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“Just keep your ears open,” I told them both. “Listen for it. You’ll hear it in your head, and in the pit of your stomach. It’s not bad, but it’s strange. ”
I thought of Kitty, less than a mile away and locked in her clean white room. She might be able to tell us something more specific, or then again, she might not; if the Hairy Man hadn’t been underneath her windowsill recently, she probably wouldn’t have much to tell us. I wondered how she was doing. I wondered if she was okay.
I looked over at Dana, and directed my attention to her instead. “I know he hangs around the hospital sometimes,” I said.
“How do you know that?” Dana asked, and, as was becoming a habit, I fudged the answer rather than give away my brother’s involvement.
“I know some people who work there. He’s been spotted by patients on the first floor—not that anyone believes them. Inmates in an asylum don’t have reams of credibility, I’m afraid. ” Not as much as television personalities, I thought. I didn’t say it, though.
“Are you sure they’re talking about the same guy?”
“Pretty sure, yes. What are the odds that they’re not? How many hair-covered paranormal beasts can a few acres hold, anyway?”
She scowled, pulling her eyebrows close together until there was a sharp vertical wrinkle above her nose. “I ask, because the way you talked about him he was interesting, strange, and possibly confused; and that’s not what I’m getting here. This whole area feels…it feels…”
“Mean,” I answered for her. It wasn’t exactly what I meant, but the words at my disposal were limited and inadequate. “Whatever’s here, it doesn’t like us. It doesn’t want us here. But I think that this is something different from Green Eyes. I think it was that way before he came here. ”
“What? What are you guys talking about?” Benny wanted to know. I didn’t blame him, but I couldn’t make him understand, either.
Dana stopped, and we stopped with her, turning to face her. “It’s kind of like…,” she began, hesitated, and started again. “It feels like a child, or an animal that’s been hurt by someone—but it’s not sure who, or why. And it doesn’t know what to do about it. But it wants restitution all the same. And I’m sorry, kid, but that’s the best I can do. ”
“Nice. Your best is better than mine,” I congratulated her. “Good call. ”
“Thanks. ”
Inertia kept us in place, and something more primal kept us close together. Even if Benny couldn’t consciously detect the malaise that hunkered over the Bend, some subconscious demand for self-preservation smelled it all the same and didn’t like it.
You didn’t have to have any special abilities to pick it up, anyway. The danger was in the way the birds never sang, and the way there was no wind coming off the wide band of water that surrounds the place. It was there in the absence of everything else—in the failure of small animals to scuttle, and in the stiffness of the trees.
There’s a special fear that God, or evolution, or Mother Nature builds into slow, fleshy, unclawed bipeds. It’s a hypersensitivity to ambience, and it keeps us alive, even when we don’t know it when we feel it.
Benny was feeling it hardcore. I could see it by the way he hung close between Dana and me, where at the beginning of the quest he was our intrepid leader. His eyes were dilated wide like a nervous cat’s.
He was sweating, too, but we were all sweating, even though the lateness of the hour meant a slight and blessed cooling. “Spring has sprung, fall has fell, summer’s here, it’s hot as hell,” as the naughty fourth-grade jump-rope rhyme goes. July means sauna, and it probably wouldn’t drop below eighty degrees before nine o’clock. Some people never get used to it. Others never get used to anything else.
We pushed our way through the unyielding trees and between them. Beneath the canopy it was almost too dark to see, but it was that funny sort of mid-light that a flashlight doesn’t help much.
Benny turned his on anyway. I waited.
Dana tugged at the satchel on Benny’s arm and pulled out the multimeter.
“Do you hear something?”
“I can’t tell,” she replied. “Maybe, I’d be more confident if I could see something, though. Give me a minute. ”
The device she held was about the size of a paperback novel, with a screen and a whole lot of buttons. She slid her thumb around the side and pressed a power switch, made some adjustments, and ordered us both behind her. “You two. Over here. And hold very, very still. ”
I’d never seen anything like it. “You’re not suggesting we could affect the—”
“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. This isn’t a toy. Shit. ”
“What?”
“I can’t hold it steady enough; it’s reading funny. ”
“I’ll hold it,” Benny offered.
“No, that’s okay. There’s a rock there big
