by Dean H Wild
“All the way up here,” Nancy said with dark wonder.
Harley shot his light forward. “Yeah, we’re close to something all right.”
They instantaneously aimed their lights, a collective conscious. Other objects lay ahead in a jumble: a ragged red stocking cap, a set of keys, a silver spoon gleaming like a dull beetle shell. Mick started as his gaze fell on what he thought was a chessboard propped against the tunnel wall. His hand jerked to his pocket in acknowledgement, and for a moment he felt the sudden cold weight of Robbie Vaughn humping onto his back, and Robbie hissing wetly in his ear, Fyvie sent me, Mr. Logan. He says there’s no way out, this time.
Then he saw the playful lettering on the board, nearly lost under a coating of grime. CHECKERS. The simple cousin of the intellectual game. It helped him to shrug off the dreaded sensations. Near him was a doll buggy, wheels up and filthy, an ashtray in the shape of the state of Florida, a softball. And at the very edge of the reach of his light, an open door frame was set into what would otherwise be a dead end.
“This is it,” he said.
The others’ lights were already dancing across the opening. Just inside was a deadfall of broken rafters and loosened hunks of fieldstone foundation, a ruined portion of the mercantile basement, plugging the way through up to three-quarters of the height.
“How’s your backs, everybody?” Harley asked as they shuffled closer.
“Damn it,” Mick said and reached through to give a length of fallen rafter an indignant shove. His stitches sent out a shockwave of protest, but the rafter actually moved a little when he pushed. A few particles of plaster sifted down and rattled at his feet.
“Do that again,” Will said and sidled up next to him. “I’ll help.”
Harley attempted to push his long arms between Mick and Will to help. “If it just happened when the door blew at our end, it can’t have settled too bad. It will be pretty unstable.”
“Oh,” Nancy said and gave the tunnel ceiling a dubious glance. “How unstable, exactly? Because I don’t feel like getting turned into mashed Nancy down here. I’d help, but you three already look like sardines in a can, the way you’re standing.”
“It’s okay,” Mick told her as he pushed in unison with the others. “I think it’s giving way.”
“Yeah,” Will rasped and ducked low to give Mick more room. “Harley, can you give us a little more?”
“Trying,” Harley said. “Why is it so goddamned wet? Can you feel how wet the wood is?”
Will’s voice was bright and yet morose. “Crymost juice.”
The barrier gave way with a loud crash. The broken rafter tumbled away with the ceremony of a falling idol and debris crashed inward, clearing the opening. Mick lit the way inside, his heart hammering against his ribs.
“Take it slow,” Harley warned him.
But he was through the opening in the same instant. His words came out with no effort, as if he was a conduit for the announcement and not its originator. “Here it is. Here’s the double barrel.”
He saw only the machine, a gray metal box the size of an alley dumpster. It was fed by several lead pipes stretching away into a crumbling hole in the far wall. The rest of the room, twelve feet on a side—palatial compared to the area they just left—was lost on him. He was barely aware of the others following him in. He set his hand on one of the metal side panels of the machine as if testing it for heat or cold. The double barrel, so much resembling it’s crudely sketched likeness.
Nancy’s light flickered around the room disclosing broken machine parts and forgotten tools, the mangled shred-nests of mice along the bases of the walls. “That’s quite a smell,” she said. “Is that gas?”
“Fuel oil,” Harley said.
“The reason so many people wanted this place torn down,” Will added. “A forgotten fuel tank was leaking somewhere. Judging from the smell, I’d say it’s close by.”
“Maybe not so much forgotten as hidden,” Mick said. “Our leaky tank might be part of the double barrel, left behind full and ready on purpose.”
He ran his fingers along one of the pipes and then held them up for Harley to see the oiliness.
Will raised his brows. “You can’t run an engine on that stuff, can you?”
“No,” Harley stepped up to examine the double barrel and lay his hands on the pipes. To Mick his countenance was that of a wild eccentric realizing the validity of some madcap theory. “The oil is for burning. And there’s a mixer here. An igniter is probably somewhere on the other side of this wall. Electric from the looks of it, which is how the whole shebang is operated, pump and all.”
