Skeleton Crew

  "Has she really got a dozen people?" I asked.

  "Well, only eight," Cornell said. "But she never shuts up! It's like those ten-hour speeches Castro used to make. It's a goddam filibuster."

  Eight people. Not that many, not even enough to fill up a jury box. But I understood the worry on their faces. It was enough to make them the single largest political force in the market, especially now that Dan and Mike were gone. The thought that the biggest single group in our closed system was listening to her rant on about the pits of hell and the seven vials being opened made me feel pretty damn claustrophobic.

  "She's started talking about human sacrifice again," Amanda said. "Bud Brown came over and told her to stop talking that drivel in his store. And two of the men that are with her--one of them was that man Myron LaFleur--told him he was the one who better shut up because it was still a free country. He wouldn't shut up and there was a ... well, a shoving match, I guess you'd say."

  "Brown got a bloody nose," Cornell said. "They mean business. "

  I said, "Surely not to the point of actually killing someone."

  Cornell said softly, "I don't know how far they'll go if that mist doesn't let up. But I don't want to find out. I intend to get out of here."

  "Easier said than done." But something had begun to tick over in my mind. Scent. That was the key. We had been left pretty much alone in the market. The bugs might have been attracted to the light, as more ordinary bugs were. The birds had simply followed their food supply. But the bigger things had left us alone unless we unbuttoned for some reason. The slaughter in the Bridgton Pharmacy had occurred because the doors had been left chocked open--I was sure of that. The thing or things that had gotten Norton and his party had sounded as big as a house, but it or they hadn't come near the market. And that meant that maybe ...

  Suddenly I wanted to talk to Ollie Weeks. I needed to talk to him.

  "I intend to get out or die trying," Cornell said. "I got no plans to spend the rest of the summer in here."

  "There have been four suicides," Amanda said suddenly.

  "What?" The first thing to cross my mind, in a semiguilty flash, was that the bodies of the soldiers had been discovered.

  "Pills," Cornell said shortly. "Me and two or three other guys carried the bodies out back."

  I had to stifle a shrill laugh. We had a regular morgue going back there.

  "It's thinning out," Cornell said. "I want to get gone."

  "You won't make it to your car. Believe me."

  "Not even to that first rank? That's closer than the drugstore."

  I didn't answer him. Not then.

  About an hour later I found Ollie holding up the beer cooler and drinking a Busch. His face was impassive but he also seemed to be watching Mrs. Carmody. She was tireless, apparently. And she was indeed discussing human sacrifice again, only now no one was telling her to shut up. Some of the people who had told her to shut up yesterday were either with her today or at least willing to listen--and the others were outnumbered.

  "She could have them talked around to it by tomorrow morning," Ollie remarked. "Maybe not ... but if she did, who do you think she'd single out for the honor?"

  Bud Brown had crossed her. So had Amanda. There was the man who had struck her. And then, of course, there was me.

  "Ollie," I said, "I think maybe half a dozen of us could get out of here. I don't know how far we'd get, but I think we could at least get out."

  "How?"

  I laid it out for him. It was simple enough. If we dashed across to my Scout and piled in, they would get no human scent. At least not with the windows rolled up.

  "But suppose they're attracted to some other scent?" Ollie asked. "Exhaust, for instance?"

  "Then we'd be cooked," I agreed.

  "Motion," he said. "The motion of a car through fog might also draw them, David."

  "I don't think so. Not without the scent of prey. I really believe that's the key to getting away."

  "But you don't know."

  "No, not for sure."

  "Where would you want to go?"

  "First? Home. To get my wife."

  "David--"

  "All right. To check. To be sure."

  "The things out there could be everyplace, David. They could get you the minute you stepped out of your Scout into your dooryard."

  "If that happened, the Scout would be yours. All I'd ask would be that you take care of Billy as well as you could for as long as you could."

  Ollie finished his Busch and dropped the can back into the cooler, where it clattered among the empties. The butt of the gun Amanda's husband had given her protruded from his pocket.

  "South?" he asked, meeting my eyes.

  "Yeah, I would," I said. "Go south and try to get out of the mist. Try like hell."

  "How much gas you got?"

