“I’ll do it,” Charlie said, waving her down. He left with the pot to make more.
“So we have a charge,” John was saying as Charlie went out. “And you teach me to ski in a hour or so in the morning, and the roads are clear enough to drive over to New Jersey, and we manage to avoid Byron and Foley and their group—”
Abruptly Constance stood up and walked from the room. In the kitchen Charlie was at the sink unmoving, both hands clutching the edge of the counter. She hurried to him and took his arm. It was rigid. After a moment he shuddered, then looked at her. Again, she thought. She was certain she had known each and every time he had gone away like that. That was how she thought of it: he went away for a few moments, a minute or longer. Then he came back. And when he came back he did not at first recognize her, or anything else. His eyes were blank, his face expressionless. That changed and his expression was of fear, then he was Charlie again. Neither spoke. She squeezed his arm slightly, kissed him, and picked up the coffee pot.
“I’ll do it. Do we need more logs inside tonight?”
Candy came in complaining about strangers cooking in their kitchen, and Ashcan followed, darting suspicious glances here and there. Charlie danced around them both, cursed them, and went to check on the fire, on the supply of logs, and now Constance stopped her coffee making motions and shut her eyes hard for a moment. “You can’t have him!” she said under her breath. “Leave him alone!” Her words were addressed to the thing behind the black door, the thing that lived in the abyss, the thing that had touched Charlie with evil. “We’ll blow it to hell and gone,” she added, still not moving, answering John’s unfinished question. When they had the charge and did whatever they had to do to get it to the right place, inside the black doorway, they would blow the evil back to the hell it had come from.
She made the coffee and they all went to the living room before the fire that hissed and crackled now and then, but was mostly quiet and steady. Charlie made good fires.
“I’ll—we’ll need your moon suit,” Constance said after a few moments of silence. Charlie regarded her with a cold, hard expression. John looked blank. “It’s a protective suit, boots and all,” she said. “Sometimes there are toxic fumes, things firemen wouldn’t want to get on their skin, much less breathe. It might come in handy tomorrow.” To Charlie she said patiently, “Isn’t that what you were thinking?”
Sometimes when she pulled things out of his head he hated it; sometimes it amused him; sometimes it left him feeling chilled, as if in the presence of a strange creature he could not fathom at all while she turned on him a look of complete understanding and awareness. That was when he hated it, he thought, when she knew him so completely and was so opaque to him. He shrugged.
“All right, then,” she said, exactly as if he had answered. “The Molotov cocktail should have done some damage and evidently it didn’t. I can’t help but think it’s because it didn’t get to the source of the field. Do you suppose there’s an intermediate space between the doorway and the transmitting mechanism? If there is, we could find that nothing we do outside the main place will be effective.”
She looked at Charlie with that same unfathomable expression. She knew those were his thoughts, his assumptions.
She went on, “There has to be a space large
enough for people. We know people have disap
peared through the doorway and some of them came back out. So there has to be a space big enough for more than one person at a time. We know that. It could be that there’s something like an airlock separating the doorway from the control room, or whatever it is. And to damage the control room the bomb has to get to it.”
“The moon suit,” John Loesser said, understanding now. “It has its own air supply, insulation?”
Constance nodded.
“I could do it,” he whispered.
“So could I,” Constance said.
“No! You’re out of your ever-loving mind!” Charlie jerked up from his chair and attacked the fire, sent sparks flying up the chimney. He faced it and said angrily, “My job. You get that? Both of you? It’s my job. You’d blow yourself up, either one of you.”
“You’ll just have to see to it that the bomb is idiot-proof,” Constance said. “And instruct us. Nothing electrical about it. Or mechanical, probably. What’s left?”
Charlie turned toward her, his knuckles white against the poker.
“You can’t get within range,” she said quiet
ly. “You know that as well as I do. And it’s going
to take all three of us. Someone has to make sure that no motor is turned on while one of us is inside the thing. What if that happened? Would you get out again if the doorway closed down because electricity came on? We can’t risk it. And someone has to help John get to the place. No accidents along the way. And remember, he’ll be on skis for the first time; he’ll need both hands for his poles. Someone’s going to have to carry stuff, help him up when he falls down. Help him into the moon suit when it’s time. You know you always needed help, someone to check it out. It’s going to take all of us, Charlie.”
“I won’t let you go anywhere near it!”
“I’m immune,” she said. “Exactly the way John is. It attacked me, gave me a fierce headache, a blinding headache for a few seconds, and then went away. I talked to Polly back in California and she said the same thing. We all know that some people within range weren’t affected, some were. That part’s okay.”
“It’s not okay!” he yelled at her. “You don’t know a damn thing about what’s behind that blackness! Neither does he! You think it’s going to let someone go in and blow it up, just like that? You think it doesn’t have defenses? It could double, triple the field effect, for all we know, as soon as someone gets near that door.”
