He hated getting up so much he simply stopped doing it.
For a while his mom was able to drag him out of bed and get him out to the school bus with a second or two to spare. But Ben wasn’t cooperating, and he soon started missing the bus, which meant his mom had to drive him to school. That suited him just fine, because it meant a few minutes’ extra sleep in the mornings. It was not fine with his mom, who took him to a doctor.
The doctor said he was what they call a night person, someone who’s naturally geared to staying up late and sleeping late, the sort of person who’s befuddled and grouchy in the morning and slowly wakes up as the day goes along. It’s natural for some people, Doc Ingram said; you’ll just have to live with it.
This morning his mom had decided she was tired of living with it.
She’d just let him sleep.
He was surprised to discover that he’d awoken on his own, without any help. He was even more surprised when he found out it was nearly ten o’clock. Then the crunch had come. He walked downstairs, less groggy than usual because he’d woken up gradually, and his mom was standing there with her arms folded, looking at him stonily.
“I see you’re finally up,” she said.
“You didn’t wake me,” he said, wondering whether she had and he just didn’t remember it.
“No,” she said. “And I’m never going to wake you again.”
He stared at her, not sure what was going on.
“From now on it’s your responsibility to get up on time and catch the school bus.” Her eyes were fixed on his, hard eyes that were driving home the point. “You set the alarm clock or do whatever you have to do, but you be out there in time to catch the school bus in the morning. Understand?”
“But what if—”
“No what ifs. Just do it.”
She obviously meant it. This was not one of those things where she’d give in later on, and the new rule would just sort of be forgotten after a while. Not this time. She was royally pissed.
“Get dressed,” she said. “You’re going to school.”
“But—”
“You’re going. Get dressed.”
He got dressed, found his mother in the kitchen, mopping the floor. “I’m ready,” he said.
“Good,” she replied. “See you this afternoon.”
“But … aren’t you going to drive me?”
She stopped mopping, looked at him as if she couldn’t believe he’d said anything so stupid. “If you wanted to ride, you should have gotten up in time to catch the school bus.”
“But … it’s raining.”
“I noticed.”
So here he was, walking through the puddles on Pine Road, rain beating on his slicker so hard and fast it sounded like static on a radio. I could catch pneumonia, he thought. I could die, and it would be all her fault. He stomped his foot in a deep puddle to vent his frustration, sending cold water splashing in all directions.
He had a long way to go. He had to follow Pine Road to Island Avenue, which would take him to the school grounds. Then he’d have to walk around the building to the Lansing Street entrance. Finally, he’d have to explain to Mrs. Baxley, his teacher, why he was so late.
Ben was sick of being out in the rain. If he had to go to school, he wished he could just get there, so he could dry out. He’d been hoping someone would come by in a car and offer him a lift, someone he knew. But no cars had come. Hardly anyone lived out this way year-round. Most of the houses were summer cabins, all of which were deserted at this time of year.
As he walked, Ben found himself looking more and more frequently into the woods on his right. By cutting through the woods he could shorten the distance between himself and the school considerably. Of course, everything in the forest was dripping, but then he was already soaked, so what difference did it make? And then he found what he’d been looking for, a path through the trees that came out on Lansing Street, about a block from the elementary school. He hesitated, knowing it could be quite muddy, then decided to hell with it and plunged into the woods.
It wasn’t as muddy as he’d feared, but the ground was covered with wet fallen leaves, which were slippery. Low branches of bushes and young trees seemed determined to slap him wetly in the face.
Ben Upchurch!
The boy jumped when he heard his name, wondering who could be there in the woods with him on a day like this. And at the same time noting that he was alone, out of sight, and very vulnerable. He listened intently, hearing nothing but the raindrops slapping the leafless trees, tapping on his slicker, pattering on the forest floor.
And then Ben realized what he’d heard. A branch squeaking as it rubbed against his wet slicker. He continued making his way along the barely discernible path. Again a branch squeaked along the slicker’s rubbery surface.
Beeeeeeeeen!
He ignored it. Woods were spooky any time. When you were alone and it was pouring rain as cold as ice water, they were even spookier. You imagined things. He came to a place where a narrow dirt road crossed the path. Someone had been through here in a car or truck recently, he noted. There were deep ruts in the mud. Following them with his eyes, Ben noticed that they led to a clearing about twenty-five feet away. The earth in the clearing was all messed up, as if someone had been digging there.
Hidden treasure.
The thought all but leaped into his mind. Sure, deep down inside, he knew that no one on Ice Island had any treasure to bury, that no one had robbed the grocery store or anything like that. Besides, robbers wouldn’t have been so obvious about burying the loot. Still, someone had been doing something, and Ben Upchurch wanted to find out what. The rain momentarily forgotten, he headed for the clearing.
Upchurch!
His foot had sunk into the mud, and he pulled it out, making a sucking sound. That was all he heard. No one had called his name.
As he approached the clearing, he saw something sticking out of the mud. Immediately his mind told him it could not be what he thought it was. You didn’t see things like that, not in real life; therefore it had to be something else. But as he drew nearer, the thing he was staring at began to look more and more like what he’d originally thought it was.
