The Pines

by Robert Dunbar

  Athena returned to the table, coffee spilling over the side of her trembling cup. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did anybody else want some?”

  “Another bounty was offered,” Steve droned on. “A few weeks later in Jackson Mills, several dogs were torn to pieces by ‘sort of a wildcat, four feet tall…long…grayish.’ Then things quiet down for a while, until—”

  “Oh, that’s enough! Let me see this.” Doris snatched the notebook from him. “Your handwriting stinks.” She glanced at the top page, then passed it to Athena.

  She skimmed the list of dates.

  1959: Wall Township, St. Trps arrest 30+ rifle-bearing “vigilantes” claim to be on track of creature.

  1960: St. Police quell panic in Dorothy, NJ. Set traps & patrol w/rifles. Same in Sims Place, Jenkins Neck.

  April 1966: Mullica River. Farm animals mangled and strewn about. Trps follow “humanlike” tracks deep into barrens before lose trail.

  “She’s right. Your handwriting is terrible. Is that all of it?”

  A jumble of papers spread across the table. “That’s about it, except for a couple dozen reports a year, mostly by vacationers.”

  “Reports?”

  “Just sightings mostly—of something that sounds a whole lot like Lon Chaney, Jr. Then there’s the poem of course.”

  “What poem?”

  He pointed. She flipped the notebook and read the scrawl on the back.

  When the moon stands over the cedars,

  And the waters are hidden by fog,

  Comes the cry of the witch’s child,

  And the Devil will rise from the bog.

  “I couldn’t think where I’d seen it before. Then it dawned on me—it’s from that damned painting at the diner. Uh”—he looked around—“did you put more coffee on?”

  “You say it comes in waves,” began Doris. “Does that mean there’s really a pattern? Let me see the dates again.” She scanned. “You realize there’s plenty of secondhand stuff, tracks, dead chickens, that sort of thing—even disappearances—but nothing you could really call evidence.”

  “You mean like an eyewitness report? Somebody left to talk about it afterwards? No, there isn’t. Somehow I don’t find that especially reassuring.”

  “Is it…God, I can’t even say it.” Athena put her cup down. “Is it a werewolf?”

  Doris shuffled papers in embarrassment. “Look at the dates. It goes back…two and a half centuries. Well,” she sighed, “we’ve certainly got enough books here. Let’s see, here’s a good one—cannibal clans on the Scottish moors. Check out the pictures. I crave that bearskin.”

  “I wasn’t sure what might be relevant to the case, so I just grabbed everything.”

  Athena had been holding her fists close to her body. Now she relaxed slightly, comforted by the professional sound of that: relevant to the case. Listening to their voices, she sipped coffee and watched Doris’s cigarette smoke fill the room.

  “This book’s about ghosts.”

  “Let me see that. I didn’t mean to bring that one. Must’ve picked it up by accident.”

  “Great chapter headings. Look, honey. ‘Haunted Places.’ Not houses, mind you. ‘Psychic Phenomena in America,’ ‘Poltergeist Activity and Pubescent Girls.’ Is this dirty, I hope?”

  Athena paged through volume after volume, her attention only partially focusing. Now that they were actually down to it, it all seemed so foolish, so fantastic. For over an hour, they all leafed through in relative silence, skimming indexes, peering at illustrations.

  “Here’s a good one,” said Doris. “Did you know you could tell a vampire by the smell?”

  “Matty’s asleep finally.” Pam wandered in. “Oh, are you still talking? What are you still talking about? Them pineys, I bet.”

  Athena opened another book. “Yes, we’re still talking.”

  “Oh well, I’ll just get some coffee and go in the other room then.” Pam poured herself an inch of coffee, then filled her cup with milk and sugar, stirring it slowly and with some apparent difficulty.

  Something thumped. Steve had opened a heavy tome. “I found this.” He turned to a marked passage. “The librarian told me the author was supposed to be a famous warlock. He claims that lycanthropy—that’s being a werewolf—that it’s…”

  Pam’s eyes opened very wide.

