The Rainy Season

by James P. Blaylock

  She peered up the narrow stairs that angled steeply toward the top two stories, remembering the jar in the attic, its memories jumbled together and sealed with wax, and how they leaked out of the jar anyway, and lay on the air of the room like perfume. On the second-story landing she looked around. There was a clutter of crates and trunks—old things from what she could see. From the layer of dust settled over everything, probably it had sat here undisturbed for years and years. She edged past some crates in order to get closer to the window. Through the gap between the two panels of dusty lace curtains, she could see Uncle Phil and the old man by the well. The two of them were bent over a hole in the ground. She moved back toward the stairs and opened the book bag, taking out her box with its inkwell inside and opening the lid.

  The inkwell, she could see, had changed, as it had always changed when someone held it—except no one had been holding it. It was nearly symmetrical now, undistorted. And it seemed to her to glow, like the things in the jar had glowed two nights ago, as if some ray of moonlight shone on it. Then she heard something, above her, in the room overhead. It was the sound of hushed whispering, like the tearing and crumpling of old paper. And there was the sound of rain falling, although she knew that there was no rain.

  For another few moments she stood looking up the stairs, thinking about turning around and going back down. Instead she climbed higher, peering into the gloom, holding the inkwell out in front of her as if it were a lantern, the sound of the rain and the whispering now louder, now softer, interspersed now with what might have been horses’ hooves running along a dirt road, with faint and distant music, with the sound of running water.

  36

  ELIZABETH WATCHED IN her rearview mirror as the couple in the car that had pulled into the turnout behind her got out and walked to the guardrail, where they pointed at various landmarks in the distance. The day was remarkably clear, and from where she sat, she could see the Matterhorn Mountain at Disneyland, and the sunlight shining off the glass facade of the Crystal Cathedral. The dark outline of Catalina Island was sharply drawn against the blue sky and ocean. In the ten minutes that she had been parked there, three different cars had pulled off to gawk for a moment before driving away downhill again. She switched on the radio, listened for a moment without interest, and then switched it off. The cell phone rang, and she flipped it open.

  “No,” she said after listening for a moment, “he hasn’t left yet. I can see the top of the driveway from here, just barely, so the truck’s still there. I haven’t seen it come out.”

  It had been an old pickup that she’d seen when she’d passed the driveway on her way up the hill—blue, with a camper shell. She didn’t want to visit Phil when he had company, and if possible, she wanted to do a little bit of sneaking around before she invited herself in. The other thing she had seen was activity out by the well. There was no way to get a clear view of what they were doing, because the tower and garage were both in the way, but it seemed to her, when she had glimpsed Phil at the edge of the tower, that he had been holding a shovel and looking back toward the well.

  “I’ve come to the conclusion that our liaison has arrived in town,” Appleton said to her.

  She hated this kind of secret talk: “our liaison.” Actually, she had come to the same conclusion last night. “What makes you so sure about that?” she asked.

  “This activity you mentioned.”

  “You mean the digging?”

  “Yes. I believe that they’re attempting to neutralize the … the well. We talked about that? You recall our conversation?”

  “Yes. I understand you perfectly. But why would they kill the well now? Because our … liaison has arrived?”

  “Exactly. Our friend wouldn’t consider it otherwise. He’s haunted that well all these years, waiting. He wouldn’t doom her by neutralizing it prematurely. See if you can find any evidence of it besides the digging.”

  “What evidence?”

  “Bones. Human bones.”

  “The sacrificial corpse.”

  There was silence on the other end, and she realized she had made a mistake. She should have used a euphemism for “corpse” since Appleton’s daughter fell into that category.

  “The digging might just as easily be a ploy,” he said. “And one more thing—I want to know who the man in the truck is.”

  “Should I flag him down and ask him his name?”

  “My God, no.”

  “Wait,” she said. “Here he comes now.” She watched the front end of the blue pickup stop at the top edge of Phil’s driveway while a couple of cars sped past. The truck pulled out and headed uphill toward her, laboring along, slowly picking up speed.

