Not as sorry as he was going to be. “Do you see those doors?”
“Yes, of course I do. What about them?”
“They give on the storage area that runs all the way along the west face of the building. Billy fell asleep and I went back there to see if I could find something to cover him up with…”
I told him everything, only leaving out the argument about whether or not Norm should have gone out at all. I told him what had come in… and finally, what had gone out, screaming. Brent Norton refused to believe it. No—he refused to even entertain it. I took him over to Jim, Ollie, and Myron. All three of them verified the story, although Jim and Myron the flower were well on their way to getting drunk.
Again, Norton refused to believe or even to entertain it. He simply balked. “No,” he said. “No, no, no. Forgive me, gentlemen, but it’s completely ridiculous. Either you’re having me on”—he patronized us with his gleaming smile to show that he could take a joke as well as the next fellow—“or you’re suffering from some form of group hypnosis.”
My temper rose again, and I controlled it—with difficulty. I don’t think that I’m ordinarily a quick-tempered man, but these weren’t ordinary circumstances. I had Billy to think about, and what was happening—or what had already happened—to Stephanie. Those things were constantly gnawing at the back of my mind.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go back there. There’s a chunk of tentacle on the floor. The door cut it off when it came down. And you can hear them. They’re rustling all over that door. It sounds like the wind in ivy.
“No,” he said calmly.
“What?” I really did believe I had misheard him. “What did you say?”
“I said no, I’m not going back there. The joke has gone far enough.”
“Brent, I swear to you it’s no joke.”
“Of course it is,” he snapped. His eyes ran over Jim, Myron, rested briefly on Ollie Weeks—who held his glance with calm impassivity—and at last came back to me. “It’s what you locals probably call ‘a real belly-buster.’ Right, David?”
“Brent… look—”
“No, you look!” His voice began to rise toward a courtroom shout. It carried very, very well, and several of the people who were wandering around, edgy and aimless, looked over to see what was going on. Norton jabbed his finger at me as he spoke. “It’s a joke. It’s a banana skin and I’m the guy that’s supposed to slip on it. None of you people are exactly crazy about out-of-towners, am I right? You all pretty much stick together. The way it happened when I hauled you into court to get what was rightfully mine. You won that one, all right. Why not? Your father was the famous artist, and it’s your town. I only pay my taxes and spend my money here!”
He was no longer performing, hectoring us with the trained court-room shout; he was nearly screaming and on the verge of losing all control. Ollie Weeks turned and walked away, clutching his beer. Myron and his friend Jim were staring at Norton with frank amazement.
“Am I supposed to go back there and look at some ninety-eight-cent rubber-joke novelty while these two hicks stand around and laugh their asses off?”
“Hey, you want to watch who you’re calling a hick,” Myron said.
“I’m glad that tree fell on your boathouse, if you want to know the truth. Glad.” Norton was grinning savagely at me. “Stove it in pretty well, didn’t it? Fantastic. Now get out of my way.”
He tried to push past me. I grabbed him by the arm and threw him against the beer cooler. A woman cawed in surprise. Two six-packs of Bud fell over.
“You dig out your ears and listen, Brent. There are lives at stake here. My kid’s is not the least of them. So you listen, or I swear I’ll knock the shit out of you.”
“Go ahead,” Norton said, still grinning with a kind of insane, palsied bravado. His eyes, bloodshot and wide, bulged from their sockets. “Show everyone how big and brave you are, beating up a man with a heart condition who is old enough to be your father.”
“Sock him anyway!” Jim exclaimed. “Fuck his heart condition. I don’t even think a cheap New York shyster like him has got a heart.”
“You keep out of it,” I said to Jim, and then put my face down to Norton’s. I was kissing distance, if that had been what I had in mind. The cooler was off, but it was still radiating a chill. “Stop throwing up sand. You know damn well I’m telling the truth.”
“I know… no… such thing,” he panted.
