But now—now something was happening. The shadow place was suddenly less comfortable. That perfect temperature was changing. Plunging. Dad’s voice—closer, clearer, more real than memory. Other voices, too, familiar.
She opened her eyes and saw her father and Bostwick leaning over her. From farther away she heard Charlie Moonlight’s voice.
Thomasine’s, too. She could not tell where she was—being lifted out of bed? out of a car? an ambulance? was she outside?—only that she did not want to be here. Did not want to be taken wherever she was being taken.
The rhamphorhynchus had warned: “The worst thing is that Indian is using his evil powers to make Dr. Bostwick go along with him. Thomasine, too. Even your dad. Isn’t that awful, Abbie? Everyone ganging up like that on you so that the Indian can kill you. Don’t you think you should do something about that? Wouldn’t you like to be safe, not killed?
“Fight them,” the creature had urged.
But she could not fight. Not Dad. Dad did not want to kill her, and he wouldn’t let the Indian either. Dad was good, she remembered that now. It was the rhamphorhynchus that was bad. Deceitful. A liar. It had visited her once in the shadow place, and it’d told her how she could not stay there—how where it was going to take her was so much better. But that was a lie. She didn’t know how she knew—perhaps because the creature had never been her friend, as it tried to make her believe, but her nightmare. No, where it wanted her to go was the worst bad of all. Dad had often talked to her about lying, about deceit, about how they were two of the most dee-spickable qualities a person, young or old, could have. Well that went for rhamphorhynchuses, too.
“D-d-dad,” she struggled to say.
“Apple Guy!” He got no further; the tears came too fast and hard. He kissed her cheek, found her hand under the blankets, and squeezed it. She smiled weakly. But it was a smile. A smile, for God’s sake!
“Dad?”
“What, sweetheart?”
“Is today Christmas?”
“Almost, honey.”
Bostwick watched, relieved. There was a potential way to bring Abbie out of her state: a powerful stimulant known as methamphetamine hydrochloride. In his bag, he had five vials of a solution he’d concocted, but he had been hoping to use it only in the cave, if at all. It might still be necessary to use it later, but the fact that she had independently awakened encouraged him. Her condition was poor, but it was not critical. Even stepping back from the madness he was involved in, he could truthfully state, as a doctor, that Abbie should be able to survive the next hour.
And past that . . .
. . . that depended on whether Charlie had been right.
The doctor let Brad comfort his daughter for a few moments before gently insisting: “We should go, Brad. After—after the next hour, you’ll have all the time in the world.”
Brad nodded. “One more stop, honey,” he told his daughter, “and then we’re going home. I promise.”
Charlie folded down the back seats of the Cherokee, and they slid Abbie on her stretcher inside. The adults piled in, and they started up Thunder Rise Road. Overhead the clouds were breaking. A thin moon was revealed, bathing the landscape in shades of silver and gray.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
Wednesday, December 24
Evening
Since nine in the morning they’d tried to reach Bostwick. He did not show up at the office, although he was not expected; appointments were never scheduled for Christmas Eve. He did not show up at the hospital. Nor did he answer his page or inform his answering service of a number where he could be reached. And his wife had no idea where he was or when he would return, only that he was up and out before dawn.
The staff at Berkshire Medical had tried to reach him because one of his patients had only hours to live.
They did not expect Bostwick to perform a miracle—why start now? one particularly belligerent nurse thought—but they knew him well enough to know he’d want to be there, if only to console the family.
Now, a few minutes before seven, it is too late.
Polly McDermott, a fourth-grader, is dead.
She was pronounced as being in that state by the medical examiner at 5:07 P.M. after an afternoon in which her fever topped 110 degrees and her heartbeat became wildly irregular, refusing to respond to any of the half-dozen medications an increasingly pessimistic trauma team pumped into her wasted body. Her last words, spoken in an almost unintelligible croak in the presence of her mother, father, and favorite granny, were enigmatic, chilling, and they will haunt them for years and years: “Please . . . Mommy . . . please, Daddy. I don’t want to . . . go away. Not . . . with . . . it. Please . . . oh . . . please. Not . . . it. “
Now her body is in the back of a hearse.
