But although rusted, they were large and solid, and the screws were sturdy in the timber.
"Well, that does it," Slaughter said.
"You don't mean we're leaving."
"No. I came up this far, and I don't intend to waste time coming back. We're going to have to climb the fence and walk."
They looked at one another.
"Wait a second while I get my camera." Dunlap went down to the cruiser for it. When he came back, Slaughter waved for him to climb up first, and Dunlap put his shoe on one thick timber, grabbing at another timber, easing over. Slaughter climbed up just behind him, and they stepped down into the compound, on the edge of Quiller's fifty acres. "Something wrong?" Slaughter asked. "No, I'm just shaky," Dunlap answered. "You were right. I need a drink."
"Well, you'll be done with this before you know it." They walked along the next part of the loggers' road, which was as overgrown as the first part. Slaughter heard a noise in the bushes and turned, but there was nothing he could see. He kept walking.
"Are there any people up here yet?" Slaughter wondered.
"I meant to ask you that myself. Parsons says there might be two or three."
"Oh, swell. Some commune."
"In its day, it was," Dunlap said. "I read that Quiller started with a couple thousand. Then he cut them down to just five hundred."
"Even so. If only two or three are up here."
"Yes, it isn't hard to measure Quiller's failure."
"What's the point then? I don't see your story?"
"That's the story. How it failed, and more important, why."
"Well, you must know your business."
They kept walking. Once again, Slaughter heard a noise behind them. He turned, but there was nothing. "Now who's jumpy?" Dunlap asked him. Slaughter had to laugh then. But the laughter echoed through the forest, and he quickly stopped.
The loggers' road disappeared a hundred feet ahead of them.
"Or could be that the forest just reclaimed it," Slaughter said.
They reached the dead end of the lane and glanced at the maze of trees around them.
"What now?" Slaughter asked.
"Well, the road was going straight up, and the clearing I suppose was somewhere near it. Let's just keep on through these trees."
"We could end up walking in a circle. We'll have to pay attention to our landmarks." That big boulder up ahead, Slaughter thought. And then that line of cliffs below the ridge. They veered through the pine trees, the needles lancing at them. Dunlap stumbled, falling on his camera, and he groped up, clutching at his chest, staring at the camera that was dangling from his shoulder.
"Is it broken?" Slaughter asked.
Dunlap didn't know. He hurriedly checked the camera, but it seemed intact, and he'd made certain that he kept the lens cap on. "I don't see any damage." "What about yourself?" "Oh, just the wind knocked out of me." "It could be worse. You want to try to walk?" Dunlap nodded. Bent a little forward, limping slightly, he pushed farther through the trees. The forest now was thicker, darker, dead trees fallen among the live ones, intersecting, thick vines growing up around them. Dunlap stopped and took deep breaths. "There has to be a better way. They brought their cars and vans up here. But it's sure as hell they didn't bring them this way."
"Maybe we should go back to the loggers' road and angle right or left," Slaughter suggested.
"And maybe lose our way as you just said? I wish I knew." "Well, let's keep going then. If this gets much worse, we'll have to change direction."
So they pushed up through the pine trees, and the clearing wasn't fifteen steps away, the trees so dense they didn't see it until they stepped free from the forest.
There were stumps that stretched off through young forest, all the growth here up to Slaughter's chest so that he looked out past the new tips of the pine trees toward the compound over there. Slaughter was reminded of a camping trip years ago. He'd gone with his father to a small lake in northern Michigan. They'd pitched their tent and eaten, so exhausted that they soon had gone to sleep. Rain pelting onto the canvas had wakened them, and they had talked and dozed and wakened again as the storm got worse, and in the morning when the storm was finished, they had crawled out from the tent to stare across the lake. A billowing mist hung over it, but they were camped up high enough that they were just above the mist, the pine trees visible along the other bank, and Slaughter now remembered how he'd thought about what he couldn't see below the mist-the fish that would be rising, and the ducks and frogs and other things. It wasn't real. That thought again. Like now. That sense of life around him but unseen. Except the compound was deserted.
They started through the new growth toward the compound. Dunlap took a photograph. "Hope the camera works." They continued walking.
"Sure," Dunlap said. "They used the timber here to build the barracks." He thought that Rettig had been accurate. With the difference that the walls were like log cabins, Dunlap was reminded of a deserted Army camp. Lanes and squares, a parade ground, everything was here. No, not exactly everything. He didn't see a flagpole. Hell, this kind of culture, they'd have called it a Maypole.
The compound loomed as they approached it, wide, the buildings all one story and with slanted roofs. At least the hippies knew enough to compensate for deep snow on the roofs in winter, Slaughter thought. And then he paused as Dunlap took another picture.
"Watch these branches on the ground here," Slaughter told him. "We don't want another accident."
Dunlap nodded, staring toward the compound as they walked around the branches, coming toward the nearest buildings. There were weeds and bushes, young trees growing in the lanes, and vines enmeshed around the shutters. There were broken windows, doors half off their hinges. And the slogans on the walls, the symbols, Day-Gloed green and red and blue, now faded, flowers, flags with rifles for the stripes and bullets for the stars, a skull and crossbones and a down with nixon, the down with slashed out, then to hell with scrawled above it, that too slashed, a simple fuck above it. vietnam will claim our children. Skeletons across a pentagon.
"Sure. They took the time to do all that, but they didn't even think to treat the logs for insects," Slaughter said and pointed. There were tiny holes in all the logs, and down below the holes, thick piles of what seemed sawdust, dirty, flecked with dead leaves from the vines.
Dunlap took more photographs. As they reached the buildings, Slaughter had the odd sensation that he'd been here before. "Is anybody around?" And then he knew what he was thinking of. Sure. Bodine's ranch when yesterday he'd gone there and he'd heard the kettle.
"You look in this building. I'll check the others," Dunlap said, and Slaughter stopped him.
"No, we'd better stay together."
"What's the matter?" Dunlap asked.
"Let's just say I've got a bad feeling. Anybody here?" he called again.
He waited, but no answer.
"No one's been here for quite a while," Dunlap said.
They stepped inside one building. There were bunk beds, wooden slats instead of springs, no mattresses, but many spiders, cobwebs, leaves piled in one corner as a nest for something. The floor-decaying planks-looked unsafe.
"Let's try a little farther on," Slaughter said.
But almost every building was the same. Slaughter glanced around to notice how the compound had been situated in a canyon, cliffs beyond the trees on three sides, and the slope behind them descending toward the loggers' road. A wind came from below there, rustling trees and cooling him. He took his hat off. Then his back felt unprotected, and he looked behind him. "Well, they picked a good spot anyhow. Except they would have needed water, and I don't know where they got it."