“Why,” she thought, “it’s like going to sleep.”
20
“What you got here,” the real estate man said, “is your own little island. One road in. The canal cutting you off from the rest. Big high fence along the canal so that no one can get in without coming up the road. Ideal for privacy.”
“Mighty poor soil,” sighed the prospective buyer, his hand full of sand. He let it trickle drily through his fingers. “I’d have to have it tested.”
“Frankly,” said the real estate man, “I don’t know what kind of soil you need to grow grapes, but I know this. There isn’t another plot of land this size for sale in the whole county, and if it weren’t for the power company canal, this plot would be prime residential property and you couldn’t touch it for twice the price. Hell, you couldn’t touch it for four times the price. Then, too, you got this situation. The fellow owned it had no close relatives, just a cousin or something out in California, some kind of hippy interested in the quick buck. You put it off too long and he might decide to come out here and look at it and go up on the price.”
“I’d have to have the soil checked,” the prospective buyer said. “And then I’d have to check the cost of clearing it. I’d need about all of it cleared, at least the central hundred acres.”
“No sweat there,” the real estate man said, checking over his shoulder to see where the woman had wandered off to. He didn’t want her over by the pond. The bush was taking the burned house site, but it was still raw and rough and there was no use spooking her by reminding her of the ill luck of former owners. Women were spooky enough anyhow. She was moving down toward the creek. “It’s just scrub oak and loblolly. Good dozer operator can have a hundred acres whipped out in a week or so.”
“Well, it looks like good grape soil,” the prospective buyer said. He squatted and scooped up sand into a plastic bag. He had it half full when the woman screamed.
“Oh, shit,” the real estate man said, “what now?”
He broke into a run and pushed through the growth. The woman was standing against a great oak tree and was cornered by a goddamned alligator, of all things. A frigging alligator. It was just a small alligator, being a North Carolina alligator and not having much warm weather for growing time. But it was a belligerent little bastard, and it was advancing with its mouth wide, making a hissing sound.
Last time it had been a goddamned rattlesnake, and it had bit the stupid woman, and he’d had to suck blood and venom out after cutting her leg with a pocketknife. Before that a goddamned fox, acting just as crazy as that time with the Ferrier woman and that goddamned possum. What kind of a frigging zoo was this?
He scared the alligator off.
The prospective buyer called the next day. “We’ve decided that the acreage you were showing us won’t do,” he said.
“You’ll never find anything at such a bargain,” the real estate man said.
“Well, we’d have to live there, too, you know. And the little woman didn’t take to the place.”
“No,” the real estate man said. “I didn’t think she would.”
He hung up, sighing. Two hundred three and a quarter acres of prime development land fouled up by a goddamned radioactive canal and you couldn’t even sell it at giveaway prices for some fool to plant grapes on. But there was one thing. They weren’t making any more land. Sooner or later he’d sell it again. Maybe one of the locals would get over being superstitious and take a flyer. He didn’t care who bought it and he didn’t care what they did with it. He didn’t care how many bodies they’d dug up on it, or how many houses had burned down, or how many people had drowned in the clear pond. They just weren’t making any more land, and sooner or later. . . . Humm, ten percent of—
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hugh Zachary was born in Oklahoma in 1928. Under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms, such as Zach Hughes and Evan Innes, he wrote several dozen novels in various genres, including horror, science fiction, and Westerns, most of them published as mass market paperback originals. He served in the U. S. Army and worked in broadcast journalism in Florida before commencing a career as a full-time writer in 1963. He once described himself as “the most published, underpaid and most unknown writer in the U. S.” Zachary died in 2006.