Dark Screams: Volume Two (3 page)

He took a deep breath, exhaled it. The collapsed green seahorse seemed to be drifting toward him again. Was its grin wider? Did it show a glint of teeth? Glenn watched the rubber ring move through the light’s beam, and then he took another breath and slid downward to find the speargun.

His thrashing had stirred up more debris. The water seemed alive with reaching, darting shadows as he kicked to the bottom and skimmed along it, his belly brushing the tiles. The light gleamed off another beer can, off a scatter of pennies left by children who’d been diving for them. Something bony lay on the bottom, and Glenn decided it was a chicken drumstick somebody had tossed over the fence. He kept going, slowly swinging his light in an arc before him.

The dirty clouds opened under his waving hand, and more metal glinted. Another crushed beer can—no, no, it wasn’t. His heart kicked. He fanned the murk away and caught sight of the speargun’s handle. Gripped it in his right hand with a flood of relief.
Thank God!
he thought. Now he felt powerful again, and the shadows seemed to flee before him. He turned in a circle, illuminating the darkness at his back. Nothing there. Nothing. To his right the newspaper page flapped like a manta ray, and to his left the clouds parted for a second to show him a glimpse of the drain. He was in the twelve-foot depth. The deep end, that place where parents warned their kids not to go.

And about three feet from the drain lay something else. Something that made Glenn’s throat catch and bubbles spill from his nostrils.

And that was when the thing that had taken the shape of a speargun in his hand burst into its true form, all camouflage done. Ice-white tentacles tightened around Glenn’s wrist as his fingers spasmed open.

The bubbles of a scream exploded from Glenn’s mouth, but his jaws clamped shut before all his air was lost. As he tried to lunge upward, a third and fourth tentacle—pale, almost translucent, and as tough as piano wire—shot out, squeezing into the drain’s grate, and locked there.

Glenn fought furiously, saw the monster’s head taking shape from its gossamer ghost of a body; the head was triangular, like a cobra’s, and from it emerged a single scarlet, blazing eye with a golden pupil. Below the eye was a small, round mouth full of suction pads like the underside of a starfish. The mouth was pulsating rapidly, and began to turn from white to crimson.

The single eye stared into Glenn’s face with clinical interest. And suddenly the thing’s neck elongated and the mouth streaked around for the back of Glenn’s neck.

He’d known that was where it was going to strike, and he’d flung his left arm up to ward off the blow an instant before it came. The mouth sealed to his shoulder like a hot kiss, hung there for a second, and withdrew with a
sputt
of distaste. The monster’s head weaved back and forth as Glenn hunched his shoulders up to protect the back of his neck and spinal cord. His lungs heaved, his mouth was full of water; the snorkel spun away in the turbulence. Water was streaming into his mask, and the light had dropped from the fingers of his left hand and lay on the bottom, sending rays through the roiling clouds like a weird sunset through an alien atmosphere.

The thing’s head jerked forward, its mouth aiming at Glenn’s forehead; he jerked aside as much as he could, and the mouth hit the face mask glass. Glenn felt tentacles slithering around his body, drawing him closer, trying to crack his ribs and squeeze the last of his air out. He pressed his left hand to the back of his neck. The monster’s eye moved in the socket, seeking a way to the juices it craved. The mouth was bright red now, and deep in the folds of its white body, Glenn saw a crimson mass that pulsated at the same rhythm as its mouth.

Its heart, he realized. Its heart.

The blood thundered in his head. His lungs were seizing, about to grab for water. He looked down, saw the real speargun a few feet away. He had no time for even a second’s hesitation, and he knew that if he failed he was dead.

He took his hand away from the back of his neck and reached for the gun, his own heartbeat about to blow the top of his skull off.

The creature’s head came around like a whip. The suckers fixed to the base of Glenn’s brain, and for an instant there was an agony that he thought would end only when his head split open; but then there was a numbing, floating, Novocained sensation, and Glenn felt himself drifting toward death.

But he had the speargun in his hand.

The monster shivered with hungry delight. From between the suction cups tiny needlelike teeth began to drill through the pores of its prey’s flesh, toward the spinal cord at the base of the brain.

