Dark Mountain (6 page)

“Keep on going,” Ettie muttered. “Don’t you stop here.”

Dropping to her rump, she scooted down the steep side of the boulder she’d been standing on. The granite felt like hot sandpaper through her dress. She pushed off, fell a short distance into a nook among the rocks, and stretched out flat on an uptilted slab. From there, she watched the hikers stride up the distant trail.

They were heading up toward Carver Pass. Three of them. This far off, they were no more than tiny shapes. Something about the way they walked made Ettie suspect they were girls, but she could only be sure about one; the figure of that one made it obvious.

The person in the lead, who wore a cowboy hat, stopped and turned around, waiting for the others to catch up.

“No,” Ettie whispered when the leader pointed down at the lake.

The three stood close together on the trail, gesturing and nodding, apparently discussing the matter. Then the one in the cowboy hat started down the steep path toward the lake. The other two followed.

“Damnation,” Ettie muttered.

Squirming forward on the sun-baked granite, she spotted Merle. He was far below, seated on his favorite rock, fishing. With a high outcropping to his right, he was hidden from the intruders, at least for now. They would need to come halfway up the opposite shore to notice Merle in his recess. By then, he was sure to hear their voices and take cover.

“You better behave, boy,” she said. “You better just leave ’em be, or I’ll skin you.”

Before yesterday, there hadn’t been much cause to worry on Merle’s account. Folks had come down every now and again to rest by the lake, explore it, take a swim, or do some fishing, but Merle always stayed out of sight and left them alone. He’d even behaved the few times campers stayed the night. None of the overnight people had been pretty young women, though, until that last. Easy enough to behave when there’s no temptation. But the first pretty girl comes along, he rapes her and kills her and lays it on the Master.

I offered ’em down
.

Bullsquat.

Ettie turned her gaze to the hikers. They were already at the bottom of the slope, walking single file along the lakeshore. They were heading toward the area where Merle had buried the bodies. With its trees and shade, it stood out like an oasis in the desolate basin. No one came down without settling there.

A fine place to plant those folks, Ettie thought. We oughta dig them up and stick them someplace out of the way.

Sure enough, the three hikers stopped in the shadows and swung off their packs. One red pack was lowered within a yard of the graves.

As they opened their packs, Ettie heard them talking and laughing. From the sounds of their voices, she was sure that all three were girls.

Merle must hear them, too. She looked toward the boulder where he’d been sitting. He was on his feet, leaning out, trying to see around the jut of rock. He stood motionless for a few moments, then leaped across the narrow band of water, set down his fishing pole, and scrambled up the slope. Near the top, he crouched low, then raised his head enough to see over.

Only the width of the lake separated him from the girls. That couldn’t be more than a hundred feet, Ettie figured.
Merle could swim the distance in half a minute, if he had a mind to.

“You just let ’em be,” Ettie whispered.

She looked at the girls. They were sitting close together on rocks, passing a couple of small bags back and forth, eating the contents.

Stopped for lunch, Ettie thought. She hoped that was all, that they would finish up quickly and be on their way.

The one in the cowboy hat, who sat with her back to Ettie, took off her checkered blouse. The straps of her bra were white against her tanned skin. She stood up and stretched, as if she liked how the breeze felt. Bending over, she set her hat on a rock. She rubbed her short brown hair, then turned away from the other two girls and walked to the shore. There, she knelt and flipped a hand through the water.

Ettie looked for Merle. He was gone.

The girl returned to her friends. Moving her hat off the rock, she sat down again and began to untie a boot.

“Oh, you fool,” Ettie muttered. She studied the opposite shore, but still couldn’t see Merle.

One of the other girls, a skinny thing in jeans and a faded blue shirt, got up and stuffed a bag into her pack. Then she took off her shirt. Her breasts were small mounds, white except for their dark tips.

“Oh, Merle, Merle.” The temptation would be too much for him.

She considered rushing down to the girls, yelling and trying to scare them away. That might ruin everything, though. They’d be sure to tell someone—maybe a ranger—about the wild woman who chased them off. A spell might take care of that, but why take chances? A good spell’s hard to call down, and you can’t always count on one to take care of business.

Be better off to find Merle and stop him before he did something foolish.

She looked at the girls. The one who’d tested the water was on her feet, pulling down her shorts. The buxom one had her T-shirt off, and was reaching behind her back to unhook her bra. The skinny one sat right where Merle had planted the bodies, and tugged off her boots.

Ettie still couldn’t spot Merle. She guessed he was across the lake from the girls, spying on them, probably hard as a club by now and going crazy.

