"I"m pretty sure, yeah."
Sublime relief washed over the kid"s face, and for a moment Sheridan felt sorry for him - h.e.l.l, he wasn"t a monster or a maniac, for Christ"s sake. But his markers had gotten a little deeper each time, and that b.a.s.t.a.r.d Mr. Reggie had no compunctions at all about letting him hang himself. It wasn"t seventeen thousand this time, or twenty thousand, or even twenty-five thousand. This time it was thirty-five grand, a whole d.a.m.n marching battalion of iron men, if he didn"t want a few new sets of elbows by next Sat.u.r.day.
He stopped in the back by the trash-compactor. n.o.body was parked back here. Good. There was an elasticized pouch on the side of the door for maps and things. Sheridan reached into it with his left hand and brought out a pair of blued-steel Kreig handcuffs. The loop-jaws were open.
"Why are we stopping here, mister?" the kid asked. The fear was back in his voice, but the quality of it had changed; he had suddenly realized that maybe getting separated from good old Popsy in the busy mall wasn"t the worst thing that could happen to him, after all.
"We"re not, not really," Sheridan said easily. He had learned the second time he"d done this that you didn"t want to underestimate even a six-year-old once he had his wind up. The second kid had kicked him in the b.a.l.l.s and had d.a.m.n near gotten away. "I just remembered I forgot to put my gla.s.ses on when I started driving. I could lose my license. They"re in that gla.s.ses-case on the floor there. They slid over to your side. Hand em to me, would you?"
The kid bent over to get the gla.s.ses-case, which was empty. Sheridan leaned over and snapped one of the cuffs on the kid"s reaching hand as neat as you please. And then the trouble started. Hadn"t he just been thinking it was a bad mistake to underestimate even a six-year-old? The brat fought like a timberwolf pup, twisting with a powerful muscularity Sheridan would not have credited had he not been experiencing it. He bucked and fought and lunged for the door, panting and uttering weird birdlike cries. He got the handle. The door swung open, but no domelight came on - Sheridan had broken it after that second outing.
Sheridan got the kid by the round collar of his Penguins tee-shirt and hauled him back in. He tried to clamp the other cuff on the special strut beside the pa.s.senger seat and missed. The kid bit his hand twice, bringing blood. G.o.d, his teeth were like razors. The pain went deep and sent a steely ache all the way up his arm. He punched the kid in the mouth. The kid fell back into the seat, dazed, Sheridan"s blood on his lips and chin and dripping onto the ribbed neck of the tee-shirt. Sheridan locked the other cuff onto the strut and then fell back into his own seat, sucking the back of his right hand.
The pain was really bad. He pulled his hand away from his mouth and looked at it in the weak glow of the dashlights. Two shallow, ragged tears, each maybe two inches long, ran up toward his wrist from just above the knuckles. Blood pulsed in weak little rills. Still, he felt no urge to pop the kid again, and that had nothing to do with damaging the Turk"s merchandise, in spite of the almost fussy way the Turk had warned him against that - demmege the goots end you demmege the velue, the Turk had said in his greasy accent.
No, he didn"t blame the kid for fighting - he would have done the same. He would have to disinfect the wound as soon as he could, though, might even have to have a shot; he had read somewhere that human bites were the worst kind. Still, he couldn"t help but admire the kid"s guts.
He dropped the transmission into drive and pulled around the hamburger stand, past the drive-thru window, and back onto the access road. He turned left. The Turk had a big ranch-style house in Taluda Heights, on the edge of the city. Sheridan would go there by secondary roads, just to be safe. Thirty miles. Maybe forty-five minutes, maybe an hour.
He pa.s.sed a sign which read THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING THE BEAUTIFUL COUSINTOWN MALL, turned left, and let the van creep up to a perfectly legal forty miles an hour. He fished a handkerchief out of his back pocket, folded it over the back of his right hand, and concentrated on following his headlights to the forty grand the Turk had promised for a boy-child.
"You"ll be sorry," the kid said.
Sheridan looked impatiently around at him, pulled from a dream in which he had just won twenty straight hands and had Mr. Reggie groveling at his feet for a change, sweating bullets and begging him to stop, what did he want to do, break him?
The kid was crying again, and his tears still had that odd pinkish cast, even though they were now well away from the bright lights of the mall. Sheridan wondered for the first time if the kid might have some sort of communicable disease. He supposed it was a little late to start worrying about such things, so he put it out of his mind.
