Summer of Night (56 page)
"It's me!" gasped Jim Harlen.
Mike felt the sling under his hand as he tapped Harlen on the shoulder as the smaller boy hustled past, Keds pounding on the bare dirt path under the low trees.Mike crouched behind the wide log and waited another minute, counting seconds by Boy Scouts, squirrel gun raised. It was a very long minute. Then he was moving along the trail, hunkered low, backpack over his left shoulder and the gun in his right hand, head always moving, trusting his peripheral vision. He felt like he'd been running for miles but realized that it had been only a few hundred yards.
There was a low whistle ahead of him and to his left. He returned three whistles. A hand tapped his shoulder as he moved past and Mike caught a glimpse of Kevin's dad's.45 automatic. Then Mike found the cutoff, the slight bend in the trail, and he rolled into the high weeds there, feeling brambles but ignoring them, whistling once, letting Kevin move past, and covering the trail both north and south for another forty-five Boy Scouts before he allowed himself to slide down the hillside himself, trying to keep as silent as possible on the soft loam and thick carpet of old leaves.
For a second Mike couldn't find the opening in the solid mass of brambles and bushes, but then his hand found the secret entrance and he was squirming in on his belly, sliding into the solid circle of Camp Three.
A penlight winked in his face, went out. The other four were whispering urgently, their voices high on adrenaline and euphoria and terror.
"Shut up," hissed Mike. He took the penlight from Kevin's hand and went around the circle of faces, almost whispering in each boy's ear-'All right?"-'You OK?" Everyone was all right. All five of them, including Mike, were present and accounted for. There were no extra bodies. "Fan out," whispered Mike and they moved to the edges of the circle, listening, Kevin to the left of the only entrance with his automatic reloaded and ready.
Mike sprinkled holy water on the ground and branches. He hadn't seen the things that left the holes, but the night was far from over.
They listened. Somewhere an owl called. The chorus of crickets and frogs-stilled for a while by the explosions of gunfire-had started up again, but was slightly muffled here halfway down the hillside. Far away, a car or small truck passed over the hills on County Six.
After thirty minutes of silent listening, the boys huddled together near the entrance. The urge to babble had passed, but they took turns whispering, their heads almost together so the sound couldn't be heard outside of Camp Three.
" "I couldn't believe they really did it,” Lawrence was gasping.
"Didja see my fucking sneaker!" Harlen kept hissing at them. "Chopped it right off the edge of the sweatshirt I'd stuffed in 'em."
"All our stuff's chopped to bits," whispered Kev. "My hat. All the stuff I'd put in the sleeping bag."
Gradually, Mike got them off their soft exclamations and wild-eyed descriptions, and had them report. They'd done what the plan had called for. Dale thought the waiting for dark was the hardest, cooking hot dogs and roasting marsh-mallows as if they were just camping. Then they'd settled into their tents, stuffing their bedrolls and bags, slipping out one by one to the prearranged positions in the deadfall behind the campsite.
"I was layin' on a fuckin' anthill," whispered Harlen and the others stifled laughter until Mike ordered them to shut up.
Mike had set out the ambush positions so that they wouldn't be firing across the campsite at each other-they'd all be firing northeast or northwest-but Kevin confessed that in his excitement after the men had chopped up the tent, he'd fired toward Mike's position. Mike shrugged, although now he seemed to remember something humming past his ear just after the second man had thrown the ax at him.
"OK," he whispered, drawing the others closer with an arm across their backs,"so now we know. But it's not over. We can't leave until morning… that's hours away. They could be getting reinforcements… and not all the reinforcements are human."
He let that sink in. He didn't want to scare them to the point they couldn't function, just keep them alert. "But I don't think that'll be the way it happens," he whispered, his head touching Kevin's and Dale's. They were like a football team in a huddle. "I think we hurt 'em. I think they're gone for the night. In the morning, we'll check the campsite, get whatever stuff we can, and get the hell out of here. Who brought some blankets?"
They'd planned on keeping five for Camp Three, but somehow they'd only hung on to three. Mike pulled out an extra jacket, assigned two people to watch for the first hour-Kev had a glow-in-the-dark wristwatch dial-assigned himself first watch with Dale, and told the others to turn in. No more whispering.
