Anything Can Be Dangerous (25 page)

~~~~ PROLOGUE: CLOVEN ROCK

The people that lived in Cloven Rock
considered the town’s final Monday a beautiful one, like most of
the days in the recent weeks. The sun was shining; the air was
clean and warm. Flowers bloomed and birds sat among the branches
singing songs only birds could understand. Dogs chased master’s
Frisbees and people said hello to strangers, not to suggest that
thousands of tourists roamed the beachfront or the area that passed
as the downtown core. That wasn’t the case; there were only a few.
If you asked one of the locals why things were this way, the answer
would be simple: Cloven Rock was an inclusive town, an
uncomplicated town, a town that didn’t encourage a vacationer crowd
even though sightseers would have flocked to it religiously. Many
residents thought the town was special and they were right.
It
was
special. It wasn’t a
small place trying to be a big place. It was a town without civic
uncertainty.

The Yacht Club Swimming Pool, a Cloven
Rock favorite, had a full house the day before the town was lost.
They also had an open door policy; if you were respectful,
courteous, and didn’t pee in the pool, you were welcome anytime.
Also on that day, friends sailed the calm waters of Cloven Lake and
children built sandcastles on Holbrook Beach. Kids played in Easton
Park while the people on the large wooden deck at the Waterfront
Café enjoyed the spectacular view. The post office closed early. An
ice cream store called Tabby’s Goodies was doing good business and
a mile and a half up the road the men and woman working at the
Cloven Rock Docks fought for, and won, a fifty-cent raise. Spirits
were high at the Docks, and the personnel were getting along just
fine. It wasn’t surprising. Nearly half the workforce was related
and the other half was considered family.

The Cloven Rock Police Department was
not at full strength when things turned ugly. One officer was on
vacation, one had gone home due to an illness in the family, and
two had the day off. Of the nine remaining officials, only Tony
Costantino, Joel Kirkwood, and Mary O’Neill, were on duty when the
reports came in. The other four were either at home or on call.
Normally this wouldn’t be deemed a problem. Most locals figured a
thirteen-person police force was nothing short of overkill anyhow.
The Rock hadn’t had a stitch of recorded violence in six
years.

The community as a whole didn’t know
horror, as most tight-knit communities can understand. It knew long
days, family activities, and simple living. It knew Thanksgiving,
Christmas, and Easter. It knew family.

But sadly, like all communities,
Cloven Rock had its share of tragedy.

2007 was a bad year.

It was the year a local artist named
George Gramme had his hands caught in his motorcycle chain while he
was working on it. He suffered two broken wrists and lost four of
his fingers. He also lost his artistic spirit and the means to keep
that spirit alive. In the weeks following, he put his motorcycle up
for sale and fell into a state of depression that changed him into
a different man.

Two weeks later the town’s senior
librarian, Angela Lore, died from cancer on the same day that
‘odd-job’ Martin West fell off a ladder and broke both of his legs
while shingling his neighbor’s roof.

2007 was also the year a car accident
claimed the lives of three teenagers.

As the story goes, a half dozen
youngsters were drinking on the unnamed road surrounding Holbrook’s
pond. After several hours of alcohol consumption, the six youths
plunked their butts inside two vehicles. In one car, Andrew Cowles
and Dean Lee, a pair of borderline delinquents, drove home without
incident and arrived safely. The second car, loaded with four of
the sweetest kids you’d ever meet, weren’t so lucky. Two brothers,
Guy and Henri Lemont, along with May Lewis and Lizzy Backstrom, the
youngest of the crew, decided it would be a good idea to take a
quick jaunt to Hoppers Gas on the
9
^th
line. But on the way to
Hoppers
something
stepped onto
the road causing Guy to swerve left and lose control of the
vehicle.

As luck would have it, Stanley
Rosenstein, a foreman at the Docks and an all-around good guy,
pulled his truck from his driveway the same moment Guy changed