"When my Popsy finds you you"ll be sorry," the kid elaborated.
"Yeah," Sheridan said, and lit a cigarette. He turned off State Road 28 and onto an unmarked stretch of two-lane blacktop. There was a long marshy area on the left, unbroken woods on the right.
The kid pulled at the handcuffs and made a sobbing noise.
"Quit it. Won"t do you any good."
Nevertheless, the kid pulled again. And this time there was a groaning, protesting sound Sheridan didn"t like at all. He looked around and was amazed to see that the metal strut on the side of the seat - a strut he had welded in place himself - was twisted out of shape. s.h.i.t! he thought. He"s got teeth like razors and now I find out he"s also strong as a f.u.c.king ox. If this is what he"s like when he"s sick, G.o.d forbid I should have grabbed him on a day "when he was feeling well.
He pulled over onto the soft shoulder and said, "Stop it!"
"I won"t!"
The kid yanked at the handcuff again and Sheridan saw the metal strut bend a little more. Christ, how could any kid do that?
It"s panic, he answered himself. That"s how he can do it.
But none of the others had been able to do it, and many of them had been a lot more terrified than this kid by this stage of the game.
He opened the glove compartment in the center of the dash. He brought out a hypodermic needle. The Turk had given it to him, and cautioned him not to use it unless he absolutely had to. Drugs, the Turk said (p.r.o.nouncing it drocks) could demmege the merchandise.
"See this?"
The kid gave the hypo a glimmering sideways glance and nodded.
"You want me to use it?"
The kid shook his head at once. Strong or not, he had any kid"s instant terror of the needle, Sheridan was happy to see.
"That"s very smart. It would put out your lights." He paused. He didn"t want to say it - h.e.l.l, he was a nice guy, really, when he didn"t have his a.s.s in a sling - but he had to. "Might even kill you."
The kid stared at him, lips trembling, cheeks papery with fear.
"You stop yanking the cuff, I put away the needle. Deal?"
"Deal," the kid whispered.
"You promise?"
"Yes." The kid lifted his lip, showing white teeth. One of them was spotted with Sheridan"s blood.
"You promise on your mother"s name?"
"I never had a mother."
"s.h.i.t," Sheridan said, disgusted, and got the van rolling again. He moved a little faster now, and not only because he was finally off the main road. The kid was a spook. Sheridan wanted to turn him over to the Turk, get his money, and split.
"My Popsy"s really strong, mister."
"Yeah?" Sheridan asked, and thought: I bet he is, kid. Only guy in the old folks" home who can bench-press his own truss, right?
"He"ll find me."
"Uh-huh."
"He can smell me."
Sheridan believed it. He could smell the kid. That fear had an odor was something he had learned on his previous expeditions, but this was unreal - the kid smelled like a mixture of sweat, mud, and slowly cooking battery acid. Sheridan was becoming more and more sure that something was seriously wrong with the kid . . . but soon that would be Mr. Wizard"s problem, not his, and caveat emptor, as those old fellows in the togas used to say; caveat f.u.c.king emptor.
Sheridan cracked his window. On the left, the marsh went on and on. Broken slivers of moonlight glimmered in the stagnant water.
"Popsy can fly."
"Yeah," Sheridan said, "after a couple of bottles of Night Train, I bet he flies like a sonofab.i.t.c.hin eagle."
"Popsy - "
"Enough of the Popsy s.h.i.t, kid - okay?"
The kid shut up.
Four miles farther on, the marsh on the left broadened into a wide empty pond. Sheridan made a turn onto a stretch of hardpan dirt that skirted the pond"s north side. Five miles west of here he would turn right onto Highway 41, and from there it would be a straight shot into Taluda Heights.
He glanced toward the pond, a flat silver sheet in the moonlight . . . and then the moonlight was gone. Blotted out.
Overhead there was a flapping sound like big sheets on a clothesline.
"Popsy!" the kid cried.
"Shut up. It was only a bird."
But suddenly he was spooked, very spooked. He looked at the kid. The kid"s lip was drawn back from his teeth again. His teeth were very white, very big.
No . . . not big. Big wasn"t the right word. Long was the right word. Especially the two at the top at each side. The . . . what did you call them? The canines.
His mind suddenly started to fly again, clicking along as if he were on speed.
I told him I was thirsty.
Why would Popsy go to a place where they - (?eat was he going to say eat?) He"ll find me.
He can smell me.
Popsy can fly.
Something landed on the roof of the van with a heavy clumsy thump.
