Summer of Night

NINETEEN

Dale went over in person to invite Harlen to Friday's outing at Uncle Henry's and he realized how lonely their friend had been. Harlen's mother, Miss Jensen, had doubts as to whether Jimmy was well enough to go for such a long outing, but Dale had brought a note inviting her along as well and she gave in to Harlen's pleas.

Dale's dad got home about two and they all left for the farm at three-thirty, Harlen in his bulky cast riding in the backseat of the station wagon with his mom and Kev while Mike and Dale and Lawrence crammed into the back. They were in a great mood and sang as they roared up and down the hills past the cemetery.

Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena had set up chairs in the shady part of the yard and there was much greeting and chatter, while Biff, Uncle Henry's big German shepherd, danced around in an ecstasy of welcome. The grown-ups settled into the broad-boarded Adirondack chairs while the boys grabbed shovels from the barn and headed for the back pasture. They walked more slowly than usual, opening gates for Harlen rather than clambering over fences, but the injured boy kept up well enough.

Finally, in the rearmost pasture before the woods began, down along the creek that ran from the south, they found their excavation marks from previous summers and began digging for the Bootleggers' Cave.

The Bootleggers' Cave had started out as a legend, had been refined as a story Uncle Henry told them years before, and now was gospel to the boys. It seems that in the 1920s, during Prohibition and before Uncle Henry had bought the farm, the previous owner had allowed bootleggers from the next county to use an old cave in the back forty to hide their hooch. The cave became a central warehouse. A dirt road was put in. The cave was expanded, the entrance shored up, and an actual speakeasy was created underground.

"A lot of them big-time gangsters used to stop by here when they was passing through from Chicago," Uncle Henry had told them. "I have it on a stack of Bibles that John Dillinger was here once, and that three of Al Capone's boys came down to rub out Mickey Shaughnessy . . . but Mickey heard they was a-coming and lit out for his sister's place over on Spoon River. So the three Capone boys just shot the place up with Tommy guns and stole some of the booze."

The ending of the tale was the most enticing part. Legend had it that the Bootleggers' Cave had been raided by revenuers shortly before Prohibition ended. Rather than remove the goods, the federal men had just dynamited the entrance, collapsing the cave on the warehouse of liquor, the speakeasy with its tables and mahogany bar and player piano, even on three trucks and a Model A that had been parked in the warehouse section. Then they had obliterated the road so no one would ever find the cave again.

Dale and the boys were sure that the cave hadn't collapsed, only the entrance to it. Probably only six or eight feet of digging separated that archaeological find from the outside world. If they could find the right part of the hillside to dig ...

Over the years, Uncle Henry had been a lot of help, showing the boys old tire tracks and rusting metal that he said had been left near the entrance, pointing out declivities in the hillside that were probably the entrance or at least the emergency exits, and generally remembering new details of the story when the boys' interest flagged after long days of digging and searching in the hot sun.

"Henry," Aunt Lena said once, her voice unaccustomably sharp with warning, "quit filling those children's heads with tall tales."

Uncle Henry had straightened up, shifted the wad of chewing tobacco to his other cheek, and said, "Aren't tall tales, Mother. That cave's out there somewhere."

It had been all the promise the kids needed. Over the years, Uncle Henry's easternmost pasture-used just for grazing the bull when he had one-began to look like the hillsides around Slitter's Creek circa 1849 as Dale and Lawrence and friends poked into every dip and shallow and grassy overhang, certain that this time they would find the entrance. Dale had often dreamed about how that last shovelful would feel as they broke through-the dark cave opening before them, perhaps with a gas lamp still burning in there, the odor of bathtub gin wafting out on a current of air that had been stilled for thirty years.

Duane arrived about six o'clock-his father dropping him off on his way to the Black Tree-and he passed half an hour talking to the adults on the shaded lawn before heading back through the barnyard to the back pastures. No one noticed it, but he had dressed up for the occasion in his newest tan corduroy trousers and a red flannel shirt that his Uncle Art had given him for Christmas.

In the last pasture, he found a circle of dirty and tired boys huddled around a hole dug three feet into the hillside. The slope below them was littered with large rocks they had pried out.

"Hi." Duane sat on one of the larger rocks. "Think you found it this time?" The shadows were growing longer and this part of the hillside was in shade. The stream was little more than a trickle twenty feet below, just beyond the flattened area that Dale had always been sure was the "bootleggers' road."

Dale mopped his forehead and left a trail of mud. "We thought so. Look ... we found this old rotted wood in there behind that big rock."

Duane nodded. "An old log, huh?"

"No!" Lawrence said angrily. His t-shirt was a mess. "It's one of the log tilings over the cave entrance."

