Summer of Night

TWENTY-ONE

It rained on and off for three weeks. Each morning the sky would be a rapidly shifting war between sunlight and clouds, but by ten a.m. the drizzle would begin and by lunchtime the rain would fall from lowering skies.

The Free Show was canceled for June 25 and July 2, although the skies were clear and the evening gentle on that second Saturday. The next morning the rain returned. Around Elm Haven, the hungry Illinois earth seemed to drink the moisture and ask for more. The black earth turned blacker. In most of America, farmers spoke of corn being "knee-high by the Fourth of July"; in central Illinois the rule always had been "waist-high by the Fourth of July," but this summer the corn was closer to shoulder-high by the Fourth.

The Fourth fell on a Monday, and although the adults seemed to enjoy the rare three-day holiday, their pleasure was ruined a bit by the rain that canceled the town parade and the evening's fireworks. Elm Haven had no city budget for a formal fireworks show, but a century of tradition had people bring their own Roman candles, skyrockets, and firecrackers to the school grounds. A few showed up this summer, but the wind had risen that evening, the nightly storm had blown in early, and the would-be revelers abandoned the effort after matches would not light and fuses failed.

Dale and Lawrence watched the lightning storm that had replaced a fireworks show from the safety of their front porch. Explosions of white light ran along the southwestern horizon, silhouetting trees, outlining gabled rooftops, and illuminating the looming mass that was Old Central. In the dark lulls between flashes, the school still seemed to glow from some inner light, a soft fungal phosphorescence that painted the grounds a blue-green and seemed to build a haze of static electricity around the ancient elms that surrounded the block. One of those elms exploded and died as Dale and Lawrence watched on the evening of July the Fourth; whether struck by lightning or simply torn asunder by the wind, they did not know. The sound was deafening even from sixty yards away. Half the tree remained standing, a jagged, broken tooth of a thing, while the leafy, living part of it fell onto the schoolyard with a lumberjack crash.

Dale and Lawrence went in after the storm had passed. They'd set off a few firecrackers from the porch, swung sparklers and lighted glowworms on the stone steps, but the wind was cold and their hearts weren't really in it.

Around the town, in the hush which followed the storm, the millions of acres of corn grew taller, forming a solid mass of greenery that turned the county roads into corridors between high walls, hid the horizon from sight, and seemed to leech substance from the next day's sunlight until the brightest spot around was no brighter than the deep shadow under the elms of town.

Dale's family brought food to Mr. McBride. Half the families in town had. Dale rode along as they drove out the familiar but strangely unfamiliar county road, past the cemetery and Uncle Henry's, and turned down the long lane. The corn seemed taller here than in any of the adjacent fields, the driveway a veritable tunnel.

The first two times they tried, no one answered the door despite the fact that Mr. McBride's pickup was in the yard. The third time he opened the door, accepted the casseroles and pie with a mumbled litany of thanks, and mumbled something else when Dale's mother and father offered their regrets. Dale had always thought of Duane's dad as an older man than any of the other parents, but he was shocked at McBride's appearance: his remaining strands of hair seemed to have turned gray in the past month, his eyes were deep-set and bloodshot, the left one almost closed as if from a stroke, his face looked more like the bust of a cracked and poorly glued figurine than a man with wrinkles, and the gray stubble ran down his cheeks onto his neck and into his dirty undershirt.

Dale's parents spoke in low, sad undertones to each other during the long ride back.

No one knew for sure what arrangements had been made for Duane's funeral or memorial service. Word in town was that Mr. Taylor had released the body to a mortuary in Peoria-the same one that had arranged Duane's uncle's cremation. Word was that the boy was also cremated, in a private service.

No one knew what Mr. McBride had done with the ashes.

At night, when he was drifting off to sleep, Dale thought of his friend now existing only as a handful of ashes and the thought brought him sitting up in bed, heart pounding with some deep realization that the universe was wrong.

At times, when mowing the yard between rainstorms or doing something else that freed his subconscious, Dale imagined that Duane McBride was still alive, that he had faked his own death and was hiding out somewhere like that comic strip character The Spirit, or like Mickey Mouse in the comic adventures when he was trying to find the Phantom Blot. At those times, Dale half-expected to get a phone call from Duane, his friend's calm voice saying, "Meet me in the Cave. I've got some information."

