Creature

Chapter Seven

CharlotteLaConner glanced at the clock that glowed dimly next to the bed. Nearly one-thirty. Beside her, Chuck was snoring softly. How could he sleep, knowing that Jeff had still not come home? Charlotte got up, slipped her arms through the sleeves of a light robe, then went to the window and peered out at the street. The night was quiet. A gentle stillness lay over the valley that seemed totally at odds with the turmoil in her mind.

It had been a bad week for her, and every day things seemed to be getting worse. It had begun on Monday evening, when she'd tried to talk things over rationally with Chuck. He'd listened patiently while she'd told him about seeing Ricardo Ramirez. But when she'd gone on to say that she'd decided Jeff was going to have to quit the football team, his expression froze and a hard look came into his eyes.

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," he'd said.

His words had lashed her like a whip, but she'd bitten her lip, then tried to argue with him.

It had done no good. "It was an accident," he'd insisted.

"You don't ask a kid to give up his favorite sport just because of an accident."

As far as Chuck had been concerned, that was the end of it. If he'd even noticed the tension in the house since then, he'd given no sign, acting as if nothing had changed. But Charlotte, unable to get Rick Ramirez out of her mind, had grown quieter through the week, and become acutely aware of changes in Jeff.

If they were really changes.

For by now, she wasn't sure. Perhaps Jeff hadn't really changed at all, and she was simply reading things into his behavior. Still, she believed his personality actually was changing. Jeff's temper-always so even when he'd been younger- appeared to flare up now at the least provocation, and twice this week, when she'd asked him to do something, he had yelled that he already had too much to do, then slammed out the door. On both occasions he'd come back a few minutes later and apologized, and she'd been quick to forgive him. A repeat of the scene on Saturday night was the last thing she needed.

But her son's sudden rage had led Charlotte to watch him closely, searching for clues to his mood before she spoke to him. And as she observed him, often when he wasn't aware that she was watching, she'd begun to feel that it wasn't just his personality that had undergone a transformation-he seemed to be changing physically as well.

His eyes seemed to her to have sunk slightly, and his brow, always strong, now seemed to have thickened and grown heavier. His jaw, carrying the same square line as his father's, had a slight jut to it, giving him an aggressive look that became even more pronounced when he lost his temper.

When Jeff had come home after football practice today, his hands looked swollen, and when she'd asked him about it, his eyes flashed with quick anger. "Anything else?" he demanded. "Got any more problems with me, Ma?"

Charlotte had recoiled from his words, then tried to tell him she was only worried about him, but it had been too late.

He'd already disappeared into his room to spend the hours until dinner working out on the Nautilus equipment Chuck had bought him the previous summer. Immediately after dinner he left the house, and she'd neither seen nor heard from him since.

She heard the faint sound of the big clock at the foot of the stairs striking two, and finally turned away from the window. With mixed emotions-part trepidation, part anger that she'd come to fear her own husband-she went to the bed and shook Chuck. He stopped snoring, then wriggled away from her and rolled over. She shook him again, and he opened his eyes and looked up at her.

"What is it?" he mumbled. "What time is it? Christ, Char, it isn't even light out!"

"It's two in the morning, Chuck. And Jeff isn't home yet."

Chuck groaned. "And for that you woke me up? Jeez, Char, when I was his age, I was out all night half the time."

"Maybe you were," Charlotte replied tightly. "And maybe your parents didn't care. But I do, and I'm about to call the police."

At that, Chuck came completely awake. "What the hell do you want to do a thing like that for?" he demanded, switching on the light and staring at Charlotte as if he thought she'd lost her mind.

"Because I'm worried about him," Charlotte flared, concern for her son overcoming her fear of her husband's tongue. "Because I don't like what's been happening with him and I don't like the way he's been acting. And I certainly don't like not knowing where he is at night!"

Clutching the robe protectively to her throat, she turned and hurried out of the bedroom. She was already downstairs when Chuck, shoving his own arms into the sleeves of an ancient woolen robe he'd insisted on keeping despite its frayed edges and honeycomb of moth holes, caught up with her.

"Now just hold on," he said, taking the phone from her hands and putting it back on the small desk in the den. "I'm not going to have you getting Jeff into trouble with the police just because you want to mother-hen him."

