by Tim Marquitz
Alan crossed over to her. She was trembling. She pointed to the basement door. A coldness crept over him. The skin on his cheeks tingled. But he went, because his daughter needed him to.
The stink of wet earth hit him before he reached the door. Wet earth and rot, and worse. He pulled the catch and reached in for the light switch before his courage failed him.
The light showed the first three steps down. After that the blackness swallowed them, utterly. It was a sea of liquid soot, or a black fog, and it rippled with a slow undulation as though it breathed.
“Oh crap!”
Alan stepped back and closed the door. “Get the kids outside, Jane.”
She put her head around the corner. “Why? What’s wrong?”
What could he say? “Just get them out, now!”
“What is it? Alan, you’re scaring me.” She stepped into the corridor.
“Now!” He screamed it at her. “Get them out.”
Jane pulled Sarah from the kitchen and pushed her to the front door.
“Ben!” Alan shouted up the stairs.
Nothing.
“Ben!” He shouted it hard enough to hurt his throat.
A clunk from behind the basement door, deep and hollow, like a boat jostling against its moorings.
On the porch Jane turned, her face strained. “He was looking for some batteries . . “
“God no.” Alan felt the strength run from him. The beat of his pounding heart seemed to fall like slow footsteps. The basement door drew his gaze but his feet would not take him to it.
“Hi Daddy!” Ben ambled down the last few stairs. “Look! I got my Gameboy working!”
The cold wave of relief made Alan tremble, made him want to cry. Relief for his baby boy, but more than that, relief for not being asked the hard question. A small voice deep inside told him that he would not have walked into the black sea, no matter what the need, no matter what the cost.
“Get in the car.” He dragged Ben into the street. “Get in the car, all of you.”
“What the hell is going on?” Tears sparkled in Jane’s eyes, and she was furious.
“I don’t know.” Alan shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“What’s in the basement?” Scared, angry, hugging two kids to her waist, but God she looked good.
“I don’t know.” He could feel himself getting angry too, as the fear ebbed. “Something. Oil maybe.” He knew it wasn’t. “It could explode.”
“Oil?” Jane pushed Sarah into the back of their old Volvo Estate. “Oil?”
Out in the street with the lights of the houses all around it all seemed silly. If he went back in the basement would be empty. Madness started like this.
On next door’s lawn a ghost flashed on and off, a spook made of Christmas lights on a wooden frame. The Jensen’s always got ready for Halloween a week too early.
“Oil?” Jane stared at him, her hand on the car door, the kids peering through the window. Sarah still with her haunted look. Ben clutching his Gameboy and frowning.
“I … I don’t know.” He turned in a slow circle. The houses, the lights, the trees, some bare, with black fingers rubbing over each other in the breeze. “Look, wait in the car. I need to ask Jim about this.”
Alan started across the street before Jane could object. He looked back. “Don’t go back in. Not yet. It isn’t safe.”
He hurried up the path to Jim’s front door and knocked hard, then rang the bell. Jim Sanders. Jim would know about the oil. Jim knew about plumbing, about warped shingles on the roof, how to seal a deck, how to wire up a Scalelectix so the cars would spark all the way around and speed like they were on nitro. Jim would know.
“Alan. You look all flustered up.” Marge opened the door to him, frumpy in her apron and iron gray curls, slight disapproval behind those half moon glasses.
“Marge, sorry, is Jim in, I’ve got a problem. Is he in?”
“Slow down, Alan, you’ll do yourself a mischief.” She pressed a smile between tight lips.
“He’s out?”
“Oh he’s in of course. Where would that old man go? Who’d have him? He’s working on some project of his.” Marge pointed the bead curtain down the hall. “Go ahead. And tell him I want him up here soon. He hasn’t had his supper yet.”
Alan hurried past her. He swept the curtain aside before he registered the smell. Earth and rot, and something older than both.
The light from the hall revealed the first three steps down before the undulating darkness swallowed it.
