A Soft Barren Aftershock by F. Paul Wilson
Creighton was overly generous, I thought, with the way he filled the three paper cups. I didn’t want any more, but I felt I had to keep up appearances. I sipped while the men quaffed.
“Jasper told us about the time he saw the Jersey Devil. He mentioned seeing pine lights at the same time.”
I sensed rather than saw Gus stiffen.
“Is that so?”
“Yeah. He said you see pine lights around here all the time. Is that true?
“You interested in pine lights or the Jersey Devil, boy?”
“Both. I’m interested in all the folktales of the Pines.”
“Well, don’t get too interested in the pine lights.”
“Why not?”
“Just don’t.”
I watched Creighton tip his jug and refill Gus’s cup.
“A toast!” Creighton said, lifting his cup. “To the Pine Barrens!”
“I’ll drink to that!” Gus said, and drained his cup.
Creighton followed suit, causing his eyes to fill with tears. I sipped while he poured another round.
“To the Jersey Devil!” Creighton cried, hoisting his cup again.
And again they both tossed off their drinks. And then another round.
“To the pine lights!”
Gus wouldn’t drink to that one. I was glad. I don’t think either of them would have remained standing if he had.
“Have you seen any pine lights lately, Gus,” Creighton said.
“You don’t give up, do you, boy,” the old man said.
“It’s an affliction.”
“So it is. All right. Sure. I see ‘em all the time. Saw some last night.”
“Really? Where?”
“None of your business.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll probably try to do something stupid like catch one, and then I’ll be responsible for what happened to you and this young lady here. Not on my conscience, no thank you.”
“I wouldn’t dream of trying to catch one of those things!” Creighton said.
“Well, if you did you wouldn’t be the first. Peggy Clevenger was the first.” Gus lifted his head and looked at me. “You heard of Peggy Clevenger, ain’t you, Miss McKelston?”
I nodded. “Sure. The Witch of the Pines. In the old days people used to put salt over their doors to keep her away.”
Creighton began scribbling.
“No kidding? This is great! What about her and the pine lights?”
” Peggy was a Hessian, like me. Lived over in Pasadena. Not the California Pasadena, the Pines Pasadena. A few miles east of Mount Misery. The town’s gone now, like it never been. But she lived thereabouts by herself in a small cabin, and people said she had all sorts of strange powers, like she could change her shape and become a rabbit or a snake. I don’t know about that stuff, but I heard from someone who should know that she was powerful interested in the pine lights. She told this fella one day that she had caught one of the pine lights, put a spell on it, and brought it down.”
Creighton had stopped writing. He was staring at Gus.
“How could she . . .?”
“Don’t know,” Gus said, draining his cup and shaking his head. “But that very night her cabin burned to the ground. They found her blackened and burned body among the ashes the next morning. So I tell you, kids, it ain’t a good idea to get too interested in the pine lights.”
“I don’t want to capture one,” Creighton said. “I don’t even want to see one. I just want to know where other people have seen them. How can that be dangerous?”
Gus thought about that. And while he was thinking, Creighton poured him another cupful.
“Don’t s’pose it would do any harm to show you where they was,” he said after a long slow sip.
“Then it’s settled. Let’s go.”
We gathered up the jugs and headed out into the late afternoon sunshine. The fresh air was like a tonic. It perked me up but didn’t dissipate the effects of all the jack I’d consumed.
When we reached the Wrangler, Creighton pulled out his sextant and compass.
“Before we go, there’s something I’ve got to do.”
Gus and I watched in silence as he took his sightings and scribbled in his notebook. Then he spread his map out on the hood again.
“What’s up?” I said.
“I’m putting Razorback Hill on the map,” he said.
He jotted his readings on the map and drew a circle. Before he folded everything up, I glanced over his shoulder and noticed that the line he had drawn from Apple Pie Hill ran right by the circle that was Razorback Hill.
“You through dawdlin?” Gus said.
“Sure am. You want to ride in front?”
“No thanks,” Gus said, heading for the rusty DeSoto. “I’ll drive myself and you kids follow.”
I said, “Won’t it be easier if we all go together?”
“Hell no! You kids have been drinkin’!”
When we stopped laughing, we pulled ourselves into the Wrangler and followed the old Hessian back up his private sand road.
5. The Firing Place
“I used to make charcoal here when I was young,” Gus said.
We were standing in a small clearing surrounded by young pines. Before us was a shallow sandy depression, choked with weeds.
“This used to be my firing place. It was deeper then. I made some fine charcoal here before the big companies started selling their bags of ‘brickettes’. “He fairly spat the word. “Ain’t no way any one of those smelly little things was ever part of a tree, I’ll tell you that.”
“Is this where you saw the lights, Gus?” Creighton said. “Were they moving?”
Gus said, “You got a one-track mind, don’t you, boy?” He glanced around. “Yeah, this is where I saw them. Saw them here last night and I saw them here fifty years ago, and I seen them near about every summer in between. Lots of memories here. I remember how while I was letting my charcoal burn I’d use the time to hunt up box turtles.”
“And sell them as snail hunters?” I said.
