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  PRAISE FOR SCRATCH

  “Scratch is not only a ripping tale—of dreams and darkness, humans and houses, and the creatures those houses are meant to keep out—but a contemplation of the beautiful dark mysteries of nature. Like a strange old story you overheard when you thought you were alone in the woods, Scratch is beguiling, haunting, and wild.”

  —KATE RACCULIA, author of Bellweather Rhapsody

  “Scratch finds Steve Himmer doing what he does best—putting a magnifier to the fine line between human and beast, between what is tame and what is red in tooth and claw. Then he sets fire to any old platitudes about nature and man, creating a new mythology out of the ashes and shadows.”

  —AMBER SPARKS, author of The Unfinished World And Other Stories

  “Steve Himmer’s particular genius involves giving the minds of his characters room to roam. His take on literary horror might usefully be compared to that of Benjamin Percy or William Gay, but its roots reach back much further, through Shirley Jackson to Hawthorne and Poe. This book, this gift to us, is an absolutely essential reminder that every story starts at the edge of the forest.”

  —ROY KESEY, author of Any Deadly Thing

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL MEANS, INCLUDING INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS, WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER, EXCEPT IN THE CASE OF SHORT PASSAGES QUOTED IN REVIEWS.

  THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. ALL INCIDENTS, SITUATIONS, INSTITUTIONS, GOVERNMENTS, AND PEOPLE ARE FICTIONAL AND ANY SIMILARITY TO CHARACTERS OR PERSONS LIVING OR DEAD IS STRICTLY COINCIDENTAL.

  PUBLISHED BY DARK HOUSE PRESS,

  AN IMPRINT OF CURBSIDE SPLENDOR PUBLISHING, INC.,

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS IN 2016.

  FIRST EDITION

  COPYRIGHT © 2016 BY STEVE HIMMER

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER:

  ISBN: 978-1940430904

  EDITED BY RICHARD THOMAS

  DESIGNED BY ALBAN FISCHER

  WWW.THEDARKHOUSEPRESS.COM

  The bird would cease and be as other birds

  But that he knows in singing not to sing.

  The question that he frames in all but words

  Is what to make of a diminished thing.

  —ROBERT FROST, “The Oven Bird”

  The true border is always a tangle, always difficult to cross.

  —C.L. NOLAN

  WE’LL WEAR THE SHAPES OF COYOTES, TO SLIDE UNDER THE scrub and travel close to the ground. You’ll keep up more easily on faster legs than your own, with a coat that blends into the bushes and sharper senses attuned to all you might otherwise miss.

  Why should we look like coyotes? Why not something else?

  These bodies are fast. They’re strong for their size, but small enough to avoid being noticed. And if your kind should see us, so what? What are two scrawny coyotes to be alarmed by, slinking along at the edge of the woods? We could wear rabbits, or butterflies, but neither of those would command your attention. You’ll listen to a storyteller with teeth and a growl, so long as it’s something you think is less fierce than a wolf. Coyote’s shape has worked for me many times, has worked so well he’s been blamed for my mischief, so there’s no reason his body won’t suit us for this story, too.

  Follow me now. Get down on all fours. Use your forehead to push the low branches aside as we move toward the border between the town and these trees. This story begins on the edge of the forest as all stories do.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgments

  1

  THE DOOR OF THE TRAILER SWINGS OPEN WITH A CLATTER against the exterior wall, and its echo stirs starlings into the air. Martin Blaskett, the man responsible for this clearing in the forest and for the houses to be built upon it, descends a folding staircase to muddy ground and leaves the door open. He steps into his story as easily, as suddenly, as those blue-black speckled birds invaded this forest from elsewhere, generations of theirs ago. I watched them arrive as I’ve watched others and now watch this man, this Martin, descend. Already he’s in the habit of leaving doors open, years of city noise rising to his locked windows wiped away by a few quiet nights, but if he knew all that winds through these woods—if he only knew how nearby we are, watching—he’d close it and lock it, or he might go back inside and stay home. As close to home as he comes.

  His arms swing like windblown branches, and his body stands straight as a trunk, but uprooted and always in motion—a constant impression of stillness and movement at once, of being both where he is and somewhere else all the time. Martin moves like a man who knows where he’s going and knows he’ll arrive, a man who has no idea—and would never believe—that in a few hours’ time he’ll be pinned to the ground with the claws of a bear in his chest.

  This morning he arose with an urge to go walking. He dreamt all night of a life not his own—two cars, two children, two well-worn dents in a couch—and emerged with a real sense of loss. I’ve heard in talk around campfires and through open windows that dreams have no place in the world and no place in your tales, that they’re cheap and confused and a residue stuck to the ends of a day. But dreams bounce through this forest, no more abstract than your radio waves. They crackle and hum almost as loudly as your black power lines and the great metal masts that carry your voices from one part of the world to another.

  Dreams are true stories told in the only moments you’re willing to listen. And because he did listen, because he did dream and because that dream hurt—or if not the dream, his waking from it—Martin is setting off for the woods near his trailer at the insistence of his restless legs, despite mizzling rain and a gauze of clouds over the sun. He’s walking it off the way he’s been taught.

