Yet they had. Every single one of them, as it turned out. So did the bullfrog, except its yellow-black eyes had gone cloudy and dull. It was present and accounted for, but when it hopped, it hopped right into the wall of its cage. It had gone blind.
Curt opened the trunk and moved back from it all in the same gesture, a move almost like ballet and one most policemen know. Sandy braced in the doorway again, hands fisted on the slack rope, ready for it to go taut. Dicky-Duck once more snagged a tight hold on his belt loops. And again there was nothing.
Curt leaned into the trunk.
"Cold in here," he called. His voice sounded hollow, oddly distant. "And I'm getting that smell--the cabbage smell. Also peppermint. And . . . wait . . ."
Sandy waited. When nothing came, he called Curt's name.
"I think it's salt," Curt said. "Like the ocean, almost. This is the center of it, the vortex, right here in the trunk. I'm sure of it."
"I don't care if it's the Lost Dutchman Mine," Sandy told him. "I want you out of there. Now."
"Just a second more." He leaned deep into the trunk. Sandy almost expected him to jerk forward as if something was pulling him, Curt Wilcox's idea of a knee-slapper. Perhaps he thought of it, but in the end he knew better. He simply got Matt Babicki's windowbox and pulled it out. He turned and held it up so Sandy and Dicky could see. The flowers looked fine and blooming. They were dead a couple of days later, but there was nothing very supernatural about that; they had been frozen in the trunk of the car as surely as they would have been if Curtis had put them in the freezer for awhile.
"Are you done yet?" Sandy was even starting to sound like Old Gammer Dearborn to himself, but he couldn't help it.
"Yeah. Guess so." Curtis sounding disappointed. Sandy jumped when he slammed the Buick's trunk-lid back down, and Dick's fingers tightened on the back of his pants. Sandy had an idea ole Dicky-Duck had come pretty close to yanking him right out the doorway and on to his ass in the parking lot. Curt, meantime, walked slowly toward them with the frog cage, the sneaker box, and the windowbox stacked up in his arms. Sandy kept coiling up the rope as he came so Curt wouldn't trip over it.
When they were all outside again, Dicky took the cage and looked wonderingly at the blind bullfrog. "That beats everything," he said.
Curt slipped out of the loop around his waist, then knelt on the macadam and opened the shoebox. Four or five other Troopers had gathered around by then. The crickets hopped out almost as soon as Curt took the lid off the box, but not before both Curtis and Sandy had a chance to take attendance. Eight, the number of cylinders in yonder Buick's useless engine. Eight, the same number of crickets that had gone in.
Curt looked disgusted and disappointed. "Nothing," he said. "In the end, that's what it always comes to. If there's a formula--some binomial theorem or quadratic equation or something like that--I don't see it."
"Then maybe you better give it a pass," Sandy said.
Curt lowered his head and watched the crickets go hopping across the parking lot, widening out from each other, going their separate ways, and no equation or theorem ever invented by any mathematician who ever breathed could predict where any single one of them might end up. They were Chaos Theory hopping. The goggles were still hung around Curt's neck on their elastic strap. He fingered them for a few moments, then glanced at Sandy. His mouth was set. The disappointed look had gone out of his eyes. The other one, the half-crazed let's-play-Bingo-until-the-money's-all-gone look, had come back to take its place.
"Don't think I'm ready to do that," he said. "There must be . . ."
Sandy gave him a chance, and when Curtis didn't finish, he asked: "There must be what?"
But Curtis only shook his head, as if he could not say. Or would not.
Three days went by. They waited for another bat-thing or another cyclone of leaves, but there was nothing immediate in the wake of the lightshow; the Buick just sat there. Troop D's piece of Pennsylvania was quiet, especially on the second shift, which suited Sandy Dearborn right down to the ground. One more clay and he'd be off for two. Huddle's turn to run the show again. Then, when Sandy came back, Tony Schoondist would be in the big chair, where he belonged. The temperature in Shed B still hadn't equalized with the temperature of the outside world, but was getting there. It had risen into the low sixties, and Troop D had come to think of the sixties as safe territory.
