Elias started at the university that fall; despite some initial bumps and false starts, he seemed to be settling down easily into college life. His professors—many of whom Reid knew—said that he was doing better than they had expected, and holding his own with classmates who’d had years of formal education.
One day, when Reid had no classes and knew that Elias would be at the university for most of the day, he went over to see Henry and Olivia. Henry was having a busman’s holiday of sorts: he was adding a wing on to their little frame house. He and Olivia had decided to try for another baby, and they would need the room.
Henry was there, up on the roof, tying in the structure of the new wing to that of the main house. He clambered down the ladder when he saw Reid standing there.
“Sorry,” Reid said, when Henry came over to him. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”
Henry smiled. “You’re not. I needed a break anyway.”
Reid looked up at the construction. “It looks good, Henry.”
“Thanks. It should be mostly weathertight by next week, I think.”
Reid smiled. “Just in time for the weather to turn.”
Henry nodded. “I’ll start on the inside at that point.” He wiped sweat from his brow. “Is this a social visit, Reid, or did you need something? Olivia’s in town, shopping, but she should be back shortly, if you’d care to wait.”
“Well, it’s always good to see the two of you, Henry… but there is something. I… have a favor to ask you.”
Henry nodded again. “Of course, Reid. Anything you need.”
Reid smiled. “Well, you haven’t heard what it is, yet. You may change your mind.”
Henry returned the smile. “Try me.”
Reid blew out a nervous breath. “Okay. I… I want you to take me out to the Hazlett place.”
Henry’s smile faded. “Well, you warned me…” he started.
Reid held up a hand. “I know what I’m asking, Henry. I just… well, you know where it is.”
“Reid, I… I don’t know…” He grimaced. “If Olivia finds out that I went out there—even with you—she would kill me.”
“But you’ve been there before.”
“Yes, I have. But that was before I was married and had a baby to worry about. Plus, it was me and four other men… and we were there at Ephraim’s request. Now… I don’t know. Henry, I’m sorry, but I just can’t.”
“I understand. It was probably out of line for me to ask. But… could you at least tell me how to get there?”
“You mean to do this, then. Even by yourself.”
“Henry, I have to see it.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Reid. I really don’t. Just… just let it lie.”
“I wish I could, but I can’t. I have to see it. I can’t tell you why.”
Henry stared at Reid for a long time. Then, he sighed, looked around, came back with a scrap of paper and a carpenter’s pencil, started drawing and annotating. Presently, he handed Reid the piece of paper. “There’s actually a mailbox on the road. At least, there was. It’s marked with the name.”
“Thank you, Henry.”
“I still wish you would reconsider, Reid. I don’t know what you’re after, but I think you should just forget about it.”
“Ephraim’s dead, Henry. He can’t hurt me any more.” With that, he turned around, walked back to his Ford, slipped behind the wheel, drove away.
—
As he made his way south, he tried to answer for himself the question he couldn’t answer for Henry. Part of it was simple curiosity; Elias’ description of the place had made it out to be a minor purgatory for those unlucky enough to have ended up there. He wanted—needed, perhaps—to see it for himself, to see just how low the Hazletts had sunk, how they had come to be the way they were.
Part of it, too, was the need—in a way—to corroborate Elias’ story. He trusted the boy, but part of him wanted to insure that trust, to make it real and tangible. To that end, he wondered if he would be able to find out where they’d put Tamara. Had they even bothered to bury her? He knew enough not to expect some tidy, well-kept graveyard, bounded by an iron railing, tucked away in the shadows, full of two centuries’ worth of various and sundry Hazletts… but perhaps he wanted to think that the Hazletts had retained some scrap of their humanity and had done well by Tamara in the end.
He couldn’t quite understand where this doubt had come from. Had it always been there, or had Catron—damn him!—planted the seed of it, when he’d come out to question Elias?
Reid drove slowly so as not to miss the various landmarks Henry had indicated—in his neat hand—on the map. The road itself dictated caution, however, and he did not mind the drive; he rather enjoyed how the road and the river danced alongside and with each other. Already, some color had begun to appear here and there in the trees; soon, it would be a year since that day he’d met Elias and his life had changed.
