The Forbidden Zone by Whitley Strieber
"Going toward the judge's," Ellen said.
More helicopters thundered overhead, started circling.
"Bob's been killed," Brian said. "They've found him in the mound and he's dead."
"I'm going," Ellen announced. "Instantly." She pulled her hiking boots on, got her heavy old camera out of a box at the foot of her bed, then headed for the door.
"We go, too," Loi announced.
2.
They followed Ellen's car. Loi sat with her chin in her hands. "She is very beautiful, Brian."
"Not as beautiful as you."
"So you say."
A state police car, its light bar blazing, stormed up from behind and darted away down the wrong side of the road. Brian increased his speed.
The judge's yard was swarming with people, state troopers, sheriffs deputies, the men from the Oscola rescue unit.
The dismal yard with its abandoned orchard and its weedy lawn was now an accident site. A rolling stretcher stood on the front walk, its white sheets gleaming in the bright morning sunlight. The judge hovered about in black trousers and a dirty dress shirt. He'd looked bad when they'd met on the mound. But seeing him now, Brian thought in terms of death.
Then he noticed the tire tracks everywhere, all over the grass,
in every bit of naked soil. He glanced around, trying to determine if the police had done it. There was no way to be sure.
"Judge terBroeck," Ellen asked, "what's happening here?"
The judge stared toward the bottom of his yard, in the direction of the mound. Brian followed his gaze.
"That's where they came from, Loi," Ellen said. "They came out of that hole."
Bob, his hat missing, his uniform tunic ripped to pieces, was being pulled out of the old root cellar by a group of troopers and emergency workers.
The next moment Brian was running. "Bob," he shouted.
There was a shriek of tires in the driveway and another car stopped. Nancy West got out and started running also. "Bobby," she cried in a hoarse voice, "Bobby!"
As they pulled him up out of the ruined cellar he regarded his wife with vacant eyes.
It seemed for a moment as if he was going to respond to her, but then his eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped into the arms of the medics. Somebody brought the stretcher and they put him on it. Nancy came down to him, threw her arms around him.
She made not a sound, a silence that was as heartrending as it was impressive.
They took him away, Nancy moving along beside the stretcher, her eyes streaming. Loi went to her. "We are with you," she said.
Nancy hugged her. "The boys are at home. Take care of them, Loi."
"They'll be well with us."
The parade left, marching to the ugly chatter of Ellen's camera clicking and grinding as she shot and reloaded and shot again. She was not one of those people who are graceful in their work. There was something awkward about her, almost brutal, as she slung her bulky camera around.
Loi missed none of this. "Look at her, Brian, how greedy she is. It is greed that allowed the demon into her heart."
"There is no demon!"
"I am not wrong. They send him back because he is a good man."
Brian looked at his wife, at her hollow eyes. "Why would they take a good man in the first place?"
"This will emerge," she replied.
Ellen's Duster rattled off at the rear of the crowd of departing vehicles.
"Let's look in the root cellar," Loi said. She tugged at Brian's hand. "I will prove there are demons, show you their marks."
"I don't think so."
"Come." Loi marched across the yard.
"Loi, get away from there!" His shout made her turn toward him. As she did so her weight unbalanced her and she toppled backward, stumbled, then slipped down into the weedy, bramble-choked hole before he could reach her.
"Brian!" Her arms came up, barely reaching above the edge.
Brian dove after her, crashing down through the choke of roots that held her.
He landed hard, rolled. The first thing he saw was her legs dangling in the dimness above him. "I've got you, baby!" He reached up, took her ankles and pushed her. Despite her unaccustomed bulk, she scrambled up into the light.
"Brian, come on!"
"I'm right behind you, I'm coming."
He grabbed the roots, hauled himself up, tacking and scrabbling against the moldering bricks in front of him.
There was a grating sound, deep and close, and all at once the whole wall started crumbling. Musty air came out. Brian flailed, pushed himself back, struggled to get away.
He grabbed the weak, giving roots immediately above him. Soil poured down into his face. With a huge, howling cry he pulled himself up—and went crashing back down amid a mass of roots and vines and a great deal of dirt.
Above him there was a terrible, piercing cry. He could see Loi's face framed against the morning sky. "Brian," she shrieked.
"I'm OK!"
Then she turned to one side. "Get a rope," she shouted.
The judge's voice replied, apparently some sort of refusal. Probably he didn't have a rope.
"You find one!" There was a sharpness there that Brian had never heard before. She leaned down into the root cellar. "He will find a rope," she said. "Are you sure you're not hurt?"
"I'm sure." He was looking into the blackness that had been opened up by the crumbling wall, trying to penetrate its inky gloom. This was more than just a root cellar, this was some sort of abandoned mine shaft or something.
People had once mined this area for iron, but that was over two hundred years ago.
From deep in the dark, Brian heard a sort of sighing... like the sound of many small wings.
Maybe the old mine had another opening, and it was the wind. But he didn't think so. "Where's that rope, Loi?"
"Coming. Remain calm."
