The Northwoods Chronicles (30 page)

“There’s something out there. There’s either
something there or I’m losing my mind. Either way, it ain’t right,
it ain’t human, it’s like nothing I’ve ever . . . known before.” He
paused. Rubbed his face.

“You saw it?” She tried hard to keep her voice
soft, quiet, intimate. He was like a skittish wild animal, and she
didn’t want to spook him.

“Sorta. Maybe. I don’t know. God, I don’t
know.”

“You’re safe here, babe,” she said. “Take a
nap.”

“Yeah . . . ,” he said, and drifted off to
sleep.

~~~

“Okay,” Margie said to the women collected in
her living room. “We need to make this fast before Jimbo comes
home.”

“Jimbo doesn’t know?” Lexy asked.

“No, I told him this was a meeting of the high
school booster club.”

She ignored the few snorts and muffled laughs
that passed through the assembled.

“I’m at my wits’ end,” she said. “There’s
something going on here, and we need to find out what it is,
because it isn’t normal, and if it’s wickedness or evil, then we
need to take steps to be rid of it.”

“The dreams are harmless,” Natasha said.
“They’re good for our sex lives.”

“But we shouldn’t
all
be having them,”
Julia said. “That’s just plain creepy.”

“This isn’t the only creepy thing that goes on
here,” Margie said, and, for a moment, everyone thought of Margie’s
missing little boy, Micah.

Louise Leppens broke the silence. “Anybody here
ever do any dream analysis?”

“Not since the Northern Aire burned down,”
Amanda said.

“Are we being poisoned?” Lexy asked. “Are these
hallucinations?”

“Are the men having the same dreams?” Louise
asked.

Everybody laughed. “If they did,” Lexy said,
“we’d all be pregnant.”

“Settle down,” Margie said, clearly disapproving
of all the women being pregnant at once. “That was a good question
about dream analysis.”

“I think dream analysis,” Kimberly said, “is a
view into one’s personal psyche. This seems to be a shared dream.
Are we all having the same dream?”

“Good question,” Margie said. “Are any of you
dreaming about anybody in particular? Anybody you know?”

“No!” Regina Porter said, a little too quickly,
and then she blushed.

“It makes me think a lot about Paulie Timmins,”
Lexy said, “but I don’t see his face while I’m dreaming. But there
is something. Kind of big and round. Humpy, sort of. It’s not like
I’m having sex with it, but I want to. Or something. It’s standing
just out of my line of sight.”

There were nods in the audience, and Margie,
standing by the kitchen door, leaned against the doorjamb. There
was
something, kind of big, kind of humpy, sort of.

“What else?” she asked.

“Sometimes I think I wake up just in the nick of
time,” Julia said. “When I wake up, I’m afraid that if I slept a
moment longer, if I was in that dream for just a second more, that
I’d die.”

More nods.

Margie remembered that, too. “Think it’s safe to
say all the women in town are having these dreams? What about in
the county?”

Nods amid shrugs.

“Sister Ruth?” Lexy asked, and the women
tittered with nervous laughter.

“Yes,” Margie said, looking pointedly at Lexy.
“I spoke with her today. She’s having them as well.”

“Jeez,” Lexy said. “Now there’s a mental
image.”

“Don’t be cruel,” Margie said. “She’s a woman,
just like the rest of us.”

“I don’t think there’s anything we can do about
this,” Julia said. “Just like there’s nothing we seem to be able to
do about the other things.”

Margie watched the women in her living room
debate the situation. She found comfort in knowing she wasn’t
alone, but, by the same token, she worried about the evil of it
all. This was something taking control of the dreams of every woman
in the county. That was some powerful magic.

It made her want to move away. Take her
remaining son and husband and get the hell out of this place. Just
walk away from the diner. Just walk away from Sister Ruth. Just
walk away from Doc and the sheriff and all these women, and the
memories, and the nightmares—

But she knew she never would. She had knowingly
put her family at risk before, and not run away from it. The price
had been one son. The price of this nocturnal pleasure would be
heavy too, she knew, but it had yet to reveal itself.

No, she’d never leave Vargas County. She’d never
leave White Pines Junction. She’d never leave the diner, Sister
Ruth, her friends . . . she’d never give up those dreams
voluntarily. That thought felt like sin. So she was a sinner. Who
wasn’t?

“So let’s say it is a force of evil,” Kimberly
was saying. “What’s the point?”

Margie didn’t want to listen to what Lexy and
the rest had to say about that, so she backed into the kitchen and
arranged cookies on a plate. This meeting was a good idea in that
it opened the doors to communication, but nothing was going to be
decided.

She brought the cookies out and set them on the
coffee table.

“It’s progressing,” Natasha said. “It started
slow, but now it’s every night, and it’s more intense, and now
there’s that . . . that creature on the sidelines. One of these
nights it will show its face.”

“Yeah,” Kimberly said. “And I’m afraid that
whoever it is, whatever it is, I’m going to recognize it.”

Margie shuddered.

