Michael fell back against the soft leather, prisoner to the centrifugal forces engendered when the couch suddenly picked up an unnatural speed and momentum. His world darkened completely when the couch was yanked into the hole. He fell into the void, along with the carpet and the books and the jukebox and all of the other expensive things that his parents were so proud of.
9
Vacancy
Dugan awoke with a start and sat up quickly in bed. He looked around his dark room before glancing up to the clock radio above his head to see that it was 4:28 a.m. There were still two minutes left before the alarm would go off, but something was wrong. Something had awakened him, and when he turned his head toward the window, he realized what it was. Throwing off his covers, he got out of bed and walked over to lift up his curtains and confirm what his senses had already told him: it wasn’t raining anymore. The storm had passed. He looked up and watched high gray clouds move swiftly against a backdrop of stars in the still black sky. He tried to remember if he’d ever seen clouds move this fast, but couldn’t. It was as if they too wanted to get the hell out of Dodge as quickly as they could. As he stood at his window watching them, he nearly jumped out of his skin when the clock radio went off. It had been tuned to awaken him to loud music, and from its tinny speaker Dugan listened a while to Jeff Lynne and his Electric Light Orchestra harangue Mr. Blue Sky about just where the hell he’d been for so long.
* * *
Dugan dawdled just long enough in the kitchen for the first rays of the morning sun to make their appearance along the horizon and then waited a little bit longer. When he finally stepped outside the house, he took in a deep breath and filled his lungs with the sweetest air he’d ever tasted, scrubbed clean after the two-week shower. On the trees, he noticed that the ripe buds that had survived the storm would soon burst open to herald the official arrival of spring. By the time he left his house to head on up to the Korner it was just after 5:30. He knew that most of the customers beyond his own street no longer cared whether or not they got their newspaper and delivered them now mostly out of habit. He rode up to the Korner anyway and opened the hutch to quickly shove the newspapers into his baskets.
Tucked into the front door of the variety store, fluttering and flapping away in the breeze, were handbills of various colors and sizes. Uncollected mail overflowed from a small black mailbox attached to the front of the store and fell onto the concrete curbing below. If he had to guess from just looking, Dugan figured it was about three days now since the store had been open. He suppressed the giant sob that threatened to overwhelm him by thinking about how much he had liked Mr. Gordon, and how much he would miss him. But knowing that he, too, was gone now gave Dugan an idea, an opportunity to test a theory.
He reached slowly behind the hutch. After a moment, his fingertips brushed the wet sides of a can of Coke. It was still cold and must have been placed there fairly recently. As he opened it and took a long swig, he thought it was probably more important anyway that it was he and not Mr. Gordon who was still around. They were going to need him. Dugan was certain of that as he sat down to read the paper. As he had been every day for a while now, Dugan was surprised to see there was still a world somewhere beyond Grantham, a world that continued going on as if there weren’t such a thing as monsters.
The IRA hunger strikers were still at it after a month and a half and it looked like the Brits weren’t going to budge. The first launch of NASA’s new space shuttle was scheduled for the next week, the Celtics were looking good, and the business section reported an open secret: IBM was going to jump into the new personal computer market before the year was out. He’d have to remember to ask Mike if he knew anything about this. He was the only person Dugan knew who had a computer. When he tossed the paper aside, he felt a pang of longing for the lost world that it described. He set those thoughts aside and stiffened his lip. It was time to make the rounds. He got on his bike and rode out onto Route 135. After about two miles, he stopped to examine the place where the river had been.
There was nothing left, except for maybe an ounce of water puddled in the lowest lying area. He set his bike off to the right side of the road and slowly walked down to the bottom of the dip. The “Black’s Brook” sign was gone, swept away perhaps in the deluge. He walked over to the far left, where yesterday there had been a raging waterfall, and saw only a small slope leading into a narrow strip of woods and down into a field beyond. He shuddered at the memory and went to get back on his bike.
Dugan placed that day’s copy of the Globe on top of the four others already stuffed inside Murph’s storm door, smiling cynically to himself to think that it was the end of cheap meat. He rode down to the Glennons’ house and put their paper on the small pile he’d been building there. He repeated this for all of his outlying customers. The piles got bigger as he approached his own neighborhood. As he walked up to the front doors, he wondered occasionally whether there were still people inside the house. When he recalled what Larry had told him about Mrs. Skin, he would have bet that some of them were. He wondered whether their hearts still beat.
As he turned into his own street, he realized only then that he hadn’t seen Mr. Gregory this morning. For some reason, that made him the saddest of all.
* * *
He went home for a while after that before walking up to Andy’s house for a surprise visit. When she saw him through the screen door, she screamed playfully about him seeing her in grungy sweats, but her beautiful blond hair was carelessly pulled behind her in a headband and Dugan liked the look. As she moved closer to the door, she got a better view of him. Her own face became a mask of worry and concern, until he told her he’d been in a bike accident and asked her to leave it at that. As they stood together on the front porch, she began placing gentle kisses on each of his myriad wounds before planting one on his lips.
