The Crymost

by Dean H Wild

  “No. Goddamn it.”

  A living organ of light squeezed between the overhead pipes and reached into the room, slow, mesmerizing. He blinked away from it and squatted next to the generator, poked a finger into the now empty starter socket which sat like an open wound above the brand name Bishop. He probed it—the hole was of a much larger diameter than his finger—and found a contact plate inside which he estimated to be the size of an old fifty-cent piece.

  “Okay. Come on now.”

  He pressed it down in the hopes of triggering the jenny’s motor, but the plate tilted under his finger and pushed back with the resistance of spring steel.

  “What the hell kind of half-wit engineers did you have, Bishop?”

  He needed something larger in circumference and stronger than his finger. He glanced around. None of Harley’s scattered tools seemed right. None of the debris on the floor was viable.

  Predatory coldness radiated from the glowing mass as it nosed up to him. So much simpler to stop now, part of him reasoned, so futile to fight. To live. He appreciated how easily it infected Will’s thoughts and scrambled Nancy Berns’ sunny nature into mud.

  He turned back to the generator and jammed his thumb into the empty socket out of sheer blind hope. No result, but he continued to force it in anyway. Perhaps with a little luck, a little of Judy’s protection. Come on luck, one more time. Come on two pawns.

  The idea unfurled in his head with an audible snap. He fumbled the velvet bag out of his pants pocket, at first certain the knight was what he needed. Or was it the king? One might not be long enough. The other might be too long and send the inner plate tilting with a spring while The Crymost enwrapped him and sucked his will away like a fly slurping sugar water. There was time to try one and only one.

  The image of the chessboard aglow in March sunlight flared across his thoughts. For a pensive second, moves were contemplated by seated opponents and by a lingering shape in a nearby doorway. Then a young hand with bitten nails and the first white wisps of not-yet masculine hair took up a piece of carved mineral and placed it deftly, assuredly on the board, knocking the opposing king over with a polite thump. At last, small victory.

  Mick took out the knight, inverted it and plugged it into the starter socket. Then he smashed his palm against it. Waves of green coldness swept over him like anxious breath.

  Something inside the jenny clicked. He punched the choke nib, put his whole body into it, and felt his shoulder stitches spread like wrangled shoelaces. The generator coughed and then caught. The roar of its motor was like a song.

  He lunged at the double barrel, knowing he’d already stayed too long.

  “I’m sorry, Jude,” he said, his jaw tight, his throat tighter, as he flicked the pump switch.

  The double barrel let go another of its waking screeches. A puttery, gyrating sound rose up from deep inside. The air ripened with fumes.

  The Crymost glow pressed against him, images refracted on its surface: kaleidoscopic blooms of posters depicting old dead poets, of composition notebooks, student desks in neat rows, book reports with faulty grammar and poor comprehension, memories of a thousand conversations, a thousand more emotions and his own laughter, because laughing is what you do when you love your life. He saw it all, heard it all, and wondered vaguely where Judy belonged in the mix. Where Knoll fit in. Or Harley. He clamped down on the red lever as the glow enwrapped him with the tenderness of icy, loving hands.

  And he realized the winds of the past are good air, but it’s best to keep them at your back.

  He flipped the switch.

  “That,” a young man’s voice announced from inside his head, from the corners of the room and the very air around him, “is a checkmate, Mr. Logan.”

  The double barrel released a whirling sound, like a shaggy ball flying through the air. Ignition.

  The glow tightened around him with a startled, strangling tension and then ejected him, pushing him out like an unwanted birth. It swirled back through the hole in the wall. He landed hard near Harley’s feet. A distant sound bloomed under the hum of the jenny and the rusty labors of the double barrel pump. Explosion. It seemed to be a prolonged thud on the floor of the world. Everything jumped. The jumbled ruins in the next room collapsed, handholds gone. He closed his eyes and they stung with tears.

  The landfill and The Crymost drop-off, he knew in ways he could never explain, erupted in a massive flash of blue flame and a cloud of blasted limestone. Chastity Mellar Borth teetered on the stony edge to face Knoll’s beast eye to eye, invite it to a finality where greed and pain were as meaningless as dust while massive slabs of rock unhitched and descended with the ease of a fissured glacier. As the drop-off crashed down to a ruinous end, Chastity fell with it.

  A vocalization traveled through the night air: a mortal whoop of betrayal as old as The Crymost stones themselves.