One part of Glenn wanted to give up. Wanted to drift and sleep. Wanted to join Neil and the others who had gone to sleep in this pool. It would be so easy…so easy…

But the part of him that clung to life and Linda and the world beyond this pool made him lift the gun, press the barbed spear against the monster’s pulsing heart, and squeeze the trigger.

Sharp, head-clearing pain ripped through him. A black cloud of blood spilled into the water. The spear had pierced the creature’s body and gone into his own forearm. The monster released his neck, its head whipping and the eye wide and stunned. Glenn saw that the spear had gone right through the thing’s heart—if that’s indeed what the organ was—and then he wrenched at his arm with all his remaining strength. The spear and the heart tore out of the monster’s writhing body. The pupil of its eye had turned from gold to black, and its tattered body began to ooze through the drain’s grate like strands of opaque jelly.

Glenn’s lungs lurched. Pulled in water. He clawed toward the surface, his arm puffing blood. The surface was so far, so terribly far. The deep end had him, was not going to let him go. He strained upward as dark gnawed at him and his lungs hitched and the water began to gurgle in his throat.

And then his head emerged into night air, and as he drew a long, shuddering breath he heard himself cry out like a victorious beast.

He didn’t remember reaching the pool’s side. Still would not trust the ladder. He tried to climb out and fell back several times. There seemed to be a lot of blood, and water still rattled in his lungs. He didn’t know how long it was, but finally he pulled himself out and fell on his back on the wet concrete.

Sometime later, he heard a hissing sound.

He wearily lifted his head and coughed more water out. At the end of the spear, the lump of alien flesh was sizzling. The heart shriveled until it resembled a piece of coal—and then it fell apart like black ash, and there was nothing left.

“Got you,” Glenn whispered. “Got you…didn’t I?”

He lay on his back for a long time, as the blood continued to stream from the wound in his arm, and when he opened his eyes again he could see the stars.

“Crazy fella busted in here last night,” one of the overall-clad workmen said to the other as he lit a cigarette. “Heard it on the news this mornin’. Radio said a fella broke in here and went swimmin’. That’s why the chain’s cut off the gate.”

“Is that right? Lawd, lawd! Jimmy, this is some crazy world!” The second workman, whose name was Leon, sat on the concrete beside the little brick enclosure housing an iron wheel that opened the drain and a switch that operated the electric pump. They’d spent an hour cleaning the pool out before they’d turned the wheel, and this was the first chance to sit down and rest. They’d filled a garbage bag with beer cans, dead bugs, and other debris that had collected at the bottom. Now the water was draining out, the electric pump making a steady thumping sound. It was the first morning of September, and the sun was shining through the trees in Parnell Park.

“Some folks are just born fools,” Jimmy offered, nodding sagely. “Radio said that fella shot himself with a
spear.
Said he was ravin’ and crazy and the policeman who found him couldn’t make heads or butts outta anythin’ he was sayin’.”

“Musta wanted to go swimmin’ awful bad. Hope they put him in a nice asylum with a swimmin’ pool.”

Both men thought that was very funny, and they laughed. They were still laughing when the electric pump made a harsh gasping moan and died.

“Oh, my achin’ ass!” Jimmy stood up, flicked his cigarette to the concrete. “We musta missed somethin’! Drain’s done clogged for sure!” He went over to the brick enclosure and picked up a long-handled telescoping tool with a hooked metal tip on the end. “Let’s see if we can dig whatever it is out. If we can’t, then somebody named Leon is goin’ swimmin’.”

“Uh-uh, not me! I don’t swim in nothin’ but a bathtub!”

Jimmy walked to the edge of the low diving board and reached into the water with his probe. He telescoped the handle out and began to dig down at the drain’s grate, felt the hook slide into something that seemed…rubbery. He brought the hook up and stood gawking at what dangled from it.

Whatever it was, it had an eye.

“Go…call somebody,” he managed to tell Leon. “Go call somebody right
quick
!”

Leon started running for the pay phone at the shuttered concessions stand.

“Hey, Leon!” Jimmy called, and the other man stopped. “Tell ’em I don’t know what it is…but tell ’em I think it’s dead! And tell ’em we found it in the deep end!”

