He dropped a dollar bill on the bar, poured beer down the side of his glass, downed it thirstily, and refilled. The bar’s only other patron at present was a young fellow in phone-company coveralls—the Bryant kid, Floyd thought. He was drinking beer at a table and listening to a moody love song on the juke.
“So what’s new in town?” Floyd asked, knowing the answer already. Nothing new, not really. Someone might have showed up drunk at the high school, but he couldn’t think of anything else.
“Well, somebody killed your uncle’s dog. That’s new.”
Floyd paused with his glass halfway to his mouth. “What? Uncle Win’s dog, Doc?”
“That’s right.”
“Hit him with a car?”
“Not so you’d notice. Mike Ryerson found him. He was out to Harmony Hill to mow the grass and Doc was hangin’ off those spikes atop the cemetery gate. Ripped wide open.”
“Son of a bitch!” Floyd said, astounded.
Dell nodded gravely, pleased with the impression he had made. He knew something else that was a fairly hot item in town this evening—that Floyd’s girl had been seen with that writer who was staying at Eva’s. But let Floyd find that out for himself.
“Ryerson brung the co’pse in to Parkins Gillespie,” he told Floyd. “ Hewas of the mind that maybe the dog was dead and a bunch of kids hung it up for a joke.”
“Gillespie doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.”
“Maybe not. I’ll tell you what Ithink.” Dell leaned forward on his thick forearms. “I think it’s kids, all right…hell, I knowthat. But it might be a smidge more serious than just a joke. Here, looka this.” He reached under the bar and slapped a newspaper down on it, turned to an inside page.
Floyd picked it up. The headline read satan worshippers desecrate fla. church. He skimmed through it. Apparently a bunch of kids had broken into a Catholic Church in Clewiston, Florida, some time after midnight and had held some sort of unholy rites there. The altar had been desecrated, obscene words had been scrawled on the pews, the confessionals, and the holy font, and splatters of blood had been found on steps leading to the nave. Laboratory analysis had confirmed that although some of the blood was animal (goat’s blood was suggested), most of it was human. The Clewiston police chief admitted there were no immediate leads.
Floyd put the paper down. “Devil worshippers in the Lot? Come on, Dell. You’ve been into the cook’s pot.”
“The kids are going crazy,” Dell said stubbornly. “You see if that ain’t it. Next thing you know, they’ll be doing human sacrifices in Griffen’s pasture. Want a refill on that?”
“No thanks,” Floyd said, sliding off his stool. “I think I’ll go out and see how Uncle Win’s getting along. He loved that dog.”
“Give him my best,” Dell said, stowing his paper back under the bar—Exhibit A for later in the evening. “Awful sorry to hear about it.”
Floyd paused halfway to the door and spoke, seemingly to the air. “Hung him up on the spikes, did they? By Christ, I’d like to get hold of the kids who did that.”
“Devil worshippers,” Dell said. “Wouldn’t surprise me a bit. I don’t know what’s got into people these days.”
Floyd left. The Bryant kid put another dime in the juke, and Dick Curless began to sing “Bury the Bottle with Me.”
EIGHTEEN
7:30 PM
“You be home early,” Marjorie Glick said to her eldest son, Danny. “School tomorrow. I want your brother in bed by quarter past nine.”
Danny shuffled his feet. “I don’t see why I have to take him at all.”
“You don’t,” Marjorie said with dangerous pleasantness. “You can always stay home.”
She turned back to the counter, where she was freshening fish, and Ralphie stuck out his tongue. Danny made a fist and shook it, but his putrid little brother only smiled.
“We’ll be back,” he muttered and turned to leave the kitchen, Ralphie in tow.
“By nine.”
“Okay, okay.”
In the living room Tony Glick was sitting in front of the TV with his feet up, watching the Red Sox and the Yankees. “Where are you going, boys?”
“Over to see that new kid,” Danny said. “Mark Petrie.”
“Yeah,” Ralphie said. “We’re gonna look at his… electric trains.”
Danny cast a baleful eye on his brother, but their father noticed neither the pause nor the emphasis. Doug Griffen had just struck out. “Be home early,” he said absently.
Outside, afterlight still lingered in the sky, although sunset had passed. As they crossed the backyard Danny said, “I ought to beat the stuff out of you, punko.”
“I’ll tell,” Ralphie said smugly. “I’ll tell why you reallywanted to go.”
“You creep,” Danny said hopelessly.
At the back of the mowed yard, a beaten path led down the slope to the woods. The Glick house was on Brock Street, Mark Petrie’s on South Jointner Avenue. The path was a shortcut that saved considerable time if you were twelve and nine years old and willing to pick your way across the Crockett Brook stepping-stones. Pine needles and twigs crackled under their feet. Somewhere in the woods, a whippoorwill sang, and crickets chirred all around them.
Danny had made the mistake of telling his brother that Mark Petrie had the entire set of Aurora plastic monsters—wolfman, mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein, the mad doctor, and even the Chamber of Horrors. Their mother thought all that stuff was bad news, rotted your brains or something, and Danny’s brother had immediately turned blackmailer. He was putrid, all right.
“You’re putrid, you know that?” Danny said.
“I know,” Ralphie said proudly. “What’s putrid?”
“It’s when you get green and squishy, like boogers.”
“Get bent,” Ralphie said. They were going down the bank of Crockett Brook, which gurgled leisurely over its gravel bed, holding a faint pearliness on its surface. Two miles east it joined Taggart Stream, which in turn joined the Royal River.
Danny started across the stepping-stones, squinting in the gathering gloom to see his footing.
“I’m gonna pushya!” Ralphie cried gleefully behind him. “Look out, Danny, I’m gonna pushya!”
“You push me and I’ll push you in the quicksand, ringmeat,” Danny said.
They reached the other bank. “There ain’t no quicksand around here,” Ralphie scoffed, moving closer to his brother nevertheless.
“Yeah?” Danny said ominously. “A kid got killed in the quicksand just a few years ago. I heard those old dudes that hang around the store talkin’ about it.”
“Really?” Ralphie asked. His eyes were wide.
“Yeah,” Danny said. “He went down screamin’ and hollerin’ and his mouth filled up with quicksand and that was it. Raaaacccccchhhh.”
“C’mon,” Ralphie said uneasily. It was close to full dark now, and the woods were full of moving shadows. “Let’s get out of here.”
They started up the other bank, slipping a little in the pine needles. The boy Danny had heard discussed in the store was a ten-year-old named Jerry Kingfield. He might have gone down in the quicksand screaming and hollering, but if he had, no one had heard him. He had simply disappeared in the Marshes six years ago while fishing. Some people thought quicksand, others held that a sex preevert had killed him. There were preeverts everywhere.
“They say his ghost still haunts these woods,” Danny said solemnly, neglecting to tell his little brother that the Marshes were three miles south.
“Don’t, Danny,” Ralphie said uneasily. “Not…not in the dark.”
The woods creaked secretively around them. The whippoorwill had ceased his cry. A branch snapped somewhere behind them, almost stealthily. The daylight was nearly gone from the sky.
“Every now and then,” Danny went on eerily, “when some ringmeat little kid comes out after dark, it comes flapping out of the trees, the face all putrid and covered with quicksand—”
“Danny, come on.”