Dreamthorp

by Williamson, Chet

  "Because the trees grew over them," Charlie said softly. "Because their spirits were trapped and had nowhere else to go. So when the trees grew, the spirits mingled with the roots, maybe over this whole grove, or what's left of it, and went up into the trees themselves."

  "And became part of the trees."

  "Yes."

  "And when the trees were cut down for lumber, the spirits stayed in the wood. . ."

  "Yes."

  "So everything that was made with wood from this grove . . ." Tom thought it out painfully.

  "Shelters these spirits, who are hungry for revenge."

  "But, Charlie, if the wood was cut down and taken away and made into things—furniture like Martha Sipling's blanket box, and, and . . ." He tried to think of what else. Charlie told him.

  "And the playhouse pillars and floorboards for the Ice Cream Shoppe and gift shop columns and the steps that old Thatcher fell down, and . . ." Charlie paused.

  "And my carvings," Tom said.

  "And your carvings."

  "But what took so long?" Tom said, almost desperately. "Those things were taken away from this grove, away from the quartz totem, or whatever the hell it was. Why didn't they . . . do something right away. If they were free?"

  "Maybe the fact that the totem was still over the bones was enough, I don't know. But once it was removed, the spirits were freed, no matter where they were or what they had become."

  "I think," Tom said slowly, "that you're trying to create too complete a theory."

  "As far as I'm concerned, there can't be too complete a theory. Like I said, this has aninternal logic."

  "Okay, okay, sure, if you accept its existence, maybe it does. But make sure that you're not seeing things that aren't there just because they fit your theory."

  "Tom," Charlie said patiently, "if you . . . if anyone can come up with something that makes more sense . . . even if you make it out of whole cloth . . . I'll grab it and be delighted. But, Tom"—he whispered the final three words—"there isn't anything."

  Tom stood there for a long time, thinking about the wood, about the deaths, about Grover Kraybill and what he had believed, about his father's final words. He thought too about the carving he had made, about the lambent life he had seen in it. Then he looked down at the pile of bones, at the skulls leering up at him with their shattered, gray-yellow grins, and he knew that what Charlie said was true. He also knew that he was denying it because it went against everything he had ever learned or believed. But dammit, dammit, oh goddamit, it had to be true.

  "What do we do then?" he said.

  "You believe me?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, thank God for that. Now, as for what to do . . . you're with me? You don't want to leave? Just pack up and move away?"

  "Charlie, I've lost an awful lot in the past year, what most people take a lifetime to lose. I'm damned if I'm going to lose Dreamthorp as well. It's all I've got left. And there's something . . . someone else."

  "Laura."

  "Yes. I love her, and this is her home too, just like it is mine." He reached out, grasped his friend's hand, and held on tight. "I'm in it."

  "And thank God for that too," Charlie said, smiling. "But what about Laura? You think she'll believe it?"

  Tom wasn't sure and didn't want to answer for her. He had been with Laura long enough to know that she was her own person. Too, he had felt her doubts, far stronger than his own, when they had met Grover Kraybill. "I don't know. She lives very much in the real world."

  "We all do. But when something from the shadow world comes into our real world, we've got to do something about it."

  "And what do we do?"

  Charlie looked around nervously. "We get out of here, for one thing. It feels too goddam naked, too exposed. I feel like we're talking military secrets in the enemy's camp."

  Tom nodded at the bones. "What do we do about those?"

  "Let's cover them up. We can find them when we need to."

  "And why do we want to find them again?"

  "I'll tell you once we're out of here." Charlie forced a grin, then knelt by the hole and took out a small handful of objects that might have been beads.

  "What are those for?" Tom asked.

  "We may need them later. You'll see." Charlie straightened and pointed at the hole. "So dig, boy, dig."

  "Dig we must," Tom said, kneeling and putting the bones back into the hole.

  "Once a bopster, always a bopster."

  Laura saw Tom and Charlie come walking down Emerson at six o'clock, and she waved to them from her porch. She thought they looked uneasy as they joined her, and the two gin and tonics she gave them quelled that uneasiness only a little.

