Otherworldly Maine

by Noreen Doyle

  Hollows Hill is really a mound of dirt with a couple of scraggy pines on it in the middle of The Hollows. A sluggish brook splits and goes around it, making Hollows Hill a sort of island in the middle of thick woods. Dan often went hunting in there, though that usually meant wet feet. But Dan always said to me, “Melvin, you can enjoy warming your feet by the fire more if you get them cold first.”

  Dan is Dan Seekins, my best friend. He watched the meteorite fall out of the sky and he figured it just about landed on Hollows Hill, or close by. He said no one else probably saw the thing, it being so late at night. He only saw it because he had gone out back of his house to quiet down his hunting dog, which was making all sorts of ruckus.

  Dan looked around to see what was disturbing his dog, which was disturbing Dan’s wife’s sleeping, which disturbed Dan, and saw the meteorite sizzling right over his head. He called me up—I remember it was near on to two o’clock in the morning—as soon as he got back into the house, taking his dog with him just to be on the safe side.

  Dan loves his long-legged Plott hound and named him Trophy Seekins. Dan always laughs at that. Anyway, when coon hunting time came near, we’d take Trophy out and practice a bit before getting to the real thing. Dan had me drag an old hat around on a long rope while the dog chased it. He did just fine, only getting a little distracted because the hat lining was rabbit fur and the earflaps were deerskin. We were sure the dog could tell the difference when the time came for the real thing, though.

  Dan had a plan. He said he read somewhere that those meteorites were worth a good bit of money when sliced up into thin slivers. Some scientists needed them for experiments, thinking life started on Earth because of hitchhiking bugs. And other people paid good money to have a slice of cosmic jewelry. So Dan decided we shouldn’t tell anyone about the one he saw. We should keep it our secret and just wait until hunting season started in two days, then go into the woods and find it for ourselves. He wanted me along because I could help carry it out. He figured that the rock had burned down some, from about the size of his couch, to about the size of his footstool. Since the thing was really dense though, it might take the two of us to carry out what was left. We eagerly waited the start of raccoon-hunting season.

  We caught some luck when Mrs. Kolinsky called Dan and said she had gotten his name from someone who knew he had a coon dog. She explained that she had just put her birdfeeders out for the season and a raccoon was eating up the sunflower seeds and making a general wreck of things. Mrs. Kolinsky lived down at the farther edge of The Hollows, and could Dan come out and rid her of this pest? Oh, sure, yes indeed!

  We had to wait until Saturday night because Dan’s wife insisted he spend some time getting firewood cut for her kitchen stove, and put on a storm window or two in case it started snowing early. Dan was one to put off such things if a chance to hunt came up, but he got his honey-do chores done on Saturday afternoon and called me. Raccoons mostly sleep in the daytime and are more active at night, so all our hunting is done in the dark. Dan picked me up at dusk and we went to see the damage that the raccoon had done to Mrs. Kolinsky’s bird feeders.

  I don’t know why Dan didn’t have a cage for Trophy in the back of the truck. Instead, Trophy stood on the front seat, proud as punch, staring out the window over my elbow. The weather got cold and wet, and there’s nothing like sitting in a closed up truck with a steaming wet Plott hound on your lap who’s dripping drool into the windshield defroster. It also meant that I occasionally let out a stream of cussing meant to fit the electrifying jolts I got when that seventy-pound dog stepped where he shouldn’t have. I’d shove Trophy around to sit between Dan and me, but as soon as that dog saw a strip of woods out the side window, he was treading all over me again, eager to stick his nose out. I really couldn’t sit in the middle you see, because I tried it once and people sort of looked at us funny, what with me all close up to Dan, who weighs about 250 to my 160, and the dog drooling out the window, all besotted with the outdoor smells, his tail whipping me about the head and shoulders.

