“Don’t remind me.”
“Seems to me this whole town is being overrun.”
“Overrun by what?”
“You name it,” Eddie said. “Take your pick. Fuck if I know. But it’s almost like that dead kid who washed up in Wills Creek was the trigger to all this madness.”
This struck Ben as oddly poignant. He looked at Eddie but Eddie was peering casually around at the yard and the rusted vehicles up on blocks around the side of the house, looking infernally bored and exhausted. To Eddie La Pointe, it was nothing more than a passing comment.
Chapter Twelve
1
Amidst a dream of plowing through rich autumn leaves, Brandy Crawly awoke to find it was the middle of the night, the darkness penetrating her bedroom like a sonic shock wave. Her fleeting thoughts still resonated with her peaceful dream—scampering through crunchy, brown leaves in the forest and overturning stones at the edge of Wills Creek to find their undersides fuzzy with moss, horned owls noiselessly circling overhead. The juxtaposition was jarring.
Flipping the sheets off her sweating body, she climbed quickly out of bed and hurried over to one of her bedroom windows. Outside, the road looked like a glowing blue ribbon coursing its way through the valley and up into the foothills of the mountains. She could see the large, black trees crowding the road and the moonlight that dripped from their branches. For whatever reason, she recalled summers spent in her youth when she’d walk up and down that road, searching for toads in muddy puddles after rainstorms. Tonight, the world seemed to close in around her like some constriction, nearly suffocating in all its claustrophobia. In nothing more than her nightshirt and panties, she hurried out of her room, into the upstairs hall, and down the steps that led to the first floor of the creaky old house.
It was the garage that bothered her. Even when she could not remember it, she knew she had dreamt of it in the night. It was a subliminal text hidden between the pages of her pleasant and youthful dreams of summers among the tree-lined roads while kicking up balls of dead leaves as she bulldozed through the forest. Tree frogs croaked and the summer crickets sounded like mechanical sprinklers going off. Yet this notion of darkness—a closet of darkness opening up into more darkness, like those Russian fertility dolls—right here on the property, right here in the yard, never fully left her.
She passed now through the kitchen, the moonlight coming through the curtained windows and the glass in the back door the color of the moon. No different would it be if the Crawly house—right here, right now—existed on the moon. She thought of the great horned owls and tried to remember if they were from real life or her dreams.
Brandy opened the back door. Frigid air rushed into the kitchen, rattling papers on the corkboard in the laundry room and twirling dead leaves around the slouching porch. In the distance, she could hear wind chimes.
Maybe I’m still asleep, she thought…but didn’t think it was true. Maybe I’m not standing here at all.
Across the yard, she could see the dark frame of the detached garage. Wind rattled the bushes and moaned through the eaves of the house. It chilled Brandy’s bones and her skin prickled beneath the thin fabric of her nightclothes.
Without giving it a conscious thought, she stepped out onto the porch. The floorboards creaked beneath her bare feet and the screen door slammed against the frame as she let it go. There was a rusty, scraping sound, and it took her several seconds to realize it was the wind bullying the clothesline that hung from the porch to the garage; the line jounced fiercely in the metal wheel that was hooked to the side of the garage.
The chrome on Matthew’s bike glowed in the moonlight. It still lay slouched against the side of the garage, causing a weakening tremor to vibrate up through the center of Brandy’s body. Before she realized what she was doing, she descended the porch steps and stood in the cool dirt of the yard, facing the garage.
And the garage was alive. Seeing this, she stopped moving and stood in absolute fear and immobility at the foot of the porch steps. The garage moved. Or, rather, parts of it moved: she could see them clearly enough even in the dark. Swarthy, undulating husks of deeper darkness hidden among the black. It—
Bats, she knew.
They still hung from the eaves of the garage. There were several of them dangling upside down from the clothesline, too. The nearby hedges were alive with them. Their fluttery wings and scrabbling claws and high-pitched chirps were suddenly all she could hear. It made the hairs on the back of her neck stand at attention.
