Phantom (14 page)

"Same thing with magic. Everybody likes to
watch a good magician at work, but you have to find the explanation
if you want to know what's really happening. Remember the stories
about the great Houdini and how he amazed thousands of people in
his day? He would be all chained up and in the strongest handcuffs
made, and just before they put him in a trunk his wife would kiss
him good-bye, like it might be the last time she saw him alive,
right? Well, she had a key in her mouth and when she kissed him she
passed that key into his mouth, and that's how he could start to
get free and make another miraculous escape. But it wasn't a
miracle and it wasn't magic; just a simple key.

"That's what you have to look for when you
think you've come across something strange or spooky: the
explanation behind it. We could sit here for a couple of hours and
watch the sky, and sooner or later we might see something unusual.
The light of an odd shape or color moving through the night. Does
that mean we've seen a flying saucer from another planet? Well,
that is one possibility, but it isn't very likely, is it? The
chances are it would be a jet plane at a high altitude or a
helicopter skimming along the horizon or a meteorite or one of
those satellites we've put into orbit—or any number of other
things, like reflected light on a dark cloud, who knows what. It
may not be as exciting as the idea of visitors from outer space,
but that's the way it is. The simplest, most down-to-earth
explanation is usually the one that turns out to be true.

"Now I'll tell you one more thing, Ned. No
explanation ever makes anything less special than it seems to you.
I've looked at that moon thousands of times since that night in
Buffalo and it has never, ever been as big as it was then. I don't
expect it ever will be, either. That moon, that night, will always
be special to me because I saw it the way no one else did. And the
fact that I was all wrong can't change that one little bit. Do you
know what I mean?"

"Yeah," Ned said without conviction.

"Okay?"

"Okay, yeah. Thanks, Dad." There was much,
so much that Ned could say in reply. What about all those
unexplained UFOs, what about the cases of people driven from their
homes by ghosts or forces unknown, what about the people who just
suddenly disappeared in strange circumstances? But his father had
had his say and Ned felt it was better to let the matter rest
there. "I think I'll go watch TV now."

Michael smiled as his son crossed the lawn
to the house.

So much for my big speech, he thought. But
maybe the boy took in some of it. If the message gets through, at
least subconsciously, that will be enough. The kid's all right,
Michael told himself. I wish I had some of his imagination. He
should enjoy it while he can. Life gets ordinary soon enough. Wait
until Ned has his first wet dream—that'll crowd some of this stuff
out of his mind.

Linda came out the back door of the house
and walked toward him. Michael saw again how attractive his wife
could be. She looked good in shorts and a light summer blouse. The
ghost of the nineteen-year-old college girl whose appearance used
to give him instant, embarrassing erections, could still be seen in
this woman. If the heat wasn't so draining Michael could almost
think about chasing her upstairs.

"That was quite a conference you two had out
here."

"Just men-talk."

"Telling your son about all the wicked women
in your past?"

Michael chuckled. "Not that kind of
men-talk."

"You were getting pretty animated there for
a while. What were you doing, reciting 'The Cremation of Sam
McGee'?"

"No, just probing a few soft points in the
Special Theory of Relativity."

"I love you, Michael."

"That's good, because I love you."

* * *

12. There Is Magic …
and Magic

"Well, well, well," Cloudy exclaimed. "If it
ain't Mr. Tadpole hisself."

"Hi."

Ned smiled sheepishly as he greeted the two
old men. Cloudy held a portable electric mixer in one hand and its
two eggbeaters in the other. Peeler was sitting back with a can of
beer, his face shaded beneath the visor of his baseball cap. He
cracked one eye open to see Ned, then shut it again.

"I thought maybe your daddy was keepin' you
away from here," Peeler said. '

"No, why?"

"He come around to see me a few days
ago."

"He did?" Ned was puzzled to learn this.
"What for?"

"Just to say hello and tell me who he was.
Last week some time, I guess it was. I was afraid maybe he didn't
like what he seen and decided you should stay away."

"No, he didn't say anything to me about it,"
Ned said. "I didn't even know he'd been here."

