Gemini Rising. Brian McNaughton

winced at the idea of shooting a dog, not at Alvin’s language. Suppose he shot a straying Lucy by mistake? But this was too far for Lucy to stray.

      “Maybe the hippies are doing it,” the storekeeper suggested.

      “Hippies,” Alvin snorted. “They just want to sit around in a circle and chant all night and smoke their funny cigarettes. I watched them close; closer than they ever dreamed, and they ain’t up to no harm. Dumb, maybe. But they’re just wasting their own time and hurting themselves, not other folks. The ones out to Falls Road, they got this goat there, and they treat it like Mrs. Astor’s pet horse. I figure they like animals.”

      “Some dog is killing your animals?” Marcia asked.

      Alvin sighed. “Not just mine. And killing them, that would be better than leaving them to bellow and bleed to death. Some son of a bitch dog, pardon me, just wants the choice parts, so he comes along and snaps them off, neat as a razor cut.”

      Marcia’s stomach felt queasy, and she didn’t want to hear which parts the dog preferred.

      “No human being, least of all hippies who spend all day combing a good-for-nothing billy goat, would be that mean,” Alvin said. “I come in here for another box of them .300 Savage hollow points, George. I’ll take them and be on my way.”

      “I think old Alvin’s fighting a war,” the storekeeper said after the tall man had left with his purchase. “Either that or his eyesight’s gone completely. That’s the second box of bullets in two weeks.”

      “Who was that?”

      “Alvin Walker. Got a dairy farm two, three miles out; two hundred acres or so. He could sell it this afternoon to a developer for a million dollars, but he says Florida’s too hot for him and he’d rather milk cows than watch TV. Sees less money in a year than I do in a month. Some folks is just plain nuts. Him and Peachy, they speak the same language.”

      Marcia made a mental note of the name. She had instinctively liked the old man, and she believed he would be an excellent source of information on the hippies—as, to her distress, she found herself thinking of them now.

      Alvin Walker had convinced her that Peachy was, as Higgins had so aptly put it, “off in outer space,” and she was fairly sure that he would have no printable story for her. But she felt obliged to see for herself, and she wrote down the complicated directions that the storekeeper gave her.

      She turned from the blacktop to a gravel road, from the gravel to a dirt road, from the dirt road to something that was less than a pair of ancient wheel-ruts through the piney woods. She drove slowly for a long time, and then the track ended in a bare dirt yard.

      She sat in the car for a while, drinking in the scene. It suggested a way of life that she had never experienced, not even through books or movies. Half a dozen junk cars in varying stages of dismemberment stood around the yard, presumably cannibalized to keep one vehicle running. The house itself had a log cabin as its nucleus. From there, frame additions had been made at random, covered with tarpaper or galvanized iron. The work had been done by someone who may have heard that there was such an art as carpentry, and who had tried to reinvent that art in total isolation.

      Maybe there was a story here—not a story about a monster, but a story about Peachy himself. She fitted a wide-angle lens to her camera and began to take pictures before she got out of the car.

      Going closer, she saw an impressive set of antlers over the door. Reddish hides, foxes on closer inspection, were nailed to the door of an attached shed. There were some raccoon hides, too. The shed was full of burlap bags containing—she paused to check—pine cones. She had heard that some people collected these for sale to manufacturers of Christmas decorations.

      The atmosphere was warm and drowsy. Except for the excited scolding of a blue jay, it was silent. That was odd. Alvin Walker had mentioned dogs. Perhaps they were all off on a romp with their master.

      She knocked timidly at the door.

      “Mr. Peachtree?”

      The blue jay squawked more raucously. She wondered what it was like in these silent woods at night, in this jerrybuilt house without electricity. She could imagine it. She could even imagine something that came “snuffling around the doors and windows like a consumptive steam engine.”

      “Mr. Peachtree!”

      She knocked so forcefully that the door drifted open.

      The wood near its makeshift fastening had been broken. She peered into the dark, cool, cluttered room. Overriding the sour odors of a careless hermit’s lair was a smell at once familiar and ominous. It was only much later that she connected it in her mind with the odor of a butcher shop.

      It took her a while to realize just what she was looking at, because she had never seen anything even remotely like it before. Her eyes scanned the room once, twice. She was looking at Mr. Peachtree.

      Something had torn him apart.