germ of truth in there somewhere.
The Army was saying it was fuel tank that exploded.
But Mitch was no longer buying that.
They had been working on something weird out there, must have been. The idea that the dead would start walking around on their own just didn’t wash. The Army were up to something fantastic out there and whatever that had been, it was out of control now. Maybe something in the rain. Mitch had spent four years in the Navy. That wasn’t exactly a career, but it was enough experience so that he knew the military were not exactly up front about their activities. And when they fucked-up, they rarely admitted such. No, Mitch was not much into conspiracies. He didn’t really think the military had captured flying saucers or anything, but they were no doubt involved in things equally as frightening.
This scenario pretty much proved that.
Mitch didn’t trust his own government any farther than he could throw them and he sure as hell did not trust the military. You put people in power and they invariably abused it. But even with that in mind, he doubted that any of this was meant to happen. No, it was an accident. Something went wrong, something got out of control.
But what exactly? What had they been doing at that base?
Tommy came over. “Mitch…it’s getting pretty wild out there.”
“No shit?”
“I’m serious here. There’s been some kind of riot out at Slayhoke, prisoners running wild. The National Guard are up there putting it down.”
“Jesus, just what we need right now.”
“And something else…there’s a bus load of kids missing,” Tommy said. “They were coming from a soccer match and now nobody can find that bus. But they figure it’s in town.”
“One tragedy after another.”
Tommy lit a cigarette. “You know what I was thinking?”
Mitch looked up at him.
“I was thinking about that witch, that old lady you took me to see.”
“Wanda Sepperly?”
Tommy nodded. “I don’t believe in any of that crap, but you got to admit that lady’s got something going on. She knows things. I bet she might know where that bus is and I bet she might know where Chrissy is.”
Mitch nodded, wondering why he hadn’t thought of it. “Maybe…maybe we should take a walk over there.”
“Maybe we should.”
Mitch nodded. “For a minute there, I thought you were going to tell me about some cousin of yours that was a witch.”
“What kind of family do you think we are?”
23
Next door to the Barron’s, as the idea of making ice cream was being tossed around, Arland Mattson came awake to the sound of invasion. He’d been snoozing in his recliner, feet atop a stool heaped with newspapers. He came awake slowly, dreaming about the sores on his chest and the pains he got down in his bowels sometimes. He opened his eyes, thinking he’d maybe heard a car backfire, but then right away he heard only the sound of the falling rain, the wind skirting the eaves.
Nothing more.
Right away, he became suspicious.
Arland had not necessarily been of sound mind since his wife Camille had been taken by cancer ten years previously. What had been a somewhat alarming trend towards suspicion and distrust while she was alive, had bloomed into a fully developed persecution complex by the time of the flooding of Witcham. Arland was extremely paranoid, was certain that the government were watching him and had planted listening devices in the walls of his house. He also believed that the pancreatic tumor that had killed his wife was not merely a matter of heredity or chance, but the result of something slipped into her food that was intended for him. And he knew that there were parasites living inside him, tiny insectlike creatures that were eating away his stomach, even if the doctor told him that such a thing was impossible. Neighbors like Mitch Barron had gotten used to the threats of frivolous lawsuits and the rampant conspiracies that Arland saw in everything from sudden changes in the weather to the questions asked by census takers, but they only saw small bite-sized portions of his dementia.
Had they seen more, they would have had him committed.
So when Arland came awake, he knew that his house had been invaded. Possibly by the things the rain had brought and possibly by government agents that had come to steal his water samples that he had taken from the rain.
Arland sat there in his chair, listening, knowing something had come into his house and right about then he began to smell it. Whatever it was, it stank dirty and flyblown.
Houses are very personal things.
They are the webs of our daily lives just as we are the spiders that inhabit them. And, like spiders, when something settles into our webs, we can feel the minute tugging of strands, the vibrations, the weight and physical impression intruders make. And this is what Arland was feeling. Though he was past eighty, terribly thin, and his vision was not so good, he could feel that sense of invasion just fine. The minute threads of his web had been touched, broken, torn asunder. Some weighty bluebottle fly or yellowjacket had landed and become ensnared in those fine filaments and he could feel the oscillations of their distress…or perhaps it was his own.
Lightly, he got to his feet and grabbed a butcher knife off the coffee table. His battery lantern was still glowing and he took this, too.
Arland was afraid, but he had suspected this for some time. It was only a matter of time before they came to silence him; he knew too much. They had no doubt hoped to kill him in his sleep, but he had thwarted their plans, had he not?
He walked out of the living room and into the hall.
The front door was open a few inches and this more than anything made something solidify in his belly. He always kept the door locked. But now it was open and what could that mean? Well, yes, they had picked the lock, of course. They knew how to do things like that. There was a hidden key outside, secreted beneath a loose brick on the porch, but even they would not have known that.
Only Arland did.
And Camille, of course. But Camille had been dead well over five years now. She’d been cremated over to the Harvest Hill crematorium.
Maybe he’d forgotten to lock it.
And then, he was suddenly certain that he had. And now somebody had come into the house in the dead of night.
Arland stood there with the knife, wishing then he had a gun. But he’d never gotten one because they had to be registered and that was just another way the government tracked you and fattened the file they kept on everyone.
There were wet footprints leading from the doorway and down the hall to the door that led to the cellar. Of course, that’s where they would go. Arland kept much of his material concerning their activities down in the cellar. He only hoped they would not touch his mason jars of rainwater, he needed those for his class action suit against them.
Breathing hard, a tightness at his chest, Arland followed those prints to the cellar door. The lantern threw jumping shadows all around him.
And a voice in his head told him, This is a job for a young man, not an old one.
But Arland dismissed that. He was up to this. Certainly, he was.
And that’s when he heard something shatter in the cellar.
One of his mason jars.