"So where you been?" Cloudy asked.

"Oh, around home."

"Around home, huh?"

"I was being punished," Ned admitted.

"You was? What for? "

"Last week I went up the hill to explore the
ruins of the old spa."

"You went up there? Alone?"

Cloudy looked genuinely surprised, and
Peeler pushed his cap back, taking notice.

"Yeah, and I got home late and my clothes
were muddy and I had a few scratches, so my mom and dad were kind
of sore at me and I had to stick around the house for a few
days."

"I bet they was sore at you," Cloudy said.
"You shouldn't never oughta go up to that place, Mr. Tadpole.
Never."

"It's dangerous," Peeler said. "You could
break a leg and be stuck there and nobody'd hear you call for
help."

"I know, I know," Ned said, almost
enthusiastically. "I nearly did get stuck there. It's the most
incredible place I've ever seen."

"You fall into one of them gardens," Peeler
warned, "and you won't never climb out again, no how."

"I know. It's like a jungle in there."

"Worse," Cloudy said.

"What did they have all those walls for,
anyway?"

"They was gardens."

"They had all kinds of gardens and things in
there," Peeler went on. "In one garden they'd have a certain type
of grass growin' so that when you walked on it, it give off a
pretty smell. Another garden'd be full of some kind of flower, just
the one, so you'd get that smell. And the next garden, somethin'
else, and so on. Every one of 'em was different, who knows what all
for."

"The gardens was quite the thing in their
day," Cloudy put in, "White folks come from miles around and plenty
kept comin' back for more. They paid a lot to stay at the spa." He
shook his head, as if still amazed at the idea. "That was back in
its heyday, of course."

"Some of the walls had shapes—like, one was
a rectangle," Ned said.

"That'd probably be the old tennis court,"
Peeler said.

"Oh ... "

"They had lots of stuff like that there,
too."

"And one wall formed a circle, and there was
a gurgling sound, and smoke came from the middle of it. But I
couldn't see because of the bushes."

"You know what that might be," Peeler
said.

"What?"

"That just might be the mud."

"Mud?"

"That's right. I heard they got a pit of
some sort up there, with hot mud and steam that perked up from
underground, kinda like a geyser, only different. And they say
folks used to take all their clothes off and get right down in that
hot mud and waller around for as long as they could take it."

"Like Georgia hawgs," Cloudy added,
grinning.

"Why would they do that?" Ned asked.

Peeler shrugged. "Somebody musta told 'em it
was good for their health, or some such nonsense like that. Or
maybe they was just havin' fun. No tellin' why folks do the things
they do."

Ned tried to picture grown men and women,
naked, slithering around in hot, steamy mud that made that horrible
slurping sound. The image was at once exotic and disturbing.

"You know," the boy said, "I heard lots of
things moving around in the brush. I could never see anything, but
I always had the feeling that somebody or something was following
me, watching me all the time. What do you think that was?"

"Animals," Peeler stated flatly.

"That's what I thought," Ned said, a little
disappointed.

"Raccoon, fox, possum—all kinds of animals
would've moved into that place over the years."

"I bet there's a big, juicy snappin' turkle
in the lily pond," Cloudy said. "lf there is a lily pond." He
thought about it some more. "They must be, a place like that."

Ned decided to try his most daring
speculation: "I was wondering if any—you know, swamp people, might
be living in there now .... "

"I don't guess so," Peeler said.

"Too close to town," Cloudy elaborated.
"Swamp folks, they don't like a town nor other people bein' too
close to them. They hide out far away as they can get, that's why
they ain't too friendly if you wander into their patch, see,"

"If I had an old map of this area I could
show you where the swamp people lived," Peeler said. "They had
their own places, like Mud Hen Gut, Dolly's Quarter, Middle Runt
Creek and Jenkins Dip—they was swamp folks hangouts."

"I remember some of them places," Cloudy
said. "Pissholes, every dad one of 'em too."

"Were they real little towns, like?" Ned
asked.

