Summer of Night

THIRTY-ONE

Dale was growing tired of the party and was about ready to leave on his own when he saw Mike and Michelle Staffney coming around the side of the house.

Michelle's dad had been moving through the crowd for several minutes, asking kids if they'd seen his daughter. The doctor had a new Polaroid camera and wanted to take some pictures before the fireworks began.

At one point Dale had gone through the kitchen and down the hall to use the bathroom-the one part of the interior of the house open to kids on this night of nights-and he passed a book-lined little room where a television set was flickering unattended. The TV set showed a mob of people under red, white, and blue banners. Dale had paid just enough attention to world events since visiting Ashley-Montague's place on Tuesday to know that tonight was the next-to-last night of the Democratic Convention. Dale stepped into the room long enough to get the gist of what Huntley and Brinkley were saying: Senator Kennedy was on the verge of being nominated as the Democrats' candidate for president. As Dale watched, a sweating man in a crowd shouted into the microphone: "Wyoming casts all fifteen votes for the next President of the United States!"

The camera showed the number 763 superimposed. The crowd went insane. David Brinkley said, "Wyoming's put him over the top."

Dale had just gone back outside when Mike and Michelle came out of the shadows of the backyard, Michelle picking up a flotilla of her girlfriends and running into the house, Mike looking around wildly.

Dale went over to him. "Hey, you OK?" Mike didn't look OK. He was pale-even his lips were white-and there was a film of sweat on his brow and upper lip. His right hand was clenched in a fist and was shaking slightly.

"Where's Harlen?" was all that Mike replied.

Dale pointed to the cluster of kids where Harlen was holding forth on his terrible accident, telling all about how he'd been climbing on Old Central's roof on a dare when a gust of wind had sent him on a fifty-foot fall.

Mike strode over and roughly pulled Harlen from the group.

"Hey, what the shit ..."

"Give it to me," snapped Mike, using a tone that Dale had never heard from his friend before. He snapped his fingers in front of Harlen. "Hurry."

"Give what ..." began Jim, obviously ready to argue.

Mike slapped Harlen's sling hard enough to make the smaller boy wince. He snapped his fingers again. "Give it to me. Now."

Neither Dale nor anyone Dale knew-much less Jim Harlen-would have disobeyed Mike O'Rourke at that moment. Dale imagined an adult giving Mike whatever he wanted right then.

Harlen glanced around, slipped the small .38 revolver out of his sling, and handed it to Mike.

Mike glanced at it once to make sure that it was loaded, then he held it down at his side-almost casually, Dale thought, so that no one would look twice at his right hand and the pistol in it unless you knew that it was there. Then he left, moving toward the barn with long, quick strides.

Dale glanced at Harlen, who raised one eyebrow, then both boys hurried to catch up, moving through the throngs of kids running toward the front yard where Dr. Staffney was taking pictures with his magic camera while some friends were setting up the aerial display rockets.

Mike moved around the south side of the barn, into the shadows there. He stayed close to the wall, his right hand raised now, the short barrel catching the last bit of light from the overhead bulbs. He whirled when Dale and Harlen stepped into the shadows, then waved them back against the wall.

Mike reached the end of the barn, stepped around some bushes there, crouching to look under them, then spun around-raising the pistol toward the black alley. Dale glanced at Harlen, remembered Jim's story about fleeing down this very alley from the Rendering Truck. What had Mike seen?

They came around the back of the barn. A single pole light half a block away down the alley only seemed to accentuate the darkness here, the black masses of foliage, the black-against-black outlines of other sheds, garages, and outbuildings. Mike had the pistol raised, his body sideways as if ready to aim north down the alley, but his head was turned and he was looking at the wood on the back of the Staffneys' garage. Dale and Harlen moved closer to look with him.

It took a minute for Dale to see the irregular rows of splinters going to the small window twenty-some feet above. It looked as if a telephone lineman had used his spiked climbing boots to gouge footholds on the vertical wooden wall. Dale looked back at Mike. "Did you see someth-"

"Shhh." Mike waved him into silence and moved across the alley, closing on a tall raspberry bush on the opposite side.

Dale could smell raspberries in the darkness, as the fruit was crushed underfoot. Suddenly he smelled something else ... a rank animal smell.

Mike waved them back again and then raised the pistol, the muzzle aimed head-high at the dark bush, his right arm straight and steady now. Dale clearly heard the click as the hammer was pulled back.

There was a hint of white there-a pale sketch of a face between black branches-then a low growling, a rumbling deep in some large creature's chest.

"Jesus," Harlen whispered frantically, "shoot! Shoot!"

Mike held the aim, thumb still on the hammer, arm never wavering as the white face and a dark mass too large and too strangely shaped to be a human being separated itself from the raspberry bush and moved toward him.

