Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (63 page)

“Had us a report of some trouble, up on Peck’s Ridge,” was all Kronke would say. He looked grey with panic; the flesh practically hung off his face.

“Peck’s Ridge?” We’d heard that place name before, of course. “Isn’t that where Lamar Tibbs lives?” The mayor didn’t answer at first; Keith leaned forwards and gripped his shoulder. “Tibbs? The man who found the creature?”

“Up near there,” Kronke said, shaking loose his arm. He tried to regain some of his mayoral authority: “’Tain’t rightly speaking none of your business anyways, mister—”

“Drop that,” Keith said impatiently. “Drop that straightaway, or else I’ll make sure you come across as the biggest hick in all creation when the story makes it into the papers. How’s that gonna play with the voters come election time, Mr. Kronke?”

The two men stared angrily at each other, but there was only ever going to be one winner of that contest. After a second Kronke told his chauffeur “Drive on,” and we were off, away down main street heading out of town, up into the hill country.

That was some drive, all right. The middle of the night, and not a light showing in all that desolate stretch; only the headlamps of the car on the ribbon of road ahead. Trees crowding close to the track, and between their ghostly lit-up trunks only the blackness of the forest. Overhead, a canopy of branches, and no starlight, no sliver of the moon; it felt as if we were going down into the ground as much as climbing, as if we’d entered some miner’s tunnel lined with wooden props, heading clear down to the Carboniferous.

Alongside me on the rumble, Keith sat, hands clenched on the back of the seat in front. He was willing the automobile on, it seemed to me, the way a jockey nurses a horse along in the home straight. His old man’s mop of hair showed up very white in the near darkness, but that didn’t fool me any: underneath it all was still the dreamer he’d always been and would remain, the thirty-year-old who’d walked out on his safe job with Mr. Hearst and headed up North to the Klondike on nothing more than a notion and a chance. Hero worship? I should say so.

Maybe seven or eight miles out of town, we saw light up ahead: fire. The Ford swung round and down a trail so narrow, the branches plucked at our sleeves and we had to cover our faces from their lash, and then we came out into a natural dip between two high sides of hills, with a farmhouse and outbuildings down the bottom of the hollow. All hell was breaking loose down there.

People were running back and forth between the main house and the outhouses, the farthest of which was well ablaze. You could hear the screams of animals trapped in the sheds; I couldn’t be sure there weren’t the cries of people in there too.

Before we even came to a halt, an old man in biballs came running up, crying out unintelligibly. “Was it you phoned?” Kronke bellowed at him above the tumult. Whether he expected any answer, I don’t know. It was clear the fellow was raving mad, for the time being at least. Keith passed him over to Kronke’s buddies, who were very pointedly not setting foot outside the automobile, and beckoned me follow him down towards the house. Kronke hung back, unwilling to leave the safety of the car; why he’d even bothered coming out there in the first place was hard to say. Perhaps he thought it was his chance to get the whoosit back, on behalf of the mining company. Perhaps—I think this is not unlikely, myself—perhaps there was always some sort of a trip planned for that night, Kronke and a few men armed with pistols, up to Peck’s Ridge on company business. Well, they might have had a chance at that, I guess; had things only panned out just a little differently.

Down by the sheds Keith managed to get a hold of one of the people fighting the fire; a teenager, no more, in a plaid shirt and patched drawers. “What’s going on here?” he yelled.

“They’re trapped!” the kid hollered back, his eyes round with panic. “Uncle Jesse and Uncle Vern! In there! They were a-watchin’ over it!”

“Watching over what?” The kid tried to shake free, but Keith had him tight. “Were they keeping guard? What over?”

“Over Pap’s thing!” The kid made to break loose again, without success. “That what Pap found, down to the mine! Lemme go, mister—”

“Your pap Lamar Tibbs?” Keith was implacable. I felt for the youngster, I did. But I wanted to know as well.

The kid nodded, and Keith had one more question. “Where is he?”

“
I don’t know!”
screamed the boy. “
I DON’T KNOW!”
Keith was so shocked at the ferocity of it, the sheer volume, that he let him go. The kid stood there for a second, surprised himself I guess, then shook himself all over like a dog coming out of the creek and ran off towards the burning barn. We followed on behind.

