by Paul Zindel
By sunset the kitchen boxes were unpacked at the apartment. Alma had fed Coffin and defrosted a shepherd’s pie and lemon cake for her and her father’s dinner. “We can finish the rest of the boxes tomorrow,” her dad said, putting on his favorite sweater and baggy brown polyester pants. “I’m taking a stroll to pick up some smokes.”
“Okay, Dad,” Alma said. “Be careful, okay?”
“Yes, darlin’.”
Alma knew “picking up smokes” really meant he was going out to the pubs, which was what her mom had hated most about him—his drinking and late hours. He’d start at the Haunch of Venison Inn, then ale and bitter his way past Poultry Cross and all the way to Queen Street. As soon as he was out the door, Alma threw off her clothes and jumped into the shower. She was drying herself with a faded blue towel when Jackson phoned.
“Did you have trouble getting through?” Alma asked.
“A little,” Jackson said. “First they connected me to the bishop’s palace, then the cloister operator. She knew where to ring.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m still in Bristol—in the hospital lobby. I’ll be back by nine. It’s a little crazy here,” Jackson said.
Alma heard the strain in his voice. “What’s the matter?”
“Aunt Sarah’s hallucinating. She’s treating her room like it’s her territory and she’s an animal.”
“An animal?”
“I was with her when she could smell roast beef cooking nine floors below and it wasn’t on the menu. Her wires are crossed—it’s got to be from Skull Face’s bite. She’s calm one minute, then freaks out and yells. She’s been drawing Stonehenge on her walls. She rubbed lipstick onto one of the top stones and shouted, ‘Doom! The trilithons with the Stone of Doom!’”
“The trilithons? A Stone of Doom?”
“She kept saying DOOM! DOOM! DOOM!”
“Trilithons are those biggest stones inside the circle.”
“I know—arranged like a big horseshoe. The doctors say she has a fever, but they won’t know how to treat her unless they can run tests on the animal that bit her.”
“We’ve got to tell the army where Skull Face’s lair is,” Alma said. “We’ve got to.”
“Aunt Sarah said we shouldn’t tell anybody anything until she gets back. Maybe she’s afraid Rath’ll just order troops in with flamethrowers. Maybe the little guys’ll rewrite every evolution theory in the book. Maybe they’re the cure for cancer. Who knows?”
“We’ve got to do something!” Alma’s voice broke. “We can’t just sit around and let Skull Face kill any-body else!”
“Do you still have your camera?”
Alma stumbled across to where she’d dropped her clothes. She dug through the pockets of her jeans until she saw the camera’s thin slab of black plastic. “I’ve got it.”
“We have to develop the film. When you were using the flash, you might have gotten a shot of the hominids. We have to check it out A.S.A.P.”
“There’s no photo shops open at this hour.”
“I know how to develop. Is there a darkroom at the close ?”
“No.” Alma’s mind raced through all the kids she knew who were into photography. She felt a chill start on her legs, then crawl fast up her spine. “The only darkroom I know is out at the crematorium. The undertakers make extra money with it. Families want videos and photos of the memorial services. Some want shots of their loved ones in their caskets.”
“Can you get us in there?”
“When?”
“Tonight.”
“Are you crazy?”
Jackson thought a moment. “Probably,” he finally said. “Try to check out those books in the cathedral library. The ones with the freakiest theories about Stonehenge. See if there’s anything about a Trilithon Stone of Doom. Then meet me at Langford’s garage at ten.”
Sergeant Keyes got Jackson back to Langford’s a half hour before Alma was to meet him. He went directly upstairs to the apartment.
His aunt’s research books and sketches were still strewn about the sitting room like jagged pieces of a frightening puzzle. He got the large, worn-leather book on Stonehenge and pulled a chair up to the oak table. The clay cast of the jaws of the beast loomed over him like the draped head of a cadaver.
He skimmed through the book looking for engravings of the trilithons. Several drawings showed them as five sets of massive stones that had originally stood in the shape of a horseshoe around an altar, but he couldn’t find anything about what they were used for. He took the book downstairs with him to wait for Alma.
