“Where’d he go, Mum?”
“We don’t know, Babe. Sit down and eat your breakfast.”
“What’s a misbegotten, Mum?” the Babe asked suddenly. Her mother nearly dropped the dish she was drying. “Babe! You must never say that again!”
“Oh. Well, why is Uncle Alton, then?”
“Why is he what?”
Babe’s mouth muscled around an outsize spoonful of oatmeal. “A misbe—”
“Babe!”
“All right, Mum,” said Babe with her mouth full. “Well, why?”
“I told Cory not to shout last night,” Clissa said half to herself.
“Well, whatever it means, he isn’t,” said Babe with finality. “Did he go hunting again?”
“He went to look for Kimbo, darling.”
“Kimbo? Oh, Mummy, is Kimbo gone, too? Didn’t he come back either?”
“No, dear. Oh, please, Babe, stop asking questions!”
“All right. Where do you think they went?”
“Into the north woods. Be quiet.”
Babe gulped away at her breakfast. An idea struck her; and as she thought of it she ate slower and slower, and cast more and more glances at her mother from under the lashes of her tilted eyes. It would be awful if daddy did anything to Uncle Alton. Someone ought to warn him.”
Babe was halfway to the woods when Alton’s .32-40 sent echoes giggling up and down the valley.
Cory was in the south thirty, riding a cultivator and cussing at the team of grays when he heard the gun. “Hoa,” he called to the horses, and sat a moment to listen to the sound. “One-two-three, four,” he counted. “Saw someone, blasted away at him. Had a chance to take aim and give him another, careful. My God!” He threw up the cultivator points and steered the team into the shade of three oaks. He hobbled the gelding with swift tosses of a spare strap, and headed for the woods. “Alton a killer,” he murmured, and doubled back to the house for his gun. Clissa was standing just outside the door.
“Get shells!” he snapped and flung into the house. Clissa followed him. He was strapping his hunting knife on before she could get a box off the shelf. “Cory—”
“Hear that gun, did you? Alton’s off his nut. He don’t waste lead. He shot at someone just then, and he wasn’t fixin’ to shoot pa’tridges when I saw him last. He was out to get a man. Gimme my gun.”
“Cory, Babe—”
“You keep her here. Oh, God, this is a helluva mess. I can’t stand much more.” Cory ran out the door.
Clissa caught his arm: “Cory, I’m trying to tell you. Babe isn’t here. I’ve called, and she isn’t here.”
Cory’s heavy, young-old face tautened. “Babe—where did you last see her?”
“Breakfast.” Clissa was crying now.
“She say where she was going?”
“No. She asked a lot of questions about Alton and where he’d gone,”
“Did you say?”
Clissa’s eyes widened, and she nodded, biting the back of her hind.
“You shouldn’t ha’ done that, Clissa,” he gritted, and ran toward the woods, Clissa looking after him, and in that moment she could have killed herself.
Cory ran with his head up, straining with his legs and lungs and eyes at the long path. He puffed up the slope to the woods, agonised for breath after the forty-five minutes’ heavy going. He couldn’t even notice the damp smell of mold in the air.
He caught a movement in a thicket to his right, and dropped. Struggling to keep his breath, he crept forward until he could see clearly. There was something there, all right. Something black, keeping still. Cory relaxed his legs and torso completely to make it easier for his heart to pump some strength back into them, and slowly raised the 12-gauge until it bore on the thing hidden in the thicket.
“Come out!” Cory said when he could speak.
Nothing happened.
“Come out or by God I’ll shoot!” rasped Cory.
There was a long moment of silence, and his finger tightened on the trigger.
“You asked for it,” he said, and as he fired the thing leaped sideways into the open, screaming.
It was a thin little man dressed in sepulchral black, and bearing the rosiest little baby-face Cory had ever seen. The face was twisted with fright and pain. The little man scrambled to his feet and hopped up and down saying over and over, “Oh, my hand. Don’t shoot again! Oh, my hand. Don’t shoot again!” He stopped after a bit, when Cory had climbed to his feet, and he regarded the farmer out of sad china-blue eyes. “You shot me,” he said reproachfully, holding up a little bloody hand. “Oh, my goodness!”
