by Brian Hodge
She nodded, taking it calmly. “The demons.”
“We’re dealing with anomalous taxonomy. But it’s entirely physical, believe me.”
Ellen lit a cigarette. Silently, Loi reached over and took another from her pack. She didn’t like smoking much, but she was too worried. She didn’t mention the sensations that were radiating up from her uterus, the dull, long pains.
“It’d help if there was a name,” Ellen said. “I wish I knew the name.”
“There is no Bureau of Monster Nomenclature,” Brian commented.
A long, sighing scrape crossed the roof. “That’s the sycamore blowing.”
“No, Brian.” Loi took off the shotgun’s safety.
A moment later a mournful howl rose, then died away into the night. The three of them huddled together.
“That could be one of the Flournoys’ cows,” Brian said. “If she’s lost her calf.”
Silently, Loi pointed to the trailer’s low ceiling. All three of them knew that the sounds had both come from directly overhead, and that the Flournoys’ dairy herd was at least a mile away on the other side of dense forest.
To Brian the howl had seemed much more human than animal. It had been a conscious sound, full of the deepest woe, as lonely and sad as any he had ever heard.
Then there was another noise, this one from the driveway. It was distinct, something scraping through the gravel. Loi positioned herself before the door. To a stranger her face would have appeared to be without expression. But Brian knew different. She was expertly concealing her fear; she’d looked like this during the hemorrhage. “Watch at the windows,” she said softly.
He went to the living room, window, parted the drapes. For a moment he didn’t understand what he was seeing. Thick black cables surrounded his truck, thrusting up out of the ground. “Give me the flashlight,” he said, trying to discern some detail.
Ellen thrust the light into his hands. He turned it on, pressed it against the glass to reduce reflection. Each cable led to a hand, and every claw was buried in the body of the vehicle.
The cables went taut, the truck shuddered, the ground beneath it began to seethe. Dust clouds rose and the truck went down. When it was half underground there was a pause. Then the hands shook, the vehicle shuddered, more dust rose.
“My God!”
Loi abandoned her post, joined him at the window.
The truck sank slowly into the driveway. As it disappeared the gravel surged like disturbed water.
Moments later, all was still.
The lights went out. Ellen screamed, Brian cried out, lurched back into the room. Both boys rushed out of their bedroom, crying and fumbling among the confused shadows being cast by the flashlight in Brian’s hand.
“Get into the middle of the room,” Loi said. “Brian, push the couch against the door.”
“What’s wrong, Uncle Brian?” young Chris cried.
He started to speak, but the words died in his throat. He couldn’t tell the truth to an eleven-year-old, he didn’t know how. “There’s a—we think it’s a bear. There’s a bear outside.”
“Oh, those little blacks ain’t any bother.” Chris started strolling toward the door. Brian froze as the boy put his hand on the knob. “You just shoo ’em off.”
Loi got to him, drew him back into the room. “Not that kind of bear,” she said.
Joey started to cry. Loi got the boys away from the windows, then went once more for the phone. Silently, she shook her head.
“The floor’s hot,” Chris announced.
Brian bent down, felt with wide sweeps of his hands. Hot, so hot in places that it stung. Mary is burning, Kate is burning.
What strange meaning was ghosting about behind the facts? He felt the floor again. A lot hotter.
The first fire—Mary and Caitlin’s fire—had started exactly the same way, under the floor. “We’ve got to get out of here!”
“Brian, we can’t!” Ellen’s voice had a desperate edge.
A line of dancing orange flames appeared along the wall behind the television. Loi lunged for her precious laughing Buddha. Before she could get it, Brian grabbed her, lifted her into his arms. “Not her,” he shouted, “not her!” A sheet of fire rushed up the wall. Ellen and both boys shrieked. The flames boiled dark red and orange across the ceiling.
Mary and Katie were howling, dancing in a curtain of fire.
It would be fast, he knew that, almost instantaneous. He threw the door open, pushed Loi out, grabbed the nearest bit of shirt and pulled. Joey. “Ellen, Chris, come on!”