Dale backed against the barn wood, his heart filling his throat, feeling Harlen scrabbling to run. Mike still did not shoot.

The growling rose to a crescendo; there was a dark scrabbling of claws on the cinders and gravel of the alley; teeth glinted in what faint light there was.

Mike planted his feet wide and waited while the thing advanced.

"Down, goddamn you dogs!" came a whiney voice from that pale circle of a face. The last word had been pronounced "dawgs."

"Cordie," said Mike. He lowered the weapon.

Dale could see now that the teeth and dark bodies on either side of Cordie belonged to two very large dogs-one a Doberman pinscher, the other some sort of variation on a German shepherd. Cordie held them on short leashes that looked like rawhide thongs.

"What are you doing here?" asked Mike, still looking up and down the ajley rather than at her.

"Could ask you the same thing," snapped Cordie Cooke. Dale heard the last word as "thang."

Mike ignored the question, if it was a question. "You see somebody back here? Somebody . . . strange?"

Cordie snorted what might have been a laugh and the two dogs looked up at her quickly, licking their chops, waiting to know if they should be happy with her. "Lotsa strange somebodies around here at night these days. Got anybody in particular in mind?"

Mike turned so he was speaking to Dale and Harlen as much as to the girl. "I was upstairs there." He gestured with the pistol toward the window above them. "I saw something outside the window. Somebody. Somebody very strange . . . strange."

Dale looked up at the black glass and thought with Michelle? He knew the priority of that thought was stupid, but it hurt him somehow to think it just the same. Harlen just frowned at the window and then back at Mike, not comprehending; Dale realized that Harlen hadn't seen Mike and Michelle come out of the shadows together.

"I jes got here," said Cordie. "Me an' Belzybub an' Lucifer come down to see who's at the snot's party this year."

Harlen moved closer and stared at the dogs. "Belzybub and Lucifer?" They growled him back several hasty steps.

''I thought you'd moved away,'' said Dale.''Thought your family'd moved." He'd almost said up and moved. Listening to Cordie talk was contagious.

The shapeless gunnysack of a dress moved up and down with what might have been a shrug. The huge dogs returned their attention from Jim back to their master . . . mistress . . . whatever. "Pa's run off," she said tonelessly. "Couldn't stand the damn night things. He always was no good in a pinch. Ma an' the twins and my sister Maureen an' that no-good boyfriend of hers, Berk, all took off for Cousin Sook's up at Oak Hill."

"Where are you staying?" asked Mike.

Cordie stared at him as if in wonderment that anyone could think she was stupid enough to answer that question. "Some-wheres safe," she said shortly. "Why was you aimin' little Jimmy's popshooter at me? You think I was one of the night things?"

"Night things," repeated Mike. "You've seen them?"

Cordie snorted again. "Why the hell you think Pa'd run off an' Ma an' the others had to give up the house, huh? Goddamn things was comin' around most nights and sometimes in the day."

"Tubby?" said Dale, his insides tense. The pale mass under black water, the eyes clicking open like a doll's.

"Tubby 'n' that soldier fellow, and the dead ol' woman, and some others. Kids to look at 'em, only not much left but bones an' rags."

Dale shook his head. There was something about Cordie's matter-of-fact acceptance of the insane curve of events that made him want to laugh and giggle and keep on giggling.

Mike lifted his left hand, slowed it as the dogs growled, and touched her shoulder. Cordie seemed to jump at the touch.

"I'm sorry we haven't been out to see you," he said. "We've been trying to figure out what's going on ourselves, spending our time running or fighting. We should've thought of you."

Cordie cocked her head in an almost canine motion. "Thought of me?" Her voice was strange. "What the hell you talkin' about, O'Rourke?"

"Where's your shotgun?" asked Harlen.

Cordie snorted again. "The dogs is better'n that ol' gun. I got it, but I turn the dogs loose on 'em if those things make for me again." A'gin.

Mike had been walking north down the alley and now the others followed. Their shoes and the dogs' claws made soft sounds on cinders. There was a cheer from the Staffney front yard, but the noise seemed very distant.

"So they've tried to get you too, huh?" said Mike.

Cordie spat into the dark weeds. "Two nights ago, Belzy-bub pulled mosta the left hand off the thing that useta be Tubby. It was clawin' to get in at me."

"In where?" asked Harlen. He was looking over his shoulder at the dark shrubs and shadowy lawns on either side, his head moving like a metronome.

Cordie didn't answer. "You boys wanta see somethin' that's stranger than your guy at the window?" she asked.

Dale could hear the words his mind framed-Not really, thanks anyway-but he said nothing. Harlen was too busy glancing at shadows to speak. Mike said, "Where?"