She scurried across the slope, staying low. She squeezed through crevices, slid down steep slabs on her rump, ducked behind every rock cluster offering any concealment, making her way slowly across the end of the lake. When she paused to catch her breath, she found all three girls stark naked. The one in the lead was knee-deep in the lake, walking backward, urging her friends to come in. The skinny one eased in a foot and jerked it out quickly. The other squatted down, breasts bulging against her knees, and tried the water with her hand.

Ettie left the sheltering rocks. The area ahead was a barren slab of granite that angled slightly downward. It offered no protection. If the girls happened to look toward the end of the lake, they would see her crossing. She squirmed along on her belly, watching them.

The girl in the lake had started to swim. The one crouched on the bank was scooping up water and rubbing it on her shoulders and breasts as if to get used to its cold. The skinny one, cringing and hugging herself, was wading in slowly. None of them so much as glanced in Ettie’s direction.

She reached the end of the open space without being seen, and crawled behind a rock. She peered over its top. The small inlet where Merle had been fishing was no more than thirty feet away. Plenty of shelter between here and there. As quickly as she could, she rushed down to it. From the recessed shore, the girls were out of sight. She heard splashing and voices, then a sudden outcry that knotted her stomach before she recognized it as a shriek of laughter.

They’re having a great time, stupid bitches. If they knew…

She hopped across the water on stepping stones, and crouched at the base of the outcropping. Merle’s abandoned fishing pole lay against the rocks in front of her, a shriveled bit of beef jerky on its hook.

Ettie worked her way up the slope, then peered over the top, first at the swimmers, then at the rocks along the bank. From this height, she expected to see Merle crouched behind a boulder.

She didn’t see Merle. But she saw his scattered clothes.

A movement caught her eye. To the left. In the water. Just below a jutting clump of rocks. All she saw, at first, were rings, rippling outward as if a stone had been tossed in. Then there was the pale blur of a body sliding along beneath the surface.

Rage seized Ettie. She wanted to scream and yank Merle from the water. The fool! The
fool
!

She scrambled to the top of the outcropping and stood up straight. The first girl was floating on her back, arms out to the sides, her wet breasts shiny in the sunlight, her matted pubic hair glistening as she kicked closer and closer to the long, gliding form of Merle. The boy couldn’t be more than a few inches below the surface, but he hadn’t come up for air, yet, and none of the girls knew he was there.

“You!” Ettie shouted. “Girls!”

Three wet, astonished faces snapped toward her.

“Get out! There’s snakes! Poison snakes. Water moccasins!”

Two of the girls screamed and started splashing for shore even while Ettie yelled. The third, the one who’d started it all by leading her friends down to the lake, trod water and looked around. “I don’t see any,” she called.

“There!” Ettie snatched up a stone and hurled it. The girl turned to her right as it smacked the water. Not far to her left, Merle’s head broke the surface. “Right there! See it?” His head turned toward Ettie, then quickly submerged.

He knows he’s found out, she thought. Sure enough,
the pale blur of his body turned beneath the water and started back.

“Tracy!” called one of the girls.

“Come on, Tracy,” yelled the other. “Let’s get out of here!”

Both girls stood on the far shore, cowering and clutching themselves, trying to hide their nakedness from the intruder as they yelled to their friend.

Tracy frowned up at Ettie. “You’re some kind of a nut,” she said. Then she swam casually across the lake.

Merle, still underwater, reached the cluster of rocks where he’d started. His head popped up. “Stay down,” Ettie snapped.

The girl waded ashore on the far side. Before rushing to join her friends, she thrust her middle finger at Ettie.

“Mom?” Merle sounded pathetic.

“Stay down. I’ll tell you when to come out.”

He waited, only his head out of the water, while Ettie watched the girls get into their clothes, swing their packs on, and start toward the far end of the lake. “Okay now?” he asked.

“No. Stay where you are.”

The trio, often glancing back, reached the footpath and started striding toward the main trail. Ettie turned away. She climbed down the rocks, snapped the baited hook off the line, and picked up the springy stick Merle used as a fishing rod.

She carried it up the slope. When the girls were out of sight, she stepped down and walked along the shore to where Merle was waiting. “Okay,” she said. “You can come out now.”

“You gotta look away.”

“Get out!”

He sighed. “Yes, ma’am.” He stood in the waist-deep water and waded ashore, both hands cupped over his groin.

“You haven’t got no sense at all, boy.”

“The Master, He—”

“Don’t you go laying it on the Master! Weren’t nothing but your pecker wanted those girls. Bend over.”

