From a Buick 8 Read online

  Beneath the corpse, spread around its hindquarters, was a thin puddle of congealing black goo. The idea that any such substance could serve as blood made Huddie feel like crying out. He thought: I won't touch it. I'd kill my own mother before I'd touch that thing.

  He was still thinking that when a long wooden rod slid into his peripheral vision. He gave a little shriek and flinched back. "Arky, don't!" he yelled, but it was too late.

  Later on, Arky was unable to say just why he had prodded the thing in the corner--it was simply some strong urge to which he had given in before he was completely aware of what he was doing.

  When the end of the rake-handle touched the place where the wings were crumpled across each other, there was a sound like rustling paper and a bad smell, like old stewed cabbage. The two of them barely noticed. The top of the thing's face seemed to peel back, revealing a dead and glassy eye that looked as big as a factory ball bearing.

  Arky backed away, dropping the rake with a clatter and putting both hands over his mouth. Above the spread fingers, his eyes had begun to ooze terrified tears. Huddie simply stood where he was, locked in place.

  "It was an eyelid," he said in a low, hoarse voice. "Just an eyelid, that's all. You joggled it with the rake, you goddam fool. You joggled it and it rolled back."

  "Christ, Huddie!"

  "It's dead."

  "Christ, Jesus God--"

  "It's dead, okay?"

  "Ho . . . Ho-kay," Arky said in that crazy Swedish accent of his. It was thicker than it had ever been. "Less get oudda here."

  "You're pretty smart for a janitor."

  The two of them headed back for the door--slowly, backing up, not wanting to lose sight of the thing. Also because both of them knew they would lose control and bolt if they actually saw the door. The safety of the door. The promise of a sane world beyond the door. Getting there seemed to take forever.

  Arky backed out first and began taking huge gasps of the fresh evening air. Huddie came out behind him and slammed the door. Then for a moment the two of them just looked at each other. Arky had gone past white and directly to yellow. To Huddie he looked like a cheese sandwich without the bread.

  "What-choo laughin about?" Arky asked him. "What's so funny?"

  "Nothing," Huddie said. "I'm just trying not to be hysterical."

  "You gonna call Sergeant Schoondist now?"

  Huddie nodded. He kept thinking about how the whole top half of the thing's head had seemed to peel back when Arky prodded it. He had an idea he'd be revisiting that moment in his dreams later on, and that turned out to be absolutely correct.

  "What about Curtis?"

  Huddie thought about it and shook his head. Curt had a young wife. Young wives liked to have their husbands home, and when they didn't get what they wanted for at least a few nights in a row, they were apt to get hurt feelings and ask questions. It was natural. As it was natural for young husbands to sometimes answer their questions, even when they knew they weren't supposed to.

  "Just the Sarge, then?"

  "No," Huddie said. "Let's get Sandy Dearborn in on this, too. Sandy's got a good head."

  Sandy was still in the parking lot at Jimmy's Diner with his radar gun in his lap when his radio spoke up. "Unit 14, Unit 14."

  "14." As always, Sandy had glanced at his watch when he heard his unit number. It was twenty past seven.

  "Ah, could you return to base, 14? We have a D-code, say again a D-code, copy?"

  "3?" Sandy asked. In most American police forces, 3 means emergency.

  "No, negative, but we could use some help."

  "Roger."

  He got back about ten minutes before the Sarge arrived in his personal, which happened to be an International Harvester pickup even older than Arky's Ford. By then the word had already started to spread and Sandy saw a regular Trooper convention in front of Shed B--lots of guys at the windows, all of them peering in. Brundage and Rushing, Cole and Devoe, Huddie Royer. Arky Arkanian was pacing around in little circles behind them with his hands stuffed forearm-deep in his pants pockets and lines climbing his forehead like the rungs of a ladder. He wasn't waiting for a window, though. Arky had seen all he wanted to, at least for one night.

  Huddie filled Sandy in on what had happened and then Sandy had his own good long look at the thing in the corner. He also tried to guess what the Sergeant might want when he arrived, and put the items in a cardboard box near the side door.

