by Steve Vera
And then it hit him. Whether from some sixth sense or premonition, Skip knew exactly where the fading tire tracks would lead him.
Immediately, a feeling of unease settled over him, and he became conscious of a slight trembling in his hands as they gripped the moist steering wheel.
Skip loved Rolling Creek, fell in love with it the first time he’d set his eyes on it. It was as if he were finally coming home, his previous life a trick of fate, a switching of babies, and for forty-two years he’d lived another man’s life. What could not be loved about the awesome majesty of the Rocky Mountains, the tight, close-knit sense of community and family that permeated every facet of this little town? Living here had put him in touch with his soul. But there was a catch.
For the first six or seven months, Skip had lived ignorant of the town’s little secret. Then he got a whiff of it. It was intangible, something in the air just below conscious thought, but Skip was a detective, a bloodhound, and he’d picked up the scent.
The tire tracks turned off the main road where he knew they would, but instead of following them, he stopped.
It was dark. There were no lampposts this far out of town, just the little reflectors on the sides of the road. He could see snow swirling in his headlights, and it seemed to him that he was on another world, different from where he’d been just thirty minutes before in the comfort of his home. The trees that surrounded him were blanketed, and looking down the narrow, cramped road that was devoid of any life save the single set of tire tracks, Skip’s hackles stood at attention. He sat in his truck a few moments, almost oblivious to the coarse, grainy voice of Bob Segar coming from his stereo, and stared down the desolate road. His thoughts glided along the edges of his mind, hovering but not landing, like a mental Ouija Board searching for letters. If he chose to follow those tracks, something was going to happen. Something bad.
His hesitation lasted only a moment longer. He put his Two-Fifty into drive, turned up the stereo and started down the road. “Riders on the Storm” by The Doors picked up where Bob Segar ended, and Skip smiled at the irony of the Radio Gods.
“Let’s tempt fate and see what happens,” he muttered to himself.
He drove down the narrow, snowy road and followed its bends and twists for nearly two miles until he found what he was looking for. It was a Range Rover, parked where the road ended. He crept slowly behind it, straining to get a look inside. As his truck got closer, he saw that it was empty, and noticed footprints leading away. He reached for his radio.
“Unit one to three,” he said into the receiver.
“Three go,” Stan answered through a cloud of static.
“Run this plate for me. It’s a rental. R-W-E-four-four-seven. Looks like a new Range Rover, black. See what you come up with.”
“Romeo-Whiskey-Echo-four-four-seven,” Stan repeated. “Did you find our rabbit?”
“Could be. I found his car at least,” Skip answered.
“Where?” Stan asked, his voice tinny as a wave of static washed through the radio frequency.
“Blackburn Trail.”
There was silence on the other end for a moment and then Stan’s radio squawked back to life. “Really,” he said more in an observation than a question.
“Looks like he got out though. I can see his footprints starting up the trail.”
“Toward the cemetery,” Stan finished.
“Kind of an odd place to be on a night like this, don’t you think?” Skip asked. There was no immediate response but several seconds later, his radio beeped to life. The interference was so bad that he couldn’t decipher what Stan had said.
“I didn’t catch all that, over,” Skip said into his radio. A second later he heard Stan echoing those same words.
“Unit one to three?” Skip asked.
His response was warbling static. He tried several more times but the snow forbade communication. He couldn’t reconnect. Figured.
“Yeah,” he said to his rearview mirror. A crazed lunatic pounded on an evil organ in the back of his mind. Dun dun dun duuuuun!
This was what he got for trying to escape the city. The smart thing to do now would be to go back and get Stan, and maybe Jared too. He had a plate and could still track him down, but for the love of God, what was this man doing here after midnight in the middle of a snowstorm, soon to be a blizzard? He should not go. He knew that. Yet he wanted to. He wanted to see.
“Unit one to three,” he said into his radio again, but again static ruled the radio waves. So that’s how it’s gonna be, he thought and opened his door. The warmth of his truck was sucked away immediately by the wintry night. The wind had picked up. What was once a winter wonderland was changing into something dangerous.
“Not smart, Skippy boy. Not smart at all.”
At first glance, the road was a dead end, blocked by a wall of spruce, pine and cottonwood. A closer inspection, however, revealed a narrow path snaking between the trees. He knew the path was marked by large, inlaid gray stones set in the earth, but they were invisible through the seven inches of snow covering them. He wrapped his scarf around his face, zipped his jacket up as high as it would go and crunched into the woods.
After only a couple of minutes, he became aware of just how alone he was. Turning around, he saw no sign of the road or his truck, no sign of civilization. Just a wall of trees covered in snow—leafless mountain ash and powdered pines. Skip imagined that the forest would have looked the same two hundred years ago. Or two thousand, for that matter.
Normally, Skip found the silence of nature peaceful and serene—it was the whole reason he’d moved out here—but as he ducked below an outstretched branch intent on gouging his eye, he found nature’s whisper to be oppressive tonight, sinister.
Unnatural.
