Torrie was about to say something to the effect of how silly that sounded when he saw his father nodding. “I made the … opposite guess years ago, when I saw a picture in one of Torrie’s schoolbooks. Your Neanderthals look awfully like unschooled Vestri,” Dad said. He stretched, painfully. “We had best divide the food, and then blow out the lantern. The fuel will not last forever, and they’re unlikely to replace it for us.” He took a sip from the clay bottle. “Fresh water,” he said.
Torrie had been planning on not sleeping, but there wasn’t anything else to do in the dark, after he had eaten enough to quell hunger pains and drunk enough to ease his thirst.
What he wanted to do was hold Maggie in the dark, but if the door suddenly opened, that wouldn’t square with the idea of them not getting along.
But what of it? He couldn’t make a break, even if the Sons decided that punishing Maggie for it was pointless—they would still have Mom.
Planning was pointless. All he could do was drive himself crazy. The right thing to do was what Uncle Hosea always said: when you don’t know what else to do, eat a meal if you’re hungry and sleep even if you’re not sleepy. He never knew quite when he slipped from lying silently in the quiet darkness into a sleep that was even quieter, and every bit as dark.
Chapter Nine
Town Council
The unofficial town council of Hardwood, North Dakota, was already in session in its usual meeting place, Doc Sherve’s living room, when Betsy Sherve led Jeff and Arnie Selmo in, Jeff constantly having to restrain himself from offering to help Arne on his crutches. Arnie had his pride.
Betsy excused herself with a silent smile and a reassuring nod, closing the door behind her.
“Evening, Jeff.” Michael Bjerke raised his head from his coffee and coffeecake. He glanced pointedly at Arnie, then raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips.
Jeff shook his head, then shrugged. By all rights, Arnie shouldn’t still be in the hospital in Grand Forks—he should be as dead as the Larson boys. But Arnie had insisted on coming home the way he had insisted on surviving the first few hours, today smilingly claiming that the intermittent questioning from a curious state trooper was starting to break him down, and had further insisted that Jeff bring him to the next meeting “over at Doc’s.”
Arnie exchanged handshakes with Doc and Reverend Oppegaard, both of whom rose to greet him, then walked to stand in front of the old maple rocker next to the overstuffed armchair where old Minnie Hansen sat, her reading glasses perched precariously at the end of her nose, seemingly absorbed in her needlepoint. Jeff always thought that a gray-haired old woman who habitually did needlepoint ought to dress the part, but Minnie was in her usual uniform of work shirt and jeans. The only time Jeff had seen her in a dress was at church.
Jeff nodded to Bob Aarsted, his father-in-law, although there was no need for small talk between the two of them; Jeff and Kathy had just had supper at the Aarsteds’ less than an hour before, and everything that needed to be said had been said then.
Aarsted and Michael Bjerke could have been cast as a Norski Laurel and Hardy, from the looks of them—Aarsted was all thick and round, while Bjerke was tall and saturnine, although they both sported the identical brush cut, complete with balding patch in the middle of their blond-going-to-gray hair.
“Sit down, Arne,” Bob Aarsted said. “Make yourself comfortable—you look like death warmed over.”
“And not all that much warmed over, either,” Mike Bjerke said.
“I came here to say something, and then I’ll leave and let the lot of you talk,” Arnie Selmo said, his voice more air than sound. “I… don’t know a lot or a little about what happened, but Davy says that young Torrie said that a silver bullet will kill these wolf-things, and I’ve heard Davy Hansen called a lot of things over the years, but never a liar, and if there’s anybody who doesn’t respect the Thorsens, why, you just let me know.
“Now … Torrie showed Davy where the tunnel comes out, even though Davy said that it disappeared in front of his eyes.
“Well, he’s marked where it disappeared from, and he and I are going to sit on that tunnel, like a wolf waiting for a gopher, except that we’ll be waiting for wolves.” He pulled a stack of bills, wrapped with a rubber band, from his pocket. “Davy collected these there; I don’t need no charity, anymore’n he does, so I’m turning it over to you.”
“That’s fine, Arnie. But is that all you’re here for?” Doc Sherve shook his head, as though to add: I doubt it.
