"I think this is breaking a law," whispered Mike.
Dale shrugged.
"Not just trespassing," said Mike. He adjusted the hood of his poncho and water slooshed off. "Messing up a crime scene or something."
"They said it was an accident." Dale found himself whispering even though no one was within a mile of them. "How can there be a crime scene if it was an accident?"
"You know what I mean." Mike pulled his hood off and stared out over the field. There was no sign of a combine. No sign of anything at all. The McBride barn was far away and it looked like any other barn.
"Are we going to do it or not?" asked Dale.
"Yeah." Mike tugged his hood back on and they clambered over the fence.
They moved across the field in a crouch. The road was several hundred yards away, but they felt exposed in the low corn. Dale felt like he was playing soldiers, running forward in a burst of speed, crouching low and gesturing Mike on. In that manner they crossed the field.
They were more than halfway across when they saw the swath of cleared corn. It was like someone had taken a lawn-mower to the field, gouging out a drunken path of stubble through the green shoots. Then they saw the yellow tape.
They crossed the last twenty yards in a low shuffle that got their knees and hands muddy.
"God," whispered Mike.
The yellow tape said police scene-do not cross, the message repeated indefinitely, and the plastic stretched in a rough rectangle at least fifty feet on a side. Within that rectangle, the swath of harvested corn suddenly ended and there was an area that had been trampled by many feet.
Dale paused a second where the tape draped over the cornstalk, and then he crossed it, moving quickly to the cleared area. Mike followed.
"God," Mike whispered again.
Dale didn't know what he expected; the combine still to be there maybe, a human outline chalked on the ground like in the TV shows he watched. There was only the trampled corn… he could see where the big machine had turned around, where the wheels had left deep gouges in the dirt now turned to mud. It looked like the field where they held the Old Settlers' carnival each August, trampled by thousands of feet. Dale saw cigarettes lying in the wet and trampled cornstalks, a Red Pouch Tobacco bag, scraps of paper, some plastic wrappers. It was hard to tell exactly where the combine had been… where the accident had happened.
"Here," called Mike.
Dale moved over, staying low in case Mr. McBride or anyone at the farm was looking this way. He couldn't see the pickup in the barnyard or drive, but the house and barn shielded much of the view.
"What?" he said.
Mike pointed. Some of the trampled corn here looked as if the stalks had been sprayed a deep reddish-brown. Some of the color had faded because of the rain, but the undersides of the corn were still marked.
Dale crouched, touched a plant, brought his fingers up.
There was a faint rusty residue there in the seconds before the rain washed it from his fingers.
Duane's blood? The thought was unsupportable. He got up and began moving around the circle of ravaged plants, seeing the turmoil everywhere, remembering overhearing his father telling his mother that Barney said that the state troopers and the volunteer firemen had stomped up the scene so much that the Oak Hill police hadn't been able to reconstruct much. Reconstruct, mused Dale. Strange word for figuring out the way something or someone is destroyed.
"What are we looking for?" whispered Mike from twenty feet away. "There's just a lot of crap lying around."
"Keep looking," Dale whispered. "We'll know when we find it." He stepped out into the corn, beyond the police line, crouching as he moved down the row.
Another five minutes and he found it, less than ten yards from the ravaged area. It was hard to see beneath the leaves of growing corn, but his sneaker had twisted in something and he'd bent to investigate. Mike ran over when he waved. The two crouched on hands and knees, the rain pattering on cornstalks next to their ears.
"A hole," whispered Dale. He measured it with his two hands. Not quite a foot across, but the earth looked bunched and strange around it. He put his hand into it but Mike quickly grabbed it and pulled it back.
"Don't."
"Why?" said Dale. "I just wanted to see if it was wider on the inside. It is. Feel."
Mike shook his head.
"The sides feel funny too," said Dale. "Sort of stiff. And the hole has ridges along the side.” He raised his head. There was no movement from the McBride farm, but he had the distinct impression that they were being watched. "Let's see if there are any more."
They found six more. The biggest was more than eighteen inches across, the smallest hardly larger than a gopher hole. There was no pattern to them, although most of them were closer to the farm, on either side of the harvested swath.
Dale wanted to sneak up on the barn and look in to see if the combine was there.
"Why the hell… why do you want to do that?" Mike whispered, pulling his friend down lower. They were too close. The boys could read the numbers on the tags in the ears of the few cows behind the barn.
"I just want to… I need to…" Dale took a breath.
The sound of a door slamming sent both boys flopping into the mud between the rows. Lying there, hearing a truck engine starting up, Dale realized that it had almost stopped raining. The air was still bleeding a fine mist, but the downpour had stopped.
"It's gone down the drive," whispered Mike. "But I think somebody's still there. Let's head back to the woods."
"One peek in the barn," Dale whispered back and began to rise.
Mike tugged him down. "I've seen those things before."
Dale crouched and blinked at Mike's ponchoed figure. "What things?"
"The holes. Those tunnels."
"Where?"
Mike turned back and began moving away from the farm. "Come on back with me and I'll tell you." He was gone, moving down the next row in a low crouch.
