by Brad Ashlock
“What do you think it is?” Cal asked.
Naumkin got off the ATV. “How long were you down there gunning the engine?”
“I was just trying to get it out.
The chess master went to his haunches and reached between the left front wheel and the steering column. “I think it’s the spark plug. It might have gotten oil on it.” Naumkin grunted, then fell back, a spark plug in his hand. He examined it in the headlight beam. “The end is black. Get up, I have a spare under the seat.”
After Cal had gotten off the ATV, Naumkin pulled the seat off and withdrew a grimy sandwich bag full of bolts, screws, ratchet heads, and a spark plug. He took the bag around to the other side, and, as he went down to his haunches, noticed two red embers burning in the woods. The creepy feeling he had while pulling the ATV from the muck seemed to be confirmed: something was watching them. Naumkin fumbled for the correct wire, found it, and tried to jam the new spark plug in. It didn’t seem to fit. He looked again into the dark woods; there were more little embers. They blinked, swayed in pairs, and vanished only to reappear a little closer. Something from the black woods snickered.
Naumkin hadn’t even noticed that Cal had walked behind him. Calvin whispered, “There’s something out there.”
“I know,” Naumkin replied, still fumbling with the spark plug. “Go round to the other side and help me. Push on my hands. We’ve got to get this damn thing in.”
Cal rushed to the other side of the four-wheeler, reached under the steering column, found his chess teacher’s hands, and pressed down on them.
“It won’t snap in!” Cal groaned.
“It’s not in completely, but maybe it will stay.”
“What’s out there?”
Naumkin ignored Cal and turned the key. The engine sputtered as the snickering amplified and the little red coals got closer. Naumkin tapped the throttle with his thumb and the engine started, issuing a black puff of smoke. Cal snapped the seat back into place. They hopped onto the ATV just as five muscular black dogs broke from the brush, the only discernable features on their blocky heads a smile of white fangs and those preternatural red eyes. Naumkin leaned forward and pushed the throttle as far as he could. The headlight compressed the world into whatever was ten feet ahead: snow and dirt, white and brown, darkness beyond. The deep barking behind them faded and merged into the whistle of the trees bracketing the path. The vault of intertwined branches above them gave way to stars as they careened into the field, almost colliding into the electric company’s barbed wire fence. Naumkin braked and turned left, ramming the fence with the left rear tire. Both he and the boy looked back down the path.
“Just keep going!” Cal said.
Naumkin sped down to the sand hills, missed his trail, and had to back up to get on it. He never rode at night. The surroundings were surreal, like something out of an old German Expressionist film. The trail seemed narrower, the turns sharper, the trees more wicked. Where were they? In his panic, had Naumkin gone onto the wrong path, some mysterious trail that led to more of those hellhounds? Had he gone through an Everywhere Door and was now hopelessly lost in a shifting labyrinth? He couldn’t help glancing over his shoulder at every turn, not seeing much beyond darkness and the top of Cal’s helmet. At last he came to familiar territory: the makeshift bridge of planks. He slowed to cross it, went around the bend, and then sped up the winding trail to his yard. He parked in front of his house and they staggered inside.
“What kind of dogs were those?” Cal asked, wiping mud off his face with a washcloth over the kitchen sink.
“Rottweilers?”
“Their eyes were glowing red and they were laughing like hyenas.”
“They weren’t laughing,” Naumkin said, but he knew the boy was right, if only partially. Those dogs were laughing all right, but not like hyenas.
Cal said, “Their fur looked fake. Like black crepe hair.”
“We were so scared we don’t know what they looked like or how they sounded.”
“They say that millionaire who lost his granddaughter keeps attack dogs. He’s a crazy son of a bitch,” Cal said.
“His name is Gordon Dudley and those most certainly were not his dogs. He lets me take walks on his property. He’s a very nice man.”
Cal rinsed the rag. “That’s not,” he said tossing it into the sink, “what I heard.”
“What did you hear?”
