Hair of the Dog

“Your husband might want to hear this if he’s doing the driving. Preston’s place ain’t easy to find out there in the woods.”

Red John Kovak dipped two fingers of wintergreen-scented snuff from a dented can before returning it to his back pocket. He nodded and tipped me a wink. I glanced over at Nick, who browsed the brief aisle of canned goods next to the humming ice cream cooler.

“He’s not my husband,” I growled. “I’ve already been out to the lodge. I believe Mr. Egolf lives near it?”

Red John held up his hands in mock surrender. “Sorry, sorry. Don’t stab me with them eyes, honey.” He ran one of the enormous paws through his hair. “Us gingers oughtta be friends.”

He smiled around the wad of tobacco fattening his lip and fumbled a creased envelope from his breast pocket. With a flat carpenter’s pencil from the jam jar beside the cash register, he drew a crude map on the back of it.

“Lookit, once you leave SR6, the road’ll be dirt. It’s rougher than my granny’s washboard in places, so tell your… friend to take it slow.”

I thanked him, watching in fascination as a dark thread of tobacco juice wended its way through the curly, glowing terrain of his beard. Nick slammed the cooler door shut, and Red John and I looked over at him. In the dim dustiness, Nick held aloft two fudgesicles, and I gave him a thumbs up. Red John leaned his meaty forearms on the counter. It groaned under his lumberjack weight. He fixed his muddy green gaze on me.

“So, you ain’t married then, huh?”

***

In the parking lot, I leaned against the Jeep and unwrapped my fudgesicle, tossing the wrapper into the back seat. The late summer heat beat a fierce rhythm on my bare shoulders, but the humidity for which Pennsylvania is infamous had departed. The first hint of the coming autumn ghosted on the air.

“What was that about?” Nick nodded toward the screen door of Red John’s Bait & Tackle. He took a bite of his ice cream and gave me a teenager’s grin. “Looked like you made a friend.”

Nick and I had met the previous October at a West Coast speculative fiction writers’ convention—a meet-the-agents event much like speed dating in both scope and success. Bored and disillusioned, we had found ourselves at the hotel bar and fallen to commiserating. Nick picked up a brochure from a stack on the bar, glanced over it, and waved it under my nose. It showed a map of the small, historic town, photocopied on cheap typing paper and crookedly tri-folded. Skulls and crossbones punctuated the map at several points. I focused on the text, difficult to read because of its spooky font: Self-Guided Ghost Tour, Sundown to Midnight/Candlelight Vigil in Meadow Rest Cemetery on the Witching Hour. Join the Hunt for Spirits IF YOU DARE.

“Look at this crap,” he said. “I wonder if anybody ever actually sees anything ghostly.” He dropped the brochure and finished his Jameson’s. He met his own gaze in the bar-back mirror. “I’d like to see a ghost, I think. I’d like to know death’s not just the house lights going down for the last time.”

The soft melancholy in his voice startled me.

“I don’t believe that,” I said. “Do you?”

He shrugged and mustered a twisted smile. I looked down at the brochure, its corner wet from the ring his glass had made on the bar. A spontaneous tickle of rebellion against our schedule of book flogging and panel discussions rose within me.

“Let’s take the tour,” I said. “Who knows? Maybe we’ll be the first successful ghost hunters this little burg has seen. I know I don’t want any more of this conference.”

He studied the clock on the wall. Sundown had passed us by an hour.

“Let’s go,” he said, and just like that, a partnership was formed.

Since that night, we’d indulged in several investigations of reported spirits and mythic creatures, all in the name of plot research and content for our blog. We’d never found anything beyond the juvenile fun of the ventures and moderate success as a writing team.

Now, I watched the mischief spread from his smile to his eyes and found myself grinning back. He wore an X-Files tee shirt and kept a tiny skeleton key in the pocket of his jeans in case he found a secret drawer somewhere, and I felt like I’d known him all my life. My annoyance with John Kovak wafted away.

“I could be a married woman by sundown. Too bad we have work to do.” I licked the denuded stick of my fudgesicle, savoring the chocolate and damp birch taste of childhood summers. “Let’s go see if we can find the caretaker’s cabin. I want to take a look around the lodge in the daylight, and we still have to set up camp.”

Nick zinged his empty stick into the bag of trash in the backseat with a graceful flick of his wrist. “I’ll drive, you navigate.”

We pulled out of the lot, dipping and bouncing through the unavoidable craters of clay and gravel, and clawed our way onto the crumbling asphalt of SR6. Sunlight fell in hot, green shafts as we drove under the trees, and I watched the village of Davitt’s Grove, population 164, fall away behind us in the side mirror. I smoothed Kovak’s map on my thigh, feeling the oily creases of it.

“We’ll leave the road in about five miles. There’s no sign for Polecat Hollow, but it’s on our right. We’ll have to keep our eyes peeled for a dirt track.”

I looked up from the map at Nick’s deep chuckle. A dimple had appeared under his three-day growth of beard.

“Polecat Hollow? Is this place for real?”

