“Only by a year, though you’d think it was more, wouldn’t you?” Ben said. “We’re thinking about putting a bar in here. The light’s stunning at sunset. A great view for cocktail hour.”
Father Caleb walked to one of the middle windows and peered through its runny glass to the world outside.
“Do you believe in ghosts, Mr. Tierney?” the priest asked him.
Ben took a moment to make sure he’d heard him right. “I don’t.”
“Good,” Father Caleb said. “Because, from what I understand, the Swanns were teetotalers. And the last thing you need is ten generations of them haunting you.”
“Teetotalers.” Ben shook his head. “How did they survive the winters?”
“It’s a beautiful room,” Father Caleb said. “Amazing ceilings.”
“So you know something about the Swanns?” Ben asked. “I don’t know much myself.”
“The Crofts has a lot of history. I’m surprised that no one told you about it. Not even the realtor?”
“I’m not sure the guy handling the sale had even seen the place before I called him about it. I’d love to hear whatever you can tell me,” Ben said.
“Well, I’m not originally from around here, and the folks in Swannhaven mostly keep to themselves—”
“I’ve noticed,” Ben said.
“—but this place has always fascinated me. Did you know that a member of the Swann family lived here for nearly three hundred years, until just two winters ago?”
“I can’t imagine many other places can make the same boast.”
“Not in this hemisphere. They say the first foundations were set in the 1720s. The Swanns were one of the first families to travel this far into the interior. Some others had settled on the valley floor, but Aldrich Swann set his homestead up here on the Drop. He and his sons cleared the forest and planted their fields. The other families thought he was crazy at the time. They didn’t see why a person would climb a mountain to knock down a forest when a whole new continent stretched ahead of them. But he said that he’d seen the place in a dream,” the priest said.
“They say the Drop made good farmland,” Ben said.
“The best in the county, maybe the best in the state. Within a generation, the Swanns were rich. When the village was incorporated in the 1740s, it’s no coincidence that it was named after the family.”
“I guess you’d have to be awfully rich to build a place like this,” Ben said. “I just wish they’d been rich enough to keep it up.”
“By all accounts, the Swanns only got richer in the nineteenth century. They helped build a railroad that ran through this valley, connecting the freight yards of New York to the North Country. Those were the boom years. I imagine that’s how they could afford to expand the Crofts.” He pointed to the ceiling, where the vestiges of once-grand chandeliers were still visible. “An old family with the purse strings of a robber baron.”
“A family like that must have had some real characters,” Ben said. He was practiced at drawing stories out of people, and the priest was a teacher. Teachers liked to talk as much as writers liked to listen.
“A mixed lot, I’m sure—like all families.” The priest smiled at Ben. “I have to admit, I was hoping you’d know more about them, that maybe you’d found something of theirs? A journal or diary, or even old photos?”
“There are some portraits that I’d be happy to show you, and I found an old Bible in the basement.”
“I’d love to see it sometime.”
“Of course. It’d be good to learn something about it,” Ben said.
“It’s a big house, so maybe something else will turn up. If it does, you should take care of it. When people are gone, all we have left are the things they leave behind. Given enough time, almost anything can be forgotten. Such a shame,” the priest said. “I’m sure the villagers will know more. Of course, getting them to talk to you will be another matter.”
Ben was about to ask what he meant, when Father Caleb turned to the door. Ben followed the priest’s gaze to the doorway, where his son stood in khakis and a light-blue polo shirt.
—
The interview went well. Charlie was polite if distant. The three of them walked around the house and into the northern fields as Charlie answered the priest’s questions. Jake Bishop had mowed some of the farther fields. What remained of the stalks crackled underfoot. After thirty minutes, Charlie was dismissed and Ben was alone again with the priest.
“A fine boy,” Father Caleb said.
“Thank you.”
“Quiet and thoughtful. Rare qualities for someone of any age. He spends a lot of time alone?”
“He plays on his own most of the time. No neighbors, you know. Why?” Ben allowed a hint of defensiveness to enter his voice.
Father Caleb was silent for a moment. “It’ll be good for him to be with boys his own age.”
They had reached the edge of the most northeasterly fields, within the shadow of the forest. Ben had been here only a few times. The wind carried a musty smell. He was ready to head back to the Crofts, but the priest made no move to turn around. Ben turned to watch Charlie running past the house, toward the lake. Loping strides and pumping arms. Running as if the world hung in the balance.
“He loves the forest,” Ben said.
“We can all find inspiration in nature’s miracles,” Father Caleb said.
Ben nodded. “It’s a nice change from the city. The land feels so old here. Some of the trees by the mountains must have been here for centuries. Sometimes in the mornings, when the fog crawls up from the valley, it feels almost Jurassic.”
The grass was stunted here and studded with bursts of starflowers. The woods stank of something—stagnant water or the putrid scent of a plant that Ben couldn’t identify.
“The Drop has gotten under your skin, Mr. Tierney,” the priest said. Ben could tell that the priest wanted to tell him something, but he was a man who took his time. “How are you getting on with the villagers?”
“You can call me Ben, Father.”