He stood frozen.
“Anything the matter, dear?” Marge came up beside him. “I expect he—?
She fell silent.
“Jim’s down there?” Alan whispered. Something in him was afraid of what he might hear.
“My Lord!” Marge found her voice. “Jim! James Sanders you come up here this minute!”
Nothing.
“Jim! Jim!” The first hint of terror entered her voice.
A silence, and then in the darkness, a scrape, the dry scrape of sandpaper on stone, and the noise of nails on a chalkboard. Not close, but down there in the depths of the basement workshop. Down amongst the blades, the chisels, the soldering irons, the wire.
“Jim?” Alan still didn’t raise his voice. He couldn’t.
Nothing, and then, so close that it might come from immediately below that skin of blackness, a chuckle. A nightmare chuckle.
Alan ran. He pushed past Marge, leaving her staggering and bewildered in her own hall, and he ran.
~
“Just keep driving. I need to think.”
The roads were neither more crowded than normal for the time of night, nor less, but the traffic was different. From time to time a police car or ambulance sped out of the rear view mirror and dwindled in the distance with indecent haste. But it was the regular cars that worried Alan. Too many of them packed with a whole family. White faced kids at the windows. Up too late.
“We’re going to be in Edmont soon!” Jane’s knuckles showed pale on the wheel.
“I know.”
“Tell me again,” she said.
It sounded stupid. With each mile they put behind them it sounded more stupid. “I’m trying the cell again.” He clicked it open.
“Still no signal?”
“Damned satellites.” He peered at the sky. Inky and featureless. He heard the chuckle again, and cold fingers touched his spine.
“There. Pull in there,” he said. A roadside eatery, ‘Mable’s steaks and fries,’ bright lights and stainless steel, a dozen cars in the lot. “We’ll call on a landline.” And tell them about a chuckle in the dark?
Jane huddled behind him with the kids while Alan tried the payphone. He started with the numbers for the local police. They were busy.
“I’m going to try 911,” he said.
He glanced across the restaurant, feeling suddenly guilty. He had never rung 911 and now he was doing it to tell them it was dark in his basement. He jabbed the numbers.
The engaged tone.
Alan hit redial.
The engaged tone.
“It’s fucking engaged!”
“Alan, Benny’s listening.” Jane said it without conviction.
He dialed three times more then slammed the phone down. “Crazy!”
The waitress scowled at him from her order.
“C’mon.” He led the way to the car. “I’ll drive.”
“Where are we going, Alan?” Jane had her ‘adult’ voice on, but he could hear the tremor under the surety.
“My mother’s,” he said.
“That’s ninety miles!”
“Ninety miles sounds good.” He turned the ignition and pulled out onto the highway.
Alan pushed the Volvo to seventy, foot on the floor. If a cop got him for speeding, well at least he’d get to speak to the police.
He turned the radio on. Static. 908 FM appeared to have closed up shop. No hot tunes, no cheaply made commercials, just a harsh static roar
. He hunted for WAFM and the news.
“ … word out of Midport. And additional disturbances in Highton, Maytown, and Deal. I repeat, police advise against any unnecessary travel. The coast road is closed from Eastham, as far west as we have reports. More on the problems for folk wanting to get into Midport as we get it.
Bob, I’m thinking it sounds like some kind of toxic spill. What’re your thoughts?”
Bob’s thoughts, if any, were drowned out by an unearthly howling.
“Turn it off! Turn it off!” Jane screamed.
Alan twisted the volume to zero then rubbed at his ear.
“What the hell was that?” Jane asked.
“Interference.” He hoped it was interference. It did have an electronic quality to it. He overtook a 4x4. The speedometer read 85.
Seconds later an old blue Beemer shot past them, boxes crowding out the rear window and a lone teddy bear stuffed between them.
The road crested a rise and started on down a long incline. Alan could still see the Beemer’s tail lights several hundred yards ahead.
“We should call your mother,” Jane said. “Let her know we’re coming.”