"Popsy!" the kid screamed again, almost delirious with delight, and suddenly Sheridan could not see the road anymore - a huge membranous wing, pulsing with veins, covered the windshield from side to side.
Popsy can fly.
Sheridan screamed and jumped on the brake, hoping to tumble the thing on the roof off the front. There was that groaning, protesting sound of metal under stress from his right again, this time followed by a short bitter snap. A moment later the kid"s fingers were clawing into his face, pulling open his cheek.
"He stole me, Popsy!" the kid was screeching at the roof of the van in that birdlike voice. "He stole me, he stole me, the bad man stole me!"
You don"t understand, kid, Sheridan thought. He groped for the hypo and found it. I"m not a bad guy, I just got in a jam.
Then a hand, more like a talon than a real hand, smashed through the side window and ripped the hypo from Sheridan"s grasp - along with two of his fingers. A moment later Popsy peeled the entire driver"s-side door out of its frame, the hinges now bright twists of meaningless metal. Sheridan saw a billowing cape, black on the outside, lined with red silk on the inside, and the creature"s tie . . . and although it was actually a cravat, it was blue all right - just as the boy had said.
Popsy yanked Sheridan out of the car, talons sinking through his jacket and shirt and deep into the meat of his shoulders; Popsy"s green eyes suddenly turned as red as blood-roses.
"We came to the mall because my grandson wanted some Ninja Turtle figures," Popsy whispered, and his breath was like flyblown meat. "The ones they show on TV. All the children want them. You should have left him alone. You should have left us alone."
Sheridan was shaken like a rag doll. He shrieked and was shaken again. He heard Popsy asking solicitously if the kid was still thirsty; heard the kid saying yes, very, the bad man had scared him and his throat was so dry. He saw Popsy"s thumbnail for just a second before it disappeared under the shelf of his chin, the nail ragged and thick. His throat was cut with that nail before he realized what was happening, and the last things he saw before his sight dimmed to black were the kid, cupping his hands to catch the flow the way Sheridan himself had cupped his hands under the backyard faucet for a drink on a hot summer day when he was a kid, and Popsy, stroking the boy"s hair gently, with grandfatherly love.
It Grows on You.
New England autumn and the thin soil now shows in patches through the ragweed and goldenrod, waiting for snow still four weeks distant. The culverts are clogged with leaves, the sky has gone a perpetual gray, and cornstalks stand in leaning rows like soldiers who have found some fantastic way to die on their feet. Pumpkins, sagging inward now with soft-rot, are piled against crepuscular sheds, smelling like the breath of old women. There is no heat and no cold at this time of year, only pallid air, which is never still, beating through the bare fields under white skies where birds fly south in chevron shapes. That wind blows dust up from the soft shoulders of back roads in dancing dervishes, parts the played-out fields as a comb parts hair, and sniffs its way into junked cars up on blocks in back yards.
The Newall house out on Town Road #3 overlooks that part of Castle Rock known as the Bend. It is somehow impossible to sense anything good about this house. It has a deathly look, which can be only partially explained by its lack of paint. The front lawn is a ma.s.s of dried hummocks, which the frost will soon heave, into even more grotesque postures. Thin smoke rises from Brownie"s Store at the foot of the hill. Once the Bend was a fairly important part of Castle Rock, but that time pa.s.sed around the time Korea got over. On the old bandstand across the road from Brownie"s two small children roll a red firetruck between them. Their faces are tired and washed out, the faces of old men, almost. Their hands actually seem to cut the air as they roll the truck between them, pausing only to swipe at their endlessly running noses every now and again.
In the store Harley McKissick is presiding, corpulent and red-faced, while old John Clutterbuck and Lenny Partridge sit by the stove with their feet up. Paul Corliss is leaning against the counter. The store has a smell that is ancient - a smell of salami and flypaper and coffee and tobacco; of sweat and dark brown Coca-Cola; of pepper and cloves and O"Dell Hair Tonic, which looks like s.e.m.e.n and turns hair into sculpture. A flyspecked poster advertising a beanhole bean supper held in 1986 still leans in the window next to one advertising an appearance of "Country" Ken Corriveau at the 1984 Castle County Fair. The light and heat of almost ten summers has fallen on this latter poster, and now Ken Corriveau (who has been out of the country-music business for at least half of those ten years and now sells Fords over in Chamberlain) looks simultaneously faded and toasted. At the back of the store is a huge gla.s.s freezer that came out of New York in 1933, and everywhere hangs the vague but tremendous smell of coffee-beans.
