It's Alive! (17 page)

Perkins spread his arms and stopped them. “Everybody got their safeties off?” he whispered.

He heard one click, and scowled.

He began moving forward again.

From outside came a hoarse, whispered call, “Troopers!” followed by the thudding steps of running boots, then more whispers.

“What the hell they doing out there?” Perkins murmured.

They listened.

“He’s asking them if they seen Darcey, lieutenant.”

Perkins snatched a cigar from his jacket pocket and stuck it in his mouth.

They were at the closed door. Perkins put his hand on the knob, then took his hand off and stepped back. He slowly brought his right foot up to the level of his belly, then smashed it against the door, breaking the latch and slamming the door open against the wall, the crash echoing through the school.

Lights shined straight ahead.

“Window’s open.”

He edged in along the shattered door, running his light quickly around the room. Then down, under the window, on the floor.

No more caution. His men burst into the room and dropped to the side of the uniformed body whose fresh blood was spilling from the gouge in his throat and oozing along the baseboard.

“He ain’t ours, lieutenant,” one of Perkins’s men called out.

Captain Sanford and his men poured into the room and dashed to the fallen figure. “No, he ain’t yours. Ours. Darcey.”

Perkins lunged for the window and leaned out. Drainpipe just to his left, half pulled away from the brick. Tracks on it, sliding, red. Not paint, blood. He looked down at the ground. “Where the hell’s the Troopers was supposed to be on this side of the building?” he roared.

They came running over the grass from the front. “We’re here, sir, just checking on one of our men.”

Sanford leaned out the window beside Perkins. “So it went out the window and down the pipe.”

“Yeah.”

“And my men weren’t covering the ground.”

“Nope.”

“I’ll have to take responsibility for that.”

“Don’t tell
me
about it, captain, goddam it! Tell your men about their buddy!”

State and local policemen stood staring down where the beams of their flashlights covered the body of their slaughtered comrade.

“Okay,” Detective Perkins chomped down hard on his cigar, “somebody find me a phone. I can’t wait no longer. I gotta get Davis up here and ask him some things.”

Frank arrived at the school to see flashlight beams waving around the playground and in nearby lawns and shrubbery. He went to the front door, where he was confronted by two policemen standing with legs apart and nightsticks in front of them.

“I’m Frank Davis, here to see Detective Perkins. What’s going on out there?”

“Afraid you’ll have to ask Lieutenant Perkins about that, sir. We aren’t allowed to answer any questions.”

“I passed an ambulance on the way here. Anything to do with this?”

“I’ll show you to Lieutenant Perkins, sir, he’s right inside.”

Perkins was seated at the principal’s desk, surrounded by several aides manning communications equipment. Captain Sanford slumped on a chair in the corner.

Perkins nodded to Frank and motioned to a chair.

“What’s going on around here, lieutenant? What was that ambulance doing?”

“I’m afraid the school had a visitor, Mr. Davis. I’m afraid it was your kid.”

Frank squirmed. “I wish you wouldn’t refer to it that way.”

“I know you don’t like it, Mr. Davis, but it’s time we all faced up to a few things. I didn’t call you over here because you were just an interested bystander, you know.”

“I know. You got it, then? It was in the ambulance?”

“No. We ain’t got it. Close, but no cigar.” Which reminded him to take out a fresh one and jam it between his teeth. “It was a cop in the ambulance. Trooper. One of Captain Sanford’s men there.”

“I’m sorry, captain. Was he hurt bad?”

Captain Sanford turned his face to the wall.

“Dead like the others,” Perkins said. “Throat carved out. Killed him upstairs, slid down a drainpipe, and got away across the grounds somewhere.”

Frank stared at him, stunned. “So it’s still out there.”

“Tell me about it, Davis. Look, I haven’t brought you into this much before now, because I didn’t want to upset you any more than you are, and also because frankly I didn’t think you could help us that much. Maybe you can’t. But I want to go over a few things with you, just between us.”

“Okay. Could you make it quick, lieutenant? I left my wife at home alone, you know.”

“I know. We’re keeping an eye on the place.”

“I hope your men aren’t stomping around outside. It’ll scare her to death. And you better not have sent them inside either, because we don’t want anybody—”

“I know all that. They’re keeping an eye on it, that’s all. She won’t even know they’re there. Let’s take a little walk, you and me.”

They left the office and walked down the hall. Detective Perkins nodded at his man stationed outside the kindergarten room, and he and Frank went inside and closed the door behind them.

Lights were now on in the school. Perkins just stood and let Frank’s eyes wander over the room.

“Well, what about it, lieutenant? What am I supposed to see?”

“This the room where your wife taught?”

“Yeah. Not full-time. Substitute. But when she was at the school, this is where she worked.”

“How often?”

“Maybe once a week, or less. Until the regular teacher got sick. She’s been here quite a bit lately. She changed it a lot, improved it. She cared a lot about—”

“How changed it?”

“Well, the toys, for example. She’s responsible for most of the stuff you see here. They used to have a lot of junk for the kids to play with: old metal toys, broken stuff, dirty things that had been here for years. There never seemed to be enough money for modern toys, good ones. But, see, I have this account in my public-relations business—or had the account. It was a toy company. And we were able to have the school get a whole bunch of new toys at discount. It’s just like what we have at home. My boy’s eleven now, but he used to play with stuff just like this. In fact, seeing all these things is like walking into his old room at home.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Something wrong with that?”

