Summer of Night (70 page)

Dale had rolled up against the wall and covered his head with his arms. What was left of the railing was on fire, the bookshelves on the lower mezzanine had erupted into flames, the stained glass had melted and was running down the north wall, and every inch of the second-floor landing was smoking and charring beneath him.

Six feet away, Dr. Roon's pantlegs began smoldering and the soles of his shoes grew soft and shapeless.

In the open stairwell ten feet to Dale's left, the webs of pink flesh were flaming and melting like clotheslines in a burning tenement complex. The hissing of the soft material sounded like screams.

Dale stumbled through the smoldering doorway."

The classroom was on fire. The explosion had knocked everyone off their feet-living and dead alike-but Harlen had helped Mike to his feet and both boys were ripping at the bonds on Lawrence. Dale took time to sweep up Mike's squirrel gun from the floor and then joined them, pulling away the hardened strands from his brother's arms and throat.

Dale pulled Lawrence to his feet while Harlen tugged the chair away. Strands still remained, but Lawrence was able to stand and speak. He threw one arm around Dale, the other around Mike. He was crying and laughing at the same time.

"Later," shouted Dale, pointing toward the burning mass of desks and darkness where the Soldier and Van Syke had struggled to their feet. Tubby was in there somewhere.

Mike rubbed blood and sweat out of his eyes and fumbled the last shotgun shell from his pocket. He took the squirrel gun from Dale and loaded it. "Go on," he shouted through the smoke. "Get going. I'll cover you."

Dale half-led, half-carried his brother out onto the landing. Roon was gone. The edge of the landing was a wall of flame with bits of the web and egg sac falling in molten spheres from above.

Dale and Harlen staggered to the stairs with Lawrence between them. The library mezzanine and stairway below them was gone, replaced by a thirty-foot pyre of flames. It looked as if the stairway had collapsed all the way into the basement. The bricks glowed white hot.

"Up," said Dale. Mike backed out of the classroom and joined them as they moved quickly up the stairs to the next landing, then kept on going to the third floor that had been closed off for so many years.

There were hisses and screams from the 'empty' high school classrooms up there… rooms that had lain in darkness and cobwebs for decades. The boys did not wait around to investigate.

"Up." It was Mike speaking this time, pointing toward the narrow stairs to the belfry. The boards smoked and charred underfoot as they climbed. Dale heard noises below which might have been the central stairway collapsing into the inferno below.

They came out onto the narrow catwalk that ran around the inside of the belfry. The boards were narrow and rotten and Dale looked down once, saw the flames licking up toward him from the floor fifty feet below, and he did not look down again.

Instead he looked straight out at the thing hanging from its web in the center of the belfry.

The bulbous, translucent sac may have been bell-shaped at one time. Dale thought he saw the mountings and fixtures for a bell where the thing had anchored itself with the most tendrils and web attachments. It did not matter.

What he saw now looked back at him… at all of them… with a thousand eyes and a hundred pulsing mouths. Dale sensed the thing's outrage, the total disbelief that ten thousand years of quiet dominance could end in such farce… but mostly he sensed its rage and power.

You can still serve me. The Dark Age can still begin.

Dale and Lawrence and Harlen were staring right at the thing. They felt the tremendous warmth touch them… not just the heat from the flames, but the deeper warmth at knowing that they could serve the Master, possibly even save Him through their service.

Together, legs moving as a creature with one mind, the three of them took two steps toward the edge of the catwalk and the Master.

Mike raised Memo's squirrel gun and fired into the egg sac from a distance of six feet. The sac ruptured and dribbled its contents, hissing, into the rising flames.

Mike tugged them back and used the gun as a hammer to bash out the rotted slats on the side of the belfry.

Cordie woke up in time to drag the unconscious Grumbacher back from the conflagration. The front of his clothes was blackened, his eyebrows were gone, and it looked as if the explosion had knocked him back some distance.

