Skeleton Crew

  Myron took a couple of steps toward me. "Look," he said. "You got to understand--"

  I looped a fist at his face. He was too surprised to even try to block it. It landed just below his nose and mashed his upper lip into his teeth. Blood flowed into his mouth.

  "You got him killed!" I shouted. "Did you get a good look at it? Did you get a good look at what you did?"

  I started to pummel him, throwing wild rights and lefts, not punching the way I had been taught in my college boxing classes but only hitting out. He stepped back, shaking some of them off, taking others with a numbness that seemed like a kind of resignation or penance. That made me angrier. I bloodied his nose. I raised a mouse under one of his eyes that was going to black just beautifully. I clipped him a hard one on the chin. After that one, his eyes went cloudy and semi-vacant.

  "Look," he kept saying, "look, look," and then I punched him low in the stomach and the air went out of him and he didn't say "look, look" anymore. I don't know how long I would have gone on punching him, but someone grabbed my arms. I jerked free and turned around. I was hoping it was Jim. I wanted to punch Jim out, too.

  But it wasn't Jim. It was Ollie, his round face dead pale, except for the dark circles around his eyes--eyes that were still shiny from his tears. "Don't, David," he said. "Don't hit him anymore. It doesn't solve anything."

  Jim was standing off to one side, his face a bewildered blank. I kicked a carton of something at him. It struck one of his Dingo boots and bounced away.

  "You and your buddy are a couple of stupid assholes," I said.

  "Come on, David," Ollie said unhappily. "Quit it."

  "You two assholes got that kid killed."

  Jim looked down at his Dingo boots. Myron sat on the floor and held his beer belly. I was breathing hard. The blood was roaring in my ears and I was trembling all over. I sat down on a couple of cartons and put my head down between my knees and gripped my legs hard just above the ankles. I sat that way for a while with my hair in my face, waiting to see if I was going to black out or puke or what.

  After a bit the feeling began to pass and I looked up at Ollie. His pinky ring flashed subdued fire in the glow of the emergency lights.

  "Okay," I said dully. "I'm done."

  "Good," Ollie said. "We've got to think what to do next."

  The storage area was beginning to stink of exhaust again. "Shut the generator down. That's the first thing."

  "Yeah, let's get out of here," Myron said. His eyes appealed to me. "I'm sorry about the kid. But you got to understand--"

  "I don't got to understand anything. You and your buddy go back into the market, but you wait right there by the beer cooler. And don't say a word to anybody. Not yet."

  They went willingly enough; huddling together as they passed through the swinging doors. Ollie killed the generator, and just as the lights started to fail, I saw a quilted rug--the sort of thing movers use to pad breakable things--flopped over a stack of returnable soda bottles. I reached up and grabbed it for Billy.

  There was the shuffling, blundering sound of Ollie coming out of the generator compartment. Like a great many overweight men, his breathing had a slightly heavy wheezing sound.

  "David?" His voice wavered a little. "You still here?"

  "Right here, Ollie. You want to watch out for all those bleach cartons."

  "Yeah. "

  I guided him with my voice and in thirty seconds or so he reached out of the dark and gripped my shoulder. He gave a long, trembling sigh.

  "Christ, let's get out of here." I could smell the Rolaids he always chewed on his breath. "This dark is ... is bad."

  "It is," I said. "But hang tight a minute, Ollie. I wanted to talk to you and I didn't want those other two fuckheads listening."

  "Dave . . . they didn't twist Norm's arm. You ought to remember that. "

  "Norm was a kid, and they weren't. But never mind, that's over. We've got to tell them, Ollie. The people in the market."

  "If they panic--" Ollie's voice was doubtful.

  "Maybe they will and maybe they won't. But it will make them think twice about going out, which is what most of them want to do. Why shouldn't they? Most of them will have people they left at home. I do myself. We have to make them understand what they're risking if they go out there. "

  His hand was gripping my arm hard. "All right," he said. "Yes, I just keep asking myself . . . all those tentacles ... like a squid or something . . . David, what were they hooked to? What were those tentacles hooked to?"

  "I don't know. But I don't want those two telling people on their own. That would start a panic. Let's go."

