accompanying the things were all essentially the same; a lowgrade scream. Tell me, tell me, tell me.
This scarf belonged to my brother, who disappeared on a fishing trip in the Allagash in 1969. I feel very strongly that he is still alive. Tell me where he is.
This lipstick came from my wife’s dressing table. I think she’s having an affair, but I’m not sure. Tell me if she is.
This is my son’s ID bracelet. He never comes home after school anymore, he stays out until all hours, I’m worried sick. Tell me what he’s doing.
A woman in North Carolina—God knew how she had found out about him; the press conference in August had not made the national media—sent a charred piece of wood. Her house had burned down, her letter explained, and her husband and two of her five children had died in the blaze. The Charlotte fire department said it was faulty wiring, but she simply couldn’t accept that. It had to be arson. She wanted Johnny to feel the enclosed blackened relic and tell her who had done it, so the monster would spend the rest of his life rotting in prison.
Johnny answered none of the letters and returned all the objects (even the charcoaled hunk of wood) at his cost and with no comment. He did touch some of them. Most, like the charred piece of wallboard from the grief-stricken woman in Charlotte, told him nothing at all. But when he touched a few of them, disquieting images came, like waking dreams. In most cases there was barely a trace; a picture would form and fade in seconds, leaving him with nothing concrete at all, only a feeling. But one of them ...
It had been the woman who sent the scarf in hopes of finding out what had happened to her brother. It was a white knitted scarf, no different from a million others. But as he handled it, the reality of his father’s house had suddenly been gone, and the sound of the television in the next room rose and flattened, rose and flattened, until it was the sound of drowsing summer insects and the faraway babble of water.
Woods smells in his nostrils. Green shafts of sunlight falling through great old trees. The ground had been soggy for the last three hours or so, squelchy, almost swamplike. He was scared, plenty scared, but he had kept his head. If you were lost in the big north country and panicked, they might as well carve your headstone. He had kept pushing south. It had been two days since he had gotten separated from Stiv and Rocky and Logan. They had been camping near
(but that wouldn’t come, it was in the dead zone)
some stream, trout-fishing, and it had been his own damn fault; he had been pretty damn drunk.
Now he could see his pack leaning against the edge of an old and moss-grown blowdown, white deadwood poking through the green here and there like bones, he could see his pack, yes, but he couldn’t reach it because he had walked a few yards away to take a leak and he had walked into a really squelchy place, mud almost to the tops of his L.L. Bean’s boots, and he tried to back out, find a dryer place to do his business, but he couldn’t get out. He couldn’t get out because it wasn’t mud at all. It was ... something else.
He stood there, looking around fruitlessly for something to grab onto, almost laughing at the idiocy of having walked right into a patch of quicksand while looking for a place to take a piss.
He stood there, at first positive that it must be a shallow patch of quicksand, at the very worst over his boot-tops, another tale to tell when he was found.
He stood there, and real panic did not begin to set in until the quicksand oozed implacably over his knees. He began to struggle then, forgetting that if you got your stupid self into quicksand you were supposed to remain very still. In no time at all the quicksand was up to his waist and now it was chest-high, sucking at him like great brown lips, constricting his breathing; he began to scream and no one came, nothing came except for a fat brown squirrel that picked its way down the side of the mossy deadfall and perched on his pack and watched him with his bright, black eyes.