Cage of Night by Ed Gorman Page A

through the darkness with purpose and fury.
    The moonlight on the snow gave the woods a soft glow. Fox and possum and raccoon and rabbit darted through the undergrowth as we made our way deeper into the stands of hardwoods. My nose and cheeks were frozen. Our breath was vapor. Despite the cold, every time I'd touch her for any significant time, I'd get an erection. I was a virgin, but not a happy one.
    Little kids in our town believe that there are two long-haunted places. One is the old red brick school abandoned back in the fifties. The story they tell is that there was this really wicked principal, a warted crone who looked a lot like Miss Grundy in "Archie" comics, who on two occasions took two different first-graders to the basement and beat them so badly that they died. Legend has it that she cracked the concrete floor, buried them beneath it and poured fresh concrete. Legend also has it that even today the spirits of those two little kids still haunt the old schoolhouse and that, on certain nights, the ghost of the principal can be seen carrying a blood-dripping axe.
    The other legend concerns Parkinson's cabin, a place built in the mid-1800s by a white man who planned to do a lot of business with the Mesquakie Indians. Except something went wrong. The local newspaper noted that a huge meteor was seen by many locals one night, and that it crashed to earth not far from Trapper Parkinson's crude cabin. The odd thing was, nobody ever saw or talked to Parkinson again after the meteor crash. Perfect soil for a legend to grow.
    It took us thirty-five minutes to reach the cabin from the road. About halfway there, Cindy finally told me that that was where we were headed. Bramble and first-growth pine made the last of our passage slow. But then we stood on a small hill, the moon big and round and blanched white like the one the Aztec priests always called a demon moon, and looked down on a disintegrating lean-to of boards and tar paper. Over the years, hobos had periodically tried to fix the place up. An ancient plow, all blade-rusted and wood-rotted, stood next to the cabin. A silver snake of moon-touched creek ran behind.
    And then Cindy said, "You see it over there? The well?"
    Sometime in the early part of this century, when the last of the Mormons were trekking their way across the country to Utah, a straggling band stopped here long enough to help a young couple finish the well they'd started digging. The Mormons, being decent folks indeed, even built the people a pit made of native stone and a roof made of birch. And the well itself hadn't been easy to dig. You started with a sharp-pointed augur looking for water and then you dug with a shovel when you found it. Sometimes you dug two hundred feet, sending up buckets of rock and dirt and shale for days before you were done. It was all tumbledown now, of course, but you could see in the remnants of the pit how impressive it must have been when it was new.
    We went over to the well. Cindy ducked beneath the shabby roof and peered straight down into the darkness. I dropped a rock down there. The rock broke a thin skin of ice. The echoes rose. I shone my light down. This was what they call a dug well, about the only kind most people made back then. Most of the dug wells in this area went down into clay and shale about fifty feet.
    I kept my light trained down there.
    "He probably doesn't like the light."
    I looked up at her. "Who doesn't like the light?"
    "I guess I shouldn't say 'he.' I should say 'it.'"
    "I guess I'm not following you, Cindy."
    She sighed and walked a few feet away from the well. I didn't go after her. Right now, for some reason, I didn't want to touch her. It was almost as if I was afraid to touch her.
    There was white moonlit snow and there was deep prairie shadow around the cabin, and on a smaller hill nearby there were deer.
    But mostly there was just the wind whipping up snow crystals, and the silence. There was a whole lot of silence.
    "You'll just