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Kineo Town Manager: 'I Don't Know What They 17 page

Henry backed away from the bathroom door. There was a paperback on the dining table, a pattern of dancing devils with pitchforks on its cover. One of Jonesy's, no doubt, already growing its own little colony of crud.

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 Wan 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 n'd 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 backwards. 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.

 

 

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 ski-poles 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 comer 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 bum. 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 bums 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 ski-poles 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.

 

 

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 fell 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 bluejeans. 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.

What do you think you're going to do? he jeered at himself. Pick it off like it was a thread or a piece of lint?

Which was exactly what he did do, because it was a thread: a red one from the shirt's printed logo. He dropped it and watched it float down to the snow. Then he retied the shirt around the tear in his jeans. For a man who had been considering all sorts of final options not four hours ago — the rope and the noose, the tub and the plastic bag, the bridge abutment and the ever-popular Hemingway Solution, known in some quarters as The Policeman's Farewell — he had been pretty goddamned scared there for a second or two.

Because I don't want to go like that, he told himself. Not eaten alive by . . .

'By toadstools from Planet X,' he said.

The eggman got moving again.

 

 

The world shrank, as it always does when we approach exhaustion with our work not done, or even close to done. Henry's life was reduced to four simple, repetitive motions: the pump of his arms on the poles and the push of the skis in the snow. His aches and pains faded, at least for the time being, as he entered some other zone. He only remembered anything remotely like this happening once before, in high school, when he'd been the starting center on the Derry Tigers basketball team. During a crucial pre-playoff game, three of their four best players had somehow fouled out before three minutes of the third quarter were gone. Coach had left Henry in for the rest of the game — he didn't get a single blow except for time-outs and trips to the foul line. He made it, but by the time the final buzzer honked and put an end to the affair (the Tigers had lost gaudily), he had been floating in a kind of happy dream. Halfway down the corridor to the boys' locker room, his legs had given out and down he had gone, with a silly smile still on his face, while his teammates, clad in their red travelling unis, laughed and cheered and clapped and whistled.

No one to clap or whistle here; only the steady crackle-and­-stutter of gunfire off to the east. Slowing a little bit now, maybe, but still heavy.

More ominous were the occasional gunshots from up ahead. Maybe from Gosselin's? It was impossible to tell.

He heard himself singing his least favorite Polling Stones song, 'Sympathy for the Devil' (Made damn sure that Pilate washed his hands and sealed His fate, thank you very much, you've been a wonderful audience, good night), and made himself stop when lie realized the song had gotten all mixed up with memories of Jonesy in the hospital, Jonesy as he had looked last March, not just gaunt but somehow reduced, as if his essence had pulled itself in to form a protective shield around his surprised and outraged body. Jonesy had looked to Henry like someone who was probably going to die, and although he hadn't died, Henry realized now that it was around that time that his own thoughts of suicide had become really serious. To the rogues gallery of images that haunted him in the middle of the night blue-white milk running down his father's chin, Barry Newman's giant economy-sized buttocks jiggling as he flew from the office, Richie Grenadeau holding out a dog-turd to the weeping and nearly naked Duddits Cavell, telling him to eat it, he had to eat it — there was now the image of Jonesy's too-thin face and addled eyes, Jonesy who had been swopped into the street without a single rhyme or reason, Jonesy who looked all too ready to put on his boogie shoes and get out of town. They said he was in stable condition, but Henry had read critical in his old fi7iend's eyes. Sympathy for the devil? Please. There was no god, no devil, no sympathy. And once you realized that, you were in trouble. Your days as a viable, paying customer in the great funhouse that was Kulture Amerika were numbered.

He heard himself signing it again — But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game — and made himself stop it. What, then? Something really Undress. Mindless and pointless and tasty, something just oozing Kulture Amerika. How about that one by the Pointer Sisters? That was a good one.

Looking down at his shuffling skis and the horizontal crimps left by the snowmobile treads, he began to sing it. Soon he was droning it over and over in a whispery, tuneless monotone while the sweat soaked through his shirts and clear mucus ran from his nose to freeze on his upper lip: 'I know we can make it, I know we can, we can work it out, yes we can-can yes we can yes we can . . .'

Better. Much better. All those yes we can-cans were as Amerikan Kulture as a Ford pickup in a bowling alley parking lot, a lingerie sale at JC Penney, or a dead rock star in a bathtub.

