was still thirsty and my head ached. Most of all, I was scared. I slipped an arm around Billy and looked from Cornell to Amanda. “What’s up?”
Amanda said, “Mr. Cornell is worried about that Mrs. Carmody. So am I.”
“Billy why don’t you take a walk over here with me?” Hattie asked.
“I don’t want to,” Billy said.
“Go on, Big Bill,” I told him, and he went—reluctantly.
“Now what about Mrs. Carmody?” I asked.
“She’s stirrin things up,” Cornell said. He looked at me with an old man’s grimness. “I think we got to put a stop to it. Just about any way we can.”
Amanda said, “There are almost a dozen people with her now. It’s like some crazy kind of a church service.”
I remembered talking with a writer friend who lived in Otisfield and supported his wife and two kids by raising chickens and turning out one paperback original a year—spy stories. We had gotten talking about the bulge in popularity of books concerning themselves with the supernatural. Gault pointed out that in the forties Weird Tales had only been able to pay a pittance, and that in the fifties it went broke. When the machines fail, he had said (while his wife candled eggs and roosters crowed querulously outside), when the technologies fail, when the conventional religious systems fail, people have got to have something. Even a zombie lurching through the night can seem pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layer dissolving under the combined assault of a million fluorocarbon spray cans of deodorant.
We had been trapped here for twenty-six hours and we hadn’t been able to do diddlyshit. Our one expedition outside had resulted in fifty-seven percent losses. It wasn’t so surprising that Mrs. Carmody had turned into a growth stock, maybe.
“Has she really got a dozen people?” I asked.
“Well, only eight,” Cornell said. “But she never shuts up! It’s like those ten-hour speeches Castro used to make. It’s a goddam filibuster.”
Eight people. Not that many, not even enough to fill up a jury box. But I understood the worry on their faces. It was enough to make them the single largest political force in the market, especially now that Dan and Mike were gone. The thought that the biggest single group in our closed system was listening to her rant on about the pits of hell and the seven vials being opened made me feel pretty damn claustrophobic.
“She’s started talking about human sacrifice again,” Amanda said. “Bud Brown came over and told her to stop talking that drivel in his store. And two of the men that are with her—one of them was that man Myron LaFleur—told him he was the one who better shut up because it was still a free country. He wouldn’t shut up and there was a ... well, a shoving match, I guess you’d say.”
“Brown got a bloody nose,” Cornell said. “They mean business. ”
I said, “Surely not to the point of actually killing someone.”
Cornell said softly, “I don’t know how far they’ll go if that mist doesn’t let up. But I don’t want to find out. I intend to get out of here.”
“Easier said than done.” But something had begun to tick over in my mind. Scent. That was the key. We had been left pretty much alone in the market. The bugs might have been attracted to the light, as more ordinary bugs were. The birds had simply followed their food supply. But the bigger things had left us alone unless we unbuttoned for some reason. The slaughter in the Bridgton Pharmacy had occurred because the doors had been left chocked open—I was sure of that. The thing or things that had gotten Norton and his party had sounded as big as a house, but it or they hadn’t come near the market. And that meant that maybe ...
Suddenly I wanted to talk to Ollie Weeks. I needed to talk to him.
“I intend to get out or die trying,” Cornell said. “I got no plans to spend the rest of the summer in here.”
“There have been four suicides,” Amanda said suddenly.
“What?” The first thing to cross my mind, in a semiguilty flash, was that the bodies of the soldiers had been discovered.
“Pills,” Cornell said shortly. “Me and two or three other guys carried the bodies out back.”
I had to stifle a shrill laugh. We had a regular morgue going back there.
“It’s thinning out,” Cornell said. “I want to get gone.”