Paskagankee

by Alan Leverone

  It was pointless and juvenile to wonder how he felt about her now, trapped as she was in some unknown location, essentially paralyzed and possibly dying, but thinking about him calmed her and took her mind off the present and all of its unthinkable possibilities. She closed her eyes, remaining perfectly still, and the pain in her skull receded slightly. It was still there, she didn’t even try to convince herself otherwise, but it thankfully moved into the background.

  Without realizing she was doing so, Sharon drifted back into unconsciousness.

  46

  “WHAT HAVE YOU GOT?” Mike looked up at Professor Dye and the papers he held in his right hand. He seemed anxious and excited at the same time.

  “I know where the old settlement is,” the professor announced. He was shaking and Mike wondered if it was with excitement at his discovery or something else.

  “How did you find it?” Mike asked. “I thought we were going to have to hunt down the old-timers that hang out at the Moose Lodge and try to find someone that might have some idea how to get there.”

  Dye shook his head. “Aerial surveys,” he said cryptically.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry,” the professor said. “Sometimes I get a little ahead of myself. No wonder my students call me the absent-minded professor. Anyway,” he said, holding the crumpled papers triumphantly in front of Mike’s face like the world’s shabbiest-looking trophy, “the state pays engineering firms to do survey work by air. The engineers go up in small planes, flying back and forth over predetermined areas, covering grids, mapping out whole sections of land. Running lines, they call it.”

  Mike nodded, starting to get the picture. “And you’ve accessed the maps?”

  “That’s right,” Ken said. “But it’s even better than that. They don’t draw maps by hand like they used to. They actually take digital photographs and then splice them together to form images, sometimes of areas miles wide.”

  “And you found the photographs of the area surrounding Paskagankee,” Mike interrupted, feeling excitement begin to ripple its way through his body like a million tiny bolts of lightning.

  “Exactly,” replied Professor Dye, “but it’s not all good news.”

  “It never is. Go ahead, hit me.”

  “Well,” Dye said hesitantly, “the old settlement is relatively close to the farmer’s field from which Sharon disappeared last night. If, as I suspect, the spirit’s body is using the old settlement as a base of operations, so to speak, it is entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that she was taken.”

  Mike lowered his gaze to the desk, not even seeing the clutter. “So that means she’s dead.”

  “Not necessarily,” the professor answered, shaking his head for emphasis.

  “Listen,” Mike said, exasperated. “You’ve seen, like I have, what happened to the other two people this . . . thing . . . attacked. The other two that we know about, that is,” he corrected himself. “It’s entirely possible there are more victims we haven’t discovered yet. But are you trying to tell me you think Sharon could have survived dismemberment? Is that what you want me to believe, Professor Dye?”

  “No, no, of course not.” The professor waved his hands like he was trying to ward off Mike’s anger and pain. The wrinkled papers he held in his left hand crackled and swished through the air. “I have a theory that, if it’s correct, might mean there is at least a small chance Sharon is still alive.”

  Mike stared at Ken Dye, then shook his head and sighed. “Okay,” he said. “In for a penny and all that. What’s your theory?”

  The professor sat on the edge of Mike’s desk and stared at him with an almost feverish intensity. “I’ve studied this legend, this phenomenon, if you will, for decades. I’ve made it my life’s work, and I‘ve suffered enormous personal and professional ridicule for it. I believe there is every chance I am the most knowledgeable person alive concerning this Abenaqui legend.”

  “I believe you,” Mike told him kindly. “And I’m sorry for jumping down your throat. I just feel . . . ”

  “Helpless,” the professor finished.

  Mike paused for a moment, reflecting. “Yes,” he said simply.

  “I understand. It’s how I feel, too. But I’m not telling you this because I’m fishing for an apology. My point is this: I don’t believe the spirit’s reign of death and destruction is entirely random.”

  Mike shook his head. “Why wouldn’t you think that? Random death and destruction is all it’s managed so far.”

