Return to Red Creek

by Nathan Hystad

  “What the hell is that?” Brent asked with a slight tremor to his voice. Taylor understood the fear only too well.

  “I don’t know,” Taylor lied. Isabelle gulped and grabbed her bottle of water, taking a deep swig.

  Taylor flipped to the next page to see a few words she didn’t understand, written in pencil and underlined heavily.

  “Schattenmann. Is that German?” Brent asked, reading the written word.

  Taylor’s heartbeat picked up, and she felt a drip of sweat run down her side. With her phone, she typed the words into the translation program. The answer came to her in a flash.

  “‘Shadow man’.” Brent took the journal and stared at it, trying to read the rest of the harshly-scribbled words. His accent was terrible, but Taylor typed the entire page into her phone.

  Taylor saw the translation and passed it over to her cousin with a shaky hand. One German phrase repeated in her mind. Hüte dich vor dem Schattenmann.

  Isabelle spoke softly. “‘My son is gone, taken in the dead of the night. I fear he will not be the last to go missing. Hans is beside himself. He and my brother seek the creature tonight, when the moon is high. I only wish we’d never made the bargain. Without Otto, I do not want to continue. Beware the shadow man. It is full of trickery, deceit, and death only. Beware the shadow man’.”

  “Holy shit. Why was this in your dad’s old house? No wonder that old lady neighbor thought the place was haunted.” Brent’s normally-colored cheeks were pale, matching the way Taylor felt. Her eyes fluttered as she considered the journal.

  “Is there a name on it?” Taylor asked Brent, who still held the book.

  “It’s small. Elisabeth Schmidt, I think,” Brent said.

  Isabelle sank in her chair, her knees pulled up to her chest. “That’s my mom’s first name, just spelled differently,” she said, looking at the upturned page held in Brent’s hand.

  “Maybe it’s a family name,” Taylor whispered, and for a second wondered if either of them had even heard her.

  “Schmidt. Wait, I remember something. Smith was English, right? Didn’t immigrants often change their last names to fit in at some point?” Taylor was typing on her phone again, and found what she was looking for. “See? Smith is a common English variation of Schmidt. That means…” She glanced over at Brent, who was listening with rapt attention.

  “I don’t get it. Are you saying you’re related to… whoever did this journal? And to the Smiths?” Brent asked, his eyes exaggeratedly wide.

  Taylor didn’t feel like she had much choice in the matter. He was there with her, and he was going to learn a lot of tough things over the next few days.

  Isabelle shook her head slightly, but Taylor couldn’t help herself. “Yes and yes.”

  “But how? Why would they abduct you, then?” he asked, his voice a little too loud.

  Taylor saw it was after eleven, Friday night. Footsteps clunked on the floor above them, and she waited to make sure no one was coming down the stairs. “Keep quiet, B. Is it really that surprising? Why do you think I’ve been so obsessed with all this?” she asked her boyfriend.

  “I really didn’t know you were. I mean, you wouldn’t watch the documentary with me after you told me about being taken by the Smiths when you were a kid, then you clammed up about it all. You never want to talk about it, and when I brought up Red Creek, you almost ripped my head off. Why do you think I wanted to come here with you? It wasn’t so I could have a romantic weekend away. It was to protect you.” Brent ran his hands through his hair, a gesture he did when he was frustrated.

  “I know. You’re right, and I’m sorry, but if you want to know everything, you have to be open-minded. It’s going to sound crazy, B. Really insane.” Taylor hoped this didn’t backfire.

  “Crazier than the old lady telling us your grandma’s house has run three tenants out in four years, and that they all saw things while living there? Or maybe crazier than me finding a box with a Schattenmann drawn inside by your great-great-grandma in Germany somewhere? Just tell me, babe. I can handle it.” Brent’s eyes were bright, and Taylor finally got the nod from Isabelle, not that she needed her younger cousin’s approval.

  “There’s a dark shadow over Red Creek,” Taylor started.

