by Brian Hodge
The line was busy. She dialed again, then slammed down the phone. “We go.” They dressed fast. She wouldn’t even let him shave. While he was still combing his hair, she marched out to the truck.
Brian didn’t even consider the idea of arguing. She was right anyway. They should have been with Nancy and the boys from the beginning, that was obvious. The shock of what had happened had numbed him, shut down his mind.
Well, he had better get it powered up again. People needed him.
They went down Kelly Farm Road and turned onto Mound. It took ten minutes to get to Queen’s Road and the little four-house development where the Wests lived. In that time he had decided that he was going to have to attempt to explain the insects to her.
“Loi, there’s more.” Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her nodding. He continued. “There have been a series of what I would characterize as unusual and dangerous incidents involving a number of people. I think they’re related, but I don’t know how.”
“Brian, what is this you are trying to say?”
“There are apparent insects. I don’t know how to say this. Something that comes out of the ground, that glows like a mass of coals—”
“You saw a demon.”
If he didn’t say exactly the right thing, this conversation was going to go off the deep end in about three seconds. He really didn’t think that Southeast Asian animism had any part to play in it. “This is about something else. It all started with the screaming in the mound. On that night, Ellen Maas also had a very strange experience.”
“What is her part?”
“She went out on the mound and saw a thing there. It defies description, really. A spectacular apparition, like a burning snake made of vicious insects.”
“So that’s it, a demon brought you together. I should have known! We must put a stop to this at once.”
“Whatever. The thing is, Bob and I confronted something similar in the road. Strikingly similar. The same sort of glowing things menaced us. It could have been that they—well, that something dreadful has happened.”
She sighed. “If demons took him he is gone, finished. There is no help for him. Now there is something more urgent than waiting with Nancy. She will have her grief a long time.”
“Loi, this is all very unknown. Very confusing.”
“They confuse you so you will not fight so much. But they will come back.” She touched the edge of an eye. “Why Bob? Ellen has sinned, she tried to steal somebody’s husband. You’re OK, you’ve confessed and faced your wrongdoing. But Bob… it’s very strange. Maybe they made a mistake. Maybe they’ll return him to us after all.”
She’s lost in her demons, Brian thought miserably. “This is a physical phenomenon.”
“We must try to save her, Brian. She is hateful, but nobody deserves such a fate. We go first to Ellen Maas.”
Brian was so stunned that he almost killed the engine. “Loi, why?”
“To warn her! She must get out of Oscola at once. She must admit her sin and cleanse her soul. Otherwise—” She made a chopping motion.
So that was it. She was going to try to scare Ellen away with tales of demons, thus neatly removing the threat of her imagined rival. He did not want to pity his wife, but it was a pitiful stratagem. “There are no demons, there’s only nature.”
“Demons are part of nature. Turn around, please.”
There was that sound in her voice again, that new determination. He obeyed her.
Ellen’s cabin was back in the woods a few hundred yards behind them. Despite the hour, he found that it was blazing with light. He wasn’t surprised.
Ellen pulled the door open before they got there; obviously she’d been watching since the moment the truck arrived.
“I’m sorry,” Brian said.
She laughed, a brittle trill. “How about some Café Français? I’ve just been making some.” She could not conceal the shock in her voice.
“We need nothing, thank you.” Loi moved into the small cabin, looked around. “This is nice.”
“Thank you,” Ellen said. Her voice was wary.
Brian met the confusion in Ellen’s eyes.
“Bob West disappeared,” he said.
Ellen looked up at him, blinking.
“A demon has come. It has come and it is collecting souls. You must leave, Ellen. Your soul is in danger.”
“Excuse me?”
“If you don’t pack your bags and leave, it’ll carry you off to hell while you’re still alive. This is a very unfortunate fate, Ellen. It is reserved only for the worst of sinners. Such as women who have seduced the husbands of others.”
“I didn’t do anything of the sort! Your husband was helping me investigate the very things that have apparently caused this tragedy.”
“We went up to Towayda yesterday, Ellen. There was a woman encapsulated in the ground. It was horrible.”
“Oh, Jesus. So there was somebody in the mound, too.”
“I’m afraid there was.”
“If there is no sin, then why has the demon come?”
“There is no demon,” Brian said patiently. “The only thing wrong here is that something horrible’s happened to Bob.”
“We don’t talk about what happened to him. Bad luck.” Then she went to the window, looked out into the brightening morning. “There is much sin here. Secret sin. Demons can smell it from a long way off.” Her hands were on the two sides of her belly, protecting her pregnancy. Another helicopter came drumming along, its sound growing to a roar, then slowly diminishing.
When the helicopter was gone, Brian spoke again—very carefully. “They’re looking for him, Loi. If anybody believed he’d been taken to hell, they certainly wouldn’t be doing that.”
Ellen wasn’t interested in Loi’s demons, either. “What happened out there, Brian?”
He told her the story. By the time he was done, they were beginning to hear sirens. They rose in the distance, fell, rose again, became rapidly louder.
“Going toward the judge’s,” Ellen said.
