Ghost Point

by James A. Hetley

  And they’d felt talkative the last couple of days. Seemed to have cranked the power up, too, judging by the effect on his stereo and CB radio.

  Den shrugged and turned away. Typical government operation, spend megawatts here to get a milliwatt there. Just like ’Nam, tons of ordnance to kill one Cong. And then bail out with your tail between your legs, abandoning the brown-skinned allies who’d spent their blood and bone.

  Den froze between one step and the next. Pete had stopped bounding around and playing with the new snow, was staring off into the shadows, ruff standing up on the coyote’s neck and back, his low growl barely audible over the surf. Dennis couldn’t see a thing, out there in the inky black under the trees. Couldn’t hear or smell anything wrong, either, but the coyote could hear a mouse thinking, could smell a snowshoe hare three townships over. Humans might as well be chunks of rock when it came to matching senses with ol’ Canis latrans.

  The night fell silent around him, a lull between gusts of the fading storm, and Dennis felt hair rise on the back of his neck. Something moaned, a low animal pain across the darkness. He couldn’t begin to guess how far away or even be sure of the direction, but he thought it was toward the base. Sound carried funny over the water.

  What the hell would scare a coyote? Bears would be hibernating. Wolves? A lynx? Both rare as hell, the state didn’t even admit that there were wolves in Maine. Same with cougars. But Pete slunk away, belly low through the drifts, glancing back and glancing back until he slipped into his pen. Dennis closed and latched the gate, and he could swear the coyote looked relieved.

  He caught a flicker of movement, almost moonlight given shape. His skin prickled. Something glowed faint in the shadows, large, larger than a man, larger even than Dennis. Dennis shuffled sideways, step by step awkward in the snowshoes, heart racing, not taking his eyes off the . . . whatever, easing back toward the boathouse and a couple of ancient guns that came with the deed. Damned if he knew whether that old side-lock Springfield would still shoot, but it was there, grease-coated relic of the Spanish War and an ancestral Carlsson. It came with a box of shells as big as a man’s middle finger. Sort of gun you wanted if you had to argue with a bear.

  Bear. A silver bear, massive, slow, standing on its hind legs. It stared straight at him. Not a polar bear, not white, silver. Glowing. Brown muzzle, just like a Maine black bear, clearly brown even though the moon didn’t give enough light for colors. Too damn big for a Maine bear—he’d kept one for a few weeks last spring, birdshot wounds from a bee-keeper’s gun. That bear hadn’t needed to stay long enough to get a name.

  The silver bear danced.

  Not waltz, not ballet, not any of the be-bop and doo-wop and rock stuff Dennis knew from the sixties when he had two feet—a shuffle-stomp-turn dance first one leg then the other, he heard drumming and chanting under the silence, an Indian powwow dance. And the bear kept staring straight at him. Not threatening, not growling or chuffing, just staring. Like he was saying something with that dance.

  Any natural bear should be hibernating by now.

  II

  Helicopters thumped across the bay, he felt them in his gut. Damned things made him jumpy as hell. Helicopters weaving and poking around the Navy base and offshore—they must be running another of their security exercises. At least one of the choppers was a Huey, had to be National Guard or state Forest Service—the Navy and Coast Guard didn’t use Hueys. He really didn’t like having Hueys overhead. He kept seeing them explode in midair. Flashbacks.

  Dennis squatted awkwardly on his snowshoes, one of the ways the GI foot didn’t work quite right. That was life. If he didn’t like it, he could have gone ahead and died.

  Instead, he studied tracks and felt ghost fingers dancing ice up and down his spine. He wasn’t a tracker, not a certified Native American backwoods wizard like Bouchard, but this didn’t take an expert.

  Bear tracks marked the fresh snow under the trees, early morning sun low to cast sharp shadows, no doubt about them, but strange bear tracks. First off, they showed rear feet only, the long tracks with the heel print connected to the pad behind toes and claw marks, no shorter front foot tracks as wide as they were long. Bears could stand on their hind legs like a man, walk a few steps, reach high for apples in the fall, but they didn’t stay that way. They usually walked on all fours.

