"And just where was it," Peter asked with a smirk, "that Grogo the Goblin was supposed to have chased us off into the woods?"
"I don't know." I laughed, and then said, more soberly, "But we did get a flat tire that morning, and Nancy did get killed when she went into the woods to take a leak."
"Yeah, she got killed by a bear or a bobcat or something," Russell reminded me. "Not a Hindu demon."
"That's what the police inferred from the wounds on the body," I replied, and then added after a pause, "when they got the time to attend to it. After they had gotten all the corpses up off the streets and back into the cemetery."
They looked at each other with amusement. "Artie!" Russell laughed.
"I know, I know," I said, laughing with them.
Peter took a toothpick from his pocket and started chewing on it. He stopped smoking fifteen years ago, and he's been chewing on wood ever since. "It is funny, though, that we never saw any of the people after that weekend."
"What's funny about it?" Russell asked. "We left right when Alex was calling the police, and I sure had no reason to ever go back. We were all angry at Clay about the land, and after what Sean told us about moving that girl's body, I wasn't crazy about seeing him anymore either."
"People do just drift apart naturally anyway," I said.
"I suppose." Peter nodded.
I parked the car on the shoulder of the River Road and we followed Bauer into the woods. There was no way to get to the foot of Saunders Mountain except by walking through the forest, and whatever path there had once been had long ago been obscured by nature, making it something of a hike. We had been walking for a half hour before I asked Bauer, "Who owns this land now?"
"Miss Saunders," he replied. "She lives up there, on that mountain. She's something of a recluse."
I nodded. "She wouldn't be crippled, would she?"
He glanced at me. "Yes. Shooting accident or something, a long time ago. How did you know that?"
"I think I remember her," I said weakly. "Does she still live with her brother?"
"Doesn't have a brother, not that I know of."
"Look." Peter nodded ahead of us. "The house is still there."
We entered the clearing and stood for a moment, looking at the old Sweet house. I remembered it as a rotting old ruin in the first place, more a cabin than a house, and the years had not treated it well. The burned-out barn looked pretty much the same as it had twenty years ago, but then I suppose there isn't much more damage could be done to it. It had been flat on the ground when last I saw it.
Peter was staring at the house. "Brings back memories," he muttered.
"Yeah," Russell said, "and I'd like to forget a lot of them." We walked on into the woods on the other side of the house, and as we walked I was thinking back on it all, on the big party Clay threw that weekend, the would-be seance in Grogo's house, the problems in Alex's bar, the hasty flight from Beckskill in the wee hours of the morning, Nancy's death.
"Hell of a weekend," I said softly.
"Hell of an understatement," Peter observed, sharing my thoughts.
It was the same weekend, of course, that the local cemetery was vandalized by person or persons unknown. The police decided that it had probably been drunken bikers or stoned-out hippies who had dug up all those bodies and left them all over the place. The whole story was reported in the local papers, and in the Daily News. Didn't make the Times, though, as I recall.
We came to the upsweep of land at the foot of Saunders Mountain and walked slowly along its edge, peering through the scrub, looking for the cave. I wasn't surprised when we found it. There are caves all over the place in the Catskills. Officer Bauer switched on his flashlight and went in. We waited outside. He came back out a few minutes later, and I asked, "Anything in there?"
"A lot of bat shit." He laughed.
I hadn't said anything to him about the manuscript, so I lied a little and said, "I seem to remember that there was another cave around here someplace. I think we'd better keep looking, just for a while."
He shrugged and we walked on. "Officer," Peter asked, "wasn't there supposed to be a factory or something like that built in this town, on the banks of the river?"
"Not to my knowledge," he replied. He was about twenty-five, so he wouldn't remember anything about that anyway. But then he added, "I don't think there could be a factory in Beckskill. The EPA keeps a close watch on the small rivers that feed the Hudson."
"Thank God for the EPA," Peter said.
I decided to needle Russell. "Yeah, good old Nixon, setting up an agency to protect the environment."
