by Stephen King
‘Good,’ she said, then sat with it long enough to get angry. We’d never lost the anger, because it had never had a definite target. ‘But … if you did … you could handle yourself all right. It’s what you do every day, isn’t it.’
‘Yeah, but strength in numbers. And snipers in the towers when the cons are out in the yard.’
She looked across at me and smiled, this tight, sad smile, childhood dimples replaced by curved lines. Her hair was as light as it used to get during summers, but helped by a bottle now, I suspected, and her face narrower, her cheeks thinner. When they were plump, Gina was the first girl I ever kissed, in that fumbling way of cousins ignorant of what comes next.
There was no innocence in her look now, though, like she wished it were a more lawless world, just this once, so I could put together a private army and come back up here and we’d sweep through from one side of the county to the other until we finally got to the bottom of it.
Shae was one of the ones you see headlines about, if something about their disappearance catches the news editors’ eyes: MISSING GIRL LAST SEEN MONDAY NIGHT. FAMILY OF MISSING COLLEGE STUDENT MAKE TEARFUL APPEAL. Like that, until a search team gets lucky or some jogger’s dog stands in a patch of weeds and won’t stop barking.
Except we’d never had even that much resolution. Shae was one of the ones who never turned up. The sweetest girl you could ever hope to meet, at nineteen still visiting her grandmother, like a Red Riding Hood who trusted that all the wolves were gone, and this was all that was found: a single, bloodied scrap of a blouse hanging from the brambles about half a mile from where our mother had grown up. The rest of her, I’d always feared, was at the bottom of a mineshaft or sunk weighted into the muck of a pond or in a grave so deep in the woods there was no chance of finding her now.
I’d had three tours of duty to erode my confidence about any innate sense of decency in the human race, and if that weren’t enough, signing on with the Department of Corrections had finished off the rest. For Shae, I’d always feared the worst, in too much detail, because I knew too well what people were capable of, even the good guys, even myself.
We made little progress that first evening, getting lost on a detour into some photo albums, then after an animated phone conversation with her pair of grade-schoolers, Gina went to bed early. But I stayed up with the night, listening to it awhile from Grandma Evvie’s chair, until listening wasn’t enough and I had to go outside to join it.
There was no cable TV out this far, and Grandma hadn’t cared enough about it for a satellite dish, so she’d made do with an ancient antenna grafted to one side of the house. The rotor had always groaned in the wind, like a weathervane denied its true purpose, the sound carrying down into the house, a ghostly grinding while you tried to fall asleep on breezy nights. Now I used it as a ladder, scaling it onto the roof and climbing the shingles to straddle the peak.
Now and again I’d see a light in the distance, the September wind parting the trees long enough to see the porch bulb of a distant neighbour, a streak of headlights on one of the farther roads, but the blackest nights I’d ever known were out here, alone with the moon and the scattershot field of stars.
So I listened, and I opened.
The memory had never left, among the clearest from those days of long summer visits – two weeks, three weeks, a month. We would sleep four and five to a room, when my cousins and sister and I were all here at once, and Grandma would settle us in and tell us bedtime stories, sometimes about animals, sometimes about Indians, sometimes about boys and girls like ourselves.
I don’t remember any of them.
But there was one she returned to every now and then, and that one stuck with me. The rest were just stories, made up on the spot or reworked versions of tales she already knew, and there was nothing lingering about them. I knew that animals didn’t talk; the good Indians were too foreign to me to really identify with, and I wasn’t afraid the bad ones would come to get us; and as for the normal boys and girls, well, what of them when we had real adventures of our own, every day.
The stories about the Woodwalker, though … those were different.
That’s just my name for it. My own grandmother’s name for it, she admitted to us. It’s so big and old it’s got no name. Like rain. The rain doesn’t know it’s rain. It just falls.
