Ollie cut him off in the same soft, even voice. “I tell you, you’re not doing anything but damage talking the way you are. There’s people here that want to go home and make sure their families are okay. My sister and her year-old daughter are at home in Naples right now. I’d like to check on them, sure. But if people start believing you and try to go home, what happened to Norm is going to happen to them.” He didn’t convince Norton, but he convinced some of the leaners and fence sitters-it wasn’t what he said so much as it was his eyes, his haunted eyes. I think Norton’s sanity hinged on not being convinced, or that he thought it did. But he didn’t take Ollie up on his offer to bring back a sampling of returnables from out back. None of them did.
They weren’t ready to go out, at least not yet. He and his little group of Flat-Earthers (reduced by one or two now) went as far away from the rest of us as they could get, over by the prepared-meats case. one of them kicked my sleeping son in the leg as he went past, waking him up.
I went over, and Billy clung to my neck. When I tried to put him down, he clung tighter and said, “Don’t do that, Daddy. Please.” I found a shopping cart and put him in the baby seat. He looked very big in there.
It would have been comical except for his pale face, the dark hair brushed across his forehead just above his eyebrows, his woeful eyes. He probably hadn’t been up in the baby seat of the shopping cart for as long as two years. These little things slide by you, you don’t realize at first, and when what has changed finally comes to you, it’s always a nasty shock.
Meanwhile, with the Flat-Earthers having withdrawn, the argument had found another lightning rod-this time it was Carmody, and understandably enough, she stood alone.
In the faded, dismal light she was witchlike in her blazing canary pants, her bright rayon blouse, her armloads of clacking junk jewelry—copper, tortoiseshell, adamantineand her thyroidal purse. Her parchment face was grooved with strong vertical lines. Her frizzy gray hair was yanked flat with three horn combs and twisted in the back. Her mouth was a line of knotted rope.
“There is no defense against the will of God. This has been coming. I have seen the signs. There are those here that I have told, but there are none so blind as those who will not see.”
“Well, what are you saying? What are you proposing?” Mike Haden broke in impatiently. He was a town selectman, although he didn’t look the part now, in his yachtsman’s cap and saggy-seated Bermudas. He was sipping at a beer; a great many men were doing it now. Bud Brown had given up protesting, but he was indeed taking nameskeeping a rough tab on everyone he could.
“Proposing?” Carmody echoed, wheeling toward Haden. “Proposing? Why, I am proposing that you prepare to meet your God, Michael Haden.” She gazed around at all of us. “Prepare to meet your God!”
“Prepare to meet shit,” Myron LaFleur said in a drunken snarl from the beer cooler. “Old woman, I believe your tongue must be hung in the middle so it can run on both ends.” There was a rumble of agreement. Billy looked around nervously, and I slipped an arm around his shoulders.
“I’ll have my say!” she cried. Her upper lip curled back, revealing snaggle teeth that were yellow with nicotine. I thought of the dusty stuffed animals in her shop, drinking eternally at the mirror that served as their creek. “Doubters will doubt to the end! Yet a monstrosity did drag that poor boy away! Things in the mist! Every abomination out of a bad dream! Eyeless freaks! Pallid horrors! Do you doubt? Then go on out! Go on out and say howdy-do! ”
” Carmody, you’ll have to stop,” I said. “You’re scaring my boy.” The man with the little girl echoed the sentiment. She, all plump legs and scabby knees, had hidden her face against her father’s stomach and put her hands over her cars.
Big Bill wasn’t crying, but he was close.
“There’s only one chance,” Carmody said.
“What’s that, ma’am?” Mike Haden asked politely.
“A sacrifice,” Carmody said-she seemed to grin in the gloom. “A blood sacrifice.” Blood sacrifice—the words hung there, slowly turning. Even now, when I know better, I tell myself that then what she meant was someone’s pet dog—there were a couple of them trotting around the market in spite of the regulations against them. Even now I tell myself that. She looked like some crazed remnant of New England Puritanism in the gloom… but I suspect that something deeper and darker than mere Puritanism motivated her. Puritanism had its own dark grandfather, old Adam with bloody hands.
She opened her mouth to say something more, and a small, neat man in red pants and a natty sport shirt struck her openhanded across the face. His hair was parted with ruler evenness on the left. He wore glasses. He also wore the unmistakable look of the summer tourist.
“You shut up that bad talk,” he said softly and tonelessly.
Carmody put her hand to her mouth and then held it out to us, a wordless accusation. There was blood on the palm. But her black eyes seemed to dance with mad glee.
“You had it coming!” a woman cried out. “I would have done it myself! ”
“They’ll get hold of you,” Carmody said, showing us her bloody palm. The trickle of blood was now running down one of the wrinkles from her mouth to her chin like a droplet of rain down a gutter. “Not today, maybe. Tonight. Tonight when the dark comes. They’ll come with the night and take someone else. With the night they’ll come.
You’ll hear them coming, creeping and crawling. And when they come, you’ll beg for Mother Carmody to show you what to do.” The man in the red pants raised his hand slowly.
“You come on and hit me,” she whispered, and grinned her bloody grin at him.
His hand wavered. “Hit me if you dare.” His hand dropped. Carmody walked away by herself. Then Billy did begin to cry, hiding his face against me as the little girl had done with her father.
“I want to go home,” he said. “I want to see my mommy.”
I comforted him as best I could. Which probably wasn’t very well.
The talk finally turned into less frightening and destructive channels. The plateglass windows, the market’s obvious weak point, were mentioned. Mike Haden asked what other entrances there were, and Ollie and Brown quickly ticked them off-two loading doors in addition to the one Norm had opened. The main IN’OUT doors. The window in the manager’s office (thick, reinforced glass, securely locked).
Talking about these things had a paradoxical effect. it made the danger seem more real but at the same time made us feel better. Even Billy felt it. He asked if he could go get a candy bar. I told him it would be all right so long as he didn’t go near the big windows.
When he was out of earshot, a man near Mike Haden said, “Okay, what are we going to do about those windows? The old lady may be as crazy as a bedbug, but she could be right about something moving in after dark.”
“Maybe the fog will blow over by then,” a woman said.
“Maybe,” the man said. “And maybe not.”
“Any ideas?” I asked Bud and Ollie.
“Hold on a sec,” the man near Haden said. “I’m Dan Miller. From Lynn, Mass.
You don’t know me, no reason why you should, but I got a place on Highland Lake.
Bought it just this year. Got held up for it, is more like it, but I had to have it.” There were a few chuckles. “Anyway, I saw a whole pile of fertilizer and lawn-food bags down there. Twenty-five-pound sacks, most of them. We could put them up like sandbags.
Leave loopholes to look out through…” Now more people were nodding and talking excitedly. I almost said something, then held it back. Miller was right. Putting those bags up could do no harm, and might do some good. But my mind went back to that tentacle squeezing the dog-food bag. I thought that one of the bigger tentacles could probably do the same for a twenty-fivepound bag of Green Acres lawn food or Vigoro. But a sermon on that wouldn’t get us out or improve anyone’s mood.
People began to break up, talking about getting it done, and Miller yelled: “Hold it! Hold it! Let’s thrash this out while we’re all together! ” They came back, a loose congregation of fifty or sixty people in the corner formed by the beer cooler, the storage doors, and the left end of the meat case, where McVey always seems to put the things no one wants, like sweetbreads and Scotch eggs and sheep’s brains and head cheese. Billy wove his way through them with a five-yearold’s unconscious agility in a world of giants and held up a Hershey bar. “Want this, Daddy?”