A Soft Barren Aftershock

  I promised myself to come back here again. Often. I was going to look up my many relatives, renew old ties. I wasn’t ready to move back here, and perhaps I never would, but I’d never turn my back on the Pinelands again.

  Creighton raised his cup to me.

  “I envy anyone who’s found the missing piece. I’m still looking for mine.”

  “You’ll find it,” I said, crawling into my bedroll. “You’ve just got to keep your eyes open. Sometimes it’s right under your nose.”

  “Go to sleep, Mac. You’re starting to sound like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.”

  I smiled at that. For a moment there he was very much like the Jonathan Creighton I’d fallen in love with. As I closed my eyes, I saw him pull out a pair of binoculars and begin scanning the cloud-choked sky. I knew what he was looking for, and I was fairly confident he’d never find them.

  It must have been a while later when I awoke, because the sky had cleared and the stars were out when Creighton’s shouts yanked me to a sitting position.

  “They’re coming! Look at them, Mac! My God, they’re coming!”

  Creighton was standing on the far side of the lamp, pointing off to my left. I followed the line of his arm and saw nothing.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Stand up, damn it! They’re coming! There must be a dozen of them!”

  I struggled to my feet and froze.

  The starlit underbrush stretched away in a gentle rise for maybe a mile or two in the direction he was pointing, broken only occasionally by the angular shadows of the few scattered trees. And coming our way over that broad expanse, skimming along at treetop level, was an oblong cluster of faintly glowing lights. Lights. That’s what they were. Not glowing spheres. Not UFOs or any of that nonsense. They had no discernible substance. They were just light. Globules of light.

  I felt my hackles rise at the sight of them. Perhaps because I’d never seen light behave that way before—it didn’t seem right or natural for light to concentrate itself in a ball. Or perhaps it was the way they moved, gliding through the night with such purpose, cutting through the dark, weaving from tree to tree, floating by the topmost branches, and then forging a path toward the next. Almost as if the trees were signposts. Or perhaps it was the silence. The awful silence. The Pine Barrens are quiet as far as civilized sounds are concerned, but there’s always the noise of the living things, the hoots and cries and rustlings of the animals, the incessant insect susurration. That was all gone now. There wasn’t even a breeze to rustle the bushes. Silence. More than a mere absence of noise. A holding of breath.

  “Do you see them, Mac? Tell me I’m not hallucinating! Do you see them?”

  “I see them, Jon.”

  My voice sounded funny. I realized my mouth was dry. And not just from sleep.

  Creighton turned around in a quick circle, his arms spread.

  “I don’t have a camera! I need a picture of this!”

  “You didn’t bring a camera?” I said. “My God, you brought everything else!”

  “I know, but I never dreamed—”

  Suddenly he was running for the tree at the center of our clearing.

  “Jon! You’re not really—?”

  “They’re coming this way! If I can get close to them—!”

  I was suddenly afraid for him. Something about those lights was warning me away. Why wasn’t it warning Creighton? Or was he simply not listening?

  I followed him at a reluctant lope.

  “Don’t be an idiot, Jon! You don’t know what they are!”

  “Exactly! It’s about time somebody found out!”

  He started climbing. It was a big old pitch pine with no branches to speak of for the first dozen feet or so of its trunk, but its bark was knobby and rough enough for Creighton’s rubber-soled boots to find purchase. He slipped off twice, but he was determined. Finally he made it to the lowest branch, and from there on it looked easy.

  I can’t explain the crawling sensation in my gut as I watched Jonathan Creighton climbing toward a rendezvous with the approaching pine lights. He was three-quarters of the way to the top when the trunk began to shake and sway with his weight. Then a branch broke under his foot and he almost fell. When I saw that he’d regained safe footing, I sighed with relief. The branches above him were too frail to hold him. He couldn’t go any higher. He’d be safe from the lights.

