The Doom Stone (The Zone Unknown)

by Paul Zindel

“You need a bus, lady.” The driver took a bite of his cake.

  Dr. Cawley trembled as she opened the door. She would try to hold on to her reason long enough to make the driver understand. She got out, stepped to his open window.

  “You… take me,” Dr. Cawley said.

  “You’re as sharp as a marble, you are,” the driver said.

  “Please. I need… your car.”

  The driver checked his watch.

  Dr. Cawley sucked in air and let out a growl that rattled the cab. The driver looked up and saw the bestial expression on the woman’s face. Dr. Cawley’s lips were peeled back over her swollen, bleeding gums. She snapped her head back like a cobra, then thrust it forward into the driver’s face.

  The driver screamed, wet crumbs and coffee flying from his mouth. He jumped past his meter and out of the cab. Dr. Cawley got in behind the wheel. She threw the stick shift into first and floored the accelerator.

  The driver was frozen in the middle of the street, watching his cab travel away. He began to shiver and spin in shock.

  “Help me!” he finally began to shout to the empty street. “Help me!”

  Alma sat on the ground cradling Coffin in her arms while Jackson spun a story for Sergeant Keyes and his small team of terrified soldiers. They had heard the roar of the beast, seen the creature race off into the mist.

  “Alma needed a book for her homework,” Jackson told them. “Her father drove us out. He’s coming back.”

  “You could have killed my dog,” Alma blasted the soldiers as she held a cloth against Coffin’s bleeding shoulder. Keyes was thrown by the accidental shooting of the wolfhound.

  One soldier said, “You’re lucky we showed up.”

  Alma felt like kicking him. “My dog needs a vet.”

  “Look, we’ve got problems,” Keyes said, scratching his head.

  Coffin staggered to his feet, dazed and bleeding, but alive. Alma stood with him, keeping pressure against his wound. “Dr. McGinn down the road is our vet.”

  “Take her,”Jackson told Keyes.

  Keyes thought a moment. “Okay.” He signaled a young private to get a landrover.

  Two other soldiers came up out of the cellar. “That ghoul thing trashed a window and part of a wall,” one of them told Keyes.

  The other soldier held the negative strip. “The kids were developing film.”

  “That’s mine,” Jackson said.

  Keyes took the strip and held it up to one of the outdoor floodlights of the crematorium.

  “All yours,” Keyes said, offering the film.

  Jackson took it, checked it. The chemicals had been on the film too long and destroyed all the images. He brought it over to Alma. “It’s ruined,” he said, trying to hide his smile. They both knew it meant that proof of the smaller hominids with the strange baby faces was gone. There’d be no way of Tillman or Rath knowing about them now.

  The private drove up in the landrover. Sergeant Keyes went right onto the radio. A wind from the north was peeling the mist back toward the river. Soon, Jackson knew, the dune buggy would be in plain sight.

  “I’m going to disappear,” Jackson whispered to Alma.

  “What?”

  “They’ll take you to the vet, then home to the close. Me they’d stick on a plane back to the U.S.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Jackson said. “All I do know is that I’ve got to help my aunt. I need to talk to her.”

  “Don’t you realize it’s no coincidence Skull Face showed up here tonight?” Alma said. “It didn’t come back to the crematorium just because it’s on a nostalgia trip.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “This thing is building in power. It’s going to go on a blood feast around here.” Alma realized her voice was getting too loud; the soldiers were starting to stare. She dropped back into a desperate whisper. “Bullets don’t kill it. Your aunt was the threat, as far as it was concerned.”

  “How could Skull Face know that?”

  “The first army guy it killed—maybe it plugged into his brain, unloaded all he knew about your aunt heading up the search into the killings. Skull Face knew your aunt was the most dangerous one. It knew she was zeroing in on it.”

  “She did get Rath to follow the river.”

  “That night in the cemetery, it didn’t just want to run by her and escape. The monster wanted to rip her to pieces. What he got was control of her brain.”

  Jackson petted Coffin’s head gently. “I put you all in danger tonight.”