  “…kind of a ‘malevolent astral projection,’ what ever that means.” He kept his eyes on the page. “Apparently the person goes into a kind of trance, and his ‘animal soul’ is free to walk around.”

  “No mental projection tore those men apart,” Doris muttered.

  “He did it.” Pam dropped her cup. Quickly, milky coffee found its way into the cracks between the worn floorboards.

  “Pamela!”

  “Oh! Oh, I’ll get it, ’Thena.” She grabbed a cloth off the sink and began to sop up the mess. “And you just cleaned in here too.”

  “No, it’s all right.” She got out of her chair. “Just leave it. Pamela, I’ll get it.”

  Steve hadn’t taken any notice of the accident. “I don’t see why we’re assuming that what we’re looking for is a he.”

  “You saw the bodies,” said Doris. “No woman did that.”

  “I don’t know. When I was on the force in the city, I saw some pretty horrendous things.”

  “You’re forgetting the semen on the body. It’s a he.”

  “It’s an it,” said Athena.

  Rag in hand, Pam crouched over the wet spot on the floor, listening with her mouth open.

  “Yeah, I guess.” Doris nodded. “It. Makes you think of cavemen huddled around a fire, seeing eyes out there in the dark. What?”

  “No, it’s nothing. Just a dream I had. Pamela, if you don’t mind…”

  “You mean I have to leave? You’re kidding!”

  “Please.” Athena waited for her to exit, then turned back to the others. “Reading all this stuff, I don’t know, it’s just a feeling I get. I can’t explain. Did either of you look through this one? It talks about central Europe and the plague. Think of them—isolated people with death all around, barricading themselves in their huts to keep out disease and wolves and vampires. And then, like what you talked about before, Steve—immigrant workers huddled in the pines. Pretty similar. What ever it is, couldn’t they have brought it with them?”

  “You sound like an expert all of a sudden, honey.”

  “I guess without knowing it, I’ve been thinking about all this.” She stopped. “Without knowing it. But do you think it’s possible?”

  “You mean something congenital?” Doris considered it. “What’s that word again? Here it is—lycanthropy. Something in the genes maybe, waiting for the right combination…” They watched her mull it over. “Okay.” Taking a drag on her cigarette, she sat up straight. “Okay, I’m starting to put something together, just hypothetical. But how’s this sound? See that book there? The Indians of the north country are afraid of the bear men. In Europe in the Middle Ages, they had werewolves. What if it’s all the same thing? See what I mean, ’Thena? Steve? Where’s that article? Leopard men in Africa? Tiger people in Asia. We get identical legends in, look, China, Brazil, Hungary. Right? Always in blasted countryside, bleak mountains or swamps, barren ground. What if it’s the same creature?” They nodded hesitantly, trying to follow. “Not a bear or a tiger anyhow. But something so terrible that the locals always interpret it as the animal they most fear.”

  “And here?”

  “They called it the Devil.”

  He sighed. “That puts a hell of a dent on the whole idea of shape-shifters. It’s what I just read. Have you seen this?”

  “I glanced over it,” Doris responded.

  “It’s about people who believe they can be trans…transmogrified.”

  “Trans-who?”

  “Changed,” Athena put in quietly.

  “Could I see that?” Doris read in silence for a moment. “Of course, right down the page here, he completely contradicts himself. Thi
s bit—a man does something, something so horrid that he blames it on some monster or other he’s dreamed up. Right? Because he couldn’t have done it, obviously. Not a nice guy like him. Or else, if he did, he must’ve been changed into a beast somehow.” She laughed sourly. “In which case, they’d go out and look for a witch to burn. I tell you, they always find a way to stick it to the woman.” She tossed the book down. “Where’s that other thing I was looking at a minute ago?”

  “What?”

  “You know, about certain kinds of psychos who completely block out what they’ve done from themselves, so they really don’t even know they’re doing it. Steve? Steve, what’s the matter? You looked funny there for a minute.”