Presently, when he was about to leave one county for another, he came upon the road that Henry had marked; he was to turn right at this point and head up into a broad valley nestled among the hills. A few miles after that, Henry had indicated another road, heading nearly west.
He drove along that road for a few miles and nearly missed the mailbox with the Hazlett name—scrawled nearly illegibly in a fading and flaking red paint—on the side of it. He slowed and turned onto the graveled end of the driveway.
Only to be confronted with a metal gate slung across the road with a sign bolted to it. No Trespassing, it warned him. Violators Will Be Prosecuted. All of it looked very recently done, and he wondered if it had been Catron’s handiwork.
He sat there with the engine running, trying to decide what to do. It would be prudent, of course, to simply turn around and head back home. But what he had said to Henry still obtained: he had to know. He switched off the engine, got out, locked the car.
It was easy work to get around the gate; it was designed to stop vehicular traffic, not pedestrian. He started walking up the rough, pitted path, then turned around and looked back at the car, sunlight glinting off the chrome and glass.
Last chance, he thought, then smiled to himself and turned back up the path.
—
The road had been hacked out of the trees and was wide enough for a car to pass along it; despite that, the trees had begun to reclaim it for their own and provided a shaded canopy of intertwined branches far overhead. Dappled sunlight cast pools of golden light upon the raw earth; grooves were etched deeply into the roadbed and he understood now why it had taken Henry and his crew so long to traverse the drive.
After nearly twenty minutes of strenuous walking he emerged from the canopy of trees into a clearing.
He was there.
To his right was an old brick farmhouse with rotting wooden trim whose age suggested that it had been here for a long time—well over a century, judging by its style—and Reid wondered if it might have been the first structure built on the property. Directly in front of him, perhaps a hundred feet or so away, sat the swaybacked remains of the original barn; its walls leaned in at precarious angles and its roof yawned open to the sky. Dotted here and there around the property were various structures whose functions eluded him, but he thought he saw—in three modest wood buildings huddled next to the hulking mass of the farmhouse—evidence of Henry’s neat handiwork.
Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere else in the yard, scattered as if they’d fallen from the sky, were the rusting remains of various machines: farm implements, tractors, trucks, cars, engines, chassis, wheels… all of them nearly overgrown with weeds.
There was, about the place—beyond the general desuetude—a sense of something malignant. Reid remembered the images from the war: great machineries of death and destruction left to rot like corpses in the fields. Here was much the same; he tried to imagine people scratching out a meager existence among these ruins, tried to imagine the lives of the children Henry had seen on his visits.
He walked over to one of Henry’s rebuilt dormitories, peeked in. He saw simple iron beds in a row, with rustic wood tables between them. The beds were neatly made and the floor swept; the room seemed ready for its residents, as if they’d all just stepped out for one reason or another. Somehow, this—more than anything—caused the hair on Reids arms to prickle with fear and a kind of hopelessness. He backed away from the window.
He noticed, then, that the door to the farmhouse stood wide open; had it been that way when he first arrived? It was tempting, somehow, to go inside the building, to poke around, to see how the Hazletts had lived out their days. The grounds around the house were littered with the cast-off detritus of years—decades?—of occupation: cribs, broken furniture, children’s toys, midden heaps of garbage around which swarmed flies.
To him, the place felt deserted, as if—absent the patriarch—the center could not hold and had flown off at all angles to disperse the hapless inhabitants far into the hills that ringed the narrow defile.
And yet, and yet… he felt he was being watched. There was a deathly silence settled upon the place; no birdsong, no gentle bumbling of bees, no call of cricket or cicada. But, at random intervals, there was sound of a sort: some scratching rasp, as if of a foot dragging through sand, or a voice abruptly cut off mid sentence, or a child stifling a sudden urge to laugh. He did not know, could not tell whether these sounds were real or simply the product of his overactive imagination.
Some motion from his left caused him to gasp and turn; he expected to see someone standing there behind him, but there was no one. He took a deep breath, forced himself to calm down.
