Harder Ground

by Joseph Heywood

  “Nor out,” said voice one.

  “A whisper between within,” said voice two.

  “And without,” voice one concluded.

  Jerrilyn Virtue stepped inside, looked left and felt herself blinking wildly, the person before her barely five feet tall, four legs, four arms, an octopus-like thing, two of the arms gripping rifles with night scopes, long tubular silencers, futuristic stuff, like biathlon firearms.

  And two heads sort of pressed together.

  “Nice weapons,” the CO said. “DNR, put your weapons down. Now.”

  “Name is Sally,” said voice one, which Virtue now thought of as Head One.

  “I’m Ally,” voice two, head two remarked.

  This was making her feel badly disoriented, vertiginous . . . need to steady yourself. Get down on one knee, look out on the marsh, ignore the . . . whatever it was. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Like relativity,” said Sally.

  “And evolution,” Ally said.

  Sally: “We’re neither plausible.”

  Ally: “Nor probable.”

  Sally: “Biologically feasible, of course.”

  Ally: “We’re the pudding.”

  Sally: “Of the proof within.”

  Ally: “Here, not caged in a freak show, free and at large.”

  Sally: “Like free-range chickens, thanks to Dear Old Daddy.”

  Ally: “Bless his dearly departed soul.”

  Sally: “He’s with Mum now.”

  Ally: “In hell, I’d allow.”

  Sally: “Is God perfect?”

  Ally: “As some declare.”

  Sally: “Or a bungling meddler?”

  Ally: “Bunkum peddler.”

  Sally: “The OB told our Mum.”

  Ally: “This here thing you’ve wrought.”

  Sally: “Is a million to one.”

  Ally: “ ‘Craniopagus’, the doctor said.

  Sally: “One in a couple million.”

  Ally: “Others like us is mostly most severely deceased.”

  Sally: “Neither Ally nor Sally nosiree.”

  Virtue was mesmerized. What in the hell is this? Who is this person . . . no, these people . . . oh God help me.

  Sally: “We keep on living, whoopee!”

  Ally: “They shipped us to Harvard, let it be known.”

  Sally: “To hoist our petard.”

  Ally: “Alas and alack, the docs to us did swarm.”

  Sally: “Yellow Holy Cow! And yowzer, here’s a new life-form.”

  Ally: “Way, way outside the acceptable norm.”

  Sally: “One in a couple million.”

  Ally: “Might be a gazillion.”

  Sally: “They enrolled us on the spot.”

  Ally: “Without debate or Tommyrot.”

  Sally: “Told us to study what we will and what we want.”

  Ally: “Mi casa, su casa, our nurturing haunt.”

  Sally: “And so we settled in.”

  Ally: “Academics only, not a hint of sin.”

  Sally then said as an aside, “Even fantasizing sex.”

  “Was a great big hex,” Ally added.

  Sally explained, “Instead of sex we elected to hunt.”

  Ally said, “Shoot ’em all, big and tall.”

  The officer shook her head, felt an ache starting to pound just above her forehead. Need to check those damn weapons, but can’t get it together, don’t dare move. Girl/girls, joined at the head, good god. Finally managed to mumble, “I need to see hunting and operator’s licenses.”

  “Why?” Sally asked indignantly.

  Ally said, “Seems odd and targeted, aimed at Craniopagate twins specifically, talk about profiling. Not fair, not fair.”

  “You know we’re not identical,” Sally announced.

  “Yet not entirely different either,” Ally said.

  “We share a mind,” this from Sally.

  “Thalamic bridge,” Ally explained. “One brain two minds.”

  “Think,” said Sally, “of a circuit board blinking and winking.”

  “When we say we feel for you,” Ally said. “It’s physiological.”

  “Not imagined empathy,” Sally pointed out.

  “Feel free to stare,” Ally said. “Join the crowd.”

  Sally said, “You’ll find us neither cranky nor cowed.”

  “Licenses, ladies. Please,” the officer said.

  “It’s not as if we have to put up with this intrusion,” Sally said.

  “We Wags claim Fifty-Six.”

  “Explain,” the CO said to them.

  “Amendments Five and Six,” Sally wag said.

  “Refuse self-incrimination and we shall want a lawyer,” Ally said.

  “This is not our fault,” Sally weighed in, fidgeting and grinning weirdly.

  “We’re hebephrenics,” Ally said. “Schizoids with one personality coming apart. See our giggles and grins, our nervous tics, drool down our chinny chin-chins?”

  “Personaliteeze,” Sally said. “Two not one.”

  “If she must second guess,” her sister said, “I think we’re done.”

  Sally said, “She always calls us one and knows we’re two,” turned her eyes to Ally’s side, stated, “I am exceptionally very, very, disappointed in you.”

  Virtue said, “Ladies?”

  “What?” Sally snapped. “Who raised you rude?”

  Expounded Ally: “When we get the lawyer we’re owed, you can expect to be sued.”

  “You can’t prove we were hunting,” Sally pronounced.

  Virtue picked up the rifles, unloaded them and sniffed the barrels. Looked through the scopes. She put them out the door opening. The rifles were feather lights, almost weightless.