  I looked around, and after a moment or two located the thin line of vertical light between the swing doors. We started to shuffle toward it, wary of scattered cartons, one of Ollie's pudgy hands clamped over my forearm. It occurred to me that all of us had lost our flashlights.

  As we reached the doors, Ollie said flatly: "What we saw ... it's impossible, David. You know that, don't you? Even if a van from the Boston Seaquarium drove out back and dumped out one of those gigantic squids like in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, it would die. It would just die."

  "Yes," I said. "That's right."

  "So what happened? Huh? What happened? What is that damned mist?"

  "Ollie, I don't know."

  We went out.

  V. An Argument with Norton. A Discussion Near the Beer Cooler. Verification.

  Jim and his good buddy Myron were just outside the doors, each with a Budweiser in his fist. I looked at Billy, saw he was still asleep, and covered him with the ruglike mover's pad. He moved a little, muttered something, and then lay still again. I looked at my watch. It was 12:15 P.M. That seemed utterly impossible; it felt as if at least five hours had passed since I had first gone in there to look for something to cover him with. But the whole thing, from first to last, had taken only about thirty-five minutes.

  I went back to where Ollie stood with Jim and Myron. Ollie had taken a beer and he offered me one. I took it and gulped down half the can at once, as I had that morning cutting wood. It bucked me up a little.

  Jim was Jim Grondin. Myron's last name was LaFleur--that had its comic side, all right. Myron the flower had drying blood on his lips, chin, and cheek. The eye with the mouse under it was already swelling up. The girl in the cranberry-colored sweatshirt walked by aimlessly and gave Myron a cautious look. I could have told her that Myron was only dangerous to teenage boys intent on proving their manhood, but saved my breath. After all, Ollie was right--they had only been doing what they thought was best, although in a blind, fearful way rather than in any real common interest. And now I needed them to do what I thought was best. I didn't think that would be a problem. They had both had the stuffing knocked out of them. Neither--especially Myron the flower--was going to be good for anything for some time to come. Something that had been in their eyes when they were fixing to send Norm out to unplug the exhaust vent had gone now. Their peckers were no longer up.

  "We're going to have to tell these people something," I said.

  Jim opened his mouth to protest.

  "Ollie and I will leave out any part you and Myron had in sending Norm out there if you'll back up what he and I say about ... well, about what got him."

  "Sure," Jim said, pitifully eager. "Sure, if we don't tell, people might go out there ... like that woman ... that woman who . . ." He wiped his hand across his mouth and then drank more beer quickly. "Christ, what a mess."

  "David," Ollie said. "What--" He stopped, then made himself go on. "What if they get in? The tentacles?"

  "How could they?" Jim asked. "You guys shut the door."

  "Sure," Ollie said. "But the whole front wall of this place is plate glass."

  An elevator shot my stomach down about twenty floors. I had known that, but had somehow been successfully ignoring it. I looked over at where Billy lay asleep. I thought of those tentacles swarming over Norm. I thought about that happening to Billy.
r />   "Plate glass," Myron LaFleur whispered. "Jesus Christ in a chariot-driven sidecar."

  I left the three of them standing by the cooler, each working a second can of beer, and went looking for Brent Norton. I found him in sober-sided conversation with Bud Brown at Register 2. The pair of them--Norton with his styled gray hair and his elderly-stud good looks, Brown with his dour New England phiz--looked like something out of a New Yorker cartoon.

  As many as two dozen people milled restlessly in the space between the end of the checkout lanes and the long show window. A lot of them were lined up at the glass, looking out into the mist. I was again reminded of the people that congregate at a building site.

  Mrs. Carmody was seated on the stationary conveyor belt of one of the checkout lanes, smoking a Parliament in a One Step at a Time filter. Her eyes measured me, found me wanting, and passed on. She looked as if she might be dreaming awake.

  "Brent," I said.

  "David! Where did you get off to?"

  "That's what I'd like to talk to you about."

  "There are people back at the cooler drinking beer," Brown said grimly. He sounded like a man announcing that X-rated movies had been shown at the deacons' party. "I can see them in the security mirror. This has simply got to stop."

