by Ronald Kelly
Curtis continued watching the shows, feeding his face and wishing that he was somewhere else. He was a little peeved. The other eleven fellows that had been hired to guard PaleDoveMountain had gone to Rebel's Roost, to drink free whiskey and plan the elimination of Gart Mayo. He had overheard talk that the county sheriff was intending on stirring up some trouble for Eco-Plenty, and since Mayo was not one to be bought off or discouraged, then he would have to be stopped, permanently so. So that was the reason his eleven buddies and that Russ fellow were down at the juke joint — to discuss the best way to handle the situation. Curtis had been left behind with a shotgun, to keep an eye on the camp.
So far the only thing he had kept his eye on was the TV set. Nothing was going on outside, that was for sure. Nothing was out there but pitch darkness and the monotonous chirring of crickets in the encompassing forest.
At least that was what he thought until someone knocked at the trailer door.
Curtis hadn't heard the sound of the company trucks returning, so he figured it must be one of the surveying crew that had come visiting. He didn't mind the company. Maybe they could play cards or checkers, or watch that Western film festival that was running all night on one of the local stations.
The knock came again, harder now, rattling the door in its frame. "Hold your horses!" called Curtis. "I'm a-coming!"
He opened the door and peered into the night. A shadowy form stood just beyond the reach of the trailer's inner light. "Who's out there?" he demanded. He was about to reach for the shotgun and take a look for himself, when the man stepped into view.
It was Dwight Lovell.
Curtis was both surprised and delighted to see his old pal. He had spent many a hellacious Saturday night with the backwoods poacher and moonshiner. In their younger days, they had painted the town together, drinking, gambling, and whore-hunting in big cities like Knoxville and Chattanooga. When Dwight had married, their wild days had tamed down a bit, but they still got together to spotlight a few deer or get bombed on Dwight's homemade sour mash.
"Dwight!" he said with a big grin. "Where the hell have you been, man? Folks hereabout have been puzzling their heads over where you'd gone to. Not a word or sign for nearly two weeks. But hey, don't just stand out there. Come on in. There's plenty of beer in the fridge, even that dark imported stuff you like."
The poacher climbed the steps and followed Curtis into the trailer's main room. Curtis opened the refrigerator and reached inside for a couple of cold ones. "Have yourself a seat there, Dwight. We'll have us some brews and you can tell me where you vanished to."
Curtis turned and handed one of the bottles to his friend. Dwight took it, but only stared at it with interest. "What's the matter, pal? You don't seem like your ornery old self tonight."
A moment later, Curtis knew that his observation was true. Dwight Lovell was not his usual self. His clothes were dark, tar black and shiny, instead of the camouflage garb he normally wore year round. But that wasn't what gave Curtis the creeps. It was the man's face. It held the same grouchy, ill-tempered expression that was common of his friend, but the skin was a sickly shade of gray. The same went for his hands. He looked as if he were made out of hard stone, rather than living flesh and blood.
Curtis watched as Dwight closed his hand, shattering the beer bottle in his grasp. He expected blood, but none appeared. Then Dwight lifted his head and stared at him full in the face, grinning with gleaming ebony teeth and glaring at him with eyes as black as the muzzles of a sawed-off shotgun.
"You ain't Dwight Lovell," stammered Curtis, backing away.
"No kidding," grated the dark imposter. The voice was Dwight's, but there the similarity ended. There was a tone of controlled menace hidden within those simple words, a burning contempt that was capable of doing horrible things to a man's mind and body. A contempt that was, at that very moment, on a very short and fragile leash.
Curtis turned tail and ran down the hall to the back bedroom. He expected to hear the dark being's footsteps pounding in pursuit, but he didn't. When he ducked inside the door and started to shut it, he saw Dwight standing in the same spot, grinning that gruesome grin and staring at him coldly with those pitch black eyes.
