The Crymost

by Dean H Wild

  “There’s a couple full cans in the back of the garage,” Harley said watching him closely. “They should tide you over.”

  “Ten gallons each,” Mick threw in. “They’re heavy.”

  Axel gave it a moment’s thought and then shifted inside his clothes. “I’ll handle it, but can I do it in the morning? I’m supposed to be at the mill about now.”

  Mick and Harley exchanged glances and Mick nodded. “Go on then,” Mick said. “I’ll put the Swisher away. Thanks.”

  Axel stalked off, swiping the green shag off his jeans.

  Harley stared after him for a moment, then stood and turned to Mick. “Do you mind if I punch out too? I’m bushed.”

  Mick took in the laborious way he lumbered toward the trash barrel and dropped his uneaten lunch inside. “Do what you’ve got to do.”

  “Whatever it takes to get past the rough patches,” Harley countered and raised a massive mitt in a parting wave.

  Mick waved back. Harley Kroener, unwell and possibly (probably) fading. Axel Vandergalien, unreadable at best. Rough patches sounded about right.

  ***

  Axel strutted all the way from the village garage to the back corner of the F&F lot where he’d left the Passat. Once there he toked up, drew in the smoke and allowed it to leak out in slow, luxurious coils. The corners of his mouth turned up slightly, accommodatingly, at thoughts of the project.

  Full gas cans. In the village garage. Perfect.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Roger Copeland strode into the back room of the Gas ‘N Go, taking the first few steps in the dark as usual because the motion sensor light was on the fritz and God didn’t he hate the dark. In such a windowless pit it was just this side of unholy.

  He barked his shin on a stack of cardboard just as the switch did its duty. Goddamned Cy Vandergalien and his cockamamie ideas. So what if Cy wanted to give Mick Logan a little good natured challenge and have every cardboard box in the town broken down and stashed out of sight? Fun was fun, but why the lot of them required stashing in the back room of his store, he didn’t know.

  He winced at the fire spot of pain on his shin and limped over to the countertop in the back where he kept a number of toolboxes at the ready. He opened one up to pull out a screwdriver. That damned cash register drawer was stuck again, and—

  His hand went to the object on top of the box’s contents with a dreamlike slowness. He picked up on the thin gold chain so the pocket watch dangled just inches before his eyes. There was no mistaking the relief image on the lid: a locomotive belching smoke, its front catcher like a wedge of perdition. His granddad’s pocket watch. The cover opened with a snick sound, exposing the yellowed watch face ringed in Roman numerals. A crescent of greenish water bubbled under the crystal’s bottom. The engraving on the underside of the lid caused his breath to catch in his lungs.

  Jerrold Copeland

  25 Years of Service

  Soo Line Railroads

  He snapped the lid closed and cradled the watch in his palm, transfixed. By all standards the timepiece should be a dream, a phantom of the mind, but here it was, undeniable. As real and true as his memory of taking it to The Crymost a decade and a half ago and flinging it over the edge.

  ***

  Sheila Wiedmeyer bought her grandmother’s house on Meadow Lane just after she was married. She loved the place for its memories more than its charm, and Patrick didn’t seem to care one way or the other. There was so much of Grandma in the house, and in the town, it seemed a shame to deny herself of either. She was sentimental and nostalgic at heart. Yet, the nostalgia of Grandma’s three hat pins, the fancy old-world ones with the long shafts and shiny stones set into the tops, was suddenly lost on her, mostly because they sat—of all places—atop the stack of clean towels in the laundry room basket, and they were coated in mud. She picked them up using a washcloth, afraid to make direct contact because this was one of those weird things you saw on the ghost hunting TV shows or that old Unsolved Mysteries program with Robert what’s-his-name from when she was a kid. A once in a lifetime occurrence, she decided, because she was neither clairvoyant nor psychic, even if she sometimes wished she was. This was a gift, eerie and unexplainable, and she knew right away she would tell no one else about it. Not for a while. Maybe never.