  And there was another sound near Mick, a stirring snort from Harley. Mick reached out and rapped the bottom of his friend’s shoe; it was all he possessed the energy for.

  “Hey. Harley, we did it.”

  Harley’s reply was almost mournful, at the tattered end of consciousness. “Aw damn.”

  Anything else Mick might have tried to say caught in his throat. The double barrel jumped and rattled. Its pump gave out with a loud clatter and its parts seized with a bang. There was nothing more to pump, and nothing more to ignite. Like a hero in an old tale, its purpose was fulfilled, and therefore its life was done.

  ***

  Mick got to his feet, wobbly as a foal and the pains in his abused body began to check in from all quadrants. Yet, he smiled. “Sit tight. I’ll get you some help.”

  The walk down the tunnel was almost dreamlike, and exhausting. When he got to the basement of the bar he found just enough energy to pull open the big cooler door, and then he collapsed, only half aware of Will reaching out to catch him.

  “Jesus,” Will said as he eased Mick down to the floor. “Is it done? Of course it is, because I feel—well, it’s what I don’t feel that counts. And I heard the boom.”

  “Hell of a face-off,” Mick said and patted Will’s shoulder with a grateful hand. “For all of us. Harley’s still back there, by the double barrel. He’s not good.”

  “I’ll go. I’ll drag him out with my teeth if I have to. I owe him big time after what I did. I owe you, too.”

  “Give me a minute and I’ll help you.”

  “You stay right there,” Will said.

  Mick had to admit, it was good to have the old Will back. He nodded in concession. Many things would be back to the way they were, he supposed. He reached out, mentally, and hoped to nudge those two lucky pawns one more time. He was unable to detect them, however.

  He lowered his head, listening to Will’s diminishing footfalls and took the chance to rest. To rest at last.

  EPILOGUE:

  GOOD, LONG FUTURE DAYS

  “THERE’S THE HOUSE HUNTERS,” Harley said from the shady spot on his porch.

  Mick and Judy walked up together and separated at the top step. Mick walked toward Harley’s lawn chair perched under the sign reading THE KROENERS by the front door. Judy went to the far side where Beth Ann, in a shaft of midday sun by the porch railing, poured lemonade.

  It seemed old and right, and it also felt strained. Judy and Beth Ann embraced overlong, the heavy wrapping on Judy’s wrist keeping her arm at an awkward angle. Harley did not rise when he shook Mick’s hand but the clap of their handshake was firm and deeper than ever before. Harley’s arm, in a cast and a sling, added to the already infirm air about him.

  “I know you’re on your way to make that real estate offer, so we don’t expect you to stay,” Harley said. His eyes glimmered under his brow. There was a cane propped nearby, against a table where pill bottles stood behind a box of tissues like something shameful. “But we wanted to wish you luck.”

  “It sounds like a good offer,” Beth Ann said and brought over two frosty glasses, one for each of
them. “And if they accept it right off we can have another one of these tonight, with a shot of vodka mixed in to celebrate.”

  “Even me?” Harley’s good-humored smile was as wide as ever, and yet thinner somehow.

  “I’ll measure yours with an eyedropper.” Beth Ann laughed, an automatic response without real humor, like an echo. “And you shouldn’t even have that much.”

  They all laughed some more, and then the women broke away again. Once in their segregated groups (old and familiar as well-worn gloves) there was silence, except for the breeze through the leaves. Mick set his glass next to the pills and looked at the once towering man who now sat huddled like a crumpled ball of old paper. There seemed to be more gray in Harley’s hair, and his eyelids drooped with the weight of exhaustion.

  “It was gone,” Harley said at last. “They can blame it on a goddamned botched-up test, but I know it was gone. I felt it was gone.”

  It. Never cancer (back to the way things were). Just it.

  “I know.” Mick pushed his hand against the bony nub of Harley’s shoulder. The nudge was familiar, but that, too, felt thinner somehow. “I wish . . . ah, Jesus, I’m not sure what I wish.”

  “You did what was right. There’s a hell of a lot of people in this town who owe you their lives, and they don’t even know it. No denying it. And since we’re talking about wishes, I’ll tell you one of mine. I hope you and Judy get your offer accepted, and yet I don’t. Just so you know where I stand.”

  “It’s in Allycegate. Sixty miles. That’s not far.”

  Harley cast him a look that said ten feet was too damn far when he was facing a dire prognosis, each day of his life paying out like thread from a nearly depleted spool. Then he slumped back in his chair. “This town needs somebody to rebuild it.”

