Summer of Night

THIRTY-EIGHT

After the first ten yards or so, Mike found the tunnel easier going. It was wider now, closer to twenty-eight or thirty inches across rather than the tight squeeze he'd forced his shoulders into at the beginning. The ribbed sides of the tunnel were hard, made of packed earth and some gray material with the consistency of dried airplane glue, and they reminded him of the track a caterpillar tractor or bulldozer left in the soil after the mud had dried for days in the sun. Mike thought that crawling through the tunnel was no more difficult than forcing one's way through one of the smaller corrugated steel culverts they laid under a road.

Only this one went on for hundreds of yards-or miles-rather than a few yards.

The smell was bad, but Mike ignored it. The light from his flashlight reflected red off the ribs of the hole, making Mike think again of a long gut, an intestine to hell, but he tried not to think about that. The pain in his elbows and knees grew worse by the minute, but he put that out of his mind, reciting Hail Marys interspersed with the occasional Our Father. He wished he'd brought the remaining bit of Eucharist he'd left on Memo's bed.

Mike crawled farther, feeling the tunnel twist to the left and right, sometimes descending, sometimes rising to the point he guessed there was less than a yard of dirt over his head. At the moment he felt deep. Twice he'd come to a junction with other tunnels, one burrowing off the left almost straight down, and Mike had shone his flashlight, waited, listened, and then crawled on, keeping to what he thought was the most recently excavated burrow. At least this tunnel smelted the strongest.

At every turn, Mike expected to come across the corpse of Lawrence Stewart, clogging the way ahead. Perhaps there would be just bones and tatters of flesh left . . . perhaps it would be worse. But if Mike found the eight-year-old, at least he could leave the warren of tunnels with honor and tell Dale and the others that there was no reason for them to go into the school at night.

Only Mike could never find his way back now. There had been too many twists, more than enough turns to lose him permanently. He stayed with the main tunnel-he thought it was the main tunnel-and kept moving ahead, his jeans torn at the knee now, the flesh underneath bleeding. It was like crawling on ridged concrete. The flashlight wavered on red soil, now illuminating twenty yards of shaft, now twenty inches as the tunnel dipped or turned again. Mike expected a visitor at every bend.

The squirt guns in his waistband were leaking, making him feel like a damned fool. It was one thing to fight monsters, he thought. Quite another to fight them with wet underwear. He pulled the worst offender from his belt and clamped it in his teeth; better a dribbly chin than to look like you needed diapers.

The tunnel turned right again, began dropping steeply. Mike inched ahead, using his elbows as brakes, the flashlight beam bobbing against the red roof. Mike kept crawling.

He felt it coming before he saw it.

The earth began to tremble slightly. Mike remembered one long-ago summer night when he and Dale had been watching . a ballgame over at Oak Hill and had gone for a moonlit walk along the railroad tracks. They'd felt a vibration in the soles of their sneakers and then put their ears against the rails, feeling the distant coming of the daily express between Gales-burg and Peoria.

This was like that. Only much stronger, the vibration coming up through the bones of Mike's hands and knees and shaking his spine, rattling his teeth. And with the tremors came the stench.

Mike deliberated about turning the light off and then decided to hell with it-these things could certainly see him, Why not return the favor. He lay prone, the flashlight under his chin now, Memo's squirrel gun in his right hand, the squirt gun in his left. Then he remembered that he'd have to reload and he hurried to fumble out four more cartridges, wrapping them in the short sleeve of his t-shirt where he could get them in a hurry.

For a second the vibration seemed all around him, above him, behind him, and he had a moment of pure panic as he thought of the thing exploding on him from behind, seizing him from the rear before he managed to squirm around, get the gun aimed behind him. Mike felt the panic rise like dark bile, but then the vibrations localized and intensified. It's ahead of me.

He lay flat, waiting.

The thing came around a bend in the tunnel perhaps twelve feet ahead of him. It was worse than Mike could have imagined.

For a second he almost let his bladder go, but controlling that helped him to control his thinking. It's not so bad, it's not so bad.

It was.

It was the eel that Mike had caught and run from in a small boat, and a lamprey with its all-devouring mouth and endless rows of teeth disappearing into the gut that was its body, and it was a worm the size of a large sewer pipe, with quivering appendages that might have been a thousand tiny fingers ringing the mouth, or perhaps waving tendrils, or perhaps serrated lips . . . Mike didn't give too much of a damn at that second.