It was always on the move, she told us, from one side of the county to the other. It never slept, but sometimes it settled down in the woods or the fields to rest. It could be vast, she told us, tall enough that clouds sometimes got tangled in its hair – when you saw clouds skimming along so quickly you could track their progress, that’s when you knew – but it could be small, too, small enough to curl inside an acorn if the acorn needed reminding of how to grow.
You wouldn’t see it, even if you looked for it every day for a thousand years, she promised us, but there were times you could see evidence of its passing by. Like during a dry spell when the dust rose up from the fields – that was the Woodwalker breathing it in, seeing if it was dry enough yet to send for some rain – and in the woods, too, its true home, when the trees seemed to be swaying opposite the direction the wind was blowing.
You couldn’t see it, no, but you could feel it, down deep, brushing the edges of your soul. Hardly ever during the day, not because it wasn’t there, but because if you were the right sort of person, you were too busy while the sun was up. Too busy working, or learning, or visiting, or too busy playing and wilding and having fun. But at night, though, that was different. Nights were when a body slowed down. Nights were for noticing the rest.
What’s the Woodwalker do? we’d ask. What’s it for?
It loves most of what grows and hates waste and I guess you could say it pays us back, she’d tell us. And makes sure we don’t get forgetful and too full of ourselves.
What happens then, if you do? Somebody always wanted to know that.
Awful things, she’d say. Awful, awful things. Which wasn’t enough, because we’d beg to know more, but she’d say we were too young to hear about them, and promise to tell us when we were older, but she never did.
You’re just talking about God, right? one of my cousins said once. Aren’t you?
But Grandma never answered that either, at least not in any way we would’ve understood at the time. I still remember the look, though … not quite a ‘no’, definitely not a ‘yes’, and the wisdom to know that we’d either understand on our own someday, or never have to.
I saw the Woodwalker once, Shae piped up, quiet and awestruck. One weekend last fall. He was looking at two dead deer. None of us believed her, because we believed in hunters a lot more than we believed in anything called the Woodwalker. But, little as she was, Shae wouldn’t back down. Hunters, she argued, didn’t stand deer on their feet again and send them on their way.
I’d never forgotten that.
And so, as the night blustered on the wings of bats and barn owls, I listened and watched and took another tiny step towards believing.
‘Any time,’ I whispered to whatever might speak up or show itself. ‘Any time.’
The milk had gone bad and the bacon with it, and we needed a few other things to get us through the weekend, so that next morning I volunteered to make the run back to the store near the turn-off on the main road. I decided to take the long way, setting off in the opposite direction, because it had been years and I wanted to see more of the county, and even if I made more wrong turns than right, there were worse things than getting lost on a September Saturday morning.
Mile after mile, I drove past many worse things.
You can’t remember such a place from before it got this way, can’t remember the people who’d proudly called it home, without wondering what they would think of it now. Would they have let their homes fall to ruin with such helpless apathy? Would they have sat back and watched the fields fill with weeds? Would they have ridden two wheels, three wheels, four, until they’d ripped the low hills full of gouges an
d scars? Not the people I remembered.
It made me feel old, not in the body but in the heart, old in a way you always say you never want to be. It was the kind of old that in a city yells at kids to get off the lawn, but here it went past annoyance and plunged into disdain. Here, they’d done real harm. They’d trampled on memories and tradition, souring so much of what I’d decided had been good about the place, and one of them, I could never forget, had snatched my sister from the face of the earth.
Who were the people who lived here now, I wondered. They couldn’t all have come from somewhere else. Most, I imagined, had been raised here and never left, which made their neglect even more egregious.
But the worst of it was in the west of the county, where the coal once was. The underground mines had been tapped out when we were children, and while that’s when I’d first heard the term strip-mining, I hadn’t known what it meant, either as a process or its consequences.
It was plain enough now, though, all the near-surface coal gone too, and silent wastelands left in its wake, horizon-wide lacerations of barren land pocked with mounds of topsoil, the ground still so acidic that nothing wanted to grow there.
