Stephen King - In a Half-World of Terror.pdf - Stephen King - ostres

IN A HALF WORLD OF TERROR

It was like a nightmare. Like some unreal dream that you wake up from the next morning.

Only this nightmare was happening. Ahead of me I could see Rankin’s flashlight; a large

yellow eye in the sultry summer darkness. I tripped over a gravestone and almost went

sprawling. Rankin whirled on me with a hissed oath.

"Do you want to wake up the caretaker, you fool?"

I muttered a reply and we crept forward. Finally, Rankin stopped and shone the flashlight’s

beam on a freshly chiseled gravestone. On it, it read:

DANILE WHEATHERBY

1899 – 19622

He has joined his beloved wife in a better land.

I felt a shovel thrust into my hands and suddenly I was sure that I couldn’t go through with it.

But I remembered the bursar shaking his head and saying, "I’m afraid we can’t give you any

more time, Dan. You’ll have to leave today. If I could help in any way, I would, believe me …"

I dug into the still soft earth and lifted it over my shoulder. Perhaps fifteen minutes later my

shovel came in contact with wood. The two of us quickly excavated the hole until the coffin

stood revealed under Rankin’s flashlight. We jumped down and heaved the coffin up.

Numbed, I watched Rankin swing the spade at the locks and seals. After a few blows it

gave and we lifted the lid. The body of Daniel Wheatherby looked up at us with glazed eyes.

I felt horror gently wash over me. I had always thought that the eyes closed when one died.

"Don’t just stand there," Rankin whispered, "it’s almost four. We’ve got to get out of here!"

We wrapped the body in a sheet and lowered the coffin back into the earth. We shoveled

rapidly and carefully replaced the sod. The dirt we had missed was scattered.

By the time we picked up the white-sheeted body, the first traces of dawn were beginning to

lighten the sky in the east. We went through the hedge that skirted the cemetery and entered

the woods that fronted it on the west. Rankin expertly picked his way through it for a quarter

of a mile until we came to the car, parked where we had left it on an overgrown and unused

wagon track that had once been a road. The body was put into the trunk. Shortly thereafter,

we joined the stream of commuters hurrying for the 6.00 train.

I looked at my hands as if I had never seen them before. The dirt under my fingernails had

been piled up on top of a man’s final resting place not twenty-four hours ago. It felt unclean.

Rankin’s attention was directed entirely on his driving. I looked at him and realized that he

didn’t mind the repulsive act that we had just performed. To him it was just another job. We

turned off the main road and began to climb the twisting, narrow dirt road. And then we

came out into the open and I could see it, the huge rambling Victorian mansion that sat on

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the summit of the steep grade. Rankin drove around back and wordlessly up to the steep

rock face of a bluff that rose another forty feet upward, slightly to the right of the house.

There was a hideous grinding noise and a portion of the hill large enough to carve an

entrance for the car slid open. Rankin drove in and killed the engine. We were in a small,

cube-like room that served as a hidden garage. Just then, a door at the far end slid open

and a tall, rigid man approached us.

Steffen Weinbaum’s face was much like a skull; his eyes were deep-set and the skin was

stretched so tautly over his cheekbones that his flesh was almost transparent.

"Where is it?" His voice was deep, ominous.

Wordlessly, Rankin got out and I followed his lead. Rankin opened the trunk and we pulled

the sheet-swaddled figure out.

Weinbaum nodded slowly.

"Good, very good. Bring him into the lab."

CHAPTER TWO

When I was thirteen, my parents were killed in an automobile crash. It left me an orphan and

should have landed me in an orphan’s home. But my father’s will disclosed the fact that he

had left me a substantial sum of money and I was self-reliant. The welfare people never

came around and I was left in the somewhat bizarre role as the sole tenant of my own house

at thirteen. I paid the mortgage out of the bank account and tried to stretch a dollar as far as

possible.

By the time I was eighteen and was out of school, the money was low, but I wanted to go to

college. I sold the house for $10,000.00 through a real estate buyer. In early September, the

roof fell in. I received a very nice letter from Erwin, Erwin and Bradstreet, attorneys at law. To

put it in layman’s language, it said that the department store at which my father had been

employed had just got around to a general audit of their books. It seemed that there was

$15,000.00 missing and that they had proof that my father had stolen it. The rest of the letter

merely stated that if I didn’t pay up the $15,000.00 we’d got to court and they would try to get

double the amount.

It shook me up and a few questions that should have stood out in my mind just didn’t

settle out of court?

I went down to the office of Erwin, Erwin, & Bradstreet and talked the matter over. To make

a long story short, I paid the sum there were asking, I had no more money.

The next day I looked up the firm of Erwin, Erwin & Bradstreet in the phone book. It wasn’t

listed. I went down to their office and found a For Rent sign on the door. It was then that I

realized that I had been conned like gullible kid – which, I reflected miserably was what I

was.

I bluffed my way through the first for months of college but finally they discovered that I hadn’t

been properly registered.

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That same day I met Rankin at a bar. It was my first experience in a tavern. I had a forged

driver’s license and I bough enough whiskey to get drunk. I figured that it would take about

two straight whiskeys since I had never had anything but a bottle of beer now and then prior

to that night.

One felt good, two made my trouble seem rather inconsequential. I was nursing my third

when Rankin entered the bar.

He sat on the stool next to me and looked attentively at me.

"You got troubles?" I asked rudely.

Rankin smiled. "Yes, I’m out to find a helper."