  "What is it?" she asked Tom, and he told her then, too carefully and logically, she felt, as though he were talking to a child, what they had found and what they believed. At one point he asked her for a pencil and paper and wrote down a list of the occurrences, the dates, and the mode of death, which he handed back to her. When he finished talking, both men looked at Laura, waiting.

  "I don't know," she finally said. "I don't think I can accept that."

  "It's the only thing that makes sense," Tom said.

  "The only thing we know of that does," Laura replied. "But maybe we don't know everything."

  "What bothers you about it?" Tom asked. "The supernatural? The magic?"

  She nodded. "I guess the magic. Amulets, evil spirits, wood demons, whatever you want to call them. It just seems like it's all out of an old book. It's not that I disbelieve it—I guess I'm just"—she smiled—"an agnostic about it."

  "But if there's no harm done," Charlie said, "will you help us when you can?"

  Laura shrugged. "Yes, all right, I suppose so, if I can."

  "But your heart's not in it," Tom said with a little smile. Laura was glad to see the smile, glad that he was not hurt by her disbelief.

  "No. Not really. But like I said, I'll do what I can to help. I'm not leaving either." She looked out at the darkening trees. "I let fear—and the memory of fear—chase me out of one place. It won't chase me out of Dreamthorp." She turned toward Charlie. "So you found this grave. What's next?"

  "Well," Charlie said, almost as if he were embarrassed, "I think that tomorrow you and I, Tom, ought to go to the State Museum in Harrisburg."

  "To try and get the carving?" Tom asked.

  "Yeah."

  "They'll never let us have it."

  "They'll have to. We'll tell them the story."

  Tom winced. "Oh no, Charlie . . ."

  "We have to. In confidence. One person. And go from there."

  "They may think you're crazy. Or call the police," Laura said.

  "We have to take the chance. The only way to end this is to lay those things the way somebody did before. It was that carving that held them down, nothing else. And the day the Hersheys found it was the day the playhouse fell down, the day this whole thing started. So maybe if it's replaced, put back over the bones where it was, it might all stop. I'm not sure, I ain't gonna put any money on it, but it's the first order of business all the same. And the only way to do it is to get that figure back."

  They talked for a while longer, and then Laura made club sandwiches and they talked some more. She contributed little to the conversation, but glanced from time to time at the piece of paper on which Tom had written the details of the deaths.

  Charlie went back to his cottage at ten o'clock, and Tom and Laura sat on the couch together, their arms around each other, and went to bed shortly thereafter. At no time did Tom reproach her for not sharing his belief in the supernatural origins of whatever was stalking Dreamthorp, and she was grateful to him, as she was grateful to him so much of the time. After they made love, she lay awake for a while, hoping that she was not too grateful to this man for loving her, and decided that there was far more to their relationship than gratitude on her part and desire on his.

  She awoke in the middle of the night, aware of Tom trembling be
side her. She reached out to him, touched his face, and found it wet with tears. "What is it?" she asked.

  "I was dreaming. . . ." he said. "I dreamt about Susan. And Josh. I dreamt about them dying."

  "Tom," she said, holding him.

  "I can't forget it. I just can't seem to forget it."

  "You won't forget it. And you don't want to. Remember them. Not their dying, but remember them."

  "I'm . . . I'm sorry."

  "Don't be sorry. Go to sleep now. There. I have you. Now go to sleep."

  She held him like a mother holding a little boy, and after he had gone back to sleep she was still awake, looking into the night, thinking how much of little boys remained in men, thinking of Tom and Charlie and what they would do tomorrow.

  They both seemed so sincere, so eager to engage this demon or troll or bogeyman in which they believed. Like little boys, she thought, with their romance and their foolishness and their irrationality.

  They really were, weren't they? No matter how old they got. Maybe that was why so many of them were selfish.

  And why a few of them, she thought, remembering a red and thunderous night, a very frightening few, were crazy.

  Everything is sweetened by risk.

