Weren’t they? All of them? Could one have escaped? What did the giants look like, Grandfather?
Like . . . Like . . .
No!
This is it, thought Jason as the Indian bounded off the bed, thrust a hand into his jacket, and pulled him to his feet with a single yank. Jason protected his face until the gun barrel pushed into his stomach, almost to his spine.
The Indian hissed into his face, black eyes distilling fire, threads of saliva collecting in the deep clefts on the sides of his mouth. “He’s a spirit! He is! I know what he is. And you’re the devil, you bastard—” Moon babbled on, words spilling out of his mouth, juiced with a venomous hatred so potent they seemed to cling to the walls. He drenched Jason in obscenities, some common, some so bizarre they made absolutely no sense.
But he did not pull the trigger. Some uncertainty stilled his finger. Jason knew that if the right lever in Moon’s psyche were touched, his own life would pour out, and he had not touched that lever. It was fear that really fueled the Indian’s rage. Fear of Jason, fear sparked from some mysterious emotional terminals in his brain.
The Indian ran out of insults. He released his grip on Jason and stepped backward, his bony face a whitened mask of trapped anger.
“You were in the war, weren’t you, Moon?”
Moon breathed harshly, the breath whistling through his nostrils. His forehead glistened.
“I’m very sorry,” said Jason, straightening his coat.
He opened the door. Wind shrieked in, bearing twigs from the woods. There were no snowflakes yet, but there soon would be. The sun would darken and the sky grow fat with iron clouds that pressed tightly over the horizon. “I want my gun back, Moon. If you’re not planning to shoot me, that is.”
Moon threw the gun at him. It bounced off Jason’s jacket to the floor. Had it been cocked, one of them would not be walking out of the room.
“Thank you,” said Jason. He tucked it into his belt and bulled out into the wind.
Touching that toe had been a kind of addiction. He had to get back into the medicine bundle. Regardless of what the Indian did, Raymond Jason was determined to stick as close to John Moon as Moon had stuck to his spirit.
The late cousin Murphy used to say that Lester Cole was never on time anywhere. When relatives called Cole’s trailer to find out how he could miss Murphy’s funeral, an operator came on to say that the phone was out of order. He was not working at the lodge, where the phones were also down, so they became mildly alarmed and contacted the police.
A motorcycle cop braved the winds and drove up Hulcher Road to where Lester’s trailer was parked deep in overhanging woods. Lester’s truck was overturned, and the entire trailer was off its cinder-block mountings. The ground was littered with broken glass, furniture, and beer cans, thrown out the smashed doors and windows.
The cop took out his gun and shouldered his way inside. A rock lay on the floor. Blood was everywhere. A trail of thin blood led into the kitchen, to a great dried puddle of it soaking newspapers around the kitchen table. Lester had apparently been poaching deer. Everything else in the trailer was smashed.
The cop called headquarters, which in turn called the Forest Service. When Drake and his men arrived, the cop was poking through the woods, looking for Lester’s body.
“Let’s not fly off the handle yet,” said Drake over the map spread out on the truck hood. He indicated a fanlike section of Colby’s face with Lester’s trailer as the base. Checking it out meant trudging uphill through tangled timbers and maintaining your balance by gripping bushes. “There isn’t any reason for them to come all the way around the mountain. Oharaville’s on the north side.”
They climbed for an hour, searching the ground. After a hundred yards the blood gave out. Taylor was leaning against a tree, feet securely planted in the ground, cupping a match against the wind to light a cigarette, when he saw the shoe wedged in the exposed tree roots. It was a cheap loafer, the sole worn to paper-thinness. The heel was caught in the root.
Drake examined the shoe. Blood had dried on the instep. “It was upside down, so that means he was either walking backwards or he was dragged up and the heel caught in the roots. Let’s look for clothing or something.” They spread out, searching the underbrush and branch tips. Jones was standing next to Wallace when the wind shifted. “Listen!”
Wallace listened and heard nothing. “What?”
“It’s gone now. Did you ever blow over the top of an open bottle and make this whooo noise? For just a minute there. . .”
Again the wind shifted and this time Wallace heard a lowing sound, like that of a distant cow, coming from a rock ledge above them. He and Jones scrambled up to it.
Brush was pushed tightly against the wall of rock. It did not quiver as the wind crossed it. Jones grabbed a handful and pulled. The entire bush popped out like a cork from a small horizontal cave some four feet high and seven feet wide. The bush flew away in an ungainly ball from Jones’s hand, hit a tree, and disintegrated.
They waited on the ledge for Taylor to puff back up the slope bearing a rope and lights. Drake tied the rope around his waist and flashed a light inside the cave. “Somebody make a note that Forest Rangers be equipped with gas masks next time.”
“You don’t need Rangers here,” said Wallace. “You need a plumber.”
Although the entrance was small, the cave itself was large. Stones had been piled against the floor, forming a sort of staircase. Drake saw stalactites hanging from the ceiling. The chart had said Colby was full of limestone. Under the action of water, limestone dissolved into caves.
“If I’m not back in five minutes, flush the thing,” said Drake. Jones played out the rope as he slipped, rifle first, through the opening.
“It’s like a church,” said Drake, his voice booming. The interior was a good fifteen feet high. The walls were smooth and curved. On the opposite wall was a small opening leading to another tunnel. “It’s clean except for the smell. It’s dry, too.”
Drake could not pin down any particular detail that told him the cave was used frequently, but that was what he sensed. Somewhere he had read that living things leave a memory of their presence behind, like a battery charge. It might have been technical nonsense, but he trusted his instincts.
“Everybody tie yourselves together and let’s go in a little ways,” said Drake. “Stay behind me.”
The wind receded to a faint whistle as they followed Drake single-file into the tunnels. Unlike the mine, which was filled with the drip of water, the cave system was quiet. Dry and quiet. Silence was an unnatural state of nature, Jones thought. It meant you were being watched.
The tunnel branched, and they walked to the right. All of them smelled the smoke at once. “Taylor was right,” said Jones. It was not thick or visible. It was an old odor, as if given off by a deposit of soot on the walls.
“Hickory smoke,” whispered Wallace. “Now what in hell . . .”
Drake rounded a corner and aimed his light at the floor. Twenty feet ahead they saw the tattered remains of Lester Cole lying in a gush of dried blood.
Drake examined the body. “His head’s gone,” he said quietly. He flashed the light around, as if expecting to find it lying somewhere close by.
They carried Lester down the mountain in a tarpaulin and deposited him in the back of the truck. Drake called the state police. “We’ve found him. I want you to do something for me. I want you to take samples of all the blood in his trailer and find out what kind of an animal he was carving up in there, if that’s really what he was doing. Okay? Ten four.”
He stood outside the truck, breathing in great drafts of fresh cold air. He turned to Jones and said, “Now what, Jonesy?”