  Second thing, these were big. He pulled off a glove and spread his hand, using it as a gauge. Thumb to little finger plus three inches, four inches in length, half that wide. Call it twelve or fourteen by six or so, where he could find clear prints in the trampled snow.

  Those tracks reached twice the size of a Maine black bear’s, more in the range his books gave for grizzly or Alaskan brown bear or polar bear. That made part of the spooky shivers. This had been a bear god, walking upright, dancing. It’s not amazing that the bear dances so well, but that it dances at all. This one had danced well, like he’d done it before.

  And then its tracks vanished. That made the other half of the Ghost Point ghost story. Dennis settled back on his heels on the snowshoes, staring around, shaking his head, trying to see a different message. No matter how he looked at it, he kept seeing fresh clean snow, wind-drifted under spruce and pine, tabula rasa, no tracks leading in, no tracks leading out. The bear had appeared out of nowhere, danced, and then vanished between one step and the next. No, it hadn’t climbed a tree. He’d checked.

  It hadn’t shit in the woods, either, no matter what that rhetorical question might ask. Just danced and left the prints. Dennis had already spiraled out from the spooky dance floor, trying to cut sign in any direction. Fifty feet out, no other tracks.

  Well, at least that rules out a rogue, sick and starving and desperate. Don’t have to worry about it attacking the animals or breaking into the boathouse following the scent of food.

  The world kept rubbing his nose in stuff he hadn’t seen since drug and delirium dreams in that ’Nam hospital.

  Don’t want to go back there. Dennis shook his head again and slipped his hand back into the glove before he froze his fingers off. With the wind coming straight down from Hudson Bay, nothing between him and the North Pole but stunted spruces and willows up in Quebec, his moustache and beard were icing up. Any sane bear would be tucked up in a nice warm den, snoring away and dreaming of ripe blueberry fields under August sun.

  Dennis shook his head a third time. Ghost Point, the place where weird shit happens. The old Naskeag Indians had avoided the place as a Spirit land, place of strange dreams and stranger wakenings. Dennis had lived here long enough, he’d seen other stuff. He’d learned he didn’t need to panic and head up to Naskeag Falls to find a V.A. shrink.

  His fingers tapped the grip of a heavy pistol belted over his jacket. No need of that, he guessed. Which was just as well. One of Dad’s war relics, El Alamein Webley .455, it looked like a monster. Not a bear-killer, though, fat low velocity slug, British “wog” gun designed to stop Kaffirs and Fuzzy-wuzzies and other Kipling brown-skinned heathens.

  Unlike the old Springfield, he knew this gun worked. He’d fired it twice, three times, mercy killings on animals he couldn’t save. At that rate, two old boxes of shells would last quite a while.

  He grunted to his feet, awkward again, his war trophy. Great-great-uncle Kurt had brought a lifetime battle with malaria back from Cuba, along with that long black .47-70 rifle. Dad went through the full length of WWII, Africa and Italy and on up through Austria into Bavaria without a scratch. Revolution, 1812, Civil War, damn near everything since, Carlssons always had fought, back to their Danish housecarl ancestors wearing the king’s gold on their arms. Carlssons were warriors. Ten generations of war relics had gone up in smoke when the main house burned.

  Dennis could have dodged ’Nam, bought out a few members of the draft board or jumped a three-year waiting list to get into the Maine National Guard. The “NG” in their service numbers stood for “Not Going.” Carlsson money could have bought him that, or more. But Carlssons didn’t do
that kind of thing.

  So he’d served, and came home to have a total stranger spit on him in the Boston airport. Gimping down the concourse on crutches, stump too fresh and tender to bear his weight, some hate-faced woman walked right up to him and spat on his Class A greens. Tweed business suit, elegant hair and nails and perfect makeup, her uniform, she hadn’t said a word. Just spat and walked on. And a dozen other strangers had just turned their heads away or glared at him.

  Yeah, he still carried a grudge. Didn’t weigh as much as hers.

  He shrugged at the memories and moved on through the trees, looking for any other signs of ghost bears, adding up the damage from this storm. There’d be another, and another, and another—typical winter on the Maine coast. The marine radio forecast said he had a day or two free before the next low, better make the most of it. Keep stocked up on feed for the critters. Ranger Rick had called on the CB, said he had another road-killed deer that the driver didn’t want to claim.

