“I will cleanse this town of you!” She was either closer or bigger. “Because you failed it!”
The crack in the door went obsidian black; so black it oozed in like The Blob, to ingest McGlazer and make him nothing more than a meaningless droplet of all the universe’s great despair.
Chapter 17
The Descent
Nico issued a powerful resounding whistle. This had been the signal for assembly long before the gang had even heard of lycanthropy. The humor was not lost on them though. Pipsqueak loped toward the sagging picnic table panting and whining, his tongue hanging out.
“We’re ahead of schedule,” Nico explained as the bikers all settled in at the table. “Never hurts to be ready for plans to go south though.”
“What’s the plan now, Chief?” asked Aura.
“On Devil’s Night, we pile up some furniture and whatnot. Make a bonfire, just before dark.”
Rhino alternately spun his knife on the table and flipped it in his hands.
“Everybody but me and Jiggy goes wolf. Hobie and Rhino will patrol out around the road.” Nico pointed toward the area where the trees opened up onto the driveway. “I don’t see how anybody could find us, but better safe than stupid.”
“But first…” He lit a joint, drew from it, passed it. “We bring back my Ruthie. The ritual calls for ‘heightened emotions.’ If any of you wanna couple or triple up, whatever, that’ll help.”
Looking at Aura, Nico made a sweeping gesture, like she could take them all on and he would be fine with that.
“Killing the little girl in front of the big one will bring things to a boil. A little torture beforehand will help. I’ll handle that myself.”
Aura glimpsed toward the bedroom where Candace and Jill were held and saw the captives watching them. Jill raised both middle fingers.
“Pip, you’ll read the spell while I skin the punker bitch. Anybody who’s not banging can help me put Ruthie’s bones in the fresh flesh. Once she’s good to go, the party really starts.”
“We wolf out and feast on fat townies!” Pipsqueak clapped once.
“All but me and Jigs.” Nico motioned toward the row of motorcycles. “Somebody’s gotta drive.”
“You ain’t gonna go beast, Chief?” Aura asked.
“I’m gonna go beast all right,” Nico said. “On Ruthie.” He made a thrusting motion with his hips, drawing approving murmurs from the boys. “It’ll be reunion night for us. But don’t y’all worry. We’ll be right there with you, drinking up blood and good times.”
* * * *
“It’s only for a minute, fella.” Stuart scratched Bravo’s cheeks and let the dog lick his face.
“Hey, it’s your first French!” quipped DeShaun.
“Har…dee…har.”
As soon as Stuart rose, the dog strained at the leash, pointing his nose east, whining, imploring the boys with his eyes.
“I hate it when he does that.”
“Poor guy,” lamented DeShaun. “My mom is talking about trying to get him some doggy sedatives, or something.”
“Maybe my brother can spare a gallon or two of his precious whiskey to help him out.”
DeShaun patted his friend’s shoulder. “Come on.”
They went inside and searched for Jill, conscious now of the innocuous door leading down to the town secrets; a portal to another dimension.
“Let’s just ask for her.”
They went to the window to check on Bravo, found him still yearning and yearning.
“She didn’t come in today, boys,” Mrs. Washburn told them at the counter. “I tried calling but there’s no answer.” Mrs. Washburn knitted her brow. “So unlike her.”
The boys now felt as anxious as Bravo. “I got a weird feeling,” Stuart said.
“Maybe she’s just, you know, too upset,” offered DeShaun.
“No,” Stuart said. “Remember that mutton-chopped douche yesterday?”
DeShaun did, and it worried him.
As they went outside to get Bravo, Stuart walked to the corner of the building, examining the windows outside the storage room where Jill had taken them.
“Dude. Tell me you’re not thinking about…” DeShaun clammed up as a couple of ladies walked by and baby-talked Bravo.
“Miss Stella was pretty adamant about us getting that info,” Stuart muttered.
