Second Glance Read online

  Winks leaned forward, elbows balanced on his knees. “Anyone ever get close to them?”

  The old man ran the knife down the branch again. Behind him, he could sense Rod van Vleet, doing everything in his power to pretend he was not listening. “Nobody,” Az said, “was stupid enough to try.”

  “Ethan?”

  From his vantage point beneath the blackout shades, Ethan froze at the sound of his mother’s voice. He whipped his body back so that it wasn’t pressed against the warm glass windowpane and slid his sunglasses between the crack where his bed met the wall. “Hey,” he said, as she opened the bedroom door.

  Her hawk’s eyes took in the rumpled comforter, the hat on Ethan’s head, the drawn curtains. She approached him, narrowed her gaze, and tugged down the sleeve of his shirt where a quarter-inch strip of skin showed above his wrist. “I’m going to work,” his mother said. “You ought to be asleep by now.”

  “I’m not tired,” Ethan complained. It struck him, though, that his mother must be exhausted. To stay up with him all night, and to work part-time during the day at the library? “Mom,” he asked, “are you tired?”

  “All the time,” she answered, and kissed him good-bye.

  He waited until he heard her footsteps echoing on the tile floor of the kitchen. Words were traded like playing cards between his mother and Uncle Ross about how late Ethan should be allowed to stay up and what to do in case of emergency. Ethan dug along the side of his bed until he found the silver wraparound sunglasses. He settled his cap more firmly on his brow. Then he lifted the edge of the blackout shade and curled like a kitten on the windowsill. Within minutes, burns rose beneath the chalk of his skin, small spots dotted his face, but Ethan didn’t care. He’d scar, if that’s what it took to prove he’d been a part of this world.

  The scientists from CRREL, the Army Corps of Engineers, who had taken a van from Hanover, New Hampshire, to Comtosook and spent the day extracting soil samples with drills made to delve through ground frozen solid as stone, spoke to Rod van Vleet only peripherally. They had come out of academic curiosity and talked of the impact of thaw distribution on vehicle mobility . . . but did not explain how or why this had occurred here and now.

  The fellow who arrived from the Scott Polar Research Institute said it looked like permafrost, a climate-dependent phenomenon that occurred when the ground temperature remained below freezing for two or more years—which was not the case on Otter Creek Pass. He spoke of pore ice, segregated ice, and pingos, and reminded Rod that at one point, Burlington and its environs had been glacial.

  A Danish team phoned to ask if sudden freezing of the property had affected the chemistry of the atmosphere, and would Rod consider selling in the name of research?

  Yet for all of the combined wisdom that these scientists brought to the table, none could explain the odd cravings they developed the moment they crossed into Comtosook— for banana chips and candied violets and the soft skin of homemade puddings. They could not comment on the way loneliness perched on the telephone lines like a crow, except to point out that this was normal in regions where cold seeped so deep it was physically impossible to reach out to anyone else.

  By the time they returned to their labs and academic towers, took out their samples, and dusted away the layer of flower petals from the test tubes and Cold Paks, these quirks had been forgotten. They already knew what the residents of Comtosook were just now learning: that the world is a place where the extraordinary can sit just beside the ordinary with the thinnest of boundaries; that even in environments inhospitable to man, all sorts of entities might thrive.

  The Comtosook Public Library did not get many visitors, which was a blessing given the size of the building. Tiny rooms were strung together like pearls, far more suited to a small country inn than a repository for literature. The most crowded it got was Thursday mornings, when up to thirty preschoolers would sprawl on their bellies in the two small enclaves that made up the juvenile section, for story time. The children’s librarian had to run back and forth between the rooms with an open book, so that all the kids could see.

  There were bookshelves at angles, bookshelves stuck in the middle of the floor, bookshelves turned on their sides if necessary—whatever it took to accommodate a large number of volumes in an inadequate run of space. The reference librarian— Shelby, on weekday mornings—needed to know the Dewey Decimal system and various computer search engines, as well as how to navigate the library to find the fruits of these labors. But for the most part, Shelby was free to do whatever she liked during her work hours, and what she liked to do was chew words.

  Shelby loved them the way epicureans loved food—each syllable was something to be rolled on the tongue, swallowed, and wholly appreciated. Sometimes she would sit with the dictionary cracked open and read with all the breathless impatience another patron might save for a thriller. Griseous: mottled. Kloof: a ravine. Nidicolous: reared for a time in a nest.

  She imagined receiving a phone call one day—Meredith Vieira, on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, or a radio disc jockey offering a fortune if she only knew the definition of one bizarre word. “Pilose?” she would repeat, and then pretend she did not know it, for the sheer suspense. “Covered with soft hair.”

  She was smart enough, after four years of college and another two of graduate school, to know that she used language like shore dwellers used sandbags: to create a buffer zone between herself and the rest of the world. She also knew that she could learn every last word in the dictionary and still not be able to explain why her life had turned out the way it had.

  She was worried about Ethan; she was worried about Ross. She was so busy, in fact, taking care of the immediate world that it kept her from dwelling on the fact that there never seemed to be anyone around who bothered to worry about her.

  The library was empty, a result of regular patrons being too uneasy these days to venture out into a town that changed before their very eyes. To Shelby, the recent eccentricities amounted to sweeping petals off the steps of the library; she wasn’t worried about an impending Armageddon or global warming or the coming of phantoms, as conversation at the town diner suggested. To a woman who had built a home on a footing of abnormality, recent events were nothing to get excited about.

  When the door creaked open, Shelby glanced up. A man she had never seen before entered, dressed in a suit too expensive to have come from any store within a fifty-mile radius. However, there was something . . . off. His tie listed to the left and his skin was nearly as white as Ethan’s. He glanced from the oddly sloped floor to the jutting angles of the wall to the stacks of encyclopedias kittering up the wall. “This is the library?”

  “Yes. Can I help you?”

  His gaze circled like a bird, finally coming to rest on Shelby. “Can you even find anything in here?”

  Rhabdomancy, Shelby thought. Divination by wands. “That depends. What are you looking for?”

  “Indian burial grounds. What happened to them, in the past, when someone built over them. Legal precedent. That sort of thing.”

  “You must be one of the developers,” Shelby said. She led him to a spot at the rear of the library, where a microfiche was tucked behind a low shelf of cookbooks. “There was a dispute just a year ago in Swanton. You might want to try there first.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to remember the outcome, would you?”

  “The state bought the property.”

  “Oh, great. Terrific.” He exhaled heavily and sprawled backward in the chair. “Was that Swanton land cursed too?”

  “Excuse me?”

  For a moment, he seemed too frustrated to speak. “Those Indians, what do they do . . . conjure up all their dead ancestors whenever they need them? Whatever it takes, right, to get us Massholes out of town?”

  Shelby worried her nail between her teeth.

  “We’re just trying to build a strip mall, for God’s sake. I’ve got the owner’s signature, all nice and legal on a piece of paper. I’v