The Narrows(90)

Boy, Ben thought. This is no boy.

“What do we do, Ben?”

Ben thought for a minute then stood up. The corpse rocked back on its side with sickening rigidity. “We take the body back to the station. I’ll call the medical examiner’s office and see if Deets will come out tonight, but I don’t want to leave the body in here.” The abandoned house seemed to groan all around him. Ben shivered. “I’m gonna call the sheriff’s department over in Cumberland and have them send some guys out, too. This is beyond anything we’re prepared to handle.”

Joseph Platt just stood there, unmoving. He still had his penlight trained on the corpse.

“Is there a problem?” Ben said.

“You want us to…”

“Take the body back to the station for right now.”

Platt still didn’t move.

“Would you rather tell Wendy Crawly her son’s dead?” Ben asked.

Platt gave no response.

“I’ve got some tarpaulin and fire retardant blankets in the trunk of my car,” Ben said, tossing Platt his car keys. Catching them shook Platt from his stupor. Some color drained back into his face.

“We better get Haggis back in here with his stick first,” Platt said. He was looking up at the ceiling where his penlight fell upon the wet, matted black fur of several bats. They dripped like ink from the ceiling.



2



Opening up the rear door of Platt’s cruiser, Ben climbed in and sat next to Brandy. “Hey. You okay?”

She looked hardly there, hardly real…as if the slightest breeze might reduce her to a pile of white sand.

“We’re gonna take care of this here,” he went on, “and we’re gonna do a good job. I can take you home if you want to go there, or—”

“Where are you taking him?”

“To the police station.”

“And then what?” There was a pragmatic decisiveness to her tone that seemed out of place. Ben assumed she was still in shock.

“Well,” he said slowly, thinking things through as he went along, “we’ll call the county sheriff’s department and they’ll come take care of your brother. But for right now, you and I need to go by your house and speak to your mom. We need to tell her what happened to your brother.”

“He isn’t dead,” she said flatly.

Ben nodded. “Okay. I know this is hard, honey. I’m going to help you and—”

“He isn’t dead. He’s just…changed.”

“Changed?”

“He’s some kind of…vampire now.”

“Okay,” Ben said. He reached out and put a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“He’s been in our garage all along, sleeping during the day. He’s been in there all along.” She looked at him. Her eyes were dead sober. “Didn’t you see what he looked like?”

He looked just like that kid we found washed up in the creek two weeks ago, Ben thought. This notion made him uncomfortable.

She looked away from him, facing forward. Ben felt the seconds tick by like millennia. After he’d aged considerably, Ben’s hand slipped off the girl’s shoulder. “Let’s get you home,” he said.

Brandy said nothing.



3



Eddie La Pointe eased the squad car to a slow crawl as he advanced along the gradual incline of Full Hill Road toward Tom Schuler’s place. It was dark now, without even the occasional streetlamp to brighten the way out here.

This part of town was about as rural as it got in Stillwater—a place where the small dirt roads were named after the families who lived off them and where, over generations, the houses had become sagging, weather-ruined monstrosities that looked more like the wooded landscape than anything constructed by the hands of man. Back before the Army Corps of Engineers came and put in the pumping system and retaining walls in the 1950s, the more cautious of Stillwater’s residents, tired of constant flooding and losing their livestock and crops, had taken to this place up higher in the mountains. For the most part, the bloodline of these cautious families had remained in town and up here in the high hills, and many of the dilapidated houses up here on Wills Mountain still provided sanctuary for the descendants of those very families. Although Eddie La Pointe had been born and raised over the line in West Virginia, he had lived and worked in Stillwater long enough to become attuned to the town’s history and to the families with whom it was populated.

Now, pulling along the narrow twist of muddy roadway that led through the trees up to Tom Schuler’s place, the rain laying a tattoo against the car’s windshield, Eddie could already see that all the lights in the house were off and Tom Schuler’s old Ford Maverick was nowhere to be seen. It was possible that the car was around back. It was likely Tom had already gone to bed, too. Once he left here, he could make a call out to Jimmy Toops’s lot and see if the vehicle had ever been picked up after Kirkland had it towed.

Eddie did not feel too comfortable. He pulled alongside the slouching porch, shut off the squad car’s headlights, and switched off the ignition. The house looked silent and empty, radiating that hollowness that all abandoned houses seemed capable of emitting, like some kind of sonar.

He could readily recall the abandoned building that had stood at the end of Maple Lane in his own hometown of Truax, West Virginia. It had once been an old soda shop and burger joint but, when Eddie was just a boy, it had already become nothing but a graffiti-laden concrete shell, its row of empty windows as foreboding as black ice, the paved parking lot gritty with sand and overgrown with blond weeds. Kids from the neighborhood had said it was haunted, and indeed young Eddie La Pointe swore on more than one occasion that he had seen a figure drifting behind those black windows like a corpse moving through the ether of space. Eddie and all his friends would have to walk past the place whenever they went down to the sandlot to play baseball, which they did most days in the summer. It hadn’t been so bad in the daytime, but come dusk, when Eddie and his friends had to return home for supper, and with the sun already beginning to set while painting great sweeping shadows across the land, the run-down burger joint seemed to come alive. If Eddie happened to walk by it alone, he would break out into a run halfway across the weedy parking lot, certain that the building had come alive and was somehow capable of reaching out and snatching him up off the ground…