Paskagankee

by Alan Leverone

  “Come on, Shari. I know you were listening to him. Don’t you think that whole Abenaqui legend thing is a little . . . I don’t know . . . unusual? Strange? Insane?”

  She sat for a moment gathering her thoughts. Mike waited patiently. She reached out absently and took a sip from his coffee cup just as the waitress brought their lunch order—cheeseburger and fries for him and a salad and coffee for her. “Here’s the thing,” she said, picking a crisp piece of lettuce delicately off her bowl with two fingers and plopping it into her mouth. “I’m Catholic.”

  Mike waited for further explanation. When none seemed forthcoming he said, “So?”

  “Well, think about it,” she said. “Although Catholicism and Native American religions—if you could even call them that—are radically different in many ways, in their most basic forms they do have some things in common. There are grand mystical elements in both that stretch the credulity of non-believers.”

  She did it again, Mike thought. Once again she has surprised the hell out of me. “How so?” he asked.

  “Well, take for example the Eucharist in the Catholic Church. That’s where the parishioner stands in line during mass to receive a small wafer of unleavened bread from the priest or a designated Eucharistic minister. The bread is blessed and has been transformed into the body of Christ.”

  “Yeah, I understand,” Mike said. “The bread represents Christ.”

  “No,” Sharon answered, shaking her head vigorously, her short black hair flying around her face. Mike loved it when she did that. “That’s exactly my point. If you’re a Catholic, your faith tells you that the bread doesn’t represent Christ’s body; it actually is Christ’s body. It’s transformed by the priest’s blessing during mass.”

  “I’m still not following you,” Mike said, feeling like a dunce and once again remembering why he had had so much trouble in school as a kid. “What does any of this have to do with an ancient Native American spirit?”

  “Well, where is the difference between a Catholic knowing the piece of bread he is taking into his body is a tiny bit of Jesus Christ and a Native American knowing that a curse can force a restless spirit to take over a human’s body? Does one require any more faith than the other? And more to the point, if one is possible and credible and accepted by millions around the world as truth, why couldn’t the other be possible and credible too?”

  Mike sat back in the booth, his burger temporarily forgotten. He stared unblinkingly at Sharon. “You believe him, don’t you?”

  Sharon smiled. She hadn’t forgotten about her salad and was chewing it with gusto. “You believe him too, you just don’t want to admit it to yourself yet. Look at it another way,” she said. “Did you ever read any Sherlock Holmes stories when you were a kid?”

  “Why?” he asked. “Are you planning on calling Holmes back from the grave to solve this case? You do realize he was fictional, right?” This earned him another punch in the arm and he said, “If you’re going to do that, could you at least alternate arms so I can have matching bruises?”

  She laughed again, the sound full and rich and genuine. “We don’t need Sherlock Holmes, you’re just as sharp as he ever was, and you have the added advantage of being real, to boot. But you haven’t answered my question. Did you ever read any Holmes?”

  “Sure,” he said. “What’s your point?”

  “Just this. In one of the stories, I can’t remember which one, Holmes supposedly tells Dr. Watson, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’”

  “So you’re saying—“

  “There’s no other possibility that fits what we know,” she said, “so why would I force myself to disbelieve the evidence just because it makes me uncomfortable or forces me to think outside the box?”

  “But you don’t even seem all that uncomfortable with it.”

  “I’m not,” she agreed, shrugging. “Just because it involves a concept with which I’m unfamiliar, doesn’t mean I’m going to discount it or dismiss it out of hand.”

  “Fair enough,” Mike said, draining his coffee and picking up the check. “Wow.”

  “What?”

  “My brain hurts now, thanks a lot.”

  “That’ll teach you to ask for my opinion.”

  Mike chuckled. “I think maybe I need to do more of that, not less.”

  They walked side by side to the cash register at the front entrance, Mike acutely aware of the townspeople watching them pass by. Sharon seemed not to notice. After he paid the check, they strolled out the door, and Shari offered to drive him back to the station, located a few hundred yards down Main Street, but Mike declined. “I need to think,” he said, giving her a quick kiss before she could beat him to the punch.