More helicopters thundered overhead, started circling.
“Bob’s been killed,” Brian said. “They’ve found him in the mound and he’s dead.”
“I’m going,” Ellen announced. “Instantly.” She pulled her hiking boots on, got her heavy old camera out of a box at the foot of her bed, then headed for the door.
“We go, too,” Loi announced.
2
They followed Ellen’s car. Loi sat with her chin in her hands. “She is very beautiful, Brian.”
“Not as beautiful as you.”
“So you say.”
A state police car, its light bar blazing, stormed up from behind and darted away down the wrong side of the road. Brian increased his speed.
The judge’s yard was swarming with people, state troopers, sheriff’s deputies, the men from the Oscola rescue unit.
The dismal yard with its abandoned orchard and its weedy lawn was now an accident site. A rolling stretcher stood on the front walk, its white sheets gleaming in the bright morning sunlight. The judge hovered about in black trousers and a dirty dress shirt. He’d looked bad when they’d met on the mound. But seeing him now, Brian thought in terms of death.
Then he noticed the tire tracks everywhere, all over the grass in every bit of naked soil. He glanced around, trying to determine if the police had done it. There was no way to be sure.
“Judge terBroeck,” Ellen asked, “what’s happening here?”
The judge stared toward the bottom of his yard, in the direction of the mound. Brian followed his gaze.
“That’s where they came from, Loi,” Ellen said. “They came out of that hole.”
Bob, his hat missing, his uniform tunic ripped to pieces, was being pulled out of the old root cellar by a group of troopers and emergency workers.
The next moment Brian was running. “Bob,” he shouted.
There was a shriek of tires in the driveway and another car stopped.
Nancy West got out and started running also. “Bobby,” she cried in a hoarse voice, “Bobby!”
As they pulled him up out of the ruined cellar he regarded his wife with vacant eyes.
It seemed for a moment as if he was going to respond to her, but then his eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped into the arms of the medics. Somebody brought the stretcher and they put him on it. Nancy came down to him, threw her arms around him.
She made not a sound, a silence that was as heartrending as it was impressive.
They took him away, Nancy moving along beside the stretcher, her eyes streaming. Loi went to her. “We are with you,” she said.
Nancy hugged her. “The boys are at home. Take care of them, Loi.”
“They’ll be well with us.”
The parade left, marching to the ugly chatter of Ellen’s camera clicking and grinding as she shot and reloaded and shot again. She was not one of those people who are graceful in their work. There was something awkward about her, almost brutal, as she slung her bulky camera around.
Loi missed none of this. “Look at her, Brian, how greedy she is. It is greed that allowed the demon into her heart.”
“There is no demon!”
“I am not wrong. They send him back because he is a good man.”
Brian looked at his wife, at her hollow eyes. “Why would they take a good man in the first place?”
“This will emerge,” she replied.
Ellen’s Duster rattled off at the rear of the crowd of departing vehicles.
“Let’s look in the root cellar,” Loi said. She tugged at Brian’s hand. “I will prove there are demons, show you their marks.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Come.” Loi marched across the yard.
“Loi, get away from there!” His shout made her turn toward him. As she did so her weight unbalanced her and she toppled backward, stumbled, then slipped down into the weedy, bramble-choked hole before he could reach her.
“Brian!” Her arms came up, barely reaching above the edge.
Brian dove after her, crashing down through the choke of roots that held her.
He landed hard, rolled. The first thing he saw was her legs dangling in the dimness above him. “I’ve got you, baby!” He reached up, took her ankles and pushed her. Despite her unaccustomed bulk, she scrambled up into the light.
“Brian, come on!”
“I’m right behind you, I’m coming.”
He grabbed the roots, hauled himself up, tacking and scrabbling against the moldering bricks in front of him.
There was a grating sound, deep and close, and all at once the whole wall started crumbling. Musty air came out. Brian flailed, pushed himself back, struggled to get away.
He grabbed the weak, giving roots immediately above him. Soil poured down into his face. With a huge, howling cry he pulled himself up—and went crashing back down amid a mass of roots and vines and a great deal of dirt.
Above him there was a terrible, piercing cry. He could see Loi’s face framed against the morning sky. “Brian,” she shrieked.
“I’m OK!”
Then she turned to one side. “Get a rope,” she shouted.
The judge’s voice replied, apparently some sort of refusal. Probably he didn’t have a rope.
“You find one!” There was a sharpness there that Brian had never heard before. She leaned down into the root cellar. “He will find a rope,” she said. “Are you sure you’re not hurt?”
“I’m sure.” He was looking into the blackness that had been opened up by the crumbling wall, trying to penetrate its inky gloom. This was more than just a root cellar, this was some sort of abandoned mine shaft or something.
People had once mined this area for iron, but that was over two hundred years ago.
From deep in the dark, Brian heard a sort of sighing… like the sound of many small wings.
Maybe the old mine had another opening, and it was the wind. But he didn’t think so. “Where’s that rope, Loi?”
“Coming. Remain calm.”