Will ran his gaze along the ceiling. “Electric? I don’t see any power cables.”
“A battery, maybe,” Harley checked the floor around the double barrel.
“Here,” Nancy said and dragged a canvas tarp off of rows of car batteries stacked in a far corner. Each one was ruptured and wore a beard of long-dried corrosion. “Not any good, though.”
“Would my generator back at the bar work if I brought it down here?” Will asked.
“Like a charm,” Harley smiled.
“Then things are looking up,” Mick said.
“Yes, they are.” Nancy stepped over to a door next to the defunct battery pile. She jiggled the knob, and when it opened she said, “Because here’s our way out. Looks like the mercantile basement proper.” She followed it with a humorless Nancy Berns laugh.
“If I’m right,” Harley gazed at the wall with its infusion of pipes, “this deal mixes fuel oil spray—which is the only way you can easily ignite the shit—with another agent to run it past an igniter and make something go boom. Judging from the direction these lines are headed, that would be Pitch Road, provided the lines go straight all the way.”
Will joined Nancy at the open door as she shined her light into the adjoining room, a broad expanse lined with rotting shelves and moldy sacks. The beam played along dusty wooden steps going up. Mercantile basement, indeed. “It mixes fuel oil with another agent such as what?” he asked.
“It’s called a double barrel,” Nancy turned and grinned at them. “Gunpowder, maybe?”
Mick tapped another one of the pipes with a sudden certainty. There was only one word for what he felt just then: correlation. Damned if it wasn’t.
“Methane,” he said. “If these lines run all the way to Pitch Road, that explains the fake vent pipe at the old dump. It was a decoy, making everything look nice and normal, when the methane is really bottled up underground waiting for this old contraption to work its magic.”
Harley grunted. “Goddamn.”
Will spun around. “Give it both barrels and the dump goes boom, takes The Crymost with it.”
Mick nodded, unable to ignore the hot excitement in his belly. “All orchestrated from a safe distance, and protected by good air. Right here.”
“Goddamn,” Harley said again, squeezed in behind the double barrel and crouched as if this new revelation demanded closer examination. “Sounds crazy on the surface, but I’ve cobbled together enough projects in my day that had no business working but ended up filling the bill.”
“Will it be enough?” Nancy stepped back to join them. “Blowing up The Crymost, I mean. I think our problems come from a little more than rocks and dirt and a pool of old green water.”
“The men who put in the tunnel and the double barrel seemed to think so,” Mick said and rapped a hand on the double barrel’s sheet metal side.
“We’re not safe, guys,” Will said, his face suddenly blank as he stepped up to Nancy’s side.
Harley shrugged. “If there’s a clog in one of the lines, or if it’s not vented properly, something might blow up in our face, but otherwise—”
“No. Not the machine,” Will said and pointed. “I mean that.”
Thin greenish light burned inside the pipe-accommodating hole in the wall just above Harley’s head. As they looked, it intensified with onrushing speed.
“Get down,
” Mick said and instinctively dropped into a squat.
Harley ducked just as the glow spread above their heads, revealing itself as something more substantial than light. It seemed to be an amorphous bladder full of foxfire. Nancy made an attempt to turn away, but the glow descended on her like a rushing tide, washed over her, bathing her in green. It flowed over Will a second later. He stared out from it, his brow furrowed as if he was caught between several clashing thoughts. Shadows ran over objects in the room like the fingers of a sightless being and a muted sighing sound wafted into the air. Its voice, Mick thought, the voice of The Crymost. And there was more, a sense of animal intelligence, more instinct than reason.
“Will! Nancy!” he called out. “Get through the door to the mercantile basement if you can.”
They both marked him with dull, confused stares, but then Will rallied. He broke free of the green glow and ran through the basement door, his arms and legs jackknifing, his clothes and hair wet with Crymost juice, his eyes wild. Nancy remained bathed in green radiance, gazing into space. Her flashlight dropped to the ground and shattered.
