Cold Black Earth (29 page)

“Turn where? There’s nowhere to turn.”

“Just past the bridge, on the left there.”

Rachel rolled slowly across the bridge, peering into the dark. On the other side of the bridge she saw it, a narrow dirt track that led down off the road. She turned onto it, her headlights sweeping across brush on a rising slope and falling on tree trunks as she straightened out, casting long shadows across the snowy ground. “This doesn’t look like a road.”

“Close enough,” said Stanfield. “Go slow.”

Rachel didn’t need to be told; she could make out twin tracks over the rough ground, but it wasn’t much of a road. The track took them along a flat strip of land, the creek visible through the trees. Rachel’s heart had begun to beat faster again. Make a quick grab for the gun as he’s getting out of the car, she thought. If he doesn’t cut your throat first.

“Whoa,” said Stanfield. The knife moved away from her throat. “There it is.”

29    

“Shut it down,” said Stanfield. Rachel doused the lights and cut the ignition.

The darkness took her by surprise. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, snow reflecting the light of the new moon just enough for her to make out what was in front of her.

The house squatted dark and defunct at the end of the track. A house that was lived in always gave signs: parked vehicles, children’s playthings, a light behind a curtain on a cold night. This house was dead.

It was a square frame house that somebody had built on a slight rise fifty feet from the creek in the faith or delusion that the water would never rise enough to cover the bottom of the hollow entirely. The house would be invisible from the fields above it and invisible from the road because of the trees.

“All right,” said Stanfield, his voice a low murmur in Rachel’s ear. “Here’s what’s gonna happen. First off, give me the keys.”

Rachel pulled the keys out of the ignition and handed them back over her shoulder. When the keys left her hand she let it fall onto her purse, resting with her fingers just touching the grip of the revolver.

She gasped as the knife blade pressed against her throat. “Just take your hand out of there, sugar. You ain’t gonna be needing that phone.”

Rachel raised both hands. “Don’t hurt Billy.” She barely had the breath to say it.

“Don’t you worry about Billy. You just take care of yourself. You got a flashlight in this car?”

“In the glove compartment.”

“Give it to me. Move slow and keep your hand away from that purse.”

She leaned over, opened the glove compartment and pulled out the light. She handed it back to Stanfield and he flicked it on and off briefly, testing it.

“Cool. Now listen good. You’re getting out of the car. You’re gonna get out and run back the way we came. Just take off running and don’t stop. You read me?”

“Uh-huh.” Now, Rachel thought. Open the door, start to get out, and grab for the purse.

Abruptly Stanfield reached over the seat and snatched the purse. “I think I’ll keep this back here with me. Now get out.”

Despairing, Rachel closed her eyes. Help me God, she prayed. Help me and help Billy.

“Go on, get out.”

She opened the door and got out into the cold. Her feet crunched on the snow. The back door of the car opened and Stanfield said, “Take off, move.”

Rachel ran. She ran stumbling over the rough ground, thinking now of getting back to a main road and flagging down help. Where were the cops Dan had said were all over the roads? She ran for fifty feet or so and stopped to look back. She could just make out a dark shape next to the car. “Keep moving,” Stanfield rasped. The car door closed with a soft click.

Rachel ran back to within fifty yards of the bridge and stopped to look back. The house was out of sight but she could see flashes of light through the trees. She waited for a few seconds and then began trotting back toward the house. The light disappeared.

She stopped to listen. She thought she heard the creak of a door, very faintly, and then there was silence. She began to run again, faster.

She reached the car and clawed at the rear door handle. She tried the driver’s-side door, found it locked as well, tried both doors on the other side, and sobbed in frustration. Stanfield had locked the car. She could make out her purse with the gun in it on the back seat.

Rachel dashed into the woods by the side of the track. It took her precious seconds to find a fallen limb small enough to handle but big enough to break a window. She ran back to the car and swung the limb at the rear window. It hit the glass with a thump and the limb broke in her hands.

