(1995) The Oath

by Frank Peretti

  Steve tried to relax. He didn’t want this guy to feel threatened. “Nope, I’m still here. Still hunting.” He approached the loader. “I was hoping you could help me.”

  “Not likely.”

  “Mr. Cobb.” Steve lowered his voice. “Is it true? Is Maggie Bly dead as well?”

  Levi pulled a shop cloth from his rear pocket and started wiping the grease off his wrench. “I believe she is. There are some who say otherwise.”

  Steve pressed it. “How did she die, Mr. Cobb? Do you have any idea?”

  “I have my views.”

  “Did she die the same way as my brother?”

  Levi’s expression was troubled, but he didn’t answer.

  Steve tried again. “I really need to know. I’ve been told there’s a creature who might have killed them both. If that’s true, I’d like to go after it.”

  Finally Levi looked up from his rag and his wrench and down at Steve with narrowed, intense eyes. “Mr. Benson, you’re about a hundred years too late. I think you just need to let your brother and Maggie rest—and leave, before somebody sees you talking to me.”

  “I only want information.”

  “My information you wouldn’t believe anyway.”

  “Let me be the judge of that.”

  Levi was clearly flustered and poked his head into the big machine as if to give himself time to think. When he finally spoke again, his voice was muffled inside the engine compartment. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing: All that iron you’re carrying ain’t gonna make you one bit safer.”

  Steve came right back with, “I’ll have to be the judge of that as well. I have a job to do, Mr. Cobb, and I intend to finish it.”

  Levi’s head came out of the engine compartment, his bushy brows lowered over his eyes. “Benson, the creature you’re after you can’t kill with guns. But you listen to me. You’ve got an attitude that’ll kill you. You’ll be dead before you even know you’re in trouble, and I don’t want to be a part of that.”

  Steve looked away. Tracy had talked about Levi’s sermonizing. He’d had fair warning.

  So Steve switched subjects. “Then can you tell me how to get to Hyde Hall?”

  Now that hit pay dirt. Levi stopped short and glared at him. Steve’s tacky French tipster must have been right on the money.

  The big mechanic thought the question over for a significant amount of time, then sighed resignedly and slid down the huge tire to the ground. “You can look, but you won’t find anything.”

  “I can try.”

  “It’s private property.”

  “I’ll take responsibility for trespassing.”

  His objections answered, Levi stooped down and scratched a map in the dirt with the wrench. “Go north through town, and right past the train of ore cars. The highway’ll turn to dirt road, and you’ll see a grove of cottonwoods.”

  Steve had no trouble following Levi’s directions. He came to a little gravel turnoff, which Levi had described. He put the big camper into four-wheel drive and pushed through the gravel and high grass until he found a cubbyhole behind some old firs in which to hide the camper. With the engine shut down and the door open, he could hear the sound of the river.

  He slipped into his camouflage jacket, slung the 30.06 over his shoulder, and locked up the camper. From there, it was a short hike through tall grass and flood-killed snags to the bank of the Hyde River.

  The river, at its summer level, was wide and slow here, with extensive shores of smooth river rock. The air was just a little breezy right now, the applause of fluttering aspen leaves and the quiet sigh of the river the only sounds. Steve sank into the tall grass near a barkless, tangled tree and surveyed the river as far as he could see in either direction, carefully scanning the foliage on both shores for movement. He listened for sounds and took several deep breaths, sorting through the smells. He remained motionless.

  A familiar tension coursed through his body. It had been a long time since he’d felt this instinctive clue that there were two hunters in these woods, each hunting the other. Perhaps it was brought on by all the previous circumstances, but he went with it. He would not proceed until he knew if anything was out there and what it was.

  After several minutes he’d inventoried some swallows swooping for bugs, an osprey patrolling the river for fish, and the usual flurry of insects. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something else was around here somewhere. With caution, his eyes making steady sweeps of the surrounding landscape, he set out along the shore, doubling back toward the town, walking on the smooth, flat rocks. He was in the open, so he did not feel safe, but he was able to cover a lot of ground quickly.

