Well, he just didn’t know.
He could smell a foul odor like rotting vegetables in a root cellar. A thick and pungent closed-up smell. The stink of damp, secret places and noisome decay.
“Funny sounds,” Hyder said under his breath. “Always funny sounds out here.”
Kenney gave him a look and he shut up. Thankfully. This was all enough without that idiot whistling past the graveyard.
“Chief… sounds like they’re all around us,” Chipney said.
“That’s because they are.”
No wonder Snow had been ready to come out of his skin. It was terrible out here. There was something positively unnatural about this place. But if someone were to ask him what, he couldn’t have told them. The sounds of movement were everywhere… squishing noises, feet stepping through mud and splashing through puddles.
He began to think about what might be out there.
As crazy as it was, he did not think it was other men. At the same time, he did not think it was animals either. What had Snow said? Kind of like a man… but sort of hunched over. That’s what he claimed to have seen. Something hunched over with long arms like an ape.
Jesus, this was insane.
His ears began to pick up other noises and he wondered if he hadn’t been hearing them the whole time. He couldn’t put a finger on it at first, but as it rose up around them, yes, then he knew. Breathing. A wet, congested breathing like a man sucking wind through a mouthful of rotting leaves. It was all around them. And there were other things, too: shrill, echoing sounds, high and weird whispering.
And then, gradually, everything faded into the night, the mist, and there were just the ten of them, silent as monuments, waiting and waiting. There was nothing else to hear. Just rain dropping from the trees. The breeze. The sound of their own heartbeats. The creaking of leather Sam Browne belts.
“Wasn’t nothing,” Hyder said, enormously relieved. “Wasn’t nothing but our own noises turned back on us. Things get funny out here. Fog’ll do it. Sure enough. I was out deer hunting once and I swore something big was stalking me through the woods. But it was just my own sounds. That’s all it was.”
Nobody was buying any of that, but the less said the better.
They moved on and kept tight to one another, navigating around hedgerows and thickets and boggy hollows that threatened to swallow them whole. Nobody was saying much and Kenney knew that one word, just one word from him, and the lot of them would head back and call it a night. But that wasn’t going to happen. Not until he knew what was going on out here.
Scraped by branches and twigs, soaked right up to his knees, he began to see what looked like ancient foundations set in the ground. Crumbled things nearly entirely reclaimed by wild grasses. He saw a wall off to the left built atop a sloping hill, but just a suggestion of it jutting from the earth like rotting teeth. The shattered remains of a tower or silo. A series of cracked, frost-heaved slabs rising from the earth. Grassy mounds like inverted bowls looming around them, things that could not be natural.
“What is this place?” he asked Hyder.
Hyder kept swallowing, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like there was a hard-boiled egg stuck in there. “Was a town here… long time ago,” was all he said.
Kenney saw a vine-covered wall of limestone block set into a hillside, the dark and near-collapsed mouth of a doorway set into it. Off in the woods, there were other shapes, hunched and broken, other blasted foundations and leaning structures caught in tangles of forest.
The foundations became more numerous. Some had elms growing up from their cellars. Others were like seed pots that wild, reaching knots of leafage sprouted from. They stopped before one that reached for hundreds of feet like the skeleton of some Colonial blockhouse. They could still make out a worn set of steps leading down into a blackened, flooded cellar. They played their lights over the leaf-clotted surface and Kenney thought for one lunatic moment he saw some yellowed face peering up at them from just beneath the oily, turgid pool.
But then it was gone.
Somebody kicked a stone in and it sank without a trace.
Chipney and a couple others walked along the ledge, putting their lights onto something in the distance like a circle of tombstones rising from the earth. Hunched and broken, they were gray with age and threaded with lichen and mold, ground-fog trembling at their bases.
“Christ sake,” Chipney said. “What sort of place was this?”
Hyder said, “We should turn back. No way Riegen made it out this far… not out here.”
“Maybe he did,” Kenney said. “If he got lost in that fog, he might have seen this place, came in for shelter.”
But that got a sort of morose chuckle from Hyder. “No, no way. He wouldn’t come here. Not here.”
“He might,” one of the cops said. “He’s not local.”
Kenney paused there, lighting a cigarette. “Meaning?”
Hyder just shrugged. “Locals know better than to come out here. Nobody comes out here.”
“Why?”
“What reason could they have? Easy to get lost. These old ruins are dangerous, real dangerous. I advise against going any farther. We better wait until morning. That’s the sensible thing to do.”
Kenney could feel that the others, even his own men, were in perfect agreement. He sympathized with them because he didn’t like this goddamn place any more than they did, but a cop was missing. The longer he went missing, the worse the chances were of him being found. Kenney didn’t know Riegan, but he was willing to bet he had a family. Would they understand the search being called off because… because men were getting the fucking willies in the fog?
Pretty damn sure they wouldn’t.
“You’d leave one of your own out here?” he said to Hyder.
“Well, no, but…”
“What if it was you, Undersheriff? Would you like to spend the night out here by yourself?”
“No… not out here. Not out here.”
That statement was pregnant with ominous portent, but Kenney wasn’t about to give it the benefit of the doubt. The more he learned about Hyder, the less he liked the man. Superstitious, afraid of his own goddamn shadow… he wasn’t much of a man and even less of a cop. Besides, maybe Kenney didn’t know all the crazy, pumped-up old wives’ tales about this damnable place—and he was beginning to suspect there were more than a few—but, spooks or no spooks, a man got lost, he saw some ruins he could duck into, he was going to do it. What Kenney wanted to do was give Hyder a good going-over, get to the facts that had him and the local cops shit-scared of this place. But there just wasn’t time. He kept thinking of what was out there in the fog… he knew it was bad, but he wasn’t about to buy any of this nonsense about spooks.
Chipney and some of the other men were looking through the wreckage, flashlight beams scanning leaning doorways and collapsed sod roofs, disintegrating walls and cobbled walks disturbed by black tree roots. Everywhere, hooded shadows crept and crawled. Empty windows were filled with a leering, distorted blackness.
Kenney was wondering how long the place had been vacant.
Centuries, occurred to him, but was that possible?
He supposed it was. Wisconsin had been settled a long time. The British had forts there in the 17th century, and towns always sprouted up around those forts. Maybe this was the remains of one of those places.
He and Hyder threaded through an ancient cemetery of leaning, ivied headstones and moss-encrusted slabs, all weathered unreadable. Markers were swallowed by weedy tentacles. Grotesque, dead and decayed oaks sprawled morbidly over rows of crumbling tombstones that crowned blighted hillsides and sank from view into hollows of choked briers.