There was an almost military sense of command in that tone. But Brian was not reassured. He was beginning to notice air moving out of the hole, and the air stank. It stank of sweat and skin, urine and feces, the smell of a concentration-camp dormitory, a man-jammed boxcar. "Hurry, baby."
Was that a glow down in there? And another sound, a low sort of popping noise?
He jumped toward the roots, missed them entirely, ran back the five available steps and tried again, straining with all his might. The fingers of his right hand closed around a thick vine. He dangled, bringing up his left hand, wishing he was in better shape.
He hung with both hands, his legs windmilling. From far below there came a flicker of light.
He pulled himself up, trying to somehow get his feet over the vine. As he struggled, he felt it give. When he put even a little weight on it, the thing trembled.
He went crashing back to the floor of the pit.
The smell from below was strong now; the wind was blowing steadily. He could hear many sounds: buzzing, sizzling, a grating snick, like the snap of great scissors. The air was suffused with a purple glow.
He threw himself against the back wall, tried to somehow claw his way up the crumbly bricks. But they gave way like dry clay, collapsing even more.
Brian kicked, he tried to make chinks for his feet.
"The rope, Loi!"
Finally it came dropping down. But it was too thin, it was nothing but a clothesline. "I can't climb this!"
"Listen to me carefully, husband. Tie it around your waist, bring it around the front of your right arm, take it across your back and under your left shoulder. Do you understand?"
He fumbled with the rope. "I'm not sure."
"You do it, and do it right. Now I get the truck."
There was plenty of slack to tie it securely. He just hoped he'd done it right.
A single glowing object, looking like a lantern, rose lazily from the depths, hung for a moment on the air, then winked out. Instantly, Brian felt something in his hair, something moving. He screamed, tore at it, grabbed it—and was suddenly swept straight up and out ont
He landed with a bone-jarring thud, was dragged a few feet before Loi could stop the truck. Then she was running back, to him. "Brian, Brian!"
She came down to him. "Careful," he said, holding out his closed hand. "I've got one of the insects." He opened it—and there lay the crushed remains of a large but entirely commonplace wolf spider, a harmless creature.
"That's an insect from hell?"
He threw it down without comment.
She rushed into his arms. "I was so scared for you!"
The judge, his face pinched, peered at them from his kitchen porch. He looked for ail the world like a vulture on a stump.
"Were they there?" Loi whispered.
Brian formed his words carefully, forcing the answer past a bone-dry throat, through cracked lips. "They were there."
She went to the hole, looked down inside.
"Stay away from it," Brian said.
She stepped back, regarding him gravely. "We have a great battle on our hands, Brian. A very great battle indeed."
His first impulse was to get into the truck and take her a thousand miles from here, and never turn back.
And that, perhaps, is exactly what he should have done.
Nine
1.
Brian and Bob and Nancy were like most Oscola folk, they went back to childhood together. In a small community, the people are woven of one another, they are not single and alone and isolated. This was happening to his best friends, to people he could not remember being without.
How had he ever left Nancy alone all night to worry by herself? How had he done that? He couldn't imagine, he was shocked at himself.
Brian and Loi reached the hospital a few minutes behind Ellen.
They drove up into the emergency room parking lot, got out and went inside through the swinging glass door that led to the emergency receiving area. The nurse in the check-in booth looked up expectantly.
"Bob West," Loi said.
"He's upstairs in the Brain/Mind Suite. Let me call them and see if he can have visitors."
That was the local euphemism for the psychiatric ward. Brian had the horrible feeling that Bob had talked about the wrong thing.
Ellen was already in the waiting room. "He's physically OK. But they've got him in the psycho unit." Her voice was flat.
"You'll put this in the paper?" Loi asked.
"No."
When the nurse finally called them, Brian found himself going down a familiar corridor. It had been on his route when he'd been struggling along with his IV tree six months after the fire.
Bob was in one of those rooms that had always been closed. When the door opened, Nancy looked up, and Brian was deeply touched by the way her eyes tugged at him. "What happened, Brian?"
"I don't know."
Bob spoke. "Blue pipe," he said faintly. "E.G. and G."
Those few words changed Brian's life, his view of himself, his understanding of the world. The room rocked, the ceiling whirled. He grabbed the door frame and hung on, looking in astonished horror at the man on the bed.
Bob stared at the ceiling.
"What blue pipe, honey?" Nancy asked.
The conduit that housed the miles and miles of wire involved in Brian's facility were made of light blue PVC pipe. "Where did you see it, Bob?"
There came out of him a howl as high and wild as any from the deepest woods. The power of it made Brian stumble away from him. Nancy covered her ears with her fists. The doctor reached toward Bob, tentative, his face grave. He muttered something about the Valium drip. "It's LSD," Nancy said miserably. "He did a hell of a lot of it during the war! He's having hallucinations all over again."
"That was a long time ago," Brian said.
"An LSD flashback," the doctor interjected, "can happen at any time. This isn't uncommon."
Again Bob howled. The sound rocked them with its deafening power.
Brian had not been aware that a human being could make a noise like that. When it finally stopped, Nancy turned on him, shrieking. "What happened out there, Brian? You tell me!"
