The driver’s head was thrown back, a cap pulled across his eyes. Taylor rolled down his window, smelled the cool country air, a scent of dead leaves and earth. He was tempted to blow his horn to wake the shift cop, but he didn’t.
Funny, the man was talking to himself in his sleep. In the half-light, half-shadow of the interior, his face was contorted. He was talking quickly, then suddenly he screamed.
The man’s eyes shot open. Immediately he saw Taylor, and his hand was halfway to the gun on the seat when he recognized him.
“Snuck up on me, you bastard!”
“Any kid could have. It’s a wonder you still have tires. Must have been some dream you were having!”
Brewster laughed. “Hope I don’t have any more like it. Dreamed I was sitting right here in my Hillbilly Cadillac and some fucking monsters were creeping up on me out of the woods over there.”
Inadvertently, Taylor looked over to the darkly wooded perimeter. A full moon made the nearer trees stand out starkly, dark shadows beneath. He could almost see things moving in there.
“ ’Course, you’re the one they’re waitin’ for.”
Taylor shook his head. “Your sense of humor hasn’t improved since the G.E. job, leaving that dead cat by the first keystop . . .”
“Hey, it gets better.” Brewster consulted his watch. “Shit, past midnight, gotta haul, my momma’s waitin’.”
“One thing,” said Taylor, reaching for the walkie-talkie that Brewster handed him through the window, “I hear you have trouble keeping people on this shift, why?”
“Tales gettin’ to ya? Hell if I know. As far as action goes, don’t think anybody ever tried to hit this place. Nice and quiet and dead dull, out in the sticks like this. Maybe that’s it. City boys get lonesome. See ya.”
Brewster slammed the Camino into low, shot gravel across the lot as he took off. Taylor watch the red tail lights wink at the turn and disappear up the road toward Jeffersonville.
The beginning of a twelve-hour shift. A good time, as far as Taylor was concerned. He climbed out of the car, stretched, pulled out his shotgun, and walked across the loose gravel to the perimeter at the back of the lot.
To the left, the woods; to his rear, the road. Ahead was an empty field of autumn weeds, with a few desultory crickets chiming under the full moon and, very far away it seemed, the nearest of the abandoned barracks.
The night was quiet, so still. He took a deep breath of cool air, turned around.
He could see his old Chevy quite clearly in the moonlight. Someone was standing beside it.
Taylor’s nerves froze. He was an experienced guard. He had a twelve-gauge automatic shotgun with deer slugs under his arm. Yet there was something about the tall, apparently male figure beside his car that made him dizzy with fear. And there was only one thing to do about it.
He began to walk slowly back across the lot, the shotgun in his hands. It seemed to take a very long time. With each step, the figure was slightly clearer. It was a man, bareheaded, wearing a loose overcoat, facing away from Taylor, peering into the car.
Taylor suddenly remembered that, like an idiot, he’d left the keys in the ignition. All this dude had to do was climb in and drive away. He began to run, holding the shotgun across his chest.
He was quite close. The man must have heard him, but he didn’t move. Fifteen, ten yards. Taylor slowed to a walk, brought the gun up in one hand, his flashlight in the other.
“You, don’t move!” he yelled.
The figure didn’t move. Five yards, four, three. He could see the fellow clearly now, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched into the old khaki raincoat, a bald spot on the top of his head.
“Take your hands out of your pockets, real slow, and turn around.”
Slowly the figure took his hands out of his pockets. The bare fingers that protruded from the ends of the overcoat seemed very slender, very pale.
It turned around, and Taylor shone his flashlight in its face.
He didn’t scream, but he wanted to.
There was no face.
Taylor stood frozen, motionless.
The man was gone. There was only a faint sweetish smell in the air.
“Base calling 2101. Base calling 2101.”
Taylor jerked open the door and collapsed in the front seat. He fumbled at the walkie-talkie.
“2101 receiving.”
“Everything 10-2 down on the ranch?”