“It didn’t, though,” John said. “Remember, I was close enough to toss stuff through. Nothing changed. And you can use a flashlight. Mine was pretty small, but it didn’t have any effect on it. I can go through, Charlie.”
“Goddamn it, John!—”
“Carson,” their guest said. “John Loesser died a long time ago. I’m through hiding behind him. Carson Danvers. It’s time I finished something that began over six years ago.”
“Let’s check out the moon suit,” Constance said, as if she had suggested they play Scrabble. “Someone’s going to wear it eventually.”
Charlie went to the basement storage room and returned with a suitcase. He opened it and pulled out the suit. He had not had it on in thirteen years or more, but it was in perfect condition. How they all hated the suits, he was thinking distantly, as he explained it to Carson Danvers. Turkey roasters. But only if the turkey didn’t have enough sense to back up and get out in time. “It’s awkward and cumbersome, but it protects against chemical fires, toxic fumes, even radiation up to a point and for a limited time. But you can’t move much once it’s on. Can’t bend over very well. So you need help in getting into the boots, getting the seals right. And the air tank on the back is a bitch to manage without help. These straps can hold whatever you need in the front pouch. The charge will go there. You can’t put it on until you’re actually in the hotel, of course. You’d never reach it with the suit already on. And you can’t see too well with the helmet in place, kind of like blinders on a horse. But you need the helmet, or the air won’t work.”
He explained the parts, how to regulate the air flow, how to grasp with the oversized gloves on, how to turn your head to get a wide-angle
view of whatever was in front of you, and all the
time he was doing this, he knew that Carson Danvers would not be the one to go in. That thing wouldn’t let just anyone enter, only someone already carrying its signal, already primed. The honeybee with pollen. If a wasp tried to enter the beehive, it would be swarmed over and killed; only the bee with the right credentials would be allowed in. And he had the credentials to go through the door; the thing would recognize its own. The thing in his head wanted to go back home, wanted to take him home, and he wanted to go too. He would be allowed in; not Carson Danvers, not Constance, but he, Charlie, would be allowed in. It would be like going home.
Chapter 18
Jud Hendricks, Herman
Kohl, and Bobby
Toluri were hanging out at the Lake Pike Diner, kidding around with La Belle, who was too old for them, but was a looker. A few other kids were there in other booths, and a couple of men at the counter, wearing parkas, dripping ice water from their boots. One was Jake Dorkins, the Dork, who taught algebra and coached basketball at the high school. The other was Ralph Wasilewski, just in from plowing Old Ferry Road.
Herman Kohl
—
who had a basketball scholarship to Penn State,
if
he kept out of jail, they liked to say
—
started to yell something at La Belle; Bobby Toluri punched him in the arm.
“Shut up and listen. You hear what Wasilewski’s saying?”
At the moment he was saying nothing, having
finished, and was now staring off in the misty, greasy, odorous miasma of the diner.
“Not a hell of a lot,” Herman Kohn said.
“Yeah. What he was saying is that those guys in the four-by are holed up at Mel’s camp. What the fuck for?”
“Poaching,” Jud Hendricks said. He was the youngest of the three, still a junior; the other two were seniors. It wasn’t too often that they let him hang out with them.
Bobby gave him a withering look, a warning that he might be sent packing if he didn’t shape up. “They’re army, dope. My old man knows stuff like that. He says they’re army, they’re army.”
“Okay, they’re army. Army can’t poach?” Herman Kohl waved to La Belle and held up his Coke can. “Anyway, there’s nothing up at Mel’s except snow. Let them freeze their balls off. So what?”
Bobby was thinking, his forehead creased, his eyes narrow. “Look, first old man Tierney goes batty and shoots up the place. Right? Then Doc Gruening shoots his own head pretty damn near off. Right? Then the army moves in up at Mel’s. Right? I bet they’re testing a weapon or something up there.”
Jud groaned and closed his eyes. “You’re a nut. You know that? A real nut. Another conspiracy?”
“Maybe. What about Feldman? Lost in the woods! What a crock! He invented the woods around here.”
“I read about some new weapons,” Jud said. “They use superconductors, you know the stuff that has to be way below zero for electricity to flow through it. They could be testing something like that.”
“Sure,” Herman said. “Why bother going to the North Pole when you can go to New Jersey?”
“They’d pretend to be hunters. Why not? Did you see the van that went through this morning? Just like in E.T. I bet it was crammed with electronics.”
They did not really believe any of it. They did not really believe there was a connection among the several instances of craziness that had hit, the deaths that had resulted. It was winter, after all, and Lake Pike in the winter drove people batty. Their basketball game had been called off for that night, and all three were on the team. But Marshfield High was still snowed in. The Marshmallows couldn’t make it; they knew they’d get their asses whipped, the Lake Pike boys agreed, but it was an empty victory. They were bored. By now they were tired of the toboggans and sleds and ice skates. They drew closer together and tried to figure out a way to spy on the army. After a few
moments, Bobby called, “Hey! Mr. Wasilewski,
is Childer’s Park Road open yet?”