  ***

  Jim Schraufnagel (Old Jim to his friends because his hair had gone prematurely white at an early age but now, decades later, his mane was thick and lush while most of his friends were down to a fringe and a wisp) studied the war medal on the coffee table with concern. His father-in-law had been the only honors-bearing serviceman in the family, and as far as he knew, this wasn’t his, not covered in grime the way it was. A couple of the guys and their essentially hairless scalps were over for a game of sheep’s head yesterday. Maybe one of them left it. He’d ask around next week when they played cards again. He scooped up the medal and stashed it in the kitchen cupboard next to his coffee filters and his Metamucil, then put it out of his mind.

  There was no way he could know how his wife, in the ground at Willow Valley these last three years, had flung the object into The Crymost pool the night after her father’s funeral. She had done it without telling him.

  ***

  Cy Vandergalien sat at his kitchen table, his late lunch untouched. The object he turned over in his fingers, a brooch with a blue center stone of cut glass and an oval frame of sterling silver, was tarnished and mud encrusted. It was his mother’s, and he was pretty sure it had been pinned to her breast when they buried her a couple of decades back. And yet, when he hung up the phone after talking with Johnny Elmore, who promised to mobilize his demolition equipment the minute the Mellar’s Out vote was final, there it was, next to the message pad on the counter. He scrubbed at it with his thumb until the stone gleamed and glittered, and he thought, forgotten is foregone.

  “Cy.” The voice, like the brooch, was his mother’s, ragged with sorrow and cigarettes, just as he always remembered it. Only it was no memory. It rang stark and real and as loud as a handclap in his sunny yellow kitchen. He jumped in his chair. “This ain’t a good place anymore. Not for you nor for anyone else.”

  In an instant the source of the voice, be it memory or other less welcome possibilities, was gone from him. He felt it blink out, sensed its absence. He looked around, heart thumping, a fine layer of sweat drying on his forehead. The brooch was like an aching clot in his over-tight fingers. He relaxed his hand and watched it glitter in the sunlight. Somehow the sight of it helped to focus his thoughts.

  “Jesus, Ma,” he muttered.

  Alice wandered into the kitchen, eyed his uncompromised sandwich and lumbered over. “What you got there?”

  He slid the brooch into his front pocket. “You got the second-quarter newsletters ready, yet?”

  She grabbed his sandwich and took a luxurious bite, then brushed at the corners of her mouth with a plump pinky. “Working on it. They should go out the day of the vote. You look peaked. Is your heartburn bad today? Do you want some Rolaids?”

  He blinked slow, contemplative. “Just listening to my gut all of a sudden. I don’t think I want anybody up at The Crymost for a while.”

  She blinked, her cheek packed with partially chewed lunchmeat. “You worried about last night’s glowy stuff? I thought your state inspector said it was okay.”

  “Not worried,” he said as his fingers worked over his mother’s brooch through the fabric of his pants. “Just careful.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “You are Logan.”

  Mick turned around and squinted at the man just outside of the village hall’s open door. His first suspicion was state inspector, checking up on an absent Peter Fyvie (and that would confirm the unthinkable: that yesterday’s Fyvie hallucination was no hallucination at all and Fyvie’s words—it took me—were not only real words, but true words), but then he noticed the man’s cloak and dark hat. His thoughts harkened back to the man walking the roadside the other day, and he feared h
e might have done a comedic type of doubletake. If he’d reacted at all, the stranger’s face did not indicate it, however.

  He put down his work. “I am. What can I do for you?”

  “No favors,” the man said with a concessionary tip of his head. He made no attempt to enter the hall. “I make it a point to be familiar with the key citizenry when I visit a so-fair town such as this.”

  Mick went to the door and stretched out his hand. “Who told you I was a key citizen? My wife?” His mild curiosity was replaced by an unsettled feeling as they shook. “What brings you to Knoll, sir?”

  “The name is Thekan. I’m a court judge by profession. I’m also a bit of an historian. Town records are of particular interest to me.”

  The man’s eyes grew hard. Mick blinked. Was there a sense of intrusion, like a mental pressure as if one of the man’s cold thumbs pressed on his brain? Certainly not.

  “Plenty of old records here,” he finally said. “But if you want to browse through them, you’ll need permission from the village president.”

  “I have seen him already, thank you.” Thekan’s courtliness took on an edge. “It appears you are reorganizing the room. Are the records to be moved?”

  “Invoices and accounting stuff will be moved to the firehouse for a few days while we hold a town vote. Everything else stays right here.”

