Salvage (30 page)

Jo grabbed him by the shoulder. She pointed at her nose, her mouth, and then shook her head roughly:
Don't breathe this. Don't drink this
.

She took a cautious step inside, her foot in the sock of her wetsuit squishing down into the phlegmy mess. She kneeled a few paces in through the doorway and began tearing at the sludge. She cast the clumps aside, breaking apart into smaller bits that floated between him and Jo like dust. Her fingers reached bare earth without finding anything, and she crawled a few feet to try again, digging furiously.

He knew what she was looking for, and pushed aside his disgust to crouch down beside her, where he reached into the muck himself and tore it up in big hunks that broke apart, sifting through the fingers of his gloves like handfuls of beach sand. It wasn't long before he grabbed onto something solid, and he pulled the thing up to examine it under his LED.

It was a bone, long and naked. He turned, holding it out to Jo—but she'd dug up remains herself, and pulled out a half-buried skull from the sludge, unmistakeably human. In the place he'd found the limb, he found the rotted bones of a hand hanging limp at its end. Brushing away more loose, slimy detritus, he exposed a ribcage, scraps of black fabric hanging from the bones. The ribs were shattered in places, as if something had punctured the chest. A small, leather-bound book lay beside it in the muck, its remaining pages clumped together. Owen wiped scum from the cover, several bits of paper tore and floated away in a cloud of silt. The words HOLY BIBLE did not surprise him.

Owen remembered his dream of the corpse hand that had dragged him under the water, and his whole body wracked with a sudden shudder. The walls, the shelves along them, the floor and the ceiling, all of it congealed with a sloppy mass of organisms formed by the decomposition of human remains. Under the living sludge lay the moldered skeletons of Everett Crouch and his Blessed Trinity.

He almost gagged, but managed to fight it back, struggling to keep his lips tight around the regulator, for fear of getting any loose detritus in his mouth.

Howie was right: the lake is poisoned, but not by the dump—by the dead.

Jo stopped digging and crawled to him, snatched the bones from his hand. Behind her mask, her eyes had changed, her brow knitted. It was difficult to decipher the emotion—fear, vindication, sadness, or some combination of the three, he couldn't tell.

Owen had seen enough, had never wanted to flee from somewhere as badly in his whole life. But he didn't dare go without her—for his own safety as much as Jo's. Crouch was
everywhere
down here. Molecules of him drifted in the water around them; no wonder he could manipulate it, no wonder he could use it to kill. Everett Crouch wasn't just
a part
of the water. He
was
the water.

Jo raised the bone over her head and drove it down onto the bare earth, shattering it to bits.

Owen twisted his look of shock into sympathy—but Jo whirled away from his touch, and flung herself from the shelter, kicking away, raising a cloud of filth around him.

He was alone. Alone with
them
.

Have to leave. I have to go
now.

The sludge on the cellar floor began to writhe beneath his feet—it was
living
. Shapes formed in the gelatinous soup, gnarled limbs and misshapen heads, twisted faces crying out in voiceless agony.

The dead are in deep anguish,
those beneath the waters and all that live in them... Abaddon uncovered...

Owen turned with dreamlike sluggishness, swimming for the door. The viscous sludge reached out for him, clawing at his legs, stretching down from the ceiling to snatch at his arms, his shoulders.

He squirmed out of its reach, kicking out into the stairwell, taking shallow, quick breaths of cold, dead air, hyperventilation inevitable now. Jo had slipped away into the dark. Without turning to see the horrid things at his heels, Owen pushed the door closed. The living sludge slammed against it, throwing him back, but he dug his heel in against the bottom stair and pushed with all his strength. It wasn't enough. His muscles strained under the pressure, stiffening painfully.

He threw his shoulder against the door, then reached out for the cross with his free hand and pulled it down. It struck the door with a reverberating clang like the toll of a bell, forcing the evil sludge back into the darkness and slamming the door shut.

Hastily, Owen jerked up the rusted handles, locking the shelter door, and swam up from the tomb, leaving only death in his wake.

3

Jo waited for him on the dock, the regulator hanging between her legs, face cradled in her hands, shoulders hitching as she wept.

