by Brian Hodge
Brian did not want to embarrass him further, and he knew there was no point in pressing the man. Merriman would never divulge a secret. “Thanks for all your help, Bill.”
Bill cupped his hand over the receiver. “I wish I could do more, Doctor. It’s not a day passes that somebody doesn’t mention you—” He did not finish the sentence.
“You mean my work is still discussed?”
Bill shook his head, went back to his call. Brian could see that he wasn’t going to get anything more.
When she was finally sitting in the truck again, Loi sighed with relief. “I am tired of carrying you,” she said to her stomach. “You must come soon, my baby Brian Kelly.”
Brian drove almost blindly. His facility hadn’t been abandoned, it had been taken. And those bolts—dear heaven, what did they mean? Why would they see the empty well as so dangerous that they had to sink a million-dollar containment vessel to seal it off?
“We are not going home,” Loi said as they passed the Northway exit to Route 303.
“Not just yet.”
“Brian, I must go to the bathroom.”
Brian felt urgently compelled to go back to the spot where Bob had disappeared. The state police had searched it thoroughly, but not for things like insect legs and bits of broken wing, things that would prove something to a scientist.
It wasn’t hard to find the spot. Locally, it was a famous place, where the highway came down off the high ridge of the Jumpers into the Cuyamora valley. From where Bob’s truck had stopped you could see twenty miles and more on a clear day.
He pulled over onto the shoulder. “This is where it happened,” he said.
“I don’t want to be here.” Her voice was tight and high.
“I just need to take a look around.”
She folded her arms. “Please hurry, then. This is a place of misfortune. Not a good place to bring an unborn child.”
He’d never encountered anybody before for whom superstition was fact, and had no real idea of how to deal with his wife.
He got out of the truck.
Flooded with summer sun, this certainly seemed an ordinary enough place.
“Brian, I must pee now.”
“You can go over there.” He pointed to a clump of bushes.
She glared at him. Angry but helpless, she moved off into the brush that bordered the shoulder. In a moment the forest had swallowed her.
He walked up and down, looking for some critical fragment. He and Bob had fought the insects fiercely. They must have broken a few of them, there must be some remains.
Soon he came to the place where they’d seen the hole, and noticed that the gravel here had a light, friable quality. It looked stony, but would crumble between your fingers. Clay, really, that was all it was. Nothing unusual about that, though. He couldn’t bring the authorities out here and show them a little clay in a road shoulder otherwise composed of gravel.
The sun bore down on his neck, white clouds drifted lazily in the late-morning sky. From far off came a deep mutter—thunder back in the mountains. Day after still, quiet day the storms had been building back in there, and at night they marched forth like a discontented army.
He could see the thunderheads already bulging upward toward the stratosphere, a wall of mysterious caves and ranges.
Then he turned his attention to the ground.
On his hands and knees, he crawled slowly along, examining every detail. Bits of tar, stones and clay presented themselves, along with dandelions, teasel and other weedy plants, but nothing that seemed in the least unusual.
He extended his search back away from the gravel, into the cut part of the shoulder. There were slow grasshoppers grinding in the thick air, and quaking aspen rattling at the edge of the woods.
Another, softer sound penetrated Brian’s consciousness only slowly. Without quite realizing why, he paused in his work. He found himself watching the aspens. Behind them was a thick stand of scrubby white pine, then the taller forest.
He began to listen, gradually becoming aware that he was hearing somebody breathing.
“Loi?”
No answer.
He peered into the forest, but could see only leaves and close-ranked pines. “Loi?”
Far off, a car was droning closer, its engine straining.
He went toward the woods. How long had she been in there, how far back had she gone? “Loi!”
The car screamed past so fast Brian couldn’t tell the make.
In the silence that followed, the breathing became more distinct, and Brian realized that it wasn’t Loi, couldn’t be. This sounded like some kind of machine.
He heard a rattling sound, almost a sizzle, as if an electrical circuit was sparking.
Without wasting another moment, he went tearing into the woods, calling her at the top of his lungs. His voice shattered against the dim forest silence. His own crashing blotted out any other sound. “Loi, Loi!”
“Brian, yes!” She came rushing out from behind a tree, still pulling on her floppy maternity pants.
He grabbed her, threw his arms around her, kissed her hard. “Oh, God, I thought—” He stopped, fought for control. “I don’t know what I thought.”
“You scared me yelling like that.”
“You were gone for so long. And I heard—sh!”
It was still there, only faster. And louder—it was getting louder. The rhythmic breathing was big, the crackling was sharp and steady.
They ran, both of them, ran headlong and jumped in the truck. Frantically they rolled up the windows and locked them. Then he started the engine and hit the gas, turning around in a flurry of dust and gravel.
When he looked back, he thought he saw what might have been a thick, black cable emerging from the grass onto the gravel shoulder. But he couldn’t be certain, and he didn’t linger.
“What do you think it was, Brian?”
He shook his head.
“It was horrible!”
