“Really cold.”
I saw his finger sink into the light to perhaps the depth of the fingernail, and then suddenly the light moved. It more than moved, it leapt onto Creighton’s hand, engulfing it.
That’s when Creighton began to scream. His words were barely intelligible, but I picked out the words “cold” and “burning” again and again. I ran to the base of the tree, expecting him to lose his balance, hoping I could do something to break his fall. I saw the ball of light stretch out and slide up the length of his arm, engulfing it.
Then it disappeared.
For an instant I thought it might be over. But when Creighton clutched his chest and cried out in greater agony, I realized to my horror that the light wasn’t gone—it was inside him!
And then I saw the back of his shirt begin to glow. I watched the light ooze out of him and re-form itself into a globe. Then it rose and glided off to follow the other lights into the night, leaving Creighton alone in the tree, sobbing and retching.
I called up to him. “Jon! Are you all right? Do you need help?”
When he didn’t answer, I grabbed hold of the tree trunk. But before I could attempt to climb, he stopped me.
“Stay there, Mac.” His voice was weak, shaky. “I’m coming down.”
It took him twice as long to climb down as it had to go up. His movements were slow, unsteady, and three times he had to stop to rest. Finally, he reached the lowest branch, hung from it by one hand, and made the final drop. I grabbed him immediately to keep him from collapsing into a heap, and helped him back toward the lamp and the bedrolls.
“My God, Jon! Your arm!”
In the light from the lamp his flesh seemed to be smoking. The skin on his left hand and forearm was red, almost scalded-looking. Tiny blisters were already starting to form.
“It looks worse than it feels.”
“We’ve got to get you to a doctor.”
He dropped to his knees on his bedroll and hugged his injured arm against his chest with his good one.
“I’m all right. It only hurts a little now.”
“It’s going to get infected. Come on. I’ll see if I can get us to civilization.”
“Forget it,” he said, and I sensed some of the strength returning to his voice. “Even if we get the jeep free, we’re still lost. We couldn’t find our way out of here when it was daylight. What makes you think we’ll do any better in the dark?”
He was right. But I felt I had to do something.
“Where’s your first-aid kit?”
“I don’t have one.”
I blew up then.
“Jesus Christ, Jon! You’re crazy, you know that? You could have fallen out of that tree and been killed! And if you don’t wind up with gangrene in that arm it’ll be a miracle! What on God’s earth made you do something so stupid?”
He grinned. “I knew it! You still love me!”
I was not amused.
“This is serious, Jon. You risked your life up there! For what?”
“I have to know, Mac.”
“ ‘Know’? What do you have to ‘know’? Will you stop giving me this bullshit?”
“I can’t. I can’t stop because it’s true. I have to know what’s real and what’s not.”
“Spare me—”
“I mean it. You’re sure you know what’s real and so you’re content and complacent with that. You can’t imagine what it’s like not to know. To sense there’s a veil across everything, a barrier that keeps you from seeing what’s really there. You don’t know what it’s like to spend your life searching for the edge of that veil so you can lift it and peek—just peek—at what’s behind it. I know it’s out there, and I can’t reach it. You don’t know what that’s like, Mac. It makes you crazy.”
“Well, that’s one thing we can agree on.”
He laughed—it sounded strained—and reached for his jug of applejack with his good hand.
“Haven’t you had enough of that tonight?”
I hated myself for sounding like an old biddy, but what I had just seen had shaken me to the core. I was still trembling.
“No, Mac. The problem is I haven’t had enough. Not nearly enough.”
Feeling helpless and angry, I sat down on my own bedroll and watched him take a long pull from the jug.
“What happened up there, Jon?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t ever want it to happen again.”
“And what were you saying? It almost sounded as if you were calling to them.”
He looked up sharply and stared at me.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Not exactly. It didn’t even sound like speech.”
“That’s because it wasn’t,” he said, and I was sure I detected relief in his voice. “I was trying to attract their attention.”
“Well, you sure did that.”
Across the top of the Coleman lamp, I thought I saw him smile.
“Yeah. I did, didn’t I?”
In the night around us, I noticed that the insects were becoming vocal again.
7. THE SHUNNED PLACE
I’d planned to stay awake the rest of the night, but somewhere along the way I must have faded into sleep. The next thing I knew there was sunlight in my eyes. I leaped up, disoriented for a moment, then I remembered where I was.
But where was Creighton? His bedroll lay stretched out on the sand, his compass, sextant, and maps upon it, but he was nowhere in sight. I called his name a couple of times. He called back from somewhere off to my left. I followed the sound of his voice through the brush and emerged on the edge of a small pond rimmed with white cedars.
Creighton was kneeling at the edge, cupping some water in his right hand.
“How’d you find this?”
“Simple.” He gestured toward a group of drakes and mallards floating on the still surface. “I followed the quacking.”
“You’re becoming a regular Mark Trail. How’s the water?”
“Polluted.” He pointed to a brownish blue slick on the water. “Look at that color. Looks like tea.”
