“That’s, not regular fog,” Billy said. He looked up at me his eyes dark-circled and tear-streaked. “it isn’t, is it Daddy?”
“No, I don’t think so.” I didn’t want to lie about that.
Kids don’t fight shock the way adults do; they go with it maybe because kids are in a semi-permanent state of shock until they’re thirteen or so. Billy started to doze off. I held him, thinking he might snap awake again, but his doze deepened into a real sleep.
Maybe he had been awake part of the night before, when we had slept three-in-a-bed for the first time since Billy was an infant. And maybe—I felt a cold eddy slip through me at the thought-maybe he had sensed something coming.
When I was sure he was solidly out, I laid him on the floor and went looking for something to cover him up with. Most of the people were still up front, looking out into the thick blanket of mist. Norton had gathered a little crowd of listeners, and was busy spellbinding-or trying to. Bud Brown stood rigidly at his post, but Ollie Weeks had left his, There were a few people in the aisles, wandering like ghosts, their faces greasy with shock. I went into the storage area through the big double door between the meat cabinet and the beer cooler.
The generator roared steadily behind its plywood partition, but something had gone wrong. I could smell diesel fumes, and they were much too strong. I walked toward the partition, taking shallow breaths. At last I unbuttoned my shirt and put part of it over my mouth and nose.
The storage area was long and narrow, feebly lit by two sets of emergency lights.
Cartons were stacked everywhere-bleach on one side, cases of soft drinks on the far side of the partition, stacked cases of Beefaroni and catsup. One of those had fallen over and the cardboard carton appeared to be bleeding.
I unlatched the door in the generator partition and stepped through. The machine was obscured in drifting, oily clouds of blue smoke. The exhaust pipe ran out through a hole in the wall. Something must have blocked off the outside end of the pipe. There was a simple on/off switch and I flipped it. The generator hitched, belched, coughed, and died. Then it ran down in a diminishing series of popping sounds that reminded me of Norton’s stubborn chainsaw.
The emergency lights faded out and I was left in darkness. I got scared very quickly, and I got disoriented. My breathing sounded like a low wind rattling in straw. I bumped my nose on the flimsy plywood door going out and my heart lurched. There were windows in the double doors, but for some reason they had been painted black, and the darkness was nearly total. I got off course and ran into a stack of the bleach cartons. They tumbled and fell. One came close enough to my head to make me step backward, and I tripped over another carton that had landed behind me. I fell down, thumping my head hard enough to see bright stars in the darkness. Good show.
I lay there cursing myself and rubbing my head, telling myself to just take it easy, just get up and get out of here, get back to Billy, telling myself nothing soft and slimy was going to close over my ankle or slip into one groping hand. I told myself not to lose control, or I would end up blundering around back here in a panic, knocking things over and creating a mad obstacle course for myself.
I stood up carefully, looking for a pencil line of light between the double doors. I found it, a faint but unmistakable scratch on the darkness. I started toward it, and then stopped.
There was a sound. A soft sliding sound. It stopped, then started again with a stealthy little bump. Everything inside me went loose. I regressed magically to four years of age. That sound wasn’t coming from the market. It was coming from behind me. From outside. Where the mist was.
Something that was slipping and sliding and scraping over the cinderblocks. And, maybe, looking for a way in.
Or maybe it was already in, and it was looking for me Maybe in a moment I would feel whatever was making that sound on my shoe. Or on my neck.
It came, again. I was positive it was outside. But that didn’t make it any better. I told my legs to go and the refused the order. Then the quality of the noise changed.
Something rasped across the darkness and my heart leaped in my chest and I lunged at that thin vertical line of light. I hit the doors straight-arm and burst through into the market.
Three or four people were right outside the double doors-Ollie Weeks was one of them-and they all jumped back in surprise. Ollie grabbed at his chest. “David!” he said in a pinched voice. “Jesus Christ, you want to take ten years off my—” He saw my face.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Did you hear it?” I asked. My voice sounded strange in my own ears, high and squeaking. “Did any of you hear it?” They hadn’t heard anything, of course. They had come up to see why the generator had gone off. As Ollie told me that, one of the bag-boys bustled up with an armload of flashlights. He looked from Ollie to me curiously.
“I turned the generator off,” I said, and explained why.
“What did you hear?” one of the other men asked. He worked for the town road department; his name was Jim something.
“I don’t know. A scraping noise. Slithery. I don’t want to hear it again.”
“Nerves,” the other fellow with Ollie said.
“No. It was not nerves.”
“Did you hear it before the lights went out?”
“No, only after. But…” But nothing. I could see the way they were looking at me.
They didn’t want any more bad news, anything else frightening or off-kilter. There was enough of that already. Only Ollie looked as if he believed “Let’s go in and start her up again,” the bag-boy said, handing out the flashlights. Ollie took his doubtfully. The bagboy offered me one, a slightly contemptuous shine in his eyes. He was maybe eighteen.
After a moment’s thought, I took the light. I still needed something to cover Billy with.
Ollie opened the doors and chocked them, letting in some light. The bleach cartons lay scattered around the half-open door in the plywood partition.
The fellow named Jim sniffed and said, “Smells pretty rank, all right. Guess you was right to shut her down.” The flashlight beams bobbed and danced across cartons of canned goods, toilet paper, dog food. The beams were smoky in the drifting fumes the blocked exhaust had turned back into the storage area. The bag-boy trained his light briefly on the wide loading door at the extreme right.
The two men and Ollie went inside the generator compartment. Their lights flashed uneasily back and forth, reminding me of something out of a boys’ adventure story -and I illustrated a series of them while I was still in college. Pirates burying their bloody gold at midnight, or maybe the mad doctor and his assistant snatching a body.
Shadows, made twisted and monstrous by the shifting, conflicting flashlight beams, bobbed on the walls. The generator ticked irregularly as it cooled.
The bag-boy was walking toward the loading door, flashing his light ahead of him. “I wouldn’t go over there,” I said.
“No, I know you wouldn’t.”
“Try it now, Ollie,” one of the men said. The generator wheezed, then roared.
“Jesus! Shut her down! Holy crow, don’t that stink!” The generator died again.
The bag-boy walked back from the loading door just as they came out.
“Something’s plugged that exhaust, all right,” one of the men said.
“I’ll tell you what,” the bag-boy said. His eyes were shining in the glow of the flashlights, and there was a devil-may-care expression on his face that I had sketched too many times as part of the frontispieces for my boys’ adventure series. “Get it running long enough for me to raise the loading door back there. I’ll go around and clear away whatever it is.”
“Norm, I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” Ollie said doubtfully:
“Is it an electric door?” the one called Jim asked.
“Sure,” Ollie said. “But I just don’t think it would be wise for—”
“That’s okay,” the other guy said. He tipped his baseball cap back on his head. “I’ll do it.”
“No, you don’t understand,” Ollie began again. “I really don’t think anyone should—”
“Don’t worry,” he said indulgently to Ollie, dismissing him.
Norm, the bag-boy, was indignant. “Listen, it was my idea,” he said.
All at once, by some magic, they had gotten around to arguing about who was going to do it instead of whether or not it should be done at all. But of course, none of them had heard that nasty slithering sound. “Stop it!” I said loudly.