“It’s Paul Hampton from Sagebrook.”
Silence. This was going to be harder than Paul had thought.
“Hey,” Marc said. “What’s happening? Are you still out on Long Island?”
“Still at the same address,” Paul said. “The house you and I painted the summer of ’76.”
“No kidding. Your Mom?”
“She passed in 2001.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Look,” Paul said. “I’m calling because I spoke to Bob. He told me about the reunion and that you aren’t going.”
“I appreciate the invitation and the effort,” Marc said. “But that is such a bad weekend with school starting up the next week…”
“And how did Bob sound to you?” Paul said.
“I don’t know, a little tired.”
“Yeah, well he’s way past tired,” Paul said. “He’s dying. Stage four lung cancer. It doesn’t work into your schedule but, well, sorry. He wants to see us all.”
Another pause.
“Paul, we haven’t seen each other in thirty years,” Marc said. “After graduation, we all ran like hell from home and for good reason. It took me a shitload of therapy to get my head screwed back on straight. I’ve got a good life going out here. Why should I toss all that and rush across the country?”
“Because Bob would do it for you,” Paul said.
Marc gave no answer.
“You know he would,” Paul added.
More silence. You can’t argue with the truth, Paul thought.
“You going to give me a ride from LaGuardia?”
“I’m warning you now, I drive like a cop,” Paul said.
“I’ll rent a car,” Marc said. “I’ll see you at Bob’s.” He hung up.
Paul guessed that Bob would be pretty pissed if he knew anyone else was aware of his illness. It had taken some serious badgering to get Bob to admit it to Paul.
Paul had met Bob a few weeks ago, for the first time in over twenty years. They split a lunch pizza at Brother’s Trattoria, their old high school hangout. Bob looked like crap—drawn, ashen skin, dark circles under his eyes. He had a deep, persistent cough that was more than the usual smoker’s hack. He told Paul about the reunion idea. Paul volunteered to use his police contacts to help locate some of the harder to find former Half Dozen members. He was exceptionally proud to have delivered Jeff Block’s personal cell number. Only near the end of the conversation had Bob admitted his illness.
So Paul had to pull the dying friend card to get Marc on board. Life’s tough. Marc needed to be here. He owed Bob. They all did.
Chapter Seven
1980
The night of the tower lightning strike, Ken’s parents were asleep when he snuck back into the house, which suited him fine. After midnight was no time to do a few rounds of Twenty Questions with his father. He had a pounding headache, and the nerve endings of his right foot and left hand tingled like they were coated in ants. He guessed that was the path the charge took as it went through him. The idea made him shudder.
When he finally fell asleep, he instantly began to dream. He stood at noon by the Sagebrook millpond, a relic of the 1700s in old Sagebrook just blocks off the village green. The mill was there, but it looked newer and the road in front of it was just a narrow dirt rut. The houses that ringed the pond were gone, replaced by a forest of trees taller than he’d ever seen in Sagebrook. Children wandered around the pond. Hundreds of them. Some played with each other, some fed breadcrumbs to the ducks. They wore a mishmash of period clothing from colonial era knickers to elaborate Victorian suits to modern jeans.
The dream had an unsurpassed clarity. Vibrant colors leapt from every surface. The sun felt warm and invigorating. The smell of algae drifted up off the pond. Ken had never had a dream so vivid.
The sky darkened. Ken looked up as a black disk crept across the sun. A solar eclipse. He averted his eyes.
Around the pond the children kept playing and ignored the encroaching darkness. The clear waters of the pond turned an inky black. Couldn’t the kids tell something horrible was about to happen?
The water at the pond’s center bubbled. A bizarre, black, cylindrical creature with a top shaped like a hammerhead shark surfaced. Four eyes twitched at the corners of its faceless head. As the body cleared the water, ten tentacles appeared. The creature hovered over the water. Its tentacles cracked at the pond’s surface like bullwhips.
An enormous, bear-like snout protruded where the tentacles met. Long, jagged teeth sparkled like shards of broken glass. Its mouth snapped open and closed, as if warming up its jaws. Each bite shrieked like shearing metal.
