Authors: James P. Blaylock
He had told himself not two days ago that although he had been guilty of crimes, of big mistakes, all of that had been in
the past, years ago. He’d met Lorna since then, started a new life. But suddenly he was neck deep in it again, complicit in
Pomeroy’s breaking into Beth’s house, in the rats in the damned water tank, in every single damned twisted crime that Pomeroy
was out there committing in both their names. And the insane truth of it was that he hadn’t even needed Pomeroy’s help in
what happened last night. What Joanne said was true; he’d screwed things up with Lorna entirely on his own.
Help fighting the war—that’s what Lorna had offered him yesterday. And he’d turned away from her and gone off to fight it
himself, with a claw hammer. Maybe it would
have been better for all of them if he’d had a chance to use it.
Outside it was sunny and almost hot, the wind fallen. The poolhouse door still hung open, and he realized that he could barely
look at it. He pushed the button to open the garage door, then went out through the back, fetching the screw gun off the bench
along with a box of wooden kitchen matches before heading for the poolhouse. One by one he jammed kitchen matches into the
stripped-out screw holes in the doorjamb, snapping the matches off flush with the wood. He tilted the door back into place,
forcing it upright with his knee against the knob, then ran the screws back into the plugged-up holes. He opened and shut
the door a few times, then looked at where the bolt had splintered free of the wood. He’d have to chisel it out and scab in
a piece, then fill the door panel and repaint the whole thing.
There were leaves and trash strewn everywhere, under the sofa and chairs, heaped up in the corners. He took down the curtains
and shook them out, then hung them back up. Then he turned the Ping-Pong table upright, opened the closet door, and took
out the broom and dustpan. Methodically he swept the place out, filling the trash can and hauling the leaves out to the fence.
The room needed to be vacuumed but, like the painting, that could wait. He’d get to it. Bit by bit he would erase and eradicate
his errors….
He put the broom and dustpan away and was on the verge of going back out into the sunlight when he remembered the gun. Slowly
he walked to the sofa and lifted the cushion. Beneath it lay the .38 from his nightstand—the gun that Lorna had brought out
to shoot the man she thought was assaulting him.
The guy who needed to be shot was probably out in the canyon right now, leaning on people. He slipped the pistol into his
pants pocket and went after his car keys on the kitchen counter.
P
OMEROY SLOWED THE
I
SUZU, PEERING INTO THE WOODS
and brush along the creek, trying to spot the boy again. He’d caught a glimpse of him a moment ago, walking among the trees.
The wind moved through the vegetation now, stirring the willows and alder saplings so that the forest was full of movement.
It
had
to be the same kid that had wrecked his camera; there was no mistaking the thrift-store clothes. He had given up on the idea
of its being Beth’s son, though; a woman like her simply couldn’t have a kid that far out of hand.
There he was! Heading up along the creek, in no particular hurry. Pomeroy stepped on the accelerator, and the Isuzu banged
along to the closest turnout, where he pulled in, cutting the engine and setting the parking brake. He jumped out and clambered
down the bank, through the dry grass and into the willows along the creek, shouting, “Stop right there!” as he ran, even though
the kid was out of sight again.
Pomeroy slowed down, getting his bearings and making up his mind. He wasn’t about to back down. There was no excuse for kids
to be running wild like this, stealing things, doing malicious damage to other people’s property…. There was a movement ahead
of him, beyond the willows, and he crouched in the shelter of a tangle of roots where the creek had eaten the bank away. Hadn’t
the kid even
heard
him? The wind wasn’t making
that
much noise. It made him suddenly nervous, the kid fooling around like
that, as if maybe he
wanted
him to catch up.
Pomeroy looked around carefully, making up his mind about going on. Then the boy stepped across the creek and headed up the
other side of the canyon, kicking his way through the tall grass of a clearing toward what was pretty clearly a cut in the
wall of the ridge, maybe a little side canyon, its entrance obscured by a stand of oaks. Keeping low, Pomeroy followed, finding
a rocky ford where the kid had crossed the stream. A little section of trail lay exposed on the hillside above, some distance
above the top of the oaks, and he suddenly wondered if it led up to the trail that wound back down into Trabuco Oaks.