“Ettie, please.”

“Do what I say.” He bent over, and she swung the fishing pole hard against his rump. Crying out, he clutched his buttocks. “Move your hands.” He was sobbing. As his hands dropped away, Ettie saw a red stripe across his skin. Her throat constricted, and Merle went blurry as tears filled her eyes. She drew back the switch to strike again, but instead of swinging, she threw it down. “Go on and get dressed,” she said in a shaky voice. “And don’t you ever do nothing like that again, or you’ll be the sorriest man that ever walked on two legs.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Ettie walked away.

“Hey, look!” Julie’s arm swung up, and she pointed.

Nick gazed up the shadowy trail. Off to the side, he saw a small cleared area between two trees. It was a patch of raised ground, roughly rectangular, enclosed by a border of small stones. A weathered plank of wood tilted from the earth at its far end.

“A grave,” Julie whispered.

“Naw.”

“Sure looks like one.”

Leaning into the straps of his heavy pack, Nick hurried toward the mound. Julie stayed close to his side. He was nervous and excited, as if they were the first ever to discover this forbidden site. He stopped at its foot. The hump of ground was roughly the size of a small man. Words had been carved into the wooden marker. His eyes followed them as Julie read aloud in a hushed voice: “‘Beneath this earth lies Digby Bolles. Poor man ran out of Dr. Scholl’s.’”

Nick felt a mixture of relief and disappointment. “It’s a joke,” he said.

“I guess so.”

“Somebody went to a lot of trouble for a practical joke.”

“Some people do,” Julie said, and gave him an amused look. “
Doreeeen
,” she called softly. “
Audreeee
.”

Nick nodded. He thought of their brief, wild run behind the tents, the screams of the twins, how daring he’d felt through the whole experience. Running in only his T-shirt
and shorts, Julie close to him in the dark. The way he’d wanted to grab her and pull her tight against him, and kiss her.

“We’ll have to do that again sometime,” she said.

“We’d catch hell,” he told her. “I wouldn’t mind, though.”

“Whatcha got there?” Dad called from behind. He was trudging up the trail with Mom at his side. The girls were a short distance back.

“A grave,” Julie said.

“No kidding? Not a
real
grave?”

“Have a look,” Nick said. He and Julie stepped aside to make room for them.

“Holy Toledo,” Dad said.

“Who is it?” asked Rose, pushing forward.

“A poor guy named Digby Bolles.”

Mom read the epitaph aloud.

Heather wrinkled her nose. “Who’s Dr. Scholl?”

“It’s not a who. It’s a brand of foot powder.”

“And the guy died when he ran out?”

“No, honey. It’s just a joke. Nobody’s buried here.”

“We oughta get a snapshot of this,” Dad said. He swung down his pack. While he opened a side pocket, Rose and Heather stared at the plot of ground.

“Someone’s there, all right,” Rose said.

“How do you know?”

“I just know.”

“A grave,” Benny gasped, arriving out of breath.

“Mom says it’s not really,” Heather told him.

He frowned as he read the inscription. Then he grinned. “Hey, that’s neat.”

“I better use the flash,” Dad said. “All these shadows. Want to make sure the saying comes out.” Everyone moved out of his way. He crouched at the foot of the mound. The flash cube made a quick burst of silvery light.

“What’s all the excitement?” Scott asked. He was striding up the trail, Karen close beside him.

“It’s Digby’s grave,” Benny explained.

They walked over to it. Karen read the verse aloud, and laughed softly. “That’s a shame.”

“He should’ve been more careful,” Scott said.

Benny looked up at him. “What do you think’s down there?”

“Digby Bolles.”

“I mean really.”

Julie glanced at Nick. Her eyebrows went up and down. She turned to her father. “What-say we dig it up and find out?”

“What-say we don’t?”

“Come on, aren’t you curious?”

Half grinning, he said, “Noooo.”

“What about you, Karen?”

“I think we should let him rest in peace.”

“Now, let’s stop all this talk,” Mom said. “It’s scaring the girls. We all know there’s nobody buried here.”

“Yes, there is,” Rose told her.

“See what I mean? It’s just somebody’s rotten idea of a joke.”

“We’ve got a lot of ground to cover,” Dad said. “I say we haul ass.”

“Arnold!”

“Why don’t you guys go on ahead?” Julie suggested. “I’ll catch up later.”

“Julie…”

“Why not? What’ll it hurt? I’ll put everything back just the way it is.”

“What are you hoping to find?” Scott asked.

She smiled mysteriously. “Answers.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mom muttered. “Nothing’s there.”