Leon ran on to make the phone call.

The electric pump suddenly kicked on again, and with a noise like a heartbeat began to return water to the lake.

It hadn’t seemed possible that Michelle could hate her job more than she did yesterday. The airline’s Chapter 11 announcement brought a freeze in her salary, reduced benefits, and the threat of scaled-back hours, along with new layers of unpleasantness from travelers already inclined to complain to the wrong people about government-imposed carry-on limits and increased security delays. Too many customers asked her if they’d lose their frequent-flier miles, as if that were the worst possible crisis—and Michelle, worried about the future of her job, smiled through the pretense of friendly skies and
Thanks for flying with us!

But today. Today was worse. Apparently the skies hadn’t been so friendly.

At issue was Flight 1137, from Saint Louis by way of Nashville. The
DELAYED
indicator flashed next to
7:55 P.M.
on the arrivals screen, and lingered long enough to nudge several waiting family members to the ticket counter at scattered intervals to request an explanation. A single monitor reported status updates for the small airport’s half-dozen active flights, and Michelle assured them this public screen was usually current. Still, she dutifully checked her computer for nonexistent updates, then shook her head a few key clicks later. Close to eight-fifty,
ARRIVING
flashed into the status column on the public screen, followed a few minutes later by
AT GATE 16.
Then not.

“How could it be blank?” The tentative worry of the young woman’s previous visits had steered into anger. She was out of breath after her third trip from baggage claim, and her stomach—probably seventh month or so—heaved with each agitated wheeze. “The plane has to be somewhere, doesn’t it?”

“Let me check again for you.”

As she waited for her computer to respond, Michelle smiled at the young boy standing beside his pregnant mother. The boy seemed distant, more puzzled about his mother’s anger than about the whereabouts of his father’s airplane.
Poor kid.
Probably just tired.

The info page for Flight 1137 flashed a new message in the status box.

“What? What’s it say?” The woman leaned closer, her stomach pressing against the front of the ticket counter.

Michelle realized her face must have registered some slight surprise, and she corrected with a more neutral expression. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing. Just that they’ll be making an announcement soon.”

“What’s that mean?”

Michelle shrugged. “It says ‘Announcement forthcoming.’ I don’t know anything more than that.”

The woman stared back at her, mouth slightly open. Michelle found it hard to return her stare and glanced instead at the child. His eyes blinked a few times, exactly in sync with the flashing message in the status box.

Michelle had quoted the information precisely as it appeared on the screen, and it was true she didn’t have further explanation. Except the simple fact that she’d never seen this kind of vague entry in a flight’s status column. That, and the chilling awareness that an airline would never flash a status code like Crashed, or Missing, or All Passengers Presumed Dead.

The woman turned, and she put her hand on her son’s right shoulder, then let him guide her away from the counter. Michelle noticed the woman’s long, straight hair, which hung almost to the middle of her back. She remembered the time she’d been pregnant herself, briefly, and her scalp had been strangely sensitive, her hair so unbearably heavy that she’d cut most of it off with a pair of scissors. But she’d lost the baby in the first trimester, and was sad about her hair, too, for a while. So far along in the pregnancy: How could this woman stand it?

Her supervisor approached from the opposite end of the ticketing stations. Wade had heavy brown sideburns and glasses so tiny that he practically had to squint through them. He looked, simultaneously, like a twenty-year-old trying to be stylish, and a fifty-year-old trying even harder. Either direction, he was an awkward boss, uneasy with his authority. Yesterday, when he stumbled and stammered through the bad news about the airline’s bankruptcy filing, people understood him only because the story had already been reported in the morning’s newspaper. Michelle guessed Wade had known sooner, by at least a few days, and hadn’t summoned the nerve to tell them.

He was even more flustered now than yesterday. “There’s going to be an announcement. Flight 1137, uh, over the loudspeaker in a few minutes. We’re gathering—you know, all the people here to meet the flight—gathering them in the courtesy office downstairs. Outside the baggage claim area, where most of them are already waiting.”

“What happened?”