"Naw, not hardly," Peeler scoffed. "Nothin'
more'n a bit of marsh staked out by this family or that, and twenty
or thirty idiot kids shacked up in a pigsty. That's all. But you
run into the wrong bunch of 'em and they'd really have your nuts in
a noose faster'n you could blink."

"That's the truth," Cloudy agreed.

"Are they still around?"

"I don't care if they are, and I don't care
if they ain't," Peeler replied promptly. "Last time I come across
one of them fellers was ten or twenty years ago. I was pickin'
berries and I guess I strayed some, when all of a sudden I notice
this guy watchin' me. I could just see his face in the shadow of a
tree about a hundred yards away-well, maybe not that far. Anyhow, I
didn't act like I seen him, but I just kinda backed away, slow and
natural, like I'd got all the berries I could get. And I scrammed
outta there. I sure didn't want to meet him close up, nor his
stumpy-toothed tribe, I can tell you."

"Don't bother them, they don't bother you,"
Cloudy said. "Trouble is, you might not know when you're botherin'
them till it's too late."

"Anyhow," Peeler concluded, "you can be sure
they ain't none of 'em livin' up to the spa. Ain't nobody could
live in that place, way it is now,"

"I got inside the building, too."

"Inside the building," Cloudy cried in
pain.

"That's just askin' for trouble," Peeler
said with a look that was as close to real anger as Ned had seen on
the old man's face. "You stay away from there, hear?

"Yeah, but—"

"Never mind that. You supposed to be a
friend of ours?"

"Sure."

"Okay, you do like we say."

"All right," Ned said softly,.

For a while none of them spoke. Cloudy
resumed his examination of the electric mixer. The motor seemed to
work fine by itself, but as soon as he attached the eggbeaters the
appliance made a kind of strangled, grinding noise and refused to
run. He removed the beaters and again the motor hummed
smoothly.

"Darndest thing," Cloudy muttered, breaking
the silence. "Works fine as long as you don't try to use it."

"Junk," Peeler said scornfully,

"I know it's junk," Cloudy responded. 'The
problem is, it's junk on the fritz." He shook the mixer vigorously,
as if expecting a coin to pop out, solving the problem and
enriching him at the same time.

"Peeler." "Hmmmn."

"Do you think there could be any ghosts or
evil spirits up there in the old spa?"

"Ned, I swear you're as stubborn as all
get-out sometimes. You just don't know when to let go."

Peeler got up and went into the baithouse,
where he opened another beer and busied himself checking the tanks.
Curiosity was a wonderful thing, he thought, but not always easy to
handle. How do you tell a boy that there is magic ... and there is
magic? That you had to be open to it, but that you also had to keep
your distance and fear it? If you were blind to it, you missed some
of life's better moments. If you ignored it, you did so at your own
risk. And if you sought it out, no good would come of it. It was a
kind of power, and like all power, you couldn't really hold it; you
could only be held by it. The boy was like a dog, snuffling around
a tricky rock; if he succeeded in rolling it over he might be
sorry.

Ned appeared in the doorway and then stepped
hesitantly into the baithouse. Peeler noticed him but continued
what he was doing.

"Are you mad at me?" Ned asked timidly.

"Nope."

"Well ... You act like you are."

"Well, I ain't."

"Well ... What are you?"

"I just don't like you pokin' around no
place where you could get nipped by a cottonmouth or copperhead and
not be able to get back for help in time, that's what."

"I was careful."

"You was, huh." Peeler showed how impressed
he was by hawking up a mouthful of phlegm and spitting it to the
ground.

"I didn't get hurt."

"This time you didn't."

''I'm not going back there, Peeler.
Honest."

"I shouldn't never've told you about it in
the first place." There it was: his feeling of complicity in the
matter.

"I would have found out anyway," Ned said.
"Everybody knows about the spa and you can see it from lots of
places in town."

"Maybe."

"I've seen it and I won't go back again." No
response. "I mean it, Peeler. I don't even want to go back, I
didn't like the place."

"If you say so."

"Well, I do."