She pulled him back to the elms and slapped his face until his eyes flickered open. Together they watched the small figures crawl onto the roof of the burning school.

"Shit," said Harlen, sliding down a steep pitch of gable to the edge of the roof, "I think I saw this scene in Mighty Joe Young." They all stood at the south edge of the school roof, hanging on to whatever handholds they could find. It was at least four stories to the hard-packed gravel and cement walks of the playground straight below.

"Look at it this way," gasped Dale, hanging on to Lawrence while Lawrence clung to a fist-sized hole in the shingled roof. "At least you'll get to use your ropes."

Harlen had unwound the first of two twenty-five-foot lengths of rope. Parts of it were charred and it looked anything but safe."Yeah," he said to himself,"but how?"

"Uh-oh," said Mike. He had been gripping the corner of a chimney and staring back the way they had come across the gable tops.

Behind them, a tall figure fought its way through the smoking belfry slats.

Dale couldn't make out anything except a black silhouette. "Is it the Soldier? Van Syke?"

"I don't think so," said Mike. "It must be Roon. I don't think the other things can move or act with their Master dead. They were like parts of a bigger thing." The boys watched as the dark figure disappeared behind a gable, moving toward them quickly. Mike turned and said quietly to Harlen, "If you're going to use that rope, I'd suggest you hurry.”

Harlen had tied a slip knot and now made a lasso." "I could rope that branch out there, we could swing out and down."

Dale and Lawrence and Mike stared at the high branches of the elm. They were at least thirty feet away and much too thin to hold even one of the boys.

Behind them, the figure reappeared along the central roofline and followed the same path to the south gable that they had. Smoke billowed from between the old shingles, half-obscuring the form, but Dale thought that he could make out Dr. Roon's black suit and bloodied features.

The heat from the burning north end of the building was terrible. The boys had to turn their faces away as the entire belfry went up.

"Hey," said Lawrence. "Look." Two or three miles away, illuminated by the wild strobes of lightning, a tornado had lowered itself from the black clouds whirling out of the southwest, the funnel rising and falling. For a long second the boys simply stared. Dale found himself silently urging the twister on, inviting it to come their way and finish everything here in a final maelstrom of destruction.

The tornado rose, dipped behind trees and fields far to the east, touched down somewhere beyond the town, and whipped away into the darkness toward the north. The wind suddenly rose as the storm front passed, pelting the boys with leaves and branches and threatening to pry them loose from their perch on the eave of the roof.

"Give me that," Mike said to Harlen. He took the rope, retied the knot, looped it over the four-foot chimney, and slid down to the edge to link the two lengths of rope together with quick, sure knots. He finished, tugged to test the rope, tossed the end over the eaves, and said, "You first," to Dale.

They could hear the dark figure scrabbling across shingles on the other side of the gable behind them.

Dale did not argue or hesitate. He swung onto the edge of the gutter, saw nothing but air beneath him, got his legs around the rope, and lowered himself over. He swung slightly at the overhang, feeling how flimsy the rope was.

Harlen helped lower Lawrence onto the rope and the two brothers started shinnying down, Dale acting as a brake for the smaller boy. He felt his hands beginning to tear and chafe.

"Go," said Mike. He was looking up the steep roof toward the gable, but Roon had not yet appeared.

"My arm," Harlen said softly.

Mike nodded and stepped to the edge. Dale and his brother were twenty feet down and still descending slowly. The rope did not go all the way to the ground but Mike couldn't tell how close it came.

"We'll go together," said Mike. He stood and pulled Har-len's arms around him from behind. "Hang on to me. I'll worry about the rope."

Dr. Roon came over the smoldering gable, moving on all fours like a spider with missing legs. A piece of shattered railing still protruded from his chest. He was gasping and growling, mouth open very wide.

"Hang on," said Mike, swinging Harlen and himself over the edge. The entire rooftop was smoldering and smoking; the fire had reached the attic. The chimney itself must be very hot against the rope, Mike knew.

