A Season of Whispers Page 12

  “Stop! Do not attack!”

  The thing regarded Grosvenor with shiny black eyes little bigger than pinheads.

  “There is no food here. Return to your pit.”

  A baritone growl rolled in its throat.

  “Go, I said.”

  Slowly with its spade-like claws it pushed itself backwards, its sinuous bulk receding into the cistern. Just before its jaws passed the rim, it looked straight at Rose.

  “Another new recruit.”

  Then it slid and scrabbled away and was gone.

  Once Grosvenor was sure the wild-eyed Rose had regained control of his instincts, he released the man’s wrist. Rose lowered his arm but refused to holster his weapon.

  Lyman, meanwhile, had pushed himself to a sitting position against the wall. He studied Grosvenor with a steely glare.

  Rose began to babble questions: What is it? How does it talk? Grosvenor, for some minutes, expounded upon the nature of the thing they’d just now witnessed, including its conjectured origins, its behavior and intelligence, and its facility for speech. Certain specifics and details he left obscured. Lyman, by way of silent expressions that passed across his face, indicated he did not agree with Grosvenor on every point; and Grosvenor, observing these wordless criticisms of his lecture, felt a spike of irritation so severe it surprised even him. He wished Rose would hit Lyman again.

  “But it listened to you,” said Rose. “It obeyed you as would a hound.”

  “Precisely,” said Grosvenor. “It is a stupid beast, easily controlled by sticks and carrots. I have it under my thumb.”

  “You trained it?”

  “As a horse is broken, so I broke it.”

  “And yet you also say it dwells underground, tunneling like a mole.”

  “Yes.”

  “Might not it be used to fetch as a dog fetches?”

  Grosvenor answered with pretended indifference. “Perhaps.”

  “It occurs to me there might be some use for such a beast,” said Rose. “I grew up not far from Dahlonega in northern Georgia. You’ve heard of it?”

  “Of course,” said Grosvenor in an uneasy tone. The town had been the nexus of a gold rush less than two decades before; the hills were so fertile with the stuff that the U.S. Mint had opened a branch office in Dahlonega to strike coins.

  “Most of the gold around Dahlonega is played out,” Rose said. “As a result, many of the old claims considered exhausted can be bought cheap. If someone were to buy up some deeds and then have a fresh go at them with this trained mole of yours, who knows what wealth it could uncover.”

  Grosvenor shook his head. “Unfortunately, the creature you saw is old and too large to transport so far a distance.”

  “Are there any more of them?”

  “I’m afraid it’s the last of its kind.”

  Lyman said, “It’s pregnant.”

  Like the shadow of some maleficent sundial, Grosvenor’s head rotated slowly to cast Lyman into the darkness of his stare.

  Rose laughed. “Well now boy, is that a fact?”

  “It is,” said Lyman. “It’s preparing to lay its eggs soon.” He sat with one hand over his swelling eye, the rest of him loose and ready like a hawk on tree branch, observing events below, waiting.

  “It’s easier to train a pup than a toothless hound. Is what he says true, Mr. Grosvenor?”

  Grosvenor mumbled something.

  “Say again? I didn’t catch that.”

  “Yes,” said Grosvenor louder, “I believe Mr. Lyman to be correct.”

  “But, Mr. Grosvenor, didn’t you just say it’s the last of its kind?” The easygoing malice, so recently directed toward Lyman, now focused on the other man. “Forgive me, but didn’t it take Adam and Eve to make Cain and Abel?”

  Grosvenor took a deep breath. “Yes, but it’s a matter of when. A child gestates in the course of forty weeks. But the gestation of an elephant is nearly two years. A whale is almost as long. For an animal as ancient as this, who can say? Forty years, forty decades, maybe. Regardless, the male is long dead.”

  Lyman said, “As far as you know,” but neither of the other men acknowledged him.

  “Mr. Rose,” said Grosvenor, “I’m sorry to have given you a fright with an appearance of our local wildlife, but may I remind you of the bargain the two of us struck not more than an hour ago in my office. You are to remove this—” he pointed at Lyman “— this criminal from Bonaventure henceforth and take him to New York for justice, and in return for leading you to him, I am owed a finder’s fee of twenty percent of any monies found in his possession.”

