by Brian Hodge
Again Bob howled. The sound rocked them with its deafening power.
Brian had not been aware that a human being could make a noise like that. When it finally stopped, Nancy turned on him, shrieking. “What happened out there, Brian? You tell me!”
What could he say? “I don’t—”
“Tell me!” She was face-to-face with him, her eyes swirling, sweat pouring down her face, her top lip quivering. Never in all the years he’d known her had he seen Nancy in a state like this.
“I observed some insects. Wasps. Maybe something from the tropics, I don’t know.”
“What sort of insects?” the doctor asked.
Brian shook his head.
“Could he have been stung? I’m thinking in terms of a bizarre venom reaction.”
“It’s possible. They were all over him at one point.” Brian did not expand on Bob’s mention of blue pipe, but it had sickened him inside. That was the project, it had to be. They’d gotten that pipe specially manufactured. It wasn’t anywhere except in the facility.
The room seemed very small, the hospital stink made Brian feel as if his throat was going to close. An awful coldness began creeping through his body.
He saw the dead eye of the woman from the Traps, that staring, dead eye, moving, moving, looking into him and through him, carrying with it a message from another world—and from his own past.
He felt his skin growing clammy, crawling beneath his clothing, smelled the oily sour stink of fear.
Nancy spoke again. “Brian, you’re holding back.”
“I don’t—”
“Brian, please!”
He put his arms around her. Something about the way she leaned against him recalled a long time ago, before either of them were married, when they’d had a couple of very intense weeks together.
“My project involved the use of lots of blue PVC, and it was stamped with the logo of a defense contractor, E.G. and G. Bob must have somehow seen some of this pipe.”
“Last night?”
“I don’t know when else.”
Ellen came into the room. “Where was he, Brian, was he in some lab? Did somebody use him as a lab animal because he used to be a soldier?”
“It was almost certainly a combination of the LSD and these… apparent insects,” the doctor said, with more than a trace of self-importance.
Bob groaned.
Everybody stopped talking.
He growled.
The doctor raised his eyebrows.
With a hollow cry Bob leaped on Brian. They went down hard amid screams and toppling equipment. Brian saw his friend’s face distorted beyond belief, hideous, the lips quivering, the eyes darting like—like—
The woman in the Traps. Her eyes had darted like that when she was alive, and after her death, the one eye had kept on.
Then Bob was being dragged away, he was being restrained, and Loi and Ellen were helping Brian up, he was brushing himself off, watching as orderlies piled on his friend, covering him with heaving bodies, until only his head was visible, jerking like the head of a trussed bird, his cries rending the air.
2
Four hours later the howls were still echoing in Brian’s mind, tearing into his heart.
They’d left because there was nothing else to do, gone like three wooden people out into the innocent morning. Brian and Loi had picked up the Wests’ two scared boys, eleven-year-old Chris and his eight-year-old brother, Joey.
Now the boys sat in front of the TV, quietly watching through tear-drowned eyes.
Brian was pacing like a trapped animal, physics flying through his mind. How could Bob have been in his old facility? He had paranoid visions of some vast underground complex, growing like a cancer out of his own abandoned work while he spent his time tending his damned apples.
What on earth did gross anomalies like mutated insects have to do with his work?
Nothing made sense. He paced back and forth in the little trailer, trying to put together a functional scenario. But abstruse experiments in subatomic physics simply did not lead to… this.
If they had taken Bob underground, how had he managed to return? Why hadn’t he ended up buried?
He imagined insects burrowing beneath the whole region, from Ludlum to Towayda, a distance of over sixty miles. They must be using caves, old mines, tunnels of their own, burrowing like ants or termites.
He had to make some kind of a case with Nate Harris, Bob’s commanding officer. It shouldn’t be hard to talk him into investigating the damned hole behind the judge’s house. Maybe he could even get him to send a detective to one of the judge’s little parties. “Look,” he said to Loi, “I’m gonna go down to the state police barracks in Ludlum.”
“I’m going, too.”
He could see her filing a complaint about demons. “You stay here.” He started to leave.
“No.” She snapped her purse shut and slung it over her shoulder. “Boys, we’ll be back in two hours. You aren’t to leave the house. Is that understood, Chris?”
“Yes, Aunt Loi.”
They rode together in silence. As was her habit, she fiddled with the radio, trying to tune in WAMC, the public radio station out of Albany. She was a voracious consumer of news.
“Listen, Loi, don’t say anything to him about demons.”
“Brian, I’m not stupid. But we should pack up everything we own and leave.”
“Is that what happened in Vietnam, when the demons came?”
“Those demons wore uniforms,” she said, “and burned our houses with cigarette lighters. But when they died, they had the faces of scared kids far from home.”
She hadn’t spoken so many words to him in quite a while. “I love you,” he said.
She nodded solemnly.
The barracks was a brand-new prefabricated building on the Northway about a mile north of the Ludlum exit.
As they pulled into the parking lot, Loi opened her purse and examined her makeup.
The sight of Bob’s Blazer sitting alone and abandoned with an impound sticker on the windshield made him feel physically ill.
“Hey, Brian,” Nate said as soon as they entered his small office. “Figured you’d be along.”
