by Ray Garton
Sisters of Mercy was a small hospital on a hilltop overlooking Big Rock. There were a couple broad weeping willows in front of the hospital, a patch of lawn, a huge statue of the Virgin Mary in front of the entrance.
Hugh drove the blue RAV4 around to the Emergency Room entrance in the rear of the building. Back at the house, he’d told the children that Mommy was in the hospital, and they had not stopped grilling him ever since. They wanted to know why she was there, what was wrong, what had happened, and he kept telling them he didn’t know, until finally, he’d snapped at them and told them to be quiet for the rest of the ride or they all were gonna get it. They fell silent. He could hear Donald and Annie whispering in the backseat, while Jeannie sniffled quietly in her safety seat.
Inside, he went to the front desk, carrying Jeannie, with the other two trailing along, and told the woman there who he was and why he was there. She told him to come into the back. Hugh herded the children through swinging double doors in the Emergency Room, where a tall doctor with dark hair and a mustache approached him.
“You’re Mr. Crane?” the doctor said.
“Yes.”
“I’m Dr. Lattimer. Look, your wife has been—”
“What’s wrong with her? What happened?”
“Calm down, Mr. Crane, please. She needs you to be calm right now, okay?”
“Okay, okay. What happened?”
“It seems your wife’s car broke down on Seaside Trail. She was attacked there. By a man. She was not too badly beaten. But—” He took a step closer to Hugh and lowered his voice to a murmur. “—she’s been raped, Mr. Crane.”
“Oh, my god. Is she—what was—do you know who attacked her?”
“Well, she managed to defend herself quite well. She killed him.”
“She what?”
“Her attacker is dead.”
Hugh clenched his teeth as he felt rising up in his chest a warm swelling of pride for his Emily, then he said in a hoarse whisper, “Good.”
“It might be a good idea to put the children in the waiting room for now.”
Hugh took them out to the waiting room and told them to sit still and wait for him. There was a television suspended high in a corner, playing the news. He went to the front desk and asked the woman behind the frosted-glass window if it would be possible to change the TV to cartoons, or something else the kids might be interested in. She came out with a remote and switched channels until she found Scooby Doo. She told Hugh not to worry, that she would keep an eye on them from her window. He went back through the swinging double doors.
Emily was lying on a gurney, dressed in one of the flimsy white, blue-speckled gowns they make patients wear in hospitals, the kind that ties in the back. A thin white blanket was drawn up to her chest. Her beefy right forearm was resting across her forehead. A pale green curtain had been drawn around her to give her privacy.
The moment she saw him, she dropped her arm and sat up, her mouth and eyes open to their limit.
“Oh, Hugh, oh God, Hugh!” she said, and her face screwed up as she began to cry. Her arms reached out to him and he bent forward and embraced her, held her close. His hands moved over her back, over the rolls of fat she’d been trying so hard to lose. She pushed away from him and looked up into his eyes. As she spoke, her voice gradually grew louder and louder. “Oh, Hugh, he-he, his face was—he didn’t have—his eyes, Hugh, his eyes!” She stopped talking long enough to sob a couple of times. She gripped his upper arms, squeezed them hard. “He growled at me and, and he made this sound, this high screaming sound, luh-like he was trying to, I don’t know, trying to howl, like some kind of animal, and his eyes, my God, his eyes, they weren’t right, Hugh, something was very wrong with his eyes and his face because it changed, his face, it changed!”
“Calm down, honey, please.”
Tears rolled down her already moist round cheeks. “And his eyes, there was something wrong with his eyes, they were—”
“Please, Emily—”
“—silver, his eyes were silver—”
“—calm down, now, okay?”
“—silver, Hugh, oh Jesus, his eyes were silver!”
The curtain pulled aside and Dr. Lattimer peered around its edge.
Hugh turned to him. “Doctor, do you have something to calm her down?”
He nodded, then disappeared.
Emily continued to babble and cry, her sobs fracturing her words. She went on about hair and eyes and teeth and nails, and Hugh wondered if she’d been attacked by a man or an animal. But she’d been raped—how could an animal rape her?
