‘Please, I’m lonely and I’m scared,’ she said. ‘Come with me.’
Now she raised her hand, beckoning to him, and he saw the dirt beneath her fingernails, as though she had clawed her way out of some dark spot, a hiding place of earth, and worms, and scuttling bugs.
‘No, honey,’ said Phineas. ‘I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere with you.’
Without taking his eyes from her, he backed away until he was beside Misty, and then he squatted and began to hack at the briars. They came away reluctantly, and they were sticky to the touch. Even as he cut at them, he thought that he felt others begin to curl around his boots, but later he told himself that it was probably just his mind playing tricks on him, as if that one small detail might make up for the far greater trick of a girl glowing in the forest depths, asking an old man to join her in her forest bower. He felt her anger, and her frustration and, yes, her sadness, for she was lonely, and she was scared, but she didn’t want to be saved. She wanted to visit her loneliness and fear on another, and Phineas didn’t know what would be worse: to die in the woods with the girl for company, until eventually the world faded to black; or to die and then wake up to find himself like her, wandering the woods looking for others to share his misery.
At last, Misty was freed. The dog shot away, then paused to make sure that her master was following her, for even in her relief to be free she would not abandon him in this place, just as he had not abandoned her. Slowly, Phineas went after her, his eyes fixed on the little girl, keeping her in sight for as long as he could, until she was visible no longer and he found himself once again on familiar ground.
And that was why Phineas Arbogast stopped going to his cabin in the Rangeley woods, where the ruins of it may still be visible somewhere between Rangeley and Langdon, bound with sticky briars as nature claims it as her own.
Nature, and a little girl with pale, glowing skin, seeking in vain for a playmate to join her in her games.
I still had an old edition of a brochure called Maine Invites You given to me by Phineas. It was published by the Maine Publicity Bureau sometime in the late 1930s or early 1940s, as the letter of greeting inside the front cover was written by Governor Lewis O. Barrows, who was in office from 1937 until 1941. Barrows was an old-school Republican of the stripe that some of his more rabid descendants would cross the street to avoid: he balanced the budget, improved state school funding, and reinstated old-age benefits payments, all while reducing the state deficit. Rush Limbaugh would have called him a socialist.
The brochure was a touching tribute to a bygone era, when you could rent a high-end cabin for thirty dollars per week, and eat a chicken dinner for a dollar. Most of the places mentioned in it are long gone – the Lafayette Hotel in Portland, the Willows and the Checkley out at Prouts Neck – and the writers managed to find something kind to say about almost everywhere, even those towns whose own residents had trouble figuring out why they’d stayed in them, never mind why anyone else might want to travel there on vacation.
The town of Langdon, midway between Rangeley and Stratton, had a page all to itself, and it was interesting to note how many times the name Proctor appeared on the advertisements: among others, there was a Proctor’s Camp, and the Bald Mountain Diner, run by E. and A. Proctor, and R. H. Proctor’s Lakeview Fine Dining Restaurant. Clearly, the Proctors had Langdon pretty much all sewn up back in the day, and the town was enough of a draw for tourists – or the Proctors felt that it might be – to justify taking out a series of top-end ads, each one adorned with a photograph of the establishment in question.
Whatever appeal Langdon might once have had for visitors was no longer apparent, if it had ever been anything more than a figment of the Proctors’ own ambitions to begin with. It was now merely a strip of decrepit houses and struggling businesses, closer to the New Hampshire border than the Canadian, but easily accessible from either. The Bald Mountain Diner was still there, but it looked like it hadn’t served a meal for at least a decade. The town’s only store bore a sign announcing that it was closed due to a bereavement and would reopen in a week’s time. The notice was dated October 10th, 2005, which suggested the kind of mourning period usually associated with the deaths of kings. Apart from that, there was a hairdresser’s, a taxidermist’s, and a bar named the Belle Dam, which might have been a clever pun on Rangeley’s own dams or, as seemed more likely on closer inspection, the result of the loss of a letter ‘e’ from the sign. There was nobody on the streets, although a couple of cars were parked along it. Ironically, only the taxidermy showed any signs of life. The front door was open, and a man in overalls came out to watch me as I took in the bright lights of Langdon. I figured him for sixty or more, but he might just as easily have been older and holding off the predations of the years. Maybe it had something to do with all of the preservatives with which he worked.
‘Quiet,’ I said.
‘I guess,’ he replied, in the manner of one who wasn’t entirely convinced that this was the case and, even if it was, he sort of liked it that way.
I looked around again. It didn’t seem like there was much room for argument, but maybe he knew something that I didn’t about what was going on behind all of those closed doors.
‘Hotter than a Methodist hell, and all,’ he added. He was right. I hadn’t noticed while I was in the car, but I had begun to perspire as soon as I stepped from it. The taxidermist, meanwhile, wasn’t so much sweating as self-basting. No-see-ums hovered around us both.
‘Your name wouldn’t be Proctor, by any chance?’ I asked him.
‘No, I’m Stunden.’
‘You mind if I ask you some questions, Mr. Stunden?’
‘You already are, far as I can tell.’
He was grinning crookedly, but there was no malice in it. He was just breaking the monotony of daily life in Langdon. He detached himself from the frame of his door and indicated with a nod of his head that I should follow him inside. The interior was dark. Antlers, tagged and numbered, lay on the floor or hung from the old rafters. A recently stuffed and mounted large-mouth bass was propped on top of a freezer to my left, and to the right were shelves lined with jars of chemicals, paint, and assorted glass eyes. Blood had dripped down the side of the freezer, hardening and then corroding the metal. The room was dominated by a steel workbench upon which currently lay a deer hide and a round-bladed shaver. Piles of discarded meat lay on the floor beneath the bench. I could see that he knew his business: he was being careful to scrape the hide down to the dermis, leaving no trace of fat that might turn to acid and cause the hide to smell, or the hair to fall out. Nearby was a foam mannequin of a deer head, waiting for the skin to be applied to it. The whole place stank of dead flesh. I couldn’t help but wrinkle my nose.
‘Sorry about the smell,’ he said. ‘I don’t notice it anymore. I’d talk to you outside, but I got this deer hide to finish, and I’m working on a couple of ducks for the same guy.’
He pointed at two clear containers of ground corncob, in which he was degreasing the duck carcasses. ‘Can’t shave a duck,’ he said. ‘The skin won’t take it.’
Since shaving a duck had never struck me as something I’d feel the inclination to do, I contented myself with observing that it wasn’t yet hunting season.
‘This deer died of natural causes,’ said Stunden. ‘Tripped and fell on a bullet.’