Page 18

18

Under the Church

As it pricked the eye of the moon, the steeple of Saint Mark’s appeared as sharp as a thorn. Clad in native limestone, the church had been constructed in a time when people felt the architecture of churches should encourage consideration of the mightiness of God rather than bring to mind automobile showrooms and discount outlets.

The courthouse stood on the northeast corner of the block, Liberty Park with its bandstand on the northwest corner, the library on the southwest corner, and Saint Mark’s at the southeast position. Dating back to the electrification of the town, fluted iron streetlamps, painted dark green and each topped with a frosted glass fixture shaped like a flame, cast a pale light that imbrued the scene with loneliness, reminding Rebecca of paintings by Edward Hopper. There was also a quiet menace about the place that brought to mind certain late-night street shots in The Exorcist .

Even at just 9:40, little traffic navigated the intersection of Cunningham Avenue and Winkler Street. Maple Grove was surrounded by miles of fertile farmland, and in spite of the Keppelwhite Institute and the army of scientists who lived in that company neighborhood, this was still something of a farm town, where early-to-bed-and-early-to-rise was a guiding principle with many of its citizens.

The amigos had left two cars at the motel and had come here in Spencer’s Genesis SUV. He parked east of Saint Mark’s, in front of the cemetery that lay between the church and rectory. At the far end of the long block, the reverend’s handsome brick residence was dark. Pastor Larry Turnbuckle was asleep—or perhaps engaged in some freaky activity that explained his perpetual dreamy half smile.

Having shed her wig and eyeglasses now that night had fallen and they did not intend to return to any busy public place, Rebecca followed Bobby into the moonlit cemetery. Spencer trailed close behind.

This burial ground was a major feature of the town, extending two blocks from north to south, a maze of headstones and memorial plaques set flush in the earth, with here and there a massive old oak. When Maple Grove was a young town, before Saint Mark’s was built, when the graveyard had been less populated than it was now, those trees had already been mighty works of Nature. In the days of horse-drawn wagon trains, during the great migration westward, settlers on the way to a promised land of milk and honey stopped in Maple Grove to stock their covered wagons with supplies. They were stalwart and optimistic folks, blithely unaware that some would be stranded for months in the blizzard-ripped Rocky Mountains and cannibalize one another in desperation, which is the kind of thing that happens to stalwart and optimistic folks more often than they ever anticipate. In addition to the migrants, there were outlaws of all kinds in those days—bank robbers, wagon-train raiders, men who kidnapped schoolmarms for unspeakable purposes, horse thieves, schoolmarms who went bad and became horse thieves, vicious gunslingers in the hire of cattle barons who paid them to kill sheep ranchers, gunslingers in the hire of sheep ranchers who paid them to kill corn farmers, gunslingers in the hire of corn farmers who paid them to kill those who were foolish enough to grow beets. Really, there was no end to it. Back then, only a few brave individuals took up careers in law enforcement. Nevertheless, a great many desperadoes and miscreants were brought to trial before a judge, under the cemetery oaks, where they were found guilty with satisfying speed and hanged from the stout limbs. These enemies of civilization were left depending from the oaks for at least three days, during which they began to rot, were pecked apart by carrion-eating birds, and served as a lesson to others who might be thinking that the criminal life looked pretty sweet.

In a long-ago December, following the worst crime epidemic in state history, a reporter named William Hawkshaw, working for the Maple Grove Gazette , toured this cemetery at dusk with carolers and a crowd of holiday revelers, each of whom bore a candle. Hawkshaw wrote a moving, inspiring piece in which he described the numerous frozen corpses suspended from the winter-stripped oaks as “ornaments of true justice decorating the trees of righteousness, waiting for the ground to thaw, graves to be dug, and Hell to welcome them. Snow began to fall, the delicate flakes like merry angels capering in the candlelight.” He didn’t win a Pulitzer, as surely he would have in our time, but only because the Pulitzer didn’t yet exist. However, Hawkshaw was honored by the Maple County Corn Growers Association, half of whose members had recently been gunned down but who refused to be defeated by a bunch of sheepherders.

Now, as the three amigos made their way through the cemetery, where no one had been hanged in nearly a hundred and fifty years, Rebecca was not overcome by a sense of the town’s glorious history, as you might expect. She was instead awash in nostalgia for her teen years, when she and her amigos frequently went on night adventures. Although most of those escapades had been erased from her memory, she still vaguely recalled that they had occurred, which was enough to make her heart swell with longing. Like Rebecca, most actors are sentimental, yearning for the golden days of youth, when they were convinced that they were going to be bigger stars than they became.

