The Lights at Crawford Hills
Brendan Dubois
Twenty years ago, in EQMM’s February 1986 Department of First Stories, Brendan DuBois began his career as a published fiction writer. In the years since, he’s twice won the Shamus Award, been nominated three times for the Edgar, and had a story selected for Best American Mystery Stories of the Century. He has 80 short stories to his credit and he’s a celebrated novelist with two upcoming books from St. Martin ’s: Twilight and Primary Storm.
Brendan DuBois
The Lights at Crawford Hills
Art by Darryl Elliott
(c)2006 by Brendan DuBois
They were on a wooded hill overlooking a ravine that the locals called Merl’s Cut as the October afternoon settled into dusk. Patrolman Jay Newman sat on a moss-covered log, feet crossed, breaking small pine sticks into thumb-sized pieces of wood, which he tossed into a pile at his feet. A few feet from him Chief Frank Dow sat with his back against a white birch tree trunk, smoking a pipe. The chief wore the standard green uniform and like Jay, he also wore a green jacket with a shield and shoulder patch that said CRAWFORD POLICE. His face was red and if one looked closely, there was a tiny network of burst blood vessels that looked like a red spiderweb on one cheek. Jay looked over at the ravine, listening to the faint sound of water trickling along a stream making its way to the bottom. He was twenty-eight years old and hoped his face wouldn’t look as bad as that when he got older.
“Sorry I’m tying up your Saturday night, Jay,” the chief said, gently sucking at the black pipe stem.
“It’s all right, Chief,” Jay said, lying, because it sure as hell wasn’t all right. Earlier, he had planned a date with a young woman who worked at the Crawford Savings & Loan. Not much of a date-a dinner in town and a movie over at Drake’s Mill, which had the only movie theater in this part of the county-but he had to cancel it all. Instead of some lovely female company, he was here, miles away from the center of Crawford village and almost everything else civilized, all because of a crazy old woman. But when you and the chief make up two-thirds of the department, and when the other third of the department is on vacation up in Maine, well, there isn’t much else you can do.
The chief puffed on his pipe, letting a thin stream of smoke escape from his lips. “It’ll be dark soon,” he said. “Mrs. Tate said the lights appear about an hour after that.”
Jay felt like sighing in exasperation, but decided to talk instead. He was still on probation, for another month, and this old man had his future in his nicotine-stained hands.
“Tell me, Chief, if Mrs. Tate wasn’t Brian Tate’s mother, would we even be here? I mean, the woman’s pretty old. She’s almost senile.”
“Why do you say that?”
Jay shrugged, snapped another piece of wood in his hands. “C’mon, Chief, the old lady said aliens are landing up here every Saturday night and killing people. I mean, if she was any other old lady in town, I don’t think you’d be here, and me as well.”
The chief leaned back against the tree, his leather gear creaking. “Mrs. Tate may be the mother of the selectmen chairman, but she’s also a taxpayer here, and she filed a complaint with the department-”
“About trespassing Martians?”
“No, about someone trespassing on her land at night.”
“You must’ve helped her write out the complaint.”
“Maybe I did. But she thinks someone’s out here at night, and she says she finds bloodstains on the ground the next day. You’ve got to check it out, even if it does look like you’re wasting your time.”
Jay nodded and reached around for another stick to break into pieces. They were sitting a few yards away from the town’s only police cruiser, which was parked on a dirt turnabout that marked the end of Pomeroy Road. Jay had been with the Crawford Police Department for only four months and he was still trying to get used to the different pace of the job. Five months ago he had been a patrolman in one of the industrial cities near Boston, and had been on that job for five years, until the bad dreams started. Dreams of entering a crackhouse, all by himself. Dreams of doing a motor-vehicle stop in the middle of the city, with no backup. Dreams of responding to a night alarm at a bank, with his radio broken. And in all of the dreams, his weapon hadn’t worked, had fallen to the ground, and the bad men had killed him, over and over again.
