Terror Town (16 page)

He put a hand on the wall and came up lucky, finding a light switch. Flicking it on, he came up lucky again: florescent lights sprang to life.

Now he could see.

The room was approximately half the size of the first room, with the ceiling being at the same height. It had a hallway at the far end. Stacked against each wall were hundreds of metal cases and wooden crates. Each case was marked with a simple government label. Some of the cases were small, the size of a lunch box. Others were about the size of a small car. There were a few old bones on the floor, scattered and broken. Pat didn’t notice the bones. He didn’t notice the boxes either, not really, not at first.

His eyes were focused elsewhere.

Hanging from the ceiling in the back corner of the room was a large cocoon. It was twenty feet wide and eight feet tall. Beneath the webbing, more cocoons were attached to the crates and walls. Two dozen of them. But these silk houses were smaller, each being roughly the size of a washing machine. They were white, mixed with a dusty black tinge that looked like coal dust.

While Pat eyed the cocoons he saw something that made his legs feel weak: some of the cocoons were shifting, moving, shaking. The things that lived inside were ready to hatch. And the pair of cocoons he didn’t see––the two on the ceiling, hanging directly above him––weren’t ready to hatch. They already had.

7

Stones crunched beneath the wheels and a tree branch grazed the roof as William pulled Daniel’s car onto the road.

Beth turned towards the backseat and studied Cameron’s face in the varying shadows. Touching her cheek, she said, “Cam might be dead already, you know. She looks dead.”

William flinched like he’d been slapped. “What was I supposed to do? She was trying to kill Daniel! She was trying to strangle him to death, right in front of me! She would have killed us all if she’d been given the chance! Don’t you know that?”

“Don’t get so upset.”

“But I
am
upset!
I am!”
William slammed a hand on the steering wheel, swallowing back half his frustration. “How can I not be upset? And what the hell was that thing in the shaft? Can you answer me that? It looked like something from a science fiction movie!”

“I don’t know what it was, but it was strong. I thought it was going to smash apart the trapdoor.”

“Damn right it was strong! Did you see how big it was? I’ve never seen anything like it!”

“You know,” Beth said, speaking with a curiously calm tone, a voice designed to relieve some of William’s tension. She looked down at her big hands and coupled her fingers together. “Scientists discover new species everyday. It happens so often its not even newsworthy. They’re finding an average of two new species a week in South America. Did you know that? It’s true. And I’m not just talking about bugs and stuff. I’m talking about all kinds of things. Bats and snakes and rodents that don’t look like anything at all.”

Beth was quite good in traumatic situations. She was a social worker in Maplebrook, a neighboring town. As a supervisor in a group-home for troubled teenagers she had a staff of nine working day and night, caring for six girls and four boys. The job fit her personality perfectly. She was big enough to deal with the physical confrontations, she liked having authority, and she enjoyed helping people in need. More importantly, the job made her feel like she was making a difference in the world. She couldn’t imagine doing anything less.

William wasn’t having it.

He shook his head. “Is that supposed to make me feel better? Scientists don’t come across things like
that
everyday, now do they? That fucking thing is newsworthy!” He pulled a hand off the steering wheel and waved his index finger in the air like he was trying to accentuate a point. “You bet your ass that thing is newsworthy! It looked like a big hairy fur-ball with a whole bunch of mouths stuck to it! Have you
ever
seen anything with more than one mouth? I haven’t!”

“Spiders have eight eyes.”

“Spiders can go to hell!” Will’s line of vision slipped from the road and locked onto nothing in particular. He looked ready to crack. “I can crush a spider with my thumb, Beth! With my thumb! Do you think I’d have any luck crushing that thing beneath my thumb? Christ! It was like a dinosaur or something. How the hell did the scientific community miss that little darling, huh? Tell me that!”

“Keep your eyes on the road. You’re driving like a maniac.”

William refocused.

Beth said, “A Goliath Tarantula is almost thirty centimeters across, you know? Thirty centimeters is bigger than a dinner plate. And I found an interesting article about a fossil. Apparently they discovered a spider-like creature that was a half-meter long.”

Will gasped. “This thing was
giant!
Didn’t you see it? Was I the only one there? It was the size of a water buffalo!”

William crushed his teeth together and closed his eyes. When he opened them he slowed the car down and apologized, saying, “I’m sorry. I’m just upset––”

Beth interrupted. “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

William turned a corner. He went from one dirt road to another. A few seconds later he stopped at an intersection, a four way stop. There were no cars approaching from any direction. Looking left he could see thousands of trees. It was the beginning of a forest that went on for acres. Stalks of corn inhabited the fields on his right. Beyond the corn, if you looked past an open pasture, there were two-dozen horses standing near a farmhouse. Maybe more.

In the backseat, Cameron stirred. Her eyes opened. A smile without happiness crept across her face and a giggle escaped her lips.

Neither Beth nor William noticed.