“My father said he probably molested that little girl, so they had to get rid of her. My dad says he’s crazy. He gives all his money to some cult to prove the world is only five thousand years old.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
Cal shrugged.
I’m going to talk with Mr. Dudley tonight. Tell him about those dogs. I don’t want you to say anything to your parents about what happened. Not yet. Not until I talk to Mr. Dudley.”
“Yeah, OK, Mr. Naumkin.”
“After almost losing our skins together, you can call me Tigran.”
“Thanks, Cal said, “but I wouldn’t feel right about that.”
“OK, Calvin. Whatever you say.”
“Why don’t you just drop me off in Rogue. I’ll call my mom and have her pick me up. I won’t tell her I was even over here.”
Naumkin dropped the boy off by the payphones in front of the gas station where he had picked him up, but didn’t head homeward. Instead, he turned onto a side street that wound around a paper-mill to one of the steepest roads in Michigan. He put the station wagon into second gear and made his way up the sharp incline of icy, disintegrating macadam. At the top, he veered left; the road became dirt and wound into a patch of forest as dense and dark as the woods on the way to the stuck ATV. The private road through this part of the forest led to an imposing wrought iron gate set in brick. He pulled up to the speaker near the gate and rolled down his window. There was a little white button below the speaker. He pressed it and, looking out across the tundra to the distant mansion illuminated by raking spotlights from the lawn, waited.
The speaker crackled and a deep voice said, “Do you have an appointment?”
Naumkin leaned his head out the window. “I am Tigran Naumkin. I need to talk to Mr. Dudley. It’s about his daughter.”
The speaker clicked off and Naumkin leaned back in his seat, not sure if he was going to be let in or not. A few moments later, something electrical buzzed near the gate’s hinges, gears squealed, and the gate slowly swung ajar. Naumkin rolled past the gate as it closed behind his station wagon, automatically locking with a clunk. The yard was composed of gently rolling dips and rises, like a golf course, but white. Naked elms and maples, backlit by the same low spotlights that illuminated Lusker House, swayed around a frozen pond like drunkards. It began to snow. The mansion stood a quarter of a mile from the gate, a harsh angular building illuminated with even harsher spotlights sunk in the frozen ground around its foundations. The macadam looped around a large bronze fountain (its water was shut off) and forked left and right; to the left, it disappeared around the south side of the house, while the right led to a turn around where an SUV and a Hummer were parked.
Naumkin squeezed his car between the trucks and walked to the front door of the manor. The large porch was a half circle of green marble steps that led up to an oaken double-door inlaid with iron. It looked mediaeval, a dungeon entrance. Above the door, carved into the marble jamb, worn, shallow, and gathering snowflakes, was the word Lusker. Naumkin didn’t know the story behind that surname, or how this house became a pearl in the Dudley Chocolate Empire’s necklace, or he might have hesitated before ringing the bell. He heard three discordant notes chime, and in a few seconds, the double doors creaked open.
“Mr. Naumkin?” Naumkin heard the deep smooth voice behind the opening door before seeing the man who had said his name. “I’m Mr. Williams.” Mr. Williams stood nearly seven feet tall, sported a shortly cropped Afro, and had hands that could rend a flagpole into a pretzel. He wore a black turtleneck and a plum blazer and dress pants
; a gold cross on a thin chain gleamed between his muscular pecs. He reeked of designer cologne. “I handle Mr. Dudley’s security.”
“He must feel very safe.”
Mr. Williams ushered Naumkin into Lusker House. The air within was stuffy. It was too warm. Despite the size of the foyer, Naumkin felt suffocated. He wasn’t normally claustrophobic, but the staleness of the air, the ornamental rugs, and the quiet, so much like the quiet between the pines, all threatened to block his windpipe with dusty rococo filigrees that spread up the walls to grow in swanlike curves across the ceiling. Naumkin remembered the vault of intertwined branches over the pathway where the dogs had ambushed him and Cal not even an hour ago.
