Page 2 of The Devouring Time

The loose soil makes for hard going, and soon my shoes are covered in sand. Tiny grains get inside, scraping between sock and shoe, forcing me to stop, take off one Oxford, then shake the sand free while balancing precariously on the other foot.

Damn Zebulon Hart for not sending the promised car. My footwear was shined to a high polish by an eager boy in the train station, and now they’re so dull and filthy I might as well have saved my nickel and bought a sandwich instead. Hart better have something in his collection worth the trouble he’s putting me through.

Another mournful cry, this time to my right. Closer.

I pause, now balanced on the other foot while I empty my second shoe. Probably a pair of birds, nesting off in the grasses. Calling to each other.

They don’t sound like birds.

Some small mammal, then. What lives in a salt marsh like this?

I put my shoe back on. Start walking again, this time at a pace so brisk it’s just below a jog. Where is the house? How much longer do I have to follow this desolate road? Am I even going the right way?

A gray, twisted shape catches my eye, half-hidden by the reeds. Driftwood, cast up by some storm that reached far beyond the ordinary tides. From a distance, it looks almost like an animal with pale, silvery skin.

More and more clumps of driftwood appear as I continue, the sea-smoothed wood propped up or entangled to appear like figures. Even so, it takes me nearly ten minutes of walking to realize I was wrong—no storm did this. The driftwood is deliberately placed, as though someone tried to build sculptures of animals and people from what they’d found on the beach. No, not tried—as I march onward, the driftwood constructions become more and more lifelike, the bits slotted together like pieces of a puzzle to form clearer and clearer shapes.

The most lifelike so far catches my eye, just off the trail. This one is human-shaped, and on its head two knots form eyes, a gaping hole for a mouth.

The cry that’s been haunting me comes again, but this time I can see its origin.

The mouth of the sculpture.

2

Obviously it’s just the wind blowing through the “mouth.” Maybe whoever built the damn things even set them up in such a way as to deliberately produce the sound. Eerie, but harmless.

I’ve spent too much time starting at the shadows of my own mind to be put off by something in the real world. Stepping forward, I lift my hand, intending to touch the water-smoothed wood, to ground myself in the reality of the thing.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” a man says behind me.

I spin, hand reaching automatically for a weapon I no longer carry. A weather-beaten man stands before me, his face so aged by sun and wind I can’t guess at his actual years. There’s gray in his beard, and the mouth clamped around a pipe stem has the caved-in look that comes from a lack of teeth. His clothes are as weather-worn as the rest of him, except for a pair of newish rubber hip boots with mud up to the knees.

“Who the—” I bite back an expletive—this isn’t the army. “I didn’t see you approach,” I finish lamely.

How I missed seeing him on the flat expanse of the marsh is another question altogether. Maybe I mistook him for a sculpture, or he was wading in some low spot that hid him from my view. Neither explanation seems likely, but what else could it be?

He puffs on his pipe, looking me up and down. “You ought to go back where you came from.”

Wonderful—the locals are unfriendly. “I have business here.”

“Ain’t dressed for collecting mussels,” he observes, not bothering to hide the fact he’s judging me…and finding me not up to his standards.

I draw myself up to all of my five feet, ten inches. I don’t exactly tower over him, but he is the shorter one of us. “I’m looking for Hart’s Leap. Do you know where it is?”

“Sure do.” He spits off to the side. “You some kind of sorcerer?”

I revise my opinion. He’s not just some standoffish local, out here scavenging the marsh for mussels or whatever else can be found in this desolate place. He’s a lunatic.

Poor man. Was he in the war, too? For all I know, he might have been beside me in the hospital those terrible days when I could neither see nor hear anything outside of the clamor in my own head.

“I’m afraid not,” I say, rather than point out that there’s no such thing outside of fairytales. “If you could direct me to Hart’s Leap, I’d be grateful.”

He grunts, then shrugs. “I told you to turn around, but I guess you ain’t going to listen. Just keep following the tracks, and you’ll get there eventually.”

“Thank you.” I tip my hat, step around him, and return to the rutted path. A few moments later, I glance back, only to see him staring after me.

I’d swear the sculpture is also watching me leave, even though it had originally been facing the other direction.