But not in an opening big enough for you to fit through.
It didn’t matter. Even twenty feet away from the burning basement and house was better than nothing.
No it isn’t. The fucking tunnel is already filling with smoke.There was no way that Dale could just hunker down here and let the skinheads burn the house down, hoping that they would not wait around to comb the ruins. The fire—he could feel its heat against his back as he shuffled along on his knees—was sucking the air right out of this tunnel. He’d be dead from asphyxiation long before he died of burns. This tunnel had to go somewhere or he was finished.
The flickering lighter showed that the wall he’d seen the first time he had peered down the tunnel was not the end; the shaft angled six or eight feet to the northwest, then continued on an indefinite distance straight ahead to the west. But the old passage had caved in much more here away from the foundation of the house. The roof of the passage dropped from four feet in height to a ragged three to a hole not much more than fifteen inches high. Dale did not hesitate, but wriggled onto his back, held the ThinkPad tight to his chest, extended the lighter back and over his head, and kicked forward through the narrow slit, his sneakers sliding in the mud. Everything smelled of sewage, and for a second he was sure that just the flame of his lighter was going to ignite methane gas and set off an explosion that would lift the burning house right off its foundations and surprise the hell out of the skinheads.
It did not explode, but rats scurried over Dale’s groin, chest, and face, evidently fleeing the fire in the basement. He ignored them and kept kicking and writhing, moving west an inch at a time.
The tunnel opened out again to something like the original passage, and Dale flopped back on his knees and kept pressing ahead. The lighter illuminated rotted boards in the mud and stone overhead, and Dale realized that this was indeed a tunnel, a sort of crude mine, and that Duane’s bootlegger tale was probably correct.
Another two or three minutes of scrabbling and the tunnel ended in a rock and mud wall. No doglegs or side passages here. Dale was panting, swinging the flickering lighter in an arc behind him. Despite the cold hair striking Dale’s lacerated scalp, smoke was billowing into the tunnel behind him, curling toward him.
Cold air on my scalp.Dale lifted the lighter and looked up. A narrower shaft, no less than three feet wide, ran straight up. There seemed to be three very faint stripes of light perhaps eight feet above Dale.
There was no way for him to get up there. No ladder, no rungs, no footholds—just mud and rock and darkness.
Dale had not lived in the mountain West for almost twenty years for nothing. Flicking the lighter off and pocketing it, he removed the hammer from his belt, flipped it around to present the claw side, slammed it into the hard clay as high as he could reach, wedged his knee against the far wall, and began to climb. It would have been infinitely easier if he’d had both hands to use, but he continued cradling the computer to his chest while using his injured arm and hand to pound in the claw, lift himself with upper-body strength while bracing himself with one extended knee, then repeat the process.
He banged his head against something solid. Using what seemed the last of his strength to hold himself in the narrow chimney, he shifted the hammer to his left hand and felt above him. Boards. Very solid boards. It was as if he had reached up and found the roof of his coffin.
No.
Pressing against both walls of the shaft with his knee and back, he grabbed the hammer again and began pounding and slashing madly at the solid ceiling, not caring how much noise he was making. Let the skinheads find him. Anything was better than being buried in this stinking shaft as it filled with thicker and thicker smoke.
The hammer was not working. He dropped it into darkness and took the risk of shifting his weight, putting his right sneaker sole on the slippery wall behind him and extending his right arm across the gap to brace himself while he wedged up as high as he possibly could, almost horizontal to what must be wooden floorboards above him, his back and shoulder against the wood. In a final wild surge of adrenaline, Dale flexed in both directions, feeling lacerated muscles in his right arm tear, not caring, almost dropping the ThinkPad but clutching it in time, pressing upward in the darkness until his neck muscles audibly popped and the veins stood out on his forehead.
The rotted boards overhead splintered, gave, splintered again. With his balance failing, Dale made a fist and punched his way up through the rotten wood, punched again, then reached up and wedged his elbow over the edge just before he fell. He widened the hole, using his laptop as a battering ram, and pulled his head and shoulders up through the splintered opening.
He was in the chicken coop. Dale could see gaps in the east wall and around the door illuminated by brilliant red and yellow, flames from the burning house a hundred feet away. He slid the laptop across the rough floor, pulled himself out of the hole, and set his eye to the crack between the door and its hinge.
The Jolly Corner was fully engulfed in flame. Parts of the roof had already caved in, and even as he watched, flames exploded out both the first-floor kitchen window and the corner second-floor window. Silhouettes moved in front of the flames, cavorting, carrying weapons. The five skinheads ran back and forth, high-fiving one another and leaping into the air. They seemed to have no concern that the Elm Haven fire department would show up, and this late on New Year’s Eve, this early on New Year’s morning, they were almost certainly correct in their confidence. Dale could see the gleaming skull of the chief Nazi skinhead, Lester Bonheur, as he directed two of the others to get back around the front of the burning building, obviously hoping that the Jewboy nigger-loving professor would run, burning, from the building so that they could shoot him.
But the skinheads had eyes only for their conflagration. Dale stayed on his belly, trying to slow his panting and pounding heart. All he had to do was hide here until the bastards left or until the flames died enough for him to slip out and make his way across the snowy fields to the Johnson farm to call for help. He wasn’t going to freeze to death yet. The heat from the burning building was strong here even a hundred feet away. The skinheads could not wait all night with impunity—the farmhouse would be collapsing in fifteen or twenty minutes anyway, convincing them that Dale was dead—and there should be no reason for them to search the chicken coop or other outbuildings.
All Dale had to do was stay put and wait.
“Don’t bet on it, Stewart, you cowardly fuck.” The voice was infinitely cold and totally dead, and it came from directly behind him.
TWENTY-EIGHT
C.J. Congden was sitting against the back wall of the chicken coop not ten feet from Dale. He did not look good. Even in the flickering red light filtering through the chinks in the east wall, the skin of Congden’s face glowed mold-white and green. His eyes were sunken and opaque with white, as if covered with fly eggs. The ex-sheriff was not wearing a hat tonight, and as Congden turned his head slightly, Dale could see the exit hole the suicide.45 slug had left in the back of his skull and the fragment of bloody hair and scalp hanging over that hole as if in an obscene attempt at concealment.
Congden grinned, showing a black gap where the recoil of the pistol he had fired into his soft palate had knocked out his front teeth. That pistol was still in his hand, and now the thing aimed the weapon at Dale, its white fingers looking like bloated worms on the trigger guard and pearl handle. Congden’s mouth did not move when the voice spoke, and the sound seemed to come from the thing’s bloated belly. “Time to go out and join the party, Stewart.”