by Tim Curran
Something like wind howling through low places.
Then a voice, clotted and congested said, “I’m coming, big bwother…wait for me…I’m coming…”
Nicky.
With a rasping scream, Deke dropped the receiver and fell onto his ass in the drenched carpet.
And still he could hear his brother’s high, screeching voice.
Laughing.
And laughing and laughing.
And another voice in Deke’s head told him, they’re all down below in those secret tunnels waiting for us.
Out in the streets, the wind howled.
22
Thing was, Lily did not ask why Mitch and Tommy came home carrying bags of salt under their arms. She just looked at them, smiled and accepted. And that probably wasn’t a good thing. Again, Mitch was struck by that weird mood she was in. She was acting like a little girl with a secret. A big, wonderful secret kept locked behind pressed lips. And Mitch just couldn’t bring himself to ask what that secret might be. As it was, she was giddy and happy and excited like she was waiting for something momentous to happen.
Oh, something might happen tonight, he found himself thinking, but I don’t think you’re going to like it, Lil.
The Zirblanksi twins were staying with them being that they still couldn’t find their parents. Mitch and Tommy had been over to their house three times and they still weren’t home.
“I don’t want you girls to be worrying,” Mitch told them. “Your mom and dad are probably holed up somewhere waiting this out.”
He wasn’t sure whether the twins believed him or not, but they seemed comfortable with the idea of staying at his house. And he supposed after Miriam Blake, the Addam’s Family would have seemed acceptable. Mitch hadn’t known the girls very well before any of this started. They’d grown up a few houses down Kneale Street, but he didn’t think he’d ever said much more than a simple hello to them his entire life, stuffed some candy into their plastic pumpkins on Halloween night and waved to them on the street. Of course, the twins had a reputation as hellions, something he knew was pretty much true.
But tonight, he was not seeing that.
Rita was very quiet for the most part, brooding sometimes, kept chewing her fingernails. Rhonda was the more outgoing of the two. She kept asking questions, wanting to help with things.
When Mitch and Tommy got back at sundown, or just after, Rhonda had said, “Why so much salt, Mr. Barron?”
Maybe Lily was too lost in her personal fog to care, but not Rhonda.
Mitch had to come up with a lie…and quick. “It’s for my ice cream maker,” he said, not entirely sure where that pearl of bullshit had come from. “You need lots of salt.”
That much was true. Mitch had gotten an ice cream maker for Christmas a few years before and it now sat on a high closet shelf gathering dust. But he’d read the instructions and you did need an awful lot of salt to make ice cream.
Rita brightened at the idea. “We’re going to make ice cream? Can we make strawberry?”
Mitch swallowed. “Um…well…”
Tommy knew he was lying, was enjoying how he squirmed. “Yeah, Mitch, I want some chocolate. Can we make rocky road, too?”
“I love rocky road,” Rhonda said.
Oh, Christ…now what?
The power was off and they were sitting around by candlelight and these kids wanted to make ice cream. You didn’t need electricity to make it, but you needed a freezer. Already, Rita and Rhonda had helped Lily move most of the perishables from the upstairs freezer to the floor freezer in the basement where it was cooler. They would last down there longer, but it probably wasn’t cold enough to store ice cream. But looking at those two girls with their big dark eyes and pretty faces, he could not tell them no. He supposed they could sacrifice one of the bags of salt. Tommy and he had brought home thirty pounds of the stuff and Lily?being Lily?already had a couple five pound bags in the pantry. Lily was like that…or had been…always stocking up when things went on sale. That’s why they had like twenty rolls of paper towels downstairs and enough toilet paper for ten years.
Lily said, “I think it would be fun to make ice cream, girls. When Chrissy gets home, she’ll want some.”
Mitch felt that like a knife in his chest. Still no Chrissy. He’d fed Lily some bullshit about her staying the night at the Sale’s house and Lily had accepted that. Maybe it was true. Maybe that’s where Chrissy indeed was. After all, Heather Sale’s dad said they had been there and would be back. Still, Mitch didn’t like not knowing where she was. Especially with the flooding…and other things.
In the kitchen, by the light of a Coleman lantern, Lily and the girls began assembling ingredients. At least it gave them something to do. And when she was busy, that funny light in Lily’s eyes didn’t burn so bright. Maybe this is what she needed: to keep busy. Maybe, maybe. But there was something there that Mitch did not like.
“I been thinking of all these lights we got going,” Tommy said after Mitch had delivered the ice cream maker to the girls. “You think…you think it’s a good idea to be burning them?”
Mitch didn’t know exactly.
In a way, he thought lights might bring in people that needed shelter and the more, the merrier tonight. But there was also the possibility that the lights might draw in those other…people out there. For surely, like it or not, they were out in the streets now. Mitch had been thinking about them a lot and not coming up with any good explanations for any of it. All the doors and windows were locked. They had Tommy’s four-ten and Mitch’s twenty-gauge Remington auto-loader that he used for hunting partridge in the fall, to go “a-grousing” as his old man had called it. Though it had been a few years since he’d been out bird hunting, he still had a full box of shells. So they had weapons, if it came down to it.
