Keep Quiet - 7. A radiance that beckons

I have never been more relieved to welcome the arrival of spring than I was that year. The receding snows and increasing hours of sunlight appeared to free the world all around us from the iron grip under which it had remained, helpless, during the long dark and the icy weather. The skies cleared up as the weeks progressed, and by the end of March the regular overcast gloom under which we had lived had been completely replaced by cloudless, blue magnificence. It lifted my spirits to know that we were not completely isolated from the world anymore, and I could certainly tell that my feelings were shared by several members of the household staff. Ever since Ms. Avery’s disappearance, a persistent gloomy dejection had been evident in some of their visages, while others betrayed, from time to time, naked and superstitious fear. I did not need Mr. White to come and tell me that some of the servants had grown convinced that the property was haunted. I feared that, once the roads became traversable, Charles and I would be facing mass desertion and would be forced to hire new people for most if not all the positions which were likely to be abandoned.

All of this changed radically, however, when we received a rather shocking surprise on the day when the first supplies of the year were delivered to the estate from the village of Tupper Lake. The driver, a young man by the name of Richard Sorenson, had news which he could barely hold himself back from sharing, apparently – and, indeed, no sooner had Mr. White begun to unload the truck full of foodstuffs, firewood, fuel, paper, and liquor, that Sorenson sought out both Charles and myself. While under the pretense of wanting to speak to us privately, and yet talking loud enough to be heard by all the nearby servants, he told us that Ms. Sarah Avery was alive.

“She came in the middle of winter, suddenly like,” he told us, speaking mostly to me once he realized the extent of Charles’s hearing impediment.

Shock and relief warred within me, preventing from speaking at first.

“Impossible,” I replied at last. “How? When?”

“I thought you’d tell me,” he replied with a conspiratorial little grin. “Seeing as how she was s’pposed to be working here.”

I did not dignify him with an answer, but merely glared. The lad looked barely eighteen years old and appeared to fail to grasp the seriousness of the situation.

“She, um, asked me to give you this,” Sorenson stammered after a rather uncomfortable pause. He reached into his coat and took out a small wrapped package, which he handed over to me. I promptly gave it to Charles.

“What is it?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Just said she found it out in the woods, Sarah did. Mentioned she thought you might be interested in reading it. Anyway, she came into the village a few weeks ago, in bad shape. Dr. Gordon thought she had frostbite in her feet but thankfully she only lost the one toe. No one knows how she managed to walk the entire way and she’s been really quiet about it. Staying with her sister now.”

“Has she given an account of the events which led her to wander off?” I asked.

“Funny thing, that,” Sorenson admitted. “She keeps saying she had an attack of the nerves. Won’t say why, but one of my cousins, Roberta, asked her and she says that Sarah said that she can’t remember. The way she tells it, Sarah remembers going to sleep in her bedroom and then waking up in the middle of the forest. She knew the area, so she came home, but it was snowing pretty hard and she wasn’t wearing very many clothes, or so Dr. Gordon says. Some folks thought that she might’ve been escaping, or something, but Sarah says she wants to come back as soon as her feet get better. Told me to send you her apologies. Says it won’t happen again.”

I had dozens of questions, but I doubted this uninformed youth would be able to answer them with anything but idle gossip, and so I merely replied, “Thank you. Anything else?”

Sorenson waited for a beat, as if expecting either Charles or myself to be forthcoming with a particularly juicy tidbit of information he could carry back to his village, but he was soon disappointed and excused himself to help with the unloading of the supplies.

For the next couple of days, nobody in our household talked of anything but the mysterious and frankly miraculous survival of Ms. Avery. Nobody asked either Charles or I any direct questions regarding the matter, but I overheard enough whispered conversations in the hallways, in the basement and in the kitchen, to know that the general sentiment was a mixture of awe, suspicion, and relief. It was annoying to have to deal with such gossip, but the news did have the positive effect of preventing anyone from quitting, and I must admit that the knowledge that Ms. Avery had not perished in the woods brought me comfort, even though the manner of her survival gave me much to think about.

