The spirit reached the professor in seconds, and Mike heard the man whimper in abject terror. Still he stood motionless, inviting a certain and violent death. The monster lifted Ken up in one smooth motion and flung his body against the boulder, smashing it against the jagged surface. For the second time in minutes Ken Dye left a splash of blood on the huge rock, this one much bigger than the first.
The professor fell in a heap, and the thing lifted his motionless body again as Mike struggled to his feet. He still had his backup weapon, the one in his ankle holster; he could put the apparition down for a few seconds like he had done before, and then try to drag Professor Dye off into the safety of the woods while he figured out what to do next.
Mike felt his exhausted and aching body begin to move, slowly and painfully. He took a single step forward and immediately went down again as his right knee failed him. He watched from the ground helplessly as the spirit lifted Ken Dye and in one sickening motion ripped his arm off his body like a hungry restaurant patron pulling a wing off a roast chicken. The wet sounds of ripping and rending continued, and Mike threw up on the forest floor. He lay on the ground on his hands and knees, head hanging, tiny tendrils of steam rising from the yellowish gunk that had come from his gut and was now splattered on the forest floor, until the awful noises finally stopped. Mike knew he would live this moment in his nightmares forever.
Mike lifted his head and peered through the trees at the boulder where he had last seen Professor Dye in his curious pose of submission and surrender. Blood covered the area; it appeared to have been sprayed in a fine mist from a fire hose. There seemed to be too much of it, even to a man who had investigated plenty of accident scenes, some nearly as gruesome as this.
Mike knew he was next, that he was about to suffer the same fate as Professor Dye. There was nothing in the short, violent history of this destructive apparition to make him believe he would be spared. The only reason he was even alive right now was because the professor had awakened and somehow managed to stagger to his feet and offer himself to the monster instead. Mike wondered why he would do that instead of trying to get away—all he accomplished with his foolish act was to reverse the order of death and destruction so that Mike got to live for a few extra minutes while Ken Dye perished a couple of minutes sooner. What was the point?
Right then and there he resolved to somehow make the professor’s death matter. The man who had been ridiculed and excommunicated from academia, who had been quiet and afraid but steadfast, had heroically given his life to save Mike’s. Even if he only spared Mike for a few minutes, it was still a valiant act; one which most people would not ever have considered, much less acted on.
Mike reached down to his ankle for his backup weapon, already formulating a plan. He would draw the thing as far away as possible while radioing the location of the cabin to his officers. While he lured the monster in the other direction, the officers could make their way to the cabin and with any luck find Sharon alive, rescuing her and salvaging something from this disaster.
As plans went, Mike knew it was pretty thin, but he also knew he had to try. He unsnapped the leather restraining strap on his ankle holster and lifted the pistol. He thought about calling for help now but decided to wait until he could at least get the monster moving away from the cabin. He hefted his weapon and looked toward the boulder at the blood and the devastation.
Pieces of the professor’s body were scattered in a ragged circle around the figure of the Chief Court-thing. An arm, more or less intact, lay close to Mike on the ground, where the thing had tossed it. A lower leg, surrounded by blood and trailing muscles and tendons, lay in the same general vicinity. It had been ripped off at the knee along with a portion of the professor’s trouser leg, the blue khaki pants torn as neatly as if they had been sliced with fabric shears. The damage was so extensive, Mike couldn’t tell whether it was a left or a right leg.
Mike couldn’t see Ken Dye’s head anywhere—maybe the thing had thrown it behind the boulder. He thought about Harvey Crosker’s head, tossed casually into a tree, and shuddered.
He forced himself to concentrate on the problem at hand. Professor Dye was gone now and wasn’t coming back. He began to stand—his body fighting him, screaming in agonized protest—and prepared to start moving, to draw the monster away from the cabin and presumably away from Sharon. The apparition seemed entirely unaware of his presence. It seemed preoccupied, if that was possible.
Mike took one shuffling step forward, favoring his right knee, the one which had let him down the last time he tried to move. Shooting pain ripped through his leg, radiating from the knee outward in both directions. His knee was on fire, a bright white agony attacking him from ankle to hip. He bit his lip to keep from screaming and took another step, stumbling and catching himself on a tree bent nearly to the ground, perhaps beaten down by the storm. Mike knew how it felt.
Sweat poured down his face even in the cold northern Maine woods, more from pain than from exertion. He gasped as he took another step, struggling to stay on his feet and almost falling again. The thing still hadn’t paid the slightest attention to him. He worked his way closer, and now the apparition began to move but not in the manner Mike expected. As he watched in stunned surprise, the emaciated figure of the man who had once been Police Chief Wally Court and was now some demon from another world crumbled slowly and silently to the ground.
One moment the body was standing over the forest floor—hovering, actually, in that strange and eerie way it had of moving silently over the land without actually touching it—and the next it was dropping, seeming to fold up into itself and falling to the cold, wet surface of leaves and pine needles.
Mike watched in disbelief as the thing fell in the center of the wide swath of destruction and was still. The tattered remnants of Chief Court’s clothing fluttered to the ground into a ragged pile not much bigger than the size of a basketball.
