Passed on from generation to generation, Abraham had now taken possession of the Stroud Manse and its secrets (like this room that was both the center and the soul of the house). But had he really taken possession? Or had the house taken possession of him?
He felt weak, woozy, and defeated. He could not get back to the boy in the wood. He could see no more detail, hear no more cry or word, smell none of the odors, taste none of the flavors, feel no solid, scraping bark against his skin or coarse animal muzzle at his throat. He also was physically drained, the seizure ending in locked limbs. He fought to untangle himself from what appeared to be a drunken bout with himself, a grotesque sprawl that would make Dr. Jekyll never again turn to Mr. Hyde. Coming out of it was like surviving a plane landing on him.
He held onto the chair arm and levered himself onto the ottoman, knocking over a small table and the books atop it--books he didn't recall pulling down from their shelves. He propped himself up like a paralyzed man, his legs without feeling until he beat them with his fists where he sat on the dusty old ottoman.
“Radio,” he told himself. “Got to get to a TV or radio.” There were no such devices in the chamber. He cursed his unresponsive body and slow movements, but finally managed to find the door where he had entered and fought step by step to gain the main floor.
In ten minutes he learned of the news that had aroused every able-bodied man in Andover: a boy named Timmy Meyers was missing and presumed lost in the wood. Timmy was the second boy in two months to disappear mysteriously in the area. The other boy had never been found.
Stroud mobilized himself to join the volunteers to help in any way he could. With his police background alone, he was certain they'd welcome him along. Still, it would be the first time he'd meet most of his new neighbors, many of whom had already classed him with the reclusive Ananias who had not enjoyed the best of relations with many of Andover's 85,000 other residents. The Stroud fortune had been made in land holdings and real estate, and the family held deed to half the town who still paid land “tithes” to the Stroud Manse via the Manse Bank, which Stroud also now owned.
At the moment, however, regardless of the hammerlike jolt that streaked through his skull and the numbness in his limbs, the new millionaire rushed from the enormous house and tore down the paved path and out the iron gate which opened to the touch of his finger from his four-wheel drive Jeep.
It was nearly midnight, and tonight a small boy, helpless and alone out in the scariest forest in the whole damned state, needed all the help he could get.
-2-
The skull was so small it fit comfortably into Abraham Stroud's left hand. The poor light here made it difficult to tell if the seaweed mat atop the cranium was clinging roots that pulled out with the clay or desiccated matter and the last remnants of hair. Whatever, it clung to the skull like the last weeds on a sand dune.
It was the skull of a boy or a girl, perhaps fourteen, maybe fifteen. Impossible to determine either sex or age precisely, at least not here under the circumstances and conditions provided by the Andover Police Department. The flashlights were worthless and they hadn't a single field light or a generator to operate one. Chief Bill Briggs's only comment was that the County Sheriff's Office got all the funding. He also said, “If need be, we can run the four-by-four out and flood the area with the new floodlight we installed on her.”
Almost a hundred volunteer searchers were scouring this and another area with crummy equipment. They were looking for a missing eleven-year-old boy named Timmy Meyers. Abe Stroud had come out feigning ignorance as just another volunteer who had heard the news of the missing child. He had been paired with an insurance salesman named Carroll. Carroll had almost stepped on the skull when his flash had picked it out of a clayey runoff alongside old Route 14. The eyes of emptiness had startled the man. But Stroud bent down to pick it up as if he had expected just this. Meanwhile, the insurance man did a bit of hyperventilating. It wasn't every day that a man stumbled onto a skull alongside the highway.
“Don't fret, it's not the Meyers boy,” Stroud had told Carroll. “Been here too long for that.”
“How can you tell?”
Briggs was stumbling down toward them, seeing they'd picked something from the ground and that Carroll was distressed.
“If it was the Meyers boy's skull, it'd have flesh on it.” Stroud saw now that the stringy matter clinging to the bone was a mix of roots and a last vestige of hair. The combination had created a macabre macrame only possible in nature, he thought. Carroll was staring at him as he stared at the skull. Neither man said anymore for a moment.