Even with the nightmares, he knew he was only suited for police work, and late at night, in his apartment, he would shudder with horror at pulling the pin and going to work as a security guard or armored-car driver or something equally depressing. But one day, after purusing the classifieds in a paper from New Hampshire, he had responded to an ad for a patrolman in Crawford. His pay had been reduced nearly fifty percent, but since the first day on patrol in this small town, the dreams had not once come back. At the time, it had seemed to be a fair exchange.
The woods were fairly quiet, and he had to concentrate to hear what was going on. There was the small rustle of leaves and branches being moved by the wind, the soft sighing from the chief as he smoked his pipe, and the gurgling of a hidden stream down towards the bottom of the ravine. A tree-covered hill rose up on the other side of the ravine, and in the dimming light he could make out the distant mountain peaks. The town of Crawford was nestled right in the heart of the White Mountains, and the national forest was only about ten or so miles away. This part of the woods was called the Crawford Hills, and the nearest house was the one owned by Mrs. Tate. From Mrs. Tate’s house, the homes were scattered every half-mile or so, until Pomeroy Road linked up with Mast Road, which was one of the few main roads in Crawford.
The chief startled him by speaking. “Where do you think the lights might be coming from, Jay?”
He suddenly realized how much darker it had gotten, just in the past few minutes. In the city, it was never really dark, because of all the lights from the cars, buildings, and streetlights. Even at midnight it was easy to get around without a flashlight. But here, there was nothing. The light gradually faded away until you realized you couldn’t even make out the color of the parked cruiser, just a few yards away.
“Could be almost anything,” he finally said. “Kids playing, Boy Scouts camping.”
“And the bloodstains on the ground?”
“Christ, Chief, the lady’s almost ninety. Who knows what she’s been seeing.”
“That’s right, who knows.” Now it had gotten so dark that Jay could only see the chief’s face from the glowing ember of his pipe. “From where we’re sitting there’s probably only a few hundred people within fifty miles. These woods stretch all the way into Maine and up through Quebec, for hundreds of miles. You could hide a lot up here, Jay, quite a lot. You know, I’ve seen some things up here… especially at night… things that, well, I don’t know.”
Jay thought the chief was trying to spook him with the old-timer’s talk, so he tried to bring the topic back to ground. “Funny you should mention hiding. I’ve read some stories about farmers out in California and Oregon growing and hiding marijuana in the national forests. We just might have something like that going on right here, Chief.”
“The lights, then?”
“They might be moving the stuff out, bringing it out to Pomeroy Road or one of the old logging roads.”
“The bloodstains?”
A stick snapped in his fingers, and his hands suddenly felt moist. “Well, if they’re into drug smuggling, maybe…”
“Yeah, I know. They gotta protect what they’re growing.”
The chief tapped out his pipe on a tree trunk, the noise sounding like he was tapping something hollow. Even though it was now completely dark, he knew what the chief was doing, just from the so
unds. The scritch-scritch as he cleaned the pipe’s bowl with his penknife. The rustle of paper as he refilled the bowl with tobacco. And the scratch-growl as he lit a match and the sucking noise as he puffed the pipe back to life. It was a comforting sound, and even though it was going to be a cold night-it was a week until Halloween-he felt quite warm. But then he shivered, remembering a news photo he had seen of some captured marijuana growers from out West. They were all armed with automatic weapons. Now he wished he had worn his bulletproof vest.
“Chief,” he said, his voice sounding loud in the dark. “Do you want me to get the shotguns from the cruiser?”
There was a pause, and Jay wondered if the chief hadn’t heard him, and then he said, “Nooo, I don’t think so, Jay. I think we’re all set.”
“All right.”
The log he was sitting on was suddenly uncomfortable. It felt as though a piece of broken-off branch was now jutting into his right thigh, but as he started to move, he stopped. His feet were rustling the leaves and branches on the ground and it was making too much noise. Someone (or something, a part of him thought) might hear him, and he didn’t want that, not at all. It had gotten so dark that he had a hard time making out the shape of the chief sitting near him, even with the glow from the pipe’s ember, and the police cruiser was a dark bulk in the shadows. He suddenly remembered all those childhood stories, the tales told around Boy Scout campfires, of terrible bears and creatures in the forests, the abandoned mines that held crazed hermits, and the ten-foot-tall Windigo, which ate human flesh.