Arnie scowled. “I didn’t say that was all. The two of us aren’t enough. We need at least two more, and I’d rather have six more—pairs would work better. I’ll take Orphie, and the midnight to eight shift. I don’t sleep that well at night, anyways.” His eyes went vague and distant for a moment, then he shook himself. “We’ll need somebody to partner with Davy, and I want two more pairs,” he said, his voice somehow that of a man younger than he was. “Arrange it.”
After all these years—even Jeff didn’t know how far back the unofficial meetings went—it wasn’t necessary to take a vote. From Minnie’s nod and Doc’s sigh, from the way Dave Oppegaard sat back and crossed his arms over his chest, and Bjerke and Aarsted each tsked, it was clear that there was a consensus.
Doc Sherve spoke for them all, as usual. “You want two pairs of men, at least, to report to you, say, at eight tomorrow morning. With guns?”
Arnie shook his head. “No. Without guns. We’ve got Thorsen’s Garands, and I’m going to bring Orphie’s BAR—and that’s what we’ll use, if we have to. And there’s going to be talk—I don’t want kids coming around, night or day.”
Bob Aarsted grunted. “I don’t see a problem doing it for a few days. But, hell, what if this goes on for weeks and nothing happens? We had enough trouble getting a crossing guard across Main Street on school days. It’ll be hard to keep that manned, particularly with two men per shift.”
“Think about it, Bob,” Jeff spoke up. “We’ve got a hole that werewolves pop out of and people we know disappear into—you want to leave that unguarded?”
“Well, now that you mention it, no, not particularly.”
Jeff frowned. “We could cut a road into the woods, and then back a cement truck up to it, and fill the damn thing up, but—forgetting that we hope our neighbors climb out of there—are you willing to bet that cement would stop werewolves?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Yeah,” Arnie said, “and you didn’t see me shoot two, three of them with deer slugs and watch the bastards shake it off, either. I want that hole guarded.”
“You’ve got it.” Doc Sherve nodded. “They’ll be there. Hell, I’ll take a shift, if I have to.”
“You do that.” Slowly, painfully, Arnie levered himself to his feet. “I’ll go have some coffee with Betsy, and let the rest of you talk.”
“Werewolves, demons, and magic.” Bob Aarsted shook his head. “If there were only two of you swearing to it, I think I’d be calling for a shrink, and not a meeting.” He looked at the door Arnie had closed behind himself when leaving.
“Well…” Doc Sherve said from around the stem of his pipe, “if you’ve got any doubts, we can ask Jeff to dig up the bodies we buried.” He puffed a few times, then took a long draw, and blew it out. “I don’t think the … woman got hair on her palms from playing with herself.” Doc tilted his head to one side. “I’d thought about taking pictures, but…”
“Well, I said if.” Bob Aarsted shrugged, dismissing the issue. Bob Aarsted prided himself on being a phlegmatic Norski, although the Aarsteds had been in Hardwood for at least four generations before him, and not one of them had been known to set foot back in the old country.
“How’s it going, Jeff?” Reverend—Dave—Oppegaard asked. Well into his seventies, the minister still had a booming baritone voice; Jeff not only remembered it from childhood but remembered his father waxing nostalgic about how it hadn’t changed since his childhood. It was hard to think of him as
Dave, even though that’s what he insisted on being called when he replaced his collar with a cable-knit sweater. With his large arms and broad chest, he looked more like a fisherman, but Jeff’s mind always saw him standing in the pulpit.
“Well enough, Dave,” he said.
“No.” Oppegaard frowned. “I didn’t mean ‘how are you?’—I meant, how is it going?”
“Oh.” Jeff poured himself a cup of hot coffee from the carafe on the table before he took his seat, sitting down more heavily than he had intended. It had been a long couple of days. “It’s pretty much settled, at least as far as the staties are concerned. Ole and the Larson boys were killed in a car accident, which the local authorities—that’s me—had mostly cleaned up by the time they were able to send out a unit. Rumors that they were out hunting wolves when that happened are just rumors. Accidents happen, and the deputy medical examiner’s”—Doc Sherve raised his coffee cup in a sarcastic toast—“certification will be just fine. On another, unrelated matter, a couple of stray dogs were shot outside of the Thorsens’ barn, trying to get at the chickens.” He shook his head. “Damn.” There were no nicer people in town than Jeff and Bobby Larson, and while he wouldn’t call Ole a nice man, he had been a good neighbor.