“That’s not polluted,” I told him. “That’s the start of some bog iron floating over there. And this is cedar water. It gets brown from the iron deposits and from the cedars, but it’s as pure as it comes.”
I scooped up a double handful and took a long swallow.
“Almost sweet,” I said. “Sea captains used to come into these parts to fill their water casks with cedar water before long voyages. They said it stayed fresher longer.”
“Then I guess it’s okay to bathe this in it,” he said, twisting and showing me his left arm.
I gasped. I couldn’t help it. I’d half convinced myself that last night’s incident with the pine light had been a nightmare. But the reddened, crusted, blistered skin on Creighton’s arm said otherwise.
“We’ve got to get you to a doctor,” I said.
“It’s all right, Mac. Doesn’t really hurt. Just feels hot.”
He sank it past his elbow into the cool cedar water.
“Now that feels good!”
I looked around. The sun shone from a cloudless sky. We’d have no trouble finding our way out of here this morning. I stared out over the pond. Water. The sandy floor of the Pine Barrens was like a giant sponge that absorbed a high percentage of the rain that fell on it. It was the largest untapped aquifer in the Northeast. No rivers flowed into the Pinelands, only out. The water here was glacial in its purity. I’d read somewhere that the Barrens held an amount of water equivalent to a lake with a surface area of a thousand square miles and an average depth of seventy-five feet.
This little piece of wetness here was less that fifty yards across. I watched the ducks. They were quacking peacefully, tooling around, dipping their heads. Then one of them made a different sound, more like a squawk. It flapped its wings once and was gone. It happened in the blink of an eye. One second a floating duck, next second some floating bubbles.
“Did you see that?
” Creighton said.
“Yeah, I did.”
“What happened to that duck?” I could see the excitement starting to glow in his eyes. “What’s it mean?”
“It means a snapping turtle. A big one. Fifty pounds or better, I’m sure.”
Creighton pulled his arm from the pond.
“I do believe I’ve soaked this enough for now.”
He dipped a towel in the water and wrapped it around his scorched arm.
We walked back to the bedrolls, packed up our gear, and made our way through the brush to the Wrangler.
The jeep was occupied.
There were people inside, and people sitting on the hood and standing on the bumpers as well. A good half-dozen in all.
Only they weren’t like any people I’d ever seen.
They were dressed like typical Pineys, but dirty, raggedy. The four men in jeans or canvas pants, collared shirts of various fabrics and colors or plain white T-shirts; the two women wore cotton jumpers. But they were all deformed. Their heads were odd shapes and sizes, some way too small, others large and lopsided with bulbous protrusions. The eyes on a couple weren’t lined up on the level. Everyone seemed to have one arm or leg longer than the other. Their teeth, at least in the ones who still had any, seemed to have come in at random angles.
When they spotted us, they began jabbering and pointing our way. They left the Wrangler and surrounded us. It was an intimidating group.
“Is that your car?” a young man with a lopsided head said to me.
“No.” I pointed to Creighton. “It’s his.”
“Is that your car?” he said to Creighton.
I guessed he didn’t believe me.
“It’s a jeep,” Creighton said.
“Jeep! Jeep!” He laughed and kept repeating the word. The others around him took it up and chorused along.
I looked at Creighton and shrugged. We’d apparently come upon an enclave of the type of folks who’d helped turn “Piney” into a term of derision shortly before World War I. That was when Elizabeth Kite published a report titled The Pineys that was sensationalized by the press and led to the view that the Pinelands was a bed of alcoholism, illiteracy, degeneracy, incest, and resultant “feeblemindedness.”
Unfair and untrue. But not entirely false. There has always been illiteracy and alcoholism deep in the Pinelands. Schooling here tended to be rudimentary if at all. And as for drinking? The first “drive-thru” service originated before the Revolution in the Piney jug taverns, allowing customers to ride up to a window, get their jugs topped off with applejack, pay, and move on without ever dismounting. But after the economy of the Pine Barrens faltered, and most of the workers moved on to greener pastures, much of the social structure collapsed. Those who stayed on grew a little lax as to the whys, hows, and to-whoms of marriage. The results were inevitable.
All that had supposedly changed in modern times, except in the most isolated area of the Pines. We had stumbled upon one of those areas. Except that the deformities here were extraordinary. I’d seen a few of the inbreds in my youth. There’d been something subtly odd about them, but nothing that terribly startling. These folk would stop you in your tracks.
“Let’s head for the jeep while they’re yucking it up,” I said out of the corner of my mouth.
“No. Wait. This is fascinating. Besides, we need their help.”
He spoke to the group as a whole and asked their aid in freeing the jeep.
Somebody said, “Sugar sand,” and this was repeated all around. But they willingly set their shoulders against the Wrangler and we were on hard ground again in minutes.
“Where do you live?” Creighton said to anyone who was listening.
Someone said, “Town,” and as one they all pointed east, toward the sun. It was also the direction the lights had been headed last night.
“Will you show me?”
They nodded and jabbered and tugged on our sleeves, anxious to show us.
“Really, Jon,” I said. “We should get you to—”
“My arm can wait. This won’t take long.”
