Faces in the Night

by Thomas Conuel

  It was also strange and disconcerting and left him feeling somewhat light headed. It was as if somebody or something was carefully conducting him on a walking tour of the old Quabbin Valley showing him the sites of pre-reservoir homes and roads, and filling in old memories.

  Lester Carlson had walked most of the old Quabbin roads in the past several weeks. An odyssey that had taken him through a mostly forgotten Quabbin landscape. On a sunny, windy day he had climbed to the top of Soapstone Hill and looked out over the northern edge of the reservoir and spied an eagle soaring by on a thermal updraft. He had driven over to the great earthen Winsor Dam on the eastern flank of the reservoir, and stood on the top of the dam and looked down at the blue-gray waters of Quabbin as they lapped against the stone face of the dam; and he had hiked into Prescott Peninsula where state wildlife workers had built a hacking platform and were raising and releasing young eagles that would then nest permanently at Quabbin. His family home had been out there in the town of Enfield northeast of the peninsula, but now deep under the waters of Quabbin.

  It was spring and he liked being out in the woods. He had rambled down the dirt roads circling the reservoir and stopped to peer into the numerous cellar holes that dotted the Quabbin woods—all that remained of homes that he’d once visited or walked by as a child.

  He had wandered across what had been the Town Common in Dana where he had seen his father give the 4th of July speech at a fireman’s muster sometime in the mid-1920s. Lester Carlson had been a small boy then, but the excitement of that day had stayed with him—the firecrackers popping with loud bangs and white trails of smoke, the smell of horses and whiskey and men, and his father resplendent in a new blue suit with his handlebar mustache quivering with excitement as he stood in front of the crowd of 100 people or so and delivered a short exhortation on the pride they all felt on the 4th of July, the pride of being Americans, in being citizens of the great state of Massachusetts where the first blow for freedom had been struck, and the pride of place everybody felt in being residents of the very best part of Massachusetts, the towns of the Swift River Valley.

  The Dana Town Common, once a neatly trimmed village green, was now a triangular field with several old sugar maples standing tall and gnarly and with cellar holes filled with meadow grasses and briars. Several old roads meandered away from Dana Common to vanish into the nearby waters of Quabbin Reservoir.

  The large field to the right of Dana Common was once the town cemetery with some 700 graves. They had moved the graves and relocated the remains in 1938 when Quabbin Reservoir replaced Dana on the map of Massachusetts. Over at Quabbin Park Cemetery in Ware they had reburied 7,500 bodies disinterred from thirty-four cemeteries in the Swift River Valley. Other remains from the Swift River Valley towns were reburied in local cemeteries in nearby towns. It had been a less than precise process. Most of the time the old graves held nothing but bits of cloth, metal belt buckles, and bits of coffin wood. The bones and skulls were long gone. Lester Carlson and his crew had scooped up what they could from the dirt underneath the tombstones and covered over the rest.

  He had paused to study the granite posts still standing that had marked the boundaries of the old Dana Cemetery near the Town Common. The schoolhouse and the Town Hall, two fine and stately wooden buildings that had faced the Town Common were now cellar holes filled with prickly blackberry brambles and small oaks. One of the large cellar holes nearby was where the Eagle Hotel stood. That was a local landmark, built in 1820 with some 15 rooms. Across from the Eagle Hotel had been the Dunn’s home and near that stood the Dana Common store. The Vaughn home was gone but its cellar hole was still intact with its remarkable stone foundation, built of small, rounded stones from the Swift River and its tributary streams.

  It had been over 50 years since he’d been here, yet Lester Carlson found himself remembering the speech by his father on the Dana Town Common as if it had happened a week ago.

  Today, he had awoken picturing Winsor Dam. He had seen a notice in the newspaper for the afternoon Tuesday Teas at the Quabbin Visitor center near the dam and almost dismissed it. A bunch of really ancient folks with really old memories tottering about a room hung with maps and photos from the old days before the reservoir. Which was exactly what the visitor’s center looked like when he arrived.

