tomeubanks.com

 THE PLUNGE 
 a novel By Tom Eubanks

The Plunge is my new novel.  I've just completed editing it.  Over the next several months I will post at least once per week a chapter or half of a chapter.   I dearly want constructive criticism.  But please e-mail that criticism to tom@tomeubanks.com. Do not post your criticism as a comment, since this will only influence other readers.  You are welcome to make simple comments.

PART ONE
Thursday, August 21, 1987　　

CHAPTER ONE - Reggie & The Shadow

12:25 a.m

Desert nights. Unusually cool desert nights. The thought stretched across his mind as he walked. Cool desert nights in the Mojave. The sun had set hours ago. The air had cooled quickly, the sky had dissolved to black and now billions of stars blinked as the moon glowed through a procession of clouds.

Reggie Thomas stopped at the edge of a bluff and stretched his arms overhead, tugging the kinks from his back. He was exhausted from the long drive then burying his equipment. But he wasn't ready for sleep. Far from it.

At 10:30, from Lowell, east of Barstow on Highway 40, he'd called the mayor's home. No answer. He called Otto in L. A.–not in. He waited an hour before Otto called him back at the pay phone in Lowell. His instructions were to wait outside of town until dawn. And once again he listened to Otto carry on about the mission. That's what he called it. The Mission.

With his companions asleep in the back of the motorhome, he drove to a dry gulch that was a safe distance away from the two-lane road leading into the town of Paley. He had wanted to sleep, thought a walk might slow his thinking down long enough to let him.

Reggie flexed his biceps, massaged his forearms. In L. A. he'd work out at the gym. Working out burned off the monster in his brain that kept him awake. But out here in the desert, the bouquet of greasewood and eucalyptus in the air, his mind raced through plans, sorted business from the day's mundane tasks, fished for important ideas from his pool of thoughts.

He lit a joint. It would make him tired. Inhaling deeply, he held his breath, holding it down, then released a plume of sweet smoke. He hovered the cherry end under his nose and sniffed. The aroma caressed his brain. He took a second hit. As he held his breath, his lungs swelled. Then he heard something at the foot of the bluff, down among the eucalyptus trees. He realized he stood above the north boundary of Tenderness Cemetery. Coming into Paley, it was, oddly enough, the first sign of civilization in this desolate place.

Smoke streamed from the corner of his mouth as he peered down the bluff. And he saw movement. A man struggling with...with a hose...dragging something.

Following behind, a tall man in a cowboy hat followed the beam of his flashlight through the dark. Must be the caretaker, Reggie thought. The trespasser ducked and hid behind a display of religious topiaries. The trespasser waited for the cowboy caretaker to stop mid-way up the hill, then he grabbed the hose and the other contraption, and walked quickly across the cemetery towards the bluff where Reggie watched him crouch behind a row of shrubs. The caretaker wandered back down the hill, sweeping the grounds with his flashlight, and returned to the cemetery offices at the east end of the property. The man darted silently up the hill like a shadow floating through the trees.

Curious, Reggie crept carefully down the bluff along the natural erosion gouged into the soil to where it ended at a Cyclone fence.

In the dark, the Shadow tripped and sprawled into a granite headstone. Reggie cringed, tried not to laugh. Tangled in the hose as he rose to his feet, the contraption he had been pulling behind him banged the man on the back. He grunted painfully, then scanned the cemetery. Reggie figured the Shadow was still worried about the cowboy caretaker.

For Reggie, the scene was entertaining. He stood at the fence, arms folded, and watched.

The Shadow untangled himself. Reggie's eyes grew more accustomed to the dark. The way the man coiled it, Reggie figured out that the hose was a rope. And the contraption he’d been pulling was a dolly. Something was tied around the man's waist. It clanked when he moved.

A dog barked. Sounded close. Down at the chapel. The Shadow paused, frozen, and cocked his head, as if listening for danger. Like a wild nocturnal animal, he peered over his right shoulder, then his left...took a slow step...stopped...peered over his shoulder again. The Shadow crept along the north boundary towards the west end of the cemetery. He passed within a hundred feet from where Reggie smoked in the dark at the fence. Unloading the rope from his shoulder, the Shadow squatted over a mound of earth and appeared to be reading the face of a prominent granite spire set atop a knoll.