He glanced at me wryly. "We'll discuss this later."
And then we found the second cave, and Bauer switched the flashlight on again and went in, while we again waited outside. He did not emerge for a long while, and when he did, his face had a greenish tint to it. "Do you have that letter with you, sir?" he asked.
"No," I answered. "Why?"
He coughed. "Well, sir, this has just become an official police matter. There's a body in there, a woman. Been dead two or three days, looks to me." He paused. "If you don't mind, I'd like you to come in and see if it's your friend."
I breathed heavily. A few years ago my uncle died in a fire, and I had to go to the morgue to identify what was left of him. The image of his face tormented me for months afterward, and I prayed that I would never have to go through something like that again, but I guess my prayer had been answered no. "Okay, sure," I said reluctantly.
"You'd better brace yourself," he warned me. "It's been pretty warm, and she isn't far enough back in there for the cave's cold to do much preserving. She's in pretty bad shape. Looks like an animal got to her, too." I swallowed hard. "An animal?"
"Yeah. Chewed the back of her head clean off."
I looked at Peter and Russell. Their faces were white.
Bauer went back into the cave and I followed him. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I think the stench of rot hit my nostrils the minute I entered, and it grew worse with each step. We went about ten yards and then Bauer shone the light down on the ground. And there she was, lying on her side, her slit wrists caked with dried blood, fragments of her skull lying on the ground behind her. Even though her face was badly decayed and my eyes were watering heavily, I had no trouble recognizing her.
"Is that your friend, sir?"
"Yes," I said, and then felt my breakfast struggling to work its way back up into my mouth.
I went outside quickly, and the nausea subsided. Russell put his hand on my shoulder. "You okay?" I nodded. "I'm okay."
"Artie," Peter asked. "Is it . . . ?"
I nodded again.
Officer Bauer took a small notebook from his belt pouch and clicked open a ballpoint. He checked his watch, noted the time, and then said, "I'd like to get some preliminaries right now, if you don't mind, sir, and I'd like you to come back to the station later on today so we can make out a full report. I have to see to the removal of the body first."
"Sure, I understand." I coughed.
He put the tip of the pen to the paper. "What was the lady's name again, sir?"
"Ostlich." I sighed. "Karen Ostlich."
It all makes sense to me now, of course. It's right out of Psych 101. A sensitive young girl is sexually abused by her father, her mother commits suicide when she learns about it, and the poor kid just can't handle it all. Her personality splits, and Karen Ostlich no longer exists. In her place are someone she calls Dorcas (quiet, shy, nervous, guilt-ridden) and someone else she calls Lydia (loud, outgoing, solid as a rock, and willing to do anything). The stronger of the two personalities is the one able to handle the strain caused by the abuse, and so it is Lydia, not Dorcas, whom her father molested. But the emotional strain is an undeniable reality, the pressure mounts, the pain and the trauma and the irrational guilt persist, and so it is Dorcas who has a breakdown and slits her wrists, not Lydia.
I began to suspect what must have happened to her soon after
I started to read "Lydia's" manuscript, as I realized that "Karen" is only mentioned in "Dorcas's" psychotic musings, as soon as I saw that "Dorcas" and "Lydia" were together time and time again. Physically impossible, of course; but as far as she was concerned, that was the way it all happened, because to her (that is to say, to Karen), Dorcas and Lydia were indeed two separate people. She must have had two distinct memory perspectives of everything that happened, a Lydia memory and a Dorcas memory. But except for a brief moment while she was tripping in Grogo's house, there are no Karen memories at all.
And none of us ever really noticed or understood. Sure, we all knew that when she was in a partying mood, she insisted that everyone call her Lydia; and when she was depressed or quiet or nervous, she said her name was Dorcas. But people assumed and abandoned names easily back in the so-called psychedelic sixties, and damned peculiar names many of them were.
