by Dean H Wild
“You did just what we needed you to do,” he said. “Thank you.”
“You can thank me when the angels swoop in here and carry you safely to whatever it is you need in that tunnel.”
“Mick . . . ” Will shined a flashlight into the bootlegger’s run. “This run must have blown open at the riverbank, too. There’s fresh air coming in.”
“Good air,” Judy added.
“Then we should get down to business,” Harley said, “and go in.”
“Do all of us need to go?” Roger Copeland asked with some concern. He was crouched down, watching Nancy tend to Stu’s ankle, which was swelling by the second. “That space looks tighter than I think I can stand.”
“Stu is out,” Nancy said, apologetic. “He’s going to barely make it upstairs on this sprain, so tunnel-tromping is not an option unless one of you wants to carry him.”
“Damned if that ain’t my luck,” Stu said. “Sorry guys.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Mick said.
Once again, he was at the head of the group and once again the attention was turned toward him, almost supplicating. “We’re pretty sure the tunnel comes out at the old mercantile, but we don’t know what shape the underpinnings of that old place are in. It’s not a bad idea to have a detachment above ground, in case we need help getting out. That would be Roger, Stu and Beth Ann. We can stay in touch by cell phone. Judy, I want you to go with them.”
She stepped over to him, her face neutral. “I don’t think—”
“You’re not a fan of small dark places, either. And I think Beth Ann will do better if you’re with her.” He took both her hands and leaned in close to speak into her ear. “And I want somebody from Team Logan on both sides of this thing.”
She met this with a look of concession. “Beth Ann will ride with me. Roger, if you drive Stu it will give us enough car space for everybody once we’re back together at the mercantile.”
Roger nodded.
Nancy stood up and nudged Judy’s elbow. “They’ll be okay. They’re smart enough to take one woman along, so common sense will be up to a decent level.” They exchanged smiles.
“Are we ready?” Mick said, an anxious flutter in his gut.
Will grinned. “Fresh batteries in our flashlights, good air at our backs and guardian angels treading the streets above us. Gotta be ready.”
A cell phone chirped. Nancy pulled hers out and answered it. When she hung up she let her gaze sweep across all of them.
“Alice Vandergalien just died,” she said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mick went in first, followed by Harley, Nancy, and at last Will. They shined their lights around, taking in the dimensions of the tunnel. Harley needed to stoop, but only a little. Mick could sense the closeness of the concrete ceiling like a looming presence. It made him stoop, too. There was not quite enough width for two people to walk abreast, so they walked in a scattered formation which allowed them all to see what was ahead.
“Fine job,” Harley commented, running his fingers along the wall.
Their lights picked out only a miserly portion of space, and soon enough the passage in front and behind them was swallowed by the dark.
“Good air or not,” Nancy said with one of her humorless laughs, “this is not a nice place.”
Sheaves of webs, heavy with dust, clung to the walls or hung down from the ceiling and fluttered like desiccated trader’s silk. She batted at a swatch of it with her flashlight and grimaced when it clung to the outer casing. She picked it off with a shudder.
“My aunt Delores lived in an old farmhouse in Lamartine,” Will said. “There was a root cellar with a dirt floor in the basement. It smelled like this, only the air didn’t feel the same. Her cellar felt empty, lonely almost. Something’s alive here. Waiting.”
Mick nodded. He couldn’t have said it any better.
“And it feels like it’s going to go on forever,” Nancy said and shuddered again.
“It’s a twenty-minute walk from my house to the south edge of town,” Harley calculated, “Including corner turns and waiting for traffic on The Plank. We should be out to the mercantile in about the same amount of time.”
Will inspected the ceiling, evaluating the joints between slabs sealed with trowelfuls of hydraulic cement. “We must be under Backbank Street by now.”
“Farther,” Mick said and glanced at Harley. “Past your house for sure. Under the Austin’s yard, I’d say.”