Yet the children continued to play, as if the darkness did not blind them, as if the gnashing teeth didn’t drown out their games. Ken ran to the edge of the pond and screamed a warning. No one reacted.
A tentacle whipped out across the pond, lengthening like pulled black taffy. It zeroed in on a little girl in a pink dress. The tip wrapped around her neck. Three claws burst from the end and opened in front of her face. Her eyes bulged in terror. She screamed as the claws snapped shut on her face like a striking cobra.
Whatever veil cloaked the creature fell away. A collective cry echoed across the pond. Children fled in all directions. Larger ones trampled the smaller.
The tentacle around the girl’s neck retracted and whipped her across the pond. It flipped her up into the creature’s snapping jaws. The creature’s teeth shredded her in an explosion of red liquid.
The other tentacles began to snap out across the pond. They yanked fleeing children off their feet mid-step and reeled them in to the meat grinder running in the pond’s center.
Ken searched for something, anything, to attack the creature over the pond. He spied a softball-sized rock. He could hit home plate from centerfield with a softball, so it was worth a shot.
Ken scooped the rock up on the run like he was fielding a grounder. He wound up and let the rock fly. It whizzed across the pond and nailed the creature dead between one set of eyes. A resounding crack echoed across the pond. The creature shuddered. Its tentacles splashed back into the pond and released whatever prey they had captured. Children sputtered and coughed as they splashed back to shore.
The uninjured half of the hammerhead rotated until both eyes, narrowed in fury, trained on Ken. The creature snapped its jaws. Ribbons of skin dangled from its ragged teeth like Satan’s Christmas tinsel. Four tentacles shot out at Ken.
Before he could react they had him, one at each arm and leg. The tentacles hissed as they wrapped around him. In their vise-like grip Ken’s hands and feet went numb. The creature’s overpowering stench oozed from the tentacles, an algal smell over a stink like a rotting carcass in the summer sun. Ken’s stomach churned.
The tentacles yanked Ken off his feet. He flew through the air across the pond. The closer he got to the creature the more overpowering the smell became, until it seemed to fill him from within. The creature slammed him down face first across the pond like a skipping stone. Ken choked on a mouthful of water that tasted like dead fish and duck shit. He shook the water from his eyes just in time to see the gaping maw of the creature, dagger teeth dripping with blood, inches from his face.
Ken screamed himself awake in his bed. He threw off the covers and leapt to the floor. His pajama bottoms were soaked in urine. He dropped them to his ankles and kicked them across the room.
Never had a dream seemed so real. So terrifying. Every one of his senses registered it as reality. Ken’s heart still pounded on his ears. His wet legs made him shiver. The clock read one fifty-five a.m.
Jesus, this had better not be a side effect of the lightning strike, Ken thought. He started to strip the damp sheets off his bed. He couldn’t start scaring the piss out of himself every night.
Chapter Eight
Hours later, it was still dark in the Armstrong house.
Outside, the Friday morning sun blazed away in an azure sky and promised a glorious day ahead. But the
light couldn’t penetrate the layers of shades and drapes that hung over every window. Even the sixty-watt specials in the house fixtures, coated with the residue of secondhand smoke, could not truly banish the gloom.
Though his friends called him Smokin’ Bob, his mother Wilma was the source of the indoor air pollution. She chain-smoked several packs of cigarettes a day and often woke in the wee hours of the morning to ignite a few sticks. When she had started puffing in the ’50s, it had been a sign of women’s liberation, a cool and classy addition to any outfit she wore. After her first divorce, it had become more of a habit. After the second, it morphed into a monster.
That second divorce had done more. She had seen the truth, as the preachers used to say in church when she was young. She had seen the truth about men. She had wed two in a row who had a demanding mistress in a bottle, and she didn’t mean Barbara Eden in a genie costume. One loved Jack Daniels and the other loved vodka, but the end result was no different. The alcohol convinced them that wives were something to be slapped around. Her second trip to the emergency room after being the victim of Husband Number Two’s affection was her moment of epiphany. All men were evil.