After locking the door, Curtis leaned there and caught his breath. He listened with his ear against the panel. He could hear others entering the trailer. They came silently, not a single word spoken. After a couple of moments, the visitors settled down. The volume of the television was turned up. Curtis could hear the baritone voice of a local Knoxville news anchor reciting the big stories of the day. After the news segment had lapsed into the weather report, the channels were changed at random.
What the hell is going on out there? wondered Curtis. Little by little, his curiosity grew stronger, almost maddening. He had to see what was happening out there. He unlatched the door and, cracking it an inch, peered down the hallway.
The main room of the cramped trailer was crowded with a bizarre gathering of albino life forms. There were white rabbits, foxes, squirrels, snakes, and all manner of colorless birds. They flocked around the room, their bright pink eyes glued to the portable TV. In the center of the pale wildlife sat seven people, also albino. One was a lanky man dressed in Kung Fu pajamas with his hair pulled into a ponytail. The other six were women, naked as jaybirds or clad in skimpy lingerie. They seemed to be the ones most interested in the television programs and commercials, staring at the thirteen-inch screen and moving their lips. It almost appeared as though they were studying the images they saw and mocking their movements and gestures. As if they were attempting to learn something of great importance.
Then Curtis looked to the back of the room and saw the dark duplicate of Dwight Lovell standing there. Coal-hued eyes caught him spying from the crack in the door and a great, black smile split the familiar, if bogus, features. Curtis slammed the door shut and locked it. He sat hunched on one of the bunks, knowing that the flimsy structure of plywood and aluminum wouldn't stand a chance of holding against the fury of that awful being. He knew the thing that looked like Dwight Lovell could rip right through the damned wall if it had a mind to.
Curtis sat on the bed for the next hour, listening for the sound of the dark creature coming for him. All he heard was the blare of the television and its channels being switched back and forth. Even when the set had been turned off and he knew that the nocturnal visitors were gone, he stayed put and didn't move a muscle, recalling the old stories he had heard as a child.
When the others returned from their night of drinking and plotting, Curtis continued to sit there, lost in his cocoon of immobility. He only moved when they finally kicked the door in. Then his terror was released and he screamed and clawed and searched their shocked faces for the deceptive tint of gray skin and the glittering of raven black eyes.
And all the while, the name of the Dark'Un was on his lips.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Alice McCray decided that she had wasted enough time. She awoke that Friday morning, determined to hike into the Tennessee Appalachians and try to locate the mysterious PaleDoveMountain all by herself. She could have probably gone there with Jenny Brice earlier that morning, but Alice had the feeling that the blonde didn't want any company on her sad sojourn to her father's cabin, so she had respectfully resisted the urge to ask if she could tag along.
Alice had been able to gather only bits and pieces about the strange events that had taken place in Tucker's Mill, and what she had heard seemed preposterous. She could understand the community's concern over the involvement of the infamous Eco-Plenty Corporation with its cutthroat tactics and utter disregard for the ecology. She and her colleagues had crossed paths with Eco-Plenty several times in the past and each time had been a bad experience. In fact, a number of important scientific finds had been lost due to Jackson Dellhart's relentless pursuit of the almighty dollar.
What she couldn't understand was all the secretive talk among Gart Mayo and the others about the so-called "changelings" wh
o supposedly lived on the peak of Pale Dove Mountain—a tribe of passive albinos and their uncompromising protector, the dreaded Dark'Un. It was pure nonsense, of course. Just a crazy mishmash of Indian folklore and mountain superstition.
Right, thought Alice, as she readied her gear. And this from a woman who actually believes that dinosaurs might exist only a few miles away.
She slipped on her multi-pocketed explorer vest, grabbed her Minolta camera and backpack, and headed down the boardinghouse stairs. She poked her head through the kitchen door long enough to tell Miss Mable she was going hiking for the day, then left the house. She was walking through the flower garden to her rental car when she heard a voice whisper from behind a rose bush.
"Pssst! Over here!"