Reggie worried that the Shadow might smell the deliciously pungent marijuana, so he spit out the roach.

At the east end, down the hill, an automobile with a bad muffler started up. The engine revved; the muffler rapped. The Shadow dropped to his stomach, disappearing from Reggie’s view over the other side of the knoll. In a few moments, his head peeked over it.

Down by the chapel and mortuary office, the caretaker turned on bright, outside lights, shuffled around at the door, then went out of view around the building. Moments later, the caretaker's aging Cadillac backed down the cemetery driveway and headed for town.

The Shadow dropped everything. He hurdled the mound of earth and trotted up to the northwest corner of the cemetery to a wooden garage with a sagging roof. He raised the door. Reggie watched him pat the grill of a yellow backhoe.

The roar of the engine through the night came like a beast stalking the jungle. The rocking, bouncing creature that rolled from the garage resembled a giant scorpion, the backhoe folded under like a stinger. He drove the service road a few yards, then detoured across the grass, weaving between the gravestones, and chewed up flowers left by loved ones. The backhoe's raised front loader ripped off an overhanging tree limb. It fell onto the tractor, nearly bashed the Shadow's head. Reggie was overwhelmed with spontaneous laughter, but the growling engine drowned it out.

The Shadow maneuvered the tractor, and the limb tumbled off. He drove the backhoe to the mound, spun the tractor around and spread the hydraulic stabilizers, which, to Reggie, resembled UFO landing gear. He turned in the seat and faced out over the rear. Throttling, the backhoe bucket raised, uncurled its deadly alien teeth, reached out, and clawed open the grave.

The brilliant waning moon cast a theatrical illumination over the cemetery. Gray shadows turned black. A band of clouds marched across the moon. Shadows elongated like terrestrial fingers surrendering from each headstone. The scene turned cinematic in Reggie's mind.

Camera cranes...cue the fog...music up...aaaaaannd credits.

Could he believe what was happening right before his eyes? An exhumation! Classic. Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi. Tremors of The Unknown. Nefarious mutilations. Grim cinema, for sure.

Reggie struggled to see through the darkness, but the darkness was featureless, made blacker by the looming eucalyptus trees that veiled the moonlight. Time for a closer look.  

After several minutes of digging, the Shadow stepped from the tractor, drew near to the edge of the grave. Reggie gasped when the man jumped into it...like a soul plunging to hell, he mentally wrote.

Camera DOLLIES slowly to edge, TILTS DOWN into the black pit. The scent of musty soil, a gasp for fresh air, obliterate the aroma of evil, chill the fear, freeze it in the shape of demonic terror.

The eeriness of the scene, the movie reeling over in his brain, pumped him with adrenaline. His heart started to pound again.

The Shadow came up, untied a shovel from the dolly and returned down into the grave. The shovel clanked as it scraped against something hard. In minutes, the Shadow climbed out and tied the ropes to the backhoe bucket, then boarded the tractor.

The rope groaned as the lid of the vault was hoisted out of the grave. Reggie stiffened. Skillfully, the Shadow maneuvered the backhoe and lowered the lid, setting it atop a barrow of earth. Then he killed the engine. Silence rang in Reggie's ears. The Shadow climbed back down into the grave.

Forty minutes later, he crawled up and got back in the tractor seat. Black smoke blasted from the vertical exhaust pipe and swirled in the moonlight as the engine grumbled back to life. Reggie remained transfixed, noting every detail, every subtle dimension of the picture. The ropes tightened and the long black coffin raised from the grave, and then, suspended like an apparition, it swayed. The silhouette of the swinging casket, exhumed by the mechanical scorpion, unlocked the lid on Reggie's imagination.

