Foundations of Fear

by David G. Hartwell

  “Talk away,” said Harp, “only Ben here he’s got to get home without waiting on no Dick Hammond.”

  “That a fact, Ben?”

  “Yes. I’ll keep in touch.”

  “Do that,” said Robart, dismissing me. As I left he was beginning a fresh manicure, and Harp waited rigidly for the ordeal to continue. I felt morbidly that I was abandoning him.

  Still—corpus delicti—nothing much more would happen until Leda Ryder was found. Then if her body were found dead by violence, with no acceptable evidence of Longtooth’s existence—well, what then?

  I don’t think Robart would have let me go if he’d known my first act would be to call Short’s brother Mike and ask him to drive me into Lohman, where I could get a bus for Boston.

  Johnny Malcolm said, “I can see this is distressing you, and you wouldn’t lie to me. But, Ben, as biology it won’t do. Ain’t no such animal. You know that.”

  He wasn’t being stuffy. We were having dinner at a quiet restaurant, and I had, of course, enjoyed the roast duckling too much. Johnny is a rock-ribbed beanpole who can eat like a walking famine with no regrets. “Suppose,” I said, “just for argument and because it’s not biologically inconceivable, that there’s a basis for the yeti legend.”

  “Not inconceivable. I’ll give you that. So long as any poorly known corners of the world are left—the Himalayan uplands, jungles, tropic swamps, the tundra—legends will persist and some of them will have little gleams of truth. You know what I think about moon flights and all that?” He smiled; privately I was hearing Leda scream. “One of our strongest reasons for them, and for the biggest flights we’ll make if we don’t kill civilization first, is a hunt for new legends. We’ve used up our best ones, and that’s dangerous.”

  “Why don’t we look at the countries inside us?” But Johnny wasn’t listening much.

  “Men can’t stand it not to have closed doors and a chance to push at them. Oh, about your yeti—he might exist. Shaggy anthropoid able to endure severe cold, so rare and clever the explorers haven’t tripped over him yet. Wouldn’t have to be a carnivore to have big ugly canines—look at the baboons. But if he was active in a Himalayan winter, he’d have to be able to use meat, I think. Mind you, I don’t believe any of this, but you can have it as a biological not-impossible. How’d he get to Maine?”

  “Strayed? Tibet—Mongolia—Arctic ice.”

  “Maybe.” Johnny had begun to enjoy the hypothesis as something to play with during dinner. Soon he was helping along the brute’s passage across the continents, and having fun till I grumbled something about alternatives, extraterrestrials. He wouldn’t buy that, and got cross. Still hearing Leda scream, I assured him I wasn’t watching for little green men.

  “Ben, how much do you know about this—Harp?”

  “We grew up along different lines, but he’s a friend. Dinosaur, if you like, but a friend.”

  “Hardshell Maine bachelor picks up dizzy young wife—”

  “She’s not dizzy. Wasn’t. Sexy, but not dizzy.”

  “All right. Bachelor stewing in his own juices for years. Sure he didn’t get up on that roof himself?”

  “Nuts. Unless all my senses were more paralyzed than I think, there wasn’t time.”

  “Unless they were more paralyzed than you think.”

  “Come off it! I’m not senile yet . . . What’s he supposed to have done with her? Tossed her into the snow?”

  “Mph,” said Johnny, and finished his coffee. “All right. Some human freak with abnormal strength and the endurance to fossick around in a Maine blizzard stealing women. I liked the yeti better. You say you suggested a madman to Ryder yourself. Pity if you had to come all the way here just so I could repeat your own guesswork. To make amends, want to take in a bawdy movie?”

  “Love it.”

  The following day Dr. Kahn made time to see me at the end of the afternoon, so polite and patient that I felt certain I was keeping him from his dinner. He seemed undecided whether to be concerned with the traumas of Harp Ryder’s history or those of mine. Mine were already somewhat known to him. “I wish you had time to talk all this out to me. You’ve given me a nice summary of what the physical events appear to have been, but—”

  “Doctor,” I said, “it happened. I heard the animal. The window was smashed—ask the sheriff. Leda Ryder did scream, and when Harp and I got up there together, the dog had been killed and Leda was gone.”

