by Brian Hodge
Of course, the dream had been the product of her over-active imagination. Living out here alone in what was, essentially, the woods hadn't been exactly what she had expected. Of course, she had expected to feel a little lonely from time to time, but even Barkley wasn't quite enough company late at night when she thought she heard strange scratching sounds outside and creaking floorboards.
Barkley sprinted to the side of the house and dropped his stick when he realized Gail wasn't chasing him. Panting with excitement, he barked and pranced, trying to get her to play. His barking echoed from the woods, but Gail stood where she was, leaning on her rake and watching at the gathering gloom.
The woods seemed threatening to her now, and once again—as she so many times these past three weeks—she wondered if she had made the right decision. Not about the divorce. Her marriage to Jack was history no matter how much she might have wanted to hold it together. But she wondered if moving to Thornton on a whim—just because her college room-mate, Lois Snell, was from here—had been such a great idea.
She told herself over and over that she just had to get used to living alone. Life in the city had its own sounds that were bothersome to someone who wasn't used to them. That's all it was. The woods and her new house would just take some getting used to.
And meeting Bill Howard had changed things. Gail started walking toward the house, moving slow so she wouldn't get Barkley worked up again. The last thing she'd been thinking of was meeting someone so soon on the rebound. She wanted to stay as detached and analytical as she could, but it wasn't working. She really liked this guy. She had liked him from the first moment she had seen him, and that—well, it didn't exactly bother her, but it was something she found when she wasn't looking for it, and that made her wonder about it all the more.
Rake in hand, she rounded the corner of the house and was walking up the steps to the side door when Barkley suddenly let out a deep-throated growl and darted off at full speed into the woods behind the house.
"Barkley! Here boy!" Gail shouted. "Come on, get back here!"
She shivered as her grip on the rake handle tightened. She wanted to go after him and make him come home, but something held her there. Instead, she whistled shrilly through her teeth the way Jack had taught her to do at Springfield Indians' games and stood there, waiting.
Leaves rustled and branches snapped as Barkley thrashed around deep into the woods, all the while barking. Then a sudden, loud, piercing screech split the gathering night followed by a pained yelp from Barkley. Both sounds were short bursts whose echoes faded quickly.
Gail tensed, wondering what in the name of God could have made such a sound, and she was afraid Barkley might be hurt.
"Barkley?... Here, boy!" she called. "You all right, boy?"
Something told her not to leave the steps and to wait where she was just in case.
In case what? she wondered, but she knew the answer: in case she needed to get into the house in a hurry.
After the first screech and yelp, the woods around the house fell silent. Even the night birds were momentarily scared into silence. Gail's tension rose as she wondered what to do next.
Was Barkley hurt... or worse?
Bill had told her how vicious raccoons and skunks could be. Maybe he had run full tilt into a porcupine and was lying in the darkening woods with his face skewered by quills, bleeding to death slowly, too pained even to whine. Or what if there was something bigger out there like a bear or moose?
Maybe she should give Bill a call. He had told her to call any time for anything. Maybe he had a gun and could come over and check things out for her. That seemed reasonable, but she also wanted to handle things by herself.
Paralyzed by indecision, Gail waited on the steps, staring intensely at the black border of the woods. Her breath caught in her chest, burning as she strained for some indication that Barkley was all right. Then, vaguely, she saw something moving in the dark woods. Her first thought—that it was Barkley—quickly evaporated when she saw what looked like two, then three or four, and then more crouching shapes shifting under the shadows of the trees. They were no more than hints of motion, and looking straight at them, Gail had no idea if they were real or simply products of her over-heated imagination.
She raised the rake in front of her even though she knew what feeble protection it would be if those things she thought were out there were real and if they came at her. Something, after all, had made that piercing shriek. What the hell could it have been?
Her breathing was shallow and ragged as she waited for something... anything to happen. She made a faint squealing sound in the back of her throat when, in an explosion of leaves, a dark shape shot out of the woods. It moved swiftly, keeping low to the ground as it sped across the grass toward her. Gail's grip tightened on the rake, and she was just drawing it back, readying for a full swing, when she recognized Barkley.
Whining and panting, he dashed up the steps and nearly slammed full force into the closed door. His eyes were glistening with fear as he buried his head between Gail's legs. He almost knocked her over and sent her sprawling over the railing.
"Whoa, take it easy there, fella," she said, over whelmed with relief that he was all right. She scruffed his head, trying to get him to calm down, but all he seemed interested in doing was getting inside the house. He started slashing at the door with his paws, making deep gouges in the new wood.
"You run into something more than you could handle?" Gail asked as she turned the doorknob and swung open the door. She was trying to joke about it to relieve her own tension, but she was surprised she could speak at all.
As soon as the door opened a crack, Barkley shoved his full weight against it and exploded into the house. In a mad clatter of claws on the kitchen floor, he scrambled down the hallway and into the living room where he practically dove behind the couch and lay there, whimpering.
Gail stood at the doorway for a moment, looking out at the night. She couldn't help but wonder what had scared Barkley so badly, but then again—even though she had only heard it once—that ear-piercing screech had not sounded at all natural. She closed the door firmly and ran the deadbolt lock shut, determined to check every door and window every night before starting to make supper.
