by Tom Deitz
“And you’re certain it was Monday?”
“Absolutely.”
“Can anybody prove this? Any witnesses?”
“Like I said: some friends up north. Maybe the clerk at the Golden Pantry in Winder.”
“What about since then?” Adams broke in. “What about yesterday?”
“I was here, mostly—campin’ out in the woods.”
“Anybody see you?”
“You mean besides you guys? Well, there was the waitress at a restaurant. Cashier at the Magic Market. Couple of kids there.”
“Any idea what time?”
Calvin shrugged. “Early afternoon? Two-thirty, maybe?”
“What about last night?”
“I was here.”
“But nobody saw you?”
“Right.”
“And this mornin’?”
“In the woods.”
“And nobody saw you then, either?”
Calvin shook his head, wondering what they were getting at, and becoming more uneasy by the second.
And then the clincher: “You mentioned somethin’ ’bout bein’ in Winder, and that knife comin’ from Commerce. You spend a lotta time in Jackson County, Mr. McIntosh?”
“Not really.”
“Been there lately?”
“I spent Sunday night there.”
“Where?”
“Friend’s place, south of Jefferson.”
“This place got a name?”
“Yes.”
“Watch it!”
“Lebanon Road.”
“Anybody see you then?”
“Like I said, just some friends.”
The sheriff’s scowl deepened. Once again he consulted the piece of paper Adams had handed him. “Well, then, Mr. Calvin McIntosh, I’m afraid we’re gonna have to arrest you.”
“Arrest me? But why? I haven’t done anything!”
“It’s suspicion of murder, son. They found a woman dead up near Jefferson Monday mornin’, and some sign you’d been nearby. And—he held the pause for effect—“they found your daddy dead this mornin’, but he’d already been dead at least twelve hours. There ’uz evidence you’d been there too. I tell you what, son: I sure do hope you’ve got a good…”
“Dead!” Calvin whispered dully, not listening to the rest of the accusation, for the implications of the word had struck him like a physical blow.
Dead!
His father was dead! He was an orphan! He was alone in a strange place, and his father was dead, and that Evelyn Mercer woman was too and these yahoos thought he’d done it!
But that was ridiculous! Oh, true, he and his dad didn’t get along, had fought like cats and dogs when Calvin was in his teens, but that didn’t mean Calvin wanted him dead. At worst, he just wanted to be left to do his own thing.
“No!” Calvin mouthed numbly, and without really thinking about it began backing away.
“Just come along quietly, son. We”—and Calvin caught the gleam of handcuffs in Adams’s hand.
He started reflexively, and when he did his hand accidentally brushed the knife hilt.
“Watch him!” the sheriff yelled. “He’s got a knife!”
Adams lunged forward and grabbed Calvin around a bicep, but once more Calvin acted on pure reflex and wrenched free. What was wrong with these people? Couldn’t they see he wasn’t a killer? Wasn’t it obvious he wasn’t a patricide? And he had things to do, friends to warn, a quest to undertake…
But then Adams tackled him again, and this time the sheriff joined him, and together they dragged him down. Calvin struck out reflexively, blindly, still only half aware of what he was doing.
A fist slammed into Calvin’s cheek hard enough to jar his teeth. “Ain’t no sense fightin’,” Adams grunted as Calvin felt arms trying to pin his knife hand from behind, which he only barely managed to evade by twisting violently. “You’re resistin’ arrest, boy!” the sheriff added. “And assaultin’ an officer. We’ll have to shoot you if you don’t calm down!”
But Calvin barely heard. His mind was drowning in adrenaline, the same adrenaline that was making his body wriggle and twist as he struggled to win free of a pair of lawmen thirty percent bigger than he was, each of whom was snatching and poking him for all he was worth. He saw a gleam of dark metal appear in a hand, but that only made him struggle harder. And all the while his rational part was receding further and further, unwilling to deal with the news. Dead! Dead! Dead! Out of the clear blue his father was dead—and they thought he’d done it!
