The Fall of Never (22 page)

“Smeary?”

“Hard to see.”

“Did you try and make any further contact with him? Call out after him?”

“No way on God’s green Earth. Had no mind to whatsoever. Let ’im go.”

“No mind,” Raintree said. There was a tapping noise to his right. He looked down and saw that he was drumming his fingers on the top of the desk. “If you didn’t get a good look at him, Graham, how do you know he was male?”

“Because,” Rand said with the unimpassioned simplicity of old men, “a man can tell another man. It’s a simple as that. We’re all animals, Detective.”

Yes,
Raintree thought, looking back down at the initials printed on the label of the hunting cap,
we’re all animals indeed.

Five minutes later, Graham Rand was seated in the passenger seat of Raintree’s sedan as the detective maneuvered the vehicle through the darkened, wooded back roads of Spires. The moon was full in the sky, passing behind the occasional coal-colored cloud.

“The spot ain’t far from my home,” Rand said. He was sitting on the edge of the passenger seat, straining the seat belt. His fingers, thick and fumbling, wrestled with each other. “I’ll point out where I saw him, but I ain’t going back into those woods. You can take me directly home, thank you.”

Graham Rand lived in a clapboard ranch just off North Town Road. The tiny house was obscured on three of its four sides by the massive expanse of woodland that stretched all the way beyond the Adirondack Mountains and as far north as Canada. From Rand’s house, over and above the forestry, it was easy to make out the brooding profile of the Kellow Compound nestled on its hill on the other side of the valley. Deep Valley, as it was called by some of the locals, separated the Kellow place from Graham Rand’s home—and the rest of Spires, for that matter. A network of vein-like brooks and streams wove throughout the canyon in every imaginable direction in Deep Valley and, in some places, the forestry was so impenetrable, even the most experienced hunter knew to steer clear of the area.

North Town Road turned to dirt and gravel, now covered in a film of frost, and Raintree slowed the sedan down to a manageable speed. The car slowly drifted by Graham Rand’s little house.

“Just a little further up,” the old man said to Raintree. He was pointing at the windshield. “Just a little. On your left now…here…up here…”

“Here?”

“Stop.”

Raintree stopped the car, clicked it into PARK, left the engine running. “You want to show me exactly?”

“Ain’t moving,” Rand said, shaking his head. “It’s just there. You’ll see my traps. I dropped them and didn’t pick them up. Go on, you’ll see them. That’s where I was standing.” He shifted his index finger and pointed due north. “And that direction—that’s where I saw the fellow. He moved deeper into the woods that way.”

Now, peering through the windshield, Raintree could see the silhouette of the Kellow Compound on the hill in the distance.

“All right,” Raintree said, grabbing his flashlight from the back seat. “I’ll just be a minute, I’m going to have a look around. You wait here, then I’ll take you home.”

“Be careful, Detective.”

It was freezing outside the car. Raintree shuddered against the heavy wind, pulled his coat close to his body, and stepped across the dirt road. His shoes crunched on the frozen earth. He clicked on the flashlight and worked it around the perimeter of the woods. The old man’s story was certainly peculiar, but not
uncharacteristically
peculiar; old Graham Rand had told some whoppers in his time, and naked albinos weren’t the craziest. However, he didn’t believe the old man was lying this time. Maybe a bit confused with what he saw, but not lying.

Is it possible that the old man actually saw one of those missing hunters, that maybe he saw Justin McCullum himself?
he wondered.
That hat he found—that could certainly belong to McCullum, those could certainly be his initials…but running around naked in the woods? No, that doesn’t make any sense at all.

Raintree jumped, nearly dropping his flashlight, the second the sound of the car horn pierced the night. Shaken, he spun around to see Rand poking his pigeon-faced head out the window at him.

“Graham!”

“Would you mind gathering up the traps for me, Detective?”

“Be quiet!”

Regaining his composure, Raintree turned and stepped into the forest.

A little jumpy, are we?
a small voice said from the back of his head.
Maybe just a little bit frightened?

No—he wasn’t frightened. There was nothing to be afraid of. Just a few missing hunters and an injured young girl.

He walked through the woods, side-stepping the interlocking arms of impassable vegetation, his booted feet crunching on the frozen dead leaves. The flashlight’s beam only played a small distance ahead of him. The woods beyond the beam was dark, like a black curtain drawn across that part of the world. Again, he thought of the hunters. They’d gotten a call about them just over a month ago, from one of the wives of the three men: they’d gone hunting for the afternoon, and had not returned the following day. Alan Bannercon had taken the call and had calmed the woman, but did not bother to put anyone on the case (hadn’t even referred to it as a “case” until a good two days later when commotion befell the station in a hailstorm of frantic wives and sobbing, grub-faced children), having prematurely written the situation off as an instance of Three Men and Some Booze and Guns Out on a Friday Night. But Bannercon had been wrong—those hunters had not just been out having a good time. They’d disappeared. And soon, Bannercon had the entire Caliban County Police Department searching the immense timberland for any trace of the three hunters. Helicopter sweeps, scent-trailing canines—only to turn up not even a single clue as to the hunters’ disappearance. And now old Graham Rand finds a hunting cap? A hunting cap with the initials J.M. printed in marker on the tag? Maybe it
was
some kind of joke after all…

Raintree’s foot slammed into something solid and he muttered under his breath. He focused the flashlight beam on the object and saw that it was one of Graham Rand’s squirrel traps. It was on its side, its wire-mesh hinged doors flung open.

Old Mr. Rand dropped you and ran in one heck of a hurry,
Raintree thought, grinning without humor.
This is ridiculous. There is no one here.

