Dead Man's Song

Chapter 24

(1)

“Please tell me that you’re just having a mental breakdown,” Newton said, “and that you don’t really believe that Griswold was a werewolf.”

They had stopped walking and stood together in a natural clearing surrounded by wild rhododendrons and holly. A few crows were gossiping back and forth above them in the trees. Crow met the reporter’s skeptical stare with his own flat and level one. “I know what I saw.”

“You were nine!” Newton yelled.

“Yeah, I was nine!” Crow yelled back, “and at age nine I saw a fucking werewolf! I don’t care if you don’t believe it.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Well I damn well do!” Crow bellowed those words and they seemed to hang in the air around them like ozone.

Newton made a dismissing hand gesture and turned away, walking ten steps down the path they had come, saying, “This is nuts. How the hell I ever got talked into coming down here…”

“You can go back if you want to.”

Newton wheeled and marched right back and, when he was close enough, jabbed Crow in the chest with a stiffened finger. “Tell me what you saw. Exactly, every detail. Put me in the scene if you want me to believe this bullshit.”

Crow’s face went suddenly scarlet and in a movement too fast for Newton to see he grabbed the reporter by the front of the shirt and spun him completely around and slammed him up against a pine tree and held him there, fists knotted in the cloth of his jacket front. Newton’s hiking stick went clattering to the ground between them and Crow kicked it angrily aside. He leaned in close and his voice was a feral whisper. “Listen, asshole, this thing killed my brother and it damn near killed me. I was not hallucinating, and what I’m telling you right now is not me flashing back to the DTs. I saw its face, man, I looked right into Griswold’s face and I saw it change. I saw bones moving, Newt, I saw his eyes turn from blue to yellow to red. I saw that snout and saw the teeth tearing through the gums, dripping blood, getting longer. I smelled its breath on his face. I saw Ubel Griswold change. I saw it. Not a man, not some jerkoff in a fright mask. I saw the change.”

He took a breath and exhaled sharply, and then pushed himself away from Newton. “I saw it.” He turned away, flapping an angry hand at Newton. “Val was right. You’re really are an asshole and I should never have trusted you.” He kicked a stone and it went skittering through the brush, startling the crows, who leapt into the air to find higher branches.

Then he turned back to face the reporter. “If you want to go back, then go back. You know the way. But I’m going on and I’m going to find his house. I want to look inside…I need to look inside. Maybe I’ll find nothing but raccoon shit and thirty years of dead termites…but maybe I’ll find some evidence of who he was, and what he was.” He stopped and pointed to the northeast. “Did you even bother to look up Griswold’s name on the Internet?”

Newton nodded, unable to speak.

“Did you look up what his name means?”

A shake of the head this time.

Crow laughed. “I told you that it probably wasn’t even his real name. I told you that on Val’s porch; well the other day I did a translation on it on Google and guess what I found out. You know what it means? You know what ‘Ubel Griswold’ means?” He didn’t wait for an answer but stepped closer. “It’s German for ‘Wolf from the Gray Forest.’” He spat on the ground. “Don’t you get it? He was screwing with us back then. It was a nickname, a stupid in-joke for him and that goon squad that hung around him. Wolf from the Gray Forest. This is the gray forest, you moron!” Crow shouted. “Look around you.” Indeed the forest was perpetually gray, always in shadows. “And he was the wolf that lived here.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “He was telling us all along and we were just stupid yokels who didn’t have a clue. God!” Once again he turned and stalked a few feet away, swiping angrily at the air and cursing.

Newton stood stock still, his back pressed against the gnarled bark of the pine tree, his face burning. He licked his lips and swallowed a dry throat, then slowly straightened and smoothed down the front of his clothes. He looked around at the forest—the gray forest—and felt very cold and small. “Crow…,” he began, but Crow waved him off. Newton pushed himself off the tree and walked tentatively forward. “Look, Crow…I’m sorry I mouthed off the way I did…but put yourself in my place for a minute.”

Crow turned to look at him.

“Granted, I wasn’t there thirty years ago,” Newton said, “but I have a pretty open mind. Yesterday I didn’t so much as believe in the tooth fairy and today you want me to believe that there are such things as werewolves. I mean…werewolves for Christ’s sake. How should I even react to something like that?”

“You could try a little trust.”