Dad was smiling, obviously pulling for Julie. “Wouldn’t hurt to know for sure, though.”

“Arnold!”

“I’ll stay and help,” Nick said.

“This is absurd,” his mother muttered.

“Hell, let ’em satisfy their curiosity, Alice. You said yourself they won’t find anything.”

“That’s right,” she said. “They won’t. But if they want to waste their time and energy, far be it from me to stand in their way.”

“Atta girl.”

She gave him a quick, humorless smile.

“Don’t stay too long, kids,” Dad said.

“We’ll catch up as soon as we can.”

Heather gazed at Nick with wide, frightened eyes. “You gonna dig it up?”

“Probably nothing there but an old shoe,” he told her.

Rose narrowed her eyes. “You’ll be sorry,” she said in a singsong.

Both girls turned away and hurried to catch up with their mother and father.

“You want to stay?” Scott asked Benny.

The boy made a face as if he’d been invited to taste a worm. “I don’t want to see any stiffs,” he proclaimed.

“I don’t blame you,” Karen said.

Scott turned to her. “Shall we be off and leave Burke and Hare to their grisly chore?”

“I’m with you.”

The three of them started up the trail, leaving Nick and Julie by the grave. “Mission accomplished,” Julie said. Nick grabbed her pack while she slipped her arms out of the straps. “Thank you, sir,” she said, then took it from him and set it down. He swung his own pack to the ground. “I’ve got a little shovel in here someplace,” she told him, propping her pack against his. Crouching, she slid a plastic clamp down its tie cord and peeled back the cover.

Nick stepped behind Julie as she rummaged inside. Her T-shirt clung to her back with sweat. The tint of her skin was visible through the fabric. So was the narrow white crossband of her bra, and the thin straps running up to her shoulders. He could see the bumps of her spine pushing out the material and remembered the way her nipples had shown last night.
Hey, you can look at me all you want. I was looking at you
.

“Here we go.” She stood up, a green plastic trowel in her hand.

“Perfect,” Nick said.

They stepped over to the mound. “Where’ll we dig?”

“In the middle?”

“Good a place as any.” She smiled, looking a bit nervous, and knelt beside the border of stones. Nick stepped around her, and dropped to his knees. Her shoulder brushed against him as she reached out with the trowel. Using its edge, she scraped away a layer of pine needles to expose a patch of earth. With its point, she scratched out a pair of crossing lines. “X marks the spot,” she whispered. She pushed the plastic blade into the soil, and hesitated. “You don’t…you don’t really think anyone’s down there, do you?”

“Naw.”

“Me either.” She pried out a heap of dirt, and dumped it next to the small hole. “I mean, who’d bury someone out here?”

“I don’t know.” Nick’s mouth was dry. His heart beat fast. He didn’t know whether he felt so tense because of the grave or because Julie was so close to him.

“What if we
do
find a body?” she asked, frowning at the tiny hole.

“It’s unlikely.”

“It’s possible, though.” She turned her face toward him. Her eyes were so blue that even the white seemed to have a faint bluish color. There was a smudge of dirt on her cheek. Her tongue curled out from a corner of her mouth and caught a trickle of sweat. “It is possible,” she said.

Nick felt breathless. “Yeah,” he managed.

“Oh, what the hell.” Her face turned away, and she reached out with the trowel. Its tip hovered above the hole, quivering slightly. She sighed. “You know, I’m not sure this is such a hot idea after all.”

“We don’t have to do it,” Nick told her.

“We said we would.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“They’ll say we chickened out. Not that I give a rat’s ass what anybody says, but…I don’t know, if there’s a real-live actual corpse—”

“A
live
corpse?”

“Okay, a dead one. It’d be sacrilegious to mess around with it.”

“Not to mention gross.”

She laughed softly. “Yeah, that too.” She looked at him again. Her eyebrows lifted. “What do you think?”

“Let’s forget it.”

She shook her head a bit. “This is really weird. I mean, we both know there’s nobody under here. So what’re we afraid of?”

“I don’t know.”

With the edge of her trowel, she brushed the small pile of soil back into the hole. She patted it down. “There you go, Digby. Rest in peace.”

They stood up. Julie brushed dirt and pine needles off her knees. “I guess that’s that,” she said.

“Guess so.”

They returned to their packs. Nick watched her crouch down to put away the trowel and close her pack. Like before, he stared at the way her T-shirt clung to her back.

I’m a chicken, all right, he thought. If I weren’t a damn chicken, I would’ve kissed her.

Do it now.

No. I can’t. I just can’t.