Harley said, “That’s plenty far for me to start asking this. Where is the wreckage from the goddamned door? The pieces got sucked in here, we all saw it, but I don’t see a single sign.”
“You haven’t been watching,” Nancy said and aimed her light at the wall. She pointed out a scratch, shallow but fresh. “There’s a bunch of these along the way.”
“Good air hard at work,” Will said and cast a dubious look ahead of them.
Mick was certain they were all considering what sort of powerful force might pull wood fragments this far and farther, and they were all pondering what they might do if it came again, or if The Crymost glow came back, bringing other unknown forces with it.
Then Mick’s light fell on a rough basketball-sized opening in the wall ahead. “What caused that, do you suppose?”
“We’re under Forest Street, is my guess,” Harley said as they walked up, training their lights. He stuck his face close to the hole. “Right up next to the sewer line access. Something blew through here, strong enough to pop out a weak spot.”
“Just now?” Nancy asked, her eyes wide. “When the door blew apart?”
“No, I think it blew through the other day,” Mick said, “with pressure strong enough to loosen all the manhole covers around town. Am I right, Harley?”
“I’ll be damned,” Harley said.
Mick began walking again, shining his light from side to side. “Let’s keep going. The door debris and that first blast of air had to be drawn toward something. It’s got to be ahead of us somewhere.”
“Yeah,” Will said. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Maybe the double barrel pump, whatever it is, uses sewer gas as an explosive agent,” Harley said. “It was meant to ignite something, after all.”
“Maybe,” Mick said.
Gentle gusts still slipped around them from behind, sailing like tatters into the darkness ahead. Good air. Mick took out his phone and dialed Judy. He got no signal. “So much for Team Logan,” he said.
Nancy’s light flickered out, came back. She rapped it with her palm. “Oh Jesus, don’t go out on me.”
“Those are brand new,” Will protested. As if in defiance, his light made a single off-and-on-again wink, then went dark. “Damn it.”
Nancy shook her head. “The lights, your phone. We’re getting in pretty deep here, boys.”
“Let’s keep moving,” Mick said.
“Wait. Look.” Harley aimed his light to where a small dark shape the size of a bunched food wrapper rested.
They moved up in a tight knot. The object was the torn-away head of a stuffed animal, a horse judging from the thick yarn meant to represent a mane. The fabric was matted, the neck stump leaking curds of nubby filling. Its plastic eye glowered at them.
“It’s wet,” Harley observed, almost casually.
“How did it get here?” Nancy said, leaning over it.
Will crouched and poked the head with his defunct flashlight. “Yeah, that air blast pushed or sucked everything else out. Why not Hi-ho Silver, here?”
“I’ll say it again,” Mick said. “Let’s keep moving.”
CHAPTER NINE
Judy called Mick from the road but got his voicemail. She concluded the tunnel was some type of signal blocker.
She slowed the car as they passed the F&F. The front bay door of the mill was open, the way barred by a strand of yellow police tape. A man in a dress shirt and wearing a shoulder holster crouched near the floor grates just inside, contemplative. In the glow of the mill o
verheads the scene was eerily timeless like an afterhours museum exhibit.
“Poor Cy,” Beth Ann said with a sick rasp. “I prayed for him. Just now. Please don’t think I’m weird because of it. I couldn’t bear it if you thought less of me, Judy. I really couldn’t.”
“After today, we could all use a little more . . . well . . . something.”
She reached over and patted Beth Ann’s hand.
“I wonder what our boys will find under the streets of this town.”
“Answers, I hope. Simple, safe, low-risk answers.”
It was Beth Ann’s turn to pat her hand. “If Harley were here he’d say we passed low-risk about half-a-day ago.”
They smiled over everything hanging between them. Then Beth Ann snapped her attention to the road ahead, her face stretching with surprise. “Stop. Stop the car!”
“What?” Judy asked, but it was a secondary reaction. She was already standing on the brake. They were just out of town, the last streetlight at the corner of Tier Street and The Plank a hovering ball behind them.