He went out to the ragged end of the path, turned in a complete circle, trying to grave this image into his memory. Part of him still wanted to explore further, to winkle out the place where Tamara had been taken, but another part of him was afraid that he would find her, underneath some tree, curled upon herself as if sleeping, but now only a pile of moldering bones in a faded and rotten gingham dress.
He forced himself to take one step, and then another and another, forced himself not to break out into the panicked run that threatened to overtake him.
He felt, somehow, safer under the canopy of trees; here there was sound, a gentle soughing, as if the trees were in conversation with each other and, perhaps, with him.
As he walked, he found himself nearly overcome with weeping—out of fear, and futility, and hopelessness, and despair—that such horrors were still very real in this world and would forever be a part of it. There was plenty of misery to be found here because of the Depression, but this transcended all of it. This was not just poverty, was not just despair; this was where evil had taken root and made a home. He understood that Elias had been lucky to have survived such a place and to have summoned the courage to walk away from it.
A feeling of relief washed over him when he finally rounded a bend and saw the end of the canopy of trees and his car, still there, twinkling brightly under the afternoon sun.
He went to the car, unlocked it. Something, some urge or his conscience pricking at him, told him to go back, to look for Tamara in earnest; was this simply another thing that would corroborate Elias’ story? He didn’t know. He could very easily think that such a thing might have happened, here.
As he deliberated, something—some sort of motion—rushed towards him from the shaded depths of the tree-lined road. It seemed like a gust of wind, propelled by a kind of agitation in the branches. It seemed to him like a furious kind of whispering, of many voices clamoring for his attention.
Leave, they seemed to say. Leave, and never come back.
He slipped behind the wheel of the car, started it, backed onto the highway and set off, heading towards home and safety. He glanced in the rear view mirror, imagined that he saw some kind of figure—spectral and fantastical—standing there, in the driveway, where he had just been, but when he looked again, it was gone.
—
It was late in the afternoon; he’d spent far longer than he’d wanted to at Hazlett’s abandoned place. Elias would no doubt be home at this point, would wonder where he’d been. He hadn’t even left a note.
And, indeed, when he pulled into his driveway some time later, there was the truck, parked by the shed. He pulled the Pontiac alongside it, shut it off, got out.
Elias sat in the living room, reading, when Reid stepped inside. He looked up, smiling… but then he saw the evidence of it in Reid’s face; the smile faded.
“Where were you?” he asked, but something told Reid that he already knew.
“Out,” Reid equivocated.
“Out,” Elias echoed. His jaw worked. “You went there, didn’t you?”
Reid felt that he owed Elias this much truth, at least. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“I… I had to see it for myself.”
At that, Elias nodded. “Yes. Perhaps you did, at that. And?”
“And… it’s abandoned, I think. I don’t think that anyone is there any longer.”
Elias opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it, closed it. He reached over to a side table, picked up a bookmark, slipped it between the pages of the book he was reading—Look Homeward, Angel, by Wolfe, Reid saw—and set it on the table. He stood up, stretched, went over to Reid, slipped his arms around the man. Reid returned the gesture and the two men stood there for a long moment, saying nothing, letting touch speak in a language more powerful than words.
Reid understood that he would never doubt Elias again.
Presently, Elias slipped from him, went out into the kitchen, busied himself for a minute, came back with a glass of whiskey; he handed it to Reid.
“I want you to drink this,” he said. “And I want you to go sit out on the front porch and enjoy what’s left of the day. And I’m going to go inside and start on dinner, which you and I will then eat together at the table, and after that we will come back out here and talk. And when we have talked the day away and have said everything that we need to say about what you saw today, we will come back inside, and you will take me upstairs and into your bed and we will spend the night making love with each other.”
“Yes,” Reid responded.
“And we will do this every day from this point forward. We will live our lives and we will speak of them to each other, and we will see each day out and we will speak of that, as well, and then we will go up to our bedroom and lie with each other, making love or not, for as many days as we have with each other.”
“Yes,” Reid responded.
For there was no other answer possible but that.