by J L Bryan
“You need to go back upstairs,” I said. “It's not safe down here alone.”
“I'm not alone.” She looked ahead, toward the caves. “Amil's here.”
A shadowy figure stood there, barely visible, no larger than a boy of eleven or twelve.
“You shouldn't let him lead you out alone at night. Come on, Polly, we're going back.” I caught up to her and took her hand.
“No, wait!” She resisted, jerking toward the barred cave entrance while I tried to pull her back toward the lobby. “Let go of me!” she screamed.
The shadowy figure was on me in an eyeblink.
It struck me in the gut, knocking me back and off my feet. I crashed into a clear plastic box exhibiting something that purported to be an Egyptian pharoah's burial mask.
While I struggled to regain my balance, as well as my breath, the figure slammed into me again.
Its hand closed over my face—cold, clammy, and reeking like a neglected aquarium full of slime.
The shadowy figure had grown much larger, taller than a full-grown man now.
I saw its face—green, scaly, reptilian, the teeth sharp and yellow. But it was a human face, under all of that. And it was close to me.
“No!” Polly shouted.
Ignoring her, the Snake Man lifted me from my feet and flung me all the way up the exhibit. I hit the hardwood floor and rolled. I was almost at the open tomb door when I finally stopped.
The dark shadow—now greenish, I thought, and much more solid-looking—approached, its monstrous reptilian face snarling at me.
“Amil, please!” Polly said, running toward us. “Don't hurt her!”
“Stay back, Polly!” I raised my tactical flashlight and hit Snake Man with a concentrated blast of white light right through the face. This threw some of its hideous, scaly details in sharper relief for a moment. I was treated to a bright view of his pointed yellow teeth, mossy gums, and rotten black tongue as he snarled at me.
Then I blasted a little Te Deum, a fifth-century religious chant performed by the monks of Clervaux Abbey in Luxembourg, from the speaker at my hip. The prayers thundered out at ear-cracking volume, so that the environment was filled with holy music as well as white light.
The Snake Man roared and retreated...which would have been more reassuring if Polly wasn't right behind him.
I pushed myself to my feet and advanced on him, determined to keep him on the retreat.
“Stop it! You're scaring him!” Polly charged toward me and grabbed my arm, jarring my flashlight loose. It dropped and rolled across the floor, casting crazy shadows and flashes of light all over the room.
“Get back from it, Polly!” I said, moving to stand between her and the reptilian ghost. One problem was that I couldn't see where it was anymore.
I looked up the exhibit toward the crypt door, then down all the way to the barred door to the cave.
Snake Man seemed to have vanished for now. The room was still cold, but it was probably that way even in the summer.
“Is he still here?” I asked Polly, who seemed better able to see and hear him than me.
She hesitated, then shook her head.
“Why did he want you to come down here?”
“He said he wanted to give me something,” she said. “Something that would make us closer together.”
I shivered at those words. “What, exactly?”
“I don't know. You messed it up and chased him off.” Her face trembled like she was on the verge of tears. “You made him leave.”
“He attacked me, Polly.”
“He thought he was protecting me.”
“How could you know that?”
Polly shrugged and looked at her feet.
“Polly,” I said, “Did you know Amil was also the Snake Man?”
She hesitated, then nodded. “Kind of. It's just what he does when he gets scared.”
“He doesn't scare you?”
“I see how he really is. Amil isn't really scary. He's kind of...cute.” She blushed.
I thought about the green, scaly creature I'd seen and wondered how the word cute could even exist in the same room as that thing.
“Let's get you back upstairs,” I said. “And promise me you won't go wandering around at night again.”
Polly frowned, and she did not promise me anything, but she followed me.
“What was he going to give you?” I asked.
“I already told you. I don't know. It's a secret.”
“Polly, it's not safe to trust spirits. Even when they seem nice, or say they want to help you or give you things. Sometimes it's a trick. Some of the evil ones try to make themselves appear extra innocent. They may seem like a kindly old person. They may seem like a friendly child. But that's only to gain your trust.”
“So...is Amil really the boy or really the monster?” she asked as I opened the door to the stairs.
“I don't know,” I said, casting a final look over the museum. “But in my experience, if you don't know...it's always safest to assume that the boy is really a monster.”
We headed up, the door thudding closed behind us.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
As everyone else was asleep, I just walked Polly back to her room. I could talk to Ryan about the incident in the morning.
I kept a close eye on her hallway the rest of the night, making sure she didn't slip out again.
The green, reptilian face kept popping up every time my eyes slipped closed—the dark pits of its eyes, the sharp yellow teeth, the sour pond-scum reek of it.
So far as I'd read, the symptoms of ichthyosis didn't include abnormally sharp teeth. I thought again of the story that Snake Man had been in a circus sideshow at some point. Maybe his teeth had been filed to points for greater effect. I wondered whether that had been completely voluntary on the Snake Man's part.
I also reflected that the girls' description of a handsome young boy with brown hair didn't quite match the reptile-monster that I'd seen. Ichthyosis was genetic; a sufferer would have it from infancy. Maybe the boy-image was a projection of what the Snake Man—aka Amil—wanted to be or wished he could have been.
