The Crymost

by Dean H Wild

  The back door of the village hall was a flimsy hollow-core, warped and peeling after years of conversation with the elements. It was locked, but three good tugs broke the jamb and the door swung out at him with a shudder and a creak. He slipped into the back room that was full of boxed papers and began to slop gasoline around. Then he went to the front office, a space tidier than such a shithole deserved. There was a ladder and some buckets sitting around, as if Logan was getting ready to paint the place up. Oh, there’d be a splash of color, all right. Real soon.

  He parked the gas can, still half full, under the kneehole desk next to the front door and covered it with loose sheets of newspaper. Then, in a move he felt showed exemplary prowess, he unlocked the front door ahead of time, so Logan could boogie right on in. He left through the back again, and with a second flash of genius (man, your brain is a fucking machine today), he pulled some lengths of weathered two-by-fours from a pile behind the building and tilted them against the door in a series of diagonals, bracing the door closed.

  Then he pulled around behind the old Ice Dreams shop across The Plank where he could watch and wait. It might be an hour before that fuckwit Logan showed up, or it might be half the day, depending on what the ambulance business was all about. But he was sure Logan would be back. Everything was lined up too perfectly today for him not to show. He fired up a joint, put on his best under-the-weather voice and called his Unky at the F&F. The grilles were off the in-floor grinder, but they would have to stay that way until he felt better and could resume the cleanup. Unky Cy said it wasn’t a problem. The mill was closed for the day anyway because Cy was a little under the weather himself.

  Everything was falling into place today. Everything.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Mick found Cy about a hundred yards down Pitch Road erecting a six-foot steel pole on the shoulder. When Mick got out of the car, Cy scowled and armed sweat off his forehead.

  “About time. This is a two-man job if ever there was one.”

  It wasn’t, but Mick nodded anyway. “A lot of things in this town are. You hold it while I sink it in.”

  He took up a pole driver and had the pole standing tall and firm in less than a minute. The second one went just as quickly. “Ground’s pretty soft, yet,” Cy said, distracted, and glanced toward the rise at the end of Pitch Road. “Good thing.”

  “Anything you want to get off your chest?” Mick asked as they strode to where a heavy tow chain rested in the grass. They dragged it over to hang it between the poles. Mick imagined they must look like men holding a tug-o-war with grade 80 alloy steel instead of rope.

  “If there was, what makes you think I’d share it with you?’

  “I can handle you dragging me away while my friend is in the hospital. If you want to be the boss man and pull rank like that, I guess that’s your prerogative. But at least talk to me. I’m not the enemy, Cy. I’m just trying to figure out a few things about this town of late. If we can add what you have and what I have together, maybe we can come up with some answers when people start asking questions. Because once you start chaining off roads, you can bet the questions will come. And the speculation.”

  “This here is just me listening to my gut, Logan.” He secured his end of the chain and stepped back. His hand worked over his shirt pocket where an oval-shaped object made a noticeable bulge. “My gut has made more decisions for this town than the damn village board can ever count. And Knoll hasn’t suffered yet.”

  Mick stepped back, too, chain mounted and swaying. “And what does your gut tell you to do next? After this?”

  The man’s mouth pressed down into a hard line. “When I think of it, I’ll let you know. Now get back to town and get to work, ‘cause you ain’t off the hook yet. You got a cell phone so you can get a call if something about Koerner comes up. In the meantime, my boss man prerogative, as you put it, sets me up in a place where I still call the shots and that village hall isn’t going to paint itself. Your place is in the village doing what we pay you to do.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “Damn right we will. Get to the hall, Logan, and get to work.”

  Cy marched to his car and executed a squealing U-turn onto The Plank.

  Judy called with news just as Mick climbed into his truck. Harley’s blackout was brought on by a calcium imbalance in his blood, she said, and they were going to keep him for a few days. He was sleeping and would remain sedated until at least dinner time, so there was really no point visiting until later that evening.

  “Okay,” he told her, “then I guess Cy gets his way on this one. I’ll get a little work done around here and go back to Drury after supper.”