  "Brent?"

  "Excuse me for a minute, would you, Mr. Brown?"

  "Certainly." He folded his arms across his chest and stared grimly up into the convex mirror. "It is going to stop, I can promise you that. "

  Norton and I headed toward the beer cooler in the far corner of the store, walking past the housewares and notions. I glanced back over my shoulder, noticing uneasily how the wooden beams framing the tall, rectangular sections of glass had buckled and twisted and splintered. And one of the windows wasn't even whole, I remembered. A pie-shaped chunk of glass had fallen out of the upper corner at the instant of that queer thump. Perhaps we could stuff it with cloth or something--maybe a bunch of those $3.59 ladies' tops I had noticed near the wine--

  My thoughts broke off abruptly, and I had to put the back of my hand over my mouth, as if stifling a burp. What I was really stifling was the rancid flood of horrified giggles that wanted to escape me at the thought of stuffing a bunch of shirts into a hole to keep out those tentacles that had carried Norm away. I had seen one of those tentacles--a small one--squeeze a bag of dog food until it simply ruptured.

  "David? Are you okay?"

  "Huh?"

  "Your face--you looked like you just had a good idea or a bloody awful one."

  Something hit me then. "Brent, what happened to that man who came in raving about something in the mist getting John Lee Frovin?"

  "The guy with the nosebleed?"

  "Yes, him."

  "He passed out and Mr. Brown brought him around with some smelling salts from the first-aid kit. Why?"

  "Did he say anything else when he woke up?"

  "He started in on that hallucination. Mr. Brown conducted him up to the office. He was frightening some of the women. He seemed happy enough to go. Something about the glass. When Mr. Brown said there was only one small window in the manager's office, and that that one was reinforced with wire, he seemed happy enough to go. I presume he's still there. "

  "What he was talking about is no hallucination."

  "No, of course it isn't."

  "And that thud we felt?"

  "No, but, David--"

  He's scared, I kept reminding myself. Don't blow up at him, you've treated yourself to one blowup this morning and that's enough. Don't blow up at him just because this is the way he was during that stupid property-line dispute . . . first patronizing, then sarcastic, and finally, when it became clear he was going to lose, ugly. Don't blow up at him because you're going to need him. He may not be able to start his own chainsaw, but he looks like the father figure of the Western world, and if he tells people not to panic, they won't. So don't blow up at him.

  "You see those double doors up there beyond the beer cooler?"

  He looked, frowning. "Isn't one of those men drinking beer the other assistant manager? Weeks? If Brown sees that, I can promise you that man will be looking for a job very soon."

  "Brent, will you listen to me?"

  He glanced back at me absently. "What were you saying, Dave? I'm sorry."

  Not as sorry as he was going to be. "Do you see those doors?"

  "Yes, of course I do. What about them?"

  "They give on the storage area that runs all the way along the west face of the building. Billy fell asleep and I went back there to see if I could find something to cover him up with ... "

  I told him everything, only leaving out the argument about whether or not Norm should have gone out at all. I told him what had come in ... and finally, what had gone out, screaming. Brent Norton refused to believe it. No--he refused to even entertain it. I took him over to Jim, Ollie, and Myron. All three of them verified the story, although Jim and Myron the flower were well on their way to getting drunk.

  Again, Norton refused to believe or even to entertain it. He simply balked. "No," he said. "No, no, no. Forgive me, gentlemen, but it's completely ridiculous. Either you're having me on"--he patronized us with his gleaming smile to show that he could take a joke as well as the next fellow--"or you're suffering from some form of group hypnosis."

  My temper rose again, and I controlled it--with difficulty. I don't think that I'm ordinarily a quick-tempered man, but these weren't ordinary circumstances. I had Billy to think about, and what was happening--or what had already happened--to Stephanie. Those things were constantly gnawing at the back of my mind.

  "All right," I said. "Let's go back there. There's a chunk of tentacle on the floor. The door cut it off when it came down. And you can hear them. They're rustling all over that door. It sounds like the wind in ivy."

  "No," he said calmly.

