The Doom Stone (The Zone Unknown) Read online

  “Mrs. Langford will call me if you need anything,” Tillman said.

  “Thanks for the lift back.”

  Tillman searched for something else to say. “You have a good night,” he finally settled on.

  Oh, sure, Jackson thought as he turned and headed back up. In the apartment he found several more of his aunt’s sketches and manuscript notes about the local henges and earthworks. Next to them he noticed a tattered, leather-bound book with legends and elaborate engravings of the stones. He took the book into his room, got undressed, and crawled under the lumpy goosedown comforter on his bed.

  For a long time he lay awake propped up on pillows. The pale, gnarled body of the monster loped after him in his mind. Its hideous face was at the chopper window, the nauseating, glistening membrane taut over its huge skull. Above all, Jackson remembered the long, twisted fangs.

  He tried to lose himself in the old book reading about how Stonehenge was a kind of crude observatory. That it was religious, ritual, or astronomical depending upon whom one talked to. Virgins were believed to have been dragged over the ground there to guarantee the farmers a good harvest. The book told of earth-mystery researchers who believed Stonehenge to be the center of a supernatural grid used to influence everything from crop circles to spaceship landings. It told of some people’s belief that spirits pass through Stonehenge to worlds beyond— and that the stones themselves create a magnetic field that can cure bone diseases.

  Finally, Jackson put the book down and turned out the lights.

  The moon scattered shadows through the lace curtains. A loneliness flowed into him as he thought of his own room back in New York. There was no way he could let his parents know what had happened. They’d have him on the next plane out of there. There had been crawly creatures and things that go bump in the night on his other trips, but he and his aunt Sarah had always been together at the end of the day.

  The monster is probably half human, half something else, he told himself.

  He knew he mustn’t think about that or he’d never get to sleep. Rather, he would think about the strange girl with the long blond hair.

  Jackson slept until eleven the next morning. He took a shower, got dressed, and went downstairs.

  “Good morning, sleepyhead,” Mrs. Langford said as she was setting up the dining room for lunch.

  “Your aunt called.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine. She said I should let you sleep late and save a full English breakfast for you. Mixed grill, fried eggs, tea, and toast.” Mrs. Langford led him to a side buffet with electric warmers. “She didn’t know if you liked hot cocoa with double cream, but I made you some anyway.”

  “Thanks,” Jackson said, taking a plate for the food.

  “Your aunt sounded chipper. They’ve already started the antirabies shots, and they’ve got her down for X rays and other tests. She wants you to call her toward dinner.”

  The chef and two of his kitchen workers arrived while Jackson sat at a window table eating his breakfast. They smiled at him and began peeling red potatoes and dropping them into a large metal colander.

  CLANK CLANK

  Mrs. Langford took a key from her wicker desk and brought it to Jackson as he was buttering the last piece of bread from a silver toast caddy. “You know, Jackson,” she said, “my son works in Liverpool now, but a lot of his old toys are in the garage out back. You’re welcome to play with them, if you like.”

  “Toys?”

  “Well, that’s what I call them. Of course, my son used to treat them as if they were treasures.”

  Mrs. Langford took a framed photo off the piano and showed it to Jackson. A tall young man in a cap and gown was mugging for the camera. “Brian graduated from Cambridge last term, but he spent two semesters taking summer courses at U.C.L.A. His last summer he shipped back a dune buggy. All the girls in Salisbury thought it was brilliant. Do you know how to drive?”

  “Sure,” Jackson said. “My aunt taught me on the sly in Borneo. Are you saying I can borrow the buggy?”

  “Good heavens, yes. It’s a silly-looking thing— not a proper car—but you might enjoy running round the back roads and fields.”

  Jackson got up from the table, almost knocking his chair over.

  “Brian’s left all sorts of junk out there you’re welcome to use,” Mrs. Langford added, setting the frame back on the piano. “Lots of army surplus whatchamacallits he used to collect. He was always a pack rat.”

  “Thanks,” Jackson said, giving his mouth a last wipe with a napkin. “The breakfast was great.” He took the key and bolted out the side door.