“I need you to come with me. We can close out your terminal.”

True enough. Joanie and Erika could handle the few remaining departures that night, and her own shift was due to end within the half-hour. Was he asking her to stay late?

“A lot of back and forth on the phone,” Wade continued. “I’ve been told we need to keep people calm.”

He still hadn’t answered her question. “What happened?”

“Probably, uh.” He pressed his thumb on the bridge of his glasses, pushing them tight against his face. “Probably what you think.”

Courtesy office 2-C was a former smoking lounge, from the days when the airport allowed smoking in designated areas. Now it was a meeting area available for training sessions, policy announcements, sometimes even for staff birthday or holiday parties. They’d met in the same room yesterday, at one o’clock, when the morning and evening shifts overlapped, so Wade could privately announce the pending bankruptcy. Perhaps the main office gave him the same advice at that time:
Keep everybody calm.

Two-C needed a key card for entry, a benefit Wade impressed upon her as they headed downstairs. They needed to control who entered the room—only immediate family members (he didn’t quite say “next of kin”). The airline’s name was already tarnished by the bankruptcy announcement, and they needed to minimize further negative publicity. He’d already deflected calls from two different reporters. “Wouldn’t be surprised if someone showed up here, tried to get some awful story to turn things against us.”

All Michelle could think of was the intrusion on people’s privacy. For the sake of an exclusive story, would a reporter dare sneak into the group, try to catch people’s grief when it was fresh and agonizing and newsworthy? Not if she could help it.

Wade gathered his laptop computer and clipboard under one arm, then slid his magnetic card through the reader slot. The door opened with a click. A large refreshment cart was already inside the doorway, parked at a haphazard angle: two metal canisters of coffee, a tray of doughnuts, and a bowl of oranges. Next to it, dozens of in-flight snack boxes filled a bin, along with plastic bags of napkins and cups bearing the airline’s logo.

“Let’s line the tables along the outer wall,” Wade said. “We can spread food out more easily.”

The six long tables were usually pushed together in the middle of the room, forming a large conference table. The food items weren’t enough to cover all the tables; Michelle suspected her boss didn’t want their guests to stare at each other while they waited for news.

Wade’s arrangement of the chairs confirmed her suspicion. He set them up press-conference style, in rows that faced the lectern and projection screen at the front of the room. Then he opened his laptop and plugged it into the network and presentation system. Eventually computer icons flickered onto the screen, then after a few clicks a large representation of the public arrivals monitor appeared. The image was grainy but easy to read even with the overhead light on. The status column next to Flight 1137 was still blank.

She looked over Wade’s shoulder at the lectern. The laptop’s smaller screen was divided into four quadrants, like a security monitor. The upper left panel, surrounded by a yellow selection frame, indicated the projected image. Next to it was the evening’s view from the front of the airport, taxis and shuttle buses and passenger cars rolling past in a jerking motion caused by the camera’s slow refresh rate. On the bottom row, an innocuous view of a random runway, a plane safely landed and baggage being unloaded from beneath. The final quadrant contained another low-resolution image, but the refresh rate was better than the airport’s typical security feed. Emergency lights strobed red over a darkening field: ambulances and fire trucks at the perimeter, a scorched stretch of ground, a few trees uprooted, patches of brushfire and the waving flashlights of police searchers.

Even though she expected it, the final panel sickened her. Michelle thought of that young boy waiting for his father—of however many other children, spouses, parents, and friends might soon be seated in those rows facing the front, facing her, to plead for news they didn’t really want to hear.

Wade pressed a function key and the arrivals board expanded over the divided quadrants on his computer. “Remember we have to stay calm, to keep the others calm.”

Why had he chosen her, instead of Joanie or Erika with years more experience? The answer was too obvious. They were pleasant enough, those women, but Wade had chosen a younger companion for this trial. A kinder emissary of grief. Joanie and Erika at least had attractive phone voices, and could field calls to the airline.

He placed a cellphone headset over his right ear and assumed a soldierly expression. “I’m calling them in.” He gave a quick go-ahead to someone on the other end, obviously already prepared for his call. Almost immediately, a message droned through the airport loudspeaker: “Families awaiting the arrival of Flight 1137 from Saint Louis or Nashville, please report to baggage claim level, room 2-C courtesy office.” Then the message repeated twice more.

