“Which makes no sense to you?” Lester Carlson said, “though that’s always been the soldier’s code: bring your dead back with you and give them a proper burial.” he sipped the wine and smiled. “You’re right. This is good wine. California has some of the best.”
“Oh, I know. No, I understand. I know why he thinks he has to stay here.” Katherine sipped her own wine. “I always love a nice red wine. White wines just don’t do much for me.”
“But he has you worried?” Lester Carlson ventured after another sip of wine.
“Something very strange going on here,” Katherine said, looking directly at Lester Carlson. “I have a sense. I’ve always had like a sixth sense for weird things. And I feel it here. Here in this place. That’s why I wanted to read up on the local legends at the library after my dream.”
“The local legends,” Lester Carlson smiled and let himself look directly into Katherine’s face. “It’s all there at the library. They have at least one good one--this Durman fellow from the late 18th century. Supposed to come back and even has a special icon, or something, to help him get back.”
“Is that what has you walking all over Quabbin these days?” Katherine said. “The local legends.”
“Looking for my past,” Lester Carlson smiled again.
“It’s kinda funny. I’m almost embarrassed to tell you this, but I remember going to a protest against the war back in the early 1970s in Washington when I was in college. People knew you by then. I remember some of the speeches and how they named the behind-the-scenes players. You were one of them.”
Lester Carlson laughed with a long slow chuckle. “Well it wasn’t only you out there protesting. I remember that rally on the Mall in the Capital. There was at least a half million protestors.” Lester Carlson watched as Katherine took a seat on a picnic bench and sipped her wine.
“It’s crazy you know, but when I think how silent my generation was and how vocal your generation was, it’s such a contrast. All for the better though. I mean look at his place,” Lester Carlson swept his arm out over in front of him taking in the expanse of Quabbin Reservoir with its blue waters stretching out to the horizon. “They were too timid to even protest when we took their homes for this.”
“But it turned out well. Quabbin, I mean.” Katherine realized the judgment implicit in her comment though she hadn’t meant it that way. Vietnam certainly hadn’t turned out well and Lester Carlson’s name was forever linked to that debacle.
* * *
Chapter 46
Katherine stopped on the road winding through the Quabbin woods and stepped behind an ancient and gnarled maple tree. She had to pee and thought briefly of plunging into the dense brush that bordered the dirt access road she was now on. But the place was so deserted and quiet it was unnecessary. The maple tree, just a few feet off the road and within sight of the water, was shelter enough.
She fished in her tote bag for Kleenex, found a small package, and in a single fluid motion pulled her jeans and underwear down to her knees and squatted behind the tree leaning back on her heels. She had been drinking wine with Lester Carlson for several hours up at the Quabbin lookout and now she had to pee badly. This was one time she envied men. So easy for them. Stop and stand beside the road with your back to traffic and you were fine. But a woman had to go scurrying about in the woods and brush to find a suitable spot.
It seemed whenever she and Blake traveled together they argued about this. She would tell him she had to go and to please look for a suitable spot. He would inevitably stop somewhere where there was a single scrawny bush that couldn’t conceal a child, or else near some roadside thicket full of spiders and ticks where she would have to fight her way into and out of the woods.
Men simply had no eye for a good roadside stop. It was genetic—take a leak, zip up, get on with business. Men had no sense of the greater time and privacy that women required for the same process. This would be a good topic for her radio talk show. Make a note to yourself, Katherine told herself, and get Forrest to banter along about the differences in roadside rest stop needs for men and women. That would generate some calls.
Katherine finished. She stood and pulled her underwear and jeans into place and rebuckled her belt. She had left Lester Carlson at the lookout tower but then decided to park her car off Old Enfield Road and take a short walk into the Quabbin woods before going home.