For his part, Charles spent the better part of the next morning and well into the evening reading the contents of the package which Sorenson had delivered. I was curious, but I occupied myself with other things until it was time for bed, when Charles handed me the object: a tattered notebook, quite thick, which looked as though it had been soaked and dried several times. The pages were brittle and sometimes sticky, but its contents appeared to be quite legible.

“You should read this,” Charles told me. “I think you’ll find it… interesting.”

“Is it Ms. Avery’s diary?” I asked him, already wondering how a maid which I had thought to be all but illiterate had managed to produce page after page of intricate, neat writing.

“No. It belonged to the reporter. Eoin Caine.”

I blinked. “The one who was found…”

I did not finish the sentence, but Charles nodded. He was the man whose corpse had been discovered by the surveyors Charles had hired. The man missing a hand… And the man which, by horrible implication, must have perforce attacked Charles years ago, and stolen the meteorite which we had discovered at the bottom of the crater.

“What does it say?” I asked.

Charles shook his head. It is best if you read, he signed. Trust me. I don’t know whether it is meant to be factual, but if it is…

He left the sentence unfinished and climbed into bed. I disrobed and joined him, settling down into our comfortable nighttime routine. I caressed Charles’s hair with my left hand until he fell asleep, but I remained awake, reading by candlelight.

The more I read the lines penned by Eoin Caine, the more suspicious I became. Surely the conjectures this man had made were nothing more than the result of an overstimulated imagination. After all, this had been a man who reveled in reporting about the macabre and the horrifying, a man who had been obsessed by the disappearance of the hikers and who might have had a vested interest in exaggerating the details relating to their story in order to make it seem more mysterious than it really had been. He might have been planning to publish his wild theories with no evidence whatsoever simply to draw attention to himself again, and to sell more newspapers.

This journal had been his personal property, however. Why would he have written it as though attempting to deceive even himself? Was it not more logical to assume that these pages contained his honest opinions, before he gave them the shape of a journalistic article?

I did not sleep that night at all – morning found me still reading. The next day, around noon, Charles and I set out by tacit agreement in the direction of the crater. We went alone. We were hoping to find no hint of the things the journal mentioned… But we did.

We did.

**

Eoin Caine’s journal.

September 3

Just arrived at Tupper Lake. There’s a big story here, I can feel it. There are too many unknowns, too many unsolved things. Mattson back at the paper thinks I’m wasting my time chasing this, but I know I’m not. This is big. Just how big, I’m going to find out. I have enough money to be here a couple months, maybe longer. I’ll make sure it’s time well spent.

I booked a room in the village. Small, but I don’t expect to be using it too much. I leave tomorrow, straight for the place where the abandoned campsite was found, the last place the hikers were all together and alive. It’s important that I go there quick – there might be some more evidence lying around, things the detective missed. The investigation was sloppy and hurried. I won’t be.

September 5

I’m on the trail now, following the same path Smith and the others followed. I know exactly where they went. I didn’t tell the fellows at the paper this, but I went all the way to Maine and managed to convince Smith’s family to let me copy the travel log he kept during the trip. They found it in his tent along with the rest of his things. He didn’t write much – just the path he was following, the miles they covered each day, that sort of thing. It’s going to help me a lot, though. I’m going to retrace their steps.

September 6

I came to the first place they set up camp. I must admit I am disappointed. There isn’t much here, not after so much time. I expected to find some clues but there is nothing of interest and I can’t say I wasn’t afraid of this. I spent all day looking around the area. Waste of time. Tomorrow I will try to cover the remaining distance to the main camp, the last one they built and the one they abandoned so suddenly. I hope the weather holds. So far it has been good, and no animals have bothered me.

Now that I think about it, I haven’t seen very many animals at all. The forest is quiet. I hope it’s not a sign that there is something out there hunting. Something dangerous. There have been no large predators sighted around these parts that I know of, but I did bring a shotgun just in case. I still don’t know what happened here, and I need to be prepared for anything.

I will set up camp here for the night.

