We took a series of trails that led us around a gigantic mess of swamp. All you could see on one side were acres of reeds and tannin-saturated water the color of weak tea. This, said Wooly, is how the town got its name. This was the Hidden Lake. This particular swamp was the hidden lake in the woods, fed—like the rest of the Paumanok—by trillions of gallons of water from a vast underground river system that ran 50 feet below the surface.
“One night,” he said, “I just decided I’d had it. I couldn’t do this anymore. I kept a gun in the house, an old Beretta. Made sure it was loaded, said fuck it all and shoved the barrel in my mouth. Now maybe if I’d just rested the thing on my lips, things would’ve been different. But me, I’ve gotta do things all the way, you know? I shove the barrel all the way inside. Turns out the tooth I had back here, the molar? It was a bad tooth. I hit the thing with the gun and the pain shoots through every square inch of my skull. The pain was so bad—I’m screaming like I’ve never screamed before—I forgot all about killing myself.”
“I guess that’s some kind of miracle.”
“Yeah? Wait—I call my dentist. It’s like one in the morning. He says can it wait? I say get your ass down to your office and I’ll meet you there. I get in the car, start driving. I’m taking a road along the edge of the woods, I’m out maybe two minutes, the car dies. Middle of nowhere, I’m doing 30, 40 miles per, the car just drops dead on me. The engine cuts out, the headlights go off. I’m sitting there, the headlights go on again, then off, then on and off again, maybe three or four times all by themselves. Mind you, the next day, when I found the car again, I had it checked out. Nothing wrong with it. Engine, electrical system—not a thing wrong.”
“Okay.”
“So I get out, try to look under the hood, only it’s pitch fucking black I can’t see a thing. Just then I hear a woman crying. She’s like coming from the woods. I hear her crying, then she’s calling my name. She’s calling Wooly, Wooly Cornell. And I’m not hearing her in my head. She’s coming from out there. Definitely from the woods.
“I say, Who the fuck’re you? She says, ‘Do you want to keep going on like this? Do you want to keep doing it this way?’ I don’t know what the hell is going on. All of a sudden, these ghost lights, these clouds of fire, start rising up over the trees.”
“Ghost lights?”
“That’s what we call ‘em. People see ‘em out here all the time. Strange lights in the woods. Everything around you goes quiet. Bugs, crickets, animals—there’s no sound whatsoever. Far back as the 1600s there’s reports of lights in the woods.”
“Swamp gas.”
“Possibly, yeah—I know that. You got your plant life, animal matter decomposing in the marshes, it produces methane. And methane can ignite as it rises. But there could be more to it than that. The Algonquins, a lot of their burial grounds are still out here. That’s what some people think it is. They think the spirits of the dead are still in these woods.”
“Anyway.”
“Okay, I see these ghost lights, they’re rising from where this woman’s voice seems to be. So I start following her. What the hell. I go into the woods, I want to find out what this is all about. The woman keeps calling me, only slowly moving away from me. And the lights keep following her, deeper in to the woods. I keep following, I follow, I follow. I have to know what’s going on. How long this all took I have no idea, but eventually the lights brought me pretty much where we are right now. Incredible, right?”
“It’s still just swamp gas.”
“Maybe. But how do you explain the woman’s voice?”
“I’ll be polite and say I can’t.”
“And how do you explain what happened next? I’m wandering blind out here, scared out of my mind, but I want to know what this is. I’m walking just where we’re walking now, it all stops. The voice stops. The lights stop. It all just disappears. I’m standing here all by myself, lost who the fuck knows where, with no light but the moon. I figured this was it. I’d be lost out here forever. I was sure I was going to die.
“Then I see this light, right over there, through those bushes. It’s like a glowing, a fire. But it’s not a ghost light. It’s too close to the ground, it’s not up in the sky. So I head that way. C’mon.”
We left the trail and stumbled through a patch of thick brush.
“It was that tree,” he said, “that oak. You see that oak?”
He was pointing to an unpretentious, medium size oak maybe 20 feet tall.
“That oak was glowing like a Christmas tree. It was pulsing with lights, every square inch of it. I get a little closer, I see that thousands of fireflies are all over the thing. They were swarming on every branch, every frigging leaf. It was just amazing to see. And the silence. Complete, total silence. No crickets, no cicadas, no nothing. I thought I’d finally lost my mind.
“Then I take a step closer and, I don’t know, I guess I came too close. Whoosh. Like that”—snap—“the fireflies take off. The Christmas tree goes out. The whole thing goes black. All I can see now is something out there, past those bushes. Something shining in the moonlight, something big and round. I was right here, exactly right here when I saw it. It looked, I swear, like a giant bald head lit by the moon. So I make my way over there and—“
He grabbed my arm and pulled me through the rest of the brush.
“I make my way over here,” he said, parting the branches with his other hand, “and this is what I see.”
I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. A huge, big ass boulder was sitting squat in the middle of a clearing. It was maybe 25 feet long, 15 feet high, and had to weigh close to 100 tons. And it was resting not on the ground but on about a dozen smaller stones. The boulder was perfectly balanced—shit, impossibly balanced—on a ring of tiny, two-foot-high stones. I’d never seen anything like it. It looked for all the world like it had been carefully lowered from the sky.