  On this particular night in question, we got to The Hollows without much injury and saw Mrs. Kolinsky waiting for us on her stoop. She pointed out a whole ruination in her backyard where the feeders had been all upturned, birdbaths dumped over and cracked. This raccoon must be huge, judging by the claw marks up the side of a tree where the animal reached up to get at a greasy clump of beef fat hanging from a cord. Dan rubbed his hands together in what could only be described as delight. Tonight he might just get a two-fer: the biggest raccoon trophy he ever set eyes on, and a celestial rock to settle his income for the rest of his life.

  We let Trophy sniff around the spot for a bit and then followed along as the dog loped off into the woods, nose to the ground. He wasn’t baying yet, just trying to get an idea of where this bandit had gone. We hurried to get our equipment, which consisted of Dan’s grandfather’s old 30-30, all duct-taped on the stock. I decided not to take my old 12-gauge shotgun and let Dan have this prize, him being so eager for it. Instead, I grabbed up a couple of flashlights from the floor of the pickup and a large sack, being hopeful the meteorite had broken into bits so I could tote it out easier. By the time I got all that together, the dog gave a little yip to let us know he had found the trail. I got distracted and forgot my gloves, and I regret that mistake to this very day.

  It was our usual plan to follow the dog well back and let him do his work. When Trophy wanted to let us know he was close to the raccoon, he would start to yodel, and when the dog finally treed the raccoon, he would bay up at the tree the coon had climbed.

  This worked out fine as long as something else didn’t cross the dog’s path. Sometimes Trophy took a fling for himself and chased a deer for a bit before breaking off and returning to the raccoon scent. On those occasions, we just waited for him to get done with his silliness and get back to work, then followed him again.

  The moon had started up, but the woods were as dark as the inside of a pocket, so we had to follow the cold yellow spots from the flashlights. I let Dan go ahead and tried to shine the lights either between his legs, or over his shoulder, though neither suited to show much. He showed his displeasure by whapping some branches back into my chest and I got myself caught up in the mess and dropped one of the lights. I couldn’t find it again, and when I caught up to Dan, I shined the remaining flashlight beam at his feet, more proper like. That worked the best, as Dan’s feet were the least shadow casting part of him.

  We could hear the dog up ahead starting to bawl a little, meaning he got hold of a good sniff of raccoon. We tried to go faster, but the underbrush here was thicker and the moonlight and flashlight just couldn’t get through. We had to slog through some trickle left in the brook that ran around the mound of dirt. Nothing prepared us for the sight when we broke out into the small clearing under the pine trees on Hollows Hill. The sky here had a blue flush from the moon, and all the trees cast shadows as black as aces. Weird thing was that all around our feet was this eerie greenish glow.

  The flashlight dimmed and went out. I thunked it hard on my hand, but it wouldn’t come back on except for a tiny orange button inside the bulb. We still had that strange glow all around our feet, though, that lit up the toes of our boots. I scraped my feet over the ground and stirred up more light. Dan stooped down and took a handful of it on his glove. “Worms,” he said, and held his hand out to show me. “Just firefly larvae.” He shook the dirt off his hand, but the fingers still glimmered from the crushed bugs.

  We both saw something sitting right there in the center of that glowing mound. It was as large as a recliner, all bumpy on the outside, and crackling like a cat playing in a paper sack. Our meteorite! I looked at Dan, who looked at me, and we both looked at the burlap sack I’d brought, and we both sighed at the same time. The rock seemed to cave in on itself as we watched. Pretty soon there would be nothing left but a crumpled up husk too large even then to move.

  We just started walking over to the strange s
hrinking rock, thinking a smaller piece might be nearby, when we heard Trophy circling around, baying like I never heard before. We had no light but what was on the ground, and couldn’t make out anything in the trees a few feet away. We could only wait, turning to the sound of the dog’s voice as he circled and spiraled in toward us. I noticed Dan raise up his 30-30 and follow the sounds all around in a circle, his elbow stuck out and his hat pushed way back on his head.

  All of a sudden, something tore through the trees at us. I heard a shot as whatever it was pushed past Dan so fast that the rifle got shoved up and fired a neat hole into deepest space.

