The Doom Stone (The Zone Unknown)

by Paul Zindel

  Books by Pulitzer Prize-winner

  PAUL ZINDEL

  THE ZONE UNKNOWN

  Book One: Loch

  Book Two: The Doom Stone

  Book Three: Raptor

  Book Four: Rats

  Book Five: Reef of Death

  Book Six: Night of the Bat

  The Gadget

  YOUNG ADULT NOVELS

  The Pigman

  The Pigman’s Legacy

  My Darling, My Hamburger

  A Begonia for Miss Applebaum

  Pardon Me, You’re Stepping on My Eyeball!

  I Never Loved Your Mind

  The Undertaker’s Gone Bananas

  Confessions of a Teenage Baboon

  The Amazing and Death-Defying Diary of Eugene Dingman

  David and Della

  The Girl Who Wanted a Boy

  A Star for the Latecomer (with Bonnie Zindel)

  To Take a Dare (with Crescent Dragonwagon)

  P.C. HAWKE MYSTERIES

  Book One: The Scream Museum

  Book Two: The Surfing Corpse

  Book Three: The E-mail Murders

  Book Four: The Lethal Gorilla

  Book Five: The Square Root of Murder

  Book Six: Death on the Amazon

  Book Seven: The Gourmet Zombie

  Book Eight: The Phantom of 86th Street

  THE WACKY FACTS LUNCH BUNCH

  Book One: Attack of the Killer Fishsticks

  Book Two: Fifth Grade Safari

  Book Three: Fright Party

  Book Four: The 100% Laugh Riot

  SHORT STORIES

  Love & Centipedes

  Rachel’s Vampire

  PLAYS

  The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

  The Secret Affairs of Mildred Wild

  Ladies at the Alamo

  Let Me Hear You Whisper

  And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little

  Every Seventeen Minutes the Crowd Goes Crazy

  The Ladies Should Be in Bed

  Amulets Against the Dragon Forces

  Published by Graymalkin Media

  www.graymalkinmedia.com

  The Doom Stone

  Copyright © 1995 by Paul Zindel

  All rights reserved.

  eISBN: 978-1-935169-64-2

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS:

  Zindel, Paul.

  The doom stone / Paul Zindel

  p. cm.

  Summary: When fifteen-year-old Jackson visits his aunt in England, he becomes caught up in a chase to capture an unknown creature who is stalking and killing people on the plains surrounding ancient Stonehenge.

  [1. Monsters—Fiction. 2. Stonehenge (England)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.Z647Do 1995

  [Fic]—dc20 95-32368 AC

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, recording, photocopying or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electric piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://www.graymalkinmedia.com/

  To Bill Morris

  1

  THE SIGHTING

  The stones and the nightmare were waiting for Jackson Cawley as the landrover raced toward the storm. Thick, twisted trunks of oak trees lined the road, their branches reaching high across like fingers of hands straining to pray.

  There had already been warnings that nothing would go smoothly on this journey. Jackson’s charter flight from New York had landed in London during heavy rains and violent turbulence. The Heathrow terminal was mobbed with spring break travelers, and it was past six by the time Jackson had made it through Customs and linked up with Sergeant Tillman, his ride to Salisbury.

  Tillman found Jackson to be a good-looking fifteen-year-old with shaggy brown hair and intense green eyes who did nothing but ask questions: Will I be staying near Stonehenge? Are there mounds filled with ancient human bones? Did high priests perform blood sacrifices?

  The stocky sergeant smiled. “I’m no expert on Stonehenge. There will be guides there who can tell you the whole history when you take a tour,” he said, carrying the boy’s canvas suitcase to the landrover. He opened the door on the passenger side. Jackson got in, took his suitcase, and swung it behind him to the backseat. As Sergeant Tillman slid into the driver’s seat, Jackson noticed he was wearing a gun. “Are you on special assignment?” Jackson asked.

  “Yes,” Tillman said.

  “Did you ever have to shoot anyone?”

  Sergeant Tillman smiled. “Not lately.” He started the landrover and drove out the airport exit. After several miles he reached the M3, and followed it for a good distance until turning onto A303 west.

  It took a spectacular thunderbolt to halt Jackson’s questions, which had begun to center around the land-rover’s two-way radio. The last of the shattered sunset slid down beneath the rim of dark, huge clouds mushroomed at the horizon. A strong wind rattled and shook the branches of green willows along a stream.

  CLICK CLICK

  Jackson heard the sounds. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  The sounds came faster, more furious.

  “Hailstones,” Tillman said.

  Jackson had never been in a hailstorm. He watched the front of the landrover crust up with the falling ice pellets. They fell harder still, and in a few moments the road was a chalky white. The ice melted quickly.

  For a long stretch the roadway cut through a forest choked by thickets and twisting, thick vines. The headlights picked up red-and-white TANK CROSSING signs and a series of wooden stakes in the earth.

  “What are those?” Jackson asked.

  “Markers for the military territories,” the sergeant explained. “Restricted areas.”

