by Ronald Malfi
When he put the car in Park and shut the engine down, Brandy offered him a small thank you.
“I’ll need to go in and tell your mom,” he told her.
She nodded then looked through the rain-speckled windshield of the police car and up toward her house. Only a single light was on in one of the downstairs windows.
“Can I ask you one thing?” Ben asked.
She looked at him again. In the rain-shadowed moonlight, her face was a glowing patchwork of pale light and deep, lightless grooves. “Yeah,” she said.
“How did you…you know where to look for him?”
“The bats,” she said. “The bats go wherever he goes. I mean, I think so, anyway.”
Brandy Crawly’s eyes seemed to briefly lose focus. Then she blinked and looked back up at the house again. “He’s been staying in the garage the whole time. He’ll probably come back tonight. I’ll be waiting.” Almost as an afterthought, she said, “He can still be saved. You just have to kill the head vampire.”
It was surreal, all of it. Was he dreaming? Surely none of this was actually happening.
As she looked back at him, she suddenly looked much older than her sixteen years. “You have to kill the head vampire, Ben.”
Before he knew what he was doing, he nodded. “Yeah,” he whispered to her. “Okay.”
Wendy Crawly began yelling the second Ben and Brandy walked through the front door, exclaiming how worried she’d been and where the hell had she been all day, anyway? But when Wendy turned the corner and saw Ben standing in the foyer, she went immediately quiet. Before Ben could say a word, Brandy ran to her mother and, as if by maternal instinct alone, her mother’s arms sprang open to receive her. They embraced for what seemed like an eternity, and Ben thought he could actually see some heavy load transfer back and forth between mother and daughter via some indescribable parent-child osmosis.
“We found your boy, Wendy,” Ben said, taking a step toward them. He didn’t have to say the dreaded word and Wendy did not need him to say it. She had known, it seemed, the second she turned down the hallway and saw Ben standing there, dripping rain on the oriental runner.
Wendy closed her eyes and just nodded, over and over, like someone being prodded with a jolt of electricity. Then she buckled and folded to the floor, crying out. Brandy held her mother’s head against her stomach and let her tears fall in her hair. But her eyes, dark and pleading yet viciously intense, remained on Ben. It was as though she was swearing him to some blood oath.
Chapter Sixteen
1
Back in the car, Ben drove a block or so down the street from the Crawly house before he pulled over onto the shoulder, put the car into Park, and paused to catch his breath. His eyes burned and his face radiated heat. When he looked down, he saw that his hands were trembling. He was not a religious man or a superstitious man, but at that very moment, Ben Journell believed the world to be on the verge of ending. Or maybe it was just Stillwater that was ending. Maybe this was how small towns died. It starts slowly enough, with factories closing up and people relocating to different parts of the country in search of jobs. Houses go dark and street corners go empty. Before long, whole stretches of highway have been evacuated as if some great plague had come and swept through the countryside. Faces vanished. People dematerialized into nothingness, into vapor. The great American dreamer has awakened. Wasn’t that what was going on now? Was this no different than the spoils of some great plague?
Or maybe it’s just the reverse, he thought, watching the street ahead of him fill up with water. Maybe the plague seeks out a town that is already on the verge of collapse—that is already very much near death—and it grabs hold and takes root and plants its virulent claws into the soil. Maybe when a town dies, it becomes this rotting, festering corpse that attracts the sorts of things that feed off corpses.
He thought of his father at that moment—and not just the man, but the things that had made him the man he was. The farm out on Sideling Road where his father had sweated and bled and ached and worked hard, and where both his parents had created a home for their only child, their only son. Ben had stayed and watched his mother die and then he had remained and watched the farm die all around him. His father’s death now seemed like more of a resignation than anything else, a futile surrender as the rest of the world was similarly reduced to dust. I was a fool to have stayed.