When they had passed the east side of Saint Mark’s, they turned west, departed the graveyard, and gathered behind the church. Three doors were set in that south wall. From experience, they knew that the one to the left opened into the sacristy. The one on the right was an emergency exit from the nave. The door in the middle provided access to a small holding room from which stairs led to the basement.

During the drive from the restaurant, Bobby had explained the function of a police lock-release gun. It isn’t as big as a real pistol, and it doesn’t blow out a lock with bullets. Instead of a barrel and muzzle, it presents a pick that has to be inserted in the keyway of the deadbolt. The trigger is then squeezed, usually three to five times, until all the pins in the lock are thrown to the sheer line, disengaging the bolt. Because some novels that Bobby had written dealt with crime and police procedure, his diligent research informed him of this device, which he had then illegally acquired. He carried this instrument with him in his travels, secured to his left ankle with a Velcro strap just in case he fell into the hands of bad people who locked him in a windowless room to be tortured and interrogated later. Growing up in Maple Grove, he’d become somewhat paranoid.

He also had a penlight, which Rebecca held, directing the beam on the deadbolt. Spencer merely stood watching, which was what most visual artists did when confronted with a situation that required dexterity with a mechanical device.

They were taking a chance that Saint Mark’s did not have an alarm system. These days, churches were locked at night and often even in daylight if services were not underway, but they were rarely wired with alarm systems. Although bigots prowled in record numbers, those whose intentions were to desecrate altars were lazy cretins who, on finding the premises locked, slaked their hatred by throwing a brick through a stained-glass window or urinating on the front door.

The lock relented. They moved inside and closed the door behind them, and Rebecca shone the narrow beam down the concrete stairs. Like the holding room, the basement had no windows, so Bobby flipped up the wall switch. The light in the realm below was murky yellow and unwelcoming, remarkably reminiscent of the eerie light at the bottom of the hidden staircase that led to the secret room under the barn in Shriek and Shriek Again . Spencer must have recognized this resemblance, too, because he said, “This isn’t a movie. There is no such person as Judyface.”

Rebecca wasn’t so sure. Life often imitates movies, unless the movies are about superheroes or humongous reptiles like Godzilla. Maybe there was a Judyface; maybe there wasn’t. She had escaped from him once, set the bastard on fire in the sequel, and finally killed him in film three. So now she gathered courage and got in character, became spunky Heather Ashmont, the toughest and most indomitable young nurse in America, summoned to mind the inspiring music from the end credits of Shriek Hard, Shriek Harder , and led the way down the stairs.

The first room contained furnaces and electrical panels and fantastic snarls of plumbing that had no comprehensible purpose. A hallway led out of that space, with a large room on each side.

The chamber on the right provided storage for church records going back more than a hundred and twenty years. Included was a trove of information about generations of parishioners in which the amigos had no more interest than cows have an interest in the works of Dostoevsky.

The room to the left was about forty feet wide and fifty feet long. It was in this place that they had found ten comatose people lying face up and side by side, the recovered memory of which had drawn them here tonight.

Currently, the space was empty. They roamed back and forth, voices echoing off the concrete walls and ceiling as they strove to talk away the veils that concealed details of their previous descent into this room when they were teenagers.

Okay, here’s the thing: Dialogue tags that identify speakers can be annoying in a long exchange of short statements between more than two characters, especially when it isn’t that important to know exactly who said what. Consequently, though it will present a knotty problem for the narrator of the audiobook, dialogue identifiers have been omitted from the following give-and-take. The reader is free to employ his or her imagination as to who said what to whom.

“Back in the day, we didn’t have a lock-release gun.”

“We didn’t need one. The door was unlocked.”

“You remember that for sure?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

“Me too. I think so.”

“But why?”

“You mean, why was it unlocked?”

“I mean, I wonder ...”

“Wonder what?”

“Why did we come here in the first place?”

“You mean, back then.”

“Uh-huh. Back then.”

“Yeah, you don’t just stumble into a church basement.”

“Not by mistake.”

“Not unless you’re drunk.”

“We weren’t drunk.”

“I know we weren’t drunk.”

