“Say, Gus,” he said offhandedly. “What’s on the far side of Razorback Hill?”
Gus turned on Creighton like an angry bear.
“Nothing! There’s nothing there! So don’t you even think about going over there!”
Creighton’s smile was amused. “I was only asking. No harm in a little question, is there?”
“There is. There is. Yes, there surely is! Especially when those questions is the wrong ones. And you’ve been asking a whole lot of wrong questions, boy. Questions that’s gonna get you in a whole mess of bad trouble if you don’t get smart and learn that certain things is best left alone. You hear me?”
He sounded like a character from one of those old Frankenstein movies.
“I hear you,” Creighton said, “and I appreciate your concern. But can you tell me the best way to get to the other side of that hill?”
Gus threw up his hands with an angry growl.
“That’s it! I’m havin’ no more to do with the two of you! I’ve already told you too much as it is.” He turned to me, his eyes blazing. “And you, Miss McKelston, you get yourself away from this boy. He’s headed straight to hell!”
With that he turned and headed for his car. He jumped in, slammed the door, and roared away with a spray of sand.
“I don’t think he likes me,” Creighton said.
“He seemed genuinely frightened,” I told him.
Creighton shrugged and began packing away his sextant.
“Maybe he really believes in the Jersey Devil,” he said. “Maybe he thinks it lives on the other side of Razorback Hill.”
“I don’t know about that. I got the impression he thinks the Jersey Devil is something to tell tall tales about while sitting around the stove and sipping jack. But those pine lights … he’s scared of them.”
“Just swamp gas, I’m sure,” Creighton said.
Suddenly I was furious. Maybe it was all the jack I’d consumed, or maybe it was his attitude, but I think at that particular moment it was mostly his line of bull.
“Cut it, Jon!” I said. “If you really believe they’re swamp gas, why are you tracking them on your map? You got me to guide you out here, so let’s have it straight. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know what’s going on, Mac. If I did, I wouldn’t be here. Isn’t that obvious? These pine lights mean something. Whether or not they’re connected to the Jersey Devil, I don’t know. Maybe they have a hallucinatory effect on people—after they pass overhead, people think they see things. I’m trying to establish a pattern.”
“And after you’ve established this pattern, what do you think you’ll find?”
“Maybe Truth,” he said. “Reality. Who knows? Maybe the meaning—or meaninglessness—of life.”
He looked at me with eyes so intense, so full of longing, that my anger evaporated.
“Jon …?”
His expression abruptly shifted back to neutral, and he laughed.
“Don’t worry, Mac. It’s only me, Crazy Creighton, putting you on again. Let’s have another snort of Gus Sooy’s best and head for civilization. Okay?”
“I’ve had enough for the day. The week!”
“You don’t mind if I partake, do you?”
“Help yourself.”
I didn’t know how he could hold so much.
While Creighton uncorked his jug, I strolled about the firing place to clear my fuzzy head. The sky was fully overcast now, and the temperature was dropping to a more comfortable level.
He had everything packed away by the time I completed the circle.
“Want me to drive?” he said, tossing his paper cup onto the sand.
Normally I would have picked it up—there was something sacrilegious about leaving a Dixie cup among the pines—but I was afraid to bend over that far, afraid I’d keep on going headfirst into the sand and become litter myself.
“I’m okay,” I said. “You’ll get us lost.”
We had traveled no more than a hundred feet or so when I realized that I didn’t know this road. But I kept driving. I hadn’t been paying close attention while following Gus here, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be long before I’d come to a fork or a cripple or a bog that I recognized, and then we’d be home free.
It didn’t quite work out that way. I drove for maybe five miles or so, winding this way and that with the roads, making my best guess when we came to a fork—and we came to plenty of those—and generally trying to keep us heading in the same general direction. I thought I was doing a pretty good job until we drove through an area of young pines that looked familiar. I stopped the Wrangler.
“Jon,” I said. “Isn’t this—?”
“Damn right it is!” he said, pointing to the sand beside the road. “We’re back at Gus’s firing place! There’s my Dixie cup!”
I turned the Jeep around and headed back the way I came.
“What are you doing?” Creighton said.
“Making sure I don’t make the same mistake twice!” I told him.
I didn’t know how I could have driven in a circle. I usually had an excellent sense of direction. I blamed it on too much Jersey lightning and on the thickly overcast sky. Without the sun as a marker, I’d been unable to keep us on course. But that would change here and now. I’d get us out of here this time around.
Wrong.
After a good forty-five minutes of driving, I was so embarrassed when I recognized the firing place again that I actually accelerated as we passed through, hoping Creighton wouldn’t recognize the spot in the thickening dusk. But I wasn’t quick enough.
“Hold it!” he cried. “Hold it just a damn minute! There’s my cup again! We’re right back where we started!”
“Jon,” I said. “I don’t understand it. Something’s wrong.”
“You’re stewed, that’s what’s wrong!”
“I’m not!”
I truly believed I wasn’t. I’d been feeling the effects of the jack before, true, but my head was clear now. I was sure I’d been heading due east, or at least pretty close to it. How I’d come full circle again was beyond me.