September 7

Spent a bad night. Why is it so quiet? After setting up my tent I had some food and tried to sleep. But there was no noise… I couldn’t hear any crickets or birds or anything, really. It spooked me for some reason. Maybe I’m just imagining things, but something about this place does not feel natural at all. I’ve been camping plenty of times and there are always bugs and small critters about. Not now. It was so quiet when I lay down to sleep that I swear I could hear my own damn heartbeat. Took me a while to actually doze off.

Then the noises came. I woke up right away, my heart was pounding. I don’t know why but it’s like I was expecting something like this. I heard what sounded like careful, dragging footsteps through the leaf litter. They were faint at first, but the more I waited, the closer they came. They would start, then stop. Then they would start again, closer. They sounded odd, not like something a person would make, I don’t think.

I thought it was a bear. I waited until I was reasonably sure that the creature was close enough to shoot and then I jumped out of my tent, gun in hand. I had a flashlight but I didn’t even need it. The moon was very bright.

There was nothing out there. I looked. The strangest thing is that the footsteps had been heavy, and I’m sure I didn’t imagine them. Whatever made them, it somehow disappeared in the couple seconds it took me to leave the tent.

Next morning I looked: there were tracks. I’m not an expert, but they looked like wolf tracks to me.

I’ll have to be much more careful. Something is not right.

September 10

I’m sure I’m being followed. I reached the main camp today, the place where the hikers set up their tents for the last time. I put my tent up in the same area just a few minutes ago. Investigating will have to wait for the morning.

I’m in no mood for investigating, though. The last few nights, every single night, I’ve heard the dragging footsteps. In the morning I see the tracks. The forest around me is still quiet, much too quiet, and it’s beginning to drive me nuts. I haven’t seen as much as a rabbit for days now, it’s all plants and trees and rocks. And I feel…

This is going to sound crazy but I feel like I’m being watched. All the time. The strangest thing is that the same thing happened to Smith. He wrote a little note the night before he and his friends disappeared. It was the only note he wrote on his travel log that didn’t have anything to do with mileage or food or water. He said that some of them were worried that they might be followed. He wrote that he would set a watch for that night. That’s the same night everything else happened to them. The same night they all went crazy.

Am I going crazy, too? I don’t know. But those steps… They come closer all the time. Last night I heard them right outside my tent. Scared me so bad that it took me almost five minutes to work up the courage to leave the tent and see whether there was something I could shoot. I thought I saw a dark shape bounding away through the trees, but I couldn’t really tell.

Not looking forward to tonight. Particularly not in this place. But I’m 50 miles away from the village and I need to follow this through or I won’t hear the end of it when I return to New York. I need to tough it out for a little while longer.

September 11

The thing bit me yesterday. It’s either a wolf or a really big dog. It arrived in the night again, but I was ready. I hadn’t even slept. The second I heard the steps close in, I kicked the tent flaps open and jumped out. I saw the shape and shot. Then the animal was upon me. It clamped its jaws over my left arm, but I was able to use my other hand, where I still had the shotgun, to smack it on the head as hard as I could. It yelped and let go. I reloaded and shot again but I think I missed it. The shot scared it off, though.

The creature stank. Strange, though – not like I imagined a wolf would stink. It was more like rotting fruit, or bread left out until it gets moldy. The bites on my arm aren’t deep, thankfully, but they smell the same way and it’s disgusting. I spent most of the morning washing and disinfecting them as well as I could. They still smell like that, though. I don’t like it.

The rest of the day I dedicated to investigation, my gun always nearby. I looked all over until I found the same kind of mushrooms that Smith lists as having picked and eaten on the day before the disappearance of the group. I have a theory that maybe they were hallucinogenic, or poisonous, and that’s why everyone went crazy. The investigators dismissed that theory last year when I suggested it, but I still have my doubts. I’m going to carry a sample of the mushrooms back to the city and see whether I can get them identified. They look very normal to me, though. Like your typical forest caps. I shouldn’t forget, either, that Smith was a seasoned outdoorsman. He wouldn’t have eaten dangerous mushrooms, that’s for sure.

