PROLOGUE
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
WHAT HAPPENED TO JULIA AVERY
But three, now, Christ, three a.m.!… The soul is out. The blood moves slow.… Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open.
—Ray Bradbury
1
Julia sees the people in the stairwell when she gets up at night to pee.
They’re standing there in the dark and staring up at her, frozen like a photograph, as if they’ve been waiting for her. Her left foot is already on the top stair and she’s about to put her right foot on the next, but her fingers clamp the handrail convulsively, and she stops. Of course she stops, because it suddenly penetrates her drowsy brain: there are people in the stairwell and they’re staring at her.
Just now, she has woken up with a start. The bedside lamp dispels the shadows in the chalet, but outside the wind is howling around the roof with such vigor that the shutters tremble and the rafters creak. The sound of the wind fills Julia with an instinctive sense of doom, a familiar sense of doom. It sends her back to Huckleberry Wall, and the night it burned down. That was fifteen years ago, in the Catskills, and this is now and thousands of miles from home, in the Swiss Alps, but when at night the snow clings to the windows and the wind kicks up, all cabins are the same.
Creepy as fuck and completely cut off from the rest of the world.
She reaches under her pillow for her iPhone. 1:15, no messages from Sam. Damn it. Her stomach turns.
Julia throws back the covers and her body warmth, held by the down, disperses in the draft. The night chill hangs in the attic. It’s the draft, eddying through the chalet like an echo of the storm, that has kept her from lighting a fire earlier that evening. She pictures the draft blowing life into the embers as she sleeps, puffing glowing cinders onto the rug and setting the curtains on fire. Fifteen years ago, her big brother was there to wake her up before the smoke suffocated her—she was six, he was nine—but the last time Sam called tonight was sometime before 10:30, as he was stuck in a jam on the Bern bypass.
The snowplows are doing their best, he’d said over a breaking connection, but traffic’s stop-and-go and the worst part in the mountains is yet to come. That is, if the valley is still open.
Maybe he’s given up and taken an overnight room. That’s what Julia hopes anyway, because Sam’s been under way too much pressure lately, and she’s worried as hell—that he’ll skid off the road and plow into a snowbank, or worse, 300 feet of nothing. She hears more than just simple concern in his voice when he asks her to be on the lookout for Nick … and to be wary.
Except it’s been almost three hours now, and Sam still hasn’t called. No sign of Nick, either. By now, Julia is more than worried. She’s scared.
Barefoot, she crosses the floorboards, which crack under her weight, around the supporting wall, out to the landing.
The stairwell plunges straight down into the dark.
There’s a light switch, but before Julia can grope for it, she’s at the top of the steps and sees the people at the bottom.
They’re barely more than silhouettes, black against black, but she feels their gazes fixed on her, senses the purpose in their presence. Six, seven figures, pressed together in the stairwell, motionless.
It’s immediately obvious that they can’t be intruders; the chalet is too remote for that, the night too remorseless. She also knows, triggered by some primitive survival instinct, that she cannot turn on the light. In the light, the people in the stairwell will no longer be visible—and not seeing them, while knowing they’re there, is worse than seeing them.
Much worse.
The chill that envelops Julia as she walks back to bed is more than a physical chill. It’s a cold in her soul, so elementary she has to brace herself against the force with which it possesses her. A floorboard snaps under her foot like a gunshot and she flinches, jumps into bed, pulls the covers up to her chin. She stares wide-eyed at the afterimages in her eyes, too paralyzed to know what to do next.
She can’t see the stairwell from here.
In the safety of her bed, the oh-so-obvious explanation gradually dawns on her: she dreamed up the whole thing. Of course. Julia welcomes this possibility with overly eager conviction; it is, however, irrefutably logical. She certainly did get out of bed—her cold feet are proof—but her half-asleep mind made her see things that weren’t there. Shadows on the landing transformed into human shapes, a sleep-induced projection of her fears.
You were awake and rational enough to wonder where Sam is. Awake enough to be seriously scared.
She pushes the thought away. There’s no one in the stairwell. She’s alone in the chalet. She remembers bolting the doors before going upstairs. Because, yes, she had been on the lookout, as Sam had asked. With a blanket around her shoulders, as she tried getting acquainted with the cabin’s unfamiliar sounds. It felt—still feels—like it’s alive. The cuckoo clock ticks its heartbeat. The slanting roof groans under the snow’s weight, occasional loads come sliding down.
The worst is the storm’s wailing.
There’s something irresistibly alluring about it. Time and again, Julia is compelled to exchange her warm corner on the couch for the chilly front door, peering out its window. She can barely make out the spruces through the snowstorm, not to mention the mountain ridges or the trail that leads back to the village along the brook. The chalet stands isolated at the end of a blind valley. Higher up, there’s only the reservoir, and behind it the treacherous glacier. At a quarter past eleven, she concludes that it’s impossible for Nick to be wandering out there, in this weather. She checks the locks, listens to the strange ticking sounds coming from the heaters now that she’s turned them off, and then turns out the light. If Sam is still going to come home, he’ll call and wake her up. Julia definitely wouldn’t mind.
So there couldn’t be anyone else in the house. She is alone with the wind. The downstairs is empty.
It’s just that … the house doesn’t feel empty.
Nonsense, of course.
All she needs to do to be sure is take a look.
Of course she doesn’t need to be sure, and certainly not to prove herself to anyone. But, like it or not, she still needs to pee.
Armed with her iPhone, Julia gets out of bed and walks silently around the wall.
There’s the stairwell. Like a pit in the wooden floor.
