“Stay right there!” Harry snapped. His voice lowered slightly and leveled off. “Look at the snow around it. There aren’t any footprints.”
Scott was barely able to shift his gaze from the head even long enough to note Harry’s observation.
“For some reason, we were meant to find it like this. Why else would there still be skin on the face?” he said, turning to Scott. “You know who this is, don’t you?”
“No,” Scott said, snorting, “How the hell should I—”
“Look very closely.”
“Listen, there’s no possible way that I—”
“Look!” Harry shouted, pointing his finger directly at the face.
Scott stared straight at it, studying the eyes, the line of the cheekbones, the curve of the mouth. And all at once, it felt as though the ground dropped from beneath him, the air in his lungs seizing and growing stale as he fought to draw a single breath. His heart raced and his hands began to tremble at his sides, the keys falling into the snow. He collapsed to his knees, his jaw growing slack as he stared with sudden recognition into the face of an old friend.
His hands stung in the snow, the ice ripping into his hot pink flesh. He stared blankly up at Harry, and then back to the ground.
“Tim…” he whispered, his gaze creeping back to his friend’s lifeless face.
“How did you know him?” Harry asked, stepping between Scott and the head.
“I haven’t seen him in years.”
“How did you know him?” Harry asked, placing his hands to either side of Scott’s face and raising his head so that their eyes met. “Was he here that night?”
“What night?”
“The night that I pulled you from that car.”
Scott just stared at Harry.
Harry breathed deeply, trying to collect himself.
“Was he with you that night?” he asked, very slowly, enunciating every syllable.
“Yeah,” Scott said, brushing the man’s hands from his face and easing himself to his feet.
“Listen to me very carefully,” Harry said, his wild blue eyes so wide they looked as though they might pop free from his skull. “It was no accident that I was there when you wrecked that night.”
“What do you mean?”
“He led me to you.”
“Who’s he?”
“It would be far too hard to explain, you’re going to have to let me show you.”
Scott stared at him for a moment, sensing Harry’s anticipation. The thoughts in his head all jumbled together, and the only answer he could muster was a simple nod.
Harry brushed past him, slipping into the shrubbery. Wrenching his gaze from Tim’s blue-rimmed, swelling eyes, Scott pushed himself to his feet and stumbled through the underbrush after him. The tips of the branches ripped at the skin on his hands and face, but he could hardly even feel it, the shock having numbed his flesh. His eyes could hardly focus on anything as he bumbled through the scrub oak, stumbling onto the path beyond. Harry was already well ahead of him, slipping into the brush on the far side of the path.
“Wait!” Scott shouted after him, suddenly remembering that his keys were buried somewhere in the snow back by where the head rested.
Harry turned to look at him as he whirled as scrambled hurriedly back through the undergrowth. Watching his feet, he hurdled the interlaced trunks of the trees, bursting through the final mass of branches and into the thin clearing behind. Following his footprints in the snow, he ducked beneath the low, drooping branch of the pine and scrambled into the small gap where his footprints stopped. He found his hand prints to either side of the large matting of snow where he had knelt, running his fingers along the frozen ground beneath the fresh layer of powder, working in and out of the buried layers of pine needles beneath. His knuckle slamming into his keychain, he bundled it within his palm and hopped back to his feet, his eyes automatically glancing toward the center of the small clearing.
There was nothing there.
He could still see the small line of dripped blood across the white surface, droplets scattered to either side, and the red-stained hole in the center where the neck had been inserted… but the head was gone. And there were no other footprints anywhere close to where it had been. Harry’s tracks were still fresh, but he never got closer than three feet from it, and there was nothing else. Not a single print.
He frantically scoured the area, searching for any sign of whoever had absconded with Tim’s head. Nothing. Not a jostling branch, a broken twig, nothing to betray the direction in which the killer had fled. But he had to be close. Scott had only stepped from the clearing for a few seconds, if that. He had to be close, had to be within his view.
Scott looked up into the trees, searching for any sign that someone was up there, a trembling, bare branch; falling snow; bark that had been stripped from the trunk as someone had rushed to climb it. Still nothing.
“What’s taking so long?” Harry asked, creeping up behind him. “Is everything all right?”
Scott just turned and looked at him, stretching out his arm and pointing his index finger straight toward where the decapitated head had once been.
Harry wore a stern look of understanding, as though he had already known that it would be gone. Nodding, he grabbed Scott by the sleeve of his coat and urged him back through the scrub oak and onto the path. Looking back one last time, Scott checked to make sure that his eyes hadn’t merely been playing tricks on him, before turning and following Harry.
The sky darkened overhead as a dark mass of clouds crept over the tops of the Rockies, threatening to spill down the face of the mountains, burying the front range beneath a new, more ominous looking storm.
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THE BLOODSPAWN
Michael McBride
© 2004 Michael McBride. All rights reserved.
