A set of well-sanded wooden steps led down from the hole in the earth to a smooth concrete floor.
“Go on down and grab that pull-chain at the bottom of the stairs, son.”
The light’s pull-chain felt cold in Tim’s fist. The illumination it spawned was clinical, raw.
Down there, two sets of bunk beds stood against one wall, their spotless linens folded military-crisp. The wall opposite hosted a larder whose shelves were weighted with canned vegetables, fruits, and meats, all of which bore the same labeling: text that identified the can’s contents and the Home & Hearth Inc. logo.
H&H had also provided the shelter with distilled water, toilet paper, toothpaste, soap, linens, even a selection of magazines, crossword-puzzle digests, and a wall calendar and pencil on a string, presumably so the shelter’s occupants could mark the days of their internment like prisoners awaiting parole.
Home & Hearth had installed everything and had done so on a payment plan that fit the Wights’ budget. The same deal had been struck with dozens of households throughout Mitford. Home & Hearth had been brought into town at the behest of Mayor Fenton at the dawn of the communist threat. The mayor had assured everyone in town that Mitford would remain safe provided they heeded his instructions.
Heed they did. Shelters were installed and stocked. And the drills began, growing more and more frequent as the news poured in from around the world about spies and government secrets and a vast chaotic threat to American liberty.
Tim hadn’t noticed the faint, mechanized wheezing sound at first. But now that his ears had grown more accustomed to the tomb-like setting the noise was sharp and clear, almost percussive. Such tight confines made sourcing it a quick process. It was coming from the large fan that was spinning behind an iron grill in the wall, which Tim’s mother had switched on.
“It’s cold enough down here already!” Tim’s brother cried.
“That’s for air circulation, champ,” Tim’s father said, his voice uncharacteristically shaky. “Let’s just relax now, everyone. This will all be over soon.”
Tim wondered if his father had intended that phrase to sound so fatalistic.
The family sat on their bunks and listened to the muted scream of the siren, which soil and distance had mangled into the plea of a maimed animal. They listened also to the lulling whir of the ventilation fan, which was a balm to the Wights. Tim stared at the rotating blades and a sudden exhaustion blanketed him. His eyelids felt weighted and a tingling sensation numbed the inside of his skull.
He tried to speak, but what escaped his slackening mouth was a murmur. He was attempting to tell his parents that the fan had started to turn the wrong way, but the dream paradise had begun to beckon, and its wordless call was somehow more powerful than even the dire sirens that now felt a million miles distant.
VI
Across town, Claude hunkered down with his widowed mother and his sisters. Their shelter was less than half the scale of the one he’d seen being built on Tim’s family’s land, but it was secure and well-ventilated, stocked with foodstuffs and distilled water. That was enough.
Being the eldest child and the only son, Claude had found himself being cast in the paternal role, which he accepted simply because he could sense the immense and sorrowful burden that had been placed upon his mother. Here, in this ugly predicament, Claude found himself consoling his siblings, whose fear was raw and deep and palpable. He wished he could somehow draw it from them.
By the wan light of a lone lantern, his mother sat mute and stared at the ceiling as though it was adorned with Sistine-style murals rather than being the drab concrete it truly was. Was she contemplating the catastrophe that was brewing above the ground, Claude wondered? He gathered his sisters on the bunk and began regaling them with the French folktales his father had passed on to him in childhood: stories of the Castle of the Sun and the peasant who sang down a star for his beloved. The girls went from panicked to soothed to sleepy. As the blades in the wall spun and hummed, Claude watched over his sisters as they slept on their cot.
“Why don’t you sleep, too, maman?” he asked.
His mother nodded lazily, as though halfway to slumber already. He helped her onto the shelter’s second and final cot and slid the blanket over her.
“. . . you . . . yousleeptoo . . .” she urged him in a slurred voice.
