Virgil, walking around his car to get the wheelchair from the back of the other side, looked up and saw three Pennsylvania-Dutch-type hexes painted above the barn door, and a cross hanging in between them.
Hopfrog glanced back at him. “Would ya hurry it up with that chair? The ground’s freezing.”
Virgil unfolded the chair and pushed it up the drive to the path that led to the barn. “John Feely was well prepared for this event.”
“Not too well prepared.” Hopfrog had a system for slipping into the chair, which was like second nature for him; he grasped one arm of it, and then slid into it so quickly that at times it was startling. Virgil gasped as he watched him. “Didn’t know I was so light on my hands, did’ya, Doc? I’ve been working out my technique for years. So, what do you think? In the barn? When I was a kid, we saw a bunch of crosses in there. Tons. You think it’s safe?”
“I don’t know.” Virgil felt something, not anything as wonderful or dreadful as a premonition, but a vague but persistent thumping—a pulsation in his body. He wondered if it was his heart, because it was beating rhythmically, but too fast.
Hopfrog, noticing the look that had crossed Virgil’s face, said, “Dr. Cobb—you doing okay?”
“For someone my age, I’m doing better than expected,” he said. “I should’ve had a heart attack by now, you know, bad living, fatty foods, wine, cigars, a sedentary existence. I’m amazed I’m not dead.”
When Hopfrog leaned back in the chair, Virgil got behind it and began pushing it. “If they follow most of the vampire rules,” Virgil said, “They won’t attack us even if they are in the barn.”
They went to the barn door.
Virgil set the chair to the side, and stepped up to open the door.
Once inside, they found sixty-two crosses, and then some.
“We’re right above the lair,” Hopfrog said, circling around the well at the center of the dusty barn.
“It’s the entire network of mines down there. This is the mouth of them, I think. I’m willing to bet that John Feely had the whole town well-mined with crucifixes and hex signs. But someone must’ve overcome John before the thing could wreak its havoc. It must’ve been a human being, someone who served it. Maybe in exchange for power.”
“Christ,” Hopfrog said. “What a world. This is where we faced off, when we were kids. Me and Joe and Missy. It got Patty, but we did something to send the dragon back to wherever It came from.”
“Dragon?”
Hopfrog shrugged. “We were kids. Dragons, ogres, all that stuff. And I saw Joe do something that was like magic.”
“What was that?”
“I don’t know how he did it. But he somehow transformed himself. It was like a trick of the light—there was this brilliant glow where the thing stood, looking like a boy covered with blood. And then Joe took up this stick that was on the ground and started using it like it was a sword. It was like he was possessed, like he knew what he was doing. I had to practically pinch myself, because I didn’t really believe it. For a second, I thought he was all dressed in armor and wasn’t a boy, but a man with a crown on his head and a sword in his hand. And the thing had become this big lizard, almost like a Godzilla thing, and Missy whispered to me, ‘It’s Joe. Joe can make believe anything he wants,’ and even though I figured we were all hallucinating, that was the moment I knew she didn’t love me. When we were kids I knew she loved him. She believed in him, and he believed in himself in a way that I never could in anyone.” Hopfrog leaned forward and gathered up some of the crosses. “Jesus, it’s belief, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Joe, his imagination—that’s why he heard the voices from the dead people. That’s what almost drove him nuts back then. He was in tune with it, like it fed off his mind. Like that blood boy knew he had that power and was feeding off of him. He didn’t even know he had it.” Hopfrog leaned back in his chair, his arms thrust out at his sides, looking for all the world as if he were experiencing some kind of religious conversion. “That means he can stop it. He has the power. If he can just do that again . . . What do you think?”
“I think that what is below ground here is a monster. I think it’s fooled a good many men over the years into believing something that isn’t true. I wouldn’t want to chance your friend Joe to a theory.”
“Yeah.” Hopfrog shrugged off his own idea. “And a crazy theory at that. You want to check the house next?”
Virgil wanted to say “no,” because he, in fact, dreaded the idea of ever setting foot in John Feely’s house, but he knew that at this point, the dreadful and the inevitable must intersect. “Yes. As long as it’s daylight.”
