by J. Thorn
Suddenly, the magic of the moment became dark magic. Twilight was not blessing, but curse. Jason felt the rifle fall from fingers made numb with sudden terror.
The huge animal was only ten feet away.
Jason scrambled to right himself and grab the fallen rifle at the same time; scrambled to get into position to save himself while at the same time marveling that he suddenly cared so much about living.
Eight feet.
Jason's searching fingers touched steel.
He brought the rifle up in a slow arc, time slowing just as it had that night...
(No, don't think of that, not now, not here.)
...slowing and preventing him from doing what he had to do, from doing what had to be done if he was to save himself.
Five feet.
The deer's eyes were dark, possessed.
Four feet.
Now the whites showed as the buck's eyes rolled back.
Three feet.
It dropped its chin.
Two.
The tips of the stag's antlers still shone in the light, no longer like gleaming stars but now more like daggers that had been dipped in blood.
One....
***
TWO
***
The sun was still rising when Jason had finished getting the deer on his truck, and the sun was even now casting its first pale light over the slit in the forest that passed for a road.
The truck jounced and bounced along the dirt path, the truckbed almost entirely filled by the deer whose throat had been destroyed by Jason's single shot. The deer had shuddered to a stop only inches away from his feet, the glitter on its antlers dying as it did, as though they had been kept alight by the same life force that had dimmed and died as the blood pumped out scarlet onto the undergrowth.
The truck gave a large shudder as it jumped the small lip of asphalt that marked the main road into town. Sure enough, a moment later Jason passed the familiar sign: "Rising, Washington. Come and sit for a spell."
Only a few short minutes later he was pulling up next to Rising's small town hall, a single story building with a short clocktower that managed to seem like it was looming over everything even though it was only about forty feet high. The clock chimed quietly, haunting notes that glided through the early morning mist. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Six a.m.
Jason stopped his truck and got out. He checked the deer carcass, though he knew full well that it had not moved - how could it? - and then went into the small brick building beside the town hall.
The office inside the building was barely twenty feet to a side. A five foot by five foot reception area, a doorway that led to the three holding cells in back, and another door that was simply marked "Sheriff" were the only real accoutrements. Jason picked up the phone in the reception area, an old black rotary dialer, and frowned as he heard static interfering with the dial town. He jiggled the switch, trying to get a better link, then shrugged and dialed a number.
A phone answering machine picked up, as he knew it would, and George's pale, wispy voice breathed out, "George here. You know what to do." Jason was surprised to hear how weak sounding the voice was: usually the man's voice was a deep bass, full of life and vigor. And this, though still recognizably George's voice, seemed as though it must be the voice of some funhouse George: a twisted caricature of the real thing, shrunk and distorted by trick mirrors and failed perception.
Jason chalked the change up to whatever was interfering with the phone reception and spoke into the phone. "George, it's Jason Meeks. I'm back from my hunting trip. Shot a twelve-point that I need you to put in the freeze until I can get settled and take care of him. Could you come by the station and pick it up when you get in?"
Jason hung up, assured that George - the town butcher and one of the most conscientious workers that Jason had ever met - would be along as soon as business had opened to take care of the buck. The charitable giving of the best cuts of meat had become a shared ritual between them, a time of sharing between the two men that neither spoke of but that Jason suspected meant as much to the butcher as it did to him.
After concluding his business with the butcher, Jason went through the door marked, "Sheriff." His office was as drab and basically uninteresting as was the rest of the place: a desk, a computer, a few filing cabinets, and a fan were all that would tell a visitor that the place was inhabited.
And the picture. Meeks purposefully did not look at it. Rather, he opened one of the file cabinets and pulled out a spare uniform. He had bathed and shaved in a cold river the night before, so he knew he was reasonably clean, and anyway he rarely felt like going home after his yearly hunt, so he had prepared this uniform for his return after the ten day isolation. He slipped out of his hunting fatigues and into the uniform, a green and brown outfit that was pleasing to Jason, or at least, was as pleasing as anything was these days. Which wasn't saying much.