“What for?” Wasilewski called back.
“Good toboggan runs up there.” “It’s open.” He returned to his conversation with the Dork and dismissed the restless high school kids.
“What then? Hike back up the mountain?”
“Shit no. We go down the back side of the mountain, across the valley, and then drag the toboggan to Mel’s. We don’t know anyone’s there until we’re nearly on top of them. Our plan was to toboggan down from Mel’s on the road, only now the road’s plowed and we’re stuck. So they give us a ride to town. What’s wrong with it?”
After another five minutes, they stood up and left the diner. All three of them were over six
feet tall, Herman Kohl six feet seven. They were
grinning broadly. At the counter Jake Dorkins, the Dork, watched them with unease. Bored kids spelled trouble, but what the hell could they get into with the whole damn county snowed in? Finally, he dismissed them too.
The drive had not been as bad as Constance had feared. There had been one stretch that required chains for about twenty-five miles; all the way traffic had been slow and cautious. She had concentrated on driving, keeping a wary lookout for cars out of control, for patches of ice. Charlie had maintained a brooding silence. Carson had said that when it was over, he probably would go to California, open a restaurant there, see Beatrice. He had sounded wistful and Constance had said something appropriate if not startling; then silence had returned. Suddenly Charlie broke it.
“Take the next right turn,” he said.
Constance glanced at him; her hands tightened reflexively on the steering wheel. He was stony-faced, almost rigid, staring ahead. Gone, she thought, nearly crying out, except this was different somehow. She slowed down, searching for a road to the right.
Everything was prepared, she told herself. They had the suit, they had skis; Carson had proven he could move on them. They had the charge. A very simple looking thing. Too simple? She shook her head slightly. Charlie said it
was enough and he knew. Two-phase device, he
called it. You pull the pin and that lets two chemicals mix. After about ten minutes they start a heat reaction that will reach eighteen hundred degrees and that sets off the plastique that acts like TNT but isn’t TNT. Enough to blow up a bank vault. She made the turn off the state road. The secondary road was plowed, but hardly wide enough for two cars, and certainly not wide enough for a car and a truck, if a truck should appear.
Even if they were getting close, he couldn’t feel it with the engine running, she wanted to explain to Charlie. He couldn’t. It didn’t work when the engine was running. She imagined the bank vault blowing up, pieces flying everywhere, showers of green bills. Her mind was skittering because she was so afraid, she told herself, and her mind skittered off again, this time to the image of a submarine exploding in the sea, with a shower of green and gold fish. That was wrong, too. The black door did not lead to any place on earth or in earth’s seas. They had accepted that without discussion. The transmitter, the parent device, was in space somewhere. The door was a dimensional portal that led to space.
“The next left,” Charlie said.
Not with the engine running! She slowed down again. She had studied the map, but now was confused. The last turn was not one she had planned; the coming turn was not on her mental map. On both sides of the road farmland had yielded to forests: black traceries of trees against a sullen gray sky, snow banked over five feet high making the narrow road a tunnel, pressed in on all sides with no retreat. No way to make a turn, to go the other way. Forward only, following the road that wound around hills, made turns too sharp, considering that there could be a truck coming. The hills had become steeper, higher; had become mountains.
On either side of the road there were occasional clearings in the trees, private roads or driveways that vanished in the hills. Few of them had been plowed out. Charlie was staring past her to the left of the road, his whole body stiff with tension. They passed a narrow, tortuous driveway that climbed up the side of a hill, and Charlie sagged.
“We’ve come too far. Find a place to turn around.”
“Charlie, there wasn’t any place to turn off back there.”
“We’ll have to dig it out. Won’t take too long.”
At the next driveway that had been opened, she turned carefully and retraced their way, past the next plowed drive, searching for the one Charlie knew was there. He caught her arm in a hard grip.
“There it is.” He nodded at the opening in the trees. “Our driveway is on the north side of a valley. That last driveway is on the southern side of the same valley. Let us out here with the snow shovels and you take the car back up one of the open driveways and give us half an hour or so, then come back. You can’t park on the road while we dig.”
She stopped the Volvo and turned off the engine, then looked at Carson Danvers in the back seat. He had become almost as tense as Charlie. His scar was a bright red line along his cheekbone. He held his breath a second or two, then nodded.
“It’s okay here,” he said finally.
It was fifteen minutes before three. In two hours it would be getting dark. She said, “I’ll come back at a quarter after three. Charlie, promise you won’t go beyond the road here.”