The climb was more difficult than he remembered; he even stumbled a couple of times. The footprints didn’t, though. They were steady and confident.
Skip trudged on in concentration, senses focused, eyes and ears straining beyond the fat flakes of snow that blotted against his face, alert for anything even remotely suspicious. When he saw the break in the trees a quarter of a mile later, he slowed, creeping the last ten feet as quietly as he could, just like he’d learned back in the Air Force.
The trees felt haunted and alive, more like guardians than mature shoots of seed and nut. Two in particular stood out to him, the last trees before the clearing. Their bark had been gouged with deep carvings that reminded Skip of bear markings, but these were deeper, and Skip detected an element of intelligence in the savagery. They almost looked like glyphs.
Skip was a practical man. He’d been ambushed by insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, investigated the mob in Philly, been part of a drug task force that spanned four states and three countries, but never had he felt a situation so surreal.
It was the graveyard. There was something in it, watching…lurking.
The first time he’d been to Blackburn Memorial Cemetery, the circumstances couldn’t have been more different. It had been early summer, warm not hot, and about as close to paradise as Skip could fathom, every reason he’d moved to Rolling Creek encapsulated in one panoramic scene. Breathtaking as always, the Rocky Mountains had loomed in the distance like ancient protectors, while meadowlarks competed with cicadas as to who could mark summer the loudest.
But upon stepping foot through the disproportionately massive stonewalls guarding such a tiny, forgotten cemetery, it had been strangely quiet. He could still hear the summer, but in the distance, as if it had been banished. Skip’s senses had immediately been
drawn to the strange gargoyle glaring down from the memorial in the center of the cemetery. Chiseled with unsettling realism, the ornate creature crouched on inhuman laurels, watching over the graveyard as if it were its own domain. Marbled green patina dripped into the crevices of its muscles, suggesting that it was made of metal, bronze perhaps, but there was a definite granite-like quality about its surface as well. The craftsmanship even suggested something leathery.
No matter where Skip walked, that statue had seemed to watch him with angry, lifelike eyes made of smooth onyx. Or something. What sort of sadist created such a thing anyway?
Unsettling as it was, the gargoyle had not been the main event. That had been reserved for the thing in the ground.
Like some great black intruder, a slab of darkness rested on top of several graves as if it had fallen out of the sky itself, indifferent to what it crushed or what sacred ground it invaded. It was vaguely rectangular, like a land formation in miniature made of ebony and obsidian. It came out about a foot above ground and had broken headstones poking from under its sides. It was a secret, that much he knew, and though it had several names, the “Black Grave” was the most common.
He remembered reaching out to touch it, surprised to feel a strange inner heat coming from somewhere within. The hairs on his arm had stuck up as if from static electricity. It reminded him of volcanic obsidian, black marble and metal somehow, and yet was none of these. It was so dark that it seemed to absorb light.
All the while, Skip had felt the angry, baleful eyes of the gargoyle burning into him from above. Several times he had looked up from the fascinating grave only to lock eyes with the thing, as if the gargoyle’s very purpose had been created to guard this secret. Spoo-ooky.
Stan had met him back at town with eager, expectant eyes. “So what did you think? Trippy, right?”
Trippy was not the word. More like foreboding. Skip was all about logic, science, the ability to explain, or at least that everything could be explained. Just give him a bunch of facts, some circumstances and settings, and Skip could make sense of anything. It was why he was such a natural detective. Never in his life had he come across something so utterly…unexplainable.
Skip’s head had been whirling with questions. He demanded to know the story. “What the hell is it? Where did it come from? How long has it been there?”
Stan’s reaction had been of amusement. “What, are you a detective or something?” Still, Skip had seen something else in the kid’s eyes. Curiosity. Stan had been curious as to Skip’s own reaction, how a Philly cop and two-time Iraq war and Afghanistan veteran former Air Force Pararescueman would respond to such strangeness.
So over a couple of beers at The Rook, Stan had broken it down for him.
“I was only nine when it happened, but I remember it like it was yesterday,” he began. “One second it’s a regular October night, the next—I swear to you—thunderheads just rolled out of nowhere, as if God himself had punched a hole in the sky and exhaled. Within seconds, seconds, it’s a total whiteout, wind knocking down trees and stripping houses, cars and people suddenly stranded and freezing. It was the most insane thing I’d ever seen. It was like your eyes see it, but your mind doesn’t accept it. The leaves had just changed colors, for crying out loud. And the thunder! Like an atomic bomb. Not a car alarm was spared. In a blizzard!”
One of Skip’s gifts was his ability to smell bullshit a mile away. Not a scent.
“But that’s not the craziest part.” Skip remembered with perfect clarity the hushed, solemn tone Stan’s voice had taken. “I swear to you on my grandmother’s grave that the sky was flashing colors it had no business flashing. Red, green, end-of-world colors. It’s the only time in my life I ever pissed myself.”
Skip had looked at him.
“Just a little.”
“I see.”
