The Whisperers (32 page)

He came to a clearing, and there was Misty, now barely visible as the moon appeared in the sky. Briars had wound themselves around her legs and her muzzle, and as she had struggled against them the briars had tightened on her, so that all she could do was whimper softly. Phineas drew his knife, preparing to free her, when there was movement to his right, and he turned his flashlight in that direction.

A little girl of perhaps six or seven stood at the edge of the clearing. Her hair was dark, and she was very pale. She wore a black dress of coarse cloth, and simple black shoes on her feet. She didn’t blink in the strong beam of the flashlight, nor did she raise her hands to shield her eyes. In fact, Phineas thought, the light seemed to make no difference to her whatsoever; it was as if she merely absorbed it into her skin, for she appeared to glow whitely from within.

‘Honey,’ said Phineas, ‘what are you doing way out here?’

‘I’m lost,’ said the girl. ‘Help me.’

Her voice sounded strange, as though it were coming from inside a cave, or the hollowed-out trunk of a tree. It echoed when it should not have done so.

Phineas moved toward her, already shrugging his coat off to put it over her shoulders, when he saw Misty tugging at the briars again, her tail now wedged between her back legs. The effort clearly caused her pain, but still she was determined to break free. When her attempt continued to prove fruitless, she faced the girl and growled. Phineas could see the dog trembling in the moonlight, and the hackles on her neck were raised. When he looked back, the girl had retreated a couple of feet, moving a little deeper into the woods.

‘Help me,’ she repeated. ‘I’m lost, and I’m lonely.’

Phineas was wary now, although he could not have said why, beyond the girl’s pallor and the effect her presence was having on his dog, yet still he walked toward her, and as he did so she moved a little farther away, until at last the clearing was at his back, and there was only forest before him: forest, and the dim form of the girl among the trees. Phineas lowered his torch, but the girl did not fade into the shadows of the forest. Instead, she continued to luminesce faintly, and although Phineas could see his own breath pluming thickly before him, no such cloud emerged from the girl’s mouth, not even as she spoke again.

‘Please, I’m lonely and I’m scared,’ she said. ‘Come with me.’

Now she raised her hand, beckoning to him, and he saw the dirt beneath her fingernails, as though she had clawed her way out of some dark spot, a hiding place of earth, and worms, and scuttling bugs.

‘No, honey,’ said Phineas. ‘I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere with you.’

Without taking his eyes from her, he backed away until he was beside Misty, and then he squatted and began to hack at the briars. They came away reluctantly, and they were sticky to the touch. Even as he cut at them, he thought that he felt others begin to curl around his boots, but later he told himself that it was probably just his mind playing tricks on him, as if that one small detail might make up for the far greater trick of a girl glowing in the forest depths, asking an old man to join her in her forest bower. He felt her anger, and her frustration and, yes, her sadness, for she
was
lonely, and she
was
scared, but she didn’t want to be saved. She wanted to visit her loneliness and fear on another, and Phineas didn’t know what would be worse: to die in the woods with the girl for company, until eventually the world faded to black; or to die and then wake up to find himself like her, wandering the woods looking for others to share his misery.

At last, Misty was freed. The dog shot away, then paused to make sure that her master was following her, for even in her relief to be free she would not abandon him in this place, just as he had not abandoned her. Slowly, Phineas went after her, his eyes fixed on the little girl, keeping her in sight for as long as he could, until she was visible no longer and he found himself once again on familiar ground.

And that was why Phineas Arbogast stopped going to his cabin in the Rangeley woods, where the ruins of it may still be visible somewhere between Rangeley and Langdon, bound with sticky briars as nature claims it as her own.

Nature, and a little girl with pale, glowing skin, seeking in vain for a playmate to join her in her games.

I still had an old edition of a brochure called
Maine Invites You
given to me by Phineas. It was published by the Maine Publicity Bureau sometime in the late 1930s or early 1940s, as the letter of greeting inside the front cover was written by Governor Lewis O. Barrows, who was in office from 1937 until 1941. Barrows was an old-school Republican of the stripe that some of his more rabid descendants would cross the street to avoid: he balanced the budget, improved state school funding, and reinstated old-age benefits payments, all while reducing the state deficit. Rush Limbaugh would have called him a socialist.