“Crow—coming down that hill with you, coming out here with you—that’s showing more than just a little trust, but believing in werewolves…at the risk of you slamming me into another tree, that’s going to take a bit more than simple trust.”

They stared at each other for a while and then Crow sighed heavily and nodded. “Yeah, goddamn it.” A rueful grin twitched up one corner of his mouth and he bent and picked up the hiking stick and held it out. “Sorry about the whole slamming into a tree thing.”

“Sure,” Newton said snippily and snatched the stick out of Crow’s hands and held it defensively in front of his chest. “Don’t worry about it, but please don’t do it again.”

“Scout’s honor,” Crow said and held up three fingers.

A little breeze swept through the clearing and stirred some leaves. “So now what?” Newton asked.

“It’s your call. I’m going that way,” he said, nodding to the northeast. “If you want to head back, no harm, no foul.”

“I should go back,” Newton said. “I really should. But…what the hell.”

A big grin broke out on Crow’s face and he stuck out his hand; after only a moment’s hesitation, Newton took it and they shook. “But,” Newton said, not letting go immediately, “this doesn’t mean I believe in werewolves, witches, goblins, or honest Republicans. All it means is that I’ll go to his house and we’ll see what we see. Fair enough?”

Crow pursed his lips, then nodded. “Fair enough.”

They started walking again, heading farther up the road, and in a loud stage whisper that was meant to be heard, Newton said, “Werewolves, my ass.” Then suddenly a memory kicked its way out of the shadows in the back of Newton’s mind and he jerked to a stop and grabbed Crow’s sleeve. “Holy shit!”

Crow wheeled. “What’s wrong?”

“Ubel Griswold…” Newton stammered. “Werewolf!”

Crow blinked. “Um…yeah. We covered that.”

“No, Jesus Christ, I just remembered something that you absolutely have to know. About Griswold.”

“Newt—if you’re going to reveal that you’re his long-lost son or some B-movie shit like that I’m going to hurt you. A lot.”

“No, shut up and listen. The other day when I was doing a Net search for my feature I searched on Griswold’s name and—jeez, how the hell could I have forgotten this?—I found a reference to Ubel Griswold and werewolves. I totally forgot about it.”

“And you’re just telling me now?”

Crow whapped him on the top of the head with his open fingers. “You friggin’ cheesehead. How the hell could you not remember something about Griswold and werewolves when we are in Dark-frickin’-Hollow arguing about werewolves while going to Griswold’s frickin’ house? Explain to me how that is possible.”

“I don’t know…I just forgot. I guess I just didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. I’m sorry, okay? But at least let me tell you what I read.”

“Yeah, useful information might be—oh, I don’t know—useful?”

“Stop shouting. It was just a quick reference, and I guess it didn’t really register at the time because it referred to something that happened in the late fifteen hundreds, maybe early sixteen hundreds. Something about a guy put on trial for being a werewolf. Peter something or other. Can’t remember his last name. Point is, he was point on trial for being a werewolf and later executed.”

“You lost me. Guy named Peter gets killed four hundred years ago, what’s that got to do with—”

“They gave a bunch of aliases for him. One of them was Ubel Griswold.”

Crow stood there and stared at him for quite a while after that. “Oh, that’s just swell,” he said.

“Maybe it’s an ancestor of his,” Newton offered. “If Griswold was descended from someone who was accused of being a werewolf—and a pretty famous one if the transcripts of his trial are on the Internet four hundred some years later—then maybe he played on that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Figure it out. He took the werewolf thing from his ancestor as a gimmick to disguise the fact that it was just an ordinary man—albeit a serial killer—behind the Reaper murders. Or, maybe he was really nuts and thought he was channeling his ancestor. Didn’t Son of Sam get messages from a dog or something?”

“I think that was something he made up to try and prove to the cops that he was insane.”

“Well, he was a mass murderer…how sane could he have been?” Newton said. “But the point is that if you’re a homicidal maniac and you discover that your ancestor was tried and convicted of being a werewolf, wouldn’t you play on that? Use it to increase the terror and thereby increase whatever psychosexual pleasure these guys get from killing? Isn’t that like a given here?”

“It would be,” agreed Crow, “except for one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“During the Pine Deep Massacre no one even floated the word ‘werewolf.’ Not even me. I don’t think I’ve even said that word aloud in conjunction with Griswold until today. I didn’t even tell Val that’s what I thought Griswold was.”