The tail lights winked out.
“I said—”
The squeal of brakes cut her off. The wheel tried to twist out of Alan’s hands, but he kept his foot on the brake pedal. Jane screamed. The kids screamed. Alan couldn’t tell if he were screaming too.
They ground to a halt on the gritty margins of the road.
“Jesus fuck!” Jane spat and pulled the seatbelt from her neck. Benny could listen all he liked.
“Are you kids alright?” she asked, turning in her seat. A raw red line ran below her throat.
“Alan! What the hell—” And then she saw it too.
The road ahead vanished into a black lake. The headlights made no impression of its surface. The slow swell rose and fell, and waves of pitch washed the asphalt five yards in front of them.
~
Dawn found them, Alan at the wheel of the car, parked by the roadside on the ridge they had followed the Beemer over, Jane in the passenger seat, her head back against the rest, a line of dried saliva flaking at the corner of her mouth. The kids had cuddled together on the back seat.
At the first gray hints of morning the black lake had begun to retreat. Alan watched it draw in like a slow breath. By the time the sun’s rim rose burning over the eastern hills, the retreating lake had revealed the Beemer. All four doors stood open. More cars emerged, two, three, a dozen. Half of them formed a single twisted wreck.
The sun cleared the horizon, fanning a skein of red clouds out before it. The lake had sunk to a narrow band, a river running through the valley, overwriting whatever river might truly run there. Alan couldn’t tell how deep the blackness stood, but it overtopped any bridge that might have been down there to span the water.
He turned the volume knob on the radio, just a fraction. Beneath the faint pulsing howl, a voice, fainter still. He could make out the words ‘Emergency Broadcast’ and something about looters to be shot on sight.
The car door made a loud click as he opened it, but the kids didn’t move. Jane lolled her head to one side and went on sleeping. Alan eased himself out onto the shoulder. He stretched, never taking his eyes from the dark river a quarter mile down the slope. A long piss into the bushes at the roadside and then he set off down the shoulder, his work shoes slipping on the gravel, sending stones into the dry ditch to his left.
The morning chill raised goose bumps on Alan’s arms. He rubbed them through the thin cloth of his shirt. He could smell the rot, the basement stink, rising from the valley. No part of him wanted to walk this road, but he had to see. And more, he had to prove to himself that he could. His hesitation at the house, when he thought Ben might be down there in the basement, had sown a seed, and the shame had grown all night, until with the coming of the dawn it outweighed his fear.
The Volvo had laid down two thick lines of rubber leading to the point where Alan finally brought it to a halt. Five yards on and he came to where the lake had reached. The high-tide mark.
The road surface became more gray. It looked scoured, and potholes showed further along. The scrub to either side appeared dead, the leaves ash gray or black. In the ditch, bramble coiled like dark razor wire. Alan kept away from the ditch, walking on the road now. The hardtop crumbled under his shoes as though it were rotten snow.
He slowed as he drew nearer to the Beemer. It had been old, but this car looked as though it had spent ten years at the dump. Blue? He thought it had been blue. As he got closer he began to spot small patches of paint amongst the bubbled rust. The boxes had fallen from the rear window. The teddy still lay there, eyeless, gray stuffing drawn from its stomach.
One foot in front of the other. He needed to pee again. The silence felt fathoms deep, pressing on him from all sides. Another step.
The car lay empty, the insides torn, rusted springs jutting from perished seat covers. Alan looked toward the black river. Canal might be a better word. It gave no hint at currents or flow. All the cars would be empty. He knew where the people were.
Walking back to Jane and the kids, with his back to the valley, Alan could imagine it an ordinary day. The sun felt warm on his neck. Birds sang.
“A-Alan?” Jane woke up as he climbed back into the Volvo.
“Hey, Baby.” He gave her those moments of innocence.
She looked around the car, confused, then memory hardened on her face. “God Alan, what should we do?”