  "Almost full."

  "Have you thought that it might be impossible to get out?"

  I had. Suppose what they had been fooling with at the Arrowhead Project had pulled this entire region into another dimension as easily as you or I would turn a sock inside out? "It had crossed my mind," I said, "but the alternative seems to be waiting around to see who Mrs. Carmody taps for the place of honor."

  "Were you thinking about today?"

  "No, it's afternoon already and those things get active at night. I was thinking about tomorrow, very early."

  "Who would you want to take?"

  "Me and you and Billy. Hattie Turman. Amanda Dumfries. That old guy Cornell and Mrs. Reppler. Maybe Bud Brown, too. That's eight, but Billy can sit on someone's lap and we can all squash together."

  He thought it over. "All right," he said finally. "We'll try. Have you mentioned this to anyone else?"

  "No, not yet."

  "My advice would be not to, not until about four tomorrow morning. I'll put a couple of bags of groceries under the checkout nearest the door. If we're lucky we can squeak out before anyone knows what's happening." His eyes drifted to Mrs. Carmody again. "If she knew, she might try to stop us."

  "You think so?"

  Ollie got another beer. "I think so," he said.

  That afternoon--yesterday afternoon--passed in a kind of slow motion. Darkness crept in, turning the fog to that dull chrome color again. What world was left outside slowly dissolved to black by eight-thirty.

  The pink bugs returned, then the bird-things, swooping into the windows and scooping them up. Something roared occasionally from the dark, and once; shortly before midnight, there was a long, drawn-out Aaaaa-rooooooo! that caused people to turn toward the blackness with frightened, searching faces. It was the sort of sound you'd imagine a bull alligator might make in a swamp.

  It went pretty much as Miller had predicted. By the small hours, Mrs. Carmody had gained another half a dozen souls. Mr. McVey the butcher was among them, standing with his arms folded, watching her.

  She was totally wound up. She seemed to need no sleep. Her sermon, a steady stream of horrors out of Dore, Bosch, and Jonathan Edwards, went on and on, building toward some climax. Her group began to murmur with her, to rock back and forth unconsciously, like true believers at a tent revival. Their eyes were shiny and blank. They were under her spell.

  Around 3:00 A.M. (the sermon went on relentlessly, and the people who were not interested had retreated to the back to try to get some sleep) I saw Ollie put a bag of groceries on a shelf under the checkout nearest the OUT door. Half an hour later he put another bag beside it. No one appeared to notice him but me. Billy, Amanda, and Mrs. Turman slept together by the denuded cold-cuts section. I joined them and fell into an uneasy doze.

  At four-fifteen by my wristwatch, Ollie shook me awake. Cornell was with him, his eyes gleaming brightly from behind his spectacles.

  "It's time, David," Ollie said.

  A nervous cramp hit my belly and then passed. I shook Amanda awake. The question of what might happen with both Amanda and Stephanie in the car together passed into my mind, and then passed rig
ht out again. Today it would be best to take things just as they came.

  Those remarkable green eyes opened and looked into mine. "David?"

  "We're going to take a stab at getting out of here. Do you want to come?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  I started to explain, then woke up Mrs. Turman so I would only have to go through it the once.

  "Your theory about scent," Amanda said. "It's really only an educated guess at this point, isn't it?"

  "Yes."

  "It doesn't matter to me," Hattie said. Her face was white and in spite of the sleep she'd gotten there were large discolored patches under her eyes. "I would do anything--take any chances--just to see the sun again."

  Just to see the sun again. A little shiver coursed through me. She had put her finger on a spot that was very close to the center of my own fears, on the sense of almost foregone doom that had gripped me since I had seen Norm dragged out through the loading door. You could only see the sun through the mist as a little silver coin. It was like being on Venus.

  It wasn't so much the monstrous creatures that lurked in the mist; my shot with the pinchbar had shown me they were no Lovecraftian horrors with immortal life but only organic creatures with their own vulnerabilities. It was the mist itself that sapped the strength and robbed the will. Just to see the sun again. She was right. That alone would be worth going through a lot of hell.

  I smiled at Hattie and she smiled tentatively back.