  I backed up into a pine tree and ended up sandwiched between the tree and that thing that pounded through the woods, whatever it was. I felt the hard tree trunk behind me, something familiar and solid, and the thing in front of me like a rubbery mass that reminded me of the muck at the bottom of a stagnant pond I got my feet stuck in one time. But this thing wasn’t cold like pond mud. It was in a fever, all sticky and smelling like burned tires. It peeled itself off me and I thought I was going to be sucked along with it, like my feet were sucked down into that pond bottom. It reached up and pushed at my face and then it was gone. That happened in a second, but seemed like forever.

  Trophy tumbled through the trees, tripped over his own feet, and piled up on the ground in front of us. He got back up, shook himself off, spreading that glowworm crud all over his body, and then off he went again on the now luminous footprints of whatever it was he chased.

  Dan gave me a jab in the ribs and we ran after the dog. We must have run a mile, maybe two; we got to zigzagging so much it’s hard to tell. I know we ran back over Hollows Hill because I saw the tracks all scattered in the glowing dirt, and that hissing rock had disappeared into a small pile of blackened ash. We didn’t stop.

  Eventually we ran out the length of Pine Crest Reach and came out into the moonlight down by the ocean’s edge. We followed the tracks in the sand along the shore. We could hear Trophy barking, which sounded more like a hysterical yowl by that time, and hurried to get to him. We found him all right. He glowed all green and sat on his haunches as he stared out over the moonlight sparkled ocean. He leaned his head back and howled at something up in the sky. We called and called, but Trophy wouldn’t leave that shoreline, so we had to pick him up and take him home. All during the ride home, that dog whined and stared out the window at the sky.

  We never went back to The Hollows, though we tried to take Trophy out hunting one time after that. It didn’t work out very well. We followed the dog into a farmer’s cow pasture where Trophy was sitting, barking at a metal water tank. Trophy was ruined for a hunting dog, so Dan let his wife keep him as a pet, though she has to keep the dog in on moonlit nights or listen to the poor thing howl until daylight.

  Mrs. Kolinsky called Dan and thanked him for ending her problem with the raccoon raids, but Dan and I never talked about it. We didn’t want to talk about the smell of the thing as it went past us in the dark, a mixture of burned tires, musk, and old paper. I didn’t want to tell Dan how the thing sucked on to me like hot pond mud as it rushed into me, or tell about the sticky, rubbery fingers covered in stiff bristles that brushed my face and hands as it pushed away from me.

  We had both noticed the way the gleam from the crushed worms had stuck to the strange suckered feet and left tracks down the shoreline. Those glowing tracks, with the six-inch claw marks, went right off into the water. Thing is, we couldn’t find a way to tell anyone, especially about the way those tracks just sort of floated on the surface. The only thing Dan actually ever said aloud about the situation, more to himself that to anyone else, was that it made him grateful old Trophy was a chasing dog and not a retriever.

  THE AUTUMN OF SORROWS

  Scott Thomas

  Province of Maine, 1784

  Frost had come in the night while Susanna Hayford and her children were sleeping. It whispered patterns against the windows of their house and silvered the uneven fields. It dulled the colors of turning leaves, left an icy dusting on bracken and spruce and coy September asters. Warm in their dreams, the family slept through it all, unaware as the year advanced impassively toward winter.

  In the morning, Prudence, who was just ten, discovered the delicate impressions on the panes and ran to fetch her brother.

  “Samuel! First frost . . . first frost!”

  The boy, three years her senior, was rekindling the fire in the kitchen. He looked up and smiled. He knew what Prudence meant.

  “Cranberries!” Samuel returned.

  Both children turned and hurried up the tight staircase that nestled between the kitchen and pantry. There was chill enough for their breath to puff out before them as they made the top step and passed through a storage area to the door of the room where their mother slept. Susanna had moved to this chamber following the war. The handsome bed that she and her husband had shared, the most expensive thing in the house, remained down in the best room, little more than a monument to a cruelly interrupted marriage. Samuel stopped at the door and listened to make sure that he did not hear weeping on the other side before knocking.

