The War for the Lot
A tale of Fantasy and Terror
(1969)
Sterling E. Lanier
Prologue
SILENCE lay upon the woodland called The Lot. The spring starlight, filtering through the silver birches and oaks, touched the dark laurels beneath but only increased the blackness below them. Along the old stone wall, the poison ivy clung in thick clumps, mixed with strands of honeysuckle and wild grape.
Shadows drifted from the top of a tall tulip tree to the trunk of a lofty beech, only the scratch of tiny claws on bark and the windless night betraying the flying squirrels, revealing them as alive and not the last of the winter leaves drifting down in the soft air.
A few hardy crickets had begun to sing, foreshadowing the full-blown insect chorus of the high summer. But the main body of the night's music came from the pond and bog at the north end of the wood, where frogs were finishing their annual spring song among the reeds and wild flags.
Deeper in the wood, along Bound Brook, the scrub willows grew in patches, providing cover for the Jack-in-the-pulpits on their tall stems, the wide leaves of skunk cabbage, and the drooping fronds of fern.
The flavor of green and growing things perfumed the New England night, and the peaceful wood seemed to dream of the summer cycle of warmth and upwelling, of increase and birth, oft-repeated and always new.
Yet, to an observer wise in the ways of the forest, something would seem different, odd perhaps. Under the countless scurryings on the floor of the wood, the tiny movements of shrews and the mousefolk in the leafmold, there was urgency of a new and frightening kind. The small bickerings of the chipmunks along the old wall were taut with something besides the usual feeding, play, and nest-building. From a boulder in Bound Brook, old Scratch, the big raccoon, was fishing for freshwater mussels, his clever hands dabbling in the white sand, yet with his whole body strained and tense. Even the frog music from the swamp seemed to vibrate on a note of strangeness and fear.
Fear. That was the clue. Throughout the whole wood, and out into the starlit pastures beyond, from one end of The Lot to the other, there ran a current, subtler but more pervasive than electricity. From the smallest birds huddled on their night perches down to the newest muskrat kit in its house deep in the bog, the same thrill sent a warning.
The Lot was afraid.
Chapter One
THROUGH THE window next to his bed, the brown eyes of Alexander Geoffrey March sleepily surveyed the sky of late evening. He was very tired, but still so excited about his day that he had to think about it some more. At his age, new experiences crowded in so quickly that there was hardly time to even have them, let alone think about them properly. And what an incredible day!
The night before, Alec had said good-bye to his mother and father for the entire summer. His parents had also been upset, but they knew that the boy's grandfather would look after him properly. Old Professor March, until his retirement to the Connecticut countryside, had been one of the leading medieval historians in the world. A healthy, tough old man, long a widower, he had been only too happy to have his young grandson for the summer. His housekeeper, Mrs. Darden, and her husband, John, who had looked after Professor March for many years, were equally pleased.
Alec's father, a marine designer, had been offered a contract which would require him to live for three months in the Far East. His wife would accompany him. It meant living in hotels and moving constantly about from one country to another as Mr. March examined shipyards, saw foreign dignitaries, and dealt with fellow engineers from other countries. The offer from Professor March to take Alec for the summer on his old farm, The Lot, seemed a godsend.
The Dardens were childless, but Louisa Darden, a thin lath of a woman with warm blue eyes, had long been known as the finest nurse in the whole area of Mill Run, Connecticut. She was a member of a family which had first settled Mill Run in the seventeenth century and never allowed John Darden, a "foreigner" from New Milford, forty whole miles away, to forget it.
John was a tall, silent man in his sixties, who kept the house and its surrounding lawn and garden in wonderful order. He was one of the last of a vanishing race, the New Englander who could do anything. No machine, from the power mower to a delicate French clock on the study mantle, was too intricate for him to fix. His large vegetable garden produced asparagus and strawberries no hothouse could have bettered. He was a wonderful shot, and crows and woodchucks gave both his vegetable garden and his flower beds a wide berth. But John never hunted for sport and the wild things had learned many years ago that they could do what they liked as long as the vegetables and flowers were left alone.
