The Crymost

by Dean H Wild

  Poor Roderick Thekan, tormented, indentured and admittedly unpleasant to behold during certain intimate moments. But brimming with feats of wonder. Like the mercantile itself, she thought with a sigh brimming in its own right, spoiled to the eye and yet grand at his core.

  Dark miracles, she thought as she glanced at the mercantile once more, then into the backseat at the box she’d picked up from the printer’s. In it were posters. Red. They said Mellar’s Out in large black letters.

  ***

  “You better go, Cy.”

  It was his mother’s voice again, this time sounding a bit like the days she’d warn him out of the house before the old man came home to dole out a reprimand with the strap or the yardstick, and it stopped him in his tracks on his way to the table.

  “I can’t,” he said under his breath, his eyes darting. “For Christ’s sake, I run this town, Ma.”

  “Time to run from it. Mind me, now.”

  “This ain’t right, you talking to me.”

  He clutched at the shirt pocket made bulgy by the blue brooch inside. He supposed, pressed up to the table with his fist at his chest, he resembled a man having a heart attack. That was no good. Alice was in the front room, the TV blaring while she worked on the village newsletter. God forbid she should see him in such a state.

  His phone rang and he snatched it up, almost grateful for a distraction. Mick Logan was on the line with three matters at hand: the fire at the village hall, the fact he was closing up the garage for the day, and what option was left for the upcoming vote since the hall, like the firehouse, was now out of service.

  “Button up the garage,” Cy said and walked out to the back porch. “We’ll talk about the rest tomorrow.”

  His backyard was sun drenched, a meticulously mowed and clipped source of pride, but it offered no solace to him at the moment. A fire. Another peculiarity in their fine village. That scoreboard seemed to tick up at an alarming rate.

  “What’s happening?” he asked and aimed it deliberately at his ma, in her grave for twenty years.

  There was no answer.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  During the short drive home, true fatigue settled over Mick. His arms and legs ached and his throat was raw with the aftereffects of smoke. When he walked into the house, Judy was there despite his insistence she stay with Beth Ann. She met him with a huge embrace. “Are you all right? Really? You look exhausted.”

  “I think I’ll live, but a shower would be nice.”

  Afterward, they sat in the kitchen with the back door open. She poured glasses of iced tea and he gulped his down. It felt blessed on his parched throat.

  “I know you’ve had a big day,” she said, “so I’m sure you won’t mind if I take a raincheck on everything we need to talk about. I know it’s important and I really want to hear it—I need to hear it—but Beth Ann asked me to help her with something right after supper. Can we talk later tonight, when I get back?”

  He drained his glass and refilled it from the frosty pitcher near Judy’s elbow. “My head’s going in nine directions at once right now, anyway. Things need to settle. And I want to drive to Hillside and sit with Harley, bounce a few things off him. Later will be fine.”

  “Good,” she said. “Now why don’t you take a quick nap before you fall over? I’ll put a pizza in the oven.”

  He smiled at her, his best most reassuring smile. Under the table, his free hand worked at the chess pieces in his pocket.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Two dreams repeatedly haunted Mick Logan in the six months after the tragedy at Lincoln Middle School. Both of them dwindled in frequency after a while, but like tenacious relatives, they sometimes put in an appearance for old time’s sake. There was the memory-dream of Robbie Vaughn’s fall into the stairwell, and there was the funeral dream, also a memory-dream but possessed of a throbbing, grim undertone all its own. This dream visited him as he slept on the living room couch.

  It is a short dream, in two quick scenes, with him and Judy wearing business-like black. They enter the funeral parlor assessing islands of darkly dressed strangers who are engaged in low-voiced discussions. Judy’s face is set and worried; she doesn’t want to be here but doesn’t want Mick doing this alone. And frankly, for all of his insistence on coming, he’s ready to make a hundred-yard dash for the huge double doors behind them and burst out into the light misty rain.

