He turned around to look at her and when he looked back, the dog was gone. No longer lying beneath the tree…something brushed the back of his pant leg…it made his skin crawl like a thousand cockroaches were on him…and then he looked down. The dog was standing right beside him. He kicked it, not as hard as he could have, but hard enough that it had to hurt. The dog gave a brief cry and then sneered up at Chris, baring its teeth. There was something in the dog’s eyes that was akin to human comprehension. The dog was sizing him up, evaluating his opponent. It turned and ran towards the front of the house, disappearing through the hedge. He didn’t want to take me on without the priest, Chris concluded.
Kelly came out carrying Conner. “What in God’s name has gotten into you?” she asked. “That dog was as gentle as a lamb. Conner was playing with him all afternoon. Then the dog just got tired and went to sleep.”
“I think it had rabies,” Chris lied. “I saw just a hint of foam spittle at the corners of its mouth. I was afraid it was going to snap.”
“Seriously?” she asked, clearly not believing that he believed that. “Then are you going to call the police or something, I mean if you think there’s a dangerous animal running around the neighborhood.”
“Guess I could’ve been wrong.” He murmured, reaching his arms out to take Conner. Conner clung tightly to his mom’s neck and wanted no part of Dada right now.
“I have an idea,” Chris said, the scowling apprehension on his faced wiped clean by a newly emerging smile, “let’s go to the shelter and adopt a puppy!”
The next morning, Conner and Max, their new beagle puppy, were already rolling around on the floor of the den when Chris came down at exactly five, before the sun was up. The puppy was about three months old and had beautiful colorings; a white snout, neck and chest, a milk chocolate head, and a dark chocolate body with white paws. Its bark sounded like a little bicycle horn that you squeezed the bulb to honk. Conner had forgotten all about the dog in the yard, but Chris had not. He kissed his wife and then filled his coffee cup and went out into the yard.
* * * * *
He was topless and barefoot wearing just pajama pants. She watched him from the window, she too seemed to have forgotten the events of the prior day. Kelly’s eyes followed her husband as he walked around the yard and she thought to herself that he looked sexier now than he had when they first met, ten years ago. His lean muscles and confidence aroused her, and she glanced into the den to check on Conner before following her husband outside. Everything was good.
She took her pajama top off as she stepped through the door and snuck up behind him. She reached her arms around him from the back and covered his eyes with her hands.
“Guess who,” she teased.
Playing along he said, “hmm, is it that sexy Spanish girl who comes to do the flower beds with the gardener?”
“Ha, as if,” she replied. “Here’s a hint,” she said and, maneuvering to cover both his eyes with one of her hands, she put the other down the front of his pajama pants and grabbed his penis, rubbing it tenderly and feeling its immediate reaction.
“AHH it IS the little Spanish girl who helps the gardener,” Chris said, laughing. Kelly smacked him hard on the back, hard enough to leave a red hand print, and swung him around. “Oh, my God, you’re naked,” Chris said, “you’re a freakin psycho,” and he began to look around to see if any of the neighbors had a vantage point from which they could see his wife’s breasts. He covered them with his hands as if shielding them and then began to fondle them as well. “I’m as naked as you,” she teased, “I have pants on.”
“Mmm, wanna play hooky today?” she asked. “After I take Conner, I’ll come home instead of going to the gym and let you fuck me.”
“Tempting, so tempting,” he said, genuinely. “But there’s something I really need to go in for today. Maybe I can get home early.”
“Your loss,” she said, and headed back into the house, swinging her hips from side to side in a sexy exaggeration.
* * * * *
When Chris got off the train at Chamber’s Street, he was filled with a mix of dread and confidence. The events of the day before, particularly with the dog, had emboldened him. He had thought that dog such a sinister beast, but he faced it down with very little trouble. The fact that he had to do it, that the dog had somehow found his home, was the part that gave him pause. He entered the park on Trinity, at his usual place and Father Flynn was up ahead, collar and all. He was sitting on the park bench, but he wasn’t alone. The dog was there, of course, but there was someone else, a child maybe, sitting on the bench as well.
As Chris approached, a young girl, maybe ten or eleven years old sitting next to the priest stood up but was quickly pulled back down. She had long dark curls and big dark eyes and she was wearing a short denim skirt and a white peasant blouse with big colorful flowers on it. She showed him a smile that went from ear-to-ear but was not reflected in her eyes. “Hey Mister Chris,” she said, with a mild Spanish accent. “You want a blowjob? Ten dollars for you, special price.” He slowed his gait and approached cautiously, wondering what the game was. He should have known better than to underestimate this monster and thought perhaps he had done just that the last twenty-four hours. Flynn said nothing, but a smirk lit his entire face. She asked again, and Chris held his hand up to silence her. Her smile faded.
“Is very important to me, Mister Chris, muy importante,” she repeated.
“Sorry young lady, that would be very wrong,” Chris said, watching the priest. How easily he thought of him as Father Flynn when truth be told, he had heard that Father Flynn died several years ago. This was no priest, this was a devil, and he needed to start looking at him that way.