  “Put the phone down,” Appleton said. “Look busy.”

  She laid the phone on the seat just as the truck swung past. The driver was an old man in overalls, a hick. The truck headed away up the hill. “He’s old,” she said. “Looks like a farmer. Like I said, it’s a light-blue pickup with a camper shell. There’s a sign on the side with a forked stick and the letters ASD.”

  “American Society of Dowsers. So either they killed the well, or they failed to kill the well, or they’re going to some trouble to make me think they killed the well. So far we’ve learned nothing except that they’re moving, they’re busy. Try to find something more out, will you? Our friend Mr. Ainsworth isn’t the innocent man you’ve taken him for. Not any longer. By now he’s knee-deep in this.”

  “I’ll … feel him out.”

  “For goodness sake, be careful with it. I’m very interested in the girl, as I told you last night. Don’t jeopardize your relationship with the girl.”

  “All right.”

  “I need the girl.”

  “I understand you.”

  In fact she didn’t understand him, not entirely. But if Betsy was something he needed, then Betsy was something he got—or at least she had to let him think so. She flipped the phone closed. The old man was on edge, fired up. It had been wise to pack her bags, which now lay in the trunk of her car. Because if he was right, and the glass dog had suddenly become available, then—if she was lucky—moving day had come at last.

  37

  DUDLEY WALKED PAST the edge of the well and out through the winter grass toward the grove, but he turned around and headed back after about twenty paces. He stopped in his tracks, then started again. Phil leaned on the spade he’d taken from the garden shed and waited. The water in the well had fallen a few feet farther in the night, and already the surface was covered with floating leaves and debris. The creek beyond the grove was still running but the volume of water had diminished. There were more storms predicted over the next couple of days, but the rainy season was about over. Dudley circled the well, holding the wand in toward the rocks.

  “Now here’s something,” he said, standing still and cocking his head. He gripped the forked ends of the dowser, his thumbs massaging the bark. “What I get here is a kind of pull that’s magnetic. Your water pull is like gravity, but this is a different category.” He concentrated for another moment, moved a couple of feet farther on, then stepped back again. I’d say dig right here. I might be wrong, but I don’t think so. There’s a strong inclination here.”

  Phil started to dig. At first the spade unearthed heavy clods of wet clay, which he heaved off to the side, but then, below a depth of about eighteen inches, the clay gave way to alluvial soil, and the digging went easily.

  “Widen out the hole,” Dudley said to him, reclining easily against the stone wall of the well. He talked in a low voice, as if they were robbing a grave. “If you dig down below the water level, your hole will just fill up with water, and we’ll have to wait for it to drain.”

  Phil stepped back and tore out more of the surface clay, widening the hole until it was four or five feet across. There was a sound of water gurgling, and Dudley turned and looked down into the well. Phil leaned on the shovel and watched the water, too. The dead leaves on the water moved uneasily, drifting t
ogether to reveal a half-moon of black water, clear of leaves, through which Phil could see into the depths. There seemed to him to be movement deep in the well, and he thought of what he and Elizabeth had witnessed a few nights past—if indeed Elizabeth had witnessed anything at all—and he waited for something more to appear, pictured the face that he had seen in the moonlit depths.

  The wind died, the cloud passed away from the sun, and the leaves drifted across the surface again, leaving the water still and hidden. Dudley held the wand over the hole that Phil had been digging, and without a twitch as a warning, it leaped out of his hand and fell like an arrow into the dirt. He picked it up and slid it into the broad pocket in his overalls. “Slow up a little bit,” he whispered. “We’re about there.” Phil scraped at the soil, deepening the hole an inch at a time, and after a moment he felt the spade scrape across something wooden and hollow, and he nearly dropped the spade out of surprise.

  “Something’s buried here,” he said.

  “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  Within moments it was clear what it was—the staves of a wooden cask, like a whisky cask laid on edge. “Easy,” Dudley said, but the wood was mostly rotten, and the staves crumbled to pieces when Phil tried to scrape them clean, chunks of rotten stave falling into the dark hollow below. Phil saw now that the cask sat at the very edge of the well, probably a foot or so above the waterline. Without warning, a section of the wall of the hole collapsed inward, and he heard dirt and debris splash into the well.