  "What?" I really did believe I had misheard him. "What did you say?"

  "I said no, I'm not going back there. The joke has gone far enough."

  "Brent, I swear to you it's no joke."

  "Of course it is," he snapped. His eyes ran over Jim, Myron, rested briefly on Ollie Weeks--who held his glance with calm impassivity--and at last came back to me. "It's what you locals probably call 'a real belly-buster.' Right, David?"

  "Brent . . . look--"

  "No, you look!" His voice began to rise toward a courtroom shout. It carried very, very well, and several of the people who were wandering around, edgy and aimless, looked over to see what was going on. Norton jabbed his finger at me as he spoke. "It's a joke. It's a banana skin and I'm the guy that's supposed to slip on it. None of you people are exactly crazy about out-of-towners, am I right? You all pretty much stick together. The way it happened when I hauled you into court to get what was rightfully mine. You won that one, all right. Why not? Your father was the famous artist, and it's your town. I only pay my taxes and spend my money here!"

  He was no longer performing, hectoring us with the trained courtroom shout; he was nearly screaming and on the verge of losing all control. Ollie Weeks turned and walked away, clutching his beer. Myron and his friend Jim were staring at Norton with frank amazement.

  "Am I supposed to go back there and look at some ninety-eight-cent rubber-joke novelty while these two hicks stand around and laugh their asses off?"

  "Hey, you want to watch who you're calling a hick," Myron said.

  "I'm glad that tree fell on your boathouse, if you. want to know the truth. Glad." Norton was grinning savagely at me.

  "Stove it in pretty well, didn't it? Fantastic. Now get out of my way."

  He tried to push past me. I grabbed him by the arm and threw him against the beer cooler. A woman cawed in surprise. Two six-packs of Bud fell over.

  "You dig out your ears and listen, Brent. There are lives at stake here. My kid's is not the least of them. So you listen, or I swear I'll knock the shit out of you."

  "Go ahead," Norton said, still grinning with a kind of insane
palsied bravado. His eyes, bloodshot and wide, bulged from their sockets. "Show everyone how big and brave you are, beating up a man with a heart condition who is old enough to be your father."

  "Sock him anyway!" Jim exclaimed. "Fuck his heart condition. I don't even think a cheap New York shyster like him has got a heart."

  "You keep out of it," I said to Jim, and then put my face down to Norton's. I was kissing distance, if that had been what I had in mind. The cooler was off, but it was still radiating a chill. "Stop throwing up sand. You know damn well I'm telling the truth."

  "I know . . . no ... such thing," he panted.

  "If it was another time and place, I'd let you get away with it. I don't care how scared you are, and I'm not keeping score. I'm scared, too. But I need you, goddammit! Does that get through? I need you!"

  "Let me go!"

  I grabbed him by the shirt and shook him. "Don't you understand anything? People are going to start leaving and walk right into that thing out there! For Christ's sake, don't you understand?"

  "Let me go!"

  "Not until you come back there with me and see for yourself."

  "I told you, no! It's all a trick, a joke, I'm not as stupid as you take me for--"

  "Then I'll haul you back there myself."

  I grabbed him by the shoulder and the scruff of his neck. The seam of his shirt under one arm tore with a soft purring sound. I dragged him toward the double doors. Norton let out a wretched scream. A knot of people, fifteen or eighteen, had gathered, but they kept their distance. None showed any signs of wanting to interfere.

  "Help me!" Norton cried. His eyes bulged behind his glasses. His styled hair had gone awry again, sticking up in the same two little tufts behind his ears. People shuffled their feet and watched.

  "What are you screaming for?" I said in his ear. "It's just a joke, right? That's why I took you to town when you asked to come and why I trusted you to cross Billy in the parking lot--because I had this handy fog all manufactured, I rented a fog machine from Hollywood, it cost me fifteen thousand dollars and another eight thousand dollars to ship it, all so I could play a joke on you. Stop bullshitting yourself and open your eyes!"

  "Let . . . me ... go!" Norton bawled. We were almost at the doors.

  "Here, here! What is this? What are you doing?"

  It was Brown. He bustled and elbowed his way through the crowd of watchers.