“So then why?”

“We must have found a clue that brought us here.”

“What clue?”

“Damn if I know.”

“Hey.”

“What? What is it?”

“Something’s coming back to me. I think ...”

“What? Spit it out, amigo.”

“I think we were secretly following someone.”

“You mean, someone who came here?”

“None of us had a driver’s license then. Or a car.”

“So we were following someone on foot? Is that it?”

“On foot. Yeah.”

“Who? Who were we following?”

“Wait, wait, wait. It’s coming back to me, too. I see ...”

“What do you see?”

“It’s autumn. Cool. Moonless.”

“Yeah. The four of us are walking along Winkler Street.”

“Secretly following someone on Winkler? No, it’s too well lit.”

“We weren’t following anyone yet.”

“What were we doing?”

“‘It was night in the lonesome October ...’”

“What?”

“‘Of my most immemorial year.’”

“That’s Poe.”

“‘It was hard by the dim lake of Auber.’”

“‘In the misty mid region of Weir.’”

“‘It was down by the dark tarn of Auber.’”

“‘In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.’”

“Are you serious. You two were reading poetry?”

“Not reading.”

“We memorized a lot of stuff. All of us.”

“Yeah. And sometimes we swapped lines while we walked.”

“Why? Why did we do that?”

“We were geeks.”

“We were hopeless geeks.”

“It was that bad?”

“You don’t remember?”

“No. I don’t. Wait. Maybe. Yes! Cool, moonless, Poe.”

“Give us some.”

“Some what?”

“How about ‘The Sleeper.’”

“‘At midnight in the month of June.’”

“‘I stand beneath the mystic moon.’”

“‘An opiate vapor, dewy, dim.’”

“‘Exhales from out her golden rim.’”

“You do remember.”

“We all do.”

“So do you remember who we were following?”

“No, but I remember when.”

“When?”

“When we got to the cemetery and saw the white rabbit!”

“He was dressed all in black.”

“Yeah, but he was hurrying like the white rabbit.”

“‘I’m late, I’m late for a very important date.’”

“Hurrying through the dark graveyard.”

“It was Pastor Larry!”

“Yes, yes! Where had he come from?”

“Somewhere in the south, going north toward the church.”

“He unlocked the center door at the back and went inside.”

“He was in the basement like five minutes.”

“When he came out, we were hiding behind headstones.”

“Near enough to hear him muttering a prayer.”

“As I remember it, not a prayer.”

“I agree. Not a prayer.”

“He was muttering, ‘Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.’”

“Hey, yeah. Why did I remember a prayer?”

“Maybe because he sounded very passionate.”

“Scared and beseeching.”

“Yeah. That’s a better word. ‘Beseeching.’”

“He ran off toward the rectory.”

“He left the church door unlocked.”

“And we went inside.”

“The men were lined up in this room. Ten of them.”

“On their backs, eyes open, motionless.”

“We thought they were comatose or maybe even dead.”

“They were all naked. Weren’t they all naked?”

“Yes! I remember now. All naked. It was freaky.”

“And didn’t they ...”

“What?”

“Didn’t they all look alike? Pretty much alike?”

“Yes. And ... Oh my God. Oh my God. I’m in a horror movie.”

“What? What are you remembering?”

“They were naked and ... like unfinished.”

“Yeah, yeah. Kind of rough around the edges.”

“Pieces missing. Part of a hand missing on one.”

“No testicles on any of them. No penises.”

“One of them had a face without a mouth.”

“Lumpy and subtly out of proportion.”

“I don’t want to remember this.”

“Too late.”

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!”

“Are we back to Pastor Larry?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“Tell us.”

“They began to finish themselves.”

“Yes! A mouth started to form where there’d been no mouth.”

“You’re right. I don’t want to believe it, but you’re right.”

“Fingers slowly sprouted from a lump of a hand.”

“But still none of them had a penis or testicles.”

“Maybe because it was a church.”

“What sense does that make. It doesn’t make any.”

“One of them blinked and turned its eyes toward us.”

“Then another one.”

“Then all of them, lying there, staring at us.”

“This town is screwed! What are we doing here?”

“Saving Ernie.”

“To hell with Ernie.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“No, I don’t. But I wish I did.”

“We have a pact. One for all, and all for one.”

“It’ll probably turn out to be a suicide pact.”

“What if Ernie’s become a monster?”

