Carved in Bone

homespun mountain man had shrewdly punched the one button—short of threatening my family—that was guaranteed to ensure my complete cooperation: he dangled before me the prospect of a forensic revelation.
    We thunked onto a new concrete bridge—obviously a replacement for some predecessor that had washed away in one of the floods that frequently scoured the mountain valleys—and off the other side. “Best slow down a bit—it’ll sneak up on you. Right yonder—you see it?”
    I did, barely: two mammoth hemlock trees arched over the right-hand side of the highway, and running between them, as if they were some great gateway, a gravel road turned off and disappeared into the forest.
    The road was deceptive: unobtrusive, but smooth and well-maintained, free of the ruts and mud holes that plague most gravel roads in the mountains. The Great Smoky Mountains are classed as a temperate rain forest, with up to eighty inches of precipitation a year, so it’s a rare mountain road that doesn’t have a few wallows and washed-out spots. This one was firm, dry, and well-drained by ditches and culverts everywhere that drainage might be a problem. There were no weeds in its center, either, a sign of frequent traffic or regular grading.
    “This is a good road. The county keep it up like this?” I tried to sound offhand.
    He swiveled his bearlike head at me. Perhaps I hadn’t managed to sound quite as casual as I’d hoped. “Naw,” he said. “This here’s what you might call a private drive.” After a moment, I heard a low, rumbling growl that seemed to shake the entire vehicle. I glanced over to see him chuckling. “Private drive,” he mumbled again, and chuckled some more at his wit. Then he flashed me a delighted, speckled smile. Lord God, what have I got myself into, I thought, shaking my head. Then I felt myself chuckling, too, at the absurdity of the situation.
    But the chuckle died in my throat a moment later when the big man said, “Stop the car right here, Doc.” I felt myself freeze up, unable to speak or act. The world seemed to shrink, until nothing remained but a green tunnel, a gray gravel track, and a steering wheel gripped by a pair of white-knuckled hands that might or might not have been my own. Another hand reached in from somewhere and cut the ignition switch. The car drifted to a stop on the gravel, the only sounds the crunch of gravel under the tires and the rush of blood in my head. Then even those sounds were gone, and the tunnel of green faded to black.

    WHEN I AWOKE , I felt myself curiously confined. The air was dank and hot and close against my face, depleted of oxygen, yet my arms were cooled by a breeze. The darkness was softened by fuzzy globules of light. As my eyes shifted focus, instinctively seeking some definable shape, the globules sharpened into myriad pinpoints of daylight, viewed through the weave of fabric. My thoughts regained their focus, too, and I recognized the damp, acrid smell of sweat. A pungent camouflage cap was stretched tightly from my chin to my forehead. My arms twitched as if to bat it away, but they would not move. I jerked against whatever was restraining them and began thrashing my head.
    “Easy, there, Doc, you’re gonna hurt yourself that way,” rumbled the deep voice to my left. “We’re nearly there, so just sit tight a minute. I told you I weren’t gonna hurt you, and I ain’t, but they’s some things you need not to see, in case somebody was to ast you about ’em later.”
    I slumped back against the seat and fought to rein in my panicked breathing.
    The car stopped, and the cap came off of my face. I shut my eyes against the light, then opened them to see Waylon leaning toward me with a hunting knife. He reached down and deftly flicked the knife against strips of duct tape—printed, like the rest of his ensemble, with a camouflage pattern—binding my wrists to my thighs.
    “Sorry I had to do that,” he said. “I didn’t want to have to fight you to get you here. That wouldn’t be healthy for you, and Big Jim wouldn’t be none too happy with me, neither.”
    Big Jim? I could scarcely imagine the immensity of a man that a behemoth like Waylon would refer to as “Big.”
    He got out of the Cherokee and came around to open the door for me, as if he were some backwoods chauffeur instead of an abductor. I paused, struggling to make sense of it all, then gave up and got out and followed him.
    We had parked in a small clearing of grass,