Creighton jumped out of his seat and came around the front of the Wrangler.
“Over you go, Mac. It’s my turn.”
I started to protest, then thought better of it. I’d blown it twice already. Maybe my sense of direction had fallen prey to the “apple palsy,” as it was known. I lifted myself over the stick shift and dropped into the passenger seat.
“Be my guest.”
Creighton drove like a maniac, seemingly choosing forks at random.
“Yeah, Mac,” he said. “I’m going whichever way you didn’t! I think.”
As darkness closed in and he turned on the headlights, I noticed that the trees were thinning out and the underbrush was closing in, rising to eight feet or better on either side of us. Creighton pulled off to the side at a widening of the road.
“You should stay on the road,” I told him.
“I’m lost,” he said. “We’ve got to think.”
“Fine. But it’s not as if somebody’s going to be coming along and want to get by.”
He laughed. “That’s a fact!” He got out and looked up at the sky. “Damn! If it weren’t for the clouds we could figure out where we are. Or least know where north is.”
I looked around. We were surrounded by bushes. It was the Pine Barrens’s equivalent of an English hedge maze. There wasn’t a tree in sight. A tree can be almost as good as a compass—its moss faces north and its longest branches face south. Bushes are worse than useless for that, and the high ones only add to your confusion.
And we were confused.
“I thought Pineys never get lost,” Creighton said.
“Everybody gets lost sooner or later out here.”
“Well, what do Pineys do when they get lost?”
“They don’t exhaust themselves or waste their gas by running around in circles. They hunker down and wait for morning.”
“To hell
with that!” Creighton said.
He threw the Wrangler into first and gunned it toward the road. But the vehicle didn’t reach the road. It lurched forward and rocked back. He tried again and I heard the wheels spinning.
“Sugar!” I said.
Creighton looked at me and grinned.
“Stronger language is allowed and even encouraged in this sort of situation.”
“I was referring to the sand.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got four-wheel drive.”
“Right. And all four wheels are spinning. We’re in a patch of what’s known as ‘sugar sand.’ ”
He got out and pushed and rocked while I worked the gears and throttle, but I knew it was no use. We weren’t going to get out of this superfine sand until we found some wood and piled it under the tires to give them some traction.
And we weren’t going to be able to hunt up that kind of wood until morning.
I told Creighton that we’d only waste what gas we had left and that our best bet was to call it a night and pull out the sleeping bags. He seemed reluctant at first, worrying about deer ticks and catching Lyme disease, but he finally agreed.
He had no choice.
6. THE PINE LIGHTS
“I owe you one, Jon,” I said.
“How was I to know we’d get lost?” he said defensively. “I don’t like this any more than you!”
“No. You don’t understand. I meant that in the good sense. I’m glad you talked me into coming with you.”
I’d found us a small clearing not too far from the jeep. It surrounded the gnarled trunk of an old lone pine that towered above the dominant brush. We’d eaten the last of the sandwiches, and now we sat on our respective bedrolls facing each other across the Coleman lamp sitting between us on the sand. Creighton was back to sipping his applejack. I would have killed, or at least maimed, for a cup of coffee.
I watched his face in the lamplight. His expression was puzzled.
“You must still be feeling the effects of that Jersey lightning you had this afternoon,” he said.
“No. I’m perfectly sober. I’ve been sitting here realizing that I’m glad to be back. I’ve had a feeling for years that something’s been missing from my life. Never had an inkling as to what it was until now. But this is it. I’m …” My throat constricted around the word. “I’m home.”
It wasn’t the jack talking, it was my heart. I’d learned something today. I’d learned that I loved the Pine Barrens. And I loved its people. So rich in history, so steeped in its own lore, somehow surviving untainted in the heart of twentieth-century urban madness. I’d turned my back on it. Why? Too proud? Too good for it now? Maybe I’d thought I’d pulled myself up by my bootstraps and gone on to bigger and better things. I could see that I hadn’t. I’d taken the girl out of the Pinelands, but I hadn’t taken the Pinelands out of the girl.
I promised myself to come back here again. Often. I was going to look up my many relatives, renew old ties. I wasn’t ready to move back here, and perhaps I never would, but I’d never turn my back on the Pinelands again.
Creighton raised his cup to me.
“I envy anyone who’s found the missing piece. I’m still looking for mine.”
“You’ll find it,” I said, crawling into my bedroll. “You’ve just got to keep your eyes open. Sometimes it’s right under your nose.”
“Go to sleep, Mac. You’re starting to sound like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.”
I smiled at that. For a moment there he was very much like the Jonathan Creighton I’d fallen in love with. As I closed my eyes, I saw him pull out a pair of binoculars and begin scanning the cloud-choked sky. I knew what he was looking for, and I was fairly confident he’d never find them.
It must have been a while later when I awoke, because the sky had cleared and the stars were out when Creighton’s shouts yanked me to a sitting position.
“They’re coming! Look at them, Mac! My God, they’re coming!”
Creighton was standing on the far side of the lamp, pointing off to my left. I followed the line of his arm and saw nothing.
