The Doom Stone (The Zone Unknown)

by Paul Zindel

  “Are you crazy?”

  “You’ve got to try.”

  Alma backed closer to the spire. “Where’s the creature?”

  Suddenly there was a great crash behind her. The arm of the beast thrust through the stone wall of the spire a foot from her head. Alma was thrown forward toward the edge of the platform. She saw the whole of the drop below as she went over the edge, but Jackson grabbed her hand. The weight of her body pulled him toward the drop with her. She dangled, screaming, “Don’t let me fall! Don’t!”

  Jackson began to slide, helpless, his body inching to the edge. He tried to dig his feet into the planking, held his hand out to push against one of the suspension ropes. He heard the crashing of the stones behind him, turned to see the monster had opened the side of the spire wide and was coming out onto the platform after him.

  Jackson began to swing Alma.

  “No!” she yelled.

  It took her a moment before she understood he was making a pendulum of her. As the monster roared and loped out at Jackson, he let go of Alma. She landed on the platform below as he grabbed the suspension rope and threw himself after her head-first.

  Below, people had heard Alma’s screams and begun to come out of their homes. Others ran down St. John Street toward the cathedral. Jackson eased back from the edge, with the creature on the platform above them.

  “Don’t make a sound,” Jackson whispered to Alma, but she was too panicked. She started to crawl around the platform looking for a way down. The boards creaked, signaling her position.

  CRASH

  The planking above their heads exploded, and the inverted torso of the monstrosity dropped down at them. Jackson rolled, pulled Alma after him as Skull Face let loose a loud, shrieking blast. It righted itself as it landed.

  Jackson’s fingers dug into a loose wide plank.

  “Help me,” he yelled to Alma.

  Together they pried it up. Alma dropped down through the hole to the last level of the spire’s scaffolding. Jackson was right after her. The final platform was more solid, attached to the sturdy pipe scaffolding of the main tower. Alma saw crude plank stairs and started down as fast as she could go, Jackson right behind her.

  They passed a dozen subpinnacles that sprang from the summit like huge, intricately carved daggers.

  Jackson asked, “Are any of them sarsen stone?”

  “No.”

  Alma was so busy checking the stones of the tower, she didn’t notice the stairs came to a dead end at roof level. “Watch out!” Jackson shouted as she stepped off into air. She managed to grab the side of the scaffolding. In a second he had a grip on her and pulled her back onto the planking. From the roof it was a ten-story drop to the ground.

  ROAR

  The creature was coming fast down the scaffolding. A narrow catwalk led out along the rim of the sharp-angled roof.

  “Let’s go,” Jackson said, dragging her behind him along the catwalk. It ended more than sixty feet out along the edge. There was a wide gap of open roof before the scaffolding resumed at the back of the cathedral.

  “If we can make it to the elevator shaft, we’ll be home free,” Jackson said.

  Alma saw the creature drop onto the roof level. She turned to Jackson. “What do we do now?”

  “Come on.” Jackson climbed off the catwalk onto the steep slant of the lead-and-tile roof. He lay flat, his legs stretched out toward the roof gutter, hoping to prevent a slide. He began moving sideways like a crab.

  “Hurry!” he urged Alma.

  She watched him dig his fingernails into the lead casings—saw him search out toeholds on the chiseled surface of the tiles. None of it looked very secure.

  She looked again to Skull Face, as the monster headed out onto the catwalk. She felt herself shaking, could barely breathe. Please let us be okay, she kept saying to herself.

  “I’m coming,” she called to Jackson.

  She climbed over the end of the catwalk and lay on her stomach as she followed him. Her nails clawed into the lead. The tiles were cold against her face. Clink! Clink! She heard the tiles jiggle beneath her. Jackson saw her terrified face. He wanted to comfort her, to say everything was going to be fine, but he wasn’t certain of that at all. He moved closer to the elevator shaft.

  “Jackson,” he suddenly heard her call in a strange excited whisper.

  He planted his fingertips into a firm grip on a casing before looking back. He saw her staring at the roof, moving her hands over the tiles as though they were encrusted with gemstones.

  “What?” he asked.

