“You wrecked out here? I know you said you went out this way, but I thought you said it was a skunk you almost hit?”
“That’s correct. Incomplete, but correct. Look, I’ll fill you in later. I didn’t want Dave and Lu to worry, so I told them it happened on the mountain. That’s the version you heard, right?”
“Right. And now I feel all left out.”
“Don’t,” I assured him. “It was complicated and weird. I didn’t tell anyone, so don’t get pouty on me.”
Up ahead, I spotted a more suitable candidate for the tree-victim, and I called their attention to it. “Maybe there. That looks about right; I think I see something on the ground, too. That must be it.”
As one, we broke into a jog until we reached the spot where the tree had been violently skinned right around fender level. Benny confirmed the site by holding up a red plastic piece of my blinker light.
“Okay. Now where did you go from here?”
“I went…this way, through the trees. I didn’t have a crowbar or a tire iron or anything, so I went looking for a good stiff branch to pry the car’s wheel-well away from the tire. It was bent in sharp—I was afraid it was going to blow the tire if I tried to drive it away like that.”
“Right. Lead the way.” She prompted me forward, and I reluctantly led.
“I went along like this,” I narrated as I went. I didn’t want to stop talking, or the eerie, harsh atmosphere would get too good a foothold. “It was dark though, pitch dark, and my light was—no, I didn’t have a light.” I’d left it with Malachi, so I could find my way back to him.
“Don’t you always keep that little one right there in your car?” Benny asked, and I wanted to kick him in the shin for being so observant.
“The batteries were dead. I left it. Anyway, I followed the sound of the river. Listen. You can hear the river from here, but you’ve got to be quiet.” I quit talking then. My companions didn’t.
“Are we that close to the water? I don’t hear anything,” Benny said.
Dana frowned. “Me either.”
I closed my eyes. “Right. Okay, no. That’s why. I’ve got it now—I didn’t hear the river. I thought I was hearing the river. But I wasn’t. It was him.”
“He sounds like the river?”
“When he was near, I heard a funny noise. Or, I didn’t hear it, I…felt it in my ears. It’s hard to explain. Like radio static or electricity, but not quite. You’ll know it if you run into it. You may not know what it is at first, but you’ll figure it out.”
The humidity pulled close around us, and I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand. Again I felt the pull of something negative and restless. Every time I wasn’t specifically concentrating on something else, like talking, the creeping grudge closed in.
Dana didn’t comment on it, and I knew she must have been aware of it; so maybe she wanted it near. Maybe, in her grief, she enjoyed its almost fierce unhappiness.
Benny was blissfully oblivious, or if he wasn’t, he had me fooled.
“Just keep your ears open,” I told them both. “Listen for it. You’ll hear it in your head, and in the pit of your stomach. It’s not bad, but it’s strange.”
I thought of Kitty, less than a mile away and locked in her clean white room. She might be able to tell us something more specific, or then again, she might not; if the Hairy Man hadn’t been underneath her windowsill recently, she probably wouldn’t have much to tell us. I wondered how she was doing. I wondered if she was okay.
I looked over at Dana, and directed my attention to her instead. “I know he hangs around the hospital sometimes,” I said.
“How do you know that?” Dana asked, and, as was becoming a habit, I fudged the answer rather than give away my brother’s involvement.
“I know some people who work there. He’s been spotted by patients on the first floor—not that anyone believes them. Inmates in an asylum don’t have reams of credibility, I’m afraid.” Not as much as television personalities, I thought. I didn’t say it, though.
“Are you sure they’re talking about the same guy?”
“Pretty sure, yes. What are the odds that they’re not? How many hair-covered paranormal beasts can a few acres hold, anyway?”
She scowled, pulling her eyebrows close together until there was a sharp vertical wrinkle above her nose. “I ask, because the way you talked about him he was interesting, strange, and possibly confused; and that’s not what I’m getting here. This whole area feels…it feels…”
“Mean,” I answered for her. It wasn’t exactly what I meant, but the words at my disposal were limited and inadequate. “Whatever’s here, it doesn’t like us. It doesn’t want us here. But I think that this is something different from Green Eyes. I think it was that way before he came here.”
“What? What are you guys talking about?” Benny wanted to know. I didn’t blame him, but I couldn’t make him understand, either.