What could he say? "I don't—"
"Tell me!" She was face-to-face with him, her eyes swirling, sweat pouring down her face, her top lip quivering. Never in all the years he'd known her had he seen Nancy in a state like this.
"I observed some insects. Wasps. Maybe something from the tropics, I don't know."
"What sort of insects?" the doctor asked.
Brian shook his head.
"Could he have been stung? I'm thinking in terms of a bizarre venom reaction."
"It's possible. They were all over him at one point." Brian did not expand on Bob's mention of blue pipe, but it had sickened him inside. That was the project, it had to be. They'd gotten that pipe specially manufactured. It wasn't anywhere except in the facility.
The room seemed very small, the hospital stink made Brian feel as if his throat was going to close. An awful coldness began creeping through his body.
He saw the dead eye of the woman from the Traps, that staring, dead eye, moving, moving, looking into him and through him, carrying with it a message from another world—and from his own past.
He felt his skin growing clammy, crawling beneath his clothing, smelled the oily sour stink of fear.
Nancy spoke again. "Brian, you're holding back."
"I don't—"
"Brian, please!"
He put his arms around her. Something about the way she leaned against him recalled a long time ago, before either of them were married, when they'd had a couple of very intense weeks together.
"My project involved the use of lots of blue PVC, and it was stamped with the logo of a defense contractor, E.G. and G. Bob must have somehow seen some of this pipe."
"Last night?"
"I don't know when else."
Ellen came into the room. "Where was he, Brian, was he in some lab? Did somebody use him as a lab animal because he used to be a soldier?"
"It was almost certainly a combination of the LSD and these... apparent insects," the doctor said, with more than a trace of self-importance.
Bob groaned.
Everybody stopped talking.
He growled.
The doctor raised his eyebrows.
With a hollow cry Bob leaped on Brian. They went down hard amid screams and toppling equipment. Brian saw his friend's face distorted beyond belief, hideous, the lips quivering, the eyes darting like—like—
The woman in the Traps. Her eyes had darted like that when she was alive, and after her death, the one eye had kept on.
Then Bob was being dragged away, he was being restrained, and Loi and Ellen were helping Brian up, he was brushing himself off, watching as orderlies piled on his friend, covering him with heaving bodies, until only his head was visible, jerking like the head of a trussed bird, his cries rending the air.
2.
Four hours later the howls were still echoing in Brian's mind, tearing into his heart.
They'd left because there was nothing else to do, gone like three wooden people out into the innocent morning. Brian and Loi had picked up the Wests' two scared boys, eleven-year-old Chris and his eight-year-old brother, Joey.
Now the boys sat in front of the TV, quietly watching through tear-drowned eyes.
Brian was pacing like a trapped animal, physics flying through his mind. How could Bob have been in his old facility? He had paranoid visions of some vast underground complex, growing like a cancer out of his own abandoned work while he spent his time tending his damned apples.
What on earth did gross anomalies like mutated insects have to do with his work?
Nothing made sense. He paced back and forth in the little trailer, trying to put together a functional scenario. But abstruse experiments in subatomic physics simply did not lead to... this.
If they had taken Bob underground, how had he managed to return? Why hadn't he ended up buried?
He imagined insects burrowing beneath the whole region, from Lu
He had to make some kind of a case with Nate Harris, Bob's commanding officer. It shouldn't be hard to talk him into investigating the damned hole behind the judge's house. Maybe he could even get him to send a detective to one of the judge's little parties. "Look," he said to Loi, "I'm gonna go down to the state police barracks in Ludlum."
"I'm going, too."
He could see her filing a complaint about demons. "You stay here." He started to leave.
"No." She snapped her purse shut and slung it over her shoulder. "Boys, we'll be back in two hours. You aren't to leave the house. Is that understood, Chris?"
"Yes, Aunt Loi."
They rode together in silence. As was her habit, she fiddled with the radio, trying to tune in WAMC, the public radio station out of Albany. She was a voracious consumer of news.
"Listen, Loi, don't say anything to him about demons."
"Brian, I'm not stupid. But we should pack up everything we own and leave."
"Is that what happened in Vietnam, when the demons came?"
"Those demons wore uniforms," she said, "and burned our houses with cigarette lighters. But when they died, they had the faces of scared kids far from home."
She hadn't spoken so many words to him in quite a while. "I love you," he said.
She nodded solemnly.
The barracks was a brand-new prefabricated building on the Northway about a mile north of the Ludlum exit.
As they pulled into the parking lot, Loi opened her purse and examined her makeup.
The sight of Bob's Blazer sitting alone and abandoned with an impound sticker on the windshield made him feel physically ill.
"Hey, Brian," Nate said as soon as they entered his small office. "Figured you'd be along."
"He's bad."
"I know it. He's gonna be on psychiatric leave for a while. Won't get paid, I'm afraid."
"It happened in the line of duty."
"The pencil pushers have this phrase, 'preexisting condition.' Send quite a few guys to the poorhouse with it." He crossed his legs, leaned back in his chair. "You got some more information for us?"