The hearse, driven by a middle-aged man who would much prefer to be relaxing with his family than toiling in the embalming room this wintry holiday eve, pulls away from Berkshire Medical into the dying storm. Jake Cabot heads over the mountain and comes into Morgantown just in time to pass carolers, gathered in the town square. It is a smaller group than usual. Cabot is not surprised. Morgantown is reeling. There are few conversations now that do not get around to the Mystery Disease. Some of the rumors seem downright laughable. There’s the one started by an elderly spinster who lives with a house full of cats over Pittsfield way. Edna McCabe believes it is the work of the devil, just as she believes AIDS and communism are works of the devil. There’s the one about sunspots being responsible. Or Soviet agents. Less laughable is the one about an escapee virus from a hush-hush military laboratory. No one seems to know where the laboratory that hatched the Army Bug, as it’s called, might be—or how its prize germ might have made it to Morgantown and nowhere else—but that does not bother. Fear is feeding on itself, and logic matters little.
Cabot knows Polly McDermott will only further distill that fear, making it a little more potent.
She will not be the last. As he was removing her body, Cabot was informed by the staff not to be surprised if he is asked to return before dawn. At least two children, James Ellis one of them, are given little chance of making it to tomorrow.
The undertaker is not a coarse or greedy man. He does not rejoice, not even privately, in the fact that the disease is fat city for at least one local business: his. But he is a practical man. He has been advised by the CDC to use gloves while embalming victims of the unknown disease, and as he pulls into the driveway of his funeral home, he is intending to follow that advice strictly.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
Wednesday, December 24
Evening
They proceeded like robots, their conversation limited to the exchange of two- and three-word commands.
Shoehorning themselves into the Cherokee. The Cherokee powering through drifts to the end of Thunder Rise Road. Parking. Brushing snow off the toboggans. Gunning the snowmobile’s engine to warm it. Loading one toboggan with equipment, including dynamite and a rifle. Transferring Abbie to the second softly and tenderly, as if she might break. Thomasine, Brad, and Bostwick stepping into snowshoes. Charlie driving the snowmobile, the snowmobile hauling the equipment toboggan and Abbie’s. The others walking behind in the impressions the toboggans leave. Traveling up the mining trail, expeditiously at first, more slowly along the final stretch Charlie did not have time to clear. Stopping twice while Brad chainsaws through insurmountable deadfalls. Reaching the mine. Glancing one last time at the moon, which has chased nearly all the clouds away, then stepping inside. Flashlights piercing the darkness. Charlie and Brad on opposite ends of Abbie’s stretcher. Walking toward the side shaft, their footsteps echoing off the rock walls. Standing at the mouth of the cave, their flashlights stabbing the dark, piercing to the cave floor so far below. Charlie rigging the pulleys and ropes. Charlie testing them. Brad double-lashing Abbie into the stretcher. Bostwick feeling for her pulse. Charlie first to lower himself to the bottom. Charlie climbing back up, catching his wind, delivering a short pep talk. Bo
stwick rappelling down. Brad. Charlie lowering Abbie, who has drifted back to the shadow place. Lowering Thomasine, who is afraid of heights. Lowering the spear. Finally, Charlie shinning down again. The whole group standing by the edge of a thin stream that meanders serpentinely into the distance.
And not one of them—not even Charlie, who’s taken unchallenged command—having any conviction that what they are doing is real and not some wild, drug-induced state that would pass if only they closed their eyes long enough.
It was impossible to gauge how long they stood there, spellbound. Perhaps it was five minutes, perhaps only fifteen or twenty seconds. Except for Brad, whose father had taken him on a boyhood adventure through Howe Caverns in neighboring New York, none had ever been inside a cave. Bit by bit, they explored it with their flashlights—the way a blind man might explore the face of a stranger he has reason to fear. The walls, deeply fissured, like the once-molten skin of an asteroid. The ceiling, vaulted like a Gothic cathedral.
