When the state police officers finished their investigation, all they could do was shake their heads. There was no one to arrest. All the murderers were dead. Most of them had taken their own lives. And Don had fatally shot Reverend Douglas Pfeil. Edward Dwyer’s death was ruled a suicide. And—more important to Don—Kesselring’s death was ruled to have been the result of natural causes, specifically a heart attack. Don had explained what happened, saying that he wanted to question the retired cop about Jurkowski’s escape from jail, in which the ex-cop was a suspect. Kesselring had run, and Don had pursued him until the retired cop collapsed in the woods. He had no idea why Kesselring ran from him. Nor did the state police, but in the end they accepted Don’s explanation. Sometimes people did things like that, even former cops.
Only Don knew what had really happened on Ice Island. There was no one he could tell, not even Allison and Sarah. It was a strange feeling to know he’d been a party to ridding the world of a terrible evil. He supposed other people had done similar things, and they too had found themselves with no one with whom they could share the experience. It seemed likely, because if the monster existed, other creatures of evil had to exist as well. And other humans had battled them.
Of course, the real credit for the Evil’s destruction went to Kesselring, who’d pursued the monster until he caught it. And then he’d made the ultimate sacrifice. Don was a minor player.
ASH WEDNESDAY
By Chet Williamson
The plots of God are perfect.
The Universe is a Plot of God.
--Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka
PROLOGUE:
A Resident of Merridale
For the whole town, I suddenly realized, was something other than I so far saw it. The real activities and interests of the people were elsewhere and otherwise than appeared. Their true lives lay somewhere out of sight behind the scenes. Their busyness was but the outward semblance that masked their actual purposes. They bought and sold, and ate and drank, and walked about the streets, yet all the while the main stream of their existence lay somewhere beyond my ken, underground, in secret places.
—Algernon Blackwood, “Ancient Sorceries”
The dogs saw it first.
It was very early on a Friday morning, a few hours before sunrise, when they noticed the glow. The first to start barking were Sim Peters’s two foxhounds, lying together on top of their doghouse in Sim’s backyard. Mitzi’s nostrils flared at the glow, even though she could sense no strange scent. Her low growl woke Mike beside her, who, at the sight of the lights, immediately sent up a shrill baying. A few backyards away the Smiths’ Great Dane took up the cry, and soon all three were yelping. As the animals looked from the hill down into the shallow depression that had given Merridale its name, they saw more and more dim pools of light take form below, man-shaped nebulae that gleamed darkly, in muted contrast to the bright streetlamps that poured specks of diffused whiteness across the town in the early-morning mist.
That the images were those of naked and unmoving human beings meant nothing to the dogs. All that Mike and Mitzi and Jocko knew, as Rex and Spike and Butch and King and every other dog in Merridale just as quickly learned, was that they were alien, something that did not belong, and that barking at them might frighten them away, or draw the masters out to chase them off or ask what they wanted in the dogs’ dominions.
So the dogs barked, and one by one they woke one another, from street to street, house to house, until all of Merridale resounded with their ragged voices.
And slowly the people of Merridale woke, and rose, and discovered.
Marty Sanders sat bolt upright in his bed, a sheen of terror-sweat covering his body, making his cotton pajamas stick to his hairless back like flour paste. He’d had the dream again. Over six months now and still that damned dream of that damned night. Dotty stirred in the bed beside him and cleared her throat in the darkness. He could make out the large lumpish shape of her in the cool blue glow of the clock-radio numerals.
“Marty?” she slurred sleepily. “Y’okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, sure,” he told his wife, who grunted noncommittally.
But he wasn’t okay, and wondered if he ever would be again. He flopped back onto his pillow and looked up at the black ceiling, his tired mouth open in a grimace of self-loathing. He ran his fingers through his damp thinning hair and finally dried his forehead with a tissue. He felt sick.