“A trip to the moon… wings…”
The piano player was singing for the late dinner crowd as Jackson slipped quietly down the staircase and out the door. He saw Mrs. Langford through a vast slab of windows as he headed down the driveway. She was seating a group of guests at a table in the dining room. The chef and kitchen workers were too busy to notice him go by.
He made his way without a flashlight past the carports and herb garden. In the garage, he pulled the string of the single overhead light. The naked bulb blazed, then swung in the night breeze, causing shadows to crawl across the floor.
Jackson set the book down on the dune buggy seat and began rummaging through the army surplus equipment. The thing he spotted right off was a two-way radio. He flicked the power switch and an indicator lit up. He tossed the radio into the storage compartment of the buggy.
There were crunching sounds on the gravel driveway. A figure came toward him into the light spilling from the garage. It was Alma, her long thick hair pulled back into a ponytail. The expression on her face was dead serious.
“I’m glad it’s you,” Jackson said. He took the book from the seat and handed it to her.
“What’s this ?”
“One of my aunt’s books. It might have something about trilithons.”
“I checked through the oldest book in the cathedral library,” Alma said. “It’s huge. The pages are handwritten on big parchment pages. It has a whole section about a monster that’s supposed to have stalked the land around here for centuries. It sounds like Skull Face.”
“Anything about a Doom Stone?”
“A lot written in Latin and Old English. From what I could make out, there was a stone that had been found at Stonehenge. It had an inscription on it:
“‘And no stone
Where there was stone,
In the Tomb
Of the final Doom.’”
“It sounds like a riddle,” Jackson said.
“Half the book is written in riddles—as if whoever wrote it was afraid to just come right out and talk about the monster.”
“Or think about it.” Jackson reached down into a trunk and pulled out a fat-barreled pistol.
Alma frowned. “No guns. I hate guns.”
“This one’s okay,” Jackson said, loading a large shotgun-type cartridge into its double chamber. “It’s a flare gun. If we fall down any more flint mines, we can fire a flare.”
He opened the compartment under the rear seat of the buggy and dropped the loaded flare gun into it next to the radio—along with a couple of extra flare cartridges. His eye caught a strange set of electronic-looking goggles hanging from a nail toward the back of the garage. He grabbed them.
Alma shook her head. “We don’t need a gas mask.”
“Wrong,” Jackson said, slipping the goggles on. He reached up and yanked the string on the bulb.
“Hey, I can’t see,” Alma complained in the dark.
Jackson clicked on a switch at the side of the goggles. Instantly, Alma and the inside of the garage became a pulsing green and shimmering landscape. He reached out and clamped his hand on Alma’s shoulder. She jumped a foot. “What are you doing?”
Jackson put the garage light back on. “These are night-vision goggles. Probably one of the first models the army ever made.” He tossed the goggles into the compartment with the flare gun and radio.
“Let’s take your aunt’s book, too,” Al
ma said.
“Right,” Jackson said. “No point in leaving any stone unturned.”
10
FIRE
Jackson gassed the dune buggy up the slope past the Old Sarum ruins to a fork in the path.
“Turn left,” Alma said. “We’ll make good time going up through Woodford. There are no Ministry of Defense lands or training grounds, and the farmers don’t get too disturbed about strangers on their dirt roads.”
A fog rose from the Avon and brooked across the valley toward them. Dark rolling clouds drifted low like the hulls of sailing ships to blot out the stars. Farther on the headlights of the buggy picked up a field of scrub ever-greens, and sheep lay like ghosts among the grass barrows.
“Just keep us away from Skull Face territory,” Jackson said. “The buggy’s faster than him, but I’d rather not put it to the test. Where’s Coffin?”
“In my room at the close. I left him food and water,” Alma added. “He’d bark like crazy in Woodford. It’s famous for witches.”
“Nice. Did you find out what the trilithons were used for?”
“Nobody knows exactly.”
