The Darkly Stewart Mysteries: Light and Darkly

by DG Wood

  Instead, Darkly awoke at dawn to the pitter-patter of drops of water falling off pine needles and landing on the tarpaulin strung above her tent. She ran her hands down her body, across her bare breasts, over her abdomen, and down to her panties. There they were. Panties. Darkly did not want her bra ripped to shreds, but also did not know if she could count on remembering her first time. So, she had left the panties on as a sign that would reveal outcome.

  Failure. Had she indeed been cured? She looked down at the faded blue spider veins that leapt out from an empty place on her lower neck where a pendant once sat. Where it sat for her entire life up to that spontaneous decision forty-eight hours ago.

  Darkly packed up her wet tent. She’d dry it out when the rain stopped. If the rain stopped.

  The hike to Wolf Woods could best be described as soggy. Darkly was in good shape and motivated, to say the least, so she covered the ground in eight hours. What would she find at the end of her trek? A town flattened by a cyclone of fur and jaws? Was there even revenge to be taken? Had Buck brought a final end to the family feud with a localized flood of blood? Where did that leave Darkly? AWOL in about two and a half months. Then again, why wouldn’t she return to duty?

  Darkly approached the outskirts of Wolf Woods without incident. She parted the sheep on a sloping pasture as she made her way down to the Moon River. Naturally skittish animals? Or did they sense her true nature? The last mile into town hugged the crescent-shaped bankside.

  Darkly made her way straight to Sheriff Buck’s office through a quiet town, an empty town. There wasn’t a soul in sight. The door was unlocked. Again, no one. No sign of strife, none of the Robertson clan locked up. Darkly next visited the church. Maybe the town was giving thanks for Wyatt’s defeat? She was greeted with immaculate silence.

  Darkly decided to check in at the hotel. The front desk was unmanned, and the light switches did not illuminate anything. She tapped the bell. Lewis didn’t poke his head out of whatever cupboard he spent most of his day in to tell her he’d really rather she found her way to another establishment.

  While she was here, she might as well look in the rooms of the cast and crew from the horror film turned terrifying reality. Climbing the stairs, every squeak of the boards under threadbare carpet echoed throughout the building.

  Darkly opened the door to her room and stepped inside. It was just as she left it. The bed was unmade, and an empty brown bottle from her impromptu picnic with Buck was jammed into the window frame to hold the window open. Just where she had put it. The paper-thin curtains rustled in a light wind. She looked out over the town for movement. Not even a tom cat revealed itself.

  Darkly looked back at the bed. There were still a few hours left of daylight, and she should investigate this mystery further. She needed to find Buck and Gus. But she was tired after her hike, and she wasn’t any use to herself exhausted. Darkly decided she would continue her search under cover of night. So, she shut the door and locked it, got into bed, slid her gun under her pillow and was asleep in a few minutes.

  The creak of a rusty hinge jolted Darkly awake. The moon hung just outside the window and illuminated the room. Darkly reached under her pillow to grasp the handle of her gun and turned her head very slowly to look at the door. What she knew she had locked herself, was now open a crack. She could sense someone on the other side of the door. Watching her.

  Darkly, her eyes never leaving the door, slid out of bed and held her gun pointed at the ground with both hands as she silently crossed the space between the bed and door. She slid her back against the wall next to the door frame and freed one hand to take her smart phone from her pocket and hit the flashlight app. Then, with one swift move, she shone the front of the phone through the crack in the door.

  The screen’s light reflected off the glint of a discarded gold key on the floor and then two eyes, which was followed by a loud gasp and the sound of feet escaping down the hallway.

  Darkly swung the door open and leapt into action. She shone the light down the hallway, while pointing her gun at the darkness in front of her, ready to fire.

  “Who’s there?” Darkly commanded. “I’m an officer of the law.”

  Whoever it was, they were still on this floor with Darkly. She could hear them breathing. Darkly placed one foot carefully in front of the other, closing the distance between her and the end of the hallway.

