Then while she was puzzling over what might possibly be done, it occurred to her that she had not moved him back in time to the present before trying to wake him. She had left him stranded in 1895.
“Day—” she began but then she realized that that, too, was stupid: to be calling him Day. He was not Day. “Daniel,” she said, “you are going to move through time all the way back to the present. I will count to three and then it will be the present again, and you will be Day again, and you will wake up. One,” she said. Then she said, “Two.” She took a deep breath and said, “Three.”
His eyes popped open. “Stop,” he said. “Turn around. I want to go back.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“I’m worried,” he said. “Please. Let’s go back.”
“Maybe you’re just unsettled,” she said, “because I did a bad job of trying to bring you back from your trance. Maybe it was just a bad trip.”
“I’m sorry I changed my mind, but—”
“Let’s stop for lunch,” she suggested.
She drove off the turnpike at the first food sign and found a diner in Darien. But when they were seated inside, and she asked him what he wanted for lunch, he said he wasn’t hungry.
“Oh, I’ll bet you are, too,” she said. “I’m going to have a cheeseburger. Don’t you want one too? And a milkshake?”
Very quietly he announced, “I didn’t bring any money.”
“Silly!” she said. “This is on me.”
“You have money?” he said.
“Of course.”
He stared at her for a while with what seemed to be a kind of frown. She wondered if it seriously bothered him to be dependent on her. At length he made a wry smile and said, “In that case, and this being Sunday, I’ll have the roast beef dinner.”
“Sure,” she said. “Anything you like.”
But during the meal, he did not talk at all.
She waited until he was finished, hoping that such a heavy meal would soothe him, then she asked, gently, “What frightened you?”
“Not me, I guess,” he replied. “Him.”
“I should think he wasn’t the sort of person to scare easily.”
Day seemed abstracted, as if listening, not to her. Then he said, “‘There’s not ever any going back,’” and “‘All the bridges are burnt.’”
“Is that what he says?” she asked.
Day nodded.
“Then tell him—” she began, but did not finish. She felt ridiculous; she was not even certain that messages could be relayed in that fashion. “Let’s go,” she said. She paid the check and they went out and got into the Porsche. Before she started the motor, she said to him, “It’s your body. He can’t tell you what not to do. And you’re just as excited and eager as I am, aren’t you?” She waited, then asked again, “Aren’t you?”
“Oh yes,” he admitted.
Nine
Finding Dudleytown Proves to Be Difficult
United States Highway Number Seven at one time was the primary south–north route, all the way from Norwalk to Montreal. For this purpose it has been supplanted by New York’s Interstate 87, and its gift shops and motels are not frequented, as they once were. For much of its length in northern Connecticut and southern Massachusetts, it follows the Housatonic River, now on the left bank, now on the right; and it keeps to the trace of original dirt highway of the nineteenth century and before. It passes through some very pretty hill country, deeply wooded, above Candlewood Lake. Artists live around here; so do writers, and critics, and poets and dancers.
Above New Milford, drops splashed randomly on the Porsche’s windshield, beaded, and raced off. Soon Diana had to switch on the wipers. It was the beginning of what was to be one of the heaviest rains of the year, nearly three inches before the day was done, but at that moment it looked to Diana like a passing local shower and she hoped they would soon be through and out of it.
Around three o’clock, that afternoon, in a driving downpour, they saw a road sign: “Cornwall, Town Of. Inc. 1740” and shortly thereafter came into the small crossroads community of Cornwall Bridge. There was not a soul in sight; the rain had driven man and beast to shelter.
There is one general store in Cornwall Bridge, Monroe’s AG General Store with a Mobil gas pump, but Diana discovered it was closed on Sundays. She turned eastward from Cornwall Bridge, onto State Highway 4, and drove slowly for a while, looking for any sign pointing to Dudleytown. A mile out, she turned around and came slowly back. “See anything familiar?” she asked Day.
He shook his head. “I’ve never been here before.”
She liked that. He had never been there before. She wondered if it would help to put him into a trance again, but, apart from her reluctance to chance something that had already given her a few bad moments, she knew that he couldn’t see anything with his eyes closed anyway.
There is one service station in Cornwall Bridge, the Berkshire Garage, an Esso station, and she pulled into it, but discovered that it too was closed on Sundays. She stopped there anyway, turning off the motor and saying, “Well. Now what?”
He asked, “Don’t you even know which direction it is?”
“You said east,” she told him. “He said east.” She pointed “That’s east.” Apart from the State Highway 4, which they had just tried, there was nothing to the east but a high forested hill.
He offered, “I could just go and knock on somebody’s door and ask them.”
“You’ll get wet,” she pointed out. “Let’s wait a while.”
