Applewood (Book 1)

by Brendan P. Myers

  “My brother,” Jimmy said.

  Dugan was stunned and sat back, wanting to hear more now, but knowing he’d have to settle for later. Fighting to keep the smile off his face, he remembered Billy warning him last summer to watch his back. He thought that maybe some of Billy’s wacky conspiracy theories were finally starting to come true.

  The five sat there a while, the quiet of the basement only broken occasionally by the sound of the furnace going on and then off. The pounding of the rain against the house, and the ever present hammering of water streaming from gutters, had become a sort of white noise to all of them after so many days. None of them even heard it anymore.

  Dugan’s mind began wandering as he looked around Moon’s basement. He saw an old croquet set discarded in a far corner and a beat up ping-pong table folded up against one wall. There was a pile of laundry in front of the washer and dryer. Dugan remembered going into Harris’ basement that day and seeing nothing— literally nothing—that wasn’t expensive or a trophy of some sort or other. No beat up ping-pong tables for them.

  He remembered the way that Harris had ushered him out of the house after his mother showed up and wondered what could have been so bad that Michael wouldn’t trust Dugan to know, or to see and understand. As he looked over again at the big pile of laundry, Dugan began thinking about Moon’s mother. He knew that she didn’t work, and she could also be kind of stern about things. Dugan hadn’t even stopped to wonder how Moon could let them all into his basement in the middle of a school day. Then he looked up at the big kid and saw him weeping and he knew.

  After another moment, Moon began sobbing. They all looked over to see him cover his big face with his hands. Jimmy was the first one up, running over to sit next to him on the couch. Then Mike jumped up from his seat on the floor and took the other side. Moon got control of himself after another moment, using his big shoulders to wipe away the tears. When he thought that enough time had passed, Dugan asked the only question he had.

  “Do you still see her?”

  Moon nodded before once again bursting into tears.

  6

  Research

  He hadn’t gotten more than a page or two further into the Daniels diary before the need for sleep overwhelmed his battered body and tired mind. When he opened his eyes again, he looked up and saw it was after 3:00 in the afternoon. He sat up quickly, disoriented for a moment, before remembering in a flash all that had already transpired that day: the river, Moon, and the stories his friends had told. Furious with himself, Dugan dragged his legs off the bed and put his feet on the floor, realizing that he felt the same way he always did after a nap: like shit. He knew that because of this lapse, he would feel like shit for the rest of the day, and thought that it served him right. Sleep was for the nighttime. And the dead.

  Dugan shivered and then panicked for a moment. He turned abruptly and was relieved to see that the brown leather book was still there. It had apparently fallen off his chest as he slept. He reached for the book and then got up and walked over to sit down in the battered old chair he kept by the side of his bed. As his still tired mind came back to life, he reviewed the plan they had come up with this morning.

  Dugan had sent them all to the library, suggesting that they enter the building at varying intervals so as not to arouse suspicion. They were to work independently and keep talking to a minimum. Dugan had asked Moon and Mike to look into whatever they could find on disappeared people, not just in Grantham recently but also to see if something similar had happened in other places and times. Jimmy and Larry were to keep working the Pope angle, and find out whatever they could on Isaac Daniels or any of his descendants. Before they left, Dugan took Larry aside to give him a special mission.

  “Go down to the Historical Society. There’ll be a lady there. She’ll give you a hard time, but tell her that you’re a friend of mine and then tell her that it was at your house up in Maine we found the old newspaper. She’ll have an orgasm for a while, but after that, ask her if she can tell you anything about a guy named Remlinger. Jules Remlinger. He grew up around here and wrote a couple of books about the town. And remember to look her in the eye.”

  Larry thought that last part somewhat strange, but asked, “What does Remlinger have to do with any of this?”

  Dugan paused a beat before answering honestly that it was probably nothing. After they split up, all Dugan was supposed to do was stay home and finish the damn diary, but he had screwed up even that. Determined now to let nothing stop him, he put his head down, found the last page he was on, and began to read once again.

  * * *

  At precisely two minutes and fifty-eight seconds after 6:00 p.m., Dugan had read enough. He threw the book down onto the floor of his bedroom and ran out of the house, not stopping to put on his slicker. Pulling his battered bike out of the shed, he rode through the drizzle while keeping one eye toward the darkening skies, visions of Isaac Daniels’ nightmare haunting his mind.

  They had made him their cat’s paw and slave, keeping him alive, Daniels postulated, to care for whatever daytime needs they might have. The last few entries Daniels made in Georgia vividly described an army of monsters who fought only at night with one shared goal in mind, to gorge themselves with blood. Daniels finally escaped their grasp with General Sherman hot on the trail of the vampire army, writing:

  I have no doubt that General Sherman will bear the harsh judgment of history, for the scorched earth and black smoke left in his wake, but I tell you truly that this was done in the service of a noble purpose and a just cause, to rid the earth of these abominations, these demons. Historians will not be told that before Sherman arrived to lay further waste, Georgia already howled and Atlanta had become a city of the living dead…

  Dugan stopped to consider the word, and after a while even said it out loud. He rejected it immediately because it was impossible and there weren’t any such things and nobody would believe him.