~~~

In the morning, Wolver looked a hundred percent
better. Pamela made orange juice, pancakes and bacon, and he ate
everything that came off the griddle and drank a whole pot of
coffee. “Going to hang around for a while?” she asked from across
the table, holding her coffee cup in both hands.

“C’mere,” he said, and scooted his chair back
from the table.

She went to him and he pulled her down onto his
lap and nuzzled his face in her breasts.

“I’ve got to go back up. It’s like a disturbance
in the force.”

They both smiled.

“I’ve got to fix it.”

“Stay a couple of days. There’s nothing that
important up there.” She didn’t like the whiny quality of her
voice.

“It’s important,” he said.

She nodded and wrapped her arms around his neck.
Tell him now,
she thought.

He pushed her up off his lap just as she was
ready to open her mouth. She scooted around to the chair next to
him.

“The thing is,” he started, then rubbed his
face. “The thing is, I think I recognize this thing. I’ve seen it
out of the corner of my eye, or in my dreams, or my childhood
nightmares or on some movie sometime, or something.”

“Tell me,” she said, affection pouring out for
him in a volume she never knew she contained.

He looked her straight in the eyes. “I think
it’s me,” he said.

~~~

“I don’t mean to be crude,” Dr. Sanborn said,
“but it’s like all the womenfolk have gone into heat. I’m
dispensing birth control like crazy. Even Audrey has been a little
uncharacteristically amorous these days.”

“There’s definitely something strange going on
with them,” Doc said. “Even I’ve noticed it. Regina Porter, who
hasn’t been in the shop all summer, has been in every day in the
past week. Flirting.”

“None of the pills seem to be working, though.
I’ve got more pregnancies than I know what to do with. Margie
Benson is expecting. Even Kimberly, who swears she hasn’t had sex
with a man since they put Cousins in prison. Nine months from now
we’re going to have a boom. Good thing Audrey’s past that
stage.”

“Jeez,” Doc said. “It’s not like this place
needs more kids. What’s the county doing, repopulating itself?”

Hutch Sanborn set his empty beer glass on the
table and wiped his mustache with the cocktail napkin. “Speaking of
Audrey,” he said.

“Yeah,” Doc said. “Better get on home while it
lasts.”

“My thoughts exactly. Good night.”

Doc saw Hutch to the door, and turned on the
porch light for him. When the doctor drove away, Doc turned off the
light, closed and locked the door, then went back into the kitchen.
It was a cold, lonely house. He wondered if there was a way he
could capitalize on this breeding energy that was going on in town,
but he wasn’t exactly the attractive type, the only place he knew
he could go would be the bar, and he didn’t go there, and Regina
Porter was the only one attracted to him anyway.

He slumped into the old couch and turned on the
television. There was only one channel, and it was fuzzy, but it
was better than dwelling on his solitude. Maybe John would be home
sometime soon. Someone to talk to on this very lonely night.

He grabbed the bucket of terminal tackle and
tools that always sat in his living room next to the coffee table,
and his hands started the endless job of making leaders while his
eyes tried to make sense of the snowy TV and his mind wandered to
soft skin and how nice it used to be when Sadie Katherine was
there.