  His gaze slides across this space cut from the wild, space he will refill with acres of bright green backyards. He doesn’t see the hills emptied of trees or the grim yellow excavation equipment, at rest and crusted in mud. He only has eyes for the houses he’s going to put here, imagination made real in sheetrock and wood. He sees families moved in, assembling for ballgames and barbecues, neighbors who are friends with their neighbors. When Martin builds, he sees into the future, and that’s why he’s done well for himself—his buildings are meant to have lives lived within, not to be spaces complete in themselves.

  The houses here aren’t even holes yet, just marks on the mud in the shapes of foundations to come. Ground will be broken tomorrow, but men in orange vests and yellow hard hats have swung shrieking chainsaws for days, and have toppled tall trees from the high cabs of heavy equipment. The forest was cleared in swathes to make room for thoughtfully located Japanese maples or a single mimosa to punctuate each sculpted yard when the lots have become more than mud.

  Trunks were bundled and dragged in chains to the road, where they were piled on more trucks and hauled off to mills, swallowed by bellows, chewed up by mechanical teeth. Stumps were torn out. Acre after acre of oak, ash, and birch, of maple, hemlock, and beech, all ground into pulp and pressed into molds by machines, shaped into the components of bureaus and chairs and pressed into paper for printing assembly instructi
ons that make only half-sense. That furniture and those instructions will be boxed up and shipped off to stores or else sold online and those wandering trees will make their ways home to clutter the rooms of these houses yet to be built. Those signals, those sales, will slip through the forest along wires and masts and thin air—buzzing in my ears like the loudest of bees, because you are all like me now, like this forest, waiting for all the world offers to come your way without leaving your homeplace to find it. You’ve made your world fast enough that you can sit still, and can keep the rest of us moving.

  Time was when trees put up more of a fight, snapping sawteeth and breaking arms. They took as many of your kind as you took of theirs, and furniture never traveled so far. Now houses go up in days, one after the other, identical stalks in a field full of corn, and decades-tall trunks can come down without being touched once by hands, only by engines and blades. You can eat at a table, palms flat on the wood, without remembering it was a tree.

  Things took longer, a long time ago. Even telling my stories was slow, when I could unwind them out across years because I knew their parts would stay put. But we’ve had to adapt, we’ve had to catch up, as the world has grown faster around us. It’s the way of things. Glaciers crept in and crept out, leaving these woods with only a lake almost too small for the word. Stones crawled up through the ground, winter after winter, freeze after freeze, and a new group of people drove out the ones who were already here so they might carve the woods into farms for a few generations and pile those stones into walls, then pack up again to raise new walls somewhere else. And now you’re trickling back in, with the starlings and loosestrife and empty beer cans. One layer laps over another. Everything is devoured as soon as it’s born.

  But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Martin’s houses here aren’t even built yet. These homes of the future began with a sheet of white paper, then black lines demarcating driveways and gardens and pools. He had never heard of this town when he started, when all he knew was he wanted some acres that weren’t too expensive or too remote for potential commuters. It’s a half hour drive to the highway, then a short trip to Portsmouth or Portland or Boston and to New York a few hours on. The other way, to Montreal. To a city more or less like any other, with restaurants and offices and tiny apartments housing people who dream of escaping to places like this one he’s found. People he’s hoping will move into the houses he’s going to build, who are deep enough in their own dreams that a sagging economy and an uncertain era aren’t enough to deter them, who put away money to buy these homes years ago, locked it in for the purpose as he did with the money to build them. People whose most secret dreams are too big to fail.

  Speculators and risky borrowers aren’t his demographic. That’s not who these houses are for, though they’ve been kind to him in the past—he built the houses he was asked to build, for whoever could pay or get someone else to, and all that money he made is now paying for this, for these houses he’ll build for deep-dreamers.

  “Now?” his business partner asked, months ago, when Martin said this project would move ahead, never mind the downturn. It’s a bet on the future, not the present, Martin explained. These would be houses for people who only look forward. And the money was his own, not their partnership’s, so the risk would be his alone, too.

  “But why not wait?” his partner asked the next time they talked on the phone, and again over drinks one of the rare times they spoke face-to-face. And again Martin told him he’d already waited and now was moving ahead.

  And so here he is, moving but barely away from the trailer when a booming voice calls, “G’morning, Marty!” There’s a house across the road from the construction site, a house that began life as two rooms, up and down, but over time and across generations grew rambling additions: new bedrooms and gray shingles and indoor plumbing, a sugar shack and a mudroom and a covered porch off the front. On that porch sits Gil Rose, the only neighbor Martin has for the moment, in the folding lawn chair that seems to be his permanent perch. He was sitting there when Martin returned to his trailer in the small hours of morning, and doesn’t look to have left the spot since. He’s still wearing the same dark green work pants and white T-shirt, his face red as always despite the shade of an orange hunting cap that may well be affixed to his head. The beer cans the two men drained together last night still litter the porch and the brown yard around it, spilling toward the driveway where Martin’s own black sedan sits beside Gil’s mammoth, multihued pickup. It’s an arrangement they reached after a few days of rain left Martin’s car stuck in the mud, its city-sleek shape too close to the ground to roll free without a tow from Gil’s truck. Empty chairs cluster in various states of collapse, and Gil reaches out to pull one of the less ramshackle ones close to his own. He holds aloft a battered steel jug and says, “Come on up. I got coffee.”