"Oh, yeah?" I asked, becoming interested. "You mean you want to hire somebody?"

"Yes."

""Well, I’m your man."

He started to say something and then changed his mind.

"Let’s go over to a booth and talk it over, shall we?"

We walked over to a booth and I realized that I was listing slightly. Rankin pulled the curtain.

"That’s better. Now, you want a job?"

I nodded.

"Do you care what it is?"

"No. Just how much does it pay?"

"Five hundred a job."

I lost a little bit of the rosy fog that encased me. Something was wrong here. I didn’t like the

way he used the word "job".

"Who do I have to kill?" I asked with a humorless smile.

"You don’t’. But before I can tell you what it is, you’ll have to talk with Mister Weinbaum."

"Who’s he?"

"A – scientist."

More fog evaporated. I got up.

"Uh-uh. No making a human guinea pig out of yours truly. Get yourself another boy."

"Don’t be silly," he said, "No harm will come to you."

Against my better judgement, I said, "Okay, let’s go."

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CHAPTER 3

Weinbaum approached the subject of my duties after a tour of the house, including the

laboratory. He wore a white smock and there was something about him that made me crawl

inside. He sat down in the living room and motioned me into a seat. Rankin had

disappeared. Weinbaum stared at me with fixed eyes and once again I felt a blast of icy

coldness sweep over me.

"I’ll put it to you bluntly," he said, "my experiments are too complicated to explain in any

detail, but they concern human flesh. Dead human flesh."

I was becoming intensely aware that his eyes burnt with flickering fires. He looked like a

spider ready to engulf a fly, and this whole house was his web. The sun was striking fire to

the west and deep pools of shadows were spreading across the room, hiding his face, but

leaving the glittering eyes as they shifted in the creeping darkness.

He was still speaking. "Often, people bequeath their bodies to scientific institutes for study.

Unfortunately, I’m only one man, so I have to resort to other methods."

Horror leapt grinning from the shadows and across my mind there flitted the black picture of

two men digging by the light of an uncertain moon. A shovel struck wood – the noise chilled

my soul. I rose quickly.

"I think I can find my own way out, Mr. Weinbaum."

He laughed softly. "Did Rankin tell you how much this job pays?"

"I’m not interested."

"Too bad. I was hoping you could see it my way. It wouldn’t take a year before you would

make enough money to return to college."

I started, and got the uncanny feeling that this man was searching my soul.

"How much do you know about me? How did you find out?"

"I have my ways." He chuckled again. "Will you reconsider?"

I hesitated.

"Shall we put it on a trial basis?" he asked softly. "I'm quite sure that we can both reach a

mutual satisfaction."

I got the eerie feeling that I was talking to the devil himself, that somehow I had been tricked

into selling my soul.

"Be here at 8.00 sharp, the night after next," he said.

That was how it started.

As Rankin and I laid the sheeted body of Daniel Whetherby on the lab table, lights flashed

on behind sheeted oblongs that looked like glass tanks.

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"Weinbaum –" I had dropped the title, Mister, without thinking, "I think –"

"Did you say something?" he asked, his eyes boring into mine. The laboratory seemed far

away. There were only the two of us, sliding through a half-world peopled with horrors

beyond the imagination.

Rankin entered in a white smock coat and broke the spell by saying, "All ready, professor."

At the door, Rankin stopped me. "Friday, at eight."

A shudder, cold and terrible raced up my spine as I looked back. Weinbaum had produced

a scalpel and the body was unsheeted. They looked at me strangely and I hurried out.

I took the car and quickly drove down the narrow dirt road. I didn’t look back. The air was

fresh and warm with a promise of budding summer. The sky was blue with fluffy white clouds

fleeting along in the warm summer breeze. The night before seemed like a nightmare, a

vague dream, that, as all nightmares, is unreal and transparent when the bright light of day

shines upon it. But as I drove past the wrought iron gates of the Crestwood Cemetery I

realized that this was no dream. Four hours ago my shovel had removed the dirt that

covered the grave of Daniel Wheatherby.

For the first time a new thought occurred to me. What was the body of Daniel Wheatherby

being used for at that moment? I shoved the thought into a deep corner of my mind and let

out onto the go-pedal. The care screamed ahead I put my thoughts into driving, glad to put

the terrible thing I had done out of my mind, for a short time, anyway.

CHAPTER FOUR

The California countryside blurred by as I tried for the maximum speed. The tyres sang on

the curve and, as I came out of it, several things happened in rapid succession.

I saw a panel truck crazily parked right on the broken white line, a girl of about eighteen

running right toward my car, an older man running after her. I slammed on the brakes and

they exploded like bombs. I jockeyed the wheel and the California sky was suddenly under

me. Then everything was right-side up and I realized that I had flipped right over and up. For

a moment I was dazed, then a scream, shrill and high, piercing, slit my head.

I opened the door and sprinted toward the road. The man had the girl and was yanking her

toward the panel truck. He was stronger than her and winning, but she was taking an inch of

skin for every foot he made.

He saw me.

"You stay out of this, buddy. I’m her legal guardian."

I halted and shook the cobwebs out of my brain. It was exactly what he had been waiting for.

He let go with a haymaker that got me on the corner of the chin and knocked me sprawling.

He grabbed the girl and practically threw her into the cab.

By the time that I was on me feet he was around to the driver’s side and peeling out. I took a

flying leap and made the roof just as he took off. I was almost thrown off, but I clawed through

about five layers of paint to stay on. Then I reached through the open window and got him by

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