Less than two hundred feet from their front bumper, a green radiance flowed across the road like a plasma river. A glow, but not a glow. Light managing to maintain a shape.
Beth Ann’s eyes flashed in the illumination. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Me neither,” Judy said. The thought trailing behind it was what’s coming for Knoll is close now, almost ready to make its move.
“It’s coming from—”
“I see that.”
The glowing mass spilled from the show window space in the Mellar’s Mercantile store front. It spread as they watched, nosing toward town, and toward the car.
Roger Copeland’s headlights went out behind them followed by the thump of car doors. Roger strode up and Judy nearly smacked him with her own door when she opened it. “Is it safe, do you think?” she asked as she got out.
The glow halted and humped backward. It reminded her of an exposed grub retreating back into tilled earth.
Roger watched it, hands on hips. “Don’t know. But something just grabbed its attention from behind. Looks like it’s crawling back into its hole.”
“Hang back,” Stu Rueplinger said. He limped badly and helped himself along by hanging onto Beth Ann’s car. “We don’t know what that shi—uh, stuff is all about. Let it go. Just let it go.”
As they watched, the glow slipped back into the mercantile window like the tail of some bloated beast. Judy’s stomach turned in on itself. Come out, Mick. Oh please, come out of there.
A voice made her look behind them. “Told you it was closer than ever.”
A pair of car doors slammed. The Schelvans from Backbank Street were parked just behind Roger’s car. Another car crept to a halt behind them and a pair of youngsters tumbled out of the back, made to stop short when an imperative voice from the passenger side demanded they keep their asses next to the goddamned car. Judy was able to see silhouettes farther down The Plank as people walked from town with slow, curious steps.
“What do we do now?” Beth Ann asked.
At that moment, the green glow ignited over the crest of Pitch Road. Back in its den, whatever it is, Judy thought with some relief. Back at The Crymost.
More cars arrived. People got out, advanced. It felt like that morning’s vote at the Mellar Borth house all over again.
“What the hell?” Roger said and pointed toward the street ahead.
A variety of items rested on the pavement where The Crymost glow languished moments before. They were odd shapes, disordered and seeming somewhat forgotten, like waste washed up on the shore.
Beth Ann opened her window and craned her neck to see. “Paved with good intentions,” she said under her breath.
“Get out of the car,” Judy said, unsure of what came next, but unable to fight the need to do something. She turned to Roger and Stu. “Keep an eye on things. Don’t let this get crazy.”
Stu blinked at her. “How?”
“I’m not sure, but we’re in the front of the line, and we know more about what’s going on than anybody else. That makes us the gatekeepers.”
The crowd moved in a weary unison—men in pajama tops and shirts and ties loosened in after-work attitudes, women in aprons and bathrobes and business suits and fuzzy slippers. They were all faces Judy knew with varying degrees of familiarity, but their dull determination made them equally detestable and frightening.
“Judy, what’s going on?” a man (she thought it might be Corey Schelvan, but she couldn’t be sure) called out to her.
Roger took a stance at her side. “Everything’s under control, folks. No need to get jumpy.”
“But there’s stuff in the street,” a woman challenged. “It wasn’t there ten minutes ago when I came home from work. It came from that glow, didn’t it?”
A consorting buzz ran through the crowd. More cars pulled in farther back. They were lined up on both sides of The Plank now. There had to be at least thirty people on the scene. A child demanded, “Are those toys in the road, Mommy? Mommy? Are they?”
Beth Ann tugged her arm. “What can we do? We can’t stop them from looking.”
“I don’t know,” she said and leaned against the car, arms crossed.
“Hey,” Stu shouted and waved his arms. Hopping on his good leg, he reminded Judy of the comedy relief at a county fair grandstand show. “Those things in the road are a real traffic hazard, you know? We should clean it up before somebody drives through and blows a tire, or has a bad accident or something. Am I right folks?”
Another undertone, this one laced with notes of approval. Judy smiled at him and he smiled back.