“Balls.”

“Yeah, so any connection Griswold had with the four-hundred-year-old werewolf trial was kept pretty well hidden until you found it on the Net. I never even made that connection, and believe me I have looked.”

“Well, regardless of that…the original Peter what’s-his-name is dead, and the Griswold of the 1970s is dead, so as spooky as this is it’s all kind of academic.”

Crow turned away and looked down the tangled path. “Maybe,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Crow turned back. “What if they’re the same werewolf?”

“Oh, come on now, that’s going too far. First you want me to believe you met a werewolf, now it’s an immortal werewolf? Next thing you’ll tell me that his real name is Dracula.”

“Dracula was a vampire.”

“Well, Crow, you want me to believe in ghosts and werewolves. Why not vampires, too?” Crow walked away from him and started down the path. Newton called, “Hey, while we’re at it we can see if we can find a crop circle and maybe a leprechaun.”

Crow held up one hand, forefinger raised.

(2)

Mark stood on the porch, leaning his shoulder against the pillar, the neck of a Sam Adams hooked between his index and forefingers. The sun was up but storm clouds were rising in a solid ring from every point on the horizon; they were closing like a camera aperture, shutting out the blue of the sky. In another half an hour it would be black as night. Weird weather patterns lately, he thought. When he heard the screen door open and then bang shut he knew it would be Val and not Connie following him out of the living room battleground.

He didn’t turn to look, just said, “Don’t start.”

“I’m not going to say a damn thing.” Val’s voice was ice cold. Mark had heard his mother sound like that on those rare times when she and Dad were fighting.

“It’s not your business anyway,” he said.

“You’re right, it’s not.”

“It’s between Connie and me. So, butt out.”

Val did not reply. He heard the boards of the slat bench creak as she sat down. Over beyond the barn an owl hooted, probably confused by the coming darkness, and there was the sound of some traffic on the road. Truck, by the sound of it.

The day had started okay, with Connie acting more like her old self, even to the point of doing a bit of gardening, but when Mark had come up behind her and wrapped his arms around her, pressing his loins up against her rump, she had screamed. Actually screamed, and then started struggling to get away from him like he was some kind of damn rapist. It made Mark sick and it scared him, and it also made him mad. He hadn’t seen her struggle like that when Ruger was running his hands all over her that night, but when her husband wanted to cop a feel—her frigging husband who had rights—then she was all piss and vinegar, fighting for her maidenly honor. Well screw that. Then, of course, she had burst into tears and gone running off to cry on Val’s shoulder. She cried all the damn time. There were times that he wanted to shake her, slap her, tell her to just get over it. It had been like that since they’d gotten home. Connie spent most of her time either crying or staring off into space like a zombie, and now they were sleeping in separate bedrooms.

Val was being a pain in the ass about it, too, always siding with Connie and treating him like he was Jack the Ripper.

“Mark?” He tried to ignore her. “Mark,” she repeated, putting a finer edge to it.

“What?” he snapped, still looking out into the big dark. There was the sound of another vehicle out on A-32. A car this time.

“You need to get help, Mark.”

Now he did turn and pointed at her with the half-empty beer bottle. “Yeah? Well you need to mind your own bloody business, Val.”

Val sat almost primly on the bench, her legs crossed, hands folded in her lap, head cocked slightly to one side, appraising him. “I’m serious here, Mark. Connie’s in therapy, and I think you need to see someone, too.”

“Bullshit. The only one around here with a goddamn problem is my goddamn wife.”

There was such a look of naked contempt in Val’s face that even in the heat of his anger Mark couldn’t look at it. He turned back to the gathering darkness, drank down the rest of his beer, and with a snarl of rage threw the bottle far out into the yard where it shattered against a stone.

“Mark,” Val said, her voice softer as she got up and came to stand right behind him. “I understand that you’re hurting because of what happened, but denial isn’t going to—”

“Spare me the psychobabble,” he hissed. Then he spun on his heel and shouldered past her into the house, letting the screen door slam emptily behind him.