My first roommate at college was a guy everyone called Aardvark, and we lived down the hall from two other guys named Dwarf and Duck. I mean, good grief, Frank Zappa named his kids Dweezle and Moon Unit! Grace Slick named her son God, and then changed it to America because God seemed too pretentious! Children born back then were given names like Sky and Gazelle and Woodstock. So if she wanted to be called Lydia sometimes and Dorcas other times, what difference did it make? Who cared?
That explains the whole business about Clayton raping her that night in the trailer. He probably did, without realizing it. He thought she was Lydia that night, and he was always having sex with Lydia. But at that moment she wasn't Lydia, she was Dorcas; and in her Dorcas-memory of the incident, she was raped. As for Clayton raping and murdering Sarah, I don't know if that's the truth or merely one of Karen's paranoid fantasies. Sarah was indeed found dead, I remember that; but I don't remember rape being mentioned, and to the best of my knowledge the crime was never solved. For all I know, Karen killed her and then engaged in guilt displacement by assigning the crime to Clayton.
It was only as I stood there in front of the cave, giving what information I had to the trooper, that the pattern, which should have been obvious to us all back then, became clear. Dorcas and Lydia, Lydia and Dorcas. Dorcas when she was a good little girl, and Lydia when she was bad. Dorcas when she obeyed her father and Lydia when she didn't. Dorcas didn't do drugs, but Lydia did. Dorcas was virginally chaste, and Lydia slept with anybody and everybody. Dorcas pined with romantic innocence for Peter, and every orifice Lydia had was open to Clayton at his whim. In her letter Lydia said she hadn't seen Dorcas in ten years. Of course she hadn't.
Dorcas would never be a prostitute, and Lydia had always thought of herself as a whore. Lydia wrote and told me she was going to kill Dorcas; but inasmuch as Lydia was Dorcas and Dorcas was Lydia and they both really were Karen, what could she have been talking about other than suicide? She was a textbook case of multiple personality. I mean, like one really fucked-up chick, you know?
I found myself weeping.
We sat around the police station in Haddlyville for a few hours and then I gave my statement. Officer Bauer wants me to send him the letter, and I'll do that as soon as I get home. He said the manuscript isn't needed at the moment, but that I should hang on to it. I told him I had every intention of doing just that.
What had been supposed to be something of a nostalgic weekend had turned into a nightmare, and Peter was all for going back to Long Island as soon as we left the police station, but Russell wanted to go to New Paltz and have a few beers at P G's, one of the bars we used to hang out in when we were in college. It fell to me to cast the deciding vote, and after giving it some thought, I said, "I want to go visit Becky."
"Becky Saunders?" Peter asked. "What the hell for?"
"I just want to talk to her."
"And ask her if Grogo the Goblin was a Hindu demon?" Russell asked with a laugh. "Come on, Artie!"
"When was the last time you saw Clayton or Sean Brenner?" I asked them, and then answered my own question. "It was twenty years ago, wasn't it? And not a word about either of them since. You, me, Buzzy, Gary, Danny, none of us has seen or heard about them for twenty years."
"Why would we?" Peter asked. "After that weekend, none of us wanted anything to do with them."
"Well, I want to talk to her," I insisted. "Look, you guys take my car. Just drop me off at the Saunders place and then go to New Paltz for a few beers. It's only a half hour away. I'll meet you back at Alex's bar in about four hours, and if you want to go home then, Pete, it's okay with me."
They agreed, and soon thereafter I was back in Beckskill, walking up the still-unpaved dirt driveway that led up to the trailer. I was wondering if she still lived in it or rented it or got rid of it, but my first view of the trailer told me that it had been uninhabited for many, many years. I looked off to the left and saw the big house that Clay and Becky's parents had built. It looked fresh and clean and painted, and I figured that she must have moved there after . . . after . . .
After what? What the hell happened up here?
I walked to the house and rang the doorbell. After a minute or so the door opened and I was confronted by a behemoth of a woman, a nurse or paid companion or something like that, who stared at me coldly and said, "Yes?"
