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  SON OF THE ENDLESS NIGHT

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  SON OF THE ENDLESS NIGHT

  Copyright © 1984 by John Farris

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  First TOR printing: April 1986

  A TOR Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates 49 West 24 Street New York, N.Y. 10010

  Cover art by John Melo

  ISBN: 0-812-58266-7 CAN. ED.: 0-812-58267-5

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 84-22867 Printed in the United States

  0987654321

  For my father

  John Under Farris

  1909-1982

  And my mother

  Elinor Carter Farris

  1905-1984

  The spirit of evil peers from a silver mask.

  — Georg Trakl,

  To the Silenced

  Translated from the German by Michael Hamburger

  PART ONE

  Polly

  1

  From the testimony of Donald Ray Stemmons before the winter grand jury, Haden County, Vermont, February 17, 1984 (Twenty-six years of age. Occupation: part-time bartender. Winter address: 135 Barberry Lane, Sligo, Vermont. Tall. Bones sharp, like blades beneath the skin. The kind of face inevitably described as "Lincoln-esque,'' but with an unkempt yellow beard and a complexion inflamed, made nearly ulcerous by sunflash on the great white glaring heaps and long whalebacks of the ski trails in the area. A nervous habit of stroking the end of his nose with a forefinger while being addressed by the state's attorney for Haden County):

  Mr. Cleves: What happened when you tried to open the terrace doors?

  Mr. Stemmons: Nothing. Couldn't do it. Those doors're never used in the wintertime as far as I know. They were iced shut, and with the new snow, must have been three feet of drift piled up against them.

  Mr. Cleves: Yet you could see, despite the snowdrifts, what was going on outside?

  Mr. Stemmons: Pretty much. Had to wipe the panes with my shirtsleeve, and the others in the tavern, they were doing the same. I didn't do much looking, though, after I saw what was happening out there, and the girl screaming all the time. I just tried to force those doors apart. Finally gave up, busted one open with a barstool so I could get outside. But by that time I had a gut feeling I was probably too late to do any good.

  Mr. Cleves: Why?

  Mr. Stemmons: Well, the girl had stopped screaming by then. She was down again. Not moving at all. He must have hit her at least a couple of dozen times with that crowbar, or tire iron I guess it was. When I got a look at her up close, so much blood on the snow I couldn't believe it. Well, she— it looked— looked like— somebody had shot and dressed a deer.

  Mr. Cleves: Did you recognize the victim at that time? Mr. Stemmons: No, sir. Nobody could've recognized her. That's how bad it was.

  2

  Twenty minutes south of Chadbury, with the snow having begun and daylight fading, Richard Devon played the brief tape he'd taken from his telephone answering machine.

  Hi. This is Rich. I'm not in right now, but I expect to be back shortly and I do want to talk to you. When you hear the tone, please leave your name, the time you called, and a number where I can get back to you. Thanks for your cooperation. Remember now, wait for the tone before you leave your message.

  The girl's voice: youthful, high-pitched, a whining sound, from strain or desperation.

  Richard, it's Polly! You remember me, don't you? You told me I could call you if I ever needed anything. Well— they've been hurting me, Rich. I'm afraid they'll hurt me a lot worse if somebody doesn't stop them! You're the only one I could think of. I know I can trust you. Please come. Don't let them—

  A sharp intake of breath, the click of the receiver at the other end going down. Rich's smoky, well-traveled Porsche sideslipped uneasily on a patch of hilltop glaze. He felt Karyn's warning hand on his right elbow. He glanced at her, looked at an upcoming bridge for more trouble spots, slowed down, and punched buttons on the tape deck until Polly's portion of the recording was repeated. "... been hurting me . . ." "I don't want to hear it again," Karyn said testily. Rich ejected the tape. "What do you think?"

  Karyn stretched, giving her backbone a couple of pops; it had been a long two hours from New Haven.

  "What I've always thought. She's a little girl with an overactive imagination. Like those children in The Crucible, and ..."

