He became aware of a whickering noise from the west, one that quickly rose to a thunder. Helicopters, and not just one, this time. A lot. Big ones. They sounded as if they were coming in at rooftop level, and Henry ducked without even being aware of it. Images from a dozen Vietnam War movies filled his head and he was momentarily sure that they would open up with their machine-guns, spraying the house. Or maybe they'd hose it down with napalm.
They passed over without doing either, but came close enough to rattle the cups and dishes on the kitchen shelves. Henry straightened up as the thunder began to fade, becoming first a chatter and then a harmless drone. Perhaps they had gone off to join the animal slaughter at the east end of Jefferson Tract. Let them. He was going to get the fuck out of here and--
And what? Exactly what?
While he was thinking this question over, there was a sound from one of the two downstairs bedrooms. A rustling sound. This was followed by a moment of silence, just long enough for Henry to decide it was his imagination pulling a little more overtime. Then there came a series of low clicks and chitters, almost the sound of a mechanical toy--a tin monkey or parrot, maybe--on the verge of running down. Gooseflesh broke out all over Henry's body. The spit dried up in his mouth. The hairs on the back of his neck began to straighten in bunches.
Get out of here, run!
Before he could listen to that voice and let it get a hold on him, he crossed to the bedroom door in big steps, unshouldering the Garand as he went. The adrenaline dumped into his blood, and the world stood forth brightly. Selective perception, that unacknowledged gift to the safe and cozy, fell away and he saw every detail: the trail of blood which ran from bedroom to bathroom, a discarded slipper, that weird red mold growing on the wall in the shape of a handprint. Then he went through the door.
It was on the bed, whatever it was; to Henry it looked like a weasel or a woodchuck with its legs amputated and a long, bloody tail strung out behind it like an afterbirth. Only no animal he'd ever seen--with the possible exception of the moray eel at the Boston Seaquarium--had such disproportionately large black eyes. And another similarity: when it yawned open the rudimentary line that was its mouth, it revealed a nest of shocking fangs, as long and thin as hatpins.
Behind it, pulsing on the blood-soaked sheet, were a hundred or more orange-and-brown eggs. They were the size of large marbles and coated with a murky, snotlike slime. Within each Henry could see a moving, hairlike shadow.
The weasel-thing rose up like a snake emerging from a snake-charmer's basket and chittered at him. It lurched on the bed--Jonesy's bed--but seemed unable to move much. Its glossy black eyes glared. Its tail (except Henry thought it might actually be some sort of gripping tentacle) lashed back and forth, then laid itself over as many of the eggs as it could reach, as if protecting them.
Henry realized he was saying the same word, no, over and over in a monotonous drone, like a helpless neurotic who has been loaded up on Thorazine. He shouldered the rifle, aimed, and tracked the thing's repulsive wedge of a head as it twitched and dodged. It knows what this is, it knows at least that much, Henry thought coldly, and then he squeezed the trigger.
It was close range and the creature wasn't up to much in the way of evasion; either laying its eggs had exhausted it or it wasn't doing well in the cold--with the main door open, Hole in the Wall had gotten quite cold indeed. The report was very loud in the closed room, and the thing's upraised head disintegrated in a liquid splatter that blew back against the wall in strings and clots. Its blood was the same red-gold as the fungus. The decapitated body tumbled off the bed and onto a litter of clothes Henry didn't recognize: a brown coat, an orange flagman's vest, a pair of jeans with cuffs (none of them had ever worn cuffed jeans; in junior high school, those who did had been branded shitkickers). Several of the eggs tumbled off with the body. Most landed on either the clothes or the litter of Jonesy's books and remained whole, but a couple hit the floor and broke open. Cloudy stuff like spoiled eggwhite oozed out, about a tablespoonful from each egg. Within it were those hairs, writhing and twisting and seeming to glare at Henry with black eyes the size of pinheads. Looking at them made him feel like screaming.
He turned and walked jerkily out of the room on legs with no more feeling in them than the legs of a table. He felt like a puppet being manipulated by someone who means well but has just begun to learn his craft. He had no real idea where he was going until he reached the kitchen and bent over the cabinet under the sink.
