Cole Vandermeer

Cole Vandermeer came down the ramp at the airport on Monday afternoon carrying one bag, in a canvas jacket that was too thin for the coast, and looking out at the fog as though it were a job he intended to finish. He was a square-faced man of a little under six feet, with fair hair cut short and hands that had done work: when he took mine to shake it, the grip was dry and hard and there was a callus across the top of his palm. He had the flat middle-western vowels that I had heard enough of in the army to find restful, and he had decided, before he got off the plane, that he was going to be pleasant to everybody, and he was.

"Dr. Ashby. You're the one going up with me."

"I am."

"Well, I'm glad of it. I don't know a soul up there." He hoisted the bag. "Tell me the truth about the house. Does it have a roof?"

"It has a roof. It has no heating in the east wing and the plumbing is from the eighties."

"That's fine. I've worked on jobs like that." He started walking; he walked fast, the way people walk who have spent their lives arriving at sites where somebody is waiting for them. "The lawyer, Mr. Trowbridge, he sent me a letter about the family. Fourteen pages. I read it twice on the plane. I want you to know before we go anywhere that I'm not here about that."

"Not here about what?"

"About the dog." He said the word without any particular emphasis, the way a man says a word he has decided in advance not to be afraid of. "I know the story. My grandmother told it to me when I was a boy, and she told it to me the way you'd tell a child about a bear in the woods, which is to say she half meant it, and I took it the way you take a thing like that, which is that old people have their stories and the coast is dark and people die of their arteries. I've read the letter and I've read Dr. Cray's account, and I'll tell you what I think, and then I'll drop it and you can tell me if I'm a fool."

"Go on."

"I think my great-uncle was seventy-four years old and had been sitting in an armchair in a cold house on the water for thirty years eating too much meat, and I think he went out for a walk in the dark because that was his habit, and I think his heart stopped, and I think he fell, and I think that when the groundskeeper went out afterward he raked the path and a big dog went over it, because that county is full of people with big dogs, and the rest is a hundred and forty years of a family enjoying their own ghost." He stopped at the doors and looked at me directly. "That's my position. I'll hold to it as long as it behaves. But I will also tell you the other thing, because I paid two hundred dollars for a doctor's appointment in Chicago to be told it, and it cost me a week of sleep."

"What other thing?"

"I've got the gene," said Cole Vandermeer. "The channel thing. Dr. Cray sent her notes to my physician out there and he ran it, and I've got it. There's a beta-blocker for it and I take it and I run four miles three times a week because that's what they tell you to do, and I am in perfect health, and if something comes at me out of the dark and roars at me, I may drop dead on the spot exactly like my great-uncle. So I've read the family letter in the rain, Dr. Ashby, and I've decided I'm here anyway, and that's the whole of my character, if you want it. I don't intend to be frightened out of four thousand acres."

We took a car up the coast that evening. The road ran north out of the city through two hours of dairy country and then hit the coast and turned mean, doubling around headlands with the water on the left and the hillside coming down to the shoulder on the right, and the fog thickening as the light failed until the headlights were a wall of white going nowhere. Cole drove. He was a good driver: unhurried, both hands on the wheel, and when we came round a bend and found a wagon of hay stopped in the road with no light on it, he simply stopped, and waited, and let the farmer wave us by.

We stopped for dinner at a place called the Anchor in the town of Quillon, which is the county's only town and has a population of four hundred and a diesel generator for when the storms take the line down, and there we had the first taste of what was waiting for us. The waitress knew before we sat down. She looked at the bag, and at Cole's face, and then she said, unprompted, "You'll be the one that's come for the house."

"I am."

"Well." She wrote nothing down. "Then you'll be wanting the table by the window, so you can see who comes in."

She brought us chowder and sourdough and then stood at the end of the table with the pot in her hand and told us, in the flat way that people on that coast have of telling you a thing they have told a hundred times, which one it was. It had been seen twice in her lifetime: once in 1981, on the shore road, when a great pale animal crossed in front of her father's truck at night, and once in 2009, by two boys poaching crabs, who had come home grey and shaking and had been beaten by their fathers for lying and had never afterwards been able to be in the same room as a large dog.

"It doesn't bark," she said. "That's the thing nobody believes. Everybody knows a dog barks. Whatever that is, it doesn't bark, it doesn't growl, and it doesn't run like a dog does. It comes across the ground at you high up at the shoulder, and there's a light in it, is what people say, or on it — like a lamp behind a wet window. And then a person's heart gives out. That's all it does. It never has to bite anybody. It just has to come." She refilled our cups. "My mother told me the same when I was small: if you hear nothing, run."

There was a man at the end of the bar while she said this, in a suit that looked like a lawyer's suit, with a plate of fried fish in front of him and a phone face down beside his plate. He was perhaps forty-five, with dark hair going grey at the temples, and a narrow face, and he watched us in the mirror over the bar for two or three minutes and then got up, leaving his fish half eaten, and paid at the till and went out. He had to pass our table to do it. He did not look at us, and he did not hurry.

As the door shut behind him, Cole Vandermeer said, "That man knows me."

"How?"

"He looked at the back of my head in a mirror for a long time." Cole folded his napkin and set it on the table. "And he knew I'd see him in the glass. That's a thing people do when they want to be seen but don't want to be responsible for it." He picked up the bill. "Let's go up to the house. I want to see it in the dark before I see it in the morning, because in the morning I'll like it, and I want to know what it looks like when I don't."

We drove the last six miles in silence. The gate to Harrow Reach is a set of iron pillars with the family's name on a plate, and a cattle grid, and a long drive through trees planted a century and a half ago and now grown into a tunnel, and then the trees open and the house is there on its shelf of land with the sea below it, and a single light on in the west window.

Somebody had been waiting for us. Standing on the flagstones with a lamp in his hand was a man of sixty in a canvas coat, unhurried, with the flat professional calm of a man who looks after property that is not his own, and behind him in the lit doorway was his wife.

"Mr. Vandermeer," he said. "I'm Hollis Nord. I look after the place. This is my wife Freya." He took the bag out of Cole's hand without asking. "You'll be wanting the fire lit in the front room. It's lit. And you'll want to know two things before you go to bed, and I'd rather say them now than have you find them in the night."

"Say them."

"First, the dogs down at the station have been loud the last ten days, which is not usual and I don't like it. Second." Hollis Nord looked past us at the black drive behind, and then at the trees, and then at his own lamp. "The west gate has been open twice this week and it is locked at night by me with my own hands."