They waited a while, more than a while, fifteen, then twenty minutes, half an hour, but the hard rain did not slacken. If anything it became harder, curtaining all the windows of the car so thickly they could not see out. Diana wanted to smoke a cigarette, but in the stuff y atmosphere of the closed car she did not want to bother Day, who, she had discovered, did not smoke. Then, more than needing a cigarette, she realized she needed to find a toilet. She wondered if the Berkshire Garage’s restrooms were locked. She waited another ten minutes for the rain to let up. It did not. She waited until she could wait no longer, then said, “I’ll be right back,” and opened her door and made a dash around the side of the building, looking for a doorway marked “Ladies.” She found none. She looked all around her, and ran behind the building and into a clump of bushes. The damp branches scratched her and wetted her. She crawled on her knees as deeply into the bushes as she could get, then squatted and tugged her jeans down to her ankles.
When she returned to the car, her hair and clothing were soaked, and the knees of her jeans were covered with mud.
Day looked at her for a moment, then he said, “If you can get wet, so can I.” He got out of the car, and she wondered if he needed to go to the bushes too, but she watched as he ran swiftly across the highway to the nearest house and leapt onto the porch and began knocking at the door. Through the curtain of rain she could not clearly see what response he was getting.
When he returned, he was wetter than she. His shirt clung to him, his hair clung in matted bangs over his forehead, his ears and nose dripped raindrops. He said, “They never heard of it.”
She sighed.
“Are you sure,” he asked, “that this is the right place?”
“It was you,” she protested. “You said Cornwall Bridge. This is Cornwall Bridge.” Then she suggested, “Let’s just drive around some more.”
She started the car and drove slowly back down U.S. 7, watching the left of the road carefully for any side road. There was nothing but a few driveways. The village trickled out; she turned around and drove slowly back once again, and then again turned east toward State Highway 4, determined to follow it farther this time.
She had driven only a short distance when Day said, “Hey, look!” and pointed. She slowed the car. There, to the right of the highway, was a small asphalt road that did not seem to be a driveway. It had a signpost on it, an ordinary urban street sign, saying “Dark Entry Road.” She turned into it.<
br />
But only a short distance up this road the asphalt pavement stopped, or rather it curved into the driveway and garage of a large new ranch-style house with an immaculately kept lawn. There was, however, a continuation of the road at the curve: it became suddenly a rough, rutted trail of dirt turned by the rain into mud. Beside it had been erected a small hand-lettered sign, apparently by the owners of the ranch-style: “No parking within 15 feet.”
Diana eased the car into the crude trail, and kept going. All along the woods to the left were new signs nailed to trees, printed on yellow metal:
NO HUNTING
NO TRESPASSING
Under Penalty of the Law
—R. Wendell
The trail was steep, and the Porsche’s rear wheels began spinning in the mud; Diana realized the car would go no farther. Slowly she backed down the trail, steering with one hand and craning her neck to see through the rear window. She backed all the way to the broad asphalt driveway of the ranch-style, and there turned around.
Day gestured at the house and said, “I’ll go ask them if that goes to Dudleytown.”
Diana observed, “If the Wendells live there, obviously they don’t want anybody using their road anyway.”
There was one other house farther on down the road, near the highway, an old colonial saltbox nicely restored. “I’ll try that,” Day said, and got out of the car and ran off through the rain. This time she saw that the door of the house was opened to him, and he went in, and did not reappear for many long minutes.
He was smiling triumphantly when he returned to the car. “This is it, all right,” he declared. “I talked to a nice old lady. She even offered to have me dry my clothes. She says this is the original Dark Entry Road which goes on up the hill to Dudleytown. But listen, there’s nothing up there.” He paused to let this sink in, then he said, “That’s what she says, there’s nothing at all up there, and anyway you can’t drive a car up there, and she says you can’t even go on foot because a rain like this washes the trail out.”
“Well, darn it,” Diana commented in disappointment.
“But wait a minute,” Day hastened to add. “She told me something else….”
Ten
At Length Dudleytown Is Located and Partially Explored
“I told him there was a better way to get into Dudleytown,” Miss Mary Elizabeth Evans related to me, that bleary afternoon in March of the following year. She served tea. I showed her the two photographs. “Yes, that was him,” she said, pointing at one of the photographs. “He told me he was a Boy Scout from New Jersey. But I didn’t see her. Perhaps she was the other one in the car. He just told me that he and a friend had heard about Dudleytown and wanted to explore it. I said, ‘Young man, what kind of exploring can you do in a rain like this?’ but he said they weren’t in any hurry for the rain to stop. Well, anyway, I told him the best way to get into Dudleytown was to go back down Route 7, the way they’d come, for about a mile until they came to Route 45 on the left, and take that for about another mile until they came to the first road on the left. That’s the real Dudleytown Road, you see. I knew they wouldn’t get very far along it, either, not in that low-slung sports car they were driving, but at least the going on foot’s a lot easier from that side. More tea?”
I shook my head, and she went on, “Much later in the summer I heard that somebody was camping out up there, but I never thought to make any connection with them. I thought this Boy Scout just wanted to spend a couple of hours poking around amongst the old cellar holes, you know, and I thought a rain like that would probably drive them away. He seemed such a young man to be going into Dudleytown, even with a companion, so I told him, not just out of perversity but because I was concerned about him, he was a nice young man, I told him Dudleytown is haunted. That’s the truth, it is. I said, ‘Wait, young man, and let me tell you about the “Curse of Dudleytown.”’ But he just said, ‘Thank you, lady, but I’d rather find it out for myself.’ And he walked right out that door.”