  And the lights were here, a good dozen of them, from baseball to basketball size, gliding across our clearing in an irregular cylindrical cluster perhaps ten feet across and twenty feet long, heading straight for Creighton’s tree.

  And the closer they got, the faster my insides crawled. They may have been made up of light but it was not a clean light, not the golden healthy light of day. This was a wan, sickly, anemic glow, tainted with the vaguest hint of green. But thankfully it was a glow out of Creighton’s reach as the lights brushed the tree’s topmost needles.

  I watched their glow limn Creighton’s upturned face as his body strained upward, and I wondered at his recklessness, at this obsession with finding “reality.” Was he flailing and floundering about in his search, or was he actually on the trail of something? And were the pine lights part of it?

  As the first light passed directly above him, not five feet beyond his outstretched hand, I heard him cry out.

  “They’re humming, Mac! High-pitched! Can you hear it? It’s almost musical! And the air up here tingles, almost as if it’s charged! This is fantastic!”

  I didn’t hear any music or feel any tingling. All I could hear was my heart thudding in my chest, all I could feel was the cold sweat that had broken out all over my body.

  Creighton spoke again—he was practically shouting now, but in a language that was not English and not like any other language I’d ever heard. He made clicks and wheezes, and the few noises that sounded like words did not seem to fit comfortably on the human tongue.

  “Jon, what are you doing up there?” I cried.

  He ignored me and kept up the alien gibberish, but the lights, in turn, ignored him and sailed by above him as if he didn’t exist.

  The cluster was almost past now, yet still I couldn’t shake the dread, the dark feeling that something awful was going to happen.

  And then it did.

  The last light in the cluster was basketball-sized. It seemed as if it was going to trail away above Creighton just like the others, but as it approached the tree, it slowed and began to drop toward Creighton’s perch.

  I was panicked now.

  “Jon, look out! It’s coming right for you!”

  “I see it!”

  As the other lights flowed off toward the next treetop, this last one hung back and circled Creighton’s tree at a height level with his waist.

  “Get down from there!” I called.

  “Are you kidding? This is more than I’d ever hoped for!”

  The light suddenly stopped moving and hovered a foot or so in front of Creighton’s chest.

  “It’s cold,” he said in a more subdued tone. “Cold light.”

  He reached his hand toward it and I wanted to shout for him not to but my throat was locked. The tip of his index finger touched the outer edge of the glow.

  “Really cold.”

  I saw his finger sink into the light to perhaps the depth of the fingernail, and then suddenly the light moved. It more than moved, it leaped onto Creighton’s hand, engulfing it.

  That’s when Creighton began to scream. His words were barely intelligible but I picked out the words “cold” and “burning” again and again. I ran to the base of the tree, expecting him to lose his balance, hoping I could do something to break his fall. I saw the ball of light stretch out and slide up the length of his arm, engulfing it.

  Then it disappeared.

  For an instant I thought it might be over. But when Creighton clutched his chest and cried out in greater agony, I realized to my horror that the light wasn’t gone—it was inside him!

>   And then I saw the back of his shirt begin to glow. I watched the light ooze out of him and re-form itself into a globe. Then it rose and glided off to follow the other lights into the night, leaving Creighton alone in the tree, sobbing and retching.

  I called up to him. “Jon! Are you all right? Do you need help?”

  When he didn’t answer, I grabbed hold of the tree trunk. But before I could attempt to climb, he stopped me.

  “Stay there, Mac.” His voice was weak, shaky. “I’m coming down.”

  It took him twice as long to climb down as it had to go up. His movements were slow, unsteady, and three times he had to stop to rest. Finally, he reached the lowest branch, hung from it by one hand, and made the final drop. I grabbed him immediately to keep him from collapsing into a heap, and helped him back toward the lamp and the bedrolls.

  “My God, Jon! Your arm!”

  In the light from the lamp his flesh seemed to be smoking. The skin on his left hand and forearm was red, almost scalded-looking. Tiny blisters were already starting to form.