“Tigran Naumkin,” a voice boomed form the top of the staircase at the far end of the atrium. Naumkin recognized Gordon Dudley’s face from the recent articles in the newspapers. Dudley walked down the steps in black slippers, silk pajama bottoms, and a flowing kimono emblazoned with a jellyfish design. Twenty-five years ago, judging by his posture and arms, he must have been a military man, but now a roll of fat had encircled his middle. Gordon Dudley didn’t, however, walk like an out-of-shape frump toward Naumkin when he reached the end of the stairs; he marched up to the chess teacher with sure legs, piercing eyes, and an extended manicured hand. “How can I help you?” Dudley asked after he and Naumkin shook hands.
Naumkin looked to Mr. Williams and then back to Gordon Dudley. “I was in your woods about an hour ago. Remember those paw prints I told you about?”
“Yes.”
“I saw the dogs that made them.”
Dudley bit his lower lip and looked up to Mr. Williams. “You don’t say.”
“There’s a pack of them. Big and black. Bullmastiffs or Rottweilers. They tried to attack me, but I outran them on my ATV.”
“Mr. Williams,” Dudley said, “We’re going to have to do something about this problem. Tigran, where were the dogs?”
“By the electric company’s fence. Down that path that leads from the field to the power pylons.”
“Thank you, Tigran,” Dudley said.
Naumkin shrugged. “I don’t know if you quite understand me, Gordon. Um, your granddaughter. Could the dogs…”
“Oh,” Dudley noised, staring through Naumkin to the double doors behind him. “Yes.”
“The authorities should be notified,” Naumkin said. “Those dogs are killers.”
Dudley said, “We’ll do that. Call the DNR right now, Mr. Williams. And then I want you to go dog hunting before someone gets hurt.”
“Yes, sir,” Mr. Williams said. He turned and strode away.
Dudley trained his eyes back on the chess master. “Thank you for this information, Tigran. I wish we could have met under better circumstances.”
Naumkin nodded.
“Well, I’ll show you out.” Dudley ushered his guest to the double doors, opened one, and added, “Just let us handle all of this with the proper authorities. You’ve done far too much, already, Tigran. Stay out of those woods though, until we have a handle on this wild dog problem. I’ll give you a call.”
“You don’t think your granddaughter—”
“Oh, no,” Dudley said, his lips tightening into a little ‘o’. “It’s a terrible thought, but there would be evidence of an animal attack. Believe me, they would have found something. We had bloodhounds and a hundred experts combing those woods.”
Naumkin stepped out onto the green marble porch, and said “Strange.”
“Hmm?”
“Strange these dogs were never found in the first place.”
“Maybe they’re different dogs than the ones that circled your four-wheeler. It’s not unusual for abandoned farm dogs to go roaming, hunting deer and whatnot.”
Naumkin smiled, nodded, and headed back to his car. As he pulled out between the SUV and the Hummer, he caught the last sliver of suffocating light from the Lusker House disappear as Gordon Dudley shut the dungeon door. The gate was already open by the time he got to it, and immediately closed the moment he cleared it and was back on the dirt road. Heavy snow was falling now. The suffocating stillness of Lusker House seemed to shadow Naumkin and net the big white flakes in midair. He reached the edge of the steep hill and slowly descended it to the slippery Rogue roads below.
He reached home. Snow was clinging like molasses to the façade, and piled up on the roof like frosting on a gingerbread house. He kicked off his boots, went upstairs, and took a shower. He had to get that dusty Lusker atmosphere off his skin. After toweling himself pink, he pulled on some jogging pants, a tee shirt, and a thick pair of sweat socks. Still not feeling cozy enough, he pulled a gray U of M sweatshirt over his head and lay on the bed atop the thick comforter, crossed his ankles, and folded his hands together over his chest.
