"So,” continued Dean, “this killer could live out there in your swampland for any number of years, unless he's rooted out now."
"Nothin’ could survive out there,” said one man.
"Not for long,” agreed a second officer.
"Dogs'll get ‘em,” said the dog man.
Dean realized they didn't truly understand what they were dealing with. Finding this pervert in the dense marsh of Wekiva had led them to the banks of the Wekiva River, along which some homes stood, the property of people who were carrying on a running battle with Orange County to remain in the preserve. Dean knew that every man, woman, and child in the preserve was now in danger, and that it had been a good move to send deputies to every house to issue warnings. But this weakened the number in the central posse, and it also divided them into dangerously small satellite groups. Everyone present had seen what the dwarf had done to Mark Williams and Joe Staubb.
For over an hour now the dogs had been running far and wide, baying, going in a southeasterly direction and then cutting back northerly, coming closer to the camp again, as if confused and circling—or had the dwarf circled back? This was the running argument among the men as the sound of the dogs increased, nearing, closer still.
"Just like a ‘coon hunt,” said the dog man, grinning wide, a two-day-old growth of hair on his face. “Don't worry, my dogs have run men before ... no problem."
"Why've they turned back?” asked Sid, his legs propped over a log, the scalded ankles causing him great pain.
The dog man spat out a wad of tobacco. “Turned their prey is my guess. Got ‘em on the run and he's so turned ‘round he don't know which way's up. If we just wait long ‘nough, your criminal's going to come runnin’ right into your arms."
"Too easy,” Dean said. “Not this weasel."
The dog man returned in a moment with word from the captain, Staubb's superior, a man named Todd Daniels. “Captain says it's time we go to meet up with the dogs. Told ‘em we should give ‘em bit more time, but he's got ants in his pants."
"Don't we all,” said Dean.
The group was some thirteen armed men now, counting Dean and Sid. The first sign of the sun filtered in through the thick brush and palmetto, scrub oak and palms. The forest was so dense here that Dean expected to see monkeys in the palm trees, but all he saw were curious squirrels and a flaming-red cardinal. Somewhere at the other end of the human chain they formed, Dean heard somebody shout a warning about a cottonmouth. No shots were fired and the line moved onward, forming a wide net, toward the sound of the dogs, which were now closing in.
Sid had not exaggerated the wilderness aspect of the tropical flatlands. Grass was up to Dean's armpits wherever there was a break in the trees. No rocks, no stones, no bumps in the land here, only miles of exotic vegetation, some plants Dean had never known existed, strange and beehive-like in their crusty coverings, plants that did battle with a sun that by 10 a.m. set the place aflame. The entire effect was that of a foreign and wild place.
"Damn sure wish I was back at the lab,” complained Sid, sweat glistening from every pore.
"Damn sure I wish I was back in Chicago."
Sid managed a half-smile. “You've proven to be a good friend, my friend.” Sid's last word ended in a groan.
"Leg hurt?"
"Both legs hurt like hell ... real bad,” he admitted.
Dean had looked at the scald marks and one of the officers who'd come on had thought to bring a first-aid kit. The burns were wrapped now, but the pain and the throbbing, if anything like Dean's arm, must be difficult to put pressure on.
"Why not hold up here, Sid, until we can come back for you?” Dean suggested when they came to a clearing with a little shade.
"Not on your life, Dean ... been nearly killed twice by that ... that thing. I'll be damned if I'll risk it a third time."
"But if—"
"No, no!” he was adamant and, Dean realized, scared. “Keep moving."
"Downriver!” shouted the captain, taking a cue from the dogs’ baying and the dog man, who suddenly bolted and raced in that direction, shouting, “I think they done got him, boys!"
He fell.
He got up.
He ran.
It had been an endless repetition all night long.
Fall, get up, run.
Sometimes he'd lie there long enough to try to think, but they gave him no time.
