by Peter Straub
Now the boy held up an object that must have been a silver key.
'Oh,' Del said, and opened his door all the way and came a step out into the hall. The men downstairs roared.
On his little stage of rock, the boy held the key to the box.
'He wanted us to see it,' Tom whispered. In his pajamas, Del hugged himself beside him. One of the black dogs screeched again — had the bearded man struck it with the tongs? He did not want to get close enough to the window to find out.
The boy in the blue coat put the box to his ear and then held it out at arm's length. He must have used his thumbs to pop open the lid.
Evil black smoke gouted from the box. They were able to see the figure on the rock dropping it, then the smoke obliterated the entire scene in a coiling, billowing mass.
'Like our show,'_Tom murmured. 'When the smoke blows away, no boy.'
'That wasn't a boy,' Del said, going back into his room.
'It was a girl?' Tom asked.
'That was Rose Armstrong. Now go to bed.' Del turned around and closed his door.
Tom glanced back at the light: the last vestiges of black smoke drifted over a deserted rock. The leaves around it shook. Down below the windows, the dogs continued their argument.
A man's loud voice rose: 'Get that fucking . . . '
Another answered: 'Goddamn soon. Okay with you?'
'Oh, everything's dandy with me.'
Coleman Collins, very clear: 'Are you finally ready?'
The downstairs door slammed open and shadows sprang across the flags, immediately followed by a crowd of men, most of them carrying shovels, two of them pulling the chained dogs. Coleman Collins came behind, now wearing a bright plaid shut, wash pants, and laced boots; a lumberjack. 'Give me that bottle,' he ordered. The man in the army jacket pulled the bottle from his pocket. Collins tilted it over his mouth and handed it back. 'Okay. I'll be back after I . . . ' Check on my guests? Tom hurried back into his bedroom.
He jumped into bed, pulled the sheets over himself, and waited. I might even go to sleep, he told himself, and not have to do anything else. But his heart drummed, his nerves simmered. He heard the sounds of men moving randomly around on the flags, then the sound of boots coming up the stairs.
Tom stiffened. The boots came along the hall to Del's door and paused. Del's door opened. A second's silence; Del's door closed and the boots moved along to his own door. It opened, and light filtered into his room. 'Keep your head under your wing,' Collins said softly: it sounded almost tender. The door closed, and the room was black again. Tom heard Collins moving back down the hall, down the stairs.
He waited only a second, then jumped out of bed and groped for his shirt and pants. His feet found his loafers. When he opened the door and went on his knees to the window, he saw the men and the dogs heading out across the flagstones to the woods. Some of the men held flaming torches. Behind them, Collins strode along, carrying a knobbly walking stick. As soon as they had left the flagstones, he trotted to the staircase and began to descend.
6
In the entry the candles still burned, now only inches from their holders. When he turned back toward the body of the house, he saw weak light spilling from the living room into the hall. He saw that he was passing a row of tall posters in frames — a series of theatrical bills behind glass, like time capsules. They loomed beside him, the glass reflecting a little of the dim light from the living room, a little more of Tom's own outline. In the silence, he felt observed.
Chairs in the living room had been shoved here and there, cigars still burned in ashtrays, glasses stood empty on the wooden tables beside the couches and on the coffee table.
The glass doors at the far side of the living room were open onto the flagstone patio. Across the clutter of the wide room, Tom saw the lights of the men's torches winding through the woods. He stepped onto soft thick carpet. Cigar smoke drifted through the air.
Would he keep his head under his wing? He dodged furniture, going toward the open glass doors, and caught beneath the cigar smoke the odors of trees, earth, and night. Head under your wing, Tom?
'Nuts to that,' he whispered, and stepped through the open glass doors onto the flagstones.
7
The torches bobbed through the woods a hundred yards ahead, appearing and disappearing as the men who held them skirted trees. Tom could hear their loud voices melting into the snarling of the dogs, and sensed their anticipation without hearing their words. They were going off to the left side of the lake, along the curve of the hill where he and Del had seen Rose Armstrong.