"Pilings," said Mike.

Duane nodded and nudged the log with his black sneaker. There were stubs of branches on it. "Hmm-hm."

"I told them they were full of shit," said Jim Harlen happily enough. He shifted so that his cast was more comfortable. It was obvious that his arm still hurt him, and there was a bandage wrapped around his head that reminded Duane of Crane's Red Badge of Courage. He tried to imagine Jim Harlen as Henry Fleming.

"You been digging too?" asked Duane.

Harlen snorted. "I never did. My job's to sell the booze when we find it."

"Think it'll still be good?" Duane's voice was innocent.

"Hey, it ages, doesn't it?" said Harlen. "Wine and that stuff's worth more money after a while, right?"

Mike O'Rourke grinned. "We're not sure gin's the same way. What do you think, Duane?"

Duane picked up a twig and drew designs in the mound of fresh dirt they'd excavated. The hole was deep enough that when Lawrence poked his head in, only his legs from the knees down stayed in the open air. Duane noticed that it wasn't really a tunnel, though-there seemed no chance of a cave-in-merely a gouge in the hillside. The most recent of many.

"My guess is that you'd make more money selling the old cars that're in there," he said, joining in the game. After all, what harm was there in imagining this well-stocked cavern just a few yards away through soft soil? Was it any more fanciful than the "research" he'd been doing for two weeks?

Only now Duane knew that there was nothing fanciful about his research. He touched his shirt pocket, then remembered that he'd left his notebook at home with the others in their hiding place.

"Yeah," said Dale, "or make a fortune just giving tours of the place. Uncle Henry says that we can fix it up with electric lights and keep it just the way it was."

"Neat," said Duane. "Oh, your mom said to tell you to come on up to the house to get cleaned up. They've got the steaks on the grill."

The boys hesitated, pulled between their fading fixation and growing hunger. Hunger won.

They walked back at Harlen's pace, shovels over their shoulders like rifles, talking and laughing. The dairy cattle ambling back to the barn looked at the group quizzically and gave them a wide berth. The six boys were still a hundred yards away from the last fence when they smelled the aroma of sizzling steak on the evening breeze.

They ate on the stone patio on the east side of the house as shadows swallowed the golden light on the lawn. Smoke rose from the barbecue pit Uncle Henry had built beyond the pump near the wooden fence. Despite Mike's protests that the corn and salad and rolls and dessert would be more than enough dinner, Aunt Lena had pan-fried two catfish for him, breading them until they were extra crispy. Along with the fish and steak, the boys received two huge baskets of onion rings to go along with the vegetables that had been picked from the garden an hour earlier. The milk was ice cold and creamy, separated and stored in Uncle Henry's dairy barn that day.

They ate as the heat of the day dissipated. A breeze had come up to give relief from the humidity and rustle the branches above the lawn. The endless cornfields on the west side of the road and to the north seemed to sigh in some silken language.

The kids sat somewhat apart, perched on stone steps and flower planters-Aunt Lena had landscaped three acres of yard with flowers at all strategic spots-while the grown-ups sat in their circle, plates on their laps and on the broad arms of their wooden chairs. Uncle Henry had brought out a keg of his homemade beer and the mugs had been pre-cooled in the freezer in the garage.

The voices were a medley so common to Dale's ear that he could not imagine a time when all or some of them would not be there as background: Kev's rising chuckle and excited tones, Harlen's drawled sarcasms that sent them sprawling with laughter, Mike's soft asides, Lawrence speaking high and shrill, as if he had to speak quickly to be heard at all, and Duane's rare comments. The grown-ups' tones were equally familiar: Uncle Henry's rasp as he told about the 1928 Pierce Arrow hood ornament that he'd found in the back pasture just last month-a sure sign that some gangster had driven back to the Bootleggers' Cave and come to a bad end; Aunt Lena's husky laugh-simply the most sensual and unique human sound Dale had ever heard; his mother's and father's voices, familiar as the breeze that touched the trees, his dad now more relaxed than usual and telling humorous stories of life on the road; Harlen's mom's somehow adolescent giggle, rushing, excited, as if she had already had too much to drink or, like Lawrence, felt that she had to hurry to be heard.

Their knives made pale red patterns on the paper plates. Everyone went back for seconds, most for thirds. The huge bowl of salad dwindled; the foil-wrapped ears of corn on the barbecue were snatched up; Uncle Henry laughed and bantered even as he put more steaks on the grill and stood there beaming at everyone in his Come 'N' Get It apron, long fork in hand.

After dinner, the boys took their desserts of homemade rhubarb pie and chocolate cake-none chose just one-up to the deck.

Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena had added on to their house over the years, never completing the remodeling, merely moving on to the next project: Dale remembered a four-room white frame house when he had come down from Chicago for his grandmother's funeral when he was six. Now the house itself was brick, with four bedrooms on the first level and a finished basement. Uncle Henry had added the garage the first year the Stewarts had moved to Elm Haven; Dale remembered playing in the framed skeleton of it as Uncle Henry raised cinderblocks to the right height. Now the garage was huge-holding three cars and another vehicle-built on the south side of the low hill the house was on so that one walked from the garage directly into the basement workroom, while above it, connected to the large guest room and larger master bedroom, was the deck.

The kids loved the deck in the evening, and they knew that sooner or later the adults would stir themselves from the stone patio and come up here. As large as a tennis court (although none in the group but Dale and Duane had ever seen a tennis court), set on several levels of built-up platforms, catwalks, and steps, the deck commanded a view west to the road and Mr. Johnson's fields; south it looked out over the driveway, the swimming pond Uncle Henry had built, the woods, and even offered glimpses of Calvary Cemetery when the trees began to thin in the autumn; to the east one looked down at the barn and barnyard from the level of the hayloft, and Dale always imagined himself a medieval knight, watching from the ramparts and seeing the maze of pigpens, feedlots, chutes, chicken coops, and barnyards as the battlements in his fortress world.

There were more Adirondack chairs on the deck-massive, strangely comfortable constructs of wooden planks turned out in Uncle Henry's basement workshop every winter-but the kids always opted for the hammocks. There were three on the southernmost platform: two on metal stands and one hooked to wooden posts which held the security lights overlooking the driveway fifteen feet below. The first ones there-Lawrence, Kev, and Mike-piled into that hammock and swung perilously over the railing. Mothers hated to watch them in that hammock, fathers raised their voices in warning, but so far no one had fallen out . . . although Uncle Henry swore that he had dozed off in that hammock one summer evening, awakened to Ben-the biggest rooster-the next morning, taken one step toward what he thought was the bathroom, and had ended up on bags of Purina chow stacked in the back of the pickup parked below.

They piled in their hammocks and rocked, and talked, and completely forgot that they were going back down to work some more on the Bootleggers' Cave. It was too dark anyway. The sky still held some pale blue, but several stars were visible and the line of trees south of the pond had faded from separate trunks to a black silhouette. Lightning bugs began to blink against that dark background. From around the pond and farther down the hill, frogs and tree frogs began their sad chorus. Swallows fluttered unseen in the barn and somewhere in the deeper woods an owl hooted.

The coming of night seemed to quiet the adults' conversation on the back patio to a friendly hum, and even the kids' babble began to slow and then stop altogether for a while so there was nothing but the creak of the hammock cords and the night sounds down the hill as the sky opened with stars.

Uncle Henry had turned off the automatic security lights and had not turned on the deck lamps, so Dale could imagine that they were on the poop deck of a pirate ship under tropical night skies. The rows of" corn across the road made a soft sound much like the whisper of a ship's wake. Dale wished he had a sextant. He could feel the heat of the day's sun and exerted energies as a sunburn glow on his cheeks and neck, aches in his upper arms and lower legs.

"Look," Mike said softly, "a satellite."

All of them craned back in their hammocks. The sky had darkened perceptibly in the last half hour, the Milky Way was easily discernible here so far from city lights, and something was moving between the stars. An ember too high and fast and faint to be an aircraft.

"Probably Echo,'' said Kevin, using his professorial voice. He told them all about the huge reflecting balloon that the U.S. was going to orbit to bounce radio waves around the curve of the earth.

"I don't think they've launched Echo yet," said Duane in that diffident way he spoke even when he was the only one who knew the facts. "I think it's scheduled to go up in August."

"What is it then?" said Kevin.

Duane moved his glasses up his nose and looked skyward. "If it's a satellite, it's probably Tiros. Echo will be really bright... as bright as one of those stars. I'm looking forward to seeing it."

"Let's come back to Uncle Henry's place in August," said Dale. "We'll have an Echo-watching party and do some digging on the Bootleggers' Cave."

There was a chorus of assent. Then Lawrence said, "Look! It's fading away."

The satellite's glow was dying. They watched it track in silence for a moment. Then Mike said, "I wonder if we'll ever get people up there."

"The Russians are working at it," said Duane from the depths of the hammock he had to himself. Dale and Harlen sat opposite him.

"Hah ... the Russians!" snorted Kevin. "We'll beat them by a mile."

The dark bulk that was Duane shifted, tapping sneakers against the deck. "I dunno. They surprised us with Sputnik. Remember?"