  He had circulated for 30 or 40 minutes and then politely taken leave. Terry had clasped his hand warmly and told him it was good to have another member of the original Quabbin families back in the area. And then when he was leaving, he had encountered the old man in the battered sports coat standing in the doorway.

  “Yup, I’m a Delany from Prescott,” the old man said, wiping at the ancient, encrusted ketchup spot on his sports coat. “You take care of yourself, young fellow,” he said to Lester Carlson. “Ain’t no harm in being cautious ‘bout the old legends.”

  “What old legends?” Lester Carlson shot back. “I don’t remember too many.”

  “Well, you were there to help build this here reservoir, and you moved all the old graves, and there is that Durman legend.”

  “I don’t know the Durman legend,” Lester Carlson said.

  “It’s like all those legends,” the old man said. “You gotta watch your back when somebody comes looking for you.” And then the old man turned and tottered into the room to be greeted by Terry.

  Lester Carlson stood for a moment trying to make sense of the old man’s parting comments and then turned and started back to his car, parked in the visitor’s lot overlooking the waters of the reservoir. A man leaning on a motorcycle and a blonde woman standing beside him, both looking out over the reservoir, turned as he approached.

  They had been quietly arguing Lester Carlson surmised. She was standing rigid and apart looking away from the man, who was slowly shaking his head back and forth. The man was familiar, though. As he drew nearer, Lester Carlson recognized him. The Vietnam veteran who had talked to him at the Quabbin Memorial service and then been attacked. He and Maria had probably saved the man’s life by coming to look for him that day. And now he was still here, looking for the stolen remains of his dead buddy, killed in Vietnam so many years ago.

  “Hello,” Lester Carlson called to them. They both turned to look and Lester Carlson sucked in his breath. The woman stood there--tall and thin with shoulder-length blonde hair, long neck, and a fine expressive face--looking like a younger version of his own deceased Emily.

  * * *

  Chapter 38

  Over the course of a decade here in Belton, the entity had filled in the history of his feud with the people of the Swift River Valley towns, and how he had resided there in the person of Elijah Durman, and how the death of Greg Richardson brought about the death of Elijah Durman. The old history books, of course, told the story. But he had seen it in vivid visual details sent by the entity.

  Greg Richardson, tall, handsome, young, and confident, swimming in Pottapaug Pond with the entity hidden nearby and watching from the woods. The Gogan’s had died with their house ablaze several months before. Young Melissa Sanderson, a quiet beauty from Enfield, had vanished on her way home one dark evening, shortly after the death of the Gogan’s. And six months before that, Carl Jamson and the lovely woman he loved, Carol Hillson, had been brutally slaughtered while swimming naked at Pottapaug Pond.

  The Valley, once God’s paradise, was suddenly, unexplainably cursed. People were terrified—the Valley had never seen violence, and they pointed at Elijah Durman as the cause of the troubles. Greg Richardson was blunt about his feeling toward the red-haired stranger—Elijah Durman was an evil man and responsible for the deaths of the Gogan’s and probably more.

  Reading all of this in the old history books at the Jones Library in Amherst, he had come to understand something of the entity and of his mission here with the entity.

  The entity was almost timeless; but he needed a human body. Elijah Durman had served as that vessel for many years. And before that, far, far back in time, there had been others. D
eep in the Maine woods, a Jesuit priest had battled and contained the entity, and later other Jesuits had tracked the entity. But for many years, Elijah Durman had survived as the entity—who transcended the limits of the human body by inhabiting others. But then things had gone wrong here in the valley.

  They had wanted to hang the entity for his crimes. Hanging was no good for the entity, but fire was an acceptable way to pass out of the world and be primed for re-entry. The entity had found a way to pass on by fire. And death alone would not have stopped the entity’s progress through the world, but something had gone wrong with the remains of Elijah Durman that prevented his return, as he had done successfully in the past

  The problem began with the death of the handsome blacksmith, Greg Richardson. He had spoken out against Elijah Durman after the death of the Gogan’s. The visions sent by the entity showed the scene.