  “Perhaps not,” Dye corrected. “So far the victims have been men.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “Think about it. If my hypothesis is correct, and as you know I’m certain it is, the essence of this spirit is the energy of an agonized young woman, built from hopelessness and despair, which has been trapped on Earth for hundreds of years due to a curse resulting from a brutal murder committed by men—I repeat, by men—against her baby daughter. Despite her seemingly limitless rage against the males she has encountered, she would have no reason to harm a female, or at least no motivation to kill her.”

  “Then why would she have taken Sharon in the first place?”

  “That I couldn’t tell you,” answered the professor, “I’m flying by the seat of my pants here. Maybe I’m completely off base. But it would make sense based on the Abenaqui legend, and it provides us with at least a thread of hope to hang on to. Isn’t that better than nothing?”

  Mike nodded, almost to himself. The man had a point, as crazy as it sounded. He absolutely had to believe Sharon was still alive. He needed that slim possibility to hang on to, like a drowning man clinging to a floating log. He couldn’t bear the thought that he was responsible for the death of another innocent human being, not after the tragedy in Revere. That had been an accident, sure. He had been cleared of any wrongdoing, sure; it was a crazy ricochet they said, an absurd one-in-a-million accidental tragedy, sure.

  To Mike McMahon, though, none of that mattered. He had fired his gun and a little girl had died. End of story.

  Except it wasn’t really the end, was it? Now he had made another bad decision, and there was a pretty damned good chance another person was dead. It didn’t matter that she was a full-grown adult and a cop, too; that she had known the risks of the job when she signed on. The fact, as Mike McMahon saw it, was that his poor judgment had resulted in the situation they were now in—a situation where Sharon Dupont was in grave danger or already dead.

  Mike looked out his office window at a parking lot beginning to fill with the vehicles of arriving day shift officers. The daylight was weak and barely winning the battle against the night’s darkness and the fog, but it was likely as bright as it was going to get. “We’ve got work to do,” he said to Professor Dye. “Let’s get moving.”

  47

  SHARON WONDERED IF SHE might be hallucinating from the pain. Lightning bolts of it flashed continuously through her head, and she was certain now that her arms were broken. Probably at least one rib, too, considering how agonizingly difficult it was to breathe. She wondered, almost as an aside, whether she was suffering from internal bleeding and if so, how extensive it was and how long she could survive it.

  She lifted her head quietly and carefully and took a long look around her prison which, oddly, was now well-lit and into which she could see fairly clearly, given her poor perspective from the floor. She lay in a dirty and dingy room—perhaps a living room that had once been tastefully decorated but which had gone quickly and completely to seed. A filthy carpet covered part of the floor. At one time it may have been a rich maroon color with dark gold trim, but ground-in dirt and grime and who knew what else had reduced it to little more than the hard-packed dirt Sharon had originally suspected she was lying on.

  She couldn’t see the entire room; could probably see less than half of it, in fact, but even from her poor vantage point and through a haze of constant, almost crippling pain, what she could see made her sick with fear and dis
gust. Scattered around the room were what looked very much like piles of human bodies or at least piles of parts of human bodies. They looked as though they had been fed through a shredder, with bits and pieces of clothing still attached. An arm here, a portion of a leg there, a bone which may have been part of a sternum or perhaps a shin, still with a bloody flap of torn skin hanging off it by a thread.

  Sharon felt bile rising in her gullet and forced herself to swallow hard to avoid puking all over herself. It would be a shame to ruin my lovely outfit, she thought as she contemplated her filthy jeans and sweatshirt, almost giggling but instead choking back a wrenching sob.

  One pile of body parts in particular nagged at Sharon’s consciousness, and in her pain and general fuzzy confusion it took her a few minutes to figure out why. Then the answer struck her as surely and as violently as if she had been hit with a baseball bat. That particular pile of human remains was different from the others: it was the only one in the room, at least in the portion of the room that Sharon could see, that seemed more or less in one piece. The only one besides herself, of course, and she wasn’t entirely convinced all her parts were still intact.