Ellen was pressed against the kitchen closet, the narrow little pantry that never offered enough space, her face as expressionless as a statue. Frozen by fear.
Brian went for her, knocked her to the floor just as the fire tumbled from the ceiling. The linoleum began curling like bacon. He knotted her shirt in his fist and tugged. Help came in the form of Chris, who half dragged, half pushed her.
Then they were on the porch, and a hungry maw of flame was all that remained of the doorway. Brian pitched away from the slicing heat, Ellen flopped and flailed, regaining her balance. Chris shrieked as fire danced on his back. Loi leaped on him, rolled him in the gravel.
When the flames were extinguished she cradled him. Sobbing, his brother crying with him, he buried his face in her bosom.
“We’re gonna get you to the hospital, son,” Brian said. He couldn’t imagine how.
An owl’s muttering made him look up, and he saw in the fire-bright trees a white barn owl, its baleful eyes staring.
With a sighing roar the trailer exploded. Brian shepherded them toward the barn. “We’ll get the tractor,” he cried over the rush of the flames.
“It only goes ten miles an hour, Brian,” Loi said.
“Well, it’s what we’ve got!” Maybe they could use it to go cross country to Route 303. “Form a chain, everybody holds a hand.” Thus linked, they began the journey across the driveway and down through the weed-infested barnyard.
“Look for things like cables on the ground,” Loi said.
“And if you see any purple light anywhere—turn away,” Ellen added. “No matter how it makes you feel.”
The boys, who had been silent with shock, began to whimper. “My back hurts,” Chris said.
“Be brave, guys,” Loi told them. She was between them, holding their hands firmly. “Be as brave as the bravest man in the world.”
Behind them the fire flickered and hissed. Brian couldn’t stand to look back. His wife simply walked along, her head down, putting one foot in front of the other. This was like a natural catastrophe, a storm, an earthquake, or it was like a war. She’d probably walked a hundred miles just like this, a refugee.
There was a low, vibrating sound in the air around them. Fifty feet ahead of them dust was rising from the roof of the barn, glowing in the moonlight like smoke. Brian remembered that sound and grabbed his wife, trying desperately to shield her with his body.
It came again, like an immense groan from deep in the earth. His teeth vibrated, the boys howled, Ellen clapped her hands to her ears. The barn shuddered, seemed almost to be going out of focus. The whole front wall loomed over, and Brian saw that it was collapsing. “Run!”
It hit the ground with a huge thud and a cloud of dust, and in the dust the rest of it came to pieces, beams crashing down, walls, finally the roof itself tumbling into the destroyed heap.
Brian didn’t even stop to look for the tractor. “We’ve gotta try to walk out,” he said. But in his heart he asked a question: why don’t you just kill us? Why torture us like this? He knew the answer, it was no mystery. People were not being killed, they were being summoned.
Well, not everybody was willing to go, Brian thought angrily.
They came straggling along behind him, still clinging hand to hand, and started out the long, dark driveway.
From the grass on both sides he heard steady rustling. He just kept going, not even hoping anymore. His understanding of the
world had been gutted. There was nothing left to do but struggle blindly on.
Loi drew the boys closer to her, her eyes searching the shadows.
“You can hear it,” Brian said. “That slither.”
Ellen hesitated, then took a jerky step back.
“Take it easy, Ellen,” Brian said. But then he saw where she was looking. There was movement in the brush, coming toward them.
Then he heard a siren, thin but unmistakable. He let a moment pass, another. They all listened, nobody making a sound. The boys knew how to count the changes in tone as the vehicle maneuvered through the town. “It’s turned onto Main,” Chris said.
“It’s the fire truck,” his brother announced. A policeman’s kids could tell just by the note which service was involved.
Brian saw what looked like a long, thin tree limb appear above the line of the weeds.
The hand spread, the claw-filed nails arcing to hooks. Then a second one appeared, gliding above the moonlit grass. Behind them another shadow slipped across the driveway.
He heard more slithering, this time very close.