  “It looks worse than it feels.”

  “We’ve got to get you to a doctor.”

  He dropped to his knees on his bedroll and hugged his injured arm against his chest with his good one.

  “I’m all right. It only hurts a little now.”

  “It’s going to get infected. Come on. I’ll see if I can get us to civilization.”

  “Forget it,” he said, and I sensed some of the strength returning to his voice. “Even if we get the Jeep free, we’re still lost. We couldn’t find our way out of here when it was daylight. What makes you think we’ll do any better in the dark?”

  He was right. But I felt I had to do something.

  “Where’s your first aid kit?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  I blew up then.

  “Jesus Christ, Jon! You’re crazy, you know that? You could have fallen out of that tree and been killed! And if you don’t wind up with gangrene in that arm it’ll be a miracle! What on God’s earth made you do something so stupid?”

  He grinned. “I knew it! You still love me!’

  I was not amused.

  “This is serious, Jon. You risked your life up there! For what?”

  “I have to know, Mac.”

  “ ‘Know?’ What do you have to ‘know’? Will you stop giving me this bullshit?”

  “I can’t. I can’t stop because it’s true. I have to know what’s real and what’s not.”

  “Spare me—”

  “I mean it. You’re sure you know what’s real and so you’re content and complacent with that. You can’t imagine what it’s like not to know. To sense there’s a veil across everything, a barrier that keeps you from seeing what’s really there. You don’t know what it’s like to spend your life searching for the edge of that veil so you can lift it and peek—just peek—at what’s behind it. I know it’s out there, and I can’t reach it. You don’t know what that’s like, Mac. It makes you crazy.”

  “Well, that’s one thing we can agree on.”

  He laughed—it sounded strained—and reached for his jug of applejack with his good hand.

  “Haven’t you had enough of that tonight?”

  I hated myself for sounding like an old biddy, but what I had just seen had shaken me to the core. I was still trembling.

  “No, Mac. The problem is I haven’t had enough. Not nearly enough.”

  Feeling helpless and angry, I sat down on my own bedroll and watched him take a long pull from the jug.

  “What happened up there, Jon?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t ever want it to happen again.”

  “And what were you saying? It almost sounded as if you were calling to them.”

  He looked up sharply and stared at me.

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Not exactly. It didn’t even sound like speech.”

  “That’s because it wasn’t,” he said, and I was sure I detected relief in his voice. “I was trying to attract their attention.”

  “Well, you sure did that.”

  Across the top of the Coleman lamp, I thought I saw him smile.

  “Yeah. I did, didn’t I?”

  In the night around us, I noticed that the insects were becoming vocal again.

  7. The Shunned Place

  I’d planned to stay awake the rest of the night, but somewhere along the way I must have faded into sleep. The next thing I knew there was sunlight in my eyes. I leaped up, disoriented for a moment, then remembered where I was.

  But where was Creighton? His bedroll lay stretched out on the sand, his compass, sextant, and maps upon it, but he was nowhere in sight. I called his name a couple of times. He called back from somewhere off to my left. I followed the sound of his voice through the brush and emerged on the edge of a small pond rimmed with white cedars.

  Creighton was kneeling at the edge, cupping some water in his right hand.

  “How’d you find this?” I said.

  “Simple.” He pointed out toward a group of drakes and mallards floating on the still surface. “I followed the quacking.”

  “You’re becoming a regular Mark Trail. How’s the water?”

  “Polluted.” He pointed to a brownish blue slick on the surface of the pond, then held up a palmful of clear, brownish water. “Look at that color. Looks like tea.”

  “That’s not polluted,” I told him. “That’s the start of some bog iron floating over there. And this is cedar water. It gets brown from the iron deposits and from the cedars but it’s as pure as it comes.”

  I scooped up a double handful and took a long swallow.

  “Almost sweet,” I said. “Sea captains used to come into these parts to fill their water casks with cedar water before long voyages. They said it stayed fresher longer.”