  “It’s just clouds, Tay, they come and go,” Brent said with a smirk.

  Taylor set her hand on his knee. “That’s what my dad used to always say, and he’s right.”

  “What do you mean? A shadow like this?” he asked, flipping back to the first page where the crude drawing sat on the page.

  Taylor nodded. “Just like that.”

  “Let me get this straight. You guys think there’s a real monster living in Red Creek that looks like this?” he asked, his voice quiet.

  Isabelle took this one. “That’s what we’re saying.”

  “And what drove you to that conclusion?” Brent asked.

  Taylor grimaced, holding her arm where she could still feel its misty tendrils wrap around her wrist. “Because it was the one that brought me to the Smiths.”

  Nine

  Tom’s car’s interior light turned on as he opened the driver’s side door, and he flopped down into the seat. He pressed the ignition button, his fob safely in his pocket, and the engine came to life, his dash glowing blue against his face.

  It was after midnight, and he was exhausted. The search had brought nothing of interest, but he had hopes some sort of information would find its way to his ear. Something to give him a fighting chance. It had been too long. The likelihood that girl was found alive was well past expired, and it took the wind from his sails.

  His cell rang, and he pressed the answer icon on his console screen. “Bartlett.”

  “Detective, it’s Deputy Rich Stringer here.”

  Tom was curious to find out why the deputy was calling him at midnight. “Go for it.”

  “Someone called in to dispatch an hour ago. He said he had news about a missing person.” Rich’s voice was drawn out, as if he was stifling a yawn.

  “And?”

  “And what?” Rich asked.

  Tom’s head fell forward, his chin resting on his chest. “What did the man have to say about it?” he yelled, his tiredness making him cranky.

  “Oh… he said he saw a woman in the fields that night. Didn’t think anything of it at first, but after hearing all the news, and with us asking anyone to come forward with out-of-place details, he called in,” Rich said.

  “Good. Good. What did she look like?” Tom asked.

  “I don’t know. Didn’t say.”

  Tom was about to lose it on the deputy, but he tried to keep his aggression in check. “Rich, tell me you got this caller’s information?”

  “Sure. I’ll send it over to you now.” Rich sounded proud of himself.

  “Thanks. I’m going home. I’ll be in first thing,” Tom said, and hung up before the inexperienced deputy could say another word. He checked his email and saw the contact. He’d follow up with the caller first thing in the morning.

  Tom started away from the line of cars parked on the grass strip near the farmer’s field. Everyone was going in for the night. It was wet, muddy, and pitch black. Searching now wasn’t doing any good. He was about to turn right so he could get over to the highway, but something about the Orchards condos caught his memory. He should wait until morning, he knew it, but if he took the back roads, he could make it on his way home to Gilden.

  He went left, and in half a mile, hit a gravel road that took him north. Searching for the girl was terrible business. Her parents were there, so quiet and subdued, they hardly said a word. They’d walked the line like zombies, a tragedy so fresh they didn’t know how to process it.

  Tom drove down the road, keeping his speed to thirty along the way. He’d heard of far too many people running into deer or blowing a tire on a porcupine while driving the county roads, and he wasn’t going to be added to those statistics.

  Rain fell heavily on his windshield, and
his wipers fought to give him visibility. Trees lined either side of the gravel road, giving Tom the sense of walls closing in on him as he went. His lights were bright, and he felt on display out here alone, a shining beacon in the dark night.

  After several miles, he saw signs for the Orchards condo complex. They’d seen better days. He was told they’d built them almost a decade ago, after the Granny Smith’s fire, and the sign appeared that way. It was weather-worn, and it looked like someone had used it as target practice with a .22.

  Tom slowed as he neared the area and found open gates at the end of the gravel road leading up to the condo building. The cast-iron openings were more decorative than functional. The place looked dismal, unfinished. Tom could almost get an idea of the look the developer was going for, but since the funding had dried up, it was a shell of their initial plans. The condo building was four stories, stark white, which contrasted with the darkness around it.

