by Dean H Wild
He heard someone say, “What’s happening to Mick?”
Another: “Yeah, what’s going on up there?”
The lingering light told him what seemed to be an eternity had passed in only a few seconds. He felt dizzy, as if just stepping off a roller coaster. Like the funeral home, the wood in his hand faded away like a dream.
Judy shook him. “I thought I lost you.”
“You ought to know better,” he said back.
Thekan twirled to address the crowd, his eyes ablaze in the shadow crescent under his brim, his voice building like summer thunderheads. “It comes down to asking for guidance, people of Mellar’s Knoll. The oldest of gestures and the oldest of practices—ask and wait, since nothing comes all at once.”
Mick slipped out of Judy’s arms and stepped forward on still-wobbly legs. “We don’t want what you’re waiting for, Thekan.”
“One voice speaks for the whole town?” Thekan presented it with a wave of gnarled, beseeching hands. “Even after so many have come out for my counsel?”
“Your counsel will bring the town to its doom.” Mick likewise addressed the town. “Listen to me. There’s a cycle, some type of revisiting blight on this place, this Crymost, something hungry and awful and it means to sap the life out of us. And this monster is helping it. We need to leave now. And get as far away from Knoll as we can.”
Shouts and cries from the crowd told him he’d done some good, and it would have relieved him if it weren’t for the boiling and gurgling sounds from below the drop-off. The Crymost pond water churned full bore. The western sky was now a rusty smudge.
Thekan smiled, his lips splitting open in half a dozen places in dry, gray slits. “What comes will dine only on the living,” he said and swept up close to Mick as if to dance, “but I think one more loss is in order. I at last have an in to your thoughts. So off you go, Mick Logan.”
Another of those awareness-sucking waves washed over Mick. His crippled doors of defense flapped, broken shutters in a windstorm. Thekan’s in. There was no funeral home this time. The Crymost and the goggling people of Knoll remained. His jaw locked. He was unable to turn his neck or use his arms. His feet however were forced into tiny backward steps, sending him toward The Crymost drop-off. And down I’ll go, like Robbie Vaughn, down to the Land of Nod.
“No, Mick. Stop.”
Judy lunged after him but Thekan caught her by the wrist, his teeth gritted, his eyes feral. “Broken,” he said and flung her down.
Judy screamed and collapsed into the dirt. Mick watched with helpless rage as she rolled over and clutched her already puffing and purple wrist. Her eyes welled. In his head he let go a scream and it somehow pushed him closer to his doors of restraint, gaping doors thwarting nothing. He needed to call upon help, Crymost help, chess pawn help, and he hoped his suspicion on how to achieve it was correct.
Someone rushed toward him in the near dark, Bob Canham, calling, “Mick, come back here, man. You’re gonna fall off.”
Thekan whirled around and clapped his hands on the man’s head to shake it as if delivering the most violent of healings. “Blind,” Thekan shouted and cast the man aside.
Bob Canham sat up in the dirt howling. He groped at the air, his eyes turned to white clots.
Screams rose up. Another man rushed forward from the perimeter and Thekan gestured toward him, commanding “Fracture.”
The man’s thigh let out an audible snap. He went down with a bark of pain, his leg folded like a ruined wooden lawn chair.
Judy struggled to her feet, still clutching her ballooning wrist. Thekan stepped in front of her with an admonishing “Nuh-uh. No strength in your legs,” and performed a gentle push to the air in front of her.
She sat down hard and cried out, “Mick Logan, come back here. Do you hear me?”
He pushed close to one of those gaping head-interior doors. Crazily he thought of Peter Fyvie offering advice while leaking onto his truck seats. Just trying to help. He’d received so much help. But in the end, it was all on him. Some people were just by-yourself kinds of people. Thekan raised his hands high. He wheezed, exhausted. “Who else wishes to challenge their fate?”
Judy struggled to stand once again but got no compliance from her legs. Her voice, however, was high and clear. “Run. All of you. Get away from here while you can.”
