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  After the initial pleasantries were complete, Logan was quick to establish himself—with a variety of observations he’d picked up during his previous conversations—as someone who had at least a passing familiarity with the region and its news. As they spoke, Fred nodded with a pretense of sagacity, every so often stopping to pluck a bar towel off his left shoulder and wipe the worn varnish with it.

  “I’m a freelance photographer,” Logan said in response to a question from Fred. “Don’t work for any particular magazine or bureau. Nobody sends me anywhere, or hands me assignments. That means it’s up to me to find the most interesting pictures I can.”

  He took a pull from his beer as Fred gave another sagacious nod.

  “So I was thinking maybe I could get some shots of the region where these terrible accidents took place,” Logan went on. “You know, the killings of those backpackers.”

  “The Wilderness?” Fred asked, disbelief creeping into his voice.

  “Yes, that’s it. The Five Ponds Wilderness. It’s pretty close, right?”

  “Couldn’t get in there. Least not without a helicopter, or maybe a tank. That’s bad country in there. Nobody goes in except the occasional crazy hiker. And the last two hikers that went in there didn’t come out again.” Fred put a knowing fingertip to the side of his nose.

  “No guides?”

  Fred shook his head. “You’d be awful hard-pressed to find one—especially after what’s happened.”

  “Well, maybe I can just go to, you know, the edge of it. What I’m really looking for is a shot of a bear.” And here Logan leaned in a little conspiratorially. “I mean, if I sold that picture—the killer bear that mauled two backpackers—who’s going to dispute whether I snapped the right bear or not?”

  “Wasn’t no bear as killed those youngsters,” Fred said, leaning in a little himself.

  Logan feigned surprise. “No bear?”

  “Nope.”

  “What killed them, then?”

  Fred hesitated. “Don’t know as I should say, rightly. Haven’t got any proof. That is, unless you call sixty years of hearing tales, and seeing things with my own eyes, proof.”

  Fred was just about the most garrulous of the Pike Hollow residents Logan had spoken with. He also seemed to know more than most. Yet on this one particularly important point he seemed reticent. Logan realized he would have to show his hand just a little. He drained his beer, ordered another, and invited Fred to have one, on him. When it came, he said: “You must be talking about that clan.”

  At this, Fred nodded. “The Blakeneys,” he said, popping the cap off a bottle of Budweiser and placing it on the bar in front of him.

  This was a darkly hinted nugget that, in one form or another, Logan had picked up from just about everyone he’d talked to: the town’s deep, aiding, and long-standing mistrust of the so-called Blakeney clan.

  “Tell me about these Blakeneys,” Logan asked offhandedly. “Everything I’ve heard is just rumor.”

  Fred hesitated again.

  “I won’t say I heard it from you.”

  Fred considered a moment, then shrugged. “Guess there’s nothing wrong with saying what everyone in town knows already. Those Blakeneys have lived in the area since before anyone could remember.”

  “Where, exactly?”

  Fred pointed southwest, over Logan’s shoulder. “They’ve got a big, rambling old stead on the edge of the Wilderness.”

  “What’s it like?”

  Fred shrugged. “They don’t care for outsiders, and that’s a fact. Fenced themselves in, keep to themselves, make a living off the land, rarely set foot in town. Don’t know anybody who’s been inside, but from what I hear they’ve got all sorts of ramshackle buildings and things in there.”

  Logan pushed his beer bottle to one side, untouched. “Sounds strange, all right. But why would people think they had anything to do with the murders?”

  “First, there ain’t many bears around these parts. You find them in the High Peaks region now and again, but they avoid humans. Second, I’ve been hearing strange stories about those Blakeneys ever since I was a kid—stories that make me think them capable of murder…and more.”

  “What kind of strange stories?”

  Fred took a pull from his beer. “They’ve lived deep in the woods for too long. People do that, you know, and it changes them. But from what I hear tell, that clan was always vicious. That, and…well, there was a rash of missing children around here back in the seventies—oh, it got hushed up, but everybody knows who took ’em—and why.”

  Fred was voluble now, but even so Logan didn’t want to ask why aloud. He merely raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

  “Rituals. Dark rituals. And I don’t mean black magic—I mean something worse. The way those Blakeneys have dealings with the animals of the deep forest—well, it’s unnatural, people say. Communing with nature that way, becoming part of it. The wrong part. Who knows what’s become of them, or what they do, back up in there?”

  “That’s disturbing. But why would they want to kill those backpackers?”

  Even though the bar was empty, Fred leaned in still farther. “Mister, I can tell you that in just two words: tainted blood.”

  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 th
e 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.