  "Didn't it sound to you like she was cut off?"

  "... and that's probably all that's the matter with her. Cut off? No."

  Karyn frowned at the snow quickening from a darker sky, shuddered, pulled up the zipper of her maroon and silver down-filled jacket. The car heater had quit weeks ago. Rich finally had his Porsche, a dubious bargain, but no money for repairs.

  "Getting worse out," she said. "Do you need to put the chains on?"

  Rich shook his head. Karyn picked up the Fleetwood Mac cassette they'd been listening to before he surprised her with Polly, but she didn't play it again. She was troubled and still angry at his lack of timing, his insensitivity, his absorption in this problem child. For his sake she had suffered Polly once. She wouldn't do it again.

  "I thought we were just going skiing."

  "Chadbury's as good a place as any."

  "That's bullshit, Rich." She was building up a head of steam. "When you're not straight with me it's terrible for the relationship. The truth is, you're still obsessed with that girl, and obviously you made a hit with her. So that stupid phone call is all the excuse you need— is it the first time she's called you? Since August?"

  "Yes."

  "I hope that's the truth."

  "I'm worried about her, Karyn. And I want to get to the bottom of— "

  "She's not your responsibility. Her father— "

  "Keeps her locked up most of the time, and nobody does anything about it."

  "Because she's— "

  "Strange?"

  "Weird is a better word."

  "You spent time with Polly. How can you say that?"

  "If you wanted to ruin my weekend, you could have left me back at school."

  Rich held his tongue— no easy task for him— and watched the road, only tapping the steering wheel with the heel of one hand to indicate that he was irritated with her.

  Karyn stared at him for several seconds longer, then looked deliberately away. They had left the Interstate at Braxton and taken a rural road into a more mountainous area, through hamlets deep in winter. Sky of gunmetal, a seam of light mildly pink, like a depleted vein, far to the west. They crossed a river that was plunged into the heart of winter like a tempered blade. Rich now needed headlights and wipers. Karyn saw a grange hall, red snowplows standing beneath a bright light with a conical shield. Men in plaid mackinaws and earflap caps.

  With the windshield glass becoming a mirror, she was aware of herself. Curls were the vogue again. Very nineteenth century. Tresses. Little Women. She'd always been cheerfully faddish, but this wasn't a style that suited her. She felt cross about the mistake. The holiday she'd been looking forward to was off to a rotten start.

  "Look, Rich— "

  "I know she's half starved for attention. Oppressed by that old man of hers. She needs kindness. Friendship. But that's not all there is to it. If Polly's convinced she's in danger, I want to know why."

  "You're bein
g manipulated, Rich. Kids are so great at that. But what if it's something worse? She could very well be psychopathic— "

  "Polly's twelve years old!"

  Karyn's tone softened; she could speak with authority on this matter.

  "Her age has nothing to do with it, luv. You should see some of the cases I've come across in the children's clinic at Mount Sinai. One little boy I remember tied his mother up with her panty hose while she was sleeping, then gouged holes in her with fingernail scissors. He had the sweetest brown eyes I ever saw. You couldn't turn your back on him for a second. He was ten."

  Rich started to speak, smiled a little glumly, and said no more about Polly as they came within sight of the inn.

  Karyn and Richard were graduate students at New Haven. Karyn had decided on a career in child psychology and Rich, who had interned for a year on the Register, was becoming serious about journalism-as-literature; he greatly admired Halberstam and McPhee. His interest in Polly, Karyn suspected, was not totally altruistic. He sensed a story.

  They had met at the beginning of their junior years, Karyn transferring from Smith after a desultory term abroad. Rich, on scholarship, was well known on campus: political, defiantly threadbare. He was a little short but nearly always on his toes, argumentative, a fast talker with quick hands batting away irrelevancies, too graceful in dialectic for his Southie accent, the spasms of coughing that marred his spiels— he'd been smoking himself to death since he was thirteen. He had street style but few manners. She liked his pale and slightly hooded eyes, the faint soft winning smile, a cynical way of biting his lip when he disagreed with you. He disagreed with Karyn often and earnestly as they became acquainted, and seemed not to know what to do about her tentative interest in him. Rich made approaches, he backed away.