  “I need some rebuilding time of my own, to be honest.”

  Harley nodded. “Yup, you do. Don’t get me wrong. I want you to.”

  “You’re still the boss.”

  Judy came over. “I thought Will was stopping by.”

  The voice from the porch steps made them all look around. “Oh, he is.”

  Will greeted each of them with a smile and a hug and thanked Beth Ann when she thrust a glass of lemonade into his hand. “I’ve got a lot to do today, but I couldn’t miss wishing you guys luck.”

  “Business or pleasure?” Judy asked him.

  “Business. Things have been slow, but Friday nights are fair, so I’m keeping the inventory up for now. I don’t want to leave here if I can help it but, worst case, I got a line on a booze and sandwich place in Fond du Lac. It’s been closed up for a while but I think it shows promise. It was called Trinity.”

  Beth Ann raised her eyebrows. Her fingers worked across the collar of her blouse, searching for a gold cross no longer hanging there. “Trinity?”

  Will shrugged, sheepish. “Yeah. It . . . uh . . . used to be a church.”

  They laughed, rich and genuine this time.

  “We need a toast,” Harley said and struggled to his feet. Mick reached over to hand him the cane but Harley warned him off of it. “I’d do the honors, but I’m afraid the painkillers got me addled enough to start singing nursery rhymes instead.”

  “I can do it.” Will stepped forward with his glass raised. “To Mick and Judy—actually to all of us. And to good, long future days.”

  As they clinked their glasses together a gust of wind rattled the shrubs and made the trees whisper and stir. They all looked out at the empty expanse of Backbank Street and beyond to where Knoll dozed in a state of wounded hibernation. Mick wondered which scars would fade in time, and which would remain. He glanced at everyone on the porch with a pang as they sipped their drinks.

  “I heard from Nancy,” Judy said and Mick was glad for the change of subject. “She’s doing fine. She plans on spending the summer on the peninsula.”

  This was met with ohs and understanding nods.

  “I hate to toast and run, but those cases of chicken wings aren’t going to deliver themselves,” Will said. “Goodbye, everybody.”

  He left them, handshakes and hugs all around before stepping into the sun.

  “We need to go too,” Mick said, “if we want to make the real estate office in time.”

  Harley settled back in his chair seeming shrunken and resigned. “Don’t be strangers.”

  “Not a chance, my friend. In fact, we’ll stop by late for those vodka lemonades whether we have any news or not.”

  “It’s a date.”

  They were on the road with the windows down when Judy reached over to take his hand. “There’s still time. We don’t have to write that offer if you don’t want to.”

  “I want to,” he said. “Keep it all behind us. Where it belongs.”

  He dug in his pocket and produced the smooth mineral chess piece he kept there. The king. It flashed in the sun when he held it up for her to see. Then he tossed it out of the car window with a hitching sigh, committing it to the earth, the seasons, and to the vagaries of memory.

  “Checkmate,” he said, and gave the car more gas.

  ***

  10/28/13-1/15/16

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  “Thank You” barely begins to express how deep my gratitude runs for those who offered advice, encouragement and expertise as I shaped The Crymost into a living, breathing novel. To Michael Knost and Kathy Ptacek, your interest, advice and encouragement—past and present— helped me in a hundred untold ways. To TM Wright, I have no doubt our conversations all those years ago guided me to this place. Rest in Peace, my friend. To Matthew Pea, Kathy Gerner, Heather Quickle and Lauren Walker, I value the professional and personal knowledge you shared with me far more than you can know. To Kari Eggert, your insight and assessments helped me to rectify and clarify that which was vague, your positivity allowed me to do it without hesitation. To Marc Ciccarone, I thank you with all my heart for believing in The Crymost. To editor extraordinaire Andrea Dawn, thank you for helping me take things apart and put them back together in a finer, more sensible manner. Your talent is rare and remarkable. And finally, to Julie Wild, my beautiful wife, unflinching first reader, my compass and my conscience, thank you for believing in me. I love you, always.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Dean H. Wild has spent his entire life in east central Wisconsin, living in various small towns near the city of Fond du Lac. He wrote his first short horror story at the tender age of seven and continued to write dark fiction while he pursued careers in the newspaper industry, real estate, and retail pharmacy. His short stories have seen publication in several magazines and anthologies. The Crymost is his first novel. He and his wife, Julie, currently reside in the village of Brownsville.