She was not familiar with Quabbin Reservoir or with Old Enfield Road, but hiked a mile from the town road where she parked to the water’s edge. Halfway down the road she had passed the town storage hut, recently repaired. A new wooden door, painted green, displayed a No Trespassing sign tacked conspicuously in its middle. This was where the coffin had been stored, she realized. She had walked all the way down to the water’s edge and looked out at some of the Quabbin islands, trying to figure out where in this wilderness somebody would conceal a coffin. An almost impossible task she thought, despite Blake’s need to find and bury the bones of his old buddy from Vietnam.
“Katherine, I’m going to tell you the truth,” Lester Carlson had said to her as they sipped wine just an hour ago at the Lookout Tower. “I saw this face at my window,” Lester Carlson said holding his wine glass at eye level. “Then I started getting these real strong compulsions to come out here to Quabbin. And then, this morning, at the library I saw that face again and a body with it.”
“At this point, I should call you crazy,” Katherine said, “but I can’t.”
“No, I do sound crazy, but crazy is the new normal with me.”
“What do you think it was?” Katherine asked.
“I’ve never been one of those believers in this kind of thing, Katherine. But hell. There is some sort of presence in my life now. Something out there following me, tracking me, showing me things.” Lester Carlson had paused and laughed. “Well, at least I know it isn’t little men from UFOs. I’ve got me a real ghost.”
Now, Katherine turned her head and looked out over the reservoir. She and Lester Carlson had talked for an hour back at the lookout tower—talked of the strange face with seriousness and of the possibility that it was some sort of—God; it was hard to say the word, even to herself. Ghost. You couldn’t really say it with a straight face. Many people said they believed in ghosts or joked about people who believed in ghosts. But nobody ever actually saw a ghost. Of course, some people swore they had, but they were always suspect.
Nigel, the soundman for her radio show, was one of those who believed fervently in ghosts and was sure he had encountered one. He told her of the time in his old rooming house in downtown Columbus where he suspected a ghost. But then when he got down to describing the ghost, it turned out he had never actually seen it. Nigel had heard footsteps in the kitchen pantry, a door had mysteriously swung open and then the footsteps continued down the hall. That was his ghost story. Ho Hum—stifle a big yawn. There were lots of ghost stories like that.
Katherine had maintained a casual interest in parapsychology for as long as she could remember. It was an interest she didn’t advertise. It didn’t go well with any type of professional image one was trying to project. It was sort of like a professor she had known at graduate school who was an expert on 19th century Irish architecture, a renowned scholar really, but who admitted to her that his real passion in life was collecting and trading old baseball cards.
Katherine had never seen a ghost. She had taken a course in parapsychology at Boston University when she was a student there, attended several séances in Providence, but had never actually encountered anything that could lead her to believe in ghosts.
Was there another side to the world?
An unseen side?
Another dimension?
Impossible to know, really unless you were the one seeing the ghosts.
She had talked about all this with Lester Carlson while they sat a picnic table drinking wine that afternoon.
Lester Carlson had nodded. He didn’t believe in ghosts. At least he didn’t beli
eve in ghosts up until some six weeks ago when the face had first appeared at his window.
“Ok,” Katherine said. “Let’s not call that face you saw a ghost. Let’s just say it is some sort of apparition that we can’t explain. Something from another realm of the world that we can’t understand and rarely encounter.”
Lester Carlson had nodded. He liked that approach. There was a presence here at Quabbin. There had been a very real presence at the window those nights when the face appeared. Ghost was a word people laughed at. But everybody knew there were plenty of inexplicable happenings in the world. The face at the window was one of them. The faces in the Jones Library, another.
It was getting late. Katherine smoothed her jeans down, pulled her sweatshirt down in the back, and stepped from behind the maple tree.
