The Croning (29 page)
“Son, I hear you. Problem is, young master Hank went exploring and I’ve lost him—”
“Dad, forget Hank! Get your ass moving! I repeat, forget Hank. Oh, shit!” The call dropped to static, then silence.
Don awkwardly regained his feet, and the firecrackers became dynamite and he yelped. He spent a few moments listening to the forest, listening for either Hank in the tomb or the other men somewhere in the omnipresent mist. Night was on the wing; already the pale sky had dimmed to red.
A moan or a cackle emanated from the dolmen and Don, with the molasses speed of a man in a nightmare, turned toward the black slot of an entrance. “Hank?”
He was running, crashing through brush and smashing into trees, rebounding from them and charging onward, heedless of injury, intent solely upon flight in a straight line. His breath exploded in sobs of exhaustion and he couldn’t recall what spurred him, except that his fear had escalated to mindless terror, the terror of an animal fleeing before a cyclone of fire. He was away from the dolmen, and that was good, very good, and every stride took him farther into the trackless forest, which wasn’t so good, but better than the alternative, better than being caught. He mustn’t be caught. Mustn’t be caught.
Run, baby; they’re coming!
Michelle said, floating over his shoulder.
A branch slashed his cheek and ripped his glasses free. He ran and then it was too dark for running and he collapsed, curled tight, knuckles in mouth, retching and gasping.
Later, Don dragged himself under the sheltering boughs of a grand-daddy fir tree and rested with his cheek pressed to a bed of fir needles. His pack was gone, his clothes in shreds, he’d lost the phone, and his knee was swollen as a cantaloupe. As he calmed and adrenaline trickled away, pain filled the gap; pain sufficient to cause him to rip strips from his pants and fashion an impromptu gag to bite upon. Despite the void whirling in his brain where a record of his last few minutes at the dolmen belonged, it seemed vitally important that he meld with the environment, that he become an unobtrusive creature of the wood. He jammed the fabric into his mouth and clamped tight, and gibbered involuntarily while leaves whispered and water dripped and an owl hooted softly overhead.
Don swatted at the hungry mosquitoes and tried to concentrate. The dark was so complete he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. Bit by bit fragments fit together like puzzle pieces and he remembered staring into gloom of the dolmen as he now stared into the nothingness of the night forest. He remembered a low, throaty moan drifting from the tomb. He’d seen abrupt movement, a shadow within shadow, rapidly approaching and retreating simultaneously. A moist, pallid figure; tall, yet hunched, all angles and fluid in its motion. A faceless apparition, its head clouded in shadow.
The proportions were wrong for Hank. If not Hank, then who? It all distorted and zipped away from Don and the rest was a complete blank; the sequence only picked up again with his flight and fall.
All of this seemed familiar, somehow. The abject terror, the impossible dolmen, a missing companion, the experience of frailty and abandonment in the maw of the wild. He was reliving a nightmare that taunted him with its opacity.
You’ve been here before. Here, or somewhere very close. You’ve seen that… person.
Oh, a person, was it? He didn’t need his muse Michelle to laugh him off the stage. Shade Michelle put a finger to her lips and shook her head, then evaporated.
A fox screamed. The mist filled his bower and wormed into his nose and mouth, and he shook with violent chills. There was a terrifying moment when he jolted from a doze to the crackling of leaves and something heavy slammed into him—a beast with heaving wet fur and raw, heated breath, and Don cried out. Thule whimpered and buried his blocky muzzle under Don’s arm.
“Oh, doggie,” he said and hugged his trembling pet and together they cowered in the primeval darkness. A breeze came creaking and squeaking through the forest. Don imagined many doors opening in the trunks of cedars and firs.
Darker, and darker.
Mystery Mountain Stomp
(1980)
1.
M
onday morning after he and Michelle straggled home from the funeral reception for Louis Plimpton, Don went into the Olympia office of AstraCorp where work deluged him. His supervisor and company comptroller Wayne Kykendahl fumed and boiled like old angry Vesuvius; his florid jowls quivered wrathfully. Something was amiss. Nobody dared ask and Don was too exhausted to care.
He passed through the day in a kind of stupor, doing his best to forget the hideously strange weekend at the Wolverton estate, the bizarre interrogation by the weirdoes claiming to be federal agents, the equally unsettling conversation with the Rourke boy, the monstrous museum display…
Then, a few moments before he managed to slink home, a flat package arrived via courier, no return address. He initially assumed the package contained a bundle of requested materials from one of his ongoing projects and didn’t get around to cracking the seal until after dinner. Michelle was locked in her study, ranting and raving over the damnable family history she was assembling, so he camped in the parlor and went through the briefcase load of paperwork he’d lugged from the office.