  “I’m so pleased to know it.” Thekan rested a hand on the doorjamb as if testing its sturdiness. His smile was accommodating with a certain level of perplexity. “And so pleased to make your acquaintance, Mick Logan. But I have many more stops to make, and must make wise use of my time here. I’m sure we’ll meet again. Until then, have a pleasant day.”

  Mick nodded in reply as the judge strode away. So-fair town, Thekan had said. Old-world language, he supposed, for an old-world duck.

  He went back to work, frowning.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Mick was just finishing the after-supper dishes when Kippy Evert called.

  “Funeral’s done and I’ve had a nap. There’s time for some old stories now, if you want. I’ll be down to Chapel’s,” the old man said.

  A single car sat in the parking lot of The Chapel Bar when Mick pulled in. Twilight shadows were swallowing the finer details of the world, but he was able to pick out evidence of one more patron—Kippy’s bike was leaned up next to the front entrance. The building was long and narrow, and if not for the Bud Light sign ablaze in one of the tiny front windows, the place would have appeared closed.

  Mick approached the huge double doors where a Presbyterian preacher once greeted his Sunday congregation. Long ago, Sunday buckboards circulated from the mercantile to this building, then known as the Mellar’s Knoll River Church, so the family might hear this week’s sermon and go into the world better people. Now folks came for a different type of communion, and they went into the world merely feeling like better people. Mick smiled as he grasped one of the door handles and opened up.

  The interior was large and open, yet dim. Behind the bar at the far end of the room, Will Adelmeyer, owner and sole proprietor, rested on the heels of his hands in classic bartender fashion. His checkered shirt was cuffed at the elbows, his smooth jaw set in a dutiful almost-smile. Kippy sat on a barstool just to Will’s left, a full pilsner in his hand. The two of them seemed nostalgically perfect just then, like an image struck on photographic tinplate.

  “Get that man a shot and a beer,” Kippy said as Mick strolled over.

  Will tipped Mick a quick nod and went to work. He was a young man, at least ten years Mick’s junior, but he had the bartender swagger down to an art. Mick stuck out his hand for Kippy. “You get Orlin put to rest?”

  Kippy shook with him. He was still in his black funeral suit, his tie pulled down, his collar unbuttoned to show a spill of neck wattles. “He’s in the ground,” the old man said. “I hope to God he can rest. Thanks for coming.”

  Mick settled into the stool next to Kippy. “Glad to do it. But if it’s private stuff you want to talk about, I’m not sure I’m the one who should hear about it.”

  “Not private,” Kippy said and took a long pull from his beer glass. “If anything, it’s a very public matter, especially when things are rising to the top th’ way they are. You better start on that beer, you’re going to need it.”

  A nicely-headed glass had appeared as if by magic at his elbow. He took it up, nodded at Will Adelmeyer who stood nearby as dutiful as ever, then raised a toast toward Kippy.

  “To old things shared by new friends.”

  The other voice came from a corner table near the electronic dart boards. “Goddamn fools made a failsafe. Thass what they thought.”

  Roger Copeland brooded over a row of empty shot glasses as he spoke, gazing at a pocket watch cradled in his palm. “Something pissed off is what they got. What we got.”

  Will leaned over the bar. “Hey, Roger. You promised if I poured you that last hit of Wild Turkey you’d keep from going all mouthy, so pipe down or I’ll lock you in your car and leave you for dead in the parking lot.”

  Roger slouched back in his chair with a pout. “Bushit. Thass what your Wile Turk is. Buncha bushit.”

  Mick exchanged a look with Will, part amusement, part concern. Will leaned in and lowered his voice. In his eyes was the sad turmoil any longtime barkeep must harbor, ghosts of a hundred confrontations high and low. Or a thousand. “He’s been here since five. Who’s running the Gas ‘N Go, I don’t know. Probably Stu Rueplinger since he’s laid off from the machine shop in Winter Lake.”

  “Who does he have an issue with?” Mick asked.

  Will’s response was a dismissive head shake. Kippy expectantly watched the two of them.

  “I’m sorry,” Will backed away. “You guys have business to discuss and I don’t mean to get in the way of it. I’ll camp out in back for a while if you want to talk freely.”

