“Stay with me, Charlie,” Fred whispered. “You’re the only friend I’ve got in this town.”
Hopman came back seconds later.
“Grab hold,” he shouted, and threw down, not a rope, but a long length of exterior electric cabling. Fred had to shift his footing to get it wrapped under Charlie’s armpits, and his heart thudded faster as the septic tank slid back a foot before coming to a stop. He tied the cable in a knot he prayed was strong enough to hold.
“Okay, take him up,” he shouted. He hoisted Charlie’s weight as long as he could while Hopman took the strain. As Hopman started to haul Charlie up, Fred stepped off the tank and tried to climb the bank to keep pace. There was a crash behind him. He turned in time to see the septic tank fall away out of sight. The thud as it hit bottom seemed to take a long time to come.
Then Fred was in a scramble for his life as the soil sloughed away beneath his hands and feet. He slid back three feet before he caught purchase, his legs swinging over empty air.
He looked down.
The hole fell away into a dark pit far below. Something moved down there, something large and pale, but it was gone before he could make out what it was. He grabbed at a thick root, half expecting it to give way beneath his weight. But to his surprise and relief it held, long enough for him to clamber away from the lip of the hole and roll aside; traversing the rest of the muddy bank in a zigzag crawl that brought him within range of Hopman’s reaching hand.
He took it gratefully, and let the man pull him up onto the lawn where he lay beside Charlie’s unconscious body, gasping in air, wondering what had just happened, and wiping away a fresh nosebleed.
4
Janet Dickson had just realized that all of her patients that morning were from the east side of town. She decided that the sheriff needed to know, and was reaching for the phone when Fred Grant arrived in the waiting room, half carrying Charlie Watson. The older man had blood seeping from a scalp wound and looked to be unsteady on his feet. She put the phone down and moved quickly to help. She couldn’t miss noticing the rank smell that hung around the men, but ignored it as she helped Fred get Charlie to the treatment room.
“I’m fine,” the wounded man said and tried to push them away. “Ain’t nothing a little Jack won’t cure.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Janet said. She finally persuaded the older man to sit on one of the gurneys, and set about trying to clean the wound.
“It’s a nasty cut. What happened to you?” she asked.
It was Fred who replied.
“John Hopman’s septic tank fell on him,” he said, deadpan.
Janet almost laughed but stopped when she saw he was serious. And she was now also intrigued, so she let Fred stay while she stitched Charlie up, the story unfolding as she did so. “It’s a big hole?” she asked as both the story and the stitching came to a conclusion.
Fred nodded.
“And getting bigger by the looks of things. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Hopman house isn’t at risk before the day is out.”
“Any idea what’s caused it?”
“Nope,” Fred replied. “But I’ll tell you something—ain’t no way I’ll be the one cleaning that shit up.”
The youth was more talkative than she’d ever seen him. He wasn’t one of her patients, but she knew of him, of course. Everybody knew the town
bad boy
.
“Twenty years old and fit for nothing but the county jail,” was how Sheriff Bill Wozniak described him. Janet didn’t quite see it that way. She liked the youth. He had a good head on his shoulders. He and Charlie had painted the outside of her house just after she moved in, and it was obvious that both men took some pride in doing the job properly. Fred hadn’t come across as brash or mouthy like others of his generation.
Of course just last year he’d smashed up a car he’d stolen mere hours before. But he’d admitted it straightaway the next morning, and had even appeared contrite, blaming it on the booze and promising to behave in the future. Whether he could deliver on that promise remained to be seen. But here and now in the surgery he looked like what he was—an excited youth running on adrenaline and fumes.
There was one other thing. Both men had nosebleeds that took a long time to stop flowing. Charlie had more blood coming from his nose than from the scalp wound.
“Headache?” Janet asked.
Fred smiled wanly. “No, thanks. I’ve already got one. And it’s a real stinker. It got worse right after we arrived at Hopman’s place and it ain’t eased much since.”
That statement set alarm bells ringing in Janet’s mind. After she showed the two men out with prescriptions for painkillers, and a warning to stay off the booze and take it easy, she went to the wall map and traced her finger over the houses of the patients who seemed worst afflicted. She’d been right in her earlier assumption. All of the cases came from the east side of town, the worst being those closest to Hopman’s Hollow.
Her patients’ ailments, and the new hole, were linked.
But for the life of me I can’t see how
.
* * *
She was still pondering the question later that afternoon when Bill Wozniak arrived. By then the nosebleeds and headaches had all been seen to, and she’d checked with County that the two patients she’d sent over were fine. For the first time since her arrival that morning there were no patients in the waiting room and no appointments scheduled. She felt safe in making herself a coffee, and had just sat back at her desk when the sheriff arrived. The big man looked worried.
“You look like you need a coffee,” she said.
He shook his head, and she knew there was trouble. Anything that kept the big man from his fix could be nothing less. He looked older than his forty-four years, and seemed somehow slumped, as if suddenly beset by the strain of his office, a strain he had always seemed to carry lightly until now.
“It ain’t good, Janet,” he said. “It ain’t good at all. I need you to come with me to the Hopman place. We’ve got a forensic team coming down from County, but it’ll be a while yet before they’re here, and it’ll be getting dark. Maybe you’ll see something in daylight before then that’ll give me a heads up on what is going on.”
“What
is
going on?” she asked.
“I ain’t exactly sure myself, yet. I have my suspicions. But I’d rather let you make up your own mind. Will you come?”