  “We’re losing it,” Dudley said, looking into the well itself.

  Phil dug around the cask carefully, scooping dirt out with his hands, trying not to jar it. He exposed the rusted hoops and then the heavy wooden ends of the cask, clearing away soil until the half-decomposed barrel was mostly excavated. Inside, visible in the patchy sunlight that filtered through the broken staves, was a litter of human bones, gray and disconnected. …

  Phil recoiled in sudden horror, stepping back away from the hole and rubbing the palms of his hands against his jeans. The toothy chin of a small skull, evidently the skull of a child, lay half in shadow near the upper end of the cask, and the sight of it there was unnerving.

  “I know what you mean,” Dudley said, although Phil hadn’t spoken. “I used to think that there was a time when people were different—worse than us. When they’d drown a child like they were drowning a cat. But people haven’t changed. They still drown cats and they still drown children. There’s nothing we can do to put this right, except what we’re doing, if you follow me.”

  Phil nodded, then glanced toward the house, making sure that Betsy was nowhere around. She surely didn’t need to see this.

  Dudley bent over and picked up a fragment of wood, which he rubbed to pieces between his fingers. “Mark my words,” he said in a low voice, “there’ll be some coins in the bottom, and a rosary, among other things.”

  “Why?” Phil asked.

  “You might as well ask your friend,” Dudley told him. “You’ve got to call him anyway and tell him what you’ve found.”

  “Call him?”

  “That’s what I’d do. He’ll want the bones and the rest. That’s pretty much the whole reason I’m out here.”

  “You’re not taking this with you?”

  Dudley shook his head. “I’ll give you a hand shifting them out of here, but I don’t want them. I’m the man that finds the water. I don’t dig the well and I don’t tote buckets into the kitchen.”

  “What do I do with the skeleton?” Phil realized now that he would rather have left the cask buried. There was something shady, maybe outright unlawful, about finding the remains of a dead person and not reporting it to the authorities. And beyond that, he simply didn’t want any part of this, not now that it was no longer merely a wild premise.

  “I’d keep it hidden,” Dudley said.

  “It seems to me like we ought to report it to the police.”

  “Suit yourself. I wouldn’t, though. These bones are old, maybe two hundred years, maybe older. Probably an Indian boy or girl. You call the police and all of a sudden your property’s an Indian burial sight, and you can’t dig up a potato without clearing it with God knows who.”

  “Why would the bones be that old? I mean, how do we know this wasn’t buried thirty years ago?”

  “Because if it was buried thirty years ago, your friend wouldn’t give a damn for it. He wouldn’t want this spring water dowsed, would he? You don’t see him asking me to dowse the Hart Park plunge. I’ll tell you what, though: it’s easy to work this out. If there’s Spanish coins in the bottom, like I said, and a rosary, then what you have on your hands is a skeleton that the police won’t have any use for. In that case, if I were you, I’d go ahead and call your friend the priest.”

  “I wish I knew my friend’s phone number,” Phil said truthfully.

  Dudley shrugged. “I wish I had one to give you. I’ll bet you’ll hear from him, but if you can’t stand to wait, then if I were you I’d run on down to the mission in Capistrano and tell the padre that a dowser found something interesting on your property. He’ll listen to you.”

  “Thanks,” Phil said. “I guess we’d better try to move it.”

  “Better than leaving it here,” Dudley said.

  “I’ve got a big scoop shovel,” Phil told him. “Let’s see if we can get it underneath and lift it out of there.”

  “If you’ve got a tarp or a blanket, get that, too. Hurry up, before we lose the whole shebang.”