(3)

Crow stopped with a barrier-arm across Newton’s chest. Since their last tête-à-tête they had walked for another hour, following a series of hills that appeared to be descending lower and lower into the roots of the mountains. Their path, such as it was, spilled out at the bottom of one of the longer hills and they stood completely shrouded in cloying shadows. Across from them, perhaps forty feet away, the other hill lifted tiredly on its long journey upward to find the hidden sunlight far above—sunlight that looked weaker now as clouds thickened overhead. To their right the valley between the hills wormed through some ancient glacial boulders and then widened into a thicket of gray and sickly trees. The undergrowth glistened wetly, as if covered in grease.

Slowly, Crow raised a finger. “Listen,” he whispered.

Newton listened to the woods, to the air. It was like watching a movie with the sound turned down. “There’s nothing,” he murmured.

“Right,” Crow said softly. “Absolutely nothing. No birds, no wind. Nothing. It’s dead.”

Crow nodded slowly. “Yeah. Good word for it.”

They moved toward the thicket, entering a natural archway made from the laced fingers of empty branches. They took two paces into the corridor of black trees and then stopped, as still and silent as the forest around them. Both men blinked in surprise and alarm, both opened their mouths to speak; neither said a thing. If moving from sunlight into shadow on the hillside had jarred them, then entering the thicket positively struck them over their hearts. Both of them had stopped as if they had walked into some invisible barrier.

“Jesus Christ!” Crow gasped.

“Damn!” hissed Newton. They exchanged looks of shock.

“What just happened?” asked Newton in a hushed voice.

Crow just shook his head. He took a tentative step forward. His foot moved easily, there was no actual barrier, no specific tangible thing barring their way. He took a few steps, and then stopped and looked back to Newton, who seemed wholly unwilling to go any farther.

“Come on, Newt,” said Crow in a hushed voice. “In for a penny….”

Newton looked up, and the intertwining branches of the skeletal trees made him feel as if he were inside some vast and monstrous rib cage. He followed slowly.

The archway of trees stretched on for nearly 150 yards, at times so narrow that they had to walk in single file while branches plucked at their coat sleeves, and sometimes wider, so they could stand side by side to leech confidence from the visible presence of the other. As they reached the end of the archway, they stopped again. Crow was still sweating profusely and he was breathing as heavily as he had during the long climb down the hill. Newton noticed, as he had before, that Crow’s hands automatically and unthinkingly touched the butt of the pistol and the handle of the machete over and over again, like a pilgrim touching his talismans while in the land of the pagans.

Crow blotted his face with his sleeve and then froze, staring at the ground. He took two short steps and then squatted down. “Look at this.” When Newton came over Crow pointed at a part of the dirt pathway visible through the fallen debris.

“Is that a footprint?”

“Yeah. Not too old, either. See, there’s more of them. Someone’s been down here, since it rained last.” He brushed away some of the debris. “Couple of people. See? That set is all over the place. Looks like work shoes. But over here, smoother soles. Dress shoes.”

“Could have been the cops. They were supposed to have come down to the Hollow, weren’t they?” Newton asked.

“Maybe. Don’t know if they came this far in, though.” Crow shook his head as he rose. “Let’s go.”

They moved on for another ten minutes and once again Crow stopped. “That’s it,” he said, nodding toward the place beyond the archway, his voice low and as deflated as a flat tire. “I think we’re here.” He pointed to a spot just ahead where the path widened but was littered with grubby, stunted trees. Some of the trees were middle-aged, twenty-four years old or more, but not one of them looked healthy. Thick, hairy vines were wrapped like tentacles around nearly every trunk and sloped from one tree to its neighbor, and everywhere there were smaller vines with mottled gray-green leaves. Between the trees were fierce tangles of rough-looking shrubs and bushes, which combined with the vines to form wall after unfriendly wall between them and their destination. Along the ground moss ran like a poorly laid carpet, the dark green broken frequently by the bone-white caps of toadstools. Drifting sluggishly through the air was a sickroom smell of rotting vegetation and mold.

“Oh, man,” said Newton, wiping his mouth. “What’s wrong with this place?”

Crow’s mouth was a tight line. “Everything,” he said.

Pointing to the vines and bushes, Newton said, “How are we going to get through that? Can you see a path?”

Crow drew the machete with a rasp. “I’ll cut a path. Stand clear and give me room to swing. I don’t want to take your face off with this thing.”

“Sounds fair,” Newton said, fading back a few paces.