If it wasn’t the mushrooms, though, then… I don’t know why they all went crazy.

It was like they caught rabies or something. Particularly the two men that fought each other to the death. I was there when they found the bodies at the bottom of the ravine. Gruesome stuff. The bite marks in particular were awful to see. What kind of a person bites someone else hard enough to tear off a chunk of their arm? Then there’s the mystery of the others, the ones who dug their own grave. I saw the place. They did it willingly, but why?

Maybe I’m in over my head here. I’m just a journalist. I thought I could get a good story out of this maybe something supernatural – not that I believe in those things, but those kind of headlines sell. I suppose I could blame it on the yeti, on Bigfoot. Wouldn’t be too hard. I have a camera with me; I could forge footprints and bring the pictures back. Maybe some hair from that thing that bit me – there’s some lying around.

I will sleep on it.

September 12

For the first night ever, I heard regular forest noises. It must’ve been that creature keeping the animals away, and it didn’t come last night so things are now back to normal.

I was relieved and slept well. Good thing too, because I think I needed it. I’m feeling under the weather today. Kind of feverish. Maybe the water I got from the stream yesterday was bad, although I boiled it. Not sure. I’m just glad that the wolf didn’t come back. I must have scared it off for good.

I spent the day walking to the ravine and then back. Not sure what I expected to find. I dug up a tattered undershirt that must’ve belonged to one of the two men. I brought it back, but it’s not much. I should’ve thought this trip out better. I’m not even a good tracker. What the hell was I expecting?

September 13

Tonight, I’m setting up the camera outside the tent. I need to know what that thing is.

It’s back. I knew it would as soon as I settled down for the night yesterday. The forest was quiet again, and there was this strange pressure in the air, like the way it feels when a storm is about to break but it doesn’t.

I was awake when I first heard the dragging steps. I waited, and then… The creature howled.

I say howled because I don’t have a word for what it did. It sounded like – I don’t know. I don’t know. Like a mixture between a growl and a gurgle, along with something else…

I’ll just go ahead and say it. It sounded like something trying to speak using an animal’s throat. It sounded like a thing possessed by the Devil.

It spooked me so bad that I didn’t manage to leave the tent at all. Part of it was the fever – it got worse throughout the day, and by the time night came I was exhausted. I had the shotgun in my hands, but I felt paralyzed by fear. The creature left eventually, but it came very close to the tent. The moon was full tonight and I saw the thing’s shadow through the tent canvas. It’s bigger than a wolf, definitely. And it stinks.

My arm stinks the same way. I washed it again yesterday, several times, and the wounds are healing but they are healing strangely. I saw what looked like fuzz growing over the scabs. I washed it off but it came back. I don’t know what it is, but as soon as I get better I’m getting the hell away from this forest. It’s cursed. Whatever is out there, it’s dangerous.

I shouldn’t have come. No story is worth this.

September 20

I finally feel well enough to write again. These past few days have been awful. I’ve been delirious with fever but it’s finally broken. My arm has healed – there’s no sign of the bite marks anymore. Tomorrow, I leave with sunrise. It should take me just over a day and a half to get back to Tupper Lake. Then I’m heading straight for New York in my car and I’m never coming back to this horrible place.

I won’t write a story about this even though I have something now, in my possession, that would cause great sensation if I were to publish it.

It’s a picture of the creature. I took it two nights ago. I was feeling worse than ever, but the creature had kept coming back every night, and so I decided to at least see my enemy. I strapped one of my flashlights to the top of the camera and left it on all night. It drained the battery, of course, but it served its purpose. I also arranged the aperture trigger in the camera so that it would open when I tugged on a cord which I carried into the tent with me.

I was slightly delirious from the fever yet again, but I stayed awake as long as I could.

I didn’t have to wait long. The thing came, and it didn’t even seem to mind the light. The dragging steps came closer and closer. When I was sure I would get an image, I activated the camera. The creature escaped at the sound, of course. But I have a picture.

