The Crymost

by Dean H Wild

  “Axel,” Mick said. “I heard.”

  “No, it’s Stu. He was right next to that pickup when it got hit. Come on. It’s pretty bad.”

  Judy looked behind him and said, “Here’s Nancy and Will. Maybe Nancy can—oh.”

  Dawning understanding crossed his wife’s face the moment she got a good look at Nancy Berns. Without hesitation she took Nancy’s arm. The trembling, stunned Judy from moments ago was gone, put away with the offhanded consideration of an old unwanted overcoat. “I’ve got her,” she told them.

  “Come on, Will,” he said. “Let’s see what’s going on.”

  Stu was flat on his back near the peeled and snarling grille of the pickup. A mangled front fender stuck out above him like a broken wing. A crowd stood nearby. Someone had spread a light jacket over Stu’s stomach as if to keep him warm. A deliberately placed trail of sweatshirts, a bathrobe, a couple of paper grocery sacks described a path between Stu and the truck like a bizarre footpath.

  Stu seemed pale and unaware in the wash of headlights from the nearby cars, but as Will and Mick crouched next to him, one at each shoulder, he turned his head and managed a tired smile.

  “What happened?” Mick asked, and let his gaze pass over the jacket on Stu’s stomach. A rosette of blood was seeping through it.

  Stu raised a shaking hand far enough to aim a finger. “Damned van came out of nowhere. Piece of metal bit me pretty hard in my gut. Might be some internal bleeding.”

  Mick looked around. At least two bystanders were phoning for help, thank God, but this felt urgent. It felt dire. “Listen, Stu. You’re the expert in these matters. What do I do?”

  “I might need surgery to fix this. And I ain’t got no goddamned insurance for that.”

  Will pulled at the jacket coverlet up from the bottom, creating a barrier that prevented Stu from seeing. The wisdom of this was something Mick would marvel at later. At the moment he was simply unable to look away from what other well-meaning souls in Knoll meant to cover up.

  Just above Stu’s belt buckle, a ragged hole spilled a coil of intestine that made Mick think crazily of clock springs. A ropey length of it trailed off under the collection of cloth and bags and ended where a crescent of truck metal was hooked neatly through it, as if the pickup’s one purpose was to unspool Stu’s insides like yarn pulled off the skein. Blood pumped out in freshets and spread into the gravel.

  Will let the coverlet drop without a word.

  “Cold,” Stu said. “I must be bleeding bad, huh?”

  Mick squeezed his shoulder. “The ambulance is coming. Be here any minute.”

  Stu nodded and then looked up at the two of them. His face was a white moon. “If I’m bleeding bad, can one of you put some pressure on the wound?”

  They traded a wordless exchange. At last Will rested his hand on the bloodied jacket. Gentle. This response, too, was something Mick would marvel at later. “There,” Will said.

  Stu’s hand was still elevated and Mick grasped it out of instinct. “That better?”

  “Yeah, thanks guys.”

  Stu shivered and let out a long, ragged breath. His eyes searched the night and then settled on Mick, and that was it. Peaceful dullness took possession of his features. Emptiness.

  Mick gripped Stu’s hand even tighter for a moment, then let it go. Will slipped off his shirt and spread it over Stu’s face and upper body.

  Dropped. The word seemed to tumble through Mick’s head. They were all becoming singled out, dangled and dropped by malicious hands, and there was nothing he could do about it. Was there ever? Maybe not, Mr. Logan.

  “Axel’s a mess.” A voice from behind sent Mick to his feet. “How is Stu doing?” It was Roger Copeland, who stepped up and took in the scene with a defeated “oh”.

  Sirens wailed in the distance. Will stood up and wiped his hands on his undershirt creating maroon smudges. “Come on, Roger. Let’s get people out of the street,” he said. “We don’t need any more takedowns tonight.”

  “Yeah,” Roger said.

  Another hand, this one on his shoulder. It was Judy.

  “Oh no, poor Stu.”

  “Yeah. Where’s Nancy?”

  “I put her in the car. My God, her hair. What—”

  “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To seize an opportunity,” he said and led her around to where the van had apparently flipped after impact and rolled back up on its wheels.