He left the flags, wondering if they were looking for her. On his right a long rickety iron staircase cut straight down the hill to where the moon laid a silvery path across the lake. Tom descended as the men had, his heart stopping when the iron ladder shook and trembled, to a small beach. A building that must have been a boathouse hovered black against the dark water; a few feet from the shape of the boathouse, a white pier thrust out into the lake. No, that scene on the illuminated stage of rock had been public: whatever Mr. Peet and the others were doing now was not.
Still, he wondered what men like that would do if they caught a girl. Then he wondered what they would do if they caught him.
Fortunately, he could follow the torches and keep far enough behind so that they would never see him. He looked back as soon as he got into the woods and saw that the lights of the house gave him a clear beacon for his return.
Twice he walked straight into trees, scraping his forehead and nearly knocking himself down. The moon, sometimes so bright that he could see the blades of rough grass as silvery individual waves in a leaning, breathed — upon ocean, at times abruptly receded behind tall black trees and left him wandering in a black vastness punctuated only by the weaving torches up ahead.
Like Hansel, he kept looking back, seeing the house retreat into a dense, dreamy integument of branches and bushy leaves. Before long the house was less a beacon than a half-dozen scattered points of light chinking the forest.
This was nature of a kind he had met only in books — nature fighting for its own breath, crowded and tangled, populated with a hundred thrusting and bending shapes. Every step brought him near fingers and arms of wood reaching out for him; his loafers slipped on wet moss. The third tune he walked into a tree, the moon having temporarily departed, the tree did knock him down.
Then the lights of torches disappeared. Tom stood absolutely still, afraid to. turn around — if he lost his direction, he would be lost indeed. He thought: Insects. Since leaving the house, he had not heard one; just hours ago, at the station, their noises had crowded the darkness.
From over the rise where the men had disappeared with the dogs and torches, indistinguishable shouts erupted.
Very slowly he went forward, his hands out before his face. Something, an animal or bird, chattered at him from far up: he bent back his neck, and furry needles brushed his forehead. The thought that it was a spider sent him vaulting forward. His foot snagged a root immovable as an anvil, and Tom went sprawling face and elbows first into mushy loam.
He was conscious of a thudding heart, a muddy face, and a drenched shirt. He rubbed his hands over his face and crawled the rest of the way forward.
Finally the voices were very near. He was on his belly, inching up the little slope behind which the torches had vanished. A man said, 'Buster's ready.' The dogs grumbled; some of the men laughed. Coleman Collins said in a sharp voice, 'Take care with that fire, Root. You want to be able to see.'
'Umz plug whuzza right place?' asked someone in a thick voice — presumably Root, for Collins answered, 'I said it was, didn't I? Just watch your tinder. Be careful where you squirt that stuff! We want a blaze, not a conflagration.'
Crawling forward, so scared of being seen that his breath froze in his throat, Tom could now see the lights of the torches — or of Root's conflagration — reddening the trees before him.
'Herbie, you sure this is the set?' aske
d Mr. Peet.
'Of course this is it,' Collins said.
Herbie?
Tom crawled to the top of the rise and peeked around the trunk of a red maple set glowing by the fire.
Mr. Peet and Coleman Collins stood together beside a leaping fire tended by a thick-bodied man in a yellow T-shirt and baggy carpenter's pants — Root. His head was shaved nearly down to the skull. The others had jabbed their torches into the soft ground and were furiously digging. Dirt flew. 'There's your set right there,' said Collins, pointing to a grassy mound on the other side of the fire. In his lumberjack shut, his face ruddied by the fire, the magician looked extravagantly healthy, muscular as Mr. Peet. 'Where'd you get the dogs this time, Thorn?' he asked.
The man in the army jacket came from the other side of the mound, holding both black dogs by the chains around then — necks. 'Same old shit. Paid 'im fifty-five apiece — claims they're the strongest he had. Couldn't get no bulls.' Thorn's face had been battered into a Halloween jack-o'-lantern. 'Bulls is best, for this.'
'Bulldogs or terriers,' Collins said.
'Bulls is best,' Thorn repeated.
'Thorn, you're an idiot. Give me that bottle again.' Thorn sulkily fetched the whiskey from his pocket. Collins drank and passed the bottle to Mr. Peet. 'Those two will work out fine. I'm pleased. Now, give the chains to Root and help with the pit.'
