The Haunter of the Threshold (23 page)

“You’re going back to the cabin without me,” Hazel droned, her own tears threatening now.

“I have to. Please understand; don’t be mad. But you know how I get. Whatshisname can drive you back later, okay? Or just call me in a few hours...”

Hazel was teetering in place, staring over the car’s roof. “I’ll make you forget all about Frank.” She gulped. “I love you. Please–give me a ch–”

“It’s best this way,” Sonia said through a choke. “Just...forgive me.”

Sonia got into the car and drove away.

Hazel felt like a circuit breaker that had just been thrown off. She stared through nothing as the Prius disappeared around the bend of trees. She wanted to scream, cry, and laugh all at the same time, but instead she remained mute in place, vibrating from the crushing disappointment.
One inch away from my dream coming true...and
Frank had to fuck it all up...

She felt warped now, twisted; she felt as though pieces of her psyche had been cut off and absconded with.
Always me, always me...

The trailer door clacked again when Horace came out; he seemed hesitant. “Wurn’t listenin’ deliberate naow but couldn’t help but heer. Yew’re friend seems quite bent aout’a shape ‘baout somethin’.”

“Yeah,” Hazel sighed, dabbed her tears.

“And yew tew. Anythin’ I can dew?”

Hazel flinched, gave a mauled smile.
Shape up.
“Just girl-talk, Horace. Young and dumb, that’s me. It’ll all be okay.”

“Ee-yuh, I shuh hope so.”

But would it really be okay?

Horace came down the steps and surprised her by offering a glass of ice-water. “Heer. It’s turrible hot; yew’ll likely feel better after takin’ some’a this.”

“You’re very thoughtful, Horace.” The cold water down her throat roused her; it focused her previous idea to something, all of a sudden, thrilling.
Sonia’s in no condition to climb the summit...but
I am...
She looked up hopefully at the towering Horace. “Are you familiar with an old cottage built way up on top of the summit?”

Horace mulled the thought. With his arms crossed, his biceps bulged to the size of baking potatoes. “If’n yew mean Whipple’s Peak, well, ee-yuh. I ‘member when I was a little shaver, my gram used to talk abaout it, tryin’ ta sceer me, I ‘spose. Said it were sittin’ right at the edge’a the cliff, and didn’t have no front door.” He pronounced “door” as
doe-uh.
“Said it were haunted and’d been there since before white men ever came heer.”

“Built by Indians, in other words.”

“New, ‘cos that’s what I asked’n she said Indians
couldn’t’a
built it ‘cos they didn’t know haow ta cut stone. See, my gram said the cottage was made’a gray blocks—granite.”

Gray blocks,
Hazel’s mind wandered.
The Gray Cottage, that’s
what Frank called it.
“I’d like to go and see it, Horace. But...how do I get there?”

Horace chuckled subtly. “Ah, well naow, see, I dun’t think it really exists, Hazel. Just a wive’s tale—”

“Yeah, yeah, but let’s just say that it
does
exist,” she pressed him. “How would I go about looking for it?”

The large man shrugged, then pointed high to the west. “En’t no other way but to just walk all’s the way up the summit, and I’d imagine it’d be half a day at least gettin’ up there. See all that mist?”

Hazel’s eye followed the direction of his finger. It was just a tree-covered pinnacle, at least a half mile up.
Mist?
she thought. She strained her vision.

“Foller the line up where there en’t no trees.”

Now she saw it. There must’ve been a mudslide or avalanche of some kind, eons ago, for now she detected a swath against the summit’s most extreme rise covered only with brush, no trees. At the very top, as far as she could see, lay a blanket of pale mist.

“But I wouldn’t go up there if’n I was yew,” Horace went on.

“It’s like Sleepy Holler, and the Goat Man, yew know? Curn’t possibly be a stone cottage up there when ya think abaout it.”

“Why not?”

“Impossible to carry all them granite blocks up there.” Horace rubbed his chin. “A’course, my gram
did
say she saw it huh-self when she was young, though. So...who knows?”

Interesting.
Hazel kept her eyes on the distant smear of mist.

“She said there was ‘sposed to be
treasure
in the cottage but she couldn’t get it on account she couldn’t get
inside
. Like I said, weren’t no door.”

A stone cottage...with no door?
Could Frank really be lying that intricately? Hazel didn’t think so.
The cottage MUST exist;
Henry even mentioned it in his suicide note. And Frank really IS there, right now.

And if he isn’t back by tomorrow afternoon...I’m going to try
to find it...

“Strange tales ‘baout that cottage, I’ll say. But every place got a few sech tales.”

“Urban legends, backwoods legends, they’re all the same,” Hazel remarked. “It’s part of human nature to tell stories but then I guess every story that’s ever existed is based in some way on fact.”

“Ee-yuh. And heer’s somethin’ else, if’n yew wanna talk abaout strange.” His big hand touched her back and urged her toward the driveway. “Tell me what’cha think, but just walk up along the edge.”

She saw what he meant; the entire driveway was a trough of mud from the rain. She’d walked gingerly along the forest’s rim.

“Them prints there are mine,” he said, pointing to a track of large footprints going to the mailbox and then back to the trailer. “But naow...see thet?”

They stood at the bulky mailbox. Footprints impressed in the mud came to, then from the box.

“Tracks from whoever left you the envelope and money,” Hazel observed. She saw nothing odd about it.

Horace held up a finger. “Stay along the edge’n yew’ll see.”

She followed him farther past the driveway’s end, into the mud-splotched road itself; all the while, Horace’s finger pointed down at the tracks. With each print left by the mysterious deliverer, Horace counted out, “One, two, three...”

