by Tim Curran
“Settle down back there, ladies!” Oates called out. “This water is full of junk, nothing more!”
Then the boat lurched again. Lurched and stopped dead like they’d snagged on something. The other boats bumped into it and then they were all stopped. The lead boat twisted to the left like it was going to flip, then it spun lazily in a half-circle like something down there was holding it…then it drifted free four or five feet, then it stopped dead again.
The silence was heavy and brooding, even with the rain dropping into the water and popping against the rubber boats, splatting against vinyl ponchos.
“Fuck is this?” Jones called from the boat behind.
Then something slammed into his boat and it was actually lifted inches out of the water and dropped back with a splash. Strickland and Chernick cried out as they were tossed from their seats to the muddy floorboards.
“Something hit us!” Jones cried out. “There’s something under us! There’s something down there!”
Then, on the bottom of all the boats, slapping and pounding sounds. And along the keel of the lead craft, a muted scratching like something sharp drawn along its length.
The men were panicking, searchlights and flashlights scanning the water and the walls of the buildings, those abandoned docks. The rain fell in a fine spray and there was movement in the water around them. Things breaking the surface and disappearing, bobbing and sinking. Shadows slithering and the stink of mortuaries.
Oates saw a face just above the water.
Only for the briefest of moments, but he put his flashlight full on it and there was no denying the grim reality of it. A face bleached-white and puckered, chewed-looking as if fish had been nibbling on it, strips of flesh hanging from the cheeks and forehead like Spanish moss. Then it slid down beneath the waters again.
“What the hell was that?” Hinks said.
And Oates was going to tell him it was nothing, just a fucking doll’s head or something, but he couldn’t seem to find the words to speak. His tongue felt numb in his mouth. But his brain was thinking: Like a shark, a goddamn shark. That thing showed itself like a shark shows its dorsal fin before it attacks. And when the dorsal goes under…
“There’s things in the water,” Hopper called out. “I saw ‘em…like faces in the water, all around us.”
And right then you could almost feel the terror and the adrenaline pumping into each man. Weapons were brought up and bodies tensed. They could feel attack coming, just not from which direction. And Oates knew it, felt it, lived it, as he’d done so many times before. This was how it felt right before the enemy stormed down on your position: the terror, the juice in your veins, that pervasive sense of the calm before the storm as bodies went rigid and breath was held and nerves crackled with electricity.
“Listen to me now,” Oates said and they all heard him. “I want those safeties off those weapons right now. Anything that shows itself is to be considered unfriendly. Drivers, let’s get these boats moving right goddamn now! Hup to it, Mary Lou or there’s gonna be very little loving and a whole lot of raping…”
They were close.
They almost made it.
If they’d gotten out of there a minute sooner, maybe, maybe. But the water suddenly slapped violently around them and exploded. A white, shrunken arm shot out and snatched Chernick by the wrist and then everyone was shouting and screaming. Weapons were discharged at ghosts and the searchlights cast grotesque shadows everywhere.
Chernick was a big boy who worked the weights every day. He’d been a linebacker in high school and he’d been a golden gloves boxer, so he did not go down without a fight. As that white, slimy arm tried to yank him over the side he pulled away and brought it right up into the boat with him.
It…and what it was attached to.
And when he saw it, when he looked that thing right in the face, he started screaming like an infant, thrashing and squealing. He lost his 16, began punching and clawing at that ragged thing he’d fished up from the water. His nails shredded the waterlogged flesh right down to the bone, but the skeletal hand clung on tenaciously, the fingertips sinking right into his wrist. He flopped and wailed, knocking Jones into the drink just as another white arm looped around Strickland’s throat like an especially soft and blubbery tentacle and he was drawn over the side, a mutiny of clawing hands waiting for him.
Oates thought maybe he screamed himself as he saw what Chernick was fighting with, the searchlight spinning on its base and strobing the scene with flashes of light. In slow, jerking motion, he saw something that might have been an old woman once, but was now a blackened and withered thing like a scarecrow, its clothing and skin hanging in streamers that flapped in the wind like pennants.
