The thought had come out of nowhere. Could that face she had just seen for the briefest instant be the same face Lester Carlson had seen?
Katherine stood perfectly still waiting. Nothing moved. The toads were still chorusing in the woods, and somewhere in the distance a flock of crows cawed in disharmony as they made their way to their night roost. The sound of the crows faded into a long lonesome echo swallowed up by the vast silence. Katherine felt the chill of the night air blowing in from the water and a lonesome feeling of her own.
Why would the face want her?
No, it couldn’t be.
She hadn’t really seen a face.
An impression of a face hovering in the branches, that was all. But not an actual face. Imagination gone wild. It was all nerves.
Nerves!
She looked over to the side of the road and into the woods. Nothing.
Katherine turned her glance back to the road and began to walk at a pace approaching a brisk trot. Eyes populated the dark woods, watching her from every direction. If she wasn’t so nervous and dry-mouthed, this would almost be funny. A classic case of fear of the big bad woods.
But then she saw it again. It was almost a face. A cloud-like image, half-formed and vague in the dark, was pulsing above a small tree to her right. It reminded her of pictures of a beating heart—expanding and contracting, only this was not some internal organ pulsing with blood. This was a face, and it seemed to be hovering slightly above a 6 foot-tall sapling. A face that seemed to be trying mightily to form itself into a concrete image in front of her before fading away into the shadows.
Katherine gasped and took a step backwards. The face had been floating in the air, attached to nothing. Now it was gone. The woods were quiet. Where the face had been, a crystal blue light appeared and began slowly spinning toward her.
Katherine began to run. She ran up the road for a hundred yards and stopped to catch her breath. Behind her, in the dark shadows of a tall oak tree, she saw it again—a hovering face. It was still pulsing, still forming itself into a more complete form. She looked at it in fascination for a moment, and then it was gone. Katherine turned and ran again.
Now as she ran she felt something close to her, almost at her back, trying to stop her, to grab and hold her. A presence was in the woods with her. Following her. Stalking her. She was gasping for breath and, she realized with surprise, crying.
There was nobody to help, nobody to call out to.
She was alone. Alone in the Quabbin woods.
Alone as she had ever been in her entire life.
The face swam into view again floating over some bushes to her right. It was still pulsing, still fighting to gain a more concrete form. And now something else. A blue light hovering in the space where the eyes should be. A small intense dark blue light, spinning in a hypnotic counter-clockwise motion.
Katherine had only one thought. Get out of the Quabbin woods before the face managed to form itself any further. Get away before that spinning blue light dragged her to it. She ran now without looking back, without looking to her side and into the woods, fighting off the feeling of being hemmed in, trapped, and watched.
Katherine was a jogger. She often ran with Forest after the radio show. She was in good shape. And now it helped. The car was not that far away. Katherine ran at a steady pace, looking straight ahead, staying to the center of the road, never looking into the darkening woods. She crested a small hill and kept running. The face was back there somewhere but she refused to look.
Katherine dashed around a bend in the road and saw her car parked outside the access road gate. She sprinted the last 100 yards and reached the car with a final burst of speed. She fumbled in her pocket, found her keys and opened the car door.
Katherine turned and looked back toward the darkened woods. The face was at the end of the access road, floating in the air, the blue light still pulsing, but with less vigor than before. Even as she watched, the blue light flickered out and the face lost form and faded disintegrating into wispy ground fog. The spot where it had last hovered was just another shadow in the night.
Katherine turned back to her car. A pickup truck passed on the highway near the access road and then quickly slowed and stopped. Katherine tensed. The backup lights of the pickup truck popped on with a white glow as the driver shifted into reverse. Katherine looked to her side for a way to pull out and around the pickup as it backed up. She didn’t feel like dealing with a stranger trying to help.
And then another car stopped and pulled in behind her car, its headlights blinding her.
Katherine slid into her car and glanced nervously in the rear view mirror. A small dark Ford, and somehow familiar. And then her husband and Hudson Richardson emerged from the car. Katherine took a deep breath and tried to stop crying as she jumped from her car and ran over to them.
* * *
Chapter 53
It was good, this feeling he had, of being part of something big. He was an insider now, included for the first time in his life. He drove easily and confidentially toward the Enfield Road gate, one hand on the wheel, the other fiddling with his trusty Buck knife, which lay folded in the plastic cup holder sculpted into the console between the front seats of his pickup truck.
Driving at night like this he often thought of Ted Bundy, the executed serial killer of young women. Bundy had been tall and handsome and probably could easily have dated most of the young women he instead chose to snatch and kill. People wondered how this could be, but he had seen pictures of Bundy and had studied the man’s eyes. If you looked in the eyes, you could see the mixture of furtiveness and self-assurance that a true stonehearted killer like Bundy possessed. Oh sure, there were other types of killers out there, lots of them in fact, but they were pathetic amateurs.