Dale remembered. He remembered standing out in the backyard on an October evening three years before-he'd been taking the garbage out and his dad and mom had come out when they'd heard on the radio when the Russian satellite was supposed to pass over. Lawrence, only a little first grader then, had been asleep upstairs. Together the three of them had watched up through the almost-bare branches until that tiny light had moved among the stars. "Unbelievable," Dale's dad had whispered, although whether he meant that it was unbelievable that mankind had finally put something into space, or unbelievable that it was the Russians who had done it, Dale never knew.

They watched the skies for a while. It was Duane who broke the silence. "You guys've been checking out Van Syke and Roon and the rest of those people, haven't you?"

Mike and Kevin and Dale exchanged glances. Dale was amazed to find that he felt guilty, as if he'd been slacking off or had broken a promise. "Well, we started to but . . ."

"That's OK," said Duane. "It was sort of silly. But I've got some stuff I want to talk about. Can we get together tomorrow ... in the daylight?"

"How about the Cave?" said Harlen.

The others hooted him down.

"I'm not going backfire," saidKev. "How about Mike's chickenhouse?''

Mike nodded. Duane said OK.

"Ten o'clock?" said Dale. The cartoons he and Lawrence liked to watch on Saturday mornings-Heckle and Jeckle, Ruff and Reddy-would be over by then.

"Let's make it later," said Duane. "I've got some chores in the morning. How about one o'clock. After lunch?"

Everyone agreed to be there except Harlen. "I've got some better stuff to do," he said.

"I'll bet," said Kevin. "Like having Michelle Staffney autograph your cast?"

This time the grown-ups did have to come over to join them before the laughter and punching stopped.

Duane enjoyed the rest of the evening. He was glad he'd put off talking about the research on the Borgia Bell-especially Mrs. Moon's revelations-since the kids and grown-ups started talking about stars and space travel and what it would be like to live out there, and the hours had passed with them chatting and staring at the night sky. Dale had told his father their idea for a watching party in August when the large satellite would be visible, and Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena had endorsed the idea immediately. Kevin promised to bring a telescope and Duane heard himself offering to bring his homemade one.

The party began to break up about eleven and Duane had prepared to walk home-he knew the Old Man wouldn't be home until the early-morning hours-but Dale's dad had insisted on them driving him the mile and a half. It had been a crowded station wagon that dropped Duane off outside his kitchen door.

"It looks pretty dark," Mrs. Stewart had said. "You think your father went to bed already?"

"Probably," said Duane. He kicked himself mentally for not remembering to leave a light on.

Mr. Stewart waited until Duane turned on the kitchen light and waved to them from the window. He watched as the red taillights receded down the drive.

Knowing that he was being paranoid, Duane checked the first floor and locked the back door before going down to his basement. He got out of his good clothes and took a shower in the corner downstairs, but rather than pulling on his pajamas, Duane tugged on old corduroys, slippers, and a patched but clean flannel shirt. He was tired, the long day lay on him like a weight, but his mind was very active and he thought he'd work on his writing for a while. With the door locked, he'd have to wait up for the Old Man anyway. He tuned the radio to WHO in Des Moines and went to work.

Or tried to work. His word sketches and notes looked childish and empty to him now. He wondered if he should try to write a complete story. No, he wasn't ready. His time line did not permit him to attempt a complete story until next year at the earliest. Duane looked at his notebooks full of character sketches, exercises in describing action, exercises in which he imitated various writers' styles-Hemingway, Mailer, Capote, Irwin Shaw-his heroes. He sighed and put it all away in his hiding place and lay back on his bed, slippers on the iron footboard. He'd outgrown his bed during the previous winter so now he had to sleep diagonally, feet against the wall, or curl his legs. He hadn't told the Old Man yet. They couldn't afford to buy a bed right now. Duane knew that there was an extra, unused bed on the second floor-but it had been his father's and mother's bed when she was alive. Duane didn't want to ask for it.

He stared at the ceiling and thought about Mrs. Moon, and the Bell, and the literally incredible web of fact, fancy, suggestion, and inference it all added up to. Uncle Art had seen the outline of it. If he'd known about the events of January 1900, what would he have thought then? Duane wondered if he should keep it from the other kids.

No, they've earned the right to know. Whatever's happening is happening to them as well.

Duane was on the verge of dozing off when he heard the Old Man's pickup coming up the drive.

Sleepily, Duane shuffled upstairs, walked through the dark kitchen, and unlatched the screen. He was halfway down the basement stairs before he realized that he could still hear the pickup's engine; the sound with the missing cylinder was unmistakable. Duane walked back up and went to the door.

The pickup was parked in the middle of the lot, its driver's-side door open, headlights still burning. The cab light was on and Duane could see the truck was empty.