Dale hesitated. He was only a hundred feet or so from the barn. The feeling that he was being watched-observed -was still strong, but so was the desire to see the machine. There was little or no morbid curiosity in the desire; the thought of seeing the blades or gears or whatever that had actually killed his friend made him sick, but he had to know… to begin to understand.
The rain had started up again. Dale looked toward the south, caught the slightest glimpse of Mike's poncho moving above the corn, and then he turned and followed.
There'd be time.
TWENTY-ONE
It rained on and off for three weeks. Each morning the sky would be a rapidly shifting war between sunlight and clouds, but by ten a.m. the drizzle would begin and by lunchtime the rain would fall from lowering skies.
The Free Show was canceled for June 25 and July 2, although the skies were clear and the evening gentle on that second Saturday. The next morning the rain returned. Around Elm Haven, the hungry Illinois earth seemed to drink the moisture and ask for more. The black earth turned blacker. In most of America, farmers spoke of corn being 'knee-high by the Fourth of July'; in central Illinois the rule always had been 'waist-high by the Fourth of July," but this summer the corn was closer to shoulder-high by the Fourth.
The Fourth fell on a Monday, and although the adults seemed to enjoy the rare three-day holiday, their pleasure was ruined a bit by the rain that canceled the town parade and the evening's fireworks. Elm Haven had no city budget for a formal fireworks show, but a century of tradition had people bring their own Roman candles, skyrockets, and firecrackers to the school grounds. A few showed up this summer, but the wind had risen that evening, the nightly storm had blown in early, and the would-be revelers abandoned the effort after matches would not light and fuses failed.
Dale and Lawrence watched the lightning storm that had replaced a fireworks show from the safety of their front porch. Explosions of white light ran along the southwestern horizon, silhouetting trees, outlining gabled rooftops, and illuminating
the looming mass that was Old Central. In the dark lulls between flashes, the school still seemed to glow from some inner light, a soft fungal phosphorescence that painted the grounds a blue-green and seemed to build a haze of static 304 electricity around the ancient elms that surrounded the block. One of those elms exploded and died as Dale and Lawrence watched on the evening of July the Fourth; whether struck by lightning or simply torn asunder by the wind, they did not know. The sound was deafening even from sixty yards away. Half the tree remained standing, a jagged, broken tooth of a thing, while the leafy, living part of it fell onto the schoolyard with a lumberjack crash.
Dale and Lawrence went in after the storm had passed. They'd set off a few firecrackers from the porch, swung sparklers and lighted glowworms on the stone steps, but the wind was cold and their hearts weren't really in it.
Around the town, in the hush which followed the storm, the millions of acres of corn grew taller, forming a solid mass of greenery that turned the county roads into corridors between high walls, hid the horizon from sight, and seemed to leech substance from the next day's sunlight until the brightest spot around was no brighter than the deep shadow under the elms of town.
Dale's family brought food to Mr. McBride. Half the families in town had. Dale rode along as they drove out the familiar but strangely unfamiliar county road, past the cemetery and Uncle Henry's, and turned down the long lane. The corn seemed taller here than in any of the adjacent fields, the driveway a veritable tunnel.
The first two times they tried, no one answered the door despite the fact that Mr. McBride's pickup was in the yard. The third time he opened the door, accepted the casseroles and pie with a mumbled litany of thanks, and mumbled something else when Dale's mother and father offered their regrets. Dale had always thought of Duane's dad as an older man than any of the other parents, but he was shocked at McBride's appearance: his remaining strands of hair seemed to have turned gray in the past month, his eyes were deep-set and bloodshot, the left one almost closed as if from a stroke, his face looked more like the bust of a cracked and poorly glued figurine than a man with wrinkles, and the gray stubble ran down his cheeks onto his neck and into his dirty undershirt.
Dale's parents spoke in low, sad undertones to each other during the long ride back.
No one knew for sure what arrangements had been made for Duane's funeral or memorial service. Word in town was that Mr. Taylor had released the body to a mortuary in Peoria-the same one that had arranged Duane's uncle's cremation. Word was that the boy was also cremated, in a private service.
No one knew what Mr. McBride had done with the ashes.
At night, when he was drifting off to sleep, Dale thought of his friend now existing only as a handful of ashes and the thought brought him sitting up in bed, heart pounding with some deep realization that the universe was wrong.
At times, when mowing the yard between rainstorms or doing something else that freed his subconscious, Dale imagined that Duane McBride was still alive, that he had faked his own death and was hiding out somewhere like that comic strip character The Spirit, or like Mickey Mouse in the comic adventures when he was trying to find the Phantom Blot. At those times, Dale half-expected to get a phone call from Duane, his friend's calm voice saying, "Meet me in the Cave. I've got some information."
Dale wondered what information Duane had been prepared to share at the meeting in the chickenhouse. The meeting that never happened. He couldn't imagine how Duane could've found out much about Tubby or the school, restricted as he was to his farm and a library. But over the four years Dale had known him, he'd learned never to underestimate Duane.
After Mike's revelation about the tunnel he'd found in the cemetery and the similar tunnels under his home, the boys had seen less and less of each other. Each of them had seemed to withdraw into his own circle of family and daily chores, as if there would be safety from the encroaching darkness there.