  Greg Richardson swimming and then climbing out and stretching out on a large flat rock to dry off. Elijah Durman in the woods, watching, maneuvering closer. Greg Richardson dressing and sitting on the rock, sipping from a small flask filled with a home brew. The day waning. Greg Richardson standing to go. A softball-size rock hurled from a short distance striking him in the back of his head. Greg Richardson falling face down. Stunned, he starts to rise, but now his enemy is standing over him. A boulder smashes the blacksmith’s face.

  Elijah Durman stands over him. He grabs Greg Richardson’s hair and pushes his face into the water. The unconscious man kicks briefly, but Elijah Durman holds him down until the kicking stops. The blacksmith has drowned.

  In the woods watching is a young boy, little Jimmy Ellman. He has come to fish the pond. Later, he will bear witness against Elijah Durman at the trial that ends with a death sentence.

  But the death of Elijah Durman, dramatic and stunning as it was, was not the problem. The entity had died and resurfaced before. It was the bones that mattered and they had been scattered here at Quabbin Reservoir by an unexpected twist of fate.

  * * *

  Part IX: Katherine

  Chapter 39

  Katherine pulled on a pair of jeans and a bright red top. Blake sat in a small chair watching her. They were in the upstairs bedroom they shared at Hudson’s Richardson’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts. In the old days, he thought, before...before...before...he would have gone over to her, pulled her jeans down and made love. The old days were a long time ago.

  He’d met Katherine 20 years ago when he was 25, just out of college. He’d been back from Vietnam for 4 years. Back from Vietnam. Those were the days. Hard to really remember the details of most of those times--he was always high.

  Blake had come back from Vietnam and returned to the United States on a flight to San Francisco. He landed at 4 A.M. and immediately found a connecting flight to Seattle. His father, a scheduling clerk for Boeing, had driven through morning rush-hour traffic to pick him up at the SeaTac airport. The anti-war protestors were mostly gone from the streets and airport parking lots by then. The war was winding down. Blake had simply walked off the plane and through the terminal in the early morning rain of a gray March day prepared to find a bus that would take him home. But his father was there waving from the reception area. They didn’t hug or shake hands. They had never been that physical with each other, never displayed open affection since his teen years. “Hello, Robert,” his father said with a big smile. “It’s good to have you back home.”

  His father had brought, at his mother’s suggestion, a gym bag with civilian clothes and Blake had changed out of his uniform right there in the airport men’s room. And then they had tried hard for conversation during the ride home from the airport. His father had asked tentatively several times, “How was it? Did you have to fly your helicopter a lot?” Timid, probing questions that would let Blake talk or not. He chose not.

  When they arrived back at the small ranch-style house that he had grown up in, one of his four brothers was there, the others were busy or away, and his mother tried to hug him, and several aunts and uncles came to shake his hand or hug him. People wanted to talk to him, to ask him about Vietnam, to be part of the war they had missed—and he wanted no part of the discussion. His mother had planned a “Welcome Home” party with cold cuts and beer.

  He tried to smile and talk with the various aunts and uncles, but at some point he had gone into the small bedroom that he had shared with his four brothers while growing up lower middle class in Seattle, and he had closed the door and picked up his acoustic Martin guitar, a small wonderfully designed instrument that had been built before the Martin guitar craze of the late 1960s. He began to play, at first tentatively and then over and over again Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man, singing under his breath until he came to the last verses which he softly sang out loud:

  To dance beneath a diamond sky

  With one hand waving free

  Silhouetted by the sea

  Circled by the circus sands

  With all memory and fate

  Driven deep beneath the waves

  Let us forget about today until tomorrow

  He had stayed in his room for the rest of the day and through most of the night, playing Mr. Tambourine Man over and over again on his lovely acoustic guitar--and repeating out loud those final words of the song: “Let us forget about today until tomorrow.”

