“Come off it! I’m not senile yet. . . . What’s he supposed to have done with her? Tossed her into the snow?”
“ Mph,” said Johnny, and finished his coffee. “All
right. Some human freak with abnormal strength and the
endurance to fossick around in a Maine blizzard stealing
women. I liked the yeti better. You say you suggested a
madman to Ryder yourself. Pity if you had to come all
the way here just so I could repeat your own guesswork.
To make amends, want to take in a bawdy movie?”
“Love it.”
The following day Dr. Kahn made time to see me at
the end of the afternoon, so polite and patient that I felt
certain I was keeping him from his dinner. He seemed
undecided whether to be concerned with the traumas of
Harp Ryder’s history or those of mine. Mine were
already somewhat known to him. “I wish you had time
to talk all this out to me. You’ve given me a nice
summary of what the physical events appear to have
been, but— ”
“Doctor,” I said, “it happened. I heard the animal.
The window was smashed— ask the sheriff. Leda Ryder
did scream, and when Harp and I got up there together,
the dog had been killed and Leda was gone.”
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“And yet, if it was all as clear as that, I wonder why
you thought of consulting me at all, Ben. I wasn’t there.
I’m just a headshrinker.”
“I wanted . . . Is there any way a delusion could take
hold of Harp and me, disturb our senses in the same
way? Oh, just saying it makes it ridiculous.”
Dr. Kahn smiled. “Let’s say, difficult.”
“Is it possible Harp could have killed her, thrown her
out through the window of the west bedroom— the snow
must have drifted six feet or higher on that side— and
then my mind distorted my time sense? So I might’ve
stood there in the dark kitchen all the time it went on, a
matter of minutes instead of seconds? Then he jumped
down by the shed roof, came back into the house the
normal way while I was stumbling upstairs? Oh, hell.”
Dr. Kahn had drawn a diagram of the house from
my description, and peered at it with placid interest.
“Benign” was a word Helen had used for him. He
said, “Such a distortion of the time sense would be
— unusual. . . . Are you feeling guilty about anything?”
“About standing there and doing nothing? I can’t
seriously believe it was more than a few seconds. Anyway, that would make Harp a monster out of a detective story. He’s not that. How could he count on me to freeze
in panic? Absurd. I’d’ve heard the struggle, steps, the
window of the west room going up. Could he have
killed her and I known all about it at the time, even witnessed it, and then suffered amnesia for that one event?”
He still looked so patient, I wished I hadn’t come. “I
won’t say any trick of the mind is impossible, but I might
call that one highly improbable. Academically, however,
considering your emotional involvement— ”
“I’m not emotionally involved!” I yelled that. He
smiled, looking much more interested. I laughed at
myself. That was better than poking him in the eye. “I’m
upset, Doctor, because the whole thing goes against
reason. If you start out knowing nobody’s going to
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believe you, it’s all messed up before you open your
mouth.”
He nodded kindly. He’s a good joe. I think he’d
stopped listening for what I didn’t say long enough to
hear a little of what I did say. “You’re not unstable, Ben.
Don’t worry about amnesia. The explanation, perhaps
some human intruder, will turn out to be within the
human norm. The norm of possibility does include such
things as lycanthropic delusions, maniacal behavior, and
so on. Your police up there will carry on a good search
for the poor woman. They won’t overlook that snowdrift. Don’t underestimate them, and don’t worry about your own mind, Ben.”
“Ever seen our Maine woods?”
“No, I go away to the Cape.”
“Try it sometime. Take a patch of it, say about fifty
miles by fifty, that’s twenty-five hundred square miles.
Drop some eager policemen into it, tell ’em to hunt for
something they never saw before and don’t want to see,
that doesn’t want to be found.”
“But if your beast is human, human beings leave
traces. Bodies aren’t easy to hide, Ben.”
“In those woods? A body taken by a carnivorous
animal? Why not?” Well, our minds didn’t touch. I
thanked him for his patience and got up. “The maniac
responsible,” I said. “But whatever we call him, Doctor,
he was there”
Mike Short picked me up at the Lohman bus station and
told me something of a ferment in Darkfield. I shouldn’t
have been surprised. “They’re all scared, Mr. Dane.
They want to hurt somebody.” Mike is Jim Short’s
younger brother. He scrapes up a living with his taxi
service and occasional odd jobs at the garage. There’s a
droop in his shaggy ringlets, and I believe thirty is staring
him in the face. “Like old Harp, he wants to tell it like it
happened and nobody buys. That’s sad, man. You been
away what, three days? The fuzz was pissed off. You
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better connect with Mr. Sheriff Robart like soon. He
climbed all over my ass just for driving you to the bus
that day, like I should’ve known you shouldn’t.”
