Crouch End Page 3

  Right. And even if he had picked up a piece of information like that, it didn't change the fact that the woman was...

  "Must be going crazy," Lonnie said, and laughed shakily.

  Doris had looked at her watch earlier and saw that somehow it had gotten to be quarter of eight. The light had changed; from a clear orange it had gone to a thick, murky red that glared off the windows of the shops in Norris Road and seemed to face a church steeple across the way in clotted blood. The sun was an oblate sphere on the horizon.

  "What happened back there?" Doris asked. "What was it, Lonnie?"

  "Lost my jacket, too. Hell of a note."

  "You didn't lose it, you took it off. It was covered with -- "

  "Don't be a fool!" he snapped at her. But his eyes were not snappish; they were soft, shocked, wandering. "I lost it, that's all."

  "Lonnie, what happened when you went through the hedge?"

  "Nothing. Let's not talk about it. Where are we?"

  "Lonnie -- "

  "I can't remember," he said more softly. "It's all a blank. We were there... we heard a sound... then I was running. That's all I can remember." And then he added in a frighteningly childish voice: "Why would I throw my jacket away? I liked that one. It matched the pants." He threw back his head, gave voice to a frightening loonlike laugh, and Doris suddenly realized that whatever he had seen beyond the hedge had at least partially unhinged him. She was not sure the same wouldn't have happened to her... if she had seen. It didn't matter. They had to get out of here. Get back to the hotel where the kids were.

  "Let's get a cab. I want to go home."

  "But John -- " he began.

  "Never mind John!" she cried. "It's wrong, everything here is wrong, and I want to get a cab and go home!"

  "Yes, all right. Okay." Lonnie passed a shaking hand across his forehead. "I'm with you. The only problem is, there aren't any."

  There was, in fact, no traffic at all on Norris Road, which was wide and cobbled. Directly down the center of it ran a set of old tram tracks. On the other side, in front of a flower shop, an ancient three-wheeled D-car was parked. Farther down on their own side, a Yamaha motorbike stood aslant on its kickstand. That was all. They could hear cars, but the sound was faraway, diffuse.

  "Maybe the street's closed for repairs," Lonnie muttered, and then had done a strange thing... strange, at least, for him, who was ordinarily so easy and self-assured. He looked back over his shoulder as if afraid they had been followed.

  "We'll walk," she said.

  "Where?"

  "Anywhere. Away from Crouch End. We can get a taxi if we get away from here." She was suddenly positive of that, if of nothing else.

  "All right." Now he seemed perfectly willing to entrust the leadership of the whole matter to her.

  They began walking along Norris Road toward the setting sun. The faraway hum of the traffic remained constant, not seeming to diminish, not seeming to grow any, either. It was like the constant push of the wind. The desertion was beginning to nibble at her nerves. She felt they were being watched, tried to dismiss the feeling, and found that she couldn't. The sound of their footfalls

  (sixty lost in underground horror)

  echoed back to them. The business at the hedge played on her mind more and more, and finally she had to ask again.

  "Lonnie, what was it?"

  He answered simply: "I don't remember. And I don't want to."

  They passed a market that was closed -- a pile of coconuts like shrunken heads seen back-to were piled against the window. They passed a launderette where white machines had been pulled from the washed-out pink plasterboard walls like square teeth from dying gums. They passed a soap-streaked show window with an old SHOP TO LEASE sign in the front. Something moved behind the soap streaks, and Doris saw, peering out at her, the pink and tufted battle-scarred face of a cat. The same gray torn.

  She consulted her interior workings and tickings and discovered that she was in a state of slowly building terror. She felt as if her intestines had begun to crawl sluggishly around and around within her belly. Her mouth had a sharp unpleasant taste, almost as if she had dosed with a strong mouthwash. The cobbles of Norris Road bled fresh blood in the sunset.

  They were approaching an underpass. And it was dark under there. I can't, her mind informed her matter-of-factly. I can't go under there, anything might be under there, don't ask me because I can't.

