Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman Page B

noise of shelling—I had asked that place to heal me, and it had.
    Mostly.
    This forest was a place , too, the way Glastonbury had been a place .
    There was something powerful here, something beyond the reach of lightbulbs and combustion engines.
    It was soon after I got going again that I began to feel watched.
    I stopped.
    It was around five o’clock. The day’s heat had reached its zenith and was easing off at last. The shadows had just begun to stretch. The feeling that I was being supervised was so intense it made the back of my neck feel warm.
    I stopped and opened my mouth, which I often did to help my blighted hearing. I adjusted my glasses. I even tried to engage my nose. Nothing moved. I heard only the cruder noises; birdsong and the screeching of a squirrel warning its neighbors, whether about me or something else, I did not know. I smelled the stone-littered, black soil of the forest, how fecund it was. Trees in all their variety pushed sap, and summer flowers peddled their fragrances to the summer air; the drought that was parching half the state had not come to Whitbrow, as if the tops of these trees gouged the rain clouds and bled them out before they could save the farms over the county line.
    I started walking again, minding the diminished undergrowth that comprised the trail, but keeping part of my awareness on the forest around me.
    “Goddamnit, someone’s out there,” I mouthed. No one of my senses reported the presence; I simply knew I was not alone.
    Could it be one of the pigs?
    No. Pigs were not subtle. Pigs did not stalk.
    I would have to turn around soon if I wanted to be home by dark, but I was not ready to turn around yet. Some part of me craved confrontation with whatever was out there.
    Not far off to my right, crows called and took to their wings.
    There it is; we have something.
    “Salutations!” I called out.
    Was it Cranmer? I didn’t know the man well enough, after all, to know what sort of monkeyshines he was capable of.
    “Martin?”
    A tardy crow took off from the brush to join its fellows.
    Crows don’t spook easily.
    “It is I, Nanook of the North, and I come in peace,” I said.
    That was when I saw him.
    The boy stepped into view. A thin, pale mulatto just entering puberty. I knew this because the boy wasn’t wearing pants. Just a dirty shirt that stopped at his navel.
    “Hey there!” I said. “Are you alright?”
    The boy said nothing. Just stood there with one hand on a tree, looking intently at me.
    “Where are your pants, my friend?”
    Silence.
    “Fine, that’s fine,” I said, turning my gaze from the boy and continuing down the path. The boy kept his distance but kept pace with me. It was clear that he had not come forward because he had been discovered; it was simply time for me to see him.
    The two of us walked for a moment silently, the other keeping about twenty yards off the trail.
    I spoke.
    “We can play this way if you like. You be the naked lad of the woods, and I will be the dressed man of the trail. Is it that you own no pants, or do you reject the idea of pants altogether? I can’t say I blame you. It is a hot day. Perhaps, if I had any sense, I would remove my pants and cool off a little. The thing is, I know I would feel embarrassed. But look at you; you don’t seem to feel embarrassed at all. I envy you that. Waving your pecker about in the breeze like a primal man, that’s first-class.”
    No effect.
    I stopped walking now, and so did the boy. I took a big, burlesque step to see if the one in the trees would mimic me, but the other stood still. Another clownish step, and a third, daring the apparition, but it did not move, not until I got fed up and started walking down the path again.
    The boy caught up to me easily and regained his measure.
    What in hell does he want?
    I remembered a French poilu who called one light-skinned mulatto gravedigger café au lait during those bleak days of the Meuse offensive, how I had laughed with the other