The curtain pulled aside again a few minutes later, and a nurse came in with a syringe.
“This is just some valium, Mrs. Crane,” she said, “to calm you down.”
“No,” Emily said, “you’ve got to listen to me, this man, he wasn’t a man, he was something else, he was, wait, listen to me!”
“Calm down, honey, and let her give you the shot, okay?” Hugh said.
The needle went into her inner elbow, the plunger was depressed.
A moment later, Emily slowly laid back on the gurney, her head on the pillow. Her chest rose and fell with frantic breaths, but those calmed, and she put her right forearm across her forehead again.
“Hugh,” she whispered, “he was ... he wasn’t right, he ... he wasn’t human.” She closed her eyes then, and her breaths came evenly, slowly.
“Don’t be alarmed,” the nurse whispered. “She’s been through a lot.”
Hugh nodded as the nurse left.
He looked down at his wife and wondered what had happened to make her say such crazy things.
2
The Naked Corpse
The television was on, but Sheriff Farrell Hurley wasn’t watching it—he was reading a collection of essays by Mark Twain. His wife Ella crocheted as she watched a rerun of Law & Order. It was a quarter after ten—almost bedtime.
At fifty-one, his rust-colored hair was greying and thinning on top. He stood six feet, three inches tall, with a bit of a belly on him. His face was squarish with blue eyes that he’d always thought were a tad too deep-set. Fine lines networked over the surfaces of the half-moon pockets of flesh beneath his eyes, and crows’ feet sprouted from their corners. Smile lines extended downward from the sides of his nose to his jaw, cutting off the corners of his mouth. His nose was straight and unremarkable, he had a strong, square jaw, with a small roll of excess flesh beneath it, and dimples in his cheeks when he smiled.
He looked up from his book for a long moment at his wife, at her exquisite profile. She had the same strawberry-blonde hair he’d found so appealing twenty-eight years ago, although age had lightened it. The same angular face with those big blue eyes and that smile that sometimes turned into a provocative smirk that could improve his mood in a heartbeat. Still slender and shapely, with small breasts and long legs. There were a few telling lines in her face, of course—she had not escaped age entirely, but she’d apparently made a deal with it, a deal in her favor, because she still looked damned good.
She looked over at him without turning her head, cocked an eyebrow, and smiled. He returned the smile, then continued reading.
Their fat black-and-white cat, Izzie, was curled up and sleeping on top of the television. Hurley thought it was one of Izz’s favorite spots because it made him feel as if he were the center of attention. He was an affectionate cat—when he wasn’t on top of the television, he was in Hurley’s lap, or Ella’s, purring contentedly.
To Hurley, having Izzie in his lap was very satisfying. He liked dogs, too, but dogs were always affectionate toward everyone—to dogs, affection came naturally and unconditionally. But you had to earn a cat’s respect. He knew that, when a cat came over and sat in his lap, it was because the cat really wanted to be there, and no other reason. Cats loved you unconditionally, too, but they only showed it when they wanted to, when they really meant it. And unlike dogs, they did not love everybody.
The phone chirped and Izzie lifted his
head, looked at Hurley with sleepy eyes, and flicked his tail once, then lowered his head again.
Ella reached over and picked up the cordless receiver from its base on the lamp table between their chairs. “Hello?” she said. After a moment, Ella said, “Just a second,” and held the phone out to Hurley. He took it, removed his reading glasses, put it to his ear.
“Yes?” Hurley said.
“Hey, Sheriff, it’s Garrett.” Billy Garrett was one of his deputies. “I’m at Sisters of Mercy.”
“What’s up?”
“An ambulance just brought Emily in. She was attacked and raped tonight.”
“Our Emily?”
“Yep.”
“Oh, god.”
“I thought you’d want to know. Thought you might want to come down and get in on this yourself.”
Emily Crane was the receptionist at the Sheriff’s Office. She had been working there for almost eight years, and she almost felt like a member of Hurley’s family. They’d invited Emily and Hugh and the kids to barbecues, had taken them on a picnic once. Emily had become more than an employee, she had become a friend.