  Another part of her mind asked if she could bear for them to retrace their steps, past the empty shop with the travelling cat in it (how had it gotten from the restaurant to here? best not to ask, or even wonder about it too deeply), past the weirdly oral shambles of the launderette, past The Market of the Shrunken Heads. She didn't think she could.

  They had drawn closer to the underpass now. A strangely painted six-car train -- it was bone-white -- lunged over it with startling suddenness, a crazy steel bride rushing to meet her groom. The wheels kicked up bright spinners of sparks. They both leaped back involuntarily, but it was Lonnie who cried out. She looked at him and saw that in the last hour he had turned into someone she had never seen before, had never even suspected. His hair appeared somehow grayer, and while she told herself firmly -- as firmly as she could -- that it was just a trick of the light, it was the look of his hair that decided her. Lonnie was in no shape to go back. Therefore, the underpass.

  "Come on," she said, and took his hand. She took it brusquely so he would not feel her own trembling. "Soonest begun, soonest done." She walked forward and he followed docilely.

  They were almost out -- it was a very short underpass, she thought with ridiculous relief -- when the hand grasped her upper arm.

  She didn't scream. Her lungs seemed to have collapsed like small crumpled paper sacks. Her mind wanted to leave her body behind and just... fly. Lonnie's hand parted from her own. He seemed unaware. He walked out on the other side -- she saw him for just one moment silhouetted, tall and lanky, against the bloody, furious colors of the sunset, and then he was gone.

  The hand grasping her upper arm was hairy, like an ape's hand.

  It turned her remorselessly toward a heavy slumped shape leaning against the sooty concrete wall. It hung there in the double shadow of two concrete supporting pillars, and the shape was she could make out... the shape, and two luminous green eyes

  "Give us a fag, love," a husky cockney voice said, and she smelled raw meat and deep-fat-fried chips and something swee and awful, like the residue at the bottom of garbage cans.

  Those green eyes were cat's eyes. And suddenly she became horribly sure that if the slumped shape stepped out of the shadows, she would see the milky cataract of eye, the pink ridges off scar tissue, the tufts of gray hair.

  She tore free, backed up, and felt something skid through the air near her. A hand? Claws? A spitting, hissing sound --

  Another train charged overhead. The roar was huge, brain rattling. Soot sifted down like black snow. She fled in a blind panic, for the second time that evening not knowing where.. or for how long.

  What brought her back to herself was the realization that Lonnie was gone. She had half collapsed against a dirty brick wall, breathing in great tearing gasps. She was still in Morris Road (atleast she believed herself to be, she told the two constables; the wide way was still cobbled, and the tram tracks still ran directly down the center), but the deserted, decaying shops had given way to deserted, decaying warehouses. Dawglish & Sons, read the soot-begrimed signboard on one. A second had the name Alhazred emblazoned in ancient green across the faded brickwork. Below the name was a series of Arabic pothooks and dashes.

  "Lonnie!" she called. There was no echo, no carrying in spite of the silence (no, not complete silence, she told them; there was still the sound of traffic, and it might have been closer, but not much). The word that stood for her husband seemed to drop from her mouth and fall like a stone at her feet. The blood of sunset had been replaced by the cool gray ashes of twilight. For the first time it occurred to her
that night might fall upon her here in Crouch End -- if she was still indeed in Crouch End -- and that thought brought fresh terror.

  She told Vetter and Farnham that there had been no reflection, no logical train of thought, on her part during the unknown length of time between their arrival at the call box and the final horror. She had simply reacted, like a frightened animal. And now she was alone. She wanted Lonnie, she was aware of that much but little else. Certainly it did not occur to her to wonder why this area, which must surely lie within five miles of Cambridge Circus, should be utterly deserted.

  Doris Freeman set off walking, calling for her husband. Her voice did not echo, but her footfalls seemed to. The shadows began to fill Norris Road. Overhead, the sky was now purple. It might have been some distorting effect of the twilight, or her own exhaustion, but the warehouses seemed to lean hungrily over the toad. The windows, caked with the dirt of decades -- of centuries, perhaps -- seemed to be staring at her. And the names on the signboards became progressively stranger, even lunatic, at the very least, unpronounceable. The vowels were in the wrong places, and consonants had been strung together in a way that would make it impossible for any human tongue to get around ihem. cthulhu kryon read one, with more of those Arabic pothooks beneath it. yogsoggoth read another. r'yeleh said yet another. There was one that she remembered particularly:

  NRTESN NYARLAHOTEP.