Suddenly there was a roar from the barn that made Duane take a half-step back into the kitchen. He watched as the combine came rumbling out of the big south doors, its thirty-foot cornhead pushing ahead of it like a bulldozer blade with sharp extensions. Duane saw the gleam of the pole light reflecting on snapping rolls and chains and realized that the Old Man hadn't replaced the red metal shields on the eight units.

But he had opened the gate to the south fields, Duane noticed, as the huge machine roared across the barnyard and into the corn. He caught the briefest glimpse of his father as a silhouette in the open cab-the Old Man hated glassed-in booths and used one of the older, open combines-and then the machine was out in the corn.

Duane groaned. The Old Man had come home drunk and racked up the truck before, but he'd never wrecked a piece of farm machinery. A new combine or picker unit for the tractor would cost a bloody fortune.

Duane ran out through the barn lot in his slippers, trying to shout over the roar of the machine. It was useless. The combine cut into the first row of corn in the field and began eating its way south. The corn was only about twenty inches high and there were no ears yet, but the harvesting mechanism on the cornhead didn't know that; Duane groaned again as he saw the tender young stalks bend and snap off, the eight gatherer points guiding them to chains that fed them to the long metal snapper rolls. The lugged chains there dragged the stalks between the rolls and would have pinched off ears had there been any.

The air filled with dust and a spray of cornstalks as the combine swerved right, then left, and then lumbered straight ahead into the field, carving a thirty-foot-wide path through the crop. Duane ran through the open gate and followed, shouting and waving his arms. The Old Man never looked back.

The huge machine was almost two hundred yards out into the field when it suddenly clanked to a stop. The engine died away. Duane paused, gasping to catch his breath, imagining the Old Man bent over the steering wheel and weeping with whatever frustration had driven him to this.

Duane took a breath and jogged toward the now-silent combine.

The driving lights mounted high on the cab were off, the door was open, but the interior light was broken and the cab was empty. Duane approached slowly, feeling the sharp stalks under his slippers; he pulled himself up onto the small platform on the left side of the cab.

Nothing.

Duane looked out at the field. The corn was little more than knee-high, but it spread away to the dark borders more than half a mile away in each direction except back to the barn. The row of devastation behind the combine was visible enough even in the meager starlight. The pole light in the barnyard seemed as distant as the stars overhead.

Duane's heart had been pounding during the run and now it accelerated again. He leaned over the metal railing of the platform and looked down, half-expecting to see a man-shaped indentation in the crop where the Old Man had tumbled off. Nothing.

The corn grew very close together, the rows no longer visible as the leaves from the stalks overlapped. Another few weeks, Duane knew, and the field would be shoulder-high, a monolith of corn.

But he should be able to see the Old Man now. He stepped onto the front of the platform, peering out over the cornhead and around the right side of the combine as far as he could manage.

"Dad?" His voice seemed very small. Duane called again.

No answer. Not even a rustle of stalks to tell him which way the Old Man had walked.

There was a noise from the barnyard and Duane stepped to the rear of the platform to watch as the pickup truck became visible in the barnyard. It backed out of sight behind the house, reappeared in front of the house, and backed down the driveway. Its lights were still off, door still open. It looked like a movie being run in reverse. Duane started to shout but realized how useless that was; he watched in silence as the truck reached the end of the long drive, then disappeared down County Six with its lights still off.

It wasn't the Old Man. The thought struck him like cold water being poured down his back.

Duane stepped into the cab, sat on the high seat. He'd drive the goddamn thing back to the house.

There was no key. Duane closed his eyes, tried to remember all the modifications the Old Man had made to the ignition system of this thing. He tried the starter anyway. Nothing. The combine wouldn't start without the key the Old Man kept on a nail in the barn.

Duane flicked a toggle to turn on the bright running lights; he'd drain the battery quickly, but those lights would light up two hundred feet of the field as if it were daylight.

Nothing. Duane remembered; the key had to be on.

He stepped out onto the platform, feeling the sweat on his face, taking slow, deep breaths to calm down. The corn that had looked so short a few hours ago now seemed tall enough to hide anything. Only the thirty-foot-wide path of beaten stubble winding behind the combine offered a clear path back to the barn.

Duane was not ready to walk that way yet.

He stepped onto a metal ledge behind the cab, pulled himself up onto the empty grain tank. The metal cover groaned a bit under his weight. Duane leaned, found a handhold, and pulled himself onto the roof of the cab. From twelve feet above everything, the field was a black mass stretching out to the edge of the world. The west pasture was half a mile to his right, the black line of Mr. Johnson's stretch of timber straight ahead several hundred yards. To his left, the corn stretched a quarter of a mile to the road where he'd heard the pickup disappear. Duane could see the pole lights of Uncle Henry's farm a mile or so to the southeast.

