by R. R. Irvine
******
Harry smiled at Graham. In a way she was sorry now that she’d started in on the newspaper files. She wanted to talk to him about life, not death. And with good reason, she admitted to herself. He was the most interesting man she’d met in a long time, certainly the most interesting man in Moondance.
But how to change the subject?
“Here’s another story,” she said, handing him a clipping from the Ledger. “And this one doesn’t have any bear traps.”
“Or mutilated hands, I hope.” He did his best to sound flippant, but she detected a tortured undertone.
She sneaked a look at his metal hand. No, she might as well call it what it was, a hook. It fascinated her in a shivery sort of way.
He squinted at the yellowed newsprint.
The story she’d given him went back nearly two years. As she listened to Graham reading, the sound of her own written words made Harry uneasy.
“Two young prospectors have been found frozen to death in the high Uintas. According to a U.S. Forestry Service spokesman, their bodies were discovered on the slopes of Mount Lovenia, a thirteen-thousand-two-hundred-and-nineteen-foot peak in the northern portion of the Unita Primitive Area.’” Graham stopped reading to peer at her intently. “I’ve already heard something about this.”
“Keep reading.”
He did, but this time to himself, which annoyed and relieved her at the same time. Once finished, he asked, “Is it true—that they froze to death in the middle of the summer?”
“Yes, and it was a record-hot August.”
“There must have been a freak storm.”
“Two years ago there were no freak storms. Just the opposite in fact. It was a hot, muggy summer.”
“What are you trying to say, Harry?”
“You haven’t seen the high places yet, so it’s difficult to explain. Once you get above the timberline, it’s a gray, forbidding world up there. Those two men, they were frozen solid.”
His only answer was a nervous jerk of his head.
She went on. “Strange things have a way of happening in the Uintas.”
“Not to mention Moondance,” he added. “Still, there has to be a logical explanation.”
“According to what the rangers told me, the two prospectors had all the necessary survival equipment. But they had something else, too, animal hides. So the rangers figured that they turned to illegal trapping when they didn’t find gold.”
“More poaching?”
“Yes, and something else. They hadn’t used their sleeping bags. Instead, they froze to death right out in the open. It was almost as if they wanted to die.”
“I’ve heard that freezing is a good way to go?” He made it half question, half statement.
“It’s supposed to be like going to sleep,” she said.
Graham nodded agreement.
“Only one thing wrong with that, I talked to the rangers personally. They said those two looked like they died in terrible agony.”
15
THE THUNDERHEADS were gone. They had swept the late afternoon sky so clean that Moondance shimmered despite the dying sunlight.
Graham found himself blinking against the brilliance as he opened the station wagon door. Even after he’d climbed inside, he found the light unreal. Sundown wasn’t more than minutes away.
He glanced at Harry, who was already seated behind the wheel. A squint was puckering her face as she peered through the windshield. He found the resulting wrinkles pleasant to look at; they softened her image, adding age and compassion at the same time.
“It’s Saturday night,” he said. “What do people do around here for entertainment?”
Her smile added yet another network of wrinkles around her eyes. “After ten o’clock there’s only one place open—the Dairy Queen.”
“You mean, it’s ice cream or nothing.”
“People in Moondance go to bed early.”
He detected no double entendre, yet his mind began turning over the idea of how Harry would be in bed. But the ache in his long-gone hand told him to forget it. He didn’t need any more pain right now.
She started the engine. “I thought you were tired.”
“Those horror stories of yours weren’t exactly bedtime fare.”
“Are you having second thoughts about Moondance?”
“My second thoughts are about spending another night alone in an isolated house.”
She laughed gently. “Is that a proposition?”
He wanted to say, Yes, please. “No.”
Her good humor faded as quickly as the sun. In the sudden twilight, she popped the clutch, spun the tires, and drove out of town at what seemed to Graham like breakneck speed.
At the turnoff, he said, “You don’t have to bother coming down to the house. I can walk from here. It’s not a leg I’ve lost, you know.”
“I’m taking you right to your goddamned doorstep,” she snapped.
******
“My father had a favorite saying,” Graham told Harry. “A woman’s place is in the stove. It was his way of making fun of women’s liberation.”
Harry kept right on preparing dinner.
“The way to a man’s stomach,” he continued, “is through his mouth.”
“Cute,” she said. “But no cigar.”
He was ill at ease yet comfortable with Harry at the same time. That, he told himself, was because she was so unpredictable. One moment she had seemed hostile, and the next thing he knew she’d walked right in and started cooking.
“Not long now,” she announced.
“It smells great.”
“This is my quick, canned stew. For best results it really ought to stand overnight.”
“Not a bad idea,” he said. “We could have it for breakfast.” It came out without his thinking, like the old days before he had the hand to contend with. Now, his face grew hot, his smile forced. Would she take his comment as an honest-to-God proposition? How could she, since he didn’t even know how he’d meant it himself?
No, he decided, he hadn’t meant it. After all, he didn’t need any more problems; he didn’t want to find out if his love life had sunk to the level of his painting.