Dana stopped, and we stopped with her, turning to face her. “It’s kind of like…,” she began, hesitated, and started again. “It feels like a child, or an animal that’s been hurt by someone—but it’s not sure who, or why. And it doesn’t know what to do about it. But it wants restitution all the same. And I’m sorry, kid, but that’s the best I can do.”
“Nice. Your best is better than mine,” I congratulated her. “Good call.”
“Thanks.”
Inertia kept us in place, and something more primal kept us close together. Even if Benny couldn’t consciously detect the malaise that hunkered over the Bend, some subconscious demand for self-preservation smelled it all the same and didn’t like it.
You didn’t have to have any special abilities to pick it up, anyway. The danger was in the way the birds never sang, and the way there was no wind coming off the wide band of water that surrounds the place. It was there in the absence of everything else—in the failure of small animals to scuttle, and in the stiffness of the trees.
There’s a special fear that God, or evolution, or Mother Nature builds into slow, fleshy, unclawed bipeds. It’s a hypersensitivity to ambience, and it keeps us alive, even when we don’t know it when we feel it.
Benny was feeling it hardcore. I could see it by the way he hung close between Dana and me, where at the beginning of the quest he was our intrepid leader. His eyes were dilated wide like a nervous cat’s.
He was sweating, too, but we were all sweating, even though the lateness of the hour meant a slight and blessed cooling. “Spring has sprung, fall has fell, summer’s here, it’s hot as hell,” as the naughty fourth-grade jump-rope rhyme goes. July means sauna, and it probably wouldn’t drop below eighty degrees before nine o’clock. Some people never get used to it. Others never get used to anything else.
We pushed our way through the unyielding trees and between them. Beneath the canopy it was almost too dark to see, but it was that funny sort of mid-light that a flashlight doesn’t help much.
Benny turned his on anyway. I waited.
Dana tugged at the satchel on Benny’s arm and pulled out the multimeter.
“Do you hear something?”
“I can’t tell,” she replied. “Maybe, I’d be more confident if I could see something, though. Give me a minute.”
The device she held was about the size of a paperback novel, with a screen and a whole lot of buttons. She slid her thumb around the side and pressed a power switch, made some adjustments, and ordered us both behind her. “You two. Over here. And hold very, very still.”
I’d never seen anything like it. “You’re not suggesting we could affect the—”
“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. This isn’t a toy. Shit.”
“What?”
“I can’t hold it steady enough; it’s reading funny.”
“I’ll hold it,” Benny offered.
“No, that’s okay. There’s a rock there big enough to hold it. I’m going to set it down. We’ll get a better read that way anyhow.” She set a dial the way she wanted it and carefully set the meter down on the rock. If my sense of direction served me, she aimed it at the river.
She stepped away, backwards, towards us. She held her arms out as if she were holding us back or telling us to wait for something; and when the lighted LCD on the meter began to flicker with data, she twitched her wrists as if she were conducting the information with a baton.
“Yes,” she breathed. “Yes, yes, yes. Pick it up. Where is it?”
“Where’s what?” Benny wanted to know, but even as he asked the question I was just beginning to hear it myself.
Oh so faint. Oh so light. Barely within my range of hearing.
There it was.
“Listen, Benny,” I said, my voice roughly as quiet as Dana’s. “Close your eyes and listen. Do you hear the river now?”
He did as I told him. “Yes? I think I hear it. The river—it’s a rushing, a quiet hissing. Is that what that sound is, the river?”
“No,” I murmured. “It’s not.”
Dana raised one arm and pointed at the meter, which flickered with numbers that were meaningless to me.
“What does it say?” I asked. “Is it getting closer?”
“No,” she said.
“Where is he?” Benny raised the more direct question.
“I don’t know. But if he’s the thing making that sound, he’s stranger than anything I’ve ever met.”
Strange. That’s what everyone who’d seen him said. Of course, most people claimed he was evil, too, but I didn’t buy it. I was willing to buy strange, but the dismal pall that the Bend played host to was not of Green Eyes’s making. I wondered what it was, though.
I’d heard people talk about the way it felt to stand at the Bend, and the sense of wrongness the place held. An old friend of mine who’d done an internship there while she was getting her psych degree had said it felt like something was unfinished, and that the Bend had become impatient, and frustrated. I hadn’t known what she meant before. Not when I’d been out there with Malachi the first time; and the second time, when I’d gone to see Kitty, it had not been so strong. “It’s growing,” I said, not about the signal the meter registered, but to conclude my thoughts.