“Yeah, but…” DeShaun smacked his forehead. “The son of a sheriff’s deputy. Breaking and entering. My butt would literally be reduced to charred hamburger. Why don’t we just tell my dad about this? Or Yoshi?”
“Don’t you think they’ve got a lot going on right now?” Stuart reasoned. “And what if Reverend McGlazer fell off the wagon or something, like my stupid brother? If everybody found out, he’d be ruined.”
“You’re trying to kill me at a young age, aren’t you, butthole?” DeShaun deadpanned. Bravo whined and tugged his leash. “You too, Bravo!”
“We’ll plan it out and come back tomorrow night,” Stuart said.
DeShaun held his hands out in a frame toward the ground. “Here Lies DeShaun Lott. Taken Too Soon. Thanks To a Butthole Named Stuart. See Adjacent Stone.”
* * * *
McGlazer pulled Stella to his side, placing a gentle, assured hand on her lower back as he guided her out the church’s rear door.
The sky was a white sheet of sun and thin cloud cover. The wind and its smell of crumbling leaves was a familiar cloak of fall Stella accepted upon her shoulders for the first time of the season, as if from her gentleman escort while they awaited a coach for the opera house.
“What’s out here?” she asked McGlazer. Instead of answering in words he made a show of closing his eyes and drawing in the autumn scents.
He led her around the corner of the building, where she rarely had cause to venture. The wooden slab flooring of the lawn shed had been pried up and leaned against the church wall. The subterranean rock stairway beneath seemed too black, as if refusing to receive the daylight.
Stella willed herself to see into the dark, but the dark willed differently. Stella knew it was best not to bet against the dark.
“Shall we?” McGlazer said, gently pulling her along. Stella squeezed his hand and stopped. “What’s down there? I didn’t know…”
“Oh, it’s new to me too,” he reassured. “Don’t worry. There’s light.”
McGlazer drew a butane lighter from his pocket and sparked it as he led her down the time-polished steps. As he opened the narrow rough-hewn door, all she saw was his teeth.
Stella was alarmed that her first step over the threshold was much deeper than she expected—nearly a foot below. She didn’t feel so much beguiled now as dependent on the reverend to keep her safe from bats and spiderwebs. Could she depend on her own good sense to leave if things got too off-kilter?
McGlazer lit a dusty oil lantern resting on a crusty sconce on the wall to the side of the door. Wavering light bloomed out onto the room, which Stella found surprisingly larger than it should have been.
Stella’s attention was drawn not to a sight but to a sound; a shifting and shuffling. As she strained to see, McGlazer closed the door behind her.
Chapter 18
Dead Silence
“Where’d you get that?” DeShaun asked in a loud whisper, his eyes wide and bright under the half moon.
Stuart pulled up next to DeShaun and stopped his bike, tugging at the jacket lapel of the full ninja outfit he wore. “It was Dennis’s. He was in the Sho Kosugi fan club when he was a kid.” He didn’t feel like mentioning that Dennis had been a good couple of years younger than Stuart was now when it fit him perfectly.
“Swell.” DeShaun smirked down at his own jeans and dark blue hoodie in chagrin. “I look like some loser two-bit burglar from a low budget cop show. All I need is one of those bandit masks.”
<
br /> Stuart was relieved that DeShaun didn’t laugh at the ninja outfit. He’d had misgivings about it, wondering if it was a childish choice. Yet it was the darkest clothing he could find that didn’t have a band logo on it. And it did give him a sense of confidence, as if the cinematic ninja master’s badass essence imbued its threads.
It was a short ride to the edge of Bennington Street, where the library stood dark, save for a desk lamp somewhere in its heart.
The boys hid their bikes behind a wall of shrubs and crept toward the back. Stuart took off his backpack.
“You got a grappling hook and smoke bombs in there?” DeShaun asked, the first of many whispered wisecracks to come. “Maybe some throwing stars?”
“No but I might be able to make a gag out of my bandana if you feel like it’ll be too hard for you to keep your trap shut all on your own.”
The windows were the kind that slid sideways, with the latch screwed into the frame halfway up.
