Wolfwraith

by John Bushore

  Steve, a tall, thin blonde man in his late twenties, was the only ranger who lived outside the park. He and his pretty wife rented a modest home in Sandbridge, where they could put their two young children on a bus for school.

  Shadow didn’t much care for Slocum, who seldom smiled, except for leering when he told dirty jokes, which happened often. He usually messed the punch line up, though, with his slow, halting speech. Shadow had also noticed that Slocum was adept at being elsewhere in the park when there was physical work to be done.

  “It’s possible, of course,” Alex admitted, “but the police have asked us to look for her and that’s exactly what we’re going to do. They’re using a ‘copter to search from the air, and they want us to check on the ground. It’s not certain she even ran that day, though, so we’re not going to make a big deal of it. Check the beach; watch for anything in the surf, drive around and eyeball the dunes. I’d tell you to look for footprints, but the squall yesterday would have washed any away.”

  Alex assigned each man a specific area to search, then dismissed the meeting.

  Shadow walked with the other rangers and Jonesy to their vehicles, slightly confused as to how to conduct such a search. One man, driving down the beach, would be able to see anything out of the ordinary along the unbroken expanse of sand, but it would take several days to search the dune area.

  “Hell, this is a waste of time,” Slocum said. “I’ve seen that girl.” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively. “She is one hot piece; I give her that...” He sucked a tooth, distorting his lip below the nose. “Have you seen those titties bounce? She’s found herself a new boyfriend...” He made an obscene gesture with his fingers. “Prob’ly busy screwin’ him silly. I’ll bet she hopped into some guy’s Mercedes—livin’ the high life up on the resort strip.”

  “That’s a rotten thing to say about a girl you don’t even know,” Jonesy said. “What makes you think such a thing?”

  “Hell, you’ve seen her,” Slocum drawled. She wears those shorts...whooee...don’t hardly cover her butt cheeks and a little top showing off those fine titties of hers. I don’t know which is best—the way her ass rolls or how her tits jiggle.” He cupped his hands in front of his chest and bounced them up and down. “She’s lookin’ for it—you can bet on it.”

  “What do you mean, looking for it?” Shadow asked. “She’s no different than any other girl on the beach. That’s what they all wear.”

  “Are you kidding?” The other man leered. “They’re all lookin’ for it.”

  “And your mind is always in the gutter,” Mark replied.

  Slocum grinned maliciously. “Not that you’ll ever get the chance, old man, but are you saying you wouldn’t take a little young stuff?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying, Slocum.” Mark scowled. “You’re married yourself and you shouldn’t even consider fooling around.” He turned and stalked away to his truck.

  The other men got into their vehicles and drove away, as well. Shadow had been assigned the southern section of the beach, from Wash Woods south to the North Carolina line, the least visited area of the park.

  When he reached Wash Woods, he turned off and followed an old abandoned road—now covered with drifts of loose sand—that ran between the dunes and the woods. The rangers had kept it mostly clear over the years for their own use. He put the truck in four-wheel drive and slowly drove to the state line, watching both sides for anything unusual. When the track ended, he crossed over to the beach and returned north along the coast. The beach and the adjoining dunes were deserted. He might have believed he was in an earlier century if it were not for the police helicopter passing overhead a couple of times.

  Every once in a while, he left the truck and climbed a dune to look inland. There had once been a small settlement here, more of a collection of hardscrabble farms than a real town. It was called Wash Woods since the ocean often sloshed over into the bay in severe storms. The only employment in the area had been at the coastal life-saving stations up and down the coast, but the stations closed in the mid 1900’s and people began to leave the area. Wash Woods was mostly abandoned by the time the park had been established and the state had bought out any remaining inhabitants. All of the wooden buildings had collapsed over the years and been covered by the shifting sands. The movement of the sand was whimsical, though, and it wasn’t unusual to find abandoned cars, brick foundations, tin-roof sections, toilets or other signs of past human habitation protruding from the dunes.