By the grace of God, the old house in Sagebrook hadn’t sold, and Wilma moved back there with Bobby. She and her baby were back home. Bobby returned to school with his friends.
Bob flicked on the light in the kitchen. He hadn’t opened a window shade since doing so at age twelve earned a tongue lashing from his mother. Men could see inside the house, after all. He plugged in the coffee pot, the official start of the day.
Soaking wet, with a full meal in him, Bob might have weighed one twenty, a lean physique he certainly didn’t inherit from his mother. He had a tangle of brown hair with a wildcat’s tenacity to remain untamed. He wore a faded black Aerosmith T-shirt from the ’78 tour. He hadn’t gone to the show.
He opened a cabinet stuffed with cigarette packs. Bob slid one out and zipped it open. He tapped out a cigarette and lit it. Going through three packs a day, his mother wouldn’t miss it. Not that he’d ever smoke in front of her.
He pulled open the refrigerator. Slim pickings. Three eggs. A half stick of butter. A quart of milk that expired yesterday. Leftover spaghetti in a used Cool Whip tub. He’d have to hit the store after work.
He jammed his cigarette into an ashtray of his mother’s accomplishments. He poured a mug of coffee from the gurgling pot, shoveled in three spoons of sugar and gave the java a spin. He put a pack of cigarettes on the mug like a lid and delivered it to his mother’s room.
“Ma?”
The form under the blankets shifted. Even in the summer steam, Wilma slept under a suffocating load of bedding.
“I’m awake, Bobby,” she said, her voice muffled by the blankets. “I’m getting up in a minute. I was just laying here planning the day.”
Bob already knew the plan. Bounce out of bed by ten. Switch housecoat to sweat suit if it was a good day, grab a shower on a great one. Days of Our Lives. Sprinkle liberally with nicotine.
“Your coffee’s here, Ma. I gotta go to school.” He left the mug on her dresser.
“Be careful, Bobby,” his mother said. “There’s crazy people out driving the roads. On the news yesterday there was a big accident at the Williamsburg Bridge.”
The Williamsburg Bridge was two counties away. “Got it, Ma.”
He stopped at the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. A cadre of prescription bottles stood ready, white-capped high priests with capsulated offerings to soothe Wilma’s shattered psyche. Bob reached past them for some aspirin. His head still rang from last night’s lightning strike debacle at the tower. He rolled four pills into his palm.
The headache wasn’t all. He’d gotten over six hours of sleep, but he felt bone-tired. Something had plagued him in the night, a dream that he could not remember. There was a pond or lake… Something told him he was better off without it.
In the kitchen he filled a mug of coffee for the trip to school. He poured in a slug of sugar. It was all he carried to the door. Working forty hours a week didn’t leave time to do homework. Half the shit didn’t make sense anyhow. With two weeks to graduation, why give himself a brain cramp over Catcher in the Rye and the cosine of forty-five?
“Bobby,” Wilma called from the far end of the house. “Your horoscope says ‘A new venture will present itself.’ Keep a lookout.”
Horoscopes. Fortune tellers. Superstitions. These were the mainstays of Wilma’s life. How could she be so worried about a future she rarely stepped out of the house to face?
Bob opened the front door and squinted. Blazing sunshine lit the foyer, and the house seemed to recoil in protest at the intrusion. Bob shut the door behind him and set both locks. They wouldn’t be turned again until he got home that night.
Chapter Nine
“Paul! It’s already seven!”
His mother’s voice thundered up the steps, and Paul’s closed bedroom door was no defense.
“Coming!” Paul answered. He’d overslept big time. He was too tired and disoriented when he snuck back in last night to remember to set his alarm clock. He was just relieved he hadn’t woken his mother when he crept in past midnight.
Plus there was that dream. He couldn’t remember it specifically, but he recalled that it was dark and there was a creature with arms like an octopus. It had jolted him awake but he’d drifted right back to sleep.