  Sharon smiled, her face lighting up, then slid behind the wheel of the cruiser and drove slowly down the street.

  38

  THE WEATHER, WHICH FOR the past week had remained stubbornly cold, windy and stormy, was finally beginning to change, but from Mike’s perspective, not for the better. Clouds still churned over the town, dark and threatening as ever—Mike was beginning to think if he ever did see the sun again he might not recognize it—but now the temperature seemed to be moderating and was forecasted to continue doing exactly that.

  Normally, a warming trend would be good news. The snow and ice could finally begin melting off the trees, power lines and roads, and Paskagankee might be able to see bare ground, making a fresh start before the truly severe weather that invariably accompanies a Northern Maine winter set in for good in another couple of weeks.

  Normally.

  But in this case, the rising temperatures meant fog. Lots of fog. Waves and waves of fog, roiling and thick, covering everyone and everything in its slick moisture and reducing visibility below even what it had been during the worst of the ice/sleet/freezing rain/snow storm that the town had just endured.

  As daylight began to leach away in late afternoon, the fog made its appearance in earnest, blanketing Paskagankee in a whitish-grey mist. Wonderful, Mike thought. The one thing we have going for us with this bonfire Warren Sprague is determined to host is the sheer vastness of the wide-open field. There is no possible way anyone or anything could approach from the forest without being seen hundreds of yards before their arrival.

  But if the fog is heavy enough, that advantage will disappear. We will have people wandering around in the dark and the fog, most of them drinking, for good measure. They will become sitting ducks if our resident Native American expert is correct about what is happening in this town.

  Mike, Sharon and Professor Dye were again seated at Sharon’s kitchen table, each in the chair he or she had occupied last night. This had become the unofficial meeting place for the small group. As he had promised himself earlier in the day he would do, Mike pressed Ken Dye hard on the question of exactly how the man planned to rid Paskagankee of the vengeful spirit. “What are you going to do, sit down with her and have a little séance?”

  That question elicited a laugh from Dye, not exactly the reaction Mike had expected. He was trying to get under the man’s skin, to make him so angry he would just blurt out an answer, but it wasn’t working. “A séance would be nice, probably quite informative in fact, but unfortunately in this case it wouldn’t do us any good,” the professor said. “In any event, if we could communicate with this woman, I doubt we would want to hear much of what she has to say.”

  Professor Dye continued. “Honestly, Chief, I appreciate your position, but you don’t need to concern yourself with the specifics of how I intend to break the curse. It’s just a bunch of things I need to say and do; a ceremony of sorts. At least that’s my theory. Remember, I don’t have any hard proof that this will work; although I believe strongly that it will, based on a lifetime of research and experience.”

  Mike shook his head and told him, “You are one tough nut to crack. Your students must view you as their toughest teacher.”

  At tha
t, Dye laughed again. He seemed to have lost much of the despondency he displayed at the end of their conversation last night. “Not hardly,” he said. “Those kids knew they could push me around. After all, it’s not like I could seriously affect anyone’s future—none of them were exactly planning a career in Native American folklore. I think I’m living proof there isn’t much of a future in that.”

  Sharon spoke up. “I disagree,” she said. “If you’re correct about this spirit murdering people in Paskagankee, then you hold the key to all of our futures, don’t you think?”

  “A frightening prospect,” the older man said. His voice took on a somber tone, although he had a gleam in his eye. “One might even say ‘grave.’”

  Sharon erupted in laughter, the sheer joy of her response causing Mike to laugh too. She had certainly taken to the professor, a man old enough to be her father. Mike wondered if that might be part of the attraction for her, if perhaps Professor Dye offered something she had never received from her real father—the nurturing guidance of a male parental figure during the most critical period of her adolescence.