  Its cab faced away from the street, one weak headlight throwing amber light into the ditch. Onlookers stood near the driver’s door, which hung open drunkenly, but none of them moved in to help. A mess, Roger had called Axel, and it put an unpleasant tug in Mick’s gut as he pushed his way up to the mangled opening.

  From the waist down Axel seemed pressed into the crumpled metal, a neatly-fitted puzzle piece wrapped in a hospital gown, meant to pop in and out of place with the flick of a finger. The steering wheel jammed against his chest promised to be a hindrance to such popping, however. Another hindrance: the jag of crumpled truck roof buried in his skull.

  Mick’s first thought was somebody ought to put some pressure on that.

  The smells of hot engine oil and blood whorled out at him. “Axel. Why this? Why did you come back?”

  Axel rolled his eyes, his hair in sanguine strings. A trickle of red leaked from the corner of his mouth. “Motivating fire, I guess. That’s what I was told once. Past remorse becomes motivating fire. But everything I do ends up a clusterfuck, man.” He winced and gave an accusatory grimace at his chest, where the steering wheel pressed in impossibly deep. “That’s the part Ichabod didn’t get.”

  Mick leaned a little closer. “Ichabod. You mean Thekan?”

  “Killed my Uncle Cy, then set me up as the one who did it. He’s got something on the line, you know. Something that’s coming to Knoll real soon. A hungry thing. And its reactions are automatic. Like an animal I guess. Ow, aw fuck.”

  “Some of us have an idea about what’s coming, too, and we mean to beat it,” Mick said. “We mean to beat Thekan too. What do you know, Axel? What can you tell us?”

  Axel grunted deep in his throat. “He thinks he’s got the town in his pocket, but he’s also worried some of the people, or maybe a lot of them, will get a whiff of the rot under his skin. One thing Knoll is good at, it’s sniffing out the ripe stuff. Me included. I guess they were right. Look at the shit show I caused tonight.” His eyes fluttered with approaching unconsciousness. “By the way, sorry about the village hall fire. It was a fucking stupid move. I’m glad you made it out.”

  “Mick, the ambulance is here,” Judy said. “We better get out of the way.”

  Sirens whooped close by, deafening. Running feet approached. One hectic shout proclaimed something about the Jaws of Life as emergency vehicle lights swooped around the wreckage.

  Mick let Judy lead him back to the opposite roadside where Harley and Beth Ann waited. They blended with the other bystanders for a while and watched while stretchers and medical kits were rolled out. And Mick thought of jaws, yawning open, waiting. Waiting.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  From behind the bar, Will said, “Let’s do it, right now. We can roll my generator down the tunnel, hook it up to that double barrel machine and blow The Crymost to kingdom come before midnight.” He moved around in the half-light of the lamps over the bar in his blood-smeared undershirt. The rest of them sat on stools like a clutch of time-weary patrons: Mick, Judy, Harley, Beth Ann, and Nancy.

  “I’d be right there with you,” Harley said. “But there’s one thing we need to check on first: breather pipe. The write up on the double barrel plan says there needs to be a breather, probably on The Crymost proper. Without venting, the whole damn shebang might blow up internally and take whoever is pushing the start button with it. No way to tell if those double barrel boys got it done or not unless we check.”

  Will stopped in the middle of pouring a beer. “The Crymost might have done somet
hing to make them forget. I can tell you firsthand how easy that green glow gets into your head and starts moving things around. In that basement, I could feel it in me. In my thoughts.” His arms, Mick saw, were alive with goosebumps.

  Nancy made a low moan in the back of her throat, as if in concurrence.

  “Then get ready, gentlemen,” Mick said as Will set out beers for all of them. “It seems we need to go on a breather pipe hunt.”

  “Not tonight,” Judy said to him. “You’re exhausted, we all are. And The Crymost, or whatever lives up there, is on high alert. This town has seen two disasters today. There’s no need to walk into a third.”

  “Tromping around up there is a job for the daylight, anyway,” Harley said.

  “Daylight and faith,” Beth Ann announced. Her clear eye seemed haunted; the bloody one drooped, afflicted. “I’ll pray we have those things on our side tomorrow.”