  Phil grabbed a stadium blanket and a bungee cord out of the trunk of his car and the aluminum scoop shovel out of the back of the garage. He hurried back out to the well and laid the blanket out in front of the hole, then wiggled the shovel beneath the bottom edge of the cask as carefully as he could. Dudley pulled dirt out from under the edges, and then slipped the spade in behind the cask, perilously close to the edge of the well. Phil could hear it scrape against rock, as the two of them began to lift the cask, bones and all, out of the hole it lay in. Phil avoided focusing on the bones, or of thinking at all about what he was doing.

  “Easy,” Dudley said to him, but just then the rotten wood of the cask collapsed, and another section of wall fell inward with a splash. Phil levered hard against the handle of the scoop shovel, anxious to save the rest of what was left, and the cask and its contents tumbled forward off the shovels and broke apart on the blanket. The gray bones lay amid the pieces of wood and dirt clods and rusty iron.

  “Well, we only lost part of it,” Dudley said, stooping over the blanket. “Take a look at this.” He reached into the debris and pulled out a coin, wiping it on his overalls before handing it to Phil. Phil knew nothing about coins, but he could see that these were old, very old, and when he looked closer at the blanket he saw what looked like the beads of a rosary scattered among the bones and fragments of rotten wood, just as Dudley had predicted. In among the bones, half buried in dirt, lay what looked like a glass paperweight, four or five inches long, a mossy piece of cloudy crystal. Its shape was suggestive of something handwrought, like some sort of primitive tool.

  “I wouldn’t mess with that bit of crystal,” the old man said. “I shouldn’t even have touched the coin, but I wanted to show you. You just let the rest of this lie, especially that thing there. Don’t pay undue attention to it. Let the padre worry about it.”

  Phil stared at him for a moment, looked again at the artifact, at the beads, and what was left of the bones. He was happy to let it lie. He pulled the corners of the blanket together to make a bundle, which he tied off with the bungee. He considered where to put it, rejecting the idea of simply dumping it into the trunk of the car. With Jen upstairs, he couldn’t predict when he would get down to the mission. And Dudley was probably right: the priest would no doubt call him again soon.

  He picked up the bundle and carried it to the door of the tower, opened the door, and took the bundle inside. The tower was full of junk, most of which was his only because of the inheri
tance. The two upstairs rooms contained crates of old magazines and books and boxed odds and ends that had been taken out of the house years ago. He looked around the downstairs room, immediately deciding to put the blanket in the shadows beneath the stairs. Picking up some old newspaper, he swatted at the dirty floor, clearing away spilled potting soil.

  “He won’t mind a little dirt,” Dudley said, standing in the open door, and Phil laughed nervously. He set the blanket down carefully, but the bungee cord slipped off the top and the folds of blanket fell open. Deciding not to meddle with it until it was time to move it, Phil dusted his hands, and the two men went back out into the sunlight. Phil had several old padlocks in the garage, and he dug one out now, slipped it through the hasp on the door, and pushed the lock shut.

  38

  AT THE VERY top of the stairs, Betsy was startled by what was unmistakably the sound of the tower door opening in the room below. She tensed, ready to hide if she had to. There were footsteps on the floorboards below and other sounds that she couldn’t identify. And then a man’s voice said, “He won’t mind a little dirt,” and there was laughter. Almost at once she heard the door shut, and the tower was silent. Then, slowly, the ghostly voices and the sound of rain began again, as a mere murmur, rising slightly in volume as she listened.

  There was a soft sighing, like an inexpressible sadness, and a tapping that reminded her of fingernails on a windowpane. The inkwell glowed like a firefly, the radiance shining on the inside of the box, and holding the box before her as if it were a lantern, she stepped into the dim room, which was cramped with boxes, many of them open; and full of books and shreds of paper. The dust on the wooden floor was stippled with mouse prints.

  A wooden trunk sat against the wall, very old, its lid closed. Betsy’s eyes were drawn to the trunk, and she was suddenly certain that something lay within it. And as soon as the certainty came into her mind, the voices in the room rose in volume, and she heard rainfall, distinctly now. She stepped to the window, but then stepped away again, dizzy at the sight of the ground so far below. The sun still shone. There was no rain. The inkwell glowed with a bright aura.