  But he holds it together, following Judy’s lead—bless her for cutting the path through the heavily resistant air—up to the coffin where there are more islands, not of people but of flowers. Multitudes. More of a logjam, really. Two people a bit older than Mick stand vigil there wearing identical wrung-out expressions. Mick stammers through a weak introduction, and he refuses to look at the body in the pleated white compartment. Then, just as he takes the moist hand of Mrs. Vaughn and gives it a light squeeze, he does look. His words die on his lips.

  For one moment it is Robbie in repose, powdered and dapper in a navy blue suit and tie. A bit too pink in the cheeks. And there is a strange, miniscule bead of something cloudy in the lashes of his right eye. A grim and logical part of him identifies it as adhesive to keep the eyes shut, one of many feints to lock Robbie in the illusion of sleep.

  Then the suit grows short at the cuffs, strains at its buttons and it is now Justin Wick in the coffin, his dirty blonde hair splayed like an insult on Robbie’s fine white pillow, his larger frame violating Robbie’s space. Mick goggles at Mr. and Mrs. Vaughn, his mouth working, fish-like. Surely they must notice, must see the change in the body before them. Their weary red eyes fill with alarm, aimed at him, not at the coffin.

  “Mick.” Judy catches his sleeve. Her voice is tight and urgent. “What is it?”

  Justin jacks himself up on his elbows and twists his head around. His face cramps and stretches until the gum on his lashes lets loose, left then right, and the strand of silk keeping his lips closed breaks and flutters like sprung piano wire.

  Mick reaches out as if to embrace the dreadful figure in the coffin, entwine it and crush away the image, make it gone. His hands tremble. His throat works, unable to create anything more than a high, keening sound, but in his mind the words are huge and blaring. Where’s Robbie? What have you done with Robbie?

  Justin laughs while the great Mr. Logan is being pulled toward the door by his wife, who appears sick and pale over the whole thing.

  “Nod,” Justin says and laughs again. “Dontcha remember? The Land of Nod. It’s a hungry place. There’s always room for more.”

  “Please, Mick,” Judy is saying. There is a terrible, strained sound to her voice. She is dragging him now, her feet wide set for leverage, her black purse swinging like a pendulum, bopping between them with each step. “We’re going to the car now. Jesus. Come on.”

  The Vaughns are in each other’s arms, confused and wounded by the display. People rush to the couple with comforting hands and extra tissues, blocking out the coffin, but not before Mick can see it one last time, the logjam of flowers, the satin pillow, the soft lining brilliant yet barren. The coffin has changed once more. It is now empty . . .

  Mick jerked awake and swiped a trembling hand across his sweaty forehead. The sun was low and brooding.

  “You awake?” Judy called from the kitchen.

  “Sure,” he said and got up on wobbly legs.

  Outside, someone started up a lawnmower and began the round and round maintenance of their yard.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  When Mick walked into the hospital room, Harley was on the phone with someone, his huge gesturing hands at risk of swiping a nearly-cleaned dinner tray off the bedside table. Mick was glad to see it. He brought the LINR box around and set it on the nightstand next to some gift shop flowers. With an appreciative warmth he saw the card stuck amid the blossoms read From Mick and Judy in Judy’s fine script.

  Harley hung up the phone and considered him with a speculative banality. “That was Kippy Evert, of all people.”

&
nbsp; Mick lowered himself into a chair near the foot of the bed. “And what did Kippy have to say?”

  “He told me about the fire at the village hall. Otherwise it was the usual namby-pamby horse crap when you call somebody’s hospital room.”

  Mick set his hand on the box. The wood felt cool and unpleasantly damp all of a sudden. “No horse crap here. I want to tell you what I know. What I’ve seen, heard, and felt for the last few days. It’s all truth, even if it might sound off the wall. Do you feel up for it?”

  Harley gave a slow nod. His eyes gained some of their dark hollows back and his mouth was a thin line, tense with concentration. “Let me get the nurse in here first. I’ve got to take a leak something fierce. This goddamned I.V. Then we can get to work.”