Jay tried to push the dark thoughts out of his mind, and he touched his holstered pistol, but it was small comfort. He looked all around him, seeking a light, something warm, something familiar, a streetlight or a headlight or a lit window from a house miles away, but there was nothing save the darkness and the faint shapes of the trees. He remembered what the chief said, of hundreds of miles of woods stretching all the way into Canada and beyond, and he thought again of what type of people just might live in those woods, hiding themselves and everything else from the outside world. He had a feeling that he and the chief were outnumbered and exposed, being watched and evaluated, and he wished they were in the cruiser, the engine running, the radio playing, and the doors locked. He looked up at the sky and saw a few stars and the darker bulk of the nearby hills, and he was about to make up his mind to ask the chief if they could go into the cruiser.
Then the lights came.
***
About six hours earlier they had stopped at the home of Agatha Tate, who had called the chief about the lights and who was also the mother of Brian Tate, the chairman of the three-member board of selectmen. He had gone with the chief and as they drove in the old Ford cruiser (the odometer was on its second trip to one hundred thousand miles) the chief explained the complaint.
“Sure, she might sound nuts, Jay,” he had said, steering with one hand and holding his pipe in the other. “Martians landing in her backyard and killing people. But she is a taxpayer, and she is the mother of Brian Tate. Brian’s got a lot of power here in Crawford, and my budget’s coming up for review next month. Brian and I get along all right now, but come budget time, he’s also gonna remember that we helped out his momma, and that might help us get a new cruiser. This is Crawford, Jay, not Brockton or Medford. People take their police work seriously up here.”
Which certainly was true, Jay thought. Complaints here in Crawford that wouldn’t have even been logged in at his old job in Massachusetts-like bent car radio antennas or broken mailboxes-not only were they reported here, but the people in town actually expected you to go out and investigate them. And follow up with a phone call or a visit a week or so later, to give them an update.
Mrs. Tate’s house was the last one on the dirt road, a two-story wooden structure that looked as if it was at least two hundred years old. Any paint on the thin clapboards had faded away to a dull gray, and the yard was full of a mishmash of old barrels, rotting boxes, piles of rusting chicken wire, and scraps of wood. Cats and chickens prowled and pecked around a rust-colored 1940s-era Ford with no wheels and no roof.
Inside the house it was tough going, with piles and piles of yellowed newspapers and magazines, tied together with twine, blocking the floors and hallways. The floors were made of wide, rough-hewn planks, and even more cats had the run of the house inside. Mrs. Tate was sitting at a wooden kitchen table, puffing on a cigarette. She was in her late eighties, thin and stooped over, wearing a shapeless flowered dress. Her skin was wrinkled and looked dry, and her eyeglasses had thick lenses. Her hair was so thick and blond it had to be a wig. She was hard of hearing, and the chief had to almost yell at her to be understood. Mrs. Tate shouted back, as if she thought everyone had the same level of hearing as she.
“It’s been like this, Frank,” she yelled, her hands quivering as she moved an ashtray closer to her. “Every goddamn Saturday night the past month they’ve been landing up there in the ravine. I seen the lights, every Saturday night. ‘Course, I ain’t dumb enough to take a peek up there at that moment, so I goes up Sunday morning, before my son Brian picks me up for church. Sure enough, there’s bloodstains up there on the ground. It’s a scary thing, Frank, to think of what they’re doing.”
“Who do you think’s up there, Aggie?” the chief asked, his voice still loud, his hands politely folded in front of him on the table.
“Hmmph,” she grunted. She reached behind her on a cutting bench and pulled down a few newspapers. Jay recognized them instantly as the tabloids one saw at the supermarket checkout line. One headline read: UFO ALIENS KIDNAPPED MY TWINS. Jay felt like rolling his eyes. What a way to spend a day.