He took a moment to adjust the Sheriff's star on his chest, then sat down.
He glanced at the digital clock on the desk. It said eight twenty two. He frowned. The clock was off. Either that or the one on the clocktower was, which was unlikely.
A moment later, however, he heard the clock outside ring again. Eight rings followed by a short melody: eight thirty. Jason shook himself. What had happened to the time? Occasionally when he was alone, he did lose track of time, and it always both annoyed and frightened him: just one more example of his growing lack of connection to life and the universe in general.
He finally looked at it. The photo was on his desk, as it always was and always would be. Elizabeth and Aaron, smiling as though nothing could ever touch them. As though they would live forever and would not be gunned down in cold blood by a man who simply wanted to kill someone that day. Jason touched the picture gingerly. Family.
Gone.
He drew his service pistol, a nine-millimeter Beretta, and laid it on the desk before him.
He felt at his pocket. Withdrew a single object: a bullet. It was golden, gleaming with wicked beauty appropriately reminiscent of the day that his family had died: surely a day graced with their beauty before it had ended in such wicked senselessness.
He chambered the bullet. Stared at the gun.
But as it had with the deer, it seemed fate would not allow Jason the respite of death this day: there was a knock at the door. In a smoothly practiced motion, Jason ejected the bullet and pocketed it a half-second before the door swung open.
On the other side of the door was Hatty Cooper, his receptionist. Hatty was in her late sixties, an ex-schoolteacher who had taught most of the children in Rising - including Jason before he had wandered into the fairyland of the Big City and become a police detective with the LAPD and been happy for a time before the fairy tale ended in darkness, as all true fairy tales did. Hatty was a surly soul, a brittle, no-nonsense exterior that hid - barely - a heart the size of the Olympic Mountains and a brain that was every bit its equal. If anyone told you the mayor was in charge of this town, they were either lying or they hadn't met Hatty yet.
Jason opened his mouth to greet her, but before he could she said, brusquely, "Thank the Lord you're finally back."
"Why?" asked Jason, more than a little surprised at Hatty's tone. Usually she had a kind word or two for him upon his return from the hunt.
Her next words explained instantly to him why the normally imperturbable woman was acting so uncharacteristically stressed: "Little Sean Rand's gone missing."
Jason instantly went on full alert. "What?" he said.
"We tried to find you," said Hatty, "but you can be tough to reach when you're communing."
Jason felt the breath leave his body. Sean Rand? Jason knew the boy, as everyone in Rising knew everyone else, and was still reeling inside. The boy was a beautiful, precocious child of seven or eight, he knew. And from what he had seen, the boy was not the type to go wandering off, which was the usual case when someone went missing in Rising - usually to be found only a few h
ours later. But everything in the way Hatty was speaking, her posture, the way she pursed her lips as she waited for Jason's next words, it all added up to something much worse than a case of a child who had wandered down the wrong path and been lost for a few hours.
"When did this happen?" asked Jason.
"A week ago," said Hatty simply.
"A week?" Jason almost shouted. Before he could follow up with a "What happened?" Hatty was already speaking again. She glanced at the wall clock and said, "Memorial service is about to begin at the cemetery."
Jason blinked. This was all coming at him too fast. "Memorial service?" he said. "You said he was missing, not dead."
Without waiting for a reply, Jason hurried out the door. "Fill me in on the way," he said, and then left the Sheriff's station, Hatty at his heels.
He hustled around to the driver's side of his truck as Hatty opened the passenger's side and got in. Then Jason stopped in his tracks before touching the door.
The truck bed was empty.
No deer.
Bloody ropes lay coiled in messy piles: ample evidence that the buck had been there. But wherever it was, it was no longer in the truck. Nor would the butcher have taken it already. George typically did not do his pickup until help had arrived at the store, usually around ten or eleven in the morning.