  “Look, Skull Face doesn’t know much about me. If it can download your aunt’s mind,” Alma said, “it knows she drew the mural. It knows she showed it to you and told you about DOOM! DOOM! It’s worried somebody’s going to stumble onto something it doesn’t want them to know.”

  Jackson nodded. “It knows everything she’s been working on. The books, the sketches—all her research at the apartment. Her secrets.”

  “You’re the one who’s in a position to put it all together now. It knows that. Jackson, it’s focused again. You’re the one it’s stalking.”

  “You’ll be safe at the close,” Jackson said. He started to walk away.

  Alma walked with him, keeping close by his side. “I want to go with you,” she said.

  “Take care of Coffin.”

  “You could wait for me,” Alma said, putting her hands on her hips. “You need me.”

  “No,” Jackson said. He backed away toward the wall of fog.

  Alma was thankful Coffin’s wound had stopped bleeding. She walked with Jackson, got him to circle so the soldiers would think they were merely helping Coffin get his gait back. Against the glare from the floodlights, Alma appeared to be a phantom; her hair had long shaken loose of its ponytail.

  “I could check the old book in the cathedral library again,” Alma said. “In the Tomb Of the final Doom must mean something.”

  Jackson said, “The ‘Tomb’ has got to be Stonehenge. Maybe you can find out more about the Doom Stone.”

  “I’ll try. But you be careful,” Alma said. “Don’t do anything crazy. It’s after you.”

  Jackson stepped back into the fog.

  Alma continued to circle with Coffin back to the soldiers. No one missed Jackson until the buggy engine screamed from beyond the veil of the mist.

  12

  MOONRISE

  Jackson kept the buggy on the dirt roads and easements running parallel to the A345 as he headed south. There were stretches of streetlight and a glow from frontage farmhouses. Fog continued to trace the banks of the Avon.

  He was able to travel at a good clip on a shoulder road edging a farm, and took out the two-way radio. Please work, he thought, as he flicked on the power switch and tapped in 101, the code of his aunt’s radio. There was static.

  “Hello,” Jackson said. There was another crackle of static, then a human sound of pain. “Aunt Sarah?”

  More static. Then:

  “Jackson?” His aunt’s voice came over the receiver.

  “It’s me,” Jackson said.

  “Jackson…”

  He heard a hum in the background like tires traveling fast on a macadam road. “Are you in a car?” he asked, surprised.

  “I left… the hospital.”

  Her voice sounded fragile, anguished.

  “The doctors said it was okay?” Jackson asked. “They said it was all right?”

  There was a wheezing and a deep cry of agony. “What’s happening?” he asked. “Where are you?”

  The distress sounds became stronger but distorted in the receiver of the phone. Suddenly, Jackson had to swerve the dune buggy to avoid a defiant crow eating roadkill. It was picking at the carcass with its long, sharp beak, seemingly oblivious of the buggy bearing down on it.

  There was a growling now from the phone, guttural sounds creeping lower.

  Jackson said, “Tell me what to do, Aunt Sarah.”

  “The stone…” she said.
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  He remembered her rushing to the mural with her lipstick and rubbing it onto the top stone of the center trilithon. He could still see her placing her trembling hands into the crimson, dragging the color up high on the wall. “The one in your drawing?”

  “Ramid is… afraid of the stone….”

  Jackson heard her fighting to get each word out. “Why is it afraid, Aunt Sarah?”

  Her voice crawled lower into her chest again, snarling, grunting.

  “He’s… got me” came words, finally. “My mind…”

  BZZZZZZ

  Jackson heard the disconnect and was chilled. She sounded as if the monstrosity was at her side, its teeth at her throat.

  He dialed her number again, let it ring until he heard a violent, ground-shaking roar coming fast from behind him, loud, powerful.

  A tongue of fog from the river lay across the road and the parallel dirt path. There was a cluster of round barrows, mounds of the ancient dead, on his right.

  He cut his lights and pulled the buggy in among them as an army convoy shattered the night. A communications lorry with a revolving satellite disk led the procession like an enormous cyclops. A pair of flatbed trucks hauled generators strapped to platforms.