Crow moved forward, frowning at the imposing foliage, his eyes darting around, and then he slashed down with the machete. The blade sheared easily through the closest vine, severing it so that both ends fell away. Sap welled from the severed ends, like blood from a bisected snake, dottling the moss with black drops thick as syrup. Crow and Newton winced at the swinging, dripping ends of the vine. There was a smell like sulfur in the air. “Damn,” muttered Crow. He looked at his blade, half-expecting to see the edge corroded as if by acid, but the flat blade was only stained with smelly sap. “Let’s keep going. Stand back.”

They cut their way into the forest that had grown up on Ubel Griswold’s field, and it was brutal work. Within a dozen yards Crow was feeling tired, and he looked ready to drop. He moved his arm like it weighed about a thousand pounds and someone had poured concrete over both his shoes. Both he and Newton were splattered with dripping goo of a half-dozen shades and viscosities. All of the gunk from the unnameable plants stank like sulfur mixed with spoiled milk. Several times Crow had to stop to control his gag reflex, gulping down huge mouthfuls of air filtered by breathing against the folds of a sleeve he wrapped around his face.

“This is going to take forever,” said Newton, exhausted from watching and beginning to get seriously worried for them both.

He looked at his wristwatch. “It’s two o’clock already.”

Crow wheeled around. “What?” he demanded. “It can’t be that late!”

Newton showed him his watch, and Crow compared it to his own. 2:03 P.M. They stared at each other.

“It can’t be that late already,” Crow repeated.

Newton shook his head. “I know. I don’t get it either. At this rate, we won’t get back to town until past sunset, and let me tell you how much I don’t want to be caught down here at night.”

Crow cursed and drove the machete into the ground and drank some water from his canteen.

Newton pursed his lips judiciously and avoided eye contact with Crow. “So…you want to just bag it?”

“I can’t,” Crow snarled and then hacked the next vine, and the next.

(4)

“If you don’t stop that goddamned crying, Connie, so help me God, I’ll…”

“You’ll what?

Mark stiffened and turned sharply. Val stood in the doorway to the bedroom, her dark hair tousled from the wind, her eyes narrow and cold. “You’ll what?” she asked again. Her voice was as cold as her flat and level stare.

Mark stabbed a finger toward her. “You stay the hell out of this, Val. This is between Connie and me. It doesn’t concern you. So butt out!”

Sprawled on the bed, Connie Guthrie lay with her face buried in her hands, her shoulders quietly trembling, her sobs faint against the louder rasp of Mark’s agitated breathing.

Ignoring Mark, Val said, “Connie? Connie, are you all right?”

“No, she’s not all right!” Mark spat. “She’s on that crying kick again.”

“Why don’t you just leave her alone?”

“Leave her alone? That’s all I’ve had to do since that night. She won’t let me do anything but leave her alone! Christ! It’s worse than living with a nun!”

Contempt showed in Val’s eyes and the twist of her lips. “My God, you are a complete asshole, Mark,” she sneered.

“Oh, kiss my ass! Besides,” he snapped, “who are you to lecture me? At least you’re getting laid. Oh, no! Don’t try to deny it! Don’t you think I know why Crow talked us into going out last night? He just wanted to get in your pants. Hey, I’m not criticizing, Val, don’t get me wrong. I just think I’d like to know what it feels like. Shit, a married man and you’d think I can at least get a frigging kiss from my wife. Hah! Not with the Crying Game over here. I even look at her and she’s all tears and hysterics and all that bullshit. Shit. The way she acts, you’d think it was me who attacked her.”

“Isn’t that what you were about to do when I came in?” Val said coldly, and saw the point strike deep, but Mark’s anger was too big to let a little shame deflate it.

“No, Miss Know-it-all! I was not about to attack her. I’m just trying to get things back to the way they were. I mean, hell, there was a time—and it wasn’t all that long ago—when I could actually touch my wife without her going to pieces.”

“Poor baby,” Val said. “Did you stop to think how she feels?”

Mark looked down at Connie, who still had her face buried in her hands, refusing, or unable, to look up. He slowly raised his head to face his sister and there were hot tears in his eyes. “Just what the hell is that supposed to mean? I was there, Val. I saw what he did. I went through it, too, you know. It wasn’t just her. Ruger kicked my ass and tried to screw her right in front of me. Another couple of minutes and I’d have had to watch my wife have sex with another man. Do you know how that makes me feel?”