“I will,” Claude told her. Fatigue was pressing into his muscles and his mind as he settled into the corner of the room. He used his jacket as a rudimentary blanket and shut his eyes. Yet despite his mounting exhaustion, sleep would not claim him. Claude’s mind was submerged in a chaotic storm of images, his conscience weighted with guilt. He dwelled on the memory of his departure from the Junior G-Men. The shocked expressions of his friends haunted him. He thought, too, of Agent McMillan. For some vague, inexplicable reason, Claude felt that he had somehow made a grave error in judgment. He now viewed himself as being resonant with the characters of those old French folktales—the fool who’d struck a bargain with the Devil.
A violent tremor shook the shelter. It snapped Claude out of his reverie. It shook canned goods from the shelving unit. It caused the cots to shift like boats on rough waters.
What it did not do was awaken Claude’s mother or his sisters. Claude rose and donned his jacket against the deepening chill. Had it been this cold when they’d first sealed themselves in?
A second tremor rocked the room. Claude gripped the anchored shelving unit to keep himself upright. This one lasted several seconds longer than the first. Claude shouted for his family to wake up.
It was then that he noted the fog. The whitish mist blanketed the shelter and rendered its details hazy. Claude’s mind frantically connected the mist with the violent pulsations in the earth and realized that these were not tremors but surely the effects of powerful bombs.
The invasion was real, and what Claude was now witnessing was the poisonous smoke from the fallout insinuating itself into their supposed safe room. His hands made clumsy by panic, he grabbed towels from one of the footlockers and doused them in distilled water. Though it was likely futile, Claude pressed one to his face and then rushed to do the same to his sisters.
But the mist was not invading their sleeping forms. Instead it was gushing out of them.
Claude refused to trust his eyes. How could this colorless fog be flowing from his sisters? What manner of horrid communist weapon could cause pale mist to come leaking out from slack mouths and gently breathing nostrils? What was this ghostly substance that also came gusting out from beneath closed eyelids?
A backward glance at his mother confirmed that she was also suffering the same ugly fate. He gripped his mother’s shoulders and shook her.
A tremor then seized the shelter and shook it. The lantern flew from its hitch and shattered. Claude immediately beat out the tiny kerosene fire using one of the wet towels. The shelter was now in darkness.
Despite his panic, Claude had to resist the urge to simply curl up and go to sleep. Perhaps it was because he was plainly overwhelmed by the awfulness of his predicament. At the same time, he was only able to marvel at the way his family could appear so content despite the danger and the mania that swarmed about their sleeping forms. He wondered if they were dreaming the same glorious dreams that he had enjoyed during previous drills.
Those dreams . . .
But only ever during air-raid drills, and only when Claude and his family had cloistered themselves down here . . .
Again, a vague intuition began to heat him. These were all clues, he knew, but clues to what mystery?
There came the sound of shifting in the distance. Claude braced himself while also trying to shield his sleeping loved ones.
The tremor never came. Instead, it was light. At first Claude thought it was his eyes playing tricks in this stifling blackness, but the orange glow was plain. The faint illumination was visible through the twirling blades of the ventilation fan. The shifting he’d heard, he now realized, was footst
eps. Someone was moving on the other side of that fan. Who it was and how such a thing was even possible were questions Claude set aside in his mind. For now he crouched low and watched and listened.
Whispers.
They came slithering through the slats of the fan’s frame like eels of sound. Their tone and their indecipherable content caused the blood to surge cold through Claude’s veins.
“E’yayayayaaaa . . . ngh’aaaaa . . . Nasht . . . Kaman-Tha . . . Nyarlathotep...”
The entire grill of the fan was now illuminated by the amber gleam of lantern light. Through the slats Claude was able to discern vaguely human shapes. As the susurrus of their chanting filled the shelter, Claude watched in amazement as the fog began to slip back through the vent. Was the fan somehow drawing this alien substance out rather than pulling in fresh air? Surely this was a trick of lantern-glow and shadows.