The brochure was a touching tribute to a bygone era, when you could rent a high-end cabin for thirty dollars per week, and eat a chicken dinner for a dollar. Most of the places mentioned in it are long gone – the Lafayette Hotel in Portland, the Willows and the Checkley out at Prouts Neck – and the writers managed to find something kind to say about almost everywhere, even those towns whose own residents had trouble figuring out why they’d stayed in them, never mind why anyone else might want to travel there on vacation.

The town of Langdon, midway between Rangeley and Stratton, had a page all to itself, and it was interesting to note how many times the name Proctor appeared on the advertisements: among others, there was a Proctor’s Camp, and the Bald Mountain Diner, run by E. and A. Proctor, and R. H. Proctor’s Lakeview Fine Dining Restaurant. Clearly, the Proctors had Langdon pretty much all sewn up back in the day, and the town was enough of a draw for tourists – or the Proctors felt that it might be – to justify taking out a series of top-end ads, each one adorned with a photograph of the establishment in question.

Whatever appeal Langdon might once have had for visitors was no longer apparent, if it had ever been anything more than a figment of the Proctors’ own ambitions to begin with. It was now merely a strip of decrepit houses and struggling businesses, closer to the New Hampshire border than the Canadian, but easily accessible from either. The Bald Mountain Diner was still there, but it looked like it hadn’t served a meal for at least a decade. The town’s only store bore a sign announcing that it was closed due to a bereavement and would reopen in a week’s time. The notice was dated October 10th, 2005, which suggested the kind of mourning period usually associated with the deaths of kings. Apart from that, there was a hairdresser’s, a taxidermist’s, and a bar named the Belle Dam, which might have been a clever pun on Rangeley’s own dams or, as seemed more likely on closer inspection, the result of the loss of a letter ‘e’ from the sign. There was nobody on the streets, although a couple of cars were parked along it. Ironically, only the taxidermy showed any signs of life. The front door was open, and a man in overalls came out to watch me as I took in the bright lights of Langdon. I figured him for sixty or more, but he might just as easily have been older and holding off the predations of the years. Maybe it had something to do with all of the preservatives with which he worked.

‘Quiet,’ I said.

‘I guess,’ he replied, in the manner of one who wasn’t entirely convinced that this was the case and, even if it was, he sort of liked it that way.

I looked around again. It didn’t seem like there was much room for argument, but maybe he knew something that I didn’t about what was going on behind all of those closed doors.

‘Hotter than a Methodist hell, and all,’ he added. He was right. I hadn’t noticed while I was in the car, but I had begun to perspire as soon as I stepped from it. The taxidermist, meanwhile, wasn’t so much sweating as self-basting. No-see-ums hovered around us both.

‘Your name wouldn’t be Proctor, by any chance?’ I asked him.

‘No, I’m Stunden.’

‘You mind if I ask you some questions, Mr. Stunden?’

‘You already are, far as I can tell.’

He was grinning crookedly, but there was no malice in it. He was just breaking the monotony of daily life in Langdon. He detached himself from the frame of his door and indicated with a nod of his head that I should follow him inside. The interior was dark. Antlers, tagged and numbered, lay on the floor or hung from the old rafters. A recently stuffed and mounted large-mouth bass was propped on top of a freezer to my left, and to the right were shelves lined with jars of chemicals, paint, and assorted glass eyes. Blood had dripped down the side of the freezer, hardening and then corroding the metal. The room was dominated by a steel workbench upon which currently lay a deer hide and a round-bladed shaver. Piles of discarded meat lay on the floor beneath the bench. I could see that he knew his business: he was being careful to scrape the hide down to the dermis, leaving no trace of fat that might turn to acid and cause the hide to smell, or the hair to fall out. Nearby was a foam mannequin of a deer head, waiting for the skin to be applied to it. The whole place stank of dead flesh. I couldn’t help but wrinkle my nose.

‘Sorry about the smell,’ he said. ‘I don’t notice it anymore. I’d talk to you outside, but I got this deer hide to finish, and I’m working on a couple of ducks for the same guy.’

He pointed at two clear containers of ground corncob, in which he was degreasing the duck carcasses. ‘Can’t shave a duck,’ he said. ‘The skin won’t take it.’