No matter how urgently the Woodwalker might remind the seeds what to do.
It was the wrong frame of mind to have gotten in before circling back to the store. I left my sunglasses on inside, the same way I’d wear them on cloudy days while watching the inmates in the yard, and for the same reasons, too: as armour, something to protect us both, because there was no good to come from locking eyes, from letting some people see what you think of their choices and what they’d thrown away.
The place was crowded with Saturday morning shoppers, and there was no missing the sickness here. Those meth people that’ve made such a dump of the place, I hear they don’t mess around, Mrs Tepovich had said, and for that matter, neither did the meth. I knew the look – some of the inmates still had it when they transferred from local lockups to hard time – and while it wasn’t on every face in the market, it was on more than enough to make me fear it was only going to get worse here. A body half-covered with leprosy doesn’t have a lot of hope for the rest of it.
The worst of them had been using for years, obviously, their faces scabbed and their bones filed sharp. With teeth like crumbling gravel, they looked like they’d been sipping tonics of sulphuric acid, and it was eating through from the inside. The rest of them, as jumpy and watchful as rats, would get there. All they needed to know about tomorrow was written in the skins of their neighbours.
It had an unexpected levelling effect.
From what I remembered of when we visited as children, the men nearly always died first here, often by a wide margin. They might go along fine for decades, as tough as buzzards in a desert, but then something caught up with them and they fell hard. They’d gone into the mines and come out with black spots on their lungs, or they’d broken their backs slowly, one sunrise-to-sunset day at a time, or had stubbornly ignored some small symptom for ten years too many. The women, though, cured like leather and carried on without them. It was something you could count on.
No longer.
The race to the grave looked like anybody’s to win.
When I got back to the house, I discovered we had a visitor, a surprise since there was no car in the drive. As I came in through the kitchen, Gina, over his shoulder, gave me a where-were-you-all-this-time look that she could’ve stolen from my ex. They were sitting at the kitchen table with empty coffee mugs, and Gina looked like the statute of limitations on her patience had expired twenty minutes earlier.
I couldn’t place him, but whoever he was, he probably hadn’t had the same fierce black beard, lantern jaw, and giant belly when we were kids.
‘You remember Ray Sinclair,’ she said, then jabbed her finger at the door and it came back in a rush: Mrs Tepovich’s great-nephew. He used to come over and play with us on those rare days that weren’t already taken up with chores, and he’d been a good guide through the woods – knew where to find all the wild berries, at their peak of ripeness, and the best secluded swimming holes where the creeks widened. We shook hands, and it was like trying to grip a baseball glove.
‘I was dropping some venison off at Aunt Pol’s. She told me you two were over here,’ he said. ‘My condolences on Evvie. Aunt Pol thought the world of her.’
I put away the milk and bacon and the rest, while Gina excused herself and slipped past, keeping an overdue appointment with some room or closet as Ray and I cleared the obligatory small talk.
‘What have you got your eye on?’ he asked then. ‘For a keep-sake, I mean.’
‘I don’t know yet,’ I said. ‘Maybe my granddad’s shotgun, if it turns up.’
‘You do much hunting?’
‘Not since he used to take me out. And after I got back from the army … let’s just say I wasn’t any too eager to aim at something alive and pull a trigger again.’ I’d done fine with my qualifications for the job, although that was just targets, nothing that screamed and bled and tried to belly-crawl away. ‘But I’m thinking if I had an old gun that I had some history with, maybe …’ I shrugged. ‘I guess I could’ve asked for it after Granddad died, but it wouldn’t have seemed right. Not that Grandma went hunting, but left alone out here, she needed it more than I did.’
He nodded. ‘Especially after your sister.’
I looked at him without being obvious about it, then realised I hadn’t taken off my sunglasses yet, just like at the market. It could’ve been you, I thought. No reason to think so, but when a killing is never solved, a body never found, it can’t not cross your mind when you look at some people, the ones with proximity and access and history. The ones you really don’t know anything about any more. If Ray had known where to find berries, he’d know where to bury a girl.
