The Doom Stone (The Zone Unknown)

by Paul Zindel

  Without looking back, Jackson and Alma raced up out of the hollow. Jackson started the buggy. Alma threw Coffin’s leash off the bumper.

  “Come on!” Jackson yelled.

  Alma leaped up to straddle the backseat. He threw the shift into gear and opened the throttle wide. The buggy shot out from the mouth of the hollow, propelling them away from the sounds of Hell.

  8

  TRILITHONS

  Jackson drove full tilt, with Coffin racing off to the left of the buggy like a dolphin pacing a boat to harbor. Alma scanned the ground beneath them, no longer trusting it.

  “That was horrible,” Alma said, her arms locked tightly around Jackson’s waist. “We’ve got to tell Tillman and Rath.”

  “No way. The army’ll flood the cave or blow it up. They’d slaughter all the hominids, not just Skull Face. He’s the supermutant. Those little guys picking bugs off you weren’t killers.”

  “Stop talking about those things like they’re human!”

  “They are! Well, almost.”

  Jackson doubled back several hundred yards along a dirt road and made it into the Stonehenge parking lot. Even Coffin seemed to know there was safety in numbers as packs of tourists flowed in and out of the entrance gates and souvenir shop. Jackson pulled the buggy to a halt between a parked tour bus and a minivan.

  He remembered the piece of stone he’d found that was shaped like an arrowhead, and took it out of his pocket. It was black and shiny in the sunlight. “It’s flint, right?”

  “Of course it is.”

  “We have to call my aunt,” Jackson said, slipping the piece of flint back into his pants pocket.

  “There are no pay phones here,” Alma said, sliding down off the backseat. She started brushing off the dirt that had accumulated on her clothing in the fall into the cave. “My stomach’s doing flips—I need tea. You got any money?”

  Jackson got off the buggy and checked deeper in his pockets. He found a five-pound note and a handful of change.

  “Two teas and two scones,” Alma ordered. “And get something for yourself.”

  “You’re having two teas?”

  “One’s for Coffin,” Alma said. “He takes five creamers.”

  Jackson dusted himself off as he walked across the lot to the snack stand. By the time he got back, Alma and Coffin were collapsed on the grass near a picnic table.

  “Why are all those terrible things growing down there?” Alma took one of the steaming Styrofoam cups of tea and set it in front of Coffin.

  “I don’t know,” Jackson said.

  Coffin’s eyes widened watching Alma toss creamer after creamer into his tea. Next she buttered a scone. He grabbed it and chewed it on the grass.

  Alma groaned. “It’s like Nature’s gone berserk down in that cave.”

  “Maybe it’s the chemicals from the biochem factory,” Jackson said. “My aunt told me about a mangrove swamp where nature has no rules. The fish climb trees. The roots of the trees grow upward. That swamp is a hundred square miles of killers—tigers who eat people. The tigers have nothing to drink but salt water with strange chemicals, and it affects their brains.”

  “I think I’ve heard enough.”

  “No,” Jackson said. “The tigers are like Skull Face. They stalk and are rarely seen. They understand humans and never attack when a human is facing them. Natives started wearing face masks on the backs of their heads when they walked through the swamp. The tigers caught on. They could tell the real faces from the masks.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “The natives don’t think so. They think the tigers are gods. They believe the tigers were sent from heaven to protect their swamp and forest. They stop the land from being exploited. Those tigers are not a legend, Alma. They’re scientific fact. So is what’s growing under the ground around here. Don’t you realize what we’ve found? What’s down in that cave is older than anything we can imagine. It was kids who found one of the most important caves in France that was filled with prehistoric art. It made them famous.”

  Alma stood up, wadded her napkin, and hurled it into a trash container. “Well, that’s just swell—except that our prehistoric art wants to eat us.”

  “Only Skull Face. The little guys are cool. They were smiling, partying as they took the slugs and bugs off you. Alma, we were in the presence of an entirely different species of hominids. They weren’t at all like the super-mutant monster. They looked like our friendly little cousins, didn’t they?”

  “Not my cousins.” Alma saw the excitement in Jackson’s face. “All I know is somebody’s got to stop Skull Face before it kills again.”