  “I take it our arrangement of an extra twenty dollars a month is voided,” said Lyman.

  Grosvenor regarded him coolly. “Why settle for an annuity when the principal can be withdrawn as a lump sum?”

  “Of course. But I’m curious. Am I the only one with whom you’ve made a special arrangement at Bonaventure?”

  “I will put it to you this way, Mr. Lyman,” said Grosvenor. “You may be something special to my daughter, but you’re nothing special to me.”

  Rose walked over to the cistern and pulled up the rope with the bag at the end. He dashed away from the edge before opening the bag. His examination produced a low whistle.

  “I am a man of my word, Mr. Grosvenor,” said Rose. “I’ll give you your twenty percent. However, I should add that my employer, Mrs. Tallmadge, has stated that, as an incentive, whomever locates Caleb may keep his stolen money as reward, which means I now possess the remaining eighty percent.” Rose held up the bag. “It therefore appears I am in a position to purchase some of the eggs of this strange turkey you’ve been growing here on your farm.”

  “That’s quite out of the question.” Grosvenor’s voice trembled.

  Rose fingered his pistol and said to him, “I’m not asking any question.”

  •••

  Grosvenor awoke from his first sleep and lay listening. His wife breathed softly beside him; the house silent save for the typical creaks. Checking his pocket watch on the nightstand was impossible in the inky darkness, but he judged the hour past midnight. He pecked his wife on the forehead, rose, and dressed.

  Downstairs, as soon as Grosvenor touched the floorboards, Rose threw off the blanket and sat up on the small couch in the parlor. Something inside Grosvenor sank.

  The yard under a new moon was just as impenetrable as indoors, and only the light of the men’s half-hooded lantern illuminated the clouds of frosty breath as they puffed their way to the stone house, with a short pause at the toolshed for Grosvenor to retrieve a rucksack. They walked in silence, cautious of being overheard by some insomniac farm member, the gravel of the road crunching beneath their soles. Grosvenor turned back toward the Consulate, and with relief saw neither light nor curious face at any window. Slowly, in a long exhale, he released the air in his lungs.

  The stone house loomed blacker than the black night. In the basement they found the well room dark and empty. On the ground lay the rope Rose had used to bind Lyman’s wrists and ankles.

  “Our hen has flown its coop,” said Rose. “He’s probably miles from here. Now I have to hunt him down again.”

  “You already have his money,” said Grosvenor. “The bounty will wait.” He dangled his lantern over the edge of the well, peering into the depths. “Though I do wish he had left the extra lamp.” His voice betrayed a certain misgiving for what would come next.

  Rose also stared with reluctance into the pit. “How do you know it’s not down there? Waiting for us?”

  “It’s gone. It could wait no longer.”

  “But how do you know?”

  In truth Grosvenor knew little but intuited much. Its slyness was uncanny, he admitted. It was easy to see how Garrick could attribute intelligence to it, to credit its instinctual navigation of matters both conjectural and practical. Yet always upon reflection, nothing in its behavior or words struck him as originating fro
m anything other than a very smart dog, assuming dogs could speak. A dog was fawning and servile. The thing—it had no proper name, and so Grosvenor always thought of it as just the thing—had a knack for ingratiation, for knowing just how to present itself. It wanted to please its master and therefore fetched or herded or ratted according to breed; the benefit to man seemed purposeful but was merely a consequence of the dog’s desire for scraps or a spot by the hearth. Whatever cunning it displayed was illusory.

  Grosvenor said in reply, “If it wanted us, it could have taken us the instant we walked out of the Consulate door. It would’ve heard our footsteps across the porch and down the stairs. Even now it would know exactly where we stand, were it still on the farm.”

  “Its hearing is that good?”

  “Believe me, Mr. Rose—it hears everything.”

