The Dark Place (12 page)

Julie must have seen the change in his eyes. "Boy," she said softly, "you really are a pushover, aren’t you?"

Before he could think of anything to say, something bumped into him from behind, and a little girl’s voice, shrill with mock terror, cried, "Watch out! Everybody watch out! Here comes Bigfoot Kevin!"

Behind her, stomping down the campground’s one-way-only circular road, came a giggling boy of eight, swaying from side to side with a stiff-legged, clumping gait, arms outstretched—every child’s image of a monster since the first horror movie.

"Why don’t we get out of the traffic lanes?" Gideon said.

They threaded their way among campsites cluttered with clotheslines strung between majestic pines, and around TV-antennaed recreational vehicles and dusty pickup trucks with racked rifles in the backs of the cabs—those would belong to the lean, grim men, Gideon thought. At the lakefront there were few people and no commotion. They sat on a log a few feet from the water, enjoying the minute, silky sound of the tiny waves. Gideon picked up a handful of gravel and began flipping pebbles into the water. Julie watched him quietly for a while.

"It isn’t," she said, "just your article—"

"I wish you’d stop calling it
my
article. I was framed, as you know only too well."

Julie laughed. "Led on, perhaps. Taken advantage of, maybe, but not framed. You did it unto yourself, I’m afraid. But aside from the Bigfoot hubbub, the Quinault Valley is back in the news as Disappearance Valley again, and it’s brought a lot of people out of the woodwork. We’ve had reports of two flying saucer landings, one of them complete with—don’t laugh—little green men. We’ve had ten Bigfoot sightings, including a group of five hundred of them on the lawn at Lake Quinault Lodge at dawn…all this in addition to seven broken limbs and thousands of cuts and bruises. We’re practically out of Band-Aids."

"Sounds awful," Gideon said.

"That isn’t the worst of it. The Hornick family—that’s the girl who disappeared last week—has offered a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for finding her, or her abductors, or her killers. And there’s some Texas millionaire who’s gone on national TV and renewed an offer of a hundred thousand dollars for a Bigfoot, dead or alive."

"Whew," said Gideon. "That accounts for the people with the guns. What a mess."

"Indeed it is. And if someone actually
finds
a Bigfoot, it’ll be even worse. Not that there are any," she added quickly.

"Of course there aren’t," Gideon said. "And we don’t, thank God, need to hypothesize anymore about superhuman strength." He told her about Abe’s deduction concerning the atlatl and about their conclusions.

"An Indian group," she mused, "hiding in there. Just like the Yahi. Ishi all over again. Wouldn’t that be fascinating?"

"It would be fascinating if we had some concrete proof, but it’s little more than speculation at this point."

Julie poked at the gravel with the toe of her boot. "Well, as it happens, I just might be of help there. I think one of the reports of a so-called Bigfoot campsite might interest you."

"You jest. I’d be happy if I never heard of Bigfoot again."

"But they found a bone spear there. They brought it back. I’ve seen it."

"A bone spear?" Gideon paused in the act of tossing a pebble. "Like the one that was in Eckert?"

Julie nodded. "I think so. The people who found it are in Site 32. I told them who you are, and they’d be glad to show it to you."

   Marcia Zander was one of the sturdy, chunky girls, an experienced hiker. Louis Zander was softer and chubbier, with a downy moustache, a blank, slightly sullen expression, and a cloudlet of marijuana fumes about him. The two sat on the wooden bench on one side of the table, while Julie and Gideon sat on the other. The long, bone-pointed spear lay down the center of the table, looking disconcertingly crude in the bright morning sun. Gideon stared at it, and the others looked at him, waiting for him to speak.

"Let’s see what we have here," Gideon said to start his observational processes going. "It’s a little under six feet, I’d say."

Louis Zander nodded vacantly. "Right, man."

"It’s five feet, ten inches," Marcia Zander said earnestly. "I measured it against my shoe." Her short, straight blond hair fell over her eyes as she leaned forward. She brushed it impatiently away, only to have it come down again. "Does anyone have a bobby pin?" she asked. No one did.