Or maybe it was a trick to lure young girls to their deaths down in dark caves.
By sunrise, I was exhausted. I messaged Ryan as soon as I noticed he was awake. He was walking down the hall shirtless, and I may have looked at this longer than I really should have over the nightvision camera. He had a couple of small tattoos, including a guitar on his arm and a looping female signature over his heart. His deceased wife's name.
“We have to talk, away from the kids,” I texted Ryan. “Come down to the office when you get a chance.”
He came down a few minutes later. He'd added a shirt and pulled on some jeans. It looked like he was still wearing his pajama pants under those.
“They're still sleeping,” he said. “The day after Christmas isn't so exciting. What's up?”
I filled him in on what had happened with Polly in the night, and backed it up with video showing her and a dense cold spot.
“It attacked you?” Ryan asked.
“It may have been attempting to protect Polly,” I said. “I was trying to get her to come back upstairs, and she was resisting. But I definitely don't trust the entity's intentions, luring her down there alone at night. You have to make sure she understands not to listen to this ghost anymore, and definitely avoids going anywhere alone with him.”
“But you can get rid of this thing, right?” he asked.
“As long as I can figure out who it is, or at least what it wants,” I said. “This does simplify the case a little, knowing that there's one main entity bothering your family. Though it seems manipulative, intelligent, and deceptive, able to take different forms. There may be others causing your problems down in the museum, but this one is our main problem.”
“So what's next?”
“I sleep a little, then I spend the afternoon hitting the libraries and courthouse, looking up records for
everyone connected to this case,” I said. “And see if I can find a real name and history for Snake Man, most of all. Or Amil. Whatever you want to call him.”
“Do you think that's a made-up name? Amil?” Ryan asked.
“It could be.” I thought about it. “Maybe it's part of another word. Like if he was in a sideshow, he might have 'The Reptile Boy.' Except something that actually shortens to a sound like 'Amil.'”
“The Human Chameleon,” Ryan said, after a moment. “It could be the middle part of 'chameleon.'”
“Maybe.”
We stood there, looking at each other for a moment, like there was something unsaid in the air between us.
Footsteps thumped overhead.
“Dad! Daddy!” Ronan shouted, somewhere above us.
“That's the head office paging me,” Ryan said. “Thanks for helping us.”
I nodded. “Just talk to your girls. Keep them safe. I'll be back tonight.”
Groggy, I headed down the road, keeping an eye out for my ghost at the tight curve, but he made no appearance in the early morning light. I considered getting out and taking a closer look at the path, but decided to save it for another time.
Back in town, the mood was much more subdued. Christmas was now past, and no doubt the town would continue to milk the holiday season through New Year's, but there was a definite change in the atmosphere.
At the hotel, a few families were already up and packing their cars for the drive home. Inside, drowsy kids frowned over huevos rancheros and orange juice at the hotel restaurant, grumbling or morose, seemingly deflated now that the big holiday was over. There would be no more presents and candy, just months of winter and school ahead.
Up in my room, I texted Stacey: “Are you coming today?”
She didn't answer, at least not by the time I went to bed for the morning.
When I woke up in the afternoon, she'd replied, “We'll be up there tomorrow!! Don't trap any ghosts without me.”
After hurrying to get ready, I knocked on the door to Michael and Melissa's room. They'd been out taking in the dregs of the festivities, but I'd heard them come in.
“Look, the little owl is up,” Melissa said when she opened the connecting door and saw me standing there with a full, black mug of coffee in my hand.
“Yeah, it was a long night,” I told them. “Now I have to get to the local library before it closes. Anybody want to spend their day looking at old newspapers articles from fifty years ago? Nobody?”
“I'll come!” Melissa said.
“Really?” I tried not to let my disappointment show. “I thought you'd decided it was boring. Today will be even more boring than yesterday.”
“Yeah, but I'm, like, involved now,” Melissa said. “I want to know about the snake monster guy.”
“Okay, you can definitely come and help me sift through all that information. If you're sure you want to.”
“I don't want to miss any wild times down at the library, either,” Michael said.
“Seriously? I can't believe you guys want to research dead people when you could be out there stocking up on discounted Christmas decorations and fruitcakes,” I said.
“We can do both,” Michael said. “There's time.”
“Not for the library, there isn't,” I said. “It closes in a few hours. It seems like public libraries are closed most of the time these days. I really might need both of you to help me find anything while it's open.”
“So let's go.” Melissa headed for the door, grabbing her long jacket. “I'm ready.”
She fidgeted impatiently until we were outside, heading down the sidewalk toward the town library, which occupied a refurbished brick house that had been built in 1891, according to the historical marker next to the door.
The interior was warm and welcoming, the creaky hardwood floors softened with rugs, and a couple of little tables and armchairs were scattered around for private reading. The bookshelves were crammed full.
I approached the librarian, a woman in her seventies with close-cropped purple hair and a glittering ruby stud in her nose. She smiled from behind an antique desk.
“Hi,” I said. “We were hoping to look at some local newspaper records from a few decades ago. At least 1983.”