Just then, a cold wind whipped down from the mountains and coursed through the gutted valley of the dying town. The sound of the wind in the trees was like the clash of the ocean’s surf on a rocky shore. The wind emanating from the hollowed trunks of trees moaned like the mournful cries of the ghosts of anguished mothers.
As she stood there, she heard something move inside the garage. It was a subtle sound, like the repositioning of feet on a gritty floor, but she heard it nonetheless. This was followed by a much louder sound, the sound of something crashing from within the garage…items being knocked to the floor and kicked about.
Brandy took several steps closer to the garage. In the eaves, the black bats’ claws scrabbled for more secure footholds along the perimeter of the garage. Off to her left, the bats in the hedges twittered and hummed like electronic equipment. This close to Matthew’s bike, a dizzying wave of sadness threatened to collapse her to the ground. She fought it off with all the strength she could muster.
Someone is in the garage…
“Matthew?” Her voice was shaky and unsure. Above, the bats squealed like pigs and Brandy blinked, suddenly realizing there were at least twice as many as she had originally thought—the darkness was playing tricks on her eyes.
Then, for reasons hidden too deeply within her subconscious to be examined and fully understood, she thought of a summer where she’d bounced about in the passenger seat of her father’s pickup truck, some Americana rock song straining the speakers of the truck’s radio, a set of fishing poles and a five-gallon bucket stowed in the bed of the truck. Just Brandy and her dad, driving out in the early predawn hours to his favorite fishing hole at the crook where Wills Creek emptied into the cold and gray Potomac River, hot air pumping from the dashboard vents and the smell of her father’s cologne filling the cab. In her mind’s eye, she could see her father clear as day, the unshaven scruff at his cheeks, his chin, his neck; the somber blue eyes hidden beneath the shadowed bill of the Orioles baseball cap he wore; his big-knuckled hands gripping the steering wheel while he occasionally spit gobs of tobacco juice into an old plastic Gatorade bottle. Tattered paperbacks slid back and forth across the top of the dashboard—old Aldo Leopold essays and a book called Four Seasons North that was about arctic and subarctic exploration.
Land is important, Hugh Crawly would tell his daughter. Land is most important, Brandy. This town used to be alive. Now it’s dead. People do that to the land. We build things up and make machines that fly and crush and swim and kill, but people do it. It’s our fault Stillwater is dying.
She could smell him, even now—a smell like gun oil and cheap cologne. Those were the same scents he would leave on the couch cushions after he’d sat there watching an old black-and-white movie on the weekends or football on Monday nights.
Somehow, she had arrived at the side door of the garage, one hand extended to grip the doorknob. Directly above her, the bats were so close she could hear their commingled respiration, a sound like air wheezing out of an old accordion. A vague medicinal odor pricked the hairs in her nose, but the smell itself was too fleeting to be properly identified.
She gripped the doorknob.
Turned it.
There arose a shriek no different than the wail of a passing ambulance, though this sound came from inside the garage, followed by a scrabbling of sounds. Her hand frozen to the doorknob, Brandy couldn’t move. The sound that followed was of breaking glass, as whatever had been inside the garage had br
oken out of the window at the opposite side. She heard it—whatever it was—strike the ground outside. It emitted a piggish grunt that seemed to coincide with all the bats’ wings opening around the perimeter of the garage.
Brandy shoved the door open to an empty garage. Items from her father’s work shelf were strewn about and the floor was covered in countless screws, nuts, bolts, washers, carpentry nails. Opposite her, the small window high on the garage wall had been shattered and triangular bits of glass glittered on the floor beneath it. As she stared at the busted window, she heard the thing directly on the other side of it breathing its labored respiration. Then there came a shock wave rattle as the thing leapt the chain-link fence at the back of property and, on the heels of that, the rustling of the tall grass as it ran.
Brandy ran back out into the yard just as the bats lifted off the eaves and darted up into the night. Moving quickly around the other side of the garage, she found the chain-link fence still shaking and the field of tall grass parting as something unseen carved its way through it toward the wooded foothills.
Bats spiraled up into the sky, briefly blotting out the scythe-shaped moon. They seemed to vanish as the darkness claimed them.