But he and Dale whispered a bit as they crouched by the opening in the solid wall of high bushes.
"They really did it," Dale whispered, echoing his little brother's statement twenty minutes earlier. "They really tried to kill us."
Mike nodded, not sure if the other boy could see him even from two feet away. "Yeah. Now we know they're trying to do to us what they did to Duane."
"Because they figure that we know?"
"Maybe not," Mike whispered back. "Maybe they're just going to get all of us on general principles. But now we know. And we can go ahead."
"But what if they use… the other things?" whispered Dale. Harlen or somebody was snoring very softly, his white socks glowing from where they stuck out from under the blanket.
Mike still clutched the bottle of holy water. The squirrel gun was in his other hand, loaded, needing only the click of the safety and the pull of a hammer. "Then we get them, too," he said. He wasn't as confident as he sounded.
"God," whispered Dale. It sounded more like a prayer than a curse.
Mike nodded, huddled closer, and waited for dawn.
Just after first light they went back to search for bodies.
It was one of the longest nights Dale Stewart could ever remember. At first there was the terror, excitement, and adrenaline rush to ride on, but after the first watch with Mike, when it was Dale's turn to sleep with several hours left until dawn, there remained only the terror. It was a deep, sick-making terror, a fear of the dark combined with the startle-awake sound of someone breathing under your bed. It was the terror of embalming tools and the blade at the eye, the terror of the cold hand on the back of your neck in a dark room. Dale had known fear before,, the fear of the coal bin and the basement, the fear of the all-enveloping black circle of C. J. Congden's rifle aimed at him, the testicle-raising fear of the corpse in the water in his basement… but this terror went beyond fear. Dale felt as if nothing was to be trusted. The ground might open and swallow him up… literally… there were things under the soil, other things of the night just beyond the flimsy circle of branches that was their only protection. The men with axes might be waiting just beyond the leaves and branches, their eyes dead but bright, with no breath rising and falling in their chests but with a rattle of anticipation in their throats.
It was a long night.
Everybody was awake at the first hint of gray through the thick branches overhead. By five-thirty a.m.-according to Kevin's watch-they were packed up and moving back along the trail, Mike thirty paces in the lead, calling the others forward with hand signals, freezing them into immobility with a motion.
A hundred yards from the campsite they fanned out, mov 461 ing apart and abreast, each keeping two others in sight while they slowly advanced from tree to tree, shrub to shrub, staying low in the high grass there. Finally they could see the tents, still collapsed-Dale had half expected to find everything unharmed, the violence of the night before only a shared nightmare-but even from a distance they could see the smashed tents, hacked canvas, and scattered clothing. An ax lay blackened and half-buried in the ashes of the fire. Harlen's left sneaker lay near it.
They advanced slowly, allowing Mike on the north wing and Dale on the south wing to almost encircle the campsite. Dale was sure that he would see the bodies first… one in the glade where Mike had shot the first man, another on the edge of the ravine… but they found no bodies.
Their first temptation was to paw through the wreckage of their camp, making jokes and laughing with the release of tension, but Mike made them fan out again, sweeping southeast all the way to the quarry, north to the fence bordering Uncle Henry's property, east back almost to the road. There were no bodies.
But they found blood. Spatters of blood in the glade, about where the man Mike shot at would have gone down. Blood on rocks and shrubs in the ravine. More blood on the opposite side of the little valley, near the fence.
"Got one of the bastards," said Harlen, but his bravado sounded hollow in the sunlight, with the blood already drying to brown patches on weeds and fallen logs. There were great amounts of the stuff. The thought that they had actually shot someone-a human being-made Dale's knees go weak. Then he remembered the axes rising and falling on the tent where he would have been sleeping.
They returned to the camp, eager to salvage what they could and be gone. A single ax lay charred and blackened in the campfire ashes.
"My dad will be upset," said Kev, folding the remains of his tent.
"My old lady'11 shit bricks and kittens," said Harlen, holding up the remains of his blanket and peering through one of the rents in it. He looked at Kevin through the hole. "You can say the tent blew over into a barbed-wire fence, but what can I say about my best blanket? That I was having a wild wet dream and humped it to death?"
"What's a wet dr-' began Lawrence,.