  Whining hummed overhead, Ol’ Jake spinning along on top of his tower, Jacobs wind generator feeding amps down to the battery bank in a shed at the base. Dennis pulled out Dad’s pair of liberated Zeiss binoculars and checked for any ice build-up on the prop or tail vane. The old rig looked fine, still pulling free power out of the air after forty years. He’d had to replace the generator brushes once, lubed the bearings and gears, inspected the three-bladed spruce prop now and then and touched up the varnish while hanging from a safety belt at the top of the tower. Should last another forty, enough power for refrigerator and radio and stereo, bright lights when he was working on a critter.

  Ragged brick walls poked out of the snow beyond the tower, the ruined main house, a twenty-room “cottage” used for summer vacations back when Society did that sort of thing. Back when Money did that sort of thing. Taking three months off in the howling wilderness proved you didn’t have to hold a job. This latest storm had finally brought the kitchen chimney down, tottering for a decade. Bit by bit, year by year, the burned-out hulk settled into its burial mound.

  Appropriate. Gossip said the ruins hid at least one body, maybe two. Records were clear on a missing toddler, anyway. Add maybe a tall, dark French Canadian woodcutter never seen again.

  Gossip also said the butler did it, of course, just like in the who-dunnits. Dan Bishop, butler, winter caretaker, general factotum, hacked the cook to death with the woodshed ax one February morning, set fire to the place, killed himself. Searchers never found their child, living or dead. Gossip word on that, the kid’s hair color or eye color or nose didn’t match either side of the family, back as far as memory could reach. Looked more like the woodcutter’s. Cabin-fever murder, or maybe the gypsy lover got careless.

  Just another story of Ghost Point—ask down at the crossroads bar, sometime along about ten, eleven at night, after the regulars had the evening’s booze on board. The tales grew with the years. None of the natives seemed to think Frenchy LeClaire could have done the deed and run off to New Brunswick with the Carlsson silver. That would be too simple, too sordid, not enough doomed sex for a good tale.

  Dad said the stories all were lies, but never wanted to talk about what really happened. Dennis pulled out a hint of something hidden, some family secret, something Ghost-Point-weird with a hint of guilt, even though the old man hadn’t even been in the country when it happened.

  Anyway, all those ghosts had the Point to themselves between the fire and Den’s welcome home from ’Nam. They didn’t bother him. He had his own hauntings.

  Like bears. He trudged on, looking for signs, up over snowdrifts and down onto wind-scoured gravel on the long winding driveway, checking for storm damage out here along the shore where wind in the right quarter drove waves and even beach cobbles up clear over the cliff. Even now, the morning after the storm, seas humped up deep blue-green and broke white with a crash down below, six or eight feet high, and he tasted salt spray on the wind.

  The driveway could be a deathtrap in bad weather, one reason why he didn’t try to plow the road in winter. Some years he walked in from November on well into April. Coming back this afternoon, he’d be sure to follow the sheltered inner path and check over his storm lines as he went in case he had to fight his way through a sudden whiteout and trust his life to the blue nylon rope stretched from tree to tree leading him home to warmth and food.

  People froze to death between house and barn, some winters, between bar and car, lost in the blowing snow. That was why most Maine farmhouses rambled along through ell and connected shed to the barn—water and feed the cows without ever leaving cover. Sometimes that one-mile driveway turned Ghost Point into an island for weeks at a stretch.

  Red caught his eye, down in a bight at the tide line, almost glowing under the sun and strong against white ice and cold green water surging up and falling. The old driveway twisted in and out with the shore of the point, showing off those views across the bay and such. He thought that must be a lobster buoy or bits of wreckage washed up by the storm, Ghost Point caught flotsam and jetsam from a hundred miles of coast. He pulled out his binoculars and focused again.

  Blood. Couldn’t be paint, nobody would be out painting the snow and ice in a Maine winter storm.

