by Dean H Wild
“You will finish this with me,” he said and stepped back from her. “You owe it.”
“I will,” she said, aware of his determination still burning like a brand in her brain. She would do as he asked, as automatically as she’d spoken his words into the telly-phone. Helpless, or nearly helpless.
But a crystal-clear opening remained in her thoughts, so narrow she was sure Roderick would not notice it should he enter her mind again. At its center, a name blazed, a quasar of its own.
micklogan, mick logan, Mick Logan.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Mick sat on the bed next to Judy. Her phone was still in her hand. She had just finished speaking with Beth Ann. “Nancy has a sister on the peninsula in Egg Harbor who will take her in. The woman’s disabled so we’ll need to get Nancy up there somehow.”
“You should go then, the three of you. First thing. I want you away from here and safe anyway.”
She spoke as if she hadn’t heard. “I’m helping you at The Crymost in the morning. Beth Ann says she’ll stay in town and sit with Nancy while we do our vent pipe search.”
“And there’s no two ways about it, I suppose.”
“Nope. And if I thought Beth Ann could make the drive to Egg Harbor in her condition, there’d be no two ways about me staying right up until the big boom. Believe it.”
She kissed him, walked around to her side of the bed and climbed in.
He swallowed hard. His lips felt warm and rubbery. “I love you, Judy.”
“I love you too, Mr. Logan. Try to sleep.”
He turned out the lights and lay back, his hand cupped over hers under the blanket. He could tell her mind was racing, and he wondered what thoughts might follow her down into sleep.
Outside, The Crymost glow painted the sky.
PART SIX:
DARK MIRACLES
CHAPTER ONE
AT FIVE THIRTY AM, Nurse Debbie Schuster walked into room 323 to open the drapes. In her opinion it did little good to let in the light for the critical and comatose patients, but Hillside Hospital protocol said otherwise, and the view of Drury’s east side wasn’t a bad one. Her first thought as she stepped toward the window was how peaceful the room was at this hour. The incorrect quality of that peace struck her a moment later when she beheld the patient, the bank of monitors and the respirator equipment, all silent.
Her thoughts exploded, procedure pushing aside less immediate concerns such as why no alarms or alerts were triggered by the failing machines, or how a curl of strangely sweet smoke managed to rise out of the patient’s pale mouth like a parting dream as she pressed her fingers into the carotid artery to check for a pulse she already knew was not there.
Then she rushed out to announce the patient in ICU unit 323, Axel Vandergalien, was dead.
CHAPTER TWO
Mick squinted against the eight o’clock sun as he and Judy got out of the car and walked up to the Kroener’s house. Will pulled up, waved a greeting and followed them onto Harley’s porch. A good day for something in town to go boom. But first, they needed to see what Harley was so worried about. All he said over the phone was, “We got something else in the wind. Get over here as soon as you can. Beth Ann and me put together some breakfast so don’t worry about your stomachs, just bring your cell phones, check your messages if you haven’t checked already.”
He had checked his—one voicemail, but it was tangles of static. His readout was likewise garbled, just letters and numbers in random order. Gibberish.
Harley opened the door, his face grave. “Come on in.”
The house was filled with food smells which, on any other day, would be delightful.
“I got part of something,” Harley said and led them to the hutch in the dining room, “and I suspect it’s only partial because of what we’re up to. Like we’re not invited.”
“You lost me,” Will said.
Mick took in the blinking light on the Kroener’s old fashioned answering machine. “Who called you, Harley?”
“It’s Chastity Borth doing the talking.” Harley cued up the machine and pressed the playback button. “But I think the words belong to somebody else.”
The machine clicked and whirred. Mick leaned close. Judy and Will leaned in next to him. The recorded voice was indeed Chastity, sounding as if she was speaking through a resonating metal pipe. Background noise rose and fell, drowning her out at times.
“Fellow Knoll citizens, this is Chastity . . . —orth . . . great remorse . . . find solace . . . community . . . meet us . . . won’t you?”
The rest of the message was crackles of static.
Judy glared at the machine as it clicked off. “Meet us? She wants to set up another town meeting? After what happened yesterday?”
“This is the final move,” Mick said. “Where Thekan feeds The Crymost. But when and where? Damn, I wish I could hear the whole message.”
Judy cued up her cell phone, listened, and shook her head. “I have a message from Chastity, too, but it’s the same as Harley’s. Just bits and pieces.”
“You’re all too close to me,” Mick said. “I seem to have a knack for scrambling Thekan’s signals, remember?”
“Talking to Chastity isn’t an option, I gather,” Judy said.
Harley grunted. “I have a strong hunch she’ll clam up if she sees us coming.”
“My phone was dead this morning,” Will said. “It’s back at the bar, on the charger. I can get it and try it now.”
“After breakfast,” Harley said. “Mick and I can knock on some doors, see if somebody will tell us what’s up, maybe let us listen to their voicemail, get the whole message.”
“No. Let us talk to the neighbors,” Judy said and waggled a finger between herself and Beth Ann. “You boys are forgetting about the machine at the village garage. If this call went to every phone in town, which it sounds like it did, the garage machine might be out of range of getting scrambled, or at least have something more complete. We might as well attack this from all sides.”
