Dark Screams, Volume 9

by Dark Screams- Volume 9 (retail) (epub)

  In only a handful of seconds, Arthur was gone. Even the sound of his captor’s trampling steps vanished.

  Panicked, I raced forward and then remembered the child. I went back to Maggie Mayflower and nearly cried when I saw the recognition and life in her teary eyes. With my knife, I cut her free. Her mouth was gagged with a blue handkerchief. This I removed as gently as I could.

  “Thank you,” she whispered through a dry throat. Then, she lunged forward and wrapped her arms around my neck.

  I held her, tried to soothe her. We stayed like that until the search party gathered on the path around us.

  —

  “Keep that blanket around her and get her to the clinic,” I told Les. “Take Mel and Reed with you. Boys, once you see that Les and Maggie are safe in their car, I want you to grab your guns and haul ass back. Arthur is still out here.”

  “Did you see the guy that grabbed him?”

  “Not well,” I said. “He was big, though, and damned strong.”

  “I thought we were looking for a scrawny old guy,” Reed said.

  “That’s what Emily Salem told me, but she may have had it wrong. That or we got two crazies out here. Either way, we’re wasting time. Get moving. The rest of you come on ahead with me.”

  Flanked by Robert Dawson, a furniture builder; Harvey and Flo Becker, the owners of Luther’s Bend’s only hotel; Hank Allen, a mechanic; Dan Mott, a slender kid who just got out of the army; and Mark and Adrienne Golden, a couple of accountants who did just about everyone’s taxes, including mine, I set off down the path.

  As we walked among the dark tree trunks, I tried to form a clearer picture of the man who had dragged Arthur away. Quickly, I corrected myself: Arthur was not dragged away, he was carried. I remembered the arm, pictured the back, flexing with strain. Something about it was wrong, but the abduction had happened so quickly, it was hard to pinpoint the exact wrongness. Maybe it was the color of the skin, not quite Caucasian, certainly not African. I got to thinking about Latino and Asian, but the tone wasn’t particular to those, either. The skin was gray. I remembered the skin being the color of a rotten steak. More disturbing, I didn’t see the man’s head or face. They were far darker, perhaps hidden beneath a hood of some kind. Otherwise, the guy was naked. Bare-assed naked.

  A sick feeling gripped me as I led the group over the trail, my heart pulsing heavy every time my foot caused the pine needles to whisper. The feeling was fear, absolute terror. Arthur Milton was a big man, had a good amount of bulk on him. Anyone who could make such easy work of his weight was someone to worry about. It didn’t help that we were surrounded by blankets of darkness, walls of undergrowth, the distracting sounds of a living forest.

  A branch cracked ahead and to my left. I froze. Behind me, Flo Becker gasped. They shouldn’t be here, I thought. Despite a profound hesitance to move forward with fewer people at my side, these folks were civilians. I shouldn’t be putting them at any additional risk. Maybe I’m one of those chauvinists, probably so, but my greatest concern was for the women.

  “Harvey. Mark. I want you to take Flo and Adrienne on back now. Thank you for your help, but this isn’t a search anymore, it’s a hunt.”

  All four of them looked relieved, and I didn’t blame them for that one bit. Harvey opened his mouth to protest, but Flo was already grasping his arm, hauling him the other direction.

  “You four stick together. Get on back to your homes as fast as you can and call Ed. Let him know how far in we are. Tell him I’ll check in. If you see Duke or Mel and Reed, tell them to hurry it up.”

  Mark Golden nodded his head, grasped his wife’s hand in his, and the four turned away, leaving me with Hank and Robert and Dan. The remaining men’s faces were caught in the periphery of my lantern’s beam, glowing like masks lit from behind.

  “Your main concern is Arthur,” I told them. “Capturing this asshole takes a distant second right now. None of you are trained, so I don’t want you taking this guy on. You keep your thoughts on Arthur and let me worry about the perp. If he comes at you, get out of his way, defend yourself if you have to, but do not try and apprehend him. You got me?”

  All three agreed, and I turned back to the path.