"Never mind," Dale said quickly. "Let's get this stuff loaded, bury what we don't want to haul back, and then get out of here."
They carried their shotguns and pistols and squirrel guns openly until they crossed the fence and were almost in sight of Uncle Henry's. Then they broke them down or put them in packs and duffel bags. Dale had let Lawrence carry the Savage over-and-under once they were out of the woods, literally, but he'd kept the.410 and.22 shells in his pocket. The gun seemed heavy after an hour of toting it, but it was shorter and lighter than most shotguns. The night before, during the shooting, Dale had wished that he'd brought his dad's pump shotgun, despite its weight and size. Firing one shell from each barrel of the over-and-under and then opening the breech to reload had been maddening. Dale remembered glancing past the rock where Lawrence had been crouching, staring with wide eyes, at Kevin and Harlen on their knees in the thicket, firing their pistols-the heavy cough of Kevin's.45 and the impressive flash and blare of Jim's snub-nosed.38 making Dale want to cover his ears. Did we really do that?
They had. They'd just spent thirty minutes picking up all the spent brass and hunting for all the discarded shotgun shells, burying them fifty feet from their former campsite with the blankets, sleeping bags, and tents too torn to carry home. Mike had retrieved his bike.
Aunt Lena offered them breakfast, but the boys didn't have time for it. Uncle Henry was going into town and they scrambled to throw their bikes in the back of his pickup and clamber in themselves.
The long ride home was the part of this that Dale and the others had been dreading. Now the long bike ride became a few minutes of clatter and dust, gravel flying behind the truck as they roared down the steep hill past the cemetery into the shadow of the glen. There was still dew on the corn and weeds by the road.
"Look!" Lawrence said as they passed the Black Tree.
They looked. The place was closed and dark under the big trees at the edge of the ravine, even the owner's car gone. The horizontal light lay low and heavy across the gravel driveway.
But something sat far back in the low trees at the west side of the lot. A truck. Dale caught a glimpse of scabrous red paint, foliage reflected on a windshield half-hidden by branches, the sense of a high-sided truckbed deeper in the shadows.
"The Rendering Truck?" called Kevin over the noise in the back of the pickup. They were already to the junction of Jubilee College Road, and the truck had not emerged from the parking area.
Mike shrugged. "Could be."
Dale felt himself beginning to shake and he gripped the side of the pickup to stop it. His forearms strained with the effort. He imagined them coming up that long grade, panting and bent over their handlebars, tired from the long night and the hill, and suddenly that red nightmare coming to life with a roar of its V-8 engine, squeaking and weaving and throwing gravel behind it as it leaped out of hiding, sweeping across the driveway in two seconds, the stench of decomposing livestock corpses coming in front of it like a shock wave.
The ditch was deep on the west side of the road there, the fence between them and the woods high. Could they have gotten off their bikes and into the trees in time?
And what if Van Syke had had a gun? Or what if he had wanted them to flee east into the woods, toward Gypsy Lane?
At that second, with the rows of corn tall on either side, the sun already high in the sky and the water tower approaching and the cloud of dust broiling behind the pickup, Dale was totally and absolutely certain that something had been waiting in those woods for them.
They still would be there. Only Uncle Henry's offhand offer to drive them into town had turned their plan from a total nightmare into the limited success it was. Dale looked across the truckbed at Mike, his friend's gray eyes clouded with fatigue, and knew that Mike knew. Dale wanted to touch him on the shoulder, tell him that it was all right, that he couldn't have planned for everything… but his arms were shaking too badly to let go of the side of the truck just yet.
And, more than that, Dale knew at that second that it wasn't all right, that Mike's miscalculation could have cost them their lives on this beautiful July morning.
What was waiting in the darkness of the woods back there?
Dale closed his eyes and thought of Mrs. Duggan, eight months dead… of Tubby Cooke the way Dale had seen him, white and bloated, the skin beginning to come off like white rubber that's rotted from the inside out… of long, moist things tunneling underfoot, jaws waiting under the thin blanket of loam and leaves… of the Soldier the way Mike had described it, face rippling and flowing into a lamprey's funnel ringed with teeth…
They rode into town without speaking, waving tiredly as Uncle Henry dropped each of them off.