Cory said, “Now, who the hell are you?”
The man immediately became hysterical, mouthing such a flood of broken sentences that Cory stepped back a pace and half-raised his gun in self-defense. It seemed to consist mostly of “I lost my papers,” and “I didn’t do it,” and “It was horrible. Horrible. Horrible,” and “The dead man,” and “Oh, don’t shoot again.”
Cory tried twice to ask him a question, and then he stepped over and knocked the man down. He lay on the ground writhing and moaning and blubbering and putting his bloody hand to his mouth where Cory had hit him.
“Now, what’s going on around here?”
The man rolled over and sat up. “I didn’t do it!” he sobbed, “I didn’t! I was walking along and I heard the gun and I heard some swearing and an awful scream and I went over there and peeped and I saw the dead man and I ran away and you came and I hid and you shot me and—”
“Shut up!” The man did, as if a switch had been thrown.
“Now,” said Cory, pointing along the path, “you say there’s a dead man up there?”
The man nodded and began crying in earnest. Cory helped him up. “Follow this path back to my farmhouse,” he said. “Tell my wife to fix up your hand. Don’t tell her anything else. And wait there until I come. Hear?”
“Yes. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Snff.”
“Go on now.” Cory gave him a gentle shove in “the right direction and went alone, in cold fear, up the path to the spot where he had found Alton the night before.
He found him here now, too, and Kimbo. Kimbo and Alton had spent several years together in the deepest friendship; they had hunted and fought and slept together, and the lives they owed each other were finished now. They were dead together. It was terrible that they had died the same way. Cory Drew was a strong man, but he gasped and fainted dead away when he saw what the thing of the mold had done to his brother and his brother’s dog.
The little man in black hurried down the path, whimpering and holding his injured hand as if he rather wished he could limp with it. After a while the whimper faded away, and the hurried stride changed to a walk as the gibbering terror of the last hour receded. He drew two deep breaths, said: “My goodness !” and felt almost normal. He bound a linen handkerchief around his wrist, but the hand kept bleeding. He tried the elbow, and that made it hurt. So he stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket and simply waved the hand stupidly in the air until the blood clotted.
It wasn’t much of a wound. Two of the balls of shot had struck him, one passing through the fleshy part of his thumb and the other scoring the side. As he thought of it, he became a little proud that he had borne a gunshot wound. He strolled along in the midmorning sunlight, feeling a dreamy communion with the boys at the front. “The whine of shot and shell—” Where had he read that? Ah, what a story this would make. “And there beside the”—what was the line—“the embattled farmer stood.” Didn’t the awfulest things happen in the nicest places? This was a nice forest. No screeches and snakes and deep dark menaces. Not a storybook wood at all. Shot by a gun. How exciting! He was now—he strutted—a gentleman adventurer. He did not see the great moist horror that clumped along behind him, though his nostrils crinkled a little with its foulness.
The monster had three little holes close together on its chest, and one little hole in the middle of its slimy forehead. It h
ad three close-set pits in its back and one on the back of its head. These marks were where Alton Drew’s bullets had struck and passed through. Half of the monster’s shapeless face was sloughed away, and there was a deep indentation on its shoulder. This was what Alton Drew’s gun butt had done after he clubbed it and struck at the thing that would not lie down after he put his four bullets through it. When these things happened the monster was not hurt or angry. It only wondered why Alton Drew acted that way. Now it followed the little man without hurrying at all, matching his stride step by step and dropping little particles of muck behind it.
The little man went on out of the wood and stood with his back against a big tree at the forest’s edge, and he thought. Enough had happened to him here. What good would it do to stay and face a horrible murder inquiry, just to continue this silly, vague quest? There was supposed to be the ruin of an old, old hunting lodge deep in this wood somewhere, and perhaps it would hold the evidence he wanted. But it was a vague report—vague enough to be forgotten without regret. It would be the height of foolishness to stay for all the hick-town red tape that would follow that ghastly affair back in the wood. Ergo, it would be ridiculous to follow that farmer’s advice, to go to his house and wait for him. He would go back to town.
