The Narrows (37 page)

“Who’s your baby, Maggie?”

“He died before he was ever born, back when I was just a girl. But now he’s back and he’s making me pay. He got Tom and he got Evan and now he’s coming for me next.”

From memory, Ben recited Maggie her Miranda rights. Then he went to Poorhouse Pete’s cell and unlocked it.

“Hey,” Pete said, his old face suddenly slack and innocent. “What’d I do?”

“Time to go. This isn’t a boardinghouse.”

“You said I could—”

“I’m not in the mood tonight, Pete. Please.”

Pete rose and shuffled out of the cell. Ben gave him a few dollars and one of the rain slickers they kept in the supply closet then ushered him out the front doors of the station. The rain was coming down harder now, the sky deepening toward dusk. Before passing through the front door and out into the rain, Poorhouse Pete gave Ben one last doleful look from over his shoulder. Under his breath the homeless man muttered, “You really gonna make me go back out there, ain’t you?”

Ben sighed. “Have a good night, Pete.”

Pete shuffled out into the night, his body trembling beneath the rain slicker. His longish hair hung in wet ropes around his face as he peered up at the darkening sky. That was how Ben left him.

He went back to the dispatch office and leaned exhaustedly in the doorway. The look on his face must have been one of pure misery, judging by the empathetic look Shirley gave him from over her magazine.

“Maggie Quedentock is in lockup,” Ben said.

“Maggie?”

“I think she did something to her husband. And maybe Tom Schuler, too.”

“What do you mean ‘did something’?”

“She may have killed them.”

Outside the windows, lightning lashed across the sky. A peal of thunder followed.

Ben’s cell phone rang at his hip. He snatched it up and saw Joseph Platt’s name and number scrolling by on the digital screen. Ben answered. “This is Ben.”

“Can you…Ben? Hello?”

“Your phone’s breaking up, Joseph.”

“…problem here…”

“Come again?” Ben said. The worry on Shirley’s face increased.

“…need to get out here…”

“Where? Where are you? What’s going on?”

Through quips of static, Ben heard Platt say, “Gracie Street…old farmhouses…we found…think we…the Crawly boy…”

Ben’s left eyelid twitched.

On the other end of the line, he thought he heard Platt say, “…dead.”

Chapter Fifteen

1

Joseph Platt was in the middle of Gracie Street waving his arms when Ben approached in his squad car. Ben pulled onto the shoulder of the road and got out. He tugged a rain slicker over his uniform as he hustled across the swampy field, his boots driving craters into the soft mud. Platt met him halfway, talking fast.

“He’s up here in one of the houses,” Platt said, rainwater streaming down his face. His hair was plastered to his head.

“He’s dead?” Ben asked, following Platt between the skeletons of two run-down barns. Platt’s cruiser was parked in the mud before a square little house the same color as the storm-filled clouds above. Mel Haggis was wending around in the mud with an extendable baton in his hand.

“God, yes.” It came out in a sickening wheeze. “Me and Mel were up here checking out a car that had hit a tree and this girl, she comes running up the goddamn street—”

“What girl?”

“The sister,” Platt said. “She found the body.”

No no no no no,
Ben thought.
None of this is happening.

“Brandy Crawly?”

“Yes.”

“Where is she now?”

“In my car,” said Platt.

Indeed, as Ben hurried past Platt’s cruiser, he could see Brandy Crawly’s face staring out at him from the backseat. She was a ghost.

“Hey, Sarge,” Haggis grumbled when Ben arrived at the foot of the little house. Rickety steps led up to a door that was partway open.

“What’s with the baton?”

“Bats,” Haggis said. “Had to shoo ’em away from the house.”

“Terrific. Where is he?”

“Inside,” Platt said, moving up the porch steps and unclipping a penlight from his gear belt. “I’ll show you.”

Ben followed. Passing through the doorway was like being inhaled by the house. Inside, the air was stifling and musty, redolent with the stink of mildew, bat shit, and decay. Curtains of gauze crisscrossed the entranceway, strung up to the rotting beams in the ceiling and billowing gentle in the breeze. It took Ben a second or two to realize these were cobwebs.

“Be careful,” Platt warned. “Floor’s spongy. Don’t break an ankle.”

It was like walking on a mattress.

“There,” Platt said, shining his light at one corner of the room.

Ben thought,
Holy Christ.

Momentarily, Ben was back on the banks of Wills Creek, staring down at the unidentified corpse of a hairless child. This creature looked no different—a pale white form frozen in a fetal position on the floor of the abandoned house, the gleaming dome of its skull like a giant hard-boiled egg, patchy with strands of blondish hair. The corpse’s face was Matthew Crawly’s face, though just barely. His eyelids were swollen shut and his skin looked taut and nearly transparent.

“What the hell happened to him?” Platt asked him. “I mean, Jesus fuck, Ben,
look
at him. That’s not…I mean, that’s…what
happened
to him?”

“I don’t know.” Ben’s voice shook. Slowly, he advanced toward the boy. When Platt told him again to be careful, he wasn’t so sure he was talking about the floor anymore.

Ben knelt down beside the body. The boy’s skin was colorless and practically translucent. Ben could make out the assemblage of veins and arteries, like fine blue cables, networked just beneath the paper-thin flesh. The joints—the kneecaps and elbows—were bony protrusions that reminded Ben of knots in a tree’s trunk. The fingernails and toenails were ragged and blackened; there was mud and some other grit beneath the nails. And, of course, the face…the face was a taut membrane of skin stretched across the protuberances of the skull. Those horrific eyes bulged beneath purpled lids that had been seemingly fused shut. Within the slash of the boy’s mouth, Ben could see the protrusion of a tongue, swollen and black. When he reached out and touched the corpse—the skin was as cold and unyielding as the skin of a dead toad—Platt sucked in an intake of breath and moaned, “Ben…”

Ben ignored him. The boy’s body rocked forward and Ben peered down at the boy’s back. Shoulder blades like dorsal fins. Four circular wounds ran vertically down the boy’s back. A suppurated, yellowish discharge had dried in crusty ribbons along the interlocking knots of the boy’s spinal column.

