Dread

by Jason McIntyre

  I turned too hard into the curve and we fishtailed, much worse than before when the gravel was nearly dry. Doc screeched a curse word and in my periphery, I saw him clutch at the dashboard. The back end of the Plymouth went north and the front end veered south. I tried turning into the skid but it did nothing. I pumped the brakes but they did little. My heart thudded and my breathing stopped.

  We spilled off the road with a roar and spewed rain water and mud into the air. The beams of headlights crossed each other far away from the canting vantage of dark-on-dark horizon. I blinked hard. We tilted and landed against something with a heavy clunk and then a thud. A creak followed that and my mind grasped for a single thought.

  How close are we to the edge?

  6.

  I heard Doc’s heavy breathing mixed with rain hammering steel and glass. I looked over at him staring blankly. I cracked the driver’s door and that made the interior light go on. He blinked against the brightness. I peered out at the crack made between the bottom of the door and the foot of the doorway beneath the driver’s seat. Grey mud.

  Looking out the window, I saw only the horizon of the dark blue ocean and the messy cloud work above, meeting at a blurry line. It was full-on evening now and it got dark out here in October shortly after dinner time. No such thing as streetlights way out here. And nothing but headlight beams that seemed to go off to nothingness.

  The Plymouth was still in ‘drive’ so I squeezed the brake and popped it into ’reverse'. I gingerly put my foot on the gas. The Plymouth moved an inch and then I heard the back tires spin, felt them too. I put on more gas. RRRRRRRR. The tires spun. I tried it a few more times. I’d have tried ’drive' again to rock it out of the mud, but I had no idea how close the edge might be. I shouldn’t push my luck.

  I dropped the car out of gear and found ‘park’, then I killed the engine.

  “Doc,” I said. I repeated when he didn’t respond, “Doc.”

  “Yuh, what?” he said as though I’d woken him.

  “Get out your side. I’m coming after you. We’re, uh, right at the edge here.”

  He mobilized himself out of what looked like some kind of wide-eyed coma. He creaked open his door. One foot out, then the other. He stood—finally—and sauntered off through the downpour, bringing a shaky hand to his head as though he’d been struck. Maybe he had been.

  I had the presence of mind to take the keys and then I scrambled over the console between the two seats. I got out and the cold rain instantly soaked me. I headed around the rear of the car to the trunk, starting to shiver, as much from the understanding of what had just happened as from the icy rain. I peered around the back quarter panel of the Plymouth at the rear tire of the driver’s side. Eighteen inches to the edge at the back tire and about four inches from the edge at the front.

  I let out a breath of fatigue, exasperation and scrambled nerves.

  My hands shook. I realized this as I fumbled with Doc’s jangled mess of keys and finally managed to get one into the trunk’s lock. I popped the lid and rummaged. Doc’s tool kit, as he called it, was back there. Two flashlights and a couple of rain ponchos proved a handy find. I pulled one over my head and took the flashlights. I slammed the trunk and went over to Doc with the other poncho. “Put this on,” I said to him like a Da to his boy. Dutifully, he unfolded it, blinking against the pelting rain, and did as I said.

  I flicked on my flashlight and started walking.

  “Where we goin’?” he said to me, as if waking from a dream.

  I stopped and turned half way back to him. “I’m going to the lighthouse.” I pointed to where I saw it on the black-on-blue horizon. “You can walk back if'n you want, get the tow truck. Or you can come. After Ma, I’d think you’d want to help with this mess you made.”

  He said nothing. Only lowered his head and started off towards the lighthouse with me.

  7.

  We reached the seawall after about twenty minutes of hiking through muddy slop. Waves crashed against it, big ones, up and over the top, spraying noisy foam across the width of its head. I headed down into the stairwell that led to what I hoped was the inside of the seawall. It seemed like a hundred and fifty years since I’d been here and my memory of it was spotty.

  The seawall was a big rock and stone breakwater wall built up from the rocky edges. It wound on a curve out to the Howl Point outcropping where the Pelée Lighthouse stood. As far as I knew, the tunnel inside the breakwater wall was the only way in or out. No sign of Mac’s white Ford. No lights lit the area or the lighthouse, but the sliver of moon peeked out from behind storm clouds enough to light it as a silhouette against the backdrop of heaving sea and roiling sky.