Alice stopped in midstride and peered curiously around the thorny bush. Dale Tucker crouched there. His own knapsack and camera were on the ground next to him. "Hi, Dale," she said, mustering her most engaging smile. "What are you doing hiding there in the bushes? Shouldn't you be in school?"
Dale looked a little guilty. "I played hooky today." He shot a wary glance across the street at the general store. "Dad went to Knoxville with Rowdy Hawkens to pick up the lumber to fix up Miss Mable's place. Beatrice Ralston is tending the store while he's gone. She does that sometimes when Dad is out of town."
"But why did you decide to skip school?"
"I wanted to talk to you, Professor McCray. I wanted to say I'm sorry about acting like I did the other day. It was a stupid thing to do. And the reason I came over here this morning is to take you up to PaleDoveMountain. I want to show you where I saw those dinosaurs."
"So it wasn't a big hoax after all?" asked Alice hopefully.
"Heck no! They were for real. I should've told you that right off, but I was too busy acting like a first-class jerk."
"That's okay, Dale. We all do that one time or another. But how are we going to get on the mountain? I'm sure that Eco-Plenty has the entrance roads blocked off and guarded. They're incredibly touchy when it comes to security."
A mischievous grin split Dale's freckled face. "I reckon we'll just have to sneak up there. That is, if you don't mind breaking a few rules."
"To see your photographic subjects in the flesh, I'd break every rule in the book," Alice told him. "Come on. Let's go."
She helped the boy make it to her car unseen. They tossed their gear into the back seat, then headed southward on Highway 411. On the way to PaleDoveMountain, Alice decided to see if she could get a little information from the boy. She had tried her best to learn something from Rowdy Hawkens, but he was tight-lipped on the subject of the mountain and its strange history. She had tried every feminine charm and showed him more attention than she had originally intended, just to find out why he was so interested in those photos of the dinosaurs, but he had told her nothing of any interest. It hadn't been a total waste of her time, though. Despite the country singer's swaggering bravado and annoying macho attitude, Alice found that she enjoyed his company. He was fun to be with, a real barrel of laughs, and played love songs on his guitar that made her feel all choked up inside. In his own special way, he was one of the sincerest men she had ever met. What had begun as a cunning act of treachery on her part had turned into a genuine interest in the lanky musician. And much to her surprise, Rowdy seemed to feel the same way toward her.
She smiled to herself and turned her attention back to the boy riding next to her. "Dale, I've been hearing some weird stories about PaleDoveMountain. How the animals up there can change their form from one thing to another. You don't believe in that kind of stuff, do you?"
Dale didn't answer her at first. Then he looked at her through his oversized glasses. "You'd laugh at me if I told you what I really thought."
"No, I won't. I promise. Cross my heart."
The nine-year-old stared out the side window of the car, avoiding the look of disbelief that was bound to cross her face. "Yeah, I do believe in those stories…'cause I've seen it happen before. I've seen the critters change with my own eyes." He then proceeded to tell her about finding the albino frog in the mountain stream and its transformation into a dove inside his T-shirt pocket. When the woman stuck to her promise and didn't laugh, he decided to let her in on something that he neglected to mention in his letter. "There's something else I didn't tell you before. There was really only one dinosaur, not two. When the triceratops was chasing me down the mountainside, it changed on the way and turned into the pterodactyl. I swear, I saw it happen! It melted into a yucky black mess, then transformed into the dinosaur bird. And I'm pretty sure who it was, too. I think it was the Dark'Un."
Alice McCray drove the rest of the way to PaleDoveMountain in stunned silence. She had arrived in Tucker's Mill convinced that Dale's story had been true. But listening to his belief that the local boogeyman had taken on the form of the dinosaurs in question, Alice began to wonder if she wasn't being hornswoggled again, like with Sean McAlister and his cow bones in Scotland. Since coming to the rural Tennessee town, she had heard only fairy tales—first claims about pale humans changing into a swarm of moths, then frogs into doves, and now a triceratops into a pterodactyl.