The dog sounds frightened him. He imagined the dogs tearing him to pieces. He sensed this was going to be his end, and neither Ian nor the dark powers would stop it. Ian was gone ... they were gone. Now it was Van, alone again, facing certain death—or capture. Neither ending particularly appealed to him.
Death meant the end of all the many years of hard work to get as far as he and Ian had come. Death by gnarling, angry dogs meant destruction of all that he had toiled for, an end to the satanic power growing within him. For his failure, too, the death would be not only a painful one, but made everlasting and endless by the very powers he had served so long, the dark ones who'd nurtured him in his infancy and childhood.
He remembered the black woman well.
He even remembered the black man who, from time to time, came in the company of the black woman.
Then they stopped coming. All he ever saw afterward was the dish, like a dog plate shoved onto the top stair of the basement. But he never forgot the dark ones who'd come and nurtured him, kept him alive during those crucial early years.
He would fight back as he'd always fought back. He wouldn't just lie here and wait for the dogs to pounce upon him and rip him limb from limb. He must think like Ian, develop a workable plan.
He snatched off his oxblood-colored vest and attached it to a limb. Taking a piece of brush, he dusted his trail as he backed from the vest down toward the river again, which he'd crossed once before, nearly drowning in the process. He didn't want to return to the water, but an animal fear drove him toward it.
He backed down now into the water, which enveloped his hairy form. He got deep down, feeling the muck tug at his knees, there on the bank, hiding among the reeds, waterlillies, and branches where a slender green snake slept so soundlessly on a limb he at first believed it part of the branch.
He knew he, too, must become part of the land, to disappear before the eye of any unsuspecting person or animal that happened by. In the water he had a chance. It would erase his scent. It would erase him.
Then he heard the voices of men on the other side of the river, heard them noisily sloshing through the shallows. He darted into a small alcove covered thick with algae, the surface a green mush he parted as he went.
The dogs were bringing the men, and he realized for the first time that he'd gotten turned around in the unfamiliar landscape. He silently cursed a man named Dean Grant.
He did not see the slow, deliberate movement at his back, and when, out of the corner of one eye, he did spot it, he took it for an aged, water-blackened log moving with the current. But he felt no current in the little cove. Another glance, closer this time, and he saw the two enormous eyes at the snout of the log, realizing it was alive. The gator moved at Van with ease, grace, and the certainty of a meal.
A chilling scream, like that of a banshee, froze Dean and the other men in place where they stood almost shoulder-deep in the river, holding their weapons overhead. The scream sounded to the dog man like that of a Georgia bobcat. The dogs, too, had been startled by the cry, like that of a woman in terrible distress, Dean thought, but his senses told him it was the dwarf. “It came from that way, opposite the dogs,” shouted the captain, leading the column of men.
They fought with the river to get to the other side where it narrowed, the dogs rushing by them, when Dean saw that one of the dogs up ahead had a little vest in his mouth which appeared to have been dredged from the water—it was soaking wet. All the dogs stood in a semicircle about an algae-infested alcove off the river. There before them was an enormous monster of an alligator, rolling about in the
water, tearing one dog to pieces as the other animals yelped and barked and snarled, still keeping a safe distance.
Putrid water, algae, and the tussling animals could not hide the welter of blood discoloring the surface of the water.
"My dog! It's ... it's Queenie! Damn it, Captain, do something! Do something!"
"Look!” shouted Sid, seeing a piece of ripped clothing floating among the algae. Dean swiped at it with a stick, dredging it toward them. Even with the algae clinging to it, the clothing was easily that of a child ... or a dwarf.
"Think the alligator got the bastard?” asked Sid.
"A fitting Florida end to the man,” said Dean, satisfied even more by the blood he found on the little cloak. “But we've got to be sure, Sid."
Dean stepped to where the captain stared over the feeding gator. The dog man was still shouting in the other man's ear about his dog. “We've got to kill the alligator, Captain."
"What the hell for? The dog's done for."
"We've got to know for sure if the dwarf went before the dog."