“What are you talking about?”
“Stand up, damn it! They’re coming! There must be a dozen of them!”
I struggled to my feet and froze.
The starlit underbrush stretched away in a gentle rise for maybe a mile or two in the direction he was pointing, broken only occasionally by the angular shadows of the few scattered trees. And coming our way over that broad expanse, skimming along at treetop level, was an oblong cluster of faintly glowing lights. Lights. That’s what they were. Not glowing spheres. Not UFOs or any of that nonsense. They had no discernible substance. They were just light. Globules of light.
I felt my hackles rise at the sight of them. Perhaps because I’d never seen light behave that way before—it didn’t seem right or natural for light to concentrate itself in a ball. Or perhaps it was the way they moved, gliding through the night with such purpose, cutting through the dark, weaving from tree to tree, floating by the topmost branches, and then forging a path toward the next. Almost as if the trees were signposts. Or perhaps it was the silence. The awful silence. The Pine Barrens are quiet as far as civilized sounds are concerned, but there’s always the noise of the living things, the hoots and cries and rustlings of the animals, the incessant insect susurration. That was all gone now. There wasn’t even a breeze to rustle the bushes. Silence. More than a mere absence of noise. A holding of breath.
“Do you see them, Mac? Tell me I’m not hallucinating! Do you see them?”
“I see them, Jon.”
My voice sounded funny. I realized my mouth was dry. And not just from sleep.
Creighton turned around in a quick circle, his arms spread.
“I don’t have a camera! I need a picture of this!”
“You didn’t bring a camera?” I said. “My God, you brought everything else!”
“I know, but I never dreamed—”
Suddenly he was running for the tree at the center of our clearing.
“Jon! You’re not really—”
“They’re coming this way! If I can get close to them—!”
I was suddenly afraid for him. Something about those lights was warning me away. Why wasn’t it warning Creighton? Or was he simply not listening?
I followed him at a reluctant lope.
“Don’t be an idiot, Jon! You don’t know what they are!”
“Exactly! It’s about time somebody found out!”
He started climbing. It was a big old pitch pine with no branches to speak of for the first dozen feet or so of its trunk but its bark was knobby and rough enough for Creighton’s rubber-soled boots to find purchase. He slipped off twice, but he was determined. Finally he made it to the lowest branch, and from there on it looked easy.
I can’t explain the crawling sensation in my gut as I watched Jonathan Creighton climbing toward a rendezvous with the approaching pine lights. He was three-quarters of the way to the top when the trunk began to shake and sway with his weight. Then a branch broke under his foot and he almost fell. When I saw that he’d regained safe footing I sighed with relief. The branches above him were too frail to hold him. He couldn’t go any higher. He’d be safe from the lights.
And the lights were here, a good dozen of them, from baseball to basketball size, gliding across our clearing in an irregular cylindrical cluster perhaps ten feet across and twenty feet long, heading straight for Creighton’s tree.
And the closer they got, the faster my insides crawled. They may have been made up of light but it was not a clean light, not the golden healthy light of day. This was a wan, sickly, anemic glow, tainted with the vaguest hint of green. But thankfully it was a glow out of Creighton’s reach as the lights brushed the tree’s topmost needles.
I watched their glow limn Creighton’s upturned face as his body strained upward, and I wondered at his recklessness, at this obsession with finding “reality.” Was he flailing and floundering abo
ut in his search, or was he actually on the trail of something? And were the pine lights part of it?
As the first light passed directly above him, not five feet beyond his outstretched hand, I heard him cry out.
“They’re humming, Mac! High-pitched! Can you hear it? It’s almost musical! And the air up here tingles, almost as if it’s charged! This is fantastic!”
I didn’t hear any music or feel any tingling. All I could hear was my heart thudding in my chest, all I could feel was the cold sweat that had broken out all over my body.
Creighton spoke again, he was practically shouting now, but in a language that was not English and not like any other language I’d ever heard. He made clicks and wheezes, and the few noises that sounded like words did not seem to fit comfortably on the human tongue.
“Jon, what are you doing up there?” I cried.
He ignored me and kept up the alien gibberish, but the lights, in turn, ignored him and sailed by above him as if he didn’t exist.
The cluster was almost past now, yet still I couldn’t shake the dread, the dark feeling that something awful was going to happen.
And then it did.
The last light in the cluster was basketball-sized. It seemed as if it was going to trail away above Creighton just like the others, but as it approached the tree, it slowed and began to drop toward Creighton’s perch.
I was panicked now.
“Jon, look out! It’s coming right for you!”
“I see it!”
As the other lights flowed off toward the next treetop, this last one hung back and circled Creighton’s tree at a height level with his waist.
“Get down from there!” I called.
“Are you kidding? This is more that I’d ever hoped for!”
The light suddenly stopped moving and hovered a foot or so in front of Creighton’s chest.
“It’s cold,” he said in a more subdued tone. “Cold light.”
He reached his hand toward it and I wanted to shout for him not to, but my throat was locked. The tip of his index finger touched the outer edge of the glow.
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