There would be rocks in the creek bed. She could hear a murmur of water under ice somewhere in the dark beyond the car. She ran toward it. She slipped on the bank and slid down to the stream. On her hands and knees she felt for rocks in the mud and ice. She managed to pry loose a grapefruit-sized stone and scrambled back up the bank. She slipped again and fell on her face and then froze as the door of the house fifty yards to her left burst open and the flashlight beam came dancing crazily across the snow as somebody ran at top speed away from the house.

As panicked steps neared the car the flashlight was jettisoned and the skittering light caught a flash of Stanfield’s pale hair. The flashlight bounced a couple of times and came to rest with the beam pointing off into the woods. Stanfield skidded to a halt at the car and jabbed at the lock with the key, tore open the door and jumped in. The engine caught and roared, the car reversed in a tight curve, the lights came on, blinding Rachel, and then the Chevy spun its tires in the snow as it fought for traction, swinging around toward the bridge and straightening out, picking up speed.

Rachel watched the taillights as they receded through the trees, reached the bridge and vanished as the car tore away south along the road. She listened until she could hear nothing but the murmur of water in the creek behind her and then she got to her feet.

“Billy,” she said, knowing she was going to have to walk into that dead house. She stumbled on the rough ground, got her balance, stepped onto the track. She walked to where the flashlight lay and picked it up. She switched it off and stood for a moment, listening. There was nothing but wind in the trees. She began walking toward the house.

There was enough light for her to make out its contours: It was a simple two-story cube, with a porch tacked on in front. Rachel had been looking for the gleam of windows, but as she drew near she saw that all of the windows had been boarded over, making the house a total blank, a light-eating mass in the dark.

There is no life in there, Rachel thought.

A dark shape to the right of the house, set back against the slope among the trees, drew her eye. It resolved itself into a shed, big enough to house a tractor and not much more. Even in the dark Rachel could see it was derelict, with gaps in the side where boards were missing and holes in the roof. She switched on the flashlight and trained the beam on the ground before her. She saw tire tracks in the snow, curving toward the shed.

Rachel took a couple of steps, letting the beam play along the tracks. Something stirred, deep down, black and malevolent. She had seen tracks like these before.

She had seen tracks like these, but they had not been in snow.

She gasped as a multitude of crows rose with a great flapping of wings. She could not at first make out what this was that they had been pecking at. The side of the barn was flecked with blood spatter. The chainsaw lay a few feet from her, the teeth clotted with bits of matter, the blade smeared dark red.

Here was the other arm, the watch still encircling the wrist, and a leg there with a boot at the end of it, and a lump here draped in shreds of flannel with buttons still fastened, and worst of all the head, Ed Thomas’s head, perfectly recognizable despite its unaccustomed look of heavy-lidded boredom, impaled on a fencepost.

Someone had driven a truck through the mess, crushing a limb, leaving dark, faintly glistening tracks on the pale gravel.

“Oh Jesus, please. Dear God help me.” Rachel switched off the flashlight but it was too late: Her memory was back, toxic and invincible.

She was hyperventilating. She desperately wanted to turn and run, but her limbs would not move. It took a few seconds for her mind to claw back from sheer panic, and make out the choices and the stakes. Function, she raged at herself. Billy needs you.

Rachel looked at the black faceless house to her left and then turned on the flashlight again. She followed the tracks the few steps to the shed. It had double Z-frame doors sagging off the hinges. She leaned close to a gap in the siding and shone the light through it.

First she saw nothing but the cracked concrete of the floor. The flashlight beam rose and passed over the tread of a tire, and chrome and steel gleamed.

Rachel held the beam steady on the back gate of an old Ford pickup, a pale blue in the dim light.

Rachel stared for a few long seconds. Then she abruptly switched off the light and jerked back away from the opening and around the corner of the shed. She sagged against the wall, gasping, her heart kicking.

Run. Nobody on earth could expect you to walk into that house, Rachel thought. The only sane thing to do now is to run until you find help. Nobody could fault you.