But would any of that be enough?
“I don’t know,” Mitch finally said, “but I figure we have to take a chance. It might be worse sitting in the dark with those kids.”
They had pulled Lily’s big conversion van out of the garage now and pulled in Tommy’s truck. He had a police scanner in there and that, at least, connected them with the world. The garage was attached, so they didn’t have to go outside.
While Tommy sat in the cab listening to the police chatter which was pretty hairy stuff?lost people and bodies, looting and shootings, accidents and people trapped in flooded buildings?he sat by the workbench and smoked, staring out the single rain-spattered window at the night beyond. He didn’t really know what any of this was about. He figured most didn’t, but there were a few out there who did. After seeing that living dead woman that the cops pulled from the drainage ditch, seeing that she wore the remains of military fatigues, Mitch had pretty much made up his mind that the explosion out at the Fort Providence base was all connected up with this. He didn’t know what they did out there, nobody really did, but they were involved. All this shit had come down after that explosion and although Mitch didn’t believe half the crazy stories circulating about that, there must have been a germ of truth in there somewhere.
The Army was saying it was fuel tank that exploded.
But Mitch was no longer buying that.
They had been working on something weird out there, must have been. The idea that the dead would start walking around on their own just didn’t wash. The Army were up to something fantastic out there and whatever that had been, it was out of control now. Maybe something in the rain. Mitch had spent four years in the Navy. That wasn’t exactly a career, but it was enough experience so that he knew the military were not exactly up front about their activities. And when they fucked-up, they rarely admitted such. No, Mitch was not much into conspiracies. He didn’t really think the military had captured flying saucers or anything, but they were no doubt involved in things equally as frightening.
This scenario pretty much proved that.
Mitch didn’t trust his own government any farther than he could throw them and he sure as hell did not
trust the military. You put people in power and they invariably abused it. But even with that in mind, he doubted that any of this was meant to happen. No, it was an accident. Something went wrong, something got out of control.
But what exactly? What had they been doing at that base?
Tommy came over. “Mitch…it’s getting pretty wild out there.”
“No shit?”
“I’m serious here. There’s been some kind of riot out at Slayhoke, prisoners running wild. The National Guard are up there putting it down.”
“Jesus, just what we need right now.”
“And something else…there’s a bus load of kids missing,” Tommy said. “They were coming from a soccer match and now nobody can find that bus. But they figure it’s in town.”
“One tragedy after another.”
Tommy lit a cigarette. “You know what I was thinking?”
Mitch looked up at him.
“I was thinking about that witch, that old lady you took me to see.”
“Wanda Sepperly?”
Tommy nodded. “I don’t believe in any of that crap, but you got to admit that lady’s got something going on. She knows things. I bet she might know where that bus is and I bet she might know where Chrissy is.”
Mitch nodded, wondering why he hadn’t thought of it. “Maybe…maybe we should take a walk over there.”
“Maybe we should.”
Mitch nodded. “For a minute there, I thought you were going to tell me about some cousin of yours that was a witch.”
“What kind of family do you think we are?”
23
Next door to the Barron’s, as the idea of making ice cream was being tossed around, Arland Mattson came awake to the sound of invasion. He’d been snoozing in his recliner, feet atop a stool heaped with newspapers. He came awake slowly, dreaming about the sores on his chest and the pains he got down in his bowels sometimes. He opened his eyes, thinking he’d maybe heard a car backfire, but then right away he heard only the sound of the falling rain, the wind skirting the eaves.
Nothing more.
Right away, he became suspicious.
Arland had not necessarily been of sound mind since his wife Camille had been taken by cancer ten years previously. What had been a somewhat alarming trend towards suspicion and distrust while she was alive, had bloomed into a fully developed persecution complex by the time of the flooding of Witcham. Arland was extremely paranoid, was certain that the government were watching him and had planted listening devices in the walls of his house. He also believed that the pancreatic tumor that had killed his wife was not merely a matter of heredity or chance, but the result of something slipped into her food that was intended for him. And he knew that there were parasites living inside him, tiny insectlike creatures that were eating away his stomach, even if the doctor told him that such a thing was impossible. Neighbors like Mitch Barron had gotten used to the threats of frivolous lawsuits and the rampant conspiracies that Arland saw in everything from sudden changes in the weather to the questions asked by census takers, but they only saw small bite-sized portions of his dementia.
Had they seen more, they would have had him committed.
So when Arland came awake, he knew that his house had been invaded. Possibly by the things the rain had brought and possibly by government agents that had come to steal his water samples that he had taken from the rain.
Arland sat there in his chair, listening, knowing something had come into his house and right about then he began to smell it. Whatever it was, it stank dirty and flyblown.
Houses are very personal things.