  8

  Logan pulled up in front of Jessup’s small, tidy wood-frame home at a few minutes after seven. It was pleasantly situated on a small pond, just a mile outside the lively, tourist-friendly town of Saranac Lake. The setting felt worlds away from Pike Hollow, with its sense of remote desolation amid an unending universe of dark malignant forest.

  The house was decorated as Logan had expected: simple, Craftsman-style furniture; framed landscapes by local painters; a coffee table littered with the odd dichotomy of philosophical journals and magazines devoted to outdoor living. Over an excellent dinner of boeuf bourguignon and scalloped potatoes with raclette, he became acquainted with Jessup’s pair of towheaded children and Suzanne, a lovely woman with an acerbic wit that Logan hadn’t expected. Before marrying Jessup, she had attended Radcliffe, then taught at the Friends Seminary, the old, prestigious private school in Manhattan. Academically, she was clearly a good match for his old friend the philosopher-cum-ranger, and though Logan privately wondered if she found enough to keep her intellectually stimulated in this sleepy backwoods community, she apparently had her hands full homeschooling their kids as well as doing volunteer tutoring of disadvantaged children around the area.

  Dinner finished, Logan declined a slice of red velvet cake and, coffee cup in hand, followed Jessup out onto the front porch, where they sat in the inevitable Adirondack chairs and looked out over the pond. The windows threw cheerful yellow stripes of light out across the lawn, and the night was alive with the drone of insects. A waxing moon, almost full, shed a pale illumination over the surrounding forest.

  Jessup took a sip of coffee, then set the cup down on the broad arm of his chair. “So,” he said. “What did you think of Pike Hollow?”

  “Wouldn’t be my first choice to retire to.”

  Jessup smiled a little wryly. “Let me guess. The people you spoke with didn’t agree with the official conclusion that we’re dealing with a rogue bear.”

  “No. They had their own ideas about the responsible party.”

  “Let me guess once again—the Blakeney clan.”

  “That’s right. I went to pay a visit on them before heading back. Got a twelve-gauge in the face for my trouble.”

  “I wish you hadn’t gone there. You’re lucky that’s all you got.” Jessup was silent for a moment. “It’s my experience there’s a short list of reasons why people live within the park. The first is that they were born here, it’s all they know, and they have no desire or aspiration to move beyond it. The second is the tourist who comes here, falls in love, and either retires to the area or opens a shop or B and B or the like. Then there’s the third reason. It’s the person who doesn’t feel he fits in today’s society; that he is out of place, walking through life half asleep. People like that are drawn to the Adirondacks because, in Thoreau’s words, they want to live deliberately, to ‘front only the essential facts of life.’ ”

  “ ‘The world is too much with us,’ ” Logan quoted. “ ‘Little we see in Nature that is ours.’ ”

  “And Wordsworth had the right idea. But in any case, some people in this third group do tend to be a little crazy. Face it: one reason to live deep in the woods, away from other people, would be defective socialization. So, yes, as a ranger I’ve heard of many odd peop
le living off by themselves in various degrees of rustication. Such people tend to attract speculation and rumor—it’s only natural.” He took a sip of his coffee. “But the Blakeneys are a special case.”

  Logan remained silent, letting his old friend talk.

  “I’ve known about them for years, of course, but it wasn’t until after the death of the second backpacker that I began actively looking into their history. People in Pike Hollow say they’ve always been there, and the official records show nothing to the contrary: their compound had already been in place for decades, at least, before the park’s founding in 1885. All the park officials leave them alone, perhaps fearing that a confrontation would lead to some Waco-like tragedy. Their compound has never been officially surveyed, but that entire section of woods southwest of Pike Hollow has been grandfathered to the clan. No assessment has ever been made or taxes levied.”

  “I see.”

  “Of course, the Pike Hollow residents view the Blakeneys with the most suspicion, living as close to them as they do. There have been reports that others have had some limited success in getting acquainted. But there is no doubt they are an inbred, secretive, and most likely paranoid extended family, whose isolation over so many years has led to a warped view of the outside world.” Jessup hesitated a moment before continuing. “Did any of the Pike Hollow people you spoke to talk of, ah, specifics?”

  “Not really. The most they would do was lay the killings at the doorstep of the Blakeneys. The bar owner, Fred, said more than anybody.” Logan pulled out his notebook, consulted it for a moment. “He said they had lived in the woods too long. He said doing that changes a person. He claimed they stole babies for unknown rituals. And he said they had unnatural dealings with the animals of the deep forest—that they had, in his words, tainted blood.”

  “Tainted blood,” Jessup murmured. “Jeremy, let me explain something to you. That’s about as far as you’d expect a citizen of Pike Hollow to open up to an outsider like yourself. But what they talk of among themselves is something else again. I know, because I’ve heard some of it.”