  Kippy marked him with a crooked finger. “You stay right where you are. What I’m going to say has more than a little to do with this place of yours too, Will Adelmeyer.”

  Will blinked, intrigued. Over his shoulder, an electronic strip sign’s scrolling LED lights proclaimed Chapel’s Summer Pool Leagues were forming now. “How am I part of the subject of the day?”

  Mick decided to take a chance. “Does the term ‘double barrels’ mean anything to you?”

  “Double barrels. Whiskey barrels? Shotguns? What?”

  Kippy set down his glass, hard. “Let’s not unhitch the horse and drag the wagon home. If I’m going to tell this, I’ll do it in a sens’ble order lest I leave something out.”

  Will said, “Easy, Kippy,” and promptly filled the old man’s glass. “We’ll do this your way. No reason not to. Here’s one on the house. Now, we’re all ears, right Mick?”

  Mick was reminded of the one thing he’d always admired about Will Adelmeyer; his deft ease with handling people. He passed an appreciable nod Will’s way. Then he toasted Kippy with the shot glass this time. “We’re listening. Really.”

  Kippy folded his hands and bowed his head. When he spoke it was with slow determination. “Let me start back when people died here all of a sudden. A couple years before Japan’s antics converted this country into a card-carrying member of the WWII club, this was.” It was pronounced dub-ya dub-ya two.

  Mick nodded. “You mean 1939. The TB outbreak.”

  Kippy cackled. It sounded bitter. “T’was a sickness, all right, but t’wasn’t TB.”

  “My great grandfather once mentioned diphtheria,” Will said. “He was three sheets to the wind at the time, talking about how the family came to buy this place right after the town emptied out back then.”

  “I ’spect if you’d go back in time, you’d find a lot of folks had their own tidy explanation for what cleaned out the town in ‘39. But if you put ‘em all together, none of ‘em would jibe. Because none of ‘em was true. I was a young pup when I learned the die-off in ’39 wasn’t the first of its kind for the area around Knoll. And it
was the idea of another die-off that got a particular group of men of this town a little scared somewhere around the year 1960. They put together a plan and they recruited us younger men for the grunt work to make it happen, and by recruited I mean put us to service with a father’s command. All in secret, because Knoll doesn’t talk about its ways, or its ravagements. Me and Orlin was young bucks in ’60, a bit younger than you are right now, Will.”

  “Grunt work doing what?” Mick asked.

  “Digging, mostly,” Kippy examined his hands as if picturing the shovel in them now. “Endless digging. Some of us with flashlights, some of us with old gas and oil lamps. Like a regular gold rush team, we was. Only there wasn’t any gold. We assumed it was part of the sewer project ‘cause this was when they laid in the city sewer lines from Drury, but there was heavy digging equipment all over town, so we was puzzled over why they needed us to move any earth at all. And we were never told the purpose. We had ideas, though. We heard things. And we weren’t dumb, either.”

  “What was the purpose, Kippy?” Mick asked. “Some type of bunker? Fallout shelter?”

  “I’ll admit, bombs were on the top of a lot of minds back then. Wasn’t a few years further into the decade and we’d all sweat it out while Russia threw its weight around by way of Cuba. But this was something else. This was Knoll business, and Knoll business alone. What we figured out, and there was three of us working this end of town, was the group of our fathers and grandfathers thought they could stop the next culling in Knoll, or at least put in a way to stop it should signs of it start to rise up. And I’m not talking TB or measles or explosive damn diarrhea. I’m talking something hungry like a big fish in a deep pond coming up to gulp as many little bugs as it can before going under again, only the swim takes decades to finish. And instead of bugs, it wants people. Knoll people.”

  Words jangled in Mick’s head and twanged off his nerves: It’s close, and it’s hungry. And it will take you, too.

  Will’s voice was full of controlled patience. “You’re not saying something ate up the people of Mellar’s Knoll in 1939, are you? With all due respect, I hear a lot of crazy talk at this bar, but I haven’t heard anything like what you’re saying since Charlene Plotts came in high on cheap cut crack and told me a troop of Donald Trump clones was stalking her. It’s sad to think someone’s brain can cook up stuff like that. It’s sadder to think the person actually believes it.”