“You’re telling me that a bunch of people thousands of years ago decided to lug a mess of forty-five-ton stones over twenty miles—that’s after they already carried a load of the blue stones two hundred miles from Wales…”
“They probably floated the blue stones part of the way on rafts.”
“These folks went to all the mind-boggling pain and exhaustion of setting up the biggest stones into a horseshoe and nobody knows why?”
“What’s your point?”
“Wouldn’t you think they built the trilithons for an important reason? Ten uprights. Five humongous stones laid on top of those. Can you imagine these humans sitting around a campfire one night and saying, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be fun to bust our chops for a dozen decades or more and lug some really massive stones down here to make a horseshoe that doesn’t mean anything?’ ”
“What are you getting at?”
“Does the word ‘sacrifice’ mean anything to you?” Jackson asked. “A huge horseshoe with an altar stone smack in the middle of it looks and sounds like a great place to knock off people—or something.”
The headlights from the buggy hit an eroding hillside, making thick veins of exposed chalk look like ice melting from swollen black teeth.
“What trilithon did your aunt put the lipstick on?” Alma asked.
“The one in the middle of the horseshoe—the top stone.”
Alma pictured the stones in her mind. “That stone’s missing. A lot of the stones at Stonehenge have fallen over or are missing. Many of them were taken, cut up, and used to build farmhouses and churches. Some could have been used in Salisbury Cathedral. I thought that might be what was meant by the first two lines of the old inscription—And no stone Where there was stone….”
“Could be,” Jackson agreed, “but what does In the Tomb Of the final Doom mean?”
“I don’t know.”
Farther north the fog spilled thicker from the river, vertical wisps gliding at them like spectral, ashen sailors. Quickly, the visibility dropped dangerously. Jackson switched on the buggy’s fog lights, and the mist became a wall of blood. A flock of night crows chattered like teeth, then screamed and flew up to feast on a hive of bees in the hollow of a dead oak.
Jackson was grateful for the cover of the fog as they approached the cemetery. He had switched off the headlights, kept only the red fogs.
“The crematorium’s a couple of hundred feet ahead,” Alma said.
Jackson shut the lights and switched off the engine. He helped Alma down from the buggy. She flipped up the rear seat and took the thick leather book out of the compartment. Jackson grabbed the night-vision goggles. “You’ll need these,” he said, helping her set them into place over her eyes. He clicked the battery switch on. She signaled she could see as voices of soldiers drifted at them through the fog from the encampment on the edge of the plain.
“They’re playing cards,” Jackson figured out from their voices. A moment later, he thought he heard Sergeant Keyes’ laughter. Slowly, Alma led the way.
Mr. McPhee had two ales and bitters before he returned to the close. He’d chatted with a crony at the Black Swan Inn and was tempted to tie on a good one—but he thought of Alma. He had felt a sense of pride about being allowed to stay back at the close while the army searched for the cockamamie monster. He was reminded of the good life he’d had there. The clergy had treated him respectfully. He’d long felt guilty about making Alma move to the cemetery, but she’d never thrown it up in his face. For that he loved her dearly.
As he opened the door to the Canonry apartment, he thought kindly of his wife. “You’d come back if we lived here, you would,” he muttered aloud, as though she were in the hallway with him. “I’d try hard not to burn the bottoms out of pots or stink up the place with cigars. I’d do more with the cleanin’, and take you and Alma out to sing karaoke…”
The apartment was dusty from the unpacking. He left the front door open to let in the fresh night air. He flicked on the hall light and hung his cardigan up in the closet.
“Alma?” he called. “Alma?”
He heard Coffin start to bark—then saw the note on the kitchen table: Dad, I’ve gone out with Jackson. See you later. Love, Alma.
Mr. McPhee smiled. He was glad she was with the American boy. He knew the local boys made fun of her because she had a gravedigger for a father. But it couldn’t be helped.
