by Unknown
DOWN THE VALLEY WILD
Paul F. Olson
Paul F. Olson is a tall, friendly-looking fellow from Illinois who made his mark in publishing as the founder of Horrorstruck magazine—a popular periodical of essays, articles, and columns about the HDF genres. Published on a bi-monthly schedule, the magazine became a controlling factor in Paul’s existence, taking time away from his family and his own writing, and so it came to pass that Horrorstruck folded its mighty tents and went the way of the Great Auk. Paul has since written several novels and an ever-growing corpus of short stories, the most recent of which is “Down the Valley Wild,” a journey across the scarred landscapes of childhood, guilt, and the possibility of its expiation.
You ran screaming for your father, because there had been a terrible accident …
Very little had changed. The terrain was more weathered, the undergrowth wilder, the cabin sadly rundown—but it was still there, and nearly forty years had not altered any of it beyond recognition or repair.
Stewart arrived in the early afternoon. Of course there was no longer a family Jeep and he had not trusted his Mazda to negotiate the roads that linked the property to Highway 41, so he had parked at the Amoco in Patterson Falls and had asked the pump jockey, a man by the name of Larry Allison, to run him out in his pickup.
“Hey, I know that place,” Allison said. “Used to hunt out there when I was a kid. Ain’t nobody lived there long as I been alive. What, you buy it from the fambly or somethin’?”
Stewart shook his head. “I am the family. Name’s Don Stewart. The land and cabin belonged to my father. He died a few months ago.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Allison said, and Stewart nodded to show he appreciated the thought.
Now he used the tarnished key that had been in the lawyer’s envelope to unlock the front door. He hefted his suitcases and went inside, immediately staggering from the overpowering odors of age and decay. He gulped and blinked rapidly, but his eyes began to water and his stomach uttered a threatening groan.
There was no trace, no lingering evidence whatsoever, of his mother’s fanatical housekeeping or the slightly less effective but still dedicated cleaning his father had done after her death. Everything was coated with dust and a greasy, almost jellylike slime. Cobwebs dangled from the ceiling and decorated the few remaining sticks of furniture. Newspapers, which had once been tacked over the windows to combat sun fading, now lay on the floor, yellow and faded themselves. Rodent droppings were scattered across table tops and windowsills. A black and white photograph of two young boys with their arms around each other withered alongside a 1952 issue of Life on top of the woodstove.
Stewart swallowed hard and went in the rest of the way. It was going to take work—Jesus, was that an understatement—but it could be done. He figured that by tonight the place could be sleepable, in two or three days it would be livable, and by the end of his vacation it might actually be comfortable again.
He set the suitcases in the corner and returned to the edge of the road, where he and Allison had piled the things he’d purchased in town: cartons of food, boxes of cleaning supplies, mops and brooms and buckets. It took three trips to get everything into the cabin. After that, feeling old, Stewart forced himself to go out again for a quick tour.
The yard had been consumed by saplings and weeds.
A shame, but clearing it would have to wait for his next trip north. He had neither the proper equipment nor the ambition, and he knew that the cabin would keep him busy enough, thank you.
The woodlot to the east had succumbed to chaos as well. Deadfalls and scrub growth were everywhere. Windstorms had toppled the best of the older maples and ironwoods, while others were ravaged by age and disease. He would eventually need the chain saw he had put off buying, he supposed, for someday he’d have to come in here and salvage what he could. But luckily there was still some firewood already cut, split, and stacked under the overhang on the cabin’s eastern wall. Because of his father’s superior craftsmanship, the overhang was still weather and waterproof. Mostly, anyway. There was at least half a cord of ironwood that was nicely seasoned, unrotted.
He saved the worst of the tour for last, but finally could put it off no longer. He strolled around the back of the cabin, his hands jammed casually in his pockets, a strained but still lighthearted whistle on his lips. With his boyhood summer home squarely at his back, he ventured to the far southern edge of the property.
The ravine was still there.
Of course that was a bit like saying that the pyramids were still standing in the desert or that Niagara Falls was still roiling and rumbling. Ravines simply didn’t disappear. You didn’t have to be a geologist to know that they grew with time, but still … still … seeing those sloping, canyonlike walls for the first time in so very many years, laying eyes on the tangled thickets that ran downward into seeming oblivion … the very sight of those things made him forget about breathing for a moment or two and kicked his heart into a crude, jittery tap dance.
An image of the faded photograph in the cabin rose in his mind.
You ran screaming for your father. .
No.
It was too early. He would deal with it. Of course he would. Dealing with it had been one of the prime reasons (or to save a lie for a rainy day, the prime reason) that he had accepted the key from the lawyer in the first place. But not now, not yet.
You ran screaming—
He turned angrily and stomped back to the cabin, the gloom of the ravine and its quietly rustling trees shut off, closed off, blocked out of his thoughts.
For the first time he was grateful that such great untold quantities of work were waiting for him inside.
