by Dean H Wild
“Mortality Log,” Kippy commented and took charge, flipping the cover open to reveal a ledger-style grid filled with handwritten entries. “Buddy of mine kept one in the field during dub-ya dub-ya two, and he fussed over it like a mother hen. At least, at first. Name, rank, serial number, and he made a list of wounds and injuries, indicating what was most likely the death-dealer if there was a mess of them. I think his pen got a might heavy after a while because he cut back to just name, rank and serial. Then one day he put the book down and did nothing but stare out at the horizon. Did it long enough to get himself sent home. Was a janitor at the canning fact’ry over to Drury until 1980 when he put his mouth around the business end of a Remington shotgun.” His finger slid down the page. It made a dry scraping sound. “Olivia Rebedew, May 17, emphysema. John Pesch, May 17, heart failure. Emily Wozniak, May 18, consumption. William Zehren, May 18, diphtheria. All 1939. What’d you call it a short while ago, Will? A once-a-century boogeyman?”
Will ducked in closer to study the page, his eyes sharp and hard. “TB. Infirm lung. Melancholy? So many different things, all within a few days.”
“Like I said . . . ” Kippy tipped another scholarly finger in the air. “Doesn’t jibe, does it?”
Mick looked directly at Kippy. “Jibe or not, what did those double barrel boys have in mind with the tunnel? You must have some idea.”
“Told you, I left town before they was done, long before they laid in the concrete walls. Dads were supposed to fill in their sons on the matter, generation to generation so we would always be ready, but my dad never did lemme back in on it. What little I know came from Orlin, and he only spilt a little bit on a few drunk nights shortly after I came back.”
Kippy hooked a finger in the box again and picked at the papers resting inside.
“I just don’t know.” Will paced to the back of the bar. “This is Knoll, for God’s sake. The down-low is about Jimmy Conger’s wife running off with that cowboy wannabe from Fond du Lac or how the Prellwitzes haven’t paid property taxes for three years.”
“But sometimes there are darker handshakes,” Mick said, mostly to himself. “Almost always, in fact.”
The question twisted around in his brain with restless aplomb, bumping against the walls of reason, heady with disdain—did something roll toward Knoll with its lips parted in preparation to eventually yawn and gulp? He’d been warned long before Kippy’s story, after all. Peter Fyvie’s presence (ghost? memory? Or was it an hallucinatory manifestation?) offered words that fit the bill almost too perfectly. It’s close, Mick. And it’s hungry. The affirmative was so damned hard to accept. Common sense rejected it out of hand. Still, the bar gloom seemed to tighten around him.
“You have something else here, Mick,” Kippy said. He slid a paper from the box, a large document folded into a tight packet. His old man’s fingers struggled to undo it a layer at a time. “Darned if it doesn’t have Orlin’s writing on it. And it’s dated ’60 to ’61.”
“About the tunnel?”
“Even better,” Kippy said, assessing what was in front of him: a drawing rendered so long ago the ink appeared purple-brown. Dashed lines, notations of measurements, very technical. And a large legend at the top, still undisclosed because the last fold had yet to be turned back.
“Maybe we should stop.” Will’s face was pale. “Something’s happening. Can you feel it?”
Mick nodded. The constricting gloom seemed to lower, to steal his breath.
Kippy said, “Schematic—”
The rest was cut-off by a bone-rattling boom. The lights went out. Beer glasses chattered like crystal teeth. Bottles shattered. Will’s strip sign blazed in the sudden blackness, red and green beads of light spelling out L-I-N-R before it coughed sparks and dropped from its hanger. The silence that followed seemed deafening in its own right.
“Jesus,” Mick called out, gripping the bar like a man caught at a ship’s rail during a sudden swell. “Everybody all right?”
“Fell off the damn stool.” Kippy’s voice was thin and breathless in the dark. “Can I get a hand?”
“If I could see your hand.” Mick groped for him. “Will, got a flashlight? Anything?”
“Breaker box is in the basement. Give me a minute. I’ll try to get to it without breaking my neck. Worst case, I’ve got a brand new generator in the storage room down there.”