The whisperers then moved along, taking the light with them, leaving Claude in the bewildering blackness. Seized with fear, the boy felt his way to his mother and listened for her heartbeat. It sounded sluggish, as did the heartbeats of his sisters. It was as if whatever essence had been leeched from their sleeping forms had left them diminished.
Another tremor rocked the shelter, knocking Claude clean off his feet. His head collided with something firm. He did not lose consciousness, but when he touched the smarting area on his scalp he felt blood. Frustration tangled his insides. Claude knew that something had to be done, but what? If bombs were the cause of these shocks, he could not risk irradiating himself or his family, but he could not simply sit by and watch them slip into a potentially permanent slumber.
The fan. Claude reasoned that if those figures, whoever they were, were able to move along the opposite side of the shelter’s vent, there must be some kind of access.
Through touch alone Claude found the iron bar from which the kerosene lamp had hung. This he pried from the stone wall. Steeling himself against the risk he was about to take, Claude held his breath and began to push the bar through the slats in the vent. The fan blades clanged horribly against the foreign object. Mercifully, the fan did not spin with great velocity. This made Claude’s task of feeding the bar through to the far side of the grill somewhat easier.
The blades now locked in place, Claude began to pull back on the grill. The fan’s engine was beginning to wheeze. He wondered how much time he would have before it completely overheated. Putting all his weight into the task, Claude finally managed to yank the grill free. He fell to the ground. The grill made a horrible clang once it struck the stone floor. Panicked, Claude huddled against the wall, his ears straining to hear beyond the struggling fan motor for any sounds of people. The whisperers were apparently too far gone to have noted the noises. Their lanterns were out of sight.
Propping himself at the foot of his mother’s cot, Claude lifted his legs and began to kick at the fan. He prayed that he wouldn’t knock the bar loose and set the fan slicing into his ankles. Each kick seemed deafeningly loud. He winced every time, terrified of discovery.
The seventh attempt sent the unit out of the hole that had been carved into the wall to mount it. The back grill and the fan crashed down on the opposite side of Claude’s shelter. Sticking his head through the now-vacant aperture, he could sense a tunnel. The blackness beyond that shelter was so complete, Claude knew that attempting to feel his way through would be disastrous. His brain cobbled together a quick solution.
The footlocker held two large cans of kerosene for the lamp, along with a large box of long matches. Claude took these and the last two hand-towels. With care, he climbed through the hole in the wall, landing on the other side with as soft a thud as possible. He felt around for several minutes but at last found the iron bar, which, thanks to the towels, some kerosene, and a match, he transformed into a torch.
He was in another world, one older and stranger than he could even fathom. The tunnel in which Claude now stood was a ragged chute. The walls were braced with a zigzag of wooden beams, all of which seemed to conjoin at weird angles, forging a kind of textured cuneiform whose message was too alien to decipher. Cautiously, Claude began to creep through the tunnel. In the gloom beyond his meager torch there was the sound of foul drippings and a soft but incessant whirring.
He rounded a bend in the tunnel and immediately spotted the pools of faint light that stippled the blackness. Like a moth, Claude moved to them and found their source. Peering into those small shafts of light, he found himself staring into another underground shelter. Though slightly larger than the one that Home & Hearth Inc. had installed in Claude’s own backyard, the shelter was of an identical design. He did not recognize the occupants, both of whom were lying on cots, dreaming deeply. He could just make out the vague remnants of a heavy mist lingering inside the chamber.
Each dimly-lit vent connected this vast labyrinth of seemingly-ancient tunnels to the newly-built shelters. Claude saw the good people of Mitford lying oblivious to whatever hideous plan was unfurling here in these dank, chthonic halls. He moved slowly, fearful that he would at any moment encounter the whisperers. The tunnels all seemed emptied, just as the various bomb shelters had been drained of the strange fog.
His ears suddenly detected a sound in the distance: whispers again, only this time they were in chorus. The voices, though soft and keen, ricocheted through the passages. Claude did his best to follow the sound. Eventually it began to grow louder.