  —Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp

  "Miss Peters died two weeks ago," said the officious man, whose dress belied his manner. He was wearing a plaid shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, and a loosely-knotted knit tie. Tom couldn't see what his pants were like behind the desk, but he guessed khakis or neatly pressed, very dark blue Levi's.

  "She was the one who made the purchase," the man, whose name was Dr. Spencer, went on. He shook his head sadly. "She had a stroke in her apartment, where she lived alone. Unfortunately. If someone had been there to call an ambulance or give her CPR, she might have lived. As it was . . ." He shrugged. "But what's your interest in the piece?"

  Charlie Brewer cleared his throat. "It was found by a friend of ours. A very good friend named Sam Hershey. Sam loved metal detecting, Mr. Spencer, but he . . . well, he wasn't very good at it. Never found much of anything except for that Indian carving." Charlie chuckled. "Funny thing is, he didn't need a metal detector to find it. Wouldn't have picked it up, you know?"

  Spencer smiled and nodded. He seemed, Tom thought, friendly enough, if a bit pompous.

  "So, anyway, after he died—I guess you read about it in the papers?—his daughter, who's a friend of ours too, a school teacher, she said as how she sure wished her father hadn't sold that piece to the museum, where it'll probably sit in some storage room for the next hundred years, because if he'd kept it in the family, well, it would be in a place of honor for all the grandchildren to see and remember their grandpa, and of course she could take it to school when she was teaching about Indians, and there could be some use made of it, you know?" Charlie paused, breathless. Tom wondered if Charlie seemed as transparent a liar to Spencer as he did to him.

  "So what exactly are you getting at, Mr. Lewis?"

  "Well," Charlie said, "we'd like to buy the carving back again. For Sam's daughter."

  Spencer raised his eyebrows. "I see."

  "We'd be willing to pay more than the museum paid originally, of course," Charlie said. "I mean, you probably had paperwork expenses, things like that. And of course you're entitled to a profit."

  "Why didn't Mr. Hershey's daughter come herself to ask about repurchasing it?" Spencer asked.

  "We wanted to surprise her," Tom said, trying to smile as sincerely as he knew how. It felt terribly awkward on his face, as though he was wearing a false moustache on which the adhesive was drying up.

  "I'm sorry," Spencer said, giving no indication of whether he believed them or not, "but the museum really can't sell items to individuals."

  "But it's not selling, is it?" Charlie said. "It's more like repurchasing. Or in this case, you could just pretend that it was on loan to the museum, and now the owner wants it back."

  "I'm sorry," Spencer said again, "but we can't really pretend, as you put it, any such thing. The item is in storage, in fact, but may be put on display someday. If Mr. Hershey's daughter wants to come here and bring her family or her class, for that matter, we'll be happy to bring out the piece for them to see—it's just in that room behind us—if she calls ahead of time."

  Tom looked at Charlie out of the corner of his eye and found that Charlie was looking at him in precisely the same way.

  "There's no way to buy it then?" Tom asked.

  "No, I'm afraid not."

  "Not at any price?" Charlie asked.

  "Cost really has nothing to do with it," Spencer said. "It might," Charlie said quietly. "We'd be willing to spend a lot. A lot. Ten times what the museum paid for it. More. Whatever it takes."

  Uh-oh, Tom thought. That put Spencer on his guard. He was looking at Charlie narrowly now, and his good humor had all but vanished. "I said that cost has nothing to do with it."

  "Not even if we could make it worth your own while too?" Oh shit, that had done it. Tom watched as Spencer's cheeks reddened and his jaw set. He had never seen a more adamantine countenance. It was as though Spencer's face had suddenly been carved in red sandstone. "I think you gentlemen"—he growled the word—"have taken enough of my time. Can you find your own way out, or shall I call security to help you?"

  "Mr. Spencer," Tom said, leaning forward in his chair, "I'm sorry. We didn't mean to offend you. Charlie was . . . he was lying, because we didn't want to tell you the truth. We were . . . are afraid that you won't believe us."

  Spencer's mouth wrinkled in something that might have been a smile or a sneer. "Try me."