PART SIX
PART VI
Chapters 7 and 8
VII
Sunday, November 13th
Noon
Scott’s Grand Cherokee slowed in front of the small blue house, the gravel of the driveway rumbling beneath the heavy tires. Harry clambered out of the passenger side door as Scott killed the engine, slowly opening the door and slipping from the seat onto the snow-covered red gravel. He stared at the little bungalow as he eased from behind the door, closing it behind him. It was an older house, and one he had never known even existed.
They had opened a small gate in the barbed wire fence at the edge of the road, just barely to the east of the former convent’s property line. Following a long, thin gravel driveway that meandered off into the forest, nearly onto Air Force Academy property, they wound before dipping back down and to the small bungalow.
The freshly-stained porch ran the entire front of the house, its redwood finish shielded from the falling snow by the long overhang, a steel weathervane with a rooster mounted in the center of the crest. Two windows peered down from above the eve like small, watchful eyes. The roof had been recently repaired, as evidenced by patches of shingle that were far lighter in color than the other darker, bowed shingles that were beginning to peel up. The screen door was folded back against the house, the spring from the recoil device snapped, hanging limply from the doorway.
Harry ascended the three steps up to the porch and glanced over his shoulder to make sure that Scott was still following. Producing a set of keys from within his pocket, he shoved one into the door and opened it wide, stepping into the dark house, leaving the door standing open.
Scott crept up the steps, the boards creaking beneath his weight as he crossed the porch and stepped into the house, closing the door behind. He was standing in the middle of the living room. There was a small coat rack with brass hooks mounted to the wall beside him. Ornately framed paintings of Colorado landscapes hung along th
e walls, the room sparsely furnished with the exception of the lone recliner in the center of the room and the television set on a small, wooden cart in the corner of the room. The floor was covered with long, rust-colored shag carpeting, the wear matting the knap in a V shape coming from the kitchen.
He heard Harry toss his keys onto the kitchen counter. The fridge door opened, bottles rattling against one another, and with a clink, he produced a brown bottle of root beer for each of them, removing the caps with an opener and stepping into the doorway.
With a nod, Scott took one of the bottles from Harry’s outstretched hand, following him into the kitchen. The newspaper was spread out across the table. A small plate littered with crumbs sat beside an empty glass, a small ring of orange juice in the bottom. There were only two chairs at the table, and one was buried beneath many days worth of newspapers.
The freshly-cleaned counters shined from the light that slipped through in arcs from behind the thin white shade that covered the window at the back of the kitchen, a door leading into the back yard in the corner of the room. There was a large trash can in the corner of the room, filled to brimming with what appeared to be nothing but root beer bottles and microwave dinners. The linoleum floor was waxed to a high shine, the white and blue pattern of squares faded from years of wear.
“Follow me,” Harry said, disappearing down the dark hallway to the left with a nod.
Passing the bathroom to the right, its brick-red shower curtain drawn shut, they reached the end of the hallway. In the room straight ahead he could see the foot of a bed, a blue bedspread folded neatly across the base. There was a wooden chest in the center of the floor, and the closet door at the back of the room stood ajar.
Ducking into the room to the right, Harry flipped the light switch and walked toward the back wall. Turning, Scott stood in the doorway for a moment, lingering as he stared into the room.
It was the complete opposite of the rest of the house. Everything else seemed to have an order to it and was nearly immaculate. This room however, was crammed full of everything possible. Newspaper clippings lined the walls, pressed into place with multicolored thumbtacks. They appeared to run chronologically from the left around the room to the right based on the slight yellowing of the newsprint. Stacks of boxes filled the room, all of them labeled by year, stacked in front of the closet so that there was absolutely no way of getting close enough to reach the knob on the door, let alone open it.
The oldest box that he could see was labeled “1966,” but was buried beneath a stack of others. The more frequently accessed appeared to be ’70 to ’74, and a couple from the eighties and nineties that sat open in the center of the floor.
Harry sat down in the armed chair at the heavy, solid oak desk at the back of the room. Stacks of manila folders rested to the left side of the desk, along with a computer; the printer balanced precariously atop the monitor. In the center, there was an ancient tape recorder and an old reel to reel 8mm projector.
The room reeked of age, like the scent that gusts from the inside of an old library book. The air was still as the boxes blocked access to the window; the curtains pinned behind the weight of the stacks.
Scott stared around the room, feeling as though he were in the basement archives of a newspaper, or the obsessive den of a psycho. He was suddenly quite uncomfortable.
“I think maybe I should just go,” he said, the weight of the morning’s events visible in his weary eyes.
“Please,” Harry said, swiveling to face him in the chair. “You have nothing to fear here. I can completely understand how overwhelming this must all seem. Believe me. I was in your shoes once.”
“I’m at a pivotal point with my business and I should really be actively overseeing things right now.”
“Just have a seat on one of those boxes over there, and give me half an hour. If, after that time, you feel you need to go, then more power to you. We part with no hard feelings. But I think… no, I know, that you need to see what I have here.”
His brow knitting itself tightly across his forehead, Scott shuffled into the room, closing the top of the box, and planted himself atop “1972”.
Harry grabbed a file from the desk behind him and opened it, pulling out the top page of the stack of papers within.