'Yeah,' Thorn said. He swaggered away to do as he was told.
'Hey, let's send the little one in,' Root called.
'Jesus Christ,' one of the men shoveling dirt said. 'Why not give us a break, huh? Or come over here and shovel for yourself, shithead.'
'Now, . . . ' Mr. Peet said warningly but too late.
Root had wrapped the chains around a tree and was charging the man who held a shovel. The others stopped digging and watched the man plant his feet and swipe at Root with the flat of the shovel. Hit in the side, Root went down. 'Shithead,' the man said.
'Okay, Pease,' Mr. Peet said calmly. 'Root, just hold the dogs. It's too early to try them out. Keep that fire stoked up.'
'Fucking animal asshole,' muttered the one called Pease, taking up his shovel and digging so hard that dirt flew nearly all the way to Root.
Half an hour later, the four men digging had opened up a pit almost five feet deep and four feet long. Root sullenly jerked at the dogs' chains whenever he inexpertly tossed more wood on the fire. Tom watched all this, now and then nearly dozing, mystified. What was it the dogs were to be tried out on? What was the long trench for? It looked uncomfortably like a grave.
Finally the magician said, 'Let's get them stirred up. Seed, you and Rock go to work on the set for a while.'
'Yeah,' said one of the diggers, a fat bearded man who resembled a depraved Burl Ives. He grinned, showing a hockey player's gap where his front teeth should have been.
Seed sprang up out of the trench, followed by another man. They carried their shovels to the mound and immediately began pitching earth from it.
'Faster, faster,' ordered Mr. Peet. 'We want them to know you're there.'
'Shit, they hear us okay,' said Seed, displaying the gap in his teeth.
'You know how many there are, Herbie?' asked Rock.
'One is enough,' Collins answered. 'Look, let's get that other man out of the pit. Snail, you go over to the other side.'
Snail, Seed, Rock, Pease, Thorn, Root: were those names?
The one called Snail crawled from the pit, went to the mound, hefted his shovel and slammed the flat of the blade down onto the earth. 'Shake 'em up good,' he said, and began to pitch dirt as earnestly as Seed and Rock.
They resembled three monstrous dwarfs, these heavy-set men. Snail and Rock had vast tattooed biceps; and when Snail pulled off his shirt, Tom saw that tattoos blanketed his chest: a white skull with black eyeholes housed the tail of a glittering, scaly dragon with eagle's wings.
'Mr. Snail, move those wings for me,' ordered Cole Collins, and the tattooed man laughed and dug more ferociously.
'A goddamned hole,' Snail shouted. 'Here's one of the goddamned holes.'
Thorn jumped out of the pit, bellowing like a lunatic, and charged toward Snail; instead of attacking him, as Tom feared, jolted fully awake by the man's din, Thorn jabbed his shovel in the earth next to Snail and began to peel back the earth over the entrance to the burrow.
'Get that little one in there, Root,' said Mr. Peet.
'Wish we had a bull,' Thorn said from his jack-o'-lantern face. Root pulled the smaller dog up, untied its chain, and pointed it to the uncovered hole. 'Get in there, mutt,' Root said, but the dog needed no command: it streaked into the hole.
'Now, get the other one ready,' said Mr. Peet. 'I'll bet anybody twenty it comes out in under a minute.' He looked at his watch, and Thorn said, 'Twenty.'
Snail's tattoos widened and trembled in the firelight. The effect was so distracting that it was a moment before Tom realized that he was laughing. 'Ground-pounder.'
'A minute,' Thorn said, shrugging his shoulders.
Yelps, growls, barks came from the hole. Then the sound of screaming that Tom had heard in the bedroom.
'Watch your tail, boy,' said Mr. Peet, and a second later the dog came boiling out of the hole. Bright red lines bisected its head.
'Twenty from Thorn,' said Mr. Peet. 'Send in the other one,' and Root positioned the second quivering dog. Pease and Seed, the fat one like Burl Ives, began scrabbling with their shovels on the top of the mound.