  Karyn had the kind of gloss that demanded attention, sass without meanness, and not much conceit. The Yalies flocked around, keeping her busy, but her attention always strayed back to Rich. She was at breakpoint with her most recent beau, bored with his rugby, his healthy hedonism, the smooth self-assured way he embraced her in bed. She craved rough edges, a relationship with something a little perilous in it.

  Rich was a long time playing up to her, but when the time came he touched her boldly and with appreciation. The tense self-awareness that had always plagued her in sexual relations vanished. He was the first man she'd ever truly wanted to lie around naked with, for the sheer bumptious good-natured hell of it. Within a couple of weeks they were looking for digs to share. She weaned him from cigarettes and he taught her the art of plain speaking. She was less flighty with Rich, a quality old friends claimed to miss.

  3

  Chadbury was a T-shaped town, four blocks of graceful, gently sloping village green intercepting the narrow highway, or Post Road. The green was lined with churches, modest ramshackle inns, a couple of Vermont marble public buildings and some fine old Federal-style homes. The Post Road Inn overlooked the green from the crossbar of the T. It consisted of three buildings, unconnected, which dated from the late eighteenth century, several hilly acres with boxwood hedges almost as old, and a parking lot that was inadequate for the weekend ski crowd, many of whom had arrived in minibuses and campers.

  "They've had a fire," Karyn said, as Rich concentrated on edging the Porsche into a narrow space between a van with dark bubble windows and a couple of snowbound boulders.

  "Do I have room over there?"

  "About three inches," Karyn said, rolling down the window to look out.

  "Okay." Rich finished parking and turned off the engine. "What do you mean, a fire?"

  "The rear wing. It's dark, and some of the top windows look boarded up."

  Rich got out and Karyn followed him, sliding under the steering wheel. Snow was flying, obscuring their view of the inn. The buildings were each three stories, uneven in size, asymmetrical. The rear wing, uphill, was the largest, and had a pitched roof. It looked to Rich as if the west end of the roof had partially caved in.

  "Something happened. I hope they're not overbooked."

  Karyn gave him a dismal look and yanked luggage out of the back seat. Rich undamped their skis from the rack and they trudged to the inn, skirting a Jeep that was blading the driveway down to a half-inch of hardpacked snow.

  There were still fifteen minutes before the first seating in the dining room; the tavern at the rear of the main building was elbow-to-elbow, and a large group of ruddy drinkers in gorgeous sweaters had clustered near the log-jammed fireplace at the south end of the lobby.

  "There's Benny and Elise," Karyn said, brightening for the first time in an hour. She waved a big hello to a blond girl wearing Eskimo boots and a tunic, and her boyfriend, who had long slicked-back hair and was smoking a pipe the size of a small saxophone.

  "Go ahead," Rich told her. "I'll check in."

  "Do you want a beer?"

  "Badly," Rich said, with a grateful smile.

  The assistant manager of the Post Road Inn was a plump girl who wore a single braid, thick as a ship's hawser, over one shoulder. According to the badge pinned to her yellow corduroy jumper, her name was Fran. She went quickly through the card file and pulled Rich's reservation.

  "Got you right here. And you wanted number 21. On the back."

  "As far away from the road as I can get."

  Fran smiled. "You've been here before."

  "The last week in August."

  "Here you are, sir. How are you paying? Visa? Thank you, I'll just run off a copy of the charge for you."

  "Looks like you have a full house."

  "We're stuffed

  Rich began filling out the registration blank. "When was the fire?"

  "Six weeks ago. I thought the whole place would go up. But the fire department's just down the road, and half the town came running to pitch in."

  "Much damage?"