“He’s bad.”
“I know it. He’s gonna be on psychiatric leave for a while. Won’t get paid, I’m afraid.”
“It happened in the line of duty.”
“The pencil pushers have this phrase, ‘preexisting condition.’ Send quite a few guys to the poorhouse with it.” He crossed his legs, leaned back in his chair. “You got some more information for us?”
“Nate, I want you to investigate that root cellar over on the terBroeck place.”
“Where we found Bob? I took a look around there. It’s nothing much. An old root cellar built over an even older mine shaft.”
“How did he come out of it? Where did he come from?”
“Look, I’m gonna tell you the same thing I told that Gazette lady—”
“Ellen Maas?” Loi asked.
“Her. He didn’t come out of the thing, he was going in.”
“You know that?” Brian asked.
“Well, it’s obvious. Where would he be coming from, a mine that’s been abandoned for two hundred years or more? I don’t think so.”
“The presence of that mine could explain the screaming on the mound. That’s reason enough to investigate right there. Maybe somebody got themselves trapped in there.”
Nate sighed. “We did that two days ago. You know what we found in that mine? A shoe. A button shoe, in fact, with a big cut right down its side. Damn thing was probably a hundred years old.”
“You might have a dead body back in there somewhere.”
Nate’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah, Brian, maybe we were just too damn dumb to find it.”
“I didn’t mean it that way, Nate. I only meant that a mine like that’s a honeycomb.”
“Well, we searched every inch. I guess your bugs ate your dead body.”
Brian opened his
mouth, closed it without speaking.
Nate went on. “The Gazette lady told me all about them. How they got in her—between her legs—excuse me, Loi. For God’s sake, Brian, I think you’d better forget about these bugs. The wasps are heavy whenever we have a humid summer.”
“Ellen Maas is a smart woman,” Loi said. “She didn’t lie to you.”
Brian glanced at her. His wife was softening to Ellen.
“I wasn’t implying that,” Nate said. “But from what I hear around town, the Gazette’s on pretty shaky ground. If this was a really sensational story, she could sell it to other papers, bring in some dough.”
“That isn’t her style,” Brian said. “She’s very straightforward.”
Loi gave him a sharp look, then slipped her hand into his.
“Look, I don’t begrudge her the story. But she’s gone a little bananas about it. At least, that’s my impression. I don’t know if you’re friendly, or what.”
“She’s a levelheaded woman,” Loi replied, much to Brian’s surprise. “If she tells you something, you’ve got to think it’s true.”
“You’d have to show us some evidence.”
Brian broke the silence that followed. “There’s something out there, Nate. No doubt it’s entirely explainable. But whatever it is, one person was roughed up by these things and another one’s been hurt pretty bad. Others may have been killed.”
“Again, I have to see something. I mean, the mound area is clean. That hole the things supposedly came out of—clean. So what do you want me to do, send up smoke signals? Rattle beads?”
Nate’s hands were tied, and there was no use arguing. Brian got up to leave.
Back in the truck, he made a decision. He had to face his old life, at least enough to return to the physics building and see what in the world was being done in his facility.
“You are feeling OK with this?” Loi asked as they reached Ludlum University’s tree-shaded gate.
“Not really. But it has to be done.”
He guided the truck through the gate and up the winding street that led around the main building and curved past the physics building behind it.
The old Gothic castle was as forbidding as ever.
Loi said nothing as they went toward the building, but her eyes were big, taking in everything.
“Lovely, isn’t it?”
“It’s so big.”
“Not actually. We needed more space three years ago. It must be bursting at the seams by now.”
He took her up the herringbone-patterned brick walk, between the familiar rows of flowers.
Bill Merriman was at the proctor’s desk in the central hall. He looked up in surprise as Brian came forward, then his face erupted in a smile. He got to his feet, his big glasses glistening in the sunlight that was streaming in the door.
“I don’t believe it, Dr. Kelly!” Merriman’s voice thundered like a foghorn.
“Hi, Bill. Bill, I’d like you to meet Mrs. Kelly.”
There was just the slightest hesitation, as Bill quietly acknowledged the passing of a beloved friend. Then the smile resurfaced. “I’m so pleased to meet you, Mrs. Kelly. I just can’t tell you how pleased I am.” He pumped Loi’s hand until she began to vibrate. Then he stopped, gave Brian a sly, twinkling look. “Am I the last to know?”
“What?”
“Are you coming back with us, Doctor?”
“Bill, I’d just like to take a walk through, have a look at my old facility.”
“Well, I suppose you can do that. It’s off clearance, so I don’t have to follow you around with a gun.” He chuckled. “There’s no classified work being done here now, not since you left.”
“None?”
He shook his head.
“You’re sure it’s OK for me to go in?”
“Oh, absolutely. That’d be Dr. Robinson’s lab now.”
“Active?”
“Under construction until the fall term begins. But there’s not much of your stuff left. You know, when the funding went—”
“I know, my immortality went with it.”
Bill laughed. “I wouldn’t say that, Doctor.”