  Mrs. Langford watched from the window as he ran down the driveway. “He’s a nice boy,” she told the chef.

  Jackson’s sneakers made loud, crunching sounds on the gravel as he headed across the rear parking area. There were carports with spaces for a dozen cars. Farther back was the hothouse. The steam from the indoor heated pool fogged the hothouse windows. Beyond a vegetable garden was an old garage. Jackson unlocked the door and opened it wide.

  “Yes!” Jackson cried out at the sight of the dune buggy. Its chassis was like that of a Harley Davidson motorcycle, with a handlebar throttle and tandem seats. Four “Bigfoot” tires gave it plenty of height for all terrain.

  Jackson slid between the buggy and a row of shelves cluttered with old motors and all sorts of army surplus junk. He swung up into the driver’s seat. The buggy had a magneto start system and a four-speed gear shift.

  “KEE-YIIII!” Jackson shouted, as he threw his full weight down onto the start pedal. The motor coughed, then died, and he opened the choke. On the third kick the engine roared to life, and he straddled the seat as if he were riding a motorcycle. He threw it into first, and the buggy shot too fast out of the garage. He managed to turn before it could fly into the vegetable garden. Soon he was hurtling out into the fields behind the guest house and heading fast up a steep grassy knoll.

  At the top of the hill he could see for miles around. Straight ahead was a maze of fields and fences surrounding the ruins of an old castle. The massive tower and spire of Salisbury Cathedral rose high over the town to the south. He had thought about sightseeing around the town, but now that he had wheels, he looked north. There he could see the homes and fences giving way to the open Salisbury Plain. He knew there’d be dirt paths and stretches where he could open the buggy up. Besides, he told himself, he would see Stonehenge again.

  And the girl.

  6

  ALMA

  Alma McPhee woke up from a dream about the American boy. She’d hardly been able to sleep all night with the loud baying of the hounds and the noisy helicopters coming and going. She washed her hair and put on her favorite ripped jeans and a funky knit sweater she’d bought at a flea market in Salisbury. She told herself not to weave any elaborate fantasies about the good-looking boy with the rowdy brown hair and dark-green eyes. When it came to making friends, Alma knew even the boys at school didn’t hang around very long after they learned that her father was a gravedigger.

  She looked out the window. Her father was chatting with a lieutenant while bands of soldiers still combed the grounds.

  “Dad, I made you a cucumber-and-tuna-fish sandwich for lunch,” she called to him. “It’s in the fridge.”

  “Thanks, darlin’,” Mr. McPhee called back.

  Any of the boys who hadn’t been turned off by Alma’s father being a gravedigger would stop calling when they found out that a date with her meant picking her up at the caretaker’s apartment in the crematorium. The flat was ordinary enough, but even her mother had long ago fled to Brighton to live with her sister.

  “I don’t think gravediggin’s all that bad,” her father had told her mother. “It’s honest wages.”

  “I draws the line at livin’ in a crematorium, I do,” Mrs. McPhee had let them both know before she left. “And I don’t think it’s me that’s the oddball round here.”

  Alma knew her mother had s
topped loving her father a long time before they had moved from Salisbury and out to the cemetery.

  “He’s got a good heart,” Alma would defend her dad, trying to remind her mom about his good points.

  “He’s as much fun as a funeral” was the last thing her mother told Alma before boarding the bus for Brighton. Alma would have gone with her, but she knew her dad needed her more. Besides, Alma had no intention of leaving for anywhere until she graduated from her school in Salisbury.

  Jackson ran the dune buggy along the back dirt roads as far as Amesbury, then had to skirt the Ministry of Defense and private land fences that cut the landscape into vast wedges of training grounds and farms. There was a crisscrossing of dirt paths and easements that allowed him to keep moving north. He knew if he followed the Avon, he’d reach the graveyard.

  Edging a tract of military land, he got the dune buggy up to its top speed near thirty miles an hour. The oversized tires kicked up a dust trail as he saw the main cluster of pines marking the cemetery. A guard in a landrover peeled away from the army encampment and headed out to intercept him.

