by Robert Brown
Matt shook his head. “Dumbasses shouldn’t be drinking when they’re hunting. I would have given them a piece of my mind.”
“You don’t argue with drunk men holding guns,” Nick said.
Clayton grinned and jerked a thumb in Nick’s direction. “This is why he’s the professor.”
They finished their beers, packed up some snacks, energy drinks, and more beer, and headed out to the woods.
The three men positioned themselves in a large triangle around the clearing and a little back from it, so they could see and hear but be able to hide in the shadows if anyone approached.
No one did.
For hours, Nick stood there, occasionally chewing on some beef jerky or sipping an energy drink to keep awake but the cultists had been scared off. As the east began to lighten, the men got back together and conferred.
“Looks like they’re yellow,” Matt said. “Now that we can see, let’s bury this poor dog.”
“Let me take pictures of everything first,” Nick told them. “It could help me figure out what’s going on here.”
Nick took photos of the scene as Matt went back to the store to fetch a couple of shovels. Then they buried the poor animal where it lay. Clayton began to break apart the stick figures. Before he got through all of them, Nick took a sample of each, plus the giant bird, and put them in the trunk of his car. The bird was so large, he had to partially dismantle it.
“Now what?” he asked.
The other two shrugged.
“Keep our eyes peeled, I guess,” Matt said. “Give me your phone number. If they come around here again, I’ll call you and Clayton, and we can have another try at them.”
“You sure you don’t want to go to the police?” Nick asked.
“I told you, I can’t. Don’t worry, we can handle this ourselves.”
Nick felt a thrill run through his body, a mixture of fear and pride.
“All right. I’ll do some research and see what I can find out about these symbols.”
Nick drove home, feeling lightheaded. It had been a long time since he’d stayed up the whole night.
When he got back to the house, he crept inside and discovered that Cheryl and Elaine were still asleep. Cheryl didn’t have any morning classes that day and Elaine’s alarm was due to go off in ten minutes.
That gave Nick an idea.
He found Cheryl’s phone on the dining room table, went to her messages, and found his message. It was unread. He deleted it.
Then he snuck into bed.
He managed to doze for about an hour as he dimly heard his daughter moving around the house, getting ready for school. Then his wife got up. By then, it was time for him to get up too.
“You look tired,” Cheryl said as he came down to the kitchen. “Were you out late?”
“Yeah, Edward was way out on the interstate and the tow truck took ages,” Nick replied, naming a professor from the department he had mentioned to her but whom she had never met. “Then I had to drive him home.”
“Why did he call you?”
“He’s divorced and he didn’t want to call his ex. He tried a couple of people who lived closer, but they didn’t pick up.”
Nick poured himself a cup of coffee, suddenly wide awake thanks to his beating heart. Cheryl said nothing as she sat and finished her breakfast. He could tell she had only half-listened to the conversation, already preoccupied with the work of the day. That was how most of their conversations went, sadly. He felt like only one of her husbands, her research being the second one. Nick remembered a time when he had been that dedicated.
As he finished his coffee and got up to pour himself a second cup, he saw Cheryl turn on her phone. He felt a spike of fear, but her face showed no reaction as she checked her messages and Facebook.
He sipped his coffee with a smug sense of satisfaction. He’d pulled it off.
Pulled off what exactly? He’d never hidden things from his wife before. Despite endless fantasies about the hot coeds who cycled through his class every year, he had never cheated on Cheryl. He had no other secret sins like gambling or pornography, either. While so many middle-aged men tried to liven up their grey little lives by acting out in one way or another, Nick had no skeletons in his closet.
So why now? And why this?
The danger, he supposed, and the fact that it was all so alien. Here he was, having breakfast with his wife when just the night before he’d been shot at. He’d teamed up with a couple of hicks—one a convicted felon, no less—to track down some religious nutcases in the woods around Republic. And there his wife was, eating her cereal and thinking he was the same old boring guy he’d always been. Having a secret life made him feel good.
Elaine hurried down, late for the bus as usual, gave them both a peck on the cheek, and flew out the door. That was Cheryl’s cue to go upstairs and get ready. When Elaine occupied the bathroom, no one could get near it. Getting that girl away from the mirror would take a car bomb.
It was time for Nick to get ready, too. He and Cheryl went through the motions of their morning routine as if nothing had happened, but Nick knew better. Finally, life had a bit of an edge to it.
That didn’t help him stay up during the day. Nick walked through the hours as if in a thick fog. His lectures, all of which he’d given many times before, passed through his lips without his having to think about them. He spent his office hours deep in thought, and he couldn’t even remember the simple plot of the Netflix series he and Cheryl watched that evening.
All the time, his numbed mind tried to process what he had seen the night before.
The savagery not only shocked him but left him unstuck in the here and now. He’d hated this place since he’d gotten here, and he’d always stayed in his comfortable little circle, avoiding the locals and going to the city for weekends as much as he could. Now he saw Jackson County through a new set of eyes.
