Part 17 (1/2)

Don saw a flash of Frick and Frack screaming as blood covered them, drowned them. ”I'm certain the government is at least tangentially aware of the situation. This has gone on for a while. My gut says we're on our own.”

”Yeah.” Kurt nodded. ”Mine too. Think Granddad or Luther had any inkling?”

”Doesn't make a difference.”

”Makes one to me. I'd like to know which side they were on.”

”Again, it doesn't matter. They're dust and we're stuck.”

”My world's upside down. Be rea.s.suring to think our kin weren't in on it with the Mocks. f.u.c.king collaborators. Maybe not all of them. Maybe the ones who don't go along with the program get disappeared and that's why we only ever met those biddies Babette and Yvonne. The rest of them...I don't think we'll see Holly again.”

”Let's not throw in the towel just yet.”

”Get real, Dad. Mom took Holly to a bad scene. An evil ritual, or whatever.”

”Safe to say burning bras or celebrating menopause weren't on the agenda. It's no good expecting the worst, though. Could be nothing happened. She loves your sister.”

”If you can't indoctrinate the ones you love, who can you indoctrinate? Sis is totally screwed. And if Holly does come back she won't be my sister anymore. Mom hasn't been Mom since I was a kid, has she? She's been a Pod Person since 1980 at least. That's when she found her Hollow Earth people, right? The worms.”

”The Limbless Ones,” Don said.

”What?”

”That's what somebody called those...creatures in the trees.”

”I saw the expressions on their faces. What do you know about this s.h.i.+t? Why haven't you told me?”

”I'd forgotten. If I'm lucky I'll forget again. Those aren't what we need to worry about. There are worse things.”

”Honestly, it's Mom that scares the s.h.i.+t outta me. She's the ringmaster of this circus. We need to get gone before she comes bopping home from her vacation and sees what we've been up to.”

Don glanced at the cellar and smiled sadly. ”Too late for that, I'm afraid.”

Kurt set aside the bottle. His grubby face was slick with sweat. The broken arm must be hurting, and that pain would intensify with every pa.s.sing minute as the shock and adrenaline dissipated and cold reality settled in on them. ”I feel it. I feel it, all right. Something terrible is down there. You want to go, don't you?”

”Want?” Don shook his head. ”Not even remotely. I'm going down there because there's no choice. None at all.”

”The h.e.l.l you are. We're going to hop in my rig and put the pedal to the metal.” Kurt snapped free of his daze and grabbed the phone off the wall and dialed awkwardly with his good hand, cradling the receiver with his chin. Dialing Winnie, no doubt, and Don, despite the circ.u.mstances, was morbidly curious as to precisely what his son intended to say. Baby, creatures from Planet X are slithering through a worm hole and we got to make tracks! There was no answer, though, and Kurt dropped the phone on the tiles in disgust. The younger man's expression was definitely on the crazed end of the spectrum. He wore the hollow expression of someone reacting to a sh.e.l.led neighborhood or a pile of corpses.

Not for the first time in his eighty-plus years, Don reflected that witnessing a strong man break was among the most terrible sights possible. He said, ”Kiddo, you've got the right idea. Climb in your car and go home to your lovely wife. Your baby.”

”I can't leave you.”

”Your wife and child. Focus, my boy.”

”Jesus, I don't even know if Winnie is playing for team Earth anymore. And what are you gonna do?”

”Wait for your mother. We need to talk.”

”Dad, that's not a smart move. Mom is...She might walk through the door any second, or it might be days or weeks.”

”Oh, my hunch is it won't be so long. Go home, be with your own family. This is between your mother and I.”

Kurt stared at him, fish-eyed and blank. Then he whistled a few bars from the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and grinned with at least a hint of real humor. ”All right, Dad. I'm going.” He lurched over and gave Don a partial hug.

”Should you see your mother or me again,” Don said, ”be careful.”

”What do you suggest?”

”Check for zippers. That's all I'm saying.”

Man and dog were alone in the empty house at the edge of the hills. Don had tried to get Thule to go with Kurt, to no avail. The dog refused to budge from his spot three feet from the cellar door where he growled and grumbled.

The sun disappeared below the horizon and the purple light quickly gave way to darkness. Don snapped on the kitchen lights and a few others on the first floor. This didn't bring much comfort; the illumination was feeble and it flickered ominously and the blackness pressed hard against the windows.

”Oh, Argyle,” he said to the empty air. ”I already miss you, you old goat.” He might've wept then if not for the numbness of body and spirit. He'd looted the bathroom dresser for ancient prescriptions and located a bottle of Demerol. What had he needed it for? Standing in the threshold of the living room, acutely aware of its cramped artificiality, the thinness of the walls, he swallowed half a dozen pills and chased them with a shot of cooking sherry. Exhaustion weighed upon him. His thoughts were jagged, dark bits of gla.s.s tumbling through storms of goose down.

He ventured into the cellar and down the rickety steps, his way lighted by a cheap, dirty bulb. The dilapidated stacks of rotten shelving and corroded jars of preserves were as he remembered, and so too the dirt floor and the cobwebs. He was alarmed, but hardly surprised to find the narrow tunnel boring through the south wall where a rack of odds and ends had once dominated. The opening forced him to duck and it smelled damp and ripe.

There was an interruption of time and movement and sound; a cigarette burn in a film followed by a sheared reel. Then power was restored and he stumbled and caught himself at the threshold of the living room. His eardrums popped with a painful pressure change. Though the room seemed stable, his innards sloshed about as if he were falling at terminal velocity.

”Time is a ring,” Bronson Ford said. The dwarf was seated in Don's favorite wingback, orientated toward the fireplace so that his face was hidden. Bronson Ford's right hand dangled over the armrest. His gray fingers were so long and sharp they brushed the floorboards. His timbre was rich and modulated. Gone was the broken English, the intimation of mental deficiency. It was a voice rife with the kind of animus and evil that only a deranged genius could emit. Soft as the wind soughing through the canopy and it reminded Don of the men at the tree farm, Mexicans, Hondurans, wherever they hailed from; dark men with wide hats and black-handled machetes, their peculiar fluting cries, the cant of some ancient song that rose and drifted among the green galleries. ”We travel the ring, forward and backward, molding it like plastic. Your Mich.e.l.le can do it too, to a minor degree. She has taken the fumbling infant steps across the lightless expanses as a part of her initiation. Very difficult to maintain any semblance of humanity after one has glimpsed the Great Dark.”