But he had, and he carried a burdensome responsibility. The Crawly boy was dead. Something horrific had gotten to him, just as it had gotten to the unidentified boy a few weeks earlier. Quite possibly the same thing had happened to Bob Leary’s son, too. And then there was Maggie Quedentock…and whatever had happened to her husband and Tom Schuler…and Ben couldn’t wrap his mind around how all these random things could possibly be connected. Could they be? Could they?
He punched the car back into Drive and continued along the road until he came to the turnoff for Route 40. The rain still pounded and the driving was treacherous. Across the gulley, he could make out the ominous bulk of the old plastics factory with its twin parapets rising like lighthouses against the stormy sky. He felt like someone’s father, patrolling the house at night as his children slept soundly, checking the locks on the windows and the bolts on the doors. When he turned a bend, he jumped on the brakes, sending the car fishtailing back and forth across the asphalt. A moment later, the car came to a shuddering stop across both lanes.
A mudslide had avalanched down from the hill, tossing mounds of black sludge and twisted, skeletal trees across the highway. To his left, the water of the Narrows had already risen above its concrete basin and was slowly climbing the embankment toward the road. Wills Creek was flooded, which meant the water was shuttling quickly toward downtown.
Ben took out his cell phone, scrolled through the phonebook, and hit the number to the Allegheny County Sheriff’s Department in Cumberland. The phone never rang. When he looked at the screen, there was no signal. The storm must have knocked out some towers.
He shifted into Reverse but the tires spun without traction. The engine roared but the car did not move.
“Of course. Fantastic.”
Switching between Drive and Reverse, he jockeyed the car back and forth until the tires gripped solid roadway and he was able to execute a functional if not very pretty three-point turn that faced him back toward town. But he only had to drive another few yards to realize one of his tires was flat.
“Goddamn it!”
He slammed both palms against the steering wheel. Lightning filled the sky, a dazzling artery of electrical fire. He got out of the car and, sure enough, the passenger tire sagged dramatically off the rim. Cursing, he leaned back into the car and keyed the CB radio but got nothing but static.
“Shirley? Hon, you there?”
Static…and then a dull silence.
Ben switched frequencies and tried it again. “Shirley? It’s Ben. Come in, Shirley. Come in, HQ.”
The only response was the electronic crinkle of static.
At that moment, he was overcome by the sensation that he was being purposely segregated from the rest of the community by some unseen and preternatural force. The shepherd has lost his flock. It was such a potent feeling that it nearly caused his legs to weaken and surrender beneath his weight.
Keep it together, keep it together…
He dropped the CB and went around the car to readdress the ruined tire. He had a spare and a jack in the trunk. Question was, would he be able to change it out here on the sloping tarmac of Route 40 in the middle of a torrential downpour?
“I guess we’ll find out,” he said, already shivering as he popped open the trunk and dragged the full spare out. The water in the road was already rising over his shoes. He didn’t have much time, if he had any time left at all…
When he looked back up and back out toward town, the storm and the protruding mountainside blocked the lights of Stillwater completely from view. He could see nothing. Only darkness.
Wh
y do I have the unsettling feeling that I’m suddenly the only human being left alive in Stillwater?
And just like that, Ben Journell was standing on the moon.
2
“Oh Lord,” Shirley said, standing from behind her desk. She brought her hands to her mouth and watched as Joseph Platt and Melvin Haggis carried between them some small figure wrapped in blue tarpaulin and a heavy gray blanket. She had been working dispatch for over a decade and this was by far the most horrific sight she had ever seen. She knew the Crawly family in passing and could summon an image of the young boy from memory—blond, bowl-cut hair, frail, with a light smattering of reddish-brown freckles across his nose—but she found it impossible to equate that lively and lovely child with something packaged in blankets and plastic and carried by two grim-looking police officers.
Shirley squeezed out from behind her desk and followed them down the hall. The officers did an awkward two-step, as if deciding what room they were taking the body to and who should go in first. Haggis suggested the lockup and Platt nodded his assent.