The old men watch the children and speak in low, desultory tones. John Clutterbuck, whose grandson, Andy, is busy drinking himself to death this fall, has been talking about the town landfill. The landfill stinks like a b.u.g.g.e.r in the summertime, he says. No one disputes this - it"s true - but no one is very interested in the subject, either, because it"s not summer, it"s autumn, and the huge range-oil stove is throwing off a stuporous glow of heat. The Winston thermometer behind the counter says 82. Clutterbuck"s forehead has a huge dent above his left eyebrow where he struck his head in a car accident in 1963. Small children sometimes ask to touch it. Old Clut has won a great deal of money from summer people who don"t believe the dent in his head will hold the contents of a medium-sized water tumbler.
"Paulson," Harley McKissick says quietly.
An old Chevrolet has pulled in behind Lenny Partridge"s oil-burner. On the side is a cardboard sign held with heavy masking tape. GARY PAULSON CHAIR"S CANED ANTIQUES BOUGHT SOLD, the sign reads, with the telephone number to call beneath the words. Gary Paulson gets out of his car slowly, an old man in faded green pants with a huge satchel seat. He drags a knurled cane out after him, holding to the doorframe tightly until he has the cane planted just the way he likes it. The cane has the white plastic handgrip from a child"s bike affixed over its dark tip like a condom. It makes small circles in the lifeless dust as Paulson begins his careful trip from his car to the door of Brownie"s.
The children on the bandstand look up at him then follow his glance (fearfully, it seems) to the leaning, crepitating bulk of the Newall house on the ridge above them. Then they go back to their firetruck.
Joe Newall bought in Castle Rock in 1904 and owned in Castle Rock until 1929, but his fortune was made in the nearby mill town of Gates Falls. He was a scrawny man with an angry, hectic face and eyes with yellow corneas. He bought a great parcel of open land out in the Bend - this was when it was quite a thriving village, complete with a profitable little combined wood-milling operation and furniture factory - from The First National Bank of Oxford. The bank got it from Phil Budreau in a foreclosure a.s.sisted by County Sheriff Nickerson Campbell. Phil Budreau, well-liked but considered something of a fool by his neighbors, slunk away to Kittery and spent the next twelve years or so tinkering with cars and motorcycles. Then he went off to France to fight the Heinies, fell out of an airplane while on a reconnaissance mission (or so the story has it), and was killed.
The Budreau patch lay silent and fallow for most of those years, while Joe Newall lived in a rented house in Gates Falls and saw to the making of his fortune. He was known more for his employee-severance policies than for the way he"d turned around a mill, which had been tottering on the brink of ruination when he"d bought it for a song, back in "02. The mill-workers called him Firing Joe, because if you missed a single shift you were sent down the road, no excuses accepted or even listened to.
He married Cora Leonard, niece of Carl Stowe, in 1914. The marriage had great merit - in Joe Newall"s eyes, certainly - because Cora was Carl"s only living relative, and she would no doubt come into a nice little bundle when Carl pa.s.sed on (as long as Joe remained on good terms with him, that was, and he had no intentions of being on anything less with the old fellow, who had been d.a.m.ned Shrewd in his day but was considered to have become Rather Soft in his declining years). There were other mills in the area that could be bought for a song and then turned around . . . if, that was, a man had a little capital to use as a lever. Joe soon had his lever; his wife"s rich uncle died within a year of the wedding.
So the marriage had merit - oh yes, no doubt about it. Cora herself did not have merit, however. She was a grainbag of a woman, incredibly wide across the hips, incredibly full in the b.u.t.t, yet almost as flatchested as a boy and possessed of an absurd little pipestem neck upon which her oversized head nodded like a strange pale sunflower. Her cheeks hung like dough, her lips like strips of liver; her face was as silent as a full moon on a winter night. She sweated huge dark patches around the armholes of her dresses even in February, and she carried a dank smell of perspiration with her always.
Joe began a house for his wife on the Budreau patch in 1915, and a year later it seemed finished. It was painted white and enclosed twelve rooms that sprouted from many strange angles. Joe Newall was not popular in Castle Rock, partly because he made his money out of town, partly because Budreau, his predecessor, had been such an all-around nice fellow (though a fool, they always reminded each other, as if foolishness and niceness went together and it would be death to forget it), but mostly because his d.a.m.ned house was built with out-of-town labor. Shortly before the gutters and downspouts were hung, an obscene drawing accompanied by a one-syllable Anglo-Saxon word was scrawled on the fanhghted front door in soft yellow chalk.