  —

  A thick scrub of nettle bushes and creeping vines blocked the trail. I played my light over the green barricade, looked for a break, and realized we’d have to veer left or right. I checked the directions with the lantern’s beam. Something shimmered against the trunk of a tree on my right, and I walked up to get a better look.

  Amid the creases and dimples in the bark of a knotty pine, I found a series of glistening red smears. Blood. Though each was only the size of a nickel, hardly the marks of a fatal wound, two of the stains were accompanied by ragged, cream-colored shards. Arthur had clutched at this trunk, dug his fingers in. He left two fingernails behind, lodged in the rough bark.

  My stomach flipped. I knew the direction we had to go; but God knows I didn’t want to take it.

  “Damn, Bill, are those…?” The question came from Dan Mott, the army kid.

  “Yeah. Let’s keep moving.”

  “Damn,” Mott whispered.

  The forest fell in tight around us. At our feet, roots rose, threatening to trip us or crack our ankles. The ground was pitted with divots, some nasty enough to cause a sprain if we didn’t watch our step.

  Goose pimples covered my skin. Actually, they’d been on me since setting off into the woods more than an hour ago to find Maggie Mayflower. But they suddenly felt alive, like the nesting place for minuscule parasites, now awake and writhing.

  I pushed a low-hanging branch aside with my lantern, felt the sap on the back of my hand. I kept my service revolver pointed into the darkness ahead, holding it as steadily as I could manage. The branch snapped back, but Mott caught it. I directed my light ahead and froze.

  I barely registered the naked man on the ground, my attention held by what knelt over him. This, too, might have been a man, but considering what I interrupted, I didn’t want to believe it.

  The beast had Arthur Milton’s right pectoral clamped in its teeth. It shook and yanked at the skin and muscle, until the whole of it tore away with a wet snap, dappling the dead man’s torso with freckles of blood.

  It looked up at me then, a good portion of Arthur’s chest hanging between sharp, red-smeared teeth. Even then, I might have believed this thing to be a man. The body, incredibly built with bulges and knots of muscle, was human enough, and the thick pelt of hair at its chest trailing down its abdomen was common for men, but there was the issue of the skin’s hue, gray like old meat.

  And there was the face.

  Pronounced ridges at the brow and along the cheekbones angled forward, leading to a protrusion. A snout? A muzzle? Even as I looked upon the thing, I questioned its constitution. It was an impossible melding of species, part man and part…

  Wolf? Dog?

  I couldn’t fit this creature into any of my mind’s compartments; the only nooks available to it came from childhood spaces that had once accommodated fairy tales and monster movies, now old and filled with clots of dust.

  My body was alight with energy as if connected to a low-voltage wire. Behind me, Dan Mott screamed, and I began firing.

  My first shot hit the thing’s shoulder. The bullet passed through, spraying the woods with fluid and bits of skin. It sprang upward, dropping Arthur’s chest meat onto the supine body it had been torn from. The second bullet went through its thigh. It roared, spun, disappeared into the forest. I kept shooting. Maybe I hit it again, maybe I didn’t.

  Hank and Robert and Dan were babbling like idiots, filling the wood with obscenities and prayers. They huddled around me. Hands clutched my shoulders, my arms.

  “Knock it off,” I said, shaking them off me.

  I stepped forward. Played my light over the forest to make sure the beast wasn’t coming back for us. Then I dropped the beam to Arthur Milton’s naked and abused body.

  All four
of us took a couple minutes to empty our stomachs in the bushes.

  —

  “Werewolf.”

  Robert Dawson, the furniture maker, was the first one to say it. Maybe we were all thinking it, maybe it was just Bob and me, but as soon as I heard the word aloud, I realized how ridiculous it sounded, and I knew damned well I didn’t want anybody saying it to the state boys when they arrived.

  “Just a crazy in a mask,” I said.

  “You can’t tear out hunks of a guy with rubber teeth,” Hank said. “Hell, even I know that. Maybe we ought to give what Bob said some thought.”

