"Now, you leave him alone about that art fart business," Susan said, rising at the sound of the doorbell. She was wearing a light green summer dress, her new casual hairdo pulled back and tied loosely with a hank of oversized green yarn.
Bill laughed. "I got to call 'em as I see 'em, Susie darlin'. I won't embarrass you...never do, do I?"
She gave him a pensive, nervous smile and went to open the door.
The man who came back in with her was lanky and agile-looking, with finely drawn features and a thick, almost greasy shock of black hair that looked freshly washed despite its natural oiliness. He was dressed in a way that impressed Bill favorably: plain blue jeans, very new, and a white shirt rolled to the elbows.
"Ben, this is my dad and mom--Bill and Ann Norton. Mom, Dad, Ben Mears."
"Hello. Nice to meet you."
He smiled at Mrs Norton with a touch of reserve and she said, "Hello, Mr Mears. This is the first time we've seen a real live author up close. Susan has been awfully excited."
"Don't worry; I don't quote from my own works." He smiled again.
"H'lo," Bill said, and heaved himself up out of his chair. He had worked himself up to the union position he now held on the Portland docks, and his grip was hard and strong. But Mears's hand did not crimp and jellyfish like that of your ordinary, garden-variety art fart, and Bill was pleased. He imposed his second testing criterion.
"Like a beer? Got some on ice out yonder." He gestured toward the back patio, which he had built himself. Art farts invariably said no; most of them were potheads and couldn't waste their valuable consciousness juicing.
"Man, I'd love a beer," Ben said, and the smile became a grin. "Two or three, even."
Bill's laughter boomed out. "Okay, you're my man. Come on."
At the sound of his laughter, an odd communication seemed to pass between the two women, who bore a strong resemblance to each other. Ann Norton's brow contracted while Susan's smoothed out--a load of worry seemed to have been transferred across the room by telepathy.
Ben followed Bill out onto the veranda. An ice chest sat on a stool in the corner, stuffed with ring-tab cans of Pabst. Bill pulled a can out of the cooler and tossed it to Ben, who caught it one-hand but lightly, so it wouldn't fizz.
"Nice out here," Ben said, looking toward the barbecue in the backyard. It was a low, businesslike construction of bricks, and a shimmer of heat hung over it.
"Built it myself," Bill said. "Better be nice."
Ben drank deeply and then belched, another sign in his favor.
"Susie thinks you're quite the fella," Norton said.
"She's a nice girl."
"Good practical girl," Norton added, and belched reflectively. "She says you've written three books. Published 'em, too."
"Yes, that's so."
"They do well?"
"The first did," Ben said, and said no more. Bill Norton nodded slightly, in approval of a man who had enough marbles to keep his dollars-and-cents business to himself.
"You like to lend a hand with some burgers and hot dogs?"
"Sure."
"You got to cut the hot dogs to let the squidges out of 'em. You know about that?"
"Yeah." He made diagonal slashes in the air with his right index finger, grinning slightly as he did so. The small slashes in natural casing franks kept them from blistering.
"You came from this neck of the woods, all right," Bill Norton said. "Goddamn well told. Take that bag of briquettes over there and I'll get the meat. Bring your beer."
"You couldn't part me from it."
Bill hesitated on the verge of going in and cocked an eyebrow at Ben Mears. "You a serious-minded fella?" he asked.
Ben smiled, a trifle grimly. "That I am," he said.
Bill nodded. "That's good," he said, and went inside.
Babs Griffen's prediction of rain was a million miles wrong, and the backyard dinner went well. A light breeze sprang up, combining with the eddies of hickory smoke from the barbecue to keep the worst of the late-season mosquitoes away. The women cleared away the paper plates and condiments, then came back to drink a beer each and laugh as Bill, an old hand at playing the tricky wind currents, trimmed Ben 21-6 at badminton. Ben declined a rematch with real regret, pointing at his watch.
"I got a book on the fire," he said. "I owe another six pages. If I get drunk, I won't even be able to read what I wrote tomorrow morning."
