Fast, fast, scratching at the face of the thing that was tearing at Marcia and her parcels, grabbing with her hands and raising a foot to dig at the belly. And when the thing reeled back and fled, she turned, pounced, clawed at the second attacker. The next second it too was running, for Shannon had sprung forward, swinging the lamp. The glass chimney came loose and fell with a ringing smash of glass, and for an instant the flame, streaming long and yellow like a ribbon, showed all the women what only Wilma had seen in the darkness: feral faces, hairless heads, bulging white eyes filled with sullen hunger and rage.
Then they were gone. Wilma stood up, panting, blood under her nails and a weird singing exultation in her heart, as if she’d tasted forbidden fruit and found the taste divine.
“Oh, my God,” Shannon was gasping, her short dark curls tangled in her eyes, “oh my God, what are they? Did you see them? Did you see their faces?”
Marcia, sobbing in a welter of dropped bread rolls and tuna cans and torn bags, was beyond speech.
“Tessa!” Shannon cried. “I have to get back to my mother’s; I left Tessa there with her cousins.”
“Tell them to light lamps there,” Wilma said quietly. “It ran from the fire. But get Beth Swann and Clare Greene and everybody else who isn’t at the mine already, get them together in one house, with all the light you can manage.”
“But what are they?” demanded the young woman, hesitating, torn between her husband’s danger and her child’s. “Where did they come from?”
“I don’t know what they are,” Wilma said, thinking of the strangeness of the night air and of the terrible thing that had attacked her on the porch of Arleta’s house. “But by the smell of them, they came out of the mine.”
Shannon and Marcia left the rolls and tuna on the sidewalk where they had fallen and headed back to the neat little Front Street house where Shannon’s mother, Ardiss Hillocher, lived. Striding along Front Street toward the grimy collection of brown-brick buildings and abandoned filling stations that comprised old downtown, Wilma looked back to see the two women hastening up Appalachia Road to the trailer court, the gold spot of Shannon’s lamp outlining them in light.
Before the women had gone a dozen yards, Wilma saw dark bent shapes creep from the Souza yard and start picking up the bread and the cans. She halted, standing alone on the sidewalk. She felt curiously little fear; she could smell and hear clearly and knew there wasn’t any danger near her. She heard them grunt to one another, gutteral noises almost like words. Then a scrunching, ripping crinkle of metal and the smell of tuna (divine greasy wonderment exploding in her hindbrain!). She’d seen the cans and knew they weren’t the little single-serving tear-opens but the big six- and nine-ounce size that required a can opener.
She walked on. She heard, smelled, sensed others of the creatures moving through the night, heard their grunts and recognized the characteristic musky scent of their bodies and the fact that some of them smelled of coal and others didn’t. They smelled of engine oil, of dust, of industrial soaps. Of beer and cigarettes.
Enough people were walking along Front Street through old downtown that the creatures didn’t attack there, though Wilma was aware of them scuffling through the grimy alleys, the empty lots beyond the range of the torches. She felt, as always, a stab of profound sadness as she passed the store where she’d bought her school clothes, its window painted dark green and transformed into one of the town’s sleazier bars; as she saw the drugstore across the street where she’d lovingly combed through the rack of paperback books every Saturday, closed down since the end of the coal boom in the seventies. The restaurant where she and Hank used to go for ice cream after school on Fridays was boarded up; the record shop, where she and Hazel had picked through stock for such rarities as Glenn Yarborough and Rod McKuen albums, had “Antiques” painted on the window but actually only sold junk.
So much gone, she thought. So many places and people, vanished in that sparkling stream of time.
And Arleta? she thought. What had happened to her friend, what had happened to poor Bob, when electricity had failed, when Power had seized the white house among the honeysuckles?
There were about three hundred and fifty people gathered in front of the sagging cyclone fence that ringed the old offices, the rusted ruin of tippling shed and machine housings. The buildings were rankly overgrown, there’d been talk for years of rehabbing them for a “regional crafts market and antique mall,” but nobody’d come up with the funds to do so. The bobbing sea of candle and lamp flames passed across brick and concrete defaced by the scribbles of years of kids. The searchers, who’d straggled a little as they’d come out of the sorry squalor of old downtown, now bunched tighter at the sight of those plywood-covered windows, those chain-locked doors. Even after all those years the place stank of coal, the black dust dyeing the earth underfoot. Wilma well remembered the filthiness of everything west of Front Street in her childhood, before the union and the federal government had forced Applby to institute dust control.
She remembered, too, her mother telling her not to go near the miners’ children because they were “dirty.” Remembered Sue Hillocher telling her in a whisper, “My daddy’s got black lung, and they say he’s gonna die.”
And he did die, the following year.
Norm Mullein was still with them, presumably to protect the weather-worn sawbucks and rusted machinery from further vandalism.
Candace Leary was there too, bless her efficient soul, and she and Hazel were already hand-copying portions of Candace’s big map by torchlight.
“How we gonna go down there if we ain’t got flashlights?” asked Katy Grimes. “You can’t take no open fire into the mine.”
“Same way the old-time miners did,” said Hazel. “One person out front with a canary in a cage, to check for gas. There shouldn’t be dust up at this end; it hasn’t been worked since ’77.”
“But how’ll we find our way through to where they are?” asked someone else. “Wasn’t it all caved in?”
“Most of it was,” volunteered old Mr. Swann, who should have been home in bed, thought Wilma, recalling his queer fit on Arleta’s doorstep that morning. “But there’s shafts and crosscuts left. I know, ’cause I helped retreat out of those sections. We can probably get through. Got to keep just one candle or so at a time, though, specially once we get down deep.”
“Will they still be alive?”
“We’re talking about. .” Candy looked at her watch, then looked around her for help, since like nearly every other watch in the town it said 9:17 if it said anything at all. Every digital had simply gone blank.
“About twelve hours,” said Theo Morrison, one of the two hikers who’d come into the town at around noon with word of fire toward Lynchburg. He snapped closed the silver pocket-watch he carried and put a worried arm around his wife.
“There’s respirators down there on the walls,” added Candace. “And we got more up here, lots more.” She nodded toward the crates beside her.
“What do we do if we meet more of those grunty things?” asked Ed Brackett, whose face bore the bruises and cuts of a fight. “They all but killed my boy Steve.”
The boy, one of Wilma’s students, looked up at mention of his name, from where someone was bandaging a horrible gash on his arm.
“It may not be enough to keep guard on the town,” added Carl Souza. He hefted his rifle. “We don’t know how many of ’em there are, or where they are, except they can see in the dark and they’re strong as the devil. What if there’s an army of ’em?”