He almost walked into Jud's back again. The old man had stopped in the middle of the path. His head was cocked to one side. His mouth was pursed and tense.
"Jud? What's--"
"Shhh!"
Louis hushed, looking around uneasily. Here the ground mist was thinner, but he still couldn't see his own shoes. Then he heard crackling underbrush and breaking branches. Something was moving out there--something big.
He opened his mouth to ask Jud if it was a moose (bear was the thought that actually crossed his mind), and then he closed it again. The sound carries, Jud had said.
He cocked his head to one side in unconscious imitation of Jud, unaware that he was doing it, and listened. The sound seemed at first distant, then very close; moving away and then moving ominously toward them. Louis felt the sweat on his forehead begin to trickle down his chapped cheeks. He shifted the Hefty Bag with Church's body in it from one hand to the other. His palm had dampened, and the green plastic seemed greasy, wanting to slide through his fist. Now the thing out there seemed to be so close that Louis expected to see its shape at any moment, rising up on two legs, perhaps, blotting out the stars with some unthought-of, immense and shaggy body.
Bear was no longer what he was thinking of.
Now he didn't know just what he was thinking of.
Then it moved away and disappeared.
Louis opened his mouth again, the words What was that? already on his tongue. Then a shrill, maniacal laugh came out of the darkness, rising and falling in hysterical cycles, loud, piercing, chilling. To Louis it seemed that every joint in his body had frozen solid and that he had somehow gained weight, so much weight that if he turned to run he would plunge down and out of sight in the swampy ground.
The laughter rose, split into dry cackles like some rottenly friable chunk of rock along many fault lines; it reached the pitch of a scream, then sank into a guttural chuckling that might have become sobs before it faded out altogether.
Somewhere there was a drip of water and above them, like a steady river in a bed of sky, the monotonous whine of the wind. Otherwise Little God Swamp was silent.
Louis began to shudder all over. His flesh--particularly that of his lower belly--began to creep. Yes, creep was the right word; his flesh actually seemed to be moving on his body. His mouth was totally dry. There seemed to be no spit at all left in it. Yet that feeling of exhilaration persisted, an unshakable lunacy.
"What in Christ's name?" he whispered hoarsely to Jud.
Jud turned to look at him, and in the dim light Louis thought the old man looked a hundred and twenty. There was no sign of that odd, dancing light in his eyes now. His face was drawn, and there was stark terror in his eyes. But when he spoke, his voice was steady enough. "Just a loon," he said. "Come on. Almost there."
They went on. The tussocks became firm ground again. For a few moments Louis had a sensation of open space, although that dim glow in the air had now faded, and it was all he could do to make out Jud's back three feet in front of him. Short grass stiff with frost was underfoot. It broke like glass at every step. Then they were in the trees again. He could smell aromatic fir, feel needles. Occasionally a twig or a branch scraped against him.
Louis had lost all sense of time or direction, but they did not walk long before Jud stopped again and turned toward him.
"Steps here," he said. "Cut into rock. Forty-two or forty-four, I disremember which. Just follow me. We get to the top and we're there."
He began to climb again, and again Louis followed.
The stone steps were wide enough, but the sense of the ground dropping away was unsettling. Here and there his shoe gritted on a strew of pebbles and stone fragments.
. . . twelve . . . thirteen . . . fourteen . . .
The wind was sharper, colder, quickly numbing his face. Are we above the treeline? he wondered. He looked up and saw a billion stars, cold lights in the darkness. Never in his life had the stars made him feel so completely small, infinitesimal, without meaning. He asked himself the old question--is there anything intelligent out there?--and instead of wonder, the thought brought a horrid cold feeling, as if he had asked himself what it might be like to eat a handful of squirming bugs.
. . . twenty-six . . . twenty-seven . . . twenty-eight . . .
Who carved these, anyway? Indians? The Micmacs? Were they tool-bearing Indians? I'll have to ask Jud. "Tool-bearing Indians" made him think of "fur-bearing animals," and that made him think of that thing that had been moving near them in the woods. One foot stumbled, and he raked a gloved hand along the rock wall to his left for balance. The wall felt old, chipped and channeled and wrinkled. Like dry skin that's almost worn out, he thought.