3.
Joe and Becky loaded the groceries—enough for a week—into the trunk of the Buick. Joe ripped open a pack of cigarettes and jammed one between his lips.
He punched the lighter in the car. When it popped up, he brought it to the end of the cigarette. He took a puff.
“Delicious,” he said. “I wasn’t even addicted before today.”
“Give me one of those,” Becky said, leaning beside him, against the car. They chain-smoked three cigarettes each before they were sated. “I feel like I’m playing hooky from school.”
Joe coughed. “I never was a good smoker. To smoke well, you have to be unafraid of disease and death. I’ve always been kind of terrified of those two.”
Becky flashed an almost flirtatious grin. “That’s the joy of smoking—the fear of death combined with the pleasures of nicotine.” Then, she said, more seriously, “Will you come with me to my place? I want to get a few personal things. They seem silly right now, but I want them.”
Joe stubbed out the last of his smoke. In his best redneckese, he said, “Got me a crucifix and got me a stake, we gonna kill us a heap o’ vampires.”
4.
When they got to Becky’s house, Becky looked at the front of the building and gasped, “Someone’s in there. Look.”
Joe leaned forward, and looked up to the second-story window, where he saw nothing.
“It’s Tad,” Becky said, “I know it is.” She had an excitement to her voice like a little girl on Christmas. “Oh, my God, Joe, it’s my baby, he must’ve gotten away from them. He came home!”
And before Joe could stop her, she had bolted from the car and run up the front steps to her house.
The door was already open, as if someone were expecting her.
5.
At the Feely house, once Hopfrog had wheeled himself through the front door into the foyer, the stink hit him. It was worse than anything he had ever had the misfortune to step in. He imagined that the primary odor came from the rotting corpse of John Feely himself which swung before him, strung by his feet in the hall.
Hopfrog covered his mouth with a handkerchief and tried not to breathe through his nose.
John Feely had been gutted like a deer and the cavity of his chest and ribs was stuffed with maggots.
Carved in his forehead, the word: angel.
Behind Hopfrog, Virgil Cobb said, “Dear God.”
“What’s that room?” Hopfrog asked, wheeling closer to the hanging body.
“John’s bedroom. There’s a closet on the other side of it. It’s the inner sanctum. John told me, when I was a boy, that he kept the Angel of the Pit there, as his grandfather had, as he would until judgment day.”
“Today,” Hopfrog said, “Is judgment day. Think you can get that body down so we can get through?”
The truth was, Virgil didn’t think he could cut John Feely’s body down any more than he thought he could face the night. He was shivering, terrified, feeling his heart beat so fast he was sure he would keel over at any moment—he’d had at least one patient in all his years of practice who had died of fright, a woman in 1972, who had a series of nightmares which literally drove her to an early grave—and he felt that he was going to shortly fall victim to fear, as well. He no longer felt like an old man, but like the boy he had been when
he had seen his brother Eugene coming for him, coming with blood on his face. The fear he had felt when he and Winston had plunged the stake into Eugene’s heart, had operated on his brother’s body, and then had watched as Eugene’s own blood rose up in an almost human form before evaporating before their eyes.
Virgil went to John Feely’s kitchen and got a large carving knife. He was shaking as he cut John down, hacking at the rope that kept him tied to the spike that had been driven into the wall above the door frame. When John dropped to the floor, black and green flies rose up from his innards.
“Lord of the flies,” Hopfrog said. “Beelzebub.” Hopfrog wheeled around the body, into the bedroom. “Would you look at this?”
Virgil went in the room, and whatever fear he had possessed seconds before solidified into a feeling of certain doom.
The room was sprayed with blood, as if someone had taken a hose and attached it to several human bodies.
Winston Alden’s skin had been dried and tacked to the far wall.
“I can’t go in there,” Virgil said, not knowing if he was weeping or wailing or even speaking aloud. “I can’t go in there.”
“Holy shit,” Hopfrog said, seeing that his wheels were now soaked with the blood from the floor. “This is fresh.”