“Got a spook here, otherwise 10-2.”
“Copy?”
“Spook. S-P-O-O-K. But harmless. Everything 10-2.”
“Lay off the funny cigarettes, 2101.”
But the switchboard girl giggled.
“10-4. 2101 over and out.”
Taylor put down the walkie-talkie. What the hell had he seen? He’d never seen anything like it before, even when he’d dropped acid a few times. Was his psyche gunning for him? He put the thought out of his mind.
It was a nice night. He turned on the radio low, and had a first sip of the sweet, scalding coffee. The moon was just touching the tops of the slender black trees, the paired lights of a car passed in the distance. It would be a good night, now that his unconscious had had its little fling.
Taylor had a game he played with himself on long security shifts. He’d either mentally write the novel he’d promised himself he owed the world one day, or he’d reminisce about old girl friends.
The girl friends generally came a bit more toward the early morning hours. He decided to pick up on the novel.
The last time, he’d had his protagonist traveling across Ohio in a drunken haze. Now he would stop in a small Pennsylvania town, and meet a lonely woman who ran a rooming house. She would be in her early thirties, pale, divorced, and pretty. She would invite him to dinner one night. Outside the rain would be falling softly. Inside the candlelight danced across her face, softening its lines . . .
Taylor heard a sound.
His preconscious heard the sound and registered it before his conscious mind. His conscious mind didn’t want anything to do with it.
Distant, but not too distant, the sound of a woman crying in pain.
He scanned the lot. The moon rode high, the small floods illuminating the terminal building. The sound seemed to be coming from the far right rear of the perimeter, where a few trailers were parked.
This is weird, but it is not as weird as it seems.
Taylor climbed out of the car, taking shotgun and flashlight. He walked quickly across the lot, the sound of his boots crunching gravel loud in the night.
It came again, the cry, louder, a catch of horrible pain in the woman’s voice. Taylor began to run.
It was coming from directly behind the line of four trailers. Instead of running between them into the darkness, he slowed and went around them to the left.
The moonlight was bright. It seemed as if that icy white moon were chilling the air. There were narrow black shadows behind the trailers, but the cries hadn’t come from there. Taylor paused to catch his breath.
The cry came again, piercing, agonized. A young woman’s voice. It sounded as if she were dying, horribly.
Beyond the edge of the lot there was a stand of dry cattails, perhaps ten yards deep, indicating swampy ground. Taylor walked cautiously toward them. A scent hit his nose, not of the swamp: a faint, sweetish scent.
He almost did not go on, for it was the same scent that he’d smelled when he saw the man by his car.
But that was insane. The cry had subsided to a horrible gasping sob. Carefully placing his feet in the soggy ground, Taylor flipped on his flashlight and pressed through the cattails.
There was a small clearing in the center of the cattails. Here he saw a pool of water a few yards across, and lying half in the greenish pool was . . .
The corpse of a young woman. A pale, mottled, decayed thing whose long fair hair was entangled in the weeds, and whose hands still clutched something long and dull and metal that it had plunged into its chest.
Taylor shuddered, the light shaking in his hands, the odd, sweet smell very strong.
This thing could have made no sound.
Even as he watched, it slowly straightened, and the eyes rolled open and flashed moonlight into his.
Taylor heard his own scream. The shotgun roared in his hand, and he fell back, stumbled to his feet, crashed through the cattails back to the parking lot, wiping frantically at bits of moist . . . something . . . that the blast had scattered across his face and clothes.
He stood in the open, panting, looked back, terrified that the thing would follow. The smoke of the shotgun blast hung low over the little patch of cattails. There was no sound. He forced himself to turn and walk slowly back to the car.
The walkie-talkie was calling. Taylor answered, grateful for the human voice.
“See any more spooks, 2101?”
Silence.
“2101, copy?”
“No, Base, no more spooks. Everything 10-2.”
“You kinda sound like one, 2101. Base out.”
“10-4, 2101 out.”
