The Summoning

by Bentley Little

  It got downright depressing sometimes.

  In his more romantic moments, he liked to think of himself as a tough, hard-boiled reporter, a man whose role could easily be portrayed on the screen by Bogart or Mitchum or perhaps the young Brando. But that was a fanciful daydream, one that didn't hold up even to himself. Truth be told, he was closer to a secretary than anything else. His life wouldn't be worth dramatizing on screen, not even with a soap opera star.

  The phone rang, a stereo burr sounding simultaneously from the cordless next to his desk and the wall phone in the kitchen. It rang again, but he waited a moment before picking up the receiver, hoping that Corrie would answer it. She did, and, a beat later, called his name:

  "Rich!"

  "Got it!" he called back. He picked up the phone. "Hello?"

  "Rich? It's me."

  "Robert?" He shifted the phone to his other ear, frowning. He could not remember the last time his brother had called this early on a Saturday. "What's up?"

  "What are you doing?"

  "Talking to you." He tried to keep his tone light, but he could hear the seriousness in Robert's voice.

  "No, I mean this morning. Do you have any plans?" "Not really.

  Why?"

  Robert cleared his throat. "I want you to come out and look at something with me."

  "What?"

  He cleared his throat again, a nervous habit he'd had since childhood and something he did only when he was under extreme pressure. "We've found a dead body. Out by the arroyo. It's... Manuel Torres."

  "The old guy who worked at Troy's garage?"

  Yeah. He's .. ." More throat clearing. "You gotta come out here. You gotta see this." ........ "Murdered?"

  "You gotta see for yourself."

  "All right. Let me grab my camera. I'll meet you... where?"

  "The arroyo. But I don't know if you'll be wanting your camera. These aren't pictures that'll be suitable for the paper." , : , "What happened, Robert.> What is it?"

  "You gotta see for yourself."

  There were two cars, a Jeep, and four men already at the arroyo. Steve Hinkley and Ted Thrall, two deputies, stood next to one of the vehicles, talking. Robert and Brad Woods, the county coroner, were at the edge of the oversize gully, looking down at something.

  Rich pulled to the side of the dirt road and got out of the car, grabbing his camera from the passenger seat and slipping the strap over his shoulder. A cloud of red dust, kicked up by the braking tires, washed over him and continued on, carried by the warm morning breeze.

  He coughed and spit, wiping his eyes, then glanced over at Robert, who waved him forward.

  In a normal town, a real town, he and Robert would not have been able to maintain the professional relationship they now shared. There would have been charges of conflict of interest, allegations that the police and the press were far cozier than they should have been, and he would have had to assign someone else to cover the crime beat.

  But Rio Verde was not a normal town. No one here gave a damn whether or not he was the police chief's brother or the mayor's cousin or the president's transvestite son as long as their garage sale ads came out on time--a fact that played hell with his journalistic ethics but sure as shit made his personal life a whole lot easier.

  He walked' across the hard-packed sand, past the parked cars, to where Robert and Woods stood solemnly waiting. "Hi," he said, nodding to both.

  Robert turned to the coroner. "Would you excuse us for a sec?" he asked. "I want to talk to my brother alone."

  The other man nodded and began walking slowly back toward the cars.

  Robert looked at Rich for a moment but said nothing. His gaze was troubled. "Is he down--?" Rich began. Robert nodded.

  Rich moved closer, standing at the top of the arroyo and looking toward the bottom. His heart began thump "Iesus " he breathed. ing in his chest.. ,

  There was nothing left of Manuel Tortes but a skeleton covered with skin.

  He stared, unable to look away. Even from here, even from this angle, he could see the wrinkled parchment appearance of the man's face, the way his teeth, protruding between dark deflated lips, looked overlarge in his now shrunken head, the way his nose had collapsed in on itself, a crater between hard-bone cheeks. There were round black holes in the sockets where the old man's eyes had been.