  She looked past the entrance gates and across to Stonehenge. The monument stood fabulous, mysterious in the blazing sun. Jackson got up and stood next to her.

  “First we tell my aunt,” he said.

  Dr. Cawley was in her room at the hospital when Jackson phoned. He had dropped Alma off at the High Street Gate of Salisbury Close and driven back to Langford’s to make the call.

  At first Jackson talked so fast his aunt could barely understand him. “They’re pale and weird, like a tribe of midget Cro-Magnons.” His voice exploded from Dr. Cawley’s receiver. “They’re little versions of the big guy, but without the fangs. And they’re friendly. They picked snails and bugs off Alma, and…”

  Dr. Cawley stopped him in mid sentence. She knew her phone could be tapped. “I’ll call Tillman. He’ll arrange for a car to bring you here. Are you sure Alma can keep her mouth shut?”

  “Alma’s terrific.”

  Dr. Cawley hung up as the head nurse on the afternoon shift came in with tiny, squeaky steps. She wore a stiff, white nurse’s cap and carried a clipboard.

  “I’m Sister Thornton-Sherwood.” She glanced at the chart hanging from the bottom of Dr. Cawley’s bed. “You must be exhausted from your tests this morning. You had a problem during the CAT scan?”

  Without waiting for a response, she started checking the linen and bedstand supplies of the vacant bed.

  Dr. Cawley asked, “What are you doing?”

  Sister Thornton-Sherwood jotted on her notepad as she talked. “You’re getting a roommate,”

  “Dr. Halperin said I was to have a private room.”

  “Well, he forgot to tell us. Our rooms are double occupancy. They’re bringing her up from Admitting. A mature woman.”

  Dr. Cawley forced a smile. She wanted the nurse to know she’d be accommodating. She had shared sleeping rooms with a wide slice of humanity, from a voodoo priestess in Haiti to a half dozen Japanese men in a climbing shack on Mount Fuji.

  An attendant came in pushing an oxygen tank on a dolly.

  “Set it up there,” the nurse ordered, indicating a spot next to the empty bed.

  The smile faded from Dr. Cawley’s face. She didn’t mean to speak, but a voice was forming in her brain. She fought against the voice, but she found a single word slipping out of her throat. “No.”

  Sister Thornton-Sherwood looked up from her clipboard. She was surprised, but immune to patients trying to run things. “Did you say something?”

  Dr. Cawley tried to remain silent. The voice in her brain was clear, controlling her vocal cords and her thoughts. “The room next door is empty,” she said. Her hands began to shake. “Why don’t you put the patient in there?”

  “Because I decided she will be in here.”

  “No oxygen tank. No patient” were the words that came from Dr. Cawley’s lips. She locked eyes with Sister Thornton-Sherwood as the attendant halted setting up the tank. “I don’t want anyone else in this room.”

  “Look,” Sister Thornton-Sherwood said, “I told you this is a double room and—”

  “GET OUT!” Dr. Cawley suddenly shouted. The force was inside her; it stretched her vocal cords, made her scream like an animal. “THIS IS MY ROOM! MINE! BOTH OF YOU GET OUT!”

  Sister Thornton-Sherwood looked as if a thorn had been pressed into her heart. She considered the situation, then moti
oned the attendant to roll the tank out of the room. She checked Dr. Cawley’s chart again. “Apparently you have a problem with claustrophobia,” she said, in a low voice.

  Dr. Cawley felt her face flush, her eyes narrow with rage. She was certain it was connected to Ramid’s bite.

  “Yes,” Dr. Cawley said, struggling to calm herself. “I do have claustrophobia.”

  Sister Thornton-Sherwood watched Dr. Cawley deflate, sink back into the pillows of her bed.

  “Perhaps while you’re here,” Sister Thornton-Sherwood said, “Dr. Halperin will insist you see a psychiatrist.”

  “How are things out at the cemetery?” Jackson pumped the young soldier for news as they zipped along the A36 in a landrover. Tillman had sent a newly promoted man, Sergeant Keyes, to drive Jackson to the hospital.

  “It’s round-the-clock duty,” the soldier said. “There’s few of us left out there. The rest of the search company was moved south this afternoon.”