Louder, and brighter, for whatever chamber these tunnels fed into was large and lit by flickering fire. Claude could now see shadows and dancing light. He was close. His torch had burned down to the iron. He set down the useless tool and advanced.
He had almost reached the mouth of that great open chamber when something grabbed his arm and yanked him backward. Claude nearly cried out, but a rough hand was pressed across his mouth, muzzling him.
A face emerged from the darkness. It was the face of a mad-looking old woman. And it was a vaguely familiar face. Claude suddenly remembered where he had seen it before: at the Witch House. The Russian woman. His captor, he could only assume, was the woman’s husband.
Claude’s struggle to break free ended the instant he saw a third figure step out from behind Mrs. Volos’s robed form. It was Luna. Claude felt his eyes widen with disbelief as the girl pressed her finger to her lips.
VII
“I knock!” Leo cried. Setting his cards on the kitchen table he added, “Straight flush. Read ’em and weep, ladies!”
“Bah!” spat Leo’s Uncle Vincent. “See? What did I tell you? Mitford boys don’t know how to play rummy without cheating!”
“Cheat nothing! I’m what yous call a card shark!”
“It’s card sharp, Leo,” his father replied. “And I think it’s time we shut down this casino and got headed back to Mitford. I’ve got an early-morning delivery tomorrow.”
The Grassi family piled into the pickup truck and made their way out of Cedar Falls and back toward Mitford. The sun was well into its western descent. Leo and his siblings laughed themselves hoarse singing along to the radio’s broadcast of “I Wanna Be Loved” by the Andrews Sisters.
“Okay, you mooks,” their father advised them eventually, “pipe down. We’re home now.”
Passing the sign that welcomed them to Mitford, the Grassis found themselves facing a veritable ghost town. It was deathly still. At first Leo wondered if there might be another air-raid drill, but the sirens at the town hall were silent. There was no sign of anyone on the streets and every house they passed was unlit. The darkness of the town was near-complete, save for one patch.
“Holy frijole, will yous look at that!” Leo exclaimed, jutting a finger out of the open truck window.
The hills on the outskirts of town appeared black, for they were back-lit by a weird colored luminescence that shimmered and pulsed in the sky.
“Could be a fire, Pop,” Leo said.
“Not like any fire I’ve ever seen,” replied his father.
“This
isn’t right, I’m telling yous. Let’s go infestigate around up there.”
“Uh-uh,” replied Leo’s brothers, one shaking his head.
“Leo’s right,” his father replied, “somebody could need our help out there. We’ll drive past and then double-back to the fire station to get help if need be.”
They drove on toward the Devil’s Humps. The Witch House came into view. The sight of it caused Leo’s father to slam on the brakes.
Multicolored light came beaming through the building’s every window and door. The entire house seemed to be shaking like some carnival attraction.
And the hills . . . the hills . . .
The Devil’s Humps were pulsating, flexing, and shrinking to an impossible, horrifically drastic degree. None of the Grassi men could speak. They simply stared at the lights and the motion.
And then they felt the rumble. It was a savage tremor that seemed to intensify endlessly until at last it reached its zenith.
The Witch House began to fracture. Like a house of cards, its moldings and its sturdy walls and its framing began to collapse in upon themselves.
And from this buckling structure fled a stream of figures. Leo leapt from the truck and watched in disbelief as these people, all of whom were dressed in monkish black robes, scattered like bugs. Seconds later there was a rush of headlights and screeching tires as a manic motorcade came racing toward the truck. Leo leapt onto the hood to avoid one of the careening sedans.
When the frenzy was over, the Devil’s Humps were still once more and the lights in the sky had faded.
And in the moonlit valley, just a few yards from the ruins of the Witch House, a trio of figures stood. One of them lifted their hand as if to wave. Leo squinted. “Claude?” he gasped. Beside him, dressed in a black robe, was Agent McMillan. Luna leaned against the agent. Leo could see that she was crying.
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