"Hell, you heard the scream!"
"That's not enough, not with a killer like this!"
The captain relented when the dog man said, “Shoot the ugly bastard. He killed Queenie,"
The gun was raised, a powerful hunting rifle, and the large-caliber bullet went right between the animal's eyes. Its body kicked and shivered with the impact. There was a moment's thrashing, and it lay still at last. “Snatch him outa there,” ordered the captain, and two of his men took it by the tail. It took a third to get the giant beast onto shore.
"It's going to be hell getting him back to the lab,” said Sid.
"To hell with the lab, Sid,” said Dean, “this is fieldwork. You men, turn the animal onto its stomach."
"What the hell's he doing, Captain?” asked a confused officer.
"Cutting the thing open to see if the gator got more'n a dog."
Dean's scalpel slit the outer layers of the underbelly of the animal. A second, deeper slit caused the beast to pop open like a ripe watermelon, and the odors drove even Dean to take a step back. Covering their noses and mouths with handkerchiefs, the two pathologists began another cut into the stomach lining and esophagus and all that lay in between. With ungloved hands they probed and began to pull forth large, undigested remnants of Queenie.
The dog man was going berserk behind them, calling Dean a ghoul. He was restrained by the others.
After ten minutes, Dean, his hands bloody, stood up. Sid went to the river's edge to throw water on his face. “Nothing human inside this animal, Captain ... not a single bite."
"Gators travel in packs,” said the Captain. “Another one must've gotten our man and was gone before we got here. Hell, you got the torn clothes, the blood! Take it back to your lab and see if it ain't human blood or the dog's ... just see."
"Even if it is human, Captain ... it's not good enough."
"Well, it is for me. We're satisfied, just like the damned flies are satisfied,” said the captain, pointing to the gator carcass. It was already infested with insects. “Come on, Stewart, gather up your remainin’ dogs. The County'll pay for Queenie. Come on, all of you men ... we're going home."
Dean stared out into the blank, empty, uncaring swampland ahead of him. Somewhere out there right now the evil could he staring back at him ... or it could've been swallowed whole by this guy's mate, Dean thought again with a glance at the dead gator. Maybe, if, likely, possible ... all the qualifiers ... was that how it would now end, after all he and Sid, Peggy, and the others had lived through, after the long trail of dead bodies that had brought him to this time and place?
"Come on, Dean ... come away,” said Sid. “Get the blood off you. Let's cross back."
Dean looked into his friend's clear, watery eyes and saw a tired man still fighting down pain. “Yeah, let's get back to city streets and congestion. You can keep this wildlife refuge business for stronger men than me."
"Are you satifed the little creep is really dead?"
"No ... not really."
"Me either."
"We'll test the cloak for human blood."
"It'll only prove he cut himself with that damned knife of his."
"We may never know, Sid."
"Unless one day somewhere we read about a brutal scalping murder...."
They crossed the river, lagging behind the cops, Dean supporting Sid. “Right,” agreed Dean sadly. “Could go crazy waiting for that one."
"God, Dean, those two bastards were really sick."
Behind them Dean heard the sound of sparrows flittering about and a strange cackling bird, which sounded like a cross between a jay and a crow, his cry a staccato. He heard fish, probably mullet, jumping, and he heard small, furry animals leaping from tree to tree, some on the ground. Then came a sudden snap of a twig, a sound usually made by the human animal. It made him wheel and stare once more into the dense green forests of pines, oak, and palms fighting for space at the river's edge. But he could see nothing remotely human in the landscape.
Sid tugged at his friend. “It's over, Dean ... the dogs ran him up on a gator and that's that."
"Yeah, sure ... I can believe that."
"To sleep at night, we both have to."
"A sobering thought. Let's get the hell out of these woods."
And so they did, returning to the house where the killers had feasted on death.