  Whereas the other remains were grisly reminders of the unearthly horror stalking Paskagankee, Maine—ripped, torn and shredded pieces of skin, bone, ligaments and muscle that appeared barely human—the body slumped across the room on the floor in an opposite corner seemed to be whole. Sharon guessed it was a woman, dressed in a long gray wool skirt, although it was hard to be certain. Whether that person was alive or dead she had no way of knowing, all she knew for sure was that the body wasn’t moving.

  A door opened loudly behind Sharon, wrenched back with more force than necessary and then slammed shut. She closed her eyes and lay completely still, not that she had much choice in the matter with two useless arms and quite possibly extensive internal injuries.

  After a few seconds, Sharon’s innate cop curiosity overcame her fear and she opened her eyes just enough to peer across the room toward the door without revealing, she hoped, the fact that she was alive. Her entire body was shaking from fear and shock, and she hoped that fact wouldn’t be obvious to whomever or whatever had just entered the wrecked interior of this prison.

  Shambling into the room, moving in a manner that appeared almost but not quite aimless, was the most frightening sight Sharon Dupont had ever experienced. Her bowels loosened, and she nearly screamed but somehow managed to keep herself quiet by biting hard on the inside of her cheek. The coppery taste of blood filled her mouth but Sharon barely noticed.

  It was ex-Paskagankee Police Chief Wally Court, moving with all the grace of a three legged milk cow. Or, more accurately, it was some sort of abomination that at one time had been Wally Court, for this present version resembled Chief Court in only the vaguest general sense. The size was right—huge, he had always been a very large man—but nothing else even came close to resembling the person Sharon had come to know as a mentor and friend.

  The Wally Court who had mentored Sharon as a troubled teen and saved her from her darkest tendencies was a disciplined dresser. He wasn’t flashy in any way but would never dream of being seen without sharply creased trousers and a meticulously ironed button-down dress shirt.

  This man, or rather, this Wally Court-thing, appeared not to have bathed in days, maybe weeks. Muddy grass, twigs and straw were matted into tangled and greasy hair. A red-checked wool hunting coat hung loosely off a skeletal frame, covering a shirt haphazardly buttoned. The breast pocket was torn almost completely off the shirt and hung by a few threads. Both knees of the thing’s pants were ripped open and dried blood crusted the fabric surrounding the right knee. The razor-sharp crease Wally Court was so insistent upon was nowhere to be seen and a stench filled the room as this Court-thing moved across the room, without so much as a glance at Sharon, and stumbled into another room.

  The shock of this utterly unexpected sight almost caused Sharon to forget the intense pain from her injuries. There was no question in her mind that what she had just seen was Chief Wally Court; she had known the man for years, and he had been more of a father to her than her real one ever thought of being. It was him.

  At the same time, though, it wasn’t Wally Court. That man had moved with a grace and an economy of motion hard to imagine from such a large man. This thing barely seemed able to remain upright, slouching and sliding rather than walking with a normal gait and actually slamming into the door jamb before falling/crashing into the next room and out of sight.

  It’s true, she though feverishly to herself. It’s all true. Professor Dye’s story, which she had believed on one level but not fully understood or appreciated, was one hundred percent accurate. Because, really, what other explanation could there be for what she had just seen? She hadn’t been able to look directly into the Chief Court-thing’s face, but she knew that the bright spark of life shining in the old Wally Court’s eyes would have been gone, replaced by what she could not imagine.

  Loud crashing noises exploded out of the room the thing had entered only a few seconds ago, and Shari’s excruciating pain returned with a vengeance. Had she not already been lying crumpled on the floor, the severity of the pain would have knocked her down. Nausea flooded through her again, and she felt lightheaded and woozy. Blackness crowded the edges of her eyesight in what was becoming a dependable ritual, rapidly covering more and more of her already limited field of vision. Her last thought before losing consciousness again was that she had to figure out some way to warn Mike and Professor Dye about what she had just seen.