"You all right, Louis?" Jud murmured.
"I'm okay," he said, although he was nearly out of breath and his muscles throbbed from the weight of Church in the bag.
. . . forty-two . . . forty-three . . . forty-four . . .
"Forty-five," Jud said. "I've forgot. Haven't been up here in twelve years, I guess. Don't suppose I'll ever have a reason to come again. Here . . . up you come and up you get."
He grabbed Louis's arm and helped him up the last step.
"We're here," Jud said.
Louis looked around. He could see well enough; the starlight was dim but adequate. They were standing on a rocky, rubble-strewn plate of rock which slid out of the thin earth directly ahead like a dark tongue. Looking the other way, he could see the tops of the fir trees they had come through in order to reach the steps. They had apparently climbed to the top of some weird, flat-topped mesa, a geological anomaly that would have seemed far more normal in Arizona or New Mexico. Because the grassed-over top of the mesa--or hill, or truncated mountain, or whatever it was--was bare of trees, the sun had melted the snow here. Turning back to Jud, Louis saw dry grasses bending before the steady wind that blew coldly in his face, and saw that it was a hill, not an isolated mesa. Ahead of them the ground rose again toward trees. But this flatness was so obvious, and so odd in the context of New England's low and somehow tired hills--
Tool-bearing Indians, his mind suddenly spoke up.
"Come on," Jud said and led him twenty-five yards toward the trees. The wind blew hard up here, but it felt clean. Louis saw a number of shapes just under the gloom cast by the trees--trees which were the oldest, tallest firs he had ever seen. The whole effect of this high, lonely place was emptiness--but an emptiness which vibrated.
The dark shapes were cairns of stones.
"Micmacs sanded off the top of the hill here," Jud said. "No one knows how, no more than anyone knows how the Mayans built their pyramids. And the Micmacs have forgot themselves, just like the Mayans have."
"Why? Why did they do it?"
"This was their burying ground," Jud said. "I brought you here so you could bury Ellie's cat here. The Micmacs didn't discriminate, you know. They buried their pets right alongside their owners."
This made Louis think of the Egyptians, who had gone that one better; they had slaughtered the pets of royalty so that the souls of the pets might go along to whatever afterlife there might be with the souls of their masters. He remembered reading about the slaughter of more than ten thousand domestic animals following the decease of one Pharaoh's daughter--included in the tally had been six hundred pigs and two thousand peacocks. The pigs had been scented with attar of roses, the dead lady's favorite perfume, before their throats were cut.
And they built pyramids too. No one knows for sure what the Mayan pyramids are for--navigation and chronography, some say, like Stonehenge--but we know damn well what the Egyptian pyramids were and are . . . great monuments to death, the world's biggest gravestones. Here Lies Ramses II, He Was Obediant, Louis thought and uttered a wild, helpless cackle.
Jud looked at him, unsurprised.
"Go on and bury your animal," he said. "I'm gonna have a smoke. I'd help you, but you got to do it yourself. Each buries his own. That's the way it was done then."
"Jud, w
hat's this all about? Why did you bring me here?"
"Because you saved Norma's life," Jud said, and although he sounded sincere--and Louis was positive he believed himself sincere--he had a sudden, overpowering sense that the man was lying . . . or that he was being lied to and then passing the lie on to Louis. He remembered that look he had seen, or thought he had seen, in Jud's eye.
But up here none of that seemed to matter. The wind mattered more, pushing freely around him in that steady river, lifting his hair from his brow and off his ears.
Jud sat down with his back against one of the trees, cupped his hands around a match, and lit a Chesterfield. "You want to rest a bit before you start?"
"No, I'm okay," Louis said. He could have pursued the questions, but he found he didn't really care to. This felt wrong but it also felt right, and he decided to let that be enough . . . for now. There was really only one thing he needed to know. "Will I really be able to dig him a grave? The soil looks thin." Louis nodded toward the place where the rock pushed out of the ground at the edge of the steps.