Both John and the Professor were agreed in refusing to allow hunters or trappers into The Lot at any season of the year, and its acres were a sanctuary for animals and birds. In the deer-hunting season, the beautiful creatures cropped the lawn within full view of the house. During a hard winter, piles of hay would appear mysteriously in the upper pastures along with blocks of pink rock salt. John never mentioned these unless questioned, and then would only mutter something about not wanting "to have the bark eaten off the fruit trees by a lot of worthless varmints."
The great apple and pear trees, in appearance at least dating back to the original settlers, grew all about the house, although not encroaching on the lawn. Several clumps of them grew even in the pastures. They were always carefully pruned, although they produced more fruit than ten families could have eaten in a year. Somebody ate the fruit, however, and a stroller walking out on a late summer evening under the trees could hear the rush of small feet as the night's diners fled.
Birds abounded on The Lot. Quail loved the overgrown pastures and cock pheasants called under the very windows of the house. The drummings of a male ruffed grouse echoed from the depths of the wood, and at intervals in the evening the strange and lovely song of a courting woodcock spiraled down from the sky over the lower swamp.
Baltimore orioles hung their basket nests from the two giant elms which shaded the front walk, and house wrens disputed nesting sites on the roof of the wide porch and under the eaves. Robins haunted the lawn and the garden, and blue jays flashed from the wood to the orchard and back, pursued by smaller birds whose nests they had robbed. Bird song encompassed the house during the summer days and the calls of whippoorwills and owls rang from the shadowed trees at night.
Alec had visited the old house with his parents on two or three occasions previously, but had never been there for longer than a weekend, and that in winter. A city boy, his first day in early June had seemed an endless round of new and interesting sights.
He had followed John on his rounds of work and had been presented with an oak-handled spade of his own "so you can help me feed the house," John said.
Carrying this acquisition, Alec had next made the acquaintance of the house tomcat, a stout, lazy, orange fellow named Worthless " 'cause he is. I seen mice running over him while he lay there wide awake!" who followed them about, a bell on his collar jingling softly. The bell had been placed there so that even a very careless bird could get out of Worthless' way.
John had made Alec listen until he heard the clear song of the white-throated sparrow.
"That's a Peabody bird. Hear him? 'Peabody, Peabody,' over and over."
Then he had been shown how to put pellets of moist cat food on a stone near the old well, until a fat, mottled brown toad had emerged and gobbled them up, much to the annoyance of Worthless, who was held firmly by the collar. The golden eyes of the toad had blinked at the boy and seemed to say something strange and wild.
Amused and pleased by this, he had next been led to a small, newly made pen near the back stairs to the kitchen. The pen held a pile of leaves, a bowl of
water, some cut-up vegetables and a handsome yellow-and-black box turtle, who on spying the visitors, instantly came over and begged some of the cat food.
"Pick him up," urged John. "I found him in my garden, the varmint, digging for worms after a rain. He don't bite. There's a lot of critters around for a boy to play with. He's your first, but we'll get plenty more. Put him down now and we'll poke around a bit over the place. There's a lot to see."
Replacing his first country pet carefully on the leaves, Alec promised mentally to pay him a visit as soon as possible. A family of turtles would be fun, he thought.
John led the boy at an easy ramble around the house and up into the pasture on the hill behind it, talking in a quiet voice as he explained the layout of The Lot.
"I dunno why it's called The Lot. Actually, there's at least eight lots in the whole setup, but the whole place has been The Lot, Lou says, since there was nobody here 'cept Indians! She ought to know, 'cause her folks been here since then. I asked her once if her folks was Indians, but she took on so, I didn't push it none. She's funny about some things, for a fact.