"Mother-hen him!" Charlotte repeated. "For God's sake, Chuck! He's only seventeen years old! And it's the middle of the night, and there's nowhere in Silverdale he could be! Everything's closed. So unless he's already in trouble, where is he?"

"Maybe he stayed overnight with a friend," Chuck began, but Charlotte shook her head.

"He hasn't done that since he was a little boy. And if he had, he would have called." Even as she uttered the words, she knew she didn't believe them. A year ago-a few months ago; even a few weeks ago-she would have trusted Jeff to keep her informed of where he was and what he was doing. But now? She didn't know.

Nor could she explain her worries to Chuck, since he insisted on believing there was nothing wrong; that Jeff was simply growing up and testing his wings.

As she was searching for the right words, the words to express her fears without further rousing her husband's anger, the front door opened and Jeff came in.

He'd already closed the door behind him and started up the stairs when he caught sight of his parents standing in the den in their bathrobes, their eyes fixed on him. He gazed at them stupidly for a second, almost as if he didn't recognize them, and for a split-second Charlotte thought he looked stoned.

"Jeff?" she said. Then, when he seemed to pay no attention to her, she called out again, louder this time. "Jeff!"

His eyes hooded, her son turned to gaze at her. "What?" he asked, his voice taking on the same sullen tone that had become so familiar to her lately.

"I want an explanation," Charlotte went on. "It's after two a.m., and I want to know where you've been."

"Out," Jeff said, and started to turn away.

"Stop right there, young man!" Charlotte commanded.

She marched into the foyer and stood at the bottom of the stairs, then reached out and switched on the chandelier that hung in the stairwell. A bright flood of light bathed Jeff's face, and Charlotte gasped. His face was streaked with dirt, and on his cheeks there were smears of blood. There were black circles underJeffs eyes-as if he hadn't slept in days- and he was breathing hard, his chest heaving as he panted.

Then he lifted his right hand to his mouth, and before he began sucking on his wounds, Charlotte could see that the skin was torn away from his knuckles.

"My God," she breathed, her anger suddenly draining away. "Jeff, what's happened to you?"

His eyes narrowed. "Nothing," he mumbled, and once more started to mount the stairs.

"Nothing?" Charlotte repeated. She turned to Chuck, now standing in the door to the den, his eyes, too, fixed on their son. "Chuck, look at him. Just look at him!"

"You'd better tell us what happened, son," Chuck said. "If you're in some kind of trouble-"

Jeff whirled to face them, his eyes now blazing with the same anger that had frightened Linda Harris earlier that evening. "I don't know what's wrong!" he shouted. "Linda broke up with me tonight, okay? And it pissed me off! Okay? So I tried to smash up a tree and I went for awalk.Okay? Is that okay with you, Mom?"

"Jeff-" Charlotte began, shrinking away from her son's sudden fury. "I didn't mean… we only wanted to-"

But it was too late.

"Can't you just leave me alone?" Jeff shouted.

He came off the bottom of the stairs, towering over the much smaller form of his mother. Then, with an abrupt movement, he reached out and roughly shoved Charlotte aside, as if swatting a fly. She felt a sharp pain in her shoulder as her body struck the wall, and then she collapsed to the floor. For a split-second Jeff stared blankly at his mother, as if he was puzzled about what had happened to her, and then, an anguished wail boiling up from somewhere deep within him, he turned and slammed out the front door.

Chuck, stunned by what had happened, stared at the closed door for a moment, then knelt down to help his wife to her feet. As Charlotte began sobbing quietly, he led her upstairs.

First he'd get her calmed down and back in bed. Then he'd start hunting for Jeff.

Jeff shambled away from the house, stumbling down the sidewalk to the street. But as the glow of the streetlight struck his eyes, he blinked dazedly then quickly ducked away, darting across the street and disappearing into the deep shadows between two houses.

His head was pounding with a dull throbbing pain that seemed to penetrate the very bones of his body, and tears were streaming from his eyes. How could he have done that? It was bad enough shaking Linda Harris like she was some kind of rag doll, but to have hit his own mother that way…

He tried to force the thought from his mind. He couldn't have done that-he couldn't have! It must have been someone else.

That was it. There was someone else inside him-someone evil-who was making him do things he never would have done himself.

But if there were someone else inside him, it meant he was going crazy. He was losing his mind, and they'd lock him up. That's what they did with crazy people, he knew-at least if they got violent.

