There was nothing. The dead had risen and gone; no revenant mourned here the unburied remains. Slanting down the near wall was a half square of light and he could see the blotches of moss and fungus on the pale concrete like land-shapes from some ancient atlas. But that was all. Then in the silence there came from the pit a single momentary water-sound, softly, a small, almost tentative slosh.
He got to his feet and stepped back, then turned and trotted back up the path with his queer shambling gait, neither a run nor a walk, waving his cane about curiously.
Back in the road he slowed his steps; his breath was rasping and his chest tight.
He wandered up the road a way and came to a cleared place where he could see down through the thin trees faced with light the slope of the ground pouring over like a waterfall to break somewhere below, and the small yellow pinholes, lights from shacks and houses, warmth and life, burning steadfast among the fitful lightning bugs. A dog barked. He squatted on one heel in the road, tilted his cane against his shoulder, laved a handful of the warm dust through his fingers. A light breeze was coming up from the valley.
To his right, off beyond the last black swatch of trees in silhouette cresting the nob, he could hear a long cry of tires on the curves; in a little while the sound of a motor racking the night. The car came through the cut of the mountain, howling brokenly in the windgap. Fine pencils of light appeared far below him, swinging an arc, shadows racing on the lit trees and then lining down the road and the car hurtling into sight, small and black, pushing the lights ahead of it. It rocketed down the grade and in a thin and slowly fading wail of rubber slid to darkness again where the road curved at the foot of the mountain.
The old man’s legs began to cramp under him and he rose and stood about trying to work the stiffness out of them. He balanced on one leg and bent himself up and down by the strength of his knee. Then he stooped all the way down and tried to raise himself, an old man, exercising at midnight on a mountain top—too old to get up that way, and that was the good leg too. He hadn’t been able to do it with the other leg for years and it creaked like dry harness. It still had birdshot in it, above the knee and higher, almost (he could remember yet the doctor pointing to the last little blue hole) to where a man surely oughtn’t to be hit. Years later the leg had begun to weaken. The head too, the old man told himself, and got up, looked out over the valley once more before starting up the road.
Toward Red Branch a dog barked again. Another answered, and another, their calls and yaps spreading across the valley until the last sound was thin and distant as an echo. No dogs howled in the Hopper or down along Forked Creek where the old man lived. He thought of Scout bedded under the house, old and lame with his tattered hide half naked of hair, the bald patches crusted and scaly-skinned as a lizard. Scout with his hand-stitched belly and ribboned ears, split their length in places, whose brows so folded over his eyes that he could see at all only by holding up his head—which gave him an inquisitive air as he walked, as if he followed forever some wonderful odor strung out before him. Big even for a redbone, a strong dog in his day, but he was seventeen years old. The old man had traded a broken shotgun for him when he was a pup.
He walked and ruminated and furrowed the dust absently with his cane until he came to the circle at the end of the road and the knoll beyond where the trees had been plucked from the ground and not even a weed grew. A barren spot, bright in the moonwash, mercurial and luminescent as a sea, the pits from which the trees had been wrenched dark on the naked bulb of the mountain as moon craters. And on the very promontory of this lunar scene the tank like a great silver ikon, fat and bald and sinister. When he got to the fence he stopped and leaned his cane and hooked his fingers through the mesh of the wire. Within the enclosure there was no movement. The great dome stood complacent, huge, seeming older than the very dirt, the rocks, as if it had spawned them of itself and stood surveying the work, clean and coldly gleaming and capable of infinite contempt.
He clung there wrapped in the fence for some time, perhaps the better part of an hour. He did not move except that from time to time he licked the cold metal of the diamonded wire with his tongue.
When the old man reached home again the moon was down. He did not remember coming back down the mountain. But there was the house looming, taking shape as he approached, and he felt that he had come a great distance, a sleepwalker who might have spanned vast and dangerous terrains unwittingly and unharmed.
As he turned his steps up the path a shadow swirled past his knees and fled soundlessly into the night.
In one corner of the front room there was an old wooden footlocker and the old man cleared away papers and clothes from the top of it and set the lamp on the floor close by. Then he undid the broken hasp and lifted it open. He rummaged through it, stopping now and again to examine some object: a brass watch weighing perhaps a quarter of a pound, a pair of cock-gaffs, a .32 rimfire revolver with owlhead grips and the hand broken so that the cylinder spun smooth as a barrel in water. Reams and sheafs of old catalogs and lists he thumbed through. An eight-gauge shotgun shell. At length he came up with a small square box decorated with flying ducks and this he set on the floor beside the lamp. He dropped the lid of the locker closed and the lamp flickered, on the wall a black ghoul hulking over a bier wavered.