Mick caught the sleeve of Kippy’s suit and felt the old man rise easily, which was a good sign. Tough old Kippy. A moment later the lights came up. Neon stuttered. A chorus of electric motors started up around them, an under-the-breath buzz not noticed until it was subtracted from the air and then put back.
“I think we’ve got some trouble,” Kippy said as he climbed back onto his stool and pointed at the ruined LED sign nestled amid broken glasses on the backbar. “L-I-N-R.”
“I saw it,” Mick said. “This is going beyond weird, Kippy.”
“Far beyond.”
“What the hell just happened?” Will walked over from the basement door. He seemed pale and utterly lost. “Every last one of my breakers was tripped. And this mess up here. Jesus!”
“We brought it on.” Kippy tapped a bunched hand on the paper he’d unfolded just before the building shook. “Because we’re close to something here.”
“I’ll ask again,” Will said and thrust a plaintive hand at the blackened sign with its fried electrical cord. “L-I-N-R, same as on the box. What does it mean? What the Christ does it have to do with—”
“Will.”
Mick pointed to the legend printed on the paper in front of Kippy. They all read it over.
LET IT NOT RETURN. L-I-N-R.
“What the hell?” Will said and it sounded like a plea.
“Answers without conclusions,” Mick said as he held up the unfolded sheet. It was, as Kippy had assessed, a schematic drawing of some sort, for a large rectangular apparatus. The words double barrel were written at an angle near the LINR legend. At the bottom, the signature of the chief engineer was printed in neat block letters: Orlin Casper.
“We need to take our time with this. Think it through and compare notes. And like the tunnel, we need to approach it with clearer heads in the light of day. In the meantime, don’t share this with anyone. Hell, nobody would believe us if we tried to describe it, anyway.” They nodded and Mick glanced at Will. “Do you want help with cleaning up back there?”
Will toed some broken glass and shrugged. “No worse than when the cut-ups from the Baylor Picnic storm in here every August. I can handle it. Damn, that sign cost me a hundred bucks.”
They were all picturing it, Mick knew, because it was branded in their memories. The sign. The double barrel schematic. LINR, Let It Not Return. “Let’s get you home, Kippy. I’ll give you a ride.”
“’Preciate it,” Kippy said and brushed at his suit as he stood. “I’m so rattled right now I might drive m’ bike into the weeds. I wish there was somebody else we could call in on this, but no names’ll pop into my head.”
There was Harley, if he felt up to the task. Mick resigned himself to asking his friend privately first thing in the morning. Then he slipped the mortality log and the schematic into the box. Before closing the lid, he froze with a mixed sense of hope and reluctance. “There might be someone else. Is this who I think it is?”
Will was sweeping up, but he stopped to look at them. Mick turned the box and allowed them to read the tape label stuck on the underside of the lid.
LINR—Property of Francis P. Vandergalien—LINR
“Yep,” Kippy said. “That was Cy’s daddy.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“I’m scared, Mick,” Kippy said in the parking lot while Mick loaded his bike into the open trunk. “I know I’m the last one. I can feel the truth of it beating inside of me, harder than my old ticker. Out of all the diggers and engineers and runners, I’m it. I’m also sure another die-off is on our doorstep, turning the knob one tick at a time and grinning wide because it can almost t
aste what’s on the other side. That’s beating hard inside me, too.”
Mick glanced into the back seat, where the LINR box sat, a source and instrument of dismay. He screwed down the defenses around his thoughts the way he’d been taught after the funeral, the way he practiced frequently over the years.
“We all need to settle down,” he said at last.
Kippy turned his head and he once again reminded Mick of an anatomical compass, only this time he pointed squarely with his finger. “In fact it’s better than at our door. I ’spect it’s shining a lantern through the keyhole.”
Mick followed his finger to the southeast.
The Crymost was glowing again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When Mick arrived at work, Harley was at the garage desk turning a greasy hunk of metal over in his hands. The morning sun showed flashes of an open metal port with a metallic flap closure in those huge fingers, and it made Mick think of schematic drawings . . . and of the box locked up in his car. With a pang of nervousness he considered how to best approach the details of the previous night with Harley. This was hardly on a par with casual conversation like did you catch the game last night?