  “Never shot,” Sally said.

  “Even the breeze,” Ally added.

  “Much less the moon,” Sally said.

  “You’re both in possession of a firearm without a license. Hunting at night. Illegal night sniper scopes and silencers. The Feds will get on your case for these.”

  “We say again, Fifty-Six,” Sally said.

  “That declared, we’re done talking,” Ally said.

  “I don’t like all this balking,” Virtue said.

  The twins grinned Cheshire cat grins.

  “How did you plan to harvest a moose?”

  The girls were giggling and pinching each other.

  “Stop that,” Sally cried, “when you pinch me you pinch yourself.”

  “Such a sham,” Ally said. “When you show pain I only feign to feel, my reaction is fake not real.”

  “Bitch,” said Sally.

  “Ditto,” Ally said.

  “Sally and Ally, the Sisters Wag,” Virtue said. “You’re under arrest, this business here is not a gag.”

  Sally told the conservation officer, “Now look and see what you’ve gone and done and all me and Ally wanted was some Saturday night fun.”

  “The law’s the law,” Virtue said. “I don’t make them, I only enforce them.”

  Ally said, “The very same thing those Nazis said in Nuremberg, following orders.”

  “We’re the victims,” Sally said. “Biology and chance in evolution’s dance, a new life form which one day will be good form and the new norm.”

  “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” Ally added.

  Virtue asked for Baraga County’s assistance, and no deputies were available, but a cop from the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community heard the traffic and rolled in. His name was C. J. Drew, thirtyish, morose, but exceptionally patient in loading the cumbersome Wag sisters into his Tahoe.

  The conservation officer got the girls’ rifle cases from the van, locked their vehicle and trekk
ed back to her vehicle, stopping to light a cigarette along the way. Her first in a month. It helped calm her. What had Turk said, “We’re all God’s creations?”

  Maybe so, she thought. But sometimes it was a stretch to get to that conclusion.

  •••

  Virtue got to the county jail in L’Anse, expecting the sisters to be well into in-processing, but they weren’t there, nobody had seen them or the tribal cop. Virtue got on her radio and called, but Drew didn’t answer. Had something happened to him, them? She began to worry. An accident?

  She drove back out to the site, this time heading to where the van was parked.

  No van, no shooting shack, no nothing, everything gone.

  “I’ll be damned,” she said out loud and dialed the tribal police chief.

  “C. J. picked up two prisoners for me. He and they never made it to the jail.”

  “I know,” the chief said. “He released them.”

  “They were my prisoners.”

  “Illegally, you were on tribal land.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it.”

  “Doesn’t matter Jerri. You push, and the Tribe pushes back, tees it up in mumbojumboland.”

  She’d been down the tribal legal road before. It rarely went in her favor. “Why, Chief?”

  “Them girls is all alone, one of a kind. You’d have to be a tribal to understand.”

  “They were attempting to kill a moose.”

  “Did they?”

  “No.”

  “You can’t litigate intent or a non-act,” the police chief said. “Even under tribal law.”

  “Night sniper scopes, silencers, no licenses.”

  “Did you ask to see their tribal cards?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “They’re Soo Tribe.”

  “That’s bullshit, Chief.”

  “C. J. says they’re real smart cookies, those girls to be like that, and all on their own. You have their rifles?”

  She saw where this was going to go. “What rifles?”

  “I see,” the chief said. “I’ll have to have a powwow with your lieutenant in Marquette.”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  •••

  Turk was watching Duck Dynasty when she got home. “Interesting day, Sis?”

  “Same old,” she said and went to change out of her uniform.

  Facings

  Sheer terror had a real face and an intensity that spewed out of the eyes, the lower jaw hanging down, gasping hyperventilation often wracking the victim.

  This afternoon CO Steffi Darlecky had dealt with five clear cases of terror, each victim rambling incoherently about “things” in the woods on the county line near Bald Mountain. All five vics had been referred to her by county deputies and she had talked with each one at the sheriff’s office in L’Anse.

  The five all came from an aging hippie crowd at a compound they called the Happy Valley Association of Free Humans. Darlecky had met several individuals from the compound, and found them so saccharine, just talking to them made her teeth hurt. Worse, they all seemed otherworldly to the extreme state of absolute cluelessness. They schooled their own children, grew their own food, heated with wood, had no electricity and no running water, much less indoor privies. Their water came from two wellheads.

  The conservation officer had never been inside the actual compound, had always met the Free Humans wandering elsewhere, almost always disoriented or totally lost and she had seen them back to their gate and gone about her business, no thank yous, no how about a cup of coffee (Free Humans avoided stimulants—of course they did). They marched through the gate and that was that.

  She, like deps and local state troopers called them the Creepy Peeps and now she had met five of them, all at the jail, and tried her best to interview them as they sobbed and shook and stared off into the distance with sunken eyes.

  Some of this was to be expected from witnesses in any situation: But this time there was so much jugheaded crap and only one point of agreement, that each of them, she eventually concluded, believed they had come face to face with the unspeakable countenance of a monstrosity, which might or might not be humanoid, and was certainly and emphatically in their views, not a candidate for Free Humanhood.