Jud nodded slowly. "Ayuh," he said. "Soil's thin, all right. But soil deep enough to grow grass is generally deep enough to bury in, Louis. And people have been burying here for a long, long time. You won't find it any too easy, though."
Nor did he. The ground was stony and hard, and very quickly he saw that he was going to need the pick to dig the grave deep enough to hold Church. So he began to alternate, first using the pick to loosen the hard earth and stones, then the shovel to dig out what he had loosened. His hands began to hurt. His body began to warm up again. He felt a strong, unquestionable need to do a good job. He began to hum under his breath, something he sometimes did when suturing a wound. Sometimes the pick would strike a rock hard enough to flash sparks, and the shiver would travel up the wooden haft to vibrate in his hands. He could feel blisters forming on his palms and didn't care, although he was, like most doctors, usually careful of his hands. Above and around him, the wind sang and sang, playing a tree-note melody.
Counterpointing this he heard the soft drop and chunk of rock. He looked over his shoulder and saw Jud, hunkered down and pulling out the bigger rocks he had dug up, making a heap of them.
"For your cairn," he said when he saw Louis looking.
"Oh," Louis said and went back to work.
He made the grave about two feet wide and three feet long--a Cadillac of a grave for a damn cat, he thought--and when it was perhaps thirty inches deep and the pick was flashing sparks up from almost every stroke, he tossed it and the shovel aside and asked Jud if it was okay.
Jud got up and took a cursory look. "Seems fine to me," he said. "Anyway, it's what you think that counts."
"Will you tell me now what this is about?"
Jud smiled a little. "The Micmacs believed this hill was a magic place," he said. "Believed this whole forest, from the swamp on north and east was magic. They made this place, and they buried their dead here, away from everything else. Other tribes steered clear of it--the Penobscots said these woods were full of ghosts. Later on, the fur trappers started saying pretty much the same thing. I suppose some of them saw the foo-fire in Little God Swamp and thought they were seeing ghosts."
Jud smiled, and Louis thought: That isn't what you think at all.
"Later on, not even the Micmacs themselves would come here. One of them claimed he saw a Wendigo here and that the ground had gone sour. They had a big powwow about it . . . or so I heard the tale in my green years, Louis, but I heard it from that old tosspot Stanny B.--which is what we all called Stanley Bouchard--and what Stanny B. didn't know, he'd make up."
Louis, who knew only that the Wendigo was supposed to be a spirit of the north country, said, "Do you think the ground's gone sour?"
Jud smiled--or at least his lips slanted. "I think it's a dangerous place," he said softly, "but not for cats or dogs or pet hamsters. Go on and bury your animal, Louis."
Louis lowered the Hefty Bag into the hole and slowly shoveled the dirt back in. He was cold now and tired. The patter of the earth on the plastic was a depressing sound, and while he did not regret coming up here, that sense of exhilaration was fading, and he had begun to wish the adventure over. It was a long walk back home.
The pattering sound muffled, then stopped--there was only the whump of dirt on more dirt. He scraped the last bit into the hole with the blade of his shovel (there's never enough, he thought, recalling something his undertaker uncle had said to him at least a thousand years ago, never enough to fill the hole up again) and then turned to Jud.
"Your cairn," Jud said.
"Look, Jud, I'm pretty tired and--"
"It's Ellie's cat," Jud said, and his voice, although soft, was implacable. "She'd want you to do it right."
Louis sighed. "I suppose she would," he said.
It took another ten minutes to pile up the rocks Jud handed him, one by one. When it was done, there was a low, conical pile of stones on Church's grave, and Louis did indeed feel a small, tired pleasure. It looked right, somehow, rising with the others in the starlight. He supposed Ellie would never see it--the thought of taking her through that patch of swamp where there was quicksand would make Rachel's hair turn white--but he had seen it, and it was good.
"Most of these have fallen over," he said to Jud, standing and brushing at the knees of his pants. He was seeing more clearly now, and in several places he could clearly make out scattered strews of loose stones. But Jud had seen to it that he built his own cairn only from stones taken from the grave he himself had dug.
"Ayuh," Jud said. "Told you: the place is old."
"Are we done now?"