“And you can call me Cal,” the priest said. “Just not in front of the boys.”
Ben nodded. “Some of the villagers have gone out of their way to help us feel welcome. Others…Are you familiar with the expression ‘they wouldn’t piss on me if I were on fire’?”
The priest laughed, a throaty sound that rang across the field and rebounded from the trees.
“I first came up here in ’82,” Cal said. He sniffed at the air, wrinkling his nose at the reek from the forest. “Smells like something died,” he said before continuing. “It was a difficult year—maybe as tough as this year will be. Inflation and high gas prices coincided with a disease that cut down most of the milk herds. Before Thanksgiving, the wealthier parishes took up a collection to give away frozen turkeys in needier communities. Swannhaven was the only town to reject our help. And it’s one of the poorest towns in a very poor county. We even gave away a dozen in rich towns like Exton and Greystone Lake. It made me curious. I wondered what kind of place it was where people wouldn’t accept a gift as simple as meat for their Thanksgiving table.”
“Farmers are proud people,” Ben said. He thought of his encounter with Hank Seward yesterday.
“That’s what I thought at first,” Cal said. “So, of course, I redoubled my efforts. Christmas was coming up, celebrated around the world as the season when one can most easily get away with being a meddlesome priest. We had a great boys’ choir back then, so I set up a free concert in the church in the valley.”
“And no one showed up?”
“The concert never happened. By seven-thirty a handful of villagers had assembled, children mostly. They were thin as ghosts and half as haunted. Then, a few minutes before showtime, a man ran in to the church, wild with either horror or excitement. The Crofts was on fire. Of course, we all ran outside. The night was windless but unbearably cold. Between the mountains, there was a cloud of smoke hovering above the Crofts, tinted orange by the light of the f
ire below. I later heard people remark that they saw a pillar of flame billowing toward the sky”—the priest waved his hand above his head—“as if it were something from the Old Testament.”
“Anyone get hurt?”
Cal cleared his throat. “Two of the Swann boys died in the fire.”
“I thought the two sisters were childless,” Ben said.
“The boys were their nephews. Their parents had died in a car accident years earlier, and the sisters cared for them. One of the boys was in his teens, and I believe the other was even younger.”
“Terrible,” Ben said. The night he’d spent thinking that Charlie had been taken from him was the worst of his life.
“The sisters had taken in foster children, and it was one of them who’d set the fire. A firebug from day one, apparently. There was an investigation, a trial, and the boy was taken away.”
“Taken where?”
“Juvenile detention or some such place, I assume. Suffice it to say, this fire further piqued my curiosity about the town. I saw the looks on the faces of the villagers when it happened, and it just didn’t feel quite right. I tried to find out more about the town and the Crofts. It had gotten under my skin, too—the way it sits between the mountains like a medieval castle. But small-town folk know how to keep to themselves. Their ranks grew even tighter after the fire. Even the county road closed for a few days. They said something about bad ice conditions, but the roads everywhere else were fine. Once it reopened, I tried to reschedule the concert, but they shut me out.” The priest shook his head and looked at Ben.
“Is that all?” Ben asked.
“I assure you that, in my line of work, I don’t encounter that behavior in people often, to say nothing of experiencing it uniformly across an entire community.”
Ben nodded but felt dissatisfied. The priest’s story was all dénouement. He raised his nose to the air. The stink from the forest had become too strong to ignore.
“That smell is really something,” the priest said. What had begun as an unpleasant scent carried on the breeze was now a thick, oppressive stench.
“Might be stagnant water,” Ben said, but he knew what it really was. On the opposite side of his property, the same smell had come from the hole where he’d buried the remains of the mutilated deer. He peered into the dark wood as sweat pricked across his arms and forehead. His body wanted him to run for clean air, but Ben forded deeper into the smell.
“Probably,” Cal said. He didn’t sound any more convinced than Ben did.
Ben bent back a thatch of undergrowth and stepped under the forest’s canopy. The sunlight-starved ground under the trees was soft with the last year’s pine needles. “You don’t have to come with me,” Ben told the priest. He pulled up the collar of his shirt to cover his nose.
But the priest fell into step behind him, and Ben was glad for the company. They walked deeper into the terrible smell. Hudson would have known which way to go, but the stink had overwhelmed Ben’s olfactory senses. Every direction seemed equally unbearable, and he began to breathe from his mouth.
His eyes and ears helped where his nose couldn’t. The humming clouds of insects ahead blurred the air with their vast numbers.
The trench of a ravine or seasonal stream was ahead, and they climbed over the sprawling root system of a huge oak tree situated on its lip. It hadn’t felt as if they’d walked far, but they were right up against the foot of the mountain.
The incredible number of flies made it difficult for Ben to understand what he was seeing. There were bones in the ravine. Dead animals, Ben guessed from the varying sizes of the remains. Stark white rib cages arced from the ground, some still draped with graying sinew.
Ben picked up a rock and pitched it into the ravine. Upon contact, there was a wet sound that made his stomach lurch. The insects momentarily relinquished their stake and diffused into the air in a pulse of movement. This sent the trees above him trembling, and Ben looked up to see the branches lined with hundreds of crows, silently watching him with their empty eyes.