“Let’s not go in there,” Virgil said. “Maybe when the others get back . . .”
Hopfrog said, “Did you hear it?”
“What?”
Hopfrog’s eyes were wild, his face sweaty. He turned and clutched at Virgil’s coat. “My boy. Did you hear it? I heard him. He’s down there.”
“No, Homer, only that thing is down there. No one alive is down there.”
“No,” Hopfrog said. “Don’t you hear him? Oh, Jesus, he needs me, he’s hurt, I’ve got to go—”
Before Virgil could stop him, Hopfrog leapt from his chair, and using his hands and arms for leverage, dragged himself across the bloody floor towards the closet.
Virgil wanted to stop him, but he couldn’t move. The terror that gripped him was immense. He stood at the threshold of the doorway and called out to Hopfrog, but Hopfrog kept calling out to his son, calling to find the place where his son had been taken, and when he stopped calling, there was nothing but silence.
Interrupting the silence, briefly, a cry, a human cry, as if the man who was now in the lair of the Angel of the Pit had seen the most beautiful and horrifying vision, and could not express what he had seen in anything other than the unspeakable language of screams.
6.
Joe ran up to the house after Becky, his crucifix drawn, and followed her upstairs to the second floor of her house.
He heard Becky cry out, “Tad! Tad, oh my God, Tad, you’re alive, you’re—”
Joe took the stairs two at a time, his heartbeat so loud that he could hear it as if it were in his ears and brain rather than in his chest. He drew the screwdriver from his belt, and went through the doorway into Becky’s bedroom.
There was Tad, or what had become of Tad, his arms around his mother, her arms around him, and all around, in the room, mirrors and chalk drawings of crosses and bowls of clear water.
“Look”—Tad showed his mother—“They bit me three times, but I got away, I got away.”
“Oh, thank you, God, thank you, thank you.” Becky wept until her weeping sounded like laughter.
After a few minutes, Joe asked, “How did you do it, Tad? How did you get away from them?”
Tad grinned, but his eyes were sunken, his face wan and dirty—the kid had been through hell. “I lied to them. This helped,” he held up a thick Swiss Army knife. “You can hurt them if you try. And they’re real dumb. I was in my bed, when something came out from under it and grabbed me. It was Elvis Bonchance, but I knew he was a vampire. He and his brother and some girl dragged me out on the window ledge, and I almost fell out the window, except they could practically fly. But I always have my knife with me, so I stabbed Elvis real good in the eye, and then I ran. I was two streets over, and I remembered that Granny gave Mom this cross, so I ran over there, figuring Mom would be there and I could get help. So I came up here, only there was a bunch of ‘em. And then, I figured out something: if they’re vampires, they’re scared of lots of things.” He pointed to the bowls of water. “I told ‘em it was holy water. I pretended real hard, just like I do when I lie, and you know what? They believed me. They hung around for a while, but when I started throwing the water on them and making up fake church curses, you know, like ‘Be Thou Returned to Thy Lord Of Darkness!’ stuff like that, they went running. I believed as hard as I could, and they’re really, really dumb vampires, if you ask me.” Then, settling into his mother’s arms, he whispered, “I was too scared to go anywhere today. And I’m really hungry.”
“Well,” Joe said. “This is your lucky day ‘cause we have a ton of food down in the car.” As he stood there, he wished it were his son in this house, he wished that his son and daughter and wife and mother had been this lucky. He took some comfort in finding this one child still alive and healthy and strong.
“Let’s go,” Becky said, taking Tad’s hand. “Your father’s going to want to see you.”
“You guys thinking of getting back together?” Tad asked, carrying a bowl of phony holy water with him (“just in case,” he whispered mostly to himself). “I mean,” he added, “I believe in that, too.”
Becky didn’t answer him, but seemed to have been revived into life again, as if the wavering flame inside her almost extinguished but now caught fire again.
7.
Twenty minutes later, Becky, Tad, and Joe were back at the house.
Tad was exhausted.
He went to sleep in his mother’s arms, on the living room sofa. She would not let him go. She rocked him, and closed her eyes, and fell asleep, also.