"It ain't far. 'Course if you gotta get back to Miss Silkypants' party, I understand."

Dale thought What if it's not Cordie? What if they got her? But it looked like Cordie . . . spoke like Cordie . . . smelted like Cordie.

"How far?" persisted Mike. He'd stopped walking. They were about thirty yards away from the Staffneys' barn, not quite to the single pole light along the entire stretch of alley. Dogs were barking in many of the yards, but Belzybub and Lucifer ignored them with almost princely disdain.

"The old grain co-op," Cordie said after a silence.

Dale winced. The abandoned grain elevators were less than a quarter of a mile from where they were: up the alley to Catton Road and then west across the tracks, down the old overgrown lane that used to connect the town with the road to the dump. The elevators had been abandoned since the Monon Railroad discontinued service to Elm Haven in the early 1950s.

"I'm not going there," said Harlen. "Forget it. No way." He looked over his shoulder toward a sudden sound as some dog the size of Belzybub's head strained at his rope to get free in one of the backyards.

"What's there?" said Mike. He put the pistol in the waistband of his jeans.

Cordie started to speak but stopped. She took a breath.

"You gotta see it," she said at last. "I don't understand what it means, but I know you ain't gonna believe me unless you see it."

Mike looked back toward the noise of the Staffney party. "We'll need a light."

Cordie pulled a heavy metal four-cell flashlight from some deep pocket of her shapeless dress. She clicked it on and a powerful beam illuminated branches forty feet above them. She turned it off.

"Let's go," said Mike.

Dale followed them through the pool of yellow glow from the pole light but Harlen held back. "I'm not going out there," he said.

Mike shrugged. "OK, go on back. I'll get your pistol back to you later." He walked on with Dale, Cordie, and the two dogs.

Harlen scurried to catch up. "Fuck that. I want that back tonight." Dale guessed that he didn't want to walk the half block back to the party by himself.

There were no streetlights on Catton Road as they reached the end of the alley and stepped out onto the gravel there. Cornfields to the north rustled in a faint breeze which carried the night-scent of growing to them. The stars were very bright.

With Cordie and the dogs leading the way, they turned west toward the railroad tracks and the dark line of trees ahead.

The dead bodies were hanging from hooks.

From the outside, the door of the old grain elevator storehouse had looked secure with a heavy padlock and chain in place. But Cordie had shown them that the metal bar holding the lock could be pulled out of the rotten wooden frame with little effort.

The dogs would not go in. They whined, pulled at the rawhide thongs, and showed the whites of their eyes.

"They'll go after the movin' dead ones all right," said Cordie, tying them to a stanchion just outside the door. "It's what's in here they don't like. Don't like the smell."

Dale didn't like the smell either. The main warehouse space was twenty-five or thirty yards long and three stories high, the ceiling crisscrossed with wooden and iron crossbraces. It was from a row of those beams that the carcasses hung.

Cordie played her flashlight beam across the flayed things hanging there while the boys pulled their shirts over their noses and mouths and advanced slowly, blinking at the stench. The air was filled with the swarm-sound of flies.

When Dale first saw the carcasses-the ragged flesh and raw bone of them-he'd thought they were human. Then he recognized a sheep . . . then a calf, strung by the hind legs and hanging head down, the neck impossibly arched and gaping in an obscene smile . . . then another sheep . . . then a large dog ... a larger calf . . . there were at least twenty carcasses hanging over the long trough made of split fifty-gallon oil drums.

Cordie stepped close to the calf, set her hand on the nearly severed neck. "See what they done? I think they hung 'em up here before they cut their throats." She pointed. "Blood goes downhill here . . . through that pipe . . . out through that gutter over there so they can load up without havin' to carry buckets of the stuff outside."

"Load up?" said Dale, then realized what she meant. Someone had used the trough to transport the blood outside to the loading dock . . . to what? Where did they take it?

Suddenly the stench of decomposing flesh, the overpowering smell of blood, and the high hum of a million flies made Dale dizzy and sick. He staggered to a window, forced the old latch, lifted a movable pane there, and gasped in fresh air. The trees closed in darkly outside. Starlight reflected on rusted rails.

"You've known about this place?" Mike said to Cordie. There was an odd, flat note in his voice.

The girl shrugged, moved the light along the beams. "A few days. One of the things got one of my dogs t'other night. Followed the blood here."

Harlen was trying to use the top of his sling as a mask. His face above the black silk was very pale. "You've known about this and haven't told anyone?"

Cordie turned the flashlight on Harlen. "Who's I supposed to tell?" she said flatly. "Our ol' school principal maybe? That dipshit Barney? Maybe our justice of the peace, heh?"