  Darkly lifted the light, scanning the hallway as she moved forward. The edge of the beam found pale, white flesh. It recoiled from the light with a whimper.

  “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Whoever cowered on the ground clearly did not believe Darkly, as he or she flew at Darkly, knocking her off her feet. Darkly fired, knocking the attacker back against the wall. The voice that screamed out in pain was clearly that of a woman.

  Darkly picked herself up quickly and prepared herself to fire again. She grabbed her phone, that had been knocked to the ground, and shone it into the face of Marielle.

  Darkly couldn’t believe it. The corpse in the morgue turned to wolf was now sitting in front of her clasping a bleeding shoulder. Marielle turned her face to the wall to escape Darkly’s gaze. The back of her head looked like something out of a Frankenstein movie. It was a patchwork of over-stretched skin and clumps of hair.

  “Is this Hell?” Marielle asked with a shaky voice.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Constable William Schilling left the structure of wood, bone and animal skins. He stood looking into the blinding sun, made all the more impossible to avoid by the snow that reflected its brilliance into every crease and pore of William’s face. He lifted the caribou hide that sealed the family home from the elements.

  Inside, there was a tableau of carnage. An Inuit mother and her two young children were wrapped in furs, each child placed gently under the arm of their mother by William. This was not how William had found them. The children’s throats were cut. Cleanly. Unlike their mother. The mother had been stripped naked, and jagged cuts covered every inch of her body. More like rips in the skin. This was the third massacre he had encountered in less than a week. Each exactly the same. Committed while the man of the family was away hunting. The children killed quickly by their mother in order, he presumed, to save them from her own fate.

  William looked at the knife in his hand. Its handle was fashioned from the tusk of a narwhal. The scene of the hunting expedition that killed the narwhal was carved into the shaft. He slid it into his belt and pulled the Inuit sun goggles hanging from a leather strap around his neck up over his eyes. The narrow slit in the center of the thin piece of wood limited William’s scope of vision and protected him from snow blindness.

  She had made them for him. The one who called him ui, which meant husband in the Inuit language. William was, in fact, married to a woman back in civilization. A good woman, whom he loved very much, in a way that a man like William loved a woman for no deeper reason than because she is his wife. There was no need to complicate matters with philosophy. But, William was more complicated than he imagined himself to be because he was two men living in two very different environments with two very different sets of needs. The man who stepped foot into the boreal forest or out onto the desolate tundra had desires that if not relieved would distract him from his job. Distraction in the north meant death.

  In fact, his predecessor had encouraged such a liaison, and the predecessor before him. The British called them sleeping dictionaries. William’s Inuit wife taught him the language and how to thrive in places that white men did not ordinarily survive.

  His nuliaq, or wife, was young and wanted William often. When he was away from her and returned, they spent several days under the animal skins catching up.

  William circled the encampment. He found what he was looking for. Paw prints. Wolf. Faint in the hard, compacted snow. But, the prints had a companion. An unwanted companion? The creature had followed hours, perhaps a couple of days, later, and they covered the paw prints in many places.

/>   William looked back at the Inuit home for the last time. He had covered half a mile already. He looked down at the snow once again and the impossibly large footprint that created deep indentations in the frozen powder. William was not the only creature hunting the killer wolf. Perhaps it was the husband and father. Or not.

  The sky was the color gray that meant snow. If he didn’t hurry, William would lose the tracks. And that would be a hell of a birthday present. William Schilling was now thirty years old.

  The face was badly scarred, but Darkly recognized Marielle. She had looked into the girl’s eyes, as Marielle had prepared to kill her not so many weeks previous. One tends not to forget such people. Darkly allowed herself a moment’s distraction, as she contemplated her partner’s final breath while holding him in her arms. Then a thought that truly shocked crossed her mind. The kid Marielle was fucking in the toilet stall…what had become of him? Is he still just a shy young man? Or something more now? Darkly would need to deal with that on another day.