I brought with me some developing fluid and I spent all day yesterday developing the picture in the dark. Not ideal circumstances, but the chemicals I brought were effective and today I was able to see the thing that has been stalking me for so long. The photograph itself is low-quality and, did I not know that I myself took it, I would immediately suspect it for a forgery. It is not a forgery, though. It shows the thing in stark contrast, under the glare of the flashlight, surrounded by the darkness of the forest at night.

I wondered, that night when I took the picture, why the creature appeared to not be bothered by the flashlight. I know now.

The thing is blind.

The photograph is blurry but it leaves no doubt. The animal is a canid, much larger than a wolf, approaching the size of a Great Dane, emaciated, with large patches of skin visible where its fur has fallen off. Its eyes are gone. Where they should be, there is instead what looks like horrible scar tissue, crusted over, covered in places by that… that fuzz… that I have seen before.

It looks like it’s dying, starving to death. I can see its rib cage clearly in the image, and its body appears weak, distorted somehow. Perhaps that is why I was able to fight it off so easily on the night it attacked me. This would also explain why it feels drawn to stalk me. It must be hungry enough that its natural fear is no match for its urge to feed.

What happened to it? Is this some sort of disease? The way the creature’s skin looks where the fur has fallen off reminds me of one of the corpses I was able to see during the investigation last year. It looks infected, and yet not gangrenous. Rather, it looks as if there’s something growing out of it, something…

I don’t know what to think. I’m afraid of the conclusions I might reach. I’m leaving this place now, for good. I will keep the photograph but I will not publish it, nor will I write anything concerning this cursed place. Whatever happened to those hikers will have to remain a mystery forever. I want to forget I ever involved myself in this, as soon as I can.

September 22

I don’t understand. I followed my path but I can’t reach the village. The creature stalks me every night, still. Why haven’t I reached Tupper Lake?

September 24

The fever came back. I think I’m lost in the forest. Concentrating is… Hard. I am running out of supplies. I hope to reach the village soon. Am I going in circles?

October 2

Arm feels odd. Heavy. Ran out of food today. Not sure if I’m hallucinating, but I see a building in the distance.

October 3

I reached a sort of crater today, huge. I feel hungry. The fever comes and goes in waves. I… I think my arm is having spasms. Uncontrollable. It looks odd, too. The skin…

October 4

Tried to walk away but came back to the crater. It’s in my dreams. There’s a light… A light I want to reach. Where is it?

Where am I?

October 5

Woke up underground today. In water. Climbing out took all my strength. Thinking of burying this journal so another may find it.

They aren’t spasms. My arm moves on its own. It reaches, it grasps. I don’t know what it wants. The skin is moving. Swaying. I cannot bear to look at it.

October 6

The creature came to me in the night. It didn’t attack. I feel… I feel it. In my head. I don’t understand.

We are kin.

I want to go back down.

I want to go to the golden light.

That was the last entry in the journal, but the pages held one final horror, something which prevented me from dismissing what had been written inside as either a hoax or the ramblings of an unsteady mind.

There was a photograph there, blurry and poorly developed, but its subject was recognizable nevertheless. It showed an animal, harshly outlined against bright light, which at first reminded me of an emaciated coyote. It was blind, just as the author of the journal had described. It looked sick. Something was wrong with it, something which went far beyond the disturbing physical characteristics I could barely make out in the picture. I did not know what it was, but it awakened in me a primal sort of aversion and I well understood Charles’s almost violent reaction when I attempted to show him the picture so we could discuss it. He shrank away from it and refused to look at it for even a second.

How had Ms. Avery found this journal? What did it mean?

I was greatly disturbed, but it was nothing compared to Charles’s evident unease. He could not sit still, and it was he who suggested that we go investigate the crater on our own.

There is something there, he said to me in the physics laboratory. We need to find out what it is.

Perhaps it would be prudent to bring some of the servants –

“No!” he interrupted me, the sudden volume of his voice shockingly loud. He continued in silence, the gestures he made with his hands somewhat unsteady. No. This is important, Danny, I can tell. If there is something there, the fewer people who know about it, the better. You will help me, won’t you?