Forty- and fifty-foot stalactites, untold centuries in the making, dropping down like oversize icicles. Stalagmites growing up to meet them—like the stalactites, painted in iridescent reds and greens and yellows from copper and iron and manganese in the limestone. Occasional coral-shaped formations Brad remembered were called helictites.
And the only sound the drip-drip-drip of the water that creates them, the passage of a century marked by an inch or two of mineral deposit.
Mother Nature’s bowels, moist, hidden from the light of day, Brad thought, almost laughing out loud at the absurdity of it. The old shrew’s large intestine, that’s where we are. How’s that, Charlie, for being in touch with the old lady? Do I merit honorary Indianship for being so in tune?
Standing there dwarfed by the cave, Brad couldn’t decide if it was eminently reasonable to embrace Charlie’s belief . . . or dismiss it as indisputable humbuggery. Once again he realized the distinction was academic.
“How far?” he asked the Quidneck. His words floated upward, seeming to hang by the ceiling before they faded and were gone. “I have no idea.” Another set of circumstances, and that response would have enraged Brad. Now he accepted it unquestioningly.
“Which way?”
Charlie turned and trained his light on the cliff they had descended. Starting at the top, he traveled down to their level, stopping at the small arch water had carved through the rock over the eons. Judging by the direction of eddies that disturbed the surface, the stream was flowing through the arch into some lost chamber. There was room for the stream, nothing else. No walkways on either side, no clearance for a boat. Only a scuba diver might be able to get through into whatever was beyond the wall.
“Can’t be that way,” Charlie said. “If it is, we may as well call it quits now.” He turned back and aimed his light ahead, a few feet above the stream. The beam reflected off the walls, covered with moisture. As high as the cave was, it was unusually narrow; at the base, no wider than a couple of school buses laid end to end, Brad guessed. Still, close to the water’s edge, there appeared to be passage wide enough for them. Rocks littered the way, but they could probably get through.
“Has to be that way,” Charlie declared.
“I say we get going,” said Thomasine, her voice exuding none of the derring-do that had extricated them from the Macy’s and gas station jams. The memory of last fall’s visit to the cave entrance with Charlie was strong, too strong, and she was fighting a losing battle to purge it from her mind. Brad could only guess Bostwick’s thoughts. Since the gas station incident he’d gone into a fog that seemed to clear only when he ministered to Abbie. Brad had the troubling feeling that if Charlie told the doctor to dive into the stream and never come up, he’d do it gladly.
“How is she, Doc?” Charlie asked.
“Stable,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
“We can go?”
“We can go.”
“All right,” Charlie said. “Let’s.”
They started off, Charlie in the lead, Thomasine bringing up the rear, Bostwick and Brad between them, carrying Abbie on her litter. Like one of Marco Polo’s caravans to the Far East, Brad thought, his mind free-associating again. Crossing the fabled Pamir plateau on their way to Mongolia and Kublai Khan. At last night’s planning session they had debated hand-carrying Abbie—Thomasine had even suggested fashioning an oversize Snugli—but Bostwick had ruled it out. An aluminum stretcher, he’d explained, was lightweight. From a medical perspective, it would be safer than trying to carry her.
It was warmer than they had expected inside the cave—fifty degrees, Charlie estimated—and they did not get very far before they were forced to strip to their shirts. They dropped their coats where they shed them; they could retrieve them on their return. Brad loosened the straps around Abbie and ruffled the blanket to let air circulate around her. No one spoke. Except for Bostwick, who watched the girl like a hawk, no one let his or her attention wander from his or her feet. They were too preoccupied negotiating fallen rocks and small pools of water and keeping whatever small distance they could from the stream, whose depths they could not judge but whose current appeared capable of whisking one of them away in the blink of an eye.
