Gary Braunbeck - Keepers

“‘Cause he won’t say the same thing to you. He told me that, just like he told me about Butterball. He says different things to different people… but only if he likes them.”

Time for aspirin and sleep.

The next morning Carson woke me at seven-thirty and told me that we had to go to the truck stop for breakfast.

“Carson, my head hurts and I’ve had about four hours’ sleep. Can’t it wait?”

“No!” He sounded both excited and slightly scared. “We gotta go now.”

“Why?”

He showed me the latest issue of Modoc -the one he couldn’t read to me the night before-and opened it to the first page.

I was looking at a black-and-white drawing of the I-70 truck stop near Buckeye Lake. There was a car driving into its parking lot. My car. With Carson and me inside. And something that looked like the ghost of a bear floating behind us.

I took the comic from my nephew’s hands and turned to the next page. It was blank.

Okay; if Carson wanted to continue stringing me along with his little joke, I’d go with it for a while. It was kind of nice to see him putting this much effort into pulling the wool over my eyes.

All the way to the truck stop, I found myself glancing in the rearview mirror, half-expecting to see some diaphanous form pursuing us; Ursa Major, P.I.

We took our usual booth and ordered. While we waited for the food to arrive, Carson opened the Modoc issue and turned to the second page and showed me the “new” panels. They displayed, in order, our arriving at the truck stop, eating, paying our bill, and driving away. There were six panels per page, and in each frame we were joined in ever-developing degrees by ghostly creatures of myth; the centaur, the manticora, the chimera, and a griffin.

What started making me nervous was how the illustrations showed both of us eating precisely what we had ordered: pancakes, sausage, and a large chocolate milk for Carson; a western omelet and coffee for myself.

I knew from his monthly status reports that many of the specialists at the group home believed Carson possessed a gift for artwork. I wondered how he’d managed to draw these panels without my seeing him do it.

Carson was twenty-six, having outlived doctors’ estimates for his life by more than a decade. He was getting sneaky in his old age. Or I was becoming obtuse in mine.

For the first time in ages, the two of us ate in silence. We then paid our bill and left.

As we were driving out of the parking lot and getting back onto the road, Carson turned to the next page. So far, only one frame was there. In it, our car was making a right onto Arboretum Road-a good twelve miles away.

“Well, at least Long-Lost is giving us a little time,” I said.

Carson turned on the radio. It was still tuned to the local NPR station. This time the subject was “Foot-and-Mouth Disease: Is It Coming Back Again?”

I slowed the car as we neared the turnoff to Arboretum Road.

“We could just keep driving,” I said. “Nothing’s forcing us to do what’s drawn there.”

“Long-Lost says we gotta. He says it’ll cause all kinds of trouble if we don’t.”

“Tell Long-Lost for me that he and I need to have a talk.”

“He knows. He’s planning on having a special talk with you. About me. An’ stuff.”

And with that, I turned onto Arboretum Road.

This time we didn’t consult the comic book. About half a mile down the road there was a large fallen tree blocking the way. We would have to turn around and go back the way we came, and the only way to do that was to turn onto another, much narrower, unpaved side road-which was really more of a glorified footpath-then back out slowly as I worked the wheel.

As soon as we turned onto the path I looked up and realized where we were.

“Audubon’s Graveyard,” I whispered to myself.

“What?” said Carson.

“Nothing.” Which, of course, wasn’t the truth. Having lived in Cedar Hill all of my life, I’d heard of Audubon’s Graveyard-it was something of a local legend-but had never actually seen it, knew only that it was located somewhere in the vicinity of Arboretum Road.

I killed the engine and stared out at the small rise a few dozen yards ahead. A couple of pigeons lay there, dead, stiff, wings splayed, eyes glassy and staring up toward the sky they would never know again.

Carson reached over and gently touched my shoulder. “Where are we?”

“It’s, um… well…” How could I explain this place to him?

There was a five-acre plat on the other side of that rise which some smartass reporter had long ago dubbed “Audubon’s Graveyard,” actually thinking the name displayed wit and irony. There were still some locals who referred to this area simply as “The Nest,” but it was “Audubon’s Graveyard” that stuck.

Since the spring of 1957, those five acres of county-owned land had been the focus of several official investigations (conducted by everyone from the State Department of Health to Federal Haz-Mat teams), and for good reason: twice a year, for a period lasting about three weeks, every bird that flew over the area dropped from the sky, dead before it hit the ground. The soil had been tested countless times for contaminants, as had the air, the small creek that ran through the plat, and even the other forms of wildlife that inhabited the woods surrounding it. Nothing was infected, and only birds were dying. In every case, their hearts exploded. No tests, no dissections, no theories were able to explain why this happened. There weren’t even good legends from ancient Hopewell Indian mythology to shed any light on the cause. It was simply what it was: a huge and eerie question mark.

Carson nudged me with his elbow and showed me the next page: there we were, on the other side of the rise, on foot, walking toward the body of a dead hawk whose right eye took up a full half of the panel, while Carson and I were little more than minute, hazy ghosts in the background.

“Carson, I need you to be honest with me, all right? It’s really important that you understand that.”

“Uh-huh.”

“ Is this some kind of a joke? I know from your supervisors that you have drawing talent. Are you drawing those pages in when I’m not looking?”

“Oh, no! No. I ain’t very good at drawing. Sure can’t draw like this.”

“Swear?”

“Swear.”

I looked at the comic book in his hand and nodded my head. “Well, then; let’s go see what Long-Lost has in mind for us.”

We climbed up the rise, Carson taking care not to step on the bodies of the pigeons.

The sight below made my breath catch in my throat.

Scattered across the field were hundreds of dead birds; purple grackles and blackbirds, flickers, brown thrashers, loggerhead shrikes, bohemian waxwings, multi-colored kestrels, kingfishers, starlings, bluegrays, and a magnificent marsh hawk. I had no idea how any of these birds had died; there were no broken necks, no gunshot wounds, no animal bites. Only their eyes held a clue.

Every set was a deep, disturbing red.

There were not only the bodies of birds, but bones, as well. Neither Carson nor myself could walk more than a few paces without hearing the tiny crunch and snap of birds’ bones under our shoes. Carson looked once again at his comic, then unzipped a pocket of his knapsack, moved its contents to the pockets of his coat, and began gathering up as many bones as he could stuff in there.

“Carson, you can’t be-”

“I gotta,” he replied, thrusting the comic into my hand.

In the new set of panels (Jesus H. Christ, how was he doing this so quickly?), Carson was moving through the field, gathering up bones. In the final panel on the page an old barn suddenly entered the picture, albeit far in the background.