And a moment later, all was silent in the Crawlys’ backyard, save for the wind that still troubled the hollow trees and whistled flutelike through the nearby reeds.
There were bits of broken glass out here too, scattered in the dirt in an almost decipherable pattern.
Among them were the undeniable footprints of a boy roughly Matthew’s age.
2
No stranger to trouble, nineteen-year-old Ricky Codger pushed out the back door of Crossroads and stumbled across the darkened parking lot. There were lampposts here but the lights had been busted out some time ago. Ricky knew it was the perfect place to hide and wait for the son of a bitch. He got in his Camaro and drove it around to the side of the parking lot, never turning the headlights on, so that the front door was framed perfectly in the windshield.
See? This is smart. This is using the old melon. The last thing I need is to rip the fucker’s face open in front of a bunch of witnesses and wind my ass up in Jessup again.
No. He most certainly did not need that.
The fucker in question was Donald Larrabee, a sponge-faced lush in his midtwenties who lived out on Susquehanna and worked days over in Cumberland at Allegheny Power. Had Ricky not been pacing himself all evening and thinking rationally, the fucker in question would have already been picking his teeth up off the sticky floor of the tavern. But as it was, Ricky was skating on thin ice. Some folks might argue he was a lunatic, but Ricky would be damned if they would think he was a careless lunatic.
Ricky Codger lived with his grandmother on a sterile plot of land off Full Hill Road. It had once been the Codger family farm, back when Ricky’s grandfather had been strong enough (and alive enough) to keep it up. But that was several years ago now. Currently, the Codger family consisted of just Ricky and his grandmother (and given her rapid deterioration into the muddy swamp of dementia, Ricky questioned how much longer she’d stick around). They survived off his grandmother’s Social Security checks, bought food with her food stamps, and collected a monthly pittance from the state as a farm subsidy, despite the fact that the Codger farm hadn’t produced a single crop in just under a decade. On occasion, Ricky would pick up some hourly work at Tom Schuler’s garage, but other than that, it was slim pickings in Stillwater as far as the job market went. And the places that could hire him, didn’t, due to his stint up in Jessup for armed robbery back when he was sixteen. (Armed robbery? Okay, sure, he’d gone into a feed store in Garrett with a handgun and asked for the money out of the register, but, son of a bitch, he knew the asshole behind the register and was only joking. Well, half-joking. What did him in was that he took the money and that the sorry son of a bitch had called the cops.) He supposed he could leave town, head out for the East Coast and start fresh in a place where people were strangers and didn’t already know your business before you shook their hands and introduced yourself. Stillwater was a secret cracked down the middle, bleeding its guts all over the sidewalk. Every asshole stepped in the puddle and tracked your business down the fucking street.
No matter. As long as his grandmother was still hanging on, those checks rolled in like clockwork. He would deal with the repercussions of her death when the time came and no sooner.
There was a part of Ricky Codger that often wondered how anyone would actually know when his grandmother died. The woman had no friends and no other family. She never left the house. With the exception of her biannual doctor visit in Westlake, no one else on the planet ever saw the woman. So he wondered…with the part of his mind that was darker than even he liked to acknowledge…just how plausible it would be to keep the old woman alive even after her death. That same dark part of his brain had, on more than one occasion, imagined himself digging a deep grave at the far end of the farm’s southern field. And maybe, just maybe, that would work.
He realized he was fading in and out of consciousness behind the Camaro’s steering wheel. Maybe he’d had a bit too much to drink after all. He rubbed his eyes then flipped on the Camaro’s radio and located a hard rock station out of West Virginia. A few people stood huddled together beneath the awning of the tavern, smoking cigarettes. Donald Larrabee wasn’t among them, and he feared he might have missed him come out already.
An hour earlier, Ricky had been shooting pool, minding his own business, and in a rare state of complacency bordering on a good mood when Larrabee ambled over and complained that he’d been hogging the pool table all night. “As long as I’m paying, I’m playing,” Ricky had responded coolly. But then Alvin Toops came over and told him that the tables were on a rotating basis unless it was league night. Alvin Toops was a big son of a bitch, with a shaved head and tattoos on his neck. He kept a shotgun beneath the bar and had threatened Ricky with it on more than one occasion. “See?” Alvin said, waving an arm at the other two tables. “Look how nice everyone else is sharing.”