Val shook her head in disbelief. “Listen to you. Do you even know what you’re saying? You said you would have had to watch Connie have sex with another man. Is that how you see it? That she was going to have sex with him?”

“Well, just what the hell do you think rape is?”

Val’s voice dropped lower in both tone and temperature. “Rape isn’t sex, dumbass. He was going to hurt her, not make love to her, not screw her, not have sex with her. He was going to hurt her, inside and out. If you think what he was going to do was have sex with her, then you are a total jackass!”

“Oh, please, let’s leave feminist propaganda out of this, shall we?”

“Do you really equate rape with sex? Are you actually that stupid? God!”

“You don’t understand—” he began, faltering just a little, but she cut him off with a swift chop of words.

“I don’t understand? Kiss my ass! I’m a woman, and I know what it feels like to be afraid of men just because they’re bigger and stronger. You just can’t imagine it, Mark, to be afraid of walking outside in the dark, of being alone with a man in a parking lot or an elevator or anywhere. To always have to be on your guard! To always realize that your body—your actual body—can be invaded by a man, just because he has the physical power to do it! That’s something every woman lives with all her life. You think women have nightmares of monsters and ghosts? We don’t. We have dreams of being raped and abused because some nasty trick of genetics decided we’d be the smaller, weaker ones, that we were the ones to have vaginas that could be so easily invaded. That’s what almost happened to Connie. Another couple of minutes and he would have invaded her with all his rage and ugliness. Yeah, you would have had to watch, but that would have hurt your male pride more than your heart. You actually have the balls to tell me it would hurt you to have seen your wife have sex with another man. How about imagining what it would have been like to have Ruger’s hands all over your skin, his mouth on you, his cock inside of you, his sweat on your skin, and his semen inside of you. Do you call that having sex? Christ, you are a pathetic excuse for a human being, Mark!”

Mark Guthrie stood there, trembling with rage, fists balled at his sides, glaring at her, his mouth drawn into tight lines that showed a double row of clenched teeth. “Don’t you dare talk to me like that!” he snarled in a deadly whisper. “This is none of your goddamn business! Who the hell do you think you are to talk to me like that? Who the hell do you—”

Val’s hard left hand slapped the rest of the words into silence. It was a hard blow and so fast he never saw it, and it spun him halfway around. For a moment he stood there, eyes wide with shock, a hand pressed to his cheek, head ringing from the blow. He straightened and both of his hands became fists.

“What are you going to do, Mark?” Val asked harshly. “Are you going to hit me back?”

“If you ever do that again,” he said in a fierce whisper, “I’ll—”

“You’ll what?” Val snapped. “Will you do to me what you were threatening to do to Connie if she didn’t stop crying? Is that your only answer? To hurt women instead of being a real man and trying to help?”

He raised one fist, wanting with every fiber of his being to smash her into silence, to shut her mouth, to stop the flow of words. Val stood there and looked at him, ignoring the heavy fist poised above her, just looking at him.

She said, “If it will make you feel like a man, Mark, go on and hit me. You’re bigger than me. Go ahead and do it. Be a man.”

The fist trembled, shaking visibly as every muscle in his body strove one against another, warring with rage and confusion and a mindless compulsion to smash. Then, with a growl of inarticulate rage, he spun away and slammed out of the room. Val heard him stomp down the stairs, heard the sound of the hallway closet door opening and then banging shut, heard the front door slam open, then heard only the silence of the house and the soft sounds of Connie’s sobs.

“Shit,” Val said softly to herself as she sat down on the edge of the bed and stroked Connie’s hair, listening to her tears. After a while, she, too, wept.

(5)

The storm clouds encircling the sun closed ranks and blotted out the sky. They were thick clouds, swollen with cold rain and drooping low over the town. In just minutes day turned to an early twilight so thick that streetlamp sensors triggered and the sodium vapor lights flickered on. Drivers turned on their headlights. None of this stopped the celebrations. Little Halloween rolled through the town thicker and heavier than the clouds overhead.

Deep in the cellar of the house, down in the darkness below old floorboards, the white things in their nest stirred, knowing that the sunlight had faded. Sleep, for now, was ended. Night had come early to Pine Deep.