Without looking up, the officer asked, “What can I do for you?”
Mike’s hesitation caused the man to glance at his visitor. A look of moderate surprise crossed his face when he did not recognize the face of the young fellow standing before him. “You lost or having car trouble, son?” he queried.
“No, sir,” Mike mumbled, noting the officer’s uniform identified him as the County Sheriff, “nothing like that.” He paused momentarily before blurting out, “I’ve just come from Abe Camden’s place and, seeing the house closed up and cordoned off, I just thought I should check to make sure Mr. Camden is, well, all right.”
“I can’t say I’ve seen you around here before. Mind if I ask who you are and why you’re so interested in Abe Camden?” inquired the Sheriff.
Camden had obviously been right about outsiders not being overly welcome in Madland County. It occurred to Mike that maybe it might have been a mistake to come back after all, but now it was too late to turn back.
In gentler tones, the Sheriff advised, “Take it easy, son. I’m only asking because Abe’s been holed up in that house all alone for so long that I’m surprised to learn he had a friend.”
The sincerity apparent in the man’s voice had the desired effect; Mike identified himself and explained how he had come to know Camden. He explained that he had come back to check on the old man, to make sure he was okay. His friend, Jim, Mike further related, had reacted poorly to an unbelievable tale Camden had told them, and Mike confessed he felt bad about the way Jim had treated him.
When the Sheriff asked if Camden had told them about his experience in Famine Wood, Mike nodded enthusiastically. He started to repeat what Camden had told them of his experience in Famine Woodhad, omitting only the part about his abnormally close relationship with Tuck, but he did not get far before the Sheriff waved for him to stop.
“I know the rest, son. I know it only too well. Before I say any more, I think I should straighten you out on one important point. You referred to Abe as an old man, and that’s quite understandable in light of the way he aged prematurely, almost overnight, after the incident he described to you. Truth is, I’m thirty-two and Abe was five years my junior. You seem to have the impression that Abe and his friends went to Famine Wood twenty or thirty years ago when, in fact, it was only seven years ago. I was one of the two deputies who accompanied Sheriff McKinny out to the Wood the morning after Hank found Abe and brought him back here.”
Shocked, Mike whispered, “The man we spoke to is only twenty-seven years old? My God, I’d have guessed he was closer to sixty.”
“Nope,” replied the Sheriff as he swiveled his chair around to access the file cabinet immediately behind him. He thumbed through a mass of folders before pulling one file from the drawer. Placing it on the desk before him, he opened it and handed the top page to Mike. It was the notice of report of investigation, including basic information on those involved. The dates and overall information confirmed what the Sheriff had just told him.
Indicating a wooden chair in the corner, the Sheriff said, “You’d better sit down, son. You’re looking a mite pale.” Mike took his advice, pulling the chair nearer the desk before seating himself. The Sheriff immediately continued.
“I wish I could account for it, but as you must realize by now, Madland County isn’t quite like other places and neither are most of the folks who live here. There’s something strange about this place, maybe something in the air, the water, the soil or, well, possibly in them all. Things happen here that happen nowhere else, and most of the time those things are bad, sometimes really bad.”
“Sheriff, it sounds as if you are about to tell me the story Camden told Jim and I was true, that the soil of this county eats the residents,” Mike challenged.
The Sheriff leaned forward intently. “You can hear what I have to say about what we found that day in the Wood or you can read the official report. It’s up to you, my friend.”
“Okay,” Mike shrugged, “I’m sorry. I’d rather hear it from you, sir.” Relaxing in his seat, the Sheriff smiled encouragingly before continuing. “Like I said, it was the next morning before we took a ride out to the Wood. Sheriff McKinny and Hank led the way with Tom Riley and me following in a second car. Once Hank showed us where he’d found Roscoe’s truck, it wasn’t difficult to locate the spot where Abe and the others had climbed the fence. We followed suit, although Hank insisted on remaining outside. It was like a jungle in there, so overgrown that neither fresh air nor much light penetrated the heavy foliage, but we soon found the boys had left a clear trail through the mud and leaves. To make a long story short, it wasn’t long before we stumbled upon the skeleton of a man lying on the ground, propped up against a tree.
“Yeah,” he added, noting Mike’s apparent bewilderment, “just a skeleton. Every bit of flesh, organs, and what have you had been stripped from the bones. Nothing was holding them together but a green-gray fungus that had grown over nearly half of the body. Tom and I put the remains in a body bag we’d brought along, though it wasn’t exactly the most pleasant in the world. Lucky for us, we’d brought gloves along, because the skeleton fell to pieces as soon as it was touched and that fungus wasn’t something either one of us wanted to contact directly.”