The county had history, and secrets ... and he intended to uncover them.
CHAPTER TEN
The next morning, he called Matt.
“Hey, Professor, how’s it hanging?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing. Any trouble?”
“None. I think we scared them off.”
“I doubt we stopped them from doing their rituals, though.”
“No, they’ll probably go somewhere else. If they were willing to fire at us, they’re pretty determined. Look, I was planning to call you today. Clayton and I have talked to some of our friends, people who live outside town near rural roads and old abandoned houses. People who might see a thing or two. We’re going to have a meeting tonight at the Drunken Indian.”
“The Drunken Indian?”
“It’s a bar on Tenth Street and Walnut. Come on over. We sure could use your help.”
“All right,” Nick said, wondering how a bar named the Drunken Indian could survive in this day and age.
“That’s fine. See you at eight,” Matt said.
Nick texted Cheryl, saying he had a meeting with some informants for a paper he was thinking about writing and wouldn’t be home for dinner. That was close enough to the truth that it eased his conscience. His newfound ability to weave convincing lies made him ill at ease. Nick had always prided himself on being an honest, straightforward person, especially in his marriage.
Thinking further, he realized there was another dimension to his hiding things from his wife. He’d noticed, over the past few years, that he’d grown more than a bit jealous of Cheryl’s dynamic career, while at the same time he watched in despair as she wore herself out hammering away at it. He didn’t want all that stress, and yet every time she went off to a conference or published another paper in a leading journal, Nick felt a nagging tug of nostalgia for his more productive days. Resentment was an unworthy feeling in a stable relationship, and yet he couldn’t help it. Nor could he help the fact that it had driven an invisible wedge between them.
Now he had something to call his own.
He spe
nt every spare moment of that day researching the Mississippian culture and searching the online academic database for folk religions in the area.
He hit a dead end with local folk religions. Although he found some articles about general folklore, and even a few on superstitions, it was all mundane stuff. Herbal remedies and love charms. Ghost stories and prophetic dreams. He found nothing even close to a cult that conducted animal sacrifice and had its own brand of art.
This led him to believe that what he was seeing was something new, something entirely undocumented. His excitement grew. Publishing this could really put his career back on track.
It also made it hard to know what he was dealing with.
At least he could make some educated guesses. Modern cults tended to fall along a few set lines. Most of them in the United States were some form of alternative Christianity, often Messianic, with a charismatic leader claiming to be the new Messiah. Others were stranger, like the Twelve Tribes, which had hippie-like communes that tried to recreate the close, secretive communities of the early Christians. The Brethren were even more out there. Convinced that the end of the world was nigh, they chose to become homeless. Eating out of dumpsters and avoiding contact with women or soap, they had spread across North America, becoming part of the street culture. No one knew how many Brethren there were because the homeless were generally invisible and the Brethren were highly secretive.
While Nick had no doubt that the region was home to crazy fundamentalist Christians—after all, he only had to switch the radio to AM to hear a bunch of them—he didn’t think they were responsible for the cult’s activities. The symbolism was all wrong.
In addition to Christian sects, a common form of alternative religion was the cult of personality, in which some leader with a bizarre theology that placed him or her at the center projected a Svengali-like power over his or her followers. That didn’t really fit either. The cultists worked as a team. No one seemed to be in charge, and their vague little sermon had made no reference to an absent leader.
Nick also discarded Satanism, despite what Clayton and Matt thought. The ritual had made no reference to Satanism or Christianity, and the horned heads hadn’t been the center of attention. That would have been the giant bird figure.
More likely, the cult was some sort of neo-pagan group. Nick had known a few neo-pagans when he was an undergraduate. Most were harmless dope-smoking environmentalists who, oddly enough, lived in the suburbs. Nick had even once been on a retreat at a place called Camp Demeter, a private campground in the woods, where he had watched his friends perform rituals that were a mishmash of ancient religions with a large amount of pure invention. Most of the time, though, everyone at Camp Demeter was dancing around bonfires, skinny dipping in the lake, and taking drugs. Not a bad religion as religions went, but Nick hadn’t converted. It all seemed hedonistic and a bit silly and fake.
The cult in the woods outside Republic came from a different strain. None of the people Nick had met in Camp Demeter would have sacrificed an animal. In fact, a lot of them were vegetarian or vegan. However, they had told him of darker neo-pagan traditions. Nordic cults that put a religious gloss on their neo-Nazism. Adherents to a form of religious radical environmentalism who destroyed construction sites and spray-painted corporate headquarters. Solitary practitioners whom the neo-pagan community shunned for their bizarre ideas. Could the cult be something like this?
It was hard to tell from the fragment of ritual he had seen. He still had too little to go on. Just enough to be intrigued and continue his investigation.
Nick was on firmer ground with the ancient art. Plenty of material was available on the local variant of the Mississippian culture about which Bennett had told him. Nick found numerous parallels between their art and that made by the cult, including a nearly exact match for the large bird the cultists had used in their latest ritual—the bird that was now hidden in the trunk of his car.