Jeff was trying to sound casual about it, although he was anything but. The carnage on the Thorsen lawn was the worst thing he had ever seen, ever since the time, a few summers ago, that he was working with old John Honistead, and they had to go out to the Olsen farm, and found Dan Olsen with half his head blown away by the shotgun still held in his hands.
Oppegaard shook his head. “I still can’t quite believe it. We always knew there was something strange about Hosea, but—wolves that can’t be killed? Silver bullets? Disappearing tunnels? And where is he, and that friend of Torrie’s? The last thing anybody saw was them walking into the Thorsen house.” He snorted. “Not exactly the sort of thing we learned how to deal with in seminary, even back, shortly before the Earth cooled, when I was a student.” He sat back and rapped his knuckles against his knee. “I… don’t know that we should keep quiet about this. I don’t know that I can.”
Aarsted shook his head. “What are you thinking of doing—calling Father Swenson in from Grand Forks to perform an exorcism?”
“I’m thinking about it.” Oppegaard’s lips were white. “Don’t think that hasn’t occurred to me.” He shook his head. “But it’s not that. This whole … thing could blow up in our faces. We could handle the Thorsens’ disappearance—but there are those two friends of Torrie’s. They’ve disappeared too.”
“Ian. Ian Silverstein and Maryanne Christensen.” Jeff nodded. “Nice folks; I had some beers with them over at the Dine-a-mite the other night. Ian isn’t a problem; he doesn’t have a family. It’s likely to be a long time before anybody comes looking for him.”
“Oh?” Mike Bjerke made a face. “I thought Jewish families were supposed to be close.”
“Oh?” Bob Aarsted raised an eyebrow. “And how many Jews do you know real well?”
“Well, there’s my dentist, in Grand Forks. Nice fella.”
“I was worried about that, too, Mike.” Jeff said to Bjerke, ignoring the by-play between Bjerke and his father-in-law. “There’s exceptions to everything. Oh, there may be a distant cousin or something like that, but the closest living relative is his father, and they haven’t spoken for some years. Father sounds like a real bastard, but he’s not a problem. Maryanne is—she comes from St. Louis, and her parents are probably used to hearing from her every couple of weeks. Figure a month, maximum, before they’re concerned.” He shrugged. “If they undisappear by then, we should be okay. If they never do, we have to come up with some sort of explanation.”
“Her poor parents …”
“Sa meget viljeg si til hansfordel at han er i grunnen et godt menneske,” Minnie Hansen murmured to herself, then reverted to English, “but what silliness.” She made a face. “I suppose they would be reassured if you told them what really happened, that the last time anybody saw her, a pack of werewolves were dropping her down a tunnel that now only goes down a few feet.” She sniffed.
“Be that as it may.” Doc Sherve pursed his thin lips. “I don’t see what the problem is. At some point, somebody comes to investigate. The kids took off in Torrie’s car, after a week of vacation; the two Thorsens and Hosea left in the Thorsen car for a long-planned driving trip, down through Mexico, we think, and nobody’s heard from any of them since.” His smile was forced. “I doubt anybody’s going to guess the truth.” He puffed on his pipe, then reached over to the coffee table and turned the little electrostatic air cleaner up higher. Its whining filled the silence, interrupted by Doc’s pipe puffing.
Mike Bjerke cleared his throat. “I’m more worried about the Larsons.” He pulled at his long chin. “I had a talk with Olav and Ruth,” he said. “They’re hurting, and they want some explanations that they’re just not going to get.”
“I’ll speak to them, if necessary,” Minnie said, her high voice with the Scandinavian lilt that all of the pretelevision generation had. “I taught both of them in school, and they’ll still listen to me.”
