Full Wolf Moon

7

Back in his car, Logan took a moment to jot down notes from his conversation with Fred the bartender, then he went back and looked over what he’d written earlier in the day. All the people he’d spoken to in Pike Hollow agreed on two things: one, a bear hadn’t mauled the backpackers, and two, the Blakeney clan was mixed up in it. Exactly how, they could not or would not say.

His final stop of the day, then, seemed an obvious one.

He started up the engine, then drove slowly down Main Street to its intersection with 3A. When he’d asked more precise directions to the Blakeney compound, Fred — after numerous warnings against an attempted visit and dire predictions about what might happen if he pursued one — finally relented. “Head west maybe a mile and you’ll see a turnoff on the left,” he’d said. “Ain’t hardly visible, no markings or signs or nothing. Only way to tell is it’s the only dirt track you’ll come across along that stretch of highway.”

He pulled back onto 3A, watching the odometer as he went. It was only quarter past four, but under the heavy, sky-obscuring canopy of the surrounding forest it seemed much later. At a little more than a mile past the Pike Hollow intersection, he came across what he assumed had to be the road into the Blakeney compound: little more than a narrow cut in the otherwise unbroken mass of foliage, a muddy, deeply rutted dirt path that twisted sharply away, vanishing from sight. As Fred the bartender had told him, it wasn’t hardly visible.

Nosing his Lotus into the turnoff, he began making his bone-jarring way down the lane. It was so narrow that branches brushed and scraped against both sides of the small vehicle. After creeping ahead about a quarter of a mile, he stopped: he’d bottomed out the suspension twice already in the deep ruts and didn’t dare go any farther. There was no room to turn around, and no room to pass an oncoming vehicle: he’d simply have to leave the car where it was.

He tried opening the driver’s door, but the living wall of undergrowth that hemmed in the car made it physically impossible. In the end, he was forced to put the top halfway down and crawl out over the windscreen and hood. He paused a moment in the lane to gather his wits and reconnoiter, allowing his preternaturally heightened senses free rein.

In this path that was little more than a man-made tube bored through the woods, it was even more humid than it had been on the road. The heavy fir branches around and above sweated a cold dew, and chill vapors wafted up from the ground. He glanced back at the roadster, plugging the dirt road like a cork plugged the neck of a bottle. Once more Logan felt, even more strongly, the sense of being an intruder here — for two reasons now rather than just one.

As he began making his way down the path, following its capricious twistings through ever-denser forest, he became aware of something else. All day — as he’d made the drive to Pike Hollow, as he’d toured the town — he had heard birdsong. But here, all was quiet. He had the strong impression that the woods were listening. It was all he could do not to tiptoe forward.

A final bend in the path, and it suddenly widened before him into a small clearing, the ends of the branches and brush on both sides hacked sharply off and gathered into rude, decaying piles. A blade of a machete with an ancient, hand-carved handle was buried deep in the trunk of a nearby red maple. But it was not this that caught Logan’s attention, or what made him stop abruptly in something close to disbelief.

Directly ahead, the rutted path ended in a wall: a wall at least eight feet high, constructed of innumerable twigs of similar size and length, arranged vertically, pressed tightly together and lashed with brown, rusting baling wire. There was no obvious break in the wall to indicate where it might open — if indeed it did open. The twigs had been fitted together with fantastic, obsessive precision, like some kind of rustic, diabolical jigsaw puzzle. While individually the twigs were relatively thin, there were so many of them, and they appeared to extend to such a depth — at least a foot or more — that the wall seemed impenetrable. It was clearly very old, and something about it — the texture of the twigs, or the fantastically, compulsively complex architecture by which they had been joined — unnerved Logan. His senses told him there was an otherness here; something that was not right. Fred the bartender had spoken about how the clan communed with nature, but what Logan felt very strongly — almost like a warning cry in his head — was something deeply unnatural.

He walked along the disquieting, makeshift wall, following it first to the left, then turning and following it to the right, to the points where it vanished into the forest. The trees and undergrowth were so thick at both points that it was impossible to follow its circumference past the opening offered by the clearing, but it seemed obvious the wall encircled a large area, at least a few acres and perhaps more.

Logan opened his mouth to call out through the thick barricade, only to find that his voice had left him. He swallowed, licked his lips, tried again. “Hello,” he called, in little more than a croak. He cleared his throat. “Hello!” he said more loudly. “My name is Logan. I wonder if I could talk to you for just a minute.”

Nothing. The compound beyond the fortification of twigs and baling wire was as silent as the surrounding forest.

Now Logan stepped back to look past and over the wall. Beyond it and to the right a mountain rose steeply, fringed heavily in dense pines. The upper section of a single structure was visible on its flanks, over the top of the wall: a very large, gambrel-roofed building, covered in rude, lichen-covered shingles. At this distance, it appeared to be in an advanced state of decay. He could see two ranks of windows, huddled together under the broadly hipped roof. Candles glimmered in the lower of the two ranks, their lights distorted by ancient panes of glass. The upper windows were shuttered and dark. Whatever other structures lay within, they were evidently on lower ground, hidden by the bizarre wall of fitted twigs.

It was growing even darker under the forest canopy; soon it would be too dark to see. Logan approached the fortification again, moving slowly along it, trying to find an aperture through which he could see what lay beyond. Suddenly he found one: it was near the center of the clearing, and had obviously been made intentionally — this was clear by the careful way the twigs surrounding it had been whittled away. The hole was at eye level and cone shaped, wider on the inside than it was on the outside. As Logan looked through it — making out in the briefest of glimpses a number of decrepit outbuildings, a barn of the most ancient appearance imaginable, a fenced area for crops, and what appeared to be a large refuse pile to one side — he realized that it must have been made for the residents to look out.

Even as he stared, his empathetic instincts told him, once again, something on the far side of that enclosure was strange — very strange.

At that same moment, the aperture was abruptly filled with the barrel of a gun, large-bored and rusted. “You git away now,” came a harsh, deep voice from the far side of the wall.

Logan swallowed. “I don’t mean to trespass,” he said. “I just wanted to know if I could ask you a few—”

He went silent at the sound of a shell being ratcheted into the chamber. “Git off our land,” the uncouth voice said. “Or the last thing you’ll be seeing on this earth is the muzzle of this here goddamn shotgun.”

Logan needed no further persuasion. Without another word, he backed out of the clearing and down the rutted, muddy path. Then he turned around, walked quickly to his car, scrambled in over the hood, and made his way in reverse down the hellish, branch-choked lane and onto the safety of State Route 3A.