A hand.
Sticking out of the earth.
As if it belonged to a drowning person. Reaching up one last time for help before sinking forever.
Ben stared at it, mesmerized. Someone had buried a body here. No, he thought, it’s just a joke. He took a step closer. Then another. And another. And the hand still looked like a human hand. Not a mannequin’s hand. Not a trick. But a real live human hand. Except not live. Dead. Very dead. He was trembling.
Abruptly he turned, found the path, and ran as hard as he could toward Lansing Street, slipping in wet leaves, branches whipping his face. He slapped them away, ran harder. He thought he heard something moving through the woods, off to his right, running parallel to him. He glanced in that direction, seeing nothing. Even so, he tried to run still faster. Suddenly, getting out of the woods was the most important thing in his life. More important than getting up on time every morning for the rest of his life. More important than being mad at his mom. More important than anything.
Finally, when he thought he’d never get out of the woods, that he’d be there forever, that whoever had murdered the person whose hand was sticking out of the earth would surely find him and kill him too, Ben broke out of the trees and found himself on Lansing Street. There were houses around; he could go knock on the door of one of them, tell whoever answered what he’d found, but he decided not to. The school was only a block away, familiar territory, and he ran for it.
A few moments later, he dashed into the office, nearly colliding with the counter and startling Mrs. Schultz, the secretary.
“I … in the woods … a hand … I mean a body …”
3
The body whose arm had been sticking out of the earth belonged to Irene Waggoner. It had been shallowly buried, and the downpour had washed
off some of the soil covering it. When Don and Doc Ingram pulled her out, they found another corpse underneath. And then they found another. Six of them in all.
Roy Murdoch, who worked as a power-boat mechanic during the summer and did pretty much of nothing during the winter.
His wife, Bernice.
Wes Brock.
Earl Watt, a retired snowplow operator for the State of Michigan, who’d lived alone.
Valerie Spindler.
One by one, they were pulled from the muck, which made sucking noises, as if it didn’t want to let them go. The torrential rain washed the dirt off them, revealing bodies that had decomposed very little because of the cold earth into which they’d been put.
Some of them had been dismembered.
Wes Brock was missing an arm and a foot. Bernice Murdoch’s left ear was gone, along with three fingers from her right hand. They’d been killed cruelly. By a monster. Literally.
When all the remains had been unearthed, Don and Doc Ingram simply stood there, looking at them. “Did … did Pfeil do all this?” the physician asked, his voice filled with disbelief.
“Yes,” Don said. “Pfeil did all this.” Don had no intention of telling him the rest. The doctor would think he was bug-fuck.
“How … how could he?” Before Don could answer, the physician said, “When? When did he do it?”
“At the revivals.”
“Oh, Jesus. I … I was at one of those revivals. I … I don’t remember what happened.” The doctor looked at Don, his eyes pleading for Don to tell him none of these people had died at the one he’d attended.
“That was in the afternoon, out at McDougall’s place, right?”
“Yes.” The doctor looked haunted.
“None of them was killed then.”
“Thank God,” Ingram said.
But Tommy and Jean Quirk would have died if I hadn’t showed up, Don thought. But that was something the doctor didn’t need to know. “It’s over,” Don said. “Pfeil’s dead. Everything’s okay now.”
Just as he’d told Corrine. But it wasn’t over. The Evil was still loose on the island. A thing that took over people’s minds and bodies, turned them into killers so it could feed on the death they caused.
“Why did I go to that revival?” Doc Ingram asked.
“Pfeil drew you there. I don’t know how.”
The physician nodded as if that had told him something, although Don suspected it was just a thing done mechanically. You hear enough stuff you don’t understand, maybe you just start nodding. Oh, sure, I got you. Makes perfect sense.
Don had expected Carly Pfeil to be here too, covered with dirt and maybe with pieces of her hacked off. Her body would turn up eventually, he supposed. She had to be dead. He thought about Tommy and Jean Quirk, how close they’d come to being here. He hoped they’d make it, although they hadn’t contacted Tommy’s brother, which was clearly a bad sign. Phoning from the mainland would have been easy. And it’s what they would have done if they’d made it.
Don had gone to see Guy and Lois Quirk. He told them he believed Tommy and Jean had fled the island, taking a canoe with them to get across any open water they encountered. He also told them why Tommy and Jean had taken such a chance, explaining everything that had happened at the revival, omitting only the part about the Evil. Guy and Lois Quirk had given him the same look he seemed to be getting from everybody these days, the one that asked, How can this be happening? Explain it. Make us understand.
He wondered how they’d look at him if he told them about the Evil.
“I’m surprised the ground’s thawed enough to dig this deep,” Doc Ingram said, staring into the hole that had been a mass grave. It was filling up with muddy rainwater.
“Maybe he used a pick and just kept chipping away at it,” Don suggested. And maybe the Evil just melted it with a flame from hell.
The remains lay side by side in the muddy roadway, the rain washing the mud from their faces, eyes staring lifelessly at the gray sky. Surveying the carnage he’d pulled from the earth, Don noted that Wes Brock’s amputated body parts had been recovered—an arm and a foot—but Bernice Murdoch’s had not. But then fingers and an ear were small things that would be nearly invisible in the muddy earth.