Susan saw him to the front gate--he had walked up from town. Bill nodded to himself as he damped the fire. He had said he was serious-minded, and Bill was ready to take him at his word. He had not come with a big case on to impress anyone, but any man who worked after dinner was out to make his mark on somebody's tree, probably in big letters.
Ann Norton, however, never quite unthawed.
SEVENTEEN
7:00 PM
Floyd Tibbits pulled into the crushed-stone parking lot at Dell's about ten minutes after Delbert Markey, owner and bartender, had turned on his new pink sign out front. The sign said dell's in letters three feet high, and the apostrophe was a highball glass.
Outside, the sunlight had been leached from the sky by gathering purple twilight, and soon ground mist would begin to form in the lowlying pockets of land. The night's regulars would begin to show up in another hour or so.
"Hi, Floyd," Dell said, pulling a Michelob out of the cooler. "Good day?"
"Fair," Floyd said. "That beer looks good."
He was a tall man with a well-trimmed sandy beard, now dressed in double-knit slacks and a casual sports jacket--his Grant's working uniform. He was second in charge of credit, and liked his work in the absent kind of way that can cross the line into boredom almost overnight. He felt himself to be drifting, but the sensation was not actively unpleasant. And there was Suze--a fine girl. She was going to come around before much longer, and then he supposed he would have to make something of himself.
He dropped a dollar bill on the bar, poured beer down the side of his glass, downed it thirstily, and refilled. The bar's only other patron at present was a young fellow in phone-company coveralls--the Bryant kid, Floyd thought. He was drinking beer at a table and listening to a moody love song on the juke.
"So what's new in town?" Floyd asked, knowing the answer already. Nothing new, not really. Someone might have showed up drunk at the high school, but he couldn't think of anything else.
"Well, somebody killed your uncle's dog. That's new."
Floyd paused with his glass halfway to his mouth. "What? Uncle Win's dog, Doc?"
"That's right."
"Hit him with a car?"
"Not so you'd notice. Mike Ryerson found him. He was out to Harmony Hill to mow the grass and Doc was hangin' off those spikes atop the cemetery gate. Ripped wide open."
"Son of a bitch!" Floyd said, astounded.
Dell nodded gravely, pleased with the impression he had made. He knew something else that was a fairly hot item in town this evening--that Floyd's girl had been seen with that writer who was staying at Eva's. But let Floyd find that out for himself.
"Ryerson brung the co'pse in to Parkins Gillespie," he told Floyd. "He was of the mind that maybe the dog was dead and a bunch of kids hung it up for a joke."
"Gillespie doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground."
"Maybe not. I'll tell you what I think." Dell leaned forward on his thick forearms. "I think it's kids, all right...hell, I know that. But it might be a smidge more serious than just a joke. Here, looka this." He reached under the bar and slapped a newspaper down on it, turned to an inside page.
Floyd picked it up. The headline read satan worshippers desecrate fla. church. He skimmed through it. Apparently a bunch of kids had broken into a Catholic Church in Clewiston, Florida, some time after midnight and had held some sort of unholy rites there. The altar had been desecrated, obscene words had been scrawled on the pews, the confessionals, and the holy font, and splatters of blood had been found on steps leading to the nave. Laboratory analysis had con
firmed that although some of the blood was animal (goat's blood was suggested), most of it was human. The Clewiston police chief admitted there were no immediate leads.
Floyd put the paper down. "Devil worshippers in the Lot? Come on, Dell. You've been into the cook's pot."
"The kids are going crazy," Dell said stubbornly. "You see if that ain't it. Next thing you know, they'll be doing human sacrifices in Griffen's pasture. Want a refill on that?"
"No thanks," Floyd said, sliding off his stool. "I think I'll go out and see how Uncle Win's getting along. He loved that dog."
"Give him my best," Dell said, stowing his paper back under the bar--Exhibit A for later in the evening. "Awful sorry to hear about it."
Floyd paused halfway to the door and spoke, seemingly to the air. "Hung him up on the spikes, did they? By Christ, I'd like to get hold of the kids who did that."
