Twilight Eyes (56 page)

Horton's face looked older than it had when we had first seen him earlier in the day, closer to his true age. He said, “Just who in the hell
are
you people?”

At seventy-four, Horton Bluett was not humbled by age and did not fear the proximity of the grave, so he appeared formidable as he sat there in the corner with his faithful dog beside him. He was tough and resilient, a man who dealt uncomplainingly with adversities, who ate everything life threw at him, spit out what he did not like, and used the rest to make himself stronger. His voice did not tremble, and his hand did not shake on the stock or on the trigger guard of the shotgun, and his eyes did not waver from us. I would have preferred to deal with almost any man fifty years Horton's junior rather than with him.

“Who?” he repeated. “Who are you folks? Not a couple geology students working for doctorates. That's goose poop for sure. Who are you, really, and what're you doing here? Sit down on the edge of the bed, both of you; sit there facing me, and keep your hands in your laps, folded in your laps. That's right. That's good. Don't make no sudden moves, you hear? Now tell me everything you got to tell.”

In spite of the evidently powerful suspicion that had driven him to the extraordinary step of forced entry, in spite of what he had found secreted in the house, Horton still liked us. He was extremely wary, intensely curious about our motives, but he did not feel that a friendly relationship was yet ruled out by what he had uncovered. I sensed that much, and considering the circumstances, I was surprised by the relatively benign state of mind that I perceived in him. What I sensed was confirmed by the attitude of the dog, Growler, who sat at attention, alert but not overtly hostile, ungrowling. Horton would shoot us, yes, if we made a move against him. But he did not want to do it.

Rya and I told him virtually everything about ourselves and our reasons for coming to Yontsdown. When we spoke of goblins hiding behind human masks, genetically engineered soldiers from a lost age, Horton Bluett blinked and repeatedly said, “By God.” Nearly as often he said, “Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle.” He asked pointed questions about some of the most outlandish parts of our tale—but he never once seemed to doubt our veracity or to think us mad.

In light of our outrageous story, his imperturbability was rather unnerving. Country people often pride themselves on a calm, collected manner, so unlike most city folk. But this was rural unflappability carried to an extreme.

An hour later, when we had nothing more to reveal, Horton sighed and put the shotgun on the floor next to his chair.

Taking his cue from his master, Growler let down his guard too.

Rya and I also relaxed. She had been more tense than I, perhaps because she could not detect the aura of good intentions and goodwill that surrounded Horton Bluett. Guarded and cautious goodwill but goodwill nonetheless.

Horton said, “I could tell you was different from the moment you walked into my driveway and offered to help with the shoveling.”

“How?” Rya asked.

“Smelled it,” he said.

I knew at once that he was not speaking figuratively, that he had indeed
smelled
a difference in us. I recalled how, when he had first met us, he'd sniffed and snuffled as if suffering from a cold but had not blown his nose.

“I can't see 'em clear and easy the way you two see 'em,” Horton said, “but from the time I was a tot, there've been people who smelled
wrong
to me. Can't explain it exactly. It's a little bit like the smell of very, very old things, ancient things: you know . . . like dust that's been gathering for hundreds and hundreds of years, undisturbed in some deep tomb . . . but not actually quite dust. Like staleness but not
quite
staleness.” He frowned, struggling to find words that would help us understand. “And there's a bitterness to the smell of them that's not like the sourness of sweat or any other body odor you've ever whiffed. Maybe a little like vinegar but not really. Maybe just a touch like ammonia . . . but, no, not that, either. Some of them have a subtle odor, just tickles the nostrils, teases—but others reek. And what that odor says to me—what it's always said to me ever since I was a tyke—is something like: ‘Stay away from this one, Horton, he's a bad one, a real no-good, watch him, be careful now, beware, beware.'”

“Incredible,” Rya said.

“It's true,” Horton said.

“I believe it,” she said.

Now I knew why he had not thought us mad and why he had been able to accept our story so readily. Our eyes told us the very thing that his nose told him, so on every fundamental level our story rang true to him.

I said, “Sounds like you've got some sort of olfactory version of psychic ability.”

Growler said, “
Whuff
,” as if in agreement, then lay down and put his head on his paws.

“Don't know what you'd call it,” Horton said. “All I know is I've had it my entire life. And early on, I knew I could rely on my smeller when it told me someone was a nasty bugger. Because no matter how nice they looked and acted, I could see that most of the people around them—neighbors, husbands, wives, kids, friends—always seemed to have a lot tougher time of life than was reasonable. I mean, these ones that smelled bad . . . shoot, they carried
misery
with them somehow, not their own misery but misery for other folks. And a powerful lot of their friends and relatives died off too young and in violent ways. Though, of course, you could never point a finger at them and say they was to be held responsible.”

Taking it for granted that she was free to move now, Rya zipped open her ski jacket and slipped it off.

She said, “But you told us you got a whiff of something different about us, so you're able to detect more than just goblins.”

Horton shook his grizzled head. “Never did until I met you two. Right away I picked up a peculiar scent about you, something I'd never smelled before, something almost as strange as when I'm around those ones you call goblins . . . but different. Hard to describe. Just a bit like the sharp, pure smell of ozone. You know what I mean . . . ozone, like after a big thunderstorm, after the lightning, that crisp odor that's not unpleasant at all. Fresh. A fresh odor that gives you the feeling there's unseen electricity still in the air and that it's crackling right clean through you, energizing you, purging all the weariness and sludge out of you.”