So why didn’t she say something?
His ears felt hot enough to be bright red.
“I think I’ll wash up,” he said quickly. “Don’t start without me.”
“Five minutes,” she warned, concentrating on the simmering stew. “I don’t want it to get cold.”
So much for his proposition. She was treating him like a child. And maybe he deserved it.
Once in the bathroom, his bladder threatened to explode. His left hand fumbled with his fly. Damn! He tried using his hook on the zipper, but that, too, was ineffective. Finally, his left hand managed to unhook his belt, then the top button of his pants and, at last, the zipper.
He sighed. It was like a dam letting loose.
Yet the sense of physical relief also made him want to cry. How in God’s name would he ever be able to seduce a woman when even his own zipper gave him trouble? Imagine trying to unsnap a bra subtlely. Ha! He’d have to file his hook until it was sharp enough to cut off her underwear.
At the washbasin, he stabbed viciously at a bar of soap. His hook screeched along the enamel. Clenching his teeth against the sound, he jabbed again, this time skewering the Ivory dead-center.
Once he’d dried himself, he took out a fresh bar of soap. The last thing he wanted was Harry witnessing his bad-tempered handiwork.
Then a thought occurred to him. Maybe he should change his hook for the plastic hand. Maybe . . .
No. The plastic hand wouldn’t be fooling anyone, least of all Harry.
Before leaving the bathroom, he wiped his hook one last time. As he did so, he could plainly feel each of his missing fingers. They ached like the devil.
The devil was also on Harry’s mind as they sat down to eat in the kitchen. “Sometimes I think this country belongs to Satan.”
&
nbsp; “Mm,” he said through his first mouthful. “Delicious.”
“I’m serious, Jack.” She gave him a hard look, then sampled her stew, chewing the mouthful for a long time. “What about those clippings I showed you?”
He shrugged and kept on eating, grimly. The stew tasted worse than his own cooking. Even so, he felt obliged to go on chewing.
“Those aren’t the only stories, you know. The old-timers around here can tell you tales dating back a lot of years.” She paused to wash down a mouthful of stew with cold beer.
Then she made a face. “You won’t make me mad if you don’t eat this.” She pushed away her plate. “Not one of my better efforts. I wonder what went wrong?”
“It’s not that bad.” He took another bite, but then he, too, gave up on the concoction. “Maybe you were right the first time. It ought to age overnight.”
He held up his left hand to signal that there was no innuendo intended.
“Age won’t do anything for this.” She poked her fork at a piece of shapeless meat. “Except make it worse.”
“Just like your horror stories, I’m afraid. You know how people always go out of their way to embellish the local folklore. It’s a tradition to add more ghosts and goblins with each new telling.”
“Even Brigham Young had second thoughts about the high Uintas,” she said defensively. “After the Mormon pioneers arrived in Salt Lake City in 1847, they began to spread out, consolidating their position. Brigham Young was nobody’s fool. He wanted as much land as possible colonized by his people. That way he figured to keep outsiders out.”
She paused, toying with her beer. “He was like a king securing national boundaries. That’s when he sent a group of settlers into the high Uintas. But they didn’t survive. Officially, the disaster was blamed on the heavy winter that year, but after that nobody wanted to settle here. The fact is, it was several years before the church found anyone willing to give Moondance a second chance. Some say they were new converts ordered in here under threat of excommunication from the church.”
She looked up from her glass and stared Graham in the face. Her eyes shone. “That second group of settlers had trouble, too, but most of them survived. Even so, strange reports were sent back to Salt Lake. The survivors pleaded to be recalled from this place. But Brigham Young wouldn’t allow it, though after that he is said to have referred to the high Uintas as „The Devil’s Ground.’”
Hearsay, Graham thought, but drained his beer rather than say so out loud.
“What do you think about that?” she asked.
“I’ll get us a couple more beers and we’ll drink to old Brigham.”
“It’s no joking matter.”
He agreed, but got the drinks anyway.
“Moondance itself,” Harry went on, “was named by one of the first scouts to see the area. He named it Moondance because he claimed to have seen strange figures dancing in the moonlight.”
Graham spilled his fresh beer and suddenly wondered if visions of nocturnal dancing were contagious, a strange virus indigenous to the Uinta Mountains.
Harry handed him a napkin before continuing. “He claimed to have seen dancing animals.”
“A werewolf waltz,” Graham said, meaning to sound flippant. Instead, the remark came out in deadly earnest. “I refuse to believe in spirits.”
“Don’t tempt fate,” she said earnestly. “I know the people around here. What they don’t need is another unsolved mystery, or another strange story in the Ledger.99
“Does that mean you’re not going to print the latest one?”
“Do I have the right?”
“You’re the only one who can answer that,” he said.
Harry shook herself as if trying to throw off her mood. “Since I did the cooking, you get the dishes.”
“Like stew, they get better if you let them stand overnight.” Graham’s words came out sounding brittle. He, too, needed a good shaking to dispel his own ghosts.
“You look like you’ve been poisoned,” she said.