  “And yet, if it was all as clear as that, I wonder why you thought of consulting me at all, Ben. I wasn’t there. I’m just a headshrinker.”

  “I wanted . . . Is there any way a delusion could take hold of Harp and me, disturb our senses in the same way? Oh, just saying it makes it ridiculous.”

  Dr. Kahn smiled. “Let’s say, difficult.”

  “Is it possible Harp could have killed her, thrown her out through the window of the west bedroom—the snow must have drifted six feet or higher on that side—and then my mind distorted my time sense? So I might’ve stood there in the dark kitchen all the time it went on, a matter of minutes instead of seconds? Then he jumped down by the shed roof, came back into the house the normal way while I was stumbling upstairs? Oh, hell.”

  Dr. Kahn had drawn a diagram of the house from my description, and peered at it with placid interest. “Benign” was a word Helen had used for him. He said, “Such a distortion of the time sense would be—unusual . . . Are you feeling guilty about anything?”

  “About standing there and doing nothing? I can’t seriously believe it was more than a few seconds. Anyway, that would make Harp a monster out of a detective story. He’s not that. How could he count on me to freeze in panic? Absurd. I’d’ve heard the struggle, steps, the window of the west room going up. Could he have killed her and I known all about it at the time, even witnessed it, and then suffered amnesia for that one event?”

  He still looked so patient, I wished I hadn’t come. “I won’t say any trick of the mind is impossible, but I might call that one highly improbable. Academically, however, considering your emotional involvement—”

  “I’m not emotionally involved!” I yelled that. He smiled, looking much more interested. I laughed at myself. That was better than poking him in the eye. “I’m upset, Doctor, because the whole thing goes against reason. If you start out knowing nobody’s going to believe you, it’s all messed up before you open your mouth.”

  He nodded kindly. He’s a good joe. I think he’d stopped listening for what I didn’t say long enough to hear a little of what I did say. “You’re not unstable, Ben. Don’t worry about amnesia. The explanation, perhaps some human intruder, will turn out to be within the human norm. The norm of possibility does include such things as lycanthropic delusions, maniacal behavior, and so on. Your police up there will carry on a good search for the poor woman. They won’t overlook that snowdrift. Don’t underestimate them, and don’t worry about your own mind, Ben.”

  “Ever seen our Maine woods?”

  “No, I go away to the Cape.”

  “Try it sometime. Take a patch of it, say about fifty miles by fifty, that’s twenty-five hundred square miles. Drop some eager policemen into it, tell ’em to hunt for something they never saw before and don’t want to see, that doesn’t want to be found.”

  “But if your beast is human, human beings leave traces. Bodies aren’t easy to hide, Ben.”

  “In those woods? A body taken by a carnivorous animal? Why not?” Well, our minds didn’t touch. I thanked him for his patience and got up. “The maniac responsible,” I said. “But whatever we call him, Doctor, he was there.”

  Mike Short picked me up at the Lohman bus station and told me something of a ferment in Darkfield. I shouldn’t have been surprised. “They’re all scared, Mr. Dane. They want to hurt somebody.” Mike is Jim Short’s younger brother. He scrapes up a living with his taxi service and occasional odd jobs at the garage. There’s a droop in his shaggy ringlets, and I believe thirty is staring him in the face. “
Like old Harp, he wants to tell it like it happened and nobody buys. That’s sad, man. You been away what, three days? The fuzz was pissed off. You better connect with Mr. Sheriff Robart like soon. He climbed all over my ass just for driving you to the bus that day, like I should’ve known you shouldn’t.”

  “I’ll pacify him. They haven’t found Mrs. Ryder?”

  Mike spat out the car window, which was rolled down for the mild air. “Old Harp he never got such a job of snow-shoveling done in all his days. By the c’munity, for free. No, they won’t find her.” In that there was plenty of I-want-to-be-asked, and something more, a hint of the mythology of Mike’s generation.

  “So what’s your opinion, Mike?”