  “So,” Mike said, once again focusing his attention on the professor. “Let me rephrase my question. How do we go about doing whatever it is we need to do that you seem so certain about but are so unwilling to describe?”

  In answer, Ken Dye spoke directly to Sharon. “You grew up in this town,” he said. “Having spent all of your formative years here, you must be at least somewhat familiar with the original Paskagankee village, are you not?”

  “Of course,” she answered, “theoretically. But like I said last night, most of what I heard as a kid were whispered stories and rumors. Nobody that I’m aware of, not even the old timers in Paskagankee, possess a whole lot of knowledge about the original village, at least none that they seem willing to share.”

  “I understand,” Dye said, “but my question was in reference to the physical location of the old village, not the stories and legends about it. I’ve been there, but not in many, many years, and I really have no recollection of its location in relation to the current town of Paskagankee, other than in a very general way. I’m fairly certain it’s east of here, but beyond that my memories are quite vague, and I don’t have much confidence in them. It’s been over thirty years.”

  Sharon shook her head. “I spent a lot of time in the forest surrounding Paskagankee drinking and partying when I was a kid, but even the most adventurous among us had virtually no first-hand experience with the old village. It’s not that kids wouldn’t have tried to explore it given the opportunity, but there weren’t many people who knew how to get there, and with the thick wilderness surrounding the town, nobody really bothered trying, at least nobody I’m aware of.”

  Mike looked at the professor and said, “So you obviously think the original village is where we need to go.”

  “It makes sense, don’t you think? The original town was built on the site of the massacre that took place a century before Paskagankee’s settlers arrived, which is why the spirit of the young mother is here in the first place. If she has managed to gain possession of a human body, that’s where she should be.”

  “Well, that’s a problem then, isn’t it?” Mike answered. “You’ve seen how dense and wild the forest is. If we don’t know how to get there, we could wander around the woods for decades and never find it. And something tells me we don’t have decades; we might not even have days. But in any event, there’s nothing we can do until tomorrow at the earliest. We have to be at the Sprague bonfire tonight. A lot of people could be at risk.”

  “There’s no ‘could be’ about it. A lot of people are at risk.” Professor Dye looked at his watch. “When do we leave?”

  Mike shook his head. “I’m sorry professor. When I said ‘we,’ I was referring to Sharon and me. As Paskagankee Police officers, we have an obligation to try to keep the people safe at that bonfire. You are under no such obligation. You just hang out here, have a couple of drinks, and we’ll be back as soon as that testament to foolishness ends.”

  “Absolutely not!” Professor Dye answered vehemently. “That is unacceptable. You said yourself the reason you are so concerned about tonight’s bonfire is that you believe the killer may strike again while it is taking place. If you have any faith at all in what I’ve been telling you, then it is imperative that I accompany you tonight. We may not have the luxury of choosing the time and place of the confrontation with this spirit, Chief, and if it turns out to be this evening, what would be the point of me sitting here sipping Chivas when I am the only person who can stop it?”

  Mike sighed heavily. He knew the man was right, and yet, given the deep-seated unease gnawing at him, he didn’t feel it was appropriate to expose even one more civilian to the danger than was necessary.

  “Why do I have the feeling I’m going to regret this?” he asked as Dye smiled in satisfaction.

  “As I said,” the professor prodded, “what time do we leave?”

  39

  THE FOUR WHEEL DRIVE SUV jounced and stuttered over the trail leading through the woods to Warren Sprague’s open field. The Explorer’s reinforced suspension bounced the vehicle’s occupants in random directions, alternately pulling them tight against their shoulder restraints and then slamming them back into their seats.

  Professor Dye, who had not traveled the narrow access road before, sat in the back seat holding his breath, convinced that at any moment the truck would be tossed off the trail straight into a tree trunk. Chief McMahon and Officer Dupont seemed prepared for the rough terrain, though, and it only made sense. The chief had come here just yesterday in his futile attempt to convince the bonfire’s host to cancel the event, and Sharon had already admitted her familiarity with the woods surrounding town from her wild youth.