“Nope. But this is the room that thing came to. This is where my man first heard it. Like it was playing with this stuff.” Detective Perkins knelt and shoved some of the blocks and trucks around. He picked up the merry-go-round and wound it up. He held it while it played its song.

“My son’s got the same one.”

“Yeah? Interesting.”

“Well, if it’s anything like a real human kid, it probably likes to play with toys.”

“Yeah. When’s the last time you or any member of your family was in this room?”

“Well, Chris goes to school here, but I doubt that he’d come into this room. Let’s see. My wife was pregnant, as you know, but they waived the rules to let her keep coming in, since the regular teacher was sick. She worked pretty much right up until recently. I don’t know the last day.”

“Okay.”

“Look, if you’re telling me she had something to do with—”

“When I want to tell you something, I’ll tell you, Mr. Davis. I’m just asking, at this point in time. Just asking. Don’t read too much into it. Let’s go upstairs.”

Men were posted outside every room. Frank and Detective Perkins went into the room where the body of the Trooper had been found.

“He was right over there, under that window, Mr. Davis.” Bloodstains were still evident. “The window was open. Come over here.” They leaned out the window together. “See this drainpipe? Now, you and I couldn’t reach it from here. But see the blood on it? That’s the way the kid got down. Then it musta just took off.”

“After you were already here?”

“Right.”

“But why didn’t you have men outside—”

“We can’t be everywhere. It got by us. We don’t know exactly how.” A score of men were scouring the yards and driveways in the neighborhood. “It’s probably not in the immediate area any longer. We found a little blood on the grass right down there.”

“Why don’t you use dogs?”

“Tried dogs. They get confused. They just want to follow the scent of the blood, and that down there ain’t the blood of the thing we’re after. If it had a lot of blood on it, they
could
track it that way. But it just had a little on its feet, and it disappeared after it hit the ground. Either that thing don’t have no scent of its own, or it’s not a scent the dogs go for. And we haven’t got anything from the thing to wave in front of their noses.”

He pulled back in from the window and leaned against the wall, chewing on his cigar. “So now, all of this give you any ideas?”

“Me? How? Am I supposed to have it figured out somehow?”

“Nope. Just wondering what you thought.”

“What I
thought!
Jesus! I think you better catch it, that’s all.”

“It ain’t leaving town, apparently.”

“No.”

“And it seems to me it’s getting kind of bold.”

“How? Because it came into the school?”

“That, and what maybe happened the night before. You know the rag lady?”

“Everybody does.”

“Well, she says she saw the thing the night before, swinging in the playground.”

“You believe her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did it attack her?”

“Nope.”

“Well, why not?”

“Mr. Davis, I don’t know why it does attack, or why it doesn’t.”

“But the rag lady dreams up all kinds of—”

“Look, if you suddenly came in here today from New York City, and I told you this whole story of what’s been going on around here, you’d figure I was dreaming. This whole goddam mess is like somebody’s science-fiction dream. So I’m very careful about what I laugh off.”

“I understand.”

“So I ain’t saying she saw it, I ain’t saying she didn’t. But one night she says she saw it in the playground, the next night it’s in the school, right next door. I’d say that’s getting bold.”

“I . . . see.”

“Somebody at the hospital yesterday said something about it might be getting cold.”

“Why?”

“It mighta took the rag lady’s rags. They were gone. Maybe to build a nest, a guy said, something about adrenaline, needing adrenaline.”

“Then do they know something about its physical makeup?”

“I don’t know. How’s your wife lately?”

“Tired, naturally. Upset. Depressed.”

“Cold?”

“Hey, come on, lieutenant! What’re you trying to say? When people get over-tired they almost always feel cold. You trying to make some kind of ghost story out of this? Some kind of supernatural nonsense?”

“Nope. Some kind of natural nonsense. I wish it
was
a ghost story. I ain’t a doctor, but it seems to me that the thing must have something from both of you in it, something of your makeup, your genes, your blood, your brains—something.”

“Now, dammit! I don’t have to listen to that! Everybody’s trying to make us into monsters. This isn’t a damn human kid!”

“It ain’t a raisin either, Mr. Davis. It ain’t a dream and it ain’t a Martian.”

“But that’s just the kind of talk that gets spread around, starts rumors that we’re weirdos, cost me my job—”

“You lost your job over this?”

Frank stared out the window, his eyes heavy with fatigue. “Yeah. You can’t be in public relations with this kind of cloud hanging over your head.”

“Sorry to hear that. But it’s for just that reason that
I
haven’t spread this kind of talk.”

“You haven’t?”

“Nope. Not to anybody. Like I said, this is just between you and me.”

“But I don’t understand. I thought you said you were talking to people at the hospital about—”

“Listening, Mr. Davis, just listening. My job ain’t to tell stories, or to gossip. But my job
is
to listen, to everything and everybody. I been a cop for twenty years. I solve my cases. I don’t blabber about it. If I have suspicions, I tell them only to those of my men who need to know. I keep things to myself until I’m sure. Right now my job is to catch whatever kind of thing we’re after. I ain’t sure what it is, where it is, or what it’s gonna do next. I ain’t sure about anything. That’s why I’m still listening to everything. You’ve been helpful.”

“How?”

“I ain’t sure.”