Chapter Six
~
The Jetta slowed before leaning into the sharp curve. Corey pressed down on the brakes, eased up; then he pressed down again. He kept the car in neutral as they coasted past the old brick service station on the right and the new post office building on the left.
It was about nine o’clock in the evening. He had picked up Lina Wibosono in front of the social science building on campus as the sun edged below the horizon.
“Sorry. I almost sailed off that curve.” He gripped the wheel tighter.
“That’s all right,” Lina said. “I used to drive like that.”
Corey laughed. “I’ve driven this road enough times in good weather,” he told her. When he had been house sitting for a colleague the previous summer, he had driven this winding road every day. This late in the year, however, ice patches lay hidden in shadowy areas. He had to keep that in mind.
Corey looked back at the service station sitting lonely in the twilight; he had stopped there with two gas cans on the day he was mowing his colleague’s huge lawn. The elderly proprietor in his grease-stained green work overhauls had been stacking used tires next to the building. He had wiped his hands and poured the gas into the cans, reluctant to say much until Corey compared this area of the state with the part of the state where he had grown up. In his mind, he could see the shore of the river and the village of Warrick perched on the bluff overlooking it. Only then had the proprietor relaxed and smiled.
Corey downshifted as he took the second curve to the right. They crossed the small bridge and rumbled over the railroad tracks. What had once been a train depot appeared now as a wooden skeleton and a pile of rotting boards. This collection of buildings located next to the state park entrance on the east side of the road was nearly a ghost town. “Looks like a set from an old western movie.” He swung the car to the left, and they drifted past the cluster of empty shells.
Covering the ground were mounds of brown and yellow leaves. The temperature dropped sharply with the sun in the late autumn months.
“Nick told me that ex-hippies from the late 1960s live here,” he said.
“What? Ex-what?”
Lina, he realized, did not understand the word ‘hippies’ and he had to explain, in as short-order form as possible, the anti-establishment counterculture of that period in which rights now being enjoyed had been fought for.
“They,” he added, “tried to restore some of this. As you can see that effort didn’t always meet with the approval of some of the locals. They didn’t give them the needed support, so now they have this.”
Lina shrugged.
She has probably, he thought, only seen hippies in films in her country, and American films do not always accurately represent what happens here.
In her hands, she held the pages of Nick Sterns’s letter that she had printed out to show him.
Corey stared at the printout in her hands. “That letter,” he said. “That is like the one he wrote to me. Poor man. He seems to have been under a lot of stress.”
“He would not make this up,” Lina told him. “I know what we believe in my country. I tried to help him because I understood what he didn’t know about.”
“Well. Sure. You helped him down in Atlanta.”
“Yes,” she said. “I was there.”
Corey nodded. “Well. I don’t think he’s schizophrenic, but his letter is kind of confusing. He writes about entities who can pass through a dimensional doorway. These entities he doesn’t name, but he write something about a huge wing spread and red eyes.” He slowed the Jetta to a crawl. “Illinois is supposed to have a lot of stories of strange flying creatures – even up in Chicago.”
Two young boys sat on the hood of a derelict car. Chained in the front yard was a Doberman. It lumbered toward the road, straining its chain.
“Whoa.” Corey waited before increasing their speed again.
Closer to the road was a sign that announced the entrance to the state park. It was just ahead. “Titan State Park.”
Next, on the right, was an information sign that Lina read as Corey turned the car into the dark blanket of the forest. “Parking in Designated Places Only.”
Corey again referred to the letter. “It says there … a creature like the one or more spotted in Chicago. The most famous one is the moth-man in West Virginia on the Ohio River.” He gazed past the printout of the email in her hands at the length of her legs visible beneath the hemline of her short skirt. He could see the well-toned muscles beneath the taut skin of her still-tan thighs.
“Mr. Braedon!”
Corey turned the wheel as a camper came at them around the curve.
Lina’s expression revealed that she knew why he had been distracted. She fitted the first page of the printout letter behind the second and ran her eyes down the page.
Corey investigated the rear-view mirror. In the dark, he could barely see his reflection. He stared at his bearded cheeks with the traces of white, at his blond hair that he had to spray to keep his bald patch concealed, at his tired brown eyes. Some people insisted that he did not look over forty-five. This both flattered and dismayed him. He was flattered because maybe his own biological clock was clicking slower than some clocks, and he was only chronologically middle-aged. He was dismayed, however, when he looked at someone vital and young like Lina. The reality was that she was young; she did not just look young.
“Call me Corey,” he said. “You’re not my student.”
Lina smiled.
Corey cautiously watched the jutting noses and jawlines of the rock walls on his left that protruded over the edge of the winding road. “Okay. He went to Jakarta with you. I knew that.” He slowed down for a small wooden bridge. “Then he went to the Philippines to teach Cryptozoology for McAbee. After a couple of years, they decided that he should retire early to save the school money.”
“That was not the reason,” she told him. “Some people didn’t like what he was writing about. But he helped the school.”
“Yes, he did. Gave us good publicity.”
“But still, they fire him.”
Corey nodded. “Well, he did get a teaching position at an HBC in Atlanta for a few years. I guess they didn’t care what he wrote, or that he is a member of the Fortean Society.”
On his right, Corey saw playground equipment scattered near a stone shelter building. A lonely security light mounted on the upper corner of the building converted the structure of a slide into the skeleton of a small dinosaur. While parents chatted over the dying embers of a barbecue pit, two of their kids climbed metal steps and skidded down the shiny slide. Their tennis shoes thumped against the slide’s guardrails. When their shoes slammed against the ground, they stirred up a cloud of dust that seemed to have a phosphorous glow in the waning light.