Taylor turned his car so that he faced the terminal, and had the swamp to his left, the entrance to his right. His back was to the woods, but at the moment he was not worried about anything that might come out of the woods.
His hands were shaking. He poured himself half a cup of coffee and filled it with bourbon from the pint he kept under the seat. For emergencies. This was an emergency.
The bourbon felt good going down. Slowly he began to relax.
He tried to consider the . . . things . . . he’d seen in a calm, rational manner. There were really only three alternatives: the most likely was that someone was playing tricks on him. Elaborate tricks, to be sure, but it was possible.
The second possibility was that his own mind was playing tricks on him. But why now? Tonight? Why not at the LSD parties of the old days, when he’d sat cool, calm, and collected while everybody else was freaking their heads off? No, that was out. He was not an unstable person.
The third alternative was that there were spooks out there. No, and no, and no. Taylor was a romantic, but he did not believe in spooks in any way, shape, or form.
He raised the doctored coffee to his lips, savoring the old bourbon. Suddenly it came to him. It was so simple!
They’d had trouble keeping guards out here before. A few had told crazy stories, but management would have put that down to boozing on the job.
Someone was going to a lot of trouble to scare the guards off. He knew there were “hot loads”—booze or electronics—here occasionally. It was one thing to tackle an armed guard, but if you could just scare him off with some Dark Shadows routine, the rest would be a piece of cake!
Tricky. Well, he’d show them a trick or two! Taylor finished the coffee and decided to take another walk back to the perimeter.
Bright light filled the car. Someone was turning in off the river road.
The big Ford passed him, heading for the side door of the terminal. Taylor was halfway across the lot when a tall man in a suede jacket and western hat climbed out.
“Don’t shoot,” he said, “I gotta piss like a racehorse.”
“Sorry, this place is—”
“It’s okay. My name’s Stahl, day dispatch here. Yours is Taylor, right?”
He produced a ring of keys from his pocket and proceeded to open the door.
“Why don’t you come in for a minute? Just don’t drop that cannon. Browning auto, isn’t it? Good deer gun, close up.”
Taylor followed the big man into a narrow paneled room with a half-window like a doctor’s office, when truckers picked up their lading bills and logged in. Stahl took off his jacket and put a tin pot on an old two-burner hotplate for coffee, then plugged in the large electric heater by the desk.
Taylor sat close to the heater. It felt good. He hadn’t realized he was shivering.
Stahl disappeared behind a door marked Private and returned a few minutes later, zipping up his trousers. In the light of a couple of bare bulbs, he looked older. Taylor placed his age at about sixty, a healthy sixty.
“So you’re the new replacement guard,” said Stahl, half to himself.
“Nope, I’ve got a regular beat over across the river, pawnshops and trucking, but they needed someone for the holidays.”
Stahl shifted a pile of papers on his desk, spooned instant coffee into a couple of cups, poured the steaming water, and handed one to Taylor.
“Well, hope you enjoy yourself out here. They kind of have a hard time keeping guards here.”
Taylor had a brief suspicion that Stahl might know something about the “tricks” someone was playing. But looking into the brown, lined face, he thought not.
“Spooks, probably,” said Taylor. “This is kind of a weird spot, what with the old barracks and all. Wouldn’t be surprised if somebody might try a few tricks to scare a guard off.”
Stahl’s eyes narrowed, his nose twitching above his close-rimmed gray moustache, as if he might sneeze.
“You seen something?”
Taylor smiled, “Thought I did see somebody around earlier, but it turned out I was wrong.”
Stahl sipped his coffee, watching Taylor closely.
“You haven’t heard the history of this place, have you?”
“Only that it was once part of the military base.”
Stahl smiled almost mischievously.
“Well, there’s a bit more to it than that. This was a real active base, on around World War II. Had two, three thousand men in training at a time. They’d work ’em up, outfit ’em, and send ’em on down to Fort Knot, Kentucky, to fly out for parts unknown.