Some of the men had formed a chain, and were passing buckets of water up from the pump. The fellows nearest the door were emptying the buckets into the smoke and flames; Keith brushed straight past them and was inside before anyone could stop him. I went to follow him, but one of the men in the doorway grabbed me. “It’s gonna come down!” he yelled in my ear: I was just about to holler after Keith when he appeared through the smoke, coughing and staggering. “It’s not in there,” he wheezed, soon as he could talk. Then there came a mighty creaking and splintering, and we all sprang back as the roof collapsed in a roaring billow of sparks.

“It’s gone,” Keith insisted, as we stood and watched the barn burn out from a safe distance. “But it was there, though.” I was about to ask him what he meant, how he could have known that, when a stocky little man came running up from the house shouting, and interrupted me.

“You see anything of Vern and Jesse in there, mister?” His face was blackened, eyes white and staring; I learned later they’d dragged him out of the barn once already, half-dead from the smoke. “It’s my brothers—I’m Lamar Tibbs.”

Keith nodded. The man was about to ask the next, the obvious, question, but I guess Keith’s expression told him what he wanted to know. Tibbs’ own features crumpled up, and he bowed his head.

After a little while he said: “It all up with them?” Keith nodded again. “Fire?”

“Before the fire,” Keith said. The miner looked up, and he went on: “They were over in the far corner. They weren’t burned any.” I think he meant it kindly; that was the way Tibbs took it, not knowing any better then. But Keith’s eyes were flinty hard, and I for one had my misgivings.

“Was it that thing caused it?” Tibbs’ voice was all but inaudible. “That thing I brung up from the mine?”

“I believe so.” Keith’s voice sounded calm enough, the more so if you couldn’t take a cue from his face. “It’s not there any more: it looks to have busted out the back before the roof went.”

That got Tibbs’ attention. “You sure?”

“Can’t be certain that’s the way it got out,” said Keith, picking his words with care. “It wasn’t in there when the roof fell in, though—that, I’m sure of.”

Tibbs looked hard at Keith, who stared levelly back at him. What he saw seemed to make his mind up. “Wait there, mister,” he said shortly, and started back towards the house. Over his shoulder, he shouted: “You in the mood for a dawg hunt?”

I began to say something, but Keith stopped me with a upraised hand. “What about you, Mr. Fenwick? You in the mood for a dawg hunt, sir?”

What could I say? Understanding that no matter what, Keith would go through with it, I nodded miserably. Then there was no more time to think: Tibbs was running back from the house with three of the mangiest, meanest-looking yaller hounds you ever saw in your life. The chase was on.

The dogs picked up a trail directly we got round the back of the barn. They shivered uncontrollably—as if they were passing peach pits, as Keith memorably put it later that same night—and set off at a good fast clip into the trees. Tibbs had them on the end of a short leash, and it was all he could do to keep up the pace. Keith loped along after him, and I brought up the rear. A few of Tibbs’ relatives from back in the yard joined in—thankfully, they’d thought to bring along lanterns. There were a half-dozen of us in all.

“I thought it was a goner,” panted Tibbs from up in front. He’d pegged Keith for a straight shooter more or less from the beginning, that was clear: I suppose it was watching Keith dive straight into that burning barn had done it. I doubt it came easy for him to trust anyone much, outside of his extended family circle, but he damn near deferred to Horton Keith. “We’d been blastin’ on the big new seam, see: I swung my hammer at a big ol’ chunk of coal fell out the roof, ’bout the size of a barrel—the fall must ’a cracked it some, ’cause one lick from me was all it took. That chunk split wide open like a hick’ry nut, clean in two—an’ there it was, the whoosit, older than Methuselah. Fitted in there like a hand inside a glove, it did.”

“I know,” Keith wheezed. He was keeping up pretty good, for a man well into his fifties, but Tibbs was setting a punishing pace. “Seen it—back at the courthouse.”

“You seen that? You seen the coal? Then you got a pretty good idea what we brung back here.”
He’s got a better idea than that, maybe
, I thought to myself, but I didn’t say anything. For one thing, I doubt my aching lungs would have let me—nor yet my growing panic, which I was only just managing to keep in check.