lanes.

Guy didn’t see the truck in time. The
car clipped Stanley’s front bumper, veered off the road, rolled
three times, and slammed into a large maple tree, roof first. The
two brothers, Guy and Henri, were killed instantly. May Lewis spent
nine days in critical condition before she passed away while her
parents and grandparents watched. Lizzy Backstrom escaped with a
broken back, three broken ribs, a punctured lung, two broken legs,
and wide assortment of cuts, scrapes and bruises. Most figured she
was lucky to be alive. A few figured she was
unlucky
to be alive. Once she was able to speak
she said a bear stepped in front of the car and Guy swerved to miss
it. There weren’t many bears in Cloven Rock so the statement
generated a cluster of questions she wasn’t prepared to answer. She
pushed the inquisition aside, saying, “It might not have been a
bear but wasn’t a deer either. I don’t know what it
was.”

Two months later, Lizzy broke down in
tears, telling her friend Julie Stapleton that a monster
the size of a tank
stepped in front
of Guy’s car and she got a real good look at it. She said the beast
seemed like something from another planet and if Guy were alive
he’d be the first to confirm.

Julie, sworn to secrecy, became
worried about Lizzy’s mental wellbeing. She thought her friend had
brain damage. Of course, Julie’s knowledge on matters concerning
the brain could have been written on the on tip of her thumb, but
that hardly mattered. She also didn’t know that Stanley
Rosenstein––the man driving the pickup that fateful night––had a
similar story. If she had known this little noodle of information
she may have kept her big mouth shut. Or talked to Lizzy. Either
way, that’s not what happened. Instead, Julie betrayed her oath,
feeling it was necessary to tell Lizzy’s parents what their
daughter was thinking. This forced a confrontation between Mr. and
Mrs. Backstrom and Lizzy, who denied everything and never spoke to
Julie again. Not ever. And a year later Stanley Rosenstein found
himself separated from his wife, in rehab, and in need of
psychiatric evaluation.

He thought there were monsters in
Cloven Rock.

* * *

There were other tragedies.

Four summers before the heartbreaking
car accident Simon Wakefield, the town’s only dentist, drowned in
his backyard swimming pool while his wife Leanne talked to her
sister not forty feet away. The year before that, faulty wiring
caused a fire that burned Stephen Pebbles’ house to the ground. To
make matters worse, his insurance expired the week before.
Ironically, two weeks later the town was hit with a rainstorm that
caused over two million dollars in damages. Stephen was quoted as
saying that the rain should have come two weeks sooner; it would
have saved his life’s investments.

The tales go on: tales of love gone
astray, broken homes, poor health, and financial ruin. But these
stories shouldn’t be focused on, even if they’re commonly
considered the most interesting. Tales of sorrow don’t express the
true face of Cloven Rock’s two hundred and nine years of existence.
They pepper it in a negative light that was seldom felt or
witnessed.

Cloven Rock was a peaceful community,
a pleasant community. It was a place where folks could retire from
work and enjoy a simple life. The town was good to grow up in, good
to live life in, and good to grow old in. The problems were minimal
and living was easy. People were friendly and the air tasted sweet
with the spice of nature.

On the eve of its extinction, nobody
knew what was coming. The locals never expected terror to reveal
its vile and horrid face. Not in Cloven Rock. Not in a town of
1,690. The concept seemed out of the question.

But they didn’t know the heart of
Nicolas Nehalem.

And only Stanley Rosenstein and Lizzy
Backstrom had seen the monsters that dwelled in the dark shadows
beneath the streets.

Something from another
planet
, Lizzy had said.
If Guy
were alive he’d be the first to confirm.

Stanley Rosenstein would have
agreed.

It was the first Monday of June when
Cloven Rock began showing the world a different face. And for many
of the people that lived in the undersized and joyful town, it
would be the last Monday they would ever know.

This is what happened:

* * *