“Of course, just give me five minutes to close up.”
* * *
It was obvious before they even reached the Hopman place that something was indeed going on. There was more traffic on the road than she had ever seen. Normally you could drive along this stretch and maybe see a lorry going the other way, or a battered pickup heading for one of the farms. Now it seemed that half the town was heading out east. Whatever it was, it had brought out as many people as the church summer fete.
Bill had been remarkably quiet on the short trip from the town center, but now he cursed, long and loud.
“Ain’t had a day like this since ’98 when the school bus crashed,” he said. He waved a hand to encompass the traffic. “Damned ambulance chasers. I’d have the lot of them in the cells if I had the room.”
“
Ambulance chasers?
I thought it was only Charlie who got hurt?”
“Hurt? There’s more than hurt out here, Janet,” Bill said softly. “We got some dead folks.”
He went pale, and there was something in his eyes that made Janet wish she’d stayed back in the surgery.
It’s a bad one.
She didn’t push it, for by then they were almost on top of a crowd of gawkers. They were packed so thick on the roadside that Bill had to put on his lights and siren and edge his way through, window down, shouting curses and exhortations at the top of his voice. Even then they scarcely moved—not until Bill started to
accidentally
nudge them aside with the front bumpers.
It was only when they got through the crowd that Janet finally saw what all the fuss was about. The Hopman house, or rather half of it, sat perched on the edge of a hole that stretched off quarter of a mile to the south. What was left of the building was open to the elements, the rest obviously having fallen away when the ground collapsed beneath it. There was a fine array of antique furniture on show to the world. Janet knew that as much again and more must have joined the walls in their fall into the hole. If nothing else, the Hopmans had already lost a small fortune.
At the nearest point to their position the collapse reached all the way up to the edge of the road, where a quartet of tired-looking deputies tried to keep the crowd back. The scar was also over a hundred yards wide, and as deep as Fred Grant had said, if not deeper, a yawning chasm filled with blackness.
“It’s still growing,” Bill said quietly, as he got out of the car.
Janet got out and joined him.
As if to prove Bill’s point, a foot-wide piece of the right-hand roadway fell off into the hole and tumbled away out of sight. She waited for a splash, but none came, or if it did, it was too far off to hear. People started to crowd closer, hoping for a better look.
“Get these folks right back,” Bill shouted. “And get this road closed. I want roadblocks a hundred yards either side of the collapsed area. There’s to be no traffic either way until I say so.”
The deputies moved to comply. Bill turned to Janet.
“This isn’t why you’re here. Come with me.”
He led her west along the road, back towards town, then along the side of the hole for fifty yards. Her heart sank when she saw the bodies, three of them, lying on the edge on a bed of pine needles. From a distance it looked to be two adults and a child. They were unclothed, with the greasy pallor of flesh that had been too long in the water.
Floaters
.
She steeled herself for the inevitable stench to come. As she approached, she noticed something else.
They scarcely look human.
“What is this, Bill? An accident?”
“You tell me, Doc,” the sheriff said wearily. “I only work here.”
He looked green around the gills, as if about to puke. She saw why as she got closer. All three bodies were bloated and distended, puffed up by gasses. The degree of decomposition seemed severe.
And it’ll only get worse out here
.
“We need to get these into controlled conditions, fast,” Janet said. “Otherwise there won’t be much left for the boys from County to examine.”
“That might be for the best,” Bill said dryly, but didn’t elaborate.
He stayed well back as Janet bent to look at the bodies. The decomposition was indeed bad, and getting rapidly worse, as if the air itself was acting like acid on the pale flesh. The incongruities piled up as soon as she started her examination. The first thing that struck her was that all three bodies seemed to be completely hairless. Then she saw the tails…three feet long, gray and scaly, the sort of thing normally seen on rats. The more she looked the more she saw that these bodies were indeed not human. They
were
mammalian, of sorts, but looked to have evolved for a different existence. For eyes they only had black pits, their hands were flat and broad, palms like spades, fingers stubby, and their back legs were thick and short, built for pushing rather than walking.
She looked up at Bill, who was pointedly looking anywhere but at the bodies.
“What the hell is this?” she said. “Some kind of joke?”
Bill looked solemn.
“
Hell
might be the operative word,” he said, and pointed at the head of one of the bodies. Twin protuberances, fleshy and swollen poked from above the brow. “Sure looks like horns to me.”
It took Janet a few seconds to understand.
“Devils? You think that’s what these are?”
Bill shrugged. “If the shoe fits…”
She almost laughed, and then thought better of it. Bill was a churchman through and through, as was much of the town. She’d learned a long time ago to keep any skepticism to herself. She did, however, study the horns more closely. There was no sign of any bone. Instead the bumps seemed to be coated with short fine hairs, and she guessed they might be some kind of sensory organs. She bent to study the mouth area when the face of the thing fell in with a moist sucking sound, and she almost gagged as a foul stench rose up from the body, forcing her to cover her mouth. The chest cavity started to slump in on itself, and the smell got much worse.
It quickly became clear she wasn’t going to get much, if anything, of the remains back to controlled conditions. They were corroding fast, noxious fluids bubbling and seeping into the ground as Janet watched. There wasn’t even any hope of bones to study—the whole structure of the bodies was breaking down and in seconds there was nothing left but some greasy flesh on the pine needles.
She just had time to scrape a sample of what remained into one of her latex gloves before, with a soft hiss, the last of it turned to little more than a puff of steam.