For hours it seemed — Tom lay at the base of the red maple, dozing off and waking to some new horror — the dogs nipped into the tunnels Pease and Seed uncovered in the 'set,' emerged whining and bleeding, were sent back in. Money flowed among the eight men, most of it going to Root, Mr. Peet, and Collins. During one of his spells of wakefulness Tom saw Collins grab a shovel from tattooed Snail and attack the 'set' as fiercely as any of the younger men. He realized that Collins was not limping, and was so tired he thought only that in front of these men he would not limp either. 'Paydirt! Paydirt!' the one called Rock kept screaming.
There was another thing, Tom told himself, something else you would not think to notice unless you looked at these men for a long time: they were all very white. Their skin looked compressed, like cheap unhealthy meat, smudgy; they were strong, but they were indoor men.
Indoors, late-night men toiling outside, the ferocity of their labor and their shouts, the guttering torches and the leaping fire, the yells and the exchanges of bills and the bloody dogs — this phantasmagoric scene unrolling before Tom sometimes seemed so unreal he thought he was back in his bed in the windowless room . . . then he was truly asleep, and dreamed that Del was lying on the little hill beside him, explaining things. 'Mr. Snail is the treasurer of a big corporation in Boston, Mr. Seed and Mr. Thorn are both lawyers, Mr. Pease and Mr. Root are major stockholders in U.S. Steel and race in the America's Cup every year — Mr. Peet is the United States Secretary of Commerce.'
'Get those tongs ready!' someone was shouting. 'Get hold of those goddamned tongs!'
Tom groaned and rolled over, brushing the bottom branches of the maple with his elbow; then he remembered where he was, and compressed himself down as small as he could and went back on his belly. His neck hurt, his knees ached, his head sparkled with pain; but as he looked down at the men, the dream stuck to him, and so he saw the Secretary of Commerce gripping the handles of the metal tongs, swearing at the corporation treasurer to back away. One of the major stockholders in U.S. Steel held a dog at the ready over the pit. A pumpkin-faced lawyer in an army jacket was yelling 'Gid 'im! Gid 'im!' Another lawyer waved a fistful of folded bills: deep in the mound, the second dog wailed like a soul tormented in hell.
'Soon,' said the Secretary, and the Boston treasurer crouched over, grinning tensely like an ape.
Then two shocking things happened, so close together they were nearly simultaneous. Spouting blood, a tortured dog windmilled out of the mound; a lawyer whose body was covered with a glittering,
moving dragon tattoo took one look at it and raised his shovel over his head. Tom saw one front leg hanging by a bloody thread, ribs opened up to shine like painted matchsticks, and then the lawyer brought down the shovel and crushed the dog's head. The lawyer kicked the dog's body into the trees.
The second shocking thing, like the first, was a succession of images so brightly colored they might have been a series of slides. A furry, stubby head wet with blood poked into visibility for a second; the Secretary of Commerce jabbed with the metal tongs, and all the financiers howled gleefully; the Secretary jerked his arms powerfully upward like a man making a home run in another language, and the metal bands of the tongs clasped the belly of a squalling, crazed, bleeding badger and carried it in a wide arc through the firelit air. The Secretary pivoted, whirling the heavy body in the tongs, and dropped the animal into the pit. The U.S. Steel stockholder loosed the foaming dog and it too went headfirst into the pit. Instantly the financiers began shouting out bets.
The bets, Tom suddenly knew, were on how long the badger would live.
The shouting men closed around the pit, passing money back and forth, and Tom could not see what was happening inside it. But he could imagine it, which was worse. At times, when a spray of blood flew up, one or another of the financiers backed away, cursing, and Tom saw rolling hair. The dragon bled on its iridescent scales; a florid rose bled on a bicep; miraculous blood appeared on a yellow T-shirt, dazzling and unexpected as stigmata.
After twenty minutes one man raised his arms and crowed. Money came to him in loud waves. Then there was only the sound of breathing, the ragged breathing of hard-worked men and the punctured, frothy breathing of a badly wounded dog. The Secretary of Commerce took a pistol from his pocket and fired it once into the pit.
Tom shuddered back, rustling along the ground like a leaf. 'All right. You've had your blood,' said Coleman Collins; but it was too late, because the magician was looking up the hill right into his eyes, and saying, 'There's another one for the pit. Go to sleep, boy.'
A thick, slobbering man spun around and ran toward him; and Tom passed out.