Owen sat down beside her. After a long moment, Jo felt him there, and pressed up against him. He put an arm around her shoulder to draw her close.

"It's all death down there," she said finally, speaking into his chest. "They were
murdered
, Owen. It wasn't suicide.
Somebody locked them in there
." She wiped a forearm under her nose. "We have to let people know. We have to let them
all
know."

"They won't like it."

"
I don't care
." she told him, and the cold look in her eyes made him uneasy.

Owen turned to face the church. Waves crashed against the steeple, the cross a black silhouette against the bright sky as the sun broke free from the clouds. A gull shrieked out on the lake, flying so high it was almost invisible.

He peered into the choppy water at his feet, looking for the dark shape of the church below. Crouch's last words—
Earth, do not cover my blood. May my cry never be laid to rest
—had been somewhat prophetic. However it had happened, the church had survived the flood and so had Everett Crouch. His mortal remains had been buried, but not by earth, and his voice had never been silenced. Until recently, it had only been heard by a few, in the chuckle of the waterfall, in the groan of rusted pipes. In nightmares. In death.

Soon, the doors of that monstrous church would be blown wide open, and the whole world would hear their cries. Soon, Everett Crouch and his Blessed Trinity would be laid to rest.

4

They drove the cottage road to town, Jo sitting silently in the passenger seat, staring blankly out the window the way a trauma victim would. She'd bunched her hands into fists and jammed them between her legs, as if she were cold and struggling to keep herself warm.

As the gate to Hordyke House passed behind them, she turned to him. "The Catholic Church said atheists who are good and just will go to Heaven," she said.

Owen remembered. He used to think of himself as an atheist, a skeptic. He'd never believed in God, at least not as far back as he could remember. He supposed when he was a child he must have believed, and maybe if he'd never left Peace Falls, if the dam had never happened and the flood had never come, if he and his mother had stayed with the church and his father had remained in their lives, he'd be an entirely different man today. He might have followed in his father's footsteps. He might have become a minister—he might have been the Reverend Owen Crouch, minister of the Blessed Trinity Mission, preparing for his next sermon. Of course, it was just as likely he would have rebelled, become the Lost Son. If his father really had been insane, he and his mother might have left whether the flood had swept away their hometown or not.

"The Pope believes in the Big Bang, and evolution," Jo continued. "He said that God isn't some magician who waved a magic wand to create the Earth in seven days." She looked at him finally, her eyes misty. "Who knows what we'll find out about God next?"

Owen considered it. "Do you believe in God?"

Her dark eyes seemed to search for a motive behind the question. "Do
you
?"

Owen considered it. "I guess if I truly believed, the answer would be easy," he said, struggling for the words to express what he'd felt his whole life. "But maybe faith is supposed to be a… a constant struggle between the known and unknown, the rational and the spiritual." He turned to see if she was following along; she'd pooched out her lower lip in deliberation, but otherwise expressed no opinion. "Faith doesn't look for proof," he said, "faith exists in the
absence
of proof. In that way, belief in God is a lot like believing in love, I think." Jo scowled at this, though he couldn't tell if she disagreed or was merely considering it. "Science tells us love is chemical, right? A reaction in our brains. But we can
feel
love swell in our hearts. Losing someone we love feels like a hole in ourselves. Like a… like a vast emptiness. It's like a piece of us is missing."

"I think you're avoiding the question."

"Well, it's complicated," he said. "Okay, more to the point. My sister believed that ghosts and God couldn't exist in the same universe. You've read her journal, you know what I mean. See, the Bible does talk about spirit beings, but they're generally interpreted as angels and demons. There's only one instance of an actual haunting in the Bible, but it's not by a ghost, it's a man possessed by demons, haunting a graveyard."

"So… what? You think Crouch and the others are demons? Or angels?"

"I don't know what I believe," he said. "I'd never even considered the
possibility
of ghosts until last week."

"I wish I could say the same," she said, turning back to the trees that whipped by her window, squinting out, her face brightened by intermittent sunlight.