Mike interjected to ask, “Were the remains of an old cabin nearby, maybe three partial walls with a stone floor inside?”
Without pause the Sheriff confirmed that they had encountered an old ruin just a few feet from the corpse.
“Sorry to break in,” Mike apologized, “I just remembered Mr. Camden said they’d left Roscoe’s body fairly close to a ruined cabin, a leftover from the earliest settlement in the area.”
The Sheriff smiled indulgently. “As I recall, we’d pretty much confirmed everything he’d told us before we left, actually more than we would have liked.
“Later, after we got back to town, the doc did an autopsy of sorts on the bones. He claimed he’d never seen anything like it. There were no teeth marks, so no animals had been gnawing on the body, and the only way thing he knew of that could clean a set of bones that quickly would be a strong corrosive, like acid or quicklime, the latter taking days. Either way, nothing would be able to grow on the bones for weeks or months after due to the chemical residue, so he was also at a loss to explain how a fungus could cover so much of the corpse in just a few hours. Sure as hell there wasn’t anything natural about it, so we couldn’t blame Abe. Hell, the only way we could even be sure it was Roscoe’s body was by the gold tooth in the front lower jaw.”
“But what about Tuck?” Mike demanded. “If what Camden told us is true, he panicked and left Tuck to die. He claimed he couldn’t remember why he’d lost his nerve when he was within inches of rescuing Tuck. That was what really haunted him.”
His head lowered, the Sheriff sighed deeply. When he looked up, his entire face seemed to have changed due to his own recollection of that aspect of the story.
“I know. I was coming to that. Poor Abe never stopped torturing himself over Tuck’s death despite our desperate attempts to explain what we’d found. Nothing we said or did consoled him. He had to remember that moment for himself, which he never did.
“We found Tuck’s body, just as he described it, tied to a tree limb with his own belt. It was dangling from that limb just a few yards from the fence.”
He fell silent for a moment, then he raised the file from his desk and handed it to Mike.
“We took photos of both bodies before removing them. The photos are there, so you can see for yourself what we found.”
When Mike made no move to open the file, the other man felt obliged to describe what he wished he could forget.
“As we saw it, when Tuck ordered Abe to leave and save himself, Tuck already knew he was a dead man. It wasn’t until the boughs parted that Abe saw enough to understand, and what he saw was enough to drive any man mad.
“As the photos show, only half of Tuck came up out of the swampy soil. I can’t explain how
he held on long enough to warn Abe, but he did. But whatever he’d sunk into had already gotten to him. There was nothing left of his body from just the rib cage down; the entire lower half of his body had been eaten away, bone and all.
“That’s what Abe saw and that’s what caused him to run away. I don’t know if he let on about how he and Tuck felt about each other, but everyone knew they loved each other; that’s not something we frown upon around here. So keep in mind when you consider what that moment must have been like for Abe, to see Tuck half gone and ordering him to go. If you can look at it that way, then I think you can understand why he couldn’t live with that memory. He did his best by blotting it from his conscious mind, but deep down it was still there.”
An ominous silence followed until Mike finally whispered, “He’s dead, isn’t he? Mr. Camden, I mean.”
The Sheriff lowered his head as he nodded in confirmation. “Yeah, he’s dead. He put the business end of a shotgun in his mouth three days ago and pulled the trigger. I guess he just couldn’t take it anymore.”
“And our visit was the last straw. He begged us for help, yet Jim all but spit in his face. I’m no better, though, because I just sat there and let him do it.”
At that point, the Sheriff reached across the desk to Mike, placing his hands on top of Mike’s.
“When you first told me about your visit and how your buddy went off on Abe, I confess I thought the same thing, son, but now that I’ve relived the whole thing in my mind, I recall something Abe said to me. We’d already shown him the photos, hoping to convince him he was not responsible for Tuck’s death, but he remained inconsolable.”
“What did he say?” Mike asked reluctantly.
“He said he could see how the three of us could go into the Wood to fetch the bodies and get out without being affected since it was daytime and we were only there for a short time. What he didn’t understand was how he, unlike Roscoe and Tuck, had escaped the Wood’s unquenchable hunger. He couldn’t understand why it hadn’t overtaken him as well.”
Mike stared solemnly at the officer, unsure of his point.
“Don’t you see? He didn’t escape the Wood’s ravenous hunger any more than the others did. It ate Roscoe and Tuck right then and there, but it got inside Abe somehow without his knowing it, and it remained there, slowly eating away at his mind during all the years that followed. I’d like to think he finally realized that in the end, so it wasn’t himself he killed, it was the ravenous, cancerous hunger that fed on his brain day and night that he was determined to kill when he pulled that trigger. It was the only way for him to free himself and finally find some real peace.”
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