Since shaving a duck had never struck me as something I’d feel the inclination to do, I contented myself with observing that it wasn’t yet hunting season.

‘This deer died of natural causes,’ said Stunden. ‘Tripped and fell on a bullet.’

‘And the ducks?’

‘They drowned.’

As he worked the shaver, he began to sweat even more.

‘Looks like hard grind,’ I said.

Stunden shrugged. ‘Deer are hard. Waterfowl, not so much. I can take care of a duck in a couple of hours, and I get to indulge my artistic side. You have to be careful with the colors, else it won’t look right. I’ll get five hundred dollars for those ones. I know the guy will pay, too, and that’s not always the case. Times are hard. I take deposits now, and I never had to do that before.’

He continued shaving the deer. The sound was faintly unpleasant. ‘So, what brings you to Langdon?’

‘I’m looking for a man named Harold Proctor.’

‘He in trouble?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘No disrespect, but al’st I know is that you look like the kind of man calls about trouble.’

‘My name’s Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator.’

‘Doesn’t answer my question. Is Harold in trouble?’

‘He might be, but not from me.’

‘He coming into money?’

‘Again, he might be, but not from me.’

Stunden glanced up from his work. ‘He lives out by the family motel, about a mile west of here. Hard as a snowsnake to find, though, if you don’t know the road.’

‘The motel still in business?’

‘The only thing still in business here is me, and I don’t know how long more I’ll be able to say that. The motel’s been closed for a decade or so now. Before that, it was a camp, but motels seemed to be the way to go, or so the Proctors thought. Harold’s momma and poppa used to run it, but they died, and the motel closed. Never made much money anyway. Poor location out in the williwigs for a motel. Harold’s the last of the Proctors. Hard to believe. They used to run half this town, and the other half paid them rent, but they weren’t big breeders, the Proctors; or lookers, come to think of it, which might have something to do with it. The Proctor creatures were kind of homely, I seem to recall.’

‘And the men?’

‘Well, I wasn’t looking at the men, so I can’t rightly say.’ His eyes twinkled in the gloom, and I guessed that Mr. Stunden might have been quite the heartbreaker in his time, had there been anyone apart from homely Proctor women on whom to test his charms. ‘When they started dying out, the town died with them. Now we get by on what we can make from Rangeley’s overflow, which ain’t much.’

I waited as he completed his work on the hide. He switched off the shaver, and used dish soap to clean the grease from his hands.

‘I ought to tell you that Harold’s not too sociable,’ he said. ‘He was never what you might call outgoing, but he came back from Iraq – the first war, not this one – with a troubled disposition. He keeps himself to himself out there, mostly. I pass him on the road from time to time, and I see him at Our Lady of the Lakes in Oquossoc on Sundays, but that’s it. Best I can get out of him now is a nod. Like I said, he’s never been exactly friendly, but until recently he’d always give you the time of day, and a word or two on the weather. He used to come into the Belle Dam, and if he was in the mood we’d talk.’ He pronounced it ‘Belle Dayme.’ ‘In case you’re wondering, I own that too. During hunting season, I make a few bucks on it. The rest of the year, it’s just something to do in the evenings.’

‘Did he talk to you about his time in Iraq?’

‘Generally he preferred to drink alone. He’d buy his liquor in New Hampshire, or over the border in Canada, and bring it back to his place, but once a week he’d come out of the woods and relax some. He hated it over there. Said he spent most of his time either bored or scared shitless. But, you know—’

He stopped speaking, but continued drying his hands as he sized me up. ‘Why don’t you tell me your interest in Harold before I go any further?’

‘You seem protective of him.’

‘This is a small town, and barely that. If we don’t look out for one another, who will?’

‘And yet you’re worried enough about Harold to talk with a stranger.’

‘Who says I’m worried?’

‘You wouldn’t be talking to me otherwise, and I can see it in your eyes. I told you, I don’t mean him any harm. For what it’s worth, I’m working for the father of a former soldier who served in Iraq this time round. His son committed suicide after he returned home. It seems that the boy’s behavior had changed in the weeks before his death, and his father wants to know what might have brought that on. Harold knew the boy some, I think, because he attended the funeral. I just want to ask him some questions.’