Boy,
Ben thought.
This is no boy.

“What do we do, Ben?”

Ben thought for a minute then stood up. The corpse rocked back on its side with sickening rigidity. “We take the body back to the station. I’ll call the medical examiner’s office and see if Deets will come out tonight, but I don’t want to leave the body in here.” The abandoned house seemed to groan all around him. Ben shivered. “I’m gonna call the sheriff’s department over in Cumberland and have them send some guys out, too. This is beyond anything we’re prepared to handle.”

Joseph Platt just stood there, unmoving. He still had his penlight trained on the corpse.

“Is there a problem?” Ben said.

“You want us to…”

“Take the body back to the station for right now.”

Platt still didn’t move.

“Would you rather tell Wendy Crawly her son’s dead?” Ben asked.

Platt gave no response.

“I’ve got some tarpaulin and fire retardant blankets in the trunk of my car,” Ben said, tossing Platt his car keys. Catching them shook Platt from his stupor. Some color drained back into his face.

“We better get Haggis back in here with his stick first,” Platt said. He was looking up at the ceiling where his penlight fell upon the wet, matted black fur of several bats. They dripped like ink from the ceiling.

2

Opening up the rear door of Platt’s cruiser, Ben climbed in and sat next to Brandy. “Hey. You okay?”

She looked hardly there, hardly real…as if the slightest breeze might reduce her to a pile of white sand.

“We’re gonna take care of this here,” he went on, “and we’re gonna do a good job. I can take you home if you want to go there, or—”

“Where are you taking him?”

“To the police station.”

“And then what?” There was a pragmatic decisiveness to her tone that seemed out of place. Ben assumed she was still in shock.

“Well,” he said slowly, thinking things through as he went along, “we’ll call the county sheriff’s department and they’ll come take care of your brother. But for right now, you and I need to go by your house and speak to your mom. We need to tell her what happened to your brother.”

“He isn’t dead,” she said flatly.

Ben nodded. “Okay. I know this is hard, honey. I’m going to help you and—”

“He isn’t dead. He’s just…changed.”

“Changed?”

“He’s some kind of…vampire now.”

“Okay,” Ben said. He reached out and put a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“He’s been in our garage all along, sleeping during the day. He’s been in there all along.” She looked at him. Her eyes were dead sober. “Didn’t you see what he looked like?”

He looked just like that kid we found washed up in the creek two weeks ago,
Ben thought. This notion made him uncomfortable.

She looked away from him, facing forward. Ben felt the seconds tick by like millennia. After he’d aged considerably, Ben’s hand slipped off the girl’s shoulder. “Let’s get you home,” he said.

Brandy said nothing.

3

Eddie La Pointe eased the squad car to a slow crawl as he advanced along the gradual incline of Full Hill Road toward Tom Schuler’s place. It was dark now, without even the occasional streetlamp to brighten the way out here.

This part of town was about as rural as it got in Stillwater—a place where the small dirt roads were named after the families who lived off them and where, over generations, the houses had become sagging, weather-ruined monstrosities that looked more like the wooded landscape than anything constructed by the hands of man. Back before the Army Corps of Engineers came and put in the pumping system and retaining walls in the 1950s, the more cautious of Stillwater’s residents, tired of constant flooding and losing their livestock and crops, had taken to this place up higher in the mountains. For the most part, the bloodline of these cautious families had remained in town and up here in the high hills, and many of the dilapidated houses up here on Wills Mountain still provided sanctuary for the descendants of those very families. Although Eddie La Pointe had been born and raised over the line in West Virginia, he had lived and worked in Stillwater long enough to become attuned to the town’s history and to the families with whom it was populated.

Now, pulling along the narrow twist of muddy roadway that led through the trees up to Tom Schuler’s place, the rain laying a tattoo against the car’s windshield, Eddie could already see that all the lights in the house were off and Tom Schuler’s old Ford Maverick was nowhere to be seen. It was possible that the car was around back. It was likely Tom had already gone to bed, too. Once he left here, he could make a call out to Jimmy Toops’s lot and see if the vehicle had ever been picked up after Kirkland had it towed.

Eddie did not feel too comfortable. He pulled alongside the slouching porch, shut off the squad car’s headlights, and switched off the ignition. The house looked silent and empty, radiating that hollowness that all abandoned houses seemed capable of emitting, like some kind of sonar.

He could readily recall the abandoned building that had stood at the end of Maple Lane in his own hometown of Truax, West Virginia. It had once been an old soda shop and burger joint but, when Eddie was just a boy, it had already become nothing but a graffiti-laden concrete shell, its row of empty windows as foreboding as black ice, the paved parking lot gritty with sand and overgrown with blond weeds. Kids from the neighborhood had said it was haunted, and indeed young Eddie La Pointe swore on more than one occasion that he had seen a
figure
drifting behind those black windows like a corpse moving through the ether of space. Eddie and all his friends would have to walk past the place whenever they went down to the sandlot to play baseball, which they did most days in the summer. It hadn’t been so bad in the daytime, but come dusk, when Eddie and his friends had to return home for supper, and with the sun already beginning to set while painting great sweeping shadows across the land, the run-down burger joint seemed to come alive. If Eddie happened to walk by it alone, he would break out into a run halfway across the weedy parking lot, certain that the building had come alive and was somehow capable of reaching out and snatching him up off the ground…