‘What happened in this town during the last couple of weeks leading up to and including yesterday is a tragedy of major proportions. A deadly force is loose and it poses a threat to each and every one of us. But this is not a criminal case. No one person or conspiracy of persons is behind this force. No one could have known, until this force came out into the open yesterday morning, what we were up against. Over the last two weeks this police force made every reasonable effort to solve the mystery of the violent deaths of three people in Millville, and we weren’t able to do it. Yesterday we found out why. Whatever it is, and I have to tell you that we do not know yet what it is, we will face it and overcome it We have asked for, and we expect to receive, the help of state and federal authorities.
‘This office has been flooded with calls suggesting that yesterday’s incident was the result of witchcraft, and I saw on some of last night’s news reports that some people think there’s something strange and evil about the town of Millville, that’s causing this terrible business. I want to state categorically that I do not believe this is true. There is no witchcraft here and there is nothing unusual about Millville. This town is as normal, as ordinary and as sane as any other town in the country. What has been happening here is outside of us, a force of nature gone berserk, perhaps. But no Salem witchcraft, no evil, twisted minds, no Charles Mansons or anything else like that. Millville is clean, not foul. Millville is healthy, not sick. Millville may be in trouble, but it is not a monster or a freak.
‘I would ask those of you who have come from out of town, especially those of you working with newspapers, radio or television, to help us through our ordeal. I’m sure you will.’
Sturdevent turned to his fact sheet. That didn’t go so bad, he thought. At least they listened, and he had heard only a little fidgeting from the audience. It should even impress the Mayor, a statement like that More than the kind of thing a cop like Hanley could ever come up with.
‘Chief, how many people died yesterday?’
‘Thirteen so far. Thirty-two other people are in the hospital with injuries. Four are critical, I believe, but I think some of the others may already have been sent home.’
‘Do you believe that this thing is in any way supernatural?’
‘No.’
‘Why was the gathering at Mason’s Mill allowed to take place in the first place?’
Bastard. That had to come. Sturdevent had worked out a pat answer he knew wouldn’t satisfy anyone for long. ‘We were under the impression that it was to be a small religious event, nothing like what developed.’
‘Is it true you have an All-Points Bulletin out on the Virgin Mary?’
There were a few muffled laughs from the crowd. Sturdevent couldn’t see who had asked the question. He decided the best thing to do was to ignore it.
‘Anything else?’ he asked levelly.
‘Are you going to release the names of the dead people?’
‘In a couple of hours, I expect. We haven’t been able to contact the next of kin in each case yet, but I think we will within another couple of hours.’
‘How many were children?’
‘Eight.’
‘Is it true that one of the persons who was killed was a priest?’
‘Yes.’
‘If you don’t think the thing is supernatural, and it’s not purely criminal, then what is it?’
‘As I said, we don’t know what it is.’
‘What’s your personal opinion?’
‘I don’t know. I’m a policeman, not a scientist.’
‘It’s been said that you looked into the possibility that the Russians were involved in one of the murders. Is it your feeling that they — Russian scientists — could be behind this whole matter?’
‘We have no evidence at this time to link the Russians or any other foreign power to the events in this town.’
‘Then are you specifically ruling that possibility out?’
‘I’m not ruling out anything.’
*
Lasker and Lutz wandered out of the police station and sat down on the front steps of the building. They had heard enough of Sturdevent’s press conference and had decided to get some fresh air.
‘Have you noticed all the out-of-state license plates in town now?’ Lutz asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘We’re really on the map now.’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘How’d you like his speech?’
‘Ridiculous.’
‘Bad composition, I thought. I’d give him a D for it if he handed it in for grading.’
‘Trying to sound like Churchill, but it didn’t come off.’ Lasker fiddled with the dials on his portable cassette recorder. He had used the second side to record Sturdevent’s statement — the first side was full already. He must have left it on during yesterday’s trouble at the Mill.
A tall, gangling youth slouched along the sidewalk, spotted the two men and stopped.
‘Hiya, Mr Lutz,’ he said.