Pain exploded in his face again, as one of Adams’s blows landed square on the jaw; but then, somehow, he wrenched free, was on his feet and running. He did not look back, merely charged straight for the woods, only half aware of what he did, for his mind was flirting dangerously close to overload.
“Stop or we’ll shoot!” a voice bellowed behind, and he could hear the steady thump of heavy feet across the grassy shoulder. He was faster, but not so fast or so far ahead that the sound of a .38 being fired didn’t explode in his ears loud as a cannon. Something whizzed past his neck, and he thought for a moment he’d gone deaf, but by then he’d reached the edge of the forest and darted inside.
Gotta get away, gotta get away.
Bang!— And another bullet zipped past, and he zigged around a tree.
Two more, then, and, after the briefest of pauses, a fifth.
“Yiiiii!” he screamed as he felt fire lance across the outside of his right thigh, which meant—he thought—that they were still only shooting to wound.
But he had to escape now, ’cause if he didn’t they’d never believe he didn’t do it. And there wouldn’t be anybody to warn Dave, or fill in Sandy, or…
His life, he realized dully, was probably ruined.
But he was gaining on them, was making decent progress through the pines, with the men pounding along behind. Except that he wasn’t going the way he wanted, because there was just enough fallen timber to force him back toward the highway—and if he got there again, they’d have a clear shot.
But there was suddenly no choice, because Calvin came barrelling through a stand of oleander and found himself back on the shoulder. He hesitated only an instant—glanced left to see a car approaching, followed in quick succession by several others. And gambled. A quick sprint across the pavement just ahead of the startled woman in the Chrysler, and he made the other side, then flung himself to the ground beyond the shoulder and continued rolling into the sliver of marsh that separated the woods from the road. Four more cars passed, and each bought him time, for the officers had evidently lost sight of him, or at least were no longer pressing their pursuit.
A final check, a quick, furtive scoot through the cattails, and Calvin was once more in the forest—this time on the east side of the highway—and heading straight to his camp, which was seriously stupid.
But he was scared. His heart was thumping hard and he was sweating like a pig. Without thinking about it, he slapped his hand on his chest to still the thudding—and felt it close over the uktena scale.
The scale!
Calvin broke stride. There was one sure way to escape—if he only had the time. A quick glance back showed the deputies still in the woods on the other side, having apparently lost his trail in the brush there. He had a couple of hundred yards on them, but he doubted that would help much when they found his trail again. Grimacing, Calvin turned and ran as fast as he could toward the densest brush he could find.
And there, in the lee of a windfall, he stripped, stuffed his clothes under the rotting trunk, and grabbed the scale, thinking of only one thing: escape. But in what form? Falcon, or ’possum, or—
His subconscious made the choice for him.
Pain wracked him, flung him forward, tore his body apart, and reassembled it. And when Calvin rose again he was a deer: a handsome whitetail buck with a set of half-grown, velveted antlers and a bullet burn along one tawny thigh.
And in that guise, he ran once more toward the
river, while the part that was Calvin simply went into hiding.
Chapter VIII: The Doll-Maker
(east of Whidden, Georgia—mid-afternoon)
Allison was getting bored and just a little bit anxious. She’d been playing a long time—far longer than she ought to have been, she supposed, since the sun seemed to have slipped more than a couple of widths across the circle of treetops that ringed the clearing where she had made her playhouse. Maybe she’d give her day’s work a final survey and be done with it. She stood, backed off a little, and gazed with immense satisfaction at the additions. She’d moved one whole set of walls farther out, so that the spaces they delineated were closer to the dimensions of a real house. And she’d found bigger and better stones to mark those walls—and used a double row on the outside so she could tell which they were from the porches. Maybe when her birthday rolled around in another two weeks she could get some better boxes to use for furniture too. Maybe even one of those Cabbage Patch dolls she’d been wanting. And then she’d…
She paused in mid-thought, for something had caught her attention. A thread of melody, she reckoned, but not precisely like anything she’d ever heard. No, this was subtle and—and foreign sounding, but not at all unpleasant. It was low-pitched and full of vowels and esses, and before she knew what was happening, the melody had sort of wound its way through her brain and pretty soon she could not stop listening.
