The Bleeding Season

by Greg F. Gifune

  “You all right?” I asked.

  “I’m good.” He slid the scabbard into his belt. “Let’s just get this done, OK?”

  I turned my head toward the distant sea. We weren’t quite close enough to hear it yet, but I could smell it. I could feel it.

  I could also feel faded vestiges of Bernard here. He had driven these roads, walked these woods, breathed this air and watched night close in over the tops of these trees the same as us. Had he done things here, right here? Had his victims looked at this same sky, all the while wondering if it might be the last thing they’d ever see? Did they know, as they stood on this very ground we now walked on, that death was inescapable? Did they cry here? Fight and plead for their lives?

  Did they bleed here?

  We trudged into the forest, moving toward glimpses of the distant mill through the trees. Rick took the lead with long, powerful strides, forcing me to hurry to keep up with him. The cool air the storm had brought with it the night before was already gone, replaced again with stifling humidity, but within moments we encountered a welcome and steady breeze bounding in off the ocean.

  Unexpectedly, Rick came to an abrupt halt and looked around. “Why’d we have to come through here?” he asked quietly.

  And then I knew he felt it too. Bernard had used this stretch of forest, I was certain of it. He had brought them here first. It made perfect sense. His earliest prey had been victimized in the woods, and for some reason it had a connection to the hideous acts he committed. This particular stretch was the perfect area for his demented games. Isolated but accessible, there was nowhere to go, nowhere to run other than to the rocky coast and ocean beyond, or the old mill. And once there, he would have even more privacy. No one could hear them. No one could help them. Cries and shrieks of terror and agony would go unanswered, echoing through the bowels of a forgotten and decaying relic.

  “He brought them here, Rick.”

  He nodded but said nothing. The ghosts were back, and they spoke to me instead.

  * * *

  Bernard held her tight, one hand on the small of her back, the other cradling her neck. Her hair, wet and matted, streaked and stuck together in clumps from rain and dirt and sweat lay pasted against her cheek. He drew a deep breath, inhaled her scent, detecting earth—soil—mixed with perspiration and some uniquely feminine smells. He tightened his grip, held her closer still and leaned back his head. His eyes struggled to focus through the darkness and rain falling through the treetops overhead, tickling his face and reminding him just how alive he was. His lips parted, allowed the drops to trickle into his mouth. As it accumulated and sloshed free, running over his chin, across his throat and over his neck like the blood of Earth it was, he looked into what was left of her eyes. “Can you see God?” he whispered, so only she might hear.

  Her clothes, strewn across nearby branches, billowed in the wind. He kissed her forehead and squeezed her tight. Her bones, so close to the skin, brought him back. And then it was just the two of them—for now—there in the forest, Earth and sky, night and day, good and evil, blood and dirt, all exploding into one.

  As he released her frail form, she slumped over into a bed of wet leaves, arms flopping out, legs bent and pinned beneath her. He rose slowly to his feet, his legs shaking and unsteady, chest frantically rising and falling as cold rain gushed from a night sky. He staggered to a nearby tree, found the knife he had plunged into it earlier, and yanked it free. Turning in a slow pirouette, he threw back his head, arms outstretched to worship the rain. His dance led him back to her, and he dropped to his knees, draping himself across her upper body, his cheek against hers, one hand clutching the knife and the other gently stroking her throat. Cracked and battered lips moved as the woman’s chest heaved. He pressed his ear to her mouth. “Kill me,” she whispered.

  He touched her face tenderly; stunned she still had the strength to speak. “What do you see?” he asked, gazing into her mangled eyes. “Tell me what you see.”

  The wind answered, as did the rain, but she could not.

  “Tell me,” he insisted. “I need…I need to know for sure.”

  Thunder rumbled in the distance, breaking his concentration. He stood up, slipped the knife between his teeth and grabbed her by the feet. Trudging through the leaves and mud, he dragged her to the designated tree, found the rope and used the dangling end to bind her legs at the ankle. With three strong pulls of the rope she was raised upward, her limp nude body swaying, arms and hair hanging, reaching for the ground.