The shaft of the spear was obviously made from a tree limb that had been painstakingly smoothed and straightened. One end had been carefully thinned and split, and between the two prongs of the resulting fork, in the manner of prehistoric peoples everywhere, a rough bone blade, much like the one in the vertebra, but whole, had been lashed.

"You’re the local ethnology expert," Gideon said to Julie. "Does it look like anything from around here?"

She shook her head. "It’s a little like some of the old Makah points, but they live way up north and always have, around Cape Flattery. What it looks most like," she said doubtfully, "is…well, one of those Middle Paleolithic points you see in the textbooks, from Germany or France." She looked quickly at Gideon, as if expecting correction.

"It does, doesn’t it?" he said mildly.

"But those are forty thousand years old!"

"Curiouser and curiouser," Gideon said. He peered more closely at the head. "The binding is nearly rotted through. Look at it, will you? No one bought that in a store. It’s sinew; deer or elk, scraped thin and smooth. Between someone’s teeth, probably."

Louis Zander seemed to shake himself awake. "Well, so, is that a Bigfoot spear or not?"

Gideon looked at him closely, but the boy seemed to be in what must have passed in him for a state of earnestness. "I don’t think so. I wouldn’t give much credence," he added gratuitously, "to any of the tales going around about Bigfoot."

"Huh?" said Louis Zander, letting his mouth hang unpleasantly open for considerably longer than was required, while his dull eyes blinked twice. "I thought you were the Bigfoot expert." He turned to Julie with a look of stolid accusation. "I thought he was the big-deal Bigfoot expert."

"All right, kids," Julie said brightly, "do you suppose you could show us where you found this, on a topo map?"

   "Bigfoot expert," Gideon muttered as they walked back along the road to the ranger station. "Thanks very much."

"Well, I had to tell them something to get them to stick around long enough to show you the spear."

"What were they doing way out there, anyway?"

"Actually, it isn’t way out there. They found it on Pyrites Creek, not even a mile from the trail—as the crow flies, that is. For people, it’s well over a thousand-foot climb. More like mountain climbing than hiking."

"Then how did the Zanders get there? He didn’t seem like the mountain-climbing type."

"They’d gotten lost coming back from Chimney Peak and were following Pyrites Creek downstream. They hoped it would get them to the trail eventually, which it did."

They stepped to the side of the road, out of the way of one of the dusty pickup trucks, complete with rifle and grim, lean driver.

"Bigfoot hunter," Gideon said.

"Or bounty hunter. Either way, they make me nervous." As they continued to walk again, Julie went on: "They smelled smoke from somewhere, and one of them spotted a path leading up from the creek."

"A path?"

"They said it was like an animal path, just a wearing away of the brush. They barely noticed it themselves. They went up it, hoping to get directions from somebody. They climbed way up—almost gave it up—but finally found a big ledge near the top. They found their smoke, too, just a dead campfire, with a few warm coals. But no people. They waited around for an hour and left."

"And that was where they found the spear?"

"Yes, in some bushes near the ledge."

Gideon walked along pensively for a while, his hands thrust into his back pockets. "Julie," he said, "would you take a rain check on Kalaloch? I’d really like to see that ledge."

"I thought you might. You think it’s where your Indians live?"

He looked at her, smiling. "You mean you think there
are
Indians now? Notwithstanding
Ethnography of the
Northwest Coast
?"

"I’m beginning to think so. But you have almost ten miles of trail to get there, and a rough climb at the end of it. You can’t get in and out in a day, especially when you start this late."

"I’ll camp out overnight, then. It’d be fun; like spending a night in a haunted forest. No. I can’t do that; no sleeping bag."

"That’s not the problem. We have all kinds of gear you can borrow."

"What’s the problem, then?"

"The problem is, you’d get lost."

He stopped walking and drew himself up. "Miss Tendler, I have managed to survive very well in the trackless sands of the Sonoran Desert, the Arctic wastelands of Baffin Island, even the Boston subways—all without getting lost, or hardly. I’m sure I can make it in a national park."

"Yeah, you’d get lost," she said soberly. "You’d need a guide."

"Julie," he said, standing in the middle of the road with his hands on his hips, "with a topographic map and a river to follow, I assure you I’m competent… You wouldn’t care to go along with me, would you?"

"I’d love it," she said happily.