Dale wondered what information Duane had been prepared to share at the meeting in the chickenhouse. The meeting that never happened. He couldn't imagine how Duane could've found out much about Tubby or the school, restricted as he was to his farm and a library. But over the four years Dale had known him, he'd learned never to underestimate Duane.

After Mike's revelation about the tunnel he'd found in the cemetery and the similar tunnels under his home, the boys had seen less and less of each other. Each of them had seemed to withdraw into his own circle of family and daily chores, as if there would be safety from the encroaching darkness there.

Lawrence feared the dark more than ever before. He wept now sometimes in his sleep and insisted on a forty-watt bulb in the lamp on the dresser rather than the weak night-light. Their mother often came in and turned off the brighter light after Lawrence had fallen asleep, but several times the eight-year-old had awakened screaming.

Before their dad left on an eight-day selling trip through Indiana and northern Kentucky, their mother brought Lawrence and Dale to the local doctor to discuss their fears and the wild accusation Dale had made at dinner one night that grown-ups had murdered Duane and Tubby Cooke. The doctor was named Viskes, was a Hungarian refugee who had been in the country only eighteen months, and still had problems with English. All the kids in town called him Dr. Vicious because he was too cheap to buy new hypodermic needles and just kept sterilizing the old ones until the shots were pure agony.

Dr. Viskes prescribed hard work and fresh air to cure the children's nonsense. Dale overheard Dr. Vicious tell his mom that it was a shame about the McBride boy and his uncle, but that accidents tend to happen in twos.

Accidents happen in threes, thought Dale.

The other kids got together occasionally. For five days after the Fourth, Kev and Mike and Dale and Lawrence played almost nonstop Monopoly on the Stewarts' long front porch while the showers fell. They would leave the game out overnight, stones weighting their stacks of money and cards; when someone went broke, they changed the rules so that person could wander the board as a "bum" until the bank floated a loan or some old property brought in rent. With the rules changed, the game had no chance of being finished and they played on-meeting after breakfast and playing until mothers called them home for supper.

Dale dreamed Monopoly for two nights and was glad of it.

On the fifth day, the Grumbachers' stupid Labrador, Brandy, snuffled his way onto the porch while the boys were eating dinner and scattered the money and chewed up four of the cards. They ended the game by silent assent and for two days they did not see each other again.

On July 10, a Sunday which did not feel like a Sunday because Dale's dad was at the home office in Chicago, the basement flooded.

Things would never be the same again.

For two days Dale's mom put up with the flooding, moving things from the floor onto the workbench and trying to keep the sump pump working. The basement had flooded twice before during their four years in the house, but both times their father had been able to stop the backup at a couple of inches. This time the water kept rising.

On Tuesday morning the sump pump went out. By lunchtime the electricity went out in the house.

Dale came down from his room when his mother called. The giant basement stairs led down to solid darkness. His mom stood on the next-to-last step, her skirt soaked, a bandanna wrapped around her head. She looked close to tears.

Dale stared. The water had risen over the first step. It was at least two feet deep, probably more. It lapped at the step his mother was standing on like a dark sea.

"Oh, Dale, it's just so damn frustrating. . . ."

Dale looked at her. He didn't think he'd ever heard her curse before.

"I'm sorry, honey, but I haven't been able to get the pump to work and it's up to the level of the washing machine and I have to go way back to the back room to put a new fuse in and . . . damn, I wish your father were here."

"I'll do it, Mom." Dale was amazed to hear himself say it. He hated the goddamn basement at the best of times.

Something floated near the step. It might have been a tangle of dust in the water, but it looked like the back of a drowned rat.

"Go get your oldest jeans on," said his mother. "And bring your Boy Scout flashlight."

Dale went upstairs to change clothes in a half-daze. The sense of removal and retreat he'd been feeling since Duane's death now folded on him like a thick wrapping of insulation. He looked down at his hands as if they belonged to someone else. Into the basement? In the dark? He changed clothes, pulled on his holiest pair of old sneakers, rolled up his pant-legs, grabbed his flashlight from the extra room, tested it, and pounded down the stairs.

His mother handed him the fuse. "It's right above the dryer back in the . . ."

