by Dean H Wild
Harley plugged the double barrel into the jenny’s outlet, pressed the choke and then thumbed the damaged starter button. The jenny released a luxurious wet coughing sound and took off, filling the room with a moderate hum. Harley shuffled over to the double barrel, the light of success glimmering in his weary eyes, and switched on the pump. There was a metallic screech deep in the guts of the double barrel, aimed angrily at its creators, men who no longer lived. The fluttering, pumping sound that followed was unmistakable.
“I’ll be damned,” Harley said with quiet wonder and shut everything down. “We got ourselves a boom-maker. If it weren’t for the jenny’s exhaust I’d let her run. Once you give me an all-clear over the walkie, I’ll get her going again. Aren’t you headed the wrong way?”
Mick stood in the doorway leading to the jumbled ruin of stairs inside the mercantile cellar. “I’m going to find enough handholds to climb out this way. Luck comes in a lot of forms, and we don’t have enough time for anything else.”
Harley nodded and hunkered down by the double barrel. A drop of blood fell from behind his ear and stitched a mark down the front of his shirt. “Better get moving, then.”
“Talk to you soon,” Mick said. It didn’t seem like enough.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Judy kept the speedometer spiked at 80, her thoughts racing as quickly as the scenery outside. She was being a silly bitch, going against the plan Mick and the others so carefully laid out. But weren’t some of Mick’s decisions driven by his emotions instead of the logic of on-paper schematics and the laws of combustion and detonation? Was her endeavor so different?
As she rolled at last into Knoll, she felt in the presence of a huge, dangerous and yet sleeping beast. She saw people walking at the other end of Garden Street as she pulled into her driveway. They wandered southeast with sullen slowness. Toward The Crymost.
She hurried into the house and ignored the chiding voice which propounded there were a hundred things she could take and there was no need to waste time going upstairs, but her mind was set. She bounded up the stairs and climbed into the attic, worried that what she wanted had been moved or—God forbid—thrown away in a flurry of spring cleaning. When she saw the torn and flattened carton marked CLASSROOM she let out a cry of defeat, but as she rushed over to it she saw the newer replacement box, unmarked but also unsealed, and greedily dug into it. What she wanted was right on top: chess pieces made of dull mineral. She scooped up a hasty handful, five pawns, and dashed down the stairs, an anxious whine building in the back of her throat.
She tossed the pawns on the car seat and started the engine. Or tried to. The engine cranked but would not turn over. She thought of the negligible caravan they’d abandoned earlier on Pitch Road—
(another effect like the phones. Automatic, Axel had said through bloodstained teeth. Spontaneous, baby, a floating young suicide had proclaimed)
—and got out again, giving the lengthening shadows a wild stare. Then she scooped the pawns off the car seat—one was lost; she now had only four—and sprinted down Garden Street.
By the time she reached The Plank her breath burned in her lungs and she cut back to a brisk walk. People dotted the sidewalks, some chatting as they walked while others sauntered quiet and introspective, all of them heading in a common direction, their shadows stretched out before them as if pointing the way to The Crymost. At the edge of town, a single car cruised downhill on The Plank—a traveler whose head swiveled every which way over the strange exodus of Knoll citizens. Don’t stop your car, Mister, Judy thought as she hurried along, the minute you shut off your engine it’s game over. At least until my husband can blow the goddamned Crymost sky high.
As the highway began its uphill grade, she poured on the determination, holding her one purpose out before her, and at last turned down Pitch Road. She weaved between the familiar abandoned cars there, her own included, and pushed a couple of people aside to squeeze through the shrubbery atop the last rise. A few townsfolk stood near The Crymost ledge, sullen, exchanging bits of conversation. She moved off to the grassy fringe and glanced once more at the pawns. She had dropped another somewhere during the walk, but three was still a good amount.
The broad view of the marshlands below The Crymost drop-off seemed to summon her, a goal nearly achieved. The sun shimmered at her back, a pending droplet of red-gold dipping toward the horizon. She shivered, certain the sleeping beast of this place was aware of her intent. It made her misstep and stumble and the pawns tumbled from her hands. The surrounding tall grass swallowed every last piece.