  “All right,” Mick said and found he was grateful for the last minute opportunity to organize his thoughts.

  ***

  Judy Logan went to the door and gazed out at the last rays of daylight—molten strokes laid over the streets and sidewalks of Knoll—and a nagging voice rose within her. What would Mick say?

  The answer was a simple one. He’d say she had no business at The Crymost, no matter what her friend wanted to do. Based on the peculiar lights up there, of course, and the trivial if somewhat mysterious matter of the road to said Crymost being chained off by decree of village authority. And let’s not forget the insights her husband wished to share with her in a few hours, which no doubt orbited around The Crymost as well. It was a perfect storm of reasons to stay away.

  “It’s not just for when somebody dies, you know,” Beth Ann had said earlier, her eyes wide and wet in the afternoon light of the hospital lounge. “It’s for any heartache, and this is a big one. I’m going tonight, after dark. Please, come with me?”

  It amazed her now how firmly she decided to keep any word of it from Mick. Part of it stemmed from a sense of justification. If Mick was able to take on certain rogue behaviors—leaving the hospital when poor Harley has just been admitted for example, not to mention his secretive moodiness of late—then she was entitled to her own asides. A wild curiosity about The Crymost stirred within her that begged to be sated after all, and this was a rare chance to witness a very private Knoll practice firsthand. And on a more heartfelt level, the act (dare she call it a ritual?) might bring her friend some relief, if only of the emotional variety.

  The sun slipped below the horizon just as she pulled up to the Kroeners’ door. Beth Ann came out with a light jacket over her shoulders and a large cylindrical object clutched to her breast.

  “Thank you for taking me,” Beth Ann said as she climbed in.

  The object she held was an ornate ceramic beer stein with a fancy hinged lid. Overly large, but with a sense of generosity rather than gluttony, rather like Harley himself. It seemed a fitting token, given its purpose.

  “Of course,” Judy said.

  She glanced toward the southeast. Her stomach tightened.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The nurse put Harley back into bed, checked his IV and glared at Mick, intimating it was time for patients to pursue much needed rest. Then she strode out on foamy soles, away from their waiting silence.

  “I promised to tell you what I know,” Mick began. “So here it is. I believe that state inspector, Peter Fyvie, never left town. And I believe there are forces at work in Knoll.”

  He spoke easily about Fyvie’s sudden appearance in his truck and about his later encounter with Fyvie inside the burning village hall, keeping his voice even and logical, managing to put a frame around his thoughts to deflect any self-doubt. Not screwing down, but fortifying.

  “So, you think that Fyvie guy is dead?” Harley asked after a point. “Of course, he’d have to be if he looked the way you described him.”

  “I would love for it to all be some kind of daydream, but he touched me, damn it. Rode my back, heavy and wet and real enough to keep the flames off. So, do you want to hear more? Because if you think I’m nuts already, I can stop.”

  Harley’s gaze became fixed on a point in the corner of the hospital room. The fluorescent glow from his over-bed light accentuated the seams in his face. “My dad always feared the family car running out of gas. As a kid I’d watch how he puffed away at his pipe and checked the gas gauge over and over when we were on a drive, worried, as if the needle might drop from full to empty in a heartbeat. One of those tics that makes one person different from the next. And he was that way until the day he died.

  “In 1985, Beth Ann and I drove home in a blizzard. We’d been married all of three years by then, and I was damn fool enough to believe we could make it to Madison and back despite the weather. Like a bigger damn fool, I left with a near empty tank. We ran out of gas just the other side of Baylor. Total white-out where mid-afternoon was like being wrapped in a sheet, so you couldn’t tell east from west from Shit Can Alley. Would have been a person’s last mistake to try to walk back to town. Good way to get found in the spring, just bones wrapped in a rotted winter coat and a gas can in one hand.