“I’ll pacify him. They haven’t found Mrs. Ryder?”
Mike spat out the car window, which was rolled down
for the mild air. “Old Harp he never got such a job of
snow-shoveling done in all his days. By the c’munity, for
free. No, they won’t find her.” In that there was plenty of
I-want-to-be-asked, and something more, a hint of the
mythology of Mike’s generation.
“So what’s your opinion, Mike?”
He maneuvered a fresh cigarette against the stub of the
last and drove on through tiresome silence. The road was
winding between ridged mountains of plowed, rotting
snow. I had the window down on my side, too, for the
genial afternoon sun, and imagined a tang of spring. At
last Mike said, “You prob’ly don’t go along . . . Jim got
your ca’ out, by the way. It’s at your place. . . . Well,
you’ll hear ’em talking it all to pieces. Some claim Harp’s
telling the truth. Some say he killed her himself. They
don’t say how he made her disappear. Ain’t heard any
talk against you, Mr. Dane, nothing that counts. The
sheriff’s peeved, but that’s just on account you took off
without asking.” His vague, large eyes watched the
melting landscape, the ambiguous messages of spring.
“Well, I think, like, a demon took her, Mr. Dane. She was
one of his own, see? You got to remember, I knew that
chick. Okay, you can say it ai
n’t scientific, only there is a
science to these things, I read a book about it. You can
laugh if you want.”
I wasn’t laughing. It wasn’t my first glimpse of the
contemporary medievalism and won’t be my last if I
survive another year or two. I wasn’t laughing, and I
said nothing. Mike sat smoking, expertly driving his
twentieth-century artifact while I suppose his thoughts
were in the seventeenth, sniffing after the wonders of the
invisible world, and I recalled what Johnny Malcolm had
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said about the need for legends. Mike and I had no more
talk.
Adelaide Simmons was dourly glad to see me. From
her I learned that the sheriff and state police had
swarmed all over Harp’s place and the surrounding
countryside, and were still at it. Result, zero. Harp had
repeatedly told our story and was refusing to tell it
anymore. “Does the chores and sets there drinking,” she
said, “or staring off. Was up to see him yesterday, Mr.
Dane— felt I should. Couple days they didn’t let him
alone a minute, maybe now they’ve eased off some. He
asked me real sharp, was you back yet. Well, I redd up his
place, made some bread, least I could do.”
When I told her I was going there, she prepared a
basket while I sat in the kitchen and listened. “Some say
she busted that window herself, jumped down, and run
off in the snow, out of her mind. Any sense in that?”
“Nope.”
“And some claim she deserted him. Earlier. Which’d
make you a liar. And they say whichever way it was,
Harp’s made up this crazy story because he can’t stand
the truth.” Her clever hands slapped sandwiches into
shape. “They claim Harp got you to go along with it, they
don’t say how.”
“Hypnotized me, likely. Adelaide, it all happened the
way Harp told it. I heard the thing too. If Harp is ready
for the squirrels, so am I.”
She stared hard, and sighed. She likes to talk, but her
mill often shuts off suddenly, because of a quality of hers
which I find good as well as rare: I mean that when she
has no more to say she doesn’t go on talking.
I got up to Ryder’s Ridge about suppertime. Bill
Hastings was there. The road was plowed slick between
the snow ridges, and I wondered how much of the litter
of tracks and crumpled paper and spent cigarette packages had been left by sight-seers. Ground frost had not yet yielded to the mud season, which would soon make
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Edgar Pangbom
normal driving impossible for a few weeks. Bill let me in,
with the look people wear for serious illness. But Harp
heaved himself out of that armchair, not sick in body at
least. “Ben, I heard him last night. Late.”
“What direction?”
“North.”
“You hear it, Bill?” I set down the basket.
My pint-size friend shook his head. “Wasn’t here.” I
couldn’t guess how much Bill accepted of the tale.
Harp said, “What’s the basket?— oh. Obliged. Adelaide’s a nice woman.” But his mind was remote. “It was north, Ben, a long way, but I think I know about where it
would be. I wouldn’t’ve heard it except the night was so
still, like everything had quieted for me. You know, they
been adeviling me night and day. Robart, state cops,
mess of smart little buggers from the papers. I couldn’t
sleep, I stepped outside like I was called. Why, he
might’ve been the other side of the stars, the sky so full of
’em and nothing stirring. Cold . . . You went to Boston,
Ben?”
“Yes. Waste of time. They want it to be something
human— anyhow, something that fits the books.”
Whittling, Bill said neutrally, “Always a man for the
books yourself, wasn’t you, Ben?”