There was something a little troubling about it too, though she couldn’t focus on exactly what. Just a vague unease that made her brow furrow and the pale hairs on her arm prickle ever so slightly.
Without really being aware of it, Allison turned away from her playhouse and started off through the pine woods—not back home, though, but deeper into the forest—toward the source of that singing.
She could hear it clearly now. It was a woman’s voice (which ought to worry her, but every time she tried to think why, the thought sort of slipped away from her). Yet, though she seemed to be getting closer by the step, Allison still could not make out the words.
On and on she went, with the song sneaking into her ears, and she gradually left the pines behind and was making her way through the live oaks and willows and maples and the occasional wild magnolia of the older woods. All those trees had thick green leaves that shut out the sun and plunged her into a kind of gloom that was neat in a way ’cause it made her feel closed in and comfy. There was a lot of undergrowth as well: oleanders and sweet gum and wild black cherry, but it didn’t grow where she was ’cause she’d evidently happened onto one of those deer trails like Don had shown her one time when his buddy Mike was off with his folks on vacation and he had to make do with her for company. She wished he was that nice all the time; maybe then she might do her own dishes.
The trail was getting softer, too; in fact, the moss and leaves were getting downright soupy, and she wished she hadn’t worn her good sneakers, ’cause if she got mud on ’em Mama would know she’d been off where she shouldn’t and get mad.
Mama! The thought chimed into her mind like a bell rung at midnight, and all of sudden she realized that she had no idea where she was except that she was a long way from home, and there really was no good reason for somebody to be singing out here. She felt a chill, but though her thoughts were rational once again, her feet kept right on following that song.
All at once the trail bent around a fallen treetrunk, and she found herself unexpectedly in sunlight so bright it made her eyes water. The singing was really loud now, and she could make out the words, though she didn’t understand them.
Uwelanatsiku. Su sa sai.
Uwelanatsiku. Su sa sai.
That was it, just those nonsense phrases repeated over and over. She wondered what they meant, and then found herself trying to recall what it was she’d been thinking a minute ago. It had been important—she thought—but what was it?
Did it really matter, though? Did anything matter when she could listen to such singing?
She followed it now, and quickly found herself back in dark woods again, but this time they didn’t go far, and when she saw the sun again, she was standing by the banks of a stream. It was Muddy Branch, she thought, from the width and the color of the water. She’d been swimming there a time or two, but that was before Don had told her about ’gators and snappin’ turtles and what they could do to a little girl’s feet. She preferred the public pool down in Whidden now. Let Don and Mike have the creek—maybe one of those snappers’d take a nip out of them. Maybe one would even take a bite out of that thing Don liked to play with in the bathroom. Wouldn’t that fix him!
Uwelanatsiku. Su sa sai.
The song shocked her out of her reverie, and another few yards down the bank she found its source.
There was a good-sized clearing by this part of the branch, and most of it was covered with sand, as if it had once been a sandbar that had got too big for its britches—the sudden kink in the creek to her left seemed to indicate this. But curiously, the clearing was not surrounded by trees and bushes like it ought to be this close to water. It was sort of shielded in by stones—a whole bunch of big gray and tan rocks just poking up out of the paler sand like the teeth of a monster.
Except that there was no monster here, just a poor old woman. Allison frowned when she saw the dingy, shrunken form hunched over a mound of pebbles to her right. It was her that was singing, she knew that; but there was something troubling about that old woman, if only she could think what. Maybe Allison had seen her in town. Old ladies were always going up to her in town and telling her how pretty she was. Maybe it was one of them.