There was an almost military sense of command in that tone. But Brian was not reassured. He was beginning to notice air moving out of the hole, and the air stank. It stank of sweat and skin, urine and feces, the smell of a concentration-camp dormitory, a man-jammed boxcar. “Hurry, baby.”
Was that a glow down in there? And another sound, a low sort of popping noise?
He jumped toward the roots, missed them entirely, ran back the five available steps and tried again, straining with all his might. The fingers of his right hand closed around a thick vine. He dangled, bringing up his left hand, wishing he was in better shape.
He hung with both hands, his legs windmilling. From far below there came a flicker of light.
He pulled himself up, trying to somehow get his feet over the vine. As he struggled, he felt it give. When he put even a little weight on it, the thing trembled.
He went crashing back to the floor of the pit.
The smell from below was strong now; the wind was blowing steadily. He could hear many sounds: buzzing, sizzling, a grating snick, like the snap of great scissors. The air was suffused with a purple glow.
He threw himself against the back wall, tried to somehow claw his way up the crumbly bricks. But they gave way like dry clay, collapsing even more.
Brian kicked, he tried to make chinks for his feet.
“The rope, Loi!”
Finally it came dropping down. But it was too thin, it was nothing but a clothesline. “I can’t climb this!”
“Listen to me carefully, husband. Tie it around your waist, bring it around the front of your right arm, take it across your back and under your left shoulder. Do you understand?”
He fumbled with the rope. “I’m not sure.”
“You do it, and do it right. Now I get the truck.”
There was plenty of slack to tie it securely. He just hoped he’d done it right.
A single glowing object, looking like a lantern, rose lazily from the depths, hung for a moment on the air, then winked out. Instantly, Brian felt something in his hair, something moving. He screamed, tore at it, grabbed it—and was suddenly swept straight up and out onto the grass.
He landed with a bone-jarring thud, was dragged a few feet before Loi could stop the truck. Then she was running back, to him. “Brian, Brian!”
She came down to him. “Careful,” he said, holding out his closed hand. “I’ve got one of the insects.” He opened it—and there lay the crushed remains of a large but entirely commonplace wolf spider, a harmless creature.
“That’s an insect from hell?”
He threw it down without comment.
She rushed into his arms. “I was so scared for you!”
The judge, his face pinched, peered at them from his kitchen porch. He looked for ail the world like a vulture on a stump.
“Were they there?” Loi whispered.
Brian formed his words carefully, forcing the answer past a bone-dry throat, through cracked lips. “They were there.”
She went to the hole, looked down inside.
“Stay away from it,” Brian said.
She stepped back, regarding him gravely. “We have a great battle on our hands, Brian. A very great battle indeed.”
His first impulse was to get into the truck and take her a thousand miles from here, and never turn back.
And that, perhaps, is exactly what he should have done.
Chapter 9
1
Brian and Bob and Nancy were like most Oscola folk, they went back to childhood together. In a small community, the people are woven of one another, they are not single and alone and isolated. This was happening to his best friends, to people he could not remember being without.
How had he ever left Nancy alone all night to worry by herself? How had he done that? He couldn’t imagine, he was shocked at himself.
Brian and Loi reached the hospital a few minutes behind Ellen.
They drov
e up into the emergency room parking lot, got out and went inside through the swinging glass door that led to the emergency receiving area. The nurse in the check-in booth looked up expectantly.
“Bob West,” Loi said.
“He’s upstairs in the Brain/Mind Suite. Let me call them and see if he can have visitors.”
That was the local euphemism for the psychiatric ward. Brian had the horrible feeling that Bob had talked about the wrong thing.
Ellen was already in the waiting room. “He’s physically OK. But they’ve got him in the psycho unit.” Her voice was flat.
“You’ll put this in the paper?” Loi asked.
“No.”
When the nurse finally called them, Brian found himself going down a familiar corridor. It had been on his route when he’d been struggling along with his IV tree six months after the fire.
Bob was in one of those rooms that had always been closed. When the door opened, Nancy looked up, and Brian was deeply touched by the way her eyes tugged at him. “What happened, Brian?”
“I don’t know.”
Bob spoke. “Blue pipe,” he said faintly. “E.G. and G.”
Those few words changed Brian’s life, his view of himself, his understanding of the world. The room rocked, the ceiling whirled. He grabbed the door frame and hung on, looking in astonished horror at the man on the bed.
Bob stared at the ceiling.
“What blue pipe, honey?” Nancy asked.
The conduit that housed the miles and miles of wire involved in Brian’s facility were made of light blue PVC pipe. “Where did you see it, Bob?”
There came out of him a howl as high and wild as any from the deepest woods. The power of it made Brian stumble away from him. Nancy covered her ears with her fists. The doctor reached toward Bob, tentative, his face grave. He muttered something about the Valium drip. “It’s LSD,” Nancy said miserably. “He did a hell of a lot of it during the war! He’s having hallucinations all over again.”
“That was a long time ago,” Brian said.
“An LSD flashback,” the doctor interjected, “can happen at any time. This isn’t uncommon.”
