When he looked at the headstones again, Eduardo's imagination was suddenly crowded with unwanted images of Tommy and Margaret, not as they had been in life but as they might be in their coffins: decaying, worm-riddled, eye sockets empty, lips shriveled back from yellow-toothed grins. Trembling uncontrollably, he was gripped by an absolute conviction that the earth in front of the granite markers was going to shift and cave inward, that the corrupted hands of their corpses were going to appear in the crumbling soil, digging fiercely and then their faces, their eyeless faces, as they pulled themselves out of the ground.
He backed away from the graves a few steps but refused to flee. He was too old to believe in the living dead or in ghosts.
The dead brown grass and spring-thawed earth did not move. After a while he stopped expecting it to move.
When he was in full control of himself again, he walked between the low stone columns and out of the graveyard. All the way to the house, he wanted to spin around and look back. He didn't do it.
He entered the house through the back door and locked it behind him.
Ordinarily he never locked doors.
Though it was time for lunch, he had no appetite. Instead, he opened a bottle of Corona.
He was a three-beers-a-day man. That was his usual limit, not a minimum requirement. There were days when he didn't drink at all.
Though not lately.
Recently, in spite of his limit, he had been downing more than three a day.
Some days, a lot more… Later that afternoon, sitting in a living-room armchair, trying to read Thomas Wolfe and sipping a third bottle of Corona, he became convinced, against his will, that the experience in the graveyard had been a vivid premonition. A warning. But a warning of what?
As April passed with no recurrence of the phenomenon in the lower woods, Eduardo had become more- not less-tense. Each of the previous events had transpired when the moon was in the same phase, a quarter full. That celestial condition seemed increasingly pertinent as the April moon waxed and waned without another disturbance. The lunar cycle might have nothing whatsoever to do with these peculiar events-yet still be a calendar by which to anticipate them.
Beginning the night of May first, which boasted a sliver of the new moon, he slept fully clothed. The.22 was in a soft leather holster on the nightstand.
Beside it was the Discman with headphones, Wormheart album inserted. A loaded Remington twelve-gauge shotgun lay under the bed, within easy reach. The video camera was equipped with fresh batteries and a blank cassette. He was prepared to move fast.
He slept only fitfully, but the night passed without incident.
He didn't actually expect trouble until the early-morning hours of May fourth.
Of course, the strange spectacle might never be repeated. In fact, he hoped he wouldn't have to witness it again. In his heart, however, he knew what his mind could not entirely admit: that events of significance had been set in motion, that they were gathering momentum, and that he could no more avoid playing a role in them than a condemned man, in shackles, could avoid the noose or guillotine.
As it turned out, he didn't have to wait quite as long as he had expected.
Because he'd had little sleep the night before, he went to bed early on May second-and was awakened past midnight, in the first hour of May third, by those ominous and rhythmic pulsations.
The sound was no louder than it had been before, but the wave of pressure that accompanied each beat was half again as powerful as anything he had previously experienced. The house shook all the way into its foundations, the rocking chair in the corner arced back and forth as if a hyperactive ghost was working off a superhuman rage, and one of the paintings flew off the wall and crashed to the floor.
By the time he turned on the lamp, threw back the covers, and got out of bed, Eduardo felt himself being lulled into a trancelike state similar to the one that had gripped him a month earlier. If he fully succumbed, he might blink and discover he'd left the house without being aware of having taken a single step from the bed.
He snatched up the Discman, slipped the headphones over his ears, and hit the Play button. The music of Wormheart assaulted him… He suspected that the unearthly throbbing sound operated on a frequency with a natural hypnotic influence. If so, the trancelike effect might be countered by blocking the mesmeric sound with sufficient chaotic noise.
He raised the volume of Wormheart until he could hear neither the bass throbbing nor the underlying electronic oscillation. He was sure his eardrums were in danger of bursting, however, with the heavy-metal band in full shriek, he was able to shrug off the trance before he was entirely enthralled.
He could still feel the waves of pressure surging over him and see the effects on objects around him. As he had suspected, however, only the sound itself elicited a lemming-like response, by blocking it, he was safe.
After clipping the Discman to his belt, so he wouldn't have to hold it, he strapped on the hip holster with the.22 pistol. He retrieved the shotgun from under the bed, slung it over his shoulder by its field strap, grabbed the camcorder, and rushed downstairs, outside.
The night was chilly.
The quarter moon gleamed like a silver scimitar.
The light emanating from the cluster of trees and the ground at the edge of the lower woods was already blood red, no amber in it whatsoever.
Standing on the front porch, Eduardo taped the eerie luminosity from a distance. He panned back and forth to get it in perspective to the landscape.
Then he plunged down the porch steps, hurried across the brown lawn, and raced into the field. He was afraid that the phenomenon was going to be of shorter duration than it had been a month before, just as that second occurrence had been noticeably shorter but more intense than the first.
He stopped twice in the meadow to tape for a few seconds from different distances. By the time he halted warily within ten yards of the uncanny radiance, he wondered if the camcorder was getting anything or was overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of light.
The heatless fire was fiercely bright, shining through from some other place or time or dimension.
Pressure waves battered Eduardo. No longer like a crashing storm surf.
Hard, punishing. Rocking him so forcefully he had to concentrate on keeping his balance.
Again he was aware of something struggling to be free of constraint, break loose of confinement, and burst full-born into the world.
The apocalyptic roar of Wormheart was the ideal accompaniment to the.moment, brutal as a sledgehammer yet thrilling, atonal yet compelling, anthems to animal need, shattering the frustrations of human limitations, liberating. It was the darkly gleeful music of doomsday.
The throbbing and the electronic whine must have grown to match the brilliance of the light and the power of the escalating pressure waves.
He began to hear them again and was aware of being seduced.
He cranked up the volume on Wormheart.
The sugar and ponderosa pines, previously as still as trees on a painted stage backdrop, suddenly began to thrash, though no wind had risen. The air was filled with whirling needles.
The pressure waves grew so fierce that he was pushed backward, stumbled, fell on his ass. He stopped recording, dropped the video camera on the ground beside him.
The Discman, clipped to his belt, began to vibrate against his left hip. A wail of Wormheart guitars escalated into a shrill electronic shriek that replaced the music and was as painful as jamming nails into his ears might have been.
Screaming in agony, he stripped off the headphones. Against his hip, the vibrating Discman was smoking. He tore it loose, threw it to the ground, scorching his fingers on the hot metal case.