The monster was leaning against the other side of the big tree.
The little man snuffled disgustedly at a sudden overpowering odor of rot. He reached for his handkerchief, fumbled and dropped it. As he bent to pick it up, the monster’s arm whuffed heavily in the air where his head had been—a blow that would certainly have removed that baby-faced protuberance. The man stood up and would have put the handkerchief to his nose had it not been so bloody. The creature behind the tree lifted its arm again just as the little man tossed the handkerchief away and stepped out into the field, heading across country to the distant highway that would take him back to town. The monster pounced on the handkerchief, picked it up, studied it, tore it across several times, and inspected the tattered edges. Then it gazed vacantly at the disappearing figure of the little man, and finding him no longer interesting, turned back into the woods.
Babe broke into a trot at the sound of the shots. It was important to warn Uncle Alton about what her father had said, but it was more interesting to find out what he had bagged. Oh, he’d bagged it, all right. Uncle Alton never fired without killing. This was about the first time she had ever heard him blast away like that. Must be a bear, she thought excitedly, tripping over a root, sprawling, rolling to her feet again, without noticing the tumble. She’d love to have another bearskin in her room. Where would she put it? Maybe they could line it and she could have it for a blanket. Uncle Alton could sit on it and read to her in the evening—Oh, no. No. Not with this trouble between him and dad. Oh, if she could only do something! She tried to run faster, worried and anticipating, but she was out of breath and went more slowly instead.
At the top of the rise by the edge of the woods she stopped and looked back. Far down in the valley lay the south thirty. She scanned it carefully, looking for her father. The new furrows and the old were sharply defined, and her keen eyes saw immediately that Cory had left the line with the cultivator and had angled the team over to the shade trees without finishing his row. That wasn’t like him. She could see the team now, and Cory’s pale-blue denim was not in sight.
A little nearer was the house; and as her gaze fell on it she moved out of the cleared pathway. Her father was coming; she had seen his shotgun and he was running. He could really cover ground when he wanted to. He must be chasing her, she thought immediately. He’d guessed that she would run toward the sound of the shots, and he was going to follow her tracks to Uncle Alton and shoot him. She knew that he was as good a woodsman as AIton; he would most certainly see her tracks. Well, she’d fix him.
She ran along the edge of the wood, being careful to dig her heels deeply into the loam. A hundred yards of this, and she angled into the forest and ran until she reached a particularly thick grove of trees. Shinnying up like a squirrel, she squirmed from one close-set tree to another until she could go no farther back toward the path, then dropped lightly to the ground and crept on her way, now stepping very gently. It would take him an hour to beat around for her trail, she thought proudly, and by that time she could easily get to Uncle Alton. She giggled to herself as she thought of the way she had fooled her father. And the little sound of laughter drowned out, for her, the sound of Alton’s hoarse dying scream.
She reached and crossed the path and slid through the brush beside it. The shots came from up around here somewhere. She stopped and listened several times, and then suddenly heard something coming toward her, fast. She ducked under cover, terrified, and a Iittle baby-faced man in black, his blue eyes wide with horror, crashed blindly past her, the leather case he carried catching on the branches. It spun a moment and then fell right in front of her. The man never missed it.
Babe lay there for a long moment and then picked up the case and faded into the woods. Things were happening too fast for her. She wanted Uncle Alton, but she dared not call. She stopped again and strained her ears. Back toward the edge of the wood she heard her father’s voice, and another’s—probably the man who had dropped the briefcase. She dared not go over there. Filled with enjoyable terror, she thought hard, then snapped her fingers in triumph. She and Alton had played Injun many times up here; they had a whole repertoire of secret signals. She had practiced bird-calls until she knew them better than the birds themselves. What would it be? Ah—blue jay. She threw back her head and by some youthful alchemy produced a nerve-shattering screech that would have done justice to any jay that ever flew. She repeated it, and then twice more.