“It’s like the angels told us the other night. It’s throwing everything back,” Beth Ann said with sick wonder. “And why do I feel it’s almost done? That this is the last of it?”
Judy gazed at the clutter in the road but said nothing.
CHAPTER TEN
Chastity almost didn’t go in, but at the last minute she turned so sharply the upstairs hall runner twisted under her heel. Roderick stood at her bedroom window, hunched and panting, gazing at the place where The Crymost glow stained the sky. She was unsure which was stronger, her fear of him or her loathing, but she held them in check as she stepped up behind him.
“What could put you in such a destructive rage, Roderick? What is coming to this town?”
His fists trembled at his sides.
“Death. A cycle that follows an ancient path. It sleeps long and feasts furiously. And it’s aware of the changes aboveground. Fearful of the opposition it might meet. So it brought me, bestowed me with undreamt of gifts, and in my zeal I brought attention and angered the opposition. Now it’s restless and anxious and angry. Tomorrow must be the day I bring it an offering of many souls to touch, to expedite the feasting. It will be my atonement.”
She swallowed past a thick knot in her throat. “And after that, what becomes of you? Of me?”
He turned toward her. Sunken, she thought when she saw his face and his yellow eyes. The odor around him suggested old meat left in a hot tin box. The front of his trousers was tented. She looked away and caught the view of the town. Her thought of poor Knoll, I’m sorry Knoll was a sigh of regret.
“I ask one final willful task of you,” he said. “To help me atone.”
Knoll was devising a defense. Roderick had angered the opposition, thank God. She swept over and lowered herself onto the bed. “It’s too late to say no, I suppose.” She hoped he did not see the pulse of fear in her forehead veins. Knoll needed time to devise, to act. Needed every minute. “I’ll do what you ask. But later. After.”
She reached for the top button of her blouse, but his hands beat her to it and he fell on her, pressing her into the mattress, his mouth trembling and spurting dots of foam.
“I feel next to nothing,” he said, his eyes greenish lamps dialed low, rivulets of red welling in the corners. The silk at her collar muttered when it tore. His other ha
nd worked at a place much lower, pulling away fabric, freeing flesh. “It’s a betrayal, to be given good flesh only to wreck it with this numbness. This failing. This rot.”
Poor Knoll, the words gained in volume in her head, as if to block him out. Her flesh rippled in kind to block out the rasp of his rough hands as they tore her smart summer slacks and the silkier layer underneath.
“I know you are anxious to go,” he said in a voice nearly devoid of air. “I disgust you now.”
“As I said,” she gasped and drew up her knees to open the way for him. “It’s too late for me.”
His breath fell icy on her throat and his tears traced slick crimson across her breasts.
Please do something, Knoll, before it’s too late.
He pushed in. She screamed and latched onto him, her fingers splayed over the jutting knobs of his backbone. The flesh covering them was thin, soft. Unraveling meat. She wept.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“I don’t know,” Harley said. He stopped and gazed ahead of himself, a weary explorer just now aware of the miles he’d put on. “We should be to the mercantile by now.”
They all stopped and trained their lights on him; all but Will, who clutched his dark torch like a war club.
Nancy nodded. “We’re in for a really long haul if this thing goes all the way to The Crymost.”
“Which it might,” Harley agreed. “That Crymost glow got in here somehow, after all.”
“Or it could end just a few more paces ahead,” Mick said and swung his light around, “it’s hard to tell in the dark.”
“You know we’re in it for the duration either way.” Nancy chuckled. It was punctuated by a lazy flicker of her flashlight. “But the sooner we get out of this awful cramped place, the better.”
“Maybe sooner, then,” Will said and folded his hand over hers to guide the beam of her flashlight. “Up there. Do you see?”
Mick led the way to where dark fragments were scattered on the tunnel floor. He nudged the closest pieces with his shoe. “Old wood. Rusty nails. I’d say these are the door pieces we’ve been waiting to find.”