“If it was another time and place, I’d let you get away with it. I don’t care how scared you are, and I’m not keeping score. I’m scared, too. But I need you, goddammit! Does that get through? I need you!”
“Let me go!”
I grabbed him by the shirt and shook him. “Don’t you understand anything? People are going to start leaving and walk right into that thing out there! For Christ’s sake, don’t you understand?”
“Let me go!”
“Not until you come back there with me and see for yourself.”
“I told you, no! It’s all a trick, a joke, I’m not as stupid as you take me for—”
“Then I’ll haul you back there myself.”
I grabbed him by the shoulder and the scruff of his neck. The seam of his shirt under one arm tore with a soft purring sound. I dragged him toward the double doors. Norton let out a wretched scream. A knot of people, fifteen or eighteen, had gathered, but they kept their distance. None showed any signs of wanting to interfere.
“Help me!” Norton cried. His eyes bulged behind his glasses. His styled hair had gone awry again, sticking up in the same two little tufts behind his ears. People shuffled their feet and watched.
“What are you screaming for?” I said in his ear. “It’s just a joke, right? That’s why I took you to town when you asked to come and why I trusted you to cross Billy in the parking lot—because I had this handy fog all manufactured, I rented a fog machine from Hollywood, it only cost me fifteen thousand dollars and another eight thousand dollars to ship it, all so I could play a joke on you. Stop bullshitting yourself and open your eyes.”
“Let… me… go!” Norton bawled. We were almost at the doors.
“Here, here! What is this? What are you doing?”
It was Brown. He bustled and elbowed his way through the crowd of watchers.
“Make him let me go,” Norton said hoarsely. “He’s crazy.”
“No. He’s not crazy. I wish he were, but he isn’t.” That was Ollie, and I could have blessed him. He came around the aisle behind us and stood there facing Brown.
Brown’s eyes dropped to the beer Ollie was holding. “You’re drinking!” he said, and his voice was surprised but not totally devoid of pleasure. “You’ll lose your job for this.”
“Come on, Bud,” I said, letting Norton go. “This is no ordinary situation.”
“Regulations don’t change,” Brown said smugly. “I’ll see that the company hears of it. That’s my responsibility.”
Norton, meanwhile, had skittered away and stood at some distance, trying to straighten his shirt and smooth back his hair. His eyes darted between Brown and me nervously.
“Hey!” Ollie cried suddenly, raising his voice and producing a bass thunder I never would have suspected from this large but soft and unassuming man. “Hey! Everybody in the store! You want to come up back and hear this! It concerns all of you!” He looked at me levelly, ignoring Brown altogether. “Am I doing all right?”
“Fine.”
People began to gather. The original knot of spectators to my argument with Norton doubled, then trebled.
“There’s something you all had better know—” Ollie began.
“You put that beer down right now,” Brown said.
“You shut up right now,” I said, and took a step toward him.
Brown took a compensatory step back. “I don’t know what some of you think you are doing,” he said, “but I can tell you it’s going to be reported to the Federal Foods Company! All of it! And I want you to underst
and—there may be charges!” His lips drew nervously back from his yellowed teeth, and I could feel sympathy for him. Just trying to cope; that was all he was doing. As Norton was by imposing a mental gag order on himself. Myron and Jim had tried by turning the whole thing into a macho charade—if the generator could be fixed, the mist would blow over. This was Brown’s way. He was… Protecting the Store.
“Then you go ahead and take down the names,” I said. “But please don’t talk.”
“I’ll take down plenty of names,” he responded. “Yours will head the list, you… you bohemian.”
I could have brayed laughter. For ten years I had been a commercial artist with any dreams of greatness gradually falling further and further behind me; all my life I had lived in my father’s long shadow; my only real success had been in producing a male heir to the name; and here was this dour Yankee with his badly fitting false teeth calling me a bohemian.
“Mr. David Drayton has got something to tell you,” Ollie said. “And I think you had better all listen up, in case you were planning on going home.”