  Goose bumps popped up on Rich's arms. Manuel Tortes was sell clothed, wearing faded jeans and a greas Tshirt, but his shoes had fallen off, his pants were partially pulled down, and the thin covering of dried crinkled skin which now outlined the infrastructure of his waist and lower legs was clearly visible. i:'

  Around the body, in an almost deliberate semicircle, were dead animals, similarly drained, similarly dried: a crow, a hawk, two jackrabbits, a roadrunner.

  "What is this?" Rich asked. "How did this happen?" Robert shook his head, looking toward the two deputies standing by the cruiser. He had not glanced into the arroyo once, Rich noticed, not since he'd arrived.

  "I don't know," he said. "I don't know what's going on here. Even Brad's never heard tell of anything like this."

  Rich found that he, too, was having a hard time looking back into the arroyo. He kept his eyes on his brother. "Who discovered the body?"

  "I did. I saw the Jeep parked there, no one around, and I came over to check it out. I was driving the Bronco and had no radio, so when I saw Manuel down there, I hauled ass back to the station, called Brad, called you, and came back here with Ted and Steve."

  "You haven't gone down there yet? .... Robert shook his head. "We have to be careful. There might be footprints. We don't want to disturb anything. We'll walk along the cliff a ways and find another way down."

  Rich turned away from his brother and looked to his right, to where the arroyo curved away from town. He had not come here for a long time, but as children he and Robert and their friends had played here often, converting crevices into caves, laying boards across outcroppings of rock to make forts and hideouts. They had thought the arroyo private, had assumed that they had discovered it, and no one else knew about it.

  It had been their secret place, where they'd hidden from enemies and adults and imaginary antagonists.

  He could not remember the last time he'd been here, but as he looked down the length of the gully it seemed different to him. It was now permanently tainted by the presence of death. Of course, he was viewing the scene with adult eyes now, seeing the dead man as an incursion of evil into what had once been a childhood paradise. As kids, he was sure that they would have had no problem adjusting to the idea of the corpse, would, in fact, have concocted some elaborate adventure story to explain its existence, a story that would have made their hideaway seem that much more forbidden and exciting.

  What had they known then, though? Nothing. They'd been children. They would not have understood the implications of what had happened, would not have been any more frightened by this dried husk of a man and the dead animals surrounding him than they would have been by a gruesome horror story told around the campfire.

  He was scared now, though. And the chill which had come upon him when he'd first looked into the arroyo had not lifted. He turned again toward his brother. "Is this a murder or is this a natural death?"

  "A 'natural death'?"

  "You know what I mean. Did he just die out here and get, you know, dehydrated or something?"

  "I saw him working yesterday when I drove by the garage."

  Rich shivered. "Then how could this have happened? How could this physically have been done?"

  Robert took a deep breath. "Remember a few years back when we had those rumors of witches and satanists meeting out here? There were supposedly people in robes chanting when the moon was full?"

  "But nothing ever came of it. You never found anything. Hell, you never even found anyone who'd seen the chanters. It was all friend-of-a-friend stuff."

  "Yeah, but maybe this is connected. I mean, Jesus, look at him." He motioned toward the body. "This is not yo
ur average everyday murder."

  "There are no 'average everyday murders." This is the first murder you've ever handled."

  "And I'm scared shitless. I admit it. I don't know who I'm supposed to inform, how I'm supposed to begin the investigation. What if I screw up? I called Brad, he's here, he'll take the body and do an autopsy. I'll tell Manuel's wife. But do I have to tell the state police? Do I have to report this to the county supervisors? What is the chain of command here? What's the procedure? Who's going to know if I'm doing a decent job of investigation or poking the pooch?"

  "Call Pee Wee. He'll know what to do. He's bound to have come across something like this."

  "Something like this?" Robert shook his head. ""I don't think so."

  "I don't mean something exactly like this, I mean a murder. He was chief for thirty years. I think he's handled murders before." Rich glanced again into the arroyo, his eye drawn to the shriveled bony body and its halo of empty animals. "I don't think anyone's come across something like this."