By 1920 Joe Newall was a rich man. His three Gates Falls mills were going like a house afire, stuffed with the profits of a world war and comfortable with the orders of the newly arisen or (arising) middle cla.s.s. He began to build a new wing on his house. Most folks in the village p.r.o.nounced it unnecessary - after all, there were just the two of them up there - and almost all opined it added nothing but ugly to a house most of them already considered ugly beyond almost all measure. This new wing towered one story above the main house and looked blindly down the ridge, which had in those days been covered with straggling pines.
The news that just the two of them were soon to become just the three of them trickled in from Gates Falls, the source most likely being Doris Gingercroft, who was Dr. Robertson"s nurse in those days. So the added wing was in the nature of a celebration, it seemed. After six years of wedded bliss and four years of living in the Bend, during which she had been seen only at a distance as she crossed her dooryard, or occasionally picking flowers - crocuses, wild roses, Queen Anne"s lace, ladyslipper, paintbrush - in the field beyond the buildings, after all that time, Cora Leonard Newall had Kindled.
She never shopped at Brownie"s. Cora did her marketing at the Kitty Korner Store over in Gates Center every Thursday afternoon.
In January of 1921, Cora gave birth to a monster with no arms and, it was said, a tiny clutch of perfect fingers sticking out of one eyesocket. It died less than six hours after mindless contractions had pushed its red and senseless face into the light. Joe Newall added a cupola to the wing seventeen months later, in the late spring of 1922 (in western Maine there is no early spring; only late spring and winter before it). He continued to buy out of town and would have nothing to do with Bill "Brownie" McKissick"s store. He also never crossed the threshold of the Bend Methodist Church. The deformed infant which had slid from his wife"s womb was buried in the Newall plot in Gates rather than in Homeland. The inscription on the tiny headstone read: SARAH TAMSON TABITHA FRANCINE NEWALL.
JANUARY 14, 1921.
G.o.d GRANT SHE LIE STILL.
In the store they talked about Joe Newall and Joe"s wife and Joe"s house as Brownie"s kid Harley, still not old enough to shave (but with his senescence buried inside just the same, hibernating, waiting, perhaps dreaming) but old enough to stack vegetables and haul pecks of potatoes out to the roadside stand whenever called upon to do so, stood by and listened. Mostly it was the house of which they spoke; it was considered to be an affront to the sensibilities and an offense to the eye. "But it grows on you," Clayton Clutterbuck (father of John) sometimes remarked. There was never any answer to this. It was a statement with absolutely no meaning . . . yet at the same time it was a patent fact. If you were standing in the yard at Brownie"s, maybe just looking at the berries for the best box when berry-season was on, you sooner or later found your eyes turning up to the house on the ridge the way a weathervane turns to the nor"east before a March blizzard. Sooner or later you had to look, and as time went by, it got to be sooner for most people. Because, as Clayt Clutterbuck said, the Newall place grew on you.
In 1924, Cora fell down the stairs between the cupola and the new wing, breaking her neck and her back. A rumor went through town (it probably originated at a Ladies Aid Bake Sale) that she had been stark naked at the time. She was interred next to her ill-formed, short-lived daughter.
Joe Newall - who, most folks now agreed, undoubtedly contained a touch of the kike - continued to make money hand over fist. He built two sheds and a barn up on the ridge, all of them connected to the main house by way of the new wing. The barn was completed in 1927, and its purpose became clear almost at once - Joe had apparently decided to become a gentleman farmer. He bought sixteen cows from a fellow in Mechanic Falls. He bought a shiny new milking machine from the same fellow. It looked like a metal octopus to those who glanced into the back of the delivery truck and saw it when the driver stopped at Brownie"s for a cold bottle of ale before going on up the hill.
With the cows and the milking machine installed, Joe hired a halfwit from Motion to take care of his investment. How this supposedly hard-fisled and tough-minded mill-owner could have done such a thing perplexed everyone who turned his mind to the question - that Newall was slipping seemed to be the only answer - but he did, and of course the cows all died.
The county health officer showed up to look at the cows, and Joe showed him a signed statement from a veterinarian (a Gates Falls veterinarian, folks said ever after, raising their brows significantly as they said it) certifying that the cows had died of bovine meningitis.
"That means bad luck in English," Joe said.
"Is that supposed to be a joke?""