  Sergeant Keyes was in his late twenties, his hair cut into a designer crew look. He had a small scar to the left of his lower lip. “Lieutenant Rath had the men looking north, but a recon team turned up a mess of tracks and activity near Amesbury.”

  Jackson understood it meant the search for Skull Face was closing in on Stonehenge.

  The soldier waited until he had the landrover off the highway and onto the Bristol streets before he got personal. “Sorry your aunt’s having problems.”

  Jackson noticed there was a wariness in Keyes’ voice. “What are you talking about?”

  “Hey, I figured you knew about it.”

  “About what?”

  “I heard the call to Tillman when it came in. Something about your aunt drawing on walls. The hospital called to tell Tillman the army would have to pay for the damage.” Keyes pulled the landrover up to the main entrance of the hospital and stopped. Jackson jumped out and dashed for the front door.

  “I’ll be waiting in the coffee shop,” Sergeant Keyes called after him.

  Jackson grabbed a visitor’s pass from the reception desk and took the elevator to the ninth floor. He got off, walked quickly down the corridor following the arrows to the South Wing. Sister Thornton-Sherwood with her clipboard intercepted him as he passed the nurses’ station. “Are you Dr. Cawley’s nephew?”

  Jackson looked at the nurse’s ticked-off face. “What’s going on?”

  The nurse clicked her ballpoint. “Does your aunt have any history of mental illness? Is she on an anti-depressant?”

  Jackson spun on his heels, broke into a jog down the hall.

  “It’s not my fault,” the nurse called after him. “She asked us for blank paper. I told her she’d have to wait for the gift-shop cart like everybody else.”

  The door to his aunt’s room was closed. Jackson knocked on the door hard, opened it, and went in.

  Dr. Cawley stood in her bathrobe in front of the long high-gloss white wall across from her bed. Her back was to Jackson as her right hand lashed out with bold strokes of a felt-tipped pen—the final details of a turbulent mural. It was a sketch of Stonehenge as it must have looked when its stones were all complete and upright.

  Jackson closed the door behind him. “Aunt Sarah, are you okay?”

  “Right this minute, yes,” Dr. Cawley said without turning around. “In another minute maybe not.”

  She threw the pen to the floor and grabbed a large black Magic Marker. Her last strokes on the mural were to the largest of the sarsen stones in the middle of the circle.

  “Aunt Sarah…”

  Finally she turned to him. “Jackson, I think I’m losing my mind—but in a very thrilling way,” she said oddly, brushing her fingers repeatedly through her hair. She smiled, went to him, and gave him a big hug.

  “Sit,” she told him, indicating a brown plastic-covered armchair.

  “I know I’m frightening you,” she said, “but I’ve got to talk while I can. Something’s happening to me.” She sat on her bed.

  “What, Aunt Sarah?”

  “It’s from the monster’s bite. Not rabies. It’s like what you get in Europe from the bite of a street animal. A delirium. It’s like that. As if Ramid—that’s what I’ve decided to call the creature—has passed some crawling thing into my blood.”

  “Aunt Sarah, should I get the doctor?”

  “No. I’ve got to tell you this quickly, because sometimes my mind quits on me,” Dr. Cawley said. “The problem is that I feel too good, and no doctor around here is going to treat me for that. When my mind’s functioning, it’s razor sharp. It’s like Ramid’s blood or saliva was composed of computer chips. Smart blood. I get to glimpse things I didn’t know on my own.

  “When I came back from my tests, I was lying in bed. I could feel the spirit of Ramid hovering over me like a spirit that had control over my brain. I know this sounds quite mad, but I began to wonder if maybe this new species has evolved its own intelligence. A biomechanical brilliance that allows the monster to control its cells and fluids over great distances. I don’t know.”

  Jackson looked past his aunt to the huge drawing on the wall behind her.

  “Aunt Sarah, why did you draw Stonehenge?”

  “I drew it because…”

  Jackson watched as the manic brightness of her eyes faded. She opened her mouth as an agony twisted and stole its way into her body. “Ramid is trying to stop me from thinking about it.” she gasped. “From thinking about the trilithons.”

