She was a very old woman and she panted to keep up even his slow pace. She was ancient even to his old eyes, even in his world where now everyone was old. “I would believe you,” she said.
“There was something in the ooze. Call it a monster, a demon, if you want. I saw it in the light of a match, and I can remember it as if it were yesterday. It took her.”
“Perhaps,” she said.
“You don’t believe me.”
“I said I would. This sun is hot today, even at twilight.”
“It will be gone soon. I hate to hurry you, old woman, but I must reach the stream before dark.”
“The last field is in sight.”
Yes, it was in sight. But how would he ever fit through that small opening, how would he face the thing, even if by some miracle it still waited there in the ooze? Fifty years was a long long time.
“Wait here,” he said as they reached the little stream at last. It hadn’t changed much, not really.
“You won’t find it.” He lowered his aged body into the bed of the stream, feeling once again the familiar forgotten ooze closing over his shoes.
“No one has to know,” she called after him. “Even if there was something, that was fifty years ago.”
But he went on, to the place where the water vanished into the rock. He held his breath and groped for the little flashlight in his pocket. Then he ducked his head and followed the water into the black.
It was steamy here, steamy and hot with the sweat of the earth. He flipped on the flashlight with trembling hands and followed its narrow beam with his eyes. The place was almost like a room in the side of the hill, a room perhaps seven feet high, with a floor of mud and ooze that seemed almost to bubble as he watched.
“Come on,” he said softly, almost to himself. “I know you’re there. You’ve got to be there.”
And then he saw it, rising slowly from the ooze. A shapeless thing without a face, a thing that moved so slowly it might have been dead. An old, very old thing. For a long time he watched it, unable to move, unable to cry out. And even as he watched, the thing settled back softly into the ooze, as if even this small exertion had tired it.
“Rest,” he said, very quietly. “We are all so old now.”
And then he made his way back out of the cave, along the stream, and finally pulled himself from the clinging ooze. The ancient woman was still waiting on the bank, with fireflies playing about her in the dusk.
“Did you find anything?” she asked him.
“Nothing,” he answered.
“Fifty years is a long time. You shouldn’t have come back.”
He sighed and fell into step beside her. “It was something I had to do.”
“Come up to my house, if you want. I can make you a bit of tea.”
His breath was coming better now, and the distance back to the farmhouse seemed shorter than he’d remembered. “I think I’d like that,” he said.
Days of Rage
by Doug Allyn
In this nostalgic tale, some of Doug Allyn’s most popular series characters — Dan Shea, his right-hand man Puck, and welder Maph Rochon — find their north-country toughness tested when they’re called in to renovate a site with a history of political violence. It’s been some time since EQMM last saw an entry in this Readers Award winning series. Mr. Allyn has been busy with a series of thriller novels he’s writing for his French publisher (a series we hope will soon see print in the U.S.).
“My mama always said I’d end up in the slammer,” Puck grumbled, eyeing the rusting row of vacant cells. The dimly lit basement was divided into a dozen barred cages. Gunmetal gray paint flaking off the concrete walls gave it a scrofulous look, ugly as a leper colony. Rank, dank, and abandoned.
“Visualize the possibilities, Mr. Paquette,” Sara Jacoby said briskly. “Ignore the cells. They’ll be gone, all but one. Try to picture this room filled with smart shops and shoppers, a bustling commercial enterprise with enormous potential. And exceptional security.”
“Barred windows make for great security,” Dan Shea conceded, “but to be honest, I’m not sure I see any potential.”
The three of them were a sharp contrast. Dolph Paquette and Dan Shea, strictly blue-collar working men. Hard-eyed roughnecks in faded jeans, baseball caps, and steel-toed boots. Shea wore a dun corduroy sport coat with elbow patches over a green flannel shirt. No tie. Puck was dressed for manual labor in a hard hat and Carhartt canvas vest. Faces ruddy and weathered from the wind, Paquette and Shea could have posed for before-and-after snapshots, taken forty years apart.
Sara Jacoby, Port Martin’s city manager, was their diametric opposite, young, bright, and formidably fashionable. She wore her dark hair feathered in a short neo-pixie that accented her pert, attractive features. Dressed for success in a plum pinstripe Donna Karan suit, even her walking shoes and briefcase were color-coordinated.
“If you want to see potential, gentlemen,” she said, “follow me, please.” Stepping into an ancient freight elevator, she pulled down the wooden safety gate, then switched it on, filling the basement cellblock with an electro-mechanical din that sounded like a refrigerator falling down a flight of stairs. Puck and Shea exchanged a doubtful glance as the cage rattled upward, but neither man said anything. Couldn’t be heard anyway.
The ride up was jerky and unstable, but well worth the journey. The fourth- floor safety door opened out onto the building’s roof. Flat, coated with tar and gravel, and edged by an artfully crafted, crenellated brick barrier, it offered an absolutely stunning view.
To the northeast, the gray-green waters of Lake Huron, whitecaps riffling in the September breeze, rolling unbroken to the horizon and beyond, a hundred miles to the Canadian shore. Below them, spread out like a picnic blanket, was scenic Port Martin, Michigan, dreaming in the golden September sunlight. A resort town of lakefront cottages and summer homes, a getaway for rich and prominent families of Grand Rapids, Detroit, and Chicago.
“In real estate, location is everything, guys,” Jacoby said, “and this structure is a solid-gold site. It was built in eighteen eighty-seven and served as a combination city hall and police department well into the nineteen seventies, when it was replaced by the new civic center. It’s been standing empty since then.
“The city council has okayed my plan to transform this decrepit eyesore into a prime commercial location and tourist attraction. I envision this level as a rooftop restaurant, enclosed entirely in glass, with a three hundred and sixty degree view of the lake and the town. The lower floors will be subdivided and brought up to code, then leased as office space, shops, and boutiques.”
“What makes you think anybody will want to rent space in a jail?” Shea asked doubtfully.
“Actually, our waiting list is rapidly filling up, Mr. Shea. It’s the age of the Internet. Entrepreneurs can literally locate anywhere now, but they love funky milieus. Buildings with soul. Timberlands Mall outside of Traverse City spent a small fortune tracking down old lumber-camp relics: peaveys, bucksaws, and such. Here, the building itself has all the ambience one could ask for and the address is a perfect fit: Nineteen Sixty-Nine Main Street. Jailhouse Rock. Cellblock chic. This isn’t just a small-town lockup, it’s the Port Martin Jail.”
Shea looked at her blankly.
“The Christmas breakout, nineteen sixty-nine?” Jacoby prompted. “Woodstock? First man on the moon? Days of Rage?”
“ ’Sixty-nine was a bit before my time,” Shea said.
“And before mine too, obviously,” Sara said, annoyed, “but my profs at Michigan State would practically swoon if you mentioned flower power or Woodstock.”