Until... | Book 3 | Until The End, стр. 61
“What’s left of it,” Amber said.
“Right. You think these things have a digestive system?”
“Huh?”
“They consume, right? They drink blood. You don’t have big barn spiders down in North Carolina, do you?”
Amber opened an eye and glanced at him. “What are you talking about, Alan?”
“Sorry, I’m jumping around. I was thinking about spiders. I mentioned it yesterday under the cabin. That place should have been filled with spiderwebs. We get these enormous spiders up here that, I swear, are as big as a golfball. They weave giant webs in the barn and when we glanced under that cabin I couldn’t believe how clean it was. All I could think last night was that something had cleared out all the spiders.”
“Okay?”
“Anyway, that got me thinking about the spiders in the barn. Beneath the spiderwebs you always find these little black dots on the floor. I assume that the spiders wrap up bugs in little cocoons, drink their liquified bodies, and then, you know, excrete waste that lands on the floor as those little dots.”
“Okay?” Amber leaned her head against the glass. The road was too bouncy for that. She reclined her seat a little instead.
“It’s the same thing with bats. The floor of a bat cave will be covered in guano. It’s harvested to use as a fertilizer. So, if these things eat then they must excrete, unless their digestion is one-hundred percent perfect. If that’s true, then maybe we should be looking down, not up.”
“For guano?”
“Or whatever the vampire equivalent is. The creatures are camouflaged, sure, but I bet their guano isn’t.”
“Huh,” Amber said.
“In fact, I wonder if that spray the police use would light it up.”
“Spray?”
“They have that stuff they use to make blood show up under an ultra-violet light.”
“Oh. Right,” Amber said.
“Their excretion would be organic, so maybe it’s possible to hunt it down with that spray and a special light.”
“Don’t the police turn off all the lights so they can use a black light? If we suspect that we’re in the presence of those things, I’m not turning off all the lights.”
“Yeah. Good point. That raises another question though—would it be better if we were carrying UV lights instead of regular flashlights? I wonder if those would work even better.”
“I’m not experimenting.”
“Yeah,” Alan said.
“And if you’re looking for something organic,” Amber said, “wouldn’t it be better to use one of those dogs trained to…”
She trailed off.
Amber opened her eyes and looked at Alan.
“We should be using a dog,” he said. “I bet they would smell these things a mile away.”
Amber thought of Tucker and then quickly dismissed the idea. She couldn’t put Ricky’s dog in jeopardy, even if he agreed to it. If something happened, she would never forgive herself.
“Let’s start with your guano theory,” Amber said.
“And spiders,” Alan said. “We should be looking for spiders. It won’t prove anything, but if an abandoned mill isn’t full of spiders, then something weird is going on.”
Seventeen: Alan
He wasn’t sure if Amber was asleep or not. Her eyes were closed and she hadn’t said anything in twenty minutes. The car slowed to a stop at the side of the road and for a minute he looked at the structure in the distance. Part of one of the brick walls had collapsed. There was a tall chain link fence around the whole thing. He had been right about the snowmobile. It was completely unnecessary.
Alan got out and closed the door as quietly as he could. At the trailer, he began to unpack the snowshoes.
Amber got out and stretched while he was working. Alan tossed the keys to her as she approached.
“Thanks for driving.”
“No problem. How are your eyes?”
“They feel great, actually.”
She sat on the edge of the trailer and he handed her snowshoes.
“I guess we’re walking?”
“It’s right there,” Alan said, pointing.
They ran through their inventory and Alan sent another message before they set off. Just down the road, they climbed the bank to a spot where the hill descended to the river. Walking along the edge, they found a place where the rusted fence had been torn away by limbs caught in a flood. Amber ducked under and held the fence up for Alan to follow her through.
“There’s a place in New Hampshire up in the mountains,” Alan said as they walked towards the crumbling old mill. “Every October they transform a ski resort into an elaborate set of haunted houses. They do a great job.”
“Oh yeah?” Amber asked.
“It’s fantastic, but all that effort and it’s not nearly as creepy as just looking at this place.”
Amber laughed.
Downriver from them, the water entered into the substructure of the mill. Amber and Alan paused at the place where they saw it spilling from the arches under the foundation of the building. The windows were boarded up. A set of steel doors that looked newer than anything else had a big bar welded across the frame.
“How are we getting in?” Amber asked.
“Around the other side, I guess,” Alan said. “Where the wall was collapsed.”
They had to circle the building to get to the spot that they had seen from the road. The snow was untrustworthy. Drifts had formed and frozen to cover gullies. The ice cracked under Alan and he slipped into a hole up to his waist. Laying flat, he managed to grab Amber’s hand and she helped to pull him out. They retreated to the edge of the fence, following it to make sure they stayed on stable ground.
“Bolt cutters,” Alan said. “If we had just brought bolt cutters, we could have made short work of that fence.”
“It won’t be so bad getting out,” Amber said. “We can follow our own tracks.”
Finally, they were able to see a clear path to the crumbling wall. They worked their way over to it and leaned against the brick so they could remove their snowshoes. Amber put on a headlamp and handed one to Alan.
“No risks,” he said.
“No risks.”
They climbed through