  "Yes," Amanda said. "Me too."

  I began to shake Billy awake as gently as I could.

  "I'm with you," Mrs. Reppler said briefly.

  We were all together by the meat counter, all but Bud Brown. He had thanked us for the invitation and then declined it. He would not leave his place in the market, he said, but added in a remarkably gentle tone of voice that he didn't blame Ollie for doing so.

  An unpleasant, sweetish aroma was beginning to drift up from the white enamel case now, a smell that reminded me of the time our freezer went on the fritz while we were spending a week on the Cape. Perhaps, I thought, it was the smell of spoiling meat that had driven Mr. McVey over to Mrs. Carmody's team.

  "--expiation! It's expiation we want to think about now! We have been scourged with whips and scorpions! We have been punished for delving into secrets forbidden by God of old! We have seen the lips of the earth open! We have seen the obscenities of nightmare! The rock will not hide them, the dead tree gives no shelter! And how will it end? What will stop it?"

  "Expiation!" shouted good old Myron LaFleur.

  "Expiation ... expiation ..." They whispered it uncertainly.

  "Let me hear you say it like you mean it!" Mrs. Carmody shouted. The veins stood out on her neck in bulging cords. Her voice was cracking and hoarse now, but still full of power. And it occurred to me that it was the mist that had given her that power--the power to cloud men's minds, to make a particularly apt pun--just as it had taken away the sun's power from the rest of us. Before, she had been nothing but a mildly eccentric old woman with an antiques store in a town that was lousy with antiques stores. Nothing but an old woman with a few stuffed animals in the back room and a reputation for (that witch ... that cunt)

  folk medicine. It was said she could find water with an applewood stick, that she could charm warts, and sell you a cream that would fade freckles to shadows of their former selves. I had even heard--was it from old Bill Giosti?--that Mrs. Carmody could be seen (in total confidence) about your love life; that if you were having the bedroom miseries, she could give you a drink that would put the ram back in your rod.

  "EXPIATION!" they all cried together.

  "Expiation, that's right!" she shouted deliriously. "It's expiation gonna clear away this fog! Expiation gonna clear off these monsters and abominations! Expiation gonna drop the scales of mist from our eyes and let us see!" Her voice dropped a notch. "And what does the Bible say expiation is? What is the only cleanser for sin in the Eye and Mind of God?"

  "Blood."

  This time the chill shuddered up through my entire body, cresting at the nape of my neck and making the hairs there stiffen. Mr. McVey had spoken that word, Mr. McVey the butcher who had been cutting meat in Bridgton ever since I was a kid holding my father's talented hand. Mr. McVey taking orders and cutting meat in his stained whites. Mr. McVey, whose acquaintanceship with the knife was long--yes, and with the saw and cleaver as well. Mr. McVey who would understand better than anyone else that the cleanser of the soul flows from the wounds of the body.

  "Blood ..." they whispered.

  "Daddy, I'm scared," Billy said. He was clutching my hand tightly, his small face strained and pale.

  "Ollie.," I said, "why don't we get out of this loony bin?"

  "Right on," he said. "Let's go."

  We started down the second aisle in a loose group--Ollie, Amanda, Cornell, Mrs. Turman, Mrs. Reppler, Billy, and I. It was a quarter to five in the morning and the mist was beginning to lighten again.

  "You and Cornell take the grocery bags," Ollie said to me.

  "Okay."

  "I'll go first. Your Scout is a four-door, is it?"

  "Yeah. It is."

  "Okay, I'll open the driver's door and the back door on the same side. Mrs. Dumfries, can you carry Billy?"

  She picked him up in her arms.

  "Am I too heavy?" Billy asked.

  "No, hon."

  "Good. "

  "You and Billy get in front," Ollie went on. "Shove way over. Mrs. Turman in front, in the middle. David, you behind the wheel. The rest of us will--"

  "Where did you think you were going?"

  It was Mrs. Carmody.

  She stood at the head of the checkout line where Ollie had hidden the bags of groceries. Her pantsuit was a yellow scream in the gloom. Her hair frizzed out wildly in all directions, reminding me momentarily of Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein. Her eyes blazed. Ten or fifteen people stood behind her, blocking the IN and OUT doors. They had the look of people who had been in car accidents, or who had seen a UFO land, or who had seen a tree pull its roots up and walk.