There had been in the news recently a story about a pig farm in Vancouver, British Columbia where police had unearthed the remains of a dozen missing women—street people and prostitutes. The police thought they would find still more bodies. It was all so pathetic—a biker gang; gross-out parties; goons fueled up on drugs and alcohol; brutish behavior toward women; women killed because of money, or rage; and then other women killed for what they saw being done to the victims at the farm, women killed out of fear for what they might say, women killed because they were part of a drug deal gone bad. Women killed for reasons so small, so common that you really had to say they were killed for no reason at all.
He was different. Ted Bundy had been different. They had their reasons for killing, but it wasn’t anything like those sad sacks at the pig farm in Vancouver--stripped now of all power and pretense by a few local cops.
Power. It was there. You could reach out and grasp it. The trip toward the center of whatever it was that ran the universe. That was power. That was true power. Not something that a few well intentioned local investigators could strip from you as easily as plucking a hash pipe from the inner pocket of your leather biker jacket.
Power. It had nothing to do with those creepy bikers at the pig farm. He had looked again and again at their photos carried in the newspapers next to the story—sad-sack specimens, long greasy hair tied in ponytails in back, bad teeth, mean little amphetamine -crazed eyes. They were killers of the most pathetic sort—killing out of fear, lust, anger, and greed. Fools. Pathetic fools. They knew nothing of the other side. The side he now knew. The side of true evil; the side of true power.
Up ahead near the Enfield Road gate he saw the red car parked off the road, tucked in under the trees by the gate. He would have missed it there in the shadows, but as he slowed and drove by, the driver opened the door to get in and the dome light briefly illuminated the interior.
He gave a start.
It was her.
The Vet’s wife.
Alone.
She had evaded him once--that bad night in Ohio. But here she was. Returning from some sort of hike in the Quabbin woods as night fell. He touched the brakes and pulled off the road just beyond the gate an
d her car. He was perhaps 50 yards past her. And just like that it came—the summons, strong, and insistent, like a sudden fever that invades the body. Now was the time. The entity was with him.
His hand reached into the cup holder and found the Buck knife. He slid the gearshift of his pickup truck into reverse and paused for a moment to strategize. He would back up to the access road, turn and box her car in. Similar to his maneuver with the waitress at the phone booth. And then in two of three quick strides he would be at the driver’s side door, knife in hand. She would be his.
Then he saw the other car stop.
Dammit!!!
Some interfering good Samaritans had pulled in behind the red car. He watched in his rear-view mirror and two figures emerged. It was the Vet and the newspaper reporter. They got out of the car and strolled over to the red car and the woman in the car jumped out and ran over to them very fast. He cursed and shoved the gearshift of his vehicle from reverse into drive. He could almost feel the entity’s surging anger and disappointment right here in the cab of his pickup. Carefully he pulled back onto the road and drove off.
* * *
Chapter 54
Blake lay in bed. Katherine lay asleep beside him clad in a T-shirt and no bottoms. Somewhere downstairs in the house Hudson Richardson was slowly typing on his keyboard. Blake had driven Katherine in her car back to Amherst. Hudson followed in his car. For an hour in Amherst, the three of them sat at the kitchen table, Hudson with a bottled draft Guinness in front of him; Katherine with a glass of red wine; Blake sipping coffee. Katherine had stopped shaking and crying as she told of her long and terrifying hike in the Quabbin woods—and the face hovering and following and watching her in those woods.
Hudson shook his head. “No way”, he said. “You just think you saw something. The big bad woods scare everybody sometime or other.”
Katherine had put down her wine after a thoughtful sip and looked hard at Hudson. “I know what I saw,” she said simply.
“Kath,” Blake said, “could you have seen ground fog and shadows. I mean, a real ghost is too much.”
Katherine took another sip of wine. “Blake, hon,” she said. “I’m not making this up. There is something out there. Why can’t you guys accept that there are things in the world we can’t explain?”
Hudson and Blake looked at Katherine and then at each other. For a long time nobody said a word.
After they said goodnight to Hudson, and entered the small guest bedroom, Katherine stripped her clothes off and grabbed Blake. “Now, right now,” she said standing naked in front of him. “I need you to make love to me. Now.”
Blake was startled. It was the first time in a long time that Katherine had come to him for passionate sex. They had fallen into an unfortunate pattern at home—mechanical sex once a month that one or the other initiated in a half-hearted way to keep the illusion of passion at least desultorily alive. Now she stood naked in front of him. “Please,” she said. “Make love to me now.” He had reached out and cupped both her breasts in his hands.
When they were finished, Katherine had put her arms around him and held him for a long time. Finally, she said just before going to sleep, “I’m scared. Something is out there. Something was out there tonight. Something very bad and powerful, and probably awful.”
Blake lay awake for a long time. Beside him Katherine twitched in her sleep. He wanted to believe that Katherine had seen something or somebody in the Quabbin woods. She had, for the entire 20 years he had known here, had a gift for seeing into people and situations—a kind of prescience that he relied on for sound judgments and pronouncements about everything from friends, both hers and his, to where to spend the holidays and with which side of the family.
Katherine was the one who could tell you which dentist was really good, and which one was a hack. Katherine was the one who knew when they had been ripped off by the carpet salesman or the tree removal service.