  Tony pulled in, parked askew behind the old schoolbus, and came jogging across to Shed B. He elbowed Carl Brundage unceremoniously away from the window that was closest to the dead creature and stared at it while Huddie made his report. When Huddie was done, Tony called Arky over and listened to Arky's version of the story.

  Sandy thought that Tony's methods of handling the Roadmaster were put to the test that evening and proved sound. All through his debriefing of Huddie and Arky, Troop D personnel were showing up. Most of the men were off-duty. Those few in uniform had been close enough to come in for a look-see when they heard Huddie give the code for the Buick. Yet there was no loud cross-talk, no jostling for position, no men getting in the way of Tony's investigation or gumming things up with a lot of stupid questions. Above all, there were no flaring tempers and no panic. If reporters had been there and experienced the atavistic power of that thing--a thing which remained awful and somehow threatening even though it was obviously dead--Sandy dreaded to think about what the consequences might have been. When he mentioned that to Schoondist the next day, the Sarge had laughed. "The Cardiff Giant in hell," he said. "That would have been your consequence, Sandy."

  Both of them, the Sarge who was and the Sarge who would be, knew what the press called such information-management, at least when the managers were cops: fascism. That was a little heavy, no doubt, but neither of them actually questioned the fact that all sorts of abuses lay a turn or two down that road. ("You want to see cops out of control, look at LA," Tony said once. "For every three good ones, you've got two Hitler Youth dingbats on motorcycles.") The business of the Buick was a bona fide Special Case, however. Neither of them questioned that, either.

  Huddie wanted to know if he'd been right not to call Curtis. He was worried Curt would feel left out, passed over. If the Sarge wanted, Huddle said, he could go in the barracks that very second and make a telephone call. Happy to do it.

  "Curtis is fine right where he is," Tony said, "and when it's explained to him why he wasn't called, he'll understand. As for the rest of you fellows . . ."

  Tony stepped away from the roll-up door. His posture was easy and relaxed, but his face was very pale. The sight of that thing in the corner had affected him, too, even through a pane of glass. Sandy felt the same way himself. But he could also sense Sergeant Schoondist's excitement, the balls-to-the-wall curiosity he shared with Curt. The throbbing undertone that said Holy shit, do you fuckin BELIEVE it! Sandy heard it and recognized it for what it was, although he felt none of it himself, not a single iota. He didn't think any of the others did, either. Certainly Huddie's curiosity--and Arky's--had faded quickly enough. "Gone the way of the blue suede shoe," as Curtis might have said.

  "You men on duty listen up to me, now," Tony said. He was wearing his slanted little grin, but to Sandy it looked a bit forced that night. "There's fires in Statler, floods in Leesburg, and a rash of Piggly Wiggly robberies down in Pogus County; we suspect the Amish."

  There was some laughter at this.

  "So what are you waiting for?"

  "There was a general exodus of Troopers on duty followed by the sound of Chevrolet V-8 engines starting up. The off-duty fellows hung around for awhile, but nobody had to tell them to move along, move along, come on, boys, show's over. Sandy asked the Sarge if he should also saddle up and ride.

  "No, Trooper," he said. "You're with me." And he started briskly toward the walk-in door, pausing only long enough to examine the items Sandy had put into the carton: one of the evidence-documenting Polaroids, extra film, a yar
dstick, an evidence-collection kit. Sandy had also grabbed a couple of green plastic garbage bags from the kitchenette.

  "Good job, Sandy."

  "Thanks, sir."

  "Ready to go in?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Scared as me, or not quite that scared?"

  "I don't know."

  "Me, either. But I'm scared, all right. If I faint, you catch me."

  "Just fall in my direction, sir."

  He laughed. "Come on. Step into my parlor, said the spider to the fly."

  *

  Scared or not, the two of them made a pretty thorough investigation. They collaborated on a diagram of the she'd interior, and when Curt later complimented Sandy on it, Sandy nodded and agreed that it had been a good one. Good enough to take into court, actually. Still, a lot of the lines on it were wavery. Their hands began to shake almost from the moment they entered the shed, and didn't stop until they were back out again.