Joe sat up and had a Coke and bologna sandwich. He switched on the portable radio from the kitchen.
The news of the day was coming on—broadcast from Stone Valley, and another one all the way from Washington, D.C. As he listened to it, he was amazed how normal the world seemed.
He half expected that the Night Children would’ve already taken over the planet.
When Virgil finally returned it was four-thirty, and the sky was darkening.
“Hey,” Joe said, getting up to glance out the front window for Hop.
The driveway was empty.
“I walked all the way back,” Virgil Cobb said, and in both his slumped posture and the way his eyes glazed, Joe knew that the man had lost it. Just lost it.
No surprise there. We should all have lost it by now. All Virgil could say was, “It got Homer. It got him.” Joe pressed his eyes closed. Survivors. We are the only survivors. Countdown to the last living souls in Colony, West Virginia. He envied to some extent those who were already dead; their terror and pain were behind them. He opened his eyes and said, “We found Tad. He’s okay. A little scared and tired, but fine.”
8.
After the weeping and sadness, before night had descended, Virgil said to the others, “I am going to find more crosses. We got some up around the Feely place —there were tons there. Egyptian symbols, too, and Stars of David, even a couple of pentagrams—apparently any religion keeps the vampire at bay. There’s maybe another forty minutes of the sun.”
Joe glanced at Becky, and she at him. They could telegraph their thoughts: the old man’s lost—crushed —doomed. Like it’s his fault that Hopfrog died.
“Stay with us,” Becky said. “We can set up some more crosses in the yard. We can make it one more night.”
“You should leave. All of you.” Virgil could not even bring himself to look at them. “You have your son. Get out while he’s alive. While you’re alive.”
“We’ve talked about that,” Joe said. “I am staying because I have to see this thing through. It killed my family. I can’t walk away from this.”
“You could leave, Becky,” Virgil said.
“No,” she said, shaking
her head. “Not until it’s over. We’re safer together.”
“When I come back with some crosses,” Virgil said, “I think you should get in the car and drive over to Stone Valley. You’re putting your son in too much danger.”
Becky said, “I won’t leave Joe alone to deal with this, and I can’t send Tad by himself. Maybe in the morning. Maybe then.” She seemed set in stone, and Tad, next to her, was curled against her side; since hearing about his father’s death, he seemed to have crawled to a place inside himself from which he could not be extricated.
“Whatever,” Virgil said. “I need to go. I need to find out if there’s anything salvageable in this town. I need to.”
Virgil left in Hopfrog’s car to go gather up what weapons he could before the dark.
9.
“I am going to the Feely barn,” Joe said. “I am going to go down those stairs. I am going to do what I can to destroy the Angel of the Pit. I want you to know that since I may not come out that you should not leave here until morning. Set the crosses up, get the spikes ready in case one of the Night Children slips in somehow. Keep your back to the wall.” He opened the door to his Buick.
“I am going with you,” Becky said.
“No. You have to wait for Virgil.”
“Virgil isn’t coming back, couldn’t you tell? He isn’t coming back.” She was not hysterical, but calm, as if she had decided her own fate and would not waver from that decision. “You’re the only one now who has ever fought this before, Joe. Don’t leave Tad and me here. If we stay together we might be safer. I am not going to run away from the monster that killed my son’s father.”
10.
“It’ll be dark in ten minutes,” he said, driving the slick streets.
“We’ll be there in less than that.” Becky leaned back in her seat; every few minutes she reached over and touched Tad as if checking to make sure he was still breathing. “Hopfrog told me you fought It before, Joe. You were Tad’s age. How did you do it?”
Joe said, “I’ll tell you what I remember, I don’t know if it’s going to help us or not. What happened when we were little ...” and he began the story about Patty Glass and Hopfrog and Melissa on a rainy spring day when King Joe Dragonheart thought he’d killed a dragon. The story lasted until he’d parked the Buick beside the barn and walked in and showed Becky and Tad the well that had once seemed to be a metal cylinder filled with golden light. It was capped with a crucifix and etched with ancient symbols. They sat near John Feely’s old work bench.
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