  "Confined to the top floor, but we can't use any of the building until repairs are made— I guess that won't be until late spring. And all the rooms smell of smoke."

  "How did it start?"

  "Nobody knows. Probably in the wiring. Luckily it was the middle of the afternoon, only a few people were in their rooms. Let's see, we'll have to give you the second seating for dinner, that's at eight fifteen."

  "Fine. Is Mr. Windross here?"

  Fran opened the door to a small office behind her. "Mr. Windross?"

  She looked around at Rich. "He was here, about fifteen minutes ago. He may be in the kitchen. Was it something in particular you wanted to see him about?"

  "Just thought I'd say hello. I'm a friend of his daughter's."

  She selected a big brass key from a pigeonhole and turned with a smile. "Here you are, room 21. I didn't know Mr. Windross had a daughter."

  Rich gave his lower lip a brief chewing. "Her name's Polly. She's about twelve. Blond. How long have you worked here?"

  "Since the start of the winter season. Almost three months."

  "And you haven't met Polly?"

  Fran shook her head slightly, still smiling, but puzzled. Her manner became a little stiff, as if she suspected Rich was, for some obscure reason, putting her on.

  "Mr. Windross lives alone. And he's never mentioned a daughter to me. Hope you enjoy your stay at the inn."

  "So do I," Rich muttered.

  Fran went to the other end of the reception counter to answer the phone and Rich turned, looking for Karyn, wishing she'd appear to give him a hand with the cumbersome ski gear. She was nowhere in sight— probably still wedging her way up to the inadequate bar in the tavern. He acknowledged greetings from a couple of acquaintances from New Haven, picked up bags, two pairs of boots and skis, awkwardly made his way up the narrow staircase to the second floor and then to his right down the dimly lighted hall to the end.

  Their room had a low coffered ceiling, an uneven floor, a big featherbed that took up a third of the space, and a small private bathroom, not big enough for Karyn and himself at the same time, unless one of them was in the tub. The
room was at the opposite end of the building from the tavern, so that the volume of sound from the jukebox would be received only in dull thumping waves should they wish to be asleep before midnight.

  Rich dumped their gear and used the toilet, rinsed his face, raised his eyes to his image in the mirror.

  He's never mentioned a daughter to me.

  Rich felt a light chill across his shoulders; his mouth tightened cynically, a defensive reaction whenever he was confronted with the inexplicable or implausible. So Polly wasn't here? Then where had the frantic phone call come from? Boarding school?

  . . been hurting me, Rich . . ."

  Who was hurting her, and how? Physical punishment, mental abuse?

  The hurried phone call, the breathless pleading, now seemed, perhaps deliberately so, ambiguous. Nothing he could go to the police with. Still, he didn't want to believe that Karyn had her pegged correctly after all: a slightly askew twelve-year-old asimmer with prepubescent fantasies playing a not particularly nice joke on him. Emoting on the telephone. Kids played those phone games all the time. Maybe she'd had a friend listening in. The two of them falling apart from giggles after hanging up.

  After giving it more thought, Rich rejected the idea that her father had placed Polly in a private school. She was simply too shy and introverted to survive in any kind of competitive environment. Also Windross had been extremely reluctant to let the girl out of his sight the couple of times Rich had persuaded him to let Polly go for an outing. As if he was afraid for her to go. Afraid of what might happen to her? Not exactly.

  As if he couldn't be sure what she might do away from his watchful influence.

  The lightly coiled feeling of apprehension had snuggled down at the base of Rich's neck.

  He could buy only one version of the phone call: Polly had been under a severe strain and was desperate for his help. Nothing else made sense. He and Polly had formed a bond, that last week in August. She was enigmatic but not strange, as Karyn insisted. Hesitant from shyness but, when she came to know him better, talkative. Curious about him. Full of questions. Certainly not a budding witch. Only troubled— by what he never learned. And Polly was very lonely. It was this memory of her loneliness that pierced him now, gave him a renewed sense of mission. He was going to find Polly, and soon.