What’s so bizarre, Brad thought, is there’s no bat shit in here. No bats. What cave doesn’t have bats? And that’s not all. There’s no sign of any other form of life, either: spiders, owls, mushrooms, none of those crazy eyeless bugs scientists have found miles inside other caves. Brad had the uneasy feeling that they could pull a net through that stream and come up empty. No blind cave fish. No crayfish. As if everything living had been swept away millennia ago and not allowed to return.
They pushed on, unable to gauge how far they had come—or had to go.
Charlie had demanded silence except in emergency. He did not know what he was waiting for (a sound? an apparition? the appearance of wolves or bears or some more exotic creature?), only that he was confident there would be—had to be—some kind of warning before they reached Hobbamock’s lair. It might be as ferocious as the attack of a coyote on newborn lambs or as subtle as a trembling leaf. But it would come.
In his left hand, Charlie carried a shotgun case containing the spear. It could stop Hobbamock because this had been so ordained when Cautantowwit created the world. Without it—or if the weapon he’d tracked down turned out to be an impostor—they had no chance. Abbie would die. The other children would follow, as surely as the new moon follows the full. Maybe only one or two children a week would be lost. Maybe, Hobbamock finding his last obstacle removed, a dozen or two at a whack. Even now, having pondered it endlessly, Charlie shuddered at the logical next questions: When would the god be satisfied? Ever? Or would he continue through the years, moving along to another town when Morgantown had been destroyed, another town after that, and another, the experts eternally puzzled, kids continuing to die . . . ?
Because who other than Charlie would even know? How many Quidnecks were there left who would have heard?
But they had a chance.
If there was any reason to be optimistic—and there was, he kept reminding himself, there was—it was because Charlie knew . . . knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that he had the right weapon. Finding the spear this afternoon in Wigglesworth’s mansion (was it really just this afternoon?), removing it from its case oh, so gingerly, like a day-old newborn from its crib, holding it, feeling its power surge up his arm into his torso, the spear and the air around it seeming to blue-spark like a Van de Graaff generator—in that moment of triumph, he’d known instinctively.
This is it. As real as Quidneck blood, proud and potent and beyond the merciless reach of time . . .
Five minutes passed.
The only words spoken, most by Charlie, were “careful,” “slippery,” “watch it on the left,” “easy on the right,” “big rock,” “need a rest,” “put her down here,” “ready?” “hot.”
Ten minutes.
Fifteen.
Almost
half an hour, and the impact of their environment had lessened to the point where they could have been embarked on nothing more dangerous than a grammar school field trip for all Brad cared. His skepticism, suspended for two days, was returning with a vengeance.
What did I expect? he asked himself. What would Charlie say now?
(Last night Charlie said: “We’ll have to be patient. Hobbamock is very crafty. He could not finagle the souls of children if he were not. Without question, he will try to mislead us. Trick us. How? I don’t know how. I only know that he will want to meet us on his terms, not ours.”)
(“Why wouldn’t he just remain invisible until we give up and leave, or go so deep into the cave we could never find him?” Brad asked.)
(“Pride,” Charlie answered, “the downfall of not just man but deity, too. He will be compelled to confront us. To confront me. He will have to defeat me, as he was unable to defeat my forefathers.” (Last night it had seemed a reasonable answer.)
(But not now.)
(Not now.)
“Don’t you think it’s taking us an awful long time?” Brad said, breaking the silence. His arms were tired from carrying his side of Abbie’s stretcher, and his eyes hurt from focusing so hard in such poor light.
“It’s been half an hour,” Thomasine said.
“Shouldn’t we have seen something by now?”
Charlie did not answer. His brow was furrowed in almost painful concentration. Until just now his own faith had been wavering, an admission he would not make to his companions. But now he felt a pressure behind his temples. A gentle, not unpleasant feeling initially, it was steadily increasing, as if someone were pressing large thumbs into his forehead with greater and greater force. He was getting plugged in. He could feel his heart quicken in his chest. An image started to form . . . and was quickly gone.
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