"Hello." I smiled, as affably as possible. "I'm Artie Winston, an old friend of Becky's, and I was in the area, so I—"
"Miss Saunders doesn't receive visitors," she snapped, and began to shut the door.
"Wait a moment, please," I said hastily. "Please just tell her who I am. I'm quite sure she'll want to say hello."
The woman stared at me with irritation and then muttered, "Wait here." She shut the door again.
I tapped my fingers on the doorframe impatiently, mentally reviewing everything I wanted to ask Becky.
Did they ever solve Sarah Ostlich's murder? Where are Clayton and Sean? What happened to Alex Brown? How did she get injured? Was there really a lynching out by the old Sweet place?
And whatever happened to Grogo the Goblin?
The door swung open again and the female Gargantua said, "She doesn't want to see you." She started to close the door again.
"Wait," I said. "Did you tell her my name?"
"Of course I did. She doesn't want to see you. She says to go away and not come back." The door slammed without further exchange.
This, of course, left me in something of a quandary. I had expected to sit around talking to Becky for a few hours, and then call a radio dispatch cab from the bus station in Haddlyville to get me back into town. Now I was left without transportation, without access to a phone, and no option other than to walk.
And more importantly, I had not been able to ask Rebecca Saunders any of the questions that were on my mind.
I walked down the drive to the paved roadway, and then followed that for four miles until it bisected the River Road. To the right, two miles away, was Beckskill. To the left was the forest in the center of which stood the old Sweet place. I went to the left.
I don't really know why I wanted to go back to Grogo's house. Curiosity, perhaps, or nostalgia, or sheer perversity. I don't know. But I walked along the River Road until I came to the spot where we had parked a few hours earlier, and then I walked into the woods. It was only about four in the afternoon on a clear spring day, so I had no trouble seeing and no problem finding my way back to the clearing.
In one of his books, Salem's Lot I think it was, Stephen King has one of his characters say that horror writers are usually more skeptical and less superstitious than the general population. That's probably true for writers, and it's most definitely true for people like me, actors. Our whole business revolves around fantasy, remember. I've made my share of horror movies, worn my share of ghoulish makeup, seen how special effects work, and I know nonsense when I see it. Keep this in mind as I relate what happened next.
I entered the old house and walked to the center of the large main room. The interior smelled like time, like age. If you have ever haunted the dark downstairs stac
ks of secondhand bookstores, you will know the smell I'm referring to, the smell of dry brittle wood and long-undisturbed dust.
I looked down at my feet and saw an empty beer bottle, and discovered to my surprise that it was a bottle of Old Peculiar, a dark and tasty Yorkshire ale that Gary Mercier used to drink back in college. Then I remembered that Gary had brought a few of them with him to the would-be s~ance, and I'm quite certain that he had not taken the empties with him when he left. What this meant, of course, was that this dust-covered bottle had been sitting there for twenty years, resting in the same spot where Gary had placed it when we all left the Sweet house to go to Alex's bar.
I saw a pile of papers resting in the corner and picked them up. They were worm-ridden and rotten, but a few of the central sheets were still legible, and I was surprised to find that they were a stack of Vernon Sweet's sideshow handbills. I leafed through one of the readable copies, and an old photograph fell out. I picked it up and looked at it.
I had never met Vernon Sweet, but the little man in the picture could not possibly have been anyone else. He stood beside a small, frail, elderly man with dark skin; Ashvarinda, I suppose. I smiled sadly and muttered, "One hell of a story, Karen."
And then I heard the floor creaking in the next room.
I shivered and commanded myself to stop acting like a child. Houses creak, especially old ones. I listened carefully and heard nothing more for a few moments. And then, very soft, I heard the sound of a woman laughing.
Perhaps my imagination had taken control of me, perhaps I was tired or overwrought from the terrible experience of the day, or perhaps the wind made an odd sound as it drifted through the forest. Already the moment is fading in my memory, and it was only a few hours ago. I guess I don't really know what I heard; but at that moment, I thought I heard laughter. I turned and looked at the doorway; and in the other room, a shadow moved.
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