Bruce Tarleton and I were returned to Boston from a two-week camping trip. Bruce was driving, and before very long I began to suspect that he had taken the wrong fork back at North Eaton; though he maintained a stolid silence as the dirt road became gradually narrower and ruttier. I had a disquieting feeling that it was luring us on and on into this strange New England back-country.
Our way twisted through gloomy stretches of forest where limbs hung low over the road—they seemed strangely gnarled and misshapen. Queer patches of colorless vegetation pressed in upon us. We crossed narrow wooden bridges whose loose planks rumbled beneath us as the car rolled slowly over them. We dipped into shallow valleys where the evening sunshine seemed oddly depressing and not as bright as it should be.
For the most part these valleys seemed barren and rock-strewn, but after a while we came upon occasional poorly tilled fields and square, ungainly, unpainted farmhouses. These were set upon slopes far back from the road, reminding me of nothing so much as dead things sprawled there in that unhealthy sunshine.
Neither of us had spoken much since leaving North Eaton, but I somehow got the impression that Bruce was secretly enjoying all this. At last we rumbled across a rickety wooden bridge, followed the turn of the road to the right, and with startling suddenness found ourselves in a little village. My first impression was one of surprise that it should be there at all; then, without exactly knowing why, I knew that I loathed the place.
“I guess this is Vecra,” Bruce said, almost to himself.
“How do you know that?”
He turned and looked at me queerly. “Huh? Why, the sign—at the other end of the bridge back there. Didn’t you see it?”
I looked at him suspiciously. No, I hadn’t seen it; and I thought that was strange, because for the last twenty miles I had been watching for some such sign of a town. But I didn’t say anything—instead, I looked about me. Vecra had evidently been at one time a more prosperous town than present indications showed. A score of frame houses lined each side of the road that was the main street; but now most of them were desolate, empty and weather-beaten, long since fallen into a state of sad decay. Only in a scattered few did we see pitiful enough signs of habitation, as oil lamps gleamed meagerly in the approaching dusk. Those lamps seemed no more meager than our own gloomy situation. Apparently the only way out of this forsaken country was back along the road we had traveled, and the prospect of retracing that route at night did not appeal to me!
We stopped at what appeared to be the general store, to inquire where we might stay overnight. A small, bent, leathery old man shuffled toward us as we entered. I took an immediate dislike to him. Maybe it was his suspicious black eyes that peered from beneath a tangle of dirty white hair. Maybe it was his quaint old dialect, and the way he seemed to be secretly enjoying something at our expense.
“Lost yur way, hev ye, young fellers? I seed ye drive up out there, an’ I reckoned as haow that war the case; ain’t many outside uns has call ter come thissaway, ceptin’ them as takes the wrong rud back at Naorth Eaton.” He peered closer at us and chuckled. “Them as does, alius comes cleer on ter Vecra, acause thur ain’t no other way they kin come.” I glanced nervously at Bruce, but saw that he was listening with intense interest to the old man’s archaic speech. After another evil chuckle, he went on:
“Naow, as I war sayin’, folks as gits up ter Vecra in daylight most alius goes back to Naorth Eaton. An’ them as gets up here by dark… they be mostly skeered ter travel back afore mornin’.” He leered at us with yellowish, bloodshot eyes. “Which be ye?”
“I guess we’ll stay over for the night,” I said hurriedly, “if there’s someone who will be kind enough…”
“Yep! Reckon Eb Corey kin fix ye up fer the night. His place be easy ter find—the big haouse daown’t end o’ the rud. Tell Eb thet Lyle Wilson sent ye.”
As we went out the door I looked back and saw the old man still leering at us. Although I couldn’t hear him, I imagined he was chuckling evilly again.
“I don’t like him,” I said to Bruce.
Bruce chuckled, and it didn’t sound much better than the old man’s. “I do. He’s certainly a queer old bird. I think I’ll come down here tomorrow and have a longer talk with him.”
* * *
We found the Corey place without any trouble. Eb Corey, a tall, gaunt, slow-speaking man, received us stolidly. However, I imagined his wife was vaguely perturbed. There was something tragic about her, especially in her eyes, as though she had been haunted a long time ago and had never quite forgotten. She served us a plain but substantial meal, and we ate appreciatively. The room was large and appeared to me as definitely nineteenth century, including the smell; it was lighted by only two or three oil lamps, and shadows clung to the far corners. The room seemed full of dozens of children of all sizes, though we learned later there were only five. As their mother sent them upstairs to bed, they peered back at us curiously through the stair banister.
“Many outsiders up this way?” Bruce asked at last, when we had finished the meal.
“Last was a few months ago,” Corey replied. He seemed reluctant to talk.
Bruce lit his pipe and blew a wreath of smoke at the ceiling. His next words were so abrupt and inventive they startled even me.
“I hear you’ve got some mighty queer land hereabouts. I’m a government soil inspector—sent up from Boston.” I gaped at the lie, knowing he was nothing of the kind; but he sent me a silencing look.
About land, especially about his land, and most particularly about what was wrong with his land, Eb Corey was more than willing to talk. For an hour or more they talked, while I smoked cigarettes in silence and listened amazedly to the technical knowledge of soil that Bruce displayed. He was a professor of languages at Boston College, a far cry from an expert in soil conditions; but then, I had learned always to expect the unexpected from Bruce Tarleton.
Before retiring, we went out to move the car. We came back in time to hear Mrs. Corey remonstrating with her husband; it seemed to have something to do with our sleeping quarters. Corey was shaking his head stubbornly, and Mrs. Corey retired from the argument as we entered.
“It’s that room in the back wing upstairs,” Eb explained as he led the way up the worn wooden stairs, lamp in hand. “There’s been some tale about it for more’n fifty years—Martha’s made me keep it locked lately. My grandfather built this place, added the wing later.”
“Not haunted, is it?” Bruce asked with a show of jocularity. I noticed the falseness of his tone, the suppressed excitement, but Eb Corey did not.
“Naw!” he said. “The story’s got something to do with a funny kind of dream people sometimes have when they sleep in that room; I don’t know what it is. Martha says she does, but she won’t talk about it. I slept in there a couple of times, but I never had any dream.”
“That’s all right,” Bruce said. “I don’t dream either.”
“I knew a scientific man like you wouldn’t put up with such stock. There’s only a small cot in there that one of you can use—and then there’s another small room across the hall. Sorry I can’t offer you better.”
I looked about me dubiously as we passed along a narrow hall toward the rear of the old house. The lamplight made a pale, moving pattern on the papered walls that were worn smooth and brown from the contact of generations. I stopped at my door, and Bruce went along to his, which directly faced the length of the hall. Eb unlocked that door and said, “I’ll be out in the south field tomorrow, Mr. Tarleton; hope you’ll come out and take a look at the soil.”