She was headed for a white nylon dress and an order pad. The only real question about her future as a waitress was, did she have the feet for it?
A flash briefly lit up the front yard. She sighed, went into the kitchen, opened the pantry cabinet. Tang, Swiss Miss Cocoa, Café Français. She was turning into a rural frump with a junk-beverage habit. Vague, listless thunder underlined the thought. Somewhere out there the storm slipped through the night like a prowling cat.
As she was taking the cocoa out of the cabinet it crossed her mind that she could spend her sleepless night productively. She could work on the story.
The mound was out there, nobody would stop her, she could snoop to her heart's content.
Underground screams, a killer sound—there was a story all right.
Come morning, the judge would either be guarding his precious property line or the mound would be swarming with state cops again, in which case she'd have to negotiate both his tearing rage and their hostility.
She had a penlight. All she had to do was avoid the judge. How? Her car would shatter the tomb-like silence that shrouded Oscola at night.
She could walk. Along the road it would be a mile. But through the woods it was less than half that. It was rough, though, and full of animals. Black bears abounded. She'd seen them humping along like bridge trolls even during the day. They had strange, pointed faces, cruel, empty eyes.
Going out at this hour would be nerve-racking, no doubt about it. On the plus side, though, she couldn't get lost even if she walked. All she had to do was follow the path along Coxon Kill, the stream behind her house. After a quarter of a mile the forest opened into meadow. The mound would be directly ahead.
She stepped out onto her porch to assess the possibility of actually doing this insane thing. She tossed her hair, a gesture of defiance that had been with her since she was a child. She moved down to the loamy forest floor that formed her front yard. Another flash of lightning reminded her to count, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand... She reached eleven before she heard a faint patter of thunder. So the storm was probably not going to be a factor.
Shining her penlight ahead, she set off into the blackness of the forest. Soon she could hear the babble of Coxon Kill. Last winter it had frozen solid and its rapids had looked like quartz. She could touch them, run her hand along their wrinkles and curves. She'd fallen sort of in love with the kill then. A month ago she'd found a swimming hole about fifty feet long and eight feet deep, the water so clear you could count the trout ghosting along the bottom.
She could walk naked from her cabin and swim there, doing the breaststroke until the water turned her blue. She had adored the astonishing sensation of being naked in the woods, of feeling the cool forest air caress her breasts... God, she wished she had a man who was gentle, poetic and sexy. A nice man.
Her light flickered in a thicket of mountain laurel. Sharp stars of flowers shone pale. Far above, the enormous pines whispered on the slight wind. When the kill was so loud she was beginning to think she might stumble into it, she finally found the path.
Twenty minutes later the forest gave way to a wide field and the brook became sluggish, its banks muddy and indistinct. The mound stood before her, a low and unimposing shape blotting the horizon.
As she advanced, she saw light in a couple of the judge's downstairs windows. When she observed that it was flickering, she stopped. This light had an odd purple tinge, reminding her of the arc of a welder's torch.
Was he running a gas space heater? Surely not in this stifling weather. Maybe something was burning.
She went over to the house, moving swiftly through the ruined pear orchard with its twisted, twig-choked trees, and up the uneven brick walk that led across the garden to the kitchen door. This close, the house breathed out its own intimate smells, the odor of its cellar and the faint suggestion of the evening's meal that had been prepared in the kitchen, and another scent that was harder to define. Maybe there was a dead opossum in the crawl space.
Given that she was a tall woman, it was easy for her to look in the window. She discovered that the source of the flickering wasn't a fire, it was a huge television set.
The set was a room away, facing in her direction. Before it was a chair, and she could see the judge's head lolling to one side. Was he asleep? It looked like it.
The odd thing was the image on the screen. It was smoke— thick, roiling, purple smoke billowing endlessly past. An after-the-bomb shot from a war movie might look like this, but such a shot would only last a second. This never ended.
What in the hell was it, she wondered, and why purple? Smoke was black. When stations went off the air, didn't they go to static? Who would leave an endless loop showing nothing but this?
Well, they had, and the judge had gone to sleep watching it. No doubt it was some regional station manager's concept of a cool idea, purple smoke in the night. Her experience with the world of small-town media was that it contained a high quotient of morons. Look at her, she'd given up a decent salary, a secure job, an orthodontist with a good car and the city she love-hated for this.
She was about to turn away when she saw the judge's long, thin hand come up to his face. The fingers spread, hesitated in the air, then fell against his cheek and slowly slid down out of sight.
She backed away from the window, repelled as much by the bizarre sensuality of the gesture as by the realization that he was awake. Now that she knew that he wasn't sleeping, it looked as if he was in some kind of weird state of tongue-lolling ecstasy.
What if he was an addict? Wouldn't that be a lovely story to print? She watched him. My, but it would be fun to beat up the old creep in the paper.
Now he was nodding up and down. She could see that his mouth was wide open. He was jerking. She realized that he must be masturbating.
Her impulse was to run, but she stopped herself for fear the sound would stir him. She'd interrupted a private moment, and her cheeks began to burn.
She crept off, feeling decidedly perverse.
2.