  "I don't think so either." The breeze kicked up again, ruffling Robert's thinning hair. He said nothing for a moment. ""What do you think happened here?" he asked

  Rich blinked against the warm wind, still felt cold. He cleared his throat. "I don't know," he said. "It's... it's not like something real. It's like something out of a damn movie, you know?"

  Robert nodded. "I know." He spit, then ground the wet spot into the sand with the toe of his boot. He motioned toward the deputies and the coroner. "Come on," he said. "It's getting late. We've dicked around enough here. It's time to go down."

  Rich nodded, saying nothing.

  The two of them walked in silence toward the cars.

  Brad Woods had performed autopsies on a lot of bodies in his time. Men and women who had died of old age, children who had succumbed to illness, even victims of mining accidents and car crashes. Some had been more heartbreaking than others, some had been more gruesome than others, but all had been within the range of normalcy. None of the bodies had ever scared him.

  Until now.

  He stared down at the form of Manuel Torres, laid out on the table in the center of the room. Naked, the old man's body looked even more inhuman than it had when enveloped within the too-large clothes. Lying on the sand, Manuel had seemed so shriveled and shrunken that he'd resembled a predatory stick insect that had crawled into the clothing of a human being. But here, on the table in the cold glare of the operating lights, the unbelievable distortion of the ordinary was even more frightening. Now Brad could clearly see that the in sectile limbs of the body were severely attenuated human arms and legs, that the sunken body cavity and strangely shriveled genitals were the products of acute emaciation, that the fright-mask face was the result of dehydration without decay.

  He reached out and poked a tentative finger into the body's stomach region. He could feel the dryness even through the gloves, and in the silence of the room, against only the low hum of the lights, the skin made a Sound like that of a newspaper being crumpled.

  He pulled back, nervous despite himself. The old man's bones were broken in several spots, his rib cage crushed, and in these places the skin had cracked open. None of the dermal layers had retained enough moisture to maintain flexibility. No blood had escaped from any of the openings.

  What could have drained the body of all fluids so completely?

  And in a single night. According to Chief Carter, Troy had said that Manuel worked until five o'clock yesterday evening.

  I In the arroyo, Brad had given the body a cursory examination, visually inspecting the corpse for obvious signs of violence. That had been difficult enough. Surrounded by other people, by the police and the press, he had still not wanted to handle the body, still had to force himself to touch the old man. But now, here, alone, he was finding it almost impossible to begin his work.

  Brad felt goose bumps on his arms and on the back of his neck. The bodies of the animals were in bags at the back of the room, and those he would examine later with

  Ed Durham, the vet.

  But Manuel Torres was his and his alone.

  He turned on the tape recorder, picked up the scalpel, took a deep breath, then turned off the tape recorder, put down the scalpel, and took a drink of water from the squeeze bottle on the tray next to him.

  He didn't want to do this autopsy. That's what it came down to. He'd been procrastinating for over a quarter of an hour, laying out instruments, testing his tape recorder, performing the ordinary prep duties that should have taken no more than five minutes. He wished he had an assistant or a coworker to help him. He wished he'd called Kim, his secretary, and told her to come in, although there was nothing she could do to help with the procedure.

  He wished there was someone in the building besides himself.

  He glanced around the room. Though it was empty and well lit, though there were no shadows, there was something about the room that put him on edge, that made him feel more than a little uneasy. He had never been one of those people who were afraid of death, or who considered a lifeless body something sacred to be left reverentially alone. To him, dignity and dissection were not mutually exclusive. The idea of cutting open a dead person had never bothered him, which was why he had not had any problem deciding upon his chosen profession. To him, a corpse had always been the shed husk of an individual, what was left after the soul had departed. A body had value only in its ability to shed knowledge upon death. Its sole function was to impart medical or criminal information to those qualified to look for it.