He was beginning to feel the awful desperation of a child whose innocent play has unaccountably set the house afire.
The material world was very different from its appearance, very much less stable, he thought.
—There are an infinite number of possible universes. Reality appears as it does because of the way we look at it.
—Communication with past and future is happening all the time, and we know it. But we can’t talk about it because we don’t have the right verb tenses.
—The river of time runs between banks of chaos.
What hath God wrought? Or you, Brian Kelly? “What have I done?”
“You?”
“I think maybe so.”
The sound of his own words reverberated in the jittering cab.
“I don’t understand you.”
There are messages everywhere, messages from other worlds. That breathing—one, two, one, two—perfectly timed. The insects lined up along the window, as if they knew in advance that he would open it.
The brain is a quantum machine, filtering reality out of chaos. Rockets screaming in the sky, bombs sailing, children playing, cats screaming in the night—
Oscola passing the windows, a doll’s town, the gingerbread trim on the porches, the arched windows of the Excelsior Tower, the flowers in the town common: a doll’s town, full of secrets, dolls concealing secrets in their glassy blue eyes.
He saw where Bob had gone, down the hole of madness. He could go there, too, go and set up shop, build himself a little cottage of chocolate cement and candy.
He could attract the children of the world to his oven and bake them into obscure and terrible forms.
“I want to get home,” Loi said.
He realized that he’d been driving up and down the streets of Oscola. He turned down Main, past the town square with its bandstand and its monument to Oscola’s dead from four wars. “I was thinking,” he said. “Trying to understand.”
She made a small sound. Was it derision, or just impatience?
They drove out Kelly Farm Road, turned into the driveway. “When will you rebuild our house?” she asked.
He felt anger flare in him, then felt it transform itself, become something else. “Soon, Loi. As soon as I can.”
4
They got to the trailer, went inside. The boys were asleep in the tiny second bedroom that would one day soon belong to Brian Ky Kelly.
When she was comfortable again Loi made coffee and gave him some. He noted that it had milk in it. She sat across the kitchen table from him, drinking her own. “My name is not Loi Ky,” she said suddenly.
He was astonished.
“That’s my whore’s name.”
“Your whore’s name?”
“Easy for the white-eyes to say.”
“What’s your real name?”
She regarded him. “I’m used to Loi Ky by now.”
“Please tell me.”
She smiled in a secret, inner way. “Someday I will. When all is well again.” She kissed his forehead.
He spent the afternoon sitting on the front porch trying to come up with some useful ideas. He had a yellow pad, and he tried to do some equations, but he couldn’t make anything work. The jump from his original work to the present mess was just too great.
The shadows lengthened, and he found that he was not looking forward to the night.
When the sun was turning gold and the voices of the larks were echoing in the sky, he put his work down. This wasn’t about his theories. It was about something so far beyond his theories that he simply couldn’t see it.
Evening brought sheet lightning, and wind heaved through the old trees around his ruined house. But the storm did not break. He wondered if there even was a storm out in the mountains, in the conventional sense. Maybe the lightning represented another sort of cataclysm altogether, too big to simply break on an evening and slip away by dawn.
Bob’s boys were playing in the gloaming, their voices shrill in the shadows.
The TV went on, and Brian heard the familiar music that announced the Yankees’ pregame show. The boys heard it, too, and went racing inside to watch.
The wind began flowing down from the mountains. It swept across the back fifty with its tall stands of white pine, whispering in the needles. When it reached the barn it moaned in its eaves, then splashed up against the trailer and Brian on the porch, and made him follow the boys into the bright living room.
Loi was reading, her eyes tight with concentration. She looked up at him. “Brian, listen.” She read: “Why do you tremble at my doorway? A man of many hearts does not need me.”
“What’s that from?” He tried not to sound wary.
She held up the book. “Anne Sexton.” She laughed a little.
“This man needs you.”
She smiled, but he knew that she was still struggling to heal the pain that he had inflicted on her with his carelessness.
Silently, she handed him the book. The poem she’d been reading was called “The Interrogation of the Man of Many Hearts.” In his wife’s eyes he saw something entirely new.
“You shudder, Brian.”
A roar came from the TV. “Line drive right into the glove of Mattingly,” the announcer yelled.
Brian went down onto the couch. Chris leaned against his shoulder. He drew Chris closer, and tried to get caught up in the baseball game.
Soon, though, he sank into a black study, staring at the television and returning to the flow of theory that might have led him astray.
He thought that he must have inadvertently discovered a great poison, the most terrible of all poisons. He still didn’t fully understand. But whoever had removed his equipment, then sealed his facility with steel-reinforced concrete understood.
He was deep in thought when Loi got up and went to the door. He hadn’t heard the tap that had announced the visitor. “Your friend is here,” Loi said, stepping aside as Ellen’s striding entrance brought him to his feet.
She came straight into the room, and she came straight to the point, too. “I’m at a dead end,” she said. “I’ve played out every lead. The judge has ordered me off his property at the point of a gun.” She locked eyes with Brian. “Midnight. His root cellar. Breaking and entering.”