EPILOGUE
Some weeks later, Dean was back at his own lab in Chicago working on more routine matters when a package arrived from Florida. It had the rubber stamp of Sid's lab in the upper left-hand corner, and Dean ripped the small package open hastily, curious. He and Jackie had just finished opening Christmas packages a few days before, on New Year's Day, holding the celebration they'd missed on December 25 until then. Dean wondered if Sid was now playing Santa Claus. “Some sand, no doubt,” Dean told Sybil as she looked on. Sybil had done an excellent job of maintaining the pathology lab in Dean's absence, and Dean had spent the day alternately telling her so and filling her in on all the details of the scalping case in Orlando. Unlike Jackie, she was fascinated with all the gory details.
Dean lifted from the unwrapped box a small book, aged and crumbling, no thicker than the end of Dean's thumb, the pages a brownish-yellow. It seemed ready to fall apart. A note fell from the box as Dean slipped the delicate book from it. “What the hell is this?” he wondered aloud.
Sybil snatched up the note and handed it to her boss. “What's it say?"
Dean read it aloud. "Dean, thought you might like to see this. It was found beneath some boards in the old house the Bennimin boys used here in Florida as their headquarters. Light reading. When're you coming to Florida with Jackie just for the sights? Don't be a stranger." It was signed, "Sid."
Dean saw there was no title on the worn cloth cover, and he believed, from the look of it, that the title had simply worn away. Though he opened the cover carefully, pages pulled off the binding, breaking even with his light touch. He saw inside the title: Treatment, Curing and Preserving of Tissues.
It was an ancient textbook on taxidermy, used by the dwarf as a guide to his hideous taxidermy.
The book was so old that its author filled the pages with questionable, personal asides on skin and hair, speaking of hair as the source of vital strength and magic power, “for the life principle resides therein."
"Jesus," moaned Dean.
"What is it?"
"Listen to this,” said Dean, reading aloud: “Hair belongs to the element of earth, as it is a tangible; to the element of water, since it is free and flowing; to the element of fire, since it is fed from the furnace of the brain; and from the element of air, since it is light and can be blown by the wind."
"That's ... crazy."
"To you and me, yes ... but the way it reads to a madman? Ian Bennimin and his deformed twin, looking for answers? Apparently, there was more method to their madness than we knew."
"Method?"
&nb
sp; "Listen to this. It—hair—is animal, since other animals also have hair; it is special to humans, since no animal has hair quite like a man's; it is vegetable, since it is parasitic, like a plant. Hair is both living, since it grows, and dead, since it is without sensibility. As such, it forms a link between this world and the next. It has its own life ... it grows more rapidly than anything else and continues to grow after the death of the body."
Dean thought of all the mythical and magical religions and superstitions surrounding hair, from the tonsure of monks to young virgins having to shave their heads in order to symbolically give their heads over to deities.
"God, I sure hope that alligator really did get this creep,” said Sybil.
"You and me both ... you and me both,” agreed Dean, putting down the book, feeling strange just holding it. Yet he was drawn back to it all day long.
Sybil began to regard him. It was that same look she'd shown when he'd first suspected wrongdoing in a little girl's “accidental” drowning in a Gary, Indiana quarry so many months ago. She looked at him as if he was not only strange, but unstable as well, and he didn't like the reaction he was getting from her. Yet the book drew him to it like a magnet.
Each line he read, he tried to decipher through the mind of the deformed Bennimin child, possibly as it was read to him by his beautiful brother. Dean tried to interpret each section and imbue it with meaning as it applied to the meaninglessness of multiple murder by scalp-taking. He put every line side-by-side with what little he knew of the deadly brothers and their horrifying acts.
The integration of so many pieces of the puzzle was slow in coming. Yet Dean persevered, trying desperately and perhaps futilely to understand that which could not possibly be comprehended any more than the mind of God: the mind of a madman. His hammering away at the little book was slow-going, too, and he hadn't gotten beyond page 13 before the day was out.
At closing time, when Sybil gave him an uncalled-for hug and a “welcome back,” Dean took the slim volume with him to finish at home.
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