When she reached the summit of the mound her feet began to crunch in gravel. There'd never been any reason for her to come here before, and she'd always assumed that the summit would be like the rest of the mound, lushly overgrown with weeds.
It wasn't hard to find the place where Dr. Kelly and his Saigon Sally had heard the screams: that was where the backhoe had done its work. She went over to the black scar it had left. As she approached, she could smell the sick-sour odor of the raw soil. Once this would have surprised her, but she'd smelled enough cut dirt in this area to know that soil isn't necessarily sweet A city dweller expects black, rich-smelling earth. But the reality is very different. Wild earth smells of death and decay, for it is a killing ground and the home of a carrion multitude.
She lingered at the edge of the ditch, not quite willing to commit herself to inspect that soil. She imagined black beetles, earthworms, grubs, moles, shrews, massive high-speed snakes. The ditch was an open wound bleeding confused little creatures who wanted so very badly to rush up her legs.
A reasonable compromise was to lie in the dandelion-choked grass that gave most of the mound its green surface. She pressed her ear against the ground, closed her eyes. After a few seconds she felt the most appalling sense of vulnerability.
She got to her feet. Looking around, she noticed a glow at the far end of Mound Road. A car. She turned off her penlight. Who would be coming down here at this hour? Then another glow appeared behind the first, and a third behind that.
A whole procession of cars was coming down Mound Road. She didn't like this at all. Maybe the judge had seen her, had called the sheriffs office or the state police.
But no, the first vehicle was an old pickup with a rattly bed. There was nothing official about these vehicles.
She crouched down, watching. A total of nine cars approached, parking along the sides of the road and in the clearing where it dead-ended at the judge's pear orchard. When they tu
rned off their lights it was too dark to see, but she could hear the doors opening and closing as they got out.
She got ready to run. But then the front door of the house opened, pouring white-purple light out into the yard. The people filed into the judge's house, men, women, and children, all walking stiffly, as if they were—what? She didn't know what. They were just walking funny.
What the hell was this, a midnight meeting of some kind? Old communities are full of secrets. She ought to go back down there, try to find out what was happening.
Old communities also tend to be mean about keeping their secrets.
The judge had been flinging his fish. Was this some sort of wildly perverted backwoods sex club meeting going on here?
Then she heard low voices, saw lights going on throughout the house. Not exactly a secret meeting, after all. As the light got brighter, she could hear shouts.
The story was still out here. Again she stretched herself out, pressed her ear firmly to the ground and listened. The grass beneath her head crunched. There was nothing else... or... no.
Yes! A deep, deep sound. Underground stream, some kind of machine?
She raised her head, trying to tell if she'd been listening to the rush of her own blood. No, that deep, throbbing note had nothing to do with her.
It was a sound of engine power coming from a place where no engine should be. She took the cassette recorder out of her fanny pack and turned it on, pressed the mike into the soil.
But then it went still, almost as if—but no, that was impossible. But it did seem as if it had stopped because she'd been listening.
For a moment she wondered if she was going crazy. There weren't any machines down there.
Again she looked at the ditch. Would going down in a three-foot-deep cut really help her hear better? The mound was at least fifty feet high. On the other hand, what if the woman was in a tomb near the surface, too exhausted to scream? Maybe—if she'd heard anything—it had been the booming tremor of an exhausted voice.
She clambered down into the ditch. Did earwigs really run into your ears and start digging wildly toward the interior of the brain?
There was a bright flash of lightning and an immediate roll of thunder. That was all she needed—the storm had decided to come back. After the thunder subsided it grew very quiet. It was dark, too, like pitch, like ink, like the emptiness of profound sleep.
She leaned down, far down, and worked her ear into the muck. It was thick, giving stuff, but not nearly as gooey as she'd imagined. In fact it had a light, friable quality that was quite unexpected. The mud of the forest floor was as dense as wet concrete.
Suddenly she remembered a coke tailing she'd found behind an old silver smelter she'd once done a story about. This was what extreme temperature did to some types of stone.
She was rewarded with another noise, this one clear and close and quite ugly. It made even less sense than the deep rumbling, this rapid slithery noise. It was frantic, a lobster scrabbling in the pot, the whipping body of a snake whose head is being crushed under a boot.
She instantly leaped out of the ditch. Her impression was that the thing had been right under her.
There was no question about this sound: it had been big—very big. Not an eel in a pot, an anaconda in a caldron. Good God, what was in there?
It was time to get out of here.
She started down the mound—and was stopped at once by what she saw below. Cars now choked the dead end. There must be twenty of them. And there was activity in the house, a great deal of activity. Every curtain was drawn, but she could hear the hum of many more voices... and a sort of sizzling noise. There was also lots more purple-white light, strobing behind the curtains.
Risky or not, she knew she had to get a closer look. She moved quickly down the side of the mound—the path was well worn— using her penlight as little as possible.
The pear trees were gnarled and full of branches that seemed designed to stick her in the eye, but she found that they also afforded good cover. She could come within thirty feet of the house without showing herself.
This close, the purple light was really intense. It was odd, too, the way it made her feel kind of... trembly inside. Trembly and warm, a bit like sex.