  Mick’s next order of business was to check the messages on the garage answering machine. There was one. It was Kippy Evert, sounding excited and a little breathless.

  “Mick, don’t know if this means anything, but I remember you asking about a sort of man-in-black fella the other day at Copeland’s. Don’t know why, but it got me to thinkin’ about some old books I keep in the cellar. Something else t’ throw on the pile when we talk, I guess. Sorry t’ hear about Harley. Hope that all works out.”

  At last, Mick went over to the village hall, a gallon of paint in each hand, and walked right in.

  The air in the hall was rank, but any further consideration he might have given it slipped behind other thoughts racing through his head, the primary one concerning the private, informative time he promised his wife. The phrase forces at work crept in, quiet and logical. So much he needed to share with Judy. And Harley, too. The evening, still hours away, promised to be rough.

  He put the paint cans down and went in the back room to find some brushes. The back room storage shelves, so neatly arranged, made him think of Judge Thekan asking about town records. In turn, his thoughts swung inexplicably around to the tang in the air. Familiar. In fact, it was—

  The first sound was like a metal washtub hitting the floor in the next room. A second later the building seemed to expel a mighty breath around him, a sound-stealing whummm noise followed by the slam of the front door. The pieces came together in his head with alarming clarity. A wave of heat blasted in from the front office and knocked him off his feet. Flames, like the spill of a yellow and blue tide, roared toward him.

  And then, the voice from the dark back corner.

  “You better get over here, Mick. And you better hit it high.”

  ***

  Axel ran across Forest Street and ducked behind the bank building. The fire took off kickass style the minute his match hit the gasoline, so there was no need to worry whether or not he’d fucked it up. But he wanted to watch. Why he didn’t run back to the Passat, he didn’t know. Maybe it was fortuitous—

  “Fortuitous of you to come this way.”

  The voice startled a slight cry out of him. He whirled around. “What the fuck, Ichabod?”

  The Judge wasn’t wearing Ichabod clothes anymore. He was in regular stuff, a sport shirt and slacks, like a shoe salesman or the guys in the used car lot in Drury. “Walk with me to your vehicle. Once there, you should make a call, as any good citizen would.”

  Axel blinked and kept pace shoulder to shoulder with Thekan. The front window of the village hall was a frenzy of contained flames. Smoke leaked out around the door and through a seam in the roof. “If I call they’ll know I was here. Not cool.”

  “It’s a guarantee someone has already noticed your car behind the hat shop—or rather, the confectioner’s parlor. It’s a small town, my friend. Places to hide are an illusion. But affectations are practically a matter of record.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  A gray finger swept around and nicked Axel’s throat just above the Adam’s apple. He opened his mouth to balk but in the next instant his brain seemed to go buoyant, like a large foggy balloon. The village became a Technicolor panorama, the street jostled on hinges and rollers. “Whoa, fucking mega-hit. And I wasn’t even smoking.”

  “Oh, bu
t you were, should someone ask,” Thekan said, his voice a buzz in a box. “Just now, in your car. There will even be a few fine citizens who will attest to seeing you. When you happened to notice the village hall catch ablaze, you called on your telly-phone as fast as your fingers would allow.”

  When they reached the Passat, Thekan opened the door and a billow of sweet smoke boiled out. A pair of doobies were stamped out on the shift console. Totally fucking hilarious.

  “I am primo-grade stoned, man. How’d you do that?” Axel slumped in behind the wheel, his eye immediately drawn to the plump wallet-sized bag on the passenger seat, clear plastic stuffed with telltale shreds of green. “Is this my payoff for your dirty deed done dirt cheap?”

  This was uproariously funny, but he cut his laughter short when his thoughts turned toward Mick Logan, how the poor shithead was probably frying to death at this very moment. The reality of what he’d done was suddenly a weighty thing. He felt sick.

  “No deed goes unrewarded.” Thekan studied the village hall with narrow eyes. “And it is a relief to know certain concerns can be so easily swept away. A change that rivals alchemy. Similar to how past remorse becomes motivating fire when the inspiration is right.” He twitched as if coming out of a daydream. Dreamy old Ichabod. “You should start dialing now. Slowly, of course.”