We followed the group in a generally uphill direction along a circuitous footpath unnavigable by any vehicle other than a motorcycle. The trees thickened, and soon we were in shade. And then those trees opened up and we were in their “town.”
A haze of blue woodsmoke hung over a ramshackle collection of shanties made of scrap lumber and sheet metal. Garbage everywhere, and everyone coming out to look at the strangers. I’d never seen such squalor.
The fellow with the lopsided head who’d asked about the jeep pulled Creighton toward one of the shacks.
“Hey, mister, you know about machines. How come this don’t work?”
He had on old TV set inside his one-room hut. He turned the knobs back and forth.
“Don’t work. No pictures.”
“You need electricity,” Creighton told him.
“Got it. Got it. Got it.”
He led us around to the back to show us the length of wire he had strung from a tree to the roof of the shack.
Creighton turned to me with stricken eyes.
“This is awful. No one should have to live like this. Can we do anything for them?”
His compassion surprised me. I’d never thought there was room for anyone else’s concerns in his self-absorbed life. But then, Jonathan Creighton had always been a mother lode of surprises.
“Not much. They all look pretty content to me. Seem to have their own little community. If you bring them to the government’s attention, they’ll be split up and most of them will probably be placed in institutions or group homes. I guess the best you can do is give them whatever you can think of to make the living easier here.”
Creighton nodded, still staring around him.
“Speaking of ‘here,’ ” he said, unshouldering his knapsack, “let’s find out where we are.”
The misshapen locals stared in frank awe and admiration as he took his readings. Someone asked him, “What is that thing?” a hundred times. At least. Another asked, “What happened to your arm?” an equal number of times. Creighton was heroically patient with everyone. He knelt on the ground to transfer his readings to the map, then looked up at me.
“Know where we are?”
“The other side of Razorback Hill, I’d say.”
“You got it.”
He stood up and gathered the locals around him.
“I’m looking for a special place around here,” he said.
Most of them nodded eagerly. Someone said, “We know every place there is around here, I reckon.”
“Good. I’m looking for a place where nothing grows. Do you know a place like that?”
It was as if all these people had a common plug and Creighton had just pulled it. The lights went out, the shades came down, the “Open” signs flipped to “Closed.” They began to turn away.
“What’d I say?” he said, turning his anxious, bewildered eyes on me. “What’d I say?”
“You’re starting to sound like Ray Charles,” I told him. “Obviously they want nothing to do with this ‘place where nothing grows’ you’re talking about. What’s this all about, Jon?”
He ignored my question and laid his good hand on the shoulder of one of the small-headed men.
“Won’t you take me there if you know where it is?”
“We know where it is,” the fellow said in a squeaky voice. “But we never go there so we can’t take you there. How can we take you there if we never go there?”
“You never go there? Why not?”
The others had stopped and were listening to the exchange. The small-headed fellow looked around at his neighbors and gave them a look that asked how stupid could anyone be? Then he turned back to Creighton.
“We don’t go there ’cause nobody goes there.”
“What’s your name?” Creighton said.
“Fred.”
“Fred, my name is Jon, and I’ll give you.…” He patted his pocke
ts, then tore the watch off his wrist. “I’ll give you this beautiful watch that you don’t have to wind—see how the numbers change with every second?—if you’ll take me to a place where you do go and point out the place where nothing grows. How’s that sound?”
Fred took the watch and held it up close to his right eye, then smiled.
“Come on! I’ll show you!”
Creighton took off after Fred, and I took off after Creighton.
Again we were led along a circuitous path, this one even narrower than before, becoming less well defined as we went along. I noticed the trees becoming fewer in number and more stunted and gnarled, and the underbrush thinning out, the leaves curled on their edges. We followed Fred until he halted as abruptly as if he had run into an invisible wall. I saw why: the footpath we’d been following stopped here. He pointed ahead through what was left of the trees and underbrush.
“The bald spot’s over yonder atop that there rise.”
He turned and hurried back along the path.
Bald spot?
Creighton looked at me, then shrugged.
“Got your machete handy, Mac?”
“No, Bwana.”
“Too bad. I guess we’ll just have to bull our way through.”
He rewrapped his burned arm and pushed ahead. It wasn’t such rough going. The underbrush thinned out quickly, and so we had an easier time of it than I’d anticipated. Soon we broke into a small field lined with scrappy weeds and occupied by the scattered, painfully gnarled trunks of dead trees. And in the center of the field was a patch of bare sand.
…a place where nothing grows…
Creighton hurried ahead. I held back, restrained by a sense of foreboding. The same something deep within me that had feared the pine lights feared this place as well. Something was wrong here, as if Nature had been careless, had made a mistake in this place and had never quite been able to rectify it. As if…
What was I thinking? It was an empty field. No eerie lights buzzing through the sky. No birds, either, for that matter. So what? The sun was up, a breeze was blowing—or at least it had been a moment ago.
Overruling my instincts, I followed Creighton. I touched the tortured trunk of one of the dead trees as I passed. It was hard and cold, like stone. A petrified tree. In the Pinelands.
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