Ricky didn’t like the condescending tone of Alvin’s voice. He might have even told him so if Alvin’s brother, Jimmy Toops, hadn’t risen from his stool at the bar. Jimmy owned a towing company and junkyard. Ricky knew better than to mess with some bastard who could hook up your ride when you weren’t looking.
“Come on, Codger,” Alvin went on, making a face as if he were tasting something sour. “Cut me some slack here, will ya?”
So Ricky cut Alvin Toops some slack. He cut Donald Larrabee, that whiny little bitch, some slack too…by not shoving his boot heel up his ass. He’d dropped his pool cue and paid his bar tab while hastily chugging down the last of his Yuengling, then shoved out into the night while the eyes of the men at the bar hung on him like fishhooks. All the regulars had been there, watching the scene unfold and no doubt hoping for a little entertainment in the form of a bar fight—Elmer Watts, Delmo Dandridge, the Kowalski brothers, Flip the Drip, Lombardo, Davey Kingfield, the lot of them—and Ricky knew what they were thinking. Oh yes, he did. They were thinking, That pussy Codger can’t do shit ’less he wants to wind up back behind bars. The poor bastard’s easy meat now.
Yeah? Well, that was bullshit. He wasn’t easy meat for no one.
Nonetheless, following his release from Jessup, he hadn’t come straight back to Stillwater for just that reason—to avoid confrontations with the local hillbillies and rednecks who thought they could give the Codger kid a few shoves without getting shoved back. They were wrong, of course—Ricky had never let anyone take advantage of him like that and he didn’t plan on starting now—but he had had no real desire to jump back into that mess right away. Instead, he spent a few months living on his own in Cumberland, renting a small room in a boardinghouse and paying his rent with money he withdrew from his grandmother’s bank account.
But like all good dogs, he eventually came back home. In the time he’d been gone, which had been about a year and a half, Stillwater had dried
up considerably. Even if he’d wanted to snare a job, even a part-time gig, his choices were woefully limited. He wondered what the hell brought him back to this shitty little town after all, aside from a free roof over his head and the luxury of leeching off his grandmother. He couldn’t come up with any answer except for the most obvious—a dog like him knew nothing other than the master who whipped him. Everyone goes back to what they know, no matter how horrible and pointless and static it all is. There was a strange sort of mundane comfort in predictability.
Ricky blinked and rubbed his eyes just as he saw Donald Larrabee pushing his way past the clot of smokers beneath the tavern’s awning and hobbling down onto the uneven pavement of the parking lot. He looked drunk and Ricky wondered just how long he’d been sitting in his car, waiting for the fool. As Ricky watched, Larrabee meandered over to one section of the parking lot where, presumably, he looked for his car. When he couldn’t find it, he unbuckled his pants and released a potent arc of urine onto the tire of a green Chevy van. After shaking off, he buttoned up his jeans and staggered back across the lot to where his sad little two-door Civic sat beneath a darkened lamppost. Ricky watched the headlights come on. A long while passed before the Civic pulled out of the space. Larrabee pulled a wide arc around the lot, nearly clipping the front fender of an old Buick Skylark in the process, before emptying out onto the road. Ricky watched the Civic’s taillights flare briefly before the vehicle chugged forward into the dark.
Ricky followed.
One-on-one, he’d teach the motherfucker to embarrass him in public. He’d teach him, all right.
When both cars crossed the intersection at Highland and Gracie, Ricky shook out a Camel from the pack he kept wedged in the visor and lit it. He was feeling pretty upbeat now. The Civic continued up Gracie, and Ricky followed. They were the only two cars on the road at this hour and in this part of town—where the barns were all unoccupied and dilapidated monstrosities, and the radio signals fuzzed in and out—but if Donald Larrabee realized he was being followed he did not show it in the casual, sloppy way in which he drove.