The Narrows (44 page)

What does it matter?
he wondered.
What will be left after today? What happened to Stillwater while I sat in this house, waiting out the night?

Waiting for daylight had seemed like the smart move last night, but now he felt as though he’d allowed some virulent strain to work its poison, sickening the veins, ruining the body, corrupting the heart. Had his hometown died quietly in the night while he slept and waited?

Someone stirred across the room just as the eastern sky began to change. It was Brandy. She stretched and made half-sleep sounds before crawling over to Ben. She leaned against the wall beside him.

“I should go now,” he said.

She looked warily out the window and due east. “It’s still dark.”

“It’ll be daylight soon enough. Besides, I can’t sit here and wait any longer.”

“What does your thing say?”

“Huh?” he grunted.

“Your whatsit,” she said. “That little screen.”

“Oh.” In the night, he must have kicked it under the nearby desk. He slid it out and looked at it. The red dot was no longer moving. It appeared to have roosted at the far end of town, in the abandoned section of town beyond Gracie Street.

“Where is it?”

“Off Gracie Street,” he told her.

“What do you think we’ll find out there?” she said, her whispery voice dropping even lower.

Ben grinned with half his mouth and said, “We, huh?”

“Yes. I’m not going to let you shoot my brother.”

He nodded, but thought,
It would be doing him a favor, I think, darling.
Yet even thinking that made him feel horrible.

Brandy pointed to something on the carpet between them. “What’s that?”

He picked it up and turned it over in his fingers. “A lighter. It was my dad’s. It must’ve fallen out of my pocket while I slept.”

“Your dad’s dead, isn’t he?”

He nodded. “How’d you know?”

“It was the way you said it.”

He handed her the lighter. “Flip it open. Here. Like this.”

He showed her. It took her a few times to get it down, but she eventually did. She handed it back to him and he dropped it in the breast pocket of his uniform shirt. Then he stood up, grunting as his back creaked. Across the room, Shirley said his name in a small voice that was just barely audible over Wendy’s light snores.

“It’s time for me to go,” he told her. “You stay here with Brandy’s mother.”

“And the girl?” Shirley asked.

“I’m going with him,” Brandy said.

Ben put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “She’s coming with me,” he said.

2

Outside, freezing rain drummed against the roof of the front porch. Across the road and in the direction of town, there was nothing but black space where streetlights and house lights should have been. Looking into that emptiness caused Ben’s resolve to weaken. It was as if Stillwater had been erased from the face of the planet in the middle of the night. Pervaded by a series of queasy tremors, Ben wondered just how prophetic that thought was.

Brandy appeared beside him, zipping up a nylon jacket with her name embroidered at the breast.

“Is that a school jacket?” he asked her.

“Yes. I used to be on the track team.”

“Good. Because if anything happens, I want you to run.”

They made a dash for Ben’s squad car, which was parked at an angle in front of the house, their footfalls splashing through icy puddles while the rain pelted them. Ben secured the shotgun in the trunk while Brandy climbed into the passenger seat. In the car, Ben set the GPS on the dashboard, keyed the ignition, then spun out into the street and headed in the direction of the town square.

“Seat belt,” Brandy said, pulling hers over her chest and clicking it home.

Ben nodded and buckled up. Ahead, the squad car’s headlights chased away a chasm of darkness. The faintest ripple of pinkish light stood off to the right now, just beginning to crest the mountain range. The streets were flooded and driving was treacherous. When they reached the intersection of Hamilton and Cemetery Road, Ben had to detour around the main drag and opted for one of the higher, unnamed service roads that ran behind the cemetery.

“There’s no one on the roads,” Brandy said, her voice small.

“It’s the storm,” Ben assured her…although he did not think his voice sounded all that confident.

“Do you know the Talbots?” Brandy asked out of nowhere. “They live out on Drury.”

“I think so.”

“I was supposed to go to the school Halloween dance this Friday with Jim Talbot.”

Ben said nothing, not sure why she was bringing this up now.

“He’s got a younger sister,” she went on, “and we were making fun of her a couple of weeks ago, teasing her because she said there was a troll living under the Highland Street Bridge. You know, like in that story about the three goats?”

“I know the one.”

“She said she saw a troll living under the bridge when she drove past the Narrows with Mr. Talbot. She’s only seven, so she could have seen anything down there, I guess.” But the tone of her voice informed Ben that she suddenly believed Jim Talbot’s seven-year-old sister, and that there
had
been a troll hiding beneath the Highland Street Bridge after all.

He cut the wheel and detoured along Schoolhouse Road even though the service road had not yet flooded. Brandy asked him where they were going.

“I think it would be smart to round up some backup,” he told her. “Do you agree?”

Brandy said nothing but continued to look out the passenger window at the encroaching darkness. Here, the trees blotted out the mountains and any hint of daylight that was working its way up over them. It could have been the middle of the night.

Ben slowed the car as they passed a series of small brick houses that flanked the right side of the road. All the lights in the houses were off, making it appear as though the entire block had been evacuated.

Or worse,
Ben thought.

He pulled up in front of Mike Keller’s house, which was the last house at the end of the road before the road dead-ended into dense woods. The place was as dark as an underground mine. Mike’s police car was still in the driveway. Moonlight limned the shape of what appeared to be a pair of boots pointing up out of the overgrown grass of the front lawn.

Christ…

He popped open his door and Brandy did the same. “No,” he told her. “Wait her for a sec.” Then he snatched his cell phone out of the console and tossed it into her lap. “See if you can get a signal. If you do, call 911.”