  “Slow dial for a quick burn.”

  The phrase immediately struck Axel as gut-wrenchingly funny. He managed to poke out the numbers on the dial pad through his laughter. His eyes were filled with tears.

  ***

  Mick scrambled to his feet and whirled toward the voice in the back corner. The sight of the speaker froze his heart. Peter Fyvie, wet and bloated, gestured to the back door like a nightmarish game show host fawning over a prize. Mick’s thoughts swung back to the last time he’d seen Fyvie in such a condition, in the passenger seat of his truck. That time he tried with all his might to push the image away as hallucination, despite evidence to the contrary. This time such an estimation was harder to justify. The man shed droplets which pattered on the hall floor, staining the wood with very real, very dark starburst splatters. Firelight threw Fyvie’s shadow deep and wavering and undeniable on the wall behind him. And the smell of him, a chalky mineral scent blended with the gassy notes of new rot, crept under the rank gas-and-smoke vapor filling the room. Dead, Mick thought, so very dead. Fyvie gave him a wide let’s-do-this smile and greenish water trickled from his lips.

  At last, Mick rushed forward (I’ll do this, that door is the only way out, but dear God don’t you touch me). He shoulder-rammed the door and met unreasonable resistance. He staggered back. Ribbons of flame unspooled along the perimeter of the room behind him, festooned the walls in fluttering streaks, rushed and spread in ravenous rivers. He prepared for another pass at the door, his skin prickling in the mounting heat.

  “I’m almost out of Knoll so listen to me before I’m spent, Mick,” Fyvie gurgled above the roar of flames. His cloudy eyes bulged, mottled with points of refracted firelight. “The door is blocked on the other side, but the braces are all pretty low. Hit it lots higher.”

  Mick didn’t question it, simply rushed the door shoulder first, leaping at the last second to strike it higher up. The upper half of the door jumped away from the frame, offering a glimpse of clear, sunny air before it clapped shut again. The wood surrendered in a diagonal crack from doorknob to top hinge.

  “What the hell is this, Fyvie?”

  Sharp smoke filled the room, clouds of it churned overhead. Flames danced around his ankles, seared his skin like the touch of summer steel.

  “This is fear of discovery.” Fyvie slipped around behind him, his skin steaming, and humped up against Mick’s back in a sodden embrace. “Now move it. I’m not much of a fire barrier.”

  Mick rushed the door again, with an even greater leap. The upper portion of the door let out a splintering crack and dropped away. He dove through the opening and came to rest face down in the dust and gravel parking lot, the clammy weight of Fyvie still on his back.

  “The Crymost is giving everything back,” Fyvie’s voice bubbled in his ear. “It always does just before it feeds. But this time is different. This is the first time it’s worried about being stopped. So it brought that judge back, too. As a paver of the way.”

  “What?” He wanted to move out from under Fyvie’s miserable, sodden weight. The smell of him was wretched. But he also was loath to interrupt what this well-meaning, life-saving, very dead non-hallucination had to say.

  “The opening Thekan used is still in play. Some of us have managed to spill through. Some want to help, some don’t give a shit. But the kicker is we’re all weaker than Thekan by a mile. And we’re briefer.”

  “We?”

  “The dead, those who’ve crossed over but remain connected to Knoll in some way. Beyond the pale. Whatever you want to call it. The time for all of us is limited, and sooner or later we’ll all be pulled out of Knoll and drawn back to where we belong. Then it will be just the townspeople, Thekan, and The Crymost. Sooner or later Mick . . . all of us . . . gone . . . ”

  Mick rolled over at the precise moment Fyvie’s weight evaporated from him. Gone again, just like in the truck. Gone, perhaps, for good this time. Out of Knoll.

  “Fyvie?” he said anyway. “Why would it use Thekan? What’s his connection?”

  There was no response.