Unzipping my own jacket, I said, “Do you get the same scent now as when you first met us?”

“Sure do.” He slowly rubbed his reddish nose with the thumb and forefinger of one hand. “Fact is, I got it the very moment you opened the door downstairs and stepped into the house.” He grinned suddenly, proud of his peculiar ability. “And right away, smelling you, I said to myself, ‘Horton, these kids is different from other folks, but it's not a
bad
difference.' The nose knows.”

On the floor beside Horton's chair, Growler made a grumbling sound deep in his throat, and his tail swished back and forth across the carpet.

I realized that the unusual affinity of this man for his dog—and of the dog for him—might be related to the fact that in both of them the most powerful and reliable of the five senses was smell. Strange. Even as that thought occurred to me, I saw the man move his hand from the arm of the chair in order to reach down and stroke the dog, and the dog simultaneously raised its burly head to be petted, at the very
instant
the hand began to move. It was as if the dog's need for affection, and the man's intention of providing same, somehow produced vague odors that each detected and to which each responded. Between them existed a sophisticated form of telepathy based not on thought transferral but upon the production and swift apprehension of complex scents.

“Your scent,” Horton said to Rya and me, “didn't
seem
to be a sign of evil, as is the case with the stink of those . . . goblins. But it worried me 'cause it was different from anything I'd ever smelled before. Then you started nosing around, prying at me for information but trying to act casual, asking questions about the Lightning Coal Company, and that spooked me for sure.”

“Why?” Rya asked.

“Because,” Horton said, “since the mid-fifties when the old mine owners were bought out and the name of the place was changed, all the new Lightning employees I've ever met—every man-jack-one of them—stinks to high heaven! For the past seven or eight years, I figured that was a bad place—that company, those mines—and I wondered what in tarnation was going on up there.”

“We wonder too,” Rya said.

“And we're going to find out,” I said.

“Anyway,” he said, “I worried that you might be a threat to me, that you had something nasty in mind for me, so coming here and nosing in
your
business was purely self-defense.”

Downstairs, we prepared dinner together, using the few groceries we'd laid in: scrambled eggs, sausages, home fries, whole-wheat toast.

Rya worried about what to feed Growler, who was licking his chops as the kitchen filled with delicious fragrances.

But Horton said, “Oh, we'll just fix him up a fourth plate, same stuff as we're having. They say it isn't healthy for a dog to feed him the same as people get fed. But that's the way I always treated him, and it don't seem to have done him great harm. Look at him—he could take on a bobcat and win. Just give him eggs, sausages, home fries—but no toast. Toast's too dry for him. He likes blackberry or apple or especially blueberry muffins, though, if they've got plenty of fruit in 'em and they're real moist.”

“Sorry,” Rya said, clearly amused. “No muffins in the pantry.”

“Then he'll make do with the other stuff, and I'll treat him to an oatmeal cookie or something when I take him home.”

We put Growler's plate in the corner by the back door, and the rest of us ate at the kitchen table.

Snow—still flurrying in fluffy flakes that accumulated at only a small fraction of an inch per hour—looped out of the darkness and slid along the windows. Though the snow was light, the wind was strong, imitating wolves and trains and cannons in the night.

Over dinner we learned more about Horton Bluett. Because of his bizarre talent for smelling out the goblins—call it “olfactopathy”—he had led a relatively safe life, avoiding the demonkind whenever he could, treating them with great caution when avoidance was impossible. His wife, Etta, had died in 1934, not at the hands of goblins but from cancer. Although she was forty when she passed away and Horton was forty-four, their marriage had produced no children. His fault, he said, for he was infertile. His years with his wife had been so good, their relationship so perfectly intimate, that he never found another woman who measured up or for whom he was willing to dim his shining memory of Etta. In the subsequent three decades he had shared his life primarily with three dogs, of which Growler was the latest.

Looking fondly at the mongrel where it stood licking its plate clean, Horton said, “On the one hand, I hope my sorry bones give out before his, 'cause it's going to be hard on me to bury him if it comes to that. It was terrible hard with the other two—Jeepers and Romper—but it's going to be even worse with Growler 'cause he's been the best dog there ever was.” Growler looked up from his plate and cocked his head at his master, as if he knew he had just been complimented. “On the other hand, I'd hate to die afore him and leave him to the mercy of the world. He deserves to be kept comfy all his days.”

As Horton stared affectionately at his dog, Rya looked at me and I at her, and I knew she was thinking much the same thing that I was: Horton Bluett was not merely sweet but also uncommonly resilient and self-reliant. All his long life he had been aware that the world was full of people bent on doing harm to others, had realized that Evil with a capital
E
stalked the world in very real and fleshy forms, yet he had not grown paranoid and had not become a humorless recluse. The cruelest trick of nature had stolen his beloved wife from him, yet he had not grown bitter.

For the last thirty years, he'd been alone but for his dogs, yet he had not become eccentric as did most people whose primary relationships were with their pets.

He was a heartening example of the strength and determination and sheer granite durability of humanity. In spite of thousands of years of suffering at the hands of the goblins, our kind could still produce individuals as admirable as Mr. Horton Bluett. Such people were a good argument for our value as a species.

“So,” he said, turning his attention from Growler to us, “what will your next step be?”