A long wire rose over them, looking for all the world like a gigantic lobster’s feeler. It danced in the air, swept down, touched Chris’s shoulder. He skittered away, slapping at himself.
“Only a moth, Chris!”
“OK, Uncle Brian.” But he continued to clutch the place on his shoulder where he’d been touched.
The timbre of the siren changed. “It’s turned,” Joey announced as the sound faded.
A coldness clutched Brian’s heart, the dark seemed about to suffocate him. He ran a few steps down the driveway. “It’s going down Queen’s, it’s leaving!” The raw bellow of his own voice shocked him.
Loi slipped a hand into his, squeezed firmly. “It is on its way up Kelly Farm Road, husband.”
He looked down at the gleams of moonlight on her black hair.
Then the volunteer fire brigade arrived, their truck lurching into the driveway. Air brakes hissed as the big old truck rocked to a stop. It was a mess, pumps dripping, hoses looped crazily in the back. The men looked exhausted, their slickers smeared with ashes and dirt. “Everybody outa there, Brian?” the driver asked. It was grizzly old Mort Cleber.
“Everybody’s out.”
The truck snarled, dug in, moved slowly toward the flaring ruins of the trailer.
Loi spoke quietly to her husband. “Brian, I am bleeding again. Just a little.” She leaned her head against his chest.
Tommy Victor had followed the truck in his pickup. He stopped and leaned out. “Anybody hurt?”
“I am,” Chris said. His voice was choked, but he was being brave. “I got burned.”
“My wife needs a doctor, too.”
“My legs are hurt.”
“But nobody’s dead?”
“We’re all accounted for,” Brian said.
“You’re lucky. The Jaegers were killed about an hour ago. Whole family.”
“What’s happening, Tommy?”
“Cold snap in the summer, you always get the fires. Better get in, we wanta get you people to the docs.”
Brian was so stunned he was left speechless. They didn’t know, not a thing! He looked at Ellen and Loi. Their expressions confirmed his helplessness. There was no way to tell the story.
They rode out, Loi and the boys inside the cab, Ellen and Brian in the hay-dusted bay.
To shelter from the night wind, the two of them sat silently together with their backs against the cab. Brian watched the ruins of the trailer recede into the night. “Thank God she’s still alive,” he said.
“She’s still a soldier,” Ellen commented, “every inch of her.”
Brian considered the idea. Little Loi, with her constantly lowered eyes, her scuttling feet, her quick kitchen hands…a soldier. “A refugee,” he said. “It must be killing her. That trailer was the best thing she ever owned.”
“I’m sorry.” The wind whipped Ellen’s hair into Brian’s face.
He brushed it away. “What for?”
She was silent. They were both watching car lights behind them, glowing, then going dark as they were lost in a curve of the road. The thick forest flashed past on both sides.
When the lights disappeared and stayed gone, Ellen spoke again. “I went down in the root cellar. Back in the mine. I got something—a creature—I put it in my car. The next thing all hell broke loose.”
“It came after you.”
“And kept after me. All the way to your place.”
“Did you find it in the mine?”
“Yeah. It was like a—well, a big, curled-up spider. But ten pounds at least. It wet on me.”
“Wet?”
“Urine-type wet. It was so vile!”
The car lights reappeared, this time much brighter, much closer. Ellen’s hand gripped his.
Even over the roar of the slipstream and the rattling of the old truck, they began to hear the deep thrumming of a powerful engine. “Oh, God, Brian!”
The purple light—it would be fired directly into their faces. They’d go mad. “We have to get in the cab!”
The car came closer yet, pounding around the curves, its lights slashing the darkness.
Brian rose up, went to the side of the truck, leaned his head into the surging air, until his face was beside the driver’s door. “We’re gonna come in,” he yelled.
The truck started to slow down.
“Don’t stop! And don’t look in the rearview mirror.”
Tommy was peering at Brian out of the corner of his eye, obviously aware of his reputation for being a little crazy.
