Shivers 7 (10 page)

Hunter stopped at one of two visible traffic lights on this side of town, eyes drawn to the sparse afternoon foot traffic along the street while his mind tried to make sense of what was being generated by this special clarity of Von’s.

“If the townsfolk seem zombies to you,” she said, “it’s because they are. Oh, there’s no shortage of hospitality, or that pretense anyway, but you’ll find a blankness in the eyes of Chi Bay residents that you’ll not find elsewhere. It’s the only substitute, in the end, for the terror.”

“Terror?” he said, emphasizing each syllable.

“Sound extreme? I guess it would to an outsider.” She smiled mirthlessly as she added, “An outsider coming home again.”

As he looked around at this ageless town of hers he found himself feeling precisely that way. Like an outsider coming home again. He’d have thought a little conversation with the locals, some immersing in the culture would have been required to validate her father’s observation. But no, just being here did the trick. And not necessarily as pertained to the town itself, but rather, as Von had suggested, the environment in which the town’s props had been erected. There was a nostalgic flavor to being surrounded by the stage pieces, certainly. But there was a deeper something involved, an older, almost primal something. While many places he’d visited had inspired a certain bittersweetness, an indefinable yearning, a sense of filling up while emptying out, this was something different, something more. A strange wind blew in Chi Bay; there was no denying its delicate caress.

As they approached the next light, Von interrupted his philosophizing. “Turn left here.”

“Where are we going?” he said, pleased with the fact that, wherever it was, it was on the waterfront side.

“The hotel. You okay money-wise? The Red Bear’s a little on the expensive side, but it’s the most charming of your choices. Another one of those historic sites if you go for that sort of thing.”

“Sounds nice. But what about yourself? Do you have a place to stay?” Oddly, he didn’t feel awkward asking.

“I’ll be staying there as well. While I’m not hurting on the money end, I wouldn’t mind sharing the expense of a room.”

How natural, in fact, that what had started a quarter-mile from the ferry terminal should come to this. And without the sexual tension that might have accompanied such an encounter. Indeed, while she was attractive, and had the “natural” qualities he was attracted to in a woman, he hadn’t thought of her in that way until now. Of course, offering to share the expense of a room with someone was not the same as inviting that someone into bed with you—whatever one preferred to read in that open, clear face of hers.

“Sure,” he said, hoping it didn’t sound too casual.

When the uncertainty in his voice didn’t make it by her, he found it natural, also, to laugh along with her.

* * *

The room smelled of cedar from its rough-cut beams. Its furnishings were plush in an upscale hunting lodge sort of a way. The floor was carpeted in a rich maroon, and a fireplace stood between the two high-posted wooden beds. They hadn’t had to ask for the room type, it had been the only one available, saving them any discomfort (which he doubted at this point) an option might have caused. When Hunter had asked Von where the hotel got its guests with no tourists around, she’d told him Chi Bay appealed to a certain breed of out-of-towners. Her words: “With Alaskans being the secretive lot they are, you won’t find the town in any docudramas. But Chi Bay has its faithful.”

“Occultists like your father?” he’d said.

“More like tornado chasers. Though they’d never admit, even to one another, what they’re up to.”

“And just what are they up to?”

“I think brandy’s the appropriate drink for this place, don’t you? Or better yet, a good red wine. We’ll get a couple bottles while we’re out.”

Evening had settled and they were preparing to go out now. She looked refreshed after a shower and a two-hour nap. Not in the least bit tired after sleeping much of the way on the ferry, Hunter had followed his shower with a stroll along the waterfront promenade, stopping in at one of the drinkeries for a couple beers while letting Von rest her joints and muscles from the day’s hike. As she’d remarked, the locals were very hospitable, but equally detached. There had been no mixing among them, though the joint had been relatively busy. But Hunter hadn’t been there to appraise them, only to relax with his Alaska Ambers and enjoy the view of the bay and snow-capped mountains beyond. It was everything he’d imagined it would be, his first sit-down view from Alaskan shores. Haines, beautiful in its own right, had just been a stop where everyone who’d driven or walked aboard in Bellingham, Washington had offloaded except himself. But the view from the Chi Bay waterfront, it was the kind of experience he’d subsisted on these past several years, first in Europe, then South America, then during this revisiting of the homeland. Lonely and beautiful and soul-satisfying. For at least those choice moments in time.

