Kenney didn’t like the smell of the place.
It would have been normal to smell age and time here, to smell decay and rot. But what he smelled was far worse—a palpable, vaporous stench of contamination. He felt… he wasn’t sure, but almost something like an ominous presence, a great anxiety that made him either want to turn and run or just sit down and give. It made no sense. It ate the heart right out of him, leaving him hollow and trembling inside. The place didn’t feel right. There was no getting around that. It didn’t feel right and it made him feel completely wrong. He didn’t believe for a minute it had anything to do with Hyder and his intimations of spooks running wild or whatever the hell was behind it all.
“We should go,” Hyder said, his voice high and helpless.
But Kenney shook his head. “Not yet… there’s something here… something…”
“Then you feel it, too?”
“Yes.”
Kenney in the lead, they moved off deeper into the mummy of the village, through weedy thoroughfares, up deserted hillocks and down into small vales where charnel shadows bled from the diseased earth like black blood. Their lights illuminated odd, twisted shapes in the rank grasses, but no one dared look too closely. Atop a steep grade, ringed in by denuded oaks, they found the remains of a moldering house of gray, nitrous stone covered in a knotted profusion of withered creepers. Through the leaning, screaming mouth of the doorway an appalling stink of corrupted caskets and bones in mildewed shrouds blew out at them like the hot, sour breath of a dying man.
“Let’s have a look,” Kenney said to Hyder, telling the others to wait outside.
Hyder stared unblinking at the jackstraw tumble before them, looked upon it like it were some hollowed skull whispering secrets and shook his head. “I’d rather not,” he said, his voice dry as cinders in an ashpot. “I don’t like any of this and I don’t mind admitting it.”
“Well, I’m going in,” Kenney told him. “You stay out here, look around and see if you can find your balls—”
Hyder grabbed him by the arm and whirled him around. He was surprisingly strong. “Now, you listen to me, Mister Fucking Hotshot Detective. You ain’t from these parts and you don’t know dog turds from diamonds. Riegan ain’t goddamn well here. You wanna start searching again in the morning, fine, but right now let’s get our asses out while we still can.”
Kenney yanked his arm free. “I don’t know what kind of kiddie spookshow game you’re playing here, Hyder, but I’ve had it right up to here. Now start acting like a cop or get the hell out of my sight. I’ve had it with you.”
“Goddammit, Kenney, don’t be a fool. We’re in danger here. Real danger.”
Kenney shoved him aside and ducked through the low doorway. Inside it was like an oppressive envelope of contagion and degeneration. Flashlight held before him, he clambered over the debris of fallen walls, pushed on through dust and countless seasons of dead leaves. Above him, wan moonlight spilled in through the latticed timbers overhead. He found himself on a slanting floor of fissured flagstones that continued on for maybe thirty feet, before falling away completely into the cellar. Below was heaped rubble, black water, shapes jutting from it.
He heard Hyder coming in behind him as he knew he would.
“Look at this,” Kenney said, shining his light down into the inundated pit.
A jawless skull broke the surface of the stagnant pool, wet leaves plastered to its cranium. The slats of a rib cage, a pelvic girdle. Dozens of others.
“Like some litter pile,” he said.
But Hyder turned away, refusing to discuss it.
Kenney lit another cigarette. His fingers trembled as he held the lighter to the end and blew out smoke. His nerves were shot. But he didn’t want Hyder to know that. He didn’t want him to think for a moment that he was a superstitious idiot just like him.
“So this place is supposed to be haunted, is it?”
Hyder sighed. “I didn’t say that exactly, now did I?”
“Funny, though. Place like this… should be a natural magnet to kids. But I haven’t seen any graffiti, beer cans. Nothing. How do you explain that?”
“Those that know of this place know better than to come here. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Listen to you. And in this day and age.”
“I call it common sense.”
Kenney blew smoke into the dank night. “But what do they say exactly? People around here, what do they say?”
Hyder, his face bloodless in the glow of the flashlight beams, said, “When I was a kid, during the daytime, sometimes on a dare we’d come out here. Maybe take a brick home as proof you were here. Something like that. This place has always been bad… people hear things out here, see things. Things they don’t want to see again.”
“Ghosts?”
“No… not ghosts. Not exactly.”
Kenney was examining the wall near what might have been a hearth. He could see things scratched into the stone, weird symbols of some sort. They didn’t appear to be letters, at least none that he had seen before. There were other things, too, but they were obliterated by innumerable seasons of rain and snow and sunshine. But what really interested him were the marks dug across the fields of etchings—deep ruts like the tines of a garden trowel had been dragged across them.
Kenney traced his fingers through them. “What do you make of this?”
Hyder just shook his head. “Please,” he said, his face beaded with sweat. “Let’s go, let’s just go.”
Kenney decided it was time.
It took them about five minutes to get free of the village. Another five before the black forest blotted it from view. And the entire time Kenney was thinking, thinking. Thinking that something horrible had happened to that shuttered ruin, something horrible that was still happening. The place had gone bad, had been poisoned to its very roots. The very marrow of the village was rancid and contaminated, its blood gone black and toxic like bile. And a man could puff out his chest and pretend he didn’t feel it, but it was there. An abominable physical presence.
Aware, alive, and deadly.
7
As they walked back down into the foggy, damp lowlands and the mud sluiced around them and the shriveled, denuded bushes rose up and beckoned like misshapen skeletons, no one spoke. They stayed close and looked at each other, neither smiling nor frowning. Just glad to know they were not alone. To a man they wondered how they would explain any of this the next day in the bright sunlight, how they could possibly justify what it was they’d felt this night when instinctual dread and childhood terror were displaced by reason and logic.
They kept going and the mist held them in a terrible alchemy of dancing phantoms. The world was filled with strange, unseen forms and secret rustling noises that stopped whenever they dared look.
Kenney was sweating now despite the wet chill.
He could feel perspiration running down his spine, beading his forehead. His palms were greasy. He kept hearing sounds—off to the left, then the right, then directly in front of them, behind them. It was maddening. When he stopped to listen, everything went silent as the grave.
He was expecting to see something at any moment. Something grim loping out of the shadows at them.
Hyder was talking again, telling everyone it was just a deer. Some big buck rooting out there in the bog lands. Nothing more, nothing to be worried about. But it was obvious from his voice that he was trying to convince himself of this… and failing.
Kenney thought he caught sight of some vague form ahead bleeding into the night, but then it was gone.
One of the sheriff’s deputies said, “Christ, did you see that? What the hell was that?”
And Hyder started to answer—he was always quick with an answer—but then he closed his mouth as something came at them out of the polluted, ectoplasmic mist… a sound.