  Billy cringed against Amanda and buried his face against her neck.

  "Going out now, Mrs. Carmody," Ollie said. His voice was curiously gentle. "Stand away, please."

  "You can't go out. That way is death. Don't you know that by now?"

  "No one has interfered with you," I said. "All we want is the same privilege."

  She bent and found the bags of groceries unerringly. She must have known what we were planning all along. She pulled them out from the shelf where Ollie had placed them. One ripped open, spilling cans across the floor. She threw the other and it smashed open with the sound of breaking glass. Soda ran fizzing every which way and sprayed off the chrome facing of the next checkout lane.

  "These are the sort of people who brought it on!" she shouted. "People who will not bend to the will of the Almighty! Sinners in pride, haughty they are, and stiff-necked! It is from their number that the sacrifice must come! From their number the blood of expiation!"

  A rising rumble of agreement spurred her on. She was in a frenzy now. Spittle flew from her lips as she screamed at the people crowding up behind her: "It's the boy we want! Grab him! Take him! It's the boy we want!"

  They surged forward, Myron LaFleur in the lead, his eyes blankly joyous. Mr. McVey was directly behind him, his face blank and stolid.

  Amanda faltered backward, holding Billy more tightly. His arms were wrapped around her neck. She looked at me, terrified. "David, what do I--"

  "Get them both!" Mrs. Carmody screamed. "Get his whore, too!"

  She was an apocalypse of yellow and dark joy. Her purse was still over her arm. She began to jump up and down. "Get the boy, get the whore, get them both, get them all, get--"

  A single sharp report rang out.

  Everything froze, as if we were a classroom full of unruly children and the teacher had just stepped back in and shut the door sharply. Myron LaFleur
and Mr. McVey stopped where they were, about ten paces away. Myron looked back uncertainly at the butcher. He didn't look back or even seem to realize that LaFleur was there. Mr. McVey had a look I had seen on too many other faces in the last two days. He had gone over. His mind had snapped.

  Myron backed up, staring at Ollie Weeks with widening, fearful eyes. His backing-up became a run. He turned the corner of the aisle, skidded on a can, fell down, scrambled up again, and was gone.

  Ollie stood in the classic target shooter's position, Amanda's gun clasped in both hands. Mrs. Carmody still stood at the head of the checkout lane. Both of her liver-spotted hands were clasped over her stomach. Blood poured out between her fingers and splashed her yellow slacks.

  Her mouth opened and closed. Once. Twice. She was trying to talk. At last she made it.

  "You will all die out there," she said, and then she pitched slowly forward. Her purse slithered off her arm, struck the floor, and spilled its contents. A paper-wrapped tube rolled across the distance between us and struck one of my shoes. Without thinking, I bent over and picked it up. It was a half-used package of Rolaids. I threw it down again. I didn't want to touch anything that belonged to her.

  The "congregation" was backing away, spreading out, their focus broken. None of them took their eyes from the fallen figure and the dark blood spreading out from beneath her body. "You murdered her!" someone cried out in fear and anger. But no one pointed out that she had been planning something similar for my son.

  Ollie was still frozen in his shooter's position, but now his mouth was trembling. I touched him gently. "Ollie, let's go. And thank you."

  "I killed her," he said hoarsely. "Damn if I didn't kill her."

  "Yes," I said. "That's why I thanked you. Now let's go."

  We began to move again.

  With no grocery bags to carry--thanks to Mrs. Carmody--I was able to take Billy. We paused for a moment at the door, and Ollie said in a low, strained voice, "I wouldn't have shot her, David. Not if there had been any other way."

  "Yeah."

  "You believe it?"

  "Yeah, I do."

  "Then let's go."

  We went out.

  XI. The End.

  Ollie moved fast, the pistol in his right hand. Before Billy and I were more than out the door he was at my Scout, an insubstantial Ollie, like a ghost in a television movie. He opened the driver's door. Then the back door. Then something came out of the mist and cut him nearly in half.