“I’ve lived around the Valley all my life. Soldiers used to come into town on weekends, raised holy hell. But we liked ’em.”
Stahl paused, eyes distant.
“But part of the history of this place is a little darker. Between World War II and Korea, they brought in some scientists, chemists. Top secret, hush-hush kind of thing. We’d see ’em around town sometimes, but they were a pretty close-mouthed bunch, wouldn’t say what they were up to.
“They had a little factory, looked like, maybe fifty people workin’ there, sat right where this terminal is now, but nobody, I mean nobody, knew what they were makin’ in there. Most of us in town thought they were makin’ some kind of new rocket, missile, some such.
“Well, one morning early, County Sheriff, old Thompson, has been out checkin’ on a burglary. He’s driving by here, and somebody almost walks in front of his car. He yells at the guy, thinks he’s some damned drunk. Then he takes a good look at him, the blood on his clothes.
“He looks over at the factory, and sees maybe a dozen people, some of ’em lying on the ground, some of ’em just stumbling around, blood all over ’em. And he smells a smell, a funny sweet smell, real strong, that kind of makes him dizzy just to breathe it.
“Thompson’s no fool. He doesn’t even get out of the car. He heads down the road, burns rubber up to the guard post, and has ’em wake up the Adjutant.
“The Adjutant turns a dead shade of pale when he hears the Sheriff’s story, but tells him not to worry, that they’re keeping a few mental patients down by the factory, and that he’ll handle it.
“Well, I’ve known Thompson a long time. He’s like me, he can smell something fishy about a mile off. He goes back to town, wakes up his deputies, calls up the National Guard, and has a small army together when he heads back.
“By this time there’s almost no way of keeping it under wraps. The Adjutant, looking like he just wants to be somewhere else, drafts Thompson’s men and the Guard to help clean up the mess.
“That factory,” Stahl paused, “was makin’ nerve gas.”
“Jeeze!”
“Yeah, Jesus and Mary, too. They had a whole batch set up to ship off God knows where, when there was a little fire and one of the big canisters blew. They had masks, sure, but the stuff spread so fast that most of ’em didn’t have time to get
’em on.
“Well, like I was sayin’, the Adjutant got his men and us—I was there, ’cause I was in the Guard—together. We had to wear full gas suits. One thing he told us. If we smelled cherries, to get the hell out of there.”
“Cherries?” Something, a recent memory, came to the back of Taylor’s mind, did not quite surface.
“Cherries. The gas was scented with cherries so they could tell if it leaked. Lot of good it did ’em.
“When we went in,” Stahl’s voice had gone dry, “when we went in, it was . . . like a horror movie, or one of those pictures of hell. Some of ’em were still alive, all with blood all over ’em, theirs or somebody else’s. They looked weird, some of ’em in those white lab suits. A couple of ’em attacked us, with knives, glass, their teeth, and a few people got hurt. But there weren’t too many left.
“I mean, the people working in that factory had gone plain nuts, went at each other with chairs, nails, teeth. We found one guy disemboweled with a protractor.”
Stahl shook his head at the memory and grinned.
“Anyway, that’s the sweet story of this place. They buried a few of ’em over in that little woods across the lot, behind where you’re parked. County hassled the State until they made the Army take that factory out, and the building had one of those mysterious fires not so long after, burned it to the ground. The lot was vacant for a long time, Army sold off some land, and Coleman put in the depot here.”
Taylor’s coffee was cold. He sipped it anyway to give his hand something to do.
“Surprised you hadn’t heard that story.”
“No,” said Taylor, “but it’s one of the damndest tales I’ve ever heard.”
The story left him with an uneasy feeling, something more than just the horror of it, something he couldn’t pin down. He stood up and stretched, bumping the table with his knee. Automatically he checked his watch.
“Thanks for the coffee and the yarn, gotta get back to the dispatcher. They’ll be wondering what’s happened to me.”
“Sure thing. You be careful out there, you hear?”
Taylor laughed and closed the door.
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