The lid bursts open, the Thing emerges, a ghoulish mannequin with gray-blue flesh oozes over the edge–first the head, then a wrinkled, slimy neck, spiny-boned shoulders–and it crawls onto the barrow while its eyes dart moonlight, shifting cursedly in the man's direction.

Reggie slammed down the lid on his imagination as goose flesh clawed up his back and neck. He blamed the hallucination on the powerful hydroponic weed.

Beside the grave site, the Shadow swung the casket to the side, released a pulley and safely set it down. He unlatched couplings, unfastened straps, working hurriedly; something pressed him to work faster.

Reggie angled his watch to the moon: one forty-five.

Coiling, bending, stacking, the Shadow gathered his equipment, and he finished at the same moment the clouds uncovered the moon and lit the creepy theater.

Reggie was more scared than he wanted to admit to himself. Gripping the fence with his fingers, he pulled his face to it and accepted what he had witnessed.

And then the Shadow tilted up his arm to the moon, read his watch. He was in a rush. He circled his torso with the ropes, hung the pulley from his belt like before, slipped the foot of the dolly under the side of the casket, and pulled back the weight. He stumbled–but caught himself. Reggie caught his breath. The weight of the coffin heaved the Shadow backwards, and then it tumbled off the dolly, pounded to the grass, rolled side over side down the knoll, creaking and splintering, breaking apart, and crashed into a granite statue at the bottom.

It was the incarnation of Reggie's brain-movie.

"Damn it!" the man swore, boxing the air in frustration and turning in anxious circles.

Lights suddenly passed over the cemetery as the caretaker's car parked behind the chapel. The plot thickens! Reggie thought.

The Shadow must have known the caretaker would return after only an hour or so. But the caretaker had returned sooner, before the Shadow could escape with his embalmed treasure.

But the Shadow didn't run away. He charged down the slippery embankment to the twisted, lidless coffin. Gazing into the pile of broken black wood, even from the fence, it was evident that the Shadow shuttered. Then, slowly, he reached down, grabbed the short overweight cadaver by the lapels of its suit and raised it from the rubble. Hands clamped under its armpits, he stood it up, bent over, and let the body fall across his shoulders like a fat plank. The Shadow’s knees wobbled; he straightened his back to bear the weight. Reggie was impressed by the Shadow's strength. He didn't look that strong.

He stood the body up on the toe of the dolly. A laugh erupted from Reggie's nose; he smacked his hand over his mouth. The Shadow carefully leaned the dolly back. He struggled as he wheeled it along the lower shrubs, the cadaver's big arms flopping like thick cables. Angling away from Reggie, he turned backwards and pulled the dolly up the knoll, grunting all the way. At the top, he turned the dolly and drove it forward across the large open lawn.

The spirit of curiosity pushed aside Reggie's good judgment. He thrust his boot-toe into the diamond grid of the fence wire and climbed over it. But his pant leg caught on the top tines, ripped the pants and the flesh of his calf. Painfully, he dropped to the ground and limped after the body snatcher as he disappeared between two vine-covered arches fronting a rose garden on the south side of the cemetery.

From the direction of the mortuary, Reggie heard the dog viciously bark a warning of imminent attack. Reggie ran after the Shadow. When he reached the other end of the garden, he burst through a barrier of palm trees standing inside a six-foot high hedge and separated the cemetery from the highway, and nearly tripped over the dolly as it lay empty on its handles at a break in the hedge. A thud sounded from the other side of it–a clank-latch sound of a tailgate closing.

But behind him, the raspy, twanging voice of the caretaker encouraged the dog to attack. The dog, getting closer, barked with a deep, mean determination.

Reggie bent over, spread apart the shards of broken hedge and plunged through it to the road. As he poked his head through the other side, he saw an old Ford pick-up–the tailgate bashed in over the F–spit up shoulder-pebbles and, with its headlights out, speed away from town towards Paley Pass.

Suddenly, he heard the padding of killer paws on the blacktopped service road behind him–and then the barking turned to a growl. Reggie spun around to confront the attacking dog.

"Get 'em boy!" the caretaker bellowed. "Chew his balls!"
 
Copyright 2010 by Tom Eubanks