“It’s all right here, Frank,” she shouted, opening the papers. “I read ‘em every week, though Brian doesn’t like it when I buy ‘em. Aliens are all around us, and they’re gettin’ ready to make their move. It says here in one of these papers-I’m not sure which one-that the aliens have agents here, people who are renegades and who are workin’ for ‘em. Well, this story says that sometimes the aliens get mad at their agents and kill ‘em, but you never find the bodies. That’s why so many people are reported missing each year and they’re never found. Well, hell, this is as good a place as any to take ‘em and kill ‘em, right up there on Crawford Hills.”
Jay nodded his head and looked around the cluttered kitchen, at the sink overflowing with dishes, the half-opened cans of cat food on the floor, the piles of newspapers. A black-and-white cat with one gray paw jumped up to the sink and started licking from a water-filled casserole dish. He wondered if Mrs. Tate had any thought, any inkling, when she was young, that she would end up here, old and alone, living in a big house at the edge of a wilderness, huddling in fear some nights because of aliens in the backyard. He could see how her mind might have started slipping. She was almost a mile from her nearest neighbor, with only a thin electrical line and telephone cable connecting her to the outside world. He wondered what it was like up here when the winter storms started, when the electricity failed, and when the town plows couldn’t make it up the steep hills.
“What do you think, young man? Jay, that’s your name, ain’t it? Do you believe in aliens?”
Jay coughed, trying to think of a polite answer. “Well, ma’am, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.”
Mrs. Tate giggled. “When you get to my age, young man, you won’t believe what you’ve seen over the years. Where are you from, anyway?”
“ Newburyport, originally.”
“That’s in Massachusetts, ain’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
She frowned. “Now, Frank, he seems like a nice boy, but wasn’t there anybody local you could hire? I mean-”
The chief interrupted her. “Oh, come on, Aggie, don’t pick on him. He was the best qualified and he’s doing a good job. Listen, do you have any of your cider around? I’m a bit thirsty.”
Jay declined the offer of a drink from Mrs. Tate after he saw the old woman dump gray water out o
f a glass in the sink and then fill it up with cider from a jug in the refrigerator. Jay’s stomach did a slow roll, but the chief drank it down in one long swallow.
“Ah, good stuff, Aggie. Still make it from the apples out back?”
“Of course I do. I won’t have store-bought cider in my house.”
“Deer still stealing your apples?”
She waved a wrinkled hand at him. “Oh, of course, especially now winter’s on its way, but I don’t mind. There’s enough for all of us.”
The chief got up from the kitchen table and Jay joined him. “Don’t you worry now, Aggie, we’ll be out there tonight.”
And Jay thought, Great, a date with great potential stopped in its tracks by a UFO-believing old lady.
***
The lights were a chain of bright dots against the sky, arching about in a semicircle and settling down against the bulk of the hill on the other side of the ravine. The lights flared up for a moment and then they started moving, like a lazy snake, down the side of the hill, a chain of ten or eleven. Jay watched them, his hand on his pistol, and he realized he had been holding his breath.
“Chief?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I see ‘em.”
There was a rustle of leaves and branches, and he saw the form of the chief standing up. Jay stood up as well and joined him. When he got to him, he could smell his pipe. It was a comforting feeling.
“Looks like flashlights,” Jay whispered.
“Could be. But they sure move awfully fast. Let’s go at them, Jay.”
The chief started making his way down the side of the ravine, to the stream and the slope of the other hill. Jay followed, keeping an arm out to fend off low branches and brambles, but even then he felt an occasional sting on his face as a branch whipped at him. It was slow going and his back felt tingly, as if something was drawing a target on him. God, he thought, as he struggled to keep his balance, if this had been happening at his old job he’d have at least two or three cruisers for backup, but this was it, the entire on-duty Crawford police force, heading towards God-knows-what. He supposed the chief could have called the county dispatch for a deputy sheriff or a state trooper to swing by, but he was sure the nearest unit was at least a half-hour away.
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