  “The tiles… the roof tiles…” She lifted her gaze, let it drift upward toward the top of the roof. “They’re sarsen stone.”

  Jackson looked at a single tile, past its silvery frame of lead. He recognized the crystal gray and faint streaks of yellow, and knew she was right. “We’re lying on the Doom Stone?”

  Alma whispered, “The longer it stands, The shorter it grows. That’s the answer to the riddle: The Doom Stone’s been cut into tiles!”

  ROAR

  Jackson’s concentration was shattered. The flare gun had worked itself out of his belt, began to slide noisily down the roof. Oh, no, he thought as he watched it fall over the edge and disappear. He himself began to slip down the sharp pitch of the roof. For a moment the shoulder strap from the radio caught the edge of a casing, but then it slipped free. Alma reached out to stop him. She began to slip, too.

  “Ahhhhhh!” Jackson cried out as his feet hit the gutter. It snapped under his weight. She saw him slide over the edge and out of sight.

  She heard him gasping.

  Alma stopped her slide. Carefully, she inched down and peered over the edge of the roof. Jackson was clinging to a piece of tin gutter that had ripped, been bent down.

  The tiles beneath her were cracking, moving as if they were alive. She searched for a grip, dug her fingers in deeply.

  CRACKKKKK…

  A single tile sprang loose, slid past her, and dropped the more than a hundred feet down to crash onto a sundial in a rock garden.

  Finally, her grip held.

  “Grab me,” she yelled.

  Jackson reached up, took her hand. She squeezed her eyes shut and pulled slowly, steadily. When she opened her eyes again, she saw she was helping him shimmy up the twisted section of the gutter and back onto the roof. The creature was at the end of the catwalk, watching.

  “Don’t look at the tiles,” Jackson whispered as he moved faster toward the rear scaffolding and wire mesh of the elevator shaft. “It’s reading our body language. We need it to move out onto the tiles.”

  “Why?”

  “Who knows if that’s how the Doom Stone works? Maybe it has to be on it, on the tiles.”

  “But it’s been cut up—the Stone could have lost its power.”

  Jackson reached the rear scaffolding and pulled himself up onto the platform around the elevator shaft. He locked his hand in Alma’s and helped her climb up next to him. He hit the call button for the elevator cage, but it remained dead at the bottom of the shaft.

  “What’s wrong?” Alma asked.

  “The power switch must be on ground level.”

  Suddenly a band of floodlights illuminated all the cathedral grounds. Eyes of headlights converged on the close like lions racing in for a kill.

  “They’re here,” Jackson said. “Soldiers are here.”

  The creature saw the activity below. It raised its head, moving mantislike to look at Jackson and Alma, then at the tiles on the roof.

  It’s thinking too much, Jackson worried.

  He glanced back down to the ground. A checkered white-and-red taxi drove recklessly into the close and across the lawn until it reached the wall of military vehicles. He recognized the driver when she got out. The woman pressed a radio to her ear.

  “It’s my aunt,” Jackson told Alma.

  Dr. Cawley stared up at them. Jackson took his own radio from his shoulder strap and flicked it on.

  �
��What are you doing?” Alma asked.

  The creature roared again, its eyes scanning the roof.

  “Skull Face is wondering about the tiles,” Jackson said. “We’ve got to change its mind.”

  “How?”

  There was a crackle of static from the radio. Jackson knew the line was open. “Aunt Sarah?”

  An animal growling came from the radio. “Aunt Sarah, we found the Doom Stone,” Jackson said.

  “I thought you said telling her is like telling Skull Face,” Alma said. “It’ll read her mind.”

  Jackson covered the mouthpiece. “That’s why I’ve got to tell her a lie,” he shot at Alma. Back into the receiver, he said, “Aunt Sarah, the Doom Stone’s in the cathedral. It’s behind the altar.”

  He saw his aunt start away from the taxi and head for the entrance.

  The creature reacted, swiveled its head like a radar dish, then locked its eyes on Jackson and Alma. It climbed over the edge of the catwalk and started across the roof toward them.

  “It’s coming!” Alma screamed.

  “Distract it!”

  “How?”