It was a Thunderbird, one of the great mythic animals of Native American religion that was revered across much of North America. The Thunderbird controlled the sky and was in a constant struggle with the dark forces of the Underworld. It cast lightning from its claws and thunder rolled when it flapped its wings. Some traditions saw the Thunderbird as a guardian spirit for warriors and chiefs and a protector of humanity against the creatures of the Underworld, which wanted to destroy the human realm.
The local depictions of the Thunderbird scratched on rocks in ancient times looked almost exactly like the large construction of sticks in Nick’s car—a bird with a rectangular body, a triangular head, and long horizontal lines for outstretched wings with vertical lines descending from them to depict feathers.
Strangely, the one Mississippian symbol that wasn’t replicated among the stick figures was the man with the triangular body. The prehistoric Native Americans made their human figures in an entirely different fashion. So why the difference? Was there some sort of symbolic meaning to this departure from the norm?
Nick was tempted to show the figures to Bennett, but the archaeologist would ask difficult questions and for the moment Nick wanted to keep this investigation to himself. Besides, he didn’t feel like interrupting the guy looking at porn again.
At the end of the day, Nick stopped by the house to change and grab an early dinner. As he went to the bedroom to find clothes he could wear to a redneck bar, he saw Cheryl in her home office.
“You’re back early,” he said, wincing when he heard a high note of worry in his voice.
Cheryl didn’t seem to notice. She turned in her chair to face the door and smiled. “Hey, honey. Yeah, Luis and Sharon were on again about funding. I had to get out of there if I wanted to get anything done.”
Luis and Sharon were two of Cheryl’s fellow professors and they spent far more time plotting ways to get more funding than actually doing anything with the funding they already had. They were always trying to rope the other faculty members into their schemes, wasting everybody’s time and being general annoyances.
“I have to get changed and get a quick bite to eat,” Nick said, turning for the door.
“So, what’s this project?”
“Oh, nothing much. Some local folk beliefs. A lot of that stuff is dying out and hasn’t been recorded.”
Cheryl smiled. “I’m glad you’re finding something to research. Tell me more once you’ve met with your informants.”
“Assuming I survive the night. I have to go to some hick bar called the Drunken Indian.”
Cheryl pursed her lips. “Sounds charming.”
“Yeah, political correctness hasn’t exactly made it to most parts of Republic.”
“Or basic human respect. I’m surprised the students haven’t started some online campaign against it.”
“It’s way out on the east side. They probably don’t know it exits. I didn’t.”
Cheryl rested her chin on the back of the chair. “You know, it’s amazing how little we know about this region. We live here but it’s like we’re on an island and the locals are living at the bottom of the sea. We know almost nothing about them.”
You don’t even realize how right you are, Nick thought. Out loud he said, “Maybe the less we know, the better.”
“But you’re studying them.”
I have to.
“I’d better get ready,” he said.
He changed, dressing down as much as possible, and went downstairs to make himself a sandwich. As he sat eating at the kitchen table, Elaine tromped in.
“Ohmygod, the boys at my school are SO immature!”
“What happened, honey?” Nick asked.
Elaine thumped her book bag down on the tile floor.
“Bobby and Chad and Mark went down to some creek and collected frogs. They put them in the girls’ locker room. I was in there changing for basketball and one jumped right into my shoe!”
Nick suppressed a smile, then grew serious. “Were the boys in there, too?”
“No, or I would
have kicked their asses. They bragged about it at lunch. That’s how we know it was them. The principal made them stay late.”
“They shouldn’t be going into the girls’ locker room, even if all they were doing was planting frogs.”
“Well, they said they only opened the door and threw them in. But I think they actually went in to check out Tabitha’s locker. There’s a rumor that she stuffs her bra. It’s not true but all the boys believe it and Peter made a bet with Mark that it wasn’t true and …”
Nick smiled and let the adolescent tale sweep over him. After all he had been through, it was nice to hear something trivial.
His relaxation died when Elaine suddenly changed the subject.
“So, why did you come home so late last night?”
Nick gripped his sandwich so hard, he tore the bread.
“Oh, I had to help a friend stranded out on the highway.”
“Why was he out on the highway at four in the morning? Was he drunk or something?”
“It wasn’t that late.” As soon as Nick said the words, he regretted them. Elaine would have known the time. She slept with her cell phone and woke up a dozen times a night to check on texts and Instagram. It was a constant fight between them. Nick and Cheryl said it disrupted her sleep but getting a phone out of a teenager’s hands would require amputation.
“It so was!” Elaine said. “Don’t you check your watch?”
“Ah, well, he was a long way out. And yeah, he was a bit drunk. Good thing he called me. So, what about the school play coming up?”
“Oh, that. Yeah, I got a dress rehearsal on Thursday. You wouldn’t believe the makeup Ms. Underwood is putting on me. I look so old! It’s at seven. Can you drive me?”