by Ronald Malfi
“Annie says you had some trouble up in the woods today?”
“Oh, yes.” He was fidgeting and looked uncertain where to begin. “I was out most of the day. Collecting box-traps. It sometimes takes a while, having to stick them way out past the yard—”
“I’ve told you about trapping squirrels, Graham.”
“They get into my shed, tear apart the birdseed, tear apart the fertilizer. Damn things already gnawed the life out of my spark-plug wire on my mower…”
“What happened?”
“One of them varmints chewed right through the wire.”
“No,” he said, “what happened today in the woods?”
“Oh.” His eyes were red and shifty and Raintree guessed the man had been drinking. “Well, it was just starting to get dark—sun was just slipping through the mountains out west, could see it through the trees—and I’m out collecting the last of the box-traps when I heard something. Sounded like someone laughing. Well, I stood stark still and started looking around—you know how I don’t cotton to folks trespassing, and I own that whole lot right until that valley begins, and then it belongs to Mr. Kellow…”
“Someone laughing?”
“Yes, sir. And it sounded close by, but I didn’t see nobody when I looked up. But like I said, it was getting dark and things in the woods tend to look funny in the dark.”
Raintree leaned forward in his chair. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, working the cold out of it.
“Anyhow, I shout out, ‘Who’s there?’ but no one answers, so I think maybe it was an owl or whippoorwill or something and I start heading back home. And then I stop because I saw something on the ground.”
In one quick motion—quite agile for such an old man—Rand pulled open the snaps of his jacket with his left hand and dove into the jacket’s lining with his right. In that instant, Raintree had time to think, Dear God, I think the old coot is actually going to pull out a gun and shoot me. But Rand didn’t pull out a gun. What he pulled out was a wool hunting cap, nearly identical to the one he’d been wringing through his hands just moments before, except this one was green, not red.
Rand slammed the cap down on Raintree’s desk. “I found this,” he said with as much conviction as someone who’d just presented incontestable evidence that there was life on Mars.
“A hunting cap,” Raintree said.
“A hunting cap belonging to one of them,” Rand said, and pulled back the inner lining of the cap, exposing the brand tag. Two initials were written on the tag in permanent marker: J.M.
“Them?” Raintree said.
“One of them hunters that disappeared,” Rand said, now with some agitation. “One of them fellas was named Justin McCullum, am I right, sir?”
“Shoot,” Raintree said, reaching out and grabbing the cap from the old man’s gnarled fingers. “You playing some kind of head-game with me, Graham? That’s serious business with those hunters, you know…”
“No games, Detective, no way.” He thrust a finger at the hunting cap. “Sure as shade, that cap belonged to one of them disappeared hunters, I’ll bet any amount of money on it. I read the names in the papers last month when everyone was out looking for them and I know one of those names was Justin McCullum, know it just like I know my own shoe size. I’m right, yes?”
Raintree sighed. The cap was still damp from having been out in the woods—presumably for a month, if the old man’s story was authentic. “Justin McCullum,” he acknowledged, “yes, one of the hunters. You found this where? Could you take me back to the spot where you found it?”
The old man’s face grew dark. Jesus save the world, his eyes just wouldn’t stop.
You’re pumped up a good one there, pal, Raintree thought.
“I ain’t going back.” Rand’s voice suddenly sounded very small.
“And why is that?”
“I can tell you where I found it, right down to this rock and that tree, but I ain’t going back in those woods. Not now, not tonight and in the dark.”
“Why not, Graham?”
“That cap,” Rand said, and now he was nearly whispering, “ain’t the only thing I found out there tonight.”
Graham Rand had become a small, helpless child before Raintree’s eyes. He watched him—watched his eyes, really, those crazy and rolling eyes—regress until there was no sense behind them. Only fear. Basic, animal fear—like the unencumbered fear of small children.
“What else did you see out there tonight?” Without realizing, Raintree’s own voice came out in a whisper.