By nine that night Stewart felt that he could spend the night in the cabin without contracting a dread illness or falling prey to the March of the Marauding Mice. He had worked without a break until twilight, stopping then only long enough to fire up the woodstove, eat a quick sandwich, and down two beers. Then he had gone back to work, sticking with it until the mild complaints being offered by his body had progressed to grumbles, and from grumbles to an outright yammering bitch.
He closed the windows he had opened to air the place out and sat down by the stove with a package of Fritos and another beer. An hour ago it had begun to rain. The sound of it on the roof merged with the crackling snap of burning logs to bring back a flood of memories:
The time he and his father had driven to Conley Lake to go fishing and had somehow managed to overturn the rowboat not once but twice, the time he and Dale had rigged a high jump in the side yard, complete with a cross-pole made from a birch whippet and a landing area that consisted of rat-eaten mattresses from the county dump, the time Dale had challenged him to climb to the cabin roof and leap to the branches of the cedar tree seven feet away (little Donnie had accepted that challenge and had tumbled gracelessly to earth, fracturing his wrist and spending the remainder of the summer in an awkward, joy-spoiling cast) …
… the time when his mother had still been alive and all of them had driven into the Falls to attend a movie at the newly opened theater. The locals had called it a “picture house.” They saw a double feature with shorts, and they’d had a fine time—except, perhaps, when Dale stole all his popcorn and he had gotten in trouble for trying to snatch it back.
Memories could be a good thing, but too many memories (or the wrong kind of memories) were not. He told himself that it was for that reason more than any other he had tossed the photo of the two young boys into the woodstove first thing, before the old newspapers and magazines, before the kindling twigs, before the logs. Even still, picture or no, he seemed to have little control over the things that came to mind. They came, the good and the bad, at random, in bits and pieces, some cloudy, some clear, each demanding in its own quietly insistent way to be heard. He guessed he could have sat there by the stove for his entire vacation, listening to the fire and helplessly reflecting, letting in whatever might come (with one exception, of
course), and still not touch on half the things that lurked back there in those first eight years of his life.
That night he dreamed of Dale. Not Dale on the last day, but he and Dale high-jumping in the yard. He had been terrible at it. He had knocked the whippet from its supports every single time. But not Dale. Dale could fly. Dale would run and leap and sail upward, his body arched in a triumphant parabola, soaring. And then he would thud onto the pile of moldy mattresses and look up to ascertain that the pole was still in position, his grin dazzling, his eyes glistening and alive.
He awoke from that dream with the beginnings of a sob locked in his throat and the certainty that someone was tapping on the window next to the bed. He rolled over, expecting to see a gaggle of drunken teenagers, a lost camper, perhaps even a wilderness hobo.
But there was no one there. The tapping was just the sound of rain pattering on the glass.
Stewart sighed and lay down. Ten minutes later he was asleep again, tossing, muttering.
Dreaming.
On the third day he took a noontime break, laid down his scrub brush, and went out. The time had come. He knew that. He felt it, although it had not been a conscious decision. The idea had simply come to him, unbidden, almost as casually as a man might decide at one in the morning that it is time to get out of bed and make a sandwich.
He waded through the tidal sea of grass and stopped at the edge of the ravine, trying to remember where the path had been. He shuffled slowly back and forth along the edge of the slope, but finally abandoned the search and picked the clearest spot he could find to start down.
It was steeper than he remembered. He was forced to move from tree to tree, struggling to keep his balance. Brambles caught at his jeans. The gravelly soil beneath his boots gave way again and again. Several times, when there were no trees large enough to support his weight, he had to go it alone, slipping and skidding and sliding on the edge of disaster down to the next handhold.
It took nearly ten minutes to reach bottom. Once there he paused, gazing at the junglelike lay of the land. For the first time since Allison had dropped him off at the edge of the property he could hear the river, although it didn’t sound nearly as ferocious as it once had.
He supposed it had been a dry spring.
He forged ahead, moving cautiously into the heart of the ravine. The ground was booby-trapped with the hidden corpses of trees and frost-heaved rocks. Overhead branches groped for his face and snapped viciously as he passed, cutting him off from everything behind.
“Jesus.” he murmured, partially in surprise at just how wild the ravine had become, partially in response to the whole new rush of memories that cascaded over him as he moved along.
Good Lord, but they had spent the time down here. He and Dale, he and his father, Dale and his father, all three of them. Sometimes he would come alone, but not often; even in those days it had not been a good place for a child to play by himself, and little Donnie Stewart had never been a courageous sort of kid. So they had come together, inventing games of Jungle Scout, River Guide, African Explorer, and bizarre permutations of tag or hide-and-seek. Of course Dale always won. Whatever the game, Dale came out on top. But little Donnie, far from brave yet stubborn to a fault, had always gone back for more.
Their summer hideaway. Their summer playground.
The growth began to thin a little and he broke out at the edge of the river. It was as disappointing as he had guessed from the sound. Its banks were still rocky, still wide, but the flow of water couldn’t properly be called a river at all. It was, in fact, not much more than a muddy creek. He knew he hadn’t been looking forward to seeing it the way it had been that final summer, but still he felt a curious pang, an unaccountable frustration, a sense of being let down. It was as if he had traveled a great distance only to find—
He whirled suddenly, staring at the wall of trees behind him.