“What are you gonna do? Roundhouse kick the glass out?” DeShaun asked.
Stuart put on a pair of heavy-duty rubber work gloves and pressed his hand against the glass. He shimmied the window back and forth, causing the latch to release millimeter by millimeter. Within seconds, it was unlocked.
“Whoa!” DeShaun whispered, as Stuart eased it open. “Dude. Is there something you wanna tell me about yourself?
“Dennis taught me stuff. He was planning to go pro.”
“…Pro ninja?”
“You don’t think they do it for free, do ya?”
“What if there’s an alarm?”
“I cased it when we were here before. Not in the county budget or whatever, I guess.”
DeShaun watched his lithe friend climb in, silent as a ghost. Stuart extended a hand from the dimness to assist.
Once in, Stuart closed the window and drew a battery-powered lantern from his backpack. DeShaun had one of his father’s mini Maglites.
“Too bad we can’t get those photocopies,” lamented Stuart.
DeShaun took a Polaroid camera out of his backpack. “Next best thing.”
They donned the latex gloves as Jill had instructed before and made a pile of journals, laminated illustrations, and more recent historian’s notes.
“This should be like a good start,” DeShaun murmured.
They headed up to the main floor and the reference section for books on Old English terminology and beginner’s Latin, ducking when a set of headlights swung past, then returned to the downstairs room and went to work under the light of Stuart’s lantern.
* * * *
Bennington Street was practically a ghost town by the time the boys settled into their research.
“I don’t think Ember Hollow was exactly the Christmas card community we’re been taught,” Stuart said as he scribbled notes.
“Yeah, more like a soap opera crapped out by an acid freak,” DeShaun added. “On steroids.”
“But I can’t figure out who were the bad guys and who were the good guys. Every time this Bennington character seems like a douche, he pulls a swerve.”
“Anything about mushrooms in your stuff?” DeShaun asked.
“Gateway Blooms keep coming up in this journal.” Stuart held up a wrinkled leather-bound volume with the name Corman Sparskind tooled into the bottom edge. “And there’s something about some specimens in a…um…cask.”
“What’s a cask?”
“In that Vincent Price flick, it was like, a barrel with wine in it.”
Both boys swung their heads toward the storage case.
A minute later, a dusty little wooden drum sat on the table. The top end had a straight piece nailed across the top that could only be a crude twist top.
“Should we open it?” Stuart asked.
“Yes. And we should also apply live electrical wires to our testicles.”
Stuart gripped the mini-tun as if in a headlock under his left arm and tried to crank with his right. DeShaun cupped his palms around the far ends of the crosspiece and torqued. A mute crack had them worried they had broken it apart—but lamplight inspection showed the barrel was fine.
“Been closed a long time.”
“Duh.”
They put it back on the table and eased off the lid, sitting back to avoid the rising dust. DeShaun beamed his flashlight in.
“Are those dried eyeballs?” Stuart wondered.
“Must be the mushrooms.”
“Boring.”
“Watch the windows while I snap a coupla pictures, will ya?” DeShaun asked. When this was done, DeShaun took from his backpack two full-size ZingGo bars along with two cans emblazoned with exploding logos reading “DRENAL-ADE!” and handed one to Stuart. “My eyes need a break from all this fancy writing.”
“Don’t get any on this stuff,” Stuart said, popping the top on his. “Jill will de-crap-itate us.”
DeShaun grinned at his friend.
Stuart took a long gulp and issued a rattling burp that had DeShaun reaching across to clamp a hand over Stuart’s mouth, though he giggled like mad. “We’re gonna get caught!”
Stuart pushed his hand away, giggling himself. “Okay, sorry.”
The giggle fit died—then DeShaun essayed a burp equal to Stuart’s, and it started again.
Stuart gulped a throatful of air and pronounced his new word “de-crap-itate” on the vibrating tide of the Loudest Burp Ever.
DeShaun fell to the floor, pressing both hands against his mouth.