  Once the rope was secured, he pulled the knife from his mouth and squatted so his face was in line with hers. He pawed at his eyes, wiped away the rain and gently brushed his lips against her. “It’s all right to be afraid.” He looked to the section of forest from which he’d come. Interspersed with flashes of lightning, visions of him skipping and tossing her clothes as he went flickered through his mind. And like a child who had peeked under his bed to find that a monster did, in fact, reside there, he struggled back into a standing position, feet slipping and sliding beneath him.

  He placed the blade against her pubic bone with a disturbingly steady hand and found himself wondering if his suspicions were correct. Maybe Hell was here on Earth. Maybe he’d already found it. And as the master had tempted the one he despised—the one from Nazareth—all those years before, perhaps this too was little more than a final temptation, a test of his conviction.

  Bernard turned back to the woman. “You’re supposed to die screaming.”

  And as he thrust the blade forward, gripped the handle with both hands and dropped to his knees, gutting and tearing her open from pelvis to throat in a single ripping motion, she did her best to comply…

  * * *

  I was sure whatever evidence these woods had held was long gone. No one ever came out here, and animals and the elements would have destroyed remains within days. Months later, besides the ghosts and the stories they felt compelled to tell me, there might be a bone here or there, but not much else.

  Silence followed the breeze, whispered through the forest. It hadn’t become completely dark yet, but night was close.

  Rick snapped his flashlight on. Through a loud swallow he asked, “You think there’s bodies here?”

  “Not here.” I motioned over his shoulder. “There.”

  We were mere feet from the edge of the woods. Beyond the last line of trees stood a chain link fence separating the beginnings of parking lot from the wooded area. Perhaps one hundred yards away sat the phantomlike silhouette of an enormous structure, the decomposed remains of a behemoth from earlier times staring down at us through rapidly darkening skies.

  Without a word, we headed for the fence.

  CHAPTER 33

  Thankfully the fence was only about five feet high. We scaled it and dropped down into the parking lot, and I suddenly felt like I was twelve years old again, hopping fences and climbing trees, going on adventures like the world was still new and innocence still meant something.

  Waves crashed the beach beyond as darkness closed in around us.

  “My grandparents worked here,” Rick said.

  I’d driven by a few times but had never set foot on the property before. I vaguely remembered walking miles of beach or riding our bikes along the sandy coastline when we were kids, watching the huge old buildings ominously perched atop the cliffs, rundown and neglected even then. In those days they had represented intrigue and menace, dinosaurs at the edge of town only the elderly could speak of with firsthand knowledge. To us, as kids, they were oddities, the topic of endless imaginary possibilities.

  “No unions then, fucking sweatshops,” Rick continued. “In those days there was nowhere else to work in this town besides the mills. Broke their fucking backs in this place. A lot of people did. Made them old before their time.”

  “Life has a way of doing that,” I mumbled. “Come on.”

  With Rick leading the way, his flashlight aimed at the cracked and uneven pavement before us, we started
across the parking lot.

  “I wonder if the cops checked out these buildings?” he asked a moment later. In the dark, and in this strange place, the sound of our voices was somehow comforting.

  “Probably.”

  “I mean, they already said they know the killer tortured and murdered his victims somewhere besides where they found the bodies, right? These buildings make sense. They’re about the only places in town where you could do something like that and no one would know. Problem is they’ve all been condemned and abandoned for so long they say they’re unsafe to the point where you can’t even walk around in most of them. If they checked them out, I bet they did it half-assed. That’s if they even got this far yet. If you read the papers or listen to the news, they’re all stuck on the drifter bit and the killer already being long gone.”

  The killer. Even now, he couldn’t bring himself to use Bernard’s name.

  The smell of sea air grew stronger, and the wind off the ocean was a bit steadier, which helped to lessen the humidity some.