  Farther down, the river narrowed, and the current became swift and deep, splashing noisily in crystalline fans over the rocks and swirling in deep green pools. It was a beautiful sight that brought thoughts of rods, flies, and lures. There could be a nice big cutthroat right over there in that deep pool below the ripple. If Cliff were here right now, he’d be setting up his camera . . .

  Well, he could admire all that beauty some other time, perhaps. He kept going, hurrying over gravel spits and pushing his way through the tall shoregrass.

  Then he saw a teetering structure of graying, weathered boards, obscured by willows and alders.

  He thought of what Levi had said. “Old Town’s just what it sounds like, an old town. It’s the old Hyde River before the town moved. It’s a ghost town now, and nobody goes in there.”

  Just ahead, old pilings jutted out of the river, the remains of the wharf where the flatbottom boats used to tie up years ago. This was it, the once-bustling mining town on the river, now silent and decaying. Steve reached the pilings and could imagine where the old road down to the river used to be. He moved inland, pushing through tangled berry thickets and grass, then climbed up a shallow bank.

  When he came over the crest, he knew he’d arrived. Old Town. The ruins were a gray and decrepit scar upon the wild and beautiful setting, a dismal boneyard where progress had come to a halt and decay took it from there. He could make out the main street, mostly overgrown with grass, thistles, and serviceberries, flanked on either side with the ruins of the old buildings. Most were reduced to piles of weathered boards, fallen all over each other like jackstraws. A few brick walls remained. The foundations were visible here and there, wherever the brush had not totally engulfed them. Some tall cottonwoods still stood in what may have been the town square, but for some reason, the firs, hemlocks, and pines never got reestablished here, only the brush. Young aspens and cottonwoods had made a start in the remains of the buildings, reaching up through the floors and finding open sky where the roofs used to be. But even these trees looked weak and diseased.

  Steve sank to one knee in the grass and took some time to listen, look, smell. Part of him kept pointing out how unnecessary all this caution was; it was the middle of the day, the place was quiet, and except for birds and bugs it was deserted. But another part of him felt uneasy. These old ruins had a ghostly aura about them he could feel but couldn’t explain. It was as if he’d desecrated a graveyard or was treading on sacred ground.

  He didn’t feel alone, either. Yes, it was a deep, primitive instinct, highly subjective, but he had learned to trust it. And yet the feeling had only gotten stronger the farther he ventured into this place.

  All right. Hyde Hall. Where was it?

  Levi had said Hyde Hall was the second building from the river, on the south side of the road and that it was directly across from the old Masonic Lodge, which Steve would recognize by the remains of its front porch. Now he approached a large, rectangular ruin, totally collapsed, with its porch steps upended and rotting. This must be the lodge, Steve thought.

  He turned and studied the overgrown foundation and the three remaining walls across the street. This had once been a large structure, about sixty feet long, maybe thirty feet deep, with a massive stone fireplace at the center of the back wall. Hyde Hall. A meeting place, perhaps? A dance hall o
r community hall?

  He approached slowly, carefully studying the ground. Someone had been here; that was easy to see. The grass was trampled and run over in several directions. The cops, most likely, scrambling to find out what had happened.

  In the middle of the street he found a large patch of bare, rain-rutted ground. It was loose, dusty, and should have had footprints. Instead, it looked raked over, the surface brushed and smoothed out. Maybe the police had been combing through the soil looking for clues; he couldn’t tell.

  He froze.

  There went that instinct again, warning him, seizing him by the guts and yanking for his attention.

  He stood still, his hand on the strap of his rifle. No sound. No smell. He was facing Hyde Hall, and the river was off to his left, barely visible below the brow of its bank. He slowly turned his head to the left, toward the river, the movement steady, smooth, robotic, as his eyes took in the surroundings in segments.

  He regarded the building next to Hyde Hall. No movement.

