Where the Summer Ends - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,60
arm except it was all muscle and sinew instead of baby fat. And it was a sure enough hand, not a paw, though the fingers were too long and sinewy for any child’s hand, and the nails were coarse and pointed like an animal’s claws.”
“Wonder where old Dan come to catch him a monkey,” Olin put in.
“Somebody’s pet. Tourists, maybe—they carry everything they own in those damn campers. Thing got away; or more likely, died and they buried it, and Dan sniffed it out and dug it up. He’d been digging, from the look of him.”
“What did you finally do with it?”
“Dell weighted it down in an old gunny sack and threw it into a deep hole in the river there. Didn’t want Dan dragging it back again to give the ladies another bad start.”
“Just as well,” Olin judged. “It might have had somebody come looking for to see what come of it. I suspect that’ll be Dr Kenlaw coming up the hill now.”
Kenlaw’s Plymouth struggled into view through the pines. Brandon glanced at his watch, noted it was past seven. He stretched himself out of Olin’s ladderback chair and descended the porch steps to greet the archeologist.
“Had a devil of a time finding the turn-off,” Kenlaw complained, squeezing out from behind the wheel. “Everything set?”
“Throw your stuff in my pickup, and we’ll get going,” Olin told him. “Where we’re headed, ain’t no kind of road any car can follow up.”
“Will that old bucket make it up a hill?” Kenlaw laughed, opening his trunk to take out a coil of rope and two powerful flashlights.
“This here old Ford’s got a Marmon-Herrington all-wheel-drive conversion.” Olin said coldly “She can ride up the side of a bluff and pull out a cedar stump while your feet are hanging straight out the back window of the cab.”
Kenlaw laughed easily, shoving spare batteries and a geologist’s pick into the ample pockets of the old paratrooper’s jacket he wore. Brandon helped him stow his gear into the back of the truck, then climbed into the cab beside Reynolds.
It was a tight squeeze in the cab after Dr Kenlaw clambered in, and once they reached the blacktop road the whine of the gears and fan made conversation like shouting above a gale. Olin drove along in moody silence, answering Kenlaw’s occasional questions in few words. After a while they left the paved roads, and then it was a long kidney-bruising ride as the dual-sprung truck attacked rutted mountain paths that bored ever upward through the shouldering pines. Kenlaw cursed and braced himself with both arms. Brandon caught a grin in Olin’s faded eyes.
The road they followed led on past a tumble-down frame house, lost within a yard that had gone over to first-growth pine and scrub. A few gnarled apple trees made a last stand, and farther beneath the encroaching forest, Brandon saw the hulking walls of a log barn—trees spearing upward past where the roof had once spread. He shivered. The desolation of the place seemed to stir buried memories.
Beyond the abandoned farmhouse the road deteriorated into little more than a cow path. It had never been more than a timber road, scraped out when the lumber barons dragged down the primeval forest from the heights half a century or more ago. Farm vehicles had kept it open once, and now an occasional hunter’s truck broke down the young trees that would otherwise have choked it.
Olin’s pickup strained resolutely upward, until at length they shuddered into an overgrown clearing. Reynolds cut the engine. “Watch for snakes,” he warned, stepping down.
The clearing was littered beneath witch’s broom and scrub with a scatter of rusted metal and indistinct trash. A framework of rotted lumber and a corroded padlock faced against the hillside. Several of the planks had fallen inward upon the blackness within.
Olin Reynolds nodded. “That’s the place. Reckon the Brennans boarded it over before they moved on to keep stock from falling in. Opening used to just lie hidden beneath the brush.”
Dr Kenlaw prodded the eroded timbers. The padlock hasp hung rusted nails over the space where the board had rotted away. At a bolder shove, the entire framework tore loose and tumbled inward.
Sunlight spilled in past the dust. The opening was squeezed between ledges of rock above and below, wide enough for a man to stoop and drop through. Beyond was a level floor, littered now with the debris of boards.
“Goes back like that a ways, then it narrows down to just a crack,” Olin