So I told them what had happened, pretty much as I told Norton. There was some laughter at first, then a deepening uneasiness as I finished.
“It’s a lie, you know,” Norton said. His voice tried for hard emphasis and overshot into stridency. This was the man I’d told first, hoping to enlist his credibility. What a balls-up.
“Of course it’s a lie,” Brown agreed. “It’s lunacy. Where do you suppose those tentacles came from, Mr. Drayton?”
“I don’t know, and at this point, that’s not even a very important question. They’re here. There’s—”
“I suspect they came out of a few of those beer cans. That’s what I suspect.” This got some appreciative laughter. It was silenced by the strong, rusty-hinge voice of Mrs. Carmody.
“Death!” she cried, and those who had been laughing quickly sobered.
She marched into the center of the rough circle that had formed, her canary pants seeming to give off a light of their own, her huge purse swinging against one elephantine thigh. Her black eyes glanced arrogantly around, as sharp and balefully sparkling as a magpie’s. Two good-looking girls of about sixteen with CAMP WOODLANDS written on the back of their white rayon shirts shrank away from her.
“You listen but you don’t hear! You hear but you don’t believe! Which one of you wants to go outside and see for himself?” Her eyes swept them, and then fell on me. “And just what do you propose to do about it, Mr. David Drayton? What do you think you can do about it?”
She grinned, skull-like above her canary outfit.
“It’s the end, I tell you. The end of everything. It’s the Last Times. The moving finger has writ, not in fire, but in lines of mist. The earth has opened and spewed forth its abominations—”
“Can’t you make her shut up?” one of the teenage girls burst out. She was beginning to cry. “She’s scaring me!”
“Are you scared, dearie?” Mrs. Carmody asked, and turned on her. “You aren’t scared now, no. But when the foul creatures the Imp has loosed upon the face of the earth come for you—”
“That’s enough, now, Mrs. Carmody,” Ollie said, taking her arm. “That’s just fine.”
“You let go of me! It’s the end, I tell you! It’s death! Death!”
“It’s a pile of shit,” a man in a fishing hat and glasses said disgustedly.
“No, sir,” Myron spoke up. “I know it sounds like something out of a dope-dream, but it’s the flat-out truth. I saw it myself.”
“I did, too,” Jim said.
“And me,” Ollie chipped in. He had succeeded in quieting Mrs. Carmody, at least for the time being. But she stood close by, clutching her big purse and grinning her crazy grin. No one wanted to stand too close to her—they muttered among themselves, not liking the corroboration. Several of them looked back at the big plate-glass windows in an uneasy, speculative way. I was glad to see it.
“Lies,” Norton said. “You people all lie each other up. That’s all.”
“What you’re suggesting is totally beyond belief,” Brown said.
“We don’t have to stand here chewing it over,” I told him. “Come back into the storage area with me. Take a look. And a listen.”
“Customers are not allowed in the—”
“Bud,” Ollie said, “go with him. Let’s settle this.”
“All right,” Brown said. “Mr. Drayton? Let’s get this foolishness over with.”
We pushed through the double doors into the darkness.
The sound was unpleasant—perhaps evil.
Brown felt it, too, for all his hardheaded Yankee manner; his hand clutched my arm immediately, his breath caught for a moment and then resumed more harshly.
It was a low whispering sound from the direction of the loading door—an almost caressing sound. I swept around gently with one foot and finally struck one of the flashlights. I bent down, got it, and turned it on. Brown’s face was tightly drawn, and he hadn’t even seen them—he was only hearing them. But I had seen, and I could imagine them twisting and climbing over the corrugated steel surface of the door like living vines.
“What do you think now? Totally beyond belief?”
Brown licked his lips and looked at the littered confusion of boxes and bags. “They did this?”
“Some of it. Most of it. Come over here.”
He came—reluctantly. I spotted the flashlight on the shriveled and curled section of tentacle, still lying by the push broom. Brown bent toward it.
