Chapter Eleven #2
Down, down. Deeper, deeper! And just when he felt he couldn’t take it any longer, something happened.
This something was a postcard. It gave no clue of its sender. Instead, someone had mysteriously typed a simple note, inviting him to a meeting of the Jeremiah Wylkes Society, one week hence.
—
It has been some time since our mention of old Jeremiah, whom the memorious reader might recall from his last appearance in these pages, in September, at the Autumn Ramble, with Hugh among the hemlocks, just as they might recall the story of little Whiskey’s disappearance into the hollow Earth.
This is not to say that Wylkes had entirely disappeared from Miles’s thoughts.
Underground kingdoms were everywhere in Russian folktales—where else were evil kings supposed to cage their daughters?
In retrospect, it was surprising that Miles had not fallen down this rabbit hole, a metaphor that, given the subterranean topic, was not really a metaphor.
But life, in its richness, had given him the fall colors, chauffeuring responsibilities, the snow and skiing.
Until now, when life had taken much of this back.
The first question, of course, was who had sent the card, and why they had done so with such secrecy.
It made no sense that any of Kate’s many friends and colleagues would have invited him but not her; this eliminated about 95 percent of their acquaintances.
Hugh was the obvious choice, but why now, and why Miles of all people, and how had he found Miles’s address?
Serena Rubin and the Land Conservancy? But it seemed unlikely that she had given up the names of Conservancy members to a man she so clearly regarded as a nutcase.
Or had she invited him? Was it some ploy to overwhelm Hugh’s crew by gathering a posse of science-minded citizens?
But an unsigned postcard hardly seemed the land trust’s modus operandi.
Snowflake Bentley was another possibility, though a hollow-earther seemed precisely the kind of crank Bentley was trying to expose.
Right? Certainly, he had a file on them, right there next to flat-earthers, and convex-earthers, and square-earthers, and whatever other shape the human mind had conjured up.
Was he doing research? But why the secrecy?
If he had sent the postcard, why not sign it too?
It was all very mysterious, and, to be honest, a little sinister.
One didn’t need to be getting a Ph.D. in literature to recognize the outlines of the story: the innocent city person, on what seems to be an innocuous foray among simple country people, happens upon a dark conspiracy, with predictably horrific consequences.
We’ve read the book, we’ve seen the movie.
If the hero escapes, it is only after some gory climax, stumbling out into the night to stare, blood-bespattered, into the high beams of the state police. Not for me! thought Miles.
Wylkes himself was equally elusive. There were a few self-published historical books on used-book websites at preposterous markups, and a website for the Society’s New Hampshire branch, last updated for the 2007 Peterborough potluck dinner, now a thicket of broken links.
Wylkes’s journals, though theoretically in the public domain, were inaccessible—the sole copy in the college catalogue was listed as “missing.” Was it, like the folktales that he studied, an oral tradition?
Either Wylkes was as obscure as Miles first assumed, or an effort was being made to keep him secret.
Even Kate, who had done all in her power to get Miles out of the house, to join the film club or the Russian discussion table or a dog-walking group, advised against going to the meeting.
It had to be that what’s-his-name, Beyoncé’s savior.
He’d gotten his hands on the land trust mailing list; it wasn’t exactly a state secret.
But, no, she didn’t think that Miles should attend.
As if the invitation wasn’t sketchy enough, Google Street View told them that the address was an old seafood diner, now boarded up, a concrete dolphin on the lintel half disintegrated to its iron skeleton.
It was on the road to Oakfield, in Massachusetts, along a stretch of broken pickup trucks and unchained dogs, not far from the woods patrolled by Olive’s teacher.
Contested territory! And even if it was an innocent get-together, who wanted to listen to more stories of celebrity rescues, replenished by the hazards of winter?
And wasn’t Tuesday the night the campus movie club was meeting to watch Fritz Lang’s Metropolis?
If he wanted excitement, wasn’t Metropolis enough?