“Sure. We might not even be done yet. Let’s get at it.”
She knew he was not really seeing her, that he was simply impatient to get on with the job
of digging. His eyes had a flat hard look that she
had come to recognize over the years; he was looking inward at a landscape no one else would ever see.
The men got the shovels from the trunk and were already attacking the ridge of snow piled up by the plow, when she drove on. She turned again at the next opening, and when she passed them a minute or two later, neither looked up. Four miles farther down the road she came to the village of Lake Pike. There was a diner with steamy windows, a tiny Grand Union grocery store housed in a gray stone building, two churches, a gas station, a variety store. A typical lakeside village with a hotel at the far end, off the main street, presumably with a view of the water. She did not drive past the hotel for fear that Byron and Fred Foley were already in town. She stopped at the diner to have the thermos filled with coffee; they had drunk it all when they stopped to take off the chains earlier. The diner was overheated and loud with raucous teenagers and country rock music. A state trooper examined her as she waited for the thermos. His face was cherry red, his hair carroty. She nodded politely, paid for her coffee, and hurried back to the car. Now she had drawn attention to herself, she thought angrily, and so what? She had a right to be out driving alone, had a right to want hot coffee, had a right to have three pairs of skis on her car that had no passengers. She drove out of town without glancing back at the diner. Four and a half miles to the driveway they were clearing. There had been virtually no traffic on the road earlier; there was a little now.
At least the stretch where she stopped was relatively straight. If a car did come, there was room for it to go around her. She got out and walked to where Charlie and Carson were finishing a passageway. It was wide enough, but just barely. Both men were red-faced and breathing hard.
“How deep is the snow?” she asked, nodding toward the driveway that was visible only because no trees grew on it.
“Maybe eight or nine inches,” Carson said. “I went up a couple hundred feet; doesn’t seem to get any deeper, and there aren’t any dropoffs. It’s okay as far as I went.”
“There’s coffee,” Constance said, and pulled on her knit cap. “I’ll have a look at the drive before I start in.”
“You’re going to drive?” Carson asked dubiously.
“She was born in a snowbank,” Charlie said with a flash of his old amusement at his athletic, outdoorsy wife.
“Dad never got a son,” she said to Carson. “So he decided his daughters would have to do. I think I was skiing by the time I was three. Down Iron Mountain when I was six. I’ve been driving in snow all my life.”
Thank God for the southern exposure, she thought a few minutes later, as she followed Carson’s prints. And that it was warmer here than back home. No snow had melted in upstate New York since the first had fallen, but it looked as if this had melted off more than once. It was wet, heavy snow, maybe with ice under the top few inches. She stopped and looked around when she came to the end of the tracks. So far so good, she decided. She could make it up to this point. On one side the valley dipped slightly—not bad. On the other the hill started to rise—again, not bad. The curve had been gradual and by now the road was out of sight. Even if they parked here no one would see them. She made a soft sound of derision. They had already put up markers by clearing the driveway; their tracks would be enough.
When she got back to the car, the men had already put the chains on and stashed the shovels in the trunk; they were ready to go in. She took her place behind the wheel and started the engine again. She backed up first in order to make a wide turn and enter more or less straight.
“The trick is,” she said to Carson, grinning at him slightly in the rearview mirror, “to go very steadily, no accelerations or slowing down or sudden turns. Just go in slowly and keep going. Set?” He looked terrified. She glanced at Charlie who was again without expression. “Here we go,” she said, easing forward; she turned, aimed at the snow canyon, and then felt the front wheels hit the resistance of snow.
No one spoke then. Ice, she thought distantly; she had been right. There was ice under there. The car swerved a little, not much, and then the chains dug in. She did not slow down. It really was not bad, she thought, feeling the car wheels find purchase, aware that when the front wheels spun on ice, the chains compensated. Not bad. Her father had taught her well.
Then she stopped. She had come to the end of the tracks, Carson’s and hers.
“Why’d you stop?” Charlie demanded harshly.
“I need a trailblazer.” She took a deep breath. “Listen, Charlie. I drive only if Carson goes ahead and signals that it’s okay to keep going. And I don’t mean the road. We sit in the car and wait for his signal. With the engine off.”
Charlie knew she was right; there was no argument against her reasons. But he knew where it was. He could point to it now, go straight to it. That frightened him very much because he also knew he should not be able to sense it in the car with the engine purring away. Before he could make objections that would sound false even to him, Carson opened the back door.
“I’ll go on ahead.” He walked away, pulling on one of Charlie’s knit ski caps.
Constance watched him, thinking he was a good man, a very good man who deserved to go to California and open his gourmet restaurant and keep company with Beatrice until they decided to make it permanent. She hoped they would do that. Carson walked around a drift, tested the snow beside it to make sure she would have room to get through, then went on. She turned to speak to Charlie but he was gone again.