The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

“Jesus,” I say, “where the hell don’t two creeks meet?” But he kept looking and narrowed it down to four places he thought there could be a cabin. I said, “Pete, look at all those streams and creeks up there, and all the places they meet! Must be a hundred. How can you say these four are the right ones?” Well, he mumbled something about “cultural geography” or some such B.S., and I thought, hell, it’s his dime.

So we start up into the mountains and it isn’t long before we’re on dirt roads, and with the dirt roads come the ruts and the limbs fallen down over the road, and since I’m the big guy and Pete’s driving, I’m the one got to get out and move them. Even with the crappy roads, it’s pretty up there. Spring’s come, and the trees are greening and there are wildflowers all over. We see a few deer now and again, some rabbits, birds taking dust baths in the dirt, and none of them seem very scared of us, almost like it’s annoying that they got to get out of the road.

We get near this one place, so we park and walk through the woods — Pete’s got himself a compass — and soon we find a place where two creeks meet. I see now what Pete meant. There’s a little open area at the base of a bluff, a good place for a cabin, but there isn’t one there, not even a foundation, so we go back and drive on.

Next place it’s the same thing. Pretty site, but nothing there. It’s getting kind of late now, and I tell Pete we oughta head back, but he says just one more. So we go another ten or so windy miles of rotten road. At least this site’s closer to where we park, about a hundred yards through the trees. And son of a bitch if we don’t see a cabin there, nestled right sweet in this little hollow, just like a cover painting on one of those Songs of the Mountains CDs. A few outbuildings are near fallen down, and next to one of them is a pole about eight foot long and six foot in the air, its ends stuck in the forks of two trees, and I think all it needs is a swing hanging from it.

Only thing is, nobody’s been swinging there in years, far as I can see. The cabin’s door is wide open, and most all the glass has fell out of the windows. The chinking between the logs is out in a lot of places too, so you can look right inside between the cracks.

Still, Pete’s jumping around like he found King Tut’s tomb or something. He goes to the door and actually says, “Hello?” like somebody’s gonna answer him, like the whole Lovin clan is just gonna come out on the porch with banjos and guitars and mandolins and sing him their song.

“Nobody here, Pete,” I say. “Nobody been here for a good number of years.” I push on past him and go inside. It’s a shit pile. Everything’s dusty and smells old and moldy. There’s still some furniture, awful worse for wear, a big old square table with five spindly wooden chairs, all of them homemade, but not good homemade, not like antiques. More like crap wood just thrown together with cheap nails. There are another couple chairs, just as ugly, by a fireplace. There’s an old iron cookstove, there’s a cupboard the shelves have all fell out of, and there’s what’s left of a rope bed at the back of the room, ropes all tore and hanging down. I see a torn cord and what’s left of a cloth curtain on the floor that might’ve made the bedroom a little more private.

There’s a ladder along the side wall that goes up into the attic, and I figure kids must’ve slept up there, but the wood’s all dry and rotten, so I’m not gonna risk it. “So,” I say to Pete, “you think this is the Lovin mansion?”

He nods, like it’s the greatest place he’s ever seen. “Sure of it,” he says, and he heads for the ladder.

“Whoa, hoss,” I tell him. “That don’t look any too safe to me. Besides, it’s gettin’ dark. Let’s wait till morning to look for the hidden gold, okay?”

“You mean it?” he says. “We can stay here tonight?”

“Not here,” I say, “but in the RV, sure. You brought stuff to cook, right?” Because by now I’m getting real hungry.

He says he did, so we go back to the RV, and it is getting dark, and we trip over some roots but we make it okay. Pete’s got some burgers in the fridge that we fry up, and we have a couple of beers. I try to calm him down a little, tell him that even if this is the old Lovin place, we ain’t gonna find shit, but he doesn’t seem to care.

After we eat, he asks me if I’d sing the song for him, what there is of it, and he’s got a little Martin Backpacker guitar, so I do, and he sits there grinning like a kid. I sing a few more songs, but I’m feeling pretty tired after getting up so early, so we open the RV windows, since it’s a little stuffy, and crawl into our bunks and turn off the lights. It’s dark and quiet, just the sound of bugs chirping, and I fall asleep as quick as that.