‘You sure Jarvis is right about this place?’ Lopez asked. ‘It sure looks like nobody’s been here for a long time.’
Ethan’s eyes drifted across the street alongside them, his gaze falling on other properties further up Main Street that were likewise dilapidated in their appearance. Something was missing, something important that he could not put his finger on.
‘I don’t know,’ he murmured thoughtfully.
Ethan crouched down and stared at the wooden planks of the parade beneath his feet. The paint had peeled, but the planks themselves were still dead straight, not warped by the sunlight and the constantly alternating bitter cold of winter and heat of summer. He would have expected many of the planks to have bowed under the change in temperatures over the years, and then those bows to have filled with standing water during the rainy season, rotting the wood.
Suddenly he realised what was missing. ‘Scat,’ he said.
‘What?’
Ethan surveyed the parade and then the fronts of the houses, the shops and even the bridge itself.
‘There’s no animal scat,’ he repeated as he stood up and looked around. ‘Rats, foxes, birds, all sorts of vermin should have been all over this place for years but I’m seeing nothing, barely any bird droppings even.’
Lopez looked around, clearly beginning to realise what Ethan was getting out, and as he looked further so he saw more things that did not make sense.
‘The bridge is still intact and looks solid,’ Lopez observed, ‘even though the paint has peeled off it still looks like it could hold us.’
Ethan nodded, glancing up at the parade of shops. ‘Some of the shops windows have been broken, and the interiors look like they’re filled with dirt and debris, but there are no plants growing inside them. One of the first things that happens with old towns like this is that nature takes over, tree roots grow up through foundations and such like. These properties are just clapperboard constructions, the kind of thing that plants would have no problem pushing through in a matter of months let alone years.’
Lopez turned and looked at a nearby property and then the lawn in front of it.
‘Grass isn’t overgrown,’ she pointed out. ‘That must have been cut a few days ago, a few weeks at the very most, because we’re already in summer. It should be up to our knees by now.’
Ethan nodded as he stepped down off the parade and began walking down Main Street with Lopez alongside him. He began searching in earnest as they walked, seeking further evidence that what they were witnessing was not an aged ghost town at all.
On the edge of one lawn, itself covered with a layer of short grass that must have been cut recently, he saw a series of tyre treads where somebody had backed out of the drive and just clipped the edge of their lawn. Ethan hurried over and examined the track.
‘Wide tread, deep too,’ he said as he glanced up at the house, ‘left by a modern vehicle, not something from the 1950s.’
Ethan set off up the drive toward the front door of the house, which was hanging open from a timber frame covered in curls of peeled paint. Ethan reached up to brush some of the paint off, which fluttered to the ground like brightly colored leaves. Ethan touched the timbers themselves, the bare wood smooth and hard to the touch.
‘The wood hasn’t rotted here either,’ Ethan said.
Beside him, Lopez reached beneath her jacket and produced a pistol that seemed too large for her hands.
‘I don’t like this,’ she murmured softly as she peered into the darkness and the gloom of the house.
Ethan eased inside with Lopez covering him. Although he felt certain the town was indeed deserted, he now had serious question marks in his mind about how it had come to be so. Ethan crept forward, glancing to his right into a living room devoid of furniture, the paint on the walls faded with age, the floorboards uncarpeted.
They moved on slowly into a large kitchen that faced out across broad open lawns, the grass short and glistening as the sunlight struck early morning dew.
‘Look at this,’ Lopez said from one side.
Ethan walked across to where she was crouching down on the floor beside a grubby square mark on the tiles where a chiller had once stood. She pointed down to the skirting boards that lined the wall where it met the tiles, and there among the grime were a few morsels of food that must have spilled from the chiller when it was moved.
‘Peas, if I’m not mistaken,’ Lopez said. ‘And they haven’t rotted, yet.’
‘Three hundred people skip town, taking all their possessions with them, and within days the town looks as though it hasn’t been occupied for decades. It must have taken a lot of work to make this town look the way it does.’
‘My guess is that the townsfolk were in on it,’ Lopez replied. ‘They made the town look this way on purpose, but what on earth could cause three hundred people to just leave their homes behind and take everything with them and disappear into history?’
Ethan shook his head slowly as he led the way back out of the house and into the glowing golden sunshine outside.
‘Every one of them must have made use of paint stripper to age their properties, and I suppose it’s possible they could have loaded vacuum cleaners with dust and set them on reverse to spray all this muck over everything. Mixed with a mild adhesive it would have stuck quite easily to the windows and surfaces, ageing them overnight.’
‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ Lopez said. ‘What about the collapsed roofs?’
Ethan glanced up at one of the skeletal remains of a colonial style house’s roof. ‘It doesn’t take much to saw out some wood and let the weight of tiles and rafters do the rest. It’s an extra touch and it’s quite nice but I suspect if we went up there we’d find that the beams are cleanly cut, and not rotted away and…’
Ethan broke off as he saw movement up on the hillside over the river. He froze for a moment as he sought the source of the movement and saw a shape hiding in the grass, just below the treeline above an open, grassy clearing on the slopes. Almost at the same moment he saw it struggle, the grass waving around it, a frantic movement and then something burst from the forest behind it.
The figure moved with immense speed and grace, leaping like a gazelle across the slope as it charged in on its captured prey, and Ethan saw the flash of a blade in the sunlight as the figure plunged down on what must have been a rabbit or similar prey captured in a trap in the grass. Moments later the blade flashed down and the creature stopped struggling.
Ethan and Lopez stood in silence for a long moment before Lopez finally looked at him.
‘Did I just see that?’
Ethan nodded. ‘You take the right flank, I’ll take the left.’
V
They moved out together, spreading apart as they eased down the hillside, moving from cover to cover. Ethan kept his eyes fixed upon the figure crouched over the prey at the base of the hill. He could not tell whether it was a man or a woman, the shape completely broken up by dense foliage that had been used as camouflage, woven into their clothing to break up their outline in the manner of a ghillie suit and avoid detection by whatever it was they were hunting. The fact that they were hunting at all suggested that whatever had happened to Clearwater, it had occurred long enough ago that there were no longer any food resources within the town. If the person at the base of the hill was a survivor, Ethan knew instinctively that it was essential they were captured and questioned.