“That night,” he said, “when I first saw it, you know, I didn’t know what the fuck I was looking at, but I’m standing here maybe 20 seconds, 30 seconds, not long, I start to feel this, this feeling of peace. I start to feel calm—something’s calming me down. I don’t know, but it was like I’d dropped a drug. It was like something was opening up in my bloodstream and calming me down. I didn’t know what was happening—and after all the shit that’d gone down, shit, anything was possible—but something was happening. Something got me down deep, and the longer I stood here the deeper it took me. I think it was—how can I put this?—I think it was bliss. You know, follow your fucking bliss? Only there was nothing to follow here. This was it.”
We moved closer to the boulder, walking around it, taking the whole thing in.
“Every time I come out here,” he said, “same thing. There’s something about this rock, this place. You know, you go back again, you look at the history of this area, the Algonquins believed there were sacred sites in the woods. They believed there were certain places where the powers of the earth all focused and came together. I think this is one of those places. I think there’s a kind of ancientry here, you know? There’s a force here that flows from some ancient source. Can you feel it?”
Funny thing was, I could. I could feel a definite pull on my mind, a soft, hypnotic tugging. He was right—there almost was a drug feel to it, almost like some geomagnetic opiate was being carried through the air.
“What is this thing?”
“It’s what you call a dolmen,” said Wooly. “What it is, actually, was a tomb. They’ve been found in the British Isles—Ireland, Scotland, the like. Also in parts of Asia and the Middle East. The space under there, between the capstone and the base stones? That’s where the bodies were kept.”
I kept looking at the precise, the almost mathematical way the boulder was perched on those smaller stones. It looked like an elephant with a dozen stumps for legs.
“How did it get up there?”
“Well, that’s the question. First I was thinking it was from the glaciers, the g
laciers that formed the whole of Long Island. They carried the rock along from wherever, and once they melted, the rock just happened to be left resting on the base stones.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“Sure it does, except for one thing.”
He moved a few feet and pointed to a pair of base stones.
“You see there? One winter I noticed the sun falling directly between these two stones. Happened only for a day. And the day happened to be December 21, the winter solstice, the sun at its lowest point. Same thing with these two stones over here. On June 21, on the fucking summer solstice? The light’ll fall straight between them.”
“So no coincidence?”
“Not to me. To me, these stones were placed here in a careful, planned-out arrangement, like for a ritual or something. Now don’t ask me how they got the capstone up there—I haven’t the slightest. But you take the placement of the base stones and add in everything that goes on here, it proves this was a sacred site. Other people felt the power of this place. It means I’m not alone.”
I looked around. The woods were silent now, and the bushes seemed to be trembling with light, like a curtain blowing in the sun. I didn’t feel like I was dreaming—it was more like life was dreaming me. My feet were on the ground but my body was floating free, released from time, and this day could’ve been a day from three years ago or a day from three years ahead.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
CHAPTER 2
IT’S LIKE THE BIG BANG NEVER HAPPENED
>>FRIDAY JUNE 15 (6 days to go)
FRIDAY JUNE 15, 10 a.m.
SIGHT SO SHARP IT WAS BURNING THE AIR
I found a room in town, at the Hidden Lake Hotel. They told me I was lucky—I’d made it in before the weekend crush. Wooly had given me Georgiana Copely’s number. I called from the room. A man picked up, said he was Ms. Copely’s assistant. I told him who I was, I’m doing a story on Wooly Cornell and I’d like to interview Ms. C. He said 10 would be fine but it couldn’t go on forever. She had to be out for an 11:30 appointment.
Georgiana lived in the same wealthy part of town that Wooly did, also in a house built on the border of the woods. Only you couldn’t see hers from the road. You had to pull into a concealed driveway camouflaged by bushes and trees. Then you came to a massive Colonial that had to have been standing unchanged for generations. Everything about it—the double chimneys at each corner, the thick dark molding, the regal isolation, even the vintage Jaguar XKE parked by the side—said Classic.
A bed of dahlias had been planted in front of the porch—all white except for one red flower in the middle. A rogue red seed.
An Asian man who identified himself as Marco Sung answered the polished copper doorbell. He was tall and bony, with looping dark bags under his eyes. Like any good photographer’s assistant, he was dressed all in black.
The foyer was heavy, all mahogany panels and each one hand carved in designs so intricate and complex they were impossible to follow. It was like a museum of gloom. When Marco led me into the living room I was half expecting to see a casket laid out in the middle.
Not so. The room was open-air clean and filled with sunlight, as bright as an atrium. Georgiana’s photos were gallery-hung on all four walls. They were all like the one Wooly owned—blurs of birch and moss, pearlized lichen patterns, individual time/space warps created by some alchemical amalgam of forest mist.
“Pretty incredible,” I said.
Marco nodded—well of course. “She had a photography career before she lost her sight. Decent material, nothing outstanding. Then she began producing these. She’s always said, my blindness gave me the courage to fail.”
“It freed her up.”