A few people broke away from the crowd and began to hurry back to Pitch Road. Others, confused and uncertain, gaped at her, at Mick, and at the two men twisting in the dirt.
A laugh billowed out of Thekan in a dusty rasp. “Go on, then. Run. Your feet will not carry you fast enough any longer. Whether you’re here, or crouched in your cellars, or cowering in your beds, it will find you. Why doubt my words, people of Mellar’s Knoll? Why?”
“Because you lie,” Chastity Mellar Borth’s voice rang out. Light flushed over the crowd, and over the judge, as the headlamps on the black car came to life. She rushed toward Thekan, her face hard, her hands hooked into claws. “You’re full of empty, dangerous promises and some hellish sort of trickery, and if what’s in front of you doesn’t serve you, you damage it or hurt it or outright kill it. What we shouldn’t doubt is the reality of the dreadful thing coming over that ledge to get us. And you ought to know, you’re serving it. We also shouldn’t doubt what Mick Logan said.” With a quick but graceful motion she snatched the derby from his head and flung it to the ground. “You are a monster.”
The light blazed across his face, accentuated loose ribbons of rotted flesh on his cheeks, contrasted the deep wells of his eye sockets, flooded over the permanent grin of his jaw wrapped in a Papier-mâché rind of withered meat. The crowd shrieked and yelled. Mick felt the hold on him slip. He opened his right hand as if to receive a dark handshake and waited for The Crymost to react.
Thekan snarled at Chastity as if such insolence was unheard of. “Do you realize those virile steps you took to confront me were your last?”
He slapped her with a forceful backhand. She sprawled in the dirt.
“This has got to stop,” Roger Copeland’s voice rose up as he fought his way to Chastity, his pocket watch still pulsing with ethereal green light in his grip. “Come on, we can take him down. Bill? Randy? For Christ’s sake.”
Indecisive murmurs rippled through the crowd. The murmurs changed to gasps as green light radiated over the edge of the drop-off. All motion seemed to stop except for a few people who cut out and loped back toward town.
Thekan took note of the runners and sneered at them. “Fodder.”
“No different than you,” Chastity cried out, pushing herself to a sitting up position at his feet. Her face creased and drooped as agonies settled in their old places like a burdensome disease. “In fact, you might be the most expendable of all. Look at you. How long before your face slides off your skull, Roderick? I give it ten minutes. How blind and foolish and ridiculous of you to throw yourself into this based on a promise. Because promises are empty things.” She clawed the dirt. “Always.”
“I should end you, cunt. But I like the idea of you suffering with immeasurable pain until the end of your days.”
Mick became aware of two distinct sensations, each one stunning and empowering: his legs were under his command again (barely), and the length of coffin-water wood—its twin nails gleaming—was back in his hand, heavy, real, somehow permanent. Nails and a board, a little help for a by-yourself guy brought into being by—what? A true perfunctory response from The Crymost? Or a succoring outreach of focused energy from a few well-meaning souls? Whatever the source, he was willing to go with it. He shuffled forward.
“Come on,” Roger Copeland shouted out again. He was near the front, his stricken gaze fixed on Thekan. “We can’t let this thing push us around. Move your asses, people.”
And some did move. People fanned out along the edge of the group, uncertain and threatening at the same time, reluctant sentinels awaiting either inspiration or divine order. Judy rose up and swayed like a woman on a tightrope
as she waited for her bearings to return. Old Jim Schraufnagel broke away from the crowd, his father-in-law’s medal glittering in his hand. So many hurting, his expression said, so many in need of help. He was close enough to ruffle Thekan’s cloak on the way by, and it made Mick moan when Thekan’s hand came up to grasp him.
“Ruptured,” Thekan pronounced as his hand clamped on the back of Jim’s neck.
What followed was a bright flash of green light centered on Old Jim’s medal and a wounded yelp from Roderick Thekan. Jim staggered to the side, dumbfounded. Thekan glowered, rigid and stunned. Smoke rose out of his woolen clothes in thin curls. Mick managed another step forward, keeping his grip tight on the board.