“A man,” Rand said.
“A man.”
“I think it was a man. It was dark. A man…or a boy. It was male.”
“This is the person you heard laugh?”
“Oh, I’m certain of it.”
“Did you recognize this man?”
“No, sir.”
“It was too dark?”
“Well, too dark…but not just the dark, you know what I mean?”
“I don’t think I do.”
“I didn’t recognize him because…well, Detective…he didn’t seem like no man I’d ever seen before.”
“A stranger? Not someone from town?”
“Not someone from…” Rand’s rheumy eyes narrowed. He chose his words. “Not someone real, Detective. At least, not someone I’d ever imagine seeing in town. Or in any other town anywhere else for that matter.”
“I’m not following you, Graham.”
“Don’t think it’s nonsense—”
“I didn’t say that.”
“All right.”
“Just explain to me who—explain to me what you saw tonight.”
Rand worked his livery lips together, created a slightly irritating clicking sound. His hands had gone back to torturing his own hunting cap. “I caught him out of the corner of my eye just as I was heading back to the house. He was running, moving fast, and half-hidden behind some trees. He was deeper in the woods, an’ toward the northeast where the woods was already grown dark. But I saw him and he saw me, too—I’m pretty certain of that—and I think he wanted me to see him.”
“Why did you say he was like no other person you’d ever imagine seeing?” Raintree asked. “I don’t understand that part, Graham.”
“I was afraid,” Rand said frankly, unashamed. “It was like a warning came with him, maybe some warning that followed him in the air, I don’t know. But there was something there, sure as I’m sitting right here in front of you. Something. Just something, Detective.”
“Could you describe him? What was he wearing?”
To the detective’s astonishment, Graham Rand let out a small chuckle. But it was a nervous chuckle. Rand was still that child sitting before him. “That’s the other strange thing,” the old man said. “He wasn’t wearing no clothes.”
Raintree blinked. “He was naked?”
“As a jay bird, at least from what I could tell.” Rand swallowed a lump of spit that, from his expression, apparently felt like a golf ball going down. “And his skin was white, like snow. Or like—you know, when a dead body’s been laying around? Just white. Like no skin I’d ever seen before in my life. Not on anything alive, anyway.”
“Like snow,” Raintree repeated. If it wasn’t for the hunting cap, Raintree would have smiled at the story, patted the old man on the back, and bought him a cup of coffee. But that cap—J.M.—was here, dampening the Xeroxed papers that it rested upon. Smelling of cedar and winter and, faintly, soil. There was no denying the cap. Also, there was the fact that this strange man—this strange naked man—had frightened this poor old fellow enough to keep him out of the woods. And Graham Rand loved the woods. It was all he had.
“Ain’t making this up, Detective,” Rand said, mistaking Raintree’s silence for disbelief.
“Did this person just disappear?”
“Ran off into the woods. I said it was dark.”
“What direction?”
“Northeast, just like I said.”
“And he looked at you?”
“Yes, sir. Saw him turn his head as he ran. It was quick and I suppose if my eyes weren’t as good as they are—twenty-twenty, you know, all my life—then I wouldn’t have even noticed. But I noticed, all right. And then he just took off deeper into the woods.”
“What did he look like?”
“Not sure. Face was…I don’t know…kinda smeary.”
“Smeary?”
“Hard to see.”
“Did you try and make any further contact with him? Call out after him?”
“No way on God’s green Earth. Had no mind to whatsoever. Let ’im go.”
“No mind,” Raintree said. There was a tapping noise to his right. He looked down and saw that he was drumming his fingers on the top of the desk. “If you didn’t get a good look at him, Graham, how do you know he was male?”
“Because,” Rand said with the unimpassioned simplicity of old men, “a man can tell another man. It’s a simple as that. We’re all animals, Detective.”
Yes, Raintree thought, looking back down at the initials printed on the label of the hunting cap, we’re all animals indeed.
