beat, and the blood still coursed through his veins.
‘Jesus,’ whispered Harlan. His breath was catching in his chest. A sense of profound vulnerability washed over him, and in its wake he was engulfed by a terrible despair. He felt its hunger, its need. If it was an animal out there, then it was like none that he had ever encountered.
‘Can you see it?’ asked Paul.
‘I can’t see nothing, but I can
They stayed that way, Harlan and Paul, their weapons ready, two frightened old men facing an implacable presence in the dark, until both sensed that whatever was out there had departed, but they still agreed to alternate watches until dawn. Paul dozed first while Harlan stayed awake, but Harlan had been more tired than he thought. His eyes began to close, and his shoulders sagged. He would experience flashes of dreaming before he jerked awake, and in those moments he dreamed of a little girl dancing through the woods, although he could not see her face clearly. She approached the fire, peering through the smoke and the flames, examining the two old men, growing bolder in her approaches until, in the final dream, she was reaching out a hand to touch Harlan’s face, and he could see that some of the nails were broken and the rest were filled with dirt, and he smelled the rotting of her.
He stayed awake after that. He stood to keep sleep at bay.
Sleep, and the girl.
Because that stink had still been there when he woke up.
It was real.
But they took the money. In the end, that’s what it came down to. They took the money, and they used it to make their lives a little easier. When the cancer began flipping Paul’s cells like the tiles on an Othello board, turning them from white to black, he discreetly pursued a range of treatments, some orthodox, some not, and he never lost hope, not even when he put his gun in his mouth at last, because for him it was not an act of ultimate despair but the embracing of his last, best and surest hope.
And Harlan Vetters’ wife was looked after in her own home as the Parkinson’s quickly combined with the Alzheimer’s to create critical mass, and he was forced to move her into residential care. It was the best facility that he could find within easy reach of Falls End. She had her own room flooded with light and a view of the woods, because she loved the woods as much as her husband did. Harlan visited her every day, and in summer he would put her in a wheelchair and together they would head into town for ice cream, and there were days when she would remember who he was for a few moments, and she would hold his hand in her own, and his strength would seem to still the trembling. For the most part, though, she would stare vacantly ahead of her, and Harlan could not decide if that absence was better or worse than the fear that would occasionally animate her features, when everything was strange and terrifying to her: the town, her husband, even herself.
When Paul Scollay’s sister found that her husband had gambled away their savings, her brother stepped in, and money was put into a high-yield account to which only she had access. Her husband, meanwhile, was encouraged to seek treatment for his addiction, spurred on by a conversation that he’d had with Paul during which Paul’s shotgun was conspicuous by its presence.
And because they lived in a small town, they knew when someone was hurting – a job lost, an injury suffered, a child yielded up to the care of grandparents because the mother couldn’t cope – and an envelope would be placed on the doorstep during the night, and a little of the pressure would be anonymously relieved. In that way they salved their consciences, although both men remained haunted by the same strange dreams, visions in which they were pursued through the forest by an unseen entity, ending up at last before the black pool where something was rising from the depths, always threatening to surface but never appearing before they woke.
Rarely, too, did a day pass during those years without Harlan and Paul fearing that the plane would be discovered, and some trace of their presence at the wreckage would be revealed. They were not sure which they feared more: the law, or those who might have a personal interest in the plane and its contents. But those fears faded, and the nightmares came less frequently. The money was gradually spent until only a little of it remained, and Harlan and Paul had started to believe that they might just have committed a victimless crime when the man with the distended neck returned to Falls End.
6
It was a cold January afternoon in 2004 when the man known as Brightwell – if man he truly was – reappeared.
Harlan Vetters had always hated these winter months: they’d been bad enough when he was a young man with stamina and muscle tone and strong bones, but now he had significantly less of all three and had grown to dread the first fall of snow. His wife used to find it amusing when he began railing at the photographs in the winter catalogs that started turning up in their mailbox in August, or at the glossy store advertisements tucked inside the
‘Nobody in this state posed for those photos, I tell you that,’ he would say. ‘They ought to fill these things with pictures of some poor bastard up to his knees in snow trying to dig his truck out with a spoon.’
And Angeline would pat him on the shoulder and say, ‘Well, they wouldn’t sell too many sweaters that way, would they?’ and Harlan would mutter something in turn, and she’d kiss him on the crown of his head and leave him to his business, knowing that later she would find him in the garage, checking that the plow attachment for his truck was undamaged; that the flashlights worked, and there were batteries to spare; that the backup generator was in working order, and the woodshed was dry, and this before the first leaves had even begun to drop from the trees.
In the weeks that followed he would make a list of all that was needed, both food and equipment, and then he would set out early one morning to the big suppliers in Bangor or, if he felt like the ride, Portland, returning that same evening with tales of bad driving, and two-dollar cups of coffee, and donuts that weren’t as good as the ones Laurie Boden served at the Falls End Diner, don’t know why, after all how hard could it be to make a donut? She would help him to pack his purchases away, and there would always be hot chocolate mix, more than a whole town could ever drink in the longest winter imaginable, because he knew that she loved hot chocolate and he didn’t want her to be without.
And there would be some small treat for her at the bottom of the box, something that he had chosen himself in a boutique and not in one of the big department stores. It was the real reason why he drove so far, she knew, so that he could find her something that wasn’t available locally: a scarf, or a hat, or a small item of jewelry, with maybe a box of candy or cookies thrown in with it, and often a book, some big hardback novel that would keep her going for a week when the snow settled upon them. It amused and touched her to think of him in a fancy women’s clothing store, fingering varieties of silk and wool and interrogating the saleswoman on issues of quality and price, or browsing the aisles of a bookstore with his notebook open to a page filled with titles he had jotted down over the preceding months, a list of books that she had mentioned in passing, or novels about which he had read himself and thought she might like. She knew that he would have spent as much time, if not more, on choosing those gifts for her as he did on buying all of his winter supplies, and he would glow with delight at the pleasure she derived upon discovering what he had brought for her.
Because here was the thing: while her friends sometimes complained at their husbands’ absence of taste and their seeming inability to buy anything appropriate for Christmas or birthdays, Harlan always chose right. Even the smallest of his gifts spoke of the consideration he had given to their suitability, and, over their many years together, she came to understand that he thought of her a great deal, and she was always with him, and these small tokens were simply occasional physical expressions of her deep and abiding presence in his life.
So, on the day of the great expedition, she in turn would have a hot meal waiting for him, and a pie she had baked that day: peach or apple, not too sweet, the crust slightly burned, just the way he liked it. The two of them would eat, and talk, and later they’d make love, because he had never stopped loving her.
He loved her still, even though she no longer always knew who it was that loved her.
There was ice on the road that day, black and treacherous, and Harlan was forced to drive to the nursing home at a pace barely above walking, even for an old timer like himself. He experienced a profound sense of relief