“He hasn’t become a monster. Even if he has, he’s our monster.”

In that ominous vault under the church, having conveyed a great deal of detail in quick, easy-to-read dialogue, thereby eliminating the need for clunky paragraphs of exposition, the amigos turned as one toward the most compelling feature of that large, empty room. At the far end was a drain the size of a manhole, and the floor sloped slightly toward it.

On the fateful night they’d just remembered, they had fled the room, pulling the door closed behind them. Bobby had been determined to hold it shut to prevent the golems—or whatever they were—from escaping. He insisted his three amigos go for help. No one wanted to leave him alone. They fell to squabbling among themselves about which two would stay behind with Bobby. Because they were a gaggle of adolescents whose brains were still developing and because they were also admitted geeks, the argument was drawn out to an absurd length, especially considering that the demonic brigade on the far side of the door had raised a fearsome caterwaul. The clones or pod people or escapees from Hell groaned and growled and squealed and snarled—and fell silent. No effort had been made to yank open the door and drag Bobby inside. Recognition of the sudden silence within the room had brought a matching quiet among those in the hallway. As Bobby held fast to the handle, his three amigos stared at the door with expressions of dread. They knew how moments like this always played out in movies. When the monster or monsters abruptly ceased raging, the final assault was at hand. The door would explode off its hinges, decapitating at least one amigo, and the horde would be upon them, devouring their faces. How could it be otherwise? But it was otherwise. Bobby could not let go of the handle, and his friends were paralyzed by fear, but a minute passed and then five minutes. Teenage boys, even geeks, perhaps especially teenage boy geeks, were loath to look stupid or cowardly in front of girls, even in front of profoundly unattractive girls. At that time, Rebecca Crane’s true appearance was still unrecognized by her companions, buried as her charms were under voluminous thrift-shop costumes and one kind of ghastly makeup or another. Nonetheless, Rebecca was a girl, and Bobby Shamrock was a boy, and the scary prospect of epic humiliation lay before him, life-changing humiliation, extreme throw-yourself-off-a-bridge mortification, so after another minute of silence, he opened the door. The room was deserted. Not a trace of the ten naked men. Not even a finger crawling around in search of a hand; nothing like that. The amigos were relieved, of course, but also somewhat disappointed.

Now, two decades later, three of the four friends gathered around the drain near the end of the long room. It was about one yard in diameter. The iron lid featured inch-square holes. Perhaps the church basement was subject to flooding on rare occasion. The penlight beam revealed nothing of the drain below.

It was evident now, as on the night when they were fourteen, that the devil’s legions—or whatever those creatures might have been—retreated by way of the drain. Most likely they’d come into the church by the same route.

“What were they?”

“Where did they come from?”

“Where did they go?”

“Where have they been for twenty years?”

“Were they real?”

“You think we all hallucinated the same thing?”

“No, but is it true? Is that what really happened?”

“It must be. We all shared the recollection.”

“Maybe it was a false memory implanted by whoever erased from our minds what really happened. Maybe what really happened is worse and weirder.”

“What could be worse and weirder?”

“Weirder than ten sexless, naked clones? Nothing. Doesn’t there have to be some other explanation about what we saw that night?”

“You would think so, wouldn’t you?”

Most people who have an encounter with the Unknown, capital U, have doubts about the experience and go through a period of denial, during which they try to explain away the event and restore a sense of normalcy to their lives, which is the kind of thing that often fills two or three episodes of a ten-episode Netflix series. Rather than continue to recount this phase at tedious length, we will get on with killing off our leads until only Rebecca remains, if in fact that is what happens. Life sometimes imitates movies, but if that were always the case, Earth would already have been destroyed in hundreds of cataclysms.

“We need to talk to Pastor Larry.”

“Talk? We need to interrogate the shit out of him.”

“Not tonight. We better tread carefully.”

“Yeah. We don’t want to wake up back where we started, with no memory of having returned to Maple Grove, and Ernie still in a coma or dead.”

“It’s getting late.”

“I’m too exhausted to think straight.”

“We need to go back to the motel and get some sleep, start fresh in the morning.”

“They call it a ‘motor hotel.’”

“So they can charge more.”

“Well, they provide a free continental breakfast.”

“I am deeply moved.”

Soon the three amigos would be in their beds, in their separate rooms, where bad dreams waited for them—and maybe something worse.