  “You’re home,” Darkly responded to Marielle in the softest, most reassuring voice she could summon.

  “Then where is everyone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Darkly reached out and gently touched Marielle’s back. The girl flinched.

  “What happened to you?”

  Marielle buried her face in her arms, rolling herself up like a pill bug. Darkly, her compassion outweighing her revulsion, ran her fingers gently through the few wisps of hair left on Marielle’s head.

  “Shhh. You’re safe. I promise.”

  Marielle no longer flinched. She merely rocked her body back and forth.

  Darkly slid her hand under the girl’s arm.

  “Come on. I’ll take you to my room where you can rest. I’ll find your uncle. He’ll be happy to see you,” Darkly whispered and helped Marielle to her feet.

  Marielle was in no position to argue. She was broken and at the mercy of a stronger will. Darkly guided her into her room and to the bed. The exhausted girl collapsed into sleep. When Darkly covered Marielle with the dusty blanket, she flailed in her sleep, fighting off an imaginary force. Darkly copied what her adoptive mother did when she woke to night terrors. She placed her hand over Marielle’s heart. As their breathing synchronized, so did the terror subside.

  Darkly sat on the edge of the bed and stared out the window across the dark and silent town.

  “What the hell happened here?” she asked herself.

  Darkly changed her gaze, traveling across the river and up to the look-out ridge where both her mother and father lost their lives, albeit years apart. It was then she noticed the flicker. Like the split-second flash of light from a bug zapper. Darkly got up, walked to the window and stuck her head out into the night air. There it was again. A flicker. Two flickers. Darkly wondered if it could be a campfire. A family enjoying a warm night by a quaint forest town full of monsters?

  Darkly waded across the ford in the river. She’d left Marielle sleeping like the dead. She’d witnessed that kind of sleep before. A constable comes in from a weeks’ long cold trek, and they generally don’t get out of bed for two or three days. Marielle wasn’t going anywhere.

  Darkly ducked into tree cover and climbed up to a spot alongside the dirt road that put her about a quarter of a mile from the summit and that yet-to-be-identified flicker. In the dense wood, she had no choice but to use her flashlight. The beam bounced off the chrome of a hubcap. The hubcap was attached to a deflated tire, and as Darkly moved the light upwards, she saw that the tire was attached to an RV.

  The vehicle was permanently listing, wedged between two clumps of birch trees. Vines and nettles had grown up and over the camper and through its broken windows. At Darkly’s feet, a covering of tiny white paint chips imitated snow. The metal walls of the last home she lived in with her parents had turned to rust.

  Darkly attempted to part the growth of branches that blocked her way inside the door to the RV. It was no use. She would have needed a saw to succeed. So, she walked around the perimeter of the vehicle and found the front windshield intact. She didn’t want to bring attention to herself. Noise carries far in these parts. But, for Darkly, this couldn’t wait. Surely the seals around the window would give way without too much effort?

  Darkly climbed up a tree that draped itself over the front of the RV. She locked one foot between two boughs, grabbed hold of a branch with her two hands, and then placed her free foot against the glass. She applied gentle pressure at first, and then bore down with most of her weight. Just as she thought. One end of the windshield popped free like a lens in a pair of sunglasses.

  Darkly hopped out of the tree and pulled her Inuit knife from the sheath strapped to her leg. She slid the blade under the window and cut the weathered strip of sealant. She then grabbed hold of an end and pulled it away from the glass like pulling apart string cheese. Darkly caught the pane of glass before it fell to the ground, and propped it up against the tree. Here she was. Home.

  Darkly grabbed ahold of the steering wheel and pulled herself into the vehicle. The driver’s seat was now a petri dish of mold. She steadied herself into a slanted upright position by pressing her fingers into the roof, which was closing in on the floor after two decades of vegetation pulling the RV into the ground.