~~~~ NICOLAS NEHALEM

Nicolas Nehalem woke up from a happy
dream and shifted his near-dead weight into a new position. His
eyes opened and closed, opened and closed. He licked the dryness
from his lips and ran his tongue across his teeth while forcing
himself awake. The dream faded; he was some form of insect, if he
remembered correctly, and upon awaking he noticed that his left
hand felt funny. He could feel pins and needles pricking his
fingers and a lack of sensation in his thumb and wrist. He must
have been sleeping wrong, cutting off the circulation.

No biggie; it would pass.

The room was dark. A cool breeze blew
through the open window, causing the thin off-white drapes to
flutter. The clock on the nightstand said it was 4:08 am and while
Nicolas was looking at it time moved ahead by one
minute.

The babies were crying again. And they
were crying
loudly
.

It was the crying that woke him. The
babies seemed to cry more and more these days. He wondered if the
girls missed their mothers. It was only logical if they
did.

Nicolas sat up. He clicked on a lamp,
grabbed his librarian-issue spectacles from the nightstand, and
slid them on his face. He put his feet on the cold hardwood floor
one after another. CLUMP. CLUMP. For no real reason he looked over
his shoulder, lifted his feet, and dropped them down again. CLUMP.
CLUMP.

The other side of the bed was empty.
It was always empty.

He put a hand into the vacant space
and squeezed the sheets with his fingers.

Taking care of the girls would be
easier if he wasn’t alone with the job. Being a father was hard,
and being an only parent was harder still. Some days he wasn’t sure
if he could take the pressure of fatherhood. It was tougher than it
seemed.

He pulled his hand away from the
sheets and stumbled across the room. He entered the bathroom,
washed his hands very thoroughly and poured himself a cup of water.
The cup had a picture of a clown on it. The clown had a big red
nose and was holding a balloon. The water inside the mug was warm
but he didn’t mind. His throat felt parched and the liquid quenched
his thirst nicely. He poured himself a second helping, re-entered
the bedroom, and sat the cup on the nightstand, next to the clock
and the lamp.

A brown-checkered housecoat hung from
a shiny brass hook on the bedroom door. A pair of furry blue
slippers sat near the dresser. He put the housecoat on and tied the
cotton belt in a cute little bow. He slid his feet into the
slippers and stumbled down the hall, rubbing the sleep-cooties from
his eyes.

With a yawn and a burp he glanced into
a spare bedroom.

The room was loaded with boxes. Not
empty boxes. Full boxes. Boxes filled with goodies that go
BANG.

Beside this room was a second spare
bedroom. He stopped at the door and looked inside. There was no bed
in the room. No dressers either. Nicolas had converted the room
into his own private laboratory.

He was making stuff, just in
case.

He had boxes of diatomaceous earth,
sodium carbonate, ballistite, ethanol, ether, guncotton, sulfuric
acid, oleum, azeotropic, nitric acid, and about ten other things
that were hard to find at the local convenience store. He also had
a large maple desk that housed a laboratory distillation setup.
This setup included a heating tray, a still pot, a boiling
thermometer, condenser, distillate/receiving flask, a vacuum/gas
inlet, a still receiver, a heating bath, and a cooling
bath.

Looking at his toys, Nicolas nodded
and smiled.

They were fine; he was just making
sure.

He entered the kitchen, flicked on the
overhead light, and opened the refrigerator door. The inside of the
fridge needed to be cleaned; it had adopted a funny smell. There
were a few items that had really gone bad, including an old turkey
sandwich that was sitting behind an empty carton of orange juice on
the bottom shelf. The sandwich was nearly four weeks old and had
turned green and black with mold. The spores inside the sandwich
bag looked like moon craters.

Nicolas didn’t notice. Or maybe he
didn’t care.

A bottle of baby formula sat on the
top shelf, ready to go. In Nicolas’ current state of semi-awareness
his fatherly duties just became ten times easier. It was a small
victory but a good one.