Loi looked like a small child, peering up at the foyer’s faded grandeur. Before them a wide staircase soared up to a wall of stained-glass windows depicting the achievements of practical physics circa 1897, the year the building was completed. A blast furnace belched fire, electric lighting dotted a cityscape, a locomotive came roaring out of a tunnel.
“I’m afraid we descend into the Stygian depths,” Brian said as he led her around the staircase to the rickety iron steps that led to the basement labs. “In the old days there was nobody in the basement but us trolls.”
He had been trying to push the memories of Mary aside, but the smell coming up from the basement brought them flooding in. That familiar odor of slightly damp concrete—he hadn’t recalled that until just this moment. He’d smelled it a thousand times through their life together, working down here.
Behind him Loi negotiated the steps with exaggerated care. As best he could, he helped her down the thirty feet. The basement was deep, its ceilings high. Originally, it had been a dormitory of some sort. It must have been a depressing place to live.
Brian’s big steel door now had ROBINSON stenciled on it in black, but it was still possible to see where the KELLY & KELLY plate had been—brass, bought at the Door Store in Albany.
Brian opened the door, reached in and turned on the lights. As they always had, they glared down out of cheerless metal gratings. Brian looked up, and when he did his blood almost stopped in his body: the red tinsel they’d hung as a joke during the 1987 departmental Christmas party was still there.
“All right,” he said, looking around the room, “let’s see what’s going on in here.”
“This was your lab?”
“This was our lab.” He pointed to a wall now covered by shelving. “Our control console was over there.” The steel hatch in the floor near it looked much the same. “The waveguide was underneath.”
“What is that?”
“An esoteric particle generator—or rather, detector. Although detection and generation would have arguably been the same event, in this case.”
“I don’t understand that.”
“It was my main piece of equipment. The barrel of my rifle.”
“The barrel isn’t the most important part of a rifle. That’s the firing chamber.”
“Oh, OK. Then it was my firing chamber.”
The work being done in here now clearly had nothing to do with particle physics. When he opened the hatch, he was going to find a ruined waveguide, blue pipe and all. “The service facility is just under the floor, and the device itself eighty feet farther down.”
He went over to the hatch, which was partially occupied by the leg of a chair. “We used to call this place the forbidden zone.”
“Because it was secret?”
“Because a forbidden zone is an area near a very powerful object that you can never escape, once you enter it. In a forbidden zone the laws of physics become deranged, everything changes, the world is turned inside out. You reach a point where time runs backward and you end up forever remembering that you’ve been destroyed, but never actually dying. That’s the paradox of a forbidden zone.”
Loi had twined her arm in his. “Step back,” he said, “I’m gonna open the hatch.”
“Is there danger?”
“It’s just a ruin, it seems.”
He lifted the ring, pulled. The hatch was sheet steel, but not particularly heavy. Disuse made it creak, but it came up easily. An odor rose, of mildew and dust tinged with sewage.
The service facility was pitch-dark. All he could see were the first two rungs of the ladder that led ten feet to its floor. It was here that he and Mary had gone to adjust the polarity of the waveguide, or aim it. The guide had to be absolutely straight or there would be drop-off when it was activated.
“Be careful, Brian!”
“It’s OK, I know the terrain like the back of my hand.” He descended the ladder and reached for the light switch. He flipped it, and the fluorescents flickered on. Two of them did, anyway. In the old days, they’d been able to flood the place until it was as bright as the surface of Death Valley on a sunny day. A good bit of their work involved extremely fine wires, which were always getting lost. They manipulated these wires with tiny padded tweezers called picks.
He had not expected the place to have been stripped to the bare walls. Every single piece of equipment had been removed, even the conduit that had housed the cables leading to the waveguide.
Most extraordinary, the foot of the guide was gone. In its place was nothing but the original well, now empty of the blue tubing that had housed the guide and its supporting cables.
Brian looked into the well. About ten feet down he saw concrete, and embedded in that concrete, the heads of ten massive bolts. “It’s been sealed!”
“Brian, are you OK?”
He backed out of the hole. “I’m OK, I’m fine. But the guide— everything’s been ripped out. And it’s been sealed.” He returned to the ladder, climbed up, closed the hatch. “Sealed like an atomic containment.”
Her hands drifted to her belly. “There’s radiation?”
“No, no. Our work didn’t involve radiation. High-energy plasmas were used in the waveguide, but there was no radioactivity.”
Brian stared at the closed hatch, confused—and for a moment, horrified—by a glow emanating from around its edges.
Again he opened it—and went back down to turn out the lights.
“You won’t stay down there?”
“No.” He climbed out.
She wrinkled her nose. “That place stinks, Brian.”
“There must be some sort of mildew in the walls. Maybe down in the well.”
“It stinks of the demon.”
3
He went upstairs. “Bill, where’s my waveguide?”
“They took it out about a year ago.”
“Who took it?”
Bill only shook his head.
“Don’t tell me it’s still classified.”
Bill’s face was reddening; it was obvious that he knew more than he could say, and he was extremely uncomfortable with this. When his beeper went off, he lunged with relief for the phone. “Excuse me,” he said, dialing. He spoke earnestly into the phone. “This is Bill Merriman of the Physics Department. May I help you?”