Evening fell a bit earlier this night than the last, almost imperceptibly so but enough to remind the careful observer that the solstice had passed and that the days were getting shorter rather than longer. The sunset was that long, achingly beautiful balance of stillness in which the sun seemed to hover like a red balloon above the western horizon, the entire sky catching fire from the death of day, a sunset unique to the American Midwest and ignored by most of its inhabitants. The twilight brought the promise of coolness and the certain threat of night.
Mike had meant to nap during the day-he was so tired that his eyelids felt gritty and his throat was sore from fatigue-but there was too much to do. "Vandals' had torn the screen off Memo's window during the night; Mike's mother had heard the noise and gone rushing in to see the breeze blowing papers and old sepia photographs off Memo's table, the curtains billowing out wildly into the yard as if someone had just passed through them.
Memo was all right, although agitated to the point that her Winking made no sense and she would not wait for questions to answer. Mike's mother was upset-at the vandalism, at the fact of her son's obsession coming true. She had called her husband at work and then called Barney, who had come over in the middle of the night, scratched his head, and said that vandals had been a problem that summer and asked Mrs. O'Rourke if Michael or any of the girls had had a run-in with C. J. Congden or Archie Kreck. Mike's mom had said that her girls were not allowed to talk to trash like Congden or Kreck and that Mike didn't have anything to do with them; then she asked if this vandalism and the Peeping Tom Mike had seen might be related to the killing of Mrs. Moon's cats-a crime the entire town was talking about. Barney had scratched his head again, promised that he'd patrol by their house more often, and gone about his business. Mike's dad had called back from the brewery and said that he'd been able to change shifts with someone and that after Saturday night, he'd be off nights for the entire summer rather than just three weeks.
Mike had repaired the screen-his mom had retrieved it and locked it in place, but the latch had been torn out of the sill and the frame had been broken in two places-and while doing so he noticed the slime. It was dried to the color and texture of old mucus and wasn't immediately visible because of the torn filaments of the screen itself. But it was there. Mike had touched it and shuddered.
Once, a couple of years earlier when Mike was eight or nine, he and his dad had been fishing on some dark tributary of the Spoon when Mike had hooked an eel. Freshwater eels were rare even on the broader Illinois River, and Mike had never seen one before. As soon as the long, yellow-green, snakelike body broke the surface, Mike had thought water moccasin and turned to run, forgetting for a second that he was in a rowboat. His dad caught him by a belt loop just as Mike was leaving the boat at high speed, and-intrigued by the writhing thing on the end of the boy's line-had reeled in first his son and then the eel, ordering Mike to use the net on it.
Mike remembered his revulsion and fascination at the thing. The eel's body was thicker than that of a snake, more reptilian and ancient somehow, and it rippled and flowed like something not spawned on this world. The body was coated with a layer of ooze, as if the thing secreted mucus. The long jaws were lined with needle-sharp teeth.
Mike's dad had tied off the net and lashed it to the side of the boat to keep the thing alive in the water until they returned to the bridge where they'd parked, and they slowly trolled back that way, Mike aware of the writhing thing just below the waterline. But when they beached the small boat, the eel was gone. It had somehow slithered through a gap in the net one-fifth the diameter of its body. All that was left was a coating of slime, as if the thing's skin and flesh had been mostly liquid and not too important to leave behind.
Just like the goop on the screen.
Mike cleaned the remaining windowscreen with kerosene, as if to kill any germs left behind, re-glued and stapled the frame as best he could, replaced the broken part of the screen, and set it back in place, adding two more latches-one on the lower sill and one on the upper.
He found the bit of consecrated Host in the dirt below the window. He imagined the Soldier sliding upward to that window in the dead of night, its fingers flowing between the grille of the screen, its long snout questing toward Memo like a lamprey closing on a particularly juicy fish…
Had the Host and the holy water stopped it? Or was it the Soldier at all? Possibly some other thing had come for his grandmother last night…
Mike felt like crying. His clever scheme had ended in confusion and near disaster. Mike had seen the Rendering Truck set back in the trees behind the Black Tree. He had smelled it. And that stench of death could have been from the rotting bodies of his friends if they had chosen to ride home on their bikes the way he had planned.