Chastity’s gaze flashed from Old Jim to Thekan. Her hand, shaking with pain and resolution, went to the pocket of her skirt. She pulled out what Mick thought at first was a string of tiny glowing pearls until he saw the crucifix dangling from the end. A rosary, each bead eerily alight. She reached up only a short way because one of Thekan’s hands dangled just above her head. She looped the rosary over his wrist, then gripped the loose end tight with both hands forming a shackle. What appeared as a cluster of flashbulb pops leapt from the rosary, and Thekan let go a gritty howl, his face contorted with agonized betrayal and rage.
Mick tried to rush in and stumbled, his body not yet his to fully command. Blaring in his head, more words from his nursing home visit with Irma—pure and powerful . . . tributes . . . we sent as many as we could. And from Axel—he’s worried they’ll get a whiff of the rot under his skin . . .
“Use what you’ve brought,” he shouted. “Your loved ones’ tributes have an effect on this monstrosity. This thing. Bring them up here if you have them. Do it now.”
“Damn straight,” Roger Copeland shouted back and slung the fob chain of his pocket watch around Thekan’s free arm at the elbow.
Thekan strained like a trapped beast balking heavy chains. “No. This is my time,” he declared, his face crumpling with effort, shedding pieces of rot.
There was another flash, this one darker, accompanied by a sizzle and a reek of old decay. Chastity and Roger were flung away in opposing directions and sent rolling across the ground. Thekan shook his arms free of his ligatures and shimmied like a beast shedding water. Mick stood straight, drawing deep breaths, collecting his returning strength to make it count.
Judy lunged into the crowd. She encountered Sheila Wiedmeyer, who gripped a pair of old fashioned hat pins in her fist as if playing shortest-straw-loses, only these straws twinkled with green light. Judy snatched the pins so they jutted from her good hand like wiry daggers and then rushed toward Thekan.
Other people holding glimmering items pushed their way in, heedless of the banking Crymost glow which now illuminated the grounds. Mick felt his heart swell for them, for his Judy, and for the surge of power he felt in his own muscles as he lunged forward, sure at last, and brought up the board two-handed like a man preparing to hit a pop fly.
Judy was on Thekan in a second. “No more!” she shrieked.
She plunged the hat pins in a downward arc. They punched through the front of Thekan’s shirt and sank in deep. Thekan glowered at them, the bulbous jeweled ends wobbling like antennae, and his mouth unhinged in a silent shriek. The seams of his suit opened and belched steam while scraps of old wool fell away in strips. His cloak flew into tatters. His hands swooped around as if to shred the air. His throat worked.
Mick leapt in. Thekan goggled at him, his face illuminated by the light from the drop-off, his lips quivering on the verge of forming a word.
“Go, you son of a bitch,” Mick roared, “back to wherever the hell you came from!”
He brought the board around with a whistling swing. It struck flat and true against the bridge of Thekan’s nose. Its nails punched into his brow with a grating crunch. Mick froze, suddenly mesmerized as Thekan convulsed, his mouth caught in a mournful scowl while dark oily fluids gushed down his face from behind the board he now wore like a strange, torturous mask. A constricted guck, guck sound came out from between his bony jaws. His hands flexed like insects in panicked dying throes. His skin drew in and darkened as if the last of the moisture evaporated from it. His shirt front fell away in shreds.
Mick reached out for Judy and she latched on, but neither of them was able to look away as the figure of Thekan began to totter back and forth the way a rusted pole yields to the wind. Thekan’s stomach, now wasted and exposed, drew inward with a muffled crumpling sound and split open. Clumps of gray matter dropped out, dry and heavy, trailing comet tails of dust. Fully formed items followed, spilling from the hollow basket of ribcage in a dust-coated storm. Coins, a gavel, a brush and comb, a flask, markers of a life, trinkets reflecting tangible memory, spread out and wasted on the ground between his decaying shoes. With a strangulated wheeze Thekan dropped, the last of his brittle skin falling away from his bones on impact.
It was done. Almost done.