He walked in and smelled bacon in the air, and then saw Andy’s father standing at the top of the stairs. He was wearing a Larry Bird “33” Celtic apron and he smiled down at Dugan, inviting him to come in for breakfast. Five-year-old Alex screeched to see Dugan’s head come up the stairs, and he put his hands over his mouth with glee, knowing what was coming. Dugan didn’t let him down. After hauling out the tickle monster of death for a few minutes, Dugan threw the kid up in the air a few times and then threatened to bring out the Claw. Dugan knew Alex was scared of the Claw. He thought that maybe it was because Alex had never actually seen the Claw that he was so scared of it. Dugan decided then and there to retire it from the act. He made himself a plate and stayed for a few minutes, listening to and smiling at the controlled chaos that was breakfast in the Rourke household, silently grateful for the brief interlude of normality.
After glancing down at his watch, Dugan thanked Mr. Rourke for the wonderful breakfast before he excused himself. He took a quiet moment with Andy at the bottom of the stairs and promised to call her later, before leaving the house for his 9:00 appointment.
10
Jimmy takes charge
When he climbed down the wooden steps into Moon’s basement, Dugan was surprised to see some new but familiar faces greet him. Moon and Mike were there, along with Jimmy and Larry. But Dugan saw that Mark McCaffrey was there too, as well as his friends Tony Gomes, Artie Cullum, and Brian Dolan.
Tony and Artie went to the regional vocational school over in Granger, so Dugan had fallen out of touch with them since elementary school. He didn’t know Brian well at all, except by sight.
After arriving, Dugan went around the room saying hello to everyone. He couldn’t help but notice that Moon looked a sleepless wreck. He went over to give him a special hello and ask if he was all right. Moon nodded silently just as Jimmy interrupted the quiet conversations.
“Greetings folks, let’s get started.”
Everyone found a place to sit on one of the couches, or on the worn oriental carpet covering that section of concrete floor. Dugan glanced around the room again and winced to notice the laundry beginn
ing to pile up.
“First off, we all know why we’re here,” Jimmy said. He turned to Dugan. “You finish the book?” Dugan nodded. “Good. I want to hear your report on that, but first we need to welcome some newcomers to the club.” He turned to Mark and said, “You should probably know that we have an initiation ritual.”
Mark raised his eyebrows, but Jimmy just smiled. “You just gotta tell us your stories.” The five regulars listened to the newcomers tell their tales.
Tony and Artie both worked after-school jobs down at the supermarket. Over the past few weeks, they had watched their friends and colleagues stop showing up for their shifts. Artie had been dating one of the cashiers on and off for a couple of months now. When she stopped coming in to work, he went to her apartment to investigate.
Like Dugan’s own close brush with one of the creatures, Artie had barely survived to tell his story. As he sat listening, Dugan unconsciously began to stroke his battered face.
Mark McCaffrey was next and told a similar story. He had an older brother who came home from college about a week ago. His brother had called them from the Grantham Depot to let his family know that his train had arrived safely. He hadn’t been seen since. Brian began his story by saying that he lived in Rosemont.
“Rosemont?” Dugan interrupted to ask.
Brian looked over and nodded. Dugan was about to begin asking questions, but decided to let Brian tell his story in his own way. Brian said he had been hearing strange noises come from his neighbor’s house and had looked out his bedroom window one night. Although he was certain there was no way he could have been spotted, he swore that one of them had sensed him looking out of his darkened window, turning to stare up at him. Brian had dropped to his knees.
“And just this morning,” Brian went on, while Dugan braced himself, “there were police cars and fire trucks and even an ambulance outside the house. I mean, the house itself looked fine, so I walked over to hear what I could.”
He warned them first that what he was about to say wouldn’t make any sense. Jimmy told him it was okay: none of it made sense.
“I guess what happened is, a huge sinkhole or something kind of just opened up in the basement. They figure maybe it was ‘cause of all the rain. It just kind of…sucked everything down.”
He paused a moment. “They don’t even know how deep the hole is, but everything that was down there is gone now.”
Dugan waited for it. “Then I overheard someone say Michael was down there,” Brian said quietly. “I mean, his mother looked like she was taking it well, but I guess he’s missing now too, him and Stephen both.”
Although he was staring at the floor, Dugan knew his friend’s faces were turned to look at him. He thought a moment about Harris, about that beautiful family room, and all the beautiful things that had been in it.
Mike broke the silence, saying quietly, “Both of them, I mean, that ain’t right. They might’ve been jerks and everything, but man, his poor parents.”
Dugan couldn’t help it and knew it wasn’t right, but he began smiling when he thought about Michael’s parents. They would probably just lay down a little piece of plastic, covering up that unsightly place in their hearts where Michael used to be.
“Something funny?” Jimmy asked.
It got his attention. Dugan felt his face burn red, and when he looked up, his smile was gone. He was prepared to be angry, but the look on Jimmy’s face alerted him that Jimmy had said what he’d said, the way he’d said it, for a reason. Dugan looked down again, all of the anger gone from his system, and simply shook his head.