“That'll be on microfilm, I'm afraid,” she said. “I'll be happy to show you how the reader works.”
“I was hoping you could help us out a little, too,” I said. “We're sort of researching a local legend. We need to find out about a man named Davey Bawden—”
“Oh, not that.” The librarian frowned and shook her head. “Honestly.”
“So you're familiar with the story, ma'am?” I asked.
“A story's all it is,” she said. “Every couple of years someone comes through trying to find out about the Snake Man. The same people who hunt Bigfoot or the Tennessee Wildman or the Snarly Yow.”
“The Snarly—?” I began to ask.
“There's nothing much to the story, that's become clear enough,” the librarian said.
“Nothing at all?” I asked. “No reports of someone with—”
“Ichthyosis,” she interrupted. “No, believe me. I've helped people comb the records for it. There's nothing about such a person—whether he was a local born with the condition, or a man who came out on the bad end of a deal with the devil, or a side-show runaway who lived up in the old resort ruins. There's no mention in the papers of such things. No obituary for such a person, either.”
“Then what is there?”
“One article from 1983,” she said. “Which might just have been a couple of old locals pulling legs.”
“I'd like to see it,” I said. “And the obituary for Mr. Bawden, too.”
“Morbid.” She shook her head, but she led the way to the microfilm area, a small dim room at the back of the old house. Her eyes flicked over Melissa, then lingered on Michael. “I suppose y'all are a gang of cryptozoologists?”
“Like people who study crypts? Bones? The dead?” Melissa asked, her tone sweet even as she seemed to drink up the shocked expression on the librarian's face.
“No, dear. It's a pseudoscience in which people with too much time on their hands search for monsters that quite simply do not exist, such as the Yeti or the Loch Ness Monster.”
“Oh, like Altie!” Michael said. “The giant serpent in the Altamaha River. I know a guy who saw it—I mean, claims he saw it.”
“Yes, like the Altamaha-ha, or 'Altie.'” The librarian spoke as though the words left a sour taste in her mouth as she drew out microfilm cases for the Foxboro Gazette, one roll for the 1983 issues, and another labeled “1968” in fading ink on masking tape.
She fed the 1983 microfilm into the reader herself, not trusting us with the library's sole, creaky reader machine. Looking resigned, she pulled up the Halloween '83 story that the tabloid-style website had quoted.
“Can we print out a copy?” I asked.
“That would be fifty cents per page,” she said. “Unless you're members of the library system.”
We weren't, so we started a tab.
Next, we brought up and printed out the 1968 obituary of Davey Bawden. The man had died at the age of forty-four. He'd been slashed up and found on an old footpath on the mountain; I'd been wondering if he might have been the entity that had jumped out in front of my car, following the course of the old path where he'd been found bleeding, cut, and raving about the Snake Man.
The obituary mentioned nothing about that, only that Bawden had died of an apparent animal attack. He had no family in town, no children. He had been employed as a handyman and groundskeeper for a woman named Georgina Charrington.
“Wait a minute.” I flipped back through my notepad.
Georgina Charrington had been a neighbor of Ryan's uncle Leydan, one of those who'd petitioned for a zoning change that would have killed the museum, even though it had been an operating tourist trap in one form or another since the 1940s. I intended to research her as well.
; “So Bawden worked for Charrington,” I said. “And Bawden was found on the mountain ripped up by an animal.”
“Yes,” the librarian said. “If you ask me, it's in very poor taste to try to attribute the man's death to some magical creatures or aliens lurking around the woods. Let the man rest in peace without being the center of some sad conspiracy theory.”
“What happened to Georgina Charrington?” I asked.
“That is not something I know off the top of my head,” the librarian said. “You are welcome to use the microfilm...gently and responsibly...until the library closes.”
“Thank you.”
“There are other articles regarding Bawden in the days surrounding the obituary,” she told me. “A search party looked for the animal responsible, off and on for a few weeks. They found nothing. The general sense was that it was a bear, or maybe a mountain lion passing through.”
“Did anybody know what he was doing on the night he died?” I asked. “Where he'd been? Who he'd seen?”
“Oh!” Melissa suddenly looked interested. “You think maybe Crazy Uncle Leydan cut up the handyman and made it look like an animal?”
“Such accusations!” the librarian looked offended. “He was an active patron of the library.”
“Did you give him the business about cryptozoology, too?” Michael asked. “His museum has some of that.”
“Yes, for the tourists,” she sniffed. “But Leydan was a fine man. Never so much as a single title overdue.”
“Did you know him well?” I asked.
“Not well, but he was pleasant enough. Certainly no murderer. It offends me that you would come here and casually slander the deceased citizens of this town.”
“We definitely aren't trying to do that, ma'am—” I began.
“Or maybe Uncle Leydan had the Snake Man do the killing for him!” Melissa said, sounding quite cheered by the idea. “It's the perfect crime. Get a ghost to do your dirty work. He could even arrange an alibi for himself—with someone still living, of course—”
“I've heard about enough.” The librarian stalked off to her desk at the front.
“That was kind of rude, Mel,” Michael said.
“Oh, sorry,” Melissa said, without much trace of concern, then she looked at me. “What do you think, though?”