  The road? Only brush, grass, patches of bare ground from here to the river.

  Across the river? He eased his body around as the rifle came off his shoulder in a steady, fluid movement. Something over there didn’t look right. Get down, get down! his instinct screamed.

  With three long strides he reached the cover of tall grass and dropped to the ground, his blood pulsing through his fingers as they tightly gripped his rifle. His eyes focused on a stretch of steep hillside across the river and a little upstream, a spot where the firs and pines were tall and thick.

  Danger! said his instinct. His stomach, twisting into knots, agreed.

  Beyond the opposite bank, where a meadow of deep grass ended and the forest began, the vertical lines in the scenery—the tree trunks, hanging limbs, tall grass—were breaking up as if Steve were viewing the scene as a reflection in a cracked mirror. When there was no wind, the scene looked normal. But then a light breeze would stir the grass or make the trees sway, and the tree trunks would seemingly break in the middle as the tops swayed gently sideways and the lower portions remained steady.

  Something was over there; he could sense it.

  Another puff of wind bent the trees slightly; again their trunks appeared to break in the middle.

  Steve tightened his grip on the rifle. He thought he could see a shape, a curve, a barely discernible arc.

  Just like a hunter in a blind, he thought. Hidden. Camouflaged. Watching me.

  His heart was pounding like a drum. Fear was setting in, and he began thinking defensively. How much distance between him and whatever it was? How fast would that thing move if it charged? How far would he have to run to find cover? Would he have time to fire a shot?

  With a quick, fluid motion, he chambered a round and clicked off the safety.

  If only he could see what it was. If only he could pinpoint its position—

  Behind him he heard the sounds of rustling brush, of swishing grass. In the silence, as tense as he was, the sound startled him as if it were thunder.

  He spun around and stood, raising the rifle to his shoulder.

  Up the street, two hands went up. Between the raised hands he saw a big cowboy hat, a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, and a graying beard. “Hold your fire!”

  Levi Cobb.

  Steve exhaled as his body relaxed and the rifle came down. His hands and arms started shaking. Elk fever, they called it, the bodily reaction you sometimes got microseconds before or after a kill.

  Levi Cobb relaxed too, lowering his hands and coming forward again, moving methodically through the brush growing in the street. “Didn’t mean to sneak up on you. You’re a little hard to see. You’re pretty good.”

  Steve looked across the river again. The mirage, if it was a mirage, was gone; the spell had been broken. There was nothing across the river but meadow and forest, although some trees were swaying as if something had passed through them.

  He turned to face Levi and slung the rifle over his shoulder. He didn’t know whether to chew out this guy or thank him for coming, so he said nothing. Steve thought Levi seemed a bit disgruntled, too.

  “I don’t know why I’m out here. I really don’t,” Levi said. He gave Steve another look over, his eyes going from the rifle to the knife to the sidearm, and then scanning the camouflage clothing. “But I got a little nervous thinking about you traipsing around out here by yourself.”

  Here by myself, Steve thought. Armed to the teeth, perhaps overarmed, in a strange place he knew nothing about. He could easily inventory Levi’s weaponry: zero.

  “Am I being foolish?” he finally asked.

  The question tickled Levi, and he smiled. “Oh, not yet, I suppose. You haven’t shot anybody, have you?”

  Steve smiled back. Relief was beginning to set in, and it did feel good not to be alone. “No. No, I haven’t even seen anybody.”

  “Well, good enough. So let’s get this taken care of so we can get out of here.” He looked toward Hyde Hall. “I see you found it. What do you want to know?”

  “Tell me about the other night when Maggie Bly disappeared.”

  “I didn’t see much.”

  “But you know something.”

  Levi nodded, then recounted the events in detail, from the phone call from Tracy to the quick conversation with shotgun-toting Harold, to the harrowing moments in Old Town. He pointed out the road he’d come down, making guesses as to which way Maggie had come, even recalling the song she’d been singing.