“It enabled her to grasp forms in a new way, grasp the world in a different way. The trick, she always says, is to capture nothing that isn’t there, and the nothing that is there.”
I stood before a photo—smoky flower shapes, as murky as if they’d been shot underwater, almost too impressionistic to be real. The flower forms reminded me of something.
“The dahlias out front. Did you plant them?”
Marco, who’d been very accommodating up to now, suddenly wasn’t. “Yes?”
“The red one fascinates me. Was it intentional, or a mistake?”
“The dahlias,” he said firmly, “are no one’s business.”
Okay…
He walked over to another photo. “Do you know what the tragedy of her work is?”
“The tragedy?”
“She’ll never be able to see it. People tell her it’s beautiful—she can never see how beautiful it is.”
“How does she work? How does she actually do this?”
“By feel.”
The voice came from behind. I turned to see an attractive middle-age woman with prematurely white hair that reached down to her shoulders. She was wearing a pair of faded overalls and had the soft straight-ahead stare of unseeing eyes. Her hair was fluffy yet stringy, like cotton balls had been growing out of her scalp and somebody had clawed at them until they stretched to her shoulders.
“I can feel the light. I have a very powerful feeling for light. I move the camera around until I can feel the light at its strongest. That’s when I know I have a shot.”
Marco told her I was Quinn McShane.
“And you’re a journalist?” she said. It wasn’t quite an accusation.
“That’s me.”
“We can talk in the study. Marco, I think we’ll be fine.”
“Just remember, we have an 11:30.”
I’ve interviewed people in all kinds of places, drug houses lit by candlelight, gone-bust shacks with no electricity. Doesn’t matter—I’ve never worked a room as dark as Georgiana Copely’s study. All the blinds were drawn, all the windows shuddered against sunlight. She sat at a desk lit by a stained-glass lamp that gave off as much light as an aquarium tank. As my pupils dilated she slowly seemed to materialize again.
“So,” she said, “a story on Wooly Cornell.” Her tone: Artic indifference.
“A story on Wooly.”
“About?”
“He’s been having some troubles.”
“I’m sorry, I assumed you were investigating him.”
“Just trying to tell a story. I know there’s been a touch of hostility between you.”
“Not my fault,” said Georgiana. “He’s a pig. He overstepped the line between collector and pain in the ass. He turned greedy and obnoxious and I told him off.”
“Any interest in revenge?”
“Not particularly. He’s got to live with himself, which in and of itself is punishment enough.”
“Apparently not. Somebody’s fired shots at him twice.”
“And missed? Pity.”
“Cold.”
“So you’re here because I told him he was going to die.”
“Not something you hear every day.”
“And you think, what? I hired someone to make the prediction come to pass?”
“I’m not thinking it. I’m asking it.”
“I wouldn’t waste my money.”
I shifted in my seat, angling for a better position. “Why did you tell him he was going to die?”
“I told him what I saw.”
“Through one of your…”
“You can call them visions. It’s not offensive.”
“These visions, are they related to your photography? They have anything to do with the feel of light?”
Georgiana paused, looking at my voice. “I’m not sure. I know they didn’t start when I lost my sight. They started after.”
“How?”
Long silence.
“After the death of my son,” she said. “He was being taken to school. There was a collision, an auto accident…”
“How old was he?”
“Six.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Do you have children?”
“I have a daughter.”
“Then maybe
you can understand. Maybe you can begin to grasp the grief, the pain. I thought I was going to lose my mind. And maybe I did. At the funeral, I’d placed a photo of him next to the coffin. During the mass, I thought I could see something. I thought I could see an aura of light coming from where I knew his photograph was.”
“You could feel it?”
“I could see it. It was just on the periphery of my visual field, just a halo of smoke. And no matter how I turned my head the image wouldn’t go away. I thought it was a form of grief-hysteria, some optical pathology. But after a few days it went away. And that’s when the visions began. That day, that’s when they started. Sudden eruptions. Sudden explosions of images or memories. Bleed-throughs, they’re called.”
“Memories? The past and the future?”
“I have no control over what I see. In my work I do. In the visions, no.”
“So what you told Wooly, you didn’t will it.”
“In his case, I wish I had. I’ve never met a more disgusting human being in my life. I’ll buy another photo if you give me another tip? The balls to say that! He’s a fat, disgusting bastard. Even a blind person can see the bile stains on his soul.”
“Maybe there’re things about him you don’t know.”
“Why the hell would I want to? He’s a fat, smelly, despicable bastard. Trying to buy me off? Like I’m a whore? If I want to know anything about him I’ll read it in his obitu—.”
And then it happened. As those last words were leaving her mouth the whole right side of her body began to spasm and jerk. Her cheek, shoulder, arm—everything was rippling with convulsions. The terror in her eyes was completely out of control. She looked like someone who’d just been pushed out of a plane 15,000 feet above the ground.
I jumped up—I had no idea what the fuck was going on. She reached out and grabbed the desk to hold herself up. Her mouth was moving like she was trying to form words but nothing was coming out. I half-turned to call Marco. She was having an epileptic fit or a heart attack. Her long white hair was shaking like a mop and the veins on her forehead were about to blow apart from dilation.
The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams Page 3