  To get out of the rain, we went down the steps into the dugout and tried the heavy steel doors, now so badly rusted and bent, they didn’t close all the way. One side swung open enough to let us in.

  The dark cavern was lit by nothing but the beams of our two flashlights. We headed in and, after a few dozen paces under the low ceiling, the roar of the rain dissipated. Only a drip-drip-drip and the gurgle of water running between the bricks at our feet remained. Doc’s breathing was heavy. He had one hand on his chest and his steps looked laboured. But he trudged on with me, keeping pace.

  Beside us, a giant, haphazard hole had been blown into the brick wall. It looked like a stick of dynamite had done it. The broken brick and dirt lay all around. I went to the mouth of the opening and shone my flashlight in to the black expanse.

  “Someone’s been busy,” the doc said. It was another tunnel, adjacent to this one, and there was no light in it either. But I thought I saw one of those hand trucks they used to use on the rail lines. Two men would pump teeter-totter style on it as if to get water from a well, but it would propel them and a few goods down the track. I saw the gleam of two metal rails under it in the light of my torch and then my sight fell on a simple yellow line that ran from under the hand truck out of that tunnel and into this one.

  My eyes followed the line up to our feet and then out into the breakwater tunnel where we stood. This tunnel would lead us to the base of the lighthouse. The other? I didn’t know. Along my right-hand side the bright yellow line ran haphazard in the dark. It followed the floor of the corridor with us, in and out of puddles, winding this way and that. I went over to it and crouched down. It was an extension cord, maybe one from Parson’s Hardware on Main. I followed it with my flashlight as we kept moving through the tunnel. I heard crickets chirping. Their sound echoed. Doc and I said nothing.

  The yellow extension cord ended in a knot and the black end was plugged into another black end that led to a new cord, this one bright orange. I followed it.

  More crickets chirped, in a chorus now. Like they’d gotten into the tunnel out of the storm. A huge rushing sound blasted the tunnel and we both stopped in our last footfalls. I assumed it was a wave off the ocean—I’d seen two crash up on the seawall as we’d approached in the dark and they looked massive. Nothing new for me, but I was more used to sailing around them, rather than being a sitting landlubber unable to get out of their way. The whole tunnel rumbled with the wave’s crash and it felt like the sturdiness of the seawall was being challenged. The noise and movement dribbled away and, in a moment, I heard the chirping again, Doc’s heavy breathing again and our own shoes in the puddles and on the brickwork below.

  Up ahead, I saw light around the bend. The orange extension cord disappeared and I flicked off my flashlight to make sure it was new light and not just a reflection of our own. I motioned for Doc to extinguish his and he did, casting us into near blackness, but with a splash of faded yellow coming from around the tunnel’s bend ahead.

  We strode on. I could hear voices now, the talking of men. Around the corner, we came to a doorway and a sloppy, rusted, metal door, similar to the one that had led us down into this passage. The door was cracked a foot and a half and the orange extension cord trailed inside at the floor. With my heart rate increasing, I put my hand on the cold stee
l and eased it open with a squeal of its hinges.

  Inside was a much larger cavern of the same brown-red brickwork and grey grout but lit with a handful of construction lighting rigs. Something flashed and then I realized the men’s voices came from announcers, calling a play. A baseball run.

  “—And Reggie Jackson cracks one into the stands off Welch. Ladies and gentlemen, if my math is correct, that makes eleven hits for the Yanks and the second homer of the series for Mr. October—”

  Scattered chip bags littered the brick floor. So did candy wrappers, empty food tins and cereal boxes and what looked like chicken bones, chewed nearly clean. Every kind of food can and drink bottle made up the array of mess. The place smelled foul: rotten food, sugar, coffee and tobacco.

  The orange extension cord ran to the biggest T.V. I’d ever seen.