The car came closer, closer yet. The engine was drumming, thundering, howling. Ellen covered her face with her hands. Brian went around to the passenger side. “Loi, roll down the window!”
It came down.
Ellen was behind him, clawing at him. He put a leg over the side of the truck bed, pulled his way forward. The truck swerved onto the shoulder. “Don’t slow down, Tommy!”
“Brian, you’re going to be killed!”
“Tell him to keep driving!”
The car’s lights were flaring now. Ellen’s face was white in their glare.
And then, very suddenly, the car passed them.
It wasn’t a Dodge Viper, it wasn’t even a sports car, and it wasn’t red. It moved off, heading innocently south.
Brian returned to the truck bed, slumped down beside Ellen. He looked out at the blackness of the night. Being here, now— this was alone. And he didn’t just mean himself and Ellen and Loi and the other people in the truck.
He had a feeling that every living soul was about to find out what a few people had already discovered: this little world of ours, lost out here in the dark, is very much alone.
Chapter 11
1
Shock numbs, but unfortunately not for long. At first they all welcomed the lights of Ludlum, the familiar cluster of fast-food places out at the Northway interchange, their signs challenging the dark.
The tall Rodeway Inn sign invited Ellen. “I’ll never, ever go back there again,” she told Brian. “At dawn I’m outa here.”
Brian hardly heard her. Again and again his mind went over the events of the night. The fire had come up through the floor, just like the first time. The first one had been attributed to a defective propane line, but was that really true?
He shivered, clutched himself. It was nearly two in the morning. He looked up at the sky, the moon red against the horizon, the stars like eyes, diamond-hard, cold as ice.
He wanted to hold Loi, to enclose her precious body in a protective embrace.
He couldn’t protect anybody.
“Two hours ago I was thinking in terms of moral obligations and major stories,” Ellen said carefully. “Now I’m thinking in terms of saving ass. We’ve got to get out.”
And where did she think she would go?
Then the truck was turning, and the buildings of Ludlum Community Hospital appear
ed ahead.
When he got down off the truck, Brian embraced his wife. “How’s it going?” he asked.
“The bleeding stopped, Brian.”
He closed his eyes, felt relief wash through him.
Young Chris was hunched over. Brian picked him up. “It’s gonna be OK, guy,” he said.
“It’s hurting real bad, Uncle Brian.”
“I know that, Chris. I know all about burns.”
As they entered the emergency room, Joey said, “Our house burned up.” Nurses came, there was a brief admission ritual, Loi was put in stirrups and Chris was laid on his stomach for an examination. Brian could tell at a glance that the boy’s burns weren’t serious, but those red welts must hurt like the very devil.
Loi and Chris were in cubicles side by side. Brian stood between them. Chris cried when the ER doctor began dressing his burns. “You’re lucky this wasn’t worse,” the young doctor said.
“There was a bear out there,” Joey announced. “It had long arms like a snake.”
The ER doctor didn’t even look up. “We got a lotta bears coming down this summer,” he said. “They like the landfills. I went to see the ones up in Long Lake. You ever see those, Chris?”
“No, sir.”
Dr. Gidumal arrived for Loi. Brian slipped into the front end of her cubicle and kissed her cheek.
She smiled at him, then closed her eyes as the doctor examined her.
“This is doing well,” he said. “You have a little bleeding, maybe, but this is doing well.”
Brian kissed her again, whispering in her shell-like ear, “Thank God for you, thank God for you.” With a quick motion of her head, she gave him a peck.
The doctor put his hand on Brian’s shoulder. “How are you feeling, Brian?”
“I’m good.”
He took Brian by the shoulders, looked into his face. “No, I beg to differ. You are not good. You are in shock.”
“I feel fine. I’m—yeah, I guess you’d say that.”
“You have lost your home, you are in a terrible time. You are not good.”
“Doctor—”
“Do you two have a place you can go? Relatives, perhaps?”
Brian did not want to go to any relatives. He wanted to do three things. The first was to get Ellen and Chris and Loi in a condition to travel. The second was to find Bob and Nancy and get them out of here. The third was to run.