Inside the house it must be intolerably bright. And the voices—it sure wasn't any fun party they were having in there. People were choking and bellowing, children were wailing, it was an altogether dreadful sound. People burning, people drowning, people being torn apart—these were the images that the screams brought to mind.
She moved out of the cover of the orchard, stepped quickly across the dry grass of the back lawn. She reached what was probably a dining room window, heading toward a bright chink of light that was leaking out from between a parting of the curtains.
Close up, the house was really rocking and the cries were ghastly—too hoarse, too loud, too... lost.
Her stomach twisted, she swallowed. She wanted to run, to get out of here, to go home and bury herself under the covers.
But there was a story here, very certainly.
Closer yet, the voices were even worse. They weren't simply sounds of agony. She recognized something she thought must be pleasure. It was a mixture of pleasure and torment. She pressed her face to the rusty screen and peered into the lit interior.
The light was so bright she was blinded. She had nothing more than an impression of movement—not even the sense of shape. People were leaping, jerking, flailing so fast that their bodies were blurs in the purple-white ocean. She felt a sensation leap through her eyes and right down to her groin, a sensation that ended in a tickling so intense that it caused an instant convulsion.
She screamed, she couldn't help it. Then she threw herself backward, sprawling in the grass. The pleasure was so great that she was momentarily helpless. However, she recovered herself and dashed off, running wildly away toward the orchard.
She crouched among the trees, breathless with fear. Nobody emerged from the house. She rubbed her left eye, which tingled furiously. What was going on in there? She'd been—it was like instant climax. More than climax. She sweated, her body tingling at the memory. Her eye was numb, though, and she wasn't sure she could see clearly.
The light had hurt her. Maybe it was a retinal burn. Perhaps she'd looked into a laser.
She began to back out of the orchard. When she was parallel to the end of the road, she decided to risk trotting across it and running among the cars. She didn't recognize many of the vehicles, which meant that they weren't Oscola folk but people from nearby towns. She knew most Oscola cars by sight.
Could it be a secret society—the Order of Purple Light Freaks or something—here to have an electronic orgy?
She had already crossed the road when she noticed that one of the cars was running. It was making a deep, throbbing sound, the growl of a monster engine.
Then she spotted it, parked facing outward with a clear run to Mound Road. It was a sports car, a convertible with the top down, low and mean, of a shape unfamiliar to her. It was a taut machine designed to dominate. Gas-guzzling sports cars left her cold... and thrilled her. She'd always been conflicted about his Ira's Porsche. But this was no European jewel-box. This car had USA written all over it—the shape said tough and smart and powerful.
She moved closer, her eyes on the glowing instrument panel, which could be seen inside the open interior. The closer she got, the more obvious it became that this car was something very special. When she was just behind it, she could see the name-plate. It was a Dodge Viper. She was stunned: what was something like this doing in the Three Counties? This was the ultimate muscle car. The paper had gotten some press releases about it. A Viper was the kind of thing that belonged in Arnold Schwarzenegger's driveway, not Judge terBroeck's. She went around to the door. There were no handles, so she leaned over and peered at the odometer. Everything came up zero. According to its instruments, this car had never traveled a foot.
Was it stolen? What in hell was
a stolen car doing here?
Then she heard another sound, one that made her stop dead. Somebody was breathing, slow, regular, deep. And it was coming from up under the dash, as if a dwarf was hiding himself by pressing into the car's cramped foot well. She started to shine her penlight, but then hesitated. The feeling of being watched was overwhelming—and absolutely terrifying. She backed away from the car. "I'm sorry," she said.
There was a grumbling sound from the dark—and what felt like a tangle of threads landed on her right hand, encircling it.
She leaped back, yanking her arm away. Had she gotten in a spider web?
It was then that she noticed the lightning bugs. They appeared suddenly, because otherwise she would have seen them before. As far as she was concerned, fireflies were one of the pleasures of country life.
But she wasn't interested in enjoying them now, even though they were drifting up from a hole behind the judge's pear trees in a graceful wave. They were coming in a tight group, gliding across the lawn.
If she didn't change course, they were going to collide with her.
The sky erupted with a lacework of lightning. It was rendered fuzzy by low, nasty clouds, but it was nevertheless an astonishing display, accompanied by guttering, persistent thunder.
In the silence that followed a breeze came up, at first welcome in the wet, sucking heat. But the breeze got harder, fast. Soon it was wind, cutting and mean. Huge drops of rain began to strike her.
Even though she was out of the pear orchard, the lightning bugs were still behind her. She wasn't being chased, of course, but it sure felt like it.
When a firefly landed on the back of her hand, she shook it off. Then she noticed one was in her hair. She reached up, brushed it away. Another came so close to her face that she could feel the breeze of its wings.
And she could smell it, a cutting mix of acid and dirty skin.
She ran like a madwoman.
3.
The weeds cut into her shins. On the uneven ground she stumbled, flailed, twisted.
But the moment she slowed down a firefly landed on her face near her left eye. Before she could brush it off another joined it. Simultaneously a third started scrabbling in her ear. She thrashed, and her right hand came away dripping crumbs of pink-purple phosphorescence.