all, in which the Christian world had captured the old gods, diminishing their power (or so it thought) by making them the stuff of children's stories.

  Just this side of the crest she came to a darker place in the forest, where the trunks of the trees seemed more enormous, the carpet of leaves thicker.

  She saw a small face, very still, peering at her from a hole at the base of one of the trees. Her imagination, of course.

  She bent close, and watched with horror as it took on the absolutely solid appearance of something quite real. She started away from it, giving a little, involuntary cry. The sound was rendered tiny by the immensity of the place. And the face was quite terrible.

  It just didn't seem possible that something so small, so strikingly inhuman, could be there—but she could still see it in outline even from ten feet away. As she watched it, an awful coldness seemed to slide up out of the ground and possess her whole body. She dragged her portfolio around to the front, a fragile shield.

  She backed to the far edge of the road. She was suddenly freezing cold, almost sick, fighting the impulse to panic Hight.

  Her mind worked frantically, seeking some way of explaining the impossible presence. A dwarf? No. Perhaps a statuette. Yes, that must be it.

  But she could see the moisture gleaming on its eyeballs.

  She decided to get out of here. She would phone Constance Collier from the safety of some coffee shop in town.

  Her watch told her it was 9:45. By the time she got back to the car and drove into town it would be 10:15 at least. Over the phone Miss Collier could so easily tell her to forget the whole thing.

  There really was no choice. Reason said that she was not facing some supernatural creature, not a troll, not one of Constance Collier's faeries. Such things were not real, not anymore.

  But a mad dwarf from some nearby mental institution could be very real. And wasn't there a Peconic Valley Institute for the Criminally Insane? Either she walked past it or she gave up this job. Shaking, her hands clutching the portfolio, she started off for the crest of the hill. More than anything, she expected to find that the apparition in the hole was gone, a figment of her vivid imagination. But it was still there—staring out of blank stone eyes.

  She stooped to look more closely at what was now quite clearly a little statue. It was a sneering, evil tittle elf, a creature of the cracks and holes of the world. Perhaps a mandrake, or a little fee guarding the lands of Faery.

  A woods of fabulous spells, Oid sticks and roots and holes, Leannan's grand dominion. . .

  When she remembered those lines from Faery, the menace of the woods evaporated like a rotten mist. As with new eyes she looked around her. What had been hostile was now suffused with wonderment. The little face was not sneering, it was grimacing to frighten any who might threaten its queen. One of her doughty fairy soldiers.

  Mandy was delighted. These were the actual woods of the poem. Here a twenty-year-old Constance Collier had written the dream of Leannan, the Fairy Queen. . .

  With a newly confident tread, full of gladness and awe, Mandy marched to the top of the rise. Spreading before her was a magnificent vista indeed. The road had been carefully planned to take advantage of it. It meandered down across the rolling green fields to a long lake dusted with lilies and swans, and thence across the wide pasture that led to the house. How typical of Will T. Turner to describe this place simply as “crumbling.” Had he been forced to leave his car at the gate and come on fool also? Probably trudged this very road, thinking that the gate was rusted closed, the leaves not raked, that there were rather too many lilies in the pond, and the green was high with cockle-burs and dandelions.

  And he never noticed that he was in the Land of Dark, where lived the Faery of Constance Collier's extraordinary creation. Poor Will T. Turner.

  Emerging from the woods, Mandy set out across the fields, filling her nostrils with the dry, sharp scent of autumn brush, her mind flashing image after image of paintings that must be painted here.

  Late or not, Constance Collier had an illustrator. Amanda Walker had decided that she would not be driven off, not even at the point of a gun.

  I'll do Hansel and Gretel in the woods, of course. And Briar-Rose's castle from this vista, with the thombushes choking the ramparts in just this light.

  Everywhere she looked there were more glories, wonderful wooden fences all tumbling down, a shattered hayrick, a great rusting contraption of scythes that must once have mowed the lawns.

  How exactly right Constance Collier was to let it go to its natural state. If ever there had been happy land, this was it.

  Oh, Pollyanna, smite on. You are heading toward a rough meeting with a very difficult old lady. Constance Collier eats illustrators for breakfast. She had quite literally fired the great Hammond Morris by burning the pictures he had done for Voyage to Dawn. When she heard that story, Mandy had felt contemp
t for Constance Collier. But she hadn't been offered this job then.

  As she approached the house, she began to see that it was indeed in serious disrepair. The architecture was Palladian and very elegant, red brick and white columns, a lovely curved side porch, tal! empty windows. Leaves were everywhere, choking the gutters, matting the walks, blowing about on the porch.

  There wasn't a sound. Despite the cool air, the bright morning sun was making Mandy sweat. Her portfolio had grown heavier, and she was glad to lean it against the wall when she finally reached the house. She went up between the tall, peeling columns and hunted for a doorbell. She settled for knocking.

  Her blows echoed back from within. There wasn't an answering sound, not the clatter of feet, not a call. When she knocked again, though, there was a startling flutter of wings at the edge of the porch. Six or seven huge crows wheeled about in the front yard, then settled into an oak and commenced to caw at one another.

  “Hello!”

  The sound of her voice caused the crows to rise again. They rushed back and forth across the weedy yard, their wings snapping with every turn.

  When she knocked, the door rattled. It was obviously unlocked. Telling herself that old people are hard of hearing, Mandy turned the blackened brass knob and pushed the door open.

  Inside was a shadowy central hallway with rooms to the left and right. The hall runner was old but fine, the lighting fixtures elegantly fluted. When Mandy pushed the buttons on die switchplate, none of them turned on. She looked at mem; bits of wax revealed that they were now used for candles. Halfway down the hall a brand-new Panasonic vacuum cleaner could be seen in an open broom closet. At least there was some electricity still in the house. This touch of modem technology gave her hope, until she saw that the machine was not only new but not even completely unpacked. Its body was still in a plastic bag; as a matter of fact, all the packing material was visible beyond the end of the hall, in die kitchen. Somebody had been wrapping it up, perhaps to send it back.