What he discovered in the anonymous package proved incomprehensible at first, but after a second read through his neck prickled and he was reminded of the horror he’d felt gazing upon the Cro-Magnon skin hanging on display.
He poured himself a glass of bourbon. And another. Sleep was fitful, his dreams macabre and disjointed.
At the office the next morning Don slumped over his desk. He clutched his skull, vowing to never touch another drop of hard liquor if he lived a hundred years, all the while suffering sporadic catcalls of the boys as they poked their gleeful mugs into his broom closet of an office.
Around eleven o’clock, he asked Ronnie “Cub” Houghton from R&D to walk him the several tree-lined blocks to the Flintlock Hotel. The hotel basement constituted a substantial commercial annex, including a classy barbershop, shoeshine station, cigar emporium, an international newsstand called The Carrier, and The Happy Tiger Lounge, home of the ten-dollar martini—a hidden lair of legislators and the slick lobbyists who followed them in shoals. The Happy Tiger was Ronnie’s preferred lunch hour haunt—he endeavored to snag a booth with an opportune view of the gaggles of secretaries and paralegals and interns perched on leather stools flanking the silky-bright granite bar. Don’s head hurt too much for him to appreciate the cavalcade of high heels, short skirts and hosiery. Clouds of hairspray and perfume made his eyes water. He sneezed into his hanky. Michelle had stopped wearing scents out of a tender and rare inclination toward mercy.
No martinis for Don. The day-shift bartender, a hulking bruiser named Vern, took one look at his pale, sweaty face and mixed tomatoes, lime and ice in a shaker and had the waitress deliver it to his booth with a complimentary plate of gourmet crackers. Ronnie threw back his shaggy head and laughed good-naturedly at Don’s misery; he ordered an import beer and a Caesar salad (God knew why he bothered, the boys nicknamed him Cub on account of his behemoth pear-shaped torso and copious patches of wiry black hair that grew wild and the fact he packed enough lard to hibernate) and plunged into an earnest monologue regarding the latest remote sensing device, a prototype model designed by some firm in Norway, and he was practically salivating about the possibilities. Don nodded and smiled noncommittally and thought about the government men, the spooks, who’d braced him at the reception.
What was it with all this recent weirdness? Montoya (and why was that name so familiar?), Cooye, Bronson Ford, and Louis? Poor Louis. So much for the story about a coronary conclusion, although one wit said long ago that the ultimate cause of all death was heart failure. He sipped his hangover antidote and tried not to worry where it was leading, or how Michelle might be involved. Grandpa, that secretive coot, had loved her dearly. Don paused now to speculate whether it was the out-to-pasture spymaster in him that responded to her so well.
What if Frick and Frack were right? Everybody knows Sinatra worked for the CIA on his road shows. Michelle travels to a lot of dicey places on her little special visa. It’s the perfect cover for an operative. Goddamn those guys for putting such moronic suspicions in his head.
For dessert, he passed an envelope full of aerial photographic plates to Ronnie and watched with guarded interest as the bearded man unclipped his glasses from his shirt pocket. Nine plates were a sequence depicting Plimpton’s farmhouse shot via satellite, or so Don assumed, but they lacked time signatures and that was odd, very odd indeed. The photos zoomed in by a magnitude of ten, and the final image reduced the peak roof to X-ray transparency and captured Plimpton on his bed, revolver to his temple, face contorted as if he were shrieking.
The tenth through twelfth pictures tracked a car on a winding coastal highway. The final shot was a dramatic overhead zoom, another muddy X-ray that dissolved the cab and caught a man staring up at the camera which could’ve only been mere inches from his gaping mouth. Ronnie shuffled them repeatedly and that was obviously no help. His jaw tightened and he squinted in confusion.
“So, what do you make of them?” Don said. Ronnie had served in the Navy as a communications specialist; it seemed worth a shot.
“You want my opinion? I mean—Jesus. Military satellite? Does NASA have anything like this?”
“Dunno what else they could be.” Yes, Don was an expert in the field of high tech imaging, although that expertise hardly extended to more clandestine or esoteric applications.
“But this material. What the hell—swear to God it’s synthetic parchment…” Ronnie flexed a plate between his hands. “You can roll it into a tube, cantcha? Whoa.”