"I know where it is." The water hadn't risen visibly in the past few minutes, but it was already overrunning the second step. The short corridor toward the furnace room looked like the unlighted entrance to some flooded crypt.

"Just don't stand in the water when you put it in. Get up on the bench next to the dryer. Make sure your hands are dry and that the switch is on Off and ..."

"Yeah, Mom." He stepped off before he lost his nerve and ran back up the stairs and out the back door.

The water came above his knees and was icy cold. His toes began to ache and cramp almost immediately.

' "The whole drainage system has backed up. . ." he heard his mother say as he moved down the narrow corridor, shining his light on the cinderblock walls. The beam was dim; he should've changed the batteries.

The opening to the coal bin was a black rectangle to his right, the bottom of it just above the waterline. Black water milled around the hopper and there were dark lumps floating there that looked like human turds. Coal, thought Dale and shined the dim light on the tentacled monster of the furnace itself.

The water level wasn't quite to the grate yet. Dale had no idea what would happen if the furnace flooded.

A sound to his right made him wheel, splashing backward into the wall and shining his light into the coal bin.

It was dry in there but something had rustled up near the ceiling on the far side, where the unfinished area began. Dale saw small pinpricks of reflected light in that darkness. Just the pipes. Just the insulation. Not eyes. Not eyes.

He turned left around the furnace. The water seemed deeper here, even though he knew it couldn't be. Maybe it could be. Maybe each room slants down a little bit. Maybe the back room is completely underwater.

"Are you there yet?" came his mother's voice, distorted by stone and water and the curves of walls.

"Almost," he yelled, although he was less than halfway back.

There were no windows in this basement; it was too low. Dale's light skittered across the oily water and illuminated only a fraction of the furnace room-pipes, something floating-a piece of wood-more pipes, a soaked piece of paper washed up against the wall, the door to the workroom.

The workroom was a wide, black space. The water soaked higher into Dale's jeans until it was almost to his crotch. He'd have to be careful in the last room because the sump pump was built over a hole at least eighteen inches wide, a small well that pumped water into a jerry-rigged drainage system.

Just like the tunnels Mike saw. The tunnels at Duane's farm.

Dale realized that the flashlight beam was shaking. He steadied his right hand with his left, stepped deeper into the workroom, noted that his father's tools were high and dry although they'd forgotten a small wooden toolbox in the corner which was now floating under the bench. Lawrence had made that toolbox last winter.

"I can call Mr. Grumbacher!" called his mother. Her voice sounded light-years away, a faint recording played in a distant room.

"No," said Dale. He thought he said it; he might only have whispered it.

The basement rooms were linked in almost an S-shape, with the stairs being at the base of the S, the furnace room at the middle, the workroom just before the top curve, and the laundry room tucked back at the end of the curve, reaching back toward the coal bin and the unfinished crawl-space.

Dale shone his light into the laundry room.

It seemed larger than it had been when the lights worked. The darkness created the illusion that the far wall had been removed and that only blackness stretched away there . . . under the house, under the yards, across the street and schoolyard to the school itself.

Dale found the sump pump, its motor just above the water-line on its clumsy tripod of pipes. He gave it a wide berth as he circled to the south wall and the washer and dryer and laundry bench.

It was wonderful to crawl up onto the bench and to lift his legs out of the water. He was shaking from the cold now, the flashlight beam whipping over the cobwebby rafters and maze of pipes above him, but at least the worst was over. With the new fuse in, the lights would come, the sump pump would begin working, and he could walk back without just the flashlight.

He fumbled in his pocket with numb fingers, almost dropped the fuse into the water, and lifted it carefully in both hands. Holding the flashlight under his chin, Dale made sure the power lever was Off and then opened the access plate.

It was immediately obvious which fuse had blown. The third one. Always the third one. His mother shouted something unintelligible from a great distance, but Dale was too busy to respond; if he moved his jaw to talk, the flashlight would have fallen. He set the new fuse in place and threw the switch.

Light. The far wall was there. A stack of laundry still sat in a basket near the edge of the table. An assortment of junk he and his mother had tossed on top of the dryer and washer to keep dry resolved itself from ominous shadows to simple stacks of old magazines, an iron, a baseball Lawrence had lost . . . just junk.