  Martin takes a few steps across the cracked, cratered asphalt between them but stops at the dashed line in the center. “That’s all right. I thought I’d take a walk this morning. To see some of the woods.”

  “Woods won’t go anywhere. It’s Sunday. I’ll cook us some eggs.”

  Martin advances to the foot of Gil’s stairs. “I need the exercise. I haven’t done any hiking since I got here.”

  “Gave up exercise when I retired. Can’t blame you, though. Mild day like this, I would’ve been in the woods before dawn, a few years ago.” Gil takes a drag on his cigarette then coughs through a closed mouth so the glowing ember dips toward his chin. “Course, I would’ve been paid for it instead of tramping around for free. This late in the summer, weekend warriors are desperate to shoot something before their vacations run out.” Smoke unwinds from Gil’s rosaceous nose, and he smiles. “Preferably something big.”

  Martin slides his palms up and down either side of his waterproof jacket, and notices a hole worn through one sleeve where, he supposes, it rides over the metal band of his watch. “I, uh, I should start walking before it gets hot.”

  Gil squints at the hazy sky as if his eyes are following something. “Won’t get hot today.” He grips the chair meant for Martin and pushes it toward the stairs. “We’ll get the grill going and make a day of it. You breaking ground over there tomorrow?”

  It takes Martin a second to grasp the new thread of conversation before he nods.

  “Well. You’ll have those houses of yours up in no time.”

  “I’m hoping to get people moved in after school ends next spring. Onto the first few lots, at least.”

  “Be nice, kids running around.” Gil takes a mouthful of coffee from the jug. “You oughta keep one of those houses yourself, Marty.”

  “Maybe,” Martin mumbles. He leans his weight away from the porch, away from his neighbor, but doesn’t take a whole step. He tries to remember the whole night behind him, how much he drank and if he told Gil of his plans to settle in town. To move into one of the houses. All through the planning stages of this development he imagined himself walking from room to room, his mind lifting each house from the paper into three dimensions as he tried to decide which of them would someday be his. But he’s sure he hasn’t said so to Gil or to anyone else.

  “What you oughta do,” Gil says, shaking his cigarette in Martin’s direction, “is call up that Evans girl you got working for you. Spend the day with her. Both of you need it.”

  “Alison? She’s my foreman. Forewoman. She works for me.”

  “And that could work for you too, huh?” Gil laughs so hard at his own joke it hunches him over, coughing into his fist. He’s hoarse when he says, “That one’s a catch. Give her a call.”

  Martin slides up the torn sleeve of his jacket to look at his wrist before remembering the rule he set for himself about not wearing a watch on Sunday. “I’d better get started if I’m going to hike.”

  “Bet she’d go. Bring her son along, too. Be good for you. Good for all three of you.”

  Martin’s face gets hot. First the lucky guess about his desire to move into one of the hous
es, and now Gil is urging him toward Alison, too. Either he’s easily read, or he told his neighbor more than he meant to and more than he remembers. Lately he’s been drinking more beer than his body is used to, and—at Gil’s insistence—more whiskey than he’s had in his whole life until now. The hangovers have been slowing him down in the morning and he suspects he’s putting on weight. But it’s part of the project, part of getting these houses raised: Gil’s a loud voice in town, he’s the only neighbor the houses will have, and apart from all of that, Martin genuinely likes the old hunter. He’s never known someone even remotely like Gil before.

  “I think I’ll go alone today,” Martin says as if this will be an exception.

  “No good to spend so much time by yourself, Marty.” Gil scratches his head through his hat then adds, “Be careful, though.”

  “Of what?”

  Gil pops the cap off his head, and plays with the band of plastic snaps at the back. “Well. End of summer, animals can get a bit strange.”

  “Strange how?”

  Gil’s face tightens and he says, “Ah, I’m just talking.” He slides the hat over his thin white hair and settles it back into place. “It’s nothing. Elmer Tully’s tellin’ folks he saw a mountain lion up at his farm, but, hell, you’ve met Elmer.”

  Martin nods and recalls the night last week when, as he and Gil talked and drank their beers on the porch, a ropy old man—no older than Gil, but much worse for wear—wound his way down the road like string on a breeze. An unlabeled brown bottle dangled at the end of his arm. Gil called out, and waved, but the man moved by without looking up and as he passed Martin overheard a stream of incoherent muttering. Gil said it was only Elmer out for a walk.

  “There are mountain lions around here?” Martin asks.

  “Not for a long time. Elmer sees things when he’s drinkin’. Still. You be careful.” Gil lights another cigarette and slurps from the jug. Martin waits for more explanation, but at last the lingering dream in his legs makes him antsy and he says goodbye to Gil before crossing the road toward the woods.