Mike waited and watched, leaning against a tree for support, horrified by the events of the last few minutes but also overcome by curiosity, needing to see what would happen next. Nothing did. He kept his weapon trained on the inert pile of clothing lying on the ground. Nothing happened.
Minutes passed and still the body lay motionless where it had fallen. Mike wondered if it was a trick to get him to approach, but why would the thing attempt to trick him when he was injured and nearly defenseless? The silence was absolute. Mike’s knee throbbed and burned. The body lay unmoving.
Mike took a deep breath and struggled forward. Standing in the middle of the woods, injured and nearly immobile, with night falling and potential rescue still hours away, was no kind of a plan. It was time to figure out just what the hell was happening.
He limped and stumbled to the spot where the apparition had fallen and with the barrel of his gun, poked warily at the filthy, unmoving pile. Chief Court’s body, broken and ruined beyond belief, lay inside the tattered clothing. The awful stench of death and rotting flesh rose off the corpse and Mike gagged, but the body didn’t rise off the ground and hover, didn’t do anything, in fact. It just lay on the cold ground inside the ruined mess of clothing.
Minutes more passed as Mike waited for something to happen, but he began to realize nothing was going to. For whatever reason, the spirit was gone. Where it had gone and whether it would return, Mike had no idea, but he decided he had better check the cabin for survivors while he had the opportunity.
The lonely log cabin seemed miles away. The sky had darkened to the point where Mike could barely see a vague suggestion of the home off in the distance through the trees. He picked up the stout tree branch he had used as a club just a few minutes and a lifetime before and examined it, deciding it would make a passable walking stick. He leaned on it heavily and began moving slowly and laboriously toward the little house, wondering what horrifying revelations he would find when he entered.
Every few steps, he turned and checked the area around the big boulder, expecting at any moment to see the app
arition gliding smoothly toward him again, preparing to kill him and tear his body apart. But with each glance he saw the same thing: the awful visual evidence of slaughter, but nothing else. No movement.
Finally, Mike had moved far enough from the area that he could no longer make out the pieces of Professor Dye lying scattered on the ground. “Thank God for small favors,” he muttered through clenched teeth to no one as a wave of pain radiated outward from his knee, momentarily stopping him in his tracks.
When he reached the steps leading up to the open-air porch, Mike grabbed the wooden railing with both hands and pulled his faltering body up to the front door. He had hoped his damaged leg would begin feeling better as it loosened up, but if anything it seemed to be getting worse, the pain exploding with each beat of his heart. He paused at the entrance to the cabin, breathing hard, glancing one last time back into the thick forest, wondering why he had been spared and where the vengeful apparition had gone. He could see less than half the distance to the big boulder; nightfall was nearly complete.
Mike took one deep breath and pushed open the cabin’s heavy oak front door, stepping into a house of horrors.
54
SHARON WAS THIRSTY; SHE was burning up. Her lips felt puffy and foreign, like they belonged to someone else. They were dry and cracked and bleeding. She lay on the floor of the cabin wanting nothing more than for her suffering to be over. Blood oozed out her open mouth onto the floor; her face was slick with it as she rested on the dirty carpet. Unable to lift her head, she pushed her body forward with her legs a few inches—ignoring the shrieking pain in her useless arms and her damaged ribs—until she was clear of the gooey mess. She immediately started drooling more blood onto her new location. It wasn’t pouring out of her mouth and it wasn’t gushing, but it had been oozing sluggishly for hours. Sharon knew she should be worried.
But she was too tired to be worried. She had been fading in and out of consciousness for indeterminate periods, each time lingering in some fuzzy netherworld a little longer and sinking into it again a little faster. Maybe this time when she closed her eyes it would be the last time. Maybe this time it would all be over, this crazy nightmare she had been thrust into with Mike McMahon. Strong, steady Mike, with whom she had shared her bed and with whom she had fallen in love.
That was the only real regret Sharon felt as she waited for the end. She had slept with plenty of men, starting at about age fourteen—or was it twelve? She couldn’t remember for sure and that was so sad—when she perfected the art of using her sexuality in exchange for drugs or alcohol. Dozens of men throughout the years, mostly during those four sick, insane years of high school when she had been out of control. Not so many recently.
But during all those hookups, all the times she had awoken in strange places next to strange men, often much older than Sharon and whose faces she could often, frighteningly, not recognize, she never once felt a connection, a bond beyond the physical like that which she had experienced for such a short time with the new chief of police of Paskagankee, Maine. She treasured that bond and didn’t want it to end but at the same time was thankful she had been able to experience transcendence above the physical at least once before exiting the pain of this world into whatever the next one held, if even there was a next one.
The front door opened, squeaking slightly on its hinges, and Sharon knew it was the Court–thing returning to its lair. She wondered if this would be the time it finished her off. As she raised her eyes toward the cabin’s only entrance, trying to ignore the pain pounding through her body, she was surprised to see that the spirit no longer floated above the floor; it was now walking with its feet solidly placed on the soiled carpet.
Something was different, though. The thing wasn’t exactly walking; it was limping. Badly. It would rest its entire weight on its left leg, then hop/shuffle painfully on its right, before coming to rest again with the full weight of its body on its left side.