  Harley gave her a squeeze. “You do that, honey pie.”

  Will stretched and let out a huge yawn. “I for one am all for hitting the hay.”

  “I don’t care for the idea of some of us being home alone, however,” Judy said and gave Nancy’s arm a gentle squeeze.

  “We’ll take her,” Beth Ann said, more brightly than seemed possible. “We’ve got the spare bedroom off the attic. And I want to do this. I need to, I think.”

  “All right then,” Mick said and stepped away from the bar. Will came around to join the rest, and once again Mick found himself standing separate, facing them, all eyes looking back with acceptance. “Let’s keep each other safe.”

  Class dismissed, Mr. Logan.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Chastity leaned against the bathroom sink to keep from falling down. Her legs were weak and the pain between them was a broad and twisted cord lacing her anus to her pubic bone. On her face, streaks of blood like war paint—not hers, but the stuff that leaked from Roderick’s empty eye holes while he gyrated and rammed into her. She splashed water on her cheeks, thought about cupping some warm soap suds between her thighs but then didn’t.

  “We’re nearly done for tonight,” Roderick called out from the bedroom. “Then you can rest.”

  Nearly done. Part of her cried out against another rough penetration. Against the texture of the emissions he produced during his final, brutal thrust this last time. His semen possessed a disbanding property, like it scurried inside her. Images of the larvae she’d mined from his pockets only the day before flowered open in her brain. She shoved them away, but they only opened again.

  Another part of her insisted she relax because the tone of his voice intimated business now instead of lust. What she needed to do was put herself to rights, stagger back to the bedroom to trade her tattered blouse for a fresh one, strip away the remaining ribbon of waistband and put on new panties—or perhaps just a skirt because the thought of fabric touching her crudely-rubbed flesh made her sweat—and stay the course a while longer.

  Come on, Knoll. I’ve bought you all the time I can afford. Somebody do something.

  It was a stealthy hope, as quietly creeping as the trickle of spunk working down her legs. She wiped it and rinsed her fingers without looking at what might go spinning down the drain.

  Roderick stepped up behind her and she squeezed the last ounce of strong, unaffected posture out of her frame. He was wearing slacks and an open shirt. His empty eye holes, rimmed with starbursts of dried blood, housed the beginnings of eyeballs mushrooming back into place. He held out her bathrobe.

  “Just this,” he said and draped it over her shoulders. “We need to use the telly-phone. For one call.”

  His hands massaged her neck, hard and rough.

  “In a minute,” she said and turned on the water taps. “I want to wash my face.”

  “Of course. I’ll be downstairs.”

  Downstairs. By the telly-phone, she thought, and what might have once amused her pushed her to the brink of screaming. She scrubbed her face and pressed a few handfuls of water against her inflamed lower regions after all, then blotted with a towel. She did not look down even once. Instead she thought about what she might do if Knoll did not show its rebellious head soon. Daddy’s rosary might be a help and a comfort, she thought as she pulled on her robe and tied it closed. It presented itself to her under strange circumstances after all. As strange as Roderick’s arrival. And hadn’t she picked it up frequently throughout this day, as if subconsciously asking for its help? It was downstairs at the moment, resting on her kitchen pill shelf, and she suddenly wanted it in her possession. Wanted it more than anything.

  She stepped across the bedroom, gave the mussed and crimson stained sheets barely a glimpse, and went down to the kitchen where she plucked the rosary from its place just as Roderick moved up on her in a dark swoop.

  “Ready?”

  She slipped the rosary into her robe pocket, quite adroitly she thought, and hoped he hadn’t seen. “Yes,” she said. “Whatever you want. Who do you need me to call?”

  “Everyone.”

  She frowned at the wall phone hanging before her. “You know how this works, right?”

  He lowered himself into a kitchen chair. Gaunt. His eyes, now restored, held a dull shine. “I know how it works for me.”

  She took up the receiver and stared at the dial in its curved underbelly. Words churned in the back of her head the way a dust storm looms on a desert horizon. Roderick’s words, what he wanted her to say, being fed to her via the telegraph of dark miracles. Her other hand stirred the beads in her robe pocket, flicked at a gilt edge of crucifix.