She moaned, squatted and ran her hands over the ground, and she managed to find two. She took them to The Crymost edge, her toes sticking over the drop-off. There were no ghostly figures this time, only neighbors in the light of late day, and the unmistakable presence of that which slept, but neared awakening.
“Help him, damn you,” she said with an overall tremor. “You have to if I do this, because some of your reactions are automatic. Spontaneous, baby. So you protect the hell out of my husband.”
She flung the pawns over. They made no ripple or splash in the pond. The only sound was the low utterances of Knoll people waiting in queue.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
After she gassed up the car, Chastity Mellar Borth came close to driving hard and fast into the country, putting untold miles between her and Knoll, but in the end, uncertainty won out and sent her home. She didn’t want to think about it now that she was at the house, because there was hope (small) and fear (huge) and the overwhelming worry about Roderick picking up on any of it, so she pressed her thoughts down like a tissue worked and worried to shapelessness in a funeral widow’s hand.
He was awake. She heard him thumping about upstairs. Everything seeming very real now, and very close. A hard knot of part grief and part regret formed within her. It grew exponentially when she heard him cry out—a wail of revulsion and loss. If the intensity of the smell permeating the house was any indicator, she knew what the cry was about. His appearance had gotten worse. Her hand went to her pocket and tightened on her father’s rosary, the strange gift that incited her request for all Knoll citizens to bring a special memento should they have one. Might it do some good? She could only hope it might be the basis of a little dark miracle of her own.
When she heard him coming down she went to the foot of the stairs to meet him. His odor preceded him and the clunk of his shoes was slow and uncertain. He was in the wool suit he’d worn to town, the cloak dragging from step to step behind him with a sodden weight. His derby hat was dipped low in an attempt to hide him from onlookers, but from this close the gaunt angles of his face were stark, gray, and stretched thin over jutting teeth, molded to eye sockets set so deep they were more like the empty pits present there during their lovemaking. But dry pits now. Bloodless, gray-black holes where gleaming irises rested far back inside.
“This isn’t going well for you, is it Roderick?”
He stopped on the last step. His cordy throat worked around a deep swallow. “The reward is in the end. Always in the end. You need to trust more.”
“Or less,” she said and stepped away from him.
He pulled one of the dining room curtains aside with a withered claw. “Pull the car up close to the door. I may need help navigating the front steps.”
“Maybe a bad fall is your end redemption.”
His head snapped toward her with surprising fervor. His thin gray lips stretched into a sneer. “Careful. Endings are the subject of the day, after all.”
Pain stirred in her joints, a warning bell chiming in the distance.
“I’ll get my keys,” she said at last.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The stairway rubble was stacked almost to the gaping hole in the floor above, but it also proved to be a challenge, shifting and sliding apart every time Mick got a firm grip or a decent foothold, sending him back to the bottom again with the threat of rolling an ankle or wrenching his knees out of shape. At last he
caught a firm beam, one he didn’t notice at the start. It took his weight when he pulled himself up. Above it another handhold, broken but sturdy wood and a generous opening in the mishmash like a break in laden clouds. One to the next, he told himself as he gripped awkward protrusions and pushed off foot-friendly edges until he was in the gloomy belly of the mercantile’s main floor.
Through the show window, he saw people walking along The Plank.
“Hey,” he shouted and ran out to the shoulder of Highway L where Ken Wittkop and his wife walked. Ken carried a pair of aluminum tube frame lawn chairs. His wife, Nina, gripped a Bible with rigid fingers. “Don’t go up there. Trust me, you need to go back into town. Go home, for God’s sake.”
“We’re going to the meeting, I think,” Ken said. “I’ve heard from the right people that it will help us get over our bad hump.”
Mick shuffled backward to face them. It seemed to pull every muscle in his legs. “What if I told you The Crymost is what’s causing the bad hump in the first place, and everybody on this road is walking right into something much worse than what we’ve already seen?”
Nina glared at him. “I’d say you’re not as much a part of this town as I thought. The Crymost is a landmark. You don’t speak out against something so sacred. Especially when you’re in need. Come on, Ken.”