“Anyhow, it was deader’n Abel slain by Cain—I’ll swear to that, an’ these men here’ll back me up. You never seen a thing so dried out an’ wrinkled—nor so ugly, neither. Jesus Christ, it made me sick to look at it!—but it was my prize, an’ I swore it was goin’ to make me a rich man. Me an’ all my kin—” He choked up at that, and we none of us pressed him; we ran on, was all, with the rustling thud of our footfalls through the brush warning the whole forest of our approach, probably.

The dogs were still straining hard after the scent, when all of a sudden they stopped and gathered round something underfoot, down by a little stand of dwarf sumac. I thought it was a rock at first: I couldn’t see through the bodies of the hounds. It was Tibbs’ cry that made me realise what it
might
be—that, and the story Keith had told me not half-a-dozen hours previously, rattling round my mind the way it had been ever since.

Tibbs couldn’t pick it up, that roundish muddy thing the dogs had found. That was left to Horton Keith: he lifted it just a little, enough for one of the other men in the party to gasp and mutter “Jesse.” Tibbs repeated the name a few times to himself, while Keith replaced the thing the way he found it and straightened up off his haunches. Then Tibbs gave it out in a howl that made the dogs back off, cower on their bellies in the leaf-rot as if they’d been whipped. I swear that sound went all the way through me. I hear it still, when I think about that night. It’s bad, and I try not to do it too much, mostly because the next thing I think of is what I heard next—what we all heard, the sound that made us snap up our heads and turn in the direction of our otherworldly quarry.

You’ll probably remember that Keith had already taken a stab at describing that sound. If you go back and look what he said, you’ll see he compared it to the last trump, and all I can say is, standing out there in the middle of the forest, looking at each other in the lantern light, we all of us knew exactly what he meant. It turned my guts to water: I damn near screamed myself.

It was so close; that was the thing. Just by the clarity and lack of muffling you could tell it wasn’t far off—five, maybe ten score of paces on through the trees, somewhere just over the next ridge. Tibbs got his senses back soonest of us all, or maybe he was so far gone then that sense had nothing to do with it: he was off and running, aiming to close down those hundred yards or so and get to grips with whatever cut down his brothers and took a trophy to boot. The dogs almost tripped him up; they were cowering in the dirt still, and there was no budging them. He flung down the leash and left them there.

It was Keith started after him, of course. And once Keith had gone, I couldn’t not go myself. Then the rest of then followed on; all of which meant we were pretty strung out along the track. It may have saved Keith’s life, that arrangement.

I heard Tibbs up ahead, cursing and panting; then, I heard a strange sort of a whizzing noise. I once stood at a wharf watching a cargo ship being unloaded, and one of the hawsers broke on the winching gear. The noise it made as it lashed through the air; that was what I heard. Whip-crack, quick and abrupt; and then I didn’t hear Tibbs any more.

What I thought I heard was the sound of rain, pattering on the leaves and branches. I even felt a few drops of it on my face. Then one of the men in the rear caught up and shone his lantern up ahead. It lit first of all on Keith as he staggered back, hand to his mouth. Then, it lit on Tibbs.

At first it seemed like some sort of conjuror’s trick. He was staggering too, like a stage drunk, only there was something about his head… At first your brain refused to believe it. Your eyes saw it, but your brain reported back, no, it’s a man; men aren’t made that way. It’s a trick they do with mirrors; a slather of stage blood to dress it up, that’s all. Then, inevitably, Tibbs lost his balance and fell backwards. Once he was down it became easier to deal with, in one way—easier to look at and trust your own eyes, at any rate. At last, you could look at it and see what there was to be seen. Which was this: from the neck up, Tibbs’ head was gone.

I said you could look at it; not for long, though. Instead I turned to Keith, who was pressed back up against a tree trunk, still with his hand to his mouth. He saw me, and he tried to speak, shaking his head all the while, but he couldn’t find the words.

Then we both heard it together: a rustling in the branches above our head, the sound of something dropping. We both looked up at about the same time, and that was how I managed to spring back, and so avoid the thing hitting me smack on the crown of my head. It hit the ground good and hard, directly between the two of us: the soft mud underfoot took all the bounce off it, though. It rolled half of the way over, then stopped, so you couldn’t really see its features. There was no mistaking it, though, even in the shaky lantern-light; I’d been looking at the back of Tibbs’ head only a moment ago, hadn’t I?