  “Three rings,” he said, “and you can start talking.”

  There was no hanging up the phone, no capability of rebellion in her muscles. She pressed the receiver to her ear upon the first ring. I called from this phone to tell them Daddy was dead. She clung to the thought, a desperate scrap of thinking still her own. Ring two. This same phone rang the day they told me Gregor was in a terrible accident and I’d better come to Hillside Hospital right away.

  The third ring, and then a chorus of voices in ragged unison, unraveled at each end. “Hel-hello-lo-o?” mixed with a garble of voicemail salutations.

  Knoll. Everyone in Knoll, or close to it. Roderick’s dark telegraph commanded her vocal cords, engulfed her awareness, except for that one small shred of thought, like a bit of bright cloth fluttering in a high branch.

  “Fellow Knoll citizens, this is Chastity Mellar-Borth. I want you to know I am in a state of great remorse over the tragedies befalling our fair town today. It is easy to reflect in solitude upon our losses, but this is a time to find solace in fellowship in our community. It is time we unite to console one another, kindly and properly. And we are fortunate enough to have someone among us who is willing to offer us guidance in such matters. The Honorable Judge Thekan would like you to attend a gathering of guidance and fellowship.”

  Roderick sat forward, his grin triumphant, his yellow teeth nearly snapping at the phone cord dangling between her breasts. She held her stance, her pocket hand working rosary beads with sweaty strokes.

  “Meet us tomorrow at The Crymost, won’t you? It will be a time to face our sorrows as a community at the place which knows our sorrows best.” She clenched all over and homed in on the ache and burn between her legs. It sent an arrow of clarity through the words, summoned mental pictures of those Knoll citizens already lying dead in the morgues and funeral parlors of Drury, Allycegate, and points in between.

  “We’ll gather at . . . ” the word “noon” clacked deafeningly from the dark telegraph. She felt her mouth begin to form the word. But no. Knoll needed more time to rebel, to defy in a way she seemed unable. Someone was out there, planning, devising. She knew her town well enough to be confident there was at least one. The idea shook through her, followed by another. She gave words to them both. “ . . . at sunset. Bring a special memento, significant and curious if you have one. I know I will. And let us hope we’ll find easement of our agonies by the beautiful blu
sh of twilight.”

  Roderick snatched the receiver from her hands and pressed it close to his mouth as if to devour it. “Come to The Crymost,” he said, so close his hair tickled her cheek. His corrupted smell was overpowering. “At sunset, as she says.”

  His eyes flashed at her, a universe of a thousand camera bulbs and he cast the receiver down. It shattered on the floor, spraying components.

  Chastity pressed herself against the wall. There was nowhere to run from him; her tiny telly-phone nook was a miniature prison.

  “Sunset and mementos?” he said, his breath a cloud of swampy rot. “You wouldn’t dare plot against me, would you?”

  “Against you?” She put as much lilt into it as she was able. Probing sensations whirled around her head, trying to worm their way in, meeting a barrier formed by her thought-scrap and the still-fresh soreness between her legs. “What is it you think I could do? I just wanted that little speech to sound more like me than you. Really, Roderick.”

  “Some in this town conspire.”

  “You might think so, but who would be so foolish after what happened this afternoon?”

  She tried to slip by and he stepped in closer. “Mick Logan is a main concern. A threat, really. And I will find a way to reach him, reach into him, and subdue him. Painfully. Once I can focus my efforts. Right after the feeding begins, I think.”

  “If you’re still capable of your fine tricks once it, whatever it is, no longer needs you.”

  The universes in his eyes flared to quasars. Her mind felt exposed, as if a shard of her skull tumbled away to reveal the throbbing meat beneath.

  “I am no mere instrument to be disassembled when the job is done. I intend to join the world of man again. To feel and taste and walk in the sun, free and whole and full of life.”

  “Look at you,” she said, her voice trembling. “You have no place among men.”

  The initial effect was as she’d hoped. The probing receded, derailed. What followed surprised her, however; an imperative demand which pierced her defenses and stabbed clean and quick into her thoughts. Her car was to be filled with fuel and ready for him to speed away once business at The Crymost was complete. He meant to run, to scurry away like the loathsome thing that he was.