He crouched in the shadows for a moment, his eyes darting like those of a wild animal that knows it's being hunted. How long did he have before they would start looking for him, how long before they'd come for him? He had to get away, had to find someplace to hide.

He kept low to the ground, balanced on the balls of his feet, then darted across a backyard, vaulting over the low fence that separated one yard from the other. He crossed two more yards that way, then slipped once more between the houses, pausing to search the street for signs of life before dashing across its open expanse to the welcome darkness on the other side. He wasn't certain where he was going yet, but his instincts seemed to be leading him to the other side of town, out near the school.

And then he knew.

There was someone he could go to, someone he trusted, someone who would help him. His breathing eased slightly as his panic began to subside and his mind to clear. Even the terrible pain in his head was lessening, and he broke into a loping stride, slipping from one shadowed area to the next, carefully avoiding the bright pools of yellow light that illuminated the sidewalks. No more than ten minutes later he reached his destination.

He paused across the street from Phil Collins's house, huddling close to the trunk of a large cedar tree, watching not only the coach's house, but the houses on either side as well.

The buzzing of insects seemed amplified in his ears, and in his paranoia he couldn't imagine how anyone could sleep through the din. Yet all the houses on the block were dark, nor could he see signs of movement on the streets.

Perhaps, after all, they weren't looking for him yet.

He crouched for a moment, then darted across the street and around to the back of the coach's house. He tapped softly at the back door, then harder.

Instantly, the house came alive with the sound of a dog barking, and a second later lights came on. Then the door opened a crack and Jeff recognized the coach's familiar face peering out at him.

"It's me, Coach," he said, his voice trembling. "I-I'm in trouble. Can I come in?"

The door closed for a second, and Jeff heard Collins mumble something to the dog, then the door opened wide and Jeff stepped into the kitchen of Collins's little house. The big German shepherd crouched at its master's feet, its teeth bared, a low growl rattling in its throat.

"Easy, Sparks," Phil Collins said. "Take it easy." The dog visibly relaxed, then slunk forward to sniff atJeffs hand.

Jeff sank into the single battered chair that stood next to the kitchen table and held his head in his hands.

"I-I hit my mother," he said, his eyes avoiding the coach's. "I don't know what happened. But-Well, sometimes it's like I just go crazy." Finally he looked up, his expression beseeching. "What's wrong with me?" he asked. "I get so mad sometimes I just can't control myself. All I want to do is start hitting things. I just want to start hitting, and I don't care what happens."

Collins placed his hand on the boy's shoulder. "Now, just take it easy," he said, unconsciously repeating the same words he'd used to the dog only a moment before. "There's nothing wrong with you, Jeff. You're just going through a tough time in your life, that's all. Now just try to tell me what happened."

Half sobbing, Jeff did his best to tell Collins what had happened that evening, from the time he'd started talking to Linda Harris until the moment hours later when he'd suddenly, without thinking about it, struck his mother. But in the end he knew the story didn't make much sense-there were a lot of blank spots, times when he couldn't remember where he'd been or what he'd been doing. To his relief, the coach didn't seem too upset by what he'd done.

"Sounds to me like you just had an overreaction to breaking up with your girlfriend," he said. "Happens all the time with kids your age-hormones are flying all over your body and you never know what they're going to do to you. Tell you what," he went on. "I'll call Marty Ames and we'll take you out there and have him look you over. Believe me," he added with a wink, "if you're cracking up, Marty will be able to spot it in a minute. But you're not," he added quickly, as Jeff paled. "I'll bet he says the same thing I just said."

"But what about my folks?" Jeff asked, his voice anxious. "After what I did to my mom, my dad's going to kill me!"

"No, he's not," Collins assured him. "If we need to, I'll talk to him, or Marty Ames will. But I'll bet we won't even have to do that. Your old man's pretty proud of you, Jeff. And he's sure not going to turn against you now. He's not, and your mom's not."

As Jeff seemed to calm down, the coach went to the phone and made a quick call. A quarter of an hour later, with Jeff sitting next to him, Collins pulled his car to a stop in front of the clinic gates and rolled the window down to speak to the guard who was waiting for them. The guard pressed a remote control and the front gates swung slowly inward to let Collins drive through.