Five minutes later, Graham Rand was seated in the passenger seat of Raintree’s sedan as the detective maneuvered the vehicle through the darkened, wooded back roads of Spires. The moon was full in the sky, passing behind the occasional coal-colored cloud.
“The spot ain’t far from my home,” Rand said. He was sitting on the edge of the passenger seat, straining the seat belt. His fingers, thick and fumbling, wrestled with each other. “I’ll point out where I saw him, but I ain’t going back into those woods. You can take me directly home, thank you.”
Graham Rand lived in a clapboard ranch just off North Town Road. The tiny house was obscured on three of its four sides by the massive expanse of woodland that stretched all the way beyond the Adirondack Mountains and as far north as Canada. From Rand’s house, over and above the forestry, it was easy to make out the brooding profile of the Kellow Compound nestled on its hill on the other side of the valley. Deep Valley, as it was called by some of the locals, separated the Kellow place from Graham Rand’s home—and the rest of Spires, for that matter. A network of vein-like brooks and streams wove throughout the canyon in every imaginable direction in Deep Valley and, in some places, the forestry was so impenetrable, even the most experienced hunter knew to steer clear of the area.
North Town Road turned to dirt and gravel, now covered in a film of frost, and Raintree slowed the sedan down to a manageable speed. The car slowly drifted by Graham Rand’s little house.
“Just a little further up,” the old man said to Raintree. He was pointing at the windshield. “Just a little. On your left now…here…up here…”
“Here?”
“Stop.”
Raintree stopped the car, clicked it into PARK, left the engine running. “You want to show me exactly?”
“Ain’t moving,” Rand said, shaking his head. “It’s just there. You’ll see my traps. I dropped them and didn’t pick them up. Go on, you’ll see them. That’s where I was standing.” He shifted his index finger and pointed due north. “And that direction—that’s where I saw the fellow. He moved deeper into the woods that way.”
Now, peering through the windshield, Raintree could see the silhouette of the Kellow Compound on the hill in the distance.
“All right,” Raintree said, grabbing his flashlight from the back seat. “I’ll just be a minute, I’m going to have a look around. You wait here, then I’ll take you home.”
“Be careful, Detective.”
It was freezing outside the car. Raintree shuddered against the heavy wind, pulled his coat close to his body, and stepped across the dirt road. His shoes crunched on the frozen earth. He clicked on the flashlight and worked it around the perimeter of the woods. The old man’s story was certainly peculiar, but not uncharacteristically peculiar; old Graham Rand had told some whoppers in his time, and naked albinos weren’t the craziest. However, he didn’t believe the old man was lying this time. Maybe a bit confused with what he saw, but not lying.
Is it possible that the old man actually saw one of those missing hunters, that maybe he saw Justin McCullum himself? he wondered. That hat he found—that could certainly belong to McCullum, those could certainly be his initials…but running around naked in the woods? No, that doesn’t make any sense at all.
Raintree jumped, nearly dropping his flashlight, the second the sound of the car horn pierced the night. Shaken, he spun around to see Rand poking his pigeon-faced head out the window at him.
“Graham!”
“Would you mind gathering up the traps for me, Detective?”
“Be quiet!”
Regaining his composure, Raintree turned and stepped into the forest.
A little jumpy, are we? a small voice said from the back of his head. Maybe just a little bit frightened?
No—he wasn’t frightened. There was nothing to be afraid of. Just a few missing hunters and an injured young girl.