The flashlight illuminated gray and pink flesh, pulsing blood vessels visible through the skin. No eyes. Teeth. More teeth. Pink gut not so dissimilar from the tunnel itself.

The thing paused, tendril lips writhed, the lamprey mouth pulsated, and it came on at a terrific speed.

Mike fired the squirt gun first-Holy Mary, Mother of God-saw the water arch the ten feet, saw the pink flesh hiss, realized that the thing was too big to be destroyed or seriously inconvenienced by holy water or acid, saw it still rushing on, knew that he could never back away in time, and he fired the squirrel gun.

The blast deafened and blinded him.

He broke the breech, flipped out the empty, took a shell from his sleeve, slammed it home, clicked the breech shut.

He fired again, blinking away retinal echoes.

The thing had stopped ... it had to have stopped . . . he'd have been in its gut already if it hadn't stopped. The flashlight was askew. Mike reloaded, aimed, steadied the flashlight with his left hand.

It had stopped. Less than eight feet away. The circular jaw of the thing had been shattered in several places. Pieces of the tunnel dribbled onto it. Greenish-gray fluid leaked from the giant worm body.

It seemed more bemused than hurt, more curious than frightened.

"Fuck you!" screamed Mike between Hail Marys. He fired again. Reloaded. Thrust the squirrel gun another yard closer by wiggling forward and fired again. He had at least ten shells left. He wiggled and flopped to get some out of his right side pocket.

The lamprey thing withdrew around the bend in the tunnel.

Still screaming, only partially coherent, flailing on raw elbows and knees, Mike followed it as quickly as he could.

"Where are we?" whispered Dale.

They had come out of the boiler room into a narrow hall, followed it left around several corners, come into a wider corridor, and now were in a narrow one again. Giant pipes ran overhead. The basement hallways were littered with stacked school desks, empty cardboard drums, shattered chalkboards. And cobwebs. Many, many cobwebs.

"I don't know where we are," Harlen whispered back. Both boys had their flashlights on. The beams flickered from surface to surface like demented insects. "This west end of the basement was Van Syke's area. None of us came in here."

That was true enough. The hallway was narrow, the ceiling low, there were many small doors and access panels on the slanted concrete and stone walls. The pipes dripped moisture. Dale thought that the place was a maze, that they'd never find their way to the halls he knew from years of going to the basement restrooms. The stairway to the basement was below the central stairways.

They came around another turn. Dale's thumb had been tense on the hammer of the over-and-under for long minutes, even though it had been locked back. He was sure he was going to blow his own leg off any second. Both of Harlen's arms were straight out--the flashlight in the hand below the cast, the .38 revolver in the other hand. Harlen was moving like a jerky weathervane in a strong wind.

The basement of Old Central was not silent. Dale heard creakings, slidings, raspings-the pipes carried hollow echoes and reverberating moans, as if some huge mouth was breathing into them from above-while the thick stone walls seemed to be expanding and contracting slightly, as if something large was pressing and relaxing pressure from the opposite side.

Dale came around another corner, swinging the light in fast arcs, the Savage raised to his shoulder despite the ache in his right arm.

"Holy shit," Harlen whispered reverently as he came around behind him.

They were in the main basement corridor now. Dale recognized it from years of coming down to the restroom, marching down to the music and art rooms at the far end of this long hall. The stairways-one for coming down, one for going up-were another twenty yards along this corridor. Maybe.

The pipes dripped moist gray stalactites now. The walls were covered with what looked like a thin film of greenish oil. There were mounds of gray matter in the hall-like unformed stalagmites or giant, melted candles.

But that wasn't what had caused Harlen's comment: the walls were perforated with holes-some a foot and a half or so across, others opening from floor to ceiling. Tunnels ran off from the central corridor and disappeared into the soil and rock of the playground. A faint phosphorescence came from these tunnels; Dale and Harlen could have switched off their flashlights and still seen quite clearly in this windowless place.

They did not switch off their flashlights.

"Look," said Harlen. He pushed back a door that had the single word boy's stenciled on it. Inside what had been their restroom, the metal stalls had been ripped out of their mountings and twisted like thin tin. The toilets and urinals had been torn from their mountings and pushed almost to the ceiling, trailing torn pipes and dangling fittings.

