Aldridge, hanging on grimly, said, "Does it get any worse?"
"Don't ask me," Diane said. "I never came this way before."
What looked like another fifty yards on the map turned out to be another quarter mile of cart track. It brought them out into a grassy clearing by the lake, a shallow bay with a fringe of stony beach. Diane pulled in as soon as the ground was level enough.
They got out.
This was one of the older parts of the forest, and its silence was a thousand-year atmosphere so distilled that it was almost physically affecting. There were high dark trees on every side with slanting shafts of late morning sunlight, with the lake beyond flat and faintly glittering like a slow moving mirror.
"Hardly anyone ever comes out this far," Diane said, walking toward the middle of the clearing where about half a dozen mounds of earth appeared to have been dug over. "We lease the land out to the forestry people, and they've been doing a helicopter survey."
"When did you get the call?"
"This morning. It showed up when they looked at Friday's photographs."
Diane stopped by the first of the mounds, not too close, and waited for Aldridge to catch up. She already knew what she was going to see, but the knowledge didn't make it any less unpleasant. The mound was no mound at all, but actually a deer; a very dead deer, and a long way from fresh. Its eyes and part of its face were gone, and its belly had swollen up hard and tight.
"You explain it," Diane said. "I can't."
Aldridge glanced around the clearing at the others. "You'd do better to ask your gamekeeper," he said.
"I would, but he quit just after I got here."
"Why's that?"
"I told him to. He was taking more from local butchers than he was in wages. I've advertised for a replacement, but I haven't filled the job yet. Could this be a revenge thing?"
"I wouldn't have thought so," Aldridge said, walking over to the next one. "Not from a keeper, killing stock."
"Poachers, then, using poison?"
"We'll need a vet's report to be sure. But poisoned meat isn't much use to anybody, is it?"
"Well," Diane said, with an edge of exasperation in her voice that she couldn't fully conceal, "what do you reckon?"
Aldridge shook his head. He seemed to be finding it more than puzzling. The bodies all appeared to be at slightly different stages of decomposition; the one before them now looked to be the most recent of them all. It carried flies like a nimbus of stars.
He prodded a limb with the toe of his boot, but it was rigid. He tried harder, and the whole carcase moved a little and water came from the animal's nose and mouth. Weird, Diane was thinking, as he then put a foot on the animal's side and pressed down.
The reaction was immediate. It collapsed like a punctured airbag, except that what came forth was not air but rank, fetid water, vomiting out in a copious stream and bringing with it a stench that sent them both staggering back several paces.
"Christ," Aldridge said. "I only ever had that once before. It's a drowning smell."
Diane knew that she'd gone pale. "How could they drown?" she said. "They're yards from the lake."
"I don't know. Could be a disease with the same kind of effect, some kind of bloat. Look, could you get hold of some petrol and some plastic sheet?"
"I should think so."
"Well, get some of your lads down here before dark." He indicated the most recent looking of the bodies. "Have them cover that stag with the polythene and then drag the others together and burn them. Tell them to use gloves and then throw the gloves on the fire when they've done, and then make sure they all go back and have a good scrub down."
"You think it's that serious?" Diane said as they walked back toward the pickup.
"I don't think anything. I'm only playing safe. I'll get in touch with the agriculture people and get them to send someone out first thing tomorrow."
Diane nodded, and then sighed. "I could have done without this," she said, and then she got into the truck.
Ross Aldridge looked back at the six deer.
"So could they, I should think," he said.
That evening Ted Hammond emerged from his house, wearing the old dressing gown in which he seemed to be spending most of his time these days, and carrying a stiff drink. He took one of the outdoor chairs from the stack at the end of the nearest jetty. It was a fine night, no mist on the lake at all. The air was warm, and the stars were sharp and cold. Someone on a boat out there was having a party, people singing and making more noise than the music they were playing. He wished them well. But he didn't wish that he was with them.
He sat, contemplating the few lights that showed at this hour. Some kind of a fire appeared to be burning far away on the opposite shore, a tiny pinhole in the screen of night. Ted was awake and out here because he'd been hearing Wayne speaking to him, and he was worried about his sanity.
It had happened several times in the weeks since the funeral, and it scared him. The voice always seemed to come from the shadows or from somewhere just aside from where he was looking; and usually the words didn't make any sense, and they passed through his mind so quickly that they'd gone before he could reach for them. He resisted the temptation to treat this as some kind of a revelation because Wayne was dead, and talked to nobody.
The plain message to Ted, actual words apart, was that he was cracking up.
He'd spent most of the evening wrestling with the one fragment that he'd managed to retain, picked out of the air behind him as he'd been standing at the cooker watching his soup boil. He couldn't be sure, but it had sounded like, We're with her, now. But with who? His best guess was that the reference was to Nerys, that his unconscious mind had been looking for comfort in the prospect that Wayne would at least be with his mother, in which case he decided that there was probably some hope for his mental state after all. In many ways, he would have preferred to have been able to give himself over to the delusion and accept it as truth; but there seemed to be a definite boundary here, and it wasn't his choice whether or not he crossed it. Just before coming out, he'd phoned the health centre and left a message on their answering machine as his first step in getting himself along to a psychiatrist.
It still wasn't too late to back out. But he didn't think that he would.
The blaze across the water flared, and then died down a little. The party boat came to the end of its song, and the party people gave themselves a round of applause. Two small signals in the night, affirmations of existence from two groups of people who knew nothing of Ted or of each other.
We're with her, now.
Ted didn't feel good.
But he felt a little better.
Tom Amis lay on his fold-down bed in a back room of the ski centre, an unread paperback lying open on his chest. He was bored, and he was lonely. The road gang had turned up unexpectedly that afternoon and had laid and rolled more than two hundred yards of hot tarmac from the main building all the way around to the other side of the restaurant block; now the place didn't look quite so much like a building site anymore, and winter opening seemed more of a possibility. It had made for a lively few hours but now that they'd gone the place seemed oddly, unnaturally quiet again. He didn't know when they'd be back; all he knew was that his boss had some kind of private deal going with the gang foreman of a motorway subcontractor, and the boys always appeared without notice, worked at the speed of practised moonlighters, and probably got their money in a plain envelope passed under a pub table somewhere. There were five of them, and whenever they arrived they came up the woodland track on a big spreader wagon with a battered old van bouncing along behind. They were as ugly as sin and they had no conversation, and he missed them already.