  He got to his feet and shambled toward the garage, dialing his phone as he walked. He coughed. The fire roared inside the village hall. Thoughts roared just as loudly in his head. On the other side of the building, the front window of the village hall blew out.

  Welcome to Wonderland.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  For the second time that day, events moved with the cohesion of a fevered dream. The garage interior was filled with smoke but seemed exempt from any radiant heat for the moment, so Mick transported garage property a piece at a time, just in case the fire leapt over. He took the items to the curb facing The Plank. People began to gather and gawk and voice concerns. Some of them pitched in, helping him move items, but he couldn’t say who they were. Just dream faces. His thoughts brushed alternately across the undeniable presence of Peter Fyvie (his shirt still clung to him in back with the unpleasant dampness of Fyvie’s juices), and the men of the 1960s Knoll—the diggers, the planners, the double barrel boys—hustling in dutiful silence under a contained but growing panic.

  To accompany the rest, a word flashed through his mind, with resistance because it slung inflammatory mud at the intellect. Supernatural. It seemed too foreign, too easily applied even after what happened at the bar, even after not one but two encounters with an undeniably dead Peter Fyvie. He attempted to push the word aside but it refused to comply. Like a funhouse character on a spring, it kept popping into his line of sight.

  Fire trucks arrived. People in fire suits toted hoses, began to beat back the flames of the village hall and to saturate the garage to protect it. At some point, Nancy Berns sat him down on the curb, draped him with a blanket and handed him an oxygen mask with a portable tank. She demanded he sit still for a few minutes so she could check him over.

  “Somebody blocked the back door,” he said, knowing it sounded senseless and out of context, but he needed to get it out.

  “We’ll check it out, Mick,” she said, her round cheeks plumping with a smile. Calm, official, soothing. God love Nancy Berns. “You should call your wife. Get yourself home.”

  He wanted nothing more than to hear Judy’s voice. But the garage needed to be squared away. “I need to help out first,” he said to her, and the logic of it was a living thing. It stirred the air between the two of them. “You know how it is.”

  “I do,” she said and plumped her cheeks again. “There’s a spare fire jacket in the back of the pumper, if you’re sure.”

  He nodded his thanks and got to his feet. When he regarded the blazing village hall, he shivered.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Chas
tity Mellar Borth pulled her car into the broken remnant of parking lot next to the mercantile. It was still a regal building in her eyes, spoiled by disrepair and neglect but no less grand at its core. What would Daddy say if he knew she was willing to let it go now? Thekan wanted it gone, after all, and was willing to go out among the people of Knoll to secure the Mellar’s Out vote. He told her so while he slipped into the shirt, one of Gregor’s, which she brought to his dawn-lit bed with almost ceremonial pride. The mercantile stood in the way of his dark miracles, or perhaps threatened them. She knew it without him saying it, and for that reason alone it must go.

  But enough of this maudlin farewell. Change was upon her. Upon Knoll. The tightness of the low-heeled pumps on her feet and the naked sensation of her legs below the knee-length hemline of her new skirt seemed like alien sensations, proof of how long it had been since she attempted to dial into the mainstream. But the town’s destiny was on the horizon. Thekan drove the point home many times throughout the night. Many times, she thought with a controlled but enthusiastic smile.

  “I am a paver of the way,” he said while she lay next to him, breathless and slick and delightfully sore, the after-sex sheets bunched between them. The pits of his eye sockets glimmered and throbbed deep and red. “A time for feasting is coming to this place. As it has come many times before. When the land was young and wild the feast claimed only herd animals and flocks of birds that squawked in confusion over what drew them to the ground even as their lungs burst and their guts constricted. Later came the natives who conformed with reverent, dutiful surrender, and at last the farmers with their harsh German and Norwegian and French insinuations brought their sensible suspicions. Now that the land is crowded with houses and barns, taverns and shops full of souls, there is a risk of defiance. There is a need for liaison before the feast can make another claim.” A clear teardrop slipped out of his pulsing eye socket and coursed down to his trembling chin. “So, I am here, unsure of how but certain of my purpose.”