She gave Mick a hard-shouldered pass and stepped up her pace, pulling her husband along by the elbow.
Mick looked around, his heart in his mouth, his teeth drawing blood from his lower lip. Come on, Mr. Logan, get your lesson plan together. He broke into a run.
Starting at the dump, Pitch Road was lined up with people like patrons waiting for an amusement ride. He glanced at faces as he pushed his way through and rushed onto The Crymost’s limestone ledge. He knew them all, some well and some in passing. Children, some in pajamas, scampered around. He was unable to stop himself from picturing tiny beds in shaded rooms, their occupants wasted humps under the blankets. There was no desire to get out any longer. Mom was bundled up in her own bed, unresponsive to requests for food, or dad was under a blanket in the living room recliner, gazing toward heaven with cloudy eyes while the TV blathered and flashed and the flies buzzed around him in slow spirals. And outside something writhed unseen, glutted with delectable morsels, reaching for more.
A shape worked against the flow of the crowd, away from the ledge, and he recognized it with shock and a baffled type of chagrin.
“Judy?”
She hurried toward him, her face carefully set. He drew her into his arms, aware of relief bleeding through the other emotions warring in his head.
“I know, I know,” she said and pushed back far enough to capture his gaze, “but I’m here alone. The other two are probably in Egg Harbor by now. I just had to do something to help you.”
“Help me how?” His mind reeled. “You should get out of here. Now.”
“The explosion?”
He flashed the walkie at her. “Harley’s at the ready. My problem is getting everybody out of here, and fast.” The sun sat on the western horizon behind them, a molten knob. It painted everything in hectic red. “It already feels like we’re out of time—”
“Mick,” she said and pointed.
A black car pushed through the shrub entrance of The Crymost path and drove onto the limestone flats, reflecting the sky in streaks like electric blood. Its engine died, and the crowd fell silent. Children flocked to their parents’ sides. Did he hear a rumble from below, an anxious fuming from where the pool churned down there? Because it did churn, astir with wanting. He knew it without looking.
Chastity Mellar Borth got out from behind the wheel, head down, and hurried to the passenger side to open the door. Blatant servitude for the darkly draped passenger who climbed out in his low-set hat. Mick drew in a deep breath—his lungs seemed to have withered to nothing—and gave Judy a firm stay there gesture before he stepped away.
“There’s another way to go about this,” he said, projecting to the crowd with a power he thought he’d left at Lincoln Middle School. Heads jerked his way, a promising sign, and he climbed a ridge near the edge of the drop-off where he was visible to everyone. “Harley Kroener and I fix everything in this town, you all know that, and we mean to fix this, too. We have a plan we hope will push the darkness away from Knoll but it’s dangerous, especially if you stay here. Will you trust me if I tell you to get off of The Crymost, and get off now?”
Thekan’s voice rang out. “Yes. Who will you trust?” He stepped away from the car, his hands held out as if to clutch an unseen surface for balance. He seemed a wasted silhouette wrapped in a bagging suit, his hat brim and lowered head allowing only his jaw to catch the daylight, yet his voice was strong and atremble with fervor. “Hammer blows and crude workman’s rivets are the answer if you are repairing a park bench, but some matters call for older voices and wiser ways.” He stepped into the midst of the crowd and parted his hands. “Revered ways, you might say.”
Mutters rippled through the masses, and at first Mick was convinced the sound was one of assent. But the response was a splintered one—there were those who offered knowing nods to Thekan. The Jade family stood closest to him, their six-year-old son Tommy goggling at the man with a slack jaw brand of horror. Others stared at Mick with a dawning sense of interest, including Roger Copeland, who stood near the black car. The air stirred with a sense of awakening.
Another wave of vocalizations worked through the crowd, from only a few people this time as they looked at their hands—or more precisely at the objects in them, at the mementos they’d brought from home, just as Chastity had asked. Significant and curious. Glints of green light emanated from those items in the lowering daylight. Old Jim Schraufnagel stood close by and Mick was able to see a war medal in his hand. Green light flared across it, shrunk back, flared again in a cold imitation of a heartbeat.
