25
Kenney swallowed. “At the time… was there an investigation?”
“Yes, a very quick one, Tommy told me.” Godfrey was grinding his teeth. “I remember when the Crossen place burned. I remember it very well… people were glad. They talked about it real quietly for a day or two, then purged it from their minds. It was like a tumor had been burned out. They were content that the house and what it contained was history.”
“One last question,” Kenney said slowly. “When you went into that house… how did Pearl know your names?”
Godfrey smiled thinly. But not for long. He shook his head. “That’s troubled me badly over the years, Lou. I don’t have an answer for it. Maybe those from below have gifts of a sort and maybe what’s inside them, maybe it’s something that don’t belong here.”
Kenney didn’t argue the point. With what he’d heard and what he’d seen… who was he to argue anything? If somebody told him the moon was indeed made of cheese, he’d probably believe it, ask if it was Munster or Pepper Jack, and was any good in party dips. Reality had been shattered. He believed and he didn’t believe. He knew something had happened here, some sort of genetic degeneration had overtaken the people of Clavitt Fields, that their descendants crawled like worms through holes in the earth. He accepted that, much as he wanted to completely dismiss it.
“Well, Lou,” Godfrey said, sounding satisfied, “now you know it all. All the things this town, this county has kept secret. It’s high time this shit ends. I’ve broken the sacred trust given me by every sheriff who held this post before me. And you know what? I don’t give a happy shit. I’m glad it’s out. That file in my office is going into my woodstove and when all this… madness comes to light, I’ll be just as ignorant as anyone else.”
“It’s getting dark,” Kenney said, without knowing why.
The shadows were elongating, bleeding out in nighted pools from crypts and monuments and thickets of blighted trees.
“We should go,” Godfrey said. “But, being that you’re in charge of this investigation… what do you plan on doing now? Or should I even ask?”
Kenney sat there, noticing how the shadows were netting the cemetery, how they seemed to sprout in unwholesome tangles. “Oh, I think you know what comes next, Matt. I think you know very well.”
26
It was funny how as age advanced you could know things you couldn’t know before and funnier still how you could see the truth of things that you had long been blind to.
Elena could remember when her husband, old George, was dying, how he lay on the couch that final week, refusing both doctors and hospitals, saying in his breathless voice how he would either shake off what plagued him or it would be the end and if it was, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing because he was accepting of things, accepting of nature’s way. George was a farmer and the good earth was everything to him. He had turned it and seeded it year after year and never was there a happier man than he when his hands were soiled with black dirt. Maybe that’s how it was. A woman had her children, but a man had the earth that he tilled and sowed and reaped.
As he lay dying—something she refused to accept and something he was perfectly comfortable with—on the couch, covered in the frayed quilt his mother had made them as a wedding present, she refused to face the fact that he would soon be gone. He was old, he was tired, he was used up by the land and by life. Not only were his hands callused by long years in the field, but his entire body. And his eyes… no longer young and bright, but unfocused and dimming with that peculiar rheumy shine to them like those of an old dog remembering long golden summers many years gone. Yes, she knew what was coming but she did not want to know. He had been the only constant in her life for so many years that the idea he would soon be gone was not something she could let herself consider realistically.
But George had known.
Oh yes, he had surely known just as he knew that no doctors or hospitals could change fate or alter nature’s plans for him. They could delay it and turn him into an invalid, who would shit his pants and have to be spoon fed, but the course was set and he wanted to face it with a certain degree of dignity.
George knew just as she knew now.
This was the final year, the final month, the final week, and—she was certain—the final day. The pain in her chest was tightening by the hour and her old lungs were having trouble drawing in breath. It was close now. The shadow of death was creeping ever closer and she was too weak to stave it off.
George had been dead for years now, seventeen to be exact, and his namesake, her oldest boy, Georgy, had been gone for three. She missed them both, but mostly she missed Franny. He was her youngest. A kind boy, sweet, sensitive, and wonderful in nearly every way. He had joined the marines in 1967 and been sent to Vietnam in April of ’68. He never came home. And this was the greatest pain she had ever known and one that had never left her. Though he had been gone forty-five years now, his death was only yesterday to his mother and she still saw his smile and heard his voice and the pain of it all, dear God, it still cut deep.
A smart boy. She could tell Georgy and his sister, Betty, all that business about the Ezrens and the ruins were just spook stories twice told, but Franny did not believe it.
“There’s monsters over there, isn’t there?” he would ask. “Things that live under the ground.” To which she would always reply that that was plain foolishness. Monsters. Nothing but stories told by weak minds and there was no more to say about it than that. There were no such things as monsters and he was certainly old enough to know that, now wasn’t he?
But Franny could never be put off quite so easily.
Maybe such pat little rationalizations would work on his older brother and sister, but never him. He was far too smart for that. He tended to question things. Which always got his father’s ire up because he thought Franny simply thought too much, questioned too much. Such things were unthinkable to George, who was a creature of instinct and impulse.
“But, Mom,” Franny would say, “if there are no monsters, why do you leave things for them? Why do you put out scraps as offerings every night? Why do you feed them if they don’t exist?”
Of course, Elena had no answer for that. Not really. She would just tell him that she put the scraps out for the forest animals because they needed to eat, too, and if worse ever came to worst, and times were tough, the family would be eating those animals so she wanted them fat and healthy.
It was thin as hell and Franny knew it. But he would consider it and then later, always later when she thought he had forgotten about it, he would ask, “Why is it easier to tell lies than to admit the truth?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she’d say.
To that, Franny would only smile as if she had just confirmed things for him.
Sitting in her rocking chair by the window, remembering and remembering, Elena missed that boy terribly. It still broke her heart to think of him wasted on some dirty battlefield in another senseless war.