The turnoff into Dudleytown was easy to find, and neatly asphalted, with a white center line at the intersection. Diana mashed the gas pedal to the floor and started up it; they passed several houses, first an old brown-shingled colonial, then a rustic brown-clapboard chalet of the general Swiss-modern type, then an even more modern house of gray shingles. People of means lived in these; this end of Dudleytown, at least, was well inhabited.
The asphalt road continued climbing, becoming wider and newer, all the way up to the top of the hill, where it ended in a broad turnaround. Although no houses were visible from here, it had all the earmarks of a housing development street. Beyond the turnaround, Diana noticed, the old road continued, a crude trail through the woods similar to the beginning of Dark Entry Road. She drove into it, the car hit a hole and bounced, and the undercarriage scraped a rock or something with a jarring rasp. She slowed to a crawl, and continued. The road here was level but then it began to descend.
At least there were no “No Trespassing” signs here; no signs of any kind. As the descent became steeper, and the car’s wheels began sliding, Diana braked to a halt and stretched her head forward to peer down into the declivity. She was not at all convinced the Porsche could manage such a road, and she told Day so; then she backed—or tried to back—out. After several minutes of spinning the rear wheels in the mud, she managed to back the car next to a level glade beside the left of the road, and to back the car into this glade, off the road, with a minimum of scrapes on the undercarriage. The rain had slackened some, but was still coming steadily down. They would walk from here; they were both so wet already, it didn’t matter.
Diana got one of her suitcases from the rear of the car, and opened it, not to remove her raincoat—because she did not want to wear a raincoat if Day had none—but to get a pair of hiking shoes to replace her sandals. After lacing them up, she closed and locked the car, and they continued down the rugged trail on foot.
The woods on both sides of them made a tunnel over the trail and sheltered them from the full brunt of the rain. Diana tuned all her senses to take in the experience; the first sense was of smell: the rich woodsy fragrance of the forest, enhanced by the wetness of the rain.
The downslope of the trail was abrupt and, because of the mud, slippery. Several times Diana stumbled but Day caught her arm. He seemed to be watching out for her. Now, at least, she was dependent on him.
Except for a great stone wall bordering the road in the woods to their right, there was no sign at all of anything left by man. The forest was all second growth—but a second growth which had begun growing seventy years or more before. The hardwoods were large in girth, and dense hemlocks and spruces filled the spaces between the hardwoods.
The ground cover, the carpet of the forest, was what she liked most. She asked Day if he knew what it consisted of, and he readily named the names for it, rattling them off his tongue almost mechanically: seven different kinds of fern, moosewood or striped maple seedlings with big green leaves the size of a baby elephant’s ear, and everywhere the low light-green diadems of the ground pine. She bent down and picked one of these and held it to her nose.
The stone wall was massive, a work of great effort and determination; large sections of it had been toppled by frosts and winds, animals and earth tremors—whatever there is that doesn’t love a wall.
They came to a broad gap in the wall which obviously was not a toppled section but an opening that had once been a gate. They walked through it, and looked for signs of a house but found none, and so came back to the main road and continued down it.
The rain fell without any thunder or lightning; if it had been an electrical storm, Day, a good Scout, would not have wanted to be out.
Vapors hung like low clouds among the trees.
The forest was dark; Diana realized she was still wearing her sunglasses and pushed them up on top of her hair; still the forest was dark.
An old road diverged into the woods at the right, in an avenue between t
he massive stone walls. They did not take it.
On the trail ahead of them they caught a swift glimpse of a small animal scurrying across the road. Diana asked Day what it was but he said he hadn’t seen all of it, just its tail. A fox, maybe.
At five o’clock they came to the first cellar hole.
Diana had never seen a cellar hole before, and did not know what it was. Day, pointing it out, told her. A large clump of white birch grew up out of it. They brushed their way through weeds and bushes to reach the edge of it, and stood on the edge looking down. In the dank hole Diana could see rubble: fallen stones, bits of rotted wood, pieces of thoroughly rusted iron, shards of old crockery. Diana wanted to ask him who had lived there. To get an answer, she would have to put him into a trance. It did not seem to be an important cellar hole. She would wait until they came to something else. They went on.
They passed the exact center of Dudleytown, some time later, without knowing it: the junction of Dudleytown Road with Dark Entry Road. They did not even notice, to their left, in the brush beside a giant maple, the dark exit of Dark Entry. They walked on past a turning of the trail before coming to another cellar hole. This one was larger than the first, but just as barren; a clump of gray-green poplars nearly filled it.
They hiked another quarter-mile without finding anything of significance, except another cellar hole. Diana did not know if they had reached Dudleytown yet; she did not know that they had passed it; but she was becoming a little tired of hiking. Her jeans were soaked and chafed her thighs. She felt like taking off her shirt and wringing it out.
There was no shelter. No roof remained in Dudleytown; no rock ledge to get under out of the rain. The nearest ceiling she knew of was that of her car—a mile? or more behind them. But then the rain ceased, for a while.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 29