"I am the eggman, I am the eggman, I am the walrus! Goo-goo-joob!"
He didn't sing this but declaimed it in a loud, hortatory voice he hadn't realized was in his repertoire. It was the voice of a ham actor from the nineteenth century. That idea called up an image--God knew why--of Edwin Booth dressed as d'Artagnan, plumed hat and all, quoting from the lyrics of John Lennon, and Henry uttered two loud laugh-syllables--Ha! Ha!
I'm going insane, he thought . . . but it was okay. Better d'Artagnan reciting "I Am the Walrus" than the image of that thing's blood splattering onto the wall, or the mold-covered Doc Marten sticking out of the bathtub, or, worst of all, those eggs splitting open and releasing a load of twitching hairs with eyes. All those eyes looking at him.
He moved aside the dish detergent and the floor-bucket, and there it was, the yellow can of Sparx barbecue lighter fluid. The inept puppeteer who had taken him over advanced Henry's arm in a series of jerks, then clamped his right hand on the Sparx can. He carried it back across the living room, pausing long enough to take the box of wooden matches from the mantel.
"I am he and you are me and we are all together!" he declaimed, and stepped briskly back into Jonesy's bedroom before the terrified person inside his head could seize the controls, turn him, and make him run away. That person wanted to make him run until he fell down unconscious. Or dead.
The eggs on the bed were also splitting open. Two dozen or more of those hairs were crawling around on the blood-soaked sheet or squirming on Jonesy's pillow. One raised its nub of a head and chittered at Henry, a sound almost too thin and high-pitched to be heard.
Still not allowing himself any pause, if he paused he would never get started again (in any direction save doorward, that was), Henry took two steps to the foot of the bed. One of the hairs came sliding across the floor toward him, propelling itself with its tail like a spermatozoon under a microscope.
Henry stepped on it, thumbing the red plastic cap off the spout of the can as he did. He aimed the spout at the bed and squeezed, flicking his wrist back and forth, making sure he got plenty on the floor as well. When the lighter fluid hit the hairlike things, they made high, mewling cries like kittens which had just been born.
"Eggman . . . eggman . . . walrus!"
He stepped on another of the hairs and saw that a third was clinging to the leg of his jeans, holding on with its wisp of a tail and trying to bite through the cloth with its still soft teeth.
"Eggman," Henry muttered, and scraped it off with the side of his other boot. When it tried to squirm away he stepped on it. He was suddenly aware that he was drenched with sweat, sopping from head to toe, if he went out into the cold like this (and he would have to; he couldn't stay here), he'd probably catch his death.
"Can't stay here, can't take no rest!" Henry cried in his new hortatory voice.
He opened the matchbox, but his hands were shaking so badly he spilled half of them on the floor. More of the threadlike worms were crawling toward him. They might not know much, but they knew he was the enemy, all right; they knew that.
Henry got hold of a match, held it up, put his thumb against the tip. A trick Pete had taught him in the way back when. It was your friends who always taught you the finer things, wasn't it? Like how to give your old pal Beaver a Viking funeral and get rid of these noisome little snakelets at the same time.
"Eggman!"
He scratched the tip of the match and it popped fire. The smell of the burning sulfur was like the smell that had greeted him when
he stepped into the cabin, like the smell of the burly woman's farts.
"Walrus!"
He flung the match at the foot of the bed, where there was a crumpled duvet now soaked with lighter fluid. For a moment the flame guttered down blue around the little stick, and Henry thought it would go out. Then there was a soft flump sound, and the duvet grew a modest crown of yellow flames.
"Goo-goo-joob!"
The flames crawled up the sheet, turning the blood soaked into it black. It reached the mass of jelly-coated eggs, tasted them, and found them good. There was a series of thick popping sounds as the eggs began to burst. More of those mewling cries as the worms burned. Sizzling noises as fluid ran out of the burst eggs.