Stuart hunched down like an uncontrollably guffawing gargoyle and buried his mouth in his forearm, grateful to be thinking of Jill as holding up just fine, all things considered, and for his friend to still be childish enough to engage in such goofy gastric hijinks. But he also wondered how many more times like these he could have with his best friend.
The boys rode out the spell and returned to the books.
“Ya ever heard of a guy named Conal O’Herlihy?” Stuart whispered.
“Ain’t he the Lucky Charms elf, boyo?”
“Nay! He be one o’ the original settlers,” Stuart explained. “Had himself a row with ol’ Wilcott, ’twould seem!”
“How come we didn’t learn about him?” DeShaun said.
“Not too hard to guess,” Stuart said. “He was a real butthole.”
DeShaun drummed his thumb and pinky on the table, just like his father often did.
“Maybe this is what Miss Stella was wondering about.” DeShaun dragged from the pile a yellowed binder the size of a couch cushion, propped it on its spine, and let it ease it open. The crack of pages released from each other after years pressed together, along with the smell of weathered paper, was overpowering; even stronger than the artificial lime scent of their energy drinks.
“Hey.” DeShaun traced his Maglite beam along some pattern across the two pages. “This is like a blueprint.”
“Of what?”
“I think it’s the church.”
“Yeah?”
“Main floor…” DeShaun muttered, as he flipped the big page.
“Dude…” DeShaun did not continue till Stuart prompted him. “Did you know the church had a basement?”
Stuart came around to look over DeShaun’s shoulder. “Had?”
“Has, I guess,” DeShaun said.
Stuart had barely asked “Where’s the door?” when the big tome slammed shut, sending an acrid blast of air into their eyes and nostrils.
The boys yelped as they sprang back onto the floor. They gawked at the little dust puff that roiled and made ghost faces in the lamplight.
“Oh jeez, look at the time,” squeaked DeShaun. “It’s go-somewhere-not-scary-o’-clock.” He rose and scrambled to the window.
“Wait!”
“Wait, hell!” DeShaun clawed at the window latch. “That effing book
is haunted!”
DeShaun’s Maglite rolled to and fro on the floor, making the room appear to undulate. Stuart picked it up and aimed it at the book.
It just sat doing nothing. “It’s probably some kind of cell memory thing in the binding. Don’t let it get to you.”
“Too late,” DeShaun said, as he struggled with the window latch. “Because now, it’s keeping us from leaving.”
Stuart went to try the window himself. The latch would not budge, not even when he tried his ninja shimmy trick. DeShaun tried helping, with no result.
“Crap!”
“I don’t wanna die down here, man,” DeShaun said with a voice that cracked just as it had a few weeks earlier.
A cold wind flew across their faces. The table rose and dropped on its feet repeatedly, violently, tossing the historic materials around.
A chair slid out from under it and hurtled toward them.
The boys cried out, dashing off to either side as the chair bashed into the low wall beneath the windows.
Stuart fell on his back at the base of a tall bookcase, which ejected all its contents onto him in an avalanche of paper bricks.
Lunging to help his friend, DeShaun was tripped by a rolling step stool that rocketed into his shins.
Stuart, his arms and ribs smarting from the falling books, dug himself out of the mound in time to see the step stool rolling back to take another charge at DeShaun. “Watch out!”
Still prone, DeShaun raised his head in time to keep the stool from ramming him in the head. It missed altogether, lightly banging into the radiator, where it stopped.
The sudden quiet was as dreadful as the assault of ordinary objects had been terrifying.
DeShaun and Stuart, too breathless to speak, huddled close as the dark crushed in on them.
The door at the top of the stairs clicked open with a foreboding echo. Then came footsteps, like hard leather soles clicking deliberately and coldly into a dungeon where emaciated prisoners hung in chains, praying for death.
Stuart stood to face it, whatever it was. DeShaun rose as well, picking up the chair beside him and holding it poised for attack, like he’d seen professional wrestlers do on television.
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