For the first forty-eight hours after the monster lightquake, they'd kept someone out there around the clock. After twenty-four uneventful hours, some of the men had started grumbling about putting in the extra time, and Sandy couldn't much blame them. It was uncompensated time, of course. Had to be. How could they have sent Overtime Reports for Shed B-watching to Scranton? What would they have put in the space marked REASON FOR OVERTIME ACTIVITY (SPECIFY IN FULL)?
Curt Wilcox wasn't crazy about dropping the full-time surveillance, but he understood the realities of the situation. In a brief conference, they decided on a week's worth of spot checks, most to be performed by Troopers Dearborn and Wilcox. And if Tony didn't like that when he got back from sunny California, he could change it.
So now comes eight o'clock of a summer evening right around the time of the solstice, the sun not down but sitting red and bloated on the Short Hills, casting the last of its long and longing light. Sandy was in the office, beavering away at the weekend duty roster, that big chair fitting him pretty well just then. There were times when he could imagine himself sitting in it more or less permanently, and that summer evening was one of them. I think I could do this job: that was what was going through his mind as George Morgan rolled up the driveway in Unit D-ll. Sandy raised his hand to George and grinned when George ticked a little salute off the brim of his big hat in return: right-back-atcha.
George was on patrol that shift, but happened to be close by and so came in to gas up. By the nineties, Pennsylvania State Troopers would no longer have that option, but in 1983 you could still pump your go-juice at home and save the state a few pennies. He put the pump on slow automatic and strolled over to Shed B for a peek.
There was a light on inside (they always left it on) and there it was, the Troop D bonus baby, Old '54, sitting quiet with its chrome gleaming, looking as if it had never eaten a State Trooper, blinded a frog, or produced a freak bat. George, still a few years from his personal finish-line (two cans of beer and then the pistol in the mouth, jammed way up in back past the soft palate, not taking any chances, when a cop decides to do it he or she almost always gets it right), stood at the roll-up door as they all did from time to time, adopting the stance they all seemed to adopt, kind of loose and spraddle-legged like a sidewalk superintendent at a city building site, hands on hips (Pose A) or crossed on the chest (Pose B) or cupped to the sides of the face if the day was especially bright (Pose C). It's a stance that says the sidewalk superintendent in question is a man with more than a few of the answers, an expert gent with plenty of time to discuss taxes or politics or the haircuts of the young.
George had his look and was just about to turn away when all at once there was a thud from in there, toneless and heavy. This was followed by a pause (long enough, he told Sandy later, for him to think he'd imagined the sound in the first place) and then there was a second thud. George saw the Buick's trunk-lid move up and down in the middle, just once, quick. He started for the side door, meaning to go in and investigate. Then he recalled what he was dealing with, a car that sometimes ate people. He stopped, looked around for someone else--for backup--and saw no one. There's never a cop around when you need one. He considered going into the shed by himself anyway, thought of Ennis--four years and still not home for lunch--and ran for the barracks instead.
*
"Sandy, you better come." George standing in the doorway, looking scared and out of breath. "I think maybe one of these idiots may have locked some other idiot in the trunk of that fucking nuisance in Shed B. Like for a joke."
Sandy stared at him, thunderstruck. Unable (or perhaps unw
illing) to believe that anyone, even that dope Santerre, could do such a thing. Except people could, he knew it. He knew something else, as well--incredible as it might seem, in many cases they meant no harm.
George mistook the acting SC's surprise for disbelief. "I might be wrong, but honest-to-God I'm not pulling your chain. Something's thumping the lid of the trunk. From the inside. Sounds like with his fist. I started to go in on my own, then changed my mind."
"That was the right call," Sandy said. "Come on."
They hurried out, stopping just long enough so Sandy could look in the kitchen and then bawl upstairs to the common room. No one. The barracks was never deserted, but it was deserted now, and why? Because there was never a cop around when you needed one, that was why. Herb Avery was running dispatch that night, at least that was one, and he joined them.