Henry backed out of the room, squirting lighter fluid as he went. He got halfway across the Navajo rug before the can ran empty. He tossed it aside, scratched another match, and tossed it. This time the flump! was immediate, and the flames sprang up orange. The heat baked against his sweat-shiny face, and he felt a sudden urge--it was both strong and joyful--to cast the painters' masks aside and simply stride into the fire. Hello heat, hello summer, hello darkness my old friend.
What stopped him was as simple as it was powerful. If he pulled the pin now, he would have suffered the unpleasant awakening of all his quiescent emotions to no purpose. He would never be clear on the details of what had happened here, but he might get at least some answers from whoever was flying the helicopters and shooting the animals. If they didn't just shoot him, too, that was.
At the door, Henry was struck by a memory so clear that his heart cried out inside him: Beaver kneeling in front of Duddits, who is trying to put on his sneaker backward. Let me fix that, man, Beaver says, and Duddits, looking at him with a wide-eyed perplexity that you could only love, replies: Fit neek?
Henry was crying again. "So long, Beav," he said. "Love you, man--and that's straight from the heart."
Then he stepped out into the cold.
6
He walked to the far end of Hole in the Wall, where the woodpile was. Beside it was another tarp, this one ancient, black fading to gray. It was frost-frozen to the ground, and Henry had to yank hard with both hands in order to pull it free. Under it was a tangle of snowshoes, skates, and skis. There was an antediluvian ice-auger, as well.
As he looked at this unprepossessing pile of long-dormant winter gear, Henry suddenly realized how tired he was . . . except tired was really too mild a word. He had just come ten miles on foot, much of it at a fast trot. He had also been in a car accident and discovered the body of a childhood friend. He believed both his other two childhood friends were likewise lost to him.
If I hadn't been suicidal to begin with, I'd be stark-raving crazy by now, he thought, and then laughed. It felt good to laugh, but it didn't make him feel any less tired. Still, he had to get out of here. Had to find someone in authority and tell them what had happened. They might already know--based on the sounds, they sure as shit knew something, although their methods of dealing with it made Henry feel uneasy--but they might not know about the weasels. And the eggs. He, Henry Devlin, would tell them--who better? He was the eggman, after all.
The rawhide lacings of the snowshoes had been chewed by so many mice that the shoes were little more than empty frames. After some sorting, however, he found a stubby pair of cross-country skis that looked as if they might have been state-of-the-art around 1954 or so. The clamps were rusty, but when he pushed them with both thumbs, he was able to move them enough to take a reluctant grip on his boots.
There was a steady crackling sound coming from inside the cabin now. Henry laid one hand on the wood and felt the heat. There was a clutch of assorted skipoles leaning under the eave, their handgrips buried in a dirty cobweb caul. Henry didn't like to touch that stuff--the memory of the eggs and the weasel-thing's wriggling spawn was still too fresh--but at least he had his gloves on. He brushed the cobwebs aside and sorted through the poles, moving quickly. He could now see sparks dancing inside the window beside his head.
He found a pair of poles that were only a little short for his lanky height and skied clumsily to the corner of the building. He felt like a Nazi snow-trooper in an Alistair MacLean film, with the old skis on his feet and Jonesy's rifle slung over his shoulder. As he turned around, the window beside which he had been standing blew out with a surprisingly loud report--as if someone had dropped a large glass bowl from a second-story window. Henry hunched his shoulders and felt pieces of glass spatter against his coat. A few landed in his hair. It occurred to him that if he had spent another twenty or thirty seconds sorting through the skis and poles, that exploding glass would have erased most of his face.
He looked up at the sky, spread his hands palms-out beside his cheeks like Al Jolson, and said, "Somebody up there likes me! Hotcha!"
Flames were shooting through the window now, licking up under the eaves, and he could hear more stuff breaking inside as the heat-gradient zoomed. Lamar Clarendon's father's camp, originally built just after World War Two, now burning merry hell. It was a dream, surely.
Henry skied around the house, giving it a wide berth, watching as gouts of sparks rose from the chimney and swirled toward the low-bellied clouds. There was still a steady crackle of gunfire off to the east. Someone was bagging their limit, all right. Their limit and more. Then there was that explosion in the west--what in God's name had that been? No way of telling. If he got back to other people in one piece, perhaps they would tell him.