Except Billy. If he is still alive.

Function. Rachel switched on the light and ran it over the front of the house as she approached. It had probably been a standard frame house originally, but somebody had shingled the sides at some point, giving it a look of irredeemable poverty. The front door had been kicked in, reinforced, shot at, patched up, pounded on and scrawled on multiple times. Now it hung slightly open. Beyond it was darkness.

She paused at the foot of the front steps. I can’t do this, she thought. I’m not brave enough. I’m not strong enough to walk in there.

Rachel mounted the steps. The porch was treacherous, with boards rotted and missing; she swept it quickly with the light and stepped carefully. She paused at the door, standing to one side so that only her face and the hand holding the flashlight would be exposed, and pushed the door open.

Her light played over a floor covered with grit, scraps of paper, an old sock, cigarette butts, crushed beer cans, clots of animal excrement. She made out the foot of a flight of stairs. She switched off the light.

“Billy?” she called, more weakly than she had intended, hardly loud enough to be heard ten feet away. There was no answer.

Rachel waited for a few heartbeats, listening, hearing nothing. She ducked quickly through the door and sank to her haunches with her back to the wall just to the right of the opening, waiting for something to come flying out of the dark.

Nothing came. Rachel inhaled the acrid breath of the place, the smell of vermin and decay and ash.

And something else: wood smoke. She squatted by the door and strained to make out shapes in the blackness. She listened as well, hearing the faint rustlings of mice or something worse. The loudest sound in her ears was that of her heart.

When she was still alive after half a minute Rachel stood up and held the flashlight to one side at arm’s length, hoping that if anything leaped at the light it would miss her. She switched on the light and quickly swept the room.

People had lived here once; they had sat on these chairs that now lay splintered and hung pictures on these walls that had been gouged and defaced. The beam of the flashlight steadied on the words
STONE COLD KILLERZ
spray-painted on a patch of wall. She shifted the light and it fell on another inscription, in larger letters and sprayed with a less steady hand:
DEATH RAINS HERE
.

When Rachel was sure the room she was in was empty, she took a few steps away from the door. At the back of the room was a doorway into another room, only glimpsed in her sweep of the light. You are going to have to look, Rachel told herself. She went toward the doorway.

As she did, she became aware, beneath the terror, of something that didn’t fit: It was warm inside the house. This rooted her to the spot for a long moment. That was impossible: The house should have been as cold as the woods outside.

When she put that together with the smell of wood smoke, it did nothing but increase her alarm.
Get out
, an inner voice screamed at Rachel. She drew breath and called out, stronger now, “Billy?”

There was no answer, and Rachel walked slowly toward the doorway at the rear of the room, jerking the light this way and that, the limited field of illumination inflating her dread of the darkness just outside it. To her astonishment she survived the trip across the floor, finding that every second she lived gave her strength to face the next one. Again she stood to one side while shining the light through: This was the kitchen, or had been; truncated pipes and scars on ancient linoleum showed where a sink had been. The light fell on a back door, planks nailed across it.

And there in a corner was the old potbelly cast iron stove, the faint glow of embers visible behind the slightly opened door. On the floor beside it sat a small stack of firewood, neatly split logs.

Rachel whirled around frantically at a soft creak behind her, crying out. The light shook in her hand, wildly sweeping the room. There was nobody there.

She waited for her breathing to steady and looked into the kitchen again, probing the corners now. There was a pantry in the far corner but the door was long gone; Rachel stepped far enough into the kitchen to shine the light inside the pantry.

She let out a single ragged cry and leaped backward. The man in the pantry just looked at her. Rachel stumbled over debris and fell heavily back against a wall, losing the light. Amazingly it survived the jolt as it hit the floor, coming to rest and casting its beam on the rear wall next to the stove. Rachel scrabbled in panic to retrieve it, waiting for the man to come and kill her. When she managed to train the light on the pantry, the man had not moved.