The Siege (2 page)

“And then I dived,

In my lone wanderings, to the caves of Death,

Searching its cause in its effect; and drew

From withered bones, and skulls, and heaped up dust,

Conclusions most forbidden.”

—Lord Byron

“Run to escape, for they hurl their ghostly tracking against you, serpent-fisted and blackened of flesh, offering the fruit of terrible pain.”

—Euripides

“Heading North”

I

—
W
ho’s dead now?
—

That was the first thought in Dale Harmon’s mind when the harsh ringing of the telephone sliced into his sleep. Through sleep-blurred eyes, he saw the glowing red digits of his alarm clock—

2:37 A.M.

“Damn!”

The numbers were swimming in his vision as his hand fumbled for the receiver. He knocked the empty water glass from his bed stand, but luckily it didn’t break and went skittering off somewhere into the darkness. Finally, after one more nerve-jangling ring, he found the phone and, grunting, rolled into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. Chills darted up the back of his legs when his feet hit the cold floor.

—
Who died this time?
his mind screamed.

Angie was safe in bed, he knew
that
much even through the haze; so how bad
could
it be?

A dash of fear, as cold and numbing as ice, seemed to jab at him from the surrounding darkness and slam into his stomach. Suddenly, in his confusion, it was eight and a half years ago

That
telephone call had come at 11:30 P.M., more or less. It was back in the days when he didn’t have a digital wristwatch, and he rounded off time to the nearest quarter hour. Even back then, though,
any
call after ten o’clock usually meant some kind of trouble, unless it was his brother, calling from Omaha and not keeping the time difference in mind.

That
telephone call hadn’t caught him asleep because he had been sitting up watching Johnny Carson… watching and waiting! Angie had been just shy of four years old then, and she had been blissfully asleep for hours, but not Dale… not as long as Natalie still wasn’t home.

Her class at the University of Maine in Augusta should have been cancelled as soon as the storm started; and even when the forecasters said it wasn’t going to amount to much, Dale, especially with 20/20 hindsight, knew he should have pushed harder to make her stay home. How serious could it be to miss one class? She had the highest grade going into the final week of the semester, and he had seen no sense taking any chances on the hour-long drive from Thomaston to Augusta and back, especially if the roads near the coast iced up.

And then
that
telephone call had come…

—“We’re sorry to tell you this, Mr. Harmon, but there’s been an accident.”

—“What happened?” he remembered saying, although even before the state trooper told him Natalie was dead, he knew it… he felt it coming like a hammer-fisted blast of wind.

—“… lost control on Route 17… just outside of Coopers Mills.”

“Is she… all right?” Dale had asked, his throat raw. He wasn’t even hearing what the trooper was saying. The details—such as the exact time and place could wait. What he wanted… what he
had
to know was…

—“
killed instantly, I’m afraid
…”

The words drove into his brain like an overheating drill. Dale remembered looking at the television and seeing mouths move but not hearing what they said because of the rushing sound in his ears. His vision had blurred until Johnny Carson’s face looked like watercolors left out in the rain.

—“…trucker never even saw her. The snow must’ve masked her headlights.”

The state trooper had spoken some more, had offered to come and pick him up, but Dale’s mind had blanked, and he couldn’t think of anyone he could call to have come and sit with Angie while he went down to the police station. Probably the person closest to him, someone who wouldn’t mind getting a call to help out at this late hour, would have been Larry Cole, his co-worker. He didn’t live too far away.

…That was eight years ago…

“Hello, Dale?” the voice on the phone said.

“Uh, yeah,” Dale replied sleepily, his eye still fastened on the glowing red digits. He recognized the voice on the other end; it was Bob Nichols, his boss at the Department of Transportation.

The receiver was slick in his hand as he groped for the light switch with his other hand, found it, and snapped it on. Yellow light filled the room, hurting his eyes.

“Sorry to call you so late,” Nichols said gruffly.

Still staring at the clock—
2:38 A.M
.—Dale said, “ ’S not late; it’s early.” His hand muffled his voice as he rubbed his face, trying to pull his awareness up to the surface.

“There’s been an accident up north,” Nichols said, and for the first time Dale registered just how strange his boss’s voice sounded. It was wound up so tight Dale was fearful it would crack. He tried to imagine gruff old Nichols so upset his voice almost cracked.

“What?” Dale said, confused. As far as he knew, there wasn’t any major construction up north. All they had going now was the preliminary survey work on the road between Haynesville and Houlton, and that was being handled by…

“Oh, no,” Dale said as a chilling thought filled his mind. “Not
Larry
!”

“ ’Fraid so,” Nichols said. “He lost control on one of the back roads and went straight into a tree.”

“Is he—?”

“I’m afraid he’s dead, Dale,” Nichols said, and now it happened his voice
did
crack, and Dale clearly heard his boss begin to sob.

“Jesus Christ!”

“I’m sorry I have to be the one to tell you,” Nichols said, fighting to control his voice. “I know how close you and he were.”

“Yeah,” Dale said, feeling numb all over as the realization that he’d lost not just a co-worker, but a close friend as well, worked deeper and deeper into his mind.

—
First Natalie!… Now Larry! Christ!

“I haven’t got all the details yet,” Nichols said, “but I assume, since he was from up that way, he’ll be buried in his hometown. Where was he from?”

“He, uh, he grew up in Dyer,” Dale said. Coming through the receiver, his own voice sounded oddly distorted, as if someone else was using his mouth to talk.

“ ’Course, I figure you’ll want to go up there for the funeral. You’ve still got two weeks vacation coming, right?”

“Huh?”

“You have some time off coming,” Nichols repeated. “I assume you’ll drive up for the funeral.”