~~~

Pamela fretted over Wolver for a week, and then
she decided that worry and stress wasn’t doing the baby any good.
She needed to go check on him to make sure he was all right.
Besides. It was time he knew about the baby. She didn’t want him to
think she was hiding the information from him. When a week had
passed, she thought that was sufficient time, it wouldn’t give him
the impression that she was too pushy, too needy, too aggressive,
so she threw an overnight bag into the car and headed north.

What she found when she got there was alarming.
Pamela always knew that there must be something a little bit odd
about a man who only wanted to live by himself in a cabin in the
woods with no modern conveniences, no neighbors, no social contact,
but until she was considering making a family with Wolver, she
never really saw him.

He was sitting on his woodchopping stump when
she pulled up. He was just sitting there, not drinking coffee, not
resting, just sitting, staring into space. Pamela had never seen
him motionless before.

“Hey,” she said.

He gave her a wan smile.

“You okay?”

He shook his head no.

“What’s the matter?” She knelt in the wood chips
next to him and put a hand on his thigh.

He shook his head. “I feel like I’ve
accomplished my purpose.”

“What’s your purpose?”

He shrugged. “No clue.”

“Honey,” she said. “Come inside. I’ll make you
some tea.”

It was as if he hadn’t heard her. “I dream all
the time about all these women. Having sex with a dozen women a
night. Only I’m not myself, I’m some kind of a creature. The
creature I see sometimes—” he swept the woods with a hand, and then
it fell back into his lap like it weighed a hundred pounds.

“Wolver, you’re starting to scare me.”

“I can’t sleep. When I sleep, I can’t rest. I
can’t remember my childhood. My earliest memories are about a year
ago, just before I met you.” He looked at her, his face drawn, his
eyes haunted. “Why is that, Pamela?”

“I don’t know, babe. I think you ought to come
home with me. Maybe too much solitude is catching up with you.”

“I can’t believe that will help. I feel like I’m
finished, and I don’t know why.”

“Come home with me. Just leave your stuff. We’ll
come back and get it later.”

He didn’t move.

“Wolver? We’re going to have a baby.”

A crease furrowed his brow. He looked down at
her kneeling at his feet. “So that’s it,” he said. He nodded.

“Honey?”

He nodded again, then stood up and walked off
into the woods.

When two days had come and gone and he still
wasn’t back, Pamela tidied up the cabin, took the black T-shirt
that still smelled like him, and went home. She worried about her
baby, who it was, what it would become, but then she decided that
worry wasn’t good for it. She tried not to think about what it
might be.

~~~

“It’s gone,” Margie said out loud. She hadn’t
realized the nighttime sexual presence was that palpable all day,
all the time, until just this second when it quit. The demon had
released her.

She took her hands out of the big bowl of salad
that she had been tossing, wiped her hands on a clean cloth, threw
it over her shoulder, and walked out into the diner.

All the women were looking up, as if the thing
that had weighed them all down for months had finally vanished,
leaving their heads light, and they automatically looked up. Like
vixens sniffing the air.

Soon they all turned and looked at each other,
and at her.

She knew if she started laughing, they’d all
join in. But strangely enough, she didn’t feel like it.

When the phone rang, Margie
looked at the clock before she answered. Two-forty-seven a.m.

Jimbo was in bed next to her, and Jason was
asleep upstairs, so if it wasn’t one of their relatives in trouble
out of state, it could only be Sister Ruth.

Margie picked up the receiver, held it to her
ear and listened.

Raspy breathing.

“Hello?” she whispered.

“Margie?”

“Sister?” Margie tried to keep her voice low,
but heard a snort of disgust from Jimbo and knew he was awake.

“They were here again tonight,” Sister Ruth said
in a small voice.

“Are they gone?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Then you can go to sleep.”

“No, I couldn’t possibly sleep. I’m so afraid.
Could you come?”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Margie said.
“They’re gone.”

“They’ll come back.”

Margie sighed. “Not tonight.”

“Micah was here this time,” Sister Ruth said in
her little girl voice.

Margie sighed, resigned. Sister Ruth knew how to
play her. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll come.”

Jimbo gave another snort. “That’s the second
time this week,” he said.

“Hush,” she said hanging up the phone. “It’s my
ministry.”