07 The Return_ Midnight - L. J. Smith

18
After breakfast Matt went online to find two stores, neither in Fell’s Church, that had the amount of
clay Mrs. Flowers said she’d need and that said they’d deliver. But after that there was the matter of
driving away from the boardinghouse and by the last lonely remains of where the Old Wood had been.
He drove by the little thicket where Shinichi often came like a demonic Pied Piper with the possessed
children shuffling behind him—the place where Sheriff Mossberg had gone after them and hadn’t
come out. Where, later, protected by magical wards on Post-it Notes, he and Tyrone Alpert had pulled
out a bare, chewed femur.
Today, he figured the only way to get past the thicket was to work his wheezing junk car
up by stages, and it was actually going over sixty when he flew by the thicket, even managing to hit
the turn perfectly. No trees fell on him, no swarms of foot-long bugs.
He whispered “Whoa,” in relief and headed for home. He dreaded that—but simply
driving through Fell’s Church was so horrible it glued his tongue to the top of his mouth. It looked—
this pretty, innocent little town where he had grown up—as if it were one of those neighborhoods you
saw on TV or on the Internet that had been bombed, or something. And whether it was bombs or
disasterous fires, one house in four was simply rubble. A few were half-rubble, with police tape
enclosing them, which meant that whatever had happened had happened early enough for the police to
care—or dare. Around the burned-out bits the vegetation flourished strangely: a decorative bush from
one house grown so as to be halfway across a neighbor’s grass. Vines dipping from one tree to
another, to another, as if this were some ancient jungle.
His home was right in the middle of a long block of houses full of kids—and in summer,
when grandchildren inevitably came to visit, there were even more kids. Matt just hoped that that part
of summer vacation was done…but would Shinichi and Misao let the youngsters go home? Matt had
no idea. And, if they went home, would they keep spreading the disease in their own hometowns?
Where did it stop?
Driving down his block, though, Matt saw nothing hideous. There were kids playing out
on the front lawns, or the sidewalks, crouching over marbles, hanging out in the trees. There was no
single overt thing that he could put his finger on that was weird.
He was still uneasy. But he’d reached his house now, the one with a grand old oak tree
shading the porch, so he had to get out. He coasted to a stop just under the tree and parked by the
sidewalk. He grabbed a large laundry bag from the backseat. He’d been accumulating dirty clothes
for a couple of weeks at the boardinghouse and it hadn’t seemed fair to ask Mrs. Flowers to wash
them.