Neiderhauser was the first to open up.
Whether he killed Chernick or that thing did when it bit out his throat in a spray of dark arterial blood, it was hard to say. Slugs ripped into both Chernick and the dead woman. She was a pitted and insect-ravaged husk and the rounds from Neiderhauser’s M-16 literally blew her apart into a spray of carrion that filled the bottom of the boat, wriggling gruesomely on the anodized aluminum floorboards…bones and scraps of flesh, things that were both and neither like writhing like worms.
And then all around them, faces camouflaged with wet leaves surfaced.
White, scarified hands reached up the sides of the boats.
A faceless thing rose up to Oates’ right and he hammered it with the butt of his 16. It fell back, making a watery, coughing sound. Then he flipped the 16 over and sprayed the water where it sank.
And then the boats were in motion.
Neiderhauser opened up the lead boat, smashing through a gauntlet of white faces and clutching hands. As Jones’ empty boat was flipped over, Hopper’s boat slammed into it and knocked it out of the way. The two boats raced down that alley, barely making the turns.
And as they did so, Oates saw a woman standing on a loading dock, a withered and eyeless thing with long silver hair clotted with leaves and filth trailing down her gray, seamed face and onto her mildewed burial dress.
She was grinning.
Then the boat broke free of the alley and Oates could see the dark, expanding slick of the river as it slowly consumed River Town. Hopper seemed to see it, too, because he turned away from it just as Neiderhauser did. They flew through a street of tall buildings and into a residential district of ancient weather-vaned houses and then there was open fields which had become ponds and then encroaching trees.
Oates had to pry Neiderhauser’s hands from the wheel to get him to slow down and when he did, Neiderhauser looked like he wanted to scratch his eyes out.
“Settle down! Settle the fuck down before you get us all killed!”
Hopper’s boat went right past them, spraying them with filthy water and leaves. And it kept going and going.
“Rubber baby buggie fucking bumpers!” Oates shouted. “Go after those dumb sonsofbitches! Go! Go! Go!”
And they did.
They raced through the falling rain after Hopper’s boat and they caught up with it soon enough. And it wasn’t until Oates saw the high tips of that wrought iron gate pass behind them that he knew they had just entered a sunken cemetery.
And all around them in the wind-lashed night, they could hear the voices of the dead and the damned scraping up from lungs inundated with reeking water and mud.
And this was how things went from bad to worse for Henry T. Oates.
16
There was a dripping.
And from somewhere far away, a sobbing.
Chrissy Barron opened her eyes and they slid shut almost immediately. She was in her bed, she had to be in her bed. Just half awake coming out of a dream, that’s all this was. Just relax and drift off. She heard her mind tell her this and she accepted. At least for a moment or two, then she felt the wetness sloshing around her. Heard that dripping. The sobbing.
Sobbing?
She leaned forward, expecting maybe a pillow, but
submerging her face in chill water instead.
She gasped and cried out.
She opened her eyes and forced them to stay open. She was sitting in the back of Heather Sale’s little VW bug, her safety belt cutting a trench into her belly. The car was filled with water. It was right up to her neck. Her entire body felt numb and tingly.
What the hell was going on?
She tried to think and the harder she tried, the less anything made sense. But in the front seat, that sobbing. She recognized it. Maybe everything else was a blur, but she certainly recognized that sobbing.
“Lisa?” she said. “Lisa?”
But the sobbing continued unabated. Chrissy tried to rise, but her seatbelt held her in place. Her neck was sore like she’d gotten whiplash and the rest of her was just numb and senseless. When she tried to move her arms, they felt thick and ungainly. Like rubber limbs somebody had grafted onto her as a joke. She flexed her hands into fists, kept doing so and soon they were tingling madly, almost painfully, but they were working.
“Lisa!” she said. “Heather!”
“Oh my God, oh my God,” Lisa Bell was saying, her head reclined back on the seat. She moved it slowly from side to side, so at least she was coming around and that was something.