The long room was almost filled with the gray stalactites, mounds of softly pulsating greenish wax, strands of something that looked like a spiderweb made of hairless flesh. The round hole in the wall to their left was at least eight feet across. Dale smelled the odor of wet earth and decay wafting out of it. There were a dozen other tunnels, some in the floor and ceiling.

"Let's go," whispered Harlen.

"Mike said he'd meet us down here."

"Mike may not be coming," hissed Harlen. "Let's find your brother and get our asses out."

Dale hesitated only a second.

The stairways had been shut off by swinging doors. One of them on the north side had been torn off its top hinges and hung askew. Dale leaned on it, shone his light up the stairway.

A dark fluid pulsed down the steps between gray mounds and the glazed, waxy icing on the walls. It came under the doors and pooled around Dale and Harlen's sneakers.

Dale took three deep breaths, wrenched the door aside, and led the way up the stairs, toward the first landing, feeling and hearing his tennis shoes squish on each step. The liquid was a dull brownish-red, but it felt too thick for water, possibly too thick for blood. More like motor oil or transmission fluid. It smelled a bit like cat urine.

Dale imagined a giant, three-story cat crouched above them, and he almost giggled. Harlen gave him a warning glance.

"Mike'll come up looking for us," he whispered to Harlen, not caring who heard. But at that second he did not believe that Mike was still alive.

Two long blocks south, across the abandoned and darkened Main Street, Bandstand Park was empty except for the limousine parked on the strip of gravel on the west side. The projector was still running because it had been plugged in to the volunteer fire department's circuit. The bandstand was silent, the large hole in the floor visible only from a certain angle. A large branch had fallen on the speakers, smashing both of them and silencing the film.

The screen had partially ripped loose from its moorings on the side of the Parkside Cafe, the fifteen-by-twenty-foot canvas slapping and snapping against siding like a fast-firing cannon. On the screen, a man and woman struggled in what looked to be a dungeon. The camera cut to a room above them where a tumbled candelabrum ignited a red velvet curtain. The fire spread, rising to the ceiling.

A woman opened her mouth to scream, but there was no noise except the crack of canvas and the louder crack of lightning.

A long semi went by on the Hard Road, its metal sides buffeted by the gale-force winds, its wipers flashing despite the fact that it was not raining here. It did not slow as it passed through the speed 25 mph electrically timed zone.

Lightning to the south revealed a solid wall of black moving across the fields toward Elm Haven at the speed a horse could run at full gallop, but there was no one to see it.

On the whipping screen and the white siding of the cafe, flames seemed three dimensional as they devoured the House of Usher.

Kevin jumped onto the high fender of the bulk tanker, grabbed the walkie-talkie, and clicked the transmit button five times. There was no answering click.

"Hey, Dale . . .hey, something's coming here!" he shouted into the radio. The speaker returned only static and a crackling that echoed the lightning overhead.

Something was indeed coming. The twin wakes of fresh soil being plowed across the schoolyard disappeared beneath the asphalt of Depot Street.

Like sharks diving deep, thought Kevin. He had his father's Colt Government Model .45 in both hands now and he racked a round into the chamber, holding the semiautomatic's grip steady in his left hand, finger on the trigger guard, while he pulled the slide back. The first round chambered, the automatic "cocked and locked" as his father called it, Kevin set his thumb on the hammer as he waited for the lamprey-things to emerge on this side of the street.

Nothing happened for a minute or more. There was no noise-or at least no noise audible over the crash of storm and continuing gurgle of the centrifugal pump. Kevin held the automatic in both hands and gently lowered the hammer before he shot his foot off. He looked down at the pump and hose, decided that it was still feeding properly, and stayed on the truck rather than jump down.

One of the lamprey-worms surfaced six feet to the right of the truck, the other threw gravel into the air as it arched out of the driveway. Their bodies were long and segmented. Kevin saw the working mouth as the first one passed, saw the quivering tendrils and pulsating gut lined with teeth.

He raised the pistol as the thing surfaced and dove again, but he did not fire. Mein Gott! His arms were shaking.

The one in the driveway dove to the right as it submerged again, displacing more gravel and passing under the hose as its endless back disappeared. What if it hits the underground tank?

