"Well, he was evidently something. Six foot eight. Thin beyond grotesqueness, and that maybe helped him. Newsmen who were near him said he wasn't real. You know, as if they couldn't quite believe that he was there. It's like he radiated something holy. Charismatic like the best of that type, and those newsmen saw the best, believe me. If this way of life had any chance, Quiller was the man to do it."

"He was rich, I hear."

"An understatement, and that money would have helped as well."

They squeezed up past a fallen pine tree. Its needles were dead, dried and scattered across the road, the branches skeletal, and Slaughter looked up past them toward a wall of vines and bushes, slats of brown that showed through, and he knew that they were almost there. He slowed around a curve and, before he even stopped the cruiser, said to Dunlap, "See if you can budge that gate."

But Dunlap only stared ahead. "I said-"

"I'm going." Dunlap stepped from the cruiser. First he viewed the wall of vines from several angles, took several photographs; then he left the camera in the cruiser, and he walked up to the weed-shrouded gate.

Slaughter watched him through the windshield. With the filtered sun, the frame around his windshield, Slaughter sensed that Dunlap was much farther than he really was. Sitting here, the motor idling, Slaughter was abruptly conscious that there weren't any other sounds around him in the forest. Sure, the noise we made has frightened everything away, he guessed.

He watched as Dunlap stopped and looked at all the vines and weeds that wound around the gate posts. Dunlap reached out. Then he brought his hand back.

"Poison ivy?" Dunlap called.

Slaughter laughed. "A city boy. No, I don't know exactly what they are, but they're not poison ivy."

Dunlap nodded. Then he turned back to the vines and almost touched them before looking at him again. "You're sure?"

"For Christ sake."

"Never mind. I'll do it."

Dunlap tugged some vines away. He did it cautiously at first, and then he used more strength against them. He was pushing at the gate.

"We'll maybe have to clear the whole bunch," Slaughter leaned out, saying.

"More than that. We'll have to break the lock here."

"What?"

"A rusted chain and lock."

"Tug at it. The chain might be so old you'll break it."

"That's what I've been doing."

"Hell, I thought that was more weeds."

"You'd better have a look."

Slaughter thought about all the time they were wasting, thought about the town, and shut the motor off. He stepped from the cruiser, walking toward the gate. "I should have known they'd have fixed the gate once Wheeler drove up through it," Dunlap said.

Slaughter didn't understand the reference.

"I'll tell you later. But they fixed it, all right. Christ, they really did. Just look at those thick timbers. They'd stop any pickup truck."

The two men stood in the shadowy, cool, yet humid forest that was close around them, grass and fallen pine tree needles underfoot, and they were silent for a moment.

"Here, let me try it," Slaughter said. He put his full weight against the gate and pushed, but nothing happened. Oh, a little creaking in the wood and some slight movement as the chain went taut, but nothing else, and Slaughter felt the awkward pressure in his shoulder, stepping back and rubbing at it. "What about the hinges?" he asked.

But although rusted, they were large and solid, and the screws were sturdy in the timber.

"Well, that does it," Slaughter said.

"You don't mean we're leaving."

"No. I came up this far, and I don't intend to waste time coming back. We're going to have to climb the fence and walk."

They looked at one another.

"Wait a second while I get my camera." Dunlap went down to the cruiser for it. When he came back, Slaughter waved for him to climb up first, and Dunlap put his shoe on one thick timber, grabbing at another timber, easing over. Slaughter climbed up just behind him, and they stepped down into the compound, on the edge of Quiller's fifty acres. "Something wrong?" Slaughter asked. "No, I'm just shaky," Dunlap answered. "You were right. I need a drink."

"Well, you'll be done with this before you know it." They walked along the next part of the loggers' road, which was as overgrown as the first part. Slaughter heard a noise in the bushes and turned, but there was nothing he could see. He kept walking.

"Are there any people up here yet?" Slaughter wondered.

"I meant to ask you that myself. Parsons says there might be two or three."

"Oh, swell. Some commune."

"In its day, it was," Dunlap said. "I read that Quiller started with a couple thousand. Then he cut them down to just five hundred."

"Even so. If only two or three are up here."

"Yes, it isn't hard to measure Quiller's failure."

"What's the point then? I don't see your story?"

"That's the story. How it failed, and more important, why."

"Well, you must know your business."

They kept walking. Once again, Slaughter heard a noise behind them. He turned, but there was nothing. "Now who's jumpy?" Dunlap asked him. Slaughter had to laugh then. But the laughter echoed through the forest, and he quickly stopped.

The loggers' road disappeared a hundred feet ahead of them.

"Or could be that the forest just reclaimed it," Slaughter said.

They reached the dead end of the lane and glanced at the maze of trees around them.

"What now?" Slaughter asked.

"Well, the road was going straight up, and the clearing I suppose was somewhere near it. Let's just keep on through these trees."

"We could end up walking in a circle. We'll have to pay attention to our landmarks." That big boulder up ahead, Slaughter thought. And then that line of cliffs below the ridge. They veered through the pine trees, the needles lancing at them. Dunlap stumbled, falling on his camera, and he groped up, clutching at his chest, staring at the camera that was dangling from his shoulder.

"Is it broken?" Slaughter asked.

Dunlap didn't know. He hurriedly checked the camera, but it seemed intact, and he'd made certain that he kept the lens cap on. "I don't see any damage." "What about yourself?" "Oh, just the wind knocked out of me." "It could be worse. You want to try to walk?" Dunlap nodded. Bent a little forward, limping slightly, he pushed farther through the trees. The forest now was thicker, darker, dead trees fallen among the live ones, intersecting, thick vines growing up around them. Dunlap stopped and took deep breaths. "There has to be a better way. They brought their cars and vans up here. But it's sure as hell they didn't bring them this way."

"Maybe we should go back to the loggers' road and angle right or left," Slaughter suggested.

"And maybe lose our way as you just said? I wish I knew." "Well, let's keep going then. If this gets much worse, we'll have to change direction."

So they pushed up through the pine trees, and the clearing wasn't fifteen steps away, the trees so dense they didn't see it until they stepped free from the forest.

There were stumps that stretched off through young forest, all the growth here up to Slaughter's chest so that he looked out past the new tips of the pine trees toward the compound over there. Slaughter was reminded of a camping trip years ago. He'd gone with his father to a small lake in northern Michigan. They'd pitched their tent and eaten, so exhausted that they soon had gone to sleep. Rain pelting onto the canvas had wakened them, and they had talked and dozed and wakened again as the storm got worse, and in the morning when the storm was finished, they had crawled out from the tent to stare across the lake. A billowing mist hung over it, but they were camped up high enough that they were just above the mist, the pine trees visible along the other bank, and Slaughter now remembered how he'd thought about what he couldn't see below the mist-the fish that would be rising, and the ducks and frogs and other things. It wasn't real. That thought again. Like now. That sense of life around him but unseen. Except the compound was deserted.