  "How could you remember such gibberish?" Farnham asked her. Doris Freeman shook her head, slowly and tiredly. "I don't know. I really don't. It's like a nightmare you want to forget as soon as you wake up, but it won't fade away like most dreams do; it just stays and stays and stays."

  Norris Road seemed to stretch on into infinity, cobbled, split by tram tracks. And although she continued to walk -- she wouldn't have believed she could run, although later, she said, she did -- she no longer called for Lonnie. She was in the grip of a terrible, bone-rattling fear, a fear so great she would not have believed a human being could endure it without going mad or dropping dead. It was impossible for her to articulate her fear except in one way, and even this, she said, only began to bridge the gulf which had opened within her mind and heart. She said it was as if she were no longer on earth but on a different planet, a place so alien that the human mind could not even begin to comprehend it. The angles seemed different, she said. The colors seemed different. The... but it was hopeless.

  She could only walk under a gnarled-plum sky between the eldritch bulking buildings, and hope that it would end.

  As it did.

  She became aware of two figures standing on the sidewall ahead of her -- the children she and Lonnie had seen earlier. The boy was using his claw-hand to stroke the little girl's ratty braids.

  "It's the American woman," the boy said.

  "She's lost," said the girl.

  "Lost her husband."

  "Lost her way."

  "Found the darker way."

  "The road that leads into the funnel."

  "Lost her hope."

  "Found the Whistler from the Stars -- "

  " -- Eater of Dimensions -- "

  " -- the Blind Piper -- "

  Faster and faster their words came, a breathless litany, a flashing loom. Her head spun with them. The buildings leaned. The stars were out, but they were not her stars, the ones she had wished on as a girl or courted under as a young woman, these were crazed stars in lunatic constellations, and her hands went to her ears and her hands did not shut out the sounds and finally she screamed at them:

  "Where's my husband? Where's Lonnie? What have you done to him?"

  There was silence. And then the girl said: "He's gone beneath."

  The boy: "Gone to the Goat with a Thousand Young."

  The girl smiled -- a malicious smile full of evil innocence. "He couldn't well not go, could he? The mark was on him. You'll go, too."

  "Lonnie! What have you done with -- "

  The boy raised his hand and chanted in a high fluting language that she could not understand -- but the sound of the words drove Doris Freeman nearly mad with fear.

  "The street began to move then," she told Vetter and Farnham. "The cobbles began to undulate like a carpet. They rose and fell, rose and fell. The tram tracks came loose and flew into the air -- I remember that, I remember the starlight shining on them -- and then the cobbles themselves began to come loose, one by one at first, and then in bunches. They just flew off into the darkness. There was a tearing sound when they came loose. A grinding, tearing sound... the way an earthquake must sound. And -- something started to come through -- "

  "What?'' Vetter asked. He was hunched forward, his eyes boring into her. "What did you see? What was it?"

  "Tentacles," she said, slowly and haltingly. "I think it was tentacles. But they were as thick as old banyan trees, as if each of them was made up of a thousand smaller ones... and there were pink things like suckers... except sometimes they looked like faces... one of them looked like Lonnie's face... and all of them were in agony. Below them, in the darkness under the street -- in the darkness beneath -- there was something else. Something like eyes..."

  At that point she had broken down, unable to go on for some time, and as it turned out, there was really no more to tell. The next thing she remembered with any clarity was cowering in the doorway of a closed newsagent's shop. She might be there yet, she had told them, except that she had seen cars passing back and forth just up ahead, and the reassuring glow of arc-sodium streetlights. Two people had passed in front of her, and Doris had cringed farther back into the shadows, afraid of the two evil children. But these were not children, she saw; they were a teenage boy and girl walking hand in hand. The boy was saying something about the new Martin Scorsese film.