He pulled on a T-shirt and noticed it stretched over his midsection. He’d still been eating like a football player with the season over for months. He had a lifeguard job lined up at the beach for the summer. There was no way he was going to sit in the big elevated chair all summer with his gut rolling over the edge of his swimsuit. He wanted bikini-clad babes to look at him, not laugh at him. He vowed to hit the weights when he got home today.
He took his football letterman jacket out of the closet, but it was still too wet to wear. On the top shelf sat his father’s peaked NYPD dress cap, dark blue with a black band over the brim. The metal badge on the peak, an Indian and a colonist flanking an eagle and shield, shone like a mirror. Paul hand buffed it every Sunday. He gave the cap a touch to the brim and closed the closet door.
The kitchen was a whirlwind of activity when Paul blew in. His mother was dressed for work in a dark blue pants suit, though she’d safeguarded the jacket from kitchen spills by leaving it draped over the living room couch. Her red hair was pinned back but a few strays had escaped and dangled before her right eye. She slid plates of steaming bacon and eggs in front of the two children at the table like she was dealing cards in Vegas.
Paul’s siblings, twins Annie and Alice, age eight, dove into the meal. They wore red-checked blouses that matched, as they mirrored each other by choice each day. School started for them a half hour after Whitman High.
“Paul! Breakfast!” his mother said. Two pieces of toast popped up from the toaster, and she grabbed them in mid-flight. She slapped together a bacon sandwich, spun a few paper towels around it and handed it to Paul.
“Thanks, Mom.” Paul took a bite from one corner.
Paul’s mother flipped the tops shut on two duplicate Mork and Mindy themed lunch boxes. She flicked the errant hairs away from her face and delivered the lunch boxes to the kitchen table. On the way back to the kitchen, she slipped two dollars into Paul’s free hand.
“That’s for lunch,” she said. A bagged lunch had been uncool since tenth grade. “I’ll be home late tonight. Make your sisters dinner. There’s TV dinners in the freezer. Make them eat the vegetables.”
“Sure, Mom.”
“I’ll be home by seven,” she said. Then she delivered a sharp slap to the back of his head. “Then we are talking about why the hell you got home so late last night.”
Paul winced. He headed for the hall to avoid the rest of the conversation. Paul was sure there would be a day when he got one past his mother, but today wasn’t that day. When the shock of his father’s death on the job wore off, the tough Iri
sh heritage in his mother’s DNA had kicked into overdrive, and the family heartbeat hadn’t missed a pulse.
In the hallway, he passed a framed, black-and-white picture of his late father, a suave and relaxed NY cop slouching against his police cruiser, .38 Special resting easy on his hip, big smile spread under a bushy moustache. Paul scooped up his binder from the hall table and went out the front door.
He fired up the engine of his battered ’67 Mustang and headed out to school. So, he hadn’t gotten home undetected late night. He wondered if the rest of the Dirty Half Dozen had fared any better.
Chapter Ten
Marc moved through the house at half speed that morning. His head thrummed like a bass drum. He assumed part of it was a residual effect of having tens of thousands of volts channel through his body. But he was certain he’d had a horrific nightmare, though the emotions it stirred were a stronger memory than the dream itself. There was water and something sinister. A spider or eels or something like that. As if a dream about water wasn’t frightening enough to an aquaphobic.
He entered the kitchen, and both of his brothers were already at the table. Albert, the three-year-old, sat in a booster seat. He had a mop of black hair had a round face that was forever smiling. Marc had never seen a happier kid. His breakfast of Cheerios was as much a toy as a meal this morning, and a milk-soaked platoon of them were in formation on his placemat.
Danny sat opposite Albert. He was only three years younger than Marc, but their worlds barely intersected. Danny had been born with Down’s syndrome. He had short, rusty hair and folded eyes that Marc thought always made him look sleepy. Weak abdominal muscles made his stomach distend, and with his thick glasses and stout legs there were times Danny looked like an old man, while his mind would never have him act like anything but a child. He wore his favorite yellow T-shirt. He had five of them.
“Marc is awake!” Danny announced. He gave a big smile full of crooked teeth. The beauty of Danny was that he was damn near as happy as Albert despite a pile of reasons to be just the opposite.
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