He bent and scooped up the trap. Something white and plastic was beneath the trap, half-hidden under some leaves. With one hand (the tips of his fingers already starting to go numb), he reached down and brushed the leaves aside. The white, plastic thing was a fork, three of its four tines broken off. Nothing. Garbage.

He found a few more box-traps deeper in the woods and gathered them up before turning around and heading back to the car. He hadn’t expected to find anything, anyway—and now it seemed too evident to him that Rand, that lonely old bastard, could have simply written those initial inside one of his
own
hunting caps and brought it down to the station. In fact, if he had to bet, he’d say the initialed hunting cap was probably the same exact size as the one the old fool now had perched on his head.

Christ…

He tossed the box-traps in the back of the car and slid back behind the wheel.

“Well?” Rand’s eyes were like saucers.

“Well,” Raintree repeated in his way, “you left those rusted box-traps back there in the woods, Graham, left them all just lying on the ground.”

“Forget the traps, what did you see?”

“I didn’t see anything. Just traps—traps I told you to keep out of these woods, remember?”

“I said forget the traps!” the old man barked. He suddenly became very nervous, his eyes darting along the length of the windshield and out into the night. Great blue veins surfaced and throbbed at his temples. His skin looked tissue paper-thin. “Detective, what did you
see?”

Taking a deep breath, slowly counting backwards in his head (this was a calming stunt he’d mastered after several confrontations with the disagreeable Sheriff Bannercon), Raintree said, “Graham, I didn’t see anyone out there. The place is pitch black. And cold. Maybe you saw someone there and maybe you just think you did, but whatever the case, there is no one there now. I promise you.”

Rand’s eyes did not accept the detective’s promise; they continued to dance across the dark scenery beyond the windshield, searching.

“I’ll take you home now,” Raintree said. He threw the car into reverse, executed a two-point turn on the narrow road, and headed back down toward the old man’s house.

When he stopped and turned to look at Rand, he saw the man was shaking violently. “You’re cold?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll warm up inside. Do I need to keep these box-traps?”

“No, sir.”

“Keep them in your yard, Graham, and not scattered throughout North America, all right?”

“Yes, sir.”

The old man collected his traps from the back seat and walked silently up the shadowed walkway toward the front of his square little house. Raintree watched him go. Despite the situation, he harbored a sense of compassion for the old man.
He’s lonely,
he thought.
He can’t help it.

Once Rand had passed through his front door, Raintree turned the sedan around and headed back to town along the dirt road. He tried the heater but, go figure, the darn thing hadn’t worked properly the past three winters, why should it start working now?

In his rearview, he caught a glimpse of the Kellow Compound in the distance. And for some reason, he suddenly felt as though the giant mansion was creeping up on him, that its image in the rearview mirror was a false one, a mock-image reflected only to fool him while the real thing was right now sneaking up on him in the woods—

He saw something dart through a thicket of trees off to his left, causing him to slam on the brakes. The tires growled along the road. He jerked his head in that direction and caught a fleeting human visage disappear into the darkness of the forest.

My sweet God…

It took all of thirty seconds for Raintree to regain composure and snap from his daze. His right hand went for the flashlight that now rested on the passenger seat while his left hand popped open the door. Again, freezing wind blew into the car, mercilessly needling his skin. The air was so bitterly cold, it caused his head to spin. He thought,
This is what it is like at the top of a mountain.

He hopped from the car and hustled in the direction of the figure, now completely gone from his sight. He moved the flashlight to his left hand, his right unconsciously sliding to the handgun inside his pancake holster.

“Hello?” he shouted. His voice echoed back on the dry, cold wind. “This is the police. Step out, now.”

He crossed the dirt road and stepped into the woods for the second time that evening, only now his heart was pounding and the beam of the flashlight vibrated ahead of him like a giant epileptic lightning bug. Sweat blossomed on his forehead, immediately freezing in the cold night air.

“Hello?”

Except for his muted footfalls crunching on the dead, frozen earth, the woods were silent. He paused in midstride and swept the surrounding trees with the flashlight.

There was someone out here, all right, someone for certain. Some white figure, just like Graham Rand said…

But the thought of spotting Rand’s naked ghost-man just minutes after convincing Rand himself that no such person existed seemed way too economical. It was impossibly—

A flutter: a materialized image somewhere in the darkness ahead of him. Like flailing arms. He was too slow with the flashlight beam, just barely missing the figure—yet he could hear it now, bounding through the forest. The abecedarian gait of a human being. He’d grown up in these woods and was certain of the sound—the sound of a human being, a
man,
running through the woods.

“Police! Police!”

Raintree hopped a deadfall and proceeded after the man, moving faster, although he could no longer see the figure. Arms up as protection against the whipping tree limbs, the cop ran awkwardly and without certitude, his subconscious mind already beginning to doubt a positive outcome to this situation. It was an inbred knowledge, akin to Graham Rand’s proclamation that he could tell a man was a man because he could just
feel
it. Instinctual. It was the basic, animalistic sensation of unavoidable doom. And it was now mere seconds away.

Out of breath and vanquished, Felix Raintree paused and leaned his great weight against a tree, his head back, his teeth chattering in the frigid air despite the sweat he’d managed to work up. He brought his flashlight down. The beam trickled over his boots. His right hand slowly slid away from his holster and to his right side, where a burning stitch had suddenly materialized.

Just a few feet ahead of him, the woods seemed to come alive. It wasn’t something he saw—not immediately, anyway—but, rather, something he
felt—
felt it like a white-hot pulse at the center of every cell, every fiber in his body. A sense of
thereness,
of an empty space suddenly and completely filled.

And then he saw the figure, half hidden behind a stand of firs.

Out of breath, he managed, “Step out. Sir. Caliban County…Police…please…step out where I can…”