"Anyway, look down there. That's our patch of woods, to the left of the house and reaching up the hill here towards us. That ain't the house first built here either, although it's old enough, around Civil War times. But there was two houses earlier on that site.
"Your Grandpa picked it up for a song in the 'thirties. He didn't want to farm, just fixed up the house and used the barn to put his car in. Seems a pity not to farm, but there's no living in it nowadays, not in Connecticut. When I was a boy over to New Milford, it was all farms through here and only a few factories."
John pointed with a large brown hand. "See there, where the drive comes in from the road? Now you go left and there's Mill Run village where you can just see the Congregational church steeple over the trees. Maybe you can go to church on Sundays with me and Lou, if your Grandpa don't mind.
"Our land stops over there on the right, by the long wire fence. That's a camp for Scouts, all that forest area, and the boys come up from the city and camp there and stravagle around in the woods all summer. Does 'em good, I tell you, but I wish they wouldn't light fires so durn much, even if they have them counselors with them.
"Now, here behind us again the boundary goes to that old wall. There's a big lake a long way over there, full of city people in little shacks all round, till you can't see the water for laundry and mailboxes. They got so many outboard motors on the lake the fish don't dare move off the bottom, and I hate to think what the sewage goes into."
The easy contempt of the countryman showed in his voice, bred from generations of men and women who disliked crowding and were invincibly suspicious of cities and the value thereof.
"So you see, sonny, we're on kind of a triangle here."
The big hand traced a rough triangle in the pasture's loam, where a fox had overturned a rock in search of mice the night before.
"Up here, near the point, there's the house, on the left side. There's good second-growth woods over most of the place, but in the parts that get sun, you look out for poison ivy. After a while you'll keep away by instinct, like."
He had showed Alec the three glossy leaves on their short stem, and warned him of the way the treacherous plant could wear different colors, being red, yellow or green seemingly at whim.
"I expect you'll get it anyway, but it ain't bad on most people. Just tell Lou if you begin to itch. She knows a poultice that's better than anything the doc can do for it.
"Now down here, there's a brook we call Bound Brook. Must have been a boundary once, I guess. Goes through the woods down to Musquash Pond. I had it tested and it's over five miles of scrub oak and brush to the spring it starts from. So you can drink it. Don't tell Lou that, though; she thinks any water from outside will make you sick."
John winked one blue eye as he spoke, and Alec winked back, conscious of the trust imposed in him.
"There's little pools in the woods, where the brook widens," continued John, "just the right size for you to go swimming on hot days. I'll show you some and maybe we can dig them wider yet, for a real swim ... Well, that's about it for now. Let's go see what Lou has for lunch. It's around noon and I'm hungry!"
After a hearty meal, Alec had gone to look for his grandfather.
He found him working in his study, a vast, rambling room on the first floor, full of walnut bookshelves right up to the ceiling and pleasantly lit by large windows along the outside wall. Books were everywhere on tables, in corners and even on the floor. In the middle of the room was an enormous, rolltop desk, also covered with books. In a swivel chair of an antique variety, made of fumed oak and heavily padded with dark leather, sat Professor March, a small, square, ruddy old gentleman, with a closely trimmed white mustache and a shock of coarse white hair bristling on his head.
His studies had apparently overcome him, for his head was bowed on his breast and a resonant snore proclaimed at fixed intervals that his thoughts were more than wandering.
But he awoke at once upon Alec's gentle knock on a corner of the desk, and clearing his throat, glared affectionately at his grandson.
"Well, Alexander, good to see you. I was musing over a commentary on Irenaeus and lucubrating, as it were, upon the question of his alleged laxness with heresy. But it can wait, it can wait! What can I do for you?"
"I thought you were asleep," said Alec, provoking a series of "harumphs" and, "No, no, nothing of the sort's," which finally died away under the boy's stare.