"Devil worshippers," Dell said. "Wouldn't surprise me a bit. I don't know what's got into people these days."
Floyd left. The Bryant kid put another dime in the juke, and Dick Curless began to sing "Bury the Bottle with Me."
EIGHTEEN
7:30 PM
"You be home early," Marjorie Glick said to her eldest son, Danny. "School tomorrow. I want your brother in bed by quarter past nine."
Danny shuffled his feet. "I don't see why I have to take him at all."
"You don't," Marjorie said with dangerous pleasantness. "You can always stay home."
She turned back to the counter, where she was freshening fish, and Ralphie stuck out his tongue. Danny made a fist and shook it, but his putrid little brother only smiled.
"We'll be back," he muttered and turned to leave the kitchen, Ralphie in tow.
"By nine."
"Okay, okay."
In the living room Tony Glick was sitting in front of the TV with his feet up, watching the Red Sox and the Yankees. "Where are you going, boys?"
"Over to see that new kid," Danny said. "Mark Petrie."
"Yeah," Ralphie said. "We're gonna look at his...electric trains."
Danny cast a baleful eye on his brother, but their father noticed neither the pause nor the emphasis. Doug Griffen had just struck out. "Be home early," he said absently.
Outside, afterlight still lingered in the sky, although sunset had passed. As they crossed the backyard Danny said, "I ought to beat the stuff out of you, punko."
"I'll tell," Ralphie said smugly. "I'll tell why you really wanted to go."
"You creep," Danny said hopelessly.
At the back of the mowed yard, a beaten path led down the slope to the woods. The Glick house was on Brock Street, Mark Petrie's on South Jointner Avenue. The path was a shortcut that saved considerable time if you were twelve and nine years old and willing to pick your way across the Crockett Brook stepping-stones. Pine needles and twigs crackled under their feet. Somewhere in the woods, a whippoorwill sang, and crickets chirred all around them.
Danny had made the mistake of telling his brother that Mark Petrie had the entire set of Aurora plastic monsters--wolfman, mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein, the mad doctor, and even the Chamber of Horrors. Their mother thought all that stuff was bad news, rotted your brains or something, and Danny's brother had immediately turned blackmailer. He was putrid, all right.
"You're putrid, you know that?" Danny said.
"I know," Ralphie said proudly. "What's putrid?"
"It's when you get green and squishy, like boogers."
"Get bent," Ralphie said. They were going down the bank of Crockett Brook, which gurgled leisurely over its gravel bed, holding a faint pearliness on its surface. Two miles east it joined Taggart Stream, which in turn joined the Royal River.
Danny started across the stepping-stones, squinting in the gathering gloom to see his footing.
"I'm gonna pushya!" Ralphie cried gleefully behind him. "Look out, Danny, I'm gonna pushya!"
"You push me and I'll push you in the quicksand, ringmeat," Danny said.
They reached the other bank. "There ain't no quicksand around here," Ralphie scoffed, moving closer to his brother nevertheless.
"Yeah?" Danny said ominously. "A kid got killed in the quicksand just a few years ago. I heard those old dudes that hang around the store talkin' about it."
"Really?" Ralphie asked. His eyes were wide.
"Yeah," Danny said. "He went down screamin' and hollerin' and his mouth filled up with quicksand and that was it. Raaaacccccchhhh."
"C'mon," Ralphie said uneasily. It was close to full dark now, and the woods were full of moving shadows. "Let's get out of here."
They started up the other bank, slipping a little in the pine needles. The boy Danny had heard discussed in the store was a ten-year-old named Jerry Kingfield. He might have gone down in the quicksand screaming and hollering, but if he had, no one had heard him. He had simply disappeared in the Marshes six years ago while fishing. Some people thought quicksand, others held that a sex preevert had killed him. There were preeverts everywhere.
"They say his ghost still haunts these woods," Danny said solemnly, neglecting to tell his little brother that the Marshes were three miles south.
"Don't, Danny," Ralphie said uneasily. "Not...not in the dark."