  His mother had knocked quietly on the closed bedroom door several times, the way she used to knock on the bathroom door when he was a kid and taking a long time in the bathroom and she would knock and ask “are you all right in there?” and he would answer, “fine, just fine.”

  Blake left home a day later. His father said little but he could tell by his face, puzzled and riddled with hurt that he wanted badly to talk and tell him to stay. His mother had been more aggressive, trying to persuade him not to leave home just yet, she worried about him, he needed to eat better, and she had nightmares that he would end up in a ditch somewhere killed while hitchhiking. Blake had left anyway and taken a bus all the way across the country to Boston, Massachusetts where he knew a friend from high school who was a chef at a hotel outside of the city. It was the first of many jobs in the hotel restaurant business.

  Blake had gone to college for a year before dropping out and being drafted for Vietnam, and now he resumed college. He enrolled at Boston University in the heart of the city. He attended classes during the day and worked almost every night as a bartender at a popular spot called “Charley’s” a big pick-up bar near Copley Square. There were loads of young women available, and Blake enjoyed that part of his life. He didn’t really have time to date seriously, what with school and work, but he had a series of small affairs for two years while in Boston. And he also began to drink. When you were a bartender it was too easy. Beer, wine, liquor—it was all right there in front of you.

  He lost the job at “Charley’s” when the night shift manager found Blake and a waitress drinking scotch from the bar in an alcove at 2 A.M.--long after the restaurant had closed. And then he was let go from another job for being rude to a customer who had complained that his beer was not cold. And then he met Katherine.

  She was standing outside the Barnes & Noble bookstore at Kenmore Square and he was leaving the store with a copy of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion in his hand, and she had looked at him and smiled and nodded at his book. “I like that one too,” she said. “Not as famous as Cuckoo’s Nest but what a great story.”

  He had stopped and looked at her in silence for a full three seconds before finding his voice. She was slender and blonde with fine skin and remarkable flashing blue eyes. She was not so much a beauty as pretty and attractive—drawing your gaze to her face and her wonderful eyes and smile. He had swallowed hard and finally said. “I’ve never read this guy. It’s for a class.”

  “English 301, at BU?” she asked.

  “How’d you know?”

  “I’m here at BU, too,” she said. “Senior year. English 301 with Klarfeld. Good teacher.”

&n
bsp; “Let’s have a coffee,” he had said, surprisingly himself, for he was no pick up artist. And just as surprising, she had immediately agreed. And like that, Blake’s life had changed. Katherine had become his anchor and they had married after college and moved to Ohio where she got an advanced degree in architectural history, and Blake told her about his nightmares and his drinking, and how every morning when he woke up he could hear screams and see himself huddling inside his helicopter—afraid to look out into the fields of Vietnam and see what was happening.

  * * *

  Chapter 40

  “Blake, Hon,” Katherine said to him many times back in those early days. “You did what anybody would do in the circumstances. Your buddy Kevin was crazy to run into all that. You survived. That’s not a sin.”

  “It’s my pattern, babe--big or little, I’ll fuck up and then stand on the sidelines.”

  “Stop it Hon. Not true. Not true. Not true.”

  But it was. That was the problem. He had forgotten about the bad old days of junior high school, until that day he came back from Vietnam. Sitting there strumming his guitar in the bedroom of the house he had grown up in, memories popped up like bubbles in the air and then drifted away.

  “Let us forget about today until tomorrow.”

  He played the Bob Dylan song over and over to hear himself sing that last verse. There were good memories, of course, but mostly his days in the old house and nearby schools were hazy. But there were bad memories too.

  There was Alan Ambrose.

  He had been bending over his locker on the lower level of North Junior High School, a big rambling brick building with 600 students. He was in the 7th grade and already tall for his age. There was only one kid bigger. Alan Ambrose, a simian-looking creature who even at that age had been singled out by the teachers as “Trouble.”