Uwelanatsiku. Su sa sai.
And with that, the singing stopped and did not resume again. Allison felt something twitch in her mind, and started to turn and run, but by then the old woman had glanced up and Allison found herself staring straight into her eyes. They were black, absolutely black, like two lumps of coal embedded in skin that looked dry and hard, almost like sun-baked sand. Those eyes had no pupils she could see, but they glittered, and she found she could not look away from them.
The woman broke contact instead, and pointed first to the ground, then to something in her lap, and Allison saw that what she’d taken for piles of rounded river rocks were in fact dolls—rather attractive dolls, especially given that they seemed to be made out of nothing but pebbles. There was another in the woman’s lap, half completed; Allison could see the feet, legs, and lower torso. Boy, it sure was neat how she found rocks just the right shape to make the various parts. Like rocks with little ridges in ’em for toes (the closest doll had feet like that), or slightly elongated pebbles in varying sizes to make the toes of another one. And…why, that one even had pieces of sea shell for nails.
And their faces! Allison squatted down to see, amazed at how the woman had used the natural lumps and hollows to make faces, and had added lines of dark sand for eyebrows and swatches of redder sand for lips (she wondered how she got it to stay on, too—she’d never had any luck sticking things to rocks). There was something strange about those faces, though: they didn’t look like the kind of people Allison was used to. In fact, now she really examined one, it looked a whole lot like an Indian.
“You may play with my children,” a sort of creaky-rumbly voice said—one that sounded like it had to fight its way up a long way to reach the air. Not at all like the singing, though it had the same deep, gravelly undertones.
Allison jumped, having discovered that she’d gone right up to the old woman, squatted before her, and started staring at her dolls without bothering to speak to her, and without being told it was all right to do so.
“They’re made out of rocks, ain’t they?” Allison inquired carefully. Then, as curiosity caught up with her: “Did you make ’em?”
“Bone and muscle, pebble and rock,” the woman replied, and Allison blinked as she said that. An eyebrow lifted in perplexity, for she was pretty sure the woman’s mouth hadn’t matched the words she’d heard. But just as she began to cons
ider that, her thoughts brushed the tune that was still hiding among them, and the notion drifted right on away.
A soft click, and Allison’s gaze shifted to the work-in-progress in the woman’s lap. She had on a filthy-looking rag shawl, which served her as a sort of work surface across her knees. But what Allison found curious was the way she was putting the dolls together. As best she could tell, the woman simply picked up a pebble about the right size from the pile at her feet, whispered something to it, and then stuck it where she wanted it to go and it just stayed there. And if the shape hadn’t been quite right to start with, why, all of a sudden it was. But there was something else queer about the way the woman worked, too; and Allison realized that she was doing everything with her right hand. The left she kept hidden, sort of thrust up under a fold of the shawl. Maybe there was something wrong with it she didn’t want folks to see.
“You do like my children?” the woman prompted, and Allison remembered she hadn’t responded to her earlier invitation to play with the stone poppets.
“Can I have one?” Allison asked suddenly.
“You may have them all!” the woman chuckled.
“Really?”
“All.”
“No kiddin’?”
“All. I ask only one thing in return.”
Allison was suddenly wary. “What?”
The black eyes found hers again, and Allison felt herself growing dizzy, though it really wasn’t such a bad feeling.
“Let me comb your hair,” the woman whispered, stretching out a gnarled hand, and rising just enough that the doll she’d been working on shifted and clicked in her lap.
Allison’s fingers sought automatically for the blond curls that were so obviously superior to the lank gray wisps she could see peeping out from beneath the woman’s shawl.
“Pretty hair,” the woman murmured. “Maybe I should call you that: Pretty Hair.”
“Thank you,” Allison said, because it was polite. And true, and certainly true if you were comparing it to the crone’s dusty-looking locks.