“Looks like deer, mostly,” Cal said.
Ben counted at least five large and separate rib cages. The ground beneath them writhed with maggots. Some of the bones were clean, others coated with torn flesh and gristle. It was a pit fresh from a Brueghelian hell.
“Maybe they fell into the ravine, broke their legs, and couldn’t get out,” Ben said. His voice was muffled from the sleeve he’d pressed over his face. The drop into the ravine was severe, and the bottom was littered with boulders. He could imagine a herd of the animals losing their footing in the dark of night.
“But there are smaller animals, too,” the priest said. He pointed to a pile of rodent-like skulls along the rocky ledge.
Raccoons or opossums, Ben guessed.
“There are coyotes in the forest,” Ben said.
“Coyotes don’t gather their prey like this,” Cal said. “And I doubt they’d have the strength to move a full-grown deer. Though the coyotes around here are bigger than they used to be. There’s a theory that they traveled through Canada, breeding with wolves along the way before recolonizing the East Coast,” Cal said.
“Interesting,” Ben said. He hoped the priest had a Wikipedia entry’s worth of information about coyotes. Anything to distract some of his attention from the grisly scene in front of him. Anything to postpone the obvious questions.
“Let’s go,” Ben said, turning his back on the pit of horrors. He got no argument from the priest.
Ben restrained himself from running out of the woods. He held his breath when he saw the tree line, promising himself that his first inhale would be of the sweet air of the living world.
Father Cal trudged out of the undergrowth a moment later, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. The Crofts was silhouetted against the verdant slopes of the mountains, and they gathered their breath, watching the fields ripple around the motionless house.
“That was appalling,” Cal said after a few moments. “Why don’t you seem more horrified?”
“I found a mutilated deer two weeks ago. At first I thought it was a bear or something, but…” Ben shook off the memory of those black eyes staring at him. “I think some of the locals are having fun with us.”
“You think that the villagers filled up that ravine with dead animals? Why would they leave the creatures’ bodies so far from the Crofts? If they wanted to harass you, wouldn’t they put them in a place where you were sure to find them?”
“Could it just be hunters?” Ben asked.
“It’s not the season, but even if it were, they shouldn’t be trespassing. I can’t imagine you’d want men hunting the forest with Charlie playing there.”
“And I’d have heard the hunters’ gunshots, right? Unless they hunt with bows; I know some people find that more sporting.” He frowned. “Listen, I don’t know, okay? But please keep it to yourself. Charlie’s not allowed out of sight of the Crofts, and I don’t want Caroline to worry. Honestly, we have enough on our plate right now.”
They began the trek across the tall grass fields, and Ben told the priest more about the dead deer and the head on his doorstep.
“You’re really not going to call the police?” Cal asked when they reached his car.
“I can’t see how any good would come of it. And there was no harm done. We’ll need the village on our side if this inn is going to work.”
Father Cal looked as if he was going to pursue the point, but then he agreed. “Well, I can’t say it was entirely pleasant, but we’d be glad to have Charlie in September. And it was good spending the morning with you, Ben. You take care of yourself and your family.”
“Yes, sir.”
Father Cal climbed into his sedan and stuck his head through the window. Ben thought he was going to say something, but he only stared at the Crofts for what felt like a minute. “It’s a fine place, no mistake,” Cal said. “But doesn’t it ever frighten you to be alone in such a big house, so far from everything else?”
He gave so much weight to the declaration that, for a moment, he even believed it.
16
Charlie stood at the center of the faerie circle, still as the trees that ringed it.
He tried to concentrate on the sound of the wind through the forest. He tried to hear past the rustling of leaves and the creaking of branches. He tried to listen for that which did not want to be heard.
It had been days since he’d followed noises up the mountain. Though he’d been grateful that the Watcher had finally revealed itself, their encounter had lasted only a moment. He’d gotten only a glimpse of it, silhouetted against the sun. It had stood there, the edges of its darkness catching fire. Since first seeing it, Charlie had replayed the sight constantly in his head. He thought about what it looked like, what it wanted, and what it would do next. It had summoned him to the mountain, and he had followed, and now it was the Watcher’s turn once again. Charlie had only to be patient. This was why he waited here, still and silent as a tree. He felt sure that their game would soon continue.
Above Charlie, the birdsong stopped as the din from the forest changed. There was a new sound now. One that did not follow the rhythm of the wind or the sway of the trees. Charlie stepped off the stump to land in a crouch on the floor of pine needles. In his bare feet, he was as quiet as an owl gliding on a breeze.
These tapping sounds were the same as the ones he’d heard on the day he’d seen the Watcher. Explosions of noise across a range of pitches. Just as before, they lured him toward the mountains. He picked his way through the trees and underbrush as he ascended the slope. But the tapping from the deep forest never seemed to get any closer.
When the strange sounds stopped, Charlie stopped, as well. He stood in mid-step as the minutes stretched. He waited, but the sounds did not return. He wondered if he had done something wrong, but when he turned around, Charlie understood that he had done exactly what he was supposed to do.
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