Beth had headed up that way two days ago after he’d chatted with her in front of the old man’s house. When he saw the boy
climb up onto the section of exposed trail, vanishing beyond the rock and brush, he set out at a run, leaping over fallen
limbs and ducking into the deep shade of the big oaks. The wind blew straight into his face as it funneled down out of the
side canyon, and a little leaf-choked stream trickled through scattered rocks from a spring somewhere above.
He found the trail and set out hurriedly, then stopped in his tracks, listening to a strange noise that seemed to float down
toward him on the wind. He could swear it was the sound of a child’s crying. After a moment came the clear sound of a woman’s
voice, clearly calling out a name. The wind picked up just then with a rush of creaking and rustling, but Pomeroy had heard
enough. In a rush of understanding he connected the boy’s strange clothing—the suspenders and out-of-date shirt and pants—with
the hippie-looking woman out at Klein’s fence.
Of course! He felt ashamed of himself for suspecting that Beth would have anything to do with a man like Klein or would use
her son for any such purpose. A woman like her! It was Klein and this hippie woman all along, conspiring against him. Good
God, maybe the kid was Klein’s son! A little bastard!
He pushed on, not knowing what any of this meant, but knowing that he could
use
it. He had to meet the woman, follow her, speak to her. He would automatically have a certain power over her…. As he climbed
he watched the trail ahead closely, so as not to come on them unawares. Better to seem as if he were just out hiking. The
kid would be knocked sideways seeing him, but so what? He’d keep his mouth shut.
There was the woman’s voice again. She sounded pretty worked up, and there was the crying again from the kid. The wind slammed
down the trail so suddenly and so hard that he staggered backward, nearly pushed off his feet. He had a sudden vague premonition
that he was reading this wrong, that there was something involved here that he didn’t understand. Was the wind trying to turn
him around? He searched the sky. It was cloudless, clear blue, as if inviting him to climb higher—at least up onto the ridge.
Heavy dry brush closed in from either side, and the trail was so steep, and it switched back so often, that he couldn’t see
far enough ahead to gauge how close to the top he was. He was sweating freely, and the flies swarmed around his face in the
heat, buzzing infernally. He wiped his forehead and listened for footsteps ahead, but the wind blasted through the vegetation
and he heard only the sound of the flies and of his own feet scrabbling across the broken rock.
Then suddenly the trail opened out ahead of him, the ridge leveling off some distance above into a nearly flat scrub-covered
plateau. Mountains rose again beyond it, rough and dense with vegetation, but the trail he was following wound away to the
west now along the edge of the plateau. He stepped out into a broad clearing and then stepped hurriedly back again, hunching
down behind the edge of the brush. There she stood, Klein’s back-door bimbo, not twenty yards away, dressed just as she had
been yesterday afternoon and last night. Her hair was a windblown frenzy, and the dress, clearly, had seen a lot of wear.
Clearly she was some kind of local white trash, a drug case
or something. He knew that Klein was low, but taking advantage of a woman like this …
She took the boy’s hand and was hurried forward, the boy crying now for all he was worth, and the wind blowing her skirts
up around her legs. Surprised, Pomeroy stepped out into the open and shouted, setting out after them. The wind threw his words
back into his face. If they heard him, they didn’t care. Ahead lay a dense stand of dark alders clustered along what must
have been a spring—the source of the little creek at the bottom of the canyon.
Making up his mind, he set out at a run, overtaking them near the trees. They were tangled and dense, heavy with undergrowth,
and even with the sun high in the sky, the interior of the little copse was dark with shadow. There was the sound of water
splashing somewhere below, weirdly clear despite the rush of wind on the unprotected ridge. The woman hesitated for a moment
before a dark hollow in the branches, an arched window of moving shadows. Lunging forward, Pomeroy grasped her shoulder with
one hand and the boy’s elbow with the other.
“Whoa up there, little lady,” he said, trying to sound pleasant even though he had to raise his voice to be heard.
