Today however, he found himself speeding down the hill toward the narrow valley. Ahead was a small natural ditch carved by runoff, and he yanked up on his handlebars, jumping it. The bike wobbled on the hard landing, but he maintained his pace and balance, pedaling furiously.
The ground leveled off, and he slowed as he approached the site, not wanting to startle anyone. When he reached the trees on the perimeter of the dig, he hopped off his bike and walked it the rest of the way.
But there was no one there.
The site was deserted.
He looked around. The university had not been scheduled to conclude their excavation until sometime in late August, but obviously they had decided to leave early. Billy's first thought was that they had all taken a day off, gone to town or to the lake or to one of the streams, but it was clear that they had packed everything up, finished their work, and gone home. Nothing was left save a few stakes embedded in the ground and a scattering of torn envelopes on the dirt.
Billy frowned. Something was wrong here. There had been no litter left behind on the dig last summer. None at all. The professor's motto had been "Pack it in, pack it out," and he'd made sure that his students left the area as close as possible to the way they'd found it.
He was suddenly scared, and he realized that he was all alone out here, that the closest person to him was up at the top of the hill. It came over him instantly, this feeling of being isolated, cut off from everything and everyone, and he quickly turned his bike around . . .
And he saw the mailman.
The mailman was striding toward him across the dirt, his hair a fiery red against the green background. There was no mail sack on his back, no letters in his hand, and the fact that he had come here to do something other than deliver mail scared Billy more than anything else. He jumped on his bike, swung it around, and began to pedal.
But he did not see one of the excavation trenches, and his front tire slid sideways, spilling him onto the ground. His head connected with the hard dirt.
He was stunned but not hurt, and he jumped to his feet. The mailman was standing right next to him, smiling.
"Billy," the mailman said quietly, horrifyingly gently.
He wanted to run but was powerless to do so. All the will seemed to have been drained from his body. The forest around the archaeological site seemed heavy and impenetrably thick, like a tropical jungle.
The mailman put a hand on Billy's shoulder. His touch was soft and tender, like a woman's. "Come here," he said.
He led Billy with unused force across the empty dig to a large pit at the far end of the clearing. Billy could not remember seeing the pit before, and he tensed as the two of them drew closer to it. He knew he didn't want to see what the mailman wanted to show him.
"Look," the mailman said, smiling.
The pit was filled with bodies and parts of bodies, eyes staring upward, hands fallen limply over torsos. In the split second before he shut his eyes against the horror, Billy saw an alternating color scheme of pink flesh, red blood, and white bone, and he thought he saw, somewhere near the top of the pile near his feet, amid a tangle of arms and legs, fingers and toes, the bottom portion of the professor's face.
Billy awoke from the nightmare drenched with sweat, his mouth dry. For a second, the loft seemed strange, facing the wrong direction, the individual elements of its composition, the furniture and posters, slightly off. Then his brain kicked into its awake mode and everything fell neatly into place.
Well, not everything.
For the images of his dream stayed with him, not as something he had viewed secondhand, like a movie or a regular dream, but as a five-sensory recollection of an actual event, something he had actually experienced, and try as he might to repeat to himself, "It's only a dream It's only a dream It's only a dream," something inside him told him it was not.
27
"It's gotten to the point," Irene said, "where I'm afraid to open the mail."
Tritia , seated on the antique love seat, nodded. "I know what you mean.
The first thing I do these days is check the return address. If it's unfamiliar, I toss it."
"I throw away all mail, even letters from people I've known for years. The last one I opened was from Bill Simms, accusing me of poisoning his dog. Can you believe that?" The old woman licked her lips nervously, and Tritia realized that her friend was frightened. Badly frightened. She frowned. Irene was not a woman who was easily scared, and Tritia was unnerved by the sight of her in such an uncharacteristic state. Something other than a few hate letters had made her so fearful.
Tritia put down her glass of iced tea. "What is it?" she asked. "What's the matter? This is more than just Bill Simms."
Irene shook her head. "Nothing."
"It's not nothing,dammit ! Tell me."
Surprised by the vehemence of her reaction, Irene stared at her. Then she nodded. "Okay," she said. "You want to know what it is? Come here." Her voice was low, conspiratorial, tinged with more than a hint of fear.
Tritia followed her down the hallway into the closed room that had been her husband's den. It was now simply a storage room, filled with the physical forms of painful past memories, items either owned by or associated with her late husband. Tritia looked around. She had never been in this room before, had never even been brave enough to ask about it. Now she saw that it was dominated by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that lined two opposing walls. Clothes and personal effects were piled high on an old oak dining table that had been placed in the middle of the room next to other unused pieces of furniture.
"There," Irene said. Her voice was shaking.
Tritia followed the old woman's pointing finger. On top of the open rolltopdesk, next to a dusty pile of old western paperbacks, was a small box still half-wrapped in the brown butcher paper in which it had been delivered.
There was an irregular trail of clearness, a skid mark through the dust on top of the desk, which made it obvious that the box had been thrown there in haste.
Irene stood in the doorway, tightly grasping the brass doorknob. "It was sent to me yesterday," she said. She swallowed with obvious difficulty. Her hands were shaking, and Tritia could hear her uneven breathing in the silence of the room. "There's a toe in there."
"What?"
"There's a toe in the box."
Tritia moved slowly forward. Her own heart was pounding loudly. She reached the desk, picked up the box, and opened it.
She had known what to expect, but it was still a shock. A toe, a human toe, lay in the bottom of the box, unnervingly white against the brown cardboard. It was such a small thing that she would have expected it to look fake, to look rubbery. But it was distressingly real. She could see the smooth rounded tip, the curved lines around the joints, the individual hairs growing from the flat skin below the pinkish nail at the top. It had been severed cleanly, cut somehow, but there was no blood, not even a drop.
Tritia put the box down, feeling slightly nauseous. The toe rolled over, and she could see red muscle, blue vein, and a core circle of white bone. The room suddenly seemed too closed, too cramped, and she backed up, away from the desk.
"Jasper lost his big toe in a logging accident in 1954," Irene said quietly.
The severed joint seemed suddenly more sinister, invested with a documented past that lent it a decidedly supernatural aura. Tritia looked at her friend. Irene was pale, frightened, and for the first time since Tritia had known her she looked far older than her years.
Irene closed the door as soon as Tritia came out into the hall, and led the way silently back to the living room. She picked up her iced tea before sitting down on the sofa. Ice cubes rattled nervously against the glass. "He was working in the Tonto," she explained, "out by Payson, and was doing ax work when he swung and missed and chopped off his big toe. I don't know how he got that toe and missed the others, or how he didn't chop off a whole chunk of his foot, but he chopped off only the toe. He said he was screaming so loud that loggers miles away could hear the echoes through the trees. He said the spurting blood turned the green pine needles all around him red.