“Now Christopher my son, we all have our peculiarities, right? Mine, of course, was young boys, but you know that don’t you?” the man said, still sounding like Flynn. “I have it on good authority that you like little Spanish girls.”
Chills ran up and down Chris’s spine and the little hairs on his arm and the back of his neck stood up in warning. Had the dog been eavesdropping? Is that even possible? “You are so sick, you bastard. Did you think this would tempt me? Keep me at bay? Well, you’re wrong you fucking monster.” He grew stronger and stronger as he spoke, drawing courage from his own defiance. “Go away, and leave me and my family alone. I know that dog is some kind of agent or something for you and I swear to god if it comes near me or my family again, I’ll fucking kill it.”
“Christopher, such talk of violence is not necessary. Our deeds, not our words tell our stories for us.”
“Well then watch this deed, I’m walking away from you again, I don’t need second chances. I’m done!” He screamed the last word.
“I’m very sorry to hear that Christopher, no, I lied. I’m actually, quite titillated.” He pulled a vial from his pocket and it looked just like the one Chris had given him the day before, with his semen in it. He took the little cork stopper out and nodded to the girl. She tilted her head back and opened her mouth and he poured the contents of the vial down her throat.
Chris watched in stunned silence, unable to move. What the fuck, he thought. The little girl smiled, and Flynn said, “all done?” She opened her mouth again to show him she had swallowed it all and obviously thinking she had done all he required for whatever promise this devil had made to her. She was so wrong. Just then, the man pulled a Bowie knife from somewhere inside his frock, its forged steel tip caught the morning sun and reflected it back into Chris’s eyes. He raised a hand to shield them. The girl suddenly looked confused, as the man brought it to her neck and slit her throat open from one side to the other, her eyes a mix of confusion and terror. The blood pulsated out in a gushing stream and the girl silently but quickly died, briefly choking, and gurgling on her own blood. “What do you think the police will find when they examine this precious little thing’s stomach?” he said, laughing, and laughing and laughing, the sound echoing through the graveyard as the man and the
dog walked away.
He knew the girl was already dead, so he made an anonymous call to 911 from the pay phone just outside the graveyard and walked in a daze to his office. When he got off the elevator on his floor, he was immediately greeted by Allison, the floor’s receptionist. “There’s a Mr. Drummond here to see you, Chris,” she said. “He’s waiting in your office, said you were expecting him.” Chris walked on, zombie-like, with no recognition of the name or the scheduled meeting and no desire to see anyone.
“Mr. Carter, Chris Carter?” the man said stretching out his hand to shake.
Chris had never seen this man before. “Yes. Did we have a meeting scheduled?” He answered.
The man put a large manila envelope in Chris’s hand when he stuck his out to shake. “You’ve been served, Mr. Carter. This is a subpoena to appear before the SEC for questions relating to some illegal funds you used to purchase some securities last year.”
Chris looked down at the envelope in his hand and saw it all crumbling down. How quickly they worked, he thought, because this had to be them, whoever they were. He was one of the cleanest traders around, but he had no doubt that the SEC had evidence indicating otherwise. Just as he knew that very shortly, forensics experts at the NYPD would have evidence linking him to the body of a dead ten-year-old girl that was lying on a bench in the graveyard at Trinity Church.
* * * * *
Back on Long Island, there was a silver Volvo waiting at the light on the corner of 25A and Glen Cove Road, just seven minutes south of the wealthy little hamlet of Glen Head. When the light turned green, Kelly Carter began to accelerate into the intersection. She didn’t see the tractor-trailer that was barreling down Northern Blvd. with the driver who had dropped his lit cigarette in his lap. On the passenger side, in his car seat, Conner Carter was staring out the driver’s side back window at the truck, repeatedly chopping his right hand down into his upward facing left palm. When he realized the sign for stop was not going to work, he did the only thing left that he could think of and pushed both his hands towards the truck, he closed his eyes and tried as hard as he could to use the force to stop the truck. By the time the driver recovered his cigarette and looked up, he didn’t even have time to touch the brakes, he rammed full speed into the Volvo and sent it tumbling over and over down Northern Blvd. until it came to rest right side up in the brush on the side of the road.
* * * * *
When Christopher got home, early that afternoon, he tripped over a mangled mass of brown and white fur and blood, lying just inside the front door: There were no organs, muscles, or veins, just the bloody pelt, and teeth, that had been Max.
Chapter XXVII
At exactly 43°39’03.7” N latitude and 89°47’50.7” W longitude, there is a small, thickly wooded, unpopulated island, with a diverse terrain that includes ridges, gorges, cliffs, rock outcrops, and a few small areas of level ground. The island’s rich mix of virgin and undisturbed flora includes white oak, red oak, white pine, sugar maple, basswood, hemlock, white cedar, yellow birch, river birch, cottonwood, and red maple. Each of these species, dominate specific areas of the island; white oak and white pine are the most prevalent species on the north shore, river birch to the west, hemlock, and cottonwood on the southeast. The island lies within fifty feet of I-90, just the other side of the highway from Rocky Arbor State Park near to the geographic center of the state of Wisconsin.