She has to walk all the way to the edge in order to look into it and, admittedly, she doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want the only way to the bathroom to be through that dark hole. So she stays put. Listens to the ticking of the cuckoo clock coming from downstairs.
She extends her neck but can’t see further than the top stair.
You’re being ridiculous.
Julia takes a deep breath and quickly steps forward. Only when she reaches the top of the stairwell does she see it—and when her gaze latches onto what’s down there, cold air is sucked violently into her body, and with an enormous jolt, the world comes to a standstill. Her lungs swell up like balloons, ready for the scream growing inside her, but it’s as if the air is trapped, because when she puts her hands to her mouth, all you can hear is a stifled squeak.
The people in the stairwell are still there.
They’re closer now.
They’ve all raised their heads and are staring right at her. But most terrifying is that they’re staring right into her. In their faces lurks the frozen silence of insanity. The one up front, a tall, gaunt woman dressed in black, with pale, almost translucent skin, is standing fixed on the third step. She is followed closely by a fat man in a grubby white shirt. The others behind them are phantoms.
Completely paralyzed, Julia stares back. It takes a long time before she’s certain that the people in the stairwell are more than a still projection or a lifeless afterimage, but then she sees the woman’s index finger trembling and the palpitating, purple-black skin under her eyelids. Her eyes are large, fierce and concentrated, full of hate. She has the face of a psychopath who’s on the verge of screaming. If she does, her face will shatter and fall off.
Julia finally manages to breathe. The air squeezes out of her lungs in a string of short, gasping cries. Her eyes well up with tears. She feels heat behind her cheekbones and a crackling stab in her brain, like electricity. My fuses are blowing, she thinks soberly.
She runs back to bed on legs that no longer feel like legs. The springs groan as she leaps in. She sits upright, one cramped hand pulling the covers up to her waist, the other clawing her face till it hurts. Pain is good, it clears the head. When she lowers her hand, she can feel half-moons of blood on her cheek and nostril.
A stair creaks.
Her gaze is fixed on the area of the vestibule that is visible behind the supporting wall. It’s empty, but she can’t see the stairwell. She looks quickly over her shoulder, as if expecting to catch someone behind her. There is no one.
That woman. That face.
Why did she have to look at her with so much hate?
Julia unlocks her iPhone and with trembling fingers swipes to the top of the recent calls list, to Sam’s number. If she hears Sam’s voice, she won’t have to feel scared anymore. Then her nightmare will dissipate; with Sam’s voice in her ears there will be no people in the stairwell.
It takes ages before she gets a signal and the phone starts ringing. It’s a bad connection. It’s storming not only around the roof but also on the line.
Pick up. Come on, come on, come on …
Voicemail. She moans in dismay and tries again.
When another stair creaks, she lets out a silent scream.
He picks up after the third attempt.
“Julia!”
“Why didn’t you pick up?”
“Sorry, it’s a hairy situation here on the road. Hadda link to my Beats first. Any news?”
“I … no.” Not the news he was waiting for. She feels stupid. What should she say? That she fell asleep on sentry duty? That she’s afraid to be alone—that she’s afraid now that she’s not alone? She wants him to talk, for his voice to make everything all right. “Where are you?”
“On my way. You okay, sis? You sound weird.”
She listens for sounds from the stairwell but hears only silence.
“Yes,” she finally says. “It’s just this storm is driving me crazy. How long will it take you to get here?”
“Um, beats me. Get this: I’m driving behind a snowplow! Only way to go up tonight. After Bern there were no more jams, but only cuz no one’s crazy enough to go out there. There’s a weather alert for the whole west and they raised the avalanche alarm in the mountains to four, probably five tonight. Unbelievable. Some areas you literally can’t see your hand in front of your face. Somewhere before Montreux, I went into a skid. Lucky there was no one next to me, cuz I slid sideways across the road, all the way to the shoulder, before I got it under control. After that it got a bit better cuz they’re spreading salt, but they can salt till the cows come home, it’s not gonna do any good. Totally awesome, all the gear these Switzers bring out to…”
With the phone clamped between her shoulder and ear, Julia stands up. She feels a sudden urgency to go look, while his soothing voice is yapping on and on, to make sure there’s no one there, that it’s okay to go to the bathroom. Maybe she’s acting like a child, but with her brother’s voice in her ear—
Oh, Jesus, fuck-fucking-fuckery-fuck!
The phone slips off her shoulder and clatters onto the floorboards.
The pale woman in black looms out of the stairwell, up to her waist. Once more, she’s standing there motionless, but her head and shoulders are turned and she’s staring right at Julia.
Without pausing for breath, Julia stumbles forward to pick up her phone. That means she has to crawl closer to the hole in the floor, and as she tries to not lose sight of the woman, she sees fingers clinging to the edge.
Stocky fingers; a man’s fingers.
“Hello? Hello? Are you there?” Sam’s voice sounds tinny when she puts her ear to the phone. “Julia?”
“Yeah, I’m here.” Somehow, she manages to make her voice sound calm. Hollow, dead, but calm. Sam won’t notice a thing.
She looks up and gets the greatest shock yet.
The woman with the bulging, staring eyes is now standing next to the stairwell, right in front of her. The fat man in the grubby shirt is standing at the top of the steps, looking at Julia, and a third, gaunt face has appeared behind him.
In the split second her glance had strayed to her iPhone screen, the people had moved, and she hadn’t even noticed.
Now they’re standing still again.
Two bleeps sound in her ear and Julia has to bite her tongue to keep from screaming. She falters backwards through the vestibule, not letting the people out of her sight.
Copyright © 2019 by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Copyright © 2022 by Tor