  “Sweet Mary, mother of shit,” Dan said, leaning back on the trunk of a tree. “A werewolf.”

  “Stop talking yourself into that crazy shit,” I said.

  “Into it?” Dan replied. “I’m trying to talk myself out of it, but what the hell else could it have been? Hank’s right. Fake teeth can’t do that to a man.”

  “You see a full moon?” I asked. “You see hair covering that guy? Below the neck he wasn’t any different than a thousand other guys. And just so you know, my bullets don’t have a scrap of silver in them.”

  “How many times did you shoot him?” Bob asked, thinking he had his trump card.

  “I got him in the shoulder and the leg. Both flesh wounds.”

  “And it didn’t slow him down a bit.” This from Hank.

  “Fine,” I said. “If any one of you boys feels you need to tell the troopers about a wolf man, you go right ahead. I’ll be sure to send flowers to your ward at the loony bin. My story is going to be a nut case in a mask.”

  This quieted them down, got them to thinking a little more rationally. It was one thing to throw that shit around among friends, but I don’t think one of them was willing to risk their reputations to defend that particular fairy tale to state troopers or television reporters.

  As for me, I started examining Arthur’s remains, though I knew the state boys would be along shortly and could do a far more thorough and efficient job of it. I knelt down by his left shoulder, drew a line up his legs with my light. Both thighs were torn away, leaving broad, ragged wounds. Blood pooled in these, so I suspected they occurred premortem. The wound on the right leg was so deep, the femur was exposed, creating a ridge like a serpent surfacing in a red pond. I moved the light higher, leaving behind the grotesque wound and falling on his privates.

  “I guess we know what made Arthur so popular with the ladies,” Hank said.

  “Damn,” Dan Mott said. “I wonder if he had to burp that thing.”

  This got the three men laughing, but I wasn’t having any of it. “Show a little respect for the guy.”

  They kept cackling like a bunch of hens. But they tried to keep it down.

  I slid the light’s beam over Arthur’s belly, up to the wound on his chest. This was a drier wound with little pooling. The skin at its edges drooped like wet paper into the shredded striations of muscle. The wad of flesh that fell from the beast’s mouth sat like a lump of clay on Arthur’s sternum. Both of Arthur’s biceps were similarly torn away.

  Muscle meat, I thought. It went for the prime cuts.

  Not it, I reminded myself. He. He went for the major muscle groups.

  And he ate them. He’d chewed Arthur’s quadriceps and his biceps and a pectoral, and except for this last, which littered Arthur’s chest, he’d swallowed them raw.

  My stomach flipped again, and I stood up.

  Behind me, the bushes erupted with sound. A wheezing pant joined the snapping of brush and I spun, my revolver already aimed at chest level. And I almost pulled that trigger, almost sent lead into the darkness, but something paralyzed my fingers.

  Mel and Reed and my deputy, Duke, burst through the brush, all of them wild-eyed, sighting down the barrels of their shotguns.

  “We heard shots,” Duke said. “You guys okay?”

  2

  I kept Mel and Hank with me, sent the others back to the trail to make sure the state boys found their way to us. Standing over Arthur’s body, I felt like a frightened kid, my mind returning to the days when monsters were real and any dark place was likely to brim with them. Things moved in that darkness. Several times while waiting with the body both Mel and Hank spun toward a sound in the forest, only to whip back around because a new sound emerged on the other side of us. In those instances, you can’t help but react. I, too, turned to the noises, gun raised, telling myself that Arthur’s killer was coming back for seconds. When your nerves are that frayed, cruel imagination has the opportunity to peek through the holes, worry them and remove the threads so it can emerge to fill your head with any number of disturbing fantasies. At one point the subtle rustlings in the forest grew so frequent I thought we were being circled.

  It was just the wind, I told myself. Foraging animals. Settling deadfall.

