Kenney lit another cigarette off the butt of the last. “No, I don’t know how they are. Maybe you should tell me.”
“Well, all these woods and empty fields, Lou. They play on the imagination. And those farmhouses, falling down with rot and neglect—”
“Are you saying this place is haunted?”
Hyder laughed uneasily. “No, not exactly. Not haunted exactly. Bellac Road, you know, people wouldn’t live out here. Said they heard things, saw things. Weird things. Just a bunch of bullshit, Lou. You give these backwoods types some empty land and soon enough they’re talking spooks.”
Kenney was going to push it a little further, get to the root of it all—because there had to be one, and, who could say, maybe in some offhand way it would contribute to the investigation—but Chipney came splashing through the mud, leaves festooned to his pants and boots.
“Lieutenant, come and take a look at this.”
Kenney tossed his cigarette and followed him out deeper into the field. All the rain had turned the land into a sluicing river of slush. The fog parted at his approach. The search party was paused before a wide, smooth stone about the size of an ottoman. On it there was a muddy footprint.
Kenney got in real close so he could see it under the wash of the flashlights.
It was a human footprint… or nearly. The print of a bare foot, but very wide, splayed out. But maybe it was just the splattered mud that gave it such an abnormal appearance.
He looked up at Hyder. “Who in the Christ would be running around out here barefoot?”
But Hyder just shook his head, pressing his lips tight as if maybe he was afraid he might accidentally say something. Something he just did not want to admit to.
6
There were ten of them now, moving through the wet darkness, the beams of their flashlights cutting through the murk like swords. They moved in a lateral line, one arm’s length apart. The country was filled with tall, unshorn grasses and craggy bushes, low swampy dips filled with leaf-covered pools and cast-off branches.
“You wanna be careful where you step out here, boys,” Hyder was saying. “This country can be treacherous. We get a lot of rain like this on top of that clay, sinkholes develop… can suck a man down five, ten feet before he knows what’s what.”
“Just keep your eyes open,” Kenney said, something unpleasant beginning to worm in him now.
Hyder’s eyes were wide in his rain-misted face. “Yeah… strange things happen out this way… a funny place. Always has been. Air’s just funny, maybe, got a… a… negative charge to it, I guess.”
Kenney stopped suddenly, unsure.
“What’s the matter, Chief?” Chipney asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”
They kept going. No one was saying a thing. The only sounds now those of boots being pressed into the mud, withdrawn. Kenney placed each foot carefully, half-expecting to trip over a log or twist his ankle in a hole. Ten minutes into it, he started getting real good and it seemed he didn’t have to think about where he was walking or what he might be stepping on, because his feet were on autopilot and they seemed to know. Instinct, maybe.
The forest began to press in closer from all sides. It was black and wet and craggy, the wind making the high branches rattle together like bones. Squat, gnarled bushes formed themselves into unnatural shapes that stood high as a man and broke up the grid search. More than once, Kenney thought the bushes moved out of the corner of his eye, and he was struck by a mad, irrational feeling that they were alive and sentient. Moving, erasing the search party’s footprints, turning everyone around and shuffling them like cards so they would never find their way out again.
Thoughts like that left his throat dry as ash.
Crazy thinking, sure, but he wasn’t blaming himself for how he felt or how the others felt, the way their faces were drawn and tight like the skulls beneath were trying to work themselves free. This place got to a man, and try as you might, you could not put a finger on it. But it was there. In your guts and head, crawling up the back of your spine. Maybe Hyder was right: maybe it was the air. Maybe there was something negative about it, as unscientific as all that was.
I better pull it together here. I can’t let these boys see that I’m scared shitless. But I am. I really am and I honestly don’t know why.
It was like the skin of the known universe had been peeled back and he was looking over its rim, knowing there was something out there in that fathomless blackness that would drive him mad if he saw it.
He figured if he had been alone out there, he would have run screaming into the night.
Again, it made no sense, but it was there, twisting inside him with a bleak sense of expectancy.
Some of the men were getting apprehensive, too. They began to speak in nervous whispers to break the silence. One man hummed to himself. And Hyder, damn fool bastard, he kept running his mouth like a machine with no off switch. Talking about how livestock sometimes would stray out toward Bellac Road and you’d never see them again, except maybe bones that would show up somewhere in a dry wash come July.
He was afraid and Kenney knew it, but he still had little sympathy for the guy.
He was the undersheriff, and according to state law, the second-highest-ranking law enforcement officer in the county, a leader of men. And here he was talking spook stories and getting the troopers and deputies worked up. Kenney had a maniacal urge to punch him right in the mouth.
But that was stress talking.
Stress had a way of rising up, getting big and bloated and angry, looking for something to vent itself on.
And the stress was bad out there. The damp, the mist, the chill breath of night air. The darkness moving around them. Kenney felt it just like the rest. He kept seeing shapes slinking around them, hearing muted sounds like maybe someone or something was trying real hard not to be heard. And it all got to him, laid down low in the pit of his belly in a buzzing, almost electrical mass of terror.
The mist had become a fog that was oozing out of the earth like plumes of smoke. It was thick and twisting, faintly luminous. The bobbing flashlight beams seemed to reflect off it, filling it with surreal moonlike phosphorescence. It climbed their legs and rose higher and higher, blotting out the landscape like a shifting, ominous sheet.
The men had stopped moving. Something was building and they all knew it deep within themselves. Something malignant and nameless, but savagely aware. It made the hairs stand up on the back of Kenney’s neck, made his flesh go clammy and tight. His eyes were wide and unblinking, his voice locked down tight in a flow of black ice.
Hyder, his voice high and girlish, started to say, “Was… was a fella had a farm just south of here and things… things started happening… something got to his cows—”
“Quiet,” Kenney said, the air hot and cold around him. Just air, sure, but suddenly filled with life, with stealthy motion, with something.
Hyder was making a moaning sound low in his throat.
In the tree line off to their left there was noise, motion, activity. Underbrush crackled and sticks snapped and there was a weird rustling sound like a tree being shaken. Everyone was still and tense.
Kenney felt sweat trickle down his forehead, heard a humming in his ears that he knew was the frantic rushing of his own blood. The noises seemed to be all around them now—slopping, dragging sounds. Moving closer, moving away, circling them like a noose. And he was thinking that any moment now, whatever it was, was going to show itself and something buried deep inside him told him that he didn’t want to see it, he didn’t want to look upon it, because if he did, if he did—