The Fall of Never(134)
It was one of the detectives who’d questioned her awhile back at her parents’ house. As if she’d picked up the body’s lingering thought from the air, she was suddenly certain of it. The detective. Raintree, his name had been…
She pushed herself up from the floor…and noticed that the floors were neither earth and sod and grass, nor were they shoddy, termite-ridden planks laid one next to the other. No—this was a floor, an actual floor you’d find in someone’s house…
My parents’ house, she suddenly understood. This is the same floor in the front hall of my parents’ house.
“Are you coming?” Simon said from behind her, his voice now very real and very exact. Still on her hands and knees, Kelly spun around to catch a glimpse of the monster, but it was too dark. She could hardly make out his shape in front of her. Simon laughed at her persistence. “What a waste if you choose to sit around on the floor all evening…”
She pushed herself up. Her body protested, a barrage of aches and pains exploding in every joint.
“I remember it all,” she said, her voice faltering. “I know what’s next. It’s the dog again, isn’t it? Only this, too, you’ve improved on. Am I right? This is something bigger, just like all…all these innocent…”
“You have no idea,” Simon breathed…and she saw his shape begin to weave in and out of the darkness. She followed, her shoes clacking loudly against the floor—her parents’ floor. In the distance, she could see the dull, throbbing red light radiating up through the floorboards like a nuclear silo. And she could hear it now, too, and feel its beat reverberating throughout her body.
The heart of Never, she marveled. Oh my God, it’s real. I can feel it and it’s real.
She imagined the entire forest valley and hillside, including the Kellow Compound, as the camouflaged carapace of some supernatural basilisk now just moments away from exhuming itself from the earth and standing upright for the first time in ten thousand years. And not just the valley and hillside, but all of Spires itself—the schools and tiny houses, the village square and the confused jumble of diners on the outskirts near the highway. All of it. All part of some irrational, awakened beast…some monster that had existed here since forever.
And did I bring it all to life? She couldn’t help wonder.
As the red light grew stronger, Kelly was able to make out Simon’s grotesque, shuffling shape in the gloom. Over the passage of years, and in seeming defiance of Kelly’s struggle to heal, Simple Simon the imaginary boy was now a deformed, troll-like adult. His body suggested a human being in only the most rudimentary ways: two arms, two legs, a head. The knots of his elbow and knee joints had grown to obscene excess, and instilled on him significant lameness. He walked like an elderly woman…although something deep down inside Kelly told her that she was not being permitted to see all there was, and that this creature was only appearing to her this way because he chose to.
She stalled and Simon urged her on, pausing slightly and waving his right hand in a beckoning gesture. She caught a glimpse of the hand in the red light: it was more a web than a hand, the fingers practically twisted and fused together.
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about anything.
As had happened so many years ago, her legs now seemed to be propelled by some extraneous force, urging her along the dark room like a dummy being controlled by a puppeteer. Beneath her feet she could hear the floorboards creak and pop—but not from her footsteps: the heart was slowly pushing up through the floor, starving for exposure and freedom, splintering the manicured floorboards down the middle like balsa wood. Each beat, elucidated by a tremendous throb of red, burning light, caused her entire body to shake, right down to the center of her bones. It was alive, she knew: the house, the forest, the hillside, Spires. And Simon. Somehow, despite everything he’d done, that rhythmic cadence beneath the floor solidified Simple Simon’s existence more than anything.
A shape lay slumped against the far wall, in the exact same spot the injured dog had been bound to so many years back. But this wasn’t the shape of a dog; like the rest, this was the shape of a person. Details were impossible to perceive in the blackness of the room, but of its form she had no doubt. A person, another dead person…
His head turning slightly over his finlike shoulder, Simon passed between the slumped figure and the light, his eyes aglow with a preternatural omnipotence. He watched Kelly with a frightening sense of hunger, of mastery, waiting for her own expression to falter and change—waiting for her to reach that final plateau and look up, only to realize there was no place left to go, and that the body slouched against the wall—wrists tied, hands dangling from pegs, legs spread akimbo—was her precious Gabriel Farmer, now as dead and as pale as the creature she’d created from her imagination.
And she saw this. And she felt the world turn to ice, felt it crystallize all around her, threatening to fracture and break apart on itself immediately afterward. Gabriel. The name no longer made sense, as if the abrupt comprehension of his demise somehow rendered those three syllables meaningless. Gabriel! Her mind screamed this with authority, yet the name’s uselessness did not falter. Gabriel! Gabriel! Gabriel!
“This was the one,” Simon muttered from the darkness, “that I enjoyed the most. This one. This one who dared come and interrupt, to come between anything we had; anything we still have.”