by Bruce Jones
“‘Who’ my ass! What the hell was her name?”
“Laurie.”
“That’s it. I knew it was something lyrical.”
“Look, I have to go…”
“Why the sudden lower tones? Shit. She’s there now, isn’t she?”
Laurie came up to him, set his coffee on the end table, smiled up and cradled his balls in her hand.
“Isn’t she, Richard? What’s she doing right now?”
“I’ll call you soon…”
Laurie took his free hand, placed it on her breast.
“Yeah, I’m sure you’ve got your hands full. Well, it was great talking to you, Sport. Why on earth I thought you might have changed I’ve no idea. Give Laurie a squeeze for me. And say hi to the chubby one—what’s his name—‘Scroogie’. I always liked him.” Click
Richard put down the phone.
Laurie’s expression dissolved. She took her hands away. “Shit. That was your wife, wasn’t it?”
“Not anymore.” He handed her the towel and moved to the closet. “Let me get dressed and I’ll be right with you.”
“Dressed? We’re going out? At this hour?”
He yanked down hangers, slipped into jeans and shirt with sharp, decisive motions.
“Richard?”
TWENTY-FIVE
She followed him into the garage, found him against the east wall pulling down a spade from the garden tools rack. A spade, then a shovel. He held one before him in each hand, seemed to be weighing them.
“Richard? What are we doing?” Laurie had slipped quickly back into her clothes, dark hair still in tangles, skipping comb and lipstick for fear of being left behind in his determined wake.
Richard’s attention was focused only on the tools. He appraised the shovel’s beveled steel edge, finally replaced the spade on its hook. “Going for a little walk.”
She lingered indecisively at the rear bumper of his Toyota, trying to read his face under the poor light of the single garage door bulb. She could see it well enough, was just having trouble reading it. “A walk? At six in the morning? With a shovel? Where?”
“Woods,” he muttered absently, looking past the shovel now at the driver’s side door.
“What woods? Where?”
Richard reached for the door handle, hesitated, drew back his hand. “No.” More a statement to himself than her.
Laurie rubbed at her naked arms below her t-shirt. “What?”
“Old man Janson’s north pasture.” He turned to look at her now as if recalling her presence with a patient kind of look you might give a troubled child. “The car would be quicker, of course…”
She stared at him, waiting. “Richard?”
He’d been staring at the shovel again, turned to regard her once more with that air of recent acknowledgement. “…but we have to walk.” He nodded. “It’s important that we walk, that I retrace our steps.” His eyes seemed to focus more sharply on her. “It’s not that far, really. We cut across your old backyard and the vacant lot—what used to be the vacant lot—to Janson’s north forty.” He seemed pleased with the explanation as though despite the hour and everything else it made perfect sense, that it was absolutely the thing to do, the right decision.
He came toward her and Laurie backed up a step, then stood resolutely, one hand braced on the trunk, blocking his path. “Richard, we can talk about this. Whatever you’re doing…I don’t think you’ve thought it through…”
He gazed at her. Finally nodded. “You’re right…”
She sagged with relief. “Let’s go back in the house, get some sleep. Tomorrow, I mean today is…we have to go…Scroogie…”
Richard turned and marched back to the tool rack. Searched quickly and brought down the big black MagLite. Clicked it on to test the beam. A bright cone of light shot forth. “Now we’re ready.”
She caught at his arm as he exited the small door garage door to the side door. “Richard, honey wait! I don’t understand!”
He didn’t stop moving, strides wide, posture resolute, shovel in one hand, flashlight in the other. “You don’t have to come.”
She stopped at the front sidewalk, the black empty streets and darkened houses. “I just don’t understand!”
Richard kept moving. She watched his figure grow smaller toward Knollwood Drive. “I love you,” he said, not looking back, barely audible.
Laurie watched his dwindling figure.
Then ran after it.
* * *
They didn’t speak all the way to the old pasture.
Not that Laurie didn’t have a million questions. She just kept begging off every time one popped to mind. Something about Richard’s purposeful gait. His path was set. He knew exactly where he was going, even if--she feared--he might not know exactly how to get there. Or even completely why. Questions would only distract him. And his mind was some place else now anyway. She could follow. But not really be a part of this. Only a spectator.
At the pasture, Richard threw the shovel and flashlight over the barbed wire fence, grabbed a post for support and hauled himself after them without breaking stride. Like it was something he did everyday.
Laurie balked, then placed a shoe atop a rung of wire, copied his movements and dropped to the other side with only minor scratches. She had to run again to catch up with him. She wasn’t entirely sure he knew she was even there.
But when she reached his side again he spoke without moving his vision from the darker line of trees a quarter of a mile ahead. “The woods,” he said.
Two words she tried to discern the emotion behind: dread, hope, fear, urgency. But nothing came through. Just another flat statement, as if acknowledging another sign post along the way, the path of an invisible map, Richard’s legs carrying him ahead in an unhurried but steady rhythm.
Laurie stumbled once in the plowed earth.
Richard caught her arm and broke her fall, both without looking and still holding the flashlight. Neither of them spoke.