Michelle started to panic. She half wondered if Wade followed a set protocol, or if he was being allowed to improvise. Shouldn’t there be some police officers here? Airport representatives? Some kind of professional grief counselor? On-call specialists should be available to handle this kind of thing—even for a small out-of-the-way airport and their small, money-losing airline. She wasn’t trained.

“Here’s an extra copy.” Wade handed her a passenger list and a yellow highlighter. “Get ready.”

Ninety-seven passengers, according to the total at the bottom of the third page. Just a number, just a list of names. As Michelle read over the list, she wondered if she’d checked any of these people in for the westbound portion of their journey. A few names seemed familiar, but she had no faces to connect to them.

No.
Only the recent faces of the pregnant woman and her son; the tall, gray-haired man in a plaid suit; the heavyset woman with a two-liter plastic tumbler of soda from 7-Eleven. And more faces soon to arrive.

The first wave was the roughest, a large group of about thirty who formed two separate lines outside the open doorway. Michelle asked the first woman in her line for identification, then compared the driver’s-license name against the relatives on her list.

“My daughter, visiting home from college.” The woman was in her forties, thin and barely over five feet tall. With her small legs she must have walked quickly to get to the front of the line. Anxious as she was, her voice remained quiet and restrained. “I wish Lizzie hadn’t gone to school so far away. But we still get to see her a couple times a year.”

Michelle highlighted the daughter’s name and waved the woman into the conference room.

The woman paused before entering and turned her head to ask, almost as an afterthought: “Do you know what’s going on?” Again, the quiet voice, and Michelle responded in kind.

“Not really.” Michelle felt the stares of people in both lines, their ears straining to listen. No such thing as a private conversation here: Speaking to one meant speaking to all. “We’re still waiting for information.”

A murmur of frustration thrummed through the crowd. Most of them were strangers to one another, spoke only to themselves or the air. Michelle turned to the next person in her line, a man in a salmon-colored polo shirt. He held his license by one corner, extended as if he were making a credit card purchase.

“No, no.” Wade’s voice rose sharply above the random airport noise. He looked at a teenage girl and made dismissive motions with his fingertips. “Relatives only. Family members, like the announcement says. The rest of you will have to wait outside.”

For a moment, Michelle feared there would be a small riot. “I’ve waited over an hour,” the teenager said. She looked barely old enough to drive—probably on her first ever pickup trip to the airport. “My best friend is on that flight.” Several people raised exasperated arms, either in sympathy to the girl’s plight or angry about their own pending dismissal. They looked to people on either side for allies. Michelle had earlier conceded Wade’s point about privacy, didn’t want intruders to witness the coming grief. But she blushed now, aware of how this situation would look, how they’d assume her tacit approval of Wade’s ruling as she stood there with her clipboard and highlighter, a pitiless gatekeeper who measured each supplicant, denied entrance to those deemed unworthy. As if their budget airline, already stingy with in-flight drinks and snacks, couldn’t spare the extra coffee or doughnuts.

Then the crowd settled down, the collective mood flattened by the more important subtext to Wade’s statement. She could see the realization slowly dawn on their faces, their eyes glazing over, jaws dropping slowly, hands lifting in almost choreographed unison to cover mouths that needn’t say what they’re all thinking, have been trying for a long while not to think:
If they’re allowing only family members, it must be something terrible.

Michelle’s eyes blurred, shifting the two lines of people out of focus so she didn’t have to distinguish their expressions. The announcement repeated from the airport speaker: “Families awaiting the arrival of Flight 1137…” The tin voice, sterile and mechanical before, now sounded smug. It knew. It knew, and it withheld the truth deliberately.

A faint tug pulled the clipboard away from her chest. A tall man stood next to her, too close, really, but gentle as he looked over her shoulder and drew a slender finger down the list. “Robert is my…my partner,” he said. “The last names won’t match, I’m afraid.” He reached the bottom of the page without success, and Michelle absently lifted it to reveal the second sheet.