  There was no sign of the girl, so Shadow decided to look in the dunes. He couldn’t search them all, but there was a nearby trail leading to an area he hadn’t searched, the Wash Woods cemetery.

  Shadow left the truck and climbed the side of the dune by a trail marker. Atop the second row of sand hills, he went up the steps of an observation tower, built as some boy scout’s Eagle Project. He scanned the area, but saw nothing out of the ordinary and was about to go back down when he caught a glimpse of something red moving through the trees to the west. He watched for another minute. When it didn’t show again, he left the tower and resumed his walk to the cemetery, a site he had visited only once before with Jenny Ostrowski. Every so often, reaching into a bag in his shirt pocket, he’d pop a jellybean into his mouth.

  Soon he crossed over the old road he had driven on earlier. Moist, dead leaves muffled his footsteps as he walked out of the sunlight and under a canopy of twisted, gnarly live oaks. Here in the shadows, silvery-white lichens tinged the bark of the trees. Gray Spanish moss hung thickly, like funeral draperies. The wind off the sea didn’t reach to this side of the dunes, creating a solemn hush.

  The weathered steeple of the former Wash Woods Methodist Church stood like a lonely sentinel over the abandoned graveyard. Jenny said the church was built from cypress lumber salvaged from a shipwrecked schooner in the nineteenth century. The building itself had collapsed several years ago. Most of the debris had been hauled away, but the peak of the steeple, shaped like a tee-pee of the western-plains Indians, had been left behind. It stood intact except for a recent, make-shift cross, cobbled together and nailed atop it to replace the missing original icon, perhaps by someone who couldn’t bear to see a Christian church without its defining symbol of crucifixion. Twice the height of a man, the steeple roof had been set to stand upright within the confines of the low, brick foundation of the former church. Covered with narrow, mossy wooden shingles, the conical structure looked as though it could be the home of forest gnomes, surrounded by a foot-high brick wall.

  As he approached the structure, Shadow was perplexed by small, white, irregular objects resting atop the bricks of the foundation. They had not been here the last time he visited the cemetery. When he got near, he saw they were obviously skulls of small animals, but it puzzled him as to why they were placed around the shrine-like steeple roof. He recognized the head-bones of raccoons, foxes and squirrels, among others. There was also the skull of a large bird, probably an osprey. Had they had been placed there to guard something within, their sightless eye-sockets and bare, pointed teeth or beaks pointing outward?

  Shadow stepped over the low wall of bricks into a space that had once been the interior of the church. A thick, invisible miasma of energy enveloped him. It became hard to breathe. His movements became slow and drawn out. His skin tingled. It was different from the sensation he had felt pulling the girl’s body from the bay. This was like drowning in a slow moving river, unable to tell where the water was coming from, but knowing it was wet. He wondered if this force was something left by whoever or whatever had placed the macabre ornaments on the bricks. He swallowed the jellybean he’d been sucking. It went down like lump of coal.

  It was the same sort of energy he’d felt as a child, when his grandmother Min had occasionally called for assistance from one or another of the primeval forces her people had always known. Almost all the spirits his eccentric grandmother had summoned had been benign, but when she was angry, a heartfelt curse could evoke more th
an a hint of more malevolent essences.

  Young Shadow had been scared. His grandmother, apparently surprised he felt the forces so strongly, had reassured him. She told him he shouldn’t fear the hostile entities she sometimes skirted with; he possessed a power of his own to protect him.

  “But Grandmother Min, I’m a Christian. Like Grandfather,” Shadow protested. The old man was devout in the Baptist faith and had instilled many of the Christian Bible’s values in his grandson.

  “I go to church. Am I not a Christian, too?” Grandmother asked. “Nevertheless, the old ways are in our blood. Be strong in each belief and both of them will someday serve you well.”

  Shadow had always known everything had a spirit if you only looked at it in the right way—like the wood, which told him how he should sculpt it with his knife. As a child, he had found many an old arrowhead in the woods. Some spirit in him shared the memory of the long-gone toolmakers, who had chipped away at the edges of a piece of stone, knowing exactly how to work each unique piece of raw rock. If carved true to the stone’s inner soul, its energy would guide it to skewer a fat goose or a deer. Young Shadow had somehow known, when setting a rabbit snare, which trees would cooperate when bent over to provide the spring for the trap.