They carried their beer into the living room. There he said, “It’s not your cooking, so it must be the altitude.”
She settled down on the leather couch that faced the stone fireplace. Across the room, Shotgun, who’d been sleeping, raised his head and tested the air.
“Hey,” Graham said to Harry, “I hope this won’t hurt your feelings, but how about me giving the rest of the stew to Shotgun?”
“Certainly. That’s better than wasting it.”
Shotgun made short work of the leftovers.
“I’m a success after all,” Harry said, smiling as the dog cleaned every last lick from its bowl.
Then all three of them returned to the living room: Harry to the couch, Graham perched on the hearth with Shotgun at his feet.
“You know,” Harry began, “I just remembered something that Yeba Kah told me. About a month ago I was doing an article on him. He said the animals would dance for him.”
Graham had trouble swallowing. He tried to speak, coughed, then managed to ask, “Did you believe him?”
“The point is, I mentioned the dancing bit to Hiram Benyon, and our mayor just about went through the roof. He told me not to print the story. He said he didn’t want any bad publicity for the Hunting Ground.”
“And did you print it?”
“No. Maybe that makes me a bad journalist, but I thought Yeba Kah was probably pulling my leg anyway.”
“Would you believe me,” Graham said, “if I told you that I’d seen the dancing?”
She stared at him intently. “Tell me about it.”
“Let’s forget it. I must have been hallucinating.”
She insisted.
So he told her, sketchily at first, but gradually adding more and more detail.
“Do you think I’m crazy?” he asked when he’d finished his story.
“No. I believe you. I don’t think you’re the kind of man to imagine things. Not like that anyway.”
“What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know, but it scares the hell out of me.”
16
DEL TIMMONS smiled in his sleep as he killed Jack Graham, over and over again, in various ways, each more satisfying than the last.
But then death got out of hand. Graham started to fight back. Timmons woke with a start.
His mouth tasted awful, and he was so dry that when his tongue attempted to moisten his teeth, it stuck against the enamel. He rolled off the living room sofa, rubbing a hand over his face that had been pockmarked by the couch’s nubby fabric.
He tried using his tongue to wet his lips. Nothing. Not so much as a drop of spit.
A sigh escaped him. He felt guilty, the guilt that always followed his naps, because a man should never sleep while there’s work yet to be done.
Timmons staggered into the bathroom, ran the tap for a moment, then bent down and wrapped his lips around the corroded metal spigot. He sucked and sucked until his stomach sloshed with cool artesian water.
Then he slumped down on the edge of the bathtub and tried to think. Instantly his mind filled with images of Jack Graham and that damn dog. God, how he hated them both.
Graham, the animal lover. Shoot! The man was no better than an animal himself. A ferret. No. Graham had more of a weasel look to him, the same kind of weasel face the other one had, the man who’d tried to steal Timmons’s wife.
He exhaled sharply. Of course, that wife-stealing weasel had two good arms. More like three, to hear Timmons’s wife when he caught them together. The third being the one that hung between his legs.
Well, one weasel was like another. Kill one, you might as well kill another.
Bubbling with renewed enthusiasm, Timmons jumped to his feet, but instantly lost his balance and had to steady himself against the tile wall.
“Nothing to get excited about,” he said. “You just got up too quickly.”
Even so, his body felt elongated, while compressed in upon itself at the s
ame time. He eased over to the washbasin and was about to splash water on his face when he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror.
What he saw started him screaming.
He fled the house at a dead run. The thing in the mirror followed right behind him, its breath burning the back of his neck.
Panic, like the jabbing of spurs, urged him across an irrigation ditch at full gallop. He came down like a clumsy steeplechase horse, legs buckling momentarily before recovering enough to fling himself forward again.
Speed was his only hope. Lose a step and he would be caught from behind. If that happened . . .
A monstrous picture filled his brain, so monstrous that he whinnied with fear and raced even faster. He was seeing his own terrible death, the kind of death that he’d always feared most.
His mouth opened so wide his jaw muscles creaked. The whinny died and was replaced by a high-pitched moan that ran before him in the darkness, toward the trees beyond the pasture land.
The trees, new-leafed aspens, were his hope. Reach them and he could hide from the thing that he’d seen in the mirror.
His moan became a gasp for air. His heart was pounding toward explosion. How much longer could he run like this? Until he died, his mind answered. Any death was better than the vision he’d just seen.
Run! his brain screamed. The thing, the vision, was at his heels. He could hear it, feel it, smell it.
He remembered every detail seen in the mirror, a specter beyond bearing.
His mind reeled. How could such a thing be? He should have been there in the mirror. His own reflection. A man just didn’t become invisible.
Without losing a step, he nodded. He understood now. The thing had been behind him, that’s all, and in the excitement he hadn’t noticed his own face.
A perfectly understandable mistake, considering the evil that he had been forced to look upon.
His lungs burned, itched with fire. He was killing himself, yet he dared not stop.
But what if that had been his own image in the mirror?
Fool! Nothing human could look like that. Only nightmares, secret fears, held such terror.