The undulant line of trees had seemed so far away, like a horizon that recedes the closer you get. Then suddenly they were there.
Richard plunged in without hesitation, snapping on the MagLite.
Laurie kept hold of his right arm without really using it for support. The forest swallowed them.
It was not more than five minutes after the canopy of trees blocked the nearly full moon that Laurie was certain something was following them…
* * *
Scroogie wasn’t sure how long he’d known it: that someone was dogging them. Cautiously. Barely discernable really, but oh so deliberately. Matching the crunch of his and the other boy’s footfalls with its own. And though no one else in their little group had said anything for the last five minutes or so, not a single word actually, Scroogie was pretty sure from the silence alone that the other guys felt it too. That all four of them knew something was back there pacing them or tracking them…somewhere just beyond their vision…
Richard followed the map in his head.
Laurie struggled through underbrush and brambles at his side, Dante to his Virgil.
The rubber treads of their tennis shoes made such a startlingly loud noise on the dry leaves and twigs she was certain the whole woods could hear them, as well as anything else that trod there. She had the most peculiar sensation. She tried, amid the crunch and Richard’s unhesitant gait, to discover exactly what it was, how she felt out here in the black and tangle and pungent smells, what word might best describe her solitary (despite Richard’s strange silence) soul, impending alienation, the vertiginous, unending openness of an empty desert two yards beyond which she could see nothing, and the invisible, close-in pressure of a tropical jungle revealed ahead only by the thin cone of bobbing flashlight; she finally settled on the word primordial.
This is what it must have been like then in those days both Man and Earth were new. These were not the daily fears of tax returns and dodging traffic, but the visceral reality of Mother Nature’s terrors,
that not you but the planet spinning beneath your feet was the one in true control. That all else was nonsense. How, she thought in tripping, snatching darkness and distant feral sounds did they ever do it, ever bring us to this, to the now? Not alone, surely. And for one fleeting instance she was not merely an occasional conjecturer about God, but a true believer. A God that loved her, perhaps, but whose greatest weapon was the cancerous fear of the Unknown. Or, perhaps, a greater terror yet: that of pure abandonment. No wonder it was a world of cites or even tribal societies: Man, for all his violence against his brother, clung desperately to his companions in the yawning abyss of night.
A chill found her spine. She craned back quickly over her shoulder, thinking she’d heard the sound behind them again. Nothing but blackness, no sound she could hear now.
Should she snag Richard’s arm, warn him? But warn him of what, a deer or possum? Certainly not a bear in the suburbs of Kansas. And Richard’s granite profile didn’t look in the mood to be interrupted, especially with trivialities. Still it wouldn’t leave her mind. She thought of the line from The Ancient Mariner: ‘…like one who on a lonely road doth dread, a frightful fiend behind him treads…’
A dog monster? The rippled snout of the gold book’s awful engraving? How silly it would all seem with a bright fireplace and a reassuring cognac.
There was a low soughing through high upper boughs. A deep internal creaking--
--that Richard swore for a good three seconds was the wail of descending banshees, their red eyes fixed on him, razor talons curved to rend… Then the wind stopped, abrupt and complete, and stillness closed fast again.
Now is was Shivers who whispered. “S-Somethin’s fucking following us…”
The little hairs on the back of Bobby Maser’s very practical and methodical neck stood up straight at attention, starting a carpet of gooseflesh down his slender young back close to the bony nub of his tailbone. “Yer fulla crap,” he whispered. No one believed it, least of all him.
Shivers had to go and get all moody-quiet on them, just as they were getting underway again and starting to feel good. Had to walk stiffly on through the dark woods holding The Box too close to his chest again like a protective shield, acting, every three minutes, like he wanted to crane around and look back behind them at whatever was following, though he never did this, just kept trudging stiffly and solemnly ahead across the crackle-crunch of leaves and twigs and hard sod until the trees grew slightly thinner and the ground slightly harder still and the land around them dipped down a degree into a kind of broad bowl, not so you’d notice it by looking, and then you were moving downhill gradually…and then came the large slab of limestone poking through the skein of moss, the even larger slabs after that and finally the largest one of all, jutting up by itself like a miniature
Rock of Gibraltar at nearly the center of the clearing, the empty earthen bowl.
And they were there.
Richard stopped abruptly.
Laurie, not so attuned to their surrounds as he, trudged on another two steps, then turned to him quickly, eyes lit with anticipation.
“This is the place,” Richard said. Not to her, really. Maybe not even to himself. Maybe no one; or to the clearing itself, the big white stone jutting up there.
It hadn’t changed much. None of it. He knew the trees must be thicker, must, like himself, have aged, the branches heavier and flocked with more leaves. But it didn’t seem so, at least not there in the dark few minutes before daybreak. It seemed very much like it had seemed then, forty some years ago. The evening of Scroogie’s birthday.
“What is it?” Laurie squeaked. And that’s what it was, a mousy little throat-closed squeak she was half-embarrassed by, half-frightened of--the sound of her own voice.
“This is where we did it.”
Who? she thought, almost asked. But she knew who. The Deadenders, of course. Who wasn’t the question at all. The question was what?