They drove in silence, gravel crunching under the tires. In the rear-view mirror, a big old black '70s monster with a shiny, toothy grill emerged from the cloud of dust kicked up behind them. Owen took the corner, and for a moment, it disappeared behind the trees. Then it was back, hogging the road, swerving wildly.

Maniac
, Owen thought. "If we take what the Bible says literally," he said, trying to ignore his creeping paranoia, "demons, or a single demon, has been using Crouch and his congregation as puppets, for their own nefarious purposes. That's one interpretation."

"You're using rationality to explain the irrational. Isn't believing in ghosts the same as faith, too?"

"Whether it's demons or ghosts we're dealing with, we're in trouble."

"Right."

Behind them, the elderly engine roared. The big American car lurched forward, catching up, and the driver laid on the horn. Jo twisted to look over the seat.

"Who the hell is this?" Owen asked.

"That's Jeb's car. Pete Jebson." She scowled. "What's he
doing
?"

Owen kept driving to a long, straight stretch and pulled over into the soft ditch. Jeb's behemoth tore up gravel as it ground to a halt behind them.

The old man wore a look of deep concern as he hauled himself out, visible even before he stood alongside his car. Something was wrong. Smoke or steam rose from the hood. The engine rattled angrily.

Owen and Jo got out of the car. Owen recognized Pete Jebson right away—he was the bearded old man from Lori's funeral, the man who'd told Owen he looked just like his father. He understood now the old man had meant Crouch, although having seen his father, Owen hardly thought they looked alike. The argument Jeb and his mother had must have been about him being at the funeral. She must have been worried the old man would reveal the truth to Owen, and ordered him to leave.

"Jeb?" Jo said, moving toward him. "What's wrong?"

The old man began waving his arms fervently, gesturing for her to steer clear. "You aren't safe!" he shouted. "None of us are! I never should have trusted him! Dink… oh, God, Dink Deakins is dead! Drowned in his canoe! I never should have—"

The hood shot upward with a vicious
BOOM!

Blackened debris shot out on a gust of blistering steam. Owen and Jo ducked back from the explosion; Pete Jebson wasn't so lucky. A small chunk of metal smashed through the rear window of Owen's car, while Jeb threw his hands up to his face. In a moment, blood began to pour from between his fingers.

Jo cried Jeb's name, hurrying to his side, and Owen took up behind her, eyeballing the steam still rising from the hood with caution, his mind making unconscious connections:
Steam and water, water and Crouch, Crouch and death
.

"Get away from the car!" he shouted to Jo, who threw an irritated look over her shoulder before reaching out to the old man, saying something softly to Jeb, trying to keep him calm. Jeb pushed her hands away, revealing his face. Looking at Jeb's ruined face reminded Owen of Brother Woodrow in his dream, though Jeb had suffered far worse: flaps of skin and white, blood-streaked hair hung loose from glistening muscle and bone, his right eye obliterated, the other rolling wildly in its socket. Jeb's lower lip had been completely torn off, his teeth shattered, sharp little pink and white bits left in his moaning, bloody hole of a mouth that opened and closed as if Jeb were a fish gasping for breath.

Jo stumbled back, a look of horror in her tear-rimmed eyes as she brought a hand to her widened lips. "Jeb—" she said, quietly, as if raising her voice might make his injuries somehow worse, "Jeb, we need to take you to the hospital."

The old man shook his head violently, red flaps of flesh waggling like lures on a fishing vest. "
Ay
…
away
," the old man said with his lipless mouth, and he stumbled off half-blind into the woods.

Jo turned to Owen with a distressed look, then followed after the old man. Owen gave the old car a wide berth and chased after her.

Pete Jebson slid down the gravel ditch on his ass. He got to his feet unsteadily, snagged himself in the brambles of a raspberry bush, and tore his shirt breaking free to the other side. Jo avoided the bushes, trudging over a slightly less prickly juniper, and Owen followed in her footsteps. The old man broke for the trees then, swinging his arms out before him, low spruce branches springing forward then back again as he brushed through. He bumped headfirst into a white birch as Owen and Jo caught up to him. His blood streaked its pale flesh, looking like a blazing red trail marker.