Sharon noticed the thing was now dressed differently, too. Instead of the tattered red hunting jacket with its checkerboard pattern and the disgusting matted hair, the apparition now wore a Paskagankee Police uniform and looked, incredibly, impossibly, unbelievably, like Mike McMahon!
Sharon smiled, her bleeding lips screaming painfully at her to stop, as her eyes rolled up into her head and she was gone again.
55
MIKE STEPPED INTO THE cabin and almost had to retreat. The stench was overwhelming. From somewhere inside the darkened home wafted the smell of corruption; of decaying flesh; of death. Mike gagged and moved a step or two into the large, open living area and waited for his eyes to adjust to a darkness even more complete than that of the thick forest.
Nothing leapt out at him. Nothing attacked him. Nothing even moved, as far as he could tell. Whatever horrors had taken place here had apparently been perpetrated by the single renegade spirit inhabiting Chief Court’s body, and for some unknown reason that spirit had vanished. Mike wondered if it was gone for good, and if not, how much time he had before it returned.
A stealthy sliding/slithering sound interrupted Mike’s train of thought, and he strained to see through the gloom. Something across the room moved almost imperceptibly on the floor, something that looked like a pile of clothing—someone was alive! He rushed as quickly as he could through the darkened room on his damaged knee and as he got closer his heart leaped into his throat. It was Sharon Dupont, smiling up at him incongruously, surrounded on the floor by what looked like gallons of blood, barely able to move and in very bad shape, probably dying.
But she was alive, and to Mike McMahon, who had seen more death and devastation in fifteen years as a law enforcement professional than he wanted to remember, it was nothing less than a miracle. He had been hoping against hope to find Sharon alive and now, here she was. He knelt beside her broken body, ignoring the pain in his knee, and took her hand, hoping to assess the extent of her injuries.
After that fleeting smile, she fell into unconsciousness, and Mike hoped it wasn’t for good. She was clearly very badly injured. Both arms bent at awkward angles, broken and/or fractured and obviously useless. Blood streaked her face, oozing from her mouth in a slow but steady trickle and forming a map on the carpet marking her slow progress across the floor as she tried to keep her beautiful face clear of it.
She had lost so much blood Mike wondered how much longer she could hold on. He hoped fate would not be so cruel as to allow him to find Sharon alive, only to snatch her away while he sat and watched helplessly, injured and waiting for rescue.
Leaning against the side wall, sitting in a sticky reservoir of Sharon’s drying blood but not caring, Mike reached for his radio with his left hand, fumbling to remove it from its leather holster. He held both Sharon’s hands, so tiny and frail, inside his big right hand and wasn’t about to let them go.
Mike unclipped the radio. Dropped it. Picked it up, now slick with blood, and keyed up the Paskagankee Police frequency. He tried to remember exactly where the cabin was located and how he and Professor Dye had gotten to it, passing the information as quickly and succinctly as he could along to Gordie Rheaume in the dispatcher’s office.
He knew how difficult it would be to find this cabin in the dark, especially given the near impassability of this ancient primeval forest, but he also knew that time was running out for Sharon Dupont. If a rescue wasn’t affected tonight, it wouldn’t matter how long it took afterward because she would be dead by morning and the mission would change from a rescue to a body recovery. He knew she might die anyway, it seemed quite likely in fact, but he wasn’t about to give up now that he had found her.
Dispatcher Rheaume asked for details. “What the hell went on up there?”
But Mike was too tired to pass along irrelevant information, and besides, he didn’t really have a clue what had happened, did he? One minute he found himself dangling helplessly eight feet off the ground, held aloft by an angry three hundred-fifty-year-old spirit of a dead Native American girl with the clea
r intention of tearing him apart, then the next moment he watched in horror as his friend Professor Dye was dismembered in front of his eyes. Then the thing disappeared into thin air, gone as thoroughly and completely as if it had never existed in the first place.
Mike shook his head in tired confusion, telling Gordie, “Just get those guys up here; we have a seriously injured officer who needs immediate medical attention.”
After terminating the radio call, Mike struggled to his feet, not wanting to let go of Sharon’s hand but knowing he had to investigate the rest of the cabin. His stomach lurched as the awful stench of death penetrated his consciousness again. He had been so wrapped up in his discovery of Sharon and calling for help that everything else took a back seat, but now it came rushing back with a vengeance.
Mike tried to ignore the distracting smell and pulled out his Maglite, shining the bright white beam around the open expanse of the cabin’s living area, searching for a light switch. He finally located one in the corner of the room, next to an open doorway leading to the kitchen. His knee pounded and throbbed, screaming out with angry insistence for attention. He ignored it and shuffled/hopped to the switch, flicking it on. Nothing happened.
Mike chuckled. He must be more tired than he realized. Of course nothing happened. There was no electricity way out here in the middle of nowhere, so obviously Chief Court must have powered his home with a generator. The spirit inhabiting Court’s body had been too busy wreaking havoc in and around Paskagankee to worry about anything as mundane as electricity, so it stood to reason that the generator would not be powered up.
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