Thus did the lady much protest, and thus did Miles listen.
Had Kate encouraged him to join the Wylkesians, he probably would have decided against it.
But as she spoke, he felt a kindling defiance, the very same defiance that has driven many a man and woman to reject the reasonable and rational, and to do something, believe something, precisely because reasonable and rational people did not want them to believe or do it.
Who was she to tell him, she with her beloved students, her hilarious friends, her charismatic colleagues, her functioning knees?
He felt as if he were being lectured to by the coastal elite.
Someone had chosen him.
So, strategically, he let the matter drop. And on Tuesday evening, he kissed her and the children and set out for Metropolis, then took the highway south, down past the river, out of town, and into the hills toward Oakfield.
—
In his six months in Vermont, Miles had often stared across the border into Massachusetts, but he could count the number of times that he had gone there on one hand, and most were in the early days, when he had gotten lost. It was not that he held any animus toward the people of the Commonwealth.
Rather, it was the borderlands that gave him pause.
Standing on the top of Greensbury Mountain, looking out over the misty hills to the south, he thought: Massachusetts.
Back in California, telling stories about Vermont to Wesley and Olive, Miles had conjured up a land of sheep and bushy beards, of Bernie Sanders, maple syrup, sweaters, snowshoes, socialism.
But Massachusetts was a different story, he told them.
Insurrection, tar-and-featherings, witch trials, outcasts wandering abandoned apple orchards with scarlet letters on their chests.
“What you are saying is completely ridiculous, Miles,” said Kate. “Children, ignore him. Humbaba, Miles, Humbaba. Remember.”
Remember: the dangers of suggestion, the absorption to which the paternal line was prone.
Thus spoke the sensible woman, who’d been eavesdropping.
And he stood corrected: Really—Olive, Wesley—there was no reason to fear Massachusetts.
Just keep an eye out for those long-toothed people with buckles on their hats and monstrous turkeys beneath their arms. Big fat turkeys that they stuffed ceaselessly, for their feasts.
And at night, the wild dances in the woods. One day he’d take them. Massachusetts.
“Miles, seriously.”
But since their picnic with the camouflaged Miss Kayleigh, Kate also stayed clear of the borderlands, lest she meet more Southern Vermontian revanchists in the deep, dark woods.
Which was exactly where he was headed.
—
The road he took that night from Greensbury to Oakfield was the old road from Greensbury to Oakfield, built during a time when people liked to build roads in the most difficult places, as a hobby.
Whereas a new highway took the gentlest slope between two valleys, the old road had been designed clearly as an inside joke among hardy New Englanders, to thwart unsuspecting visitors, taking every unnecessary pitch and dip and throwing in a hairpin for the fun of it.
On a dark note, that very summer there had been an accident, a young biologist killed when her car tumbled down into the ravine.
The road was plowed in the winter, but just barely, and as Miles left the valley of the Greensbury River, he registered the falling snow with some trepidation.
But the Subaru held steady, and as the road rose, Miles felt something he hadn’t felt for weeks—adventure.
Here he was, a man who had traveled across a divided nation, who had skinny-dipped in country streams, scythed and double-danced and been to the emergency room and back.
Now, truly, he was headed off into the unknown.
Was it a trap? How silly, but how fun, and, sadly, deep down, he knew the most dangerous thing that could happen was that he would be bored by Hugh.
Indeed, as he made his way up the road, the prospect of such unfettered pedantry was the only thing to give him pause.
Realistically, he had three and a half hours, maybe four, to cover the full screening of Metropolis and a discussion.
With the drive, this gave him just under three at the Mountain Catch—seemingly enough, but, knowing Hugh, Miles thought that perhaps it wasn’t.
It had been a long time since the hike, but he sensed the guide was not the kind to take lightly to an early departure.
Miles would just have to explain himself before the meeting started, apologize.
He was a father, he had children, as Hugh surely recalled.