That was, Laurie suddenly realized, the question to everything.
Everything.
Because it was in this little woodland clearing the essence of Richard Denning lay. A Richard Denning she’d known for forty years. And hadn’t known at all.
She sat down quietly on a tree stump and watched him.
He was staring at the white rock. The big one. The biggest one in the forest. All his attention was focused on it. And all she could think was, how young he looks, how incredibly young. Nearly like a child.
And he was doing something very strange right now. He’d put down the shovel and flashlight and was standing there before the big white rock with his hands lifted before him to near shoulder height. Standing there with his fingers together, palms facing each about two feet in front of his chest, as if measuring an invisible something in thin air. Turning his palms this way and that around the invisible something, brows knitted intently, a magician conjuring something---a certain something with a certain height and width—out of the ethers.
“Richard?”
He dropped his hands at the sound of her voice, dropped them to his sides.
Picked up the flashlight and shovel again and came to her on her stump of log, handed her the flashlight. “I need you to hold this.”
“Okay.”
“I have to dig.”
“Okay.”
“Dig a hole. Here in the clearing.”
She nodded, holding the beam. “Uh-huh.” And when he just stood there staring at her mutely Laurie swallowed once with a little half smile of both fear and curiosity and said, “Where?”
He stared at her. Straightened with the shovel and looked back at the clearing behind him. “…trying to remember…”
And that was it for a while.
A minute or so later Laurie cleared her throat gently. “Is…is it something you buried here before?”
Richard said nothing.
After another while he finally turned to her again. “You know what writer’s block is, right?”
She nodded. “Sure, I guess so.”
“Allie said—on the phone tonight, earlier—Allie said I’m a character in my own novel.”
Laurie waited. Nothing. “Uh-huh, I see.” But he could tell she didn’t see at all and was growing nearly as afraid of the look on his face as the pressing forest around them.
Richard hefted the shovel, turned back to appraise the clearing again. “Do you think people can block out real life the way writers do, the way they get writer’s block.”
She nodded rapidly at his back. “Of course. People do that all the time. It’s one of the corner stones of…”
He turned quickly to her. “Madness?”
Laurie pulled back from his face, his eyes. She saw in her mind the shovel replaced by the carving knife, those eyes coming at her where she cringed in the corner of the bedroom. “I was going to say neurosis,” she said softly.
He stared at her.
Then smiled. “Well, I guess I wouldn’t be a writer if I weren’t a little neurotic, right?”
She forced a grin, forced hard a little chuckle. “Right.”
The old Richard flickered back in his eyes. “I buried something out here, Laurie, something very important. But I can’t remember where we put it.”
She leaned forward again. “What did you say?”
“I said I can’t remember where I put it.”
“No. No, you said ‘we’. I can’t remember where we put it.”
His eyes shifted and she thought he was going to go weird on her again but he only went out of focus for a moment, at least his eyes seemed to, then he was back, nodding slowly. “Yes. They were here. All of them.”
“The Deadenders.”
He kept nodding. “My precious Deadenders, as Allie would say. Yes, all of them—all of us—here in this clearing. Years ago. Years. When we were kids…”
He looked down and saw that he was holding the invisible something between his palms again. “The Pyx.”
Laurie jumped as he sprang at her, tore
the flashlight from her hand, turned the beam on the clearing, the jutting shards of limestone, the dimpled bowel of earth, the ringing scrip of maples and elders, the big white stone…
He lowered the beam. Sighed defeat. “But where? Where would we bury a little thing like that? I know it’s in this clearing, I can feel it, Laurie. But where?”
“The Pyx,” Laurie said tonelessly.
Richard nodded. “ ‘He put his wishes in the Pyx with the others’, Zelda said, ‘and he buried it.’ That’s what the gold book instructed. Bury your wishes deep in the earth for Charg to watch over, or they won’t come true.”
“Charg?”
“The illustration in the gold book. The demon who grants wishes.”
“That what Zelda told you.”
He nodded. “What the book told us.” And he laughed a funny laugh, an unpleasant laugh, Laurie thought. “None of us really believed it, of course. I mean we were just boys, just twelve-year-old kids, but we weren’t stupid. Weren’t really childish either in the usual sense. Especially Maser. Maser was…”
“What?”
“…smart…the smartest of the group…ahead of his time.”
Laurie glanced around the small clearing. “And what did you wish, Richard?”
His eyes squinted tight as if the thought pained him; his jaw muscles bulged. “I don’t remember!” He looked at her imploringly. “Don’t you see? If I could remember it might help, might even save him!”
“Scroogie.”
“Yes!”
Laurie thought back over it. “Zelda told you if you put your wishes in a—what was it?”
“A Pyx. It’s just an old word for a vessel or chest of some kind.” He looked up quickly, remembering something. “ ‘That within which the reserved Eucharist or Host is kept,’ the book said.”
“What did it look like?”
“In ancient days?” He shrugged. “Could look like most anything I guess, something pretty ornate, I assume. But the Druids used them as well so I guess they didn’t have to be too big or fancy. Just large enough to hold a few scraps of paper.”