There had been a noise back there, a crisp snapping of branches and a slow dragging sound, as though someone was pulling something very heavy through the scrub.
He tried to remember if there had ever been any animals down here. There had, yes, but only squirrels, chipmunks, and the occasional jackrabbit. If there had been anything large enough to make a noise like that, they would have known about it, and they probably wouldn’t have played down here as often as they had.
Was it a bear, he wondered.
But whatever it was, it was gone now. There was nothing but the gentle sough of wind and the pitiful gurgle of the river. He listened a little longer and finally lifted his gaze to the sheer rock wall across the water. The sight chilled him. He was seized with a sense of pure, uncut sorrow more powerful than he had felt in years. Remorse he recognized. Guilt he knew well. But this … this was an agonizing sensation of burning loss. He felt as though someone had seared the inside of his chest with a blowtorch, making every heartbeat a weeping cry of pain, every breath a stinging jolt of misery. He shook his head slowly.
“I’m back, Dale,” he whispered. “I finally came back.”
He stayed there for a long time, staring at the wall. He wasn’t sure if he still wanted to keep the memory at bay or not, but it was too late for such distinctions. Choice was not a factor. Free will, if it had ever existed, was gone. The memory had arrived and there was no stopping it as it played itself over and over in a vivid loop. The game that had soured. Little Donnie’s anger rising. Dale on the edge and Dale going down. The mighty, almost mystical roaring of the river. It was very hot that summer, he remembered, but there had not been a dry spring, oh no, not that year, not by a long shot.
You ran screaming for your father.
Oh yes, you ran screaming, didn’t you? You wailed and wept and wet your pants and kept thinking it couldn’t be true. You wished it were you, wished you were the one and not Dale. You wanted to go back and do it again and have it all turn out differently, have the beginning and the ending magically alter themselves until—
Stewart left the riverbank, his steps quicker now that a path had been made. He was almost running, was running, as though the shadows and phantoms and wicked creatures thundering through his brain were actually things that could be left behind.
But they followed him.
And something else followed him, too.
He stumbled along, pushing branches aside, trampling the underbrush, making enough noise to completely smother the heavy dragging sound that dogged him like a nightmare from the past.
He drank a great deal of beer that night, fell asleep early, but awoke sometime later in the middle of a foggy, troubling dream. He sat up in bed, gulping air, rubbing his eyes, trying to rein in his wildly galloping senses.
The tapping was at the window again, only this time the night was dry, the sound not the whisper of black rain but something else. He looked out and saw the kind of darkness that was only possible in places like this, miles from civilization … except that this darkness was marred in the center by two distinct pinpoints of light.
Stewart blinked. The pinpoints didn’t waver. He drew a breath and fought back the irrational fear that was stirring within him. Those pinpoints, those dots of light—they were glowing eyes.
“Kids,” he muttered drunkenly, and struggled out of bed. He found his pants and pulled them on without bothering to zip them. He wobbled out into the main room and yanked open the back door, finally sobering a degree as the chill of the summer night struck his skin and made it tingle.
“Hey! You kids! You get outta here right now! This is private property!”
There was a brief silence, but then he heard the tapping again, still at the bedroom window around the corner from where he stood.
“I told you to get outta here! You’re trespassing, and I’ve got a gun inside.” That was a lie, but he didn’t intend to give the little sneaks a chance to find out.
The tapping continued, increased, grew louder. It was fast becoming a sound of angry insistence.
“Well, goddamn it.”
S
tewart went back inside to grab whatever weapon he could find. It took him awhile, but when he reemerged he was brandishing the scrub mop he had purchased in the Falls. He held it in both hands, like a bat, and stepped into the yard.
“You got one more chance!” he yelled, moving gingerly through the long and dewy grass. “I want you kids outta here—right now!”
The tapping had become a banging. It seemed impossible that the intruder would not break the glass. “You asked for it!”
He raised the mop and rounded the corner.
And then he stopped, the anger drying and dying within. In its place was an instant of stark confusion, followed by a dark, crawling sensation in the pit of his stomach.
Whoever had been at the window was running away, into the forest, but in the dark what he saw didn’t look anything like a kid. Actually, it looked only vaguely human, rather more like a gnarled woodland animal, its body pale and twisted. It scuttled into the underbrush on skinny, bowed legs, its arms swinging spastically, ape-like.
“What the hell … ?”
He put out a hand and steadied himself against the cabin wall. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. His mouth opened and closed in convulsive silence. He finally managed to force something out—”You stay away from here, damn it! Next time I’ll shoot you for a thief!”—but he felt ashamed even as he uttered it, well aware of the hollow force behind the words.
Then he began to tremble violently, uncontrollably, his body wracked with great, quaking sobs. He told himself he was shivering because of the unseasonable temperature, but he knew that wasn’t true. It was because of something else, oh yes, because of that moment just before the thing had scurried off into the wilderness, when it had turned toward him for one brief breath of a moment and he had seen its face. It was because of that, and it was because of the four words that had risen to his lips as he gazed at that face, the four words he had barely choked back in time.