  “You know what? You know what?” From the doorway, Pam’s words poured in a rushing babble. “At my ma’s house, when my uncle Nim died, when I was just a little girl, one night I woke up, and I was real scared, and there he was, and he was just standing there, standing by my bed, and he had these real big eyes, and he just kept looking at me and looking at me. I was so scared. And his eyes was all strange like.”

  “How long have you been standing there?”

  “And then one time when I was fooling around with the wee-gee board and I asked if anyone was there, remember, ’Thena? You was here. And it spelled out…”

  The books lay in a disorderly heap. “So, is it a monster all the time?” Athena made her voice very loud, but her words barely got past the forlorn laugh that caught in her throat. “Or is it sometimes normal?”

  “C’mon now, honeychile,” Doris drawled. “Down home we all know the loup-garou looks human except during the full moon.”

  “It wasn’t a full moon when I saw it,” Athena told her.

  “And then, child, he’s all covered with hair, of course,” she went on. “But there’s one way to tell. Surefire. You only become a werewolf when one bites you. You catch it like rabies, and the bite never heals.” Pam drew closer, and Doris played straight to her. “And the wound is supposed to drip blood in the presence of the next person you’re going to kill.”

  “Do they kill everybody?” asked Pam in a small voice.

  Steve went to the sink where he began rinsing out cups.

  “Everybody except for witches.” Doris crumpled the empty cigarette pack.

  “You don’t have to do that, Steve.”

  “There’s supposed to be a strong sexual bond between witches and werewolves.” Doris winked. “I’ll just bet that’s a real howl.”

  After a moment, Pam recognized this as a joke and giggled uncontrollably.

  “That’s enough of this for one night.” Athena started gathering up the books and stacking them. “Pamela! If you could excuse us.” Her voice struck like steel, and Pam sulked out of the room.

  “So?” Stretching and yawning, Doris pushed away from the table. “How do we begin? Oh Christ, my leg fell asleep. Do we all get silver bullets or what?”

  “I figure we’ll use this house as a base of operations.” He returned to the table. “If that’s okay with Athena.”

  She nodded.

  “Of course, we can’t expect to find much in the way of evidence lying around in the woods,” he continued. “What with the state cops tramping about with dogs, and all that rain.”

  Doris peered at the map he’d brought. “If those campers you told us about were supposed to be all the way over h ere…and the fire tower is way the hell over this way…I don’t know but…could there be two of them?”

  “Why stop at two?” Athena made a grim sort of chuckling noise. “Perhaps the woods are full of them.”

  “I think it’s safe to say that the person or persons we’re looking for cover a great deal of ground. I’ll want to see the trailer,” he added. “After that, we should start questioning all the people around here. Someone may have heard or seen something. As of today, I’m on indefinite leave of absence, so I…I’ll…uh…have plenty of time.” He stammered at the sight of the gratitude on Athena’s face. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” Rising, he banged his knee on the table. “Both of you,” he added hastily, picking up a stack of books. “I want to get started right away. I’m going to take this stuff home and look through it some more. Unless you want them, Athena?”

  “I should get going too, honey, and let you get to bed. Big day tomorrow, apparently. Though I sure as hell ain’t going to sleep too good to night. C’mon, sport,” she called to Steve as she headed for the door. “You sure you’re all right, honey? Call me if you need anything. Have you got all the windows and everything locked? You’re sure?” She pushed the screen door open against thick darkness. “Steve? You following me to the highway?”

  “Good idea.” But he remained with Athena a moment and dropped his voice to a whisper. “About Barry…”

  “Don’t. Please. I don’t even know what I feel yet. I just can’t believe he’s gone. No, please, don’t say anything.”

  He took something out of his pocket and placed it on the table. “Belonged to my wife.” Then he hurried out the door.

  “Night, honey.” Doris’s voice drifted back through the dark.

  “Steven?” She could hear their footsteps fading on the gravel around the house, and she wanted to run after them but could only stare at the bracelet.

  It was an antique, quite lovely really, but not the sort of thing she could ever wear, she thought. Designed of interlocking grape leaves, it lay there on the table like a sprig of some strange, tarnished plant. Puzzled by the gift, she picked it up, wondering what Steve’s wife had been like.