  BAM

  There was another crash of thunder as a crop duster biplane fled the sky and nightfall to land in a field. Here the shoulders of the road began to lift into eerie mounds, blocking the view of the countryside and making the road appear to drop into a long, open grave. Several miles later, beyond a hog farm and a sign for a gravel operation, the road rose onto a ridge with a breathtaking expanse of Salisbury Plain in front of them.

  “I can take a slight detour up onto A344 if you want a closer look at Stonehenge,” Sergeant Tillman said. “There’s a good view of it from there.”

  “Great.”

  Tillman took a small northwestward road, then doubled back beyond a thatch-roofed farmhouse. He pointed. “Dead ahead.”

  Jackson strained forward against his seat belt to see through the fogging windshield. There was another flash of lightning, and his heart crawled up into his throat when he saw the circle of massive stones. Stonehenge stood like a ring of giant sentinels.

  Closer, a thunderhead burst over the landrover. Suddenly Jackson could barely see the great stones between the sweeps of the worn, thumping wipers. There were no lights, no cars or tourists in the parking lot.

  “Where is everybody ?” Jackson asked.

  “Stonehenge closes at five,” Sergeant Tillman said, his foot staying heavy on the accelerator.

  “Closes?” That was like being back in the States and finding out that Mount Rushmore closes or that Niagara Falls gets turned off
.

  The stones became framed by a sturdy chain-link fence that ran along the edge of the road. The rain was a deluge now, blurring everything. Jackson hoped for a bolt of lightning, a sharp wide crackle on the horizon, so he could see close up this monumental temple of the wind.

  The flash of lightning came, and in that moment Jackson saw the true enormousness of the stones. But there was something else. Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed a figure moving swiftly from the shadows of the stone circle and heading for the roadside fence.

  Jackson wiped the window and strained to see through the night and the rain. Three lightning flashes hit one after the other like a tremendous sky strobe. It was then he could see that it was a young man in a plaid shirt with a ponytail running toward the landrover. The lightning made the man’s movements unreal, as though he were a flickering image on a movie screen. The man kept coming.

  In the next flash of lightning Jackson saw the young man’s face twisting into a scream, his hands desperately reaching out toward the speeding landrover. Jackson’s first thought was that someone was playing a joke. He was used to all sorts of scams and insanity on the streets of Manhattan—but then, behind the terrified man, he saw a shadowy form coming fast, like a jungle animal closing on its prey.

  Another explosion of blue-white lightning.

  Jackson saw the shadow crash into the young man, hurtling his body against the fence with such force, the hair of his ponytail burst loose to fan out like snakes on the weave of metal. The dark thing was behind the man, twisting his neck terribly, crushing the young man’s face into the wire fence as the landrover flew past.

  Jackson found his voice. “Stop!”

  “What?” Sergeant Tillman was momentarily startled, his eyes fixed on the wet roadway ahead. “What’s going on?” he asked, his tone quickly military again.

  “Somebody’s being attacked!” Jackson cried out, twisting in his seat to indicate behind them. “Some guy’s being attacked by an animal!”

  “Hold on.”

  Sergeant Tillman braked hard. With a single motion he spun the landrover around and crashed his foot back down on the accelerator. The tires burned rubber and finally gripped, and the landrover raced back toward the stones.

  “Where?” the sergeant asked.

  “There,” Jackson said, pointing across the hood.

  The sergeant slid the landrover to a halt on the grass-and-clay shoulder of the road. “Wait here,” he ordered as he leaped out of the car with his gun drawn and ran to the fence. Jackson knew Tillman would be trained to act in emergencies, but he hadn’t expected him to believe his report of an attack so quickly. Jackson jumped out of the landrover after the sergeant. The stark, raw smell of the storm socked into his nose and lungs.

  “It was here,” Jackson shouted against the wind, running his hand along the wire mesh as it glowed in the landrover’s headlights. He looked down expecting to see the young man’s body crumpled into the mud. Lightning flashed, followed by a growl of thunder.

  There was no body of a young man.

  No animal.

  Nothing but the huge, towering stones bearing silent witness to the night.

  The sergeant clipped his gun back into its holster. “Come on,” he said, putting his arm around Jackson’s wet shoulder and starting him back toward the landrover. “Your aunt is waiting for us.”

  2

  NIGHT SOUNDS

  Sergeant Tillman made a report to his base camp on the landrover’s radio before setting off toward the town of Salisbury. Jackson was too thrown by the attack on the young man to catch all of Tillman’s clipped army jargon. All he understood was that a couple of military police were being dispatched from the camp to check the area around the stones.

  “You and your aunt are staying at Langford’s Guest House,” Tillman said, turning left onto a narrow, heavily eroded street on the north fringe of town.

  Jackson brushed his hair out of his eyes. “Down here?” he asked, as the landrover hit deep into a pothole. A spray of muddy water flew over the fenders.

  “This is where the army puts up civilian visitors,” Tillman said.

  Jackson glanced at the sergeant’s eyes. They were red and squinted like those of a poker player playing his cards close to his vest.

  Jackson was used to secrets and unexpected events whenever it came to visiting his aunt Sarah on one of her anthropological work assignments. The summer before, she had invited him along on a fossil dig in India. They had had to sleep in hammocks at night to escape giant jungle rats that would climb into their stilted hut. His last spring break he had visited her in Ethiopia, where she had been hired by a university to help carbon-date a skull that had been nicknamed “Lucy’s Sister.” There he had had to wear steel-reinforced boots as a defense against leeches capable of needling into a human foot.