But Jason had no time to do more than be disturbed by the absence of the corpse. He hopped in the truck, joining a visibly impatient Hatty. They drove in silence for a short time, a few moments that allowed Jason to notice the funereal gloom that had settled like a fog over the town. Corner store, post office, feed barn, all closed. The houses were shut as well, and there was an unusual absence of children and their mothers playing and walking along the streets.
"Why a funeral service?" Jason finally asked Hatty. "You said he's just missing."
"They...." Hatty began speaking, but her voice petered out into nothing almost instantly.
"What, Hatty?" asked Jason. "Now's not the time to be demure." He looked over at her, his voice softening instantly as he realized that for the first time in his memory Hatty was on the verge of breaking into tears. "Sorry, Hatty," he whispered, and patted her shoulder. "Just-"
She waved him off, drying the tears on a handkerchief that she produced from somewhere in the folds of her coat. "There was blood, Sheriff," she said in answer to his earlier question. "No body, but lots of blood."
"How much?" asked Jason, and a chill settled over him, a gloomy sense of despair that was quite different from the lifeless sense of isolated disconnection he had come to accept as his lot.
"Too much," was all Hatty said.
Jason felt his mouth thin to a bloodless slash, his lips pressed together so tightly he could literally feel the blood rushing from them. "Any witnesses?"
"One. Amy-Lynn. Little Sean's momma."
"What's she got to say about it?"
Hatty quieted again, and Jason could sense without looking that she was growing even more disturbed when asked about the boy's mother. "She hasn't said much of anything since it happened," said Hatty at last. "Locked herself in her bedroom, mumbling nonsense."
"What kind of nonsense?"
Hatty paused pregnantly, long enough that Jason wondered if he was going to have to ask the question again. Then she spoke, and her voice was raspy and dry. "She said, 'Monster got my boy. Monster stole my baby.'"
Jason blinked, then turned into the lane that led to the Rising Cemetery. It was an old-fashioned kind of place, misty and heavily treed. Beautiful in the full light of day, but in the morning when the fog still hung on it, or at night when the moon illuminated the older headstones that hunched like evil guardians in the midst of the newer and more well-maintained markers, this was the kind of cemetery that children would dare each other to enter.
"What about Sean's father?" asked Jason. He turned up a small hill, following a line of cars that were obviously here for the funeral: the cemetery was small enough that there were only a few places where new burials might occur, and as the Sheriff of Rising, Jason knew them all.
"He was at Poker night with Bill Thompson and Fred Whittaker when it happened. Ron came home and found the basement..." and here Hatty gulped as though it had been she that had made the horrifying discovery, "...looking like it did, his wife curled up on the floor."
Jason stopped the car and got out, trudging up to the large group that stood just up the hill, clearly in the middle of the service. Christ, he thought, looks like the whole town is here. Out loud, he said, "What's the FBI said about this?"
"Not a damn thing," answered Hatty. "First they wouldn't talk to me, just the Sheriff."
Jason snorted. "I was on my vaca-"
"Which I dutifully told them," Hatty interrupted. "They weren't interested. Then when I finally got through to someone who'd listen, reception on the phones started going all fuzzy. The FBI guy I talked to told me to fax him the details."
"Did you?"
"Day before yesterday."
"And?"
"No response."
They quieted as they approached the mourners at the service, Jason whispering quietly, "Why would they do this?"
Hatty looked at the assembled townsfolk. "Afraid. It's a way to keep the ghosts at bay."
"He might not even be dead," said Jason, and his voice was loud enough that some of the group turned and stared at him.
Hatty laid a hand on his arm. "Sheriff, I saw the place. Believe me, the boy is dead."
"Not until I find him, he's not," said Jason through clenched teeth. But he said it quietly, recognizing Hatty's wisdom in not voicing such opinions aloud, particularly without having any kind of a handle on what had happened here.
Daniel Wells, the pastor at Rising's one and only church, was speaking. "And though he has not been found," said the portly gentleman, "we know that all will once more be found, at the morning of the First Resurrection, when the innocent and the just will be called to Christ's side. Amen."