  Vampires.

  These sorts of things were reserved for Halloween movies at the State or for channel 56’s midnight Creature Feature. There are no such things, he thought, before he remembered sickeningly that Moon would believe him. Harris already knew. He had almost told him as much, but Dugan hadn’t listened. He shook his head and tried to put the word out of his mind as he thought back to the diary.

  Daniels eventually was able to limp his way back home to Grantham where he began to try and put the horror of the war and its immediate aftermath behind him. He was home only a month when he began asking himself if he had experienced any of it. In the last year of the war, with his regiment under fire daily and each evening spent digging or marching, he had watched some of his fellow soldiers go mad.

  Having witnessed firsthand the pressure that war wrought on the minds and hearts and souls of his comrades, he wondered whether he had been similarly afflicted. Daniels began to question whether the Colonel’s bloodbath was in its own way a manifestation of that same mental affliction that had undone some of his colleagues.

  He began to court his late brother’s fiancée. But it was after Dugan read the following that he threw the book down and rushed off to see his friends:

  “I have seen tonight that lights burn again in the Pope Mansion.”

  * * *

  When he got to the library, he threw his bike down onto the concrete and ran inside. Moon and Mike were sitting at a long table with piles of books in front of them, all subterfuge unneeded now that the school day was over. Their faces turned serious when they looked up to see him standing there without a coat and drenched.

  “Where’s Jimmy?” he asked.

  Both of them moved their chins to point toward the stacks to the right. Dugan walked in the direction they had indicated to find Jimmy sitting cross-legged on the floor of the American History section and leafing through a thick book. They nodded to each other. Jimmy appeared concerned at first, but then smiled while looking at his friend’s drenched clothing and beaten up face.

 
“You gotta take better care of yourself, man.”

  Dugan smiled back. “You find anything?”

  Jimmy looked down and sounded disappointed when he answered. “Don’t think so.”

  “Where’s Larry?”

  Jimmy told him that Larry went to the Historical Society a few hours ago. Dugan nodded and then motioned with his head for Jimmy to get up and follow him. As he walked away, Dugan muttered under his breath, “We’re looking in the wrong section anyway.”

  Unsure how to take the remark, Jimmy asked Dugan’s departing back, “Where should we be looking?”

  “Horror.”

  * * *

  Dugan was right, Larry thought. The woman had been excited to meet him. After he told her who he was, she made him go down to her office where the two drank tea for half the afternoon. She made Larry tell her everything he knew about his great-grandfather, the house up in Maine, and his family history. By the time she was done with him, he was exhausted and had already excused himself three times to go pee.

  When he finally got around to asking about Remlinger, she answered that he was in luck. Remlinger had donated all his notes and papers to the Historical Society sometime during the ‘60s, and she would be more than happy to help a budding historian like himself.

  The two of them got up and walked down to a door off the long hallway, then down two sets of narrow stairs into the basement. He was surprised to see that such an old building would have a modern basement, but he realized it would have to be if they were going to use it to store valuable books and papers and whatnot, which they obviously did. Beneath bright overhead fluorescent lights, a series of long wooden tables were lined up among and between the various bookshelves and file cabinets.

  She pointed out two stout matching metal file cabinets over in a far corner and said, “Those are Remlinger.” Before leaving him alone, she told him to be careful and to leave everything the way that he had found it. She also asked him to stop by her office and see her before he left. After she had gone, he went over to the file cabinets, opened a drawer at random, and withdrew a pile of folders and notes and papers, not at all certain what he was supposed to be looking for.

  * * *

  In a hushed whisper and as quickly as he could, Dugan told them everything he had learned. He caught himself looking up occasionally, at the narrow rectangular windows that went all the way around the library, to watch the skies darken. When he was finished, he remembered the question he wanted to ask.

  “Hey, where was the old Pope Mansion anyway? Did you find that out yet?”

  There was no immediate response from Jimmy, just a queer look. Dugan glanced at Moon and Mike and realized again that there was something he didn’t know.

  “What?” he asked impatiently.

  “I thought you knew,” Mike said. “I thought everyone in town knew.”

  Dugan was getting seriously pissed now. “Come on, Mike! Knew what?”

  After a short pause, Mike said, “He donated it to the town. It’s the old library. The Historical Society.”

  * * *

  After tossing the book aside, Larry began rolling his head back and forth and shrugging his shoulders in an effort to loosen up stiffened muscles. He had been looking through Remlinger’s high school yearbook. Beneath the photograph of a serious kid with funky glasses, it said that Remlinger had belonged to the debate and current events clubs. He had also been a Room Captain— whatever the hell that was—and his ambition was to become a teacher.