In the room, they carried the bundle to the nearest desk. Haggis swiped a hand across its surface, throwing the ink blotter and a few pens to the floor. They set the bundle down and Shirley saw, with mounting sadness, that the figure beneath the blanket still retained the shape of a small boy.
“Where’s Ben?” she asked.
“He went to see the kid’s mother,” Platt said, hiking up his gun belt. His eyes remained on the boy beneath the blanket. He looked defeated.
“What are we supposed to do?” she asked.
“Ben was going to call the sheriff’s department over in Cumberland and have them come out and take over,” Mel Haggis interceded. He looked about as pasty and out of sorts as his partner. “This is beyond us, Shirl.”
“This is horrific,” Shirley told them.
“Christ,” Platt barked, his voice cracking. He was looking across the room at Maggie Quedentock, who still occupied the first cell. “Who’s that?”
Shirley walked around the desk and addressed the woman in what she hoped sounded like a semicheerful voice. “You okay in there, Maggie? You need anything?”
Maggie lifted her head up the slightest bit and addressed Shirley with dark eyes. She gave no reply.
“Why’s she locked up?” Haggis asked, dropping his voice to a whisper.
Shirley shot him a glance that said I’ll fill you in on everything the moment we’re in the next room. Melvin Haggis seemed to comprehend.
Shirley looked back at Maggie. “You want some water or something, dear?”
Again, Maggie said nothing.
“Let’s step out in the hall,” Platt said.
3
Maggie watched them go out into the hallway. Part of her—the part that was still in the police station holding cell—could hear the rain pounding the roof, could feel the cold steel bench beneath her thighs, could hear the muted whispers out in the hallway. Another part of Maggie—arguably the more conscious of the two halves—sat down on the bench seat of her father’s truck. Her father, Aaron Kilpatrick, sat beside her behind the wheel. Daylight glittered against the windshield and the distant sky looked like an impressionistic painting.
They were driving along one of the old logging roads far up in the hills. It was summer—she could tell by the fullness of the trees and the heat against her flesh, magnified as it radiated through the truck’s cracked windshield—and she was eleven years old. Dressed in a pair of pink denim shorts and a loose-fitting white blouse with short, scalloped sleeves, her long brown legs slid into the passenger footwell while her hands fumbled with each other in her lap. She smelled her father’s pungent and medicinal aftershave coupled with the ghostly aroma of pipe tobacco that always seemed to linger in the cab of the truck and on Aaron Kilpatrick’s clothes.
“You know why we’re out here, Margaret?” he asked her, shattering the peaceful silence.
“No, sir.”
“It’s your momma’s idea. You’ve made her very angry. She wanted me to have a talk with you.”
A cold dread gripped her by the hand. Her mouth went dry. A million possible violations shuttled through her head. Had someone seen her smoking? Had one of her friends ratted her out about shoplifting candy and sunglasses from Lomax’s? Sometimes she skipped school with Susan Winterbarger—had her folks found out about that?
“You just gonna sit there, being quiet?”
“No, sir.”
“You have any idea what your momma’s so off the rails about, girl?”
She had to fight off the urge to respond that her mother was always going off the rails about something. She knew damn well that her father knew this, too.
Instead, she said, “I don’t know what it is. I didn’t do anything.”
The truck crested a hill that overlooked Stillwater and, beyond, the serpentine ribbon of glittering diamonds that was the Narrows. Her father whipped the truck around so that the town below was framed perfectly in the windshield. At this hour, she could see the shadow of the mountain sliding in slow increments across the town as the sun sank behind the mountain. Even at such a young age, Maggie Kilpatrick had always felt an imprecise sadness at this time of day, knowing that while the rest of the countryside would enjoy a few more hours of daylight, Stillwater was doomed to a lifetime of premature night. Even now, young Maggie was overcome by despondency.