Whispered "amen"s greeted the end of the pastor's homily. Jason glanced around as the pastor uttered a short benediction. He noticed little Sean Rand's mother, sitting beside her husband. Ron was on his feet along with most of the rest of the assemblage, but Amy-Lynn was in a wheelchair, vacant eyes staring at nothing. She twitched occasionally, as though minute electrical shocks were being run through her body, but other than that she looked as though she were already dead herself. Ron, for his part, clearly was trying to understand what had happened to his life. Jason felt his heart tug in sympathy. He knew what it was to lose a child. To lose a son. To lose -
Stop it, he told himself. Now is not the time. Not the time.
Never the time.
The benediction ended, and mourners started shuffling past the small gravestone that had no casket beneath it. Flowers fell to the mown grass, and Jason noticed how many of the mourners were children: the Rand family was well liked in Rising, and Sean had been a rare delight.
Pastor Wells came over to Jason as the mourners filed past, and Jason felt his gut clench. He didn't have anything against the pastor as a person, but he was damned if he could see why he would ever want to attend church again. Not after what had happened. The way Jason saw it, either there was no God, or if there was then the Devil was not only real, but also much stronger than any other deity. Neither was a particularly good reason to go to church in Jason's mind. But the pastor insisted on trying to get him there every time the two bumped into one another. It was too bad, because Jason had heard that Wells played a mean game of poker and was a genuinely fun person to spend time with. But, again, if that came at the cost of having to listen to repeated invitations to church, then it wasn't worth it in Jason's mind.
"Good to see you here, Sheriff," said Wells, holding out his hand. Jason shook it. "We've missed you at church," he continued.
Jason broke off the handshake at that. "Hard to see how you could miss me, considering I've never been to your church."
"That's why we miss y
ou, of course," said Wells with a grandfatherly grin. "Why don't you come down this week?"
"Not much to believe in these days, Pastor," said Jason. Wells opened his mouth - no doubt to dole out some platitude about the importance of believing even when it appeared there was nothing to believe in - but the sheriff cut him off before he could speak. He pointed at Sean's parents, and said, "How's the family holding up?"
Again the pastor opened his mouth to speak, and again he was interrupted. This time, however, it was by Sean Rand's mother, Amy-Lynn. The woman began shrieking. "Give him back! Bring back my baby!" She erupted from her wheelchair, throwing off her husband's restraining arm and rushing at the gravestone that marked Sean's empty grave. She began slamming the marker stone with her fists. "He's not there!" she shouted. "He's not down there! He's dead but not down there, he's down there but gone, now give him back!" The smack of her fists could be clearly heard in the calm air of the cemetery, and soon they were leaving bloody smears on the marker as her hysterical strength caused her to pound her fists to pieces against the gravestone.
Ron rushed to his wife's side and tried to pry her away from the marker, but couldn't. Jason rushed through the confused and horror-struck crowd, adding his strength to Ron's, the two of them struggling vainly against Amy-Lynn. The woman only weighed perhaps one hundred fifteen pounds, and should have been easily overpowered by the two of them, but Jason felt like he was trying to pull a mother grizzly off a honey tree.
One of the mourners, Doc Peabody, an older man who had grown up at a time when doctors still made house calls, rushed forward. "Hold her tight, Sheriff," said the doctor. He produced the black bag that he carried with him whenever he went out to visit a patient. That in itself told Jason volumes about how badly off Amy-Lynn was: the doctor had clearly come prepared for such an outbreak as this.
Doc Peabody withdrew a syringe from his bag. "She's been doing this all week," he said to the sheriff, then injected Amy-Lynn as Jason and Ron held the woman tight while she shrieked. "I was worried this would happen," said the old man as he pushed down the plunger and injected Amy-Lynn. A moment later the woman's panicked screaming had become a muted sobbing. Then she closed her eyes.