  "Okay. This is going to sound crazy, but we're convinced that it's true." Then Tom told Spencer about how the deaths in Dreamthorp related to the finding of the quartz carving. He told him about the modes of death, some of which had not been reported in the media, about what Grover Kraybill had thought and how he had died, and about the theory they had evolved. "So," he finished, "we think that if we replace the carving over the graves, the deaths will stop. It's that simple." Tom sighed deeply. "And that crazy."

  Spencer's face had not lost its cynical smile throughout Tom's telling of the tale. "That's a very interesting story." Charlie reached into his pocket and removed a small plastic bag, whose contents he poured onto Spencer's desk. "These are some beads we found in the grave. I don't know if they'll help you believe us or not."

  Spencer eyed the beads suspiciously, then pushed them about gingerly with an index finger. He picked up several of them, examining them, Tom thought, like a jeweler with a loupe. Finally he pushed them together in a neat pile and slid them across the desk to Charlie. "Mr. Lewis, Mr. Brewer, you are entertaining liars, but you are liars."

  "What do you—" Charlie began, but Spencer went on.

  "You didn't find those beads near Dreamthorp. That's impossible. Those are Alligewi in origin. Very rare too. But the Alligewi's farthest eastern settlement is two hundred miles west of here. So you see, you couldn't have found them near here." Spencer leaned his swivel chair back, put his hands behind his head, and looked at the ceiling. "Now if you want to know what I think, I think you're working for some private collector who's trying anything he can think of to get his hands on what is really a very scarce Lenape artifact. Those beads are simply a prop. They look old, they are old, and maybe your boss . . . your client, should I say? . . . thought that I could be fooled with them. But if so, he underestimated me."

  With a bang that made both Tom and Charlie jump, Spencer brought his seat down and slammed his arms on the top of his desk. "Your story is nothing but a tremendous crock of manure. The door's that way, and I suggest you use it. Now."

  Tom and Charlie stood up, nodded to Spencer, and walked to the door, where Tom turned back for a moment. "It's the truth, Mr. Spencer. I'm sorry we lied to you at first, but the rest was the truth."

  Spencer looked at them coldly. "Good-bye, gentlemen."

  In the elevator, Tom and Charlie stared at the f
loor until Charlie finally looked up at Tom. "Smooth talker," he said.

  "Me?" Tom said unbelievingly. "What about you and that story about the daughter? Jesus, I had no idea you were going to say that!"

  "Neither did I, right up to the point where I started it. I guess I just didn't think he'd go for the truth."

  "You were right," Tom said as the elevator doors opened on the ground floor. "Boy, were you right." They stepped out. "So what do we do now?"

  "We go to the archives," Charlie said. "I want to find out more about the Alligewi, whoever they were."

  Together, Tom and Charlie went through several books before they found one that mentioned the tribe. It was Shephard's History of Pennsylvania, and Charlie read the section softly to Tom.

  "'The Lenape spies brought back word that the country east of the Mississippi was tenanted by a powerful nation of tall and savage natives, some of whom were purported to be of gigantic stature. These warriors were called Alligewi, and the Lenape requested permission to cross their river and seek another country to the eastward. But whilst the Lenape were crossing, the Alligewi, alarmed at their great number, fell upon those who had reached the eastern shore and destroyed them, and threatened a like fate to any who dared attempt the stream. The Lenape then fell in with the Mengwe, and waged a terrible war of many years duration upon the Alligewi that ended with the total destruction of the Alligewi nation, though stories were told of a small group of Alligewi who survived by fleeing down the Namaesi Sipu (the Mississippi), and who interbred with the native tribes of the southeast, such as the Creek and the Seminole, who still reside in the area.'"

  "Okay," Tom said when Charlie was done. "So what does that tell us?"

  "It tells us who these spirits are," Charlie answered. "Savage, the man said. And easily riled, since they attacked the Lenape for no good reason." Charlie closed the heavy book. "Spencer was wrong. The Alligewi were in Dreamthorp. I'm guessing . . . just guessing that there were a bunch of warriors the Lenape chased east and finally caught up with where Dreamthorp is now. They killed them, buried them in that grove, and put that totem over them to make their spirits behave."