“Hey, Chip! Can you give me a hand up here?” his father called. Mr. Mallory had opened a side door so as to access the roof rack and the hot August air was pouring in, making all three passengers squirm and groan.
Chip put down his DVD player and started to climb out. The scene was monotonous. Bare fields stretched away, parched and yellowing, randomly dissected by barbed wire and half-fallen snake fences. Beyond them lay clumps of cedars and a few cultivated acres thick with corn. The green, leafy maize plants seemed to dissolve in the steaming air and dazzling sunlight.
“Up here,” Mr. Mallory explained. “Just hold the tarpaulin while I tighten these ropes. You know, son, I’m beginning to wonder about that Jackson woman’s directions.”
Chip shrugged his shoulders, then grabbed one of the loose covers. As he did so he leaned against the roof rack, touching the hot metal. He winced and pulled back, then waited patiently while his father struggled with the ropes. Minutes passed; in one of the scrubby fields beyond the road a red farm tractor groaned and shuddered into sight from behind a cedar stand.
“Hey, Dad,” Lee called out. “The locals have arrived. Why don’t you ask them for directions?”
Mr. Mallory grunted. “Yeah, guess I’ll have to. I can just see their smirks — city folk lost again.”
The roof adjustments finished, Chip climbed down and wandered dreamily along the deep ditch that ran along the side of the road. The heat was awful, but he was bored with sitting in the car. His father slammed the car door and started across the road toward the tractor, signalling to the farmer as he walked.
Everything around him looked pretty dishevelled and dried out, Chip thought. He bent over a scrawny willow branch that lay against a nearby jutting rock. An idea occurred to him and he pulled out his Swiss Army knife and held the magnifying glass attached to it over the branch, avoiding the stream of red ants swarming in and out of a crack in the stone. After a while a tiny wisp of smoke rose from the thinnest of the twigs. Chip cast an amused glance back at the car. Watching him, his sister shook her head as if to say, “Doing stupid things again — there’s just no help for that boy.”
The smoke ceased and Chip stood up and saw his father lope across the field toward the tractor. Seconds later, the engine racket stopped and Mr. Mallory was conferring with a sturdy-looking, straw-hatted man who had climbed down to meet him. Arms waved, and Chip smiled, imagining the conversation. He strolled a little farther along the ditch, then stopped.
In the cleared space at his feet, among the sprouting weeds, lay a small animal. It looked almost as if it had been planted there, squished into the earth, belly up, its bloated stomach like a tiny sick half-moon, two paws raised helplessly against the heat and the sky. Flies swarmed around the thing, buzzing and darting. Chip held his nose, thoroughly disgusted but also fascinated. He bent closer to the carcass and heard something odd: a low, chomping sound, as if a thousand tiny teeth or claws were at work. He shook his head, puzzled, then a picture from some TV nature show, or from a book, shot into his mind of burying beetles, or maggots, doing their grisly removal work.
The dead groundhog — for that was what it was — was being ushered back into the earth, and Chip remembered a little rhyme that Grandfather Wilson had quoted him one day, after he’d had a glass or two:
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,
The worms play pinochle in your snout…
He laughed, jumped the ditch, and trotted back through the scruffy field toward the car. Pretty soon he was sweating miserably, but happy, feeling himself alive and in motion — a million miles away from dead groundhogs, flies, and burying beetles.
The tractor was clattering away again, back toward the cultivated land, and his father approached the parked car, stepping across the road with what seemed to be a confident look.
A few minutes later, the SUV, turned around, was heading back the way they had come.
“It seems we should look for a sign to Bascombe,” Mr. Mallory explained. “A little town or hamlet we should find if we turn right two roads back this way.”
“A hamlet?” Mrs. Mallory quipped. “To be or not to be.”
“Most likely not to be,” Lee said scornfully. “And how come Mrs. Jackson didn’t mention it?”
“You know how it is,” her father said. “I rented the cottage from her at short notice and by telephone. She seemed pretty anxious to rent to us and in a hurry to go somewhere herself. And even at the best of times people often give very personal and eccentric directions. That’s why we make computers on an either-or language basis. Makes the routes a little more certain.”
“Are you sure this cottage is going to be all right, John?” Mrs. Mallory said. “The countryside around here seems pretty boring.”
“Yeah, that’s been bothering me a bit, too. But heck, Mrs. J. sent me an email picture and it looked okay. Sometimes you’ve got to take a chance on these things.”
“Is that what you tell your customers, Dad?” Chip teased him.
Mr. Mallory laughed. “I guess so. But you know something? That farmer back there had never heard of the Jacksons. He told me to ask in Bascombe. We must have really messed up. I thought everyone around here would know everyone else for miles.”
“The country’s not what you thought, dear,” his wife said. “You’re just going to have to spend more time getting to know it.”
Mr. Mallory cast a glance at the scrubby fields. “I don’t know if I want to. Not exactly beautiful, is it? That farmer was a little odd, too. He had some kind of a scar, or cut, or mark on his cheek. A birthmark, maybe — I don’t know.”
“The mark of Cain?” Chip said in a spooky comic voice, and they all laughed.
“Well, here’s the second right,” his father said. “Bascombe is this way, he told me. Doesn’t look too promising, does it?”
They bumped along on a rutted road that ran steeply up into a wooded area. Within minutes they were among the trees. Leaves trembled in a haze of heat. The tangled underbrush spilled over into the ditches, taking shape in patches of day lilies, elderberries, and sumac. The car knocked against clumps of stiff brown cattails, and here and there startled blue jays hurtled up, flapping above the broken tree trunks, zooming past creepers and wild vines to scout the nests of tent caterpillars hung high in the leafy canopy.
“This feels like a tropical rain forest,” Chip observed.
“Not exactly,” his father said. “But, boy, this road is in bad shape. That farmer wasn’t kidding. Now, there should be a fork just up ahead.”
Sure enough, the rutted road divided near the crest of the low hill. One branch ran upward and was swallowed by the forest; the other snaked along a low embankment and disappeared in a swamp of dead trees.
“We’ll take the low road,” Mr. Mallory said, steering that way, while Lee gazed around skeptically and asked quietly, “Are you sure, Dad?”
In answer, her father stepped on the gas, whizzing around a few sharp curves, running over wet patches where the blackened, flattened road oozed and seethed, as if dark flowers were about to burst through its slimy surface.
“What
