Forever never ends

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Robert felt the tremor. It was slight, just enough to knock the ash off his cigarette. There were few earthquakes in the Appalachians, and the upheavals and tectonic distress that had pushed the mountains out of the crust were eons past. He wondered if the construction crews were blasting over at Sugarfoot again. It seemed too early for them to be creating such a public disturbance.

And he wondered why he wanted to go out into the woods, with his hand throbbing and his head splitting open in pain, his thoughts not quite fitting together.

The screen door creaked open, the loose glass rattling. Ginger held the door open with a small hand. Her eyes were wide and Robert looked into them. Then he shook his head. For a moment, they had looked exactly like Tamara's.

"Come in, Daddy," she said, with no sleep in her voice.

"Another bad dream, sweetheart?" Robert said, grinding his smoke into the ashtray and staring into the forest.

"No, Daddy. Mommy says come in."

Her face was so solemn that Robert almost laughed. Almost. "What is it, Ginger?"

"Mommy says the shu… shu — something"-Ginger scrunched up her face in concentration-"the bad people are coming. Out of the woods."

"Who?" Tamara couldn't have called, or else Robert would have heard the phone ring. Ginger must have had a bad dream. And why did his head hurt so much?

"Please come in, Daddy," Ginger said, and then she was a six-year-old again, pleading and confused. "They speak for the trees."

"Like the Lorax in Dr. Seuss."

"No, not like him."

"Okay, honey. I'm coming."

Robert looked around and saw nothing but the dim outlines of trees whisking faintly in the stale dawn breeze. But he stepped inside and closed the door, then locked it. He knelt and hugged Ginger. "We'll be safe now."

"Mommy thinks she hopes so."

Robert wiped at his eyes. Must have been the lack of sleep that made him confused, made him want to go under the trees and lie down in the leaves. Maybe he was dreaming right now, and had brought Ginger into it to keep away the loneliness.

“They speak for the trees,” Ginger repeated.

"Mr. Sun is coming up, and he makes the boogeymen go away."

"Sometimes. But not all the times."

Her eyes were too earnest, too wise and knowledgeable for a child's. He loved her so much. He hoped that she wouldn't be cursed all her life with the Gloomies.

"I don't think so," she said, in answer to his thoughts.

Virginia Speerhorn felt the tremor in her sleep, and it woke her up without her knowing why. She thought it was the excitement of her big day that had caused her insomnia.

She rubbed her eyes and looked at the clock. It was already five. Time for her to get up anyway. She wanted to take a shower and spend a half hour on her makeup. Then a quick breakfast and she'd be downtown before most of the tourists crawled out from between the sheets at the Holiday Inn.

She turned the bathroom faucet until the water was steaming hot, then stood under the shower head. As she vigorously lathered her skin, she rehearsed the speech she was going to give on the stage before Sammy Ray Hawkins played. She believed that visualization was the key to success. She saw the moment as if it were on film.

And she was at the microphone, looking out over a sea of tourists and voters and big spenders and community leaders and movers and shakers, and they all looked up up up at her, every head tilted, every eye fixed on their queen-no, mayor — waiting for her to bestow her seal of approval on the festivities. She would be in her lavender linen dress with the padded shoulders.

Virginia pictured herself addressing the crowd in her strong, amplified voice, moving the jut-jawed farmers and the tie-choked realtors with equal ease. Children would not be distracted by the smells of cotton candy and the bright balloons that bobbed on the ends of a thousand strings. The women would be unable to hide their natural jealousy. Sammy Ray himself would yield to her celebrity. Even the birds would quit their senseless chirping.

All attention would be hers. It was her favorite moment of the year, even better than when the Town Council annually approved the budget she insisted upon, even better than sitting in the lead car during the Fourth of July parade, even better than being declared the winner and still-reigning champ of the Windshake mayoral elections.

She stepped out of the shower and toweled off, running the fabric luxuriantly over her skin. The phone rang, but she knew it would stop before she had time to reach it. Then she heard the thumping at the front door. She had a reputation as an early riser, but no one would dare be so presumptuous at this hour. She slipped into her robe, shivering as she walked down the hall to the door.

Virginia turned on the porch light and squinted through the peephole, expecting either Chief Crosley with news about Emerland or one of the Blossomfest committee members with an eleventh-hour problem.

At first, she wasn't sure what she was seeing. Her breath fogged the peephole glass like Vaseline over the eye of a camera. She looked again at the wide distorted froggish face and the quivering flesh, at those familiar freckled cheekbones that were so much like her own. She saw the son she had raised and treasured and diapered and suckled, the boy with those deep green eyes-no, Reggie had brown eyes.

And he was supposed to be in bed. Confused, she opened the door. Her baby was hurt or sick… her son was… Reggie was home.

He fell into his mother's arms as the earth shook again.

Rocks and dirt clods showered down on the group and the boulders wiggled like loose teeth. Bits of soil and thick rot spewed from the Earth Mouth.

"Sonuvawhore!" Chester shouted, falling backward and dropping his shotgun. It clattered against stone and slid to the ground.

Chester rolled over onto his hands and knees and scrabbled to the edge of the granite face that shielded them from the Earth Mouth.

"Dee-double-damn you. We're going to blow you back to hell," Chester yelled, shaking his fist in the air. The tremor eased and Chester looked back to see DeWalt sweating over the dynamite. Tamara was watching DeWalt, too, but her eyes seemed focused beyond the paper-wrapped sticks.