‘Nardello,’ Lutz said with distaste. The student wore a tee-shirt that carried the message: I choked Linda Lovelace.
‘I saw ya there yesterday, Mr Lutz.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yeah. How do you explain it? That thing, I mean? Think it’s from outer space?’ Nardello tried to look intelligent and concerned, but failed to carry it off.
‘I don’t know.’ This thing must really be getting to me, Lutz thought, if I can’t even put down Nardello.
‘I thought it was a mass hallucination,’ Nardello said firmly. ‘You know, hysteria. Everybody expected to see something, so they did, and then some of them got trampled when the crowd panicked.’
‘Did you tell the police?’ Lutz asked indifferently.
‘Hell, no, they’d only laugh at me. They were there too, you know.’
‘Didn’t you see the blue light too?’ Martin Lasker queried.
‘Sure, but I still think it wasn’t real. Just a big… like a group trip, you know? It woulda been neat if some people didn’t get hurt and stuff.’
‘That’s your considered opinion, is it, Nardello?’ Lutz was annoyed that the student, this one in particular, was making more sense than he felt capable of at the present time.
‘Yeah. I guess so,’ Nardello said. For several minutes no one spoke and the student got tired of standing around. ‘I’ll see ya, Mr Lutz. I gotta go.’
‘Good-bye.’ Lutz pronounced the syllables as two separate words.
‘That’s an interesting argument,’ Lasker said, after Nardello had shuffled out of sight.
Lutz snorted. ‘You don’t believe that.’
‘Makes as much sense — or nonsense — as anything else I’ve heard or thought of yet’
‘That thing was real to me — in the classroom, in the field with Sandra and at the Mill yesterday. Ask your friend Marge, she’s in the hospital. Ask that guy who got killed and the married couple over at Heritage House. Ask them all if it was a hallucination.’
‘I’m not saying it is,’ Lasker replied defensively. Dave had been very touchy since yesterday. ‘I just think it might as well be considered as a possibility, along with everything else. Hallucinations can be very real If something could make them even more real, sort of super-real, crossing from the mental to the physical world — ah…’ Lasker waved his hand dismissively. The argument seemed to fall apart like sand. Like everything else connected with the Millville Monster, as one radio announcer had termed it, there was too much improbability. And yet, the most improbable thing of all, the Monster had so far killed sixteen people.
‘Hello, Lasker.’
It was Ned Hanley, with a cup of orange crush in one hand, a cigarette in the other and a smile on his face.
‘Captain Hanley,’ Lasker acknowledged.
‘Who’s this?’ Hanley sat down on the step, gesturing with his cigarette to Lutz. ‘Jimmy Olson?’
‘Dave Lutz,’ Lasker replied. ‘Teaches at the high school.’
‘Oh, hi,�
� Hanley smiled. ‘I thought everybody around here now was a newspaperman or a cop, and I can tell you aren’t a cop.’ Lutz scowled and resumed staring at the sidewalk. ‘Too hot in there,’ Hanley continued to Lasker. ‘They’re really giving the Chief a hard time.’
Before Lasker could think of anything to say, a short, elderly man came up to him, grabbed his arm urgently and said, ‘Are you a reporter?’
‘Uh, yes, I am.’
‘You must listen to me. I can tell you what it is.’
Hanley and Lutz watched with scepticism evident on their faces. ‘Who are you?’ Lasker asked.
‘Doctor Gabriel Acevedo, and I have made a study of these things. You must hear what I have to say.’
‘All right,’ Lasker said reluctantly. ‘What do you think it is?’
‘Jinn,’ Dr Acevedo said simply, and his eyes lit up with the word.
‘Gin?’ Lutz chuckled.
‘J-i-n-n,’ Dr Acevedo spelled it out. ‘Jinn. In Arabian mythology the universe is full of jinns, which are for all practical purposes demons. They may be friendly or hostile, and I believe what we have here are malevolent jinns terrorising your town of Millville.’ Dr Acevedo paused to catch his breath and then continued. ‘The commonly held and ignorant view today is to think of genies in a bottle or a lamp, and so on. You know that, everyone does. But the real jinn can assume any different form it wishes, and it takes great pleasure in harming mankind.’