“What are you going to say?” Doc Sherve asked, passing a tired hand through his thinning hair. Doc had been tired for all of Jeff’s life. Even in the years when he had a partner, he still was on call half the nights, and most of those, four seasons a year, were interrupted by something, be it a birth or an injury.
“I’m going to say to them just what I’m going to say to you, again,” she said firmly. “That’s why people believe me—because unlike some people,” she said with a sniff in the direction of Dave Oppegaard, “I don’t tailor the sermon to the congregation. I’ll tell them everything I know, and that no good would come from making it public. I’ll say to them: do you want to turn this town into a circus? Do you want reporters from the National Enquisitor—”
“Enquirer,” Doc put in. The two of them had been genially correcting each other for more than a generation.
“—nosing about? Do you want teevee camera crews spread out across the Thorsens’ yard, interviewing everybody right and left about a werewolf attack? Do you want Thorian Thorsen’s background investigated, and then questions asked about how he could live among us so long without anybody talking about it? Do you want every secret this town holds to be investigated and held up for public scrutiny?” Her eyes locked on Jeff’s for a moment, then swung past.
No, he didn’t want every secret made public. Years ago, he and Bob Aarsted had quietly gone to Chicago to try to track down Kathy’s stepfather, but the bastard had long since disappeared. If he was still alive, Jeff didn’t want him knowing where Kathy was.
You can’t save the world, old John Honistead had said, when he had turned the badge over to Jeff, but you can preserve the peace of this part of it.
That was hardly the only secret, either. Nobody spoke about it, but everybody in the room knew what Ethel Holmstedt had done to that asshole she married, and nobody in the room was willing for that to come to light, either. Dick Holmstedt had officially died when he had fallen from his seat on the combine and into the threshing blades, and that was the way that was going to stand.
There were other secrets, as well.
“We take care of our own, here,” she said. “And if our men die protecting our own, well, they’ve done that before.” She drew herself up proudly. “My husband died on Makin Island, and my oldest son in the retreat from Chosin Reservoir, and right now I have a grandson sitting on a helicopter carrier off the coast of Somalia.” She looked down at her needlepoint, and with a muttered syllable or two began to pick out the stitches she had just put in. “My great-grandfather Gerhardsen,” she said quietly, “took his young wife from her home in Trondheim and settled in New Ulm in eighteen hundred and fifty-three. He lived through the massacre in eighteen sixty-two, and moved here a year later, and died of the flu in the winter of sixty-eight; my great-grandmother’s journal says he caught it d
ragging home a deer he had shot, to feed the family—to take care of his own. We take care of our own,” she said. “My husband and my son did that when they marched off to war, and Doctor Sherve, you and I and Eddie Flagstad did that back when we changed Johnny Thompson’s birthday to give him a higher draft number.”
Doc Sherve leaned forward as though to say something, but her glare silenced him. “And,” she went on, “did Davy Hansen ever complain about that? Even when only part of him came back from that horrible Vietnam place?” She shook her finger at the lot of them, and for a moment she was the teacher and Jeff her student again.
“We take care of our own,” she said, with quiet faith, and looked back to her knitting. “You do what you have to, all of it.”
“Yes, Minnie,” Doc said, and after a moment, Dave Oppegaard nodded.
Jeff sipped his coffee.
Chapter Ten
Mount Aeskja and a Bergenisse
Mountain climbing turned out, at least here and now, to be an anticlimax, Ian had decided. It mostly consisted of walking, up-slope. Far above, the peak was covered with snow and ringed by clouds, but here all they had to do was follow a path.
The idea, Hosea explained, was to take the path that led part way up and around the mountain, and then down. They certainly could have simply walked down the mountain and skirted it, but since they were already more than halfway up, this would be faster.
He didn’t know how many miles he walked or how far it was to their destination—Hosea wasn’t helpful on that, or much of anything else while they walked—and Ian couldn’t make a good guess. Ten miles? Thirty, maybe? How tall was this mountain, anyway, and how high would they have to go?
It wasn’t all bad. At one point, as the path dipped down the side of the mountain, it became a well-worn stone-inlaid trail, half as old as time. Raspberry brambles grew high alongside an impenetrable thorny jungle edged with tiny berries of such a dark red as to seem almost purple.
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