When he remembered what he had done, how he had done it, he always felt sick. Even though no one would ever know, would ever grasp him by the arm and drag him away to pay for what he’d done, he still felt sick.
One time. One time in thirty years of marriage he had cheated and look how it had ended. It had seemed so safe—Dotty out of town visiting her mother in Lauderdale for two weeks, his running into Sheila Sommers outside the 7-Eleven, her teasing him, talking about last summer at the pool and asking him if he had liked her bathing suit, and then asking where his wife was, and when he told her, her saying how lonely he must be in that big house all by himself and wouldn’t a little company be nice and no one would know.
Something had happened then that had totally surprised him. Thirty years of husbandly fidelity, fifty years of moral training had slipped off of him like a robe off a whore’s shoulders, and he said yes. A little company would be nice.
Even now, he could scarcely believe he had done it, but he had. They went back to his house. The outside lights were off, and they were out too far for streetlights, so the chance of being spotted by his neighbors was unlikely. Once inside, they had a drink and talked—he about his business, she about her two failed marriages—and finally she just said, “Well, it’s about time, isn’t it?” and started to undress right there in the living room. By the time everything was off, they were in the bedroom and he was half undressed too. Then they did it, right there on the bed in which he and Dotty had slept for years, and goddamn if it hadn’t been good. If he hadn’t been good. But then she started teasing him. And right away he knew how stupid he’d been. He hadn’t remembered, with her pressing up against him in the car on the way over, how she’d busted up Larry Drebbins’s marriage with her big mouth, but now it came back to him all too clearly.
“Did ya like that?”
“Bet you haven’t had it that good for a long time.”
“Does your wife do it like that?”
“Wouldn’t she die if she knew about us?”
“Maybe we oughta call her in Florida …”
And with each remark from the strange naked woman stretching and moving like a cat in heat beside him, his stomach tightened more and more and the memory of what had just occurred grew tasteless, then bitter. He realized that he had no idea what Sheila would do, but it might be something crazy. After all, wasn’t she crazy enough to pick up married men outside the 7-Eleven?
“C’mon, let’s call her.”
He laughed, trying to reassure himself that she was joking. She laughed too, but then looked at him half seriously. “What’s the number?”
He laughed again, less jovially. “You’re crazy.”
“Maybe. What’s the number?” He didn’t say anything.
“I’ll find it,” she said, rising from the bed. He followed her through the house until she found the personal directory by the kitchen phone. He could only stand and watch her, his own nakedness forgotten, as she flipped through it. “Here we go. Mom.” She moved back into the bedroom then. “More comfy in here, huh, Marty?” When she picked up the phone was when he stopped her, grabbing her hand.
“Are you crazy?” he said, and then she said something horrible and laughed at him, and he got mad, so mad that he pushed her.
To stop her. Just to stop her.
The next thing he knew she was lying there and her eyes were open but she wasn’t moving, and when he looked, there was this thing on her head like a lump, a knot. There wasn’t even any blood. Just this knot on her head, and he couldn’t remember if she’d hit the sharp corner of
the headboard or the bedside table or what, and there was just this lump and her not moving or even blinking, and he knew, he knew even as upset as he was, that live people blink.
He was so scared he cried. Just cried and cried until he couldn’t anymore. So he blew his nose into a wad of Kleenex from the bedside table and thought about what to do next. He considered calling the police, but talked himself out of it. All that would mean would be that they’d take him away. And even if they freed him, everybody would know. Dotty would know, Pastor Craven would know, Tom Markley—hell, the whole damn town. And it wouldn’t bring her back, would it? It wasn’t like he was a criminal, was it? What had he done? Self-preservation, that was it—she would have destroyed him. And his punishment wouldn’t bring her back. Nothing would bring her back.
Back to tell the truth.
Once he made his choice, the emotion seemed to fade, at least for the moment, and analysis took over. She lived in an apartment house two blocks away from the town square, had probably walked to the 7-Eleven, and he was fairly sure that no one had seen him with her. If he could get her back to her building.
