Mystery Walk

Melissa smiled and nodded her head, and then her mother pulled her on into the store.

He watched her over his shoulder as he neared the door, and saw her look quickly back at him. His heart pounded. And then the cowbell clanged over his head and he ran into someone who was coming through the door.

'Whoa there, Billy!' Link Patterson said, trying to sidestep. 'You gatherin' wool, boy?' He grinned good- naturedly; in another instant the grin had frozen on his face, because Billy Creekmore was staring at him as if he'd sprouted horns from the top of his head.

Billy's blood had gone cold. Link Patterson looked healthy and well fed, possibly because he was one of the few men who'd gotten a job at the sawmill and his life had taken a turn for the better; his wife was expecting their second child in October, and he'd just made the first payment on a trailer parked outside the town limits. But Billy saw him enveloped in a purplish black haze of light, a hideous cocoon that slowly writhed around him.

Link laughed nervously. 'What's wrong? Looks like you'd seen a . . .' The word ghost lay in his mouth like cold lead, and he swallowed it.

Billy slowly reached out; his fingers touched the haze, but felt nothing. Link shrank back a step. 'Boy? What the hell's wrong with you?'

Coy Granger, Mrs. Pettus, and Melissa were watching. Billy blinked and shook his head. 'Nothing, Mr Patterson. Sorry. I . . . sorry.' And then he was out the door and gone, hurrying along the road with the sack of groceries clamped in the crook of an arm. With a few more steps he began running, feeling scared and sick. What did I see? he asked himself, and didn't stop running even when he passed the green, grown-over ruin of the Booker house.

'Pack of Kents, Coy,' Link Patterson said. As Granger got his cigarettes, Link stepped to the window and peered out, watching Billy running away. He could hear the high singsong of the saws; in fifteen minutes he'd be on the line, called in to fill the shift for a man who'd gotten sick and had to go home. 'That Creekmore boy is . . . really strange, ain't he?' Link said, to no one in particular.

Mrs. Pettus answered. 'He's got that wicked seed in him, that's what. My Melissa sees him at school every day and he's always picking fights, isn't he?'

'No, Momma,' she replied, and pulled away from her mother's arm. 'That's not how it is.'

'Always picking fights. And he's such a nice-lookin' boy, too, to have such bad blood in him.'

'Billy's all right,' Coy said. 'He's a smart boy. He'll go far if he can cut himself loose from that farm. Link, here're your cigarettes. How's work at the mill?'

'In bits and pieces,' Link joked, trying to summon up a grin. The way Billy had stared at him had made him jittery. He paid for the cigarettes, went out to his pickup truck, and drove on toward the mill.

Link parked his truck in the gravel lot, took a few pulls from a cigarette to calm his jittery nerves, then crushed it out and put on his heavy canvas safety gloves. Then he walked the few dozen yards to the main building, past bunks of yellow pine logs sitting alongside the railroad tracks; they were newly arrived, oozing sap, and ready to be hauled into the small pond behind the mill before the hot weather made them harden and swell. He went up a flight of rickety stairs to the main hall.

Before he opened the door, the noise of the saws was simply irritating; when he stepped inside, into a golden haze of sawdust and friction heat thrown off by the whirring circular saws, band saws, and ponies, the shrill scream of machinery pounded into his forehead like a sledgehammer. He fished earplugs from his pocket and screwed them in place, but they helped hardly at all. The smell of raw lumber and sawdust in the air scratched the back of Link's throat. He clocked in next to the glassed-in office where Lamar Chatham sat at his desk, the telephone to one ear and an index finger plugging the other.

The mill was working at full speed. Link saw where he was needed—the master sawyer, Durkee, was operating the headrig and and aligning the logs, a two-man job that was slowing down the flow of timber—and hurried toward the far end of the line. He took his place next to the whining headrig and began operating the long lever that sped up or braked the circular saw, while grizzled old Durkee judged the raw logs and maneuvered them so they'd go into the headrig at the proper angle and speed. Link worked the lever, adjusting the saw's speed to Durkee's shouted orders.