  Jackson ducked low on the seat as the caravan of vehicles flooded the road. The heart of the convoy was a slew of transports laden with armed troops, men sitting on benches facing each other under rippling canvas hoods. A van for top brass accelerated to pull in front of the convoy. It had walls of dark tinted glass and a massive, oversized air conditioner rising high from its rear.

  Searchlights.

  Jackson dropped into the ditch surrounding one of the mass graves. The lights cut like lasers over the top of the buggy.

  Bringing up the rear of the convoy was a pair of huge tanker trucks with DANGER reflector signs. The trucks thundered past escorted by armed personnel in landrovers. One tanker was a high-octane fuel truck. The other’s tank was longer, narrower, with complex gauges and steel wheel valves. The kind of truck that could carry extermination chemicals, poisons, Jackson thought.

  Jackson was shaken as he climbed back onto the dune buggy. The sounds his aunt had made on the phone seemed no longer human. Why was she in a car? Where was she going? He didn’t know whom he could turn to for help. The staff at the hospital thought she was hallucinating and mad—at best, belligerent. The army had no real reason to care about her except that she keep her mouth shut. She’d defined the beast, led them to it, and now they were caught up in the hunt. The convoy had to be on its way to supply the stalking teams out of Amesbury. They’d track Skull Face down to its lair this time.

  His aunt had been right. The military was bringing in incendiary devices. Trucks with combustibles and poisonous gases that would certainly kill the small, innocent hominids. Even if the heavy artillery and chemicals were capable of doing what bullets couldn’t, Skull Face would survive, Jackson knew. The monster would trick them. Escape through a secret tunnel. It would drift away in an underground river. Something cunning.

  Ramid is afraid of the Stone.

  He kick-started the buggy and headed south. The creature had been seared by the furnace. It would be raging home to lick its wounds.

  Jackson couldn’t worry any longer about staying on the easements and dirt roads. He set out across an open stretch of army training ground. There the sky was brushed clean of clouds, a black night stenciled with stars. Jackson saw a distant flickering of lights at the horizon to his left. It was advancing, and he knew it had to be the military search team moving westward and north with its weapons of death.

  He wished Alma were with him. She would have been his voice of sanity.

  Near Stonehenge he had to run the buggy near a private farmhouse in order to avoid the main entrance to Stonehenge with its chain-link fence. A corner of the crop field was a pear orchard with the older, weakest branches of its trees nailed to trellises. A pruning ladder lay in the grass near a well.

  Jackson braked the buggy to a halt, shut off its motor and lights.

  He knew he’d traveled faster than the beast. There would be time. He just didn’t know how much.

  He opened up the rear seat compartment, took out the loaded flare gun, and wedged it under his belt. He put the extra flare cartridges in his pocket, hung the radio by its strap around his shoulder, and set out on foot lugging the rickety, old wooden ladder.

  Rabbits scurried in the weed cover as Jackson made his way past the earth ditches. He kept alert for open pits. A pair of horses feasted on the clipped grass nearer the stones. They were startled and shook the ground as they raced off frightened through the night.

  Jackson shifted the weight of the ladder. The massive stones loomed as dark sentinels waiting for him, as he walked inside the circle to what was left of the horseshoe of trilithons.

  He stopped in front of the trilithon his aunt Sarah had marked in her drawing. One of the uprights was gone, as well as the top stone—the one she’d streaked with red and about which she’d kept shouting “Doom.” The crude, weathered ladder wasn’t long enough to reach the top of the surviving upright.

  He looked across to a stretch of four uprights with top stones that made up part of the main circle, and hauled the ladder over to them. He set it in place against an end stone. As he climbed, he felt dizzy.

  On the last rung he took a deep breath and pulled himself onto one of the capping lintel stones. He grunted as he hauled the heavy ladder up after him.

  The circle below was a black pit the stars could not light. He sat down on the lintel, took the radio hanging from his shoulder, and punched in his aunt’s number. There was still no answer. It was possible she was hallucinating everything. It could be like voodoo. If she believed Skull Face’s bite had power over her, then her mind could play tricks on itself.