Judy pushed him away. “Mick.” She indicated the massive, glowing bladder rolling over the lip of the drop-off like a storm heading inland.
“Yeah,” he said and pulled the walkie from his pocket. To the crowd he leveled his best calm but authoritative voice. “Everyone, you need to leave here. Now. Get off The Crymost. Help those who need it.”
Judy looked around, anxious. “Do you think the cars will start now?”
“It’s worth a try,” he said and began to walk with her in his arms. He never wanted to let her go again.
They were the first to approach Chastity who sat in the dirt, pale and stricken. She regarded her twisted and palsied limbs with remorse. Mick could nearly feel the pain radiating off her. “Ms. Mellar Borth, Let us help you. This area is going to blow sky high in about five minutes.”
She tried to smile but could achieve only a sneer of agony. “There is no help for somebody who could do this to the town, to these people.” She let her gaze drift toward The Crymost glow. “This pain is ten times worse than ever before. I can’t walk. And if you touch me to help it will feel like you’re ripping me apart. That’s no way to live, and you’re almost out of time. I’ll wait here for you to finish it, if you don’t mind, Mick Logan. It’s what I want. And I’ll pray you get it done before that green light can eat up what’s left of me.”
Judy squeezed his hand. Their eyes locked, the message in them mutual and grim. And then they ran.
“Harley,” he said into the walkie as they caught up to the back of the departing crowd.
Harley’s voice came soft, almost dreamy. “M-Mick?”
“You ready? We’re just getting off The Crymost.”
“Ready? We goan fishin’? . . . You sure it’s okay with Cy . . . if we take off?”
He stopped and let the walkie dangle at his side. Green light washed across Judy’s cheeks and forehead and it made her dread plain. “What’s wrong?”
“Harley took a pretty good hit to the head down there. I guess it’s worse than I thought. A lot worse. I’m going to have to go in and blow the double barrel.”
“I’ll come too.”
“No. I’ve got to go in through the mercantile. The stairs are collapsed; it’s a mess. You’ll never make the climb with that arm.”
“Mick!” Roger Copeland called from nearby. He was attending two other men who were guiding the blinded Bob Canham down Pitch Road together. He broke away and fought his way back through the crowd. “How long before The Crymost blows?”
“As soon as I can get down to the double barrel to do it. Listen, you and Judy work on getting everybody out of here. I’ll give you as much time as I can. Then, you get her to the hospital.”
“I will,” Roger said.
Mick embraced his wife, regretful it needed to be a quick one. “Don’t worry. I’ve got protection behind me. Two pawns worth, if I counted right. Thank you, Jude.”
She hugged him back. Her breath was warm in his ear. “I’ll never forgive myself if it’s not enough.”
He gave
her a long, deep look—something too all-encompassing to be contained by words. Then he turned to Roger. “Thanks for everything. I mean it.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The climb down to the mercantile cellar went quickly, as if on a subconscious level he stored away where all the easy handholds and footrests were. But a coldness, heavy and waiting, was on his back again. It was the reach of The Crymost, targeting his activity with idiot fascination and suspicion.
He called out for Harley when he reached the cellar floor and rushed into the double barrel room. Harley was slouched over the stack of old batteries, unresponsive, the walkie in his hand, the lantern hissing at his feet. Mick lowered him to a reasonable sitting-up position and then snatched up the lantern and hurried over to the jenny.
Harley’s instructions came back to him in a measured cadence: hold the choke button and push the starter, activate the double barrel pump with a switch, the igniter is the red lever on the side. He went over it again and again, feeling unprepared and unsure.
The crack in the jenny’s starter button seemed wider than before. He rested his thumb on it and brought his other hand around to work the choke, which was a spring-loaded pop-up. Above him, the pipe hole in the wall came alight with green radiance. It grew in intensity, rapid and rushing.
No time. No more time.
He pushed the choke down hard and gave the starter a preparatory nudge.
The starter button fell inside with a hollow rattle. So did the contact piece underneath it, leaving a deep hole like a surprised eye looking back at him.