Harley looked at her, his eyes sparkling. “You are a peach.”
“That’s why I keep her,” Mick said and hugged her at the waist. She smiled, but there was a certain rigidity to it. “Let’s eat,” he said at last.
They filed into the kitchen where Beth Ann set out plates while Nancy Berns sat in a corner chair, studying the eastern window as if it were a dream.
CHAPTER THREE
At first Mick was worried about the village garage machine’s ability to play anything back; he even said as much as they walked up to the desk, but Harley ran a thumb across the controls to wipe away the soot that covered everything: the desk, the window, the Swisher, like a blanket of shadow. It revealed a bleary message light, and he pressed the playback without hesitation. It immediately took off. When Chastity stopped talking he hit the stop button with a thoughtful frown.
“Tonight,” Mick said at last, and felt the color drain from his face.
Harley rewound the message, played it again. “We were going to blow the double barrel today anyway.”
“Which means we damn well better find that breather pipe fast. Or figure out how to make one, or we’re screwed.”
Harley nodded, almost curt, put up his hand and listened to Chastity Mellar Borth make her announcement once more. “She’s struggling with it,” he said. “Right . . . here.”
“ . . . we’ll gather at . . . at sunset. Bring a special memento . . . ” the message implored.
Mick considered it. “Maybe Thekan let her pick the time.”
“Maybe,” Harley said and tapped the controls where a digital counter displayed seconds. “But I’ve been stopping the message when she’s done talking. From the looks of this, there’s more to it.”
They watched the counter tick down and listened to the rustle and clatter of a phone changing hands. “Come to The Crymost,” Thekan’s voice rose out of the machine so loud the plastic around the speaker made buzzing sounds. “At sunset, as she says.”
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“Sun sets around eight,” Harley said gazing at the window.
“Gives us less than twelve hours. It suddenly doesn’t seem like enough. Where are they when you need them?”
“Who?”
“The dead. At one time I had one riding my goddamned back, don’t forget. Now they’re all gone. Out of Knoll. Abandoned ship.”
“Are you sure?” Harley said and pointed at the message machine again.
The counter flashed, but it showed no numerals now. It flashed L-I-N-R over and over again.
CHAPTER FOUR
Will pulled up and climbed out of his car just as they were leaving the garage.
“It’s tonight,” he shouted as he jogged around to meet them. “My phone is toast but I ran into Cheryl Abitz and she told me.”
“Yeah, we’ve got it,” Mick said. “Clock’s ticking now.”
His cell rang and he jumped a little. It was Judy.
“Connie Gassner tells me—”
“At sunset,” he said. “Which means as soon as we find that breather, you’re in the car and on your way north, understand?”
“I’ll meet you at The Crymost.”
“Yeah,” he said and traded glances with Will and Harley.
He felt like a man at the edge of a tensing, volatile trap, unsure when the jaws might close, but certain they would. Soon.
***
Judy’s car rode the uphill stretch of The Plank just as Mick, with Will right behind him, pulled over at the Pitch Road entrance. He got out and used a bolt cutter to nip the chain barring the entrance.
“Stronger up here today,” Harley said after Mick was behind the wheel once again.
Mick wanted to agree. The Crymost was indeed exuding more than its usual palpable presence of sorrow. His attention, however, was pulled away by the choking gasp of his engine as an array of idiot lights winked to life across his dashboard.
Will’s horn sounded, a single dying bleat. Judy rolled to a halt behind them, making them a stilled procession on silenced engines. Mick groaned. “I guess we hoof it from here.”
He got out, his edge-of-a-trap feeling gaining some weight. Will strode toward him. “All three cars conked out at the same time?”
“My phone, too,” Judy said as she slipped up next to Mick. “It’s out.”
Will grunted. “Like we’re being warned off.”
Harley nodded and glanced up the hill, toward The Crymost turnoff. “It can warn us all it likes. We got business we mean to get done.”
“If it’s a warning at all,” Judy said. “Remember what Axel said last night? ‘Its reactions are automatic, like an animal.’ Maybe some of The Crymost’s effects are involuntary. Pure reaction.”
“And they spread like a glow,” Mick said and let the possibility slide into his thoughts. “Or with a glow. Anyway, back to the matter at hand. One of us should be able to cover the ledge top easy enough. The rest of us need to comb through the greenery down below. What I wouldn’t give for a metal detector right now.”
“I’ll cover the top,” Judy said. “Girls up, boys down.”
“We’re looking for a heavy gauge metal pipe,” Harley said as they walked toward the last gentle rise with its screen of shrubs. “Probably black—more probably rusted to hell—about eight inches in diameter, poking out of the ground. Somewhere.”
“Needle in a haystack is what we’re looking for,” Will said and stamped his foot.
Mick patted his shoulder. “It’s going to be a slow, steep climb down to the pond and we need to keep our eyes open the whole way, needle or not.”
“Yes, eyes open please,” Judy said and gave Mick a parting hug. “The Baylor Clinic saw enough of you yesterday.”
He kissed her. “Thanks for helping with this.”
She made no reply.
