The Fall of Never(52)

“Why not, Graham?”

“That cap,” Rand said, and now he was nearly whispering, “ain’t the only thing I found out there tonight.”

Graham Rand had become a small, helpless child before Raintree’s eyes. He watched him—watched his eyes, really, those crazy and rolling eyes—regress until there was no sense behind them. Only fear. Basic, animal fear—like the unencumbered fear of small children.

“What else did you see out there tonight?” Without realizing, Raintree’s own voice came out in a whisper.

“A man,” Rand said.

“A man.”

“I think it was a man. It was dark. A man…or a boy. It was male.”

“This is the person you heard laugh?”

“Oh, I’m certain of it.”

“Did you recognize this man?”

“No, sir.”

“It was too dark?”

“Well, too dark…but not just the dark, you know what I mean?”

“I don’t think I do.”

“I didn’t recognize him because…well, Detective…he didn’t seem like no man I’d ever seen before.”

“A stranger? Not someone from town?”

“Not someone from…” Rand’s rheumy eyes narrowed. He chose his words. “Not someone real, Detective. At least, not someone I’d ever imagine seeing in town. Or in any other town anywhere else for that matter.”

“I’m not following you, Graham.”

“Don’t think it’s nonsense—”

“I didn’t say that.”

“All right.”

“Just explain to me who—explain to me what you saw tonight.”

Rand worked his livery lips together, created a slightly irritating clicking sound. His hands had gone back to torturing his own hunting cap. “I caught him out of the corner of my eye just as I was heading back to the house. He was running, moving fast, and half-hidden behind some trees. He was deeper in the woods, an’ toward the northeast where the woods was already grown dark. But I saw him and he saw me, too—I’m pretty certain of that—and I think he wanted me to see him.”

“Why did you say he was like no other person you’d ever imagine seeing?” Raintree asked. “I don’t understand that part, Graham.”

“I was afraid,” Rand said frankly, unashamed. “It was like a warning came with him, maybe some warning that followed him in the air, I don’t know. But there was something there, sure as I’m sitting right here in front of you. Something. Just something, Detective.”

“Could you describe him? What was he wearing?”

To the detective’s astonishment, Graham Rand let out a small chuckle. But it was a nervous chuckle. Rand was still that child sitting before him. “That’s the other strange thing,” the old man said. “He wasn’t wearing no clothes.”

Raintree blinked. “He was naked?”

“As a jay bird, at least from what I could tell.” Rand swallowed a lump of spit that, from his expression, apparently felt like a golf ball going down. “And his skin was white, like snow. Or like—you know, when a dead body’s been laying around? Just white. Like no skin I’d ever seen before in my life. Not on anything alive, anyway.”

“Like snow,” Raintree repeated. If it wasn’t for the hunting cap, Raintree would have smiled at the story, patted the old man on the back, and bought him a cup of coffee. But that cap—J.M.—was here, dampening the Xeroxed papers that it rested upon. Smelling of cedar and winter and, faintly, soil. There was no denying the cap. Also, there was the fact that this strange man—this strange naked man—had frightened this poor old fellow enough to keep him out of the woods. And Graham Rand loved the woods. It was all he had.

“Ain’t making this up, Detective,” Rand said, mistaking Raintree’s silence for disbelief.

“Did this person just disappear?”

“Ran off into the woods. I said it was dark.”

“What direction?”

“Northeast, just like I said.”

“And he looked at you?”

“Yes, sir. Saw him turn his head as he ran. It was quick and I suppose if my eyes weren’t as good as they are—twenty-twenty, you know, all my life—then I wouldn’t have even noticed. But I noticed, all right. And then he just took off deeper into the woods.”

“What did he look like?”

“Not sure. Face was…I don’t know…kinda smeary.”

“Smeary?”

“Hard to see.”

“Did you try and make any further contact with him? Call out after him?”

“No way on God’s green Earth. Had no mind to whatsoever. Let ’im go.”

“No mind,” Raintree said. There was a tapping noise to his right. He looked down and saw that he was drumming his fingers on the top of the desk. “If you didn’t get a good look at him, Graham, how do you know he was male?”

“Because,” Rand said with the unimpassioned simplicity of old men, “a man can tell another man. It’s a simple as that. We’re all animals, Detective.”

Yes, Raintree thought, looking back down at the initials printed on the label of the hunting cap, we’re all animals indeed.