‘Listen, Gob-reel,’ Ned Hanley interjected. ‘I’m a policeman and you can’t expect me to swallow this crap.’
‘A policeman! Good. I’m telling you it’s true. The jinns are demons born of fire, they can become visible or invisible at will and they have a vast range of supernatural powers. What happened yesterday was a display of just that. A malignant jinn.’
‘So the Arabs are doing it to us,’ Lutz said. ‘It figures.’
‘Believe me,’ Dr Acevedo urged. ‘I think this town is in the possession of two, three, maybe more jinns. They have, as it were, marked this place as their own, and that means your whole town is in great danger. Great, great danger.’
Hanley sneered and lit another cigarette. The town was in danger all right, from cranks and oddballs like this guy. Bullshit was the order of the day, he reflected.
‘I’m telling you,’ Dr Acevedo repeated.
Martin Lasker had observed all this without saying anything. There was certainly something peculiar about Dr Acevedo, but he didn’t have the fanatic gleam of just another crank. Rather, he had the rumpled, pedantic air of an academic.
‘Do you teach somewhere, Doctor?’ Lasker inquired.
‘Yes, Boston,’ the elderly man said quickly. ‘But I am not important. What is important is the jinn, and what they will do to you.’
‘What will they do to us, Doctor?’ Lutz asked in a bored tone of voice.
‘More damage, more trouble, and quite possibly more injuries or death to people.’
‘What should — assuming you’re right — what should we do about the jinn?’ Lasker found the idea intriguing. Perhaps there was a short news item in it — visiting professor warns of mythological demons, etc.
‘Evacuate the town,’ Dr Acevedo answered promptly. ‘That is the only safe, sure thing to do. You cannot try to fight them and you cannot hope to outlast them. Of course, they are prankish and impulsive, and they may leave of their own accord. But it wouldn’t be safe to count on that.’
‘Well,’ Dave Lutz yawned. ‘We’ve had the Catholics and now the Moslems. Who’s next — the Shintoists or the Christian Scientists?’
*
The pleasant drone of crickets drifted up on the evening breeze to Father Lombardy’s room. He smoked cigarettes, one lit from the burnt-down end of the last. Harsh, untipped French cigarettes. He thought he was burning his throat away, steadily, systematically, and he didn’t know why. It was something to do.
Father Slomcenski didn’t deserve to die. Not then, not so pointlessly. He belonged in the land of the living, on the golf course where he probably would have been on any other Saturday morning. Any normal Saturday morning. In the land of the living. With the rest of the survivors.
A freak death in a freak situation.
‘Gosh,’ Father Slomcenski had said when the crowd turned around and overwhelmed them. Both priests had gone down to the ground, it was impossible to escape — or so it had seemed at the time. Yet Father Lombardy survived, with bruises and cuts, whereas someone had stepped on Father Slomcenski’s head, breaking his neck. It was that simple.
Father Lombardy had slept only in short, fitful bursts in the thirty-six hours since the incident at the Mill. He had been short and sharp with Father Connors, and in a brief moment of cruelty the pastor reminded him that he had been in touch with the Chancery, which had sent its own observers to Mason’s Mill that day. Father Lombardy, feeling more useless than ever, remained in his room. He remembered reading books by people who had been through German concentration camps during World War II and the enormous anguish they had suffered because they had survived while their families and friends had perished. Now he too wondered why he was still living when Father Slomcenski had died on the ground next to him. It was hard to accept, and they hadn’t even been close friends. Just — colleagues.
A daze — he had walked away in a daze. He had seen the thing twice now, and had felt its power. A power loose among the survivors. What was it? The unknown, and that in itself said everything. Father Lombardy knew now what had never occurred to him before — that there is no place for the unknown with man. Everything had to be something, capable of being named, tagged and put in place, if not actually explained and understood. Not pure knowledge, not Faust’s dream, but something much more banal. An ability to cope and assign that suggests knowledge. Man can live with mysteries, in fact to a certain extent he needs them — the Holy Trinity or the Immaculate Conception, these things he could not know or understand but he could accept. They would fit in his picture of the universe.