He gave the desktop a jovial knock, just to get the ball rolling. “What’s with the carburetor?”
“Out of the Swisher,” Harley said. The hollows under his eyes seemed nearly black. “Axel couldn’t get her started up this morning. Neither could I, so I sent him packing for the day. The choke pull-off on the damn thing is all twisted up.”
“I can drive into town and pick up a replacement if you want. Today’s my day to paint the village hall interior and I’ll have some time while the first coat dries.”
“I’ll manage the drive if I need it. Pour me a coffee, would you? My hands are black with grease.” So was the desk top. And there was a smudge on his cheek like an inky exclamation mark.
“Listen, Harley, last night I was talking with Kippy Evert and the subject of the Knoll die-off came up. So did some other stuff.”
“Well, Kippy’s got to have some mournful things on his mind of late, what with Orlin’s funeral and all.”
Mick set a cup of coffee down where Harley could reach it. “But there’s more. Did you know there’s a tunnel under this town?”
“Sewer access. Sure.”
“Something more. Something Kippy and a bunch of other men from Knoll helped dig out in the early sixties.”
“Gotta wonder about Kippy sometimes. He seems with it for somebody just over the eighty hashmark, but there’s a way a man’s mind works after a point, if you know what I mean.”
Mick leaned on the edge of the desk. “I saw it, Harley. The mouth of it, anyway. It’s in the basement of The Chapel Bar. Will Adelmeyer didn’t even know it was there until Kippy showed him. And there’s supposedly a machine of some sort in there, something called the double barrel.”
Harley set the carburetor down as if it were exceedingly fragile, his face fixed on the desk. “Oh.”
“He says it was designed as some kind of precaution against another die-off. He said Mellar’s Knoll emptying out in the ‘30s wasn’t a natural fluke or an accident, but something that cycled through on some sort of agenda, and that it’s coming due again. It sounds nutty, I know, but at the bar last night Kippy, Will and I—”
Harley pivoted in his chair. His fists jutted out and shook like those of a child throwing a tantrum. He was staring at a point in distant space. “You’ll have to catch me later, I think.”
“Harley?”
The big man’s face lost all color and crumpled with pain. The grease mark on his cheek was like a black hole in parchment. Mick thought later he was fortunate to be standing because it allowed him to ease Harley to the floor before he toppled out of the chair.
“Goddamn,” Harley said through gritted teeth. “Can’t breathe.”
“Hang in there,” Mick said, wrung up in polarizing bands of concern and panic.
He got out his phone and forced a layer of calm over his thoughts. Then he clasped his friend’s shoulder while he dialed and waited for the 911 operator to pick up.
CHAPTER NINE
Everything seemed to happen with the loose cohesion of dreams. The village EMTs bustled in with record speed—Nancy Berns and Stu Rueplinger were on duty today—and Mick tried to stay out of the way. Harley was out cold and it scared Mick. Unresponsive, he heard Nancy call it. The ambulance came screeching in and men in crisp blue shirts and soft-soled shoes deployed with a sort of steely efficiency, cinching Harley to a stretcher and hoisting him up like some collective machine. They spoke in factual bursts as they worked, and one of them informed Mick they were taking Harley to Hillside Hospital in Drury. Mick was on the phone with Beth Ann at the time, alerting her, and he told the ambulance tech that was fine.
He called Judy on the way to Drury, and it wasn’t until he was in the hospital admitting area that he realized he’d left the village garage wide open. Knoll would just have to be on its honor for a while. It seemed only a few minutes later when Judy came down the hall, her face set and grim.
“What do we know?” Her eyes betrayed a parallel to his own deep running thought: It’s too soon for Harley. Too soon. “Where is Beth Ann?”
“No news yet. And Beth Ann should be here any minute. She was working at the branch in Baylor today.”
“God, I hope she drives carefully. She gets so rattled. What happened? Were you there?”
“Right next to him. You know how people say so-and-so just keeled over? Well, one minute we were talking and I . . . what’s the matter?”