‘Especially then,’ I said.
‘Did I say something wrong?’ he asked. ‘My apologies if I did.’
He sounded sincere, but I’d been hearing sincere for years. Naw, boss, I don’t know who hid that shank in my bunk. Not me, boss, I didn’t have nothing to do with that bag of pruno. They were all sincere down to the rot at their core.
The other COs had warned me early on: There’ll come a time when you look at everybody like they’re guilty of something.
I’d refused to believe this: No, I know how to leave work at work.
Now it was me telling the new COs the same thing.
I took off the shades. ‘You didn’t say anything wrong. A thing like that, you never really get over it. Time doesn’t heal the wounds, it just thickens up the scars.’ I moved to the screen door and looked outside, smelled the autumn day, a golden scent of sun-warmed leaves. ‘It’s not like it used to be around here, is it?’
He shrugged. ‘Where is?’
I had him follow me outside and turned my face to the sun, shutting my eyes and just listening, thinking that it at least sounded the way it had. That expansive, quiet sound of birds and wide-open spaces.
‘When I was at the market, I would’ve needed at least two hands to count the people I’d be willing to bet will be dead in five years,’ I said. ‘How’d this get started?’
Ray eyed me hard. I knew it even with my eyes closed. I’d felt it as sure as if he’d poked me with two fingers. When I opened my eyes, he looked exactly like I knew he would.
‘You’re some kind of narc now, aren’t you, Dylan?’ he said.
‘Corrections officer. I don’t put anybody in prison, I just try to keep the peace once they’re there.’
He stuffed his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth, his gaze on far distances. ‘Well … the way anything starts, I guess. A little at a time. It’s a space issue, mostly. Space, privacy. We got plenty of both here. And time. Got plenty of that, too.’
His great-uncle hadn’t, not to my recollection. Mr Tepovich had always had just enough, barely, to do what needed doing. The same as my grandfather. I wondered where all that time had come from.
>
‘How many meth labs are there around here, I wonder,’ I said.
‘I couldn’t tell you anything. All I know’s what I hear, and I don’t hear much.’
Can’t help you, boss. I don’t know nothing about that.
‘But if you were to get lucky and ask the right person,’ Ray went on, ‘I expect he might tell you something like it was the only thing he was ever good at. The only thing that ever worked out for him.’
The trees murmured and leaves whisked against the birdhouse gourds.
‘He might even take the position that it’s a blessed endeavour.’
I hadn’t expected this. ‘Blessed by who?’
His hesitation here, his uncertainty, looked like the first genuine expression since we’d started down this path. ‘Powers that be, I guess. Not government, not those kinds of powers. Something … higher.’ He tipped his head back, jammed his big jaw and bristly beard forward, scowling at the sky. ‘Say there’s a place in the woods, deep, where nobody’s likely to go by accident. Not big, but not well hid, either. Now say there’s a team from the sheriff’s department taking themselves a hike. Fifteen, twenty feet away, and they don’t see it. Now say the same thing happens with a group of fellows got on jackets that say “DEA”. They all just walk on by like nothing’s there.’
He was after something, but I wasn’t sure what. Maybe Ray didn’t know either. They say if you stick around a prison long enough, you’ll see some strange things that are almost impossible to explain, and even if I hadn’t, I’d heard some stories. Maybe Ray had heard that as well, and was looking for … what, someone who understood?
‘I don’t know what else you’d call that,’ he said, ‘other than blessed.’
‘For a man who doesn’t hear much, you have some surprising insights.’
His gaze returned to earth and the mask went back on. ‘Maybe I keep my ear to the ground a little more than I let on.’ He began to sidle away towards his aunt’s. ‘You take care, Dylan. Again, sorry about Evvie.’