He decided that the playground parking area would be as appropriate a location as any to stop, and he slid into an empty space next to a truck. “May I see that?” He turned off the engine. “I think we’re okay out here. Only little gremlins are over there. I don’t think they’ll attack us.”
Lina smiled and handed the pages to him. “In my country we have the le-ak and the kuntilanak. He thinks that the le-ak are like the flying creatures you talk about.”
“Indonesia?” Corey pressed the pages against the steering wheel and perused what she had read to him. “Kunti-what? How do you say that?”
She pronounced it slowly. “Koon-tee-laan-ak. It is a woman who is pregnant because she was raped and kills herself out of shame. Her spirit wanders in the night and cries. Some say she has a hole in her back. Some say the spirit is curious about children and takes babies, so pregnant women become worried.”
“I would think so.”
“Some say she has white hair; some say she has long black hair. Many believe that she will attack men who have been unfair to women. One man who was seduced by this ghost said that her perforated back gave off a terrible odor.”
“Perforated?” He smiled. “How did the man survive being seduced by her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe he made up the story.”
Lina looked surprised. “No. Well. I mean, I don’t know. Sundelbolong it is also called in Java.”
“Wow.” He rattled the pages of the letter in his hand. “And I thought Nick’s story was convoluted.”
“There is also the dukun who can control spirits. Many beliefs. Similar in Malaysia. Nick thinks these . . . what you call them . . .”
“Moth-men.”
“Moth-men. Birdmen. Those things could be like the le-ak, but he mentions many things that do not have to do with what Indonesian people believe about the kuntilanak.”
“Oh.” Corey looked down again at the pages. “The large flying half-man, half-hawk.”
“Not a floating head?” Lina offered.
“No, Only Nick saw it down there, as far as he knows. Only I saw it up here, as far as I know.”
“You did?”
Corey looked up at the children playing on the dinosaur slide just to give his eyes -- straining in the dark -- a rest. “I was at the Lewis farm recently, driving a truck to pick up squash, doing Cooter and his father a favor to repay them for use of the truck. I could have sworn that day that I saw a huge bird-like being sitting on the farmhouse roof. But it was getting late, and the sun was shining a yellow beam into my eyes.”
“You saw that bird-man thing?”
“I … saw something. At least, I thought I did.” He returned to the print-out of the email. “These things from old times, Nick thinks, can travel to different times in our history. But why should these entities or beings want to possess – or become – frightening creatures from your country? Why these kuntilanak . . . or flying whatever you mentioned?”
“Le-ak,” she reminded him. “Many people in my country believe in them, but you wouldn’t believe me if I described them.”
“Try me.” Images flashed in Corey’s mind – images from horror movies that had played in his father’s theatre in Warrick.
“They are supposed to be just a flying head with entrails hanging down.”
“What?”
“Yes.”
“Just guts hanging down?”
“Yes. See what I mean?”
“If Indonesians are frightened of these flying severed head creatures, that would give those entities control of the people. Fear is exciting. But it’s also powerful and controlling.”
Lina frowned as she nodded. “Saya mengerti. I understand.”
“Fear as control,” he continued, “is something that Nicko writes about in his articles. But his theories caused him a lot of problems, and not only with McAbee U. People who dare to present controversial issues are often treated poorly by others who don’t want the system – whatever it is – government, corporate, legal, medical – to change. Some people only want others to see the world as they do.”
“You said problems not only with the university. What else? Apu ini? What is it that can supposedly look like a giant bird-man?”
“Yes. In this area and later down in Atlanta, cynical former colleagues focused on Nick because of his research and the light that his publications threw into dark corners.”
“But these things can watch us? Study us?”
He nodded at Lina. “Apparently. Like they only came here by accident.”
“Really?”
“Maybe they traveled through a time corridor by accident – as I heard this from a physics professor at McAbee – and are lost and bewildered and have no intention of being harbingers of bad things to come. If that is what is happening, they’re not really malevolent. They might even, through no fault of their own, be the real source for so-called demons or witches.”
As Lina sat in the dark, she was little more than a shadowy outline. “Masyaallah! What can we do? What can you do?”
Corey returned the email pages to her. “I want to go up to Warrick, of course, to drive by my family’s closed theatre and to see my friend Crandall, who teaches at a community college up there. Maybe he knows something helpful. In fact, he and his wife own a farmhouse in the Warrick Bottoms and want me to visit during our semester break. Dr. Morison, my chairperson, thinks I should go, that it might be a good rest for me.”
Lina watched Corey’s face. “Rest? Is she a medical doctor?”
“She thinks so, sometimes.”
“Can we go now?” She folded away the email letter. “It’s getting pretty dark.”
“Sure.” Corey turned the ignition switch. “How about we find a good restaurant in town? I know McAbee doesn’t have an Indonesian restaurant, but . . .”
“They have a Chinese restaurant.” Lina folded her arms across her breasts as if expecting a chill.
“Of course, they do. Most large towns have at least one.”
Lina smiled, faced forward, but said nothing.
Corey turned the Jetta onto a gravel road that angled past an empty baseball diamond and connected with a blacktop that carried them north, back toward McAbee. As he accelerated the Jetta away from the park into the open countryside, he smelled the field in the still night air.
***