The logs kept coming, faster and faster Link settled down to the routine, watching the oil-smeared gauge set into the machinery next to him, reading the saw's speed.

Bare light bulbs hung from the ceiling, illuminating the mill with a harsh and sometimes unreliable light: many men who'd worked the mill were missing fingers because they couldn't judge exactly where a fast-spinning sawrim was, due to poor lighting. Link let himself relax, became part of the trembling headrig. His mind drifted to his new trailer. It had been a good buy, and now that his second child was on the way it was good that he, Susie, and his son Jeff were out of that shack they'd lived in for years. It seemed that finally things were working out his way.

Durkee shouted, 'This one's as punky as a rotten tooth!' and jabbed at the wood with a logger's hook. 'Damn, what sorta shit they tryin' to pass through here!' He reached out, pushed the log's far end a few inches to line it up correctly, and made a motion with his forefinger to give the saw more speed. Link pushed the lever forward. The log started coming through, sawdust whirling out of the deepening groove as the teeth sank in. The headrig vibrated suddenly, and Link thought: This sonofabitch is gonna come a—

And then there was a loud crack! that vibrated through the mill. Link saw the log split raggedly as the saw slipped out of line. Durkee roared, 'SHUT HER DOWN!' and Link wrenched the lever back, thinking I've screwed up, I've screwed up, I've . . .

Something flew up like a yellow dagger. The three-inch-long shard of wood pierced Link's left eye with a force that snapped his head back. He screamed in agony, clutched at his face, and stumbled forward, off-balance; instinctively he reached out to keep himself from going down . . . and the saw's scream turned into a hungry gobbling.

'Help!' Durkee shouted. 'Somebody cut the master switch!'

Link staggered, blood streaming down his face. He lifted his right hand to clear his eyes, and saw in his hazed half-vision the wet nub of white bone that jutted from the mangled meat of his forearm. His hand, the fingers still twitching, was already moving down the conveyor belt wrapped in its bloody canvas glove.

And then the stump of his ruined arm shot blood like a firehose.

Voices cut through the haze above him. '. . . call the doc, hurry . . .'

'... bandage it . . . tourniquet in the. . . !'

'. . . somebody call his wife!'

'My hand,' Link whispered. 'Find ... my hand. . . .' He couldn't remember now which hand was hurt, but he knew it had to be found so the doctor could stitch it back on. The sawdust around him was wet, his clothes were wet, everything was wet. A black wave roared through his head. 'No!' he whispered. '. . . Not fair, not this way!' Tears streamed down his cheeks, mingling with the blood. He was aware of someone knotting a shirt around his forearm; everything was moving in slow motion, everything was crazy and wrong. . . .

'... too much blood, the damned thing's not gonna . . .' a disembodied voice said, off in the distance. A shout, full of sharp echoes: '... ambulance!' and then fading away.

The black wave came back again, seemingly lifting him up from where he sat. It scared him, and he fought against it with his teeth gritted. 'NO!' he cried out. 'I WON'T LET IT . . . be . . . like this. . . .' The voices above him had merged into an indistinct mumbling. His eye hurt, that was the worst of it, and he couldn't see. 'Clean my eye off,' he said, but no one seemed to hear. A surge of anger swelled in him, searing and indignant. There was still so much to do, he realized. His wife to take care of! The new baby! The trailer he was so proud of and had put so much work into! I won't let it be like this! he screamed inwardly.

The light was fading. Link said, 'I don't want it to get dark.'

Above him, an ashen-faced and blood-spattered Durkee looked at the ring of stunned men and said, 'What'd he say? Anybody hear him? Jesus, what a mess!' Durkee went down on his knees, cradling the younger man's head. Now that all the saws were quiet, they could hear an ambulance coming, but it was still on the other side of Hawthorne.

There were droplets of blood across the front of Lamar Chatham's white shirt. He was trembling, his hands curled into helpless fists at his sides. His brain was working furiously on two tracks: how to make up the work that was being lost and how to smooth this thing over with the safety inspectors. He saw Link Patterson's gloved hand