 

 

And so he eventually returned to the shelter where he had left Pete and the woman. Pete was gone. No sign of him at all.

The rusty tin roof of the lean-to had fallen, and Henry lifted it, peeking under it like a metal bedsheet to make sure Pete wasn't there. He wasn't, but the woman was. She had crawled or been moved from where she'd been when Henry set out for Hole in the Wall, and somewhere along the line she'd come down with a bad case of dead. Her clothes and face were covered with the rust-colored mold that had choked the cabin, but Henry noticed an interesting thing: while the growth on her was doing pretty well (especially in her nostrils and her visible eye, which had sprouted a jungle), the stuff which had spread out from her, outlining her body in a ragged sunburst, was in trouble. The fungus behind her, on the side blocked from the fire, had turned gray and stopped spreading. The stuff in front of her was doing a little better — it had had warmth, and ground to grow on which had been melted clear of snow — but the tips of the tendrils were turning the powdery gray of volcanic ash.

Henry was pretty sure it was dying.

So was the daylight — no question of that now. Henry dropped the rusty piece of corrugated tin back on the body of Becky Shue and on the embery remains of the fire. Then he looked at the track of the Cat again, wishing as he had back at the cabin that he had Natty Bumppo with him to explain what he was seeing. Or maybe Jonesy's good friend Hercule Poirot, he of the little gray cells.

The track swerved in toward the collapsed roof of the lean—to before continuing on northwest toward Gosselin's. There was a pressed—down area in the snow that almost made the shape of a human body. To either side, there were round divots in the snow.

'What do you say, Hercule?' Henry asked. 'What means this, mon ami?' But Hercule said nothing.

Henry began to sing under his breath again and leaned closer to one of the round divots, unaware that he had left the Pointer Sisters behind and switched back to the Rolling Stones.

There was enough light for him to see a pattern in the three dimples to the left of the body shape, and he recalled the patch on the right elbow of Pete's duffel coat. Pete had told him with an odd sort of pride that his girlfriend had sewed that on there, declaring he had no business going off hunting with a ripped jacket. Henry remembered thinking it was sad and funny at the same time, how Pete had built up a wistful fantasy of a happy future from that single act of kindness . . . an act which probably had more to do, in the end, with how the lady in question had been raised than with any feelings she might have for her beer-soaked boyfriend.

Not that it mattered. What mattered was that Henry felt he could draw a bona fide deduction at last. Pete had crawled out from under the collapsed roof Jonesy — or whatever was now running Jonesy, the cloud — had come along, swerved over to the remains of the lean-to, and picked Pete up.

Why?

Henry didn't know.

Not all of the splotches in the flattened shape of his thrashing friend, who had crawled out from under the piece of tin by hooking himself along on his elbows, were that mold stuff. Some of it was dried blood. Pete had been hurt. Cut when the roof fell in? Was that all?

Henry spotted a wavering trail leading away from the depression which had held Pete's body. At the end of it was what he first took to be a fire-charred stick. Closer examination changed his mind. It was another of the weasel things, this one burned and dead, now turning gray where it wasn't seared. Henry flipped it aside with the toe of his boot. Beneath it was a small frozen mass. More eggs. It must have been laying them even as it died.

Henry kicked snow over both the eggs and the little monster's corpse, shuddering. He unwrapped the makeshift bandage for another look at the wound on his leg, and as he did it he realized what song was coming out of his mouth. He quit singing. New snow, just a scattering of light flakes, began to skirt down.

'Why do I keep singing that?' he asked. 'Why does that fucking song keep coming back?'

He expected no answer; these were questions uttered aloud mostly for the comfort of hearing his own voice (this was a death place, perhaps even a haunted place), but one came anyway.

'Because it's our song. It's the Squad Anthem, the one we play when we go in hot. We're Cruise's boys.' Cruise? Was that right? As in Tom Cruise? Maybe not quite.

The gunfire from the east was much lighter now. The slaughter of the animals was almost done. But there were men, a long skirmish line of hunters who were wearing green or black instead of orange, and they were listening to that song over and over again as they did their work, adding up the numbers of an incredible butcher's bill: I rode a tank, held a general's rank, when the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank . . . Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name.

What exactly was going on here? Not in the wild, wonderful, wacky Outside World, but inside his own head? He'd had flashes of understanding his whole life — his life since Duddits, anyway — but nothing like this. What was this? Was it time to examine this new and powerful way of seeing the line?


Date: 2015-12-17; view: 569


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