"I wonder how stable that stuff is," Emerland said, grinning like a doped-up court jester. Chester figured Emerland was touched in the head, two pecks shy of a full bushel, nuttier than a Payday bar. Hell, they all were, every single goddamn thing in the ass-end-up universe.

"Don't know if we ought to wait around for the next little hiccup," Chester said.

Tamara finally spoke. "Gentlemen, I think it's time. Is the detonator ready, Herbert?"

DeWalt nodded. "As far as I can tell. May as well put the rest of the TNT into the thing. I just have to push this button. The explosion of this batch will set off the rest of it."

Tamara lifted the can of Roundup from where it had fallen on its side. She carried it to the ledge, removed the cap, and tilted the can, letting the thick concentrate glug down into the deep alien hole. The wormy tendrils inside the throat shriveled and writhed and the white roots along the stream bank began turning to jelly. Tamara tossed the empty can into the dark opening.

"Drink up, you old bastard," Chester said. He lifted the sack of Acrobat M-Z and tore the flap, ripping at the paper with his aching fingers. He tossed it over the side in a white dust storm, then emptied his pockets of the dynamite and rolled the sticks gently into the hole. Emerland followed suit with the Sevin after breaking the bag open against an edge of sharp stone.

"Attaway to go, Emerland." Chester slapped the developer on the back. Chester was starting to like him a little, now that both of them had dirty knees and money didn’t matter. He wondered if maybe they were all the same under the skin after all, that rich or poor or sinner or saint, they were all equal in the eyes of God when they faced a common enemy.

Naw, he thought. Don't reckon so.

He chomped into his tobacco and rolled it around in his mouth to collect some juice, then spat into the Earth Mouth. He watched with satisfaction as powdery molds fell from the roof of the cave. He noticed for the first time that the light of dawn was now brighter than the neon radiance of the hole.

The ground shook again, frantically but with less force. Chester hoped that the poison was slowing it down, making it weaker. Tamara had said something about the alien becoming part of what it ate, and if it was part of the earth now, then a generous helping of earthly poison ought to put a twist in its innards.

"Do it. The sun,” he heard Tamara saying to DeWalt.

"Can't.”

Chester turned and saw the tears in DeWalt's eyes.

DeWalt pushed the button again. "Must be the battery. Dead."

They looked at each other. "Then so the fuck are we," Chester said.

The Earth Mouth rumbled as if in agreement.

"Ginger? Honey? What did you-" Robert stopped. Then he tried an experiment.

"No, Daddy, I don't want any chocolate milk. That's only for nice times, not now," Ginger said.

"Can you-?"

"Hear Mommy? Sometimes her words just come in my head. She thinks it’s sort of silly. But she's scared, too."

Anxiety ground Robert's guts between its molars. "Can you take me to Mommy?"

"No, she doesn't want me to. She wants us to stay here. Until they blow up the monster…"

" They? "

"Emerland and Chester and Herbert DeWalt. That's funny, DeWalt has a bleeding heart."

"Tell me about them."

She did.

Bill felt empty, aching from loneliness, as if his heart had been ripped out and replaced with straw. Yet he also burned with rage at the things that had killed Nettie. He turned away from the graveyard and looked at the patrolman.

Arnie swung his two-handed grip on the gun from side to side, tracking the slow, swarming movements among the trees and monuments. His eyes were wide with fear and shock. "Do I shoot them, or what? Where the hell is the chief when a body needs him?"

Bill figured they didn't teach this situation at the police academy. "It's no sin to kill what’s already dead," Bill said. “Or at least ought to be.”

"Are you drunk or something?"

"No. Was blind but now I see.”

Sandy Henning fell through the hedge ten feet away from them and looked up with her deep alien eyes. She ran the broadleaf of her tongue over her swollen lips. She sprayed something toward the sky, her sagging face quivering. Arnie pulled the trigger twice, and the thing that had been Sandy Henning exploded into a slick pool of miasma.

"They're juicy," Bill said. "Miracles never stop ceasing. Behold. He turns the water into wine."

"Bill?"

Bill looked at the stars and the fading moon, trying to see the face of his cruel God.

"Bill?" Arnie asked again, and Bill could actually hear the patrolman gulp.

"Yes, Arnie?" Bill smiled. His smile scared himself almost as much as it did Arnie.

"Got a shotgun in the car, if you're up to helping."

Bill followed Arnie to the cruiser, its lights oscillating against his face in a steady panic. Arnie tossed Bill the shotgun, a short-barrel pump-action. Then he reached under the dash and pulled out his radio mic. "Unit Six here, you copy, Base?"

Static squawked into the air. The hedges were coming to life, teeming with the creatures who had turned their affections toward Bill and Arnie. Bill pumped the shotgun and the clack was pure metal authority.

"10-4, Unit Six, I copy,” the radio sputtered. “What's your 10–20?"

"Responding to that 10–36 at Windshake Baptist. I've got a 10–44, or, uh, a 10-hell, I don't know if this situation's even got a damned number."

"Come again?"

"10–33. Send backup. On the double. Got some creepers here."

"10-9, Unit Six?"

"Screw it.” Arnie tossed the mic onto the seat. He turned and fired his revolver at the nearest moist hunk of plantmeat. Bill raised the shotgun and pressed the butt against his shoulder.

"We will come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves," Bill sang in a barely recognizable melody, before sending a handful of pellets screaming into the night.