Kevin climbed higher onto the truck, looking down into the open filler cap on top now, calling desperately into the walkie-talkie. "Dale . . . Harlen! Anybody! Help. Come in, over!"

Static-lashed silence.

Kevin clambered forward to the cab, leaned down and swung the passenger-side door open, thinking of getting in out of the wind.

The lamprey-thing surfaced five feet to the right of the cab and lunged, the mouth opening wider than the width of the body itself, flaps and tendrils pulsing as it smashed into the door with a thud that rocked the three-and-a-half-ton vehicle.

Kevin had released the door and rolled across the roof of the cab, away from the thing, his mouth open and ready to scream but with no sound emerging but rapid gasps. He teetered on the driver's side of the cab, fingernails clawing at the smooth metal of the roof. He went over but managed to grab the upper frame of the open window and land heavily, his feet clanging on the running board, the radio flying out onto the grass of the yard.

The second lamprey surfaced fifteen feet out and cut through the grass in an arching rush that left sod flying ten feet into the air. Kevin saw it coming, saw the radio knocked farther away by the thing's wake, and then he swung himself up onto the hood of the truck, his long legs scrabbling for purchase there.

The second lamprey-thing smashed into the driver's door with the same blind fury that the first had shown. It backed away, arching its quivering feeding-mouth six feet into the air, like a cobra weaving before striking. Kevin spread-eagled himself on the rocking hood and looked to his left; the first thing had backed off, had dived into the gravel again, and now rose in full force to crash into the right door again. Glass broke and the heavy door warped inward.

The instant the first lamprey backed off, before the second one attacked again, Kevin scrambled over the hood and roof of the cab, leaping onto the higher steel tank, feet sliding out from under him, but not before he threw himself forward and grasped the cylindrical filler cap in the center of the tank, his legs sliding off to the right.

Nine feet of lamprey unwound from the soil and went for his legs, tendrils quivering. Kevin got the full benefit of the death-stench rising from the thing's pulsing interior, and then he swung his legs up like a trick horse-rider, hanging completely by the force of his arms, his blue jeans skidding against the curved steel tank.

"Go git 'em!" came a voice over the wind.

Kevin looked over the tank to see Cordie Cooke standing by the truck shed. The wind plastered her shapeless dress against her and flapped it like a manic brown flag behind her. Her short, crudely chopped hair stood straight back from her face.

Cordie released the large dog she was holding back by a leather thong. It threw itself across the ten yards to the worm-thing on the far side of the truck. Kevin swung his legs up and over as the segmented thing rose and struck again on the lawn side.

It fell back, leaving a trail of slime on the side of his father's steel tanker. There was a dent in the steel not ten inches from Kevin's raised sneaker.

The dog growled and leapt on the first lamprey, its massive forelegs spread as it landed on the thing's segmented back. The lamprey arched and then dove, the dog chewing and growling, leaping from its back to run six paces before leaping on it again as the lamprey surfaced farther down the driveway.

"Come on!" screamed Kevin.

Cordie ran down the hill and jumped for the fender. She would have fallen back if Kevin's hand hadn't caught her wrist and pulled her up. The first lamprey surfaced and slammed its mouth into the tank a foot below her bare legs; it slid off the rear fender and began circling again, the growling and chewing dog going crazy on its back. The second lamprey was circling on the lawn as if it were building up speed.

"Up here," gasped Kevin, pulling her to the top of the tank. They stood, balancing in the high wind with their arms out, legs straddling the raised filler cap.

The first lamprey suddenly arched back on itself, its open end coming around faster than a snake could strike. The dog had time to howl once before most of it disappeared into the wide feeding orifice. The body pulsed, the mouth widened, the dog became a lump near the front of the giant worm, and it dove again, disappearing beyond the gravel into the yard near the street.

"Lucifer!" said Cordie. She was sobbing without noise.

"Look out!" cried Kevin. They swung off the right side of the truck as the second lamprey charged in from the yard again, its pulsing mouth rising eight feet into the air and slamming into the top of the tank near the filler cap this time.

Kevin and Cordie looked over their shoulders as the first thing circled and came back.

The centrifugal pump continued to chug and the gasoline continued to pump into the bulk tank as both lamprey creatures rose and converged.