   At the ranger station, John lukewarmly endorsed the idea. "Yeah, you never know. You might find something interesting. Incidentally, did you know they’ve been finding those bone points around here for years? They’re nothing new."

"They’re not?" Julie said. "How is it that I didn’t know?"

John shrugged. "One of my agents, Julian Minor, heard a couple of old guys talking about them at the market in Amanda Park. He told them who he was, and one of them took him home and showed him his collection. Three of them. Found one over fifty years ago. Plus a lot of other stuff."

"Indian stuff?" Gideon asked.

"Yeah. Baskets, that kind of thing. I wish I could go to the ledge with you," he said halfheartedly, "but I can’t spare a couple of days. I’ll send an agent along with you, though."

"What for?" Julie asked quickly. "Protection?"

"That’s right, protection," John said, blustering and concerned. "A bunch of people have been killed in there, you know."

"Two people," Julie said. "And that was six years ago. Claire Hornick is still missing. Look, John, we haven’t sealed the place off to ordinary weekend hikers, and we don’t send a bodyguard in with them, do we? So why us?"

John appealed to Gideon. "What do you think, Doc?"

What he thought was that he didn’t want some grumpy, griping agent horning in on his night under the stars with Julie. "I think she’s right," he said. "There are thousands of hikers in the park all the time, and as far as we know there have been two murders in the last six years. Those are better odds than I get in San Francisco."

"Damn it, let’s not play games. You spent all morning with a guy with a big, ugly hole in his head. There’s something skulking around in there with a Stone Age spear and murder on its mind. And superhuman strength, from what you tell us. Or an atlatl, which is just as bad."

"John," Julie cut in, "I have a sidearm, and I know how to use it, and I mean to carry it. We’ll be all right."

"Yeah," John said, the fight draining out of him, "but—"

"She also has me. Don’t worry about it, I’ll protect her."

"Protect
me
?" Julie said. "I’m going to have to hold his hand the entire time to make sure he doesn’t get lost."

"That," said Gideon with a grin, "is far and away the best offer I’ve had all day."

"Be right back," Julie said, giving his hand a preliminary squeeze. "I want to change into civvies. Then I’ll bring the truck around."

After two miles on the trail, the crowds began to thin out. After three, they were alone. They walked steadily but gradually uphill, beneath giant limbs that blocked the sunlight a hundred and fifty feet above them, through translucent and ethereal archways of club moss that hung from the branches in exquisite, two-dimensional crescents and vaults. Indeed, it was like a haunted forest, Gideon thought, in which they’d shrunk to Lilliputian size. The ferns and herbs and flowers and mosses that covered the forest floor were all familiar, but grown to monstrous proportions. He half expected to see a house cat the size of an elephant poke its nose around a tree and leer at them.

They walked quietly for the most part, listening sometimes to the singing of far-off wrens and thrushes, but mostly absorbed in the dreamy, heavy silence that seemed to hang like a fog over them. Even their steps made no sound on the spongy trail. It had been a long while since Gideon had had a pack on his back, but he quickly fell into a hiker’s steady, swinging stride. The incredible foliage and immense trunks enchanted him now, and he was comfortable and relaxed, enjoying the odd illusion that he was not walking, but floating through a green and dappled ocean, far below the surface, where the water was dark but pure and gloomily transparent.

After two hours…three?…four?…the pack began to weigh on him, his feet to drag. Julie seemed as fresh as ever.

"How are you doing?" she asked cheerfully as they paused at a rough wooden bridge.

"I’m doing fine," he said. "Great. I could do this all day. It’s fantastic."
Say you’re tired,
he willed her ferociously,
so I can take this miserable pack off my back and rest for a
while.

"That’s fine," she said, "because here’s where it starts getting hard. We don’t cross this bridge. Here’s where we leave the trail. This is Pyrites Creek. We follow it up the hill."

He swung his eyes to the left, up the nearly vertical waterfalls. "Hill?" he said weakly. "Good God, I hope we don’t have to go up any mountains."

Julie laughed. "If you think you’ve had it, there’s no reason why we can’t camp here and call it a day."

"Not on your life," he said grimly. "On we go." Hopefully he added, "Unless you’re really tired?"