  Jackson stood up. “I’ll get help…”

  Dr. Cawley motioned him to be still. She grabbed a lipstick from her pocketbook and rushed to the mural. “Here…” she said, fighting to force the words out before Ramid had complete control again. “Don’t forget… here!”

  She managed to rub the lipstick onto one of the horizontal stones, the top of an archway inside the circle. Trembling, she put her hands into the shiny redness and dragged the color with her fingertips high up the wall. The crimson streaked as though the one stone were setting the sky on fire.

  Jackson turned her from the painting.

  “You should lie down, Aunt Sarah…”

  “DOOM!” she started to shout, as she wrote the word above the stone. “The trilithons with the Stone of Doom!”

  She was shaking, stripped of her voice again as he got her back onto the bed. Her two-way radio was on the bedstand. Jackson looked for the room’s emergency buzzer. When he couldn’t find it, he ran out into the hall. “Get a doctor!” he shouted, running toward the nurses’ station.

  Sister Thornton-Sherwood came fast from another patient’s room. “What’s wrong?”

  “Just help her!”

  “Page Dr. Nielsen,” Sister Thornton-Sherwood shot to a nurses’ aide behind the desk.

  He saw the expression on Sister Thornton-Sherwood’s face suddenly change from irritation to surprise. He realized she was looking behind him and turned. Dr. Cawley was strolling down the hall toward them and strangely smiling.

  “Aunt Sarah?” Jackson said, puzzled.

  Sister Thornton-Sherwood put her hand in her pocket to check for a hypodermic she had readied. “You should rest in your room, Dr. Cawley.”

  “I would like some beef,” Dr. Cawley said.

  Sister Thornton-Sherwood rolled her eyes. “We’re very sorry, Dr. Cawley,” she said, as if she were talking to an infantile madwoman, “but today is Friday and that means chicken or fish. Our chef doesn’t cook beef on Fridays.”

  Dr. Cawley said, “I smell beef.”

  The nurse put her arm around Dr. Cawley and started to turn her back toward her room. “Now, now… the kitchen is nine floors down. Even if we had beef, which we don’t, you couldn’t smell it up here.”

  “I SMELL BEEF!” Dr. Cawley screamed, pounding her fist on the counter of the nurses’ station. “BEEF!”

  Sister Thornton-Sherwood let go of Dr. Cawley and grabbed the P.A. mike. “Dr. Nielsen to S9 Station! Dr. Nielsen, S9 emergency!”

  Two hulking attendants appeared
at the end of the hall and ran toward them. Dr. Cawley turned suddenly, desperately, to Jackson. “Don’t tell where the hominids are,” she said, starting to wheeze and choke. “Don’t tell anyone until I get out of here. And the trilithons! Don’t forget the trilithons! Doom! Doom! Promise me!”

  “I promise,” Jackson said quickly. “I promise.”

  “BEEF!” Dr. Cawley found herself screaming again. “BEEF! GIVE ME BEEF!”

  9

  WAITING

  Alma knew Salisbury Cathedral and the redbrick buildings of the close as well as she knew the back of her hand. The vast cathedral with its huge tower and spire had been under repair for years—since the time when her father was one of the close gardeners. Steel pipe and rough-hewed plank walkways still covered vast sections of the cathedral’s leaded roof. Scaffolding in the shape of octagonal platforms circled its spire up to the pinnacle like a trio of rings on a ringtoss.

  Alma smiled as she crossed the main green and saw familiar faces. Many evenings, when the McPhees had lived at the close, Alma had baby-sat for the children of the masons and construction crews.

  “Hi, Reverend!” she called across to the black-frocked Reverend Kalley on Bishop’s Walk.

  The cleric waved when he recognized her. “Welcome back, Alma.”

  “Do you know where they put us?” she asked. She knew the Reverend Kalley usually knew everything that was happening at the close.

  “In the Canonry, I think. The basement flat.” He smiled, pleased that he could help.

  Alma felt warm and safe back inside the close grounds. The smell of arbored wisteria and fresh-mowed spring grass made the horror of Skull Face and the creepy little hominids seem far away. She wished they could live at the close permanently. She had often daydreamed about just that, had visions of being able to walk to school and to live in a place where friends weren’t spooked if they stopped by. Of course, part of the dream was that her mother would come back and they could be a real family again.