  “Hold it!” the guard ordered. He blew a shrill silver whistle, and Jackson brought the buggy to a halt.

  “This is a restricted area,” the guard said, pulling the landrover up next to him. “Turn back.”

  Alma and the wolfhound were on the steps of the crematorium. She put her hand up to her forehead to shield her eyes from the sun as she looked out onto the plain. A smile broke across her face at the sight of Jackson.

  “She’s a friend of mine,” Jackson told the guard, pointing. Soldiers were carrying boxes out of the crematorium and loading them into a truck. “What’s going on?”

  “The family’s moving,” the guard said.

  Jackson played dumb. “Why?”

  “A gas leak in the area,” the soldier lied. Alma started running toward them with Coffin at her side. “All right,” he told Jackson, checking the thick treads on the Bigfoot tires. “But don’t come in any closer with this vehicle.”

  “Okay,” Jackson agreed.

  The soldier turned the landrover and headed back as Alma reached the buggy.

  “Hi,” she said, out of breath. “What are you doing back here?”

  Jackson smiled as he climbed down from the driver’s seat. “Returning to the scene of the crime. Did they catch Skull Face yet?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, tossing her hair so it all fell to one side of her face. “It’s still pretty spooky round here.” Coffin began wagging his big tail and sniffing at Jackson’s legs. “How’s your aunt doing?”

  “Fine,” Jackson said. Coffin rolled over onto his back and starting pawing at the air with his legs. Jackson stooped to scratch the dog’s chest.

  She reached out and touched the handlebars of the dune buggy. “Where’d you get this?”

  “Borrowed it,” Jackson said. “The son of the lady where I’m staying was a California freak. He brought back his own dune buggy.”

  “I remember seeing it running round Salisbury.” Alma slipped a thin flash camera out of her jeans pocket. “Can I take a picture of you with it?”

  “Sure.”

  She checked over her shoulder to make certain none of the soldiers were watching, then quickly clicked the shutter.

  “I used to be into photography,” Jackson said. “I was president of the junior high school photography club.”

  Alma said, “The only club at school I joined was chorus, but I’ve been taking pictures. Shots of the body bags. Bloodhounds swarming over the cemetery. I don’t want the army pulling some coverup next week and saying what happened to us last night didn’t happen.”

  “Right,” Jackson said. “When anything spooky happens back home, they usually say it’s a weather balloon.” He glanced back toward the crematorium. Soldiers were carrying out armfuls of clothes on hangers.

  “They think the monster might come back,” Alma said, “so they’re putting us up in the close at Salisbury Cathedral. My father used to be a gardener there.”

  “What’s the close?”

  “That’s what they call the walled area around a cathedral. In Salisbury it’s mainly the bishop’s palace, a lot of museums, and a cloister. There’s a few houses where they’ve been boarding glaziers and masons. There’s been a lot of construction going on.”

  “At least you’ll be safe.”

  “I guess so.” Alma put her camera back into her pocket. “The search troops are looking north. I told the officers about hearing its tick tick on other nights. I think it’s smart and doubles back in the river to cover its tracks.”

  Coffin slapped his two front paws up onto Jackson’s shoulders and started licking his neck.

  “Down, Coffin! Down!” Alma scolded.

  Jackson let out a mock growl in Coffin’s face. The dog cocked his head left, then right.

  “Only kidding, fellah,” Jackson said. Coffin began sniffing at his chin.

  “I want to check out Stonehenge,” Jackson told Alma. “Maybe that’s where Skull Face’s lair is. If the army captures it, they can test that weird slime it has for blood. Maybe save my aunt from having to get the whole series of rabies shots. You feel like taking a ride?”

  Jackson ducked out from under the dog’s paws, grabbed a stick off the ground, and threw it. Coffin took off after it.

  For a moment Alma’s thoughts shot back to the sight of the beast coming out of the fog. She didn’t want Jackson to know she wasn’t a very brave person.