* * *
Chapter 47
He paused at the base of lookout tower at Quabbin Reservation. Lester Carlson and the attractive wife of the motorcycle man had just left in separate cars. They had been sitting, drinking wine on a park bench, and talking for an hour. They had not noticed him. He had lingered on the other side of the stone tower pretending to be scanning the woods below for birds. The entity hovered nearby, but had sent him no strong message. This was not surprising. He had sensed over the past several days that the entity had somehow grown in power, and was moving inexorably to the point where he would once again become a physical presence. His job now was to assist the entity in any way possible on this final mission.
There was no point in driving off and following Lester Carlson or the woman. The entity didn’t seem to require that. Instead it was guiding him along the base of the tower and now down a long winding road to the place called Enfield Lookout. In 15 minutes he was at the Lookout, and then following a path that wound through hemlock and oak woods descending into the valley just below the Lookout. The entity wanted to show him something.
Melinda Sanderson, the daughter of a colonial farmer, had disappeared one cold December night in 1792 during a snowstorm--vanished right along this very path. That would have been shortly after Grandfather Red, the man known as Elijah Durman, had come to the Swift River Valley after the War of Independence. As always, the entity didn’t speak but sent images flashing through his mind full of vivid details. As he walked now, he could see and feel the scene that had played out here over 200 years ago.
Melinda Sanderson, thin and tremulous, in a big gray cloth coat with a high collar, alone on the road at night during a snowstorm—on her way home after visiting a cousin in Enfield. She was nervous, and walked quickly glancing furtively to her left and right. There were a few black bears in these woods, and maybe even a solitary mountain lion, but wild animals seldom bothered anybody in New England anymore. The woods were dark and all around her, but there was nothing to worry about. That was what Melinda Sanderson kept telling herself.
There is nothing to worry about. It’s dark, but there is nothing to worry about.
And then he was there, beside her. The entity in the person of Elijah Durman, stepping out from the woods in front of the surprised and then terrified young woman and moving swiftly to her side.
He could feel her terror--the pure animal fear that enveloped her and still saturated this spot some 200 years later. Standing in front of her in a blinding snowstorm was a man she probably knew and recognized as Elijah Durman. But deep in her soul she felt cold fear and knew this was not really a man. Melinda Sanderson had turned and stumbled and tried to run, but her fear was too great. She tried to scream, and managed only a horse choking sound.
But the entity showed him no more of Melinda Sanderson or her final agony. She had died quickly, just as he had in more recent times done in the housewife in the red bikini. It pleased him to think that sometimes the entity allowed him to copy the entity’s own work.
He continued along the path until he reached the bottom on the hill and came to stand near the waters of Quabbin. Here he was near what had been the center of Enfield, now under the waters in front of him. The town gallows and jail stood on the Town Common in 1792. The entity wanted to show him the last days of Elijah Durman--those very last days he had read about so often in the old history books.
That summer when the men from Enfield came to seize Elijah Durman for the murder of Greg Richardson, hatred toward the sour stranger they called Grandfather Red permeated the air. He was tried quickly for the murder of Greg Richardson and convicted in less than an hour due to the testimony of the young boy who had seem him strike the village blacksmith on the head with a large rock.
The old history books told how during his trial, he had glared out at the judge, jury, and spectators with a sneering, contemptuous look that left many in the courtroom terrified. But they found him guilty.
Elijah Durman spent his final days in a one-room cabin in Enfield that served as the jail awaiting his sentence--hanging. The local history books described how he lingered in the jail for only a month while workmen from the valley built a gallows. During that time he saw nobody except his wife, who came for a single brief visit. Elijah Durman had been brief and brusque with her.
He showed her a silver necklace with an ancient ornament dangling from it. He would hand her that ornament right before he died and she must then place it on his tombstone as a permanent ornament. Fail in that and she would pay dearly, he said with a cold glare that frightened the woman. She had often seen the ornament around his neck—an elaborate stone cross carved from some ancient marble with a blue stone at the center. A fine piece of work.
They took Elijah Durman to be hung on a Saturday morning in Enfield. A large crowd had gathered from all over the Quabbin Valley. Some had even brought picnic baskets. Elijah Durman was led out from the one-room log-cabin jail and marched to the foot of the gallows in Enfield Town Square.
