“Babe!”
“All right, Mum,” said Babe with her mouth full. ‘Well, why?”
“I told Cory not to shout last night,” Clissa said half to herself.
‘Well, whatever it means, he isn’t,” said Babe with finality. “Did he go hunting again?”
“He went to look for Kimbo, darling.”
“Kimbo? Oh Mummy, is Kimbo gone, too? Didn’t he come back either?”
“No, dear. Oh, please, Babe, stop asking questions!”
“All right. Where do you think they went?”
“Into the north woods. Be quiet.”
Babe gulped away at her breakfast. An idea struck her; and as she thought of it she ate slower and slower and cast more and more glances at her mother from under the lashes of her tilted eyes. It would be awful if Daddy did anything to Uncle Alton. Someone ought to warn him.
Babe was halfway to the wood when Alton’s .32-40 sent echoes giggling up and down the valley.
Cory was in the south thirty, riding a cultivator and cussing at the team of grays when he heard the gun. “Hoa,” he called to the horses, and sat a moment to listen to the sound. “One-two-three. Four,” he counted. “Saw someone, blasted away at him. Had a chance to take aim and give him another, careful. My God!” He threw up the cultivator points and steered the team into the shade of three oaks. He hobbled the gelding with swift tosses of a spare strap and headed for the woods. “Alton a killer,” he murmured, and doubled back to the house for his gun. Clissa was standing just outside the door.
“Get shells!” he snapped and flung into the house. Clissa followed him. He was strapping his hunting knife on before she could get a box off the shelf. “Cory—”
“Hear that gun, did you? Alton’s off his nut. He don’t waste lead. He shot at someone just then, and he wasn’t fixin’ to shoot pa’tridges when I saw him last. He was out to get a man. Gimme my gun.”
“Cory, Babe—”
“You keep her here. Oh, God, this is a helluva mess. I can’t stand much more.” Cory ran out the door.
Clissa caught his arm: “Cory, I’m trying to tell you. Babe isn’t here. I’ve called, and she isn’t here.”
Cory’s heavy, young-old face tautened. “Babe— Where did you last see her?”
“Breakfast.” Clissa was crying now.
“She say where she was going?”
“No. She asked a lot of questions about Alton and where he’d gone.”
“Did you say?”
Clissa’s eyes widened, and she nodded, biting the back of her hand.
“You shouldn’t ha’ done that, Clissa,” he gritted, and ran toward the woods, Clissa looking after him, and in that moment she could have killed herself.
Cory ran with his head up, straining with his legs and lungs and eyes at the long path. He puffed up the slope to the wood, agonized for breath after the forty-five minutes’ heavy going. He couldn’t even notice the damp smell of mold in the air.
He caught a movement in a thicket to his right, and dropped. Struggling to keep his breath, he crept forward until he could see clearly. There was something in there, all right. Something black, keeping still. Cory relaxed his legs and torso completely to make it easier for his heart to pump some strength back into them, and slowly raised the 12-gauge until it bore on the thing hidden in the thicket.
“Come out!” Cory said when he could speak.
Nothing happened.
“Come out or by God I’ll shoot!” rasped Cory.
There was a long moment of silence, and his finger tightened on the trigger.
“You asked for it,” he said, and as he fired, the thing leaped sideways into the open, screaming.
It was a thin little man dressed in sepulchral black and bearing the rosiest baby face Cory had ever seen. The face was twisted with fright and pain. The man scrambled to his feet and hopped up and down saying over and over, “Oh, my hand. Don’t shoot again! Oh, my hand. Don’t shoot again!” He stopped after a bit, when Cory had climbed to his feet, and he regarded the farmer out of sad china-blue eyes. “You shot me,” he said reproachfully, holding up a little bloody hand. “Oh, my goodness.”
Cory said, “Now, who the hell are you?”
The man immediately became hysterical, mouthing such a flood of broken sentences that Cory stepped back a pace and half raised his gun in self-defense. It seemed to consist mostly of “I lost my papers,” and “I didn’t do it,” and “It was horrible, horrible, horrible,” and “The dead man,” and “Oh, don’t shoot again.”
Cory tried twice to ask him a question, and then he stepped over and knocked the man down. He lay on the ground writhing and moaning and blubbering and putting his bloody hand to his mouth where Cory had hit him.
“Now what’s going on around here?”
The man rolled over and sat up. “I didn’t do it!” he sobbed. “I didn’t. I was walking along and I heard the gun and I heard some swearing and an awful scream and I went over there and peeped and I saw the dead man and I ran away and you came and I hid and you shot me and—”
“Shut up!” The man did, as if a switch had been thrown. “Now,” said Cory, pointing along the path, “you say there’s a dead man up there?”
The man nodded and began crying in earnest. Cory helped him up. “Follow this path back to my farmhouse,” he said. “Tell my wife to fix up your hand. Don’t tell her anything else. And wait there until I come. Hear?”
“Yes. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Snff.”
“Go on now.” Cory gave him a gentle shove in the right direction and went alone, in cold fear, up the path to the spot where he had found Alton the night before.
He found him here now, too, and Kimbo. Kimbo and Alton had spent several years together in the deepest friendship; they had hunted and fought and slept together, and the lives they owed each other were finished now. They were dead together.
It was terrible that they died the same way. Cory Drew was a strong man, but he gasped and fainted dead away when he saw what the thing of the mold had done to his brother and his brother’s dog.
The little man in black hurried down the path, whimpering and holding his injured hand as if he rather wished he could limp with it. After a while the whimper faded away, and the hurried stride changed to a walk as the gibbering terror of the last hour receded. He drew two deep breaths, said: “My goodness!” and felt almost normal. He bound a linen handkerchief around his wrist, but the hand kept bleeding. He tried the elbow, and that made it hurt. So he stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket and simply waved the hand stupidly in the air until the blood clotted. He did not see the great moist horror that dumped along behind him, although his nostrils crinkled with its foulness.
The monster had three holes dose together on its chest, and one hole in the middle of its slimy forehead. It had three close-set pits in its back and one on the back of its head. These marks were where Alton Drew’s bullets had struck and passed through. Half of the monster’s face was sloughed away, and there was a deep indentation on its shoulder. This was what Alton Drew’s gun butt had done after he clubbed it and struck at the thing that would not lie down after he put his four bullets through it. When these things happened the monster was not hurt or angry. It only wondered why Alton Drew acted that way. Now it followed the little man without hurrying at all, matching his stride step by step and dropping little particles of muck behind it.
The little man went on out of the wood and stood with his back against a big tree at the forest’s edge, and he thought. Enough had happened to him here. What good would it do to stay and face a horrible murder inquest, just to continue this silly, vague search? There was supposed to be the ruin of an old, old hunting lodge deep in this wood somewhere, and perhaps it would hold the evidence he wanted. But it was a vague report—vague enough to be forgotten without regret. It would be the height of foolishness to stay for all the hick-town red tape that would follow that ghastly affair back in the woods. Ergo, it would be ridiculous to follow that farmer’s advice, to go to his house and wait for him. He would go back to town.