She had never approached him so directly, and Jesse knew he could not put her off any longer. “No, I knew I couldn’t be hurt.” He drew in a deep breath, like a swimmer preparing for a long dive. “We were in Quang Ngai Province. We walked into a trap. Knowing what I knew, knowing I was safe, I dared them. I said, ‘Go ahead, take me! Take me out of this one.’ ” His eyes filled with wonder.
“And they did. They got me out. And they let twenty-seven men from my unit who were there with me die.”
Amelia looked at him quizzically. “Who are ‘they,’ Jesse?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t know, or won’t tell me?”
“A little of both, I guess.”
Amelia didn’t press the issue. “Then I guess I’ll just have to add that to the list.”
“What list?”
“The list of things you’re going to tell me someday,” she said as she urged him forward once again.
He smiled and touched her hair. “Will you marry me, Amelia?” he asked.
She smiled and nodded.
After depositing Sarah into safe hands, Sam returned to the site of the dig, drawn by a terrible curiosity. Taut with fear, he shined his light into the chamber, but saw nothing but a pile of rocks. The chamber was just as Powell and the others had left it, a pit nothing could come out of, save through the single entry where Sam stood.
He lowered himself into the chamber, moved past the altar, and faced the wall of rocks wedged in and around other rocks, almost like the stone walls of New England. He pulled one rock out, then another and another, until the rocks began to fall away, dropping to the floor of the chamber.
There it was.
He looked into the large shaft dug out of the ground behind the rock wall. He shined his light into the shaft, but the darkness rose solidly, blocking the beam.
Sam pulled himself into the shaft and the darkness closed in around him. It was thick and dense, and he felt a suffocating airlessness, as if the oxygen were growing thinner and thinner as he continued to drag himself deeper into the mouth of the shaft.
He was moving upward now, the floor of the shaft rising oddly, inching him toward the surface, where he could see the beam of his flashlight touch the open air. He followed the beam and pulled himself to the surface, rising out of the shaft like a man out of a foxhole.
He got to his feet and peered around.
And there it was-the “mummy”-laid out ceremoniously on a bed of leaves.
Sam knelt down and began to unravel the shroud that concealed the face. Shred by tattered shred, he unwound the shroud. The outline of the head emerged first, taking shape as he drew back the layers of cloth from a decidedly unhuman pear-shaped head and almond eyes.
“Proof,” Sam whispered.
A sound, little more than a rustle of leaves.
Sam scrambled away, hid among the trees and waited.
At first he saw nothing, then a figure emerged from the woods, moved slowly to the body and brought it tenderly into its arms, weeping softly as its four-fingered hand stroked the creature’s long-dead face.
Then, suddenly, the mysterious visitor turned and peered directly into Sam’s eyes. Sam felt himself locked in the visitor’s gaze, helpless, frozen, until a key turned, releasing him, and he fell into an engulfing darkness.
“Are you all right?”
Sam’s eyes opened and he looked around in surprise.
An old man knelt over him.
“At first I thought you might be dead,” the man said.
“Who are you?‘” Sam asked.
“Name’s Leo,” the man said.
Sam sat up quickly, watching the man closely.
“My daughter’s name was Nadine,” the man said, his face in a curious trance, the story coming from him as if from a puppet. “She’d have been forty this year.” He seemed to be looking into his past, watching it from afar. “She went off walking one night, wanted to get a better look at these strange lights we got up here. She come back a day and a half later. No idea where she’d been or what had happened to her.” The old man stopped briefly, then continued, like a doll whose string had wound down, but been pulled again, loosening his tongue. “It was about four months after that she begun to show. Had twins in early fifty-nine. Died giving life to them. It was Dr. Shilling delivered them and he told me that Nadine saw her babies before she died.” The string wound down and was pulled again. “I took the boys. Named them Larry and Lester. Strange boys. Grew too fast. Looked sixteen by the time they was eight. Had a way of peering inside a fellow. Spooked people doing that, so we moved out to the woods.”
Sam heard another rustling in the trees, turned and saw Kerby emerge from the shadowy forest.
“Evening, fellas,” Kerby said. He placed his hand firmly on Leo’s shoulder.
The old man gave no response, but only faced Sam silently, a doll whose string had broken on the final pull.
Kerby looked at Sam. “You and I are going to go for a drive.” He drew the the pistol. “Let’s go.”
On the drive Sam knew he was going to die. He knew because Kerby had brought a deputy along with him, but the car was not a police car. And he knew because Kerby talked freely, even boastfully, about his other crimes.
“Yes, I killed one of the twins,” he said. He shook his head. “Larry was the worse of the two. He took to trying his ‘abilities’ when he was about sixteen. Did Leo mention that? All the dead dogs and cattle? The things he’d do to hunters in the woods.” He glanced back to where Sam sat, the deputy beside him, in the backseat. “This town runs on hunting season and for close to ten years, we couldn’t pay folks to go into our woods.”
Sam glanced at the deputy, who was mindlessly humming “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair.”
“It’s my job to keep the town safe,” Kerby went on, “and that boy was a menace. I tried to talk some sense into him but…”
The deputy leaned forward and clapped his hand on Kerby’s shoulder. “He come at you, Kerby. It’s not like you had a choice.”
“Maybe so,” Kerby said. “Anyway, I buried him under a tree. How he wound up in that burial pit, wrapped up like that…”
The deputy’s hand remained on Kerby. “You’re just too kindhearted is what’s your problem,” he said.
“Maybe so,” Kerby said again.
It was now or never, Sam thought. He steeled himself for an instant, then reached past the deputy, opened the door and lunged forward, knocking him out onto the road, then following after him, the two rolling in the gravel as Kerby slammed on his brakes and brought the car to a skidding halt.
Sam leaped to his feet, glanced about desperately, then bolted into the woods. He could hear Kerby and the deputy in pursuit, thrashing through the undergrowth like angry bulls. If they caught him, there’d be no more driving down the road. They would kill him where he stood.
He ran and ran, and the woods seemed to thicken around him, branches slapping at his face, the undergrowth clutching at his shoes and pants like tiny, entangling arms.
A figure suddenly darted in front of him, blocking his path. At first he thought it must be Kerby or the deputy, but he couldn’t imagine how either of them could have managed to circle around and get in front of him.
He squinted hard, and the figure took shape, the head slightly pear-shaped, the arms elongated, and yet incon-testably human.
“Can you… come with me?” Lester asked.
They walked together, through the trees, into the ever-more entangling forest.
Then the forest suddenly drew back, and he stood in a clearing where a small cabin rose in the distance, its lights blinking out of the darkness. At the door, Lester stepped back and motioned Sam inside, where he saw a little girl lying on a couch.