He told her that he was sent to warn. . . but that he couldn’t interfere. He told her he was near Daddy because they were together when his soul was discorporated.
Jud knows, but he won’t tell. Something is going on. Something.
But what?
Suicide? Is it suicide? Not Louis; I can’t believe that. But he was lying about something. It was in his eyes. . . oh shit, it was all over his face, almost as if he wanted me to see the lie see it and put a stop to it. . . because part of him was scared so scared.
Scared? Louis is never scared!
Suddenly she jerked the Chevette’s steering wheel hard over to the left, and the ear responded with the abrupt suddenness that small cars have, the tires wailing. For a moment she thought it was going to turn over. But it didn’t, and she was moving north again, exit 8
with its comforting Holiday Inn sign slipping behind her. A new sign came in view, reflective paint twinkling eerily.
NEXT EXIT ROUTE 12 CUMBERLAND CUMBEBLAND
CENTER JERUSALEM’S LOT FALMOUTH FALMOUTH
FORESIDE. Jerusalem’s Lot, she thought randomly, what an odd name. Not a pleasant name, for some reason. . . Come and sleep in Jerusalem.
But there would be no sleep for her tonight; Jud’s advice notwithstanding, she now meant to drive straight through. Jud knew what was wrong and had promised her he would put a stop to it, but the man was eighty-some years old and had lost his wife only three months before. She would not put her trust in Jud. She should never have allowed Louis to bulldoze her out of the house the way he had, but she had been weakened by Gage’s death. Ellie with her Polaroid picture of Gage and her pinched face—it had been the face of a child who has survived a tornado or a sudden dive-bombing from a clear blue sky. There had been times in the dark watches of the night when she had longed to hate Louis for the grief he had fathered inside her, and for not giving her the
comfort she needed (or allowing her to give the comfort she needed to give), but she could not. She loved him too much still, and his face had been so pale. . . so watchful.
The Chevette’s speedometer needle hung poised just a bit to the right of sixty miles an hour. A mile a minute. Two hours and a quarter to Ludlow maybe. Maybe she could still beat the sunrise.
She fumbled with the radio, turned it on, found a rock-and-roll station out of Portland. She turned up the volume and sang along, trying to keep herself awake. The station began to fade in and out half an hour later, and she retuned to an Augusta station, rolled the window down, and let the restless night air blow in on her.
She wondered if this night would ever end.
55
Louis had rediscovered his dream and was in its grip; every few moments he looked down to make sure it was a body in a tarpaulin he was carrying and not one in a green Hefty Bag. He remembered how on awakening the morning after Jud had taken him up there with Church he had been barely able to remember what they had done—but now he also remembered how vivid those sensations had been, how alive each of his senses had felt, how they had seemed to reach out, touching the woods as if they were alive and in some kind of telepathic contact with himself.
He followed the path up and down, rediscovering the places where it seemed as wide as Route 15, the places where it narrowed until he had to turn sideways to keep the head and foot of his bundle from getting tangled in the underbrush, the places where the path
wound through great cathedral stands of trees. He could smell the clear tang of pine resin, and he could hear that strange crump-crump of the needles underfoot—a sensation that is really more feeling than sound.
At last the path began to slant downward more steeply and constantly. A short time later one foot splashed through thin water and became mired in the sludgy stuff underneath . . . the quicksand, if Jud was to be believed. Louis looked down and could see the standing water between growths of reeds and low, ugly bushes with leaves so broad they were almost tropical. He remembered that the light had seemed brighter that other night too.
More electrical.
This next bit is like the deadfall—you got to walk steady and easy.
Just follow me and don’t look down.
Yes, okay. . . and just by the bye, have you ever seen plants like these in Maine before? In Maine or anywhere else? What in Christ’s name are they?
Never mind, Louis. Just. . . let’s go.
He began to walk again, looking at the wet, marshy undergrowth just long enough to sight the first tussock and then only looking ahead of himself, his feet moving from one grassy hump to the next—faith is accepting gravity as a postulate, he thought; nothing he had been told in a college theology or philosophy course, but something his high school physics instructor had once tossed off near the end of a period . . . something Louis had never forgotten.
He accepted the ability of the Micmac burying ground to resurrect the dead and walked into Little God Swamp with his son in his arms, not looking down or back. These marshy bottoms were noisier now than they had been at the tag end of autumn. Peepers sang constantly in the reeds, a shrill chorus which Louis found alien and uninviting. An occasional frog twanged a deep elastic
somewhere in its throat. Twenty paces or so into Little God Swamp he was buzz-bombed by some shape. . . a bat, perhaps.
The groundmist began to swirl around him, first covering his shoes, then his shins, finally enclosing him in a glowing white capsule. It seemed to him that the light was brighter, a pulsing effulgence like the beat of some strange heart. He had never before felt so strongly the presence of nature as a kind of coalescing force, a real being . . . possibly sentient. The swamp was alive, but not with the sound of music. If asked to define either the sense or the nature of that aliveness, he would have been unable. He only knew that it was rich with possibility and textured with strength. Inside it, Louis felt very small and very mortal.
Then there was a sound, and he remembered this from the last time as well: a high, gobbling laugh that became a sob. There was silence for a moment and then the laugh came again, this time rising to a maniacal shriek that froze Louis’s blood. The mist drifted dreamily around him. The laughter faded, leaving only the drone of the wind, heard but no longer felt. Of course not; this had to be some sort of geological cup in the earth. If the wind could have penetrated here, it would have torn this mist to tatters . . . and Louis wasn’t sure he would want to see what might have been revealed.
You may hear sounds like voices, but they are the loons down south toward Prospect. The sound carries. It’s funny.
“Loons,” Louis said and barely recognized the cracked, somehow ghastly sound of his own voice. But he sounded amused. God help him, he actually sounded amused.
He hesitated briefly and then moved on again. As if to punish him for his brief pause, his foot slipped from the next tussock, and he almost lost his shoe, pulling it free from the grasping ooze under the shallow water.
The voice—if that was what it was—came again, this time from the left. Moments later it came from behind him . . . from directly behind him, it seemed, as if he could have turned and seen some blood-drenched thing less than a foot from his back, all bared teeth and glittering eyes . . . but this time Louis did not slow. He looked straight ahead and kept walking.
Suddenly the mist lost its light and Louis realized that a face was hanging in the air ahead of him, leering and gibbering. Its eyes, tilted up like the eyes in a classical Chinese painting, were a rich yellowish-gray, sunken, gleaming. The mouth was drawn down in a rictus; the lower lip was turned inside out, revealing teeth stained blackish-brown and worn down almost to nubs. But what struck Louis were the ears, which were not ears at all but curving horns . .
. they were not like devil’s horns; they were ram’s horns.
This grisly, floating head seemed to be speaking—laughing. Its mouth moved, although that turned-down lower lip never came back to its natural shape and place. Veins in there pulsed black. Its nostrils flared, as if with breath and life, and blew out white vapors.