A slight wind came up and Duane shivered, buttoning the top few buttons of his shirt. I'll stay here. They'll expect me to walk back, but I'll stay here. He wondered who the "they" were even as he thought it.

Suddenly there was the slightest whisper of motion in the corn and Duane leaned forward to watch as something moved . . . glided . . . through the low stalks. There was no other word for what he saw: something long and large slid through the corn with little more than a silky rustling. It was about fifteen yards out and only the slight motion of the stalks marked its wake.

If he had been at sea, Duane thought, he would have thought a dolphin was swimming alongside the ship, occasionally breaking the water with a smooth glistening of its back.

Starlight did glisten as something slid above the level of the cornstalks and then below, but the wet sheen Duane saw seemed to be a glint of starlight on scales rather than flesh.

Any thought that it was the Old Man out there, stumbling around in the low corn, disappeared as he watched the wake of the thing, sliding counterclockwise in a huge circle, moving faster than a man could walk. Duane had the sense of a giant serpent moving through the field, a thing with a body as thick through as Duane's own. Something that was many yards long.

Duane made a noise like a swallowed laugh. This was nuts.

The thing in the corn had circled a fourth of the circumference of its way around the combine when it reached the bare area where the machine had harvested its swath.

The wake veered as smoothly as a fish reaching the end of play on a line, turned back, began swinging around to the south along the same invisible line. Duane heard a noise and shifted to the opposite edge of the roof. Something equally large and silent was sliding through the corn on the west side of the machine. As he watched, Duane realized that the circling motion moved in a foot or so each time the things reached the end of their circuit.

Ah, shit, breathed Duane in the precise tone of a prayer. He was definitely staying with the combine. If he had started walking back when it made sense to, those things would have been sliding alongside him by now.

This is insane. He curbed that line of thinking. It was insane . . . impossible . . . but it was happening. Duane felt the cool metal of the combine roof under his palms and forearms, smelled the cool air and scent of moist earth, and knew that however impossible it was, it was real. He had to deal with what was happening and not slide into denial.

Starlight gleamed on something long and slippery as the serpent-slug things wound back and forth in their tireless circling. Duane thought of a lamprey he'd caught once in Spoon River when he was fishing with Uncle Art. The thing had been all mouth, circles of teeth descending into a reddened gut, just waiting until it could latch on to something and drain its vital fluids. Duane had had nightmares for a month. He watched as the things passed each other in their sentinel-slide, only the slightest rustle and hint of motion revealing their location.

I'll stay here until morning. Then what? Duane knew that it wasn't midnight yet. What would he do if he lasted the five hours until morning? Perhaps the things would go away in the daylight. If not, he could stand on the roof, use his shirt as a flag, and wave toward traffic on County Six. Someone would see him.

Duane stepped from the cab to the grain tank, peering down behind the combine. Nothing was close. If the swirl of motion came closer to the machine, he'd be back up onto the roof in a second.

There was a noise from the driveway so far away, the sound of a truck driving, still no headlights.

It was the Old Man! He's coming back.

Duane realized that the engine sound was wrong at the same instant he caught a glimpse of the truck under the barnyard pole light.

Red. High sides. Scabrous cab.

The Rendering Truck crossed the barnyard and drove carefully through the gate into the field.

Duane jumped to the cab roof and had to sit to let the sudden nausea pass. Ah, goddammit.

The Rendering Truck pulled a hundred yards into the field, following the corridor of trampled corn, and then stopped, first pulling across the cleared strip diagonally as if to block his way. It was still almost a hundred yards away, but Duane could smell the dead things in the back of the truck as a breeze came to him from the northeast.

Stay there, stay there, he mentally commanded the truck.

It stayed where it was, but against the distant glow of the pole light, Duane could see movement in the back. Pale forms climbed down from the high sides, jumped down from the rear of the truck. They began shambling toward the combine.

Fuck. Duane pounded the roof with his fists. When the forms came between him and the distant light, he could see they were human-shaped. But they moved strangely ... almost lurching. There were one, two ... he counted six.

Duane swung down into the cab, pawed behind the seat for the toolbox the Old Man kept there. He stuck a nine-inch screwdriver in his belt, pulled out the largest and heaviest tool there-a fourteen-inch wrench. Hefting it, he stepped back out onto the platform.

The sliding things were circling closer, less than ten yards from the combine. The six figures were moving their way up the harvested path. Duane could only see four of them now, but it was very dark without the light behind them. They were less than twenty yards away.

"Help!" screamed Duane. "Help me!" He screamed in the general direction of Uncle Henry's house more than a mile away. "Please, help!"