  Then there was nothing.

  48

  THE FOG HUNG OVER Warren Sprague’s empty field like a death shroud, cloaking everything in a damp grey mist that writhed and twisted on unseen breezes as if possessed. As Mike McMahon parked the Explorer, the hulk of burned brush, limbs and small trees—remnants of last night’s bonfire—loomed out of the mist, thick smoke still curling off the blackened top.

  The silence was oppressive, broken only by the sucking/crunching sound of the two men’s boots as they walked over the partially frozen ground in the early morning stillness.

  “How do you want to do this?” Professor Dye asked, his voice sounding thin and reedy, swallowed up by the mist.

  “Well, splitting up would allow us to cover more ground faster, and we do have the walkies, but under the circumstances I don’t see how we can take that chance,” Mike replied.

  They stopped and warmed their hands at the still-hot remains of the bonfire. “I guess we just start on the western edge of the field and work our way clockwise, walking along the boundary where the field joins the woods. Hopefully we’ll uncover evidence of what went down here last night. There has to be something, we just need to find it.”

  Mike started off slowly toward the edge of the clearing, the forest still pitch-dark beyond the ten feet or so adjoining the field. The steam rising from their Styrofoam coffee cups mixed with the cool, damp air, trailing behind them as they moved like smoke from an old-time steam engine.

  “I feel completely useless,” the professor said softly. “I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”

  “Anything,” Mike replied. “You’re looking for anything out of the ordinary. It might be a piece of cloth torn off a jacket or a shirt and left hanging on a branch. Or it could be something as obvious as footprints leading into the woods or maybe blood or some other sign of a struggle. I can’t say for sure what it might be, but I guarantee you’ll recognize it if you see it.”

  They approached the edge of the clearing, the massive Douglas firs towering majestically in front of them, materializing out of the gloom like gigantic sentries lined up to protect some unknown treasure hidden inside the forest. Mike shivered, not only from the damp cold but from a rising sense of disquiet, from the feeling that Sharon was somewhere close by, probably dead thanks to his miscalculation but maybe, just maybe, still alive, injured and in desperate need of help.

  Mike reached the edge of the fo
rest and turned south. He began inching his way along the vague demarcation between plowed field and virgin forest, saying nothing, his concentration intensely focused on the task at hand. Professor Dye followed close behind. Mike knew the older man still felt like a useless appendage, but he had other things to worry about at the moment.

  ***

  FORTY MINUTES INTO THE search, Ken Dye began to gain a sense of appreciation for real police work. Unlike on television shows and movies, in which the good guys seem to spend the majority of their time shooting it out with the forces of evil or speeding through congested cities locked in thrilling car chases, the bulk of real-life police work seemed to consist of the patient examination of often uncomfortable crime scenes, searching for evidence without any idea what that evidence might be, or even whether it existed at all.

  He had passed Mike and was methodically working his way down the line of trees thirty feet or so in front of the chief. Whether because he was naturally more impatient than the trained law enforcement officer or simply because he didn’t know what to look for, the professor found himself moving more rapidly than Mike and had tired of cooling his heels behind him. The lack of intellectual stimulation had given him too much time to think and the resulting images filling his head were less than reassuring.

  By midmorning the daylight was not much more prevalent than it had been at dawn. Professor Dye wondered absently if he would ever see the sun again—not this pseudo-sunlight, which felt more like dusk and didn’t really get the job done, but strong, warming, good-cheer-inducing solar activity. His eyes were beginning to tire from the constant strain of searching and he found his mind wandering.

  He picked his way a few feet into a small break in the trees—perhaps six feet across and slightly less overgrown than the rest of the tangled mass of brush and uncontrolled undergrowth—and tripped over a fallen tree branch. He stumbled to his knees and swore under his breath, annoyed and now wet and cold as well. Without a conscious thought, the professor reached back and grabbed the branch to toss it into the woods and out of his way.