  “Then I guess it’s okay to bathe this in it,” he said, twisting and showing me his left arm.

  I gasped. I couldn’t help it. I’d half convinced myself that last night’s incident with the pine light had been a nightmare. But the reddened, crusted, blistered skin on Creighton’s arm said otherwise.

  “We’ve got to get you to a doctor,” I said.

  “It’s all right, Mac. Doesn’t really hurt. Just feels hot.”

  He sank it past his elbow into the cool cedar water.

  “Now that feels good!”

  I looked around. The sun shone from a cloudless sky. We’d have no trouble finding our way out of here this morning. I stared out over the pond. Water. The sandy floor of the Pine Barrens was like a giant sponge that absorbed a high percentage of the rain that fell on it. It was the largest untapped aquifer in the Northeast. No rivers flowed into the Pinelands, only out. The water here was glacial in its purity. I’d read somewhere that the Barrens held an amount of water equivalent to a lake with a surface area of a thousand square miles and an average depth of seventy-five feet.

  This little piece of wetness here was less than fifty yards across. I watched the ducks. They were quacking peacefully, tooling around, dipping their heads. Then one of them made a different sound, more like a squawk. It flapped its wings once and was gone. It happened in the blink of an eye. One second a floating duck, next second some floating bubbles.

  “Did you see that?” Creighton said.

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “What happened to that duck?” I could see the excitement starting to glow in his eyes. “What’s it mean?”

  “It means a snapping turtle. A big one. Fifty pounds or better, I’m sure.”

  Creighton pulled his arm from the pond.

  “I do believe I’ve soaked this enough for now.”

  He dipped a towel in the water and wrapped it around his scorched arm.

  We walked back to the bedrolls, packed up our gear, and made our way through the brush to the Wrangler.

  The Jeep was occupied.

  There were people inside, and people sitting on the hood and standing on the bumpers as well.
A good half-dozen in all.

  Only they weren’t like any people I’d ever seen.

  They were dressed like typical Pineys, but dirty, raggedy. The four men in jeans or canvas pants, collared shirts of various fabrics and colors or plain white T-shirts; the two women wore cotton jumpers. But they were all deformed. Their heads were odd shapes and sizes, some way too small, others large and lopsided with bulbous protrusions. The eyes on a couple weren’t lined up on the level. Everyone seemed to have one arm or leg longer than the other. Their teeth, at least in the ones who still had any, seemed to have come in at random angles.

  When they spotted us, they began jabbering and pointing our way. They left the Wrangler and surrounded us. It was an intimidating group.

  “Is that your car?” a young man with a lopsided head said to me.

  “No.” I pointed to Creighton. “It’s his.”

  “Is that your car?” he said to Creighton.

  I guessed he didn’t believe me.

  “It’s a Jeep,” Creighton said.

  “Jeep! Jeep!” He laughed and kept repeating the word. The others around him took it up and chorused along.

  I looked at Creighton and shrugged. We’d apparently come upon an enclave of the type of folks who’d helped turn “Piney” into a term of derision shortly before World War I. That was when Elizabeth Kite published a report titled “The Pineys” which was sensationalized by the press and led to the view that the Pinelands was a bed of alcoholism, illiteracy, degeneracy, incest, and resultant “feeble-mindedness.”

  Unfair and untrue. But not entirely false. There has always been illiteracy and alcoholism deep in the Pinelands. Schooling here tended to be rudimentary if at all. And as for drinking? The first “drive-thru” service originated before the Revolution in the Piney jug taverns, allowing customers to ride up to a window, get their jugs topped off with applejack, pay, and move on without ever dismounting. But after the economy of the Pine Barrens faltered, and most of the workers moved on to greener pastures, much of the social structure collapsed. Those who stayed on grew a little lax as to the whys, hows, and to-whoms of marriage. The results were inevitable.