"Ayuh." He clapped Louis on the shoulder. "You did good, Louis. I knew you would. Let's go home."
"Jud--" he began again, but Jud only grabbed the pick and walked off toward the steps. Louis got the shovel, had to trot to catch up, and then saved his breath for walking. He looked back once, but the cairn marking the grave of his daughter's cat Winston Churchill had melted into the shadows, and he could not pick it out.
We just ran the film backward, Louis thought tiredly as they emerged from the woods and into the field overlooking his own house some time later. He did not know how much later; he had taken off his watch when he had lain down to doze that afternoon, and it would still be there on the windowsill by his bed. He only knew that he was beat, used up, done in. He could not remember feeling so kicked-dog weary since his first day on Chicago's rubbish-disposal crew one high-school summer sixteen or seventeen years ago.
They came back the same way they had gone, but he could remember very little about the trip. He stumbled on the deadfall, he remembered that--lurching forward and thinking absurdly of Peter Pan--oh, Jesus, I lost my happy thoughts and down I come--and then Jud's hand had been there, firm and hard, and a few moments later they had been trudging past the final resting places of Smucky the Cat and Trixie and Marta Our Pet Rabit and onto the path he had once walked not only with Jud but with his whole family.
It seemed that in some weary way he had pondered the dream of Victor Pascow, the one which had resulted in his somnambulistic episode, but any connection between that night walk and this had eluded him. It had also occurred to him that the whole adventure had been dangerous--not in any melodramatic Wilkie Collins sense but in a very real one. That he had outrageously blistered his hands while in a state that was nearly somnambulistic was really the least of it. He could have killed himself on the deadfall. Both of them could have. It was hard to square such behavior with sobriety. In his current exhaustion, he was willing to ascribe it to confusion and emotional upset over the death of a pet the whole family had loved.
And after a time, there they were, home again.
They walked toward it together, not speaking, and stopped again in Louis's driveway. The wind moaned and whined. Wordlessly, Louis handed Jud his pick.
"I'd best get across," Jud said at last. "Louella Bisson or Ruthie Parks will be bringin Norma home and she'll
wonder where the hell I am."
"Do you have the time?" Louis asked. He was surprised that Norma wasn't home yet; in his muscles it seemed to him that midnight must have struck.
"Oh, ayuh," Jud said. "I keep the time as long as I'm dressed and then I let her go."
He fished a watch out of his pants pocket and flicked the scrolled cover back from its face.
"It's gone eight-thirty," he said and snapped the cover closed again.
"Eight-thirty?" Louis repeated stupidly. "That's all?"
"How late did you think it was?" Jud asked.
"Later than that," Louis said.
"I'll see you tomorrow, Louis," Jud said and began to move away.
"Jud?"
He turned toward Louis, mildly questioning.
"Jud, what did we do tonight?"
"Why, we buried your daughter's cat."
"Is that all we did?"
"Nothing but that," Jud said. "You're a good man, Louis, but you ask too many questions. Sometimes people have to do things that just seem right. That seem right in their hearts, I mean. And if they do those things and then end up not feeling right, full of questions and sort of like they got indigestion, only inside their heads instead of in their guts, they think they made a mistake. Do you know what I mean?"
"Yes," Louis said, thinking that Jud must have been reading his mind as the two of them walked downhill through the field and toward the house lights.
"What they don't think is that maybe they should be questioning those feelings of doubt before they question their own hearts," Jud said, looking at him closely. "What do you think, Louis?"
"I think," Louis said slowly, "that you might be right."
"And the things that are in a man's heart--it don't do him much good to talk about those things, does it?"
"Well--"
"No," Jud said, as if Louis had simply agreed. "It don't." And in his calm voice that was so sure and so implacable, in that voice which somehow put the chill through Louis, he said: "They are secret things. Women are supposed to be the ones good at keeping secrets, and I guess they do keep a few, but any woman who knows anything at all would tell you she's never really seen into any man's heart. The soil of a man's heart is stonier, Louis--like the soil up there in the old Micmac burying ground. Bedrock's close. A man grows what he can . . . and he tends it."