Briggs had seen and heard now, and he said with a bit of forced cock-sureness, “Professor, that might be right, but you're sorta presupposing the killer didn'tboil it off!” Briggs's reference to Stroud as “Professor” was facetious, both a nod to Stroud's degree in archeology and a stinging accusation that Stroud was an outsider.
“Je-Jesus,” moaned Carroll. “With all you read about in the papers, things that happen in New York, Chicago...”
“Abe here's from Chicago,” said Briggs.
“You never believe it could happen here ... but it does ... and then...”
“Mr. Carroll, I assure you, this”--Stroud pointed to the skull--”is not the Meyers boy.”
Others began gravitating to them, hearing Briggs's brash remarks, sensing Carroll's anxiety, seeing the man's labored breathing.
“What the hell?” Briggs turned and asked Stroud, “How do you know, Professor? How do you know it isn't the kid?”
“The teeth for one thing. Your description of the boy said he was missing two front teeth.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Whoever this is, he's got all his.”
Stroud, an archeologist and anthropologist, had been a lieutenant detective on the Chicago Police Force for some thirteen years. Prior to his stint as a detective and sometime undercover cop, he'd been a “grunt,” a U.S. Marine in Vietnam. It was a war from which he had returned with two things other than his life: the Medal of Valor and the steel plate in his head. He sometimes felt that the steel plate had made him loco enough to become a cop and dumb enough to remain one for as long as he had.
Surrounded now by many of the volunteers gaping at the little skull, Stroud felt uneasy as he studied the contours. He revolved the eye sockets round in the light, turned the cranium and jaw upside down, staring down from the neck hole. Around him he heard the audible moan of men in close proximity to death. He knew they wanted him to say something to make it go away, and so he spoke his thoughts.
“This skull's been here for a long time.”
“How long?” asked Briggs.
“That would take lab work to determine, but from the condition, I'd say a long time.”
A whipping March wind sent a shiver along the base of the spine and through his body in pulsar fashion. He was unsure whether it was the chill, the skull, or the eyes of the others that made him involuntarily shiver. For a nanosecond he felt like the stranger and outsider that he was. Despite the fact his grandfather's fortune had kept the town alive when it would have died, they saw Abe Stroud as a peculiarity amongst them. Despite the fact he had often summered here as a boy before he had lost his parents in a car crash, and despite the fact he now owned the huge, elaborate Stroud Manse on Stroud Road along with six hundred acres of land and animals and stables and a fortune in stocks, bonds, and cash left him by his grandfather. Despite it all, he was an “outlander.” And he'd likely remain so for as long as he remained.
“There's likely to be more bones hereabouts,” Stroud told the others.
Again Briggs spoke the mind of the others, “How do you know that, Professor?”
“It's been my experience as both a policeman and an archeologist, Chief Briggs, that where you find one bone you'll find many more.”
“Makes sense,” mumbled Carroll, and some of the others agreed. Briggs worked to bring the center of command back to himself. He was calling out to men
he'd known all his life, high school buddies and drinking pals, to fan out and begin a sweep off in the direction from where the skull had been found.
Stroud admitted to himself his surprise over the skull and what it portended. Skulls didn't just pop up out of the clay. In Chicago, it would have started the police off on an investigation that would most likely end in a raid of some cult group that had gotten careless with its toys. But here in quiet, sleepy little Spoon River Valley in southern Illinois? He had heard no talk of missing sheep or other livestock found gutted or beheaded, blood siphoned off. But he wasn't forgetting that such things happened. He'd keep an open mind, or try to, because the Spoon River area held what few fond memories Abe Stroud had stored away; even the suggestion that drug-crazed cult creeps were working Andover now made him angry. Everybody on the planet, it seemed, was going mad, everyone wanting a surefire, quick fix to nirvana. But nirvana turned out to be hell on earth. Could such crime exist here in his boyhood dream town of Andover? Were there drugs in every household drawer and every locker at Andover High?