She stood there in the light, her flawless skin glowing, her soft round eyes sharpened by determination, her lips a rigid line.
Loi’s eyes widened. “We have been in this man’s house as guests. We won’t go as thieves.”
Ellen knew that she had to be very careful here.
She sat down in the big easy chair, crossed her legs and took out a cigarette. “May I?” Loi went into the kitchen, returned with an ashtray. “Look, Loi, I know that you don’t want him to do this. I don’t blame you. I don’t want either one of us to do it! But it’s my obligation to discover the truth of what’s happening here and tell the public. Brian has an obligation, too, because he’s a scientist.”
“Didn’t Nate Harris tell you that he’d gone through that place? You don’t need Brian to help you do something the police have already done.”
“The insects come out of the same hole Nate said was clean. Therefore it is not clean.”
Concerned lest the boys overhear upsetting talk, Loi sent them off to their room. She pulled their door closed. “I know something’s crazy,” she said quietly. “But I don’t see where my husband has to get in the middle of it. Skulking around playing robber! What use is it, Brian? What will you accomplish? Let me tell you, the more you place yourself in their way, the more you tempt them. Eventually, they will strike again.”
“Just for a second open your mind to the idea that this isn’t demons,” Ellen said. “Consider the idea that it’s something so completely different that we can hardly even begin to understand it. Something totally new.”
“I know about demons from a long time.”
On the television, the crowd roared. First baseman Don Mattingly had just hit a stand-up triple. Chris peeked out of the bedroom. “Can we come back out, Auntie Loi?”
“Yeah, boys,” she said. “We’re finished with the private stuff.” She gave Ellen a guarded look. “We keep it Reader’s Digest from now on, OK?”
“Brian, we can get our evidence, I know we can! It’s down in that root cellar, I’m sure of it. That’s the lair.”
Loi put her arms around Brian.
Ellen wanted to yell at her, but there was nothing to say, nothing she could say. Finally she let out a long exhalation of smoke, slumped. “Brian—”
“I know what it is! And I’m not going back in there.”
“You went in?”
“Fell.”
“And—”
“I’m not going back. I can’t.”
“You’re a funny kind of a coward.”
“We need more information. The direct approach is too much of a risk.”
“It’s all we have!”
“People are getting killed!”
Little Joey began to cry. “Stop this,” Loi said. “Both of you, shut up!”
Ellen got up and left without another word.
“She’s a damned fool,” Brian said into the sudden quiet.
Their eyes met. They had both felt the faint, deep vibration that could have been a big truck out on the road, or maybe the engine of Ellen’s old car starting roughly. And they both knew that it could have been something else.
Ellen lingered a moment on their porch, furious at them and at herself. Here the vibration was too small to be noticed. She peered out into the night, which was rushing with wet wind and not a bit pleasant. She’d come to hate the hours between dusk and dawn.
She’d searched the woods looking for strange nests. She’d even searched her house trying to find where the thing she’d put in the jar had gotten out. Eventually she’d located a neatly burned hole in the top of the bathroom screen, and she’d patched it with a square of duct tape.
She walked down the stone path into the sleepy argument of katydids and the deep rhythm of
frogs. Her car was a shabby ghost in the driveway. She turned around, and the light flowing from the windows of the trailer seemed to her to possess a special gold.
Down in the woods she could see lightning bugs. She tensed, watched.
They were ordinary.
She resumed the walk to her car. What she was about to do was insane. She ought to go home and lock her door and windows and pray. Her habit now was to sleep from five a.m. until ten, never in the deep night. To keep going she floated in coffee, which made her irritable. She was smoking like hell, too, like she had when she was first starting out in the newspaper business and she thought it made her look more reporterly.
She reached her car and got in. The Speed Graphic was on the seat, beside it the large flashlight she’d gotten from Ritter’s Hardware this afternoon.
She caressed the cold steel box of the camera, then picked up the flashlight and turned it on and off, testing it.
Do it, woman. She had her principles, and one of them was to get to the bottom of a story.
Quite near the car a lightning bug shone and faded. She rolled up the window with fumbling hands.
The question was, how scared could a person be? Was fear like cold, with a final, ultimate extreme, or was it like heat, that would just keep rising forever?
The mound, the root cellar…
Don’t think, do.
She turned on the car, pulled out into Kelly Farm Road. Once an opossum’s eyes flared like angry little torches, another time some deer were briefly caught in her headlights, but the drive to the terBroeck estate was otherwise without event.
She drove as far down Mound Road as she dared, then cut the lights and pulled off, letting the car roll into the woods, hoping the tires wouldn’t sink. She cracked her window, inhaled the fresh night air. Ahead of her stood the judge’s house, as dark and quiet as a tomb. At least there were no cars here tonight, and no dance behind the curtains to the purple light from hell.
Far off a powerful engine guttered, began to whine, then settled into a steady rumble. It echoed in the darkness, mingling with the mutter of thunder.