"Want me to call someone in off the road, Sandy? I can, if you want."
"No." Sandy was looking around, trying to remember where he'd last seen the coil of rope. In the hutch, probably. Unless some yo-yo had taken it home to haul something upstairs with, which would be just about par for the course. "Come on, George."
The two of them crossed the parking lot in the red sunset light, their trailing shadows all but infinite, going first to the roll-up door for a little look-see. The Buick sat there as it had ever since old Johnny Parker dragged it in behind his tow-truck (Johnny now retired and getting through his nights with an oxygen tank beside his bed--but still smoking). It cast its own shadow on the concrete floor.
Sandy started to turn away, meaning to check the hutch for the rope, and just as he did there came another thump. It was strong and flat and unemphatic. The trunk-lid shivered, dimpled up in the middle for a moment, then went back down. It looked to Sandy as if the Roadmaster actually rocked a little bit on its springs.
"There! You see?" George said. He started to add something else, and that was when the Buick's trunk came unlatched and the lid sprang up on its hinges and the fish fell out.
Of course, it was a fish no more than the bat-thing was a bat, but they both knew at once it was nothing made to live on land; it had not one gill on the side they could see but four of them in a line, parallel slashes in its skin, which was the color of dark tarnished silver. It had a ragged and membranous tail. It unfolded out of the trunk with a last convulsive, dying shiver. Its bottom half curved and flexed, and Sandy could see how it might have made that thumping sound. Yes, that was clear enough, but how a thing of such size could ever have fit into the closed trunk of the Buick in the first place was beyond both of them. What hit the concrete floor of Shed B with a flat wet slap was the size of a sofa.
George and Sandy clutched each other like children and screamed. For a moment they were children, with every adult thought driven out of their heads. Somewhere inside the barracks, Mister Dillon began to bark.
It lay there on the floor, no more a fish than a wolf is a housepet, although it may look quite a bit like a dog. And in any case, this fish was only a fish up to the purple slashes of its gills. Where a fish's head would have been--something that at least had the steadying sanity of eyes and a mouth--there was a knotted, naked mass of pink things, too thin and stiff to be tentacles, too thick to be hair. Each was tipped with a black node and Sandy's first coherent thought was A shrimp, the top half of it's some kind of shrimp and those black things are its eyes.
"What's wrong?" someone bawled. "What is it?"
Sandy turned and saw Herb Avery on the back step. His eyes were wild and he had his Ruger in his hand. Sandy opened his mouth and at first nothing came out but a phlegmy little wheeze. Beside him, George hadn't even turned; he was still looking through the window, mouth hanging slack in an idiot's gape.
Sandy took a deep breath and tried again. What was meant for a shout emerged as a faint punched-in-the-belly wheeze, but at least it was something. "Everything's okay, Herb--five-by-five. Go back inside."
"Then why did you--"
"Go inside!" There, that's a little better, Sandy thought. "Go on, now, Herb. And holster that piece."
Herb looked down at the gun as if unaware until then that he had drawn it. He put it back in his holster, looked at Sandy as if to ask was he sure. Sandy made little flapping gestures with his hands and thought, Granny Dearborn says go back inside, dad-rattit!
Herb went, yelling for Mister D to shut up that foolish barking as he did.
Sandy turned back to George, who had gone white. "It was breathing, Sandy--or trying to. The gills were moving and the side was going up and down. Now it's stopped." His eyes were huge, like the eyes of a child who has been in a car accident. "I think it's dead." His lips were quivering. "Man, I hope it's dead."
Sandy looked in. At first he was sure George was wrong: the thing was still alive. Still breathing, or trying to breathe. Then he realized what he was seeing and told George to get the videocam out of the hutch.
"What about the r--"
"We won't need the rope, because we're not going in there--not yet, we're not--but get the camera. Fast as you can."