It is little different from the native lands that surrounded it, prior to the arrival of the white men and their penchant for changing it. At that time, it was indistinguishable from the mainland but for one incredible feature, it has an ancient effigy burial mound, the effigy has the head of a dog, the body of a bear and it the wings of an eagle. The mound was built around the time that Julius Caesar was ruler of most of the known world. Buried deep within are the remains of a wendigo, wrapped in three blankets and decorated with thousands of beads carved from the shells of river clams. A mask covers its head.
The river chose to go through most of the soft Cambrian sandstone in this area thus creating the feature known as the Dells, the prominent geographic feature in this area and a draw to a million tourists annually. For some reason, however, the river chose to go around this piece of land in a two-and-a-half-mile loop, rather than through it. The piece of land still bears the name given it centuries ago by the Native Americans here, Blackhawk Island.
This, of course, was not part of the known world in the time of Caesar and yet there existed here a culture that was already thousands of years old. About the time that this burial mound was created, these nomadic people had just begun to settle down and farm, Dakota Sioux had much of the land around, but this was an Algonquin village, an Ojibwe tribe, and this was long before their wars. They were a great and powerful nation that had trade routes running east all the way to the Atlantic. For just a few generations now, they had begun to dig in and take root. Farming and husbandry now supplemented their hunting sufficiently, that they no longer had to range so far for food. They had a paradise here between the Great Lake and the Great River and they would do anything to protect it.
So it was, when young girls of the tribe started disappearing into the woods and not returning. Several hunting parties were dispatched, and remains of the missing girls were usually found, skeletons picked clean of flesh and organs, well-eaten corpses. One day a great hunter, whose name loosely translated to Strong Bow, was leading a search party to find his missing sixteen-year-old daughter when they came across a former member of their tribe. They hid in the thick bush, silently watching and analyzing. He was barely recognizable and yet they knew who he was by the white tuft of hair that sat on his head like a hat. He had grown several feet taller and aged greatly, and as they watched from the bushes, he would periodically change from human to bear to wolf. He had the remains of a girl on the ground in front of him and blood colored the earth all around. The creature, for that is how they thought of him now, was devouring the flesh voraciously as they watched.
The great hunter had in his quiver, a dozen arrows topped with copper arrowheads and one topped with silver, carried specifically for this occasion with the hope that it was never needed. They knew what they had come across and they knew what they had to do to kill it. This was not a creature that was unknown to these people, it existed in their legends for as long as they were a people and yet none of the members of this hunting party had ever encountered one.
The hunter pulled the silver-tipped arrow from his quiver and set it in his bow. He was careful to be as quiet as possible, for the acute hearing of these creatures was one of their legendary powers. He pulled the bowstring back with his powerful arms and eyed his quarry, closing his left eye, and placing his right even with the height of the arrow. He said a silent prayer to The Great Spirit, asking him to guide his arrow. Strong Bow prayed to his ancestors for strength and wisdom, in the event his arrow missed its mark. Then, still pulling back on the bow with all the power he could muster, he also apologized to the spirit of the Wendigo.
A headshot would kill the creature and that was his best option, although any penetration with the silver tip might incapacitate him sufficiently for them to then be able to set him on fire. Those were the only two ways known to kill a Wendigo. With the bow pulling at his arms and straining his shoulder muscles, he took aim. At last, he held his breath and let the arrow fly. He did not begin breathing again until he watched that silver tip split the skull, right between the eyes.
The Wendigo that they buried there on that island was powerfully evil. He had been summoned by The One, the force of evil itself, and enslaved by an unquenchable desire for human flesh. When the Ojibwe people buried him, they chose this island because they believed that surrounding him with the river that gave them life, would keep him dead. They built a great burial mound over the grave with two chambers; one to pay homage to the evil spirit that had summoned him, and one, a larger one, to the spirit that had strengthened the great hunter and allowed him to kill the bea
st.
It was in the larger chamber that the man who had in turns been Father Flynn, Alfred Vale and Captain Zimmerman, lay sleeping on a hemp rug with his head on a pillow made from his tattered canvas hooded jacket, rolled, and folded. Nearby, the dog kept watch with drooping eyes, drifting now and then into a place that walked the line between sleep and wakefulness. They existed in a state that most of us would describe as hibernation, it was a state that they thought of simply as, between feedings. Outside, the cars and trucks whooshed by on the interstate, the planes flew high above them and the twenty-first century was in its second decade. Inside it could have still been early in the first century except for the clothes that hung from the man’s bony frame: Little else had changed for this creature and his kind.
At last, the dog’s eyes grew wider, his breathing less shallow, it began to stir, letting the man know that the time to feed was drawing near.
Part Four
My Name is Legion
Chapter XXVIII
Late afternoon had become evening, and the sun was setting outside the window in a fiery display reflected off the high clouds that had begun to settle over the city. The lights at the airport had all come on and directly below, a trail of red lights headed to Long Island and white ones headed to the city. It was her turn at the window now and as the darkness outside deepened, she was able to watch his reflection in the glass that she was looking out of. About an hour into his story, he had asked for a drink, and she ordered a bottle of whiskey from room service. They had both put down a couple.
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