No one had reported the Murdochs or Earl Watt missing, but it was entirely possible no one knew they were. Earl Watt was a widower who lived alone, and the Murdochs kept to themselves so much they were almost reclusive.
“You got any idea what he used on them?” Don asked.
“I’ve got to get them on a table and clean them up before I can tell you anything,” the physician said.
And then they just stood there in the wind-whipped rain, staring at the six bodies in the mud, all in a row, Wes Brock looking like one of those statues that had lost its arm. Except the arm wasn’t lost. It was lying beside Earl Watt. Along with Wes Brock’s foot.
Don wished they were statues, for statues didn’t matter. Sure, they could be vandalized; great, historic art could be lost and all that. But you couldn’t torture or murder one. And no small-town cop would have the responsibility of notifying the statue’s next-of-kin. Don would have to tell Kevin Waggoner that his wife was dead. And he’d have to tell Stan and Patsy Brock about Wes. He’d have to tell Jake Spindler about Valerie.
“Let’s load as many of the bodies as we can in the wagon,” Don said, glancing toward the Cherokee.
Doc Ingram slowly shook his head. “I’m not a goddamned coroner, you know. The town doesn’t pay me a cent. And yet here I am digging up bodies and getting drenched, taking all these corpses back to my office, for Christ’s sake. It’s not a morgue. It’s a doctor’s office, where people come to get treated in sanitary conditions.” He looked at Don, his blue eyes hard. And then the hardness left them, and he sighed. “Once we get them there, where are we going to put them? I’m out of freezer space.”
“Buy some more freezers from Dennis O’Connor, charge them to the town. When all this is over, maybe the town can have an auction on all the freezers.”
As they were carrying Roy Murdoch to Don’s Cherokee, Corrine Matthews’s voice came over the radio. “Ice Island to unit one.”
They put down Murdoch, and Don slipped into the front seat, instantly soaking the upholstery. He grabbed the microphone. “Go ahead.”
“It’s still going on, Don. I thought it was over, but it’s not, it’s still going on.”
“Corrine, what are you talking about?”
“Hollis Jurkowski. He just killed his wife and one of his kids. Strangled them. And he tried to kill his other kid, but the boy got away, and … and when he chased him out of the house, Vince Terrell was reading the meter, and Vince chased Hollis, and a couple of the neighbors helped, and …” Corrine seemed to just run out of steam.
“Jurkowski. Did he get away?”
“No, they caught him.”
“Is he okay?”
“Jurkowski?”
“Yes, Jurkowski.”
“I think so.”
“Where is he?”
“Detroit Street. Two-oh-seven Detroit Street.”
“Get a hold of somebody over there, and tell them to make sure he isn’t hurt.”
“Jurkowski? Why would they hurt him?”
“Corrine, just do it, okay? And tell them I’m on my way.”
Sixteen
1
Don took Doc Ingram with him, since the physician did not care to be left behind in the rain with a bunch of corpses. In the two-hundred block of Detroit Street, he found a group of people standing outside a yellow house in the rain. Don got out of the Cherokee and joined them. They were standing over Hollis Jurkowski, who sat on a soggy lawn that only a few days ago had been covered with snow. He looked up at Don with eyes that were filled with mindless rage.
Don felt something cold and clammy slithering around inside him. He had the Evil. Still trapped within the body of the host. It can be killed, Kesselring had said. You just have to know how
.
As if suddenly becoming aware of Don’s presence, everyone began talking at once.
“His little boy’s at our place. Wife’s with him.”
“Marky came running out of the house, screaming like he’d seen the devil, and then his father came after him, and I’ve never seen Hollis look like that. There was murder in his eyes. Murder. For sure.”
“Vanessa and Lauren are inside. He strangled the both of them. Woulda strangled Marky if he’d got a hold of him.”
“Took three of us to hold him down. Just kept screaming, fighting like a crazy man.”
“Whatcha mean, like a crazy man? You shoulda seen him.”
“He was wild.”
“Yeah, wild.”
“Berserk’s what I’d call it.”
“Yeah, that’s even better: berserk. That says it all.”
Then they all fell silent, as if they’d simultaneously run out of words. Don thought he knew what had happened. The Evil had found its new host, Hollis Jurowski, a janitor at the elementary school. The victims had been strangled, which probably meant there were no weapons inside the house. Especially no guns. No axes or chainsaws. The only knives most likely old and dull and cheap. The Evil, according to Kesselring, had to go where it was invited to go; it couldn’t enter just any victim. Jurkowski had been what was available. And despite the less than ideal circumstances, the Evil had decided to kill. And it got caught. Without the means to slay the host and escape.
Looking down at Hollis Jurkowski, Don saw a rather ordinary-looking guy in his fifties, tall and thin, with blond hair turning gray. Their eyes met, and a silent communication passed between them. I know you know. Don shivered.
He knew about the Evil, knew the things Kesselring had told him. And the Evil knew he knew. The thing inside Hollis Jurowski was his enemy. And he was its enemy. Don looked away.
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