The woods creaked secretively around them. The whippoorwill had ceased his cry. A branch snapped somewhere behind them, almost stealthily. The daylight was nearly gone from the sky.
"Every now and then," Danny went on eerily, "when some ringmeat little kid comes out after dark, it comes flapping out of the trees, the face all putrid and covered with quicksand--"
"Danny, come on."
His little brother's voice held real pleading, and Danny stopped. He had almost scared himself. The trees were dark, bulking presences all around them, moving slowly in the night breeze, rubbing together, creaking in their joints.
Another branch snapped off to their left.
Danny suddenly wished they had gone by the road.
Another branch snapped.
"Danny, I'm scared," Ralphie whispered.
"Don't be stupid," Danny said. "Come on."
They started to walk again. Their feet crackled in the pine needles. Danny told himself that he didn't hear any branches snapping. He didn't hear anything except them. Blood thudded in his temples. His hands were cold. Count steps, he told himself. We'll be at Jointner Avenue in two hundred steps. And when we come back we'll go by the road, so ringmeat won't be scared. In just a minute we'll see the streetlights and feel stupid but it will be good to feel stupid so count steps. One...two...three...
Ralphie shrieked.
"I see it! I see the ghost! I SEE IT!"
Terror like hot iron leaped into Danny's chest. Wires seemed to have run up his legs. He would have turned and run, but Ralphie was clutching him.
"Where?" he whispered, forgetting that he had invented the ghost. "Where?" He peered into the woods, half afraid of what he might see, and saw only blackness.
"It's gone now--but I saw him...it. Eyes. I saw eyes. Oh, Danneee--" He was blubbering.
"There ain't no ghosts, you fool. Come on."
Danny held his brother's hand and they began to walk. His legs felt as if they were made up of ten thousand pencil erasers. His knees were trembling. Ralphie was crowding against him, almost forcing him off the path.
"It's watchin' us," Ralphie whispered.
"Listen, I'm not gonna--"
"No, Danny. Really. Can't you feel it?"
Danny stopped. And in the way of children, he did feel something and knew they were no longer alone. A great hush had fallen over the woods; but it was a malefic hush. Shadows, urged by the wind, twisted languorously around them.
And Danny smelled something savage, but not with his nose.
There were no ghosts, but there were preeverts. They stopped in black cars and offered you candy or hung around on street corners or...or they followed you into the woods...
And then...
Oh and then they...
"Ru
n," he said harshly.
But Ralphie trembled beside him in a paralysis of fear. His grip on Danny's hand was as tight as baling wire. His eyes stared into the woods, and then began to widen.
"Danny?"
A branch snapped.
Danny turned and looked where his brother was looking.
The darkness enfolded them.
NINETEEN
9:00 PM
Mabel Werts was a hugely fat woman, seventy-four on her last birthday, and her legs had become less and less reliable. She was a repository of town history and town gossip, and her memory stretched back over five decades of necrology, adultery, thievery, and insanity. She was a gossip but not a deliberately cruel one (although those whose stories she had sped on their back fence way might tend to disagree); she simply lived in and for the town. In a way she was the town, a fat widow who now went out very little, and who spent most of her time by her window dressed in a tentlike silk camisole, her yellowish-ivory hair done up in a coronet of thick, braided cables, with the telephone on her right hand and her high-powered Japanese binoculars on the left. The combination of the two--plus the time to use them fully--made her a benevolent spider sitting in the center of a communications web that stretched from the Bend to east 'salem.
She had been watching the Marsten House for want of something better to watch when the shutters to the left of the porch were opened, letting out a golden square of light that was definitely not the steady glow of electricity. She had gotten just a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been a man's head and shoulders silhouetted against the light. It gave her a queer thrill.
There had been no more movement from the house.
She thought: Now, what kind of people is it that only opens up when a body can't catch a decent glimpse of them?
She put the glasses down and carefully picked up the telephone. Two voices--she quickly identified them as Harriet Durham and Glynis Mayberry--were talking about the Ryerson boy finding Irwin Purinton's dog.
She sat quietly, breathing through her mouth, so as to give no sign of her presence on the line.