Of course, I told him. Let’s go.

We made as if to go to the Observatory tower and from there we headed for the crater. I did not deceive myself – one of the servants was bound to see where we went, since it was all but impossible to keep secrets in a place where we all lived in such close proximity to one another. Nevertheless, I hoped they would leave us alone, if only so that Charles could satisfy his curiosity and life could go back to normal without strange obsessions and mysterious events. As before, however, the two of us had woefully underestimated the complexity of descending into the crater, particularly given the fact that part of it was still frozen since the cold of winter had not left entirely.

We spent most of the day there, trying to puzzle out a safe way for one of us to descend. I brought the car over like I had done the first time and secured a rope to it, but even with that done we could go no further than a few feet down the shaft of the crater because of all the ice. Charles was stubborn. He refused to send for help and the two of us, alone, hacked away at the hard ice in what, to me, became an increasingly evident exercise in hubris and futility.

Dusk came all too soon and still Charles refused to give up. It was his turn to dig, below me, and as the shadows lengthened and the temperature dropped, I finally made up my mind to call this stupid enterprise off.

“Charles, it’s no use,” I called loudly down into the shaft. “Let’s have the servants dig. We have to return.”

There was no answer except for particularly intense digging. I had no way of knowing whether Charles had not heard or was simply ignoring me.

“Charles!” I all but shouted. “Let’s go!”

The digging ceased abruptly. I heard a sharp intake of breath.

“Danny?” Charles asked, his voice tremulous.

“Yes?”

“Climb down. Tell me if you can see this.”

The shaft was much too narrow for two people, so Charles climbed to the surface and I, somewhat impatiently, obliged by jumping down. My feet landed on hard ice and I slipped, stumbling in the near-total darkness at the bottom of the hole which could not have been more than eight feet deep.

I was about to ask Charles for a flashlight so that I could see whatever it was he wanted me to observe. But it was then that I saw the radiance.

It was hard to distinguish because it came from directly below me, through the thick layer of ice that separated me from the watery cave that I knew lay beneath the crater. Nevertheless, there was no denying I could see it. My eyes perceived a faint luminescence which appeared to oscillate between shades of lemon green and deep gold. It reminded me, very strongly, of the light I had seen coming from the meteorite when I had first discovered it underwater. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it was the very same radiance, warm and peaceful yet somehow deeply disturbing. Something was down there, beneath the ice. Could it be the meteorite itself? But if so, how had it gotten back into the crater after it had been stolen from Charles?

The more I looked, the more enraptured I became. I crouched down as best as I was able to in the cramped confines of the shaft so that I could look at the light a little bit better.

It was an interesting light. I felt as if I wanted to get closer to it. To… To understand it.

“Danny! Daniel!”

Charles’s voice, edged with worry, was like a bucket of cold water poured over my head. I shuddered, feeling confused for a split second. Then I climbed out of that shaft as fast as I could.

We need to seal the crater, I said to Charles as soon as I was out into the blessed crispness of the cold evening air.

He nodded, his expression troubled. Agreed. Did you feel it? The pull?

I think I did. Come on. Let’s go.

I ignored the puzzled look Mr. White gave us as both Charles and I came back to the property. We ordered dinner to be brought to us in the bedroom, and a warm bath to be drawn. Afterwards, feeling much cleaner and far less hungry, I felt less alarmed. I climbed into bed with Charles for the night.

What is happening, Danny? he asked me before falling asleep. Is everything connected? All of the odd things that have happened? And if so, how?

I don’t know. But some things are better left unknown.

I suppose you’re right, he said, yawning. We should seal that place tomorrow.

I waited until he was asleep before turning off the lights. I considered lighting a candle and reading for a while, but decided against it. I reached for the switch and flicked the electricity off.

I shuddered, and it was only through sheer force of will that I did not shout or scream or push Charles away. Because, as soon as the darkness in the room was complete, I saw that the pendant Charles wore, that malignant fragment of the meteorite he carried with him always around his neck, was luminescing softly with the same green-gold radiance I had seen at the bottom of that frozen crater.