I’d heard of box turtle hunting—another Pinelands mini-industry—but I’d never met anyone who’d actually done it.
“Sure. Folks in Philadelphia buy all I could find. They liked to let them loose in their cellars to keep the snails and slugs under control.”
“The lights, Gus,” Creighton said. “Which way were they going?”
“They was goin’ the same way they always went when I seen them here. That way.”
He was pointing southeast.
“Are you sure?”
“Sure as shit, boy.” Gus’s tone was getting testy, but he quickly turned to me. “ ‘Scuse me, miss,” then back to Creighton. “I was standing back there right where my car is when about a half dozen of them swooped in low right overhead—not a hunting swoop, but a floaty sort of swoop—and traveled away over that pitch pine there with the split top.”
“Good!” said Creighton, eyeing the sky.
A thick sheet of cloud was pulling up from the west, encroaching on the sinking sun. Out came the sextant and compass. Creighton took his readings, wrote his numbers, then took a bearing on the tree Gus had pointed out. A slow, satisfied smile crept over his face as he drew the latest line on his map. He folded it up before I had a chance to see where that line went. I didn’t have to see. His next question told me.
“Say, Gus,” he said offhandedly. “What’s on the far side of Razorback Hill?”
Gus turned on Creighton like an angry bear.
“Nothing! There’s nothing there! So don’t you even think about going over there!”
Creighton’s smile was amused. “I was only asking. No harm in a little question, is there?”
“There is. There is. Yes, there surely is! Especially when those questions is the wrong ones. And you’ve been asking a whole lot of wrong questions, boy. Questions that’s gonna get you in a whole mess of bad trouble if you don’t get smart and learn that certain
He sounded like a character from one of those old Frankenstein movies.
“I hear you,” Creighton said, “and I appreciate your concern. But can you tell me the best way to get to the other side of that hill?”
Gus threw up his hands with an angry growl.
“That’s it! I’m havin’ no more to do with the two of you! I’ve already told you too much as it is.” He turned to me, his eyes blazing. “And you, Miss McKelston, you get yourself away from this boy. He’s headed straight to hell!”
With that he turned and headed for his car. He jumped in, slammed the door, and roared away with a spray of sand.
“I don’t think he likes me,” Creighton said.
“He seemed genuinely frightened,” I told him.
Creighton shrugged and began packing away his sextant.
“Maybe he really believes in the Jersey Devil,” he said. “Maybe he thinks it lives on the other side of Razorback Hill.”
“I don’t know about that. I got the impression he thinks the Jersey Devil is something to tell tall tales about while sitting around the stove and sipping jack. But those pine lights . . . he’s scared of them.”
“Just swamp gas, I’m sure,” Creighton said.
Suddenly I was furious. Maybe it was all the jack I’d consumed, or maybe it was his attitude, but I think at that particular moment it was mostly his line of bull.
“Cut it, Jon!” I said. “If you really believe they’re swamp gas, why are you tracking them on your map? You got me to guide you out here, so let’s have it straight. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know what’s going on, Mac. If I did, I wouldn’t be here. Isn’t that obvious? These pine lights mean something. Whether or not they’re connected to the Jersey Devil, I don’t know. Maybe they have a hallucinatory effect on people—after they pass overhead, people think they see things. I’m trying to establish a pattern.”
“And after you’ve established this pattern, what do you think you’ll find?”
“Maybe Truth,” he said. “Reality. Who knows? Maybe the meaning—or meaninglessness—of life.”
He looked at me with eyes so intense, so full of longing that my anger evaporated.
“Jon . . .?”
His expression abruptly shifted back to neutral and he laughed.
“Don’t worry, Mac. It’s only me, Crazy Creighton, putting you on again. Let’s have another snort of Gus Sooy’s best and head for civilization. Okay?”
“I’ve had enough for the day. The week!”
“You don’t mind if I partake, do you?”
“Help yourself.”
I didn’t know how he could hold so much.
While Creighton uncorked his jug, I strolled about the firing place to clear my fuzzy head. The sky was fully overcast now and the temperature was dropping to a more comfortable level.
He had everything packed away by the time I completed the circle.
“Want me to drive?” he said, tossing his paper cup onto the sand.
Normally I would have picked it up—there was something sacrilegious about leaving a Dixie cup among the pines—but I was afraid to bend over that far, afraid I’d keep on going head-first into the sand and become litter myself.
“I’m okay,” I said. “You’ll get us lost.”
We had traveled no more than a hundred feet or so when I realized that I didn’t know this road. But I kept driving. I hadn’t been paying close attention while following Gus here, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be long before I’d come to a fork or a cripple or a bog that I recognized, and then we’d be home free.
It didn’t quite work out that way. I drove for maybe five miles or so, winding this way and that with the roads, making my best guess when we came to a fork—and we came to plenty of those—and generally trying to keep us heading in the same general direction. I thought I was doing a pretty good job until we drove through an area of young pines that looked familiar. I stopped the Wrangler.
“Jon,” I said. “Isn’t this—?”
“Damn right it is!” he said, pointing to the sand beside the road. “We’re back at Gus’s firing place! There’s my Dixie cup!”