Her father shifted the truck into Park but kept the engine idling. With his window rolled down, he poked an elbow out as he surveyed the darkening landscape below. Cars twinkled like sapphires along Rapunzel and the lampposts along Hamilton blinked on. Her father dug a pack of Marlboros out of the front pocket of his overalls. He shook a cigarette into his mouth then seemed to reflect on something for a second or two before offering Maggie the pack.
She looked at him with stark confusion.
“I know you smoke,” he said, the Marlboro bouncing between his lips.
She felt like she was being set up. “I don’t want one.”
He shook the pack so that the tip of one cigarette poked out from the cellophane. “Go on.” There was an uncomfortable insistence in his voice that made Maggie’s heart beat faster.
Reluctantly, she plucked the cigarette from the pack then stared at it numbly as if she’d never seen one before. Sure, she had smoked plenty of them behind the schoolhouse or down by the Narrows with her friends, but this was something different. This was like being shoved out onto a stage and told to dance because her life depended on it. Just the thought of smoking the cigarette in front of her father made her ill.
Aaron Kilpatrick lit his cigarette with a flashy gold Zippo then extended the flame toward Maggie.
In a tiny voice, she said, “I really don’t want—”
“Smoke it,” he barked, uncompromising.
She poked the cigarette between her lips and inhaled as her father held the flame to the tip of the cigarette. Afraid to inhale in front of him, she just let the thing dangle lifelessly from her mouth.
Her father capped the lighter then tossed it onto the dashboard where it joined a container of Skoal and a scattering of bottle caps. In silence, he smoked and admired the view through the windshield.
After a little while, he said, “Your mother is concerned that you’ve been hanging out with some boys.” The word boys caused her to cringe inwardly. “Is that true?” And before she could answer—not that she was quick to answer—he followed up with, “Don’t lie to me, now, Margaret.”
She swallowed foul-tasting spit. “Sometimes me and Susan Winterbarger and Caroline Hunt hang out in the park with some boys from school.”
“Mmm-hmm,” her father hummed, nodded. He was still looking over the hill and down at the town. “What you girls been doin’ with them boys?”
What had she been doing? Images flashed like a filmstrip before her eyes—all the inappropriate things she had done with the boys, Bobby Douglass in particular. She had kissed him on the mouth several times an
d she had let him touch her chest (even though there wasn’t much there to touch, unlike Suzie Winterbarger, who actually had Once, Bobby had even showed her his boobs). thing. They had been in the woods behind the elementary school and completely unprovoked Bobby had taken down his pants, revealing a horrific little mushroom that Maggie found at once both ridiculous and terrifying. He’d asked her if she wanted to touch it and she had said no…but there had been a part of her that had wanted to touch it. What did it feel like?
But Christ, she couldn’t say these things to her father. She just stared at him, her face slack, the Marlboro pinched between two fingers.
“You been doing things with boys you shouldn’t be?” he rasped through a cloud of cigarette smoke.
“No, sir.”
“You been kissin’ up on some boys?”
“No,” she said. Her lower lip trembled and her vision abruptly blurred.
“You been showin’ boys what you got?”
“No…”
One of her father’s big, meaty, workman’s hands shot out and gripped her hard around the forearm, eliciting a weak cry as he dragged her closer to himself across the bench seat.
“What you got to show anyone, huh? What you got?”
“Daddy!” She screamed and closed her eyes and felt his big paws suddenly all over, suddenly everywhere. She bucked and kicked her legs and one of her shins cracked against the underside of the dashboard. She howled and her father cracked her firmly across the face. The smell of his aftershave mingling with the stink of his cigarette smoke caused her throat to burn and her eyes to spill tears.
“What you got, Margaret? What you got?”
She screamed again…and this time the scream traveled straight through space and time until it finally resonated now in the center of Maggie Quedentock’s head as she sat motionless in the jail cell. The power of that scream caused her eyes to water and her hands to tremble in her lap. She thought she could feel her blood pumping throughout every single vein and artery in her body. In her shoes, her toes felt like cold little marbles.