  Deputy Clare Charles sat through the interviews with her and afterwards remarked, “You gonna look into it?”

  Clare was a nice woman and solid cop. “I make it a point to never look for monsters. They show up often enough on their own.”

  “What monsters?” Darlecky shot back.

  “You didn’t hear what those folks were saying?”

  “What I heard was a lot of fear and jumbled mumbo jumbo.”

  “You want to look for evil, it’s all yours,” Clare said. “Me, my job takes me down other roads.”

  “You afraid of the dark, Clare?”

  “Not afraid, but I don’t have a vampire’s love for it either.”

  Vampires? “Clare.”

  “Just sayin,’ ” the dep said. “You like crawling around in the night, it’s all yours.”

  Ten minutes later Darlecky got cornered by County Board Chairman Theodore Nathaniel Thinnes, who went by TNT. “Jeepers, Darlecky, you gonna let monsters be scaring the pants off our citizens?”

  Darlecky knew a lot of female citizens of the county who’d willingly lose their pants over a lot of things before fear.

  “I’ll drive out that way and take a look-see,” she told him.

  “Tell you now, girl, I bump one in the woods, it’ll get six rounds of 44 mag.”

  Darlecky rolled her eyes. “Yah, that’s smart.”

  “You need to shoot ’em all, catch ’em in a barrel trap, whatever it takes. You get paid good to protect citizens from this kind of thing.”

  “For God’s sake, we don’t even know what this is, or even if it is, TNT.”

  Where did monsters fit into state fish and game laws? She had no clue.

  “Just do your job,” TNT said, “and if you don’t handle it, you can bet I’ll be on the horn to your El-Tee in Marquette.”

  “I would not recommend that call,” Darlecky said.

  “Why not?” TNT asked.

  “Because Lieutenant Tubbs thinks you are a pompous blowhard. He’s always telling his officers that if he has to deal with you face to face . . . well, he never says what exactly he’ll do, but I’m sure you’ve heard stories of his temper.”

  “I heard. Thought it was the usual bull you DNRs spin to keep folks on edge.”

  “Give Lew that call, find out for yourself.”

  “You call your superior officer Lew?”

  “I was his field training officer. He’s like my younger brother.”

  “Just do something to make the problem go away,” TNT said, and sashayed away.

  As soon as Darlecky reached her truck, her state cell phone clicked and clucked. “Darlecky,” she answered.

  “Spike Phillips. Heard you’re organizing a monster hunt.”

  Phillips, who had no known given name, only the initials C. S., was the L’Anse post commander for the Michigan State Police. “There’s no such thing as monsters, Spike.”

  “Not even Tim McVeigh and Charlie Manson?”

  “Criminals, not monsters,” she countered.

  “I guess we can agree to disagree.”

  “What the hell do you want, Spike? I’m busy.”

  “Just bustin’ your balls, Darlecky.”

  She closed the phone to his laugh and drove out toward the area of the sightings. All five had been seen in the evening over the last two days, all of them on the north slope of a mountain, near the mouth of the Little Huron River, which was two or three miles from the Free Humans compound.

  No point guessing what might have stimula
ted the weird reports. As a cop you learned early in your career to keep your imagination in check, and to deal with reality as it revealed itself. The complicating factor in this was night. She was sure of that. She still found it remarkable how many people were scared out of their wits by the night. She had never been afraid, which put her in a very small minority. Even some other conservation officers were creeped out by the dark and some wouldn’t work nights unless forced to.

  Whenever she mentioned this phenomenon, most people objected until she ticked off her list of evidence of mankind’s dislike for dark: twenty-four-hour street lights, nightlights in every room, vehicle headlights you couldn’t turn off, cabinets and trucks filled with flashlights, closets of kerosene lanterns and candles, houses and farms in the country with twenty-four-hour spotlights. Dark was an enemy to be pushed back by light. Just listen to your minister or read the Bible. The dark was where the wild and untamed ruled.

  Ridiculous.

  Huron Road would take her to the mouth, but it was soft sugar sand and with snowmelt still in the rivers, the Huron would be too deep and swift to wade. Instead she took a two-track down the other side of the Huron to Lake Superior, parked and locked the truck, got her field pack and headed up hill into the woods to look around. Still plenty of light left which would make it easy to look for sign.

  Sign of what? What exactly kind of marks did a monster leave in its wake?

  Can’t believe I’m out here doing this. The crap COs are expected to do.

  •••

  Several strenuous hours and no sign of anything unusual, not even any deer sign to speak of and before she knew it, night was coming in fast. Recent rains left the forest floor damp and quiet. Darlecky sat on a rock overlooking a small vale and ate her sandwich, venison meatloaf on Huron Mountain Indian Bread. When dark fell, she thought about angling directly back to her truck, but in for a dime. It would make more sense to play this out, loop around Bald Mountain to a two-track running south and walk that back to the truck.

  She was skirting an area of tamaracks when she heard muted voices and slowly made her way toward them, wondering who the heck was in the woods tonight. Not mushroom hunters, not in the dark.

  A muffled voice said, “You can do this.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Can.”