"If they don't just decide to bag me, too," he said. His voice came out in a dry croak, and he realized he was all but dying of thirst. He bent down carefully (he hadn't been on skis of any type in ten years or more), scooped up a double handful of snow, and took a big mouthful. He let it melt and trickle down his throat. The feeling was heavenly. Henry Devlin, psychiatrist and onetime author of a paper about the Hemingway Solution, a man who had once been a virgin boy and who was now a tall and geeky fellow whose glasses always slid down to the tip of his nose, whose hair was going gray, whose friends were either dead, fled, or changed, this man stood in the open gate of a place to which he would never come again, stood on skis, stood eating snow like a kid eating a Sno-Cone at the Shrine Circus, stood and watched the last really good place in his life burn. The flames came through the cedar shingles. Melting snow turned to steaming water and ran hissing down the rusting gutters. Arms of fire popped in and out of the open door like enthusiastic hosts encouraging the newly arrived guests to hurry up, hurry up, dammit, get your asses in here before the whole place burns down. The mat of red-gold fuzz growing on the granite slab had crisped, lost its color, turned gray. "Good," Henry muttered under his breath. He was clenching his fists rhythmically on the grips of his skipoles without being aware of it. "Good, that's good."
He stood that way for another fifteen minutes, and when he could bear it no more, he set his back to the flames and started back the way he had come.
7
There was no hustle left in him. He had twenty miles to go (22.2 to be exact, he told himself), and if he didn't pace himself he'd never make it. He stayed in the packed track of the snowmobile, and stopped to rest more frequently than he had going the other way.
Ah, but I was younger then, he thought with only slight irony.
Twice he checked his watch, forgetting that it was now Eastern Standard No Time At All in the Jefferson Tract. With the mat of clouds firmly in place overhead, all he knew for sure was that it was daytime. Afternoon, of course, but whether mid or late he couldn't tell. On another afternoon his appetite might have served as a gauge, but not today. Not after the thing on Jonesy's bed, and the eggs, and the hairs with their protuberant black eyes. Not after the foot sticking out of the bathtub. He felt that he would never eat again . . . and if he did, he would never eat anything with even a slight tinge of red. And mushrooms? No thanks.
Skiing, at least on cross-country stubs like these, was sort of like riding a bike, he discovered: you never forgot how to do it. He f
ell once going up the first hill, the skis slipping out from under him, but glided giddily down the other side with only a couple of wobbles and no spills. He guessed that the skis hadn't been waxed since the peanut-farmer was President, but if he stayed in the crimped and flattened track of the snowmobile, he should be all right. He marvelled at the stippling of animal tracks on the Deep Cut Road--he had never seen a tenth as many. A few critters had gone walking along it, but most of the tracks only crossed it, west to east. The Deep Cut took a lazy northwest course, and west was clearly a point of the compass the local animal population wanted to avoid.
I'm on a journey, he told himself. Maybe someday someone will write an epic poem about it: "Henry's Journey."
"Yeah," he said. " 'Time slowed and reality bent; on and on the eggman went.' " He laughed at that, and in his dry throat the laughter turned to hacking coughs. He skied to the side of the snowmobile track, got another double handful of snow, and ate it down.
"Tasty . . . and good for you!" he proclaimed. "Snow! Not just for breakfast anymore!"
He looked up at the sky, and that was a mistake. For a moment he was overwhelmed with dizziness and thought he might go right over on his back. Then the vertigo retreated. The clouds overhead looked a little darker. Snow coming? Night coming? Both coming at the same time? His knees and ankles hurt from the steady shuffle-shuffle of the skis, and his arms hurt even worse from wielding the poles. The pads of muscle on his chest were the worst. He had already accepted as certainty that he wouldn't make it to Gosselin's before dark; now, standing here and eating more snow, it occurred to him that he might not make it at all.
He loosened the Red Sox tee-shirt he'd tied around his leg, and terror leaped in him when he saw a brilliant thread of scarlet against his blue jeans. His heart beat so hard that white dots appeared in his field of vision, flocking and pumping. He reached down to the red with shaking fingers.