Coffin scratched at the floor inside Alma’s room. “Okay, okay, don’t go diggin’ to China,” Mr. McPhee said. He was used to Coffin kicking up a fuss whenever Alma went out and left him behind. He stood to one side. Coffin would, as always, bound out and crash into him, then whip him painfully with his tail. After that, without fail, the dog would leap up, slap his front paws down hard on Mr. McPhee’s shoulders, and start licking his face.
“Here I am, boy,” Mr. McPhee said, opening the door and braced for the eruption.
The massive blur of shaggy fur flew out of the room. Mr. McPhee put out his hand to brace himself, but Coffin ran smack past him.
“Hey!” Mr. McPhee called out. The dog raced for the hall, his huge paws skidding as he turned on the waxed wide-planked floors. Before Mr. McPhee could stop him, Coffin was out the front door.
Mr. McPhee rushed after him, shouting, “Come back, you lout!” He watched the dog fly across the close like a race horse.
“Coffin! Coffin!” Mr. McPhee shouted as he ran on for a distance across the grass. He noticed a group of frocked men moving out from the shadows of the towering cathedral and knew he shouldn’t shout or they’d think he was drunk. He stopped, gasping for air, and watched as Coffin disappeared through the North Gate.
Alma opened the combination lock on the heavy steel cellar doors of the crematorium. They were flush with the ground and lifted like a pair of flaps on a box to reveal a set of damp cement steps.
“No lights or the soldiers will come snooping,” Jackson said.
“What if they think we’re the monster?” Alma asked.
“They won’t.”
“But they could. We might look like the beast in the fog. They might have set a trap. Or they could shoot us—did you think about that?”
“They won’t know we’re here,” Jackson said, feeling his way to close the cellar doors behind them.
Alma adjusted her night-vision goggles, reached out to take his hand, and led him down into the main cremation room.
“You wanted to see what the furnace looks like,” Alma said, taking off the goggles and handing them to him. Jackson slipped them on and saw the room bathed in a bright, ghastly green. It was a half cellar with a row of narrow windows lining the top of weeping cinder-block walls. In the middle of the room lay the cremation furnace.
“It does look like a Chirping Chicken grill,” Jackson had to admit.
“There’s another, more modern furnace upstairs.
It’s in a viewing room that’s like a stage. It’s for cremation services where the relatives want to see their loved one cranked into the flames.”
Jackson reached out to touch the safety cage over the furnace. It resembled a zoo cage complete with a door. “Where’s the darkroom?”
He took the night-vision goggles off. Alma slipped them on and led him toward the rear wall. “In here,” she said, opening a door and leading him into a small, narrow room.
“Put on the developing light,” Jackson asked.
She threw a wall switch and a single red bulb cast a glow over the small room.
“Great.”
Alma took the goggles off as Jackson closed the door and began checking out the equipment. There was a sink, a counter with shallow trays, and shelves with a half dozen gallon jugs of developing chemicals.
“Where’s our film?” Jackson said.
Alma wiggled the camera out of her pocket and handed it to him. He pressed the automatic rewind, let it whirl to a stop, and flicked open the back of the camera. Jackson removed the cartridge and shut off the red light long enough for him to get the film itself into a circular black plastic canister. He began mixing fresh solutions from the chemicals.
CLANK
A sound from the furnace room.
“What’s that?” Alma asked.
“The wind rattling the cellar doors,” Jackson guessed.
Alma pulled up a stool under the glowing red bulb and started scanning the pages of the big book for anything remotely connected to the trilithons.
“The altar stone is presently half-buried in front of one of the trilithons,” she said. “But it used to be a big slab lying right out on the ground.”
Alma speed-read down the narrow type of the pages. “There’s another stone they call the Slaughter Stone that has stains that look like blood from sacrifices. It says the stains are really from rains leaching out the iron content of the stone.”
“What about the moon? It can’t be an accident that it’s almost a full moon and this monster is starting to kill.” Jackson used a funnel to pour a solution into the developing canister and set the wall timer. “And if it is the moon, why doesn’t the creature kill every twenty-seven days or something?”