She slipped from his grasp like smoke, not even turning to look at him. He realized that she was weeping—something was going
on here; something more than he understood. The boy pivoted around and looked Pomeroy full in the face, his wide-open eyes
staring and dark with fear as if he were looking into a pit. Clearly he comprehended nothing. His face was almost idiotic
with fear. Pomeroy stepped backward in sudden alarm. The boy clutched a cat to his chest, cradling it in his right arm, and
for one terrible moment Pomeroy was certain that the cat was the same one he’d shot yesterday, that the boy had been carrying
the dead cat around for the past twenty-four hours. Then the darkness of the overshadowing trees swallowed the two of them,
and Pomeroy was left alone with the wind.
Recovering a little, he shouted, “Wait!” and bent forward
warily, shading his eyes from the leaves and dust that the wind raised into the air around him. He groped into the darkness
within the trees, stretching out his arms to fend off the moving branches. There was the sound all around him of wood snapping
and of the roaring wind, and then suddenly, piercing through all of it, the nightmarish sound of a woman’s scream.
Pomeroy edged forward, pushing out through bushes to find himself suddenly at the edge of a cliff, looking downward over the
edge at cascading water. He reeled backward, stepping into the shallow creek, realizing then what the scream had meant, what
the woman had done. Even then he wondered if he could use it against Klein. The dirty bastard! Clearly what had gone on last
night had driven this poor woman to suicide.
He turned back into the darkness, covering his eyes against the dirt and leaves that flew into his face, trying to grope his
way back out toward the arch of sunlight, which glowed now like the mouth of a cave. Creek water filled his shoes. The gale
lashed through the foliage, and a heavy spray of wind-whipped water and leaves slapped his pants and shirt and face. He slipped
on wet rocks, falling forward, reaching out to break his fall with his hands and opening his mouth to shout, plunging into
water up to his elbow. His mouth filled with grit and wet leaves, and he clamped his teeth down, gagging on the debris in
his throat.
Pushing himself to his feet, he lurched forward out of the creek bed, groping for something to hold on to. The tree limbs
flayed themselves leafless, whipping at his face and back and arms. Something hit him on the back of his head—a broken-off
tree branch, slamming down with all the fury of the wind behind it. He staggered like a drunken man, looking wildly around,
trying to breathe, but sucking in dirt and fragments of leaves. The wind crashed and hummed, and the arch of sunlight and
open air was obscured by windborne stuff, swirling tighter and tighter until
it looked to Pomeroy like a dense curtain of leaves and twigs and branches that was roughly the height and shape of a man.
He took a step backward, grabbing onto a limb to steady himself. He could almost imagine that the black void in the thing
was an open mouth, the focus of the terrible humming of the wind. A shower of pebbles and dirt flew toward him suddenly, cast
from within the whirling mass of forest trash, forcing him farther back into the trees and undergrowth. Behind him—ten feet?
twelve?—lay the edge of the cliff. The thing tottered forward, groping toward him, broken branches thrusting out from its
side like rude arms. Mulch and dust dribbled from the open hole of its mouth and were sucked back into the revolving mass.
Pomeroy heard the sound of the waterfall at his back as the thing drew near. With a desperate scream he lunged blindly toward
it, flailing with his arms, trying to sweep it aside and escape once again into the sunlight.
He tripped on a limb and fell hard, the broken stump of a branch tearing his shirt and chest. He felt his face peppered with
dirt, and he squeezed shut his mouth and eyes and groped blindly forward on his hands and knees. A twig wiggled down into
his ear like an insect antenna, and he snatched at it, suddenly terrified, screaming despite himself and feeling his mouth
fill instantly with muddy leaves and mulch. He pushed himself to his feet, coughing and spitting and windmilling his arms
in front of him, pressing his chin into his chest. Something hit him hard in the small of the back, and he staggered forward,
barely keeping his feet, bursting out of the trees and into the open air.
Without looking back, he lurched through the high brush, into the clearing where he’d first come upon the woman and boy. From
behind him he heard the snapping of branches and a sound like dry leaves being crushed in a box. He screamed, redoubling his
pace, angling down the path, the wind driving at his back now, hurrying him forward.
He plunged down the steep hillside, and within an instant he was running headlong, the vegetation along either side passing
in a blur. Still he could feel the awful rush of wind pushing at his back like hands, and he could hear the humming of it
in his ears and the snapping and breaking of vegetation.