“I’ll get up there right away,” Hurley said. “See ya.” He turned and put the receiver back on its base, then put the book and his glasses on the table beside the phone.
“Something wrong?” Ella said.
“It’s Emily. She’s in the hospital. She was raped.”
Ella gasped and her crocheting hands dropped into her lap. “Oh, Lord, no.”
“‘Fraid so.” He stood. “I’ve got to go.” He went upstairs and put his uniform back on.
As he drove up to the hospital, Hurley thought about his two daughters. MBilly was twenty-six, Jennifer was twenty-four. He imagined how he would feel if what had happened to Emily happened to either of them. The very thought of it created an ache in his chest. He clenched his teeth and his hands clutched hard the wheel of the white Ford Explorer with the green seal of the Sheriff’s Office on both sides.
MBilly—named after the song because Ella was such a Barry Manilow fan—lived in Crescent City with her husband Will, a contractor, and their little three-year-old boy Mark, who was Hurley’s pride and joy. Jennifer was still single and not interested in getting married yet—she had a successful young career as a commercial artist in San Francisco, into which she poured her all. The big old Victorian house in which Hurley and Ella lived had seemed huge and empty ever since the girls had moved out, but they just couldn’t bring themselves to sell it and move into something smaller. Hurley and Ella had lived in that house ever since they’d gotten back from their honeymoon, and it had become a part of them.
He did not know the details yet, but he had little doubt it was their serial rapist—the Pine County Rapist, as the Big Rock Herald called him. If that were the case, Hurley would be even more sickened by the attack, because the Pine County Rapist was his responsibility, and in spite of the considerable efforts of his department, he hadn’t been able to catch the bastard yet.
The shortest route to the hospital took him by the old Laramie place. It was just off of an undeveloped strip of Perryman Road, standing alone, with no other houses around it. Across the street was a stand of Sitka spruce trees, and beyond that, thick woods. More woods grew wild on either side of and behind the old two-story house. At night, the house was difficult to see—it blended in with its wild surroundings, a greater darkness against the dark woods. As he looked at it going by, a familiar knot tightened in his stomach. All these years later, and the house still made him tense up. He had not been inside since he was a boy, but the memory was still quite vivid, still powerful, and it still haunted him, still inhabited his nightmares. A simple glance at its vague shape there in the darkness took him back to that Halloween night when he’d gone in on a dare, by himself, helpless and unprotected.
The story was that it was haunted, of course. That old man Laramie still roamed its halls, an angry, insane spirit that hated children. He’d killed his own children, then his wife, then himself ages ago, and the story lingered and grew before Hurley ever came along. Then it was enhanced by Hurley’s childhood buddies, told again and again. Hurley wondered if the children of today talked about the place, if they were as afraid of it as he and his friends had been.
How old had he been? Nine or ten, he couldn’t remember. But he still remembered, all too vividly, what he had found in there—the dusty, cobweb-caked, maggot-eaten man sitting on the rotten old couch, empty eye sockets staring at nothing from a face that was little more than a skull wearing a few traces of leathery, long-dead skin. The mouth hung open, several teeth missing, and small insects crawled over the dangling jaw.
He’d gone nowhere near the house ever since. He was amazed it still stood after all these decades. Refusing to crumble and collapse, it stood there, defiant, upright, not unlike the rotting, stiff-backed corpse he thought he’d seen inside. He remembered how he’d screamed, how he’d been unable to stop screaming as he ran out of the house. Waiting for him outside, his friends had laughed at first—until they’d seen the terror in his face and had heard the sincerity of his screams. Then they’d run screaming after him.
An involuntary shiver passed through him, even though he fought it. He took a big, deep breath, scrubbed a hand down his face.