  They opened the trunk because it had been open when Arky first looked in and noticed the thing in the corner, and although it was as empty as ever, they took Polaroids of it. They likewise photo'd the thermometer (which by then had gotten all the way up to seventy degrees), mostly because Tony thought Curt would want them to. And they took pictures of the corpse in the corner, took them from every angle they could think of. Every Polaroid showed that unspeakable single eye. It was shiny, like fresh tar. Seeing himself reflected in it made Sandy Dearborn feel like screaming. And every two or three seconds, one of them would look back over his shoulder at the Buick Roadmaster.

  When they were done with the photos, some of which they took with the yardstick lying beside the corpse, Tony shook out one of the garbage bags. "Get a shovel," he said.

  "Don't you want to leave it where it is until Curt--"

  "Probationary Trooper Wilcox can look at it down in the supply closet," Tony said. His voice was oddly tight--strangled, almost--and Sandy realized he was working very hard not to be sick. Sandy's own stomach took a queasy little lurch, perhaps in sympathy. "He can look at it there to his heart's content. For once we don't have to worry about breaking the chain of evidence, because no district attorney is ever going to be involved. Meantime, we're scooping this shit up." He wasn't shouting, but a raw little edge had come into his voice.

  Sandy took a shovel from where it hung on the wall and slid the blade beneath the dead creature. The wings made a papery and somehow terrible crackling sound. Then one of them fell back, revealing a black and hairless side. For the second time since the two of them had stepped in, Sandy felt like screaming. He could not have told why, exactly, but there was something deep down in his head begging not to be shown any more.

  And all the time they were smelling it. That sour, cabbagey reek.

  Sandy observed sweat standing out all over Tony Schoondist's forehead in fine little dots. Some of these had broken and run down his cheeks, leaving tracks like tears.

  "Go on," he said, holding the bag open. "Go on, now, Sandy. Drop it in there before I lose my groceries."

  Sandy tilted it into the bag and felt a little bit better when the weight slid off the shovel. After Tony had gotten a sack of the liquid-absorbing red sawdust they kept for oil-spills and sprinkled it over the gooey stain in the corner, both of them felt better. Tony twirled the top of the garbage bag with the creature inside, then knotted it. Once that was done, the two of them started backing toward the door.

  Tony stopped just before they reached it. "Photo that," he said, pointing to a place high on the roll-up door behind the Buick--the door through which Johnny Parker had towed the car in the first place. To Tony Schoondist and Sandy Dearborn, that already seemed like a long time ago. "And that, arid there, and over there."

  At first Sandy didn't see what the Sarge was pointing at. He looked away, blinked his eyes once or twice, then looked back. And there it was, three or four dark green smudges that made Sandy think of the dust that rubs off a moth's wings. As kids they had solemnly assured each other that mothdust was deadly poison, it would blind you if you got some on your fingers and then rubbed your eyes.

  "You see what happened, don't you?" Tony asked as Sandy raised the Polaroid and sighted in on the first mark. The camera seemed very heavy and his hands were still shivering, but he got it done.

  "No, Sarge, I, ah . . . don't guess I do."

  "Whatever that thing is--bird, bat, some kind of robot drone--it flew out of the trunk when the lid came open. It hit the back door, that's the first smudge, and then it started bouncing off the walls. Ever seen a bird that gets caught in a shed or a barn?"

  Sandy nodded.

  "Like that." Tony wiped sweat off his forehead and looked at Sandy. It was a look the younger man never forgot. He had never seen the Sarge's eyes so naked. It was, he thought, the look you sometimes saw on the faces of small children when you came to break up a domestic disturbance.

  "Man," Tony said heavily. "Fuck."

  Sandy nodded.

  Tony looked down at the bag. "You think it looks like a bat?"

  "Yeah," Sandy said, then, "No." After another pause he added, "Bullshit."

  Tony barked a laugh that sounded somehow haggard. "That's very definitive. If you were on the witness stand, no defense attorney could peel that back."

  "I don't know, Tony." What Sandy did know was that he wanted to stop shooting the shit and get back out into the open air. "What do you think?"

  "Well, if I drew it, it'd look like a bat," Tony said. The Polaroids we took also make it look like a bat. But. . . I don't know exactly how to say it, but . . ."

  "It doesn't feel like a bat," Sandy said.