"We'll never make it," Harlen gasped in his ear.

"We'll make it," said Mike, knowing that they wouldn't have time to lower themselves far before Roon reached the overhang above them. All he has to do is cut the rope.

Below them, Dale and Lawrence reached the end. They were still at the top level of the first-story window, at least fifteen feet from the ground.

"It's nothing," whispered Lawrence. "Do it." They both let go at the same second, hitting and rolling in the loose sand of the playground near the slide. It was nothing. They stood on shaky legs and ran back from the flames erupting from windows and the south door. Dale shielded his eyes and looked up at the outline of the two boys against the bright brick. They were halfway down, still thirty feet from the ground, with Harlen clinging to Mike's shoulders for all he was worth.

"Go! Go!" the brothers screamed at Mike as a dark figure appeared at the edge of the roof.

Mike glanced up, wrapped his arms and legs around the rope so that it wound around the inside of his arm and between his ankles, whispered "Hang on' again to Harlen, and let himself slide, the rope whining between his palms."

Dale and Lawrence watched in horror as Roon seemed to hesitate at the edge of the roof, glanced back up at the flame rising from the gable itself now, and then quickly looped a coil of rope around his wrist. Moving like a black spider, Roon lowered himself over the eaves above Mike and Harlen. He began to descend quickly.

"Oh, shit," whispered Lawrence.

Dale pointed and began to scream at Mike. Above the overhang, where neither Mike nor the rapidly descending Roon could see, the roof suddenly burst into a thousand discrete points of flame-like a piece of film acetate suddenly browning, melting, and burning through, Dale thought-and the long south gable collapsed inward with a shower of sparks that filled the sky. The old chimney stood by itself for a second, a brick tower in a geyser of fire, but then toppled inward.

"Jump!" screamed Dale and Lawrence in unison. Mike and Harlen fell free the last six or eight yards, landing hard and rolling in the deep sand.

Above them, the descending form of Dr. Roon was suddenly tugged upward as the rope jerked tight around its wrist. He threw his free arm out in the last second before he struck the overhang of the burning eave, was dragged above it, and disappeared into the firestorm, looking for an instant like a thrashing insect on a string being tossed into the flames of a campfire.

Dale and Lawrence rushed forward, arms raised against the heat, and dragged Mike and Harlen out past the playground equipment, into the ditch on the edge of School Street. The four of them watched as Kevin and Cordie made a wide circle of the burning, collapsing school to join them there.

Without warning, the streetlights and houselights of Elm Haven snapped on. The children huddled together, Cordie ripping the last of her dress into strips and wrapping them around Mike's bleeding hands. None of them thought it odd that she stood there in her gray slip, nor that Kevin was barefoot and bleeding, nor that the other four boys looked like chimney sweeps in sooty rags. Suddenly Lawrence started giggling and they all laughed until they cried, holding each other and pounding each other on the back.

Then, as the laughter died away before it turned to tears, Mike was whispering something, tugging Kevin close. "You heard somebody stealing your dad's truck," he gasped between coughs. He had inhaled too much smoke. "You called us on our toy walkie-talkies, we tried to catch up to it. We thought we saw Dr. Roon driving. Then it hit the school and the fire started."

"No," said Kevin dully, rubbing his temple,"that's not the way it happened…"

"Kevin!" said Mike, grabbing the boy's sooty t-shirt with a bloody hand and shaking him.

Kevin's eyes cleared. "Yesss," he said slowly. "Someone was stealing dad's truck. I went out to chase him."

"We couldn't catch up," said Dale.

"Then the fire started," said Lawrence. He squinted at the blaze. The roof had fallen in completely now, the belfry was gone, the windows had burned away and the walls were falling in. "And boy did it start."

"We don't know who or why," coughed Mike, sagging back onto the grass. "We tried to get the guy out of the truck and we got all messed up like this. But we don't know anything else."