“Shut your damn hole, Daniel Hyder! You don’t know your dick from a willow twig!” she snarled at him, shaking one thin knobby finger at him. The tip of which looked sharp enough to spear an eyeball. “Fantasies? Dreams? Is that what? Ramblings of a senile old woman? Horseshit. If you’ve been out there and at night, you know I speak the truth. For it’s no horseshit that a group of copper miners not six miles from here disappeared down in a lower shaft. And when they went down to look for ’em, they found the walls honeycombed with holes. Same way this whole countryside is honeycombed. And it ain’t horseshit that when I was a girl, something came wandering out of those ruins, something that was struck down by a car not two miles from here. Something white and blind, had more in common with a grub than a human being. Something that was burned, lest anyone dare dig it up to take a look.”
Hyder didn’t say anything more. Nor did the sheriff or Kenney.
“Maybe, maybe if the sheriff here feels particularly talkative,” she said to Kenney, “he might tell you about Genevieve Crossen’s child.”
Godfrey just swallowed and looked at his feet.
“If you’ve been out there, boys, then you know,” she said to them, darkness behind her words. “And if you’ve been out there, can you deny that something lives there still?”
But no one could.
Elena Blasden seemed to grow angry then calm, agitated then serene. She began to ramble on about “obscene heredity” and “diseased blood,” “genetic blasphemies” and “nameless things that walk like men but should creep like vermin.” She went on at some depth, her mind drifting in and out of the fog of senility. But at her advanced age, God knew she had the right to lose it a little.
“Think I’m crazy?” she said to Kenney. “Think I’m just plain mad, do you?”
Kenney was going to say that he didn’t think that at all, but she just laughed. And that laughter was not a good sort, but bitter and tormented as if she carried the pain of her lineage upon her.
“No matter, Mr. Hotshit Detective. No matter. I say what I say and you can laugh… surely, you can laugh… but I bet you weren’t laughing last night, now were you?”
The way she looked at him made Kenney squirm. It was almost like those gray, rheumy eyes could see right into his soul. See all the dark truths and terrible things he couldn’t even admit to himself.
“What,” he began finally, “what caused this business? What degenerated those people? That meteorite? Some kind of radioactivity?”
Elena Blasden just stared at him. But she was looking through him and beyond, at something very, very far away. “No one can rightly say, son. Only that it’s ancient and it’s been here for Lord knows how long. The Ojibwa might have a story or two, but they’ve never shared it with whites. Only thing I ever heard was something in my family papers, a reference to some old Ojibwa who said that what was down there was from some place where things aren’t as they are here.” Elena shrugged. “But that was given just a brief mention and no more. Them injuns is sensible folk. They knew enough to leave whatever it was alone.”
Kenney wanted to laugh all this off. Jesus, he’d come here to handle a crime scene investigation and now he was getting tangled up in shit that was just beyond him. Beyond any man’s experience. But there was no humor in him. He’d seen things out there last night and, much as wanted to, he just couldn’t dismiss all this as local folklore.
Elena Blasden said that—according to the papers of her ancestor, a fellow named Elijah Willen—what was in the well had never been properly named nor classified. Whether it was flesh or spirit, no one could say or no one wanted to say. Just that it was bad, a cancer, a blight, a malignance that had sucked the blood out of the soil over there and from the people of Clavitt Fields.
She said there was only one story in Willen’s papers about it. Something concerning a drunk named George Gooden, who claimed to have seen something coming out of the well one night. Something he described as being made of “eyes and squirming parts, lights that that coiled and slithered and screeched.” Elena said that this George Gooden stumbled over to Trowden, just about out of his mind, ranting and raving, telling anyone that would listen what he had seen. How it had seemed to glow and flicker, how it had burned his eyes just to look upon it.
“Maybe that George Gooden was just a crazy drunk back then,” Elena said. “But there was no getting around one thing.”
“What’s that?” Kenney asked.
“That what he had looked upon had robbed him of his sight, had burned his eyes near out of his head. That he spent the rest of his days stone blind.”
Maybe it was radioactive, Kenney got to thinking. But right away, he chastised himself for it. Christ, he was a cop. He couldn’t let himself be swayed by stories handed down for two hundred years. What was he thinking? Sure, he’d seen something out in those fields last night, but that didn’t mean he had to start swallowing every old wives’ tale dumped in his lap.
Be sensible, for chrissake, he told himself.
But being sensible was easier said than done.
“No,” Elena Blasden said, “we’ll never know about that which was down that well. It may be long gone now, but its legacy is still out there. I know that much.”
She told them that according to her great-grandfather’s papers, it was thought by locals that what was in the well was dormant before Corben came, that he was the one who “stirred it up.” Got that thing or whatever it was all riled.
Hyder and Sheriff Godfrey both looked bloodless by this point. Kenney had been watching them, looking for some sign that most of this was sheer nonsense. But he got no such impression. If anything, Hyder and Godfrey looked disturbed, scared maybe. Like little boys afraid of the dark.
Kenney sat there thinking about what he’d seen in those fields and told himself, kept telling himself that no, no, it wasn’t possible. Maybe two hundred years ago when Wisconsin was huddled with black, encroaching forests and Indians and settlers… but surely not now? Not in this day and age.
Elena grinned like a skull. “Let me make it plain for you, son. What you’re after… what’s responsible for them bodies you’re finding… it’s not above, but below.”
15
After they said their good-byes to Elena Blasden, getting a sour look in return, they dropped Hyder at the Ezren farm so he could attend to his search parties. Kenney and Godfrey drove over to Haymarket and the sheriff’s department where there was something the sheriff wanted Kenney to see.
In Godfrey’s office, once the door was shut and coffee was poured, Kenney sat there and waited for it. Because he knew it was coming and that it wouldn’t be good. Whatever in the Christ it was, it would not be good.
Godfrey dug through the bottom drawer of a locked file cabinet and came out with a large manila envelope. He held it in both hands, keeping his eyes on it… like maybe he was afraid of what might come crawling out. “I’ve had this post a long time, Lou,” he said, not exactly happy about the idea. “I’ve been sheriff here a good many years and I was a deputy sheriff before that. Somehow, I get reelected each term and I accept the job and mainly because I’m too damn old to know anything else but law work. Sometimes, though, I hope I’ll get voted out of office.”
“But you don’t?”
Godfrey shook his head. “No, I don’t. And sometimes I wonder if it’s because I’m doing such a fantastic job… which I doubt… or if it’s because I carry a big broom, keep this goddamn county clean. Sweep up all the dirt and keep it hidden away from the taxpayers and tourists.”