The response was immediate—the call of a blue jay, four times, spaced two and two. Babe nodded to herself happily. That was the signal that they were to meet immediately at The Place. The Place was a hide-out that he had discovered and shared with her, and not another soul knew of it; an angle of rock beside a stream not far away. It wasn’t exactly a cave, but almost. Enough so to be entrancing. Babe trotted happily away toward the brook. She had just known that Uncle Alton would remember the call of the blue jay, and what it meant.
In the tree that arched over Alton’s scattered body perched a large jay bird, preening itself and shining in the sun. Quite unconscious of the presence of death, hardly noticing the Babe’s realistic cry, it screamed again four times, two and two.
It took Cory more than a moment to recover himself from what he had seen: He turned away from it and leaned weakly against a pine, panting. Alton. That was Alton lying there, in—parts.
“God! God, God, God—”
Gradually his strength returned, and he forced himself to turn again. Stepping carefully, he bent and picked up the .32-40. Its barrel was bright and clean, but the butt and stock were smeared with some kind of stinking rottenness. Where had he seen the stuff before? Somewhere—no matter. He cleaned it off absently, throwing the befouled bandanna away afterward. Through his mind ran Alton’s words—was that only last night?—“I’m goin’ to start trackin’. An” I’m goin’ to keep trackin’ till I find the one done this job on Kimbo.”
Cory searched shrinkingly until he found Alton’s box of shells. The box was wet and sticky. That made it—better, somehow. A bullet wet with Alton’s blood was the right thing to use. He went away a short distance, circled around till he found heavy footprints, then came back.
“I’m a-trackin’ for you, bud,” he whispered thickly, and began. Through the brush he followed its wavering spoor, amazed at the amount of filthy mold about, gradually associating it with the thing that had killed his brother. There was nothing in the world for him any more but hate and doggedness. Cursing himself for not getting Alton home last night, he followed the tracks to the edge of the woods. They led him to a big tree there, and there he saw something else—the footprints of the little city man. Nearby lay some tattered scraps of linen, and—what was that?
Another set
of prints—small ones. Small, stub-toed ones. Babe’s.
“Babe! ” Cory screamed. “Babe!”
No answer. The wind sighed. Somewhere a blue jay called.
Babe stopped and turned when she heard her father’s voice, faint with distance, piercing.
“Listen at him holler,” she crooned delightedly. “Gee, he sounds mad.” She sent a jay bird’s call disrespectfully back to him and hurried to The Place.
It consisted of a mammoth boulder beside the brook. Some upheaval in the glacial age had cleft it, cutting out a huge, V shaped chunk. The widest part of the cleft was at the water’s edge, and the narrowest was hidden by bushes. It made a litlle ceilingless room, rough and uneven and full of potholes and cavelets inside, and yet with quite a level floor.
Babe parted the bushes and peered down the cleft.
“Uncle Alton!” she called softly. There was no answer. Oh, well, he’d be along. She scrambled in and slid down to the floor.
She loved it here. It was shaded and cool, and the chattering little stream filled it with shifting golden lights and laughing gurgles. She called again, on principle, and then perched on 1111 outcropping to wait. It was only then she realised that she still carried the little man’s briefcase.
She turned it over a couple of times and then opened if. It was divided in the middle by a leather wall. On one side were a few papers in a large yellow envelope, and on the other some sandwiches, a candy bar, and an apple. With a youngster’s complacent acceptance of manna from heaven, Babe fell to. She saved one sandwich for Alton, mainly because she didn’t like its highly spiced bologna. The rest made quite a feast.
She was a little worried when Alton hadn’t arrived, even after she had consumed the apple core. She got up and tried to skim some flat pebbles across the roiling brook, and she stood on her hands, and she tried to think of a story to tell herself, and she tried just waiting. Finally, in desperation, she turned again to the briefcase, took out the papers, curled up by the rocky wall and began to read them. It was something to do, anyway.
The Dark Side Page 14