He’d never told anyone what he’d seen in the Laramie house because, frankly, Hurley was not too sure himself. As soon as he’d gotten a good distance from the place, where he felt safe, he began to wonder if perhaps it hadn’t exactly been the decayed, rotted body of a person on the couch. It could have been some kind of doll or mannequin, or even something as simple as the play of light and shadow in the dark, dusty house, mixed with his hyperactive imagination. Still, all these years later, he’d told no one, not even Ella. The house had inhabited his dreams ever since he’d run from it screaming as a terrified boy. Even now, all these decades later, it made rare but memorable appearances in his sleep, filling him with fear.
It started to rain as he drove up the hill to the hospital. He parked beside Garrett’s cruiser in the small lot in front of the Emergency Room entrance, got out, and went inside. There were only a couple other cars in the lot, one of them parked in a space reserved for a doctor. It was obviously a slow night for the Emergency Room.
Hurley saw Emily’s husband Hugh and their three children in the waiting room. The kids were seated around their father in a row of chairs, looking worn out and sleepy. Hurley went to Hugh, who stood up and shook his hand. Hugh was frowning and distracted and pale. “I’m really sorry about this, Hugh.”
“Thanks. I’m, uh, I’m ... I don’t know, I’m just beside myself.”
“That’s perfectly understandable. Sit tight, I’m gonna go back there.”
Hugh nodded and sat down again.
“Emily Crane?” he said to the nurse at the front window.
“Go on back, Sheriff, she’s back there.”
He pushed through the swinging doors and found Deputy Garrett standing just outside a curtain that was pulled around one of the gurneys, writing something in his small notebook.
“What’s up?” Hurley said.
“She’s been sedated,” Garrett said. He was tall and gangly, twenty-nine years old, with his cap on over his balding head, his black leather jacket still on. He had a carefully-trimmed mustache which hid the scar left behind by a corrected cleft pallet. “They had to give her something to calm her down because she was pretty hysterical for awhile, wasn’t making much sense. Now she’s very sluggish, but she’s talking. They’re doing the rape kit right now.”
“What about the attacker—was it our guy?”
“If it was, she killed him for us.”
“Killed him?” Hurley said with a smirk.
“Far as I can make out, she felt around on the ground while he was raping her, found a rusty old corkscrew, and stabbed it into his eye. Went right into his brain.”
“On the ground? Where did it happen?”
“Seems she was
driving home on Seaside Trail, car broke down, and she got out to look under the hood. Next thing she knows, this guy is on her.”
“And she killed him.” The smirk became a smile. “I’ll be damned. Good for her. I take it he’s down in the morgue?”
“Yep, he just got here a couple minutes before you did. But if you ask me, he’s not our guy. This guy looks like he’s been living on the street for awhile. Stinks like you wouldn’t believe.”
“He does, huh? Well, maybe he’s not. None of the rape victims have reported a smell. But we can hope. How’d she get here?”
“A phone company truck drove by and saw her lying beside the road. She was unconscious. The driver called 911. Ambulance brought her here. Kopechne and Selwyn are still at the scene.”
Hurley clenched his teeth and shook his head. “Hm. I may go out there and take a look around when I’m done here. Okay, I’m going down to the morgue. I’ll be back in a bit.”
Hurley left the Emergency Room through a side door that opened onto a corridor. He turned left and went to the nearest elevator and pushed the button. When it opened, he stepped inside and punched the button marked B. The elevator descended, stopped, and the doors slid open on a basement corridor. Hurley turned right, the clock-clock-clock of his shoes on the tile echoing slightly. Overhead, exposed pipes ran along the corridor, painted the same beige as the walls. He turned right down another corridor.
“Hey, George,” Hurley said as he approached the morgue.
In an alcove on the left, a desk stood outside and to the left of the double doors that went into the morgue, and at the desk sat George Purdy, the Deputy Coroner. A small brown paper bag stood on the desk and George was eating half a sandwich as he read an old dog-eared John D. McDonald paperback. George looked up and smiled as he chewed. “Hey, Sheriff, how goes it?” He was a broad, paunchy man in his mid-forties, with a fleshy face and a thick head of mussed black-and-silver hair. He wore a long white coat with an ID badge on the left breast pocket. He folded a top corner of a page over and closed the book, put it on the desk.