“You ready?” Von asked him as she stuck a pin in the knot she’d made of her long, honey-brown hair. She looked in the mirror, fussing with the knot a bit, then with a dissatisfied twist of her lips pulled the pin and let her hair down again.

“Hey, I rather liked it like that,” Hunter said.

“Is that so.”

“Yeah. It went well with the turtleneck. Gave you a certain sophisticated look.”

“In spite of the lack of effort that went into it?”

“Less effort goes into leaving it down.”

“Are you a woman?”

“No.”

“Then shut up.”

He smiled. The fact was, she didn’t need to be a botherer when it came to her appearance. Nor, he suspected, did she ever put more time into it than he’d watched her do this evening. Deeply tanned, with a smooth, clear complexion, she’d put on very little make-up, and then only around the eyes, with a sparing tastefulness. The jade-colored turtleneck, the jade earrings, the fashionable if wrinkly jeans…granted, she was working out of a backpack, but she’d spent about as much time selecting these as it had taken him to wash the shaving cream off his face. Hell,
he
had been the one to run his outfit by the other.

She was really rather lovely, he’d decided. And appearance only a part of it.

“Are you going to stare at me or answer the question?” she said with a girl’s grin.

No use letting
her
know how he felt. “I’ve been ready, Von. I’m a man.”

She stuck her tongue out at him. “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume there’s not a double meaning there.”

He felt himself blush, a rarity for him. “So where are we going?”

“As I’ve told you, it’s a surprise.”

“Well, I hope they have food there. I’m starved.”

“I should have thought that obvious. When a small-town Alaskan says she’s going out in her small town, she means she’s going out to eat and, if she’s in the mood, have a few drinks. Where the hell else is there to go? The club? The symphony?”

“I get your point. So are we walking or driving?”

“Driving.”

“After you,” he said with a gentlemanly sweep of his arm.

* * *

Of all the places she might have taken him—okay, of all the
few
places she might have taken him—he’d never have guessed
here
. He’d known it would be outdoors after a trip to Wal-Mart (“You have a
Wal
-Mart?” he’d voiced in amazement as the store came into view) to pick up a tablecloth, a block of sharp cheddar cheese, a half dozen slices of semi-fresh deli ham, a loaf of semi-fresh bakery bread, and a basket of semi-edible-looking strawberries (“Fresh produce in Chi Bay?” she’d said. “Forget it.”). At her insistence they’d split both that bill and the bill for the wine, which, along with a pair of red wine glasses and a corkscrew, they’d picked up at a legitimate dealer at a cost that had made him glad for her sharing spirit. But picnic materials invoke images of pretty parks and sandy beaches, not the sort of place to which she took him. Not in a million years would he have expected an abandoned turn-of-the-century gold mine, even with its brief mention of earlier.

Thankfully, the only accessible part of the hundred-plus-year-old setup was
outside
the mountain, and it a skeleton of what it had once been. The mine was accessed by an offshoot of the road out of town. The main road, according to Von, continued on in a curve around the mountain, passing through a tunnel and a few residential areas before settling into its long, lonely pursuit of the fabled Alaska Highway. A foot trail led to the site from the spot at the end of the road where they parked, following the edge of a length of wetlands active with ducks and other waterfowl before entering a body of trees which Von identified for him as Western Hemlocks. Ten minutes along, the path, by way of a dilapidated wooden bridge, crossed a stream carrying the melt of the winter snows to the sea. A short distance beyond, the trees opened up and the mine, in phantom shapes, presented itself.

The picnic spot was inside the larger and most intact of three concrete buildings standing in close proximity to each other. In the building’s main room a concrete platform that must have been a work table of some sort provided a handy surface on which to place the tablecloth. As they laid out their gourmet spread, a light wind blew through the holes where the windows and doors had once been. The beach was easily visible from the room, the high tide line some forty or fifty yards from the building. The waves coming in now were far from that line, lapping softly at the lonely posts left behind by a collapsed pier; a bright half-moon, visible through a gaping vacancy in the ruined roof, highlighting the gentle crests that occasionally formed. In the foreground rusty metal chutes extended from the next building, some broken and lying in the silt, others connecting to an unidentifiable apparatus that stood silhouetted in the dusk. More of these chutes extended in the opposite direction toward the mountain, where other, smaller structures lay in ruin. The generous moonlight contributed to the overall industrial phantasmagoria, and Hunter, taking it all in, found the surprise the location had brought along with it giving way to a sort of adolescent thrill.