  Larry thought he had probably wasted too much time looking through the faces in the black and white photographs of Grantham’s Class of ‘28. He did the math and figured they’d all be around seventy years old now. Some of them were probably dead, but most should still be alive. Larry knew that he was lucky to come from a family of people that tended to live a long time. His great-Uncle Press was ninety years old and still drove a car, though Larry’s father had forbidden Larry to ride along with him. Uncle Press had lived up in Maine with his eighty-eight year old sister his whole life. Neither of them had ever married, and until this very moment, Larry had never thought to ask them why.

  He found it interesting to look at the old photographs of Grantham High. The building in those pictures looked much the same as it did when it was first built, before additions had been put onto the building in the ‘40s and again in the ‘60s. Bastards still hadn’t built enough rooms, he thought, cursing again the fact that he and his friends had been sentenced to an extra year in junior high. The adults all called it the “middle school” now, but not him and his friends. They all knew that no fancy name was going to change the fact that they had to spend what rightfully should have been their freshman year in high school still trapped in junior high. He had a theory about that too.

  He figured that everyone must have been really horny when they got home from the war. The climax of the horniness must have occurred right before he and his friends had been born into a new and smaller generation of kids. He was thinking that he could certainly forgive and understand their horniness, when he looked up to realize he had been hearing an unusual noise coming from someplace. He cocked his head to listen. It was a scratching, shuffling noise. Now that he was paying attention, he noticed the noise itself was almost lost in the constant buzzing of the fluorescent lights. He picked up the books and papers he had been looking through and returned them to the file cabinet, and before he left, decided to investigate the source of the noise.

  * * *

  Dugan didn’t stop to explain after hearing the news. Leaving his friends to stare after him, he ran to the doors and exited the new library to head for the old one, thinking that Mike was right. He should have known that! How could you grow up in this town and not know something like that? Maybe he’d been absent that day, he thought, while running up the granite steps of the Historical Society.

  He went underneath the portico and loudly shoved open the old wooden door, coming to a squeaky, wet stop on the polished marble. He glanced up at the portrait of the Colonel that dominated the room, quickly turning away after feeling the same strange pull he’d felt his other time here, as well as that day out at the cemetery. It was stronger this time.

  He ran down the hallway and poked his head into Pope’s library for a moment before running on, stopping outside the woman curator’s office. She was sitting at her desk and dressed in regular clothes today. She smiled when she saw him standing at her door. He thought it was an odd sort of smile.

  “Where’s my friend?”

  “Ah, Mr. Dugan. Welcome back! Please have a seat. Won’t you join me for some tea?”

  She began pouring herself a cup from what looked to Dugan like an old and valuable white porcelain teapot that was luxuriously decorated in blue.

  “Umm…no thanks, really, I just need to find my friend.”

  She smiled at him again. “Your friend is in the basement.” She took a quick glance up to the wall clock. “I do want to thank you for introducing me to him. He has an interesting…bloodline, don’t you think?”

  Dugan didn’t know how to answer the question. She went on. “I’ll bet the Colonel knew his great-grandfather. Wouldn’t it be something if he were to recognize a family resemblance!”

  Dugan stepped backwards and began shouting his friend’s name. “Larry! Larry!” He walked along the hallway, loudly trying all the doors, before finding one with a set of stairs going down.

  * * *

  Painted an archaic shade of green and half hidden behind a large bookcase was an ancient door. Larry saw the brass of the door handle had been worn away over time, but he was certain that this was where the noise was coming from. He pulled open the door and was knocked backwards by the powerful odor that escaped through the crack. His eyes teared up and he turned his head to the side to try to take in some fresh air. After the odor had dissipated, he realized that he had smelled something the whole time he had been here and that this was its source. It smelled kind of like rotting fruit.

/>   He took in a deep breath and held it before poking his head into the open crack of the door. He felt around for a light switch but could find none. The noise was louder now, although no longer a scratching noise but more a sucking sound that he felt both drawn toward and a little aroused by. He looked down at the ancient and cracked top step but could see nothing below that. The sucking sound got even louder and—God!—it was a major turn on for some reason and then, from somewhere deep below the ground, he heard someone calling his name. He reached down to adjust himself a little bit before he took the first step.

  * * *

  “Larry! Larry!”

  Dugan raced down the steps and was surprised to find himself in a brightly lit basement. He tore through the room shouting his friend’s name. He searched behind the shelves and file cabinets and found nothing, and then stood still for a moment before he smelled it. A foul odor was coming from somewhere, and it was a smell he had experienced before. He followed his nose behind a huge bookcase and saw an open door through which were coming obscene sucking sounds. He stepped through the doorway, but it was pitch black. He reached into his pocket for his lighter. It seemed to take forever for the thing to spark, but when it finally did, he caught a glimpse of Larry standing at the edge of what looked to be a very long drop.

  “Larry?” Dugan spoke softly so as not to startle him. When his lighter went out, he flicked it on to see that Larry had not acknowledged him at all, or even turned around. Dugan started down the half dozen steps to where Larry stood above what he now saw was a void in the ground, about six feet square. He turned his head away when he realized that whatever was down in that hole was also the source of the odor.