  It was a mess. Another Chernobyl. Yet, like that toxic town reclaimed by the Ukrainian wilderness, there were still signs of the RV’s former humanity present. Darkly shone her light across the breakfast nook and into the storage space below the seat. The place she hid from her own kind. Darkly’s mother, Catharine, flashed across her mind. The yellow seeping into the eyes, as she became the monster she wished above all other things to save Darkly from.

  Darkly felt a moment of guilt. She had betrayed her mother’s final commandment. She felt the empty space above her chest, where the silver amulet had been a permanent fixture up until a few days ago.

  Darkly looked over at the cupboards. Most of them were closed. The kitchenette was intact. A bottle of propane and a scrub brush, and Darkly could make a meal in it. She didn’t know why, but she felt compelled to open one of the cupboards. Inside, she found faded, water-stained polaroids pinned to the wood. They were of Darkly. The locales were all tourist spots on the Family Stewart’s last holiday. There was Darkly standing in front of the door to a motel room shaped like a teepee. There was Darkly in front of the Canadian border crossing. There as Darkly crouching slightly and pressing her head up into the hand of a sasquatch statue.

  It was during the mixture of grief, regret and nostalgia fighting for first place within Darkly, that she discovered she was singing. Well, humming, with the occasional lyric she could remember. Some Tina Turner song about children who couldn’t find their way back home. It was then that the hand of long leathery fingers reached in through a broken window and grabbed her jacket.

  Darkly almost jumped inside the cupboard.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Snow is a book that rewrites itself each time it falls. William was reading the story it had to tell this incarnation. The large feet and the comparatively small paws met at the place William knelt over. No longer was one set tracking the other. This was a dance. A violent dance that ended with the large feet the only prints to carry on walking.

  William scanned the horizon ahead. No sign of a body. That could only mean it was carried away. Alive or dead, William wondered? Alive was preferable. He was certain he was tracking the serial killer. The trapper, Deluche. There was no doubt after the last slaughter. He thought about the mother and her two children and buried the sorrow he felt for two young lives that would never truly know life.

  William had tried to give his wife, Elizabeth, a child from the first night of their marriage. Several years later, she was eating mood pills in place of meals and reading about fertility treatment miracles in Reader’s Digest.

  The young Mountie pushed the thoughts of new life from his mind and thought about what he may have to do. He had killed a susp
ect before. When there was absolute certainty of guilt and he knew it was him or them. But, to bring a murderer back to face trial by the people he left to corrupt an unspoiled wilderness, that was the prize every man who came before William longed for. If Deluche was still alive, William would do everything in his power to keep it that way. The reality, of course, was that there would need to be some kind of unfortunate accident arranged before Deluche stood trial, but after he and William’s photograph were on every front page across the country. A warning to more of his kind. It goes without saying, there is a protocol to follow when bringing in a werewolf.

  For the Inuit communities, a people who had endured every known hardship inflicted upon man, there was no need to protect them from the truth. They did not hide themselves from reality behind central heating and popular entertainment that turned monsters into mythology. Constables would spread the word. The shapeshifter is dead. Your women and children are safe.

  William set out again, following the lonely set of impossibly big tracks, and asking himself if another legend was true.

  William trudged along the barren stretch of wilderness all day, following the tracks, plain as day in the snow and a couple of inches deeper than the indentations his own boots were creating. Still, there was nothing in sight yet.

  Then, slowly, like the sun rising over water, something dark and low to the ground grew in size with every step William took. With the flatness of the terrain, it was not long before he could pick out the form of a body. A flap of leather and long, black, stringy hair blew in the wind. That’s all that was moving.

  It became quickly apparent that William was not the only being approaching the body. Making its way from the opposite direction, and sure to get there before William, was a polar bear. For an animal with no qualms about hunting humans, William pondered for a split second if such an easy meal was in any way disappointing to the creature.