6
The front sighting bead of the .22 danced and wavered around its target, circling and dodging, never settling in tight and steady the way it should have. Evening had come, and everything became an indistinct purple blur. John Watson told himself it was the approaching darkness, not the half fifth of whiskey he had consumed, that made it difficult to hone in on his target.
"Com'on, Goddammit!" he snarled, and a thin string of saliva stretched from his mouth to the wood rifle stock. He squinted his left eye so tightly it began to hurt. Pinwheels of light spun across his vision, but he didn't want to stop now. Not while he had his target in sight.
"Com'on, you son-of-a-bitch," he hissed.
The target darted back and forth across the gun sight and then, without really thinking, Watson squeezed the trigger. The gun snapped against his shoulder. A trace of spent gunpowder stung his nostrils as the bullet flew into the night.
"There, goddamn yah! Got yah," Watson growled. He lowered the rifle, letting the butt rest on the porch floor as he groped for the bottle, found it, and raised it to his lips. Amber liquid splashed down his throat, burning as it went.
Watson was still staring at the target, nodding with satisfaction. The rusted shell of a 1963 Mustang, its front end crumpled, its roof flattened almost level to the top of the door panel, crouched like a hungry lion on the fringe of woods in Watson's backyard. He was sure that somewhere in that decaying car there was a freshly drilled bullet hole, so fresh it'd shine like a dime in the daylight. He smiled contentedly as he took another drink.
That goddamned Mustang, he thought, and both hands—one holding the bottle, the other holding the rifle—tightened until the joints of his fingers began to hurt. His eyes stung as he glared angrily a
t the car, now almost lost in the lengthening shadows as twilight deepened. Something deep inside made him wish—yes, even pray to the Spirit Father—that he could take his rifle and blast—blast—BLAST! every shred of metal until it was obliterated.
But he knew, not on the conscious level, which was now swirling in alcoholic fumes, but on a deeper level that even if he could blast that damned Mustang into the next county, it would never take away his memory of that night almost twenty years ago.
That memory was too sharp, too clear even now.
No matter how often he sat in the deepening night, no matter how many empty bottles he piled up in his backyard, the sight of that twisted wreck and the memory of seeing Lisa's arm—thin and white, with ribbons of blood streaking it like a macabre barber's pole from elbow to wrist—would never dim much less disappear. He knew that as the roof of that car crushed inward, it took with it his daughter's life and any possibility that he would ever experience any happiness in this world.
"No... No!" he wailed, his voice rising and falling like an errant wind. The whiskey bottle slipped from his hand, landing with a slosh as it tipped and spilled over the porch floor.
A low growl built up inside Watson's chest as he slammed the rifle butt to his shoulder and quickly squeezed off three—four more shots. There was something comforting and reassuring about the gentle kick of the rifle on his shoulder. The smile on his face was a hard, cold line.
"There, you bastard!" he snarled.
The sun was well below the horizon, and the night air filled with the whirring sound of crickets. The sprinkling of stars overhead looked like the dust of moth wings, but Watson kept his gaze fixed on the hulk of the old car. He suddenly froze, feeling an electric tingle up his spine when he registered movement, a subtle motion in the inky shadows next to the car.
Could it be—? he thought, leaning forward and wishing his eyes had the sharpness they once had.
There were ghosts down there in that car... memories of a night nearly twenty years old, but ghosts didn't move like that, crouching and hulking in the night shadows like these appeared to. Watson leaned forward and rested his chin on the porch railing. His hand groped blindly for the bottle. The air he inhaled turned instantly to fire, searing his lungs.
It can't be, he thought as a rush of fear went up his back, stirring the hair at the nape of his neck. No! It can't be them!
The trick to night vision, his father had taught him when he was a child, was not to look directly at what you wanted to see in the darkness. Look a little to one side or the other and let your concentration pull the object into view.
The motion he had seen had been in line with the car, just a bit beyond it, so Watson let his gaze drift to the left. Through the cloud of alcohol, he wondered which he wanted more—to be mistaken and find out that there really was nothing there, or to be right and find out they were indeed there, and he would have a chance to—
No! Not...
Something moved. A black—no, several black splotches shifted in the night-stained woods. There was no breeze, and the moon wasn't up yet. No clouds were passing by overhead, but there was... something.
"Untcigahunk," Watson whispered.
He fished in his shirt pocket for extra bullets and slowly slid them into the chamber. His fingers were numb and wouldn't work as swiftly and as accurately as he wished they would. Finally, though, with the gun loaded, he took aim, careful to keep his gaze focused to one side, and then he fired.
The rifle spat out orange flame, and Watson listened as the bullet ripped harmlessly through the leaves of the trees. The shadows around the Mustang seemed to be multiplying. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could see more and more of them, seemingly melting into existence from the night. Darker than shadows in the woods, they seemed frozen in mid-motion. The whole night crackled with tension.
"I know you're out there," Watson called out. His voice rolled from his chest like thunder. "I know it's your time again. I know you've come back."
