They call this second story The Phantom Hitchhiker, and you find versions of it all over the place — all around the world, I’d bet. That I heard a variation connected to the Reservoir was pure chance. It could as easily have been set any location with no effect to its integrity. Most of the ghost and strange stories I’ve heard are like this, local riffs on a more general theme. If you tried, I suppose you could find a meaning for them, a moral they embody. In the case of the Hitchhiker, I guess it would have to do with being leery of strangers, and there’s probably a caution about desire in there, too, isn’t there? With Howard’s tale, I couldn’t figure out what lesson to draw from it, what message it was trying to convey. What was I supposed to think about, say, the stone those workers had unearthed on the Dort House’s property? Stone? I thought. Howard hadn’t said anything about a stone. What was this? Only, I knew exactly what stone, the large, blue one in whose depths a worker had glimpsed a distant, fiery eye. My foot slacked on the gas.
To our left, one end of a driveway looped towards a sizable house whose fieldstone walls, tall windows, and jagged roofline appeared intended to suggest a fairy castle, a suggestion the no-less-sizable outbuildings gathered near it picked up and reinforced. At the top of the manicured lawn next to it, an Italianate villa brooded over a yard full of statuary. Beside me, Dan was silent, his thoughts his own. I kept on 28A as it descended the hillside, past a boxy church, a pair of semitrailers parked in an improvised lot, and houses whose pretensions skewed middle-class, until the road leveled. I veered left, onto Stone Church Way, away from the Reservoir, and took it till Ashokan Lane branched to the right. I was reasonably sure Howard had mentioned the Sheriff who saw to the Dort House’s eventual destruction, but I was less certain whether he had described that official’s look at the interior. Here, the houses tucked in amidst the trees were more modest than those we’d passed at the top of the hillside, raised ranches, cottages, the occasional farmhouse. The cars in their driveways were not the newest models; their bumper stickers proclaimed their pride in their honor students, their loyalties in the last couple of elections. A mile or so up the road, past a heavy stand of trees, a sign for Tashtego Way marked the opening to a narrow lane on the left. I turned onto it.
Trees grew at the very edge of the road. Their branches and in some cases trunks weighted with rain, they leaned towards one another, forming a tunnel of bark and leaf. Concerned I might clip one of them, I eased off the gas and steered towards the middle of the blacktop. Overhead, the rain clung to the branches and swelled into large drops that dangled and then dropped, striking the roof of the cab with a bang. Dutchman’s Creek was supposed to be somewhere off this road, but as yet, I had not spotted any potential parking spots, only trees walling us in on either side. Briefly, I wondered if the Creek actually existed — if it might not be some kind of local legend — but the trees on the right fell away to reveal a stretch of marsh, a meadow along from it, a low ridge backing both. I braked to a crawl, rolling past the marsh until we came to the meadow. After about ten feet, I turned the wheel slightly, testing the soil with the right-hand tires. The truck had four-wheel drive, so I most likely could have driven straight into the tall grass with full confidence I’d be able to drive out again, but I hated to tear up a stretch of land like that if I didn’t have to. Not to mention, if I was wrong, it would be an expensive proposition to have a tow-truck come all the way out here to extricate me from my error. The ground felt solid enough. I turned the wheel a little more, until the truck was completely in the meadow, with a good five-foot margin between my door and the road. I shifted into park, set the parking brake, and cut the engine.
As if my turning the key had summoned it, the rain fell with renewed force, washing away the view out the windows. Dan sighed and reached for his hat, but I caught his arm. “Let’s wait a minute,” I said. “It won’t last for long like this.”
“All right,” he said.
“Anyway, it’ll give me a chance to ask you something.”
“Oh?” He raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah,” I said. “Exactly how did you find out about this place?”
He had to have known what my question was going to be. After Howard’s story, what else would I have wanted to know? Yet he jerked his head back, shifted in his seat, and said, “What? I told you, Alf Evers’s book.”
“Bullshit,” I said, not unkindly.
“What do you—”
“I’m guessing if we had a copy of that book, we wouldn’t find a single reference to Dutchman’s Creek in it.” I held up a hand to forestall his protest. “What is it you aren’t telling me?”
“Jesus, Abe,” Dan said. He grabbed his hat, jammed it on his head, and flung open his door with sufficient force to shake the truck. He stepped down into the rain, and reached behind the seat to where we’d stored our gear. I sat where I was while he removed his rod and tacklebox and the knapsack holding our food and drink. Once he had the knapsack shouldered, he glared at me, his face red, and said, “Well? Are you coming?”
There was no way I wasn’t going with him. I opened my door as he slammed his and stormed off across the meadow. I fetched my gear, locked the truck, and set after him. The rain had not let up the way I’d predicted, and the grass and ground were soaked. Water streamed off the bill of my cap, and mud tugged at the boots I was glad I’d worn. By the time I was at the bottom of the ridge, which is to say, not much time, at all, the lower halves of my jeans were wet and heavy. My cap was saturated. The ridge was forested with decent-sized trees, which offered a modicum of shelter. I ducked in among them and continued on my way. It’s funny: although the air was full of the sound of the rain thundering down, and, closer to home, my breathing as I pushed up the slope, I could hear a couple of birds in the branches somewhere nearby, chirping these snippets of song that cut through all the water. It was such a cheering sound, I thought, I’ll have to figure out what bird that is.
The crest of the ridge didn’t take that long to reach. To be honest, it was more a hump in the earth than a proper hill. From its top, I saw Dan starting down the other side, into a valley formed by the low hill we were on and the larger wall of earth and rock behind it. I don’t mind a walk to a fishing spot, but I have to admit, as the years have piled on, I’ve come to like climbing to a location less and less. I feel it in my knees, my problems with which, I guess I inherited from my pa, who was plagued with knee trouble for almost as long as I could remember. I suppose I should have been grateful my knees had held out the length of time they had. Well, in for a penny, and all that; with a sigh, I started my descent.
Just beyond the foot of the first ridge, a ribbon of water crossed the valley. You would have been forgiven for calling it a puddle, except that it was flowing, trickling from left to right through the black, muddy ground. Something — some trick of the light, I judged, the effect of all the trees looming over it, the earth below it — made the water look black as ink. What light there was didn’t skip on its surface; it seemed to float further down in it, as if the rivulet ran far deeper than I knew must be the case. I thought of Howard’s black ocean, and the memory angered me. I was half-tempted to stomp my boot in it, to prove it was no more than the overflow from some nearby pond or stream, but the prospect of my foot touching that black water made my mouth go dry, my heart hammer. “Damn fool,” I muttered, and hopped over it.