  I spent a lot of time in these woods as a kid, playing games like tag and hide and go seek, building forts out of fallen branches and thick slabs of scabby bark, setting off in search of imaginary treasures. My best friends from those days, Timmy Feld and Nathan Holm, and I hiked and hid and pretended battle beneath the pines. We found our own world there, a magical primeval world scented like a musky Christmas, a world for boys. I saw my first girlie magazine in those woods, took my first puff off a cigarette, and had my first sip of beer. But for all of the time spent and all of the adventures taken, the woods had never scared me before. As a boy, the woods seemed to be exactly the place where I belonged.

  Those joyful days were gone.

  For all of my fond and familiar memories of this forest, I stood in it with Mel and Hank and the remains of Arthur Milton, feeling completely lost. The woods held no hidden treasures, no damsels to rescue; it was simply a dark and dangerous place, providing ample cover to at least one monster.

  When the state boys showed up, they came stomping through the forest like a platoon, lights cutting the tree trunks and brush. I was relieved to see them. They walked onto the scene all good-natured authority and efficiency, gave Arthur a look, shook their heads. A couple boys cursed, but none of them had the gut reaction we local folks had at seeing the gaps in Arthur’s body. After all, the state boys spent their days scraping people out of ten-car pile-ups, shoveling remains off the rocks at the base of Treetop Bluff (a popular place for suicides upstate). The destruction of the human body came in a number of fashions, and these boys had seen most of them.

  They didn’t have to say a word; the crime scene was theirs. When a big trooper with a close-shaved mustache asked me to stand back, I stood back. I didn’t have an ounce of ego about it. Most of the dead bodies I’d seen were in training films and the occasional old folks whose hearts gave out in the middle of the night. The two murders that occurred in my town since I joined the police force were both gunshot victims. Neat. Clean. No mystery as to their killer. My life as sheriff for Luther’s Bend was an easy one, so I deferred to the state boys. They would do the job, and they’d do it right—at least, far better than I could.

  I was taken aside by a young trooper named Burleson who wanted my version of the events, which I gave him, including the bit about a psycho in a mask. He looked skeptical, asked if it might have been an animal, and I assured him it was not.

  “So we have the alleged child offender and this other guy,” Burleson said.

  “Yes. Unless that freak already made a snack of the offender.”

  “Is there any chance they are the same person?”

  “Yes,” I told him, explaining that my description could have been way off. After all, a very disturbed little girl had provided the only information I had. She might have remembered the incident wrong. “But if this is the same guy, why didn’t he harm Maggie? He had her tied up for a good long time. A lot longer than he had Arthur, and he made quick enough work of him.”

  “Couldn’t say,” Burleson replied. “Why don’t you give me that description again?”

  So the night passed. The state boys set up lights and took pict
ures; they swept the area for evidence. Burleson told me that they had an all points bulletin out with the description I gave him, but they wouldn’t start searching the woods until morning when full light rose. Two hours before that dawn came the state boys zipped Arthur Milton into a black rubber bag.

  —

  I drove back to the station bone tired. Nothing was solved. No arrests made. At least one sick son of a bitch, maybe two, had come to town and for all I knew were still prowling the forest on its outskirts.

  It was likely the sex offender had moved on (if he was a different guy than the one I saw taking apart Arthur). The killer might have spooked him after he finished tying Maggie Mayflower to the ground. If he was lucky, he fled a good long ways from my town. If fortune wasn’t exactly pleased with his behavior, the state boys might just stumble over his butchered body once they began to sweep the forest. I didn’t have a single bitch about that scenario.

  But whether two monsters roamed our woods or just the one, the fact remained that Luther’s Bend was going to be carrying fear for a good long time.

  I entered the station and greeted the two deputies on duty. The station was small, with four desks behind a low wall that separated the reception area from my deputies’ desks. The door to my office was on the right of the back wall, and the door to the holding cells was on the left. The corridor at the front of the building, which ran to the right, led to the restrooms, the locker rooms and shower, a storage closet for office supplies, another for weapons, and a narrow shooting range at the back.

  Duke rose slowly from his desk. Bucky Minden looked up from a pile of papers and pushed his glasses back on his nose. He was the greenest on the force, so he worked with me most days.