  Tom pulled up to the parking lot, which appeared to only be large enough to hold ten or twelve cars. Maybe eight were in the stalls now, an assortment of vans and run-down cars from previous decades. He wondered who the clientele were. Surely different than the ones the builder had intended.

  So this was the land the Smiths had lived on. Underground, somewhere close by, they’d secreted the children they’d abducted away, their remains piling high in a cave. Some of the older guys at the Gilden police department were privy to the footage a local had filmed before one of them had torched the place.

  Tom wasn’t so sure that was the best idea, but a good fire could cleanse a lot of things, even evil. The old man, Conway Smith, was just a man, but Tom believed evil to be real. He’d seen too much in the alleys of Chicago to think anything else.

  Tom smelled cigarette smoke as he walked around the building’s corner to see a man and woman sitting on their walk-out patio, lights off. Their cigarettes burned hotly, their faces glowing behind the tobacco embers.

  “Who you here for? Travis again?” the man asked.

  Tom shook his head. “Nope. Should I be here for someone named Travis?”

  The man shrugged and put out his cigarette in a giant coffee can; the smoke poured from his bad snuff job. The woman kept smoking, choosing to remain silent.

  “You guys seen anything strange out here lately?” Tom asked.

  Now the woman laughed, a coarse sound like sandpaper running across concrete. The man joined her. “What’s your name? I ain’t seen you around before,” the man said.

  “Detective Tom Bartlett. I’m investigating the disappearance of Brittany Tremblay.” He pulled his badge from his blazer’s breast pocket, but they didn’t seem too keen on getting close enough to read it. If Tom had to guess, this pair had some hard drugs inside their condo unit, maybe even on their persons at that moment. He didn’t care. He was here for something else.

  “Good to meet you.”

  Tom noticed they didn’t offer their names, and he didn’t ask. Not yet. “You going to answer me?”

  “Sure, we see weird things. This is Red frickin’ Creek. Home of the strange and land of the depressed. You wanna see some odd shit, pop a squat beside me for a bit and keep your eyes peeled.” The man pulled a pack of smokes from his pocket, passed one to the woman, and lit them both up. She tossed her butt into the can and accepted the offering.

  Seeing them sitting there chain-smoking made Tom grateful his wife had made him quit. It had been years. Even when it ended, he hadn’t gone near them, even though they’d called to him for a while. Long after he’d tried to reconcile with his wife, the death sticks sang to him like sirens to sailors.

  “What does that mean? You see things here?” Tom asked, wondering if he was barking up the wrong tree.

  “You do know what happened here, right?” the man asked.

  “Doesn’t everyone?” Tom threw back at him.

  “All them bodies. Children, mostly. Kids have an energy to them, a strong life force. Smother that out too early, and they’re bound to linger. That being said, I haven’t seen as much as felt things out here.”

  Tom was surprised by how soundly and astutely the man was coming across. He pressed his luck. “Were you nearby on the night Brittany went missing?”

  “I’m always around. Ever since I sued that trucking company for hurting me in an accident, I sit here most days and nights. It’s peaceful, if you can get on with the fact all them murders happened here,” the man said.

  “You didn’t see anything?” Tom asked.

  The man peered at the woman, and she nodded, speaking for the first time. Tom put her at thirty-five, but she sounded like she was in her late sixties. “Didn’t see so much as hear something. Thought I heard a scream around eleven. Buzz here had just gone in to use the can. We were going to go to bed.”

  “You heard a scream out here that night? Around eleven?” Tom asked.

  Tom grinned when he saw Buzz’s face go slack. He wasn’t sure if it was because the woman had used his name or because they’d become potential witnesses.

  She suddenly looked afraid. “Maybe. Can’t be sure.”

  “What did you do?” Tom asked.

  “I peeked around the corner, didn’t see nobody, so I went in, locked the door, and went to bed. Didn’t hear anything else,” she said.

  “Did you tell Buzz about it?” Tom asked.