“Yeah… I will,” Dale said. Now, even though his eyes were fully adjusted to the bright light, he noticed that the red digits on the clock were shimmering and shifting. The minute number changed, and he assumed it had turned to 2:39, but he couldn’t be sure; warm tears made it impossible for him to see.

Nichols was respectfully silent for a moment, then he cleared his throat and said, “I wish I could make it, too, but we’ve got that budget meeting on Tuesday morning. You’ll have to represent the department. ’Course, well send flowers and condolences to the family.”

“There’s just his mom left,” Dale said, surprised he could still talk through the jumble of memories flooding his mind. And at the bottom of it all was the icy thought that it was all over—

Larry was dead and would be buried in two days!

No more chances to store up any more memories, not even the slightest ones.

It’s horrible how life can suddenly turn like this!
he thought. Already he could feel the anger, just like when Natalie died, stewing with the empty feeling of grief and loss.

“Thanks for letting me know,” he said.

Nichols started to say something, then stopped himself and simply grunted. For some reason, that made Dale like him all the more; his boss knew there was nothing he or anyone could say to take away the razor-edged pain.

“Thanks for the time off, too,” Dale said. “But I’ll just take a week.”

“You’ve got two coming,” Nichols said, almost brightly, as if the offer could help.

“Thanks… one’s plenty,” Dale said, then hung up. He had to restrain himself from slamming down the phone. He turned out the light and lay back down, his hands cradling his head, staring wide-eyed at the blackness of his bedroom ceiling until morning stained the sky a burnished gray.

II

“T
his is really friggin’ stupid! I don’t see why we don’t just get on the turnpike and hitch,” Tasha Steward said. She didn’t care if her irritation showed. They had been walking since sometime around three o’clock in the morning, and she was much too uncomfortable to care what her travelling companion thought.

She stared angrily at the back of the man she had been travelling with since they joined up near Fredericksburg, Virginia, and she wished for the millionth time she had left him behind long ago. He, like her—although for different reasons—was heading to northern Maine, and any company was better than none, she supposed.

His name was Roy Moulton, but because of his habit of frequently clearing his throat and spitting, especially when he was nervous or upset, she had taken to calling him “Hocker.” And it hadn’t taken her long to realize there was definitely something—a lot of something—weird about him.

For one thing, and she knew she should have deserted him as soon as he told her this, he had readily admitted that he had “walked out of” (“escaped,” she figured) a mental hospital in Athens, Georgia. During their journey north, she had had plenty of time to wonder exactly why he had been hospitalized. She wasn’t entirely convinced by his reason: that his aunt and uncle had wanted to “get rid of” him after his mother died. His father, he told her, had gone to the store for cigarettes and never returned when Hocker was six years old.

For another thing, Tasha had to consider how he travelled. It had taken her a while to see the pattern, but there was a definite pattern. They would hitchhike just as bold as could be along major turnpikes, usually I-95, even getting stopped and questioned by the cops now and then; but then, for no apparent reason, Hocker would suddenly demand that they leave the highway for a backroad, and they would spend several days passing through one small, nameless town after another. Then, acting as if some danger of which only he was aware was over, he would just as suddenly say it was all right for them to get back onto the turnpike, which they would travel a few days until they were off again onto some twisting two-lane backroads. That had slowed their progress down considerably. Tasha was beginning to wonder if, at the rate they were going, they’d even make it to northern Maine before snow fell. But most of all she just wondered why Hocker used such a strange leapfrog method of travel.

She failed to see why Hocker would suddenly want to get off the highway. It made no sense at all. It wasn’t to buy food or other supplies because they could get everything they needed in any of the sprawling shopping malls along the turnpike. It was almost as if… as if Hocker was on a mission of some kind… of that he felt suddenly threatened or pursued. By
what
, Tasha didn’t know… and she wasn’t so sure she wanted to find out, either.

Whatever the reason, Tasha had learned not to resist him; the first and only time she had done that, he had threatened to “make her sorry” if she didn’t come with him.

Lying awake late at night and on early morning walks like now, Tasha wondered if maybe Hocker had been hospitalized for something a bit more serious than “family squabbles.” Secretly, she wondered if he might not have it within him to kill her and leave her buried in some nameless, shallow grave along the highway. Maybe he was one of those serial killers who cuts a notch into his belt for each woman he murders. But of course, Tasha was pretty sure she could handle herself. Anyway, she figured if Hocker was going to off her, he would have done it long before now. No, there were a lot of things weird about him, but he wasn’t a murderer….

As they walked along, Tasha kept looking at the wispy gray traces of morning mist still clinging to low spots along the side of the road. She imagined tattered, shrouded ghosts—
maybe the ghosts of mass-murderer Hocker’s victims
—drifting noiselessly along the road with him, following them north. Droplets of dew clung to grass and bushes like ripe berries, ready to fall or fade as the sun angled its light through the leaves overhead. They were on the outskirts of a small town. It was Holden, Maine, Hocker informed her. Tasha could just about care; all she was interested in was maybe grabbing breakfast at a roadside diner because she was so damned sick of beans and soup heated in their cans over a campfire.

Hocker made a deep rumbling in his chest, worked a wad of spit back and forth in his mouth, and then sent it sailing into the air. It arched gracefully, two globs joined by a silver filament twisting end over end, and then landed—
splat
—on a dew-slick stop sign.

“Hot damn!” Hocker said, pausing to watch with child-like intensity as his saliva slowly slid down to the edge of metal, hung suspended for a moment, and then dropped to the pavement. The sound it made when it hit reminded Tasha of her mother’s parrot, when his turds hit the newspaper lining his cage.

“This is bullshit, and you know it,” Tasha said sourly as they resumed walking. “I’m cold and wet, and my friggin’ legs are so tired I can barely feel them.”