Her eyes were very intense in the diffused hospital light. Penetrating. “There’s more going on with you. All the time. Don’t think I can’t see it.”
Damned eighteen years of marriage.
“Number one, I’m worried about Harley but I’m coping. But there are things from a few days ago I need to come clean about, and something happened at the bar last night. Here is not the place to go into it, though. We need someplace private and quiet.”
Her hands sought his out and gripped them tight. “Bad?”
“Confusing to say the lea—”
“Oh God,” the voice from down the hall made them crane around. Beth Ann ran toward them, her Bank of Dunnsport blazer slipping off one shoulder. A swatch of hair blew across her face like a mousey-brown shadow. “Oh, Judy. Have you heard anything? Where is he?”
Judy caught her by the shoulders and began speaking to her, direct but gentle. At that instant, Mick’s cell phone rang and their portion of the corridor seemed like a pocket of contained chaos. The call was from Cy.
“Where the hell is everybody? I’m looking at a wide open but empty village garage right now. Gordy Prellwitz tells me there was an ambulance.”
“It’s Harley. He’s suffered a—I don’t know, an episode. We’re at Hillside.”
“His wife there?”
“She just got here.”
“Then you don’t need to be handholding him. I got a job for you. Meet me at Pitch Road. We’re going to shut her off.”
“The Crymost?”
“Damn right. I don’t want anybody poking around up there for a while. Reporters, people who believe they’re in an episode of the goddamn X-Files or think they’re Ansel freaking-Adams. Just makes sense to keep everybody away.”
“Right now, Cy? Really? Can’t it wait until we’ve got some word on Harley, for Christ’s sake?”
“Kroener is going to pull through or poop off whether you’re sitting vigil over there or not. There’s town business that needs doing, and I say it needs doing now. Don’t give me a reason to paste the help wanted sign in the village garage window on my way home from Pitch Road.”
“That’s dirty pool, even for you.”
“It’s what makes sense, Logan. Meet me over there or you’re out.”
“Goddamn it.” Mick shook himself as if it might calm his trembling insides. For all of its shitty use of an upper hand, he saw the thinnest
sliver of agreement with Cy’s insistence they shut down the road to The Crymost. For a while at least. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”
Judy convinced Beth Ann to sit in a nearby chair and then stepped away to inform the admission desk of her arrival. Mick caught her on the way back. “I’ve got to go.”
“Go where? You can’t leave.”
“Cy has declared The Crymost off limits and he wants the road blocked right away. He was very insistent. Brutally.” He made sure his expression was very direct. “I’m not wild about leaving right now, but it seems I don’t have a choice. And I have to admit, given the circumstances, I think Cy’s idea is a good one.”
“What’s going on, Mick?”
He left her with a look that promised someplace private and quiet soon, very soon.
CHAPTER TEN
Axel drove down The Plank toward the village hall for the third time, his gut full of steely tightness. The time for Ichabod’s project was here. The certainty of it arrived with the same fingers-in-the-brain sensation that accompanied the details of the task.
A funny and weird son-of-a-bitch, that Thekan/Ichabod. Equally funny and weird was how everything came together. Sure, he intentionally messed up the village mower’s carburetor with a few jabs from a screwdriver, and hopefully that overgrown bag of shit Kroener wouldn’t notice it was intentional. Then he drove by the garage an hour ago, just for the hell of it, and fuck if there wasn’t an ambulance parked out front and a bunch of commotion to go with it. When he rolled past the garage a second time, there was Mick Logan climbing in his car and heading for who knew where, and not another soul around even though the garage was still open. Perfect.
A third pass for good measure showed not a soul, just the morning sun shining into the open garage door. He pulled around back and went right for the ten-gallon gas cans. Full. Heavy.
He dragged one around to the village hall next door, and a tiny bud of thought bloomed. The opportunity for a little retribution was open to him, something personal to top off Ichabod’s project. Logan was one of the big-idea dick wipes in this town, which made him a pain in the ass. Plus, he squealed to Unky about the roach in the drawer the other day. So, maybe it was time to fuck with him. Flame-fuck him, in fact.