“We sent as many as we could,” Mick said under his breath. “It’s all LINR.”
Thekan stalked toward Mick. “There is no more time.”
“You want revered?” Mick put all the force he could muster behind his words. “There are old voices, familiar well-loved voices, speaking out to you right now. Telling you what’s right.” He snatched Jim’s hand and hoisted the glowing medal high for all to see. “Are you going to deny the gifts—no, more than gifts—the warnings your deceased loved ones sent back to you? Can you deny them?”
“You are not as wise as you think.” Thekan stepped closer, his sunken eyes glinting like candles afloat in twin wells. “And you are no longer as safe as you believe. I have saved up a reserve of power just for you, Mick Logan. Just for you.”
Mick once chaperoned an eighth-grade field trip to a science museum in Milwaukee. One of the displays offered the opportunity to feel the resonant vibrations brought about by various decibels of sound. A large silver dome offered a place for both hands, and the students talked him into experiencing the highest setting on the dial. The sensation was a whole-body, scintillating yet numbing assault.
A similar feeling gripped him when Thekan’s eyes flashed at him. The world was swallowed, all sight and sound consumed. This time there was no laughter of students to help him focus once again. This time there was a disorienting sense of displacement, then a reverent hush, and the scent of carnations, and then the mumble of organ music all around.
His vision cleared. He stood in a funeral home peopled by small groups in various attitudes of discussion. An open casket sat at the far end of the room. Behind it, a minister in a white cassock busied himself in preparation for an upcoming service. The casket was Robbie Vaughn’s—the handsome bronze and brass model was burned into his memory—and it was there he felt drawn. He stumbled up to the coffin, weak and anxious and peered inside. His breath caught in his lungs. The casket was full of brackish green water. Flecks of scum swirled near the satin covered lip. He was unable to see Robbie, but Robbie had to be in there, deep down, neglected for far too long.
H
e plunged his hands in; tainted water as cold as death. He leaned close until he was inhaling swampy vapors of decay. And he felt a whooshing sensation at his back as if a series of doors opened at once to let in the night air. The exposed, vulnerable feeling that followed unnerved him, but still he groped and delved into the water, hoping to find some part of Robbie: a shoe, a sleeve, a bloated and clammy hand, to grip it and pull him up, up . . .
The minister stepped up, his arms opened over the casket lid. “So this is the shuttered part that kept me out.”
Mick looked up. The minister’s cassock slid away in gray tatters. Not a minister at all but a judge. Thekan stood over him.
“Where is he?” Mick called out, his arms thrashing in the water and churning up greenish foam. “Do you have him? Where the hell is he?”
“Go after him, Mick Logan. Dive in. Perhaps you will find him if you go deep enough, down and down and down.”
Down deep, in the dark. In the quiet, safe, airless dark. Where there was nothing. Where he was no one.
“Mick!”
Judy’s voice exploded in his head. One of his hands struck an object, free-floating but hard, as if a pebble was suspended in the swill. He tried to draw it close and caught sight of it just before it was churned under again. A chess pawn, the mineral skin of it startlingly familiar. It was followed by a second one. New additions to the mix, he understood with amazing clarity, because his dear wife felt she needed to do something to help him.
Judy’s exploding voice again. “Mick, he’s doing something to you. Fight him!”
The funeral home wavered around him. Only Thekan remained solid, his stare intensifying. Mick plunged his hands deeper into the casket water with new determination. This time his fingers encountered a larger object. A flat thing almost as wide as his hand. He grasped it and pulled it out.
The funeral parlor blinked out of his view. He was at The Crymost again, with Judy clutched to his side and the people of Knoll looking on. In his hand was a foot-long slat of old lumber spiked on one end with two protruding nails. It made him think of a primitive war club designed to deliver a swat that resulted in snakebite damage. More than that, it made him think of Irma Casper the day he and Will visited her at the nursing home, the way she aimed her withered, forked fingers at her eyes and proclaimed “nails and a board” while she spent perhaps the last of her lucid moments recounting what she knew about the Honorable Judge Thekan.