As Chrissy tried to work her seatbelt catch with those rubbery, useless fingers, a panic settled into her. She was not the panicky type, that was Lisa’s thing, but it took hold of her and she began to thrash in her seat, fighting to get the belt off. When careful manipulation didn’t work, she tried brute force. Yanking and pulling on it, sweat popping on her brow, her muscles bunching and straining. But it was no good. She was gripped by claustrophobia, the sense that the car was sinking and that she was going to sink with it.
Finally, she relaxed, panting.
The car wasn’t sinking. Oh, it had definitely sank, but the water wasn’t any higher than it was before. Still up to her throat. It was then, as she breathed in and out, forcing herself to relax, she remembered or allowed herself to remember. Heather. It had been Heather’s idea. They were coming back from the Uptown Mall just off Main and Heather wanted to get a closer look at the flooding in River Town. Chrissy had told her she was nuts…it was getting dark, the sun was going down. Time to get home while they could. And that had been Heather’s idea. She was driving Chrissy home, over to Crandon, but she decided to skirt the outer edges of Crandon, get a look at River Town and the flooding…
Then what? Think! Think!
Cable Street. It wound around the outside of River Town, right in-between River Town and Crandon. It was a hilly drive and then they’d come down into that hollow, the road disappearing into a sea of dark water.
“Let’s just plow on through,” Heather said, liking the idea.
And before anyone could stop her, she’d jammed down on the accelerator and they’d raced down there, hitting that water and then something else, something that stopped the VW dead. Chrissy could remember the car flying up in the air, the sudden jolt…then blackness.
And how long ago had that been?
It was dark now…they must’ve been out for awhile.
The feeling coming back into her fingers, she easily popped the catch on the safety belt. And let out a breath, the cruel embrace of that belt squeezing her mercilessly.
“Heather!” she said, sitting forward now, a sharp pain in her guts and shoulder where the belt had dug in. “Lisa! Lisa!”
From Heather there was only silence.
But Lisa was coming around, moaning and groaning. She coughed a few times and raised her head up. “Where…are we? Oh My God! Help me! Somebody help me! I’m drowning! Oh God, help me!”
She began to thrash and wail, crying out things that were utterly unintelligible. Chrissy pulled herself up by the front seat and took hold of her. “Take it easy! You’re all right!”
Lisa turned her head. “What happened? What’s going on?”
“We hit something in the water,” she managed. “Now get your belt off.”
Lisa started to do that and then she looked over at Heather, seemed to realize that there was someone else in the car with them. “Heather? Heather? Heather?” She let out a little scream and started to thrash again. “She’s dead! She’s dead! Heather’s dead”
“Knock it off!” Chrissy shouted at her. “Heather’s not dead! She’s just out cold…”
But then she pulled herself halfway over the seats and saw Heather. Unbelted as usual, she was facedown in the water, her blonde locks floating around like strands of sea grass in a tidal pull. Chrissy grabbed her, pulled her up out of the water, but it was no good. The windshield was shattered and she must have hit when they struck the water and whatever was in it. She could see that perfect bloody impact in the windshield, cracks spiderwebbing away from it in every direction.
Lisa screamed and Chrissy wanted to, too.
Heather’s head was split wide open, the ragged wound running from forehead to the crown of her skull. The water had washed all the blood away and even in the dim light, you could see the bubbly-looking convolutions of her brain, gray and fleshy and just awful.
Chrissy let go of her and she slipped into the water face-first.
She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt, Chrissy started thinking. She’s dead because she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt.
She turned away, dropping back into her seat, ripples running through the water now. She fought to keep the contents of her stomach down and slid over towards the door. She tried to open it, but it was jammed somehow. She unrolled the window and pulled herself out of it, submerging in that chill, stinking water. Coming up, gasping and shaking, feeling all those slimy things floating in it. She had to get a grip here and she knew it. It was all up to her now. That’s how it worked. Heather was the daredevil. She was the queen and Lisa? Lisa was the basketcase. Sweet and caring, but useless in a stressful situation. She freaked out when she got a B on an algebra paper, became positively suicidal when she couldn’t remember the combination to her gym locker.