"Well," said the Professor, sheepishly, "I was asleep. As a matter of fact, I sleep a lot. I'm seventy-two, you know, Alec, and despite what they say, old people like me do sleep a lot. We just don't do it all at once like younger people, but take little naps all the time. Sometimes, when you've been in bed for hours, I'm down here working. I mean really working, not pretending to, as I was just now. So you may find me resting from time to time. If the door's not shut, come in and wake me up. If it is, I really need peace and quiet. Now what's on your mind?"
"John told me about how you bought the house," said Alec. "Could you tell me more about The Lot?"
The Professor looked reflective.
"It's a funny place, in some ways," he said, "but it suits me. There used to be legends about it. Lou told me some of them, as a matter of fact. There are always more animals around here than in any other part of the country, and apparently the original Indians never hunted in this particular area unless they were starving. They were a small tribe, an offshoot of the Mohegans. They served as shamans, medicine men and priests, you know to the other Indians around here. They didn't allow hunting, even by the first white settlers, in any of this area. They were pretty rough about it until they died out or were run off.
"Lou can tell you more, but that's why John doesn't hunt and, frankly, one reason why I don't allow hunting or trapping. The Lot was the center of all the sacred territory, and the Indian priests used to hold ceremonies in the woods down there."
"When did they leave?" asked Alec.
"Long ago. The last Indians moved out in 1780 or thereabouts. Still," he continued, "you'll see lots of animals around. I gather from Lou and your parents that you like animals?"
"They interest me more than anything!" said the boy. "I want to study them when I'm older, but I read all about them now. Mom lets me go to the two zoos and the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and I know some of the scientific names of mammals and birds."
"Hm," mused the Professor, cocking one eyebrow at the boy. "From medieval studies to marine engineering to zoology in three generations. Not a bad mix ... Now," he continued, "it's too nice a day to stay in, for you that is, and I am going to do some real work. Why don't you explore some more? Don't go too far from the house until you know the lay of the land better."
Alec promptly took this advice and set off outside, steering for the gray, tumbledown stone wall along the brow of the hill. As the sun warmed his bare head and a gentle breeze ruffled his
brown hair, he watched a ragged flight of black crows drift over, cawing hoarsely at the sight of him. When they had vanished, a blue jay came and sat on a branch not ten feet away and stared, first with one bright eye, then the other, until Alec laughed at the twisting azure head and frightened the bird away. On and on he strolled, until he had passed far out of sight of the house.
He sat down finally in the shade of a large oak and simply watched the old wall and its life, somehow realizing that he would see more when not in motion himself.
It was very hot now. He had walked for almost an hour. Insects buzzed around him and birds called in almost deafening numbers. Along the wall, he noticed the striped chipmunks darting about, although none came close to him. He watched a large brownish-gray bird, a mourning dove, eating berries and walking about on its short legs through a dense cluster of poison ivy. He decided that the bird was not affected by the plant's poison and made a mental note to ask John if this was true of all wild animals.
Alec sat down. The blend of bird and insect voices and the heat had made him drowsy. Half-asleep, he was just closing his eyes when a rustle of leaves came from the left. He saw a beautiful black-and-white animal, the size of a cat, with a long bushy tail held proudly in the air, calmly surveying him from not more than a yard away.
He watched, strangely unafraid, as the skunk sat up on its short hind legs and sniffed, peering shortsightedly at him and wrinkling its pink nose. Its small forepaws were tucked into its chest, like a squirrel's, and it rocked slightly on its haunches as it stared at him.
Another human, I see. It looks small; no doubt a cub or half grown. Harmless, I guess, no nasty smell or metal. Wonder where it came from? Oh well, I can't sit here all day like some I could name. Will it throw stones? Probably. But there you are, you can't have everything. I'll go into the trees where it can't aim. Just one more interruption. Still, as I say, we can't have everything.
When Alec finally moved, the skunk had long since departed, having climbed the broken wall and trundled steadily off under the trees and into the undergrowth.
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