  It had been the same when he was inside the Baptist Church, though. Viewing the statues he encountered there, he glimpsed another world beyond the plaster and stone, sensing the power of the icons. He became aware of the embodiment of the worship flowing through the building, especially during services. Shadow no longer went to church, but the church was still within him.

  What he felt now, in this grove where the old Methodist church had stood, was also a manifestation of the true nature of some life force, living or dead—but it wasn’t Christian.

  He turned to the remains of the church graveyard nearby, looking for a clue as to what haunted this place. He noted nearly a dozen grave markers, set haphazardly. None of the tombstones stood straight after all these years, yet there were signs of recent care. A white picket fence, which appeared to be fairly new, surrounded one grouping of graves, perhaps a family plot that was still occasionally tended. Other markers lay hidden by underbrush, deeper in the woods. Shadow wondered if some of the graves had been dug for victims of the many shipwrecks along the cape. There was a story about an entire shipload of children who had once drowned here, their cries still keening on the night winds.

  These graves were the resting places of white men, women and children, though, and he got the impression they had nothing to do with the aura of malice.

  A faint whooshing noise penetrated the silence beneath the trees, interrupting his thoughts. He stood quietly and listened. The sound grew louder, and then stopped with a scraping hiss. He recognized the scraping of tires sliding to a stop on a sandy surface. A bicycle. Someone was coming.

  Shadow stepped back over the brick foundation, the sensation of evil fading as he cleared the wall. He walked in the other direction as quietly as possible. Twenty yards away, he stepped behind some bushes and crouched down to observe.

  A tall man appeared, walking down the trail toward the graveyard. He looked old, his leathery face creased, his hair and beard white. His quick pace and straight back belied the appearance of age, however. Shadow was unsure if he was viewing an old man or a younger individual whose face and hair had been treated harshly by the outdoors. His scarecrow-skinny frame was clad in a long-sleeved red shirt and too-short khaki pants, revealing scrawny lower legs. Hiking boots covered his feet, a floppy olive-drab hat perched on his head, and he carried a pack on his back.

  This must be ‘False Cape Frank,’ a regular in the park. Shadow had seen him occasionally at a distance, looking like an ungainly, stilt-legged heron riding a bicycle. Jonesy had mentioned Frank once or twice, saying he was probably an ardent naturalist. Frank would go on at length about the state of the cape’s ecology and how the park was destroying it. This old man looked the part, with a small binocular case and a sheathed knife on his belt. None of the rangers knew much about him, not even if Frank was his real name, but rumor had it that he had lived on the cape in the days before the park.

  The newcomer walked directly to the bricks surrounding the church steeple, as though he would step over the wall. Suddenly, he stopped and scanned the surrounding woods with his deep brown eyes. Shadow crouched lower. The old man’s gaze passed over him, apparently without noticing anything.

  The oldster turned and stepped away from the old church site. He walked to the irregular cluster of tombstones nearby and Shadow thought the man would stop there but he went on. Twenty yards further on, outside the graveyard proper, sat an old, pitted tombstone Shadow hadn’t noticed before. There, False Cape Frank dropped to his knees, removed his pack and rummaged inside. He removed several rounded white objects from the bag and put them at the base of the grave marker. The old-timer’s hands concealed the items from Shadow’s view. Animal skulls perhaps? Did this old man have something to do with those grisly ornaments on the wall?

  Frank carefully arranged the objects in front of the tombstone, then stood. He bowed his head and apparently spent a minute in prayer. Abruptly, he raised his head and looked directly at Shadow, crouching behind the bushes.

  “You going to skulk there all day, youngster?” he called. “People don’t generally hide in the woods when they meet other people around here. Sort of makes the party of the second part distrustful of the party of the first part, if you get my drift.”

