I ran around to the hutch, not pausing at the side door although I registered the smell of gasoline, heavy and rich. I knew what he’d done. The only question was how much gas he’d poured under the car and how much he’d saved back in the can.
The door to the hutch was secured with a padlock. For years it had been left open, the curved steel arm just poked through the hasp to keep the door from swinging open in a breeze. The lock was open that night, too. I swear that’s the truth. It wasn’t noontime bright out there, but there was enough glow from the open side door to see the lock clearly. Then, as I reached for it, the steel post slid down into the hole on the body of the lock with a tiny audible click. I saw that happen . . . and I felt it, too. For just a moment the pulse in my head sharpened and focused. It was like a gasp of effort.
I keep two keyrings: cop-keys and personals. There were about twenty on the ‘official’ ring, and I used a trick I’d learned a long time before, from Tony Schoondist. I let the keys fall on my palm as they would, like pickup sticks, then simply felt among them without looking. It
doesn’t always work but this time it did, likely because the key to the hutch padlock was smaller than all the others except the one to my locker downstairs, and the locker key has a square head.
Now, faintly, I heard the humming begin. It was faint, like the sound of a motor buried in the earth, but it was there.
I took the key my fingers had found and rammed it into the padlock. The steel arm popped up again. I yanked the lock out of the hasp and dropped it on the ground.Then I opened the door to the hutch and stepped inside.
The little storage space held the still and explosive heat which belongs only to attics and sheds and cubbyholes that have been closed up for a long time in hot weather. No one came out here much anymore, but the things which had accumulated over the years (except for the paint and the paint thinner, flammable items that had been prudently removed) were still here; I could see them in the faint wash of light. Stacks of magazines, the kind men read, for the most part (women think we like to look at naked women but mostly I think we like tools).
The kitchen chair with the tape-mended seat. The cheap police-band radio from Radio Shack.
The videocam, its battery undoubtedly dead, on its shelf next to the old box of blank tapes. A bumper sticker was pasted to one wall: SUPPORT THE MENTALLY HANDICAPPED, TAKE AN FBI AGENT TO LUNCH. I could smell dust. In my head the pulse that was the Buick’s voice was getting stronger and stronger.
There was a hanging lightbulb and a switch on the wall, but I didn’t even try it. I had an idea the bulb would be dead, or the switch would be live enough to give me a real walloper of a shock.
The door swung shut behind me, cutting off the moonlight. That was impossible, because when it was left to its own devices, the door always swung the other way, outward. We all knew it. It was why we left the padlock threaded through the hasp. Tonight, however, the impossible was selling cheap. The force inhabiting the Buick wanted me in the dark. Maybe it thought being in the dark would slow me down.
It didn’t. I’d already seen what I needed: the coil of yellow rope, still hanging on the wall below the joke sticker and next to a forgotten set of jumper cables. I saw something else, too.
Something Curt Wilcox had put up on the shelf near the videocam not long after the E.T.
with the lashing pink ropes had made its appearance.
I took this item, stuck it in my back pocket, and grabbed the coil of rope from the wall.
Then I banged out again. A dark form loomed up in front of me and I almost screamed. For one mad moment I was sure it was the man in the dark coat and hat, the one with the malformed ear and the Boris Badinov accent. When the boogeyman spoke up, however, the accent was pure Lawrence Welk.
‘Dat damn kid came back,’ Arky whispered. ‘I got halfway home and Yudas Pries’ I jus’
turned around. I knew it, somehow. I just — ‘
I interrupted then, told him to stay clear, and ran back around the corner of Shed B with the rope looped over my arm.
‘Don’ go in dere, Sarge!’ Arky said. I think he might’ve been trying to shout, but he was too scared to get much in the way of volume. ‘He’s t’rown down gas an’ he got a gun, I seen it.’
I stopped beside the door, slipped the rope off my arm, started to tie one end to the stout hook mounted there, then gave the coil of rope to Arky instead.
‘Sandy, can you feel it?’ he asked. ‘An’ the radio gone all blooey again, nuttin but static, I heard Steff cussin at it t’rough d’window.’
‘Never mind. Tie the end of the rope off. Use the hook.’
‘Huh?’
‘You heard me.’
I’d held on to the loop in the end of the rope and now I stepped into it, yanked it up to my waist, arid ran it tight. It was a hangman’s knot, tied by Curt himself, and it ran shut easily.
‘Sarge, you can’t do dis.’ Arky made as if to grab my shoulder, but without any real force.
‘Tie it off and then hold on,’ I said. ‘Don’t go in, no matter what. If we . . .’ I wasn’t going to say if we disappear, though — didn’t want to hear those words come out of my mouth. ‘If anything happens, tell Steff to put out a Code D as soon as the static clears.’
‘Jesus!’ Only from Arky it sounded more like Yeesus. ‘What are you, crazy? Can’t you feel it?’
‘I feel it,’ I said, and went inside. I shook the rope continually as I went to keep it from snagging. I felt like a diver starting down to some untried depth, min ling his airhose not because he really thinks minding it will help, but because it’s at least something to do, something to keep your mind off the things that may be swimming around in the blackness just beyond the reach of your light.
The Buick 8 sat fat and luxy on its whitewalls, our little secret, humming deep down in the hollows of itself. The pulse was stronger than the humming, and now that I was actually inside I felt it stop its halfhearted efforts to keep me out. Instead of pushing with its invisible hand, it pulled.
The boy sat behind the wheel with the gas can in his lap, his cheeks and forehead white, the skin there taut and shiny. As I came toward him, his head turned with robotic slowness on his neck and he looked at me. His gaze was wide and dark. In it was the stupidly serene look of the deeply drugged or the cataclysmically wounded. The only emotion that remained in his eyes was a terrible weary stubbornness, that adolescent insistence that there must be an answer and he must know the answer. He had a right. And that was what the Buick had used, of course. What it had used against him.
‘Ned.’
‘I’d get out of here if I were you, Sarge.’ Speaking in slow, perfectly articulated syllables.
‘There’s not much time. It’s coming. It sounds like footsteps.’
And he was right. I felt a sudden surge of horror. The hum was some sort of machinery, perhaps. The pulse was almost certainly a kind of telepathy. This was something else, though, a third thing.
Something was coming.
‘Ned, please. You can’t understand what this thing is and you certainly can’t kill it. All you can do is get yourself sucked up like dirt in a vacuum cleaner. And that’ll leave your mother and your sisters on their own. Is that what you want, to leave them alone with a thousand questions no one can answer? It’s hard for me to believe that the boy who came here looking so hard for his father could be so selfish.’
Something flickered in his eyes at that. It was the way a man’s eyes may flicker \vheri, deep in concentration, he hears a loud noise on the next block. Then the eyes grew serene again. ‘This goddamned car killed my father,’ he said. Spoken calmly. Even patiently.
I certainly wasn’t going to argue that. ‘All right, maybe it did. Maybe in some way it was as much to blame for what happened to your dad as Bradley Roach was. Does that mean it can kill you, too? What is this, Ned? Buy one, get one free?’