“But that’s not the craziest part. It was in the news and everything. Meteorologists trying to explain it, news crews from all over the place swarming like a bunch of vultures interviewing people. This place was a circus for a couple of days.”
“There’s footage on that cemetery in the news?” Skip had interrupted.
“No, no, nobody knew about that ’til after. They were just here because of the freaky storm. A foot and a half of snow in a half hour? When there wasn’t a lick of moisture in the air for five hundred miles in any direction? There were recorded wind gusts of ninety-five miles an hour. Ninety-five miles an hour. People froze to death!”
But that wasn’t the craziest part.
“So what’s the story on the gargoyle?”
Stan had looked at him. “What gargoyle?”
There had been nothing false in Stan’s question, nothing contrived or disingenuous.
“What do you mean, ‘what gargoyle’? The one on the memorial, right over the Black Grave.”
Skip vividly remembered Stan’s puzzled, uncomprehending stare.
“Oh, I get it. You’re messing with me, some kind of practical joke you guys do to city slickers. I get it.”
Nope. No practical joke. Of course, when he’d gone back to show Stan, the thing had been gone. No statue. No gargoyle. Just a jackass pointing at a weathered memorial.
And now he was back.
Skip peered through the foreboding, spike-tipped wrought iron double doors that normally sealed the graveyard from the forest behind him (the chain that usually draped the lock lay broken in the snow) and saw his prey. A man dressed in a black overcoat stood in front of a grave, unbothered by the wind and snow that swirled angrily around him. And it wasn’t just any grave he was standing in front of.
It was the Black Grave.
Surprise was out of the question. There was no way he could take two steps without being seen. Skip contemplated for a moment, unzipped his coat for easier access to his Python and stepped from behind the trees and through the gate doors. He made his way to the man casually, almost in a stroll.
“Nice night for a walk,” Skip said cheerfully, approaching the man. “Come here often?”
The stranger looked up, unsurprised. Those women weren’t kidding. He was crazy handsome, like an angel. Of darkness. Though his face was as expressionless as a blue moon, there was something menacing about him that no amount of finely chiseled cheekbones or golden-highlighted hair plastered to his neck could conceal.
And he was wearing sunglasses. Red ones.
“Look, we can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way. It’s your choice,” Skip continued, brandishing his badge.
“It would be better for you if you left,” the man said in a coarse, grainy rasp that conjured images of dark closets. There was hardly any vocal cord involved, more like a whisper.
“Would it now?” Skip asked, trying to read the man as he read any other person. He might as well have been studying a NASA propulsion system.
“It would.”
It was then that Skip saw the edges of a pale scar disappearing into the collar of his coat. Son of a bitch if it didn’t look like he’d had his throat slit at one point. Of course, that normally killed a person…
“I don’t think you understand how this works,” Skip said, resting his fingers on the handle of his .357. He should have stood farther away.
The stranger’s body blurred, and Skip’s head rocked back as a fist smashed against his mouth. He fell back into the snow, stunned.
“Look, we can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way. It’s your choice,” the man said in a raspy imitation of the tone Skip had just used.
Skip ran his tongue over his lips a
nd tasted the metallic bite of his own blood, felt the pulse of his heart beating in his mouth.
Did Skip Walkins just get sucker punched? he thought incredulously. Skip was a former spec ops operator, an artist in hand-to-hand combat—well, had been at one point—and here he was, ass down in the snow, swallowing his own blood. The young, sunglasses-wearing stranger stared down at him, daring him to get up, to go for his gun. Before Skip could properly instruct this little shit on the science of ass-whipping, Skip glanced at the Black Grave and caught his breath.
Long, sinuous strands of ethereal light crept from the darkness of the grave, crawling toward the stranger like a hungry fog.
“What. The hell. Is that?” Skip pointed, incredulity forgotten.
Following Skip’s finger, the stranger turned around and finally exhibited some damn emotion. It was of surprise.
The light seemed to shimmer in the winter night, pulsing and changing as it crawled from the darkness, and for the first time, the mercury-cold exterior of the blond-haired stranger cracked and a sliver of curiosity joined the surprise.
He bent to one knee and passed his hand through the light without the slightest inkling of trepidation. It whirled around his glove as if it had substance, like fog or mist. It reminded Skip of spider silk. And then the night got even stranger.
“Holy shit, it’s coming out of your chest too,” Skip said in a controlled gasp, pushing himself back through the snow on his heels and elbows. Wasn’t Alfred Hitchcock dead? The emotion on the stranger’s face expanded. He stood up and with one hand began to unbutton his overcoat to explore this new bit of data. Like steam allowed to escape, a light similar in ethereal craziness of the Black Grave wafted into the snowy air from his chest.
Just then, the stranger stopped and cocked his head to the right. He remained frozen for a moment, misty light forgotten, and sniffed the air like an animal. In one liquid motion, he spun around and pulled a gun from within his overcoat with the grace of a matador, pointing it into the surrounding trees. Shocked by the man’s speed, Skip realized instantly how overmatched he was. And Skip was never overmatched.