Katherine was the one who made friends in the neighborhood and knew everybody, and made sure they knew he was a Vietnam vet. She was his anchor. She was tough and sensible and self-assured. And in all their years together she had never seen things; never talked of ghosts.
He didn’t like her involved here. He had been summoned, not her. He needed to run down his past and find the remains of his friend and mentor from Vietnam—Kevin Flanagan. Circumstances had brought him to this place in New England where a great reservoir stretched over buried and forgotten towns. He was here and he was going to find Kevin Flanagan’s body and then go home. It was that simple; and that complicated.
He thought back to Vietnam and how so many of his troubles had started with a simple failure to act. He had spent his life on the sidelines—really since boyhood—afraid to get too involved; afraid to try too hard or take decisive action. Staying out of it; staying on the sidelines—that was the way to go. If you never really tried hard, you never really failed, either.
Blake remembered words that James Brady had spoken some 25 years ago in Vietnam. They had popped into his head unbidden at strange times over the years. Now they came back to him.
* * *
Chapter 55
“Listen,” James Brady said that long-ago day as Blake piloted the helicopter back to base and the hospital, where James Brady’s life was saved while his leg was sacrificed. “Listen up man. About what you saw out there today. It’s not your fucking fault. You couldn’t have saved them. It’s nobody’s fucking fault. It happens all the time out there on the ground. You’re up here in your big-ass chopper so you don’t know it; you don’t see it, you don’t feel it. But man it happens all the fucking time.”
Blake had turned to James Brady way back then, turned away from the helicopter controls and looked right at James Brady. “Zapping kids. Popping old men and women. That happens all the time?”
“Listen, buddy,” James Brady had said a great weariness in his voice. “Let me tell you how it is. How it really fucking all comes down.” James Brady had paused again as if mentally rechecking his facts before making an announcement.
“It’s night,” he said. “You’re on the fucking ground in some strange place you never been before. Maybe you’re with a big-shot elite unit like the Navy Seals or the Green Berets, or maybe not. Maybe you’re just plain old fucking ground troops like me. Maybe you think you know what you’re doing, and maybe not. You come to a village. It’s night. It’s black and dark as a witch’s tit. You see some folks in this village, hiding from you in the dark. Kids. Couple old men, couple old women. Maybe let them be. Who gives a fuck. And then a fucking gun gets fired. OK, maybe it’s just that crazy trigger-happy Okie from Muskokie in your unit who is firing off his fucking M16 at shadows. But the other possibility is some fucking kid or prick of an old man just fired at the unit. It’s dark man. It’s dark and you are fucking scared. You are fucking scared of dying out there in the middle of nowhere in the dark for no fucking reason.”
Blake had kept the helicopter in the air and turned to look back at James Brady. He found no words.
“It’s dark,” James Brady had said again. “You are in the dark, you are in the jungle, it is night, and you are so fucking scared. Somebody is firing a fucking gun. Then somebody starts running. Possibility is that it is just one of these little kids or old grandmas scared cause a gun has gone off. But shit. They run right at you. They run right at you when you’re fucking scared. They run right at you in the night, right at you when you can’t see them so good. So you start shooting. Don’t come close to me you little fuckers. And then everybody starts shooting, and you wipe these little shadows running around in the dark right off the face of this fucking earth.”
James Brady had paused grimacing through his pain in the medical sling where he rode that afternoon. “You dig man. It ain’t about being anybody’s fault. It’s about being scared and having a gun and this shadow running at you in the dark. That’s the real story. The dark. And the shadows in the dark.” James’s Brady paused again and looked
down at his damaged leg. “And it happens all the time. All the time.”
Blake remembered well what he had said next. Pointing out from the helicopter window as they rode through an orange twilight toward the base camp, he had turned to James Brady and said, “But it’s not dark out now. It’s still daylight.”
James Brady had again grimaced through his pain. “I know that man, but that’s what I’m trying to tell you. How it starts and how it grows and keeps growing. It happens the first time in the dark when you’re scared—wicked, fucking scared. And then maybe the second time it happens in the dark again. And sure you are scared, but this time it’s easier. This time instead of some kid running toward you in the shadows, you start firing away when you just see a shadow. As a precaution. Same way you step on a hornet on your front porch even if it ain’t bothering you. As a precaution. So you fire first. Maybe turns out to be something, but maybe not. Maybe turns out to be a couple of old folks huddled together scared of you and the old mama raises her hand to her mouth to stifle a cough and you see that hand moving in the dark and panic and fire away. Blow her right away so you just see a pile of bloody rags where she was sitting. And then after that, it’s easy. You’ve crossed the line. It don’t matter as much. Only thing that matters is you. You start to think that what you do is all precautionary stuff. And you know what? It is. Pretty soon you see a hut in the broad daylight and you see a movement that you don’t like. Fire away. You see an old man running across a field at noon. Fire away. You see a broken down water buffalo plodding alongside the road. Fire away.”
Faces in the Night Page 19