  Splashes of blood frozen into the snow and ice, a trail started at the high-water line of bare granite where waves had washed the snow off the jagged rocks still clear in early winter, without sea ice blanketing the tidal range and piling up like grotesque modern art, glittering harsh enough to hurt your eyes. He stopped and stared across at the Navy base, at porcupine-quill towers spiking the horizon two miles across the bay, hundreds of feet tall, draped in guy wires and the long feed lines and cables of the actual antennas.

  All those helicopters and some boats in the water, the launch and a couple of inflatables . . . nothing on the radio this morning, either broadcast or CB or the marine-band VHF, no boats missing, nobody caught by surf and washed off the rocks. No public reason for a search. He’d check with Bouchard. . . .

  He followed the trail from above, as close as he dared walk to the cliff edge, icy, dangerous—red here, red there, dots and streaks and splashes in the binoculars, tracks in the snow that he squinted to make out. Looked like a seal, claws and scrapes and sliding body, not man-tracks. Tension eased out of his shoulders. Not the Navy, not a lobsterman caught out in the storm.

  Not bear tracks, either. Dammit, he couldn’t climb down to check them closer—ice and a sharp drop of twenty feet, thirty feet to the rocks. The government foot made for chancy climbing even on bare ground. One snowshoe skidded on the crust and he lurched away from the edge, grabbing a sentinel spruce for balance. No, he didn’t dare try for a closer look.

  Get a calm day, with low swells on the water, he could bring the sloop’s old dinghy around and search from the water. Wasn’t a man, he felt sure of that, so he didn’t have to call out the fire squad to rope up and rappel down for a rescue. Or recover the body, more likely.

  The driveway cut across a lobe of the point, through a dark sheltered side-lit tunnel of spruce and fir and a knife-edged ridge of drifted snow higher than his head, two days of storm leaving its signature on the land. He came out into dazzling sun and icy wind again and looked down at the tide line. The tracks had vanished, the blood trail had vanished. He shook his head. Every spring, he’d find a seal or two on the shore, winter-killed and frozen, usually dead cormorants, one time the shark-chewed carcass of a dolphin or small whale. The Gulf of Maine was a killer, animals as well as men.

  He remembered a rockfall and slabs out there on that finger, pink granite roof and walls slanting across other rocks, a bit of shelter above all but the highest waves. He’d played there as a child, wormed his way deep into tight dark secret holes, hide-and-seek with his brother and cousins, sentry guarding the fort and watching for pirates.

  Maybe the critter also remembered that windbreak and roof, sought it when it came ashore injured from the storm. He wished it luck. Dennis checked his watch and trudged on
. He had promises to keep and miles to go, et cetera.

  From force of habit, he brought up the binoculars again and scanned the water and sky for birds or seals or whales spouting out in the bay. Dark spots floated against the heave and glare of the sea, probably guillemots or auklets by the size and color. A raft of eiders bobbed like corks on the water. Overhead, a couple of herring gulls and a blackback rode the wind.

  Dennis blinked dazzle out of his eyes. No sign of the eagles today, must be fishing other waters. No lobstermen or seiners out there, either, but those would keep far offshore. The Navy posted a restricted zone around the base, and folks who knew these waters wouldn’t bring a boat in close along his side of the bay. Ghost Point had a bad reputation for rocks and shoals that didn’t seem to stay where they belonged. Charts warned of compass anomalies in the area.

  Helicopters thumped away, getting on his nerves. One Huey swung out to sea, sharp against the blue sky, and he focused the binoculars on it. National Guard, all right, down from their base in Naskeag Falls. Strange. They didn’t play with the Navy much—service rivalries. And the communications group required security clearance straight from God Himself, both here and at the crypto intercept site a few bays off to the west. That one was listening only, it didn’t light up the whole town, but there’d been rumors of uniformed visits to the owners of old pickup trucks that put out a lot of ignition noise.

  A growl built from the west, grew to a roar, thundered low enough overhead he swore it scraped needles from a tall fir, and faded, leaving Dennis crouched beside the thick trunk of a spruce. A jet fighter, he couldn’t tell if it was Air Force or Navy. He lowered the Webley, pulling the notch of its sights off the retreating tail. No, he hadn’t fired.