They are the webs of our daily lives just as we are the spiders that inhabit them. And, like spiders, when something settles into our webs, we can feel the minute tugging of strands, the vibrations, the weight and physical impression intruders make. And this is what Arland was feeling. Though he was past eighty, terribly thin, and his vision was not so good, he could feel that sense of invasion just fine. The minute threads of his web had been touched, broken, torn asunder. Some weighty bluebottle fly or yellowjacket had landed and become ensnared in those fine filaments and he could feel the oscillations of their distress…or perhaps it was his own.
Lightly, he got to his feet and grabbed a butcher knife off the coffee table. His battery lantern was still glowing and he took this, too.
Arland was afraid, but he had suspected this for some time. It was only a matter of time before they came to silence him; he knew too much. They had no doubt hoped to kill him in his sleep, but he had thwarted their plans, had he not?
He walked out of the living room and into the hall.
The front door was open a few inches and this more than anything made something solidify in his belly. He always kept the door locked. But now it was open and what could that mean? Well, yes, they had picked the lock, of course. They knew how to do things like that. There was a hidden key outside, secreted beneath a loose brick on the porch, but even they would not have known that.
Only Arland did.
And Camille, of course. But Camille had been dead well over five years now. She’d been cremated over to the Harvest Hill crematorium.
Maybe he’d forgotten to lock it.
And then, he was suddenly certain that he had. And now somebody had come into the house in the dead of night.
Arland stood there with the knife, wishing then he had a gun. But he’d never gotten one because they had to be registered and that was just another way the government tracked you and fattened the file they kept on everyone.
There were wet footprints leading from the doorway and down the hall to the door that led to the cellar. Of course, that’s where they would go. Arland kept much of his material concerning their activities down in the cellar. He only hoped they would not touch his mason jars of rainwater, he needed those for his class action suit against them.
Breathing hard, a tightness at his chest, Arland followed those prints to the cellar door. The lantern threw jumping shadows all around him.
And a voice in his head told him, This is a job for a young man, not an old one.
But Arland dismissed that. He was up to this. Certainly, he was.
And that’s when he heard something shatter in the cellar.
One of his mason jars.
The crash was followed by another and another and another. They were destroying his specimens, that’s what they were doing.
He threw open the cellar door, the light casting flickering illumination. He saw prints leading down the steps, prints that were black and muddy. As he started down, a papery rustle in his chest, more jars shattered and as he got to the bottom of the steps, one was tossed at him out of the darkness, exploding against the wall a few inches from his head.
Arland started and slashed out with his knife.
Shadows.
Shadows creeping and crawling and oozing around him. The stink was worse down here, a musty odor of rotting vegetables kept in moist closets. It was almost unbearable. Like something dead and fruiting with mushrooms had come into the house. It made his eyes water and his stomach heave.
Another jar shattered against the wall and another.
A pain needling dead-center of his chest, Arland struggled forward and for the first time he was wondering if he was truly up to this. If maybe coming down here had not been a terrible mistake.
He could hear that other person…they were somewhere down in the webby, mazelike confines of the cellar and they moved with a wet, squishing sound as if they did not have feet as such, but were stepping about on bloated toadstools. Shaking badly now, he came around the furnace room and into the washroom where the dryer and washer were. His light reflected off shards of glass in the stationary tub. Dozens of bottles had been broken in there.
But as he moved forward, something sinking inside him, he saw a mason jar on the floor. Its lid was missing, but it was about half full. But not with rainwater, but with something yellow and sharp-smelling: urine.
Arland gasped, barely able to catch his breath now.
He held up his lantern and there was another mason jar a few feet away and another beyond it. Both were about half-filled with urine. There was no mistaking that gagging, foul odor, the ammonia-like sharpness of it. Somebody…somebody had broken his jars and then emptied the others out, filling them with piss. Yes, there were more jars ahead, they led like a trail right up to the door of the rec room.
Arland was suddenly terrified.
Because unless there were dozens of people, no single person could have put out that much urine. Nobody had that much water in them. Yet, he was still hearing those squishing sounds and he knew there was only one individual down here.
Okay, you fool old man, now what? Do you try and run or do you face what’s been doing this?
But Arland knew there was really no choice.
For if he tried to make it up the steps, he would feel the motion behind him, then cold white fingers at the back of his throat. Because this was not some mere prank, this was all done for his benefit. Just like that trail of jars was meant to lure him into the rec room like a trail of candy leading to a witch’s cottage.
There were things in life you knew and those you could never know.
And what was waiting for him in the rec room was definitely of the latter variety. It had come slinking in here to torment him. Something hideous that had perhaps went door to door up Kneale Street trying locks until he or she or it had found one unlatched.
You might as well have invited it in, he told himself. Something that wanted to get out of the rain and wind, something lonely looking for warmth and…companionship.
And what could that be?
What exactly could that be?
Because he was pretty certain it was not the government.
It was something else.
Arland went to the rec room door and heard a muted giggling in there. The sound of someone laughing into their hands. His throat dry and his heart hammering painfully, he pushed open the door.