I had to agree. Harp asked, “Hadn’t no ideas?”
“Just gave me back my own thoughts in their language.
We have to find it, Harp. Of course some wouldn’t take it
for true even if you had photographs.”
Harp said, “Photographs be goddamned.”
“I guess you got to go,” said Bill Hastings. “We been
talking about it, Ben. Maybe I’d feel the same if it was
me. . . . I better be on my way or supper’ll be cold and
the old woman raising hellfire.” He tossed his stick back
in the woodbox.
“Bill,” said Harp, “you won’t mind feeding the stock
couple, three days?”
“I don’t mind. Be up tomorrow.”
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“Do the same for you sometime. I wouldn’t want it
mentioned anyplace.”
“Harp, you know me better’n that. See you, Ben.”
“Snow’s going fast,” said Harp when Bill had driven
off. “Be in the woods a long time yet, though.”
“You wouldn’t start this late.”
He was at the window, his lean bulk shutting off much
light from the time-seasoned kitchen where most of his
indoor life had been passed. “Morning, early. Tonight I
got to listen.”
“Be needing sleep, I’d think.”
“I don’t always get what I need,” said Harp.
“I’ll bring my snowshoes. About six? And my carbine—
I’m best with a gun I know.”
He stared at me awhile. “All right, Ben. You understand, though, you might have to come back alone. I ain’t coming back till I get him, Ben. Not this time.”
At sunup I found him with Ned and Jerry in the stable.
He had lived eight or ten years with that team. He gave
Ned’s neck a final pat as he turned to me and took up our
conversation as if night had not intervened. “Not till I
get him. Ben, I don’t want you drug into this ag’inst your
inclination.”
“Did you hear it again last night?”
“I heard it. North.”
The sun was at the point of rising when we left on our
snowshoes, like morning ghosts ourselves. Harp strode
ahead down the slope to the woods without haste,
perhaps with some reluctance. Near the trees he halted,
gazing to his right, where a red blaze was burning the
edge of the sky curtain; I scolded myself for thinking that
he was saying good-bye to the sun.
The snow was crusted, sometimes slippery even for
our web feet. We entered the woods along a tangle of
tracks, including the fat tire marks of a snow scooter.
“Guy from Lohman,” said Harp. “Hired the goddamn
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thing out to the state cops and hisself with it. Goes
pootin’ around all over hell, fit to scare everything inside
eight, ten miles.” He cut himself a fresh plug to last the
morning. “I b’lieve the thing is a mite farther off than
that. They’ll be messing around again today.” His fingers
dug into my arm. “See how it is, don’t y’? They ain’t
looking for what we are. Looking for a dead body to hang
on to my neck. And if they was to find her the way I
found— the way I fo
und— ”
“Harp, you needn’t borrow trouble.”
“I know how they think,” he said. “Was I to walk
down the road beyond Darkfield, they’d pick me up.
They ain’t got me in shackles because they got no— no
body, Ben. Nobody needs to tell me about the law. They
got to have a body. Only reason they didn’t leave a man
here overnight, they figure I can’t go nowhere. They
think a man couldn’t travel in three, four foot of
snow. . . . Ben, I mean to find that thing and shoot it
down. . . . We better slant off thisaway.”
He set out at a wide angle from those tracks, and we
soon had them out of sight. On the firm crust our
snowshoes left no mark. After a while we heard a
grumble of motors far back, on the road. Harp chuckled
viciously. “Bright and early like yesterday.” He stared
back the way we had come. “They’ll never pick that up
without dogs. That son of a bitch Robart did talk about
borrying a hound somewhere, to sniff Leda’s clothes.
More likely give ’em a sniff of mine, now.”
We had already come so far that I didn’t know the way
back. Harp would know it. He could never be lost in any
woods, but I have no mental compass such as his. So I
followed him blindly, not trying to memorize our trail. It
was a region of uniform old growth, mostly hemlock, no
recent lumbering, few landmarks. The monotony wore
down native patience to a numbness, and our snowshoes
left no more impression than our thoughts.
An hour passed, or more; after that sound of motors
faded. Now and then I heard the wind move peacefully
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overhead. Few bird calls, for most of our singers had not
yet returned. “Been in this part before, Harp?”
“Not with snow on the ground, not lately.” His voice
was hushed and careful. “Summers. About a mile now,
and the trees thin out some. Stretch of slash where they
were taking out pine four, five years back and left
everything a christly pile of shit like they always do.”
No, Harp wouldn’t get lost here, but I was well lost,
tired, sorry I had come. Would he turn back if I
collapsed? I didn’t think he could, now, for any reason.
My pack with blanket roll and provisions had become
infernal. He had said we ought to have enough for three
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