“I should have grabbed her,” Will said from the doorway, his face stricken. “Shit, why didn’t I grab her?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll get her on our way through. Come on, Harley.”
“Yup,” Harley said and stood up, as if unaware of the overhead stream of radiance feeding the mass around Nancy. His head and neck were instantly bathed in it.
Will shouted. “Oh, shit.”
Mick reached for Harley’s arm to drag him out but saw there was no need. The Crymost glow recoiled, repelled. In the next instant it vanished the way a spotlight stills to darkness when its power is cut. A ghostly afterimage of it slipped through the door to the mercantile basement and up the stairs. The room around them became a confusion of clanks and clatters as objects fell to the floor from a dropped height. Crymost objects.
The mercantile let out a low, settling groan above them. Plaster dust streaked across their flashlight beams.
“I don’t know about the rest of you,” Harley said, his gaze and his light trained on the ceiling. “But I think we should get a move on. I’m getting a bad vibe about this place coming down around our ears, people.”
“After what I saw you just do,” Will said, “your vibes are the law. Let’s go.”
“We’ll never make it,” Nancy said, dour and almost prophetic, and showing no intention of going anywhere.
Mick dashed around and pushed her ahead of him. She was soaked to the skin with Crymost water but she responded with loose, sleepwalker’s steps. Miserable tearing sounds came from above as the mercantile shifted and shed hunks of stone and broken wood. The four of them rushed into the main basement, large pieces of foundation and plaster crashing to the floor as they gained the stairs. Mick was the last one up. Loud thuds like pursuing footsteps made him look around to where broken segments of the basement ceiling fell on the risers at his heels, smashing the wood. He gave Nancy one last mighty shove at the top, and as he burst through the upstairs door into Will’s waiting arms, the stairs fell away behind him in ruins. He leapt up and landed hard on the wood of the main floor.
Will helped him up and said, “Mick, Nancy’s not good.” There was a tremble in his voice.
Nancy was hunched in Harley’s arms as if drawn up against the cold. Her eyes looked out at them, wide and yet empty, so different from just moments before.
“We’ll never make it,” she said.
Mick winced at the hopeless sound of it, but it was Nancy’s hair he stared at. It was completely white.
“Let’s get her outside,” he said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Fuck you, Ichabod, Axel Vandergalien thought as he dropped the manual shift of the hospital transport van into cruising gear.
The world rushed by outside and the appearance of it was strange to him—long streaks of color turned to threads the way blood thins in the rain. The flimsy hospital gown drooped off one of his shoulders and the hem was bunched to the side. Anybody looking in would see his worldly goods, bag and all, hanging out. But fuck them, too.
A single, clear fact blazed in front of him like a dripping sun, so real he could touch it. It pushed aside the idea that his busted left leg, in a fresh cast, slug removed, debilitated him like a stone anchor. It overpowered the memory of his slipping away from the nurse who was doping him up. He barely remembered hobbling outside like an overwound broken toy and jumping into this van, which was left idling next to the storage garage marked HOSPITAL PERSONNEL.
Only one thing flamed on in his head. Thekan was some kind of double-crossing, uncle-killing freak with nothing but dangerous intentions toward Knoll, and for once in his life Axel Herman Vandergalien needed to do the right thing. He needed to pull Thekan down, or at least get the people of Knoll to pull him down. Somehow.
“No. Go back to the hospital, dumb shit,” Unky Cy said from the row of seats behind him.
In the rearview Axel could see him, mostly pulled apart in bloody chunks and then restacked, half-assed, as if that Pablum Picasso artist had gotten ahold of him. Next to him was Auntie Alice grinning with that stupid patience of hers, her fat cheeks taut and purple and a little shiny, her lips as black as engorged leeches.