  He maneuvered a fresh cigarette against the stub of the last and drove on through tiresome silence. The road was winding between ridged mountains of plowed, rotting snow. I had the window down on my side, too, for the genial afternoon sun, and imagined a tang of spring. At last Mike said, “You prob’ly don’t go along . . . Jim got your ca’ out, by the way. It’s at your place . . . Well, you’ll hear ’em talking it all to pieces. Some claim Harp’s telling the truth. Some say he killed her himself. They don’t say how he made her disappear. Ain’t heard any talk against you, Mr. Dane, nothing that counts. The sheriff’s peeved, but that’s just on account you took off without asking.” His vague, large eyes watched the melting landscape, the ambiguous messages of spring. “Well, I think, like, a demon took her, Mr. Dane. She was one of his own, see? You got to remember, I knew that chick. Okay, you can say it ain’t scientific, only there is a science to these things, I read a book about it. You can laugh if you want.”

  I wasn’t laughing. It wasn’t my first glimpse of the contemporary medievalism and won’t be my last if I survive another year or two. I wasn’t laughing, and I said nothing. Mike sat smoking, expertly driving his twentieth-century artifact while I suppose his thoughts were in the seventeenth, sniffing after the wonders of the invisible world, and I recalled what Johnny Malcolm had said about the need for legends. Mike and I had no more talk.

  Adelaide Simmons was dourly glad to see me. From her I learned that the sheriff and state police had swarmed all over Harp’s place and the surrounding countryside, and were still at it. Result, zero. Harp had repeatedly told our story and was refusing to tell it anymore. “Does the chores and sets there drinking,” she said, “or staring off. Was up to see him yesterday, Mr. Dane—felt I should. Couple days they didn’t let him alone a minute, maybe now they’ve eased off some. He asked me real sharp, was you back yet. Well, I redd up his place, made some bread, least I could do.”

  When I told her I was going there, she prepared a basket while I sat in the kitchen and listened. “Some say she busted that window herself, jumped down, and run off in the snow, out of her mind. Any sense in that?”

  “Nope.”

  “And some claim she deserted him. Earlier. Which’d make you a liar. And they say whichever way it was, Harp’s made up this crazy story because he can’t stand the truth.” Her clever hands slapped sandwiches into shape. “They claim Harp got you to go along with it, they don’t say how.”

  “Hypnotized me, likely. Adelaide, it all happened the way Harp told it. I heard the thing too. If Harp is ready for the squirrels, so am I.”

  She stared hard, and sighed. She likes to talk, but her mill often shuts off suddenly, because of a quality of hers which I find good as well as rare: I mean that when she has no more to say she doesn’t go on talking.

  I got up to Ryder’s Ridge about suppertime. Bill Hastings was there. The road was plowed slick between the snow ridges, and I wondered how much of the litter of tracks and crumpled paper and spent cigarette packages had been left by sight-seers. Ground frost had not yet yielded to the mud season, which would soon make normal driving impossible for a few weeks. Bill let me in, with the look people wear for serious illness. But Harp heaved himself out of that armchair, not sick in body at least. “Ben, I heard him last night. Late.”

  “What direction?”

  “North.”

  “You hear it, Bill?” I set down the basket.

  My pint-size friend shook his head. “Wasn’t here.” I couldn’t guess how much Bill accepted of the tale.

  Harp said, “What’s the basket?—oh. Obliged. Adelaide’s a nice woman.” But his mind was remote. “It was north, Ben, a long way, but I think I know about where it would be. I wouldn’t’ve heard it except the night was so still, like everything had quieted for me. You know, they been adeviling me night and day. Robart, state cops, mess of smart little buggers from the papers. I couldn’t sleep, I stepped outside like I was called. Why, he might’ve been the other side of the stars, the sky so full of ’em and nothing stirring. Cold . . . You went to Boston, Ben?”

  “Yes. Waste of time. They want it to be something human anyhow, something that fits the books.”

  Whittling, Bill said neutrally, “Always a man for the books yourself, wasn’t you, Ben?”

  I had to agree. Harp asked, “Hadn’t no ideas?”

  “Just gave me back my own thoughts in their language. We have to find it, Harp. Of course some wouldn’t take it for true even if you had photographs.”

  Harp said, “Photographs be goddamned.”

  “I guess you got to go,” said Bill Hastings. “We been talking about it, Ben. Maybe I’d feel the same if it was me . . . I better be on my way or supper’ll be cold and the old woman raising hellfire.” He tossed his stick back in the woodbox.