“Listen,” Beth said, running her fingers through her hair. “Don’t get all freaky on me here, just listen. When I was a kid my father ordered subscriptions from Time-Life books. He had books about history and war, animals, the sea, science, space… you name it; he bought it. Every couple weeks he’d acquire a new book and nobody was allowed to touch it. But I was a kid and I was curious, and whenever he wasn’t around, which was fairly often, I’d sneak into his den and look through his books whether he liked it or not. I was always careful. I never looked at the newest one. I knew if I ever smudged dirt on a new one my ass would be redder than the sun.” Beth paused, searching her memory bank.

William drove through an intersection and did what Beth had instructed: he kept his eyes on the road.

“He had this one series called ‘The Mysteries of the Unknown’. They were beautiful hardcovers, filled with interesting facts and amazing photography. They were my favorite, tackling stories about UFOs, dinosaurs, and all the other things that made kids like me have a hard time sleeping. Well… there was this one volume called ‘Unidentified Creatures’––something like that. It had those washed out photographs of the Lock Ness Monster and Sasquatch. You know the ones. They’ve been shown on television a million times.”

Will nodded. He knew the ones.

“But inside this book they had these
other
photographs too, ones that don’t get much publicity. And this was the stuff that just made me dizzy with excitement. I don’t know why exactly. But the point is, in 1976 they found an unknown species of shark that had the expression of a man. Damn thing looked like a giant, squished boot with a face on it. In 1936 they found a fish off the Comoro Islands that had been extinct for seventy million years––or so they thought. In 1977 Japanese trawlers caught a four thousand pound carcass, snapped a photograph, and threw the creature overboard. The scientific community still has no idea what the damn thing was, but they know what it looked like: it looked like a dinosaur, like something that wasn’t supposed to be here.”

“You have dates and everything.”

Beth said, “Yeah I have dates.” The fact that she was guessing them didn’t seem important. “When I was growing up my parents didn’t believe in television. So yeah, I’ve got dates. I’ve got the library memorized.”

“No TV? Really?”

“Oh, we had one. But I was never allowed to watch it. Plus we didn’t have cable and my parents kept the only TV set in their bedroom… another room that was off limits, I might add.”

“Sounds like your parents were tough on you when you were younger.”

Beth could hear the change in William’s tone. She was draining the anger from him successfully and forcing him to think about other things. She decided to give him a little
something
to think about, although she didn’t enjoy bringing it up. “They were militant, that’s for sure. They used their fists to communicate and they put me in the hospital more than once.”

Beth tapped her fingers against her leg and returned to her story. “Anyway… back in 1920 an expedition of travelers explored the jungles of Colombia and Venezuela. They were in the jungle a week or so before they were attacked.
Like us
, Will.
Just like us
. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time, I suppose, attacked by things unknown and undocumented.”

William looked into his rear view mirror.

There was someone behind him, following closely. He didn’t recognize the car.

Beth continued: “The explorers got lucky. They killed one of three beasts. The other two ran off. So the explorers, knowing they had something special, propped the dead body up on a fuel crate. They put a long stick beneath the creature’s jaw to hold it in place and then they snapped a photograph. The photograph isn’t blurry or taken from far away. It’s perfect. To this day scientists have no idea what the animal is.”

Beth took a deep breath.

“That photograph really freaked me out. I must have looked at it every evening for a year. It looked like Bigfoot or something, like an ape. It had human features and intelligent eyes. Its arms were almost the entire length of its body. Its feet and hands looked exactly the same, if you can imagine. All four of them seemed to be placed on the wrong limb somehow. It was like this thing was born with its left hand on its right arm and its right hand on its left arm. Its leathery fingers were the size of bananas. It was the craziest, weirdest animal I ever saw.”

William tried to imagine what that would look like––to have your hands on the wrong arms. He couldn’t do it.

They drove in silence for a moment.

“I dreamt about it for years. I figured one day I’d be making my way to school, or playing in the yard, and out it would come. The real Bigfoot, that’s what it was to me: the real Bigfoot. That blurry photograph that gets pimped around is a joke, I tell you. It’s a joke. This thing in the Time-Life book looked like it could tear your head from your neck in seconds. It was the real deal. And at night I’d keep my eyes glued to the window… waiting… watching… thinking it would come.

“I never told my parents about my sleepless nights. I couldn’t. I wasn’t supposed to see those books and I knew it, so I laid in bed scared of what was out there, scared Bigfoot was coming to get me.”

“Why are you telling me this?” William looked in his rearview mirror again. The car was still there, driving so close that William wondered if the guy behind the wheel had an attitude problem. He touched the break pedal, trying to encourage the driver to back off a little.

Get off my ass,
he thought.
You’re way too close.

Beth placed a hand on William’s shoulder, saying, “Because Will… I know you, and I can see how upset you are. There are a lot of strange things in this world and not all of them get talked about television or gawked at in a zoo. Some of these unknown beasts don’t
like
getting looked at. Some of them get angry. Some of them feel threatened, and sometimes they fight back. This might be only place in the world those creatures exist. Ever think of that? We may have discovered a new species.”

Such creatures
had
been discovered before. Twice. The first nest was uncovered behind a wooden church in the northern regions of Hungary in 1276. Soon after, the church, and the village closest to it, was burned to the ground. One hundred and forty-nine years later three more nests were discovered, high upon the slopes of the Transylvanian Alps.