Mystery Walk

John stopped halfway up the porch steps, his fists knotted and the cords in his neck as tense as piano wires. 'Maybe you've got money,' John snarled, 'and maybe you wear fancy suits and fancy rings and you can work men like dogs, but this is my land, mister! And I'm tellin' you to move off of it, right now!'

'Creekmore,' Chatham said with a hiss of breath between his teeth, 'I own half this town. My brother owns the other half. Paper can be torn up, do you understand me? It can be misplaced. Listen, I don't want no trouble. Hell, I'm tryin' to offer your boy a job and pay him for it, too! Now back off, man!'

In the porch swing, Ramona saw the trapped-animal look in her husband's eyes, and her heart ached. She sat with her hands clasped in her lap as John said, 'I don't ... I don't . . . want you here. ...'

And then Billy was coming up the steps, passing his father. He walked right up to Lamar Chatham and looked him directly in the eyes. 'Are you threatening my father, Mr Chatham?'

'No. 'Course not. Hell, there's a lot of steam needs to be blowed off around here! Ain't that right, John?'

The other man whispered, 'Damn you . . . damn you. ...'

'What is it you want with me?' Billy asked him.

'Like I say, I had a long talk with your mother We came to an understandin', and she's asked me to talk to you. ...'

John made a strangling sound; then he stepped back down the stairs and stood facing the pond. He clamped his hands to his ears.

Chatham paid him no attention. 'I don't believe in haunts, Billy. No such thing in my book. But a lot of the men do. They won't work and I had to close the mill because . . . because of the saw Link Patterson stuck his hand into.'

'The saw? What about it?'

Chatham glanced uneasily at Ramona Creekmore, then looked back into the boy's face. There were amber glints in Billy's eyes, and his gaze seemed so deeply penetrating Chatham thought he felt the short hairs at the back of his neck stir. Chatham said, 'The saw screams. Like a man.'

22

Twilight framed the sawmill against a sky of blue and gold. Shards of sunlight lay across the gravel parking lot like pieces of broken glass, and bunked piles of timber threw dark blue shadows.

'You drink yet, boy?' Lamar Chatham asked as he switched off the pickup's ignition and took the keys out.

'No sir.'

'Time you started. Open that glove compartment there and fetch the bottle.'

It was a flask of moonshine that Billy could smell even before Chatham uncapped it. The man took a swig and closed his eyes; Billy could almost see the veins in his bulbous nose lighting up. 'You believe me when I say I don't think there's such a thing as a haunt?'

'Yes sir.'

'Well, I'm a goddamned liar, boy. Sheeeit! My old daddy used to tell me ghost stories that made the hair on my ass curl! You won't catch me closer than a mile to a cemetery, that's for truth!' He passed the flask to Billy. 'Mind you now, I don't care what you or your momma can or can't do. I've heard the stories about your mother, and I was there that night at the Falconer tent revival. That was one hell of an uproar. Once you go in my mill and ... do whatever it is that has to be done, then I figure my men will come on back to work. And I'll make sure every last one of them knows what you did . . . even if you don't do a damned thing. Get my drift?'

Billy nodded. His insides were quaking. When he'd said he would help Mr. Chatham, his father had looked at him as if he were a leper But Mr Chantham had said he'd pay fifty dollars and so wasn't it right, Billy reasoned, that he help out the family as much as he could? Still, he didn't know exactly what he was supposed to do; he'd brought his good-luck piece of coal, but he knew that whatever had to be done would have to come from inside him, and he was on his own. Before he'd left the house, his mother had taken him inside and talked to him quietly, telling him that his time had come now, and he would have to do the best he could. Oh, she'd said, she could go with him this time to give him confidence, but it would all be his work anyway; there might not even be anything in the sawmill, she'd told him, but if there was it could be part of Link Patterson, in agony and unable to find its way across. Draw it to you with trust, and remember the lessons your grandmother taught you. Most importantly: blank the fear out of your mind, if you can, and let the revenant find you. It'll be searching for help, and it'll be drawn to you as if you were a candle in the dark.

As Billy had climbed into the white pickup truck, Ramona had stood on the porch and said to him, 'Remember, son: no fear. I love you.'

The light was slowly fading. Billy sniffed at the moonshine and then took a drink. It felt like lava at the back of his throat, and bubbled down his gullet searing tissues all the way to his stomach; it reminded him of the stuff Gram had made him drink to clean his stomach out before he'd gone into the smokehouse.

Sometimes at night, on the edge of sleep, he seemed to relive that entire strange experience. He'd stayed inside that sweltering smokehouse for three days, wrapped in the heavy blanket, with nothing to eat and only home-brewed 'medicines' to drink. Lulled by the fierce heat, he'd drifted in the dark, losing all sense of time and space; his body had seemed cumbersome, like a suit of armor, trapping his real self within it. He was aware, though locked into sleep, of his mother and Gram looking in on him, and sitting with him for a while: he could tell the difference in their heartbeat, in their rhythms of breathing, in the aromas of their bodies and the sound of air parting around them as they moved. The crackling of the burning wood and leaves had become a kind of music alternating between soft harmony and rough pandemonium; smoke at the ceiling rustled like a silk shirt as it brushed the boards.

When he'd finally awakened and had been allowed out of the smokehouse, the morning sunlight had pierced his skin like needles, and the quiet forests had seemed a riot of cacophonous noise. It was several more days yet before his senses had settled down enough for him to feel comfortable again, yet even so he was and had remained fantastically aware of colors, aromas, and sounds; thus the pain was terrible when they'd returned home from Gram's, and his father had hit Ramona a backhanded blow across the face and then stropped Billy with a belt. Then the house was filled with his father's voice, torn between begging their forgiveness and loudly reading Bible verses.

Billy looked at the golden streamers of cloud across the sky and thought of how the papier-mache decorations would look in the Fayette County High gym on May Night. He wanted very much to go to that dance, to fit in with all the others; he knew it might be his last chance. If he said no to Mr Chatham now, if he let everybody know he was just a scared kid who didn't know anything about haunts or spirits, then maybe he could ask Melissa Pettus, and maybe she'd go with him to May Night and he'd get a job as a mechanic in Fayette and everything would be just fine for the rest of his life. Anyway, he'd hardly known Link Patterson, so what was he doing here?

Chatham said nervously, 'I want to get through with this before it gets dark. Okay?'

Billy's shoulders slowly sagged forward. He got out of the truck.

They walked in silence up the wooden steps to the sawmill's entrance. Chatham fumbled with a ring of keys and then unlocked the door; before he stepped inside he reached in and switched on several banks of dimly glowing blubs that studded the raftered ceiling.

Greased machinery gleamed in the mixture of electric light and the last orange sunlight that filtered through a series of high, narrow windows. The smells of dust, woodsap, and machine oil thickened the air, and the place seemed hazed with a residue of sawdust. Chatham closed the door and motioned to the far end of the building. 'It happened up there, right at the headrig. I'll show you.' His voice sounded hollow in the silence.

Chatham stopped ten feet away from the headrig and pointed at it. Billy approached the saw, his shoes stirring up whorls of dust, and gingerly touched the large, jagged teeth. 'He should've been wearin' safety glasses,' Chatham said. 'It wasn't my fault. Punky timber comes in all the time, it's a fact of life. He ... he died about where you're standin'.'

Billy looked at the floor. Sawdust had been spread over a huge brown stain; his mind went back to the stained floor in the Booker house, the hideous mark of death hidden with newspapers. The saw's teeth were cold