“Balls,” he told himself and he screwed on a mocking smile. Even so, he reached over to the fence rail, tapped the coal out of his pipe, grinding it into the mud and put the warm pipe in his pocket so that he had both hands free. For a moment he stood there unconsciously holding the shotgun at port arms, sniffing the wind like Spooker. The dead-sweet smell was, if anything, stronger, and that wasn’t right. The breeze was coming out of the west, blowing across Pine River. The state forestland was north and east of his place, and Pinelands College was south and east. There were no deer woods to the west. Just farm fields and the river, and on the other side of the river was a big auto junkyard that covered more than a square mile.
With the pipe gone his sense of smell began sharper with each breath, and now the dead-sweet smell was much stronger. Not distant at all and…not a dead scent, really. More like sick-sweet. Earthy and rotting and somehow—he fished for the word—
“Balls,” he said, and decided that he’d had enough of moonlit strolls. He had walked the fenceline for half a mile and it ringed his property, but if he cut across the fallow field he could be home in just a couple of minutes. He looked due east to where the lighted windows of his home gave the house its own definition against the utter blackness of the fields and forest beyond. Those yellow rectangles had always looked homey to him, warm and inviting and—even he had to admit it—safe, but now those tiny dots of light seemed dwarfed by the immense darkness and as he looked at them he thought he had never seen anything look as lonely.
Carby started out across the field, looking down as he went to pick a path through the shadows on the ground. It wasn’t until he was a third of the way across that he saw the mound, and it stopped him in his tracks. The hump of dirt wasn’t big, no more than three feet high at the crest, but it was there and he sure as hell hadn’t made it. He hadn’t done any digging in this field all year.
“What the hell is this shit?” There was a small flashlight on his keychain for finding key slots on the fence locks, and he fished in his jeans for his keys and then flicked it on. It was so dark out that the tiny flash threw a pretty good beam and Carby played it over the mound. It was maybe eight feet long, but only a yard high in the middle and tapering off pretty quickly toward each end. The dirt was rough and chunky like it had been hand dug, not clean packed the way a shovel would have done. He shone the beam all along it and then swept the area around the mound. He saw two things that caused gooseflesh to pebble him from feet to hairline. All around the mound were footprints. Clear prints that went this way and that, sometimes standing alone, sometimes overlapping. City shoes with smooth soles, the complex tread-pattern of sneakers, and the rippled ridges of work boots. He counted five separate pairs. That was the first thing, and it froze him to the spot.
The second thing he saw made his pores open and burst with cold sweat. Just beyond the mound, maybe ten feet farther on into the darkness, was a second mound. He moved the light around and saw a third. And a fourth. All of them were about the same length, the same height. All made up of hand-churned clods of dirt. Then he saw the fifth mound. It was not as high as the others, nor as rounded on top. In fact the top of this mound was ragged and the sides had caved back from the crest. Carby swallowed a lump the size of a corncob. His flash beam played over the uneven dirt and even without drawing any closer to it he could see that this mound was
Open was a strange thought, and Carby took a step closer, examining the mound, trying to understand them all, but trying to understand this one more because this one bothered him more. This one looked even more like a…
He didn’t even want to think that word, but there it was. The thing looked like a grave. “Oh, shit,” he said, and a thousand thoughts flew around in his head like hysterical crows in a lightning-struck tree.