He stopped. His heart was pounding so fiercely that he was sure it would rip its way out of his chest if he didn't calm down.

Hide in the grain tank. No. It took too long to pull up the access panel and it was no hiding place.

Hot-wire this thing. His heart lurched with hope. He went down on one knee and fumbled under the small switch panel.

There was a tangle of wiring running into the steering column, all of it modified and recircuited by the Old Man. Without a light, there was no way that Duane could see the color of die insulation to guess which wires ran to the ignition circuits and which just supplied fans or lights or somesuch. He pulled four free at random, chewed off the insulation on the ends, and began splicing quickly. The first combination did nothing. Nor did the second. He looked up from the third and leaned outside at the sound of footsteps.

The human shapes were less than twenty feet from the back of the combine.

The closest two seemed to be men ... the tallest might have been Van Syke. The third shape looked like a woman in rags or a shroud; tatters trailed behind her. Duane blinked as he realized that the starlight on her cheekbone seemed to be glinting on exposed bone.

Three other figures had moved into the knee-high corn. The closest one was shorter and wore a campaign hat that threw his features into shadow.

Duane sighed and stepped out onto the platform, hefting the wrench. Six of them. At least.

He stepped over the railing and jumped to the long com-head, teetering on the narrow support bar. Eight of the picker units gleamed coldly, the long snapping rolls and gathering chains dipping to the ground, their snouts embedded in the stalks where the machine had quit feeding.

Metal stairs echoed behind him as someone stepped up onto the platform. A shadow came around the right side of the combine, still a few yards out. The stench from the Rendering Truck was stronger than ever.

Duane had been waiting until the sliding things in the corn had passed each other and were at the farthest point in their circuits. Now.

He jumped out over the cornpicker heads, snapped off stalks as he hit soft soil and rolled, and then was up, running, feeling the screwdriver where it had gouged his belly, making sure the wrench was still in his hand.

Cornstalks crackled to his right and left as the lamprey-things reversed course and plowed toward him. Behind him, there were footsteps on metal, more crunching as corn bent.

Duane ran as hard as he could, faster than he could have imagined he was capable of. The line of trees of Mr. Johnson's woods was straight ahead; he could see the fireflies winking there like eyes glowing.

Something passed him to his right, a wake of bending corn curling in front of him. Duane staggered, tried to stop, almost fell on it.

Once he and the Old Man had helped Uncle Art carry a roll of carpet into a friend's new house. The tube of carpet must have been thirty-five feet long, three feet tall when it was rolled. It weighed a ton. The thing in the corn ahead of Duane was longer than that.

Duane teetered as the thing turned toward him. It had stayed beneath the level of the cornstalks only because most of it was in the moist soil, burrowing like some gigantic grub. The front of it surfaced now and starlight glinted on teeth.

Just like the lamprey.

The thing lunged toward Duane like a guard dog on the attack. He pirouetted like a matador, brought the wrench down hard enough to smash a skull.

The thing did not have a skull. The wrench bounced off thick, moist hide. It's like clubbing an underground cable, was Duane's splinter of a thought as the maw of the thing burrowed under the soil again, the back arched like a sea serpent's, and starlight glinted on it. Duane thought of a catfish's slimy skin.

There were rapid footsteps and the sound of breaking stalks a dozen paces behind.

The Soldier. Pale hands coming up and forward.

Duane swiveled gracefully and threw the heavy wrench. The man in the uniform made no attempt to duck. The campaign hat flew off and there was a dull, sickening sound as the wrench struck bone.

The form did not pause or stagger. The arms were extended, fingers wriggling like grubs. Someone else-a tall, dark figure, was moving to Duane's right. A third figure ran farther out to cut Duane off. There was more motion in the shadows.

Duane pulled the screwdriver from his belt and crouched, shifted left, trying to stay low in the corn. He swiveled as there was a movement below and behind him, jumped to his right.

Not fast enough. The slug thing had emerged, brushed against Duane's left leg, then dived into the soil again.

Duane rolled through corn, struggling to get to his feet eyen as he felt a tingling in his left leg as if someone had applied an electric current to it. Staggering, screwdriver still held like a knife, he balanced on his right leg and looked down.

Something had taken a hand-sized bite out of the calf of his left leg. There was a ragged hole in his corduroy pants, a more ragged hole in his calf. Duane swallowed as he realized he could see exposed muscle tissue there. The blood looked black in the starlight.

Hopping on one leg, Duane pulled his bandanna from his pocket and wrapped it tightly around his leg, below the knee. He'd think about it later.

He began hobbling toward the dark line of woods so far away. A sudden turmoil in the cornstalks ahead made him turn left, toward the county road.