Everything slipped into place then, and he made himself wait until three in the morning, when all of Merridale was sleeping. He dressed Sheila slowly and awkwardly, nearly panicking over his inability to fit her into her panty hose without twisting the legs. But after twenty minutes of backbreaking effort, she was dressed presentably enough that Martin Sanders felt confident that it would appear she had dressed herself. He took the scotch bottle from which she’d been drinking and splashed a bit on the front of her sweater and over her chin. Just enough, he thought. Don’t overdo it. She drank, but she wasn’t a drunk. And that’s why, isn’t it? That’s why she fell—she wasn’t used to it.
He was unable to pick her up, so he dragged her outside to his car and put her into the trunk on top of a blanket. On the way to her building he didn’t pass a single car. It all went perfectly then—hauling her out, dragging her up the dimly lit stairway to her apartment, opening her door with her keys in her hand (fingerprints), turning on her lights, leaving the door open, and finally lifting her erect and letting her fall down the rubber-treaded concrete stairs. That was the worst. He was barely able to let her go, but he closed his eyes and forced himself to shove her slightly out so that she flopped loosely down the whole long flight, like a boneless rag doll, to strike her head with a dull crack at the bottom.
He ran then, ran down the steps, leaping fleetly over her, making himself slow down just a hair as he passed the sole streetlight on the way to his car parked in a shadowed corner. Then home. Home to a nightmare of stuffing soiled sheets in the washing machine, looking for long ash-blond hairs on the back of the couch, the upholstered headboard, everywhere, everywhere she’d stood, sat, lain.
The nightmare hadn’t stopped there. It had continued even when the sheets were dry, the few hairs were found and flushed away, the glasses were washed and rinsed. It plagued him when the lights were out, when his eyes were closed, when dreams shredded his waking veil of forgetfulness.
The passage of months had not helped, nor did the total and unexpected success of his pulpish plot. Accidental death had been the ruling, had made him at least physically free. But he was still chained by the nightmares, and now he lay there, replaying them involuntarily on the dark ceiling. The pressure of his bladder temporarily took his mind off them and onto his tiring prostate. He rose and padded into the bathroom.
He had just finished when the dogs began to bark. Damn mutts, he thought. Four in the morning… never sleep now. He had just hit the flush lever when he heard Dotty scream.
The sound froze him, and the first thought that entered his mind was insane, irrational, and totally correct. She knows. He shivered, and thought again, She knows.
As he entered the bedroom, the blue glow was brighter than the clock radio had ever been, bright enough for him to see his wife huddled on the floor in the corner, staring and screaming at the slightly transparent corpse of Sheila Sommers lying on the bed in the same position in which she had died. Her eyes were still open and, like her entire accusing body, shone with a pale blue light.
Up to that moment, Martin Sanders had never thought that a man could scream more loudly than a woman.
Brad
A transgression, a crime, entering a man’s existence, eats it up like a malignant growth, consumes it like a fever.
—Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
CHAPTER 1
Merridale had had its last sleep for a time. It seemed a village made for sleep, designed for a permanent, contented somnolence. From Interstate 79 it was already said to look like a town of the dead. But this image followed the actual event, the result of journalistic second-guessing, one of a slew of rapidly devised images for a poetry-hungry public.
For only in the poetry of image, metaphor, even parable, could the phenomenon of Merridale be dealt with by the ignorant, which included the entire human race in terms of truly understanding what had happened and how. Why was beyond even the wisest and greatest of the mystical. Poetry triumphed because prose was too stark, too frighteningly clear in the pictures it drew. So Merridale, from afar, was “a town of the dead, nestled among the hills of Pennsylvania like a curled and sleeping giant.”