Harlen turned his face away from the light. "That'd be better than telling nobody, for Chrissakes."

Cordie began walking down the row of carcasses, shining the powerful flashlight first on ribs and flesh, then on the rusted and blood-coated trough beneath. The blood looked black and thick as molasses in the flashlight beam. The trough was so coated with flies that it looked as if the metal were moving. "I told you, didn't I?" said Cordie. "It's what I found here today made up my mind to tell somebody."

She had come to the end of the line of carcasses, far in the rear of the warehouse space. She moved the flashlight up.

"Jesus fuck!" said Harlen, jumping back.

Mike had been carrying the pistol at his side since coming through the door. Now he lifted it and moved forward.

The man hanging there had been strung up like the animals-legs tied together by a wire looped over an old iron hook-and at first glance his body was very similar to the sheep and calves: naked, ribs outlined against white flesh, throat cut so thoroughly that the head had come close to being severed. Dale thought that the neck looked like the mouth of some great white shark with ragged bits of flesh and cartilage in place of teeth. The underside of the man's chin was so streaked that it looked like someone had upended bucket after bucket of thick red paint on him.

Cordie walked up to the trough and, while still keeping the light steady on the corpse, grabbed it by the hair and pulled the dangling head forward.

"Jesus," gasped Dale. He felt his right leg begin to vibrate of its own accord and he set a hand on his thigh to steady it.

"J. P. Congden," whispered Mike. "I see why you couldn't tell the justice of the peace."

Cordie grunted and let the head hang free again. "He's new," she said. "Wasn't here yesterday. Come here an' look at somethin' though."

The boys shuffled forward, Harlen holding the sling to his face, Mike still keeping the gun high, and Dale feeling as if his legs were going to fold under him. They lined up along the trough like thirsty men at a bar.

"See here?" said Cordie, grabbing J. P. Congden by the hair again and pulling forward until the corpse was leaning out into the light and the wire creaked above them. "See?"

The man's mouth was open wide, as if frozen in a shout. One eye stared blindly at them but the other was almost closed. The face was streaked with caked blood from the throat wound, but there was something else. It took Dale a minute to see it.

The former justice of the peace's temples were flecked with wounds and his scalp was half-dangling, as if Indians had started to scalp him and then thought better of it.

"Shoulders too," said Cordie, still speaking in flat but vaguely interested tones, sort of the way Dale imagined Digger's dad or a pathologist talking during an autopsy or embalming. "See on the shoulders there?"

Dale saw. Holes. Cuts. It looked like someone had poked him a few dozen times with a sharp, perfectly round blade-certainly not enough to kill him, but terrible all the same.

Mike understood first. "A shotgun," he said, looking at the other two boys. "He just caught the edge of the pattern."

It took Dale a minute. Then he remembered. One of the men running from the campsite directly at the spot where Mike had been hidden. Then the blast of Mike's squirrel gun. The man's cap flying off and him going down in the grass.

Dale felt sick again and he walked back to the window, hanging on to the dusty sill to steady himself. Flies whizzed by ... more on their way inside.

Cordie let the corpse hang free again. "I just wondered if his own people done that, or if someone else is fightin' these things."

"Let's go outside," said Mike, his voice suddenly shaky. "We'll talk."

Dale had been staring outside at the dark trees, taking long, deep breaths and letting his eyes adapt to the darkness there, when suddenly the night exploded with light and noise. He threw himself away from the window, landing on the rough boards and rolling.

Mike grabbed the flashlight from Cordie, killed the light, and dropped to one knee, pistol raised. Harlen started to run, hit the trough, and almost fell into it, his good arm going deep into the caked blood. A million flies took wing.

The room was suddenly illuminated by the flare-bright bursts of light from outside-first phosphorous white, then bright red, then a green that made the dangling carcasses look covered with a brilliant mold. The burst of light would come through the dusty panes and then the sound of the aerial explosion, forcing its way through the pane Dale had opened. Only Cordie Cooke remained precisely where she had been-her round face scrunched up as she squinted at the light. Outside, her dogs were going crazy.

"Aw, shit," breathed Harlen, rubbing his hand on his jeans. The blood came off in brown smears. The explosions outside redoubled in number and intensity. "It's only Michelle Staffney's goddamn fireworks."

There was a general sighing and slumping. Dale got to all fours, turning to look into the shadows and watch the carcasses as they came into existence and then disappeared with the vagaries of light from the skyrockets-green and red, pure red, the naked flesh and protruding ribs and slit throats, blue, blue and red, white, red, red, red ... Dale knew that he was seeing something that he would never forget as long as he lived. And something that he would want to forget as long as he lived.

Saying nothing to each other, resetting the metal bar and padlock behind them, they went back out into the night and took the road back to town.