  Tony smiled bleakly and pointed a finger at Sandy like a gun. "Very zen, Grasshoppah. But those marks on the wall suggest it at least acted like a bat, or a trapped bird. Flew around in here until it dropped dead in the corner. Shit, for all we know, it died of fright."

  Sandy recalled the glaring dead eye, a thing almost too alien to look at, and thought that for the first time in his life he could really understand the concept Sergeant Schoondist had articulated. Die of fright? Yes, it could be done. It really could. Then, because the Sarge seemed to be waiting for something, he said: "Or maybe it hit the wall so hard it broke its neck." Another idea came to him. "Or--listen, Tony--maybe the air killed it."

  "Say what?"

  "Maybe--"

  But Tony's eyes had lit up and he was nodding. "Sure," he said. "Maybe the air on the other side of the Buick's trunk is different air. Maybe it'd taste like poison gas to us . . . rupture our lungs . . ."

  For Sandy, that was enough. "I have to get out of here, Tony, or I'm gonna be the one who throws up." But what he really felt in danger of was choking, not vomiting. All at once the normally broad avenue of his windpipe was down to a pinhole.

  Once they were back outside (it was nearly dark by then and an incredibly sweet summer breeze had sprung up), Sandy felt better. He had an idea Tony did, too; certainly some of the color had come back into the Sarge's cheeks. Huddie and a few other Troopers came over to the two of them as Tony shut the walk-in side door, but nobody said anything. An outsider with no context upon which to draw might have looked at those faces and thought that the President had died or war had been declared.

  "Sandy?" Tony asked. "Any better now?"

  "Yeah." He nodded at the garbage bag, hanging like a dead pendulum with its strange weight at the bottom. "You really think it might have been our air that killed it?"

  "It's possible. Or maybe just the shock of finding itself in our world. I don't think I could live for long in the world this thing came from, tell you that much. Even if I could breathe the . . ." Tony stopped, because all at once Sandy looked bad again. Terrible, in fact. "Sandy, what is it? What's wrong?"

  Sandy wasn't sure he wanted to tell his SC what was wrong, wasn't even sure he could. What he'd thought of was Ennis Rafferty. The idea of the missing Trooper added to what they had just discovered in Shed B suggest
ed a conclusion that Sandy didn't *want to consider. Once it had come into his mind, though, it was hard to get it back out. If the Buick was a conduit to some other world, and the bat-thing had gone through it in one direction, then Ennis Rafferty had almost certainly gone through in the other.

  "Sandy, talk to me."

  "Nothing wrong, boss," Sandy replied, then had to bend over and grip his shins in both hands. It was a good way to stop yourself from fainting, always assuming you had enough time to use it. The others stood around watching him, still saying nothing, still wearing those long faces that said the King is dead, long live the King.

  At last the world steadied again, and Sandy straightened up. "I'm okay," he said. "Really."

  Tony considered his face, then nodded. He lifted the green bag slightly. "This is going into the storage closet off the supply room, the little one where Andy Colucci keeps his stroke-books."

  A few nervous titters greeted this.

  "That room is going to be off-limits except for myself, Curtis Wilcox, and Sandy Dearborn. BPO, people, got it?"

  They nodded. By permission only.

  "Sandy, Curtis, and me--this is now our investigation, so designated." He stood straight in the gathering gloom, almost at attention, holding the garbage bag in one hand and the Polaroids in the other. "This stuff is evidence. Of what I have no current idea. If any of you come up with any ideas, bring them to me. If they seem like crazy ideas to you, bring them to me even quicker. It's a crazy situation. But, crazy or not, we will roll this case. Roll it as we would any other. Questions?"

  There were no questions. Or, if you wanted to look at it the other way, Sandy reflected, there was nothing but questions.

  "We ought to have a man on that shed as much as we can," Tony said.

  "Guard duty, Sarge?" Steve Devoe asked.

  "Let's call it surveillance," Tony said. "Come on, Sandy, stick with me until I get this thing stowed. I don't want to take it downstairs by myself, and that's the God's truth."

  As they started across the parking lot, Sandy heard Arky Arkanian saying that Curt was gonna get mad he dint get called, wait and see, dat boy was gonna be madder'n a wet hen.