  Buzz shifted in his seat. “No, she did not. Why is this the first I’m hearing about this?”

  “Because you worry too much, and I don’t want your heart to go off again,” she said.

  Tom doubted the six-pack of empties on the concrete block, or the pack of cigarettes, was helping much.

  “Bear in mind, Detective, it’s not that unusual for someone to scream around here in the dead of night. You may have noticed the residents of this here condo aren’t cut from silk,” Buzz said.

  “Here’s my card. Anything else comes to mind, call me,” Tom said.

  They left in a hurry, moving inside. Tom wasn’t sure if she’d really heard something, but it warranted a deeper dive into the area. He couldn’t do that now. Not on an empty stomach with a pounding headache, after a sixteen-hour day.

  He walked up to the front doors on the other side of the building and pulled the handle. It was locked. Only ten names were on a buzzer system inside; at least another six slots were empty. Tom doubted this place had ever had full occupancy.

  With a sigh, he got into his car, and started the drive to his house in Gilden.

  _______________

  Taylor stared at the ceiling, then plucked her phone from the nightstand. Three in the morning. She’d dozed off briefly after one, when they’d finally called it a night. The three of them had spent a few hours scouring the internet for stories of shadow entities, getting many different variations from different cultures. None of them sounded exactly like the one she’d encountered as a young girl.

  It was so frustrating. Her ancestors were tied up in this. The book. They’d gotten so distracted by the shadow stories, they’d forgotten to keep looking through the journal. Taylor had it in the room with her, and she slipped out of bed, her bare feet pressing on the shag carpet. The book sat on a desk by the door, but she suddenly froze in fear.

  A slight glow emanated from her phone, casting a dull shadow on the wall. Had it moved? She stayed still; the only part of her moving was her eyes as they frantically searched the room for it. Taylor had the relentless urge to climb back in the bed and pull the blankets over her head, only she knew that would do nothing against the creature from the drawing in the book.

  It was malicious and demented. It fed on children. Maybe their flesh, organs, or souls. Taylor didn’t know the ins and outs of it, but she intended to find out. If she could understand it, she could destroy it once and for all.

  She stood still for another long minute when she finally lunged for the book, snatching it and rushing over to the bed, where she turned on the bedside lamp. It came on with a click, the soft yellow light of the inc
andescent lamp cascading over the wood-paneled room. Nothing was in here with her.

  Taylor found her breath again and smiled in spite of her fear. She needed to toughen up. Her whole life, she’d been afraid. Taylor thought she would be stronger when she went off to college, but when she got there, she didn’t leave her dorm room after classes for a whole week. It took introverted Karen to get her to go meet some people the second weekend.

  To this day, Taylor stayed close to the streetlights when she walked the campus in the dark, and she sat there on the bed in her aunt and uncle’s basement in Red Creek and swore she wasn’t going to let this thing control her any longer. A tear rolled over her cheek, but she left it, continuing her protest as more fell. She felt free, a burden lifted off her young shoulders.

  She was Taylor Alenn. Her dad had survived an abduction by it. He’d come to rescue her too, Cliff saving both of them. They were a strong family. Her dad was an inspiration, and she wasn’t going to disappoint him any longer.

  Taylor flipped the journal open to the third page and kept reading, typing the hand-scrawled German text into her phone’s translate program.

  An hour later, she was still in bed, sitting straight-backed, wondering how the hell she was ever going to break her ancestor’s binding.

  Ten

  Fredrik heard rapping at the window and spun over in bed. The tree must have been blowing in the wind again. His gaze darted open as the sound continued, and his brain clicked into place. Wait. There was no tree outside his room anymore. His dad had chopped it down, and they’d brought a root guy in to take the trunk out.

  Dad said it was growing too big and was too close to the house. It could mess up the cistern underground, he’d said. Now Fredrik was up, peeking out from the blankets toward the window.

  Tap tap tap. Then a pause, before the same three beats again. Tap tap tap.