But he was getting far ahead of both himself and the physical evidence to support such wild imaginings. All he had was a skull that had lain in a ditch beside the road and the image in his head of the missing boy he now knew was Timmy Meyers.
Stroud held onto the skull as if it were a treasure. The others began doing as Briggs said. Carroll looked to Stroud for his okay, and they moved off, going about the black forests in the moonless night, their flashlights as useless as dentists tools against the great pyramids near Gîza.
He had often visited his now deceased grandfather here as a boy, and if he fought back the good, rich fun of those days with old Grandpa Ananias Stroud--going fishing, boating, horseback riding, camping out in the wood, and listening to the old man tell ghosts stories--if he peeled back that layer, he recalled vividly the other Andover. Walking about in the fog, the eerie bleak fields gobbling down the ineffective lights, Abe Stroud's memory opened further, allowing him to remember that Andover had always been strange. It was a place forever pervaded by a sense of imminent evil. The Spoon River itself was a black abyss by nightfall, and its course ran along the property back of the old manse. As a boy he'd stare out at it from the window on the third floor where he'd slept, a long, moving, giant eel. For the past three months he'd slept in that same room, now as a man. He'd watched the river but had forgotten that it was an enormous monster snake until now.
Breathtaking in its blackness, he once had believed anyone going into the Spoon at night was instantly taken away to a bad place. It was the spirits of land and water--forests gnomes and river demons combined--that had teased his boy's mind with misty figures giving chase over the moorlike pasture that had enticed him into the Spoon one night. He didn't even remember stepping from land to water, nor who had pulled him out, or how he was returned to the house. In fact, he hadn't remembered the incident until now, searching for bones not six miles from the manse, in what had begun as a search for a living boy who'd gotten lost out here.
Now Professor Abe Stroud clearly remembered--unless the metal in his head was causing havoc with his memories again--that much of his fascination with Andover was a child's curiosity about ghosts because he had seen ghosts. In his grandfather's house, and in the wood around the great old manse. Like anyplace inhabited by mankind, the place had its share of secrets. Even as a boy, the place was pervaded with a kind of spirit life all its own, as if the trees housed souls and the bushes hid body snatchers.
The skeleton crew of officials and the army of volunteers who'd come in search of the disappeared Timmy Meyers, hadn't much in the way of high-tech equipment, but they carried enough weaponry to lay waste to twenty acres if the need arose.
Stories and rumors of grave-robbing, child-snatching warlocks and witches abounded here, tales of dark and evil rituals carried out in the dense, black under-forests that hugged the Spoon River. Abe Stroud had paid little heed until now. He was not the boy who'd followed apparitions into the black river any longer. He was a veteran of two nasty wars, one in Vietnam, one in Chicago. He was now getting on in years and had finally earned that degree in archeology, and had remained with the University of Chicago an additional two years to also claim a doctorate in anthropology. He had no illusions about man or the horror of his past and present.
Stroud was a big man at a full 6'4”, his gait measured in the thoughtful step of a Henry Fonda or a Yul Brynner, but the rough cut edges of his face, particularly the high cheek bones and wide forehead were reminiscent of statues found only in big city museums. Clint Walker in his TV Cheyenne phase came to mind for a lot of people, except that Stroud's Indian blood came from a Cherokee great-grandmother named Minnie Hale. His hair was peppered with silver strands. His eyes were an icy steel blue-gray, and they seemed to light on any object they came across.
Even as a young person Abe Stroud couldn't abide heavy clothing, especially in a cramped area; he was often seen in his shirtsleeves even on the coldest of days. At the moment he huddled inside his parka just staring at the sad skull while some of the men in the “posse” stumbled onto the burial site Stroud had predicted they'd find. Some were aghast at the number of bones the lights were now picking up.
It was a boneyard in the middle of a field back of the trees. From here the lights of the cars on the road were shut out.
Someone in the group called Turnip by his pals, a man who'd been drinking since the rescue effort began, shakingly said, “It's ahh ... a burial site for the witches!”