Lawrence feared the dark more than ever before. He wept now sometimes in his sleep and insisted on a forty-watt bulb in the lamp on the dresser rather than the weak night-light. Their mother often came in and turned off the brighter light after Lawrence had fallen asleep, but several times the eight-year-old had awakened screaming.
Before their dad left on an eight-day selling trip through Indiana and northern Kentucky, their mother brought Lawrence and Dale to the local doctor to discuss their fears and the wild accusation Dale had made at dinner one night that grown-ups had murdered Duane and Tubby Cooke. The doctor was named Viskes, was a Hungarian refugee who had been in the country only eighteen months, and still had problems with English. All the kids in town called him Dr. Vicious because he was too cheap to buy new hypodermic needles and just kept sterilizing the old ones until the shots were pure agony.
Dr. Viskes prescribed hard work and fresh air to cure the children's nonsense. Dale overheard Dr. Vicious tell his mom that it was a shame about the McBride boy and his uncle, but that accidents tend to happen in twos.
Accidents happen in threes, thought Dale.
The other kids got together occasionally. For five days after the Fourth, Kev and Mike and Dale and Lawrence played almost nonstop Monopoly on the Stewarts' long front porch while the showers fell. They would leave the game out overnight, stones weighting their stacks of money and cards; when someone went broke, they changed the rules so that person could wander the board as a 'bum' until the bank floated a loan or some old property brought in rent. With the rules changed, the game had no chance of being finished and they played on-meeting after breakfast and playing until mothers called them home for supper.
Dale dreamed Monopoly for two nights and was glad of it.
On the fifth day, the Grumbachers' stupid Labrador, Brandy, snuffled his way onto the porch while the boys were eating dinner and scattered the money and chewed up four of the cards. They ended the game by silent assent and for two days they did not see each other again.
On July 10, a Sunday which did not feel like a Sunday because Dale's dad was at the home office in Chicago, the basement flooded.
Things would never be the same again.
For two days Dale's mom put up with the flooding, moving things from the floor onto the workbench and trying to keep the sump pump working. The basement had flooded twice before during their four years in the house, but both times their father had been able to stop the backup at a couple of inches. This time the water kept rising.
On Tuesday morning the sump pump went out. By lunchtime the electricity went out in the house.
Dale came down from his room when his mother called. The giant basement stairs led down to solid darkness. His mom stood on the next-to-last step, her skirt soaked, a bandanna wrapped around her head. She looked close to tears.
Dale stared. The water had risen over the first step. It was at least two feet deep, probably more. It lapped at the step his mother was standing on like a dark sea.
"Oh, Dale, it's just so damn frustrating…"
Dale looked at her. He didn't think he'd ever heard her curse before.
"I'm sorry, honey, but I haven't been able to get the pump to work and it's up to the level of the washing machine and I have to go way back to the back room to put a new fuse in and… damn, I wish your father were here."
"I'll do it, Mom." Dale was amazed to hear himself say it. He hated the goddamn basement at the best of times.
Something floated near the step. It might have been a tangle of dust in the water, but it looked like the back of a drowned rat.
"Go get your oldest jeans on," said his mother. "And bring your Boy Scout flashlight."
Dale went upstairs to change clothes in a half-daze. The sense of removal and retreat he'd been feeling since Duane's death now folded on him like a thick wrapping of insulation. He looked down at his hands as if they belonged to someone else. Into the basement? In the dark? He changed clothes, pulled on his holiest pair of old sneakers, rolled up his pant-legs, grabbed his flashlight from the extra room, tested it, and
pounded down the stairs.
His mother handed him the fuse." "It's right above the dryer back in the…"
"I know where it is." The water hadn't risen visibly in the past few minutes, but it was already overrunning the second step. The short corridor toward the furnace room looked like the unlighted entrance to some flooded crypt.
"Just don't stand in the water when you put it in. Get up on the bench next to the dryer. Make sure your hands are dry and that the switch is on Off and…"
"Yeah, Mom." He stepped off before he lost his nerve and ran back up the stairs and out the back door.
The water came above his knees and was icy cold. His toes began to ache and cramp almost immediately.
" "The whole drainage system has backed up…" he heard his mother say as he moved down the narrow corridor, shining his light on the cinderblock walls. The beam was dim; he should've changed the batteries.
The opening to the coal bin was a black rectangle to his right, the bottom of it just above the waterline. Black water milled around the hopper and there were dark lumps floating there that looked like human turds. Coal, thought Dale and shined the dim light on the tentacled monster of the furnace itself.
The water level wasn't quite to the grate yet. Dale had no idea what would happen if the furnace flooded.
A sound to his right made him wheel, splashing backward into the wall and shining his light into the coal bin.
It was dry in there but something had rustled up near the ceiling on the far side, where the unfinished area began. Dale saw small pinpricks of reflected light in that darkness. Just the pipes. Just the insulation. Not eyes. Not eyes.
He turned left around the furnace. The water seemed deeper here, even though he knew it couldn't be. Maybe it could be. Maybe each room slants down a little bit. Maybe the back room is completely underwater.