  “The county plow went by while we sat worrying over what to do, and this was back when Verne Prellwitz—Gordy’s dad—was driving for the county. He was a half-blind maniac and he damned near shoved us right off the road. Buried one side of the car clear to the top, and never slowed down. Beth Ann’s scream pretty much capped my feeling like a jackass, and in those few seconds I was just about out of my mind with worry and self-disgust, thinking about the wisdom of my old man, four years in his grave by then. ‘You had it right, Dad,’ I even said.

  “And just like that somebody patted my hand, a there-there kind of thing. Wasn’t Beth Ann either; she was still curled up on her side of the car from reacting to the plow’s near miss. I realized I was being egged on. Not there-there, but let’s go. Without thinking about it I cranked the ignition, and the engine caught right away. Stayed running, too, and we drove the twelve miles home, the gas needle on E the whole way, and the air blowing out of the heater vents smelling of pipe smoke. My dad’s brand. I have no doubt about it.

  “You don’t have to plead much of a case if you want me to believe those who’ve passed on can grab the reins on this side when it matters. The only ones who are lacking something upstairs are the ones who can’t make room for the idea. Or won’t. What puzzles me is why a complete stranger like Fyvie is jumping in on your behalf.”

  “Maybe because whatever put him where he is now is what’s at work in Knoll. Maybe because I was the last one to talk to him. His final connection to the earthly plane.”

  Harley accepted this with a quiet nod. “So what else is there? One death doesn’t make for a revived die-off, after all.”

  Mick summed up the incident at The Chapel Bar next: the tunnel, the blackout, the exploding LED sign. Then he drew the folded paper from the LINR box and handed it over. “Do me a favor and use your mechanical good sense to tell me about this drawing.”

  Harley took the sheet two-handed like a man reading a daily paper. After a moment he said, “Part schematic, part assembly plan.”

  “But to assemble what?”

  “A pump of some kind. And a big one, too. A six-footer is my guess. There are impellers here . . . ” He indicated with a thick finger. His eyes played over the image with growing interest, like a plunderer surveying a treasure map. “And there’s another outlet down here with a fan of some kind.”

  “A pump,” Mick said and examined the drawing from behind Harley’s shoulder. Tension built in him, a sense they were closer to answers the men of 1960s Knoll took to their graves. It was like a weight on his heart. “For water?”

  “This one’s for liquid.” Harley pointed at one part of the drawing, then dragged his finger to another. “But something else goes here. Air, maybe. And these are intake pipes, one next to the other. Whatever this thing is, it’s meant to pump out two things at once.”

  “That explains the name.” Mick pointed to the legend at the top of the drawing. “Double Barrel.”

 
Anything else he might have said caught in his throat.

  Tension whorled around them like a living thing. Tension and intrusion. Harley’s sudden, hectic expression confirmed it was more than Mick’s imagination. The overhead lights flickered.

  “Time to put that away.” Mick motioned to the paper. “Last time we took it out like this there was an incident, if you recall my story.”

  “Ignition and primary vent,” Harley said despite the warning. “Look at it come.”

  “Put it away, I said.”

  “Just now.”

  “What?”

  “Mick, I’m telling you, some of the notations on this paper weren’t there a second ago.”

  Fixtures vibrated in the room. Mick felt the small hairs on his body bristle out in waves. The LINR box toppled over. The mortality log skated out ceremoniously to the middle of the floor and flopped open. They both stared at it.

  At last Mick snatched up the LINR box and thrust it toward Harley. “The drawing. Put it away. Now.”

  “Wait.” Harley extended a white, trembling finger. “Look at that, Mick.”

  From the nightstand a pen lifted off a book of crosswords and sailed across the room like a slow-motion torpedo to hover just inches above the mortality log. The television screen in the corner became awash with a frenzy of white static. The telephone at the bedside rang, and they both jumped. A wall speaker, presumably for emergency announcements only, issued a series of crackles, but neither of them acknowledged it. They were transfixed by the pen, which jabbed—tip down—onto the open page in the book and moved with harsh strokes. Mick took a step closer. Harley patted his arm with concession. “Take it slow. This is something we don’t want to get in the way of.”