“It’s too late. You need to turn this truck around, honey,” she said, and her eyes, bulging and dotted with red snaps, tried to blink but failed. “Or it’s going to get very bad for you. The Crymost is going to do what The Crymost is going to do. That Thekan creature is just a part of it. You can’t change anything.”
Axel focused on the road and shrugged his shoulders.
“Fuck it all,” he said again and pressed the accelerator as hard as he could. “I gotta tell somebody.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Touching The Crymost items was unnerving at first, but as she continued to collect them and deposit them in a damp but serviceable wicker basket she’d found, Judy felt more at ease. Beth Ann helped her, wordless and grim. Many of the townspeople had gone home, but a few remained to pick through the curiosities like browsing sheep. This relieved her as well, but she was still worried for Mick and the others. It seemed they were below ground for longer than a reasonable amount of time.
She glanced over at Stu, who had borrowed a pickup truck from one of the curious passers-by—Dave Bortner, perhaps. He limped around, transferring Crymost items to the truck bed for transport. Good old Stu.
At last she turned to Beth Ann. “I think it’s been long enough. I’m going over to the mercantile, just to assess the shape of things.”
“Let me take those over to the truck,” her friend said and took the basket from her, “and I’ll be right behind you.”
Judy nodded and stepped into the street. Roger Copeland stood across the way gabbing with one of the browsing villagers, and she was glad to see him. They would make an adequate rescue team, her, Roger and Beth Ann, should it be needed.
As she crossed the center line she heard a crash from inside the mercantile. Something large. Huge. Perhaps part of the old building itself.
She stopped, her eyes locked on the gaping window opening of the mercantile, her mind playing out a hundred scenarios, her heart jackhammering. At the same time, she saw headlights coming into town from the south, but it did not fully register. All she could think about was Mick and the others and what might have befallen them. A hateful, tingling fear found a foothold in her heart.
The roar of an engine sank in next. The street became ablaze with headlamp light. Her shadow stretched out as if trying to break away. A white van bore down. She whirled to face it. Tires shrieked. She felt oblivious, betrayed, hopeless.
Her feet lurched forward, her vision and awareness blurred, and then crashing sounds filled the world.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mick raced through the dusty wooden compartments of the mercantile ground floor. The open socket of the show window, draped in young vines, appeared in his flashlight beam and he hurrie
d toward it with the others right behind, the two men helping Nancy along.
The sound of a racing engine barely registered as he stepped through the window opening into the fresh air of night. Then the screech of tires rose like a strain of sickness. It was the metallic crashing noise and the tinkle of scattering glass that finally awoke the dread in him. More awfulness, a part of him announced, more and more awfulness.
The scene on The Plank was described in surreal brights and darks by crosshatched beams of headlights. People stood in the road, some of them making distressed cries. A shadow ran toward him, huffing.
“Mick. For crissakes, you better get over here.”
It was Roger Copeland, he realized as he broke into a run. On the opposite side of the road sat a pickup truck and a white van, yards apart, equally mangled. Puddles of ejected liquid shone on the pavement. Silhouetted street people began to gravitate toward the vehicles, and he felt the needed to go too, but as his feet hit the road another shape captured his attention. A solitary shape, arms clutched together, feet on the center line of The Plank.
“Judy?”
She turned to him and her arms flew up almost wing-like as if now, with him here, they could fly above the scene together, evaluate and decide what to do. He wound his arms around her. She fiercely gripped him.
“He missed me by inches,” she said against his neck. “Crazy, crazy idiot.”
“Who?”
She pulled back to give him a reason-filled look. “Axel Vandergalien. He came down the hill in that van. So fast. He swerved away from me. And he hit . . . oh God.”
More people gathered around the wreckage, several on their cell phones. Like crows, Mick decided, spreading the bad news via wireless signals instead of treetop caws.
“There’s Beth Ann,” he said with some relief and pointed at the form standing just paces from the crumpled pickup.
He shouted for Harley, but his friend was already on the way over to his wife, muttering under his breath with racehorse urgency. Then Roger Copeland was back. “Mick, come see what we can do. We got a man down.”