“I’ll tell you when we get there.” Jud turned away. “Mind the tussocks.”
They began to walk again, stepping from one broad hummock to the next. Louis did not feel for them. His feet seemed to find them automatically, with no effort from him. He slipped only once, his left shoe breaking through a thin scum of ice and dipping into cold and somehow slimy standing water. He pulled it out quickly and went on, following Jud’s bobbing light. That light, floating through the woods, brought back memories of the pirate tales he had liked to read as a boy. Evil men off to bury gold doubloons by the dark of the moon. . . and of course one of them would be tumbled into the pit on top of the chest, a bullet in his heart, because the pirates had believed—or so the authors of these lurid tales solemnly attested—that the dead comrade’s ghost would remain there to guard the swag.
Except it’s not treasure we’ve come to bury. Just my daughter’s castrated cat.
He felt wild laughter bubble up inside and stifled it.
He did not hear any “sounds like voices,” nor did he see any St.
Elmo’s fire, but after stepping over half a dozen tussocks, he looked down and saw that his feet, calves, knees, and lower thighs had disappeared into a ground fog that was perfectly smooth,
perfectly white, and perfectly opaque. It was like moving through the world’s lightest drift of snow.
The air seemed to have a quality of light in it now, and it was warmer, he could have sworn it. He could see Jud before him, moving steadily along, the blunt end of the pick hooked over his shoulder. The pick enhanced the illusion of a man intent on burying treasure.
That crazy sense of exhilaration persisted, and he suddenly wondered if maybe Rachel was trying to call him; if, back in the house, the phone was ringing and ringing, making its rational, prosaic sound. If— He almost walked into Jud’s back again. The old man had stopped in the middle of the path. His head was cocked to one side. His mouth was pursed and tense.
“Jud? What’s—”
“Shhh!”
Louis hushed, looking around uneasily. Here the ground mist was thinner, but he still couldn’t see his own shoes. Then he heard crackling underbrush and breaking branches. Something was moving out there—something big.
He opened his mouth to ask Jud if it was a moose (bear was the thought that actually crossed his mind), and then he closed it again.
The sound carries, Jud had said.
He cocked his head to one side in unconscious imitation of Jud, unaware that he was doing it, and listened. The sound seemed at first distant, then very close; moving away arid then moving ominously toward them. Louis felt the sweat on his forehead begin to trickle down his chapped cheeks. He shifted the Hefty Bag with Church’s body in it from one hand to the other. His palm had dampened, and the green plastic seemed greasy, wanting to slide through his fist. Now the thing out there seemed so close that Louis expected to see its shape at any moment, rising
up on two legs, perhaps, blotting out the stars with some unthought-of, immense and shaggy body.
Bear was no longer what he was thinking of.
Now he didn’t know just what he was thinking of.
Then it moved away and disappeared.
Louis opened his mouth again, the words What was that? already on his tongue. Then a shrill, maniacal laugh came out of the darkness, rising and falling in hysterical cycles, loud, piercing, chilling. To Louis it seemed that every joint in his body had frozen solid and that he had somehow gained weight, so much weight that if he turned to run he would plunge down and out of sight in the swampy ground.
The laughter rose, split into dry cackles like some rottenly friable chunk of rock along many fault lines; it reached the pitch of a scream, then sank into a guttural chuckling that might have become sobs before it faded out altogether.
Somewhere there was a drip of water and above them, like a steady river in a bed of sky, the monotonous whine of the wind.
Otherwise Little God Swamp was silent.
Louis began to shudder all over. His flesh—particularly that of his lower belly—began to creep. Yes, creep was the right word; his flesh actually seemed to be moving on his body. His mouth was totally dry. There seemed to be no spit at all left in it. Yet that feeling of exhilaration persisted, an unshakable lunacy.
“What in Christ’s name?” he whispered hoarsely to Jud.
Jud turned to look at him, and in the dim light Louis thought the old man looked a hundred and twenty. There was no sign of that odd, dancing light in his eyes now. His face was drawn, and there was stark terror in his eyes. But when he spoke, his voice was steady enough. “Just a loon,” he said. “Come on. Almost there.”
They went on. The tussocks became firm ground again. For a few moments Louis had a sensation of open space, although that dim glow in the air had now faded, and it was all he could do to make out Jud’s back three feet in front of him. Short grass stiff with frost was underfoot. It broke like glass at every step. Then they were in the trees again. He could smell aromatic fir, feel needles.
Occasionally a twig or a branch scraped against him.
Louis had lost all sense of time or direction, but they did not walk long before Jud stopped again and turned toward him.
“Steps here,” he said. “Cut into rock. Forty-two or forty-four, I disremember which. Just follow me. We get to the top and we’re there.”
He began to climb again, and again Louis followed.
The stone steps were wide enough, but the sense of the ground dropping away was unsettling. Here and there his shoe gritted on a strew of pebbles and stone fragments.
twelve. . . thirteen. . . fourteen.
The wind was sharper, colder, quickly numbing his face. Are we above the treeline? he wondered. He looked up and saw a billion stars, cold lights in the darkness. Never in his life had the stars made him feel so completely small, infinitesimal, without meaning. He asked himself the old question—is there anything intelligent out there?—and instead of wonder, the thought brought a horrid cold feeling, as if he had asked himself what it might be like to eat a handful of squirming bugs.
twenty-six. . . twenty-seven. . . twenty-eight.
Who carved these, anyway? Indians? The Micmacs? Were they tool-bearing Indians? I’ll have to ask Jud. “Tool-bearing Indians”
made him think of “fur-bearing animals,” and that made him think of that thing that had been moving near them in the woods. One
foot stumbled, and he raked a gloved hand along the rock wall to his left for balance. The wall felt old, chipped and channeled and wrinkled. Like dry skin that’s almost worn out, he thought.
“You all right, Louis?” Jud murmured.
“I’m okay,” he said, although he was nearly out of breath and his muscles throbbed from the weight of Church in the bag.
forty-two. . . forty-three. . . forty-four.
“Forty-five,” Jud said. “I’ve forgot. Haven’t been up here in twelve years, I guess. Don’t suppose I’ll ever have a reason to come again.
Here. . . up you come and up you get.”
He grabbed Louis’s arm and helped him up the last step.
“We’re here,” Jud said.
Louis looked around. He could see well enough; the starlight was dim but adequate. They were standing on a rocky, rubble strewn plate of rock which slid out of the thin earth directly ahead like a dark tongue. Looking the other way, he could see the tops of the fir trees they had come through in order to reach the steps. They had apparently climbed to the top of some weird, flat-topped mesa, a geological anomaly that would have seemed far more normal in Arizona or New Mexico. Because the grassed-over top of the mesa—or hill, or truncated mountain, or whatever it was—was bare of trees, the sun had melted the snow here. Turning back to Jud, Louis saw dry grasses bending before the steady wind that blew coldly in his face, and saw that it was a hill, not an isolated mesa. Ahead of them the ground rose again toward trees.
But this flatness was so obvious, and so odd in the context of New England’s low and somehow tired hills— Tool-bearing Indians, his mind suddenly spoke up.
“Come on,” Jud said and led him twenty-five yards toward the trees. The wind blew hard up here, but it felt clean. Louis saw a
number of shapes just under the gloom cast by the trees—trees which were the oldest, tallest firs he had ever seen. The whole effect of this high, lonely place was emptiness—but an emptiness which vibrated.