Don was equally mystified. He’d certainly never encountered any photographic print on the order of this stuff that flexed and deformed like a weird, Nuclear Age vellum. He said, “Sure, sure. We got eyes in the sky that can snap a picture of your driver’s license from twenty miles up. Infrared; ultraviolet; electromagnetic; X-ray; and so on. These photos could’ve been taken from an orbital spy sat, I suppose.”
“Unless they’re fakes. I mean—they gotta be fakes.”
“I wish.” If the plates were forgeries Don hadn’t been able to deconstruct their artifice via training or equipment. He concluded what they depicted was horribly authentic.
“Jesus, H. Do you know these guys?” Ronnie glared at the shots of Louis and Cooye in their final moments of extremis. “Where’d you get these anyway?”
“They said I couldn’t tell anybody or they’d roll ’em in a carpet.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. Look, a couple of spooks cornered me this weekend. Cloak and dagger to the hilt. My guess is that these plates are a warning. I can’t figure their angle—”
“Watch your butt. Sounds like shysters. You see ID? No ID, then who knows. Couple of conmen running a scam.”
“Do me a favor. You still tight with that guy on Whidbey Island?”
“Ferrar? Yeah.”
“Maybe you could get him to run an analysis for me.”
“I’ll give him a call—but I bet my ass he’ll want a look at this radical shit.” Ronnie meticulously slipped everything into the envelope, held it in his giant hands with something like reverence.
The men finished lunch and drifted back to the office, promising to keep in touch over the next few days before separating to follow their routines.
Don’s punishment descended near quitting time when Wayne appeared at his door with a carefully smooth expression and informed him that he’d be flying to the Peninsula in the morning alongside an impromptu team consisting of a lawyer, a medical doctor and an architect. Some kind of difficulty with mapping the mountainous region for mineral deposits.
AstraCorp was commissioned to record seismic data, take water and mineral samples, the usual. The camp was rugged and the crew a notoriously surly bunch, but the wrap-up would only require two or three days—a week tops, ha-ha. Sorry about the last-minute notice, but you know how these things sneak up, right, right? By the way, didn’t Don minor in psychology back in the days of the dinosaurs? Don explained that he’d taken a course in abnormal psychology related to the stresses inherent in remote wilderness and subterranean operations conducted over lengthy durations. And as his boss absorbed this, Don said, “This is all rather mysterious, isn’t it, Wayne?”
Wayne rolled his eyes and blustered that consultants were a continual pain in his ass—just do your job and keep a sock in your pie hole, thank you.
Don didn’t bother to react, simply shrugged and gathered his papers, left an hour early to drive home and pack. He tried to summon the conversation with the agents in Spokane; they’d expressed a hell of a lot of interest in the Slango operation, and here he was a few days later, heading there for an in-person visit. The coincidence bothered him.
He stalked into the farmhouse, what he couldn’t help but consider Michelle’s house, loosening his tie with mounting frustration, spied young master Kurt, home from college classes, flopped on the couch, plugged into a cassette player and reading a
Heavy Metal
magazine with a fancifully-endowed cartoon princess on the cover. Potato chip wrappers and empty pop cans littered his area, crumbs and puddles sprinkled the coffee table. Don guessed he’d actually skipped university for the day and hopped a ride with one of his degenerate upperclassmen friends, of which it seemed he possessed locust hordes. Don didn’t bother to upbraid him; he gritted his teeth and went upstairs to undress, shower and gobble aspirin.
Clad in socks and shorts, he sat on the unmade bed, listlessly tracking the slant of heavy red light through the circle window, how it transfigured the knots in the paneling to frozen eyes, the imperfections in plaster to howling mouths, hollowed cheekbones and teeth. His gaze traveled to a framed portrait of a smiling woman in aviator glasses. Dear Mum back when she looked the part of an MGM silent film starlet. An ancient picture, because the boyish iteration of Dad lurked at the edge of the frame—a fuzzy smirk and half-raised hand, bare-chested like a marble cast of Hercules made flesh. A murderous Adonis with Sphinx eyes, on loan to the United States Army Rangers despite his natural proclivity toward the sciences. In those days, Dad had been more interested in meeting new and fascinating people and then killing them. Cheerio, mates. Need someone shot, guvnah? Don beheld a stranger wearing a familiar face. What didn’t you tell me, Pop? Why did you have to go mad and get yourself shot to pieces? And Gramps, you grizzled old sonofabitch, how dirty was your laundry anyhow? Nanking, what the hell were you doing in Nanking?