I turned the Jeep around and headed back the way I came.
“What are you doing?” Creighton said.
“Making sure I don’t make the same mistake twice!” I told him.
I didn’t know how I could have driven in a circle. I usually had an excellent sense of direction. I blamed it on too much Jersey lightning and on the thickly overcast sky. Without the sun as a marker, I’d been unable to keep us on course. But that would change here and now. I’d get us out of here this time around.
Wrong.
After a good forty-five minutes of driving, I was so embarrassed when I recognized the firing place again that I actually accelerated as we passed through, hoping Creighton wouldn’t recognize the spot in the thickening dusk. But I wasn’t quick enough.
“Hold it!” he cried. “Hold it just a damn minute! There’s my cup again! We’re right back where we started!”
“Jon,” I said, “I don’t understand it. Something’s wrong.”
“You’re stewed, that’s what’s wrong!”
“I’m not!”
I truly believed I wasn’t. I’d been feeling the effects of the jack before, true, but my head was clear now. I was sure I’d been heading due east, or at least pretty close to it. How I’d come full circle again was beyond me.
Creighton jumped out of his seat and came around the front of the Wrangler.
“Over you go, Mac. It’s my turn.”
I started to protest, then thought better of it. I’d blown it twice already. Maybe my sense of direction had fallen prey to the “apple palsy,” as it was known. I lifted myself over the stick shift and dropped into the passenger seat.
“Be my guest.”
Creighton drove like a maniac, seemingly choosing forks at random.
“Do you know where you’re going?” I said.
“Yeah, Mac,” he said. “I’m going whichever way you didn’t. I think.”
As darkness closed in and he turned on the headlights, I noticed that the trees were thinning out and the underbrush was closing in, rising to eight feet or better on either side of us. Creighton pulled off to the side at a widening of the road.
“You should stay on the road,” I told him.
“I’m lost,” he said. “We’ve got to think.”
“Fine. But it’s not as if somebody’s going to be coming along and want to get by.”
He laughed. “That’s a fact!” He got out and looked up at the sky. “Damn! If it weren’t for the clouds we could figure out where we are. Or least know where north is.”
I looked around. We were surrounded by bushes. It was the Pine Barrens’ equivalent of an English hedge maze. There wasn’t a tree in sight. A tree can be almost as good as a compass—its moss faces north and its longest branches face south. Bushes are worse than useless for that, and the high ones only add to your confusion.
And we were confused.
“I thought Pineys never get lost,” Creighton said.
“Everybody gets lost sooner or later out here.”
“Well, what do Pineys do when they get lost?”
“They don’t exhaust themselves or waste their gas by running around in circles. They hunker down and wait for morning.”
“To hell with that!” Creighton said.
He threw the Wrangler into first and gunned it toward the road. But the vehicle didn’t reach the road. It lurched forward and rocked back. He tried again and I heard the wheels spinning.
“Sugar!” I said.
Creighton looked at me and grinned.
“Stronger language is allowed and even encouraged in this sort of situation.”
“I was referring to the sand.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got four-wheel drive.”
“Right. And all four wheels are spinning.
He got out and pushed and rocked while I worked the gears and throttle, but I knew it was no use. We weren’t going to get out of this superfine sand until we found some wood and piled it under the tires to give them some traction.
And we weren’t going to be able to hunt up that kind of wood until morning.
I told Creighton that we’d only waste what gas we had left and that our best bet was to call it a night and pull out the sleeping bags. He seemed reluctant at first, worrying about deer ticks and catching Lyme disease, but he finally agreed.
He had no choice.
6. The Pine Lights
“I owe you one, Jon,” I said.
“How was I to know we’d get lost?” he said defensively. “I don’t like this any more than you!”
“No. You don’t understand. I meant that in the good sense. I’m glad you talked me into coming with you.”
I’d found us a small clearing not too far from the Jeep. It surrounded the gnarled trunk of an old lone pine that towered above the dominant brush.
We’d eaten the last of the sandwiches and now we sat on our respective bedrolls facing each other across the Coleman lamp sitting between us on the sand. Creighton was back to sipping his applejack. I would have killed, or at least maimed, for a cup of coffee.
I watched his face in the lamplight. His expression was puzzled.
“You must still be feeling the effects of that Jersey lightning you had this afternoon,” he said.
“No. I’m perfectly sober. I’ve been sitting here realizing that I’m glad to be back. I’ve had a feeling for years that something’s been missing from my life. Never had an inkling as to what it was until now. But this is it. I’m . . .” My throat constricted around the word. “I’m home.”
It wasn’t the jack talking, it was my heart. I’d learned something today. I’d learned that I loved the Pine Barrens. And I loved its people. So rich in history, so steeped in its own lore, somehow surviving untainted in the heart of twentieth-century urban madness. I’d turned my back on it. Why? Too proud? Too good for it now? Maybe I’d thought I’d pulled myself up by my bootstraps and gone on to bigger and better things. I could see that I hadn’t. I’d taken the girl out of the Pinelands but I hadn’t taken the Pinelands out of the girl.