Yes, he supposed Gordon Dudley was right about those dogs not having anything to do with his granddaughter’s disappearance. They would have found some tattered clothing and scattered human remains somewhere. Moreover, what kind of dogs were they? Did their eyes really glow red or was it some kind of reflection from the ATV’s headlight? Cal, too, had noted the strange snickering sound the animals had made. Surely, those dogs were not laughing, could not really snicker. At least Naumkin hadn’t been the only one to hear those sounds, whatever they had been; Cal had heard them too—it wasn’t snickering, couldn’t be laughter, that was impossible… ridiculous. Well, if those mutts were laughing, they wouldn’t be for long once Mr. Williams went “dog hunting”.
Imagining the stylish Mr. Williams toting a gun in an Elmer Fudd hat made Naumkin smile. The image reminded him of Calvin Burgess’s father. He had promised the boy he’d call the man tonight. He rolled to the side of the bed, picked up the telephone receiver and dialed Cal’s number.
Cal’s mother, Tabby, answered. After the hellos, Naumkin asked to speak to Alec. There was a rustling noise, and then Cal’s father said hi.
“Cal called me today. He said you were going to stop having him come over for chess lessons.”
“He did?”
“Yes. He was upset.”
“Well, we’ve all been upset today. He shot a bullet through my saltwater aquarium this morning.”
“He mentioned that.”
“Yeah. Look, Tigran, he spends all day in his room reading chess books. None of his friends ever come over. I wonder if he even has any friends.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“I know he’s not coordinated like I was, not a natural athlete, and I know it was my idea he take chess lessons, but he knows the game now. It’s probably helped in school, too. There’s other things in life, though, Tigran. He needs to get out and do something. Be proactive.”
“Alec, your boy is a phenomenal chess player for his age. He loves the game, and I love having him as a student. I don’t mean to be butting in, but I’ve invested a lot of time in Cal—“
“Yeah, at twenty-bucks an hour.”
“You didn’t let me finish, Mr. Burgess. What I’m trying to say is he’s learning a lot more than just chess here.” Naumkin wanted to say he had spent a lot of time with Cal, and that he loved Cal like a son and nobody was going to take Cal away from him, not hellhounds and not even Cal’s own father. Nobody! He had already lost Jenny. Instead, he continued: “He is gaining knowledge in discipline, logic, and how to learn from losses. He is learning how to see ahead and develop plans. Let’s not throw all of that away, Alec.”
“Don’t you tell me how to raise my son!”
“Alec, I’m—“
“He’s not playing chess anymore, he’s gonna do things that normal sixth graders do and that is that. All he does is study chess and watch those goddamn gook kung fu movies. It’s done. Goodbye!”
Naumkin let the receiver fall into the phone cradle. He shook his head and slapped his thighs with his palms, sighing. He stood from the bed and went down the spiral staircase to the divan, the glass kidney-shaped table, and the notepad and the novel that rested upon it. He sat on the leather cushions
and read the list of terms: Dwight Browne = White Brown; Pinehill Cemetery = Pines; Browne’s bulldog = bullmastiffs’ Miller’s Field = the field; Sam Duncan = Gordon Dudley (?); Rose Kellem (Cort’s sweetheart) = anagram for Meeko Russell; Chief Silver Falcon = Albino’s Cane. It was like playing with a haunted crossword puzzle. He didn’t know what was stranger: the coincidences or him noticing and documenting them. The weirdest one, finding most other name Meeko Russell hidden in the name Rose Kellem, seemed to just leap at him when he read the fictional character’s name backwards. Why did he read the name backwards? His gaze had simply fluttered over the letters that way.
He opened the book, reexamined the underlined text until the tears in his eyes blurred everything. He threw Warpath across the room and buried his face in his hands. He cried because of Cal Burgess, he cried because of Meeko Russell, he cried because of his father, he cried because of the feral dogs and the pines and the odd millionaire and his odd security man and the horrible nightmares and he cried, he sobbed, he wept and wailed because…for Jenny. These woes combined and grew like different poisons into a noxious wave to smash him down and drag him out to oblivion.