“Okay,” Jimmy said after a moment. “Dugan, you’re next.”
Dugan told them what he’d read in the book last night, but said it had ended too soon. There was no information in it about what the townspeople had finally done to end the plague. He mentioned too that Daniels had written about caves up near the quarry where the creatures gathered at night.
“That’s weird, isn’t it?” Dugan asked. His friends just nodded.
“No it isn’t,” Mike said. The assembled friends looked at the small redhead. Mike went on. “I mean, we know there aren’t any caves up there now, that you can see anyway, but…”
“Go on, Mike,” Jimmy said gently.
After a thoughtful moment, Mike continued, “I mean, there’s like a hun’red years of water down there. And remember, it used to be a quarry.” Mike looked around the room and saw that all of his friends except Moon still didn’t get it. “Moon, get the stuff.”
Moon got up from his seat and ran up the stairs, his heavy footfalls shaking the house. He came down a moment later with a stack of books and papers and manila folders. Dragging over an old coffee table, he put the pile of stuff down on top of it and then reached into one of the folders. He removed a series of black and white photographs and began passing them around.
When they got to him, Dugan saw the pictures were of men working the quarry about a century earlier. One of the photos was taken from the very top of the quarry, looking down into a hundred- foot pit. The people standing at the bottom looked as small as ants.
Much of the cliffside face of the quarry had been worked, the steep walls honeycombed with multiple nooks and crannies showing where rock had been taken. Ladders fifty feet tall were scattered throughout the worksite. One photo showed a man carrying a lantern inside a deep cavern with a pack mule by his side.
Just before he was about to ask the question, Dugan remembered. Moon and Mike had paired up to work on the school project, and had selected as their subject the history of the quarry. The thought of that reminded Dugan of his own partner. He put that out of his mind until he got some time alone.
After passing along the pictures, Dugan began looking through some of the other material the two had collected, including what appeared to be a set of rolled up maps. Picking them up, he unrolled them and saw they were a series of topographic maps showing that portion of Grantham including the quarry, the old railroad line, and Lookout Hill. Looking more closely, he saw that the whole area of woods behind his house was shown all the way up to the quarry. The map even included the ancient stone walls they had to climb over to get there, walls demarking property lines that were two hundred years out of date.
“Okay. They like the quarry,” Jimmy said, bringing the meeting back to order. “What else ya got for us Dugan?”
Dugan thought a moment and shrugged, not knowing what else to say. Jimmy then began passing out assignments for the day. Tony and Artie were dispatched to every supermarket and farm stand in the area, to buy them out of garlic and whatever else the two of them could think of that might work.
Mark and Brian were tasked with buying gallon jugs of water, and then seeing if they could get Father Gould to bless them. Jimmy said to make up a story if they had to, and failing that, they should steal all the holy water they could from the font at the entry of the church sanctuary. While they were at it, they should empty the baptismal font on the altar.
Moon and Mike were sent up to the quarry to see if they could find any evidence of…strangers…passing through. After the rest of them had left on their errands, Jimmy informed Dugan and Larry what he had planned for them.
“I’m not ready for that,” Dugan said. He tried to imagine it and couldn’t.
Jimmy assured him it might not be necessary at all, but even so, they needed to be prepared just in case. Dugan couldn’t deny that it made sense. Jimmy reached behind the couch for the three large knapsacks he had brought from home. They would use these to tote their work back to Moon’s house. The three of them left the basement to go break in to their own school.
About halfway there, Larry made a joke at Jimmy’s expense. He called him, “woodshop boy.”
“I like that,” Jimmy said, “and I want both you guys to call me that from now on.” He turned toward his two friends with a twinkle in his eye. “Makes me sound like a superhero.”
Four
Wood shop—Tools of the trade—
Larry goes home—Hoofbeats—Splatter—The night visitor—Boy God—Endgame—Hunger
1
Wood shop
The sun shone brightly overhead as they walked to the school. The temperature felt somewhere in the mid-50s. Dugan knew it should have been a bustling, busy Saturday on the streets of their town. It was the first day of school vacation and the first sunny day after weeks of rain. But as they walked along Route 135, only a single vehicle passed them. It was moving way too fast for the road and headed toward the interstate highway.
There were no cars in the school parking lot. When they got closer, Jimmy put Plan A into effect, checking to see if any of the doors had been left unlocked. They found the glass doors leading into the cafeteria all secured, but soon discovered that the side door of the school was not only unlocked, but wide open. Jimmy discarded Plan B, the large rock he had picked up along the way.
Dugan had harbored the secret hope that they might see some people on the tennis courts, taking advantage of the mild early spring weather. Or maybe, he thought, they would see joggers running around the large oval track, but they had seen no one. As they entered the darkened hallways of their school, Larry excused himself, saying he had to go and do something. Jimmy warned him not to take too long, and after that, Dugan and Jimmy walked together down the silent hallways, past the empty office and through the cafeteria, on into the wood shop.
Applewood (Book 1) Page 18