His eyes began to sting as they darted back and forth. The dark shapes increased in number until the Mustang was surrounded by a solid black mass. Sweat trickled down the sides of Watson's face. His grip on the rifle was so tight it was painful.
"Go away!" he suddenly shouted, standing up and brandishing the rifle. He leaped from the porch to the ground. "Go away!"
He started across the backyard, a drunken, weaving run. With the rifle at his hip, he cracked off two more shots. The sound split the night. As he got closer to the Mustang, his night vision got better, and he caught a flickering hint of motion. Squat, black shapes shifted and turned, instantly dissolving into the surrounding woods. All around him, the shapes blended back into the night.
"Go away!" Watson shouted, his voice ragged as air hammered into his lungs. He kept the rifle at ready, but when he was about halfway to the Mustang, he slowed his pace. Scare them off—yes, that was one thing; but to run after them was suicide.
But Watson wasn't in a clear state of mind. What the whiskey hadn't rattled, seeing the untcigahunk near the Mustang and thinking about Lisa had. With a nearly inhuman growl, he charged over to the bullet-riddled car, pausing to scan the surrounding woods. Then he ran into the woods.
The woods fell suddenly silent as he thrashed through the brush. He was lost in swirling madness, slashing at the trees with his rifle and cursing in a strange mixture of English and Micmac. Of course, he knew the woods behind his house as well as he knew the streets in town. He had walked them in both daylight and at night, both summer and winter. He knew the way the land breathed. He knew its secret laws and motions.
But driven by fear and grief, he was far beyond rational thought and caution, because rational thought and caution would have told him if he was right—and he had no reason to doubt it—and if it was time for the untcigahunk to return, as his father and his grandfather had told him they always would, then he was a fool to be out here in the dark. Rifle or no rifle, if they were out there and if they wanted him, they would run him down before he heard or even sensed their presence.
Watson staggered and crashed through the woods, shouting at top-lung and stopping every now and then to crack off a few more shots whenever he thought he saw something—anything—that might be one of them. The night closed in around him like warm, wet velvet—suffocating him, holding him back. He had the sensation that he was running under water: His arms and legs felt like they were being held back by thousands of tiny, invisible hands. The air entering his lungs was thick and cloying, like honey.
The woods Watson knew so well seemed to change subtly, throwing up strange, unexpected hillocks that tripped him, sprouting unusual trees and bushes whose roots and branches pushed and clawed at him, knocking him off balance. Watson's night vision was gone, and he couldn't see much of anything now. Everything was a spinning swirl of alcohol fumes and retina tracers, and he was lost without even realizing it.
He probably walked—lurched would be a better word—for several hundred yards completely unconscious, a shambling, Frankenstein's monster incapable of rational thought. When he finally broke out of the woods onto Tannery Loop Road, no more than a hundred yards from the town dump (now labeled the "Thornton Sanitary Land-Fill and Reclamation Area"), he was barely aware of it when his foot snagged on the road embankment. He didn't feel the pain when his knees slammed against the asphalt. A sudden explosion of multi-colored stars was the last thing he saw until several hours later when he woke up in the town jail.
"Hunting at night" was the charge Police Chief Parkman told him once he regained consciousness. "And if you'd been downtown and not out by the town dump, I would've charged you with drunk and disorderly, too." Watson was too hung-over to care. His body felt like it had been mauled by a grizzly bear. Anything that hadn't been cut or scratched by briars and branches was bruised from stones and hard-packed earth. The bed in the jail cell was actually cleaner than his own bed at home, so he let himself drift off into the comfort of the clean sheets. S
omeone was using a jackhammer on the inside of his skull, though, and sleep seemed to shift away from him as fast as he moved toward it.
"I don't know 'bout pressin' charges," Chief Parkman said solemnly. "I figure you'll be payin' a fine, at least. And Barry Putnam who called to complain 'bout the gunfire said one of your bullets took out his kitchen window. You'll probably be hearin' 'bout that soon enough. But it'll do both you and the town some good if I cool you off here for a while, okay ?'
Watson was too far gone to respond. His breathing came in short, bubbling gasps that sounded to Parkman like he was drowning. Of course, Holden, his deputy, would say, "So what if he did? How much would Thornton miss this sample of lowlife?"
After looking with pity and concern at the bloody, slobbering mess of a man for a few more seconds, Parkman went into the outer office and started writing up the report. He figured he would have to drive out to Putnam's place to check out the damage. He'd get Watson cleaned up and bandaged later, once he was conscious. He had other things to do, anyway, like finish the report so he could get back on the phone with Elaine Bradshaw.
CHAPTER FIVE
"The Windowsill"
1
"You know I don't like coming out here," Cassie McNight said as she walked along the path beside Marty, her hand clasped tightly in his grip. Sunlight slanted through the leaves, giving her hair a copper luster that intensified the pale blue of her eyes.
She and Marty, along with Al LaBlanc and Jenny White, his current girl friend—at least for this week—were wending their way out to the Indian Caves. School had let out almost two hours ago, but they had been held up because Cassie had to go home and check with her mom before she went anywhere. Marty suspected she actually was stalling, trying to figure out some way to get out of going out to the caves with the rest of them.