“Take a look at this,” he said, handing the page to Scott. “This is what first dragged me into this entire mess. It’s a summary from the State Department of Child Welfare of four children that ended up in the custody of a group of nuns at the convent just down the road from here. At the time, none of the names of the children were made available, just their ages and the condition in which they arrived. It was my job to do a physical inspection of their health and the living conditions.”
He pulled another piece of paper from the folder and handed it to Scott.
It was a photocopied page of an original newspaper article. There was a photo of what looked like a castle, the caption identifying it as the Cavenaugh Convent. He perused the article quite rapidly. The main details of the article that jumped from the page were that both the nuns who staffed the castle and the four children recently placed in their care had disappeared. While no foul play was suspected, the circumstances revolving around their disappearance were suspicious the article stated, but failed to elaborate. The last line caught his attention.
“The last person to have contact with the sisters was Dr. Harry Denton, a physician on staff with the Department of Child Welfare,” he read aloud.
“Right,” Harry said, intently leaning forward in his chair. “I saw three of these children lying slaughtered on a couch, grabbed the fourth and ran away with him. I got out of there just in time to see someone, something, slip into that little house. I can still hear the screams of those nuns when I lay in my bed at night.”
“So you think they’re dead?”
“I know they’re dead.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Of course.”
“And…”
“And I went out there with them the following morning just past dawn, and guess what we found?”
“What?”
“Absolutely nothing,” Harry said, leaning back and lacing his fingers in his lap. “Let me tell you something, when I was in that house, I remember as clear as day the blood of those children that puddled on the hardwood floor. The arcs of blood dripped down the walls and soaked into the couch where their bodies lay. And I tell you this… I could hear those nuns getting slaughtered, their screams gurgling to a sudden halt.”
“But when the police got there, they found nothing?”
“I couldn’t believe it. I led them through the front door of that house and pointed straight into the room, but nothing that I had told them about was there. The floor was dry as a bone and freshly lacquered. The furniture, which had been pushed up against the walls, sat neatly arranged in the center of the room without a single stain.”
“You keep talking about this house. I thought this was all up at the convent.”
“The Cavenaugh house.”
“That little boarded up shack?”
“The same.”
“That’s where we were the night of the accident.”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“I walk to that house every night. It’s part of my watch. I saw you kids there. I figured you were just getting into normal trouble, so I thought I’d just watch for a few minutes to make sure that everything was going to be all right. I was just about to leave when I saw him…”
“Who?”
“The same person… thing… that I saw walk into that same house and slaughter those nuns so many years prior.”
“I didn’t see anyone other than the six of us.”
“I was standing atop the hill on the other side of the road, leaning against the trunk of a tree when something caught my attention out of the corner of my eye. I turned to see, but there was nothing there. I could feel him out there with me, though, his cold eye
s watching me. I could taste his breath on the wind, feel him in my bones. I had seen him in those woods a handful of times in the interim, a shadow slipping behind a tree, a dark face leering at me from the shadows, but it wasn’t until that moment that I knew that he wanted me to see him.”
Scott stared closely at him. The whole thing sounded like complete and utter hogwash, but he could tell from the man’s face that he believed every word that came out of his mouth.
“I heard shouting, and I turned just in time to see two of you kids come running out the front door, one dragging the other. You got into your car and started to back up. It was at that point that I could feel him standing next to me. There was a certain aura of coldness around him; I could feel it straight through the flesh on my arms, aching in the center of my bones. All I could hear was the sound of his breathing, the sound of razors scraping across flesh. My knees were knocking as I turned to look, but I only caught a quick glimpse of his face, his eyes settled into shadow, his cracked lips pressed tightly over his teeth. The skin on his cheeks was dry and flaking, the purple veins right up against the surface of his pale, blue flesh. I flinched as he raised his arm and pointed down toward the road. I followed where his finger pointed just in time to see someone else racing to his car to follow you. I turned back, but he was already gone.”
“Who’s he?”
Harry rose from the chair and walked across the room, closing the door. There was a large white sheet of butcher’s paper pinned to the back of the door. Stepping through the mess of boxes, he sat back down in the chair and flipped a switch on the side of the reel to reel, a thin line of white flowing right in front of Scott’s face on the way to the wall.
“I’d like you to meet LeRoy Trottier,” Harry said, sliding the clip forward on the camera. The film began to feed through.
“Who?”
“Just watch.”
The scratched and lined, faded color picture appeared on the wall, amidst the crackling of the spinning reel.
A man sat a table in the center of the screen, his fingers laced before him, his head bowed. Slowly, he raised his eyes and stared into the camera, his dark, deep-set eyes staring right through Scott as he sat in the small, darkened room. His wild, black hair was streaked with lines of gray, as was his long, scraggly beard. He had thick, bushy brows and his forehead was heavily lined. Only the bottom row of teeth was visible beneath the long mustache, crooked and jagged. Slowly, his tongue appeared, licking his lips as he prepared to begin.
The Bloodspawn Page 15