  From the T.V. and hi-fi speakers: “—Well, your math is right on, Al, and I must say, I do believe the Yankees have this series wrapped up. I can’t see how L.A. can possibly come back from a deficit like this. What an incredible performance tonight by Bucky Dent and Brian Doyle—and the venerable Reggie Jackson—”

  Out in front of the large-screen TV, flashing blue and white light, was a La-Z-Boy recliner, or at least a knock-off, and I saw the top of someone’s head. “Mac?” I said, as I approached and rounded to the side of the recliner with a wide berth.

  “Sonofa—!” The man in the chair stood up and threw a handful of potato chips at the screen. Doc was somewhere behind me but he’d caught his breath. At least, I couldn’t hear it through his nostrils like before. “Bobby Welch never stood a chance. He was robbed, I tell ya. Robbed!” It was the Moort Man; I knew it was him from the profile of rotted, yellowing skin that hung off his jowl, and that matted hair in its patchwork of at least three different colours. He was reacting to the play, no doubt, but he was either unaware of me or ignoring me. I was only about ten or twelve feet from him, approaching with a soft tread.

  I was more astonished that Moort was talking in complete sentences. Or even with words at all. The frothing animal I’d seen throw Doc down to Ma’s kitchen tile was replaced by this almost-normal looking human being. But it was him. He was wearing an untucked man’s dress shirt and dark pants, both of which looked too big for him. I couldn’t see the tattoo of a B-24 with the bare-breasted girlie on the side saying, “Liberty for all!” but it would be under his shirt, I knew it would. Just as I knew my Da’s tattoo would be on his mottled mishmash of a chest too.

  He had bare feet, no socks or shoes, just those brown-leather feet that could have passed for old slippers if not for the sickly toenails glinting yellow in the flashes from the TV.

  His eyes flicked sideways to me and he darted a black tongue out to lick his bloated lips, bug-like. “I wouldn’t get too close, cowboy,” he said, his voice a low growl. “They won’t like it, not one bit, Y’hear?”

  “What?” I said, a frown of confusion.

  “The hive, cowboy, they have plans for me. Big ones. And if you take another step, I’m sure you’ll holler for it.”

  I did take another step. Another two, actually, as I got around to a three-quarter’s view of him bathed in the flashing light of the ballgame. Against the roar of applause and the announcers’ voices, I wasn’t sure I heard him right. It was inertia. I just kept moving.

  Moort’s eyes contracted, throwing wrinkles around them. His shoulders tensed and I saw the veins of his neck pulse under its mottled skin.

  A swelling roar started, somewhere at the outskirts of the big round room, and I shuddered as the sound heaved into the space. It could have been a cacophony of birds, but in a moment, I understood what it actually was: the altogether sing-song of crickets. Hundreds. Or maybe thousands.

  And then they entered. From between the bricks, grates in the floor and gaps in the high ceiling and a heavy contingent from the doorway where we’d entered. Thousands of them. But they weren’t the dark brown or black I knew from catching crickets in the fields north of town as a boy. These wore a light ashen grey in the fallow light. Waves of them entered with that shrieking throng of chirruping. The nearer ones were white, stark white. They only looked grey at a distance in this under-lit cavern of stone and brick. They hopped and danced in a sloppy set of converging waves, covering the food containers, apple cores and animal bones strewn across the floor.

  Doc screamed. I turned to him. They crawled up his pant legs and on his shoes. And in a few seconds they reached me. I widened my stance but there was nowhere to run. I saw the only exit and another closed metal door. I didn’t think I’d make it there before the mass of crickets hopped up my pants legs and covered me.

  The Moort Man let loose a combination of a wide-mouthed growl and a shout. He swung his arm out in an arc. And, in an instant, the chirruping fell away from its stormy torrent, not to silence but to a volume less likely to perforate my ear drums. A heavy blanket of noisy, scattered chirps remained. And the throng stopped their hopping. Doc flicked them from his pants and arms. He shook himself with a disgusted shiver. I pushed a few away from me with the toe of my shoe. As near as I could tell, the floor was covered with the small white insects except for three areas, one around my feet, one around Moort and his recliner and one around Doc that gave him a few bricks of space.

  The white mass writhed and hopped and chirped at our feet but whatever Moort had shouted at them, they stayed at bay.