Her expectations of coming across a scientific discovery of historical magnitude suddenly slipped a few notches. She felt like turning around that very moment and booking the first flight back to Colorado. But something stopped her from doing that. There was no doubt that something incredibly bizarre was going on in Tucker's Mill, as well as on the much-fabled PaleDoveMountain. Alice McCray was a practicing paleontologist and anthropologist, a winner of awards and a well-respected authority on prehistoric history. But she was also a curiosity seeker. Since she was a child, anything out of the ordinary had appealed to her basic fascination with the unknown. And from what she had learned so far, the mysteries of PaleDoveMountain were about as far into the realm of the unknown and the unexplained than you could possibly hope for.
Deep down inside, Alice hoped to change that. Perhaps uncovering the secret of those legendary changelings would prove to be much more of a discovery than finding a cache of lost dinosaurs.
There wasn't much at the old homestead that Jenny Brice actually wanted. Most of the things she put in her car to take back were her mother's possessions: a sewing box, a few black and white photographs, and a cameo broach that Fletcher had given his bride during happier days. On the other hand, there was absolutely nothing of her father's that she wanted to keep. The very thought of that made her sad. It wasn't because she held any lingering grudge toward him, but because he had left nothing of any sentimental value. He had been a man of few earthly possessions during his lifetime. In his death he had left his daughter nothing that might conjure the least amount of warmth and fond remembrance.
Jenny sat on the big bed that her parents had shared throughout their marriage. She remembered the cot she had slept on at the other side of the room, separated by a curtain her father had rigged up for her privacy. That was one of the few acts of consideration he had ever shown her. It hurt her to think of him being that way all those many years, tending to the needs of the mountain more than his own family. Jenny thought of how happy the three of them could have been there in the midst of the Tennessee wilderness. The absence of electricity and creature comforts wouldn't have been so bad if they could have spent their lives with the joy and satisfaction of simply having one another. But like the stern men who had gone before him, Fletcher Brice was too involved with the welfare of PaleDoveMountain and its peaceful inhabitants to show much concern for his own family. Remembering the emotional voice on the cassette tape, she knew that the old man had regretted his single-minded responsibility and, in his final days, had wished that he could have turned back the hands of time and set things right.
Staring out the bedroom's side window, Jenny studied the dense forest a short distance from the cabin. The spring greenery of the surrounding forest sparkled brightly in the noonday sun. Deep within the shadows of the thicket, she could make out the pale
forms of small animals and birds. They perched on low limbs and crouched within the underbrush, watching the cabin with blazing pink eyes. Perhaps they saw her through the panes of the bedroom window, hoping that she might come to the rescue and shelter them from the cruelty of progress the way her father had for nearly seventy years. Perhaps it was the gleam of desperate hope she saw in those rosy eyes.
"I'm sorry," she said aloud. "I'm sorry, but there's nothing I can do. It's too late."
Then, from behind her, came the creaking of footsteps on the kitchen floor and a voice. A deep and crisply articulate voice that said, "Perhaps not."
She froze, afraid to turn around. It's the Dark'Un, she thought. I know it is. I'll look around and there it'll be…in the image of Papa. It'll have the same black clothing, the same ghastly gray face, and the same deadly strop clutched in its fist. And it'll have those same pitch black eyes. God help me, I don't ever want to have to look at those horrible eyes again!
When Jenny finally gathered the nerve to leave the bed and enter the outer room, she found it was not the dark being of her nightmares that stood there. Instead, she found the ones who had visited her room two nights earlier. Lance LaBlanc and his albino harem of unclothed beauties.
"What do you want?" she asked, feeling that dreamy sensation torn between belief and denial engulf her. "Why do you keep coming to me?"
"You are our only chance, Jenny Brice," said LaBlanc. "Our only chance for a peaceful solution to the invasion that has been launched upon our home. We need your help if our race is to survive."