Art by Darryl Elliott

(c)2006 by Brendan DuBois

They were on a wooded hill overlooking a ravine that the locals called Merl’s Cut as the October afternoon settled into dusk. Patrolman Jay Newman sat on a moss-covered log, feet crossed, breaking small pine sticks into thumb-sized pieces of wood, which he tossed into a pile at his feet. A few feet from him Chief Frank Dow sat with his back against a white birch tree trunk, smoking a pipe. The chief wore the standard green uniform and like Jay, he also wore a green jacket with a shield and shoulder patch that said CRAWFORD POLICE. His face was red and if one looked closely, there was a tiny network of burst blood vessels that looked like a red spiderweb on one cheek. Jay looked over at the ravine, listening to the faint sound of water trickling along a stream making its way to the bottom. He was twenty-eight years old and hoped his face wouldn’t look as bad as that when he got older.

“Sorry I’m tying up your Saturday night, Jay,” the chief said, gently sucking at the black pipe stem.

“It’s all right, Chief,” Jay said, lying, because it sure as hell wasn’t all right. Earlier, he had planned a date with a young woman who worked at the Crawford Savings & Loan. Not much of a date-a dinner in town and a movie over at Drake’s Mill, which had the only movie theater in this part of the county-but he had to cancel it all. Instead of some lovely female company, he was here, miles away from the center of Crawford village and almost everything else civilized, all because of a crazy old woman. But when you and the chief make up two-thirds of the department, and when the other third of the department is on vacation up in Maine, well, there isn’t much else you can do.

The chief puffed on his pipe, letting a thin stream of smoke escape from his lips. “It’ll be dark soon,” he said. “Mrs. Tate said the lights appear about an hour after that.”

Jay felt like sighing in exasperation, but decided to talk instead. He was still on probation, for another month, and this old man had his future in his nicotine-stained hands.

“Tell me, Chief, if Mrs. Tate wasn’t Brian Tate’s mother, would we even be here? I mean, the woman’s pretty old. She’s almost senile.”

“Why do you say that?”

Jay shrugged, snapped another piece of wood in his hands. “C’mon, Chief, the old lady said aliens are landing up here every Saturday night and killing people. I mean, if she was any other old lady in town, I don’t think you’d be here, and me as well.”

The chief leaned back against the tree, his leather gear creaking. “Mrs. Tate may be the mother of the selectmen chairman, but she’s also a taxpayer here, and she filed a complaint with the department-”

“About trespassing Martians?”

“No, about someone trespassing on her land at night.”

“You must’ve helped her write out the complaint.”

“Maybe I did. But she thinks someone’s out here at night, and she says she finds bloodstains on the ground the next day. You’ve got to check it out, even if it does look like you’re wasting your time.”

Jay nodded and reached around for another stick to break into pieces. They were sitting a few yards away from the town’s only police cruiser, which was parked on a dirt turnabout that marked the end of Pomeroy Road. Jay had been with the Crawford Police Department for only four months and he was still trying to get used to the different pace of the job. Five months ago he had been a patrolman in one of the industrial cities near Boston, and had been on that job for five years, until the bad dreams started. Dreams of entering a crackhouse, all by himself. Dreams of doing a motor-vehicle stop in the middle of the city, with no backup. Dreams of responding to a night alarm at a bank, with his radio broken. And in all of the dreams, his weapon hadn’t worked, had fallen to the ground, and the bad men had killed him, over and over again.

Even with the nightmares, he knew he was only suited for police work, and late at night, in his apartment, he would shudder with horror at pulling the pin and going to work as a security guard or armored-car driver or something equally depressing. But one day, after purusing the classifieds in a paper from New Hampshire, he had responded to an ad for a patrolman in Crawford. His pay had been reduced nearly fifty percent, but since the first day on patrol in this small town, the dreams had not once come back. At the time, it had seemed to be a fair exchange.

The woods were fairly quiet, and he had to concentrate to hear what was going on. There was the small rustle of leaves and branches being moved by the wind, the soft sighing from the chief as he smoked his pipe, and the gurgling of a hidden stream down towards the bottom of the ravine. A tree-covered hill rose up on the other side of the ravine, and in the dimming light he could make out the distant mountain peaks. The town of Crawford was nestled right in the heart of the White Mountains, and the national forest was only about ten or so miles away. This part of the woods was called the Crawford Hills, and the nearest house was the one owned by Mrs. Tate. From Mrs. Tate’s house, the homes were scattered every half-mile or so, until Pomeroy Road linked up with Mast Road, which was one of the few main roads in Crawford.

The chief startled him by speaking. “Where do you think the lights might be coming from, Jay?”

He suddenly realized how much darker it had gotten, just in the past few minutes. In the city, it was never really dark, because of all the lights from the cars, buildings, and streetlights. Even at midnight it was easy to get around without a flashlight. But here, there was nothing. The light gradually faded away until you realized you couldn’t even make out the color of the parked cruiser, just a few yards away.

“Could be almost anything,” he finally said. “Kids playing, Boy Scouts camping.”

“And the bloodstains on the ground?”

“Christ, Chief, the lady’s almost ninety. Who knows what she’s been seeing.”

“That’s right, who knows.” Now it had gotten so dark that Jay could only see the chief’s face from the glowing ember of his pipe. “From where we’re sitting there’s probably only a few hundred people within fifty miles. These woods stretch all the way into Maine and up through Quebec, for hundreds of miles. You could hide a lot up here, Jay, quite a lot. You know, I’ve seen some things up here… especially at night… things that, well, I don’t know.”

Jay thought the chief was trying to spook him with the old-timer’s talk, so he tried to bring the topic back to ground. “Funny you should mention hiding. I’ve read some stories about farmers out in California and Oregon growing and hiding marijuana in the national forests. We just might have something like that going on right here, Chief.”

“The lights, then?”

“They might be moving the stuff out, bringing it out to Pomeroy Road or one of the old logging roads.”

“The bloodstains?”

A stick snapped in his fingers, and his hands suddenly felt moist. “Well, if they’re into drug smuggling, maybe…”

“Yeah, I know. They gotta protect what they’re growing.”

The chief tapped out his pipe on a tree trunk, the noise sounding like he was tapping something hollow. Even though it was now completely dark, he knew what the chief was doing, just from the sounds. The scritch-scritch as he cleaned the pipe’s bowl with his penknife. The rustle of paper as he refilled the bowl with tobacco. And the scratch-growl as he lit a match and the sucking noise as he puffed the pipe back to life. It was a comforting sound, and even though it was going to be a cold night-it was a week until Halloween-he felt quite warm. But then he shivered, remembering a news photo he had seen of some captured marijuana growers from out West. They were all armed with automatic weapons. Now he wished he had worn his bulletproof vest.