  “I think even if the cops did check these places out they only found what it allowed them to find, what it wants them to see.”

  “It?”

  We stopped, looked at each other. “Those other bodies were found because Bernard wanted them to be found and eventually revealed to the authorities. The rest of it, I’m not so sure about.” I motioned to the mill. “I think whatever’s in there is for us to find. Things he wants revealed to you and me. Maybe only you and me.”

  Rick puffed his chest out like he hoped to intimidate his own fear. “Something’s either there or it’s not, Alan.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Unless it all depends on who’s looking.”

  Neither of us spoke for several seconds, but as we turned and continued toward the mill, I said, “I wonder why the town still leaves these beasts standing in the first place?”

  “It’d cost a fortune to demolish the fuckers,” he said. “Plus, it’s Potter’s Cove history. About all this shit town has for history, anyway.”

  Until now, I thought. Now town history would forever hold hands with violent and bloody death, with torture and mayhem and madness.

  We were within one hundred yards of the main building when a loud boom stopped us. The sky lit up over the mill, brilliant blues and reds bursting and streaming in various directions before trailing slowly toward the ground. The fireworks had begun, and against the night sky, in this old and forgotten hellhole, they offered a beautiful contrast, a magical presence of the surreal against an otherwise decidedly conventional setting.

  Forgetting it all for a moment, we stood looking up at the sky like starstruck kids.

  Every few seconds a new display briefly painted the sky, washing our faces in colorful hues that slipped past like headlights along the walls of a dark room.

  The spell finally broken, we approached the front of the building. Rick slowly raised the flashlight, moved it gradually up the face of the mill. Most of the long vertical windows were broken or completely gone, and the few panes still intact were blurred with years of grime. The doors and windows on the first floor were boarded up, covered in graffiti and filth.

  “Getting inside might be a problem,” Rick said. “They got it boarded up pretty good.”

  And then, as I studied the mammoth before us, it hit me.

  “I’ve seen all this before,” I said quietly. “That night in New Bedford. The old factory across from the car lot, I—it was the same. It wasn’t this building, but—but it was. It looks the same. I was in a completely different place, but what I saw was the same. What I saw was this.”

  Rick swung the flashlight around, pointed it at my chest so that there was just enough light illuminating my face. “Say again?”

  “I’ve been here before.”

  I snatched the flashlight from him, aimed it at the front of the building and swept the beam across the first floor until I located a doorway. The large doors that had once constituted the main entrance had rotted and mostly fallen away, and a partially decayed wooden plank that looked like it had fallen from above and landed there ages ago was wedged diagonally across the doorway. It was all exactly as I had seen it before.

  “There,” I said, stabbing with the light. “That’s the way in.”

  Squatting at one end of the plank was an enormously plump rat. Making odd grunting noises, it sat back on its hind legs, reared up and bared its teeth.

  Everything was the same, the same as that night.

  “Shit, dude,” Rick whispered, “that is one bulbous motherfucking rat.”

  I trained the beam on the animal, and it reflected off its eyes, causing them to glow fire-red. As before, the standoff continued until, after a few contemplative sniffs, the rat turned, waddled to the end of the plank and dropped from sight.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  We carefully climbed over the plank and through the doorway, and immediately slammed into a host of nauseating smells. I stepped over a pile of rubble and garbage and panned the light slowly in front of us. The nearest wall was covered with graffiti, and the floors were thick with debris.

  “All this trash and shit, I bet some homeless dudes squatted here,” Rick said, his voice echoing through the empty bowels of the building. “You think there’s still any around?”

  “There’s nothing alive in this place anymore,” I said. “Except them.”

  A group of rats a few feet ahead of us scattered, escaping into darker corners as the pyrotechnics resumed. Fireworks exploded and roared overhead like thunder, and multicolored shafts of light spilled through various holes and wounds in the building, shooting through the open spaces and puncturing the darkness. As one round faded, another followed seconds later.