  Abashed, Shadow emerged from cover and walked toward the old man. He was uneasy—embarrassed, actually—realizing he had acted like a fool. Rangers didn’t lurk in the bushes and spy on park visitors.

  “Sorry,” he said awkwardly. “I didn’t know who was coming and I wanted to find out who has been putting those skulls on the foundation.”

  “You’re the new ranger,” the old man said, as though it was a secret they shared. “I’ve seen you around.”

  “Shadow Fletcher.” Shadow extended his right hand.

  The man ignored it, looking at him closely. “You some sort of Pakistani or something? It’d be just like the damned gub’mint to send in a foreigner.” He turned his head aside and spat.

  Shadow ignored the gibe. He wasn’t about to explain who he was to this old geezer. Besides, he was a little taken aback by the odor propelled into his face by the snort—oily and somewhat like the fishy smell of really cheap paint. Sardines!

  One of Shadow’s aunts had loved eating them. He had dreaded sitting near her in church, knowing he would have to endure her breath later, when she kissed his cheek in goodbye. How had her husband been able to stand it? Even her farts had smelled like sardines, as he had discovered by standing behind her at an outdoor service for well over an hour. Shadow hated sardines.

  “Commonwealth keeps sending them in here what don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.” The white-beard continued his rant. “Never saw one hide in the bushes like a nosy blue jay before, though, and I’ve been traipsin’ these parts since I was a boy.”

  “I said I’m sorry, sir.” Shadow was unsure how to address the man, since he hadn’t introduced himself. “There’ve been some odd things happening in the park lately and I had no idea who was coming down the path. I’m looking for a woman. Young. Blonde. Have you seen anyone like that?”

  “There’s a girl missing, hah? You’re damned right there’s been some strange things happening,” Frank said. “Those two girls being killed and now you’re looking for another one.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “Just what my eyes have told me, Blue Jay. You’re sneaking around in the bushes; the other rangers are searchin’ all over the park. Police helicopter been flying over all day and there’s been something skulking around the park the last few weeks. Vile, it is—up to no good. Add it together and you’re not going to find that girl, not alive anyways. All part of the same skullduggery. Something is out for blood at False Cape.”

  “So, wh
at’s up with this mysterious evil presence, in your humble opinion?” Shadow regretted his flippant tone the moment he uttered the words.

  False Cape Frank’s eyes flashed. “What’s going on, Mister Blue Jay, is that this land and the spirits of the folks what used to live here are fed up with the way you rangers are bringing city-folk in here to spoil nature. I saw you headed this way and followed you here to talk to you. Thought you might be different since you seem to be at peace with the land, but maybe I was wrong.” He hocked loudly and spat into the bushes. “Doesn’t it bother you the tourists not only come in over the trails, you park people bring them in on a tram—them and their candy wrappers and film boxes? Now you’ve got some infernal contraption to haul them over the beach in the winter, when the land and the animals have a right to rest.”

  “You mean the Terra-Gator?” Shadow asked, puzzled. The Terra-Gator was a large, all-terrain vehicle the park had recently acquired to bring in groups of people along the beach or take eco-groups on tours of the park. Why was Frank upset about it?

  “Yeah.” Frank spat again. “Saw an article in the paper about it. Might as well build a highway into the cape, and don’t you think they won’t. Pretty soon they’ll be building mansions and golf courses here, if somebody don’t stop them.”

  Shadow ignored the ludicrous remark about mansions. He noticed the man avoided spitting toward the steeple or the gravesites. It was obvious Frank considered the cemetery to be hallowed ground. Reminded of the mysterious white articles that appeared to be offerings, Shadow glanced over at the skulls around the churchyard and then looked down toward the grave. Not skulls, but a simple arrangement of seashells. He recognized conch, whelk and sand dollars among others, bleached white by sun and salt. His eyes traveled up the rough, eroded surface of the grave marker and read the name, the edges of the letters softened by the years. Mamie Bunch.

  “Not many flowers around here this time of year,” Frank answered the question posed by Shadow’s observation. “Shells are just as pretty and last a hell of a lot longer.”