  Then, in the middle of Hyde Hall’s crumbling remains, he pointed out the spot where he’d found the shoulder bag and the running shoe.

  “And where was the blood?” Steve asked.

  “Right here,” said Levi, waving his hand over a general area near a big, flat stone set like a monument in the center of the building remains.

  Steve noticed immediately that this area, like the dirt patch in the street, had been raked over. “What is all this raking I keep seeing?”

  “Cover-up,” Levi said simply. “People want to put this out of their minds as soon as they can, so they come out here and clean it all up, get rid of any signs.”

  There seemed to be no limit to the outrageous habits of Hyde River. “You mean somebody actually sanitized the area?”

  Levi answered “Yep,” with a little nod.

  “Brushed away any footprints, any bloodstains?”

  Levi nodded again.

  “Who?”

  “Oh—” Levi looked toward the river and thought it over. “I don’t want to put the blame on Harold Bly, but it might be some folks working for him, you never know. It depends on who gets killed out here and who wants to hide the fact.” He looked at the raked ground, then surveyed the ruins. “It worked with the others, but anymore, I don’t know . . .”

  “There are others?”

  “Were others.”

  Steve stared at Levi. “I don’t follow you.”

  Levi raised his hand to call a halt. “Let’s go back a bit.” He looked around at the sagging walls and the big fireplace. “You know where we’re standing? You know anything about Hyde Hall?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, it was built by old Benjamin Hyde, the town’s founder. It was a meeting hall for the mining company, and they rented it out for socials, dances, big dinners. I think there were church meetings here for awhile, but that didn’t last long.” He gestured with his hands as he described the place. “They had a bar downstairs during the early days and rooms upstairs so folks could stop in on their way up and down the river.”

  Steve looked around at the size of the building, imagining how it must have been with windows, curtains, chandeliers, maybe a wide front porch with shady overhang and turned posts. He could imagine a big log fire in the fireplace, dinner at the tables, drinks at the bar, laughter and chatter and even the plinking of an old piano. It could have been that way—or maybe he was just recalling scenes from reruns of Gunsmoke.

  “They had some ladies for hire i
n the rooms upstairs, and a few hangings from a tree out back. You see, this was the hub of the town. Everything happened here first.”

  Levi sat on the big flat rock and removed his hat to stroke his brow. “Ehh, it was a wild town. People got real crazy, did crazy things . . .” He faltered here, uncomfortable with the subject. “In the late 1800s things got so out of control that a bunch of people got killed and some others got run out. This part of town kinda went downhill from there. It started getting a reputation. Folks got superstitious about it.”

  Now that was an odd thing to hear from a man given to so much superstition himself. “I have noticed some superstition around here,” Steve said, his tone ironic.

  “Back then,” Levi continued, “this was the town of Hyde River, but over the last hundred years, the whole town’s gradually moved downriver and left this place to rot. That’s why they call it Old Town.”

  Steve took it all in: the barren, silent loneliness of the place, the absolute and total abandonment of what seemed to be good, usable real estate.

  Levi continued, “Now people won’t come near it, they won’t build on it, they won’t drive, walk, or ride through it—and they sure won’t come here at night.”

  “What are they afraid of?”

  “Oh, ghosts, spirits of the dead, all that stuff. They think the place is haunted.” He looked down at the rock he was sitting on. “Some say the devil lives here, and they talk about how this is the gateway where evil comes into the world.” He paused just a moment, looked around the old ruins, and then said matter-of-factly, “But most of all, they’re afraid of the dragon.”

  Hmm, Steve thought. The dragon Tracy and the phony Frenchman had spoken about. “But you’re not afraid?”

  Levi shook his head. “That old lizard’s got nothing on me.”

  “So what about the people who sanitized the area? Why aren’t they afraid to be here?”

  “They’re here on business, helping hide the dragon, and I think helping Harold Bly hide whatever his interests are in this place. You won’t see ’em here at night, though. None of ’em would ever come here alone, even in daylight.”