Brushing water from her face, Chrissy thought: Okay, you have to do this. You’re an absolute self-centered bitch and you know it, but right now you have to be something else. Can you do that?
She figured she could.
She took hold of Lisa’s door and got it open a few inches. She kept pulling and it opened slowly with all the water, but it did open. Lisa was having an anxiety attack, but that was to be expected. She fought against Chrissy as Chrissy tried to help her. Finally, Chrissy just slapped her right across the face. It was what they did with hysterical people in movies and although she was not a violent person…honey, it just felt right.
It calmed Lisa right away.
She started to cry.
“Knock it off,” Chrissy told her, popping the catch on her belt and dragging her up out of the car. “We have to get help.”
Together, they climbed up the hill out of the water. When they got to the top, they could see River Town spread out to the left and Crandon to the right. Most of River Town was submerged and parts of Crandon were under, too.
“What can we do, Chrissy?” Lisa said. “I’m scared…I mean, I don’t know what I am. But we’re trapped, we’re really trapped.”
“We’re not trapped. We just have to do some wading is all.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Then in River Town, whatever lights were still burning went out and then Crandon followed suit. A thick, unbelievable blackness fell over them.
“Shit,” Chrissy heard herself say.
17
This is what happened at the Hope Street Cemetery:
When Officers Pat Marcus and Dave Rose did not turn up for a few hours after what seemed to be a pretty routine vandalism complaint, their empty squad car was discovered parked outside the caretaker’s shack. A brief search of the grounds turned up nothing. And it was this that got the wheels turning. For Marcus and Rose weren’t the first missing cops in Witcham; everyone in the departme
nt was still reeling from the loss of Officers Miggs and Heller from the River Town Precinct the night the Black River burst its banks and the disappearance of Eddie Stokely over in Guttertown that very afternoon. It was not good. And every cop in Witcham felt it right down to his or her roots. And as Captain Knoles said, “If we can’t even take care of ourselves…how in Christ are we supposed to take of this city?”
And this is what brought twenty cops out to the Hope Street Cemetery after dark that night. They came with guns and attitudes and a dog team borrowed from the State Police. Yes, the damn rain was still pissing down and there was every possibility that the dogs wouldn’t be able to scent their own balls, let alone track two missing cops. But Knoles didn’t care about that. The city fathers were shitting all over him and if he wanted to save his job, he had to at least make a good show of it. Because like the mayor herself had told him, “For the love of God, Captain, what kind of half-assed dog and pony show are you running over there?”
And Knoles honestly wasn’t sure himself.
So he siphoned off every extra available uniform he could get, even though there weren’t any extra available uniforms. His people were already pulling twelve and sometimes sixteen-hour shifts. The overtime alone was going to throw the city budget into an uproar. Let alone the bitching the cops themselves were doing.
Lieutenant Van Ibes was running the search and he broke his men into four five-man squads, each with a dog handler and each given a particular quadrant of the boneyard. And given that the cemetery was spread out over some two city blocks, that was plenty. Just a misty, rainy run of hedges and trees, hollows and low hills, stones and crypts thrust from the waterlogged ground like bad teeth from rotting gums.
Donny Soper pulled the duty and he was not happy about it. As they followed the dog-handler and his hound at the stone wall at the back of the grounds, he told Breeson and Kerr all about it. “I haven’t seen my wife or kids in three days,” he said, his black slicker shining with water. “You believe that shit? Three fucking days. I been pulling double-shifts courtesy of that prick Knoles. They got me sleeping in the barracks out back. You guys don’t have to do that. You got seniority. You got the years on me. You get to go home. But me? No, I get to bunk in that dirty, ratty old barracks. I mean, Jesus H. Christ, they haven’t even been used for nothing but storage since the fifties. Then Knoles gets this bright idea of clearing it out and setting up cots. And who gets to sleep there? Me and all the other idiots who don’t have the time in.”