What’s he driving at?
Hazel wondered.

“...thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three.”

Horace and Hazel stopped. But so did the tracks, nearly in the middle of the road. The tire-tracks from Sonia’s car coursed well away from them and, hence, couldn’t have covered up any additional footprints.

“Strange?” Horace asked.

“Very strange,” she admitted, gazing at the termination of prints.

Thirty-three steps in, and thirty-three steps back. Then...
It was as though the person who’d delivered the envelope had appeared and then vanished into thin air.

Between the footprints and the prospect of finding the Gray Cottage, Hazel hoped for enough mental diversion to forget about her almost-sex session with Sonia. It worked...for a while anyway. She passed on Horace’s offer for a ride, electing instead to walk back to town on the paved road. Dense pine and oak lined both sides of the way, breaking up only periodically to show small crackerbox houses stuck back at the ends of short driveways. As she walked, the day’s heat and humidity glazed her.
Not even sure
where I’m going.
Several persons either sitting on front porches or fussing with shrubs waved casually at her.
What did Sonia call this
place? Hooterville?
Ma and pa in rocking chairs, bumpkin women hanging clothes on the line. But she had to stop at the next house she came to: a county sheriff’s car sat parked there while the officer himself had his hands full keeping a quarreling couple apart.

“Just you calm daown now, the both of ya’s,” he warned. Meanwhile a fortyish man in a sleeveless T-shirt and beer belly raged red-faced at a mop-haired woman who sported an even
bigger
beer belly. “Been married to huh durn neer twenty years, payin’ the bills, workin’ my tail off!” He pronounced “workin’” as
wuckin’.
“Naow I sees she’s gettin on with another man!”

Hazel walked by, only ten feet from the conflict, trying to act like she was not listening.
Here we go. Backwoods love gone sour. The
good old Domestic Dispute...

“I en’t never cheated on yew, Cal, and it’s dag
shitty
to say so,” the jowly woman wailed back, fists waving. “And after all I done for yew?”

“Shee-it, woman!”

Hazel smirked. By the looks of the dowdy, overweight woman and her red nose, it would take a secret suitor with very
low
standards to be a party in infidelity.
Take what you can get, honey...

“Now, come on, Emma!” barked the sheriff. He held the woman off as though she were a pit bull. “Cal reely ketch you with another man? Admit it if’n he did—”

“He did nothin’ of the sort ‘cos there
en’t
no other man!” the woman cracked.

“If there en’t no other man!” the husband bellowed back, “then who done gave yew that ring!”

Hazel glanced at the woman’s piggish hand at the same time the sheriff did. Glittering on her finger was a roughly cut deep-scarlet ring.

Hazel wasn’t sure but she wondered,
Wasn’t Mr. Pickman
wearing a ring just like that?

Not that it mattered. Hazel stepped up her pace; she’d had enough listening to angry rednecks. As she headed away, she heard the woman yell, “I done told yew! I faound it! Warn’t no man give it to me!”

Hazel was glad the confrontation was behind her.

Another half-mile and she was on Main Street. Intermittent passersby nodded to her, yet one woman frowned when her husband gave Hazel’s legs a good look.
I guess I’m just killing time,
she supposed, looking into some windows. Every time she thought she was feeling better, though, stray images began to hector her.
I could
be with Sonia right now. Right NOW...
She winced.
Goddamn
Frank. Talk about getting torpedoed.
Soon the images turned lewd, but didn’t involve Sonia at all. When just an hour ago she’d felt cured of her kinks and demented fetishes, now they all poured back into her head like cement from a mixer. She recalled the feeling of being pissed in by Snow White yesterday, only to likewise be forced to drink more piss straight from Peter Pan’s rancid cock. Then she could feel the ghosts of his dirty fingers jammed down her throat, to make her vomit it all back up. She shuddered as she walked, appalled by the violation; nevertheless, all the disgusting memory did was throw her pervert switch, and next thing she knew her sexual nerves were buzzing.
Oh, no, not again...
Even as nauseousness grew, her sex moistened.

Sick, sick, sick,
came the dismal thought. She wouldn’t even admit to herself why she’d come here in the first place, but now she had to face it...

The Fish Boys...That’s what Horace said.

Her angst was twisting her up. She needed to find these Fish Boys...

She wandered a bit, glancing in random shop windows. A Rite-Aid store appeared round the corner. She went in to get a Sierra Mist but had to do a double take when she passed a line of ten people at the photo counter. They all stood chatting amiably, beneath a sign that read PASSPORT PHOTOS.

THESE rubes?
she wondered, passing them to the checkout.
That’s an awful lot of rednecks getting passports, of all things...

Oh, well. She walked around some more, mainly taking in the distant scenery. The green, wooded hills closer, and mountains miles off. Everything seemed pure here; even the sky looked
pure.

Eventually she meandered into Bosset’s Way Woodland Tavern.
Someone in here must know where I can find the Fish Boys.
It was the only way to discover for herself if they, indeed, had been the ones who mauled her.

The place stood two-thirds empty, yet cigarette smoke hazed the bar area. Quiet, work-weathered rednecks either chewed the fat over beers at the tables, or—
clack!
—played pool. One elderly couple, obviously tourists, marveled over plates of possum-sausage hoagies. Hazel drearily took a seat at the long empty bar.

“Waal, hey thar, sweet pea,” greeted a corpulent barmaid with bunned hair and an apron. “What’ll it be?”

“How about a beer?”
Alcohol just makes me more fucked up
than I normally am,
she admitted.
So why did I just order a beer?