But Merridale had not been as the press later described it. Instead, it had been a bustling little village of 8,000 inhabitants that showed few signs of growth, but fewer still of deterioration. As it did not welcome strangers, neither did it shun them. But one had to have a reason to live there, either ancestral or occupational. No one, thought the townspeople, should live in Merridale who did not either work there or grow up there or have a job nearby, nearby generally defined as within a fifteen-mile radius of the town. It was a town where people worked hard, went to church, seldom cheated on their mates, drank moderately, took only prescribed drugs, and nursed their frustrations without giving them reign. It was strongly Republican, overwhelmingly Protestant, universally white. It was no different from half a hundred other towns in the area—no better or worse, no more tolerant or bigoted.
Merridale sat at the base of a glacial ridge. From the town below, the ridge, denuded of trees and pocked with small ranch houses, looked like the spine of some great beast lying face down just beneath the earth’s surface, arching its back as it had for years in an effort to break through the rocky soil and free itself. This stark mound was called the mount, and the town at the bottom, the dale, though why the trappers who had settled the area in the early eighteenth century had called it merry was a secret lost in time.
Like the legs of Ozymandias, the spine above Merridale was the only break in the surrounding landscape for many miles. A rolling hill lay on the other side of the town, but its height was only half that of the ridge, although it enabled the town to be described as lying in a quiet valley, the only valley for as far as the eye could see. All about was the unrelieved flatness of farms, broken by occasional towns and cities, the largest of which was Lansford, fifteen miles southeast, to which a good portion of Merridale residents drove daily to work, or boarded the first or second Amtrak train of the day, depending on whether their collars were blue or white, whether they bore paper bags or briefcases.
The farms were everywhere, rich with the bounty of dark soil. Unlike the withering earth of the plains states, leached out by chemicals and weakened by corporate interests that strove to make the land produce as much in as short a time as possible, most of the farms were still in private hands, many run by members of Amish or Mennonite sects who farmed the way their fathers and grandfathers had before them, caring for the land with a near-religious devotion, almost worshiping it, as further removed ancestors had adored the sun and rain that nurtured that same soil.
Because of the farms, Merridale could easily have been self-supporting had the need arisen. There were hogs, sheep, a few stringy herd of beef cattle, as well as all the vegetation necessary to life, even tobacco, which grew in great fields of flat green.
Dozens of chicken farms and egg ranches completed the menu. But Merridale was not and never would be self-sufficient. It was too much a part of its county, its state, its country, to become a separate unit, though before too long county, state, and country alike would wish it out of existence.
The thought of his town and its people was far from Bradley Meyers’s mind when the dogs woke him from a sound sleep. All he knew was that he was mad. It generally took hours for him to drift into a repose as solid as the one that had just been shattered, and his first response was rage. The alarm clock read just past four, and he knew any sleep he could grab until he had to get up at six would be ragged, unsatisfying, pierced with consciousness. He muttered a curse and kicked his feet out over the side of the bed. The covers slipped off Christine’s shoulders and he pulled them back up over her roughly, wishing that he could sleep through anything, as she did.
He threw on his terrycloth bathrobe and stepped into the hall, listening for a second at Wally’s door to the thick asthmatic snores that told him the boy was sleeping. Brad sighed and ran his fingers through his long, straggly hair. Might as well make coffee, he thought glumly. Those dogs aren’t gonna shut up. He went into the bathroom, drained the remainder of the previous night’s beer, and was rinsing night fuzz from his mouth when the sirens started up. It was weird, he thought. It was usually sirens first, then the dogs, not the other way around. If there were a fire, it might be nearby. Maybe he could even see it from a window. That would be one way to pass the hours until dawn.
He saw the man in his living room out of the corner of his eye as he was walking to the kitchen. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to see when he turned and looked. Someone with a gun, perhaps, or a knife, someone wearing a look of surprise tinged with aggressiveness, someone who would hiss a warning not to move or he’ll shoot. What he did not expect to see was an old naked black man standing half in and half out of the sofa, as though it were quicksand into which he was sinking.
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