CHAPTER FIVE
Mick was drawn to a spot where the downward pitch of the land was grassy and more forgiving than the craggy face below The Crymost proper. He hiked down with the soaring view of the marshlands in front of him and Will and Harley on either side of him. A few times they needed to get a handhold on limestone fragments poking through the earth to successfully navigate, but their descent was steady. Near the bottom, they spread out.
“I’ll check around the pond,” Mick told them with uneasy thoughts of Peter Fyvie.
Limestone shelves ringed the pond, imperfect and yet precise, and he stepped up to the edge with a shiver. A baptismal font, he thought, in a cathedral of tears. To swim in the greenish water would be to weep from every pore and dissolve like a dream. And somewhere in its depths was Peter Fyvie’s car, a mute hulk limned in silt, housing a single body stiff with bloat and rigor.
Again, the feeling his feet were perched on the edge of a tensing trap enfolded him. The Crymost’s eyes were on them, of that he had no doubt. He found he was walking on the balls of his feet as he neared the place where the sheer limestone face of the drop-off terminated at the water’s edge. No soft diggable earth here, only stone.
And debris.
Not every item tossed from above over the years was on target, he noted. Wooden dowels, gray with age, poked out like a ribcage from a coat of tangled greenery. He nudged it with his foot and the dowels, once finely turned and lacquered, reorganized to reveal a large hoop-like attachment. Spinning wheel; the term slipped by him with morose ease. He wondered what past-era grandmother spun up her thread on this ancient contraption, guiding the wool with carbuncled fingers while the huge vertical wheel whirled, throwing puffs of air like a saw blade. And he wondered which bereaved family member tossed the wheel over. Were they too blind with grief to notice when their offering smashed on the stones? Did they care? Because there are many wheels in heaven and earth, and each one turns in its own way.
He shook himself, skirted along the cliff face edge of the pond and picked his way across to the other side, searching and yet distracted. So distracted he did not notice the stifling quality come into the air. Not until he heard Will shout out, “What the hell—?” as a large shadow careened toward them from The Crymost ledge above.
***
More than once, Judy found the need to steer her attention back to the matter at hand. The people she’d seen here—ghosts, manifestations, whatever you called them—were trapped in her mind’s eye. As if agitated by those thoughts, the air fluttered around her and filled with a creeping cold. Something was coming. Something bad.
She tried to call out—“Mi—”—and was cut short by a blow, full body, as if from a giant mitt. The air filled with images. People moved around her, or rather suggestions of people described by wisps of shadow. There were multitudes of them, overlapping, approaching the edge of The Crymost and dissolving there, each one unaware of the next. Memories, she thought. Memories and reaction. Incidental things riding on the back of what was coming.
She pushed her voice up and out as she stumbled to the drop-off amid shuffling, milling shadows.
“Mick!”
***
Mick’s thought was an old steamer trunk, as the shadow dropped down The Crymost face like an inky teardrop. The trunk flickered in and out of existence as it fell.
“Look at it all,” Harley declared.
Other objects were ejected over The Crymost ledge as well. Smaller, lighter for the most part, but it was to the trunk Mick fixed his attention. Its path toward the water was inevitable, a promise of something calamitous. A warning.
Will and Harley were ten feet apart, but equally close to the water’s edge.
“Back off,” Mick shouted to them. “Get away from the pool.”
The trunk vanished at the water’s surface, no splash, no sound. There was, however, an impact of a different kind.
The blow seemed to originate from within as if a large electrified club rapped the underside of Mick’s skull. He sat down hard, a crag of limestone jabbing his tailbone. He saw Harley fall backward as if tossed by a mighty wind. Will dropped to the ground as well, his hands clamped to his head.
Defensive, Mick thought as he climbed to his feet. He staggered over to Will, who was on his side, knees drawn up.
“You dare not look at them,” Will said through gritted teeth. His nails clawed across limestone. “They slip through still, but they can help you no more... Ah shit, ah fuck, I can barely move, and it feels like my head is going to explode.”
Look at who? Mick wondered and glanced at the objects still falling from the ledge top: toys, jewelry, hats, and horns. Each one winked out of existence before reaching the pond. At last he bent over and clasped Will’s hands. “Come on. We’re going back up.”
Harley stumbled over. He fetched a deep sigh, gathered Will up off the ground and held him like a broken doll. “I’ll take him. You get yourself topside and check on Judy.”
Mick glanced at the lip of the drop-off once more. He saw people there, translucent old-movie silhouettes stepping up by the dozen, leaning over with ceremony before casting trinkets out for the air and gravity to deliver to the pond. Another form, more substantial, stepped up to join them. It was Judy.
She waved. “Mick. Do you see them?” Her voice echoed down with the makings of a fevered dream.
“They’re all around you.”
“No.” She pointed. “There.”
He turned toward the place she indicated, only a few feet to his right.
Gray shapes moved near the north edge of the pond where the limestone rim touched the base of the drop-off. Three men, two of them crouching and packing loose earth into a common patch of ground and a third tamping the ground and stone down with his work boots. They flickered in and out with the same old-time movie presence. They did not speak but traded occasional morose glances. They can help you no more, Mick thought. Like hell.