  “Yes?” a voice came.

  Prudence bound in ahead of Samuel. The room was a simple whitewashed thing with a low ceiling that slanted on two sides. There was an unadorned fireplace (its contents burnt quiet) and two smallish windows on the gable side. A pretty dark-haired woman was sitting in bed with her back against the headboard. She was pale with chestnut eyes, and she was holding something in one of her hands, something that she did not want the children to notice. She tucked it beneath the rumpled tide of covers that obscured the lower half of her body, and smiled weakly.

  “Hallo, my dears.”

  The woman’s daughter sat down on the edge of the bed. “Mother, we’ve a frost! Might we please row out to Little Sorrow and pick the cranberries? They’ll now be ripe.”

  Susanna Hayford looked from one eager child to the other. Much as she would have liked to keep them there at the house, safely in her sight at all times, she knew she could not.

  “If you must, but heed to caution and should the sea be unruly, hasten back.”

  The hand under the blanket impulsively squeezed what it held.

  “Thank you, Mother!” Prudence gushed, and her brother, hovering behind her, echoed the sentiment before they both rushed from the chamber. Susanna listened to them flying down the stairs, their steps and voices defying the silence that had overtaken the house in the last six months.

  Not so long ago the humble structure had been filled with spirit and company. There had been a shifting family of occupants, from hired girls and hired men and boarders, to her widowed cousin Jennet (complete with three daughters). Susanna’s maiden aunt Polly, as well an ailing grandsir, had also made a home of the place. And, of course, there had been her Abel. He had survived the fight against the French and Indians only to be lost in the rebellion.

  But now the place was owned by shadows and painfully infused with memories. Life, about its inexplicable courses, had swept all but Susanna and her surviving children from the place. Her husband’s grandfather had gone to his maker the previous winter. Jennet remarried and went to housekeeping in Machias; the spinster aunt had left to live with another relative, and there was not enough money to keep hired help. The last boarder, a Mr. Eaton, had moved out at the end of August, and the little west room behind the formal parlor had sat empty since.

  Susanna pulled her fist out from under the blanket and opened her fingers. In her palm was a lock of hair curled up like a small sleeping thing. It was the hair of a six-year old child, blond, like Abel’s had been. “Winter fever” had taken her Betsy in March.

  Others in the village had remarked on Susanna’s strength, praising her for tending the farm on her own, caring for two children after the loss of her husband and youngest daughter. They encouraged her to trust in God, to find comfort in her faith. But, she did not feel as strong as she appeared on the outside, and while
the local Reverend Goodwin remained a dear friend, the force he served no longer garnered her devotion. Only days earlier, in her diary, she had written: I lately see God in no thing. They speak of His mercy and compassion and His mysterious ways, but little mystery do I perceive. If there be a God then He puts thorns on flowers and allows that musket balls fly and the poor to starve and disease to whither. He has taken my child and my very heart with her.

  Susanna waited until she heard the back door shut, as the children headed out, before allowing herself to weep.

  The sky was September blue, so clear and crisp that if one could hurl a stone high enough they would shatter it. Warm sunlight countered the chill air and made a strangely elongated shadow version of the house. The building itself looked smaller and plainer for the textured terrain rolling around it, a landscape shaped by a patient and astonishing violence. Stark rail fences conformed painfully to these rocky surroundings, defining crop fields and grazing land and orchard.

  There was nothing pretentious about the house itself, little to make it stand apart from others in the vicinity. It was a one-story shingled structure with a substantial center chimney, the main door bordered by windows on the long side, facing the road.

  The outbuildings were in need of repair. Samuel, who was not so handy when it came to carpentry, was outmatched by the effects of wind and temperature and gravity. Besides, much of his time was spent working at the shingle mill. There had been plenty of helpful men coming by following Abel’s death, men from miles around (the majority of them married), men eager to assist with this or that task around the farm, but they soon vanished when they found that the pretty widow—unalterably clad in her black mourning gown—was not disposed to their desires to “console” her.