The crowd murmured as he approached the gallows. He turned his face right and then left and sneered at the spectators, his eyes ablaze with hatred. His wife approached as instructed and Elijah Durman reached inside his loose linen shirt and pulled the strange pendant from around his neck. He snapped it loose from the thin silver chain and held it high for several seconds before trusting it toward his wife. She took it from him. The spectators gasped. His whole appearance changed in an instant. The moment he let go of the pendant, a bizarre transformation began. His face aged into that of a wizened, ancient, Neanderthal-like man and his body sagged into a skeletal assemblage of bones with no flesh attached.
He had ordered his wife to bring a lighted lantern with her that day. Now he stunned his guards and the crowd by reaching out and yanking the lantern from her hands. He held it aloft and ripped the glass globe from the top. In what seemed like slow motion to the spectators he grasped the lighted candle within the lantern and touched the flame to his shirt. In a flash, his white linen shirt caught fire, the arm of the shirt seemingly engulfed by flames in seconds. Several of his keepers sprang forward to put out the fire, but his tunic blazed up engulfing Elijah Durman.
He turned toward the crowd, flames covering his body, his red hair circled with a halo of fire. “I am fire,” he shouted his face contorted. “I will return again, and again, and again.” And then he fell engulfed in flames at the foot of the gallows depriving the townspeople of their chance to see him hung.
His final words hung in the morning air: “I will return, again, and again, and again.”
* * *
Chapter 48
Katherine shivered in spite of herself. She probably shouldn’t have come down here. It was almost 7 o’clock and the sky was darkening. At least she didn’t have to pee anymore. She moved away from the tree where she had just been squatting and started up the road. She had come, she realized, to look for the coffin—the missing coffin containing the bones of Blake’s buddy from Vietnam.
And to look for connections.
Connections?
Connections to what, Katherine kept asking herself. A name though had surfaced. A strange name, and if you threw enough t
entacles in all directions, you could even make a tenuous connection to the missing coffin.
She had spent two hours at the Jones library in Amherst after encountering Lester Carlson there this morning; reading the many volumes of Quabbin history. And one name; one character jumped out at her. The name of Elijah Durman dominated several pages from a book on the early history of the valley. She had read his story with fascination making no connections at first—his sudden appearance in the valley after the War of Independence, his terrible actions, both suspected and proven, his strange fiery death on Enfield Common.
And then there was the legend, repeated in several books of Swift River Valley lore: Elijah Durman had vowed to return and many believed he would do just that. He was a subhuman, or perhaps superhuman, being, one of only a few who lived for thousands of years, passing their unearthly spirits on at certain prescribed times and with certain prescribed rituals. There was more in the book Katherine had read. Something about the hinges of the year, and the earth shuddering to a stop for an instant, and the Durman powers allowing the bearer of the Durman curse to slip back into the world.
And then, reading of Elijah Durman’s final days when he had ordered his wife to attend his hanging and bring a lighted lantern and to receive his cross, the wife’s name flashed out from the story. Flanagan. The same family name as the dead soldier from Vietnam, whose family had lived here, and whose bones were now missing.
Katherine shook her head in conversation with herself. She couldn’t believe all of the legend. It was too preposterous. She stood for a moment on the access road looking out over the reservoir. Already the waters had turned a darker shade of blue and picked up the gray tint of the coming night. Trees along the shore reflected their colors on the water’s rippled surface. The woods had fallen silent except for the distinctive chirping of a small band of chickadees. Katherine looked up into a nearby white pine and saw one of the small gray and white birds flitting from branch to branch. Out on the reservoir a duck of some sort, she had never been good a bird identification, splashed into the water. But otherwise it was quiet. It was that time of evening when the woods fall silent waiting for the night to begin and the creatures of the dark to begin their patrols.
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