The girl glanced at the cell phone. “There’s no bars.”

Ben climbed out of the car and hustled across the front lawn in the rain. At the side of the house, Mike’s live-in girlfriend, Judy Janus, had parked her Chevy Blazer. One of the Blazer’s doors stood open but no interior light was on in the cab.

The figure on the lawn was Mike Keller, still in uniform. He lay with his face down on the lawn. Someone had unzipped the back of his head, leaving behind a ragged split in his skull which was already overflowing with rainwater.

Ben unholstered his gun and approached the Blazer next. The driver’s door stood ajar and the keys still dangled from the ignition, though the engine was off. There was a tremendous amount of blood on the vinyl seats and dark, soupy matter congealing in the footwells.

When he got back in the car, he was breathing heavily. He sat for a few moments behind the wheel, not speaking.

“What happened to your backup?” Brandy asked. She sounded nervous, her voice as taut as a rubber band stretched to its limit.

“I changed my mind.”

She set his cell phone back on the console. “No signal. I guess the storm knocked the towers out or something.”

“Yeah,” he said. Then he pulled back out onto the road.

3

The sky had just begun to lighten when Ben swung the car onto Gracie Street. To the left, the cornfield that flanked the road had been pulverized by the power of last night’s storm. To the right, the muddy swamp and stoic, empty houses that made up the abandoned part of town looked now like a prophecy. When they motored by the old house where Brandy had discovered her brother yesterday evening, the girl hung her head low, brownish tangles of hair covering her face.

According to the GPS, the tracking device—the bat—was located on the other side of the field, past the husks of the empty houses. Brandy looked up and out the window and Ben followed her gaze. The razorback silhouette of the eastern mountains stood in sharp relief against a sky that was brightening to a bland yellow at the horizon.

And then he saw it and he knew.

“There,” he said.

“I see it,” Brandy answered breathlessly.

The turret that climbed almost three stories into the air was that of the old grain silo off Gracie Street. Weather-rotted and the color of bone, it was like the beacon of some lost dystopian civilization. This monster was comprised of wood staves that were gapped and split and bleached from decades in the sun. The cupola resembled a Chinaman’s hat, capped with an ancient weather vane that did not appear capable of turning in even the strongest wind. Bats hovered around the top of the silo like giant flies and more of them clung from the railing that encircled the structure just beneath the cupola. A few more darted in and out of rents in the staves.

“Jesus Christ, look at them all,” Ben mused.

Brandy said nothing. The expression on her face was one of unmitigated terror.

“Are you gonna be okay?” he asked her.

After a couple of seconds, she nodded…but said nothing. She looked about as fragile as fine china.

Ben cut the wheel and bounded over the muddy field. Twice, the car got stuck and he had to switch back and forth from Drive to Reverse to jockey it loose. Finally, he turned onto a paved yet potholed slab of roadway that curled up an incline toward the silo. When they got to within a hundred yards of the structure, Ben geared the car into Park.

“What do we do now?” Brandy asked. Their commingling respiration was fogging up the windshield.

“I guess I go in there.” He was peering through the windshield and up at the silo. Sunlight had just begun to strike the eastern side of the structure.

“I’m coming with you.”

“I think it’s probably best if you—”

“No. I’m not sitting here alone. I can’t. I’m coming with you.”

He said nothing more.

Surprisingly, Brandy got out of the car first. Ben followed. He went around back and opened the trunk. He took the shotgun out of its rack then filled the pockets of his uniform with extra shells. He handed some to Brandy and told her to fill her pockets, too.

“You know how to use this thing?” he asked, hefting the shotgun. “Just in case something happens…”

“Yes. My dad taught me.”

He nodded sharply. “Okay. Good.” He took the bolt cutters out of the trunk then slammed the trunk closed. Wincing, he looked across the field at the looming cylindrical structure. The rain had lessened to a hazy drizzle but the air had turned bitterly cold. Storm clouds hung low to the ground. “If I tell you to run, to get the hell out of here, I want you to do it. Understood? No arguments. We won’t have time for it.”

“Understood.” She looked as insubstantial as a mirage standing there in the lightlessness of a predawn drizzle. Ben thought that if he closed his eyes, counted to ten, then opened them again, the girl would have disappeared. “What do you think we’ll find in there, anyway?”

“I have no idea, but I guess we’ll find out soon enough,” he said honestly. “All right. Let’s go.”

Together they crested the gradual incline toward the ancient, weather-ruined grain silo. It had stood there for all of Ben’s life, the familiarity of it tantamount to the streets of the town he had navigated since childhood or the various rooms and hallways of the old farmhouse on Sideling Road. But there was a sinister darkness cloaking it now, like how maturity brings with it a certain clarity of distinction between good and evil, and with each step that carried him closer to the thing, he felt his heartbeat amplify and quicken in his chest and his flesh, despite the cold, begin to perspire.

“Do you smell that?” Brandy asked. “It smells like chemicals.”

Indeed, that ammoniacal stink was growing stronger the closer they came to the silo.

It seemed to radiate from it like waves of heat off a desert highway.

There was a single wooden door at the base of the silo that slid open on an old, rusted track. The door was bound shut by a length of chain and a padlock, much like the door on the old plastics factory. Looking at it, Ben guessed that door hadn’t been open for the better part of a decade. When they approached it, Ben handed the shotgun over to Brandy—“Be careful,” he warned—then clipped the chain with the bolt cutters. The rusty chain fell away from the doorhandle and coiled at Ben’s feet like a cobra. He set the bolt cutters against the side of the structure then took the shotgun from Brandy.