  “Make faces. Stand on your head. Anything!”

  “I can’t!”

  “Do something!”

  The creature reached the middle of the roof and was closing on Jackson and Alma. It looked confident that the tiles were no threat, that there would be nothing between it and the prey it needed to kill. Jackson tried to get his aunt back on the radio. She disappeared under the eave.

  All Alma could think of doing to confuse it was sing. She let out a few notes, her mind racing to think of any song she knew. She remembered her mother’s favorite song, one they used to sing together on karaoke nights. She’d also sung it with the school chorus. “My wild Irish Rose…” she found the words slipping out of her trembling throat, “The sweetest flower that grows…”

  The creature stopped.

  Alma could see the bafflement in its eyes.

  “Keep singing,” Jackson said.

  “I feel like a fool.”

  “But a live fool.”

  Alma started the song again; this time her hauntingly beautiful voice sailed across the roof. “My wild Irish Rose … the sweetest flower that grows… la la la dee da dum… la la la dee da dum…”

  Skull Face locked its eyes on Alma, as Jackson turned his back. “Ot-nay rue-tay!” Jackson whispered into the radio. “E-thay oom-Day tone-Say is-ay up-ay on-ay e-thay oof-ray!”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Skull Face may be too freaked by your singing to read my aunt’s mind. If it can, it’s going to have to understand pig Latin. Sing!”

  There were scraping sounds as the tiles under the creature’s feet began to loosen. Fall, fall, Jackson wished silently. Skull Face sensed the danger now, sprang quickly up to the top of the pitch. The tiles of the ridge held firm, and the creature crossed toward the back of the church to the ridge above them.

  Alma sang louder, dread creeping into her voice as the creature started down for them. There was a pulsing thunder as a trio of helicopters roared over a ridge to the north.

  “It’s got to be Rath and Tillman,” Jackson said. “They’ll call off the search. They won’t find the flint mines. The little hominids will be safe.”

  “But they’re too late for us,” Alma cried.

  Jackson put down the radio and turned with her to face the monstrosity. They backed against the wire mesh of the shaft. The creature was on them, roaring, raising its ghastly arms. Its appalling fluids oozed from between its teeth, two thick streams bursting from the mouth and spilling over its chin.

  Jackson shouldered himself in front of Alma as the creature’s claws reached out. It was then he felt the shaft of the elevator vibrate. The cage below had come alive and was traveling up toward them.

  “Sing with me,” Jackson said, and he launched into the song, at the top of his lungs:

  “MY WILD IRISH ROSE… THE SWEETEST FLOWER THAT GROWS! LA LA LA DEE DA DA…”

  Alma joined him.

  Skull Face moved its face close to theirs, dissecting them with its eyes, sniffing at them.

  Suddenly, the head of a figure loomed behind them. Jackson turned, saw his aunt and what she held in her hand. He pulled Alma to the side as the safety door was flung open. Dr. Cawley held the flare gun. She pulled the trigger. A ball of white fire roared out at the creature.

  The fireball caught Skull Face in the stomach, pushing it back out onto the roof. The flames took root and began to crawl quickly up its chest to engulf its head.

  Shots rang out from one of the circling helicopters. One. Two. Three.

  The monster shuddered. It tottered to the edge of the roof, then fell downward like a grotesque rag doll. Alma, Jackson, and his aunt watched its long plunge toward the rock garden. There was a quick, sudden, and sickening cracking of bone as the spike of the sundial tore up through the monster’s body.

  Dr. Cawley put her arms around Jackson and Alma, turning them away into the elevator. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  Jackson looked into her eyes. He saw she had returned from wherever the power of the monster had taken her.

  Scraping sounds.

  “Look,” Alma cried, pointing to the roof.

  The tiles had begun to fall, to slide and drop. They rained quickly, savagely, like deadly blades, down upon the creature until its body was blanketed in a great mound of shattered silent stone.