  But Manuel Torres's body did not seem to him like a shed husk. Despite the fact that it was physically the most husk like corpse he had ever come across, it did not feel to him like an abandoned vessel, and he could not help thinking that the soul of Manuel Torres, whatever that spark might be that made a person a person, was still alive in this dried form and had not been able or allowed to escape.

  It was a silly thought but one he could not shake. And it was why he could not seem to bring himself to cut into the body, why he kept postponing that first incision. It felt too much like murder. Each time he picked up the scalpel and looked at the body, preplanning the cuts and crosscuts he would make to open up the chest and abdominal cavities, he saw in his mind a scenario in which Manuel suddenly sat up and started screaming, howls of agony escaping from between those flattened lips as shriveled disintegrating organs fell out through the flaps of dried skin.

  Brad's gaze darted quickly toward the old man's left foot. Had he seen a toe wiggle? He stared at the foot for a moment, but the pinkish toes remained stubbornly unmoving against the background of the silver steel table.

  What frightened him the most was the fact that he kept expecting the body to move.

  It was stupid, and he knew it was stupid. The reaction of a child who'd been watching too many fright flicks. But the feeling would not go away. He had opened up a hundred bodies in this room. Two hundred maybe. He'd worked mornings and nights, weekdays and weekends, but he had never experienced anything like this.

  What the hell was the matter with him?

  He told himself to maintain his professionalism, to simply go by the book and, step by step, objectively perform each of the simple medical procedures required for a legal autopsy. Again he turned on the tape recorder, again he picked up the scalpel. He breathed deeply, through his nose, in a conscious effort to calm himself. He looked again at Manuel Torres. He could see bone beneath the wrinkled translucent parchment skin, the white bone of skull and skeleton, and that was something he knew, that was something he could handle. There was no monster here, only a dead man. A body built around a structure of bone. The condition of the corpse might be unusual, but its composition was not.

  It was time for him to put aside his foolishness and get to work.

  This time, he used the scalpel to make an incision in the chest, and his chill abated, superstitious dread replaced by the familiar and welcome feeling of dispassionate competence.

  He
described each "procedure as it was performed, documenting the entire process on tape. The body was indeed dehydrated, and to an unbelievable degree, but this fact did not now seem as horrifying as it had only a few moments ago. He was again the coroner, doing his job, recording his findings, and while afterward he might again be affected by emotions, he was now on autopilot, observing and chronicling the facts as he encountered them.

  He turned the body over to examine its lateral and posterior segments.

  He adjusted the corpse, then blinked, staring down at Manuel Torres's neck. There was an open gash directly below the base of the head, a large missing chunk of flesh.

  How could he have missed such an obvious wound in his preliminary examination?

  He shook his head, embarrassed by his oversight, and described the wound in detail, carefully measuring its width and length. There was a dried residue around the opening, a crusty pinkish substance that he carefully excised and placed on a slide, setting it aside for later examination.

  He already knew the makeup of the substance. He had seen the combination before, on the lips of people who had had seizures, dried on tongues that had been bitten. Blood and saliva.

  He frowned. The combination might not be that unique, but a wound on the back of the neck was a very unusual place to find saliva in a concentration so large. Very unusual.

  He looked more carefully at the wound. The skin around it was so dry that no specific finding could be verified as completely accurate, but he thought he could see the imprint of teeth on the epidermis.

  Human teeth. His own mouth felt suddenly dry. Blood and saliva.

  The chili was back, the fear, and he quicken cutting more quickly, talking faster, hastening the procedure. He knew it was important that he discover the true cause of Manuel Torres's death, but right now he just wanted to get this damn thing over with.

  And he wanted to make sure he was out of the building before nightfall.

  The buildings surrounding the church were run down almost to the point of condemnation. Entire painting histories were revealed in chipped layers on the peeling stucco walls of the tiny houses. The hard dirt ground was littered with the sparkling shards of broken bottles. In the building next door, a sagging wooden structure with wire mesh over the windows and a faded sign above the door identifying it as the