Martin Ames was waiting for them in the lobby of the sprawling main building and immediately led Jeff back to the examination room. "Strip down to your shorts," he told the frightened boy, "and let's have a look at you." He turned to Collins. "Tell me what happened." While Jeff peeled off his clothes, Collins briefly repeated what Jeff had told him earlier. "Okay," Ames said when Collins was done. "Let's get started."

It was as Ames began checking the reflexes in his legs, tapping his knees with the small rubber mallet, that the rage suddenly began to build in Jeff again. He could feel it coming on but could do nothing about it. And yet there was no reason for it-he'd been through this procedure hundreds of times before and it had never bothered him. But not this time.

This time it infuriated him.

"Stop that, goddamn it!" he shouted. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" Kicking the tiny mallet in Ames's hand aside, Jeff jumped off the examination table, his eyes blazing with fury, his hands clenching into fists.

Ames took a quick step backward and glanced at Collins, who instantly threw his arms around Jeff in a powerful bear hug. In the brief moment before Jeff could recover from the sudden action, Ames jabbed his arm with a hypodermic needle and pressed the plunger. Jeff froze in Collins's grasp, and as the drug began to take effect, felt his rage ease and his body relax. As Collins released him, Jeff sank back onto the treatment table.

The last thing he heard as he drifted into unconsciousness was the sound of Ames's voice telling Collins to call his parents and explain to them where he was. He was going to be all right, Ames said, but he would have to spend the rest of the night at the clinic.

But was he going to be all right?

Martin Ames didn't know.

He knew it was a nightmare, knew it had to be. Surely what was happening to him couldn't be real.

His entire body was racked with pain, blinding, searing-pain that tore at the depths of his soul.

He seemed to be surrounded by darkness, and yet, even in the pitch-black of the torture chamber, he could see perfectly.

He was not alone.

He could see the others, some of them chained to the walls, others strapped to the rack in the center of the floor. And he could hear their cries-agonized shrieks that bellowed from the depth of their souls, reverberating through the stone room but never fading away, only being built upon by more screams, more pitiful wails.

The chamber masters were there, too, oblivious to the keening pleas of their victims, each of them carrying a different tool of torture. One of them was approaching Jeff now, a red-hot branding iron balanced delicately in his hands. He seemed to smile at Jeff for a moment, and through the cacophony, Jeff almost imagined he could hear the man laugh before he pressed the glowing metal against his thigh.

The sweet smell of burning flesh filled his nostrils then, his gorge rising as a wave of nausea swept over him. "Nooo!"

Creature he wailed, and his whole body jerked and thrashed against the chains that bound him to the metal table on which he lay. "Nooo!"

It was his own scream that finally released him from the grip of the terrible dream, and he sat bolt upright.

A blinding stream of white light shone in his eyes. He blinked several times and his vision began to clear.

He was breathing hard; his lungs felt as if they might explode as he gasped for air.

There were people around him, and for a moment the dream closed around him again and he opened his mouth to scream out once more. But then he caught hold of himself.

They weren't the torturers. These men were real, and they wore white coats-as white as the room in which he sat.

Hospital.

He was in a hospital.

Then, slowly, it came back to him, and as his memory returned in bits and pieces, he began to calm down.

He was at the sports clinic. The coach had brought him here, and Dr. Ames was taking care of him. So he was going to be all right.

He looked around now.

There were three attendants, three men he recognized immediately.

They were part of the staff; his friends.

But they were looking at him strangely, almost as if afraid of him.

He raised his hand to shield his eyes against the brilliance of the light, and it was then that he saw the leather strap.

It was buckled tightly around his wrist, but the free end was torn and ragged, almost as if…

As if he'd been strapped down and managed somehow to rip himself free.

He swallowed hard and felt a soreness in his throat, the kind of rawness he always felt after he'd spent an afternoon shouting at a football game.

Puzzled, he tried to swing his legs off the table and sit up straight, but found that he couldn't. And when he looked down at his feet, he saw that his ankles, too, were wrapped in leather straps.

Just as in the nightmare, he was bound to a metal table.

A wave of anger built up inside him, and he gathered himself together to jerk his legs free.

Once more a needle was plunged into his arm and he quickly felt himself sink back into the strange, soft darkness of unconsciousness.

Mercifully, the nightmare did not come back to haunt him.