George went around the side of the garage, not moving very well. Shock had made him gawky. Sandy looked back into the shed, cupping his eyes to the sides of his face to cut the red sunset glare. There was motion in the shed, all right, but not life's motion. It was mist rising from the thing's silver side and also from the purple slashes of its gills. The bat-thing hadn't decomposed, but the leaves had, and quickly. This thing was staring to rot like the leaves, and Sandy had the feeling that once the process really got going, it would go fast.
Even standing outside, with the closed door between him and it, he could smell it. An acrid, watery reek of mixed cabbage and cucumber and salt, the smell of a broth you might feed to someone if you wanted to make them sicker instead of well.
More mist was rising from its side; it dribbled up from the nest of tangled pink ropes that seemed to serve as its head, as well. Sandy thought he could hear a faint hissing noise, but knew he could just as well be imagining it. Then a black slit appeared in the grayish-silver scales, running north from the tattered nylon of its tail to the rearmost gill. Black fluid, probably the same stuff Huddie and Arky had found around the bat-thing's corpse, began to trickle out--listlessly at first, then with a little more spirit. Sandy could see an ominous bulge developing behind the split in the skin. It was no hallucination, and neither was the hissing sound. The fish was doing something more radical than decomposing; it was giving in. Yielding to the change in pressure or perhaps the change in everything, its whole environment. He thought of something he'd read once (or maybe seen in a National Geographic TV special), about how when some deep-sea creatures were brought up from their dwelling places, they simply exploded.
"George!" Bawling at the top of his lungs. "Hurry the hell up!"
George flew back around the corner of the shed, holding the tripod way up high, where the aluminum legs came together. The lens of the videocam glared above his fist, looking like a drunk's eyeball in the day's declining red light.
"I couldn't get it off the tripod," he panted. "There's some kind of latch or lock and if I'd had time to figure it out--or maybe I was trying to turn the Christly thing backward--"
"Never mind." Sandy snatched the videocam from him. There was no problem with the tripod, anyway; the legs had been adjusted to the height of the windows in the shed's two roll-up doors for years. The problem came when Sandy pushed the on button and looked through the viewfinder. Instead of a picture, there were just red letters reading lo bat.
"Judas-fucking-Iscariot on a chariot-driven crutch! Go back, George. Look on the shelf by the box of blank tapes, there's another battery there. Get it."
"But I want to see--"
"I don't care! Go on!"
He went, running hard. His hat had gone askew on his head, giving him a weirdly jaunty look. Sandy pushed the record button on the side of the camera's housing, not knowing what he'd get but hoping for something. When he looked into the viewfinde
r again, however, even the letters reading lo bat were fading.
Curt's going to kill me, he thought.
He looked back through the shed window just in time to catch the nightmare. The thing ruptured all the way up its side, spilling out that black ichor not in trickles but in a flood. It spread across the floor like backflow from a clogged drain. Following it came a noisome spew of guts, flabby bags of yellowish-red jelly. Most of them split and began to steam as soon as the air hit them.
Sandy turned, the back of his hand pressed hard against his mouth until he was sure he wasn't going to vomit, and then he yelled: "Herb! If you still want a look, now's your chance! Quick as you can!"
Why getting Herb Avery on-scene should have been the first thing he thought of, Sandy could not later say. At the time, however, it seemed perfectly reasonable. If he had called his dead mother's name, he would have been equally unsurprised. Sometimes one's mind simply passes beyond one's rational and logical control. Right then he wanted Herb. Dispatch is never to be left unattended, it's a rule anyone in rural law enforcement knows, the Fabled Automatic. But rules were made to be broken, and Herb would never see anything like this again in his life, none of them would, and if Sandy couldn't have videotape, he would at least have a witness. Two, if George got back in time.
Herb came out fast, as if he had been standing right inside the back door and watching through the screen all along, and sprinted across the nearly empty parking lot in the red light. His face was both scared arid avid. Just as he arrived, George steamed back around the corner, waving a fresh battery for the video camera. He looked like a game-show contestant who has just won the grand prize.
"Oh mother, what's that smell?" Herb asked, clapping his hand over his mouth and nose so that everything after mother came out muffled.
"The smell isn't the worst," Sandy said. "You better get a look while you still can."