“Don’t touch that,” I said. “It may still be alive.”
He straightened up quickly. I picked up the broom by the bristles and prodded the tentacle. The third or fourth poke caused it to unclench sluggishly and reveal two whole suckers and a ragged segment of a third. Then the fragment coiled again with muscular speed and lay still. Brown made a gagging, disgusted sound.
“Seen enough?”
“Yes,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
We followed the bobbing light back to the double doors and pushed through them. All the faces turned toward us, and the hum of conversation died. Norton’s face was like old cheese. Mrs. Carmody’s black eyes glinted. Ollie was drinking another beer; his face was still running with trickles of perspiration, although it had gotten rather chilly in the market. The two girls with CAMP WOODLANDS on their shirts were huddled together like young horses before a thunderstorm. Eyes. So many eyes. I could paint them, I thought with a chill. No faces, only eyes in the gloom. I could paint them but no one would believe they were real.
Bud Brown folded his long-fingered hands primly in front of him. “People,” he said. “It appears we have a problem of some magnitude here.”
VI.
Further Discussion.
Mrs. Carmody.
Fortifications.
What Happened to the Flat-Earth Society.
The next four hours passed in a kind of dream. There was a long and semi-hysterical discussion following Brown’s confirmation, or maybe the discussion wasn’t as long as it seemed; maybe it was just the grim necessity of people chewing over the same information, trying to see it from every possible point of view, working it the way a dog works a bone, trying to get at the marrow. It was a slow coming to belief. You can see the same thing at any New England town meeting in March.
There was the Flat-Earth Society, headed by Norton. They were a vocal minority of about ten who believed none of it. Norton pointed out over and over again that there were only four witnesses to the bag-boy being carried off by what he called the Tentacles from Planet X (it was good for a laugh the first time, but it wore thin quickly; Norton, in his increasing agitation, seemed not to notice). He added that he personally did not trust one of the four. He further pointed out that fifty percent of the witnesses were now hopelessly inebriated. That was unquestionably true. Jim and Myron LaFleur, with the entire beer cooler and wine rack at their disposal, were abysmally shitfaced. Considering what had hap
pened to Norm, and their part in it, I didn’t blame them. They would sober off all too soon.
Ollie continued to drink steadily, ignoring Brown’s protests. After a while Brown gave up, contenting himself with an occasional baleful threat about the Company. He didn’t seem to realize that Federal Foods, Inc., with its stores in Bridgton, North Windham, and Portland, might not even exist anymore. For all we knew, the Eastern Seaboard might no longer exist. Ollie drank steadily, but didn’t get drunk. He was sweating it out as rapidly as he could put it in.
At last, as the discussion with the Flat-Earthers was becoming acrimonious, Ollie spoke up. “If you don’t believe it, Mr. Norton, that’s fine. I’ll tell you what you do. You go on out that front door and walk around to the back. There’s a great big pile of returnable beer and soda bottles there. Norm and Buddy and I put them out this morning. You bring back a couple of those bottles so we know you really went back there. You do that and I’ll personally take my shirt off and eat it.”
Norton began to bluster.
Ollie cut him off in that same soft, even voice. “I tell you, you’re not doing anything but damage talking the way you are. There’s people here that want to go home and make sure their families are okay. My sister and her year-old daughter are at home in Naples right now. I’d like to check on them, sure. But if people start believing you and try to go home, what happened to Norm is going to happen to them.”
He didn’t convince Norton, but he convinced some of the leaners and fence sitters—it wasn’t what he said so much as it was his eyes, his haunted eyes. I think Norton’s sanity hinged on not being convinced, or that at the very least, he thought it did. But he didn’t take Ollie up on his offer to bring back a couple of returnables from out back. None of them did. They weren’t ready to go out, at least not yet. He and his little group of Flat-Earthers (reduced by one or two now) went as far away from the rest of us as they could get, over by the prepared-meats case. One of them kicked my sleeping son in the leg as he went past, waking him up.
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