  “Okay,” she said. “I have to tell my dad I’ll meet him in Salisbury.”

  “Great.”

  She started to jog back toward the crematorium.

  “Hey,” Jackson called after her, “maybe you’d better bring your camera along just in case.”

  She shouted back, “And Coffin!”

  Dr. Cawley knew that the time it took for rabies victims to go mad and die depended upon where on their body they’d been bitten. The bite she’d received at the base of her skull was the most dangerous kind, because the virus would have little distance to go to reach her brain.

  “There’s no question the bite contained some of the creature’s saliva,” Dr. Halperin told her at Kings Hospital. “Whether or not the creature’s infected we don’t know—but we’ll begin the series of antirabies shots immediately. I’ve made the arrangements for you to have private accommodations.”

  Dr. Cawley had trouble sleeping that night in her sterile room on the ninth floor of the hospital. A second bed, empty, sat like a draped coffin next to the window. The monster’s existence was still too staggering for her to make sense of.

  She had long ago learned that she needed to label a phenomenon in order to be able to think about it effectively. “Ramid,” she said aloud to hear the sound of the label she would give to this creature. Ramid was the word for “root” in the Afar language. For several hours she lay awake, disturbed by the notoriety the event could bring her. Finally, her nerves completely shot, her eyes closed and she managed to fall asleep.

  The next morning a young Pakistani attendant came to take Dr. Cawley down for her CAT scan. “I’m Muhammad,” the attendant introduced himself.

  It was in the elevator as Muhammad took her down to the radiology department that Dr. Cawley felt a pronounced difference in her thinking process. She was replaying the checklist in her head: keep after Rath for the results of the bio lab tests on the beast’s fluid samples; Ramid had a short muzzle, clearly qualified as a vertebrate, mammal, and primate; Ramid was tailless, with an opposable thumb and shoulder blades at the back; Ramid, from the clay jaw mock-up, would more than likely have a Y shape on the surface of its molars—further defining it as a hominid; Ramid was probably a single mutant arisen full-blown because of genes run amok, or else human evolution itself had long ago taken a second, most terrible and frightening route….

  It was at that moment she felt her mind stumble, as though someone had hit the Delete key of her brain.

 
Muhammad noticed Dr. Cawley’s mouth twist into a grimace. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “No,” Dr. Cawley said. She preferred to believe the strangeness that was coming over her brain, the sensation that her mind was being wrapped in cellophane, was due to nerves and a lack of sleep.

  Outside the X-ray lab a radiologist took over from Muhammad and gave Dr. Cawley two glasses of a chalky, thick liquid to drink.

  “It’s got a radioactive tracer that will read on the CAT scan,” the radiologist explained.

  “It’s bitter. Can’t you put a shot of vodka in it?”

  Dr. Cawley asked with a wink.

  The radiologist smiled, gave Dr. Cawley’s hand a reassuring squeeze. Twenty minutes later he wheeled her into the main room of the radiology lab.

  Dr. Cawley gazed at the massive gray machine towering above her and smelled the sharp, heavy, sickening odor of ozone. “It looks like a cyclotron.”

  “Yes, it’s quite a monster,” the radiologist agreed as he transferred her gently from the gurney onto a mechanized stainless steel sled.

  “It’s cold,” Dr. Cawley complained, trying to keep her hospital gown tucked completely under her.

  “We have to strap you in so the imaging system will read accurately,” the radiologist explained. “We’ll want as little motion as possible while you’re inside the machine.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “About twenty minutes.”

  Dr. Cawley tried to take her mind off the fact that she was going to be inserted into the center of a gigantic machine. She had told the army to look north, that Ramid would hide in forests and quarries by day. Now that she’d seen the creature, she realized from its deep-set red eyes and translucent skin that it had most likely evolved without pigment in a place far below the ground. The ancient Savernake quarries weren’t deep or dark enough. There had to be another black, hidden place, a world of caves and caverns somewhere far beneath Salisbury Plain itself. It would be a labyrinth where life could evolve in endless night and without interruption.