‘Now how do you suppose that happened?’
And Harlan had sat in the seat, and gripped the broken armrests, pulling them up. Then he’d examined the handcuffs, each set with the key still in the lock.
‘I think someone was cuffed to this chair,’ he said.
‘And they got free after the crash?’
‘Or before. Could be they even caused it.’
They both stepped out of the plane then, and the blackness of the pool was mirrored in the blackness of the forest, and the beams of their flashlights were swallowed up by both. Somehow they managed to sleep, but it was an uneasy rest, and while it was still dark Harlan woke to find Paul standing over the embers of the fire, his rifle in his hand, his aged body tensed against the night.
‘What is it?’ said Harlan.
‘I thought I heard something. Someone.’
Harlan listened. There was no sound at all, but still he reached for his rifle.
‘I don’t hear anything.’
‘Someone’s out there, I tell you.’
And every hair on Harlan’s body seemed to stand on end at that moment, and he got to his feet with the alacrity of a man a third of his age, because he felt it. Paul was right: there was a presence out there among the trees, and it was watching them. He knew it as surely as he knew that his heart still beat, and the blood still coursed through his veins.
‘Jesus,’ whispered Harlan. His breath was catching in his chest. A sense of profound vulnerability washed over him, and in its wake he was engulfed by a terrible despair. He felt its hunger, its need. If it was an animal out there, then it was like none that he had ever encountered.
‘Can you see it?’ asked Paul.
‘I can’t see nothing, but I can feel it.’
They stayed that way, Harlan and Paul, their weapons ready, two frightened old men facing an implacable presence in the dark, until both sensed that whatever was out there had departed, but they still agreed to alternate watches until dawn. Paul dozed first while Harlan stayed awake, but Harlan had been more tired than he thought. His eyes began to close, and his shoulders sagged. He would experience flashes of dreaming before he jerked awake, and in those moments he dreamed of a little girl dancing through the woods, although he could not see her face clearly. She approached the fire, peering through the smoke and the flames, examining the two old men, growing bolder in her approaches until, in the final dream, she was reaching out a hand to touch Harlan’s face, and he could see that some of the nails were broken and the rest were filled with dirt, and he smelled the rotting of her.
He stayed awake after that. He stood to keep sleep at bay.
Sleep, and the girl.
Because that stink had still been there when he woke up.
It was real.
But they took the money. In the end, that’s what it came down to. They took the money, and they used it to make their lives a little easier. When the cancer began flipping Paul’s cells like the tiles on an Othello board, turning them from white to black, he discreetly pursued a range of treatments, some orthodox, some not, and he never lost hope, not even when he put his gun in his mouth at last, because for him it was not an act of ultimate despair but the embracing of his last, best and surest hope.
And Harlan Vetters’ wife was looked after in her own home as the Parkinson’s quickly combined with the Alzheimer’s to create critical mass, and he was forced to move her into residential care. It was the best facility that he could find within easy reach of Falls End. She had her own room flooded with light and a view of the woods, because she loved the woods as much as her husband did. Harlan visited her every day, and in summer he would put her in a wheelchair and together they would head into town for ice cream, and there were days when she would remember who he was for a few moments, and she would hold his hand in her own, and his strength would seem to still the trembling. For the most part, though, she would stare vacantly ahead of her, and Harlan could not decide if that absence was better or worse than the fear that would occasionally animate her features, when everything was strange and terrifying to her: the town, her husband, even herself.
When Paul Scollay’s sister found that her husband had gambled away their savings, her brother stepped in, and money was put into a high-yield account to which only she had access. Her husband, meanwhile, was encouraged to seek treatment for his addiction, spurred on by a conversation that he’d had with Paul during which Paul’s shotgun was conspicuous by its presence.
And because they lived in a small town, they knew when someone was hurting – a job lost, an injury suffered, a child yielded up to the care of grandparents because the mother couldn’t cope – and an envelope would be placed on the doorstep during the night, and a little of the pressure would be anonymously relieved. In that way they salved their consciences, although both men remained haunted by the same strange dreams, visions in which they were pursued through the forest by an unseen entity, ending up at last before the black pool where something was rising from the depths, always threatening to surface but never appearing before they woke.
Rarely, too, did a day pass during those years without Harlan and Paul fearing that the plane would be discovered, and some trace of their presence at the wreckage would be revealed. They were not sure which they feared more: the law, or those who might have a personal interest in the plane and its contents. But those fears faded, and the nightmares came less frequently. The money was gradually spent until only a little of it remained, and Harlan and Paul had started to believe that they might just have committed a victimless crime when the man with the distended neck returned to Falls End.