  The nervous tension that Ken had been feeling since seeing the news story about the disappearance and subsequent brutal murder of Harvey Crosker—the very real sensation of a ball of fear growing in the pit of his stomach—was now blossoming into outright terror. He had made every attempt to maintain a calm and reasonable persona, both to assure the two police officers who seemed actually to be giving him the benefit of the doubt that he wasn’t a stark, raving lunatic, but also in an effort to prevent his nervous system from short-circuiting and maybe stroking out.

  Ken watched the trees bounce slowly past the rear window, their branches scraping the side of the car. All the leaves had long since fallen off the trees way up here in northern Maine, and the bare ends of the branches looked to Ken like bony skeletal fingers, reaching for him, grasping, trying to clutch him and pull him into the thick black forest.

  If anyone could be prepared for the impending confrontation, it was Ken Dye. He had heard of the Abenaqui legend for the first time as a young child and shortly thereafter began undertaking the exhaustive research that would eventually consume him and become his life’s mission. Ken knew he was ready, although to say he was also scared shitless would not be an overstatement.

  He almost wished he understood a little less about what they were up against, like Sharon and Mike did. But wishes were irrelevant at this point. Professor Kenneth A. Dye was the only person who could bring an end to what had been set inexorably in motion here in this isolated and remote town. It had to be him. He could not explain to the two police officers in the car with him why that was the case without putting them and everyone else in even more danger than they already faced.

  They deserved the truth, if for no other reason than the fact that now, at the exact moment in time when Ken Dye most needed someone to believe in him and his admittedly unlikely story, he had found two people who did. Oh, they were skeptical, of course they were—especially the chief, Mike McMahon—and why wouldn’t they be? Ken had no solid proof to offer in support of his hypothesis, but the fact that the evidence in the two murders pointed to nothing the police could quantify in terms of traditional crime-solving, surely helped his case.

  In any event, Ken knew he owed
a debt of gratitude to the man and woman sharing the car with him tonight; a debt he could never repay. He tried to clear his head and told himself to concentrate on the task at hand. Becoming dewy-eyed and sentimental would be a mistake, one that would likely end up getting more people killed. Focus, he told himself, and just do your best to bring this thing to a successful conclusion.

  The vehicle crept along the rutted path leading through the woods. Outside the windows the fog seemed alive, writhing and dancing, thick as soup in one area and then, tantalizingly, nearly nonexistent in the next. The forecast called for temperatures continuing to moderate through the night and into tomorrow, so the likelihood of the fog lessening was slim. In fact, conditions would probably worsen.

  The tension inside the Explorer was palpable. Silence reigned as each member of the little group concentrated on his or her own thoughts and, Ken assumed, fears. At last the vehicle slid through a small opening in the forest and burst into the massive, open field. The heavy fog refracted the truck’s headlights unpredictably, making it even more difficult to see out here than it had been while they were driving along the path through the forest, where the trees looming on both sides of the trail had focused the light more or less straight ahead along the trail.

  From the back seat, Ken could vaguely discern the shadowy, boxy shapes of vehicles ahead and to their right. Mike turned the SUV in that direction and crept along the edge of the trees. Rows of parked cars came into focus, and the chief nosed into the first available spot.

  The three climbed out of the vehicle and fell in behind a cluster of teens who seemed to know where they were going. Mike clearly had no clue which direction would lead them to the big bonfire, and Sharon, although she had attended the event many times as a youth, admitted she really didn’t remember enough about those visits to be able to point them in the right direction with any degree of confidence.

  Ken hoped the kids in front of them were headed toward the bonfire and not out into the woods to do whatever it was teens around here did in the woods. He assumed the presence of two uniformed Paskagankee Police officers a few feet behind them would be motivation enough to move in the direction of the huge mountain of timber—at least until they could ditch the cops—and apparently it was. After slogging along for a few minutes he began to see the unfocused yellow haze of the gigantic pile of burning brush and trees.