  EPILOGUE

  MADAGASCAR—ONE YEAR LATER

  Dr. Cawley felt the happiest she’d been in a long while as she drove along the coast of Madagascar heading for the airport. She hadn’t seen Jackson since the events at Stonehenge. They’d written a great deal, compared each others’ nightmares. By now they had almost begun to believe the story as the army had wanted them to tell it: The bad dream at Stonehenge had been completely explainable by a series of unfortunate events. A pet bear had turned savage, escaped from a private estate, and done the killings. The creature seen by so many atop the cathedral was someone in a masquerade costume, a man who had flipped out on drugs. Anything else was some sort of mass hallucination. Every aspect of the horror had been methodically cleansed by the military press machine, expert in manipulating rumors and transforming truth.

  All the charade was worth it, Dr. Cawley, Jackson, and Alma had agreed. The existence of the other hominids was something they knew must be kept to themselves for a time, or they would not have gone along with it. In a few short months—in summer—it would be safe to quietly return to Stonehenge and explore the secret only they knew still breathed and moved and waited for them.

  Dr. Cawley was happy Alma’s father had let her accept the invitation to join her and Jackson for their spring break. Jackson was to be on the three-P.M. flight from Kennedy; Alma would be arriving on the four ten P.M. from Heathrow. The dig itself in Madagascar wouldn’t be very exciting, but she had so many wonderful things to show them on the island. The farmers and herders were friendly. Jackson would want to search for treasure left by Captain Kidd and the hordes of other sea pirates who had once plundered off the coast. The lightning storms were spectacular. They’d visit the coffee and sugar plantations, the vanilla and oar factories.

  She could already hear Jackson’s voice in her mind.

  “Stop the car! Stop the car!” he’d cry out.

  She knew he’d be jumping out of the car to pet the sheep and goats. He’d want to ride a horse. To fish. Sail. And he’d ask so many questions.

  Most of all, she knew Jackson and Alma would spend hours on her favorite dock near the dig. Giant manta rays would rise to look at them and then curl magnificently to reveal their massive white bellies. At night Dr. Cawley would show the kids how to snatch handfuls of plankton, rub them, and make their hands explode with brilliant, shocking luminescence.

  As Dr. Cawley drove to the airport, there was no way she could know what was happening deep in the ground thousands of miles away. In the blackness of the flint m
ines beneath Salisbury Plain, one pale face and body had begun to transform, to move and sound and appear different from the other living forms around it. It knew its limbs were growing faster, stronger. Its skull had become larger, its hunger grown beyond the small, brittle, and mucoid forms that crawled at its feet. It had been a while now since it had learned to crawl from time to time up the long distance to the surface. It was drawn to find a hole that looked up toward the starry nights. There it found rodents and other small animals that strayed across its path. It used the sharp, growing daggers that were its teeth. It feasted and dreamed, waiting for the return of its special moon.

  A preview of what’s next in

  if you dare…

  1

  THE NEST

  FLAMING GORGE, UTAH

  Professor Norak stopped dead in his tracks. This must be a joke, he thought. A few of his paleontology students were playing a joke. Very funny.

  He’d told everyone at the main dig that he was going to spend his day off exploring the caves and abandoned silver mine north of the dam. Two of the summer interns had already shown their twisted senses of humor by greasing up a bunch of triceratops gizzard stones and slipping them into a girl’s sleeping bag. The girl was one of those neatness freaks and she had run through the whole camp screaming. The professor could easily imagine the same kids stealing into the mine the night before and using chisels to fake the scratching, raking, and kicking marks. He had to laugh. They had made the imprints from talon feet much too large.

  “Quite a joke,” he told Mario, his pack mule, as he examined the “dinosaur nest.” The animal turned from the edge of darkness to stare at Professor Norak. It pawed at the ground, shuddered from a tick bite, then tried to tug its reins loose from the base of a stalagmite.

  Somewhere below—in the bowels of the network of rotting mine shafts and solution caves that riddled Silver Mountain—the murky shape of a mother lizard was looking for food near the base of a waterfall. She had searched for hours each day, ever since she’d felt motion beginning inside her eggs in the nest—a warning that there would soon be a dozen hatchlings clawing at her underside for food. Her instincts had told her it was time to gorge on blind mud fish and stubby-limbed bats—anything she could find hiding in the dark and damp crannies of the caves.