But not this thing that had come on them like an evil visitation. That was a mystery, and it could not remain so. No one could stand it. Mysteries do not appear out of the sky, kill people, and disappear, without some answer, some explanation. You cannot call it the unknown and then forget about it. It’s a warp, no, more than that, a vacuum in the fabric of reality. No, that’s still not it, Father Lombardy thought. It’s a kind of anti-reality that wreaks havoc with the normal course of events.
He remembered reading a magazine article about snake venom, which is almost pure protein. Protein is essential to life, so why should snake venom be so deadly to life? Because it was too much for the body to handle, it jammed the system, destroying instead of aiding life. It didn’t fit the pattern. Conflicting signals resulted in total paralysis, breakdown and death. The blue cloud was like that, the pure protein of death.
Father Lombardy explored the analogy for a few moments, then lit another cigarette.
It wasn’t an escaped cloud of chemical pollution, that much was certain. He regretted that fact because, although he never quite believed his own argument, he knew it was a good one, better than many he had heard. But it was irrelevant now.
What was it?
It had to be knowable, he was sure of that. Only God in His infinite ways was unknowable, and Father Lombardy was sure that the blue cloud was not God, the Virgin Mary or any of the angels.
What would the observer priests report back to the Chancery? He would enjoy hearing what they had to say. How could anyone be an expert at this?
The Devil? Demonology, possession, Satanism, witchcraft — no, it was none of these. Not unless the entire history, literature and mythology on the subject was wrong. Father Lombardy found it hard to believe in the Devil anyhow. It was a subject the Church tended to play down somewhat these days, as being rather old-fashioned. Positive thinking said you should stress the good, the holy, the right way, not build up gruesome tales of demons and evil spirits. Of course Evil existed, but t
o personify it too much was not a wise thing to do. No, the Devil, if he existed in the traditional sense, worked to a purpose. With cunning and arrogance. But the blue cloud merely appeared and disappeared, killing people mindlessly, aimlessly. It was a thing, and it had to be knowable.
Why had he left the scene again? Why was he so numb and unobservant both times he had encountered it? The questions came back to Father Lombardy’s mind, again and again. Was he afraid of seeing something, of knowing?
He would go back. Even though it was now getting dark the sky would probably be quite bright and he might see something, or feel something, that would give him a better idea. He slipped on his loafers, tucked his shirt in his pants, took cigarettes and matches, and left the rectory.
As he drove through Millville, Father Lombardy recalled the times he had gone back to the clearing near Emerson School. He had seen nothing there on each return visit. And all he had felt was a little foolish. But this time might be different. For one thing, the blue light had been much bigger and brighter at Mason’s Hill than it had been when he saw it with Joey Pomar. Joey Pomar — not listed among the dead, lucky boy. What did the Pomars think now of their Virgin Mary?
Even if this time was no different, Father Lombardy felt he had to go. Too late again, perhaps, but necessary. This thing had brought to light weaknesses in himself he hadn’t known about, and it disturbed him. He had to get to the bottom of it. He had been a self-confident person; now he realised that that was false, a veneer behind which hid considerable doubt and confusion. He had been complacent; now he was restless. He had been a smooth-talker; now he was incoherent with other people. He had been an extrovert, a take-charge fellow; now he was withdrawn and unassertive — as witness his performance with Henderson and the other men in the rectory last week. This thing had snarled him up. Personally.
It was a good, clear night and the moon would help him at the Mill. When Father Lombardy turned into the dirt road he wondered if he would find police posted at the site. That might be a problem. Yes — he braked quickly. Just inside the turn-off the dirt road was blocked. The police had set up three lines of barricades, running from side to side. Too much trouble to move, he thought. There didn’t seem to be anyone posted there, which was a good sign. He could drive back to the main road, swing into the field and hope to re-join the dirt road further along, as some people had done yesterday. But he might easily drive into a ditch in the dark and get stuck. He got out and walked.
The Fates Page 15