  Her blood went ice.

  It was silver.

  He drove slowly, the taillights of Doris’s station wagon bright in his windshield.

  But his mind was on something faraway. And long ago.

  It could only be played at night, he remembered, and it had been a very popular game, especially with the bigger kids, especially with the boys. All the kids would gather around a lamppost to chose who’d be “It.” Then, talking in hushed whispers, those not chosen would go up a “safe” alleyway where—giggling nervously—they’d count to a hundred, then trickle out in quiet groups.

  And the game would begin.

  As deep shadows poured across the block, loose, fearful waves of children would sweep along the tree-walled street. At times, the quiet would be broken by a laugh that was almost a scream. They were hunting the “werewolf.”

  In memory, the maple trees always swayed and whispered, dropping enormous blots of shadow over the sidewalk. A child could enter those blots and vanish. Was it hiding behind that car? On that porch? Sometimes they would disperse in screaming flurries. Sometimes they would search alone. And soon would come the time when the werewolf crept up behind some kid, and that kid would become a werewolf too…but no one else would know.

  And that had been the beauty of the game.

  He took his sweating hands off the wheel, wiped them on his pants. His high beams picked out pines, holding them until they whipped past to merge with other ghostly shapes.

  When he was about nine years old, there had come a night when, all unknowing, he’d been the only kid left on the block who wasn’t a werewolf, when suddenly all the other children had turned and grinned….

  Doris honked her horn at him, the sand road having run out. She honked again, in farewell, then turned her car onto the asphalt. He stared a long time at her diminishing lights. The paved road surged away in front of him, hard and straight.

  Pam was finishing the doughnuts. “Anyways, you should see him, he’s real handsome,” she continued in a possessive whisper. “You know, real dark and tall. So Al rents him Lonny’s old room. You know? Overtop the gin mill?” She sucked the sugar off her fingers with smacking sounds. “Course I ain’t actually seen him myself yet. But I heard all about him and all. They say he’s real strange.”

  Not listening, Athena sat across the table from her, examining the bracelet, turning it over and over in her hands.

  “They say he was a cam
per, and he had a run-in with the dogs too. And his arm was all bleeding.” Her eyes shone. “Like it been bit.”

  Tuesday, August 11

  Wallowing in softness at the turns, the car crept along the shore road, while a radio voice, fuzzy with static, jabbered cheerfully on about the heat. Driving with one hand, Steve checked the map. Barely able to read the directions he’d scrawled in the margins, he decided Doris had been right about his handwriting. The flat sameness of the countryside became hypnotic. Pines drifted in the wind, coasted in the billowing grass.

  Finally, after cruising the same stretch of road three times, he stopped the car. This had to be it. The people back at the last general store had been very specific. Getting out, he stepped over a low guardrail and struggled up a sandy hillock. Panting, he stood at the top.

  Leeds Point. The name rang in his brain.

  Nothing much of the shack remained. Below him, a scruffy line of dunes hemmed the salt marsh. At the far edge of the marsh slumped the remains of a crude structure, just a few charred timbers scattered about the tilting remnant of a corner post.

  He stared down at it, the sea air stinging his eyes. Could this really be the original shack? It couldn’t be reached without a rowboat, he now saw: floating vegetation had hidden the dark water. It could be the one. Or it could just be some old hut the locals liked pointing out to tourists. Did it really matter? If the Leeds house did still exist somewhere, it would be in similar condition. He hadn’t expected to find anything here; yet he’d felt compelled to come.

  Below him, beyond the shack, beyond the marsh, sandy hillocks humped down to the sea, a grayly wavering band from which sunlight glinted in liquid fragments.

  “You okay, honey? You sound sort of groggy.”

  “The heat. And I didn’t sleep.”

  “After last night, who did?”

  “Hang on a second.” Athena set the phone down while she poured another cup of coffee. “No, I haven’t heard from him yet either, and I tried calling him again right after I talked to you the last time. I don’t understand it. A whole morning wasted.”