Nightcrawlers

27

There were eight men down in the cellar of the Ezren farmhouse that afternoon. Hyder and Godfrey, Kenney and Chipney, an assortment of state and county cops who carried pickaxes and crowbars. Electric lights had been strung up now, but the place was still gloomy as a crypt. It had about the same ambience, too. Water was seeping from the foundation stones and the masonry was dropping away in wet clots.

Godfrey said, “I guess we’re going to do this, then?”

Kenney didn’t look at him. He was looking at the cistern set in the floor. “This can’t be the original well that Elena Blasden mentioned. This isn’t that old.”

“No,” Hyder said. “You can see it’s been worked on.”

“Probably old Charles Ezren. Maybe he fixed it like this,” Godfrey said.

And that was a possibility. The shaft of the well had been reinforced with concrete, a metal flange placed over the top. Gray, splintered boards with spreading water stains had been bolted over it. From the looks of it, that was many, many years ago.

Kenney stood there, a cigarette dangling from his lip, wondering why anyone would build a house atop something like this. But after hearing what Elena Blasden had to say, not to mention everything Godfrey had showed him and told him, he supposed there were reasons.

“All right, boys,” Godfrey said. “Have at her.”

Stripped down to shirtsleeves, the deputies with the pickaxes started swinging and the wood came away in damp chunks, rotten through and through. They kept swinging and chips kept flying and soon enough the others with the crowbars got into the act. Within ten minutes, the first boards came free. And with them, like breaking the seal on a moldering coffin, came the smell. All the men in the dank, shadowy cellar were used to the smell of death; the farmhouse and its fields were ripe with it. It got on your clothes and in your hair. It got so you could taste it every time you swallowed.

But this… a hot and boiling fetid stink, a black and pervasive odor of putrescence.

“Jesus Christ,” Kenney said, turning away, his belly rumbling with waves of nausea.

Everyone backed away, complaining as the stench filled the cellar like some toxic sludge. A few of the younger men started gagging. One of them broke into dry heaves that didn’t stay dry for long. It was that sort of smell. Even blocking your nose didn’t seem to help for it laid over your skin in a slimy sheen.

Hyder looked like he’d just swallowed a dead mouse. He kept his distance, a funny look on his face like he needed to vomit and couldn’t find a bucket.

Well that’s it, isn’t it? Kenney found himself thinking. That’s what dirty little secrets smell like when you finally bring them into the light. Did you boys think the stench would be any less? That all your lies and secrets breeding down here in the damp darkness would not smell as rotten?

Godfrey was watching Kenney. “You got something on your mind, son?” he asked.

But Kenney shook his head. No point in saying anything, no point in stirring the pot… what was wafting off it was bad enough as it was. Yet… he couldn’t help feeling angry at these people, their backwoods ignorance and clannish bullshit. We got us a fat, filthy black tumor on the underbelly of this county, boys, so let’s just keep quiet about it, feed that sucker in the darkness and see how big it gets, see how far the infection spreads and how many lives it destroys. What say? Jesus, it was that very sort of thinking that had created all this and was making Kenney do what he was now about to do and, thinking about it, he hated every one of these peckerwood John Laws for being too goddamn afraid to do their duty and cut this cancer out by the roots like they should have fifty years ago… or a hundred and fifty.

“Christ, what a stink,” Chipney said. “Smells like roadkill on a steam tray.”

A couple of the men laughed, then gagged, laughed, then gagged yet again. Yes, that about summed it up.

Kenney and Godfrey sucked their revulsion down deep to where it was manageable and took up the crowbars. Breathing through clenched teeth, they worked the remaining boards free. The last few came apart in their hands and dropped down into the blackness with splashing sounds. Rancid fingers of putrid reek misted from the mouth of the cistern like smoke from a smoldering crematory pit.

Kenney shined a flashlight down there. The beam barely cut the miasmic blackness. It reflected off water down deep. It looked like a room or passage opened up at the bottom of the shaft.

“Must be a lot of bodies down there,” a deputy said, “to smell like that.”

Hyder just nodded. “Yeah, or a lot of something.”

Godfrey had one of the deputies go and fetch about fifty feet of rope and a brick. He tied the brick to the end of the rope and lowered it down there like an old-time depth marker. When he hit bottom, he pulled it back up and measured three feet of wetness on the rope.

“Not too deep,” he said, looking at the pinched and dour faces around him. “I guess… I guess somebody has to go down and have a look.”