  “Bill,” said Harp, “you won’t mind feeding the stock couple, three days?”

  “I don’t mind. Be up tomorrow.”

  “Do the same for you sometime. I wouldn’t want it mentioned anyplace.”

  “Harp, you know me better’n that. See you, Ben.”

  “Snow’s going fast,” said Harp when Bill had driven off. “Be in the woods a long time yet, though.”

  “You wouldn’t start this late.”

  He was at the window, his lean bulk shutting off much light from the time-seasoned kitchen where most of his indoor life had been passed. “Morning, early. Tonight I got to listen.”

  “Be needing sleep, I’d think.”

  “I don’t always get what I need,” said Harp.

  “I’ll bring my snowshoes. About six? And my carbine—I’m best with a gun I know.”

  He stared at me awhile. “All right, Ben. You understand, though, you might have to come back alone. I ain’t coming back till I get him, Ben. Not this time.”

  At sunup I found him with Ned and Jerry in the stable. He had lived eight or ten years with that team. He gave Ned’s neck a final pat as he turned to me and took up our conversation as if night had not intervened. “Not till I get him. Ben, I don’t want you drug into this ag’inst your inclination.”

  “Did you hear it again last night?”

  “I heard it. North.”

  The sun was at the point of rising when we left on our snowshoes, like morning ghosts ourselves. Harp strode ahead down the slope to the woods without haste, perhaps with some reluctance. Near the trees he halted, gazing to his right, where a red blaze was burning the edge of the sky curtain; I scolded myself for thinking that he was saying good-bye to the sun.

  The snow was crusted, sometimes slippery even for our web feet. We entered the woods along a tangle of tracks, including the fat tire marks of a snow scooter. “Guy from Lohman,” said Harp. “Hired the goddamn thing out to the state cops and hisself with it. Goes pootin’ around all over hell, fit to scare everything inside eight, ten miles.” He cut himself a fresh plug to last the morning. “I b’lieve the thing is a mite farther off than that. They’ll be messing around again today.” His fingers dug into my arm. “See how it is, don’t y’? They ain’t looking for what we are. Looking for a dead body to hang on to my neck. And if they was to find her the way I found—the way I found—”

  “Harp, you needn’t borrow trouble.”

  “I know how they think,” he said.
“Was I to walk down the road beyond Darkfield, they’d pick me up. They ain’t got me in shackles because they got no—no body, Ben. Nobody needs to tell me about the law. They got to have a body. Only reason they didn’t leave a man here overnight, they figure I can’t go nowhere. They think a man couldn’t travel in three, four foot of snow . . . Ben, I mean to find that thing and shoot it down . . . We better slant off thisaway.”

  He set out at a wide angle from those tracks, and we soon had them out of sight. On the firm crust our snowshoes left no mark. After a while we heard a grumble of motors far back, on the road. Harp chuckled viciously. “Bright and early like yesterday.” He stared back the way we had come. “They’ll never pick that up without dogs. That son of a bitch Robart did talk about borrying a hound somewhere, to sniff Leda’s clothes. More likely give ’em a sniff of mine, now.”

  We had already come so far that I didn’t know the way back. Harp would know it. He could never be lost in any woods, but I have no mental compass such as his. So I followed him blindly, not trying to memorize our trail. It was a region of uniform old growth, mostly hemlock, no recent lumbering, few landmarks. The monotony wore down native patience to a numbness, and our snowshoes left no more impression than our thoughts.

  An hour passed, or more; after that sound of motors faded. Now and then I heard the wind move peacefully overhead. Few bird calls, for most of our singers had not yet returned. “Been in this part before, Harp?”

  “Not with snow on the ground, not lately.” His voice was hushed and careful. “Summers. About a mile now, and the trees thin out some. Stretch of slash where they were taking out pine four, five years back and left everything a christly pile of shit like they always do.”

  No, Harp wouldn’t get lost here, but I was well lost, tired, sorry I had come. Would he turn back if I collapsed? I didn’t think he could, now, for any reason. My pack with blanket roll and provisions had become infernal. He had said we ought to have enough for three or four days. Only a few years earlier I had carried heavier camping loads than this without trouble, but now I was blown, a stitch beginning in my side. My wristwatch said only nine o’clock.