  With nothing else to be said, they descended the ladder to the floor of the pit. Grosvenor did his best to ignore the muck that littered it and the suggestions in its odors and shapes. Instead he waved his lantern in the mouths of the various passages. Finally he chose one tunnel, which seemed smoother and cleaner than the others, and ducking his head, led the way down its course.

  They did not travel far when something glittered under the lamp’s beams.

  Grosvenor stepped forward and picked up the raw nugget, held it close to his face. He judged it near twenty-two karat purity—it was no pyrite—and weighing close to three pounds. By far the largest yet, worth at least nine hundred dollars.

  The things Grosvenor could do with that money.

  Rose let out one of his whistles and held up his lantern to see it. “You mean to say your creature leaves gold laying around here like pennies at the beach? You’re right, Mr. Grosvenor—that animal is worth something.”

  Quickly the nugget vanished inside Grosvenor’s deepest coat pocket. He knew the first thing anyone wants when unexpected money is received is a percentage.

  “No, Mr. Rose,” he said. “It never leaves such things by accident. What you saw just now was a small token left here on purpose, intended to be found by me alone.” As a cat leaves a dead sparrow on the doorstep, Grosvenor thought. A parting gift left for its master, whom it imagined it would never see again.

  Or was it something else? Perhaps it suspected Grosvenor would follow it—perhaps it intuited the dark errand Grosvenor was on. A bribe, a dissuasion from further harassment. A payoff.

  But this was attributing too much to it. Grosvenor considered the attack on Minerva and Judith earlier in the day; he knew to ascribe logic to an animal was itself irrational. The girls had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong hour. The appetence that seized it, the passion of what every fiber drove it to do, only made the creature more bestial than ever. Grosvenor was the one who wielded carrots and sticks, not the animal.

  The possibility of a third interpretation of the gold never entered Grosvenor’s mind.

  The tunnel ran as crooked as a nightcrawler pulled from under a log, and often they arrived at crossroads where other passages crossed the main before curving into shadow. Many of these lay either partially or completely collapsed, making the decision of which course to take easy; and in cases when it wasn’t, Grosvenor always selected the smoother bored of the choices, reasoning that these were more trafficked by their quarry and therefore more stable.

  As they walked—or rather staggered, both men having to stoop as if in a low-ceilinged cellar—Grosvenor endeavored to keep his mind from thinking too much about the confined arteries they traveled. He began to babble. He identified the composition of protruding rocks, he noted the strata of the soil. He soon digressed into the phenomenon of the Moodus Noises, explaining how they resulted from tunnels dug by the beast that collapsed after its passage through them—an infelicitous topic, considering their circumstance.

  “This is why the beast could never leave the farm by tunneling,” Grosvenor said, “for the whole is surrounded by a ring of rock too precarious and dense for it to penetrate. That’s why it must travel aboveground to escape.”

  “But why couldn’t it do that before?” Rose massaged his lower back with a free hand, sore from the bending. “Why tonight?”

  Arrived at another nexus, Grosvenor chewed his lip before plunging forward. “Doubtless you’ve heard tales of a man dying and his dog waiting patiently on the doorstep for him to come home. The two situations are similar. Today the last leash tethering the beast was —”

  His sentence went unfinished. In that instant, collapsing dirt and gravel echoed somewhere close. Both men halted suddenly.

  “Your pet’s behind us.” Rose’s voice was a whisper.

  “No. It’s the tunnel crumbling. We must hurry.”

  They continued on, thoughts of premature burial hastening their steps. Their course, which did not always keep to the horizontal, began a deep decline. Rocks and clods slid before them as they scudded down the slope, and the weight of the earth above them burdened their minds like chains. In the lamplight sweat ran down their faces, the air as humid and thick as the closing walls. They halted again at the clatter of rolling rock and showering sand.

  “I tell you, something’s following us.”

  Grosvenor shook his head, wheezing, the air almost too solid to breathe.

  Neither voiced their mutual fear, which was the dread vision of rounding a turn only to find the way blocked, forcing them to follow their own steps backwards only to find it collapsed, trapping them. Not soon enough their path struck an upwards tack. The walls sped by, coarse and freshly dug, uninterrupted by cross-passage or byway, and then suddenly they scrabbled up a near vertical length and over the rim like clumsy swimmers pulling themselves over the gunwales of a boat. In the cold night air, the sweat turned to ice on their faces, and both realized they had been running.