“Oh, shut up, Turnip!” shouted Briggs, pushing through. He stopped suddenly at the sight before him.
But Turnip kept talking. “Place where they cast off parts they don't ... u-use. I heard it's their way.”
“Might be a blessing if it's so,” said Abe Stroud, making them all turn and stare at him. It seemed the maddest comment anyone could make. When the professor of archeology realized how his comment had been taken, he said with deliberate emphasis, “A cult working the area would be a lot easier to trace than a serial killer who randomly stalks victims. Briggs knows that, don't you, Bill?”
Briggs cleared his throat and nodded and said, “The professor's right on that score.”
Turnip said, “Hell, he's been right on every score, Briggs. Maybe he ought to be chief of police, or maybe he knows too much. Maybe he knew right along...”
Stroud stepped to within smelling distance of the hefty man called Turnip. Another man beside the sloppy Goliath made excuses for him. “Don't pay no mind to Glen, hell ... he don't know shit, Professor.”
“That's obvious,” said Stroud, glad that Turnip was turned away by his friends who'd all come in a pair of pickups together. “Look,” said Stroud, straight out. “In my bones I feel this isn't the work of a local spook cult. I've seen things like this in Vietnam and Cambodia, and I've seen some things in Chicago that sent me racing here when I got word about my grandfather's death.”
“You mean his will, doncha?” said Turnip with a laugh that started a few of the others laughing as well.
Abe had expected such talk among the law-abiding, peaceful citizenry of the small city; it came as no surprise to him that men like Turnip would place a man like Abe Stroud on his top-ten list of the dangerous and circumspect. Small towns and cities thrive on backfence gossip, barroom bullshit, the extravagant and melodramatic, tall tales of flannel-shirted knights who overcame the obstacles of bringing down a deer with a telescopic lens or stories of the “one that got away.” In Andover peace was not enough. Stories abounded about a Big Foot creature that roamed the nearby wood, of a hound from hell that occasionally made off with a cow or a child from a crib. There were rumors of twisted night people who lived for the pleasure of drowning others in the Spoon. Now Abe wondered if Andover wasn't about to get just what it wanted; he had the distinct feeling Andover wasn't going to be quiet any longer.
The Meyers boy's disappearance was the second in as many months. The other boy, Ronnie Cooper, aged eleven
also, had his picture in every store window in town, on every fencepost and tree for miles around. It was as if the forest were abducting them. The thought made Stroud fearful. Suppose there was a Green River-type serial killer at work here? A serial killer who preferred little boys?
Other strange, oddball happenings might be chalked up to tavern talk. But now it seemed there was something in the wind that bespoke an explosion of horror, a disastrous stench like the smell of blood as it ripples up from a dagger cut. Abraham felt too old for this work, too old and too tired.
“Whole thing smells bad,” said Briggs in his ear in a conspiratorial manner. “Closest crime lab of any real caliber is in Springfield. “S'pose we oughta get some of these bones over to Herman Kells over there. Herman'll put these bones in perspective ... put 'em through their paces. Crime lab's the best 'round these parts.”
Stroud was aware that Briggs was attempting to impress him with his police jargon. “What about sending some to a friend of mine in Chicago?”
Briggs looked dubious for a moment. Then he said, “Sure, sure. You got contacts?”
“Good contacts.”
“You use my secretary, Mabel, for anything you need, Professor.”
“Thanks, I'll do that.”
Briggs then began shouting to his closest deputy. “Call out Magaffey, or is Banaker on this week? I can't keep it straight. Neither one of 'em much with m.e. work, but they're all Andover has,” he said apologetically to Stroud. “Go!” he ordered his deputy. “Tell 'em what we got. Tell 'em to pack a lunch. We'll be here through noon tomorrow. And call Carl Dimetrios--”
“Dimetrios?” asked the deputy, confused.
“Yes, damn it!”
“Who's Dimetrios?” asked Stroud of Carroll who had rejoined them.
“Dimetrios operates the John Deere place out at Three Corners.”
Vampire Dreams (Bloodscreams #1) Page 2