“This stuff is all over everywhere,” he said. “It’s on the coast, it’s back at home, it’s in this valley. It’s gonna be at Mom’s too. We can’t get past the river, and I don’t know where we’d go to if we could.”
“We can’t get across?” Jane asked.
“Not unless you’ve got some kind of magic boat.” Fear made his voice harsh. “What the hell is going to float on that? It’s just darkness.”
Jane peered into the valley, registering the black river for the first time. She swiveled in the car seat to look at the children. A tear rolled down her cheek.
Ben sat up, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “Hope floats.”
Alan was used to Ben’s sleep talk. He seldom woke up without the tail-end of some dream or other spilling from him. This one sounded like one of Jim Sanders’ little gems. “Hey, kiddo.” He forced a smile for the boy.
“It might not be so bad though,” Alan said. “Look, the dark has sunk back. It was half way to us last night. Now it’s way down there.”
“You think it’s going away?”
“I think it might, and I think we’re worse off here than we were at home,” Alan said.
“We should go back?” He could see she liked the idea.
“Maybe. Back to town in any case.” Alan could still hear that chuckle from the Sanders’ basement. “Maybe not back to the house yet.”
~
The roads which last night had been home only to the emergency services and a scattering of terrified families, were now jammed with every vehicle imaginable. They made the three miles to Ashton in six hours. At Ashton the gridlock became total.
“We’ve got to walk,” Alan told them.
“Walk?” Usually Jane liked to walk but today she had the expression of a woman asked to swim the Atlantic.
“We walk, or we stay here until it gets dark,” Alan said. He had the same reluctance to leave the safety of their metal box, but the safety was a lie. He remembered the Beemer and those open doors. He didn’t want that.
“But it’s twenty miles home,” Jane said.
“We can do it, Mom,” Sarah spoke from the back of the car, her first words since they left the house.
“I can walk it,” Ben chimed in.
“We’ll walk into Ashton,” Alan said. “Can’t be more than two miles. We’ll find a place for the night.”
~
The traffic queues ran right through downtown Ashton. Alan carried Ben on sore shoulders.
His throat burned with thirst and car fumes. They passed three fights, frustration boiling over into tire irons and baseball bats. Once they heard shots way behind them.
An old woman, gray hair in a bun, leaned out of her beat-up truck. “Mister, hey Mister, you know what’s going on up there?” She reminded Alan of Marge.
“I don’t know.” He thought of Jim down in his black cellar. “I’m sorry.”
A quarter mile on and the road dipped into an underpass. Alan led them off the first exit before the tunnel mouth.
“Holiday Inn!” Jane pointed along the street to their left.
Alan shook his head. “There.”
“That’s an office block!”
“It’s taller.”
Jane didn’t object when he broke the glass doors with a chunk of paving slab. She did step in when Ben cheered and tried to wrestle up one of the paper stands to join in the destruction.
They went up three flights of stairs and found a corner office with a view of the street.
Ben and Sarah installed themselves in the most comfortable of the swivel chairs and began to spin.
“Now what?” Jane asked.
“We wait and hope the army comes or something.” Alan had no idea. What do you do when the world goes mad? Stopping to think too much would definitely be a bad move.
Alan watched the streets. For the most part they were empty. A few groups of people passed, six or eight strong. It seemed like no one wanted to be alone. A police car with a megaphone attachment sped by. He couldn’t hear the message through the double glazing. In the distance, as the evening gloom began to gather, he saw a column of black smoke and the lick of fire above a roof.
By five the street below lay in deep shadow.
“There’s somebody outside.” Jane tugged Alan’s sleeve.
He heard a door slam. A sudden panic rose from his guts. The kids watched him with big eyes. He crept to the door and peered out. A man and woman were walking along the corridor, both laden with hold-alls and heavy coats.
“Hello there!” The man spotted Alan almost at once. He looked to be about fifty, balding and running to fat.
“Hi.” Alan stepped out from behind the door. He realized he had a stapler in one hand, clutched like a gun.