“You’re in hill country now, baby. Wait until tonight. I’ll treat you to dinner at MeeMaw’s. I have to call Claudia from there and let her know we made it to the lodge. There isn’t any cell service for miles.”

Nick glanced over at me, sunlight winking on the wire frame of his aviators.

“MeeMaw? Who’s that?”

I laughed. “Not a who, a what. It’s the local tavern, although that’s pretty generous. It’s a dive bar just outside of Davitt’s Grove. Good hamburgers. Zero ambience.”

“Can’t wait,” he growled in mock ecstasy.

The late August air slid over us, laden with the last dusty lushness of the summer. Insects whirred and piped from the weeds. The trees hung exhausted foliage over the road. We drove through the flickering sun shadows until I felt as though we were caught in a zoetrope, the world a whirling drum of light and static images, presenting only the appearance of motion. It was good to disconnect from the recent tumult of my life and to let someone else take the wheel, in a metaphorical sense. I’d been sleeping in Dr. Claudia Moon’s guest room for the past month, unable to write or to be alone in my apartment since my fiancé’s departure with someone else. If not for Claudia’s renovation schemes for old Pepekissimo Lodge on Cold Ripple Lake, and the local campfire tales about the place (tales with a dark family connection that piqued more than my writer’s curiosity), I’d have still been curled around my broken heart.

The Jeep screeched to a halt, the big tires stuttering on the macadam. I jerked back to awareness. The map had slipped down between my seat and the console. I looked over at Nick and offered him a weak smile. He pointed through the bug-spattered windshield.

“I think that’s it. Polecat Hollow.” He peered at me with sharp blue eyes. “You okay?”

“Yes. Sorry. I must have dozed.” I fished the envelope from its resting place and stared at it. “This is it. See the boulder with the graffiti?” I pointed to a mammoth chunk of granite scrawled over with a crude black drawing of a menacing dog-creature, teeth bared. “Now we go two miles back, and we should see the footpath to the cabin. Red John asked me to tell you to take it slow.”

“You got it. Slow and easy.” He put the car in gear and eased us into the woods.

Red John hadn’t exaggerated. Polecat Hollow was a hellish strip of axle-deep ruts, stagnant pools, and jutting limestone goonies. We rolled and bounced along under the heavy tree canopy until we came to a wide spot in the road. There was just enough space for Nick to turn the Jeep, the tires kicking up clots of mud and a sharp verdant smell of crushed fern. At the edge of the crowding trees, half a bowed sheet of rusty corrugated roofing threatened tetanus from its perch atop four mismatched posts. The posts had once been white, but now sported pelts of moss and lichen. A red plastic gas container languished at the back of the lean-to.

Nick killed the engine and stretched. “Christ, my tailbone feels like it’s lodged in my neck. That is a road in only the broadest terms. Can you walk?”

I aimed a punch at his shoulder and slid from the passenger seat. The leafy stratum under my feet squelched and exhaled a mushroomy gust. I bent my back into shape and gestured at the lean-to.

“Well, that’s not the cabin, I hope.”

“No, it looks like it might be some kind of… garage.” He poked his head inside, careful not to bump a leaning post. “Not big enough for a car. My guess is an ATV. Look at the tracks.”

With our gazes fixed on the forest floor, we spotted the footpath at the same instant. No bigger than a deer trail, it snaked off into the shadows, massive stands of laurel shouldering up to it like a buffalo herd. From somewhere nearby came the sound of rushing water, possibly a steep fall.

“It’s pretty gloomy in there,” I said. “You know, Mr. Egolf doesn’t have a phone. Obviously. I couldn’t let him know we were coming out today. Do you think he has a gun?”

“Undoubtedly. He’s probably a serial killer.” Nick made a deep courtly bow, sweeping his arm toward the slender path. “After you, my dear.”

I pushed my way through the laurels, Nick thrashing at them behind me. The woods were silent except for our noise, and soon we became stealthy, too. For nearly a mile, I walked with the certainty that something kept pace with us, hidden by the undergrowth, watching. I kept my thoughts to myself, concentrating on not turning an ankle on the surfing tree roots, and after a while, the feeling subsided. Nerves. Just nerves and an imagination on steroids.

The cabin hove into view at the parting of some laurel branches, and I stopped as though turned to stone. Nick crashed into me, grabbing me by the waist to stop me from stumbling out into the sudden clearing. An old woman sat rocking on the porch, her gaze fixed on the terminus of the footpath, on us.

“Heard you when you pulled up at the shed. Been waiting.”

Nick stepped forward. “Uh, hello there. We’re looking for Mr. Egolf, the lodge caretaker. Claudia Moon sent us. I think she wrote that we’d be coming up this week?”

The woman stared for a long minute. “I’m Maudie Egolf, Preston’s auntie. He ain’t here. Didn’t know just when you was coming.” She rocked forward and stood, a tall raw-boned woman with her snow-and-iron hair in a tight bun. “Best come in and have some coffee.”

She vanished into the dark interior of the shack, leaving the door open.

Nick shook his head. “Oh, I don’t have a good feeling about this.”

“Neither do I.” I plucked at his tee shirt. “Come on. When have you ever turned down coffee?”

...to be continued