  She'd come out onto the sidewalk warily, ready to dart back into the convenient bolthole of the newsagent's doorway at a moment's notice, but there was no need. Fifty yards up was a moderately busy intersection, with cars and lorries standing at a stop-and-go light. Across the way was a jeweler's shop with a large lighted clock in the show window. A steel accordion grille had been drawn across, but she could still make out the time. It was five minutes of ten.

  She had walked up to the intersection then, and despite the streetlights and the comforting rumble of traffic, she had kept shooting terrified glances back over her shoulder. She ached all over. She was limping on one broken heel. She had pulled muscles in her belly and both legs -- her right leg was particularly bad, as if she had strained something in it.

  At the intersection she saw that somehow she had come around to Hillfield Avenue and Tottenham Road. Under a streetlamp a woman of about sixty with her graying hair escaping from the rag it was done up in was talking to a man of about the same age. They both looked at Doris as if she were some sort of dreadful apparition.

  "Police," Doris Freeman croaked. "Where's the police station? I'm an American citizen...I've lost my husband... I need the police."

  "What's happened, then, lovey?" the woman asked, not unkindly. "You look like you've been through the wringer, you do."

  "Car accident?" her companion asked.

  "No. Not... not... Please, is there a police station near here?"

  "Right up Tottenham Road," the man said. He took a package of Players from his pocket. "Like a cig? You look like you c'd use one."

  "Thank you," she said, and took the cigarette although she I had quit nearly four years ago. The elderly man had to follow the jittering tip of it with his lighted match to get it going for her.

  He glanced at the woman with her hair bound up in the rag. "I'll just take a little stroll up with her, Evvie. Make sure she gets there all right."

  "I'll come along as well, then, won't I?" Evvie said, and put an arm around Doris's shoulders. "Now what is it, lovey? Did someone try to mug you?"

  "No," Doris said. "It... I... I... the street... there was a cat with only one eye... the street opened up... I saw it... and they said something about a Blind Piper... I've got to find Lonnie!"
/>
  She was aware that she was speaking incoherencies, but she seemed helpless to be any clearer. And at any rate, she told Vetter and Farnham, she hadn't been all that incoherent, because the man and woman had drawn away from her, as if, when Evvie asked what the matter was, Doris had told her it was bubonic plague.

  The man said something then -- "Happened again," Doris thought it was.

  The woman pointed. "Station's right up there. Globes hanging in front. You'll see it." Moving very quickly, the two of them began to walk away. The woman glanced back over her shoulder once; Doris Freeman saw her wide, gleaming eyes. Doris took two steps after them, for what reason she did not know. "Don't ye come near!" Evvie called shrilly, and forked the sign of the evil eye at her. She simultaneously cringed against the man, who put an arm about her. "Don't you come near, if you've been to Crouch End Towen!"

  And with that, the two of them had disappeared into the night.

  Now PC Farnham stood leaning in the doorway between the common room and the main filing room -- although the back files Vetter had spoken of were certainly not kept here. Farnham had made himself a fresh cup of tea and was smoking the last cigarette in his pack -- the woman had also helped herself to several.

  She'd gone back to her hotel, in the company of the nurse Vetter had called -- the nurse would be staying with her tonight, and would make a judgement in the morning as to whether the woman would need to go in hospital. The children would make that difficult, Farnham supposed, and the woman's being an American almost guaranteed a first-class cock-up. He wondered what she was going to tell the kiddies when they woke up tomorrow, assuming she was capable of telling them anything. Would she gather them round and tell them that the big bad monster of Crouch End Town

  (Towen)

  had eaten up Daddy like an ogre in a fairy-story?

  Farnham grimaced and put down his teacup. It wasn't his problem. For good or for ill, Mrs. Freeman had become sandwiched between the British constabulary and the American Embassy in the great waltz of governments. It was none of his affair; he was only a PC who wanted to forget the whole thing. And he intended to let Vetter write the report. Vetter could afford to put his name to such a bouquet of lunacy; he was an old man, used up. He would still be a PC on the night shift when he got his gold watch, his pension, and his council flat. Farnham, on the other hand, had ambitions of making sergeant soon, and that meant he had to watch every little posey.