Three figures were waiting. Duane saw the dim light gleaming on teeth. The shortest figure-the Soldier-moved forward as if he were standing on a wheeled platform that was being pulled by a cable; stiffly upright, legs hardly moving, the thing glided in a rush straight at Duane.

Duane didn't try to run. As the white fingers reached for his throat, Duane made a noise part grunt and part snarl, lowered his head, and drove the screwdriver into the man's khaki-shirted belly. The tool went in as easily as a blade would penetrate a rotten muskmelon, ramming home to the hilt and skewering something soft and yielding inside.

Duane gasped and staggered back. The dark figure was still standing. Both of its hands were locked on Duane's left arm. Duane tried to pull free, could not. He slashed at the hand with the screwdriver blade.

Something heavy hit the back of Duane's neck and he went down, kicking, blood from his left leg saturating his trousers now and splattering his shirt. His glasses went flying into the night. He'd lost both his slippers and his feet were caked with mud as he kicked wildly at the forms closing around him. Something long and moist glided past his face, submerged itself in the soil. He tried to stab at it but realized that the screwdriver had been forced out of his hand. There were many fingers grasping and pulling at his arms now.

There were at least four holding him down. A bony hand was spread across his face, forcing his cheek into the mud. Duane bit at the hand, chewed flesh that tasted like chicken that had been lying in the sun for a week, spit it out, and felt his teeth gnawing bone. The hand did not relent. He caught a glimpse of an old woman's face eaten with leprosy and rot.

This is a nightmare, he prayed, even as he knew it was not. Something-not the serpent thing-was chewing at his good leg, growling like a maddened dog.

Witt, he thought, feeling hopelessness finally rising him like flood water, help me.

Somebody crouched near his head and put a heavy boot on his face, driving him deeper into the loam. A shattered cornstalk gouged his scalp. There was a noise like a great cat coughing up a furball.

Another noise. The world was roaring and circling around him now, but even as Duane teetered on the edge of consciousness, recognizing in some removed, clinical part of his mind that it was as much from shock and fear as from the loss of blood, he recognized part of that roar.

The combine had been started up. It was moving toward him in the darkness. He could hear the cornstalks being severed, chewed, dragged into the unshielded maw of the snapping rolls. The air was full of the stench of decay warring with the scent of fresh-harvested stalks.

Duane struggled to rise, kicked, bit, tried to free either hand so as to gouge or claw at the shapes and dark weights holding him down. The boot on his face pressed with renewed pressure. Duane felt his cheekbone snap but did not pause in his maddened straggles to rise, to fight these things, to get to his feet.

There was a sudden movement, a shifting of the stench around him, a glimpse of the stars, and then the noise and the mass of the combine filled the entire world.

The instant the boot left his temple, Duane lifted his face from the mud. There was a great tearing at his legs, an irresistible force lifted him and turned him, pulled him toward the vortex he could feel through every fiber of his body, but for that split second, that briefest of instants, he was free-he could see the stars-and he lifted his face toward them even as he was spun away into the darkness roaring below and around him.

In Elm Haven, Mike O'Rourke had fallen asleep in Memo's room, sitting in the upholstered chair by the window, a baseball bat across his knees. He awoke at a sudden sound.

On the south end of town, Jim Harlen spun up out of his nightmare of the face at the window. The room was dark. His arm hurt from the bone outward and there was a terrible taste in his mouth. He realized that it was a distant but powerful sound that had awakened him.

Kevin Grumbacher had been dreaming when something brought him up in bed and gasping for air in the sterile darkness of his room. Some sound had awakened him. Kevin listened, hearing only the loud hum of the central air conditioner through the vents. Then it came. And again.

Dale came awake with a start, precisely the way he did when he was falling asleep and dreamed that he was falling. His heart pounded as if something terrible was happening. He blinked at the shadowed room, peered toward the night-light. He could feel stirrings in the bed nearby and felt Lawrence's warm fingers tugging at his pajama sleeve, asking what was wrong.

Dale pushed back the covers, wondering what had frightened him awake even as he blinked at the darkness.

Then it came again. A terrible sound, deep, echoing in the confines of Dale's brain. He glanced at Lawrence, saw his brother covering his ears and looking at him with wide eyes.

He hears it too.

It sounded again. A bell. . . louder, deeper, more terribly resonant than any church bell in Elm Haven. The first strike had wakened him. The second echoed away in the humid darkness. Then the third made Dale wince, cover his own ears, and hunker down in the bedclothes as if he could hide from the sound. He expected his mother and father to run into the room, shouts from the neighbors, but there was no noise but the bell, no response but his brother and he cowering from the awful noise.

The great bell seemed to be in the room with them as it struck four, struck again, and went on-relentlessly-striking the hour toward midnight.