He walked through the woods, side-stepping the interlocking arms of impassable vegetation, his booted feet crunching on the frozen dead leaves. The flashlight’s beam only played a small distance ahead of him. The woods beyond the beam was dark, like a black curtain drawn across that part of the world. Again, he thought of the hunters. They’d gotten a call about them just over a month ago, from one of the wives of the three men: they’d gone hunting for the afternoon, and had not returned the following day. Alan Bannercon had taken the call and had calmed the woman, but did not bother to put anyone on the case (hadn’t even referred to it as a “case” until a good two days later when commotion befell the station in a hailstorm of frantic wives and sobbing, grub-faced children), having prematurely written the situation off as an instance of Three Men and Some Booze and Guns Out on a Friday Night. But Bannercon had been wrong—those hunters had not just been out having a good time. They’d disappeared. And soon, Bannercon had the entire Caliban County Police Department searching the immense timberland for any trace of the three hunters. Helicopter sweeps, scent-trailing canines—only to turn up not even a single clue as to the hunters’ disappearance. And now old Graham Rand finds a hunting cap? A hunting cap with the initials J.M. printed in marker on the tag? Maybe it was some kind of joke after all…
Raintree’s foot slammed into something solid and he muttered under his breath. He focused the flashlight beam on the object and saw that it was one of Graham Rand’s squirrel traps. It was on its side, its wire-mesh hinged doors flung open.
Old Mr. Rand dropped you and ran in one heck of a hurry, Raintree thought, grinning without humor. This is ridiculous. There is no one here.
He bent and scooped up the trap. Something white and plastic was beneath the trap, half-hidden under some leaves. With one hand (the tips of his fingers already starting to go numb), he reached down and brushed the leaves aside. The white, plastic thing was a fork, three of its four tines broken off. Nothing. Garbage.
He found a few more box-traps deeper in the woods and gathered them up before turning around and heading back to the car. He hadn’t expected to find anything, anyway—and now it seemed too evident to him that Rand, that lonely old bastard, could have simply written those initial inside one of his own hunting caps and brought it down to the station. In fact, if he had to bet, he’d say the initialed hunting cap was probably the same exact size as the one the old fool now had perched on his head.
Christ…
He tossed the box-traps in the back of the car and slid back behind the wheel.
“Well?” Rand’s eyes were like saucers.
“Well,” Raintree repeated in his way, “you left those rusted box-traps back there in the woods, Graham, left them all just lying on the ground.”
“Forget the traps, what did you see?”
“I didn’t see anything. Just traps—traps I told you to keep out of these woods, remember?”
“I said forget th
e traps!” the old man barked. He suddenly became very nervous, his eyes darting along the length of the windshield and out into the night. Great blue veins surfaced and throbbed at his temples. His skin looked tissue paper-thin. “Detective, what did you see?”
Taking a deep breath, slowly counting backwards in his head (this was a calming stunt he’d mastered after several confrontations with the disagreeable Sheriff Bannercon), Raintree said, “Graham, I didn’t see anyone out there. The place is pitch black. And cold. Maybe you saw someone there and maybe you just think you did, but whatever the case, there is no one there now. I promise you.”
Rand’s eyes did not accept the detective’s promise; they continued to dance across the dark scenery beyond the windshield, searching.
“I’ll take you home now,” Raintree said. He threw the car into reverse, executed a two-point turn on the narrow road, and headed back down toward the old man’s house.
When he stopped and turned to look at Rand, he saw the man was shaking violently. “You’re cold?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll warm up inside. Do I need to keep these box-traps?”
“No, sir.”
“Keep them in your yard, Graham, and not scattered throughout North America, all right?”
“Yes, sir.”
The old man collected his traps from the back seat and walked silently up the shadowed walkway toward the front of his square little house. Raintree watched him go. Despite the situation, he harbored a sense of compassion for the old man. He’s lonely, he thought. He can’t help it.
Once Rand had passed through his front door, Raintree turned the sedan around and headed back to town along the dirt road. He tried the heater but, go figure, the darn thing hadn’t worked properly the past three winters, why should it start working now?
In his rearview, he caught a glimpse of the Kellow Compound in the distance. And for some reason, he suddenly felt as though the giant mansion was creeping up on him, that its image in the rearview mirror was a false one, a mock-image reflected only to fool him while the real thing was right now sneaking up on him in the woods—