  I wanted to holler at him over the noise, wanted to ask him why he’d been in Ma’s house, what he had been doing there. I wanted to know why he’d attacked the doc, why he ran out of there like a possessed animal. I wanted to know if he’d seen Ma. If he had been standing over her in the dark and scared her so badly she went for that vial of Doc’s pills.

  Instead of getting lost in the thicket of all that, I called out to him, at a volume above the mass of diseased-looking white crickets. I started with the basics.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Franklin W. Moort, at yer service. Well. Most of me.” He threw out his hand at me with a big grin and I saw sickly, yellow teeth that matched his toenails. I didn’t make to shake it, but he withdrew his hand and slicked it back through his unkempt hair with a big laugh, saying, “Just joshin’ ya. I don’t think you wanna shake that.” And then as an afterthought, he said, “And it’ll be you at my service, I’d venture to guess.” Then he let out another gale of laughter.

  I cringed at the noise and at this version of Frank Moort.

  From behind me, Doc shouted, “Yer dead, Franky. You’ve been dead for years now—”

  “Ah, but Doc, here I am. In the flesh, as it were. You can’t believe your own eyes, my stout ol’ friend. They lie. And I never made it in the ground, did I?”

  “But how—?”

  Frank Moort reached down and silenced the TV, then gave a wave of his hand across the room. “All these fellers, here, Doc. All’s I know is this. The black critters with all them legs, they do the taking apart and the white one’s here—” he surveyed the chirping mass at his feet “—well, they put the puzzle back together.”

  Frank sat and gestured for us to come closer. “Come on in, they won’t bite. I’ll tell you a little bedtime story.” With cautious footsteps, I did. And the crickets made room for me, hopping this way and that, colliding with one another and me, but opening space as I moved. I thought of that movie I saw when I was a kid, the one with Charlton Heston as Moses parting the sea. I wasn’t led by God. I was drawn by Frank Moort, magnetically. I couldn’t stop looking at him. I barely remembered the man who was my dad’s boss when I was a kid, the man who came by with his wife to offer condolences and even spoke at the funeral. But my mind was misfiring on what was real memory and what was a pretended thing. I wasn’t around for the death of Frank Moort but all those autopsy pictures seemed like an awful big scheme for a prank.

  Doc and I stood nearly shoulder to shoulder between Frank and the flashing T.V. and Hi-Fi. He sat cross-legged, like a perfect gentleman at a mixe
d company potluck or neighbourhood get-together.

  “I’d offer ya both a chair,” he said with more of his yellow smile, “but I only stole the one. Now listen, boys. I know it don’t make sense. Doesn’t make one bit—not even to me—but I’ve been pretty lonely the last while. Thought I’d gone right off m’rocker, tell ya the truth. So’s I’ll just lay it out for ya.”

  Both Doc and me stood dumb before him and let him talk.

  “After Caroline left, it was emptiness. And an awful sick. Puking my guts out, watching my hair pile up in the drain and matted in the living room rug. I remember sitting alone. Lots. Then going to bed one night and that was it. I woke in the dark to a terrible sound of thunder in my own head and chest. And there was this man, with bright red hair. He was standing over me.

  “Then the dark...and your voice, Doc, yours and a pile of others.

  “Them black critters, they gnawed me clean through, tiny little jaws devouring every bit of the pie, took me apart and I have memories of that. Awful memories. Some scraps of this and that, a tile floor and a white table. Then there was black. Black for so long I thought I was in the worst kind of hell.

  “Then, upchucked, mingling with spit and stomach and bile, every last piece of the Moorty puzzle regurgitated like last night’s supper after too much vodka...and I come conscious in your Ma’s place, Son—” He said this part directly to me, as though he knew exactly who I was and had complete understanding of all that had transpired for Mac and me.

  “Realized I was eating pineapple and beans. And I heard these voices, Y’know? These voices just crammed up inside my head. Pieces of the leftovers, I think. Near as I can tell, this here tiny white army put Humpty Dumpty back together, some blocks from this box, some from another set of building blocks, some from another altogether. A hodgepodge. And ain’t we a bee-yoot? I think each set had its own kind of damage. My guts stank of rot from whatever it was killed me. Now my organs’re all brand new. Now we keep each other company, all us voices in one big ol’ ‘Super Moort'...