  There was a flash of lightning and he saw his aunt—a tall, strong woman with high cheekbones and worried eyes—waiting in front of the guest house.

  Dr. Sarah Cawley breathed a sigh of relief when she saw the landrover pull into the driveway of the dismal-looking guest house. She darted out into the headlights holding an oversized black umbrella.

  “I’m sorry,” she told Jackson as she opened the mud-splattered door of the landrover and leaned inside. “They called me from the camp and told me what had happened. Are you all right?”

  “Sure,” Jackson said. “Y-whay oes-day eargeant-Say illman-Tay ave-hay a-ay un-gay?” he added, which he knew his aunt would understand was pig Latin for Why does Sergeant Tillman have a gun? Jackson’s pig Latin was the most basic kind. He’d take the first letter of a word, move it to the end of the word, and then tack “ay” on it. Short words beginning with a vowel, like “is” and “in,” he’d just usually add “ay” to, making them “is-ay” and “in-ay.”

  “Ater-lay,” Dr. Cawley told him, which was pig Latin for later. She ran her fingers through her frosted, short-cropped hair and looked across to Tillman, who looked puzzled. She was used to Jackson trying to drive people crazy by making them think he knew a secret language. “Thanks for getting my nephew here. He’s my favorite person in the world.”

  “I shouldn’t have taken him around by the stones,” Tillman said.

  “Hey, I wanted to see them,” Jackson defended the sergeant.

  Dr. Cawley told Tillman, “Lieutenant Rath wants you to wait around for a call. Mrs. Langford’s got hot soup and a sandwich in the sitting room.”

  “Thanks,” the sergeant said.

  Jackson grabbed his suitcase and got out under the umbrella with his aunt. The rain had slowed, but the wind tugged violently at the umbrella as they started back toward the house. “I called New York, but you had already left for the airport,” Dr. Cawley said. “Your mother and father sounded as obsessive as ever. I lied and said the call was to thank them for letting you come visit. If you had been home, I was going to tell you not to come.”

  “Why?”

  She rolled her eyes as they reached the shabby entrance awning. “You don’t want to know.” She closed the umbrella, opened the door, and they went in.

  Dr. Cawley wiped her shoes on a shaggy straw mat and set the dripping umbrella into an ornate wrought-iron stand. Jackson went to the center of the foyer and started looking every which way at once. The walls were covered with gold-framed oil paintings, and there were shelves filled with antique porcelain plates and goblets. Crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling. “It’s delightful, it’s de-lovely…” a man in a powder-blue dinner jacket was singing while playing the piano in the center hall. Jackson realized it was a restaurant with dozens of guests happily eating and drinking at tables.

  “This is a great place,” Jackson said. “How come it looks so weird from the outside?”

  “The British army subsidizes it but wants it all kept low profile,” Dr. Cawley explained. “One of the military’s many little secrets around Salisbury.” An archway on the right framed a bustling, charming kitchen with an Asian chef and s
everal waitresses.

  “He made it, Mrs. Langford,” Dr. Cawley called to an elegant-looking woman totaling bills at a small white wicker desk.

  Mrs. Langford waved. “Welcome, Jackson! We were worried about you in the storm.”

  Jackson waved back. He was amazed at how quickly his aunt made friends wherever she went. Even the chef gave them a smile.

  Dr. Cawley led Jackson up the center staircase.

  “Why does Tillman have to wait for a call?” Jackson asked.

  “They’re sending a helicopter for him and me.”

  “You’re going up in a chopper tonight? In this storm?”

  “It’s a front moving through,” Dr. Cawley said as they reached the next floor. “Weather in Salisbury is like it is in Texas: If you don’t like it, wait a minute. By midnight you’ll be able to see the moon and stars.”

  “Where’s the helicopter going to land?”

  “They’ve got a pad in the middle of a pepper patch out in the back. The army hides everything around here. There’s a swimming pool in a hothouse. You’ll see in the morning.”

  Dr. Cawley led Jackson down the hallway, past several large detailed paintings of slaughtered ducks and grouse after a hunt, and up another flight of stairs. The dead birds reminded him of the last time his aunt had been hired in England. A 5,000-year-old mummy had been found in the elevator shaft of a London hotel. It had taken his aunt three weeks to date the mummy and trace it to a West End art dealer. Another time, Scotland Yard had called her in to identify a piece of a skull dug up near Kensington Palace. It turned out to be the remains of a pig.

  “I had your supper brought upstairs to our rooms because I didn’t know how late you’d be getting in. Actually what we have is more like our own private apartment. Besides, we have to talk.” Dr. Cawley opened a wood-slat door at the top of the staircase. “Don’t let my friend scare you,” she warned as she went in.

  Jackson followed her inside and she flicked on the lights.

  “Ahhh!” Jackson cried out, freezing in his tracks.

  A hideous, glaring white head, its mouth gaping wide with thick, jutting teeth, stared straight at him.