“That’s quite a scar you’ve got there,” Flash said, taking a trail cookie from the bag in Karen’s hand. The scar was a pale horse shoe on her forearm. “How’d you pick it up?”

“A car accident,” she said. She looked away quickly, and offered a cookie to Benny, who was sitting at the other end of the fallen trunk. “Want to pass them around?”

Benny took the bag. “Was it a
bad
accident?” he asked.

“Very bad,” she said.

Benny got up from the log, and gave cookies to the others
sitting on the ground against their packs. There was an uneasy silence. Flash bit into his cookie and chewed. Obviously, he shouldn’t have mentioned Karen’s scar. “I’ve got a couple of doozies myself,” he said. He started to tug his shirt out of his pants.

“
Arnold
,” Alice said in her warning voice.

Ignoring her, he pulled up his shirt. He stood up and turned so Karen and Benny could see the small puffy crater in the flesh just above his hip. Karen wrinkled up her nose. Benny looked impressed. “That’s from an AK-47 bullet I caught in ’Nam.” He turned around. “See there? That’s the exit wound.”

“How’d it happen?” Benny asked.

“Well, your dad and I were on a strafing run when I caught a SAM. A surface-to-air missile. Knocked me right out of the sky. I hit the silk—ejected, you know—and found myself behind enemy lines.” His head suddenly felt light. He let his shirt fall, and took deep breaths, fighting the dizziness. “Anyway, I spent nine days alone in the jungle…working my way south, dodging pa—” He blinked. Benny’s silhouette was surrounded by a brilliant blue-silver halo. Shit, he thought, I’m gonna…He staggered backward, sat down heavily on the log, and lowered his head between his knees.

“Are you all right, honey?” he heard through the loud ringing in his ears. Alice. “I knew he shouldn’t get started on that. He tries to put on that it was a big adventure, but—”

“Stop,” he mumbled.

“Well, you shouldn’t have brought it up.”

He felt a hand on his back. “Here.” Scott. “Drink some water.”

Flash nodded. The ringing faded. He raised his head, and blinked. His vision seemed okay again. The girls, beside Alice, were staring at him with wide eyes. Alice was frowning. “Just a little dizzy spell,” he said. “Probably the altitude.” He
took the canteen from Scott, nodded his thanks, and drank a few swallows of cold water.

“Maybe you’d better lie down,” Alice suggested.

“I’m fine. Think I’ll just…” He gave the canteen back to Scott and stood up. He still felt shaky, but the dizziness was gone. Walking carefully, he made his way to the shore of the lake. He stepped out on some low, flat rocks. Crouching, he dipped his hands into the chilly water and splashed his face.

Damn, but he’d made a fool out of himself back there. Should’ve known better.

He heard the crunch of footsteps behind him. Scott stood on a rock to his left. “You okay?”

“Shit.”

“What was it, the sweats?”

“Yeah. Happens now and again. Shit, you’d think fifteen goddamn years’d be enough to get over it. The damn thing’s fucked up my whole life.”

Scott tossed a pebble into the water. It made a soft
plip
. “I guess none of us got out of it unscathed. I have plenty of bad times myself, and I wasn’t even shot down.”

“God, I used to love to fly.”

“You were one of the best.”

“I’d probably be a captain, now, like you, if…You know what really gets me? It’s all in my head. All in my fucked-up head, and there’s not a thing I can do about it. Like there’s some damn stranger inside here.” He tapped his fingertips against his temple. “Just hiding in here, scared shitless, and every once in a while he has to pop up and let me know he’s still at the controls.” Flash forced a smile. “Could’ve been worse. I’d been a grunt, I might be scared to walk.”

Scott smiled. “Always a bright side.”

They stood up, and turned away from the shining lake. As they walked back toward the others, Flash saw Nick and Julie coming up the trail. “Dig him up?” he called out.

“Sure did,” Nick said.

“Boy, was he a mess!” Julie added.

Flash sat down on the log and watched the two approaching. Nick’s hand was out, closed as if he were holding something.

“He was all dismembered,” Nick said.

“What?” Karen asked, looking stunned.

“All cut up in little pieces.”

“That’s not amusing,” Alice said.

Nick and Julie smiled as if it were. Nick stepped in front of the twins, who were resting against their packs with their legs outstretched. “I brought you girls a souvenir,” he said. “One of Digby’s fingers.”

“Nick!” Alice snapped.

“Catch, Rose.” He made an underhand toss. His sister shrieked as a finger-sized object fell on her lap. Julie cracked up.

“
Nick
!”