  The only thing Jackson was certain of was that the monster would have to be caught or killed. It was the only chance for everyone. His aunt Sarah. The people who lived around Salisbury Plain. If they got Skull Face in the open, the smaller hominids might be safe, because the army would call off the hunt and never know they existed.

  Jackson ran his hands across the surface of the capping stone, felt the grooves that had been hand chiseled by human ancestors who had lived millennia before. Whose doom stone did his aunt believe it was? Not his. Even the outer circles were so high, there wasn’t a chance Skull Face could reach him even if he showed up.

  A scarlet glow began to form on the horizon. The aura of red swelled, changing to purple, then orange. Finally, the glow became startling, and a huge ball of a moon lifted into the sky.

  Jackson stood atop the stone. In the moonlight, the giant sarsen stones were a burnished crystal gray with faint streaks of yellow. They appeared to glow from within. The power of the full moon had always been a reality to Jackson. Hospitals reported more shootings and knifings during a full moon. Police departments knew more people went mad and murdered and robbed at full moon.

  Is this your special moon, Skull Face? Jackson wondered. The moon that comes back for you every nineteen years when it repeats its cycle? There must have always been a beast like Skull Face at Stonehenge. A lurking, hungry Minotaur.

  TICK

  Jackson heard the creature, saw it moving toward him from an open field. He took the flare gun from his belt, checked the cartridge chamber, and held the gun ready. Skull Face had burns on its chest and legs, scars swiftly healing. The membrane of its face was blackened, pulled upward and taut to frame its demonic eyes.

  The beast stopped a hundred yards from the stones, cocked its head to one side.

  Jackson knew Skull Face was thinking.

  TICK TICK

  How much do you understand? it seemed to be wondering, measuring.

  Jackson believed his aunt was right—the creature was afraid of this place. But the Doom Stone was gone. It was missing from the trilithons. There must be something else here, Jackson told himself. Something in front of my eyes that I’m not
seeing.

  An owl flew overhead, and for a moment Jackson remembered the life-size cement owls a lot of tenants in the high-rises of Manhattan use to keep pigeons away. Why would Skull Face be afraid of Stonehenge? Jackson asked himself.

  Death.

  From his perch he looked again at the shape of Stonehenge. The shadows from the rising moon were shifting quickly. A dark, long, thin cloud crept across the face of the moon. All of Stonehenge began to look like a giant jigsaw puzzle, its pieces shifting until Jackson realized what had been staring him in the face all along. The trilithons formed the shape of a skull, the shadows from the outer circle its jaw and teeth. In that moment he felt as if human ancestors, the people who built Stonehenge, were speaking to him from across five thousand years: Only the Doom Stone can kill the monster.

  The creature moved closer, then stopped again. Jackson saw its eyes were still locked on him. He knew its brain was processing information. It could probably smell Jackson’s fear. He guessed it was interpreting, evaluating his every move.

  Jackson set the flare gun down, juggled the radio, and dialed again. There was the buzzing, then an open line and the hum of a speeding car.

  “Aunt Sarah?” he said, not lifting his eyes from the beast.

  He knew she was there, though she didn’t speak. What if she was right about Skull Face?

  “The monster’s here,” he said into the phone.

  A new sound joined the hum from the racing tires. There was a shrill, rising cry like that from a tortured animal. It cut into Jackson’s heart, and he knew time was running out.

  “LET GO OF HER!” Jackson shouted across the field to Skull Face. The beast stepped backward, cracking twigs with its feet—then stopped again.

  “Don’t give up, Aunt Sarah,” Jackson said into the phone. “I know about the Doom Stone. The creature’s afraid of it because it can kill it.”

  Again the pathetic cry.

  Furiously, Jackson picked up the flare gun, pointed it at Skull Face, and pulled the trigger. A thick, burning mass flew downward, whooshing in a fiery trajectory. It crashed into the ground to the right of the monster and bounced like a flat stone skimming a pond. Skull Face opened its glistening, fanged mouth and roared.