He told Von she’d done well with her spooky site.

“Naturally,” she said.

They sat on the platform, the food and wine between them. “You’ve been here before, I take it,” he said as he picked up the Buck pocketknife she’d had the foresight to take from her backpack, and began cutting slices of cheese and bread.

“Once. With my parents,” she said as she worked on uncorking one of the wine bottles. “They didn’t like having their nuisance along when communing with the spirits. This is one of those sites, according to my father’s notes, where the energy surrounding Chi Bay is concentrated. Not because of what happened here, but because of what caused what happened here. Meaning the energy is older than any tragedy.”

He paused before asking the question. He’d known, hadn’t he, that there was something? As opposed as Von was to her father’s occultism, she herself was fascinated with that aspect of Chi Bay—if indeed there was such an aspect outside of the mind. But no, Hunter knew this to be rigid thinking. And a reversal at that, as he’d already allowed for the strange wind that blew around here. A man’s skepticism had to yield sometimes to his subtler senses. And the subtler senses required no proof beyond the vibrations they picked up.

And yet, mustn’t there also be some allowance for words? For expression? For the tenor and inflection of the voice? The nuances of the face and body? For the subtle power of suggestion? Von was certainly persuasive, and all the more so because of her innocence. That established, it seemed to him that the empirical should also be trusted. Not without reason did a person grow increasingly more skeptical, more reasonable in their thinking as they aged, the fancifulness of youth dissipating with hard experience. Von could talk all she wanted of his aging backwards, but the imagination does not revert after the plateau; it merely deteriorates. They were two different things. A person could dream, for example, of misspent youth, but a person could not dream the dreams of misspent youth; they were gone forever. Yet not without leaving a man susceptible to language, to the particular thrums of the vocal cords.

But Von, having poured them each a glass of wine to go with the food, was now answering his unspoken question, and he had to tune in lest he miss something that might make this debate with himself irrelevant.

“Tragedy is nothing new to Chi Bay. Examples of this force we’re talking about were happening as far back as the days of the town’s settlement. Maybe before that, who knows. It’s not like there’s a dependable record. Far from it. It’s as though everything that had to do with the natives, the Chi-Ikuk specifically, was expunged. Why I link the tribe, which I presume you’ve gathered is extinct, with the tragedies of Chi Bay, I can’t say exactly. Nor could my father, whose research was far more extensive than mine. For him it was life. For me, a thesis. A way of coming to terms with my parents’ deaths. But that’s a separate chapter. We’re talking about what happened here at the mine, not up on Harrow Mountain.”

She paused, taking a bite of the bread and cheese and washing it down with wine. Hunter added a piece of ham to his bread and looked through the doorway across the slate beach to a tidal pond where a swan floated contentedly.

“That’s a trumpeter,” Von said, noticing the direction of his gaze. “Not only big, but a mean rascal if it feels threatened. If young are around, stay clear.” She took another swallow of wine before using the swan as a segue back to the subject. “The Ikuk believed any living thing, human, swan, what have you, was subject to the energy of this place, and that the result could appear in any number of manifestations, all of them bad. Madness. Murder. Suicide. Or in this particular case, disappearances. The mine employed dozens of people in its day, and had yet to reach its peak before it was unexpectedly shut down. It’s output, already hefty, was growing every year, putting it on pace to give the Treadwell operation in Juneau a run for its money. Everybody was happy. As happy as a bunch of zombies can be anyway. The town was prospering as business flourished. It was almost enough to make folks forget that tragedy, to one degree or another,
always
strikes again in Chi Bay. And so it did. One fall morning the wives kissed their husbands goodbye for the day, and the husbands went to their various posts at work. When lunchtime came around and the wives who expected their men home for a bite found the food getting cold, they thought little of it. Their husbands had been late for lunch before. When mid-afternoon rolled around and still no sign of their husbands, a few of the wives, still not overly concerned, went to the mining offices to inquire.”