  Still huffing, they picked up the trail again. It wasn’t hard to find. The creature’s weight and claws had carved deep rents and fissures into the soil, and following its path through the trees and across the roads was like following in the path of a narrow tornado, the earth disrupted and altered by its transit.

  Rose seemed content not to speak or ask questions. With the pressure of tons above them removed, conversation was now the last thing Grosvenor desired. With a deep breath he reminded himself that soon he’d be rid of the beast forever. It was a leftover, a remnant of Sed Garrick, and with Garrick gone, the last of his tools would soon follow.

  The generation that came next—they would be Grosvenor’s tools.

  By the use of side lanes and meanders, the trackers bypassed Saltonstall and kept to the loneliest roads and woodlands, passing darkened farmhouses and fields through November air as sharp as shears. They kept the lantern wicks dialed low.

  The miles passed quickly as they followed the path of ruin over the landscape.

  In lockstep beside Grosvenor, Rose walked with jaw clenched, the muscles of his back and shoulders tauter than a hangman’s knot. If one’s initial encounter with a bear involves nearly being savaged by it, then he may be excused for feeling some anxiety as he sets out in search of its cubs. Part of Grosvenor wished the thing had finished Rose in the basement; and another part daydreamed of it rising up with a roar to send Rose scampering into the night. If the bounty man had just taken Lyman and gone, that would’ve been the end of it. Now, their arrangement was more—complicated.

  And yet as they walked, something crept to the forefront of Grosvenor’s attention, like shadows in the corner of the eye that are dismissed as nothing, yet gradually grow into awareness. It was the conviction they were not alone. More than twice Grosvenor happened to glance into the trees behind him to see a brief dot of light as of a hastily covered lantern or shapes in the night that suggested skulking figures. When he blinked to look again, he saw only darkness broken by trunks and undergrowth. His mind attributed these distractions to tiredness and the gravity of his errand, to the fear of being discovered.

  Except Rose saw it t
oo.

  “Hold on,” he said. Rose handed Grosvenor his lantern and vanished among the wildness. A moment later there was a shout and Grosvenor thought he heard a woman’s voice. Then silence.

  Finally, Rose reappeared, his pistol pointed at the backs of two figures who marched before him. Minerva and Tom Lyman.

  Grosvenor’s shock was apparent. “How now,” he said to them, “my sweet child, what are you doing so far from your bed at this hour? And Mr. Lyman, what villainy is this?”

  Drawn and white, Minerva ignored his question. “Father, better to ask your conscience what brings you here.”

  Grosvenor addressed Lyman. “You are a devil of a man. What thoughts have you placed into her head to bring her to some lonely hilltop so early in the morning? You, sir, are no better than a kidnapper.”

  But Lyman, resolute, shook his head. “I believe we’ll return to our blankets the quicker without obfuscations or diversions. We know your errand.”

  During this intercourse, Rose had fished a length of rope from his pocket—the same used on Lyman earlier. “Well,” Rose said, “if we all agree what we’re doing here, let’s get on and be done with it,” and he wound and tied an end around Minerva’s wrists and the other around Lyman’s, leaving them bound and connected by a length of several feet.

  “Mr. Rose,” said Grosvenor, “unhand my daughter. She is not one of your criminals to be tethered to a chain gang.”

  “To be sure I will, as soon as I get what I came for.”

  Grosvenor’s face reddened. “You dare take my own blood as hostage? You’re suddenly too brash.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  The two men stared at each other—but there is little contest when only one among them holds a pistol. Instead Grosvenor turned toward his daughter, the demand for an explanation insistent. Minerva stood straight and silent, facing forward.

  “How do you come to be here?” Grosvenor asked her. “It was you following us through the tunnels. How did you know?”

  “How indeed,” she said. But the answer to the first question was simply this: she and Lyman were much practiced walkers.