  I could hear the nervous cadence of Rick’s breath beside me. “Now what?” he asked.

  I looked up. The ceiling was so high I couldn’t make it out. I turned to my right, brought the flashlight around and followed the beam to the far end of the large room. “This way.”

  We walked through the debris and clutter, the ray of light bouncing with each step, and as the fireworks subsided for a moment, I focused on a hallway I knew would be there. My heart began to race as memories of the night in that factory—this factory—beckoned me. A clammy sweat broke out across my forehead. “Down here,” I said.

  Moving through the hallway, the building seemed to close in around us and become much smaller, and although once the fireworks started up again we could still hear them, we were no longer able to see them. The confined space rapidly became overwhelming, the walls narrow and the ceiling low. I swept the light up and down repeatedly as we continued on, trying to reveal as much of the hallway as possible.

  The stench grew worse here.

  We reached a smaller room off of the hallway. An old plaque to the right of where the door had once been caught my attention, and I focused the flashlight on it. “Looks like this was some sort of office.” I wiped at the filthy plaque until I could make out a few letters. “Personnel, I think.”

  I slipped through the doorway. The room was the same one the woman had lured me to that night. There was garbage strewn from one corner to the next, and as I moved the light about the room, I saw the familiar symbols painted in red paint or blood smeared across the walls. What was once the door to the office had been suspended between two small stacks of cinderblocks to form the same makeshift altar I had seen that night.

  The same as before, something lay beneath it in a heap on the floor, dark and unmoving, but I couldn’t make out what it was.

  “What the fuck’s that shit all over the walls?” Rick asked from behind me.

  “Hexes or spells—God knows.” I sighed. “I have no idea.”

  “Is it blood?”

  “I think so.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I think it’s some sort of announcement, or a marking, something like that.”

  “Maybe it’s a warning.”

  A chill of fear reminded me I
hadn’t thought of that. I nodded, swung the light over to the door across the cinderblocks. “That’s supposed to be an altar, I think.”

  “What’s that on the floor?”

  I swallowed so hard I nearly gagged. “Not sure.”

  “I got a bad feeling about all this, man.”

  “Yeah, no fucking shit, do you really?” I shot him an annoyed look, crouched a bit and crept deeper into the room, toward the altar. When I was within a few feet of it, I realized that whatever was beneath it had been covered with an old wool blanket. I waved Rick over and handed him the flashlight. “Shine it here,” I said, pointing.

  He did, and I noticed it trembling slightly, along with my hand, as I reached for the blanket and yanked it free.

  “Oh, Christ.” I dropped the blanket and backed away. “No.”

  Rick kept staring, the flashlight pointed at it. “It doesn’t look real.”

  I ran a hand through my sweaty hair. “It’s destroyed.”

  He shook his head, his lips moving rapidly but soundlessly.

  “That night in the factory,” I said, “the woman lured me to this room and showed me her little boy. He was dead. They were—they were both dead.” Memories of that night flooded my mind, but I no longer needed them, they had become truth right before my eyes. “Bernard’s victims were all single mothers with sons. The killings were rituals, and Claudia told me the final victims, the final ritual sacrifices before he committed suicide would include not only the mother, but also the son.”

  “Why would he do that to a…a little kid?” Rick mumbled. “Why would he do that?”

  “Goddamn bloodbath,” I said. “He slaughtered him and painted the walls with his blood. He butchered a helpless little boy.” I forced myself to look back at the small body crumpled beneath the altar, tossed there like the rest of the garbage littering the floor. That which Bernard hadn’t savaged, the rats had. What remained was mutilated and battered to the point that when I had first seen it I wasn’t entirely certain of what it was. I could only imagine the terror the child had suffered, the abject terror. Anger joined the fear coursing through my veins. “You motherfucker!” I screamed at the darkness, my voice echoing eerily in the empty space. “Motherfucker!”