His mother called again. Dale heard clapping. "Got it!" he shouted uselessly. He stuck the Boy Scout flashlight on his belt, rolled his soaked pantlegs a little higher, and jumped down into the water. The ripples moved across the room like the wake of a shark.

Dale smiled at his own fears and started walking back, already imagining the story he'd tell his dad about all this. He was almost to the door of the workroom when he heard the audible click behind him.

The lights went out. Goosebumps broke out over every inch of Dale's body.

Someone had thrown the power switch to Off. That click had been unmistakable.

His mother called, but it was the most distant and useless of sounds. Dale was breathing through his mouth, trying to ignore the roar of his pulse in his ears, trying to hear.

The water stirred a few feet from him. First he heard it and then he felt the ripples washing against his bare legs.

Dale backed up until he slammed into a wall. Cobwebs tangled in his hair and tickled his forehead but he ignored them as he fumbled on his belt for the flashlight. Don't drop it Please God don't drop it Please. He thumbed it on. Nothing. The darkness was absolute. There was a sliding, liquid noise five feet in front of him, as of an alligator sliding off the bank into dark water.

Dale banged the base of the flashlight, pounded it on his upper thigh. A weak, filmy light illuminated rafters. He held the flashlight in front of him like a weapon, sweeping the dying beam back and forth.

The distant dryer. Washer. Bench. Blackness of the far wall. The silent sump pump. Fuse box. Handle Off.

Dale panted through his mouth. He felt suddenly dizzy and wanted to close his eyes, but he was afraid that he would lose his balance and fall. Into the water. Into the dark water all around. Into the water where things waited.

Stop it goddammit! Stop it! The thought was so loud that for a moment he was sure that it was his mother shouting. Stop it! Calm down, you damn sissy. He took in short breaths and continued to command himself out of his panic. It helped a little.

The switch wasn't set all the way. It fell down.

How? I pushed it all the way up.

No, you didn't. Go fix it.

The flashlight beam died. Dale pounded it back into life. There were stirrings and ripples all across the room now. It was as if entire generations of spiders had come awake and lowered themselves from the rafters. The light flickered around the room, touching everything, illuminating nothing. There was more shadow than substance everywhere. Spider legs.

Dale cursed himself for being a coward and took a step forward. Water milled around him. He took another step, tapping the flashlight every time the beam threatened to go out. The water was above his waist now. Impossible. But it was. Watch out for the sump-pump hole. He moved left to stay nearer the wall.

He was turned around now, not sure of which direction he was going. The flashlight beam was too weak to reach the walls or the washer or dryer. He was afraid he was walking to the back of the room where the wall did not meet the ceiling and sharp little eyes stared out of the crawlspace even when there were lights and . . . Stop it!

Dale stopped. He pounded the base of the L-shaped Boy Scout flashlight and for a second the beam was strong and straight. The bench was ten paces to his left. He had gone the wrong way. Another three paces would have taken him to the sump-pump hole. Dale turned and began wading toward the bench.

The flashlight went off. Before Dale could bang it against his leg, something else touched his leg. Something long and cold. It seemed to be nuzzling against him like the snout of an old dog.

Dale did not scream. He thought of floating newspaper and floating toolboxes and he worked hard not to think of other things. The cold sliding against his leg lessened, returned, grew stronger. He did not scream. He pounded the flashlight, flicked the sliding switch, and tightened the lens. A weak glow trickled out, more like the spluttering of a tiny candle than a flashlight beam.

Dale bent over and aimed the dying beam at the surface of the water.

Tubby Cooke's body floated inches under the surface. Dale recognized him at once even though he was naked and his flesh was pure white-the white of rotting mushrooms-and terribly bloated. Even the face was bloated to twice or three times the size of a human face, like a pastry that had risen until the white dough was ready to explode from internal pressures. The mouth was open wide under the water-there were no bubbles-and the gums had blackened and pulled far back from the teeth so each molar and incisor stood far out like yellowed fangs. The body floated gently there just under the surface, as if it had been there for weeks and would always be there. One hand floated near enough to the surface that Dale could see pure-white fingers swollen to the size of albino sausages. They seemed to waggle slightly as a gentle current touched them.

Then, eighteen inches away from Dale's face, the Tubby-thing opened its eyes.