Untcigahunk: The Complete Little Brothers

by Rick Hautala

  He gasped as he looked at Watson, who was sitting on the ground, the small of his back supported by the mossy deadfall. The expression of genuine concern he saw on the old man’s face was the first solid thing that pulled Kip back from the darkness that churned in his mind.

  Blinking his eyes like a bat surprised by sudden sunlight, Kip looked all around him. He tried to absorb the golden beams filtering through the spring-green leaves, the gentle bubbling sound of the stream down in the hollow, the cheerful twitterings of birds in the woods.

  This is what’s real, he told himself, not the darkness and the creatures inside it. This is real!... That was five years ago. No matter what else it means, all of that is in the past, and there’s nothing I can do about it! Nothing then and nothing now!

  Watson shifted and stood up, brushing the seat of his pants as he slowly made his way over to Kip. He gave the boy a gentle but firm clap on the shoulder, pulling him close in an embrace that reminded him of the way his father hugged him, now that he was too old for “baby hugs.”

  Kip wasn’t at all aware of the sour sweat smell of the man as he burrowed his face into his chest and sobbed. He wanted to cry, he wanted to let it all out in one long, aching howl like a lonely wolf howling, but he couldn’t. Something twisted inside his chest, holding back his tears so they came out only as gut-wrenching sobs.

  “You know, don’t yah?” Watson said as he patted Kip on the shoulder.

  Kip pushed his face all the harder against the man’s chest, grateful for the solidness of his humanness.

  “You know ‘bout them—’bout the untcigahunk.” Watson’s voice rumbled deep in his chest. “You know what they did to your mother, so now—the only question is, what’re you gonna do ‘bout it?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Living a Bad Dream”

  1

  “I dunno,” Roy Holden said, shaking his head from side to side. He was leaning over Police Chief Parkman’s desk, supporting himself on the knuckles of his clenched fists. “I mean, we can’t very well haul his ass in here and question him about it. We ain’t got enough to go on.”

  “True,” Chief Parkman said. “And on top of that, we wouldn’t want his daddy coming down on our asses, now, would we?”

  Holden flinched and smiled at the same time. “What person in his right mind would want Sidney Wood on his ass?”

  “Point taken,” Parkman said as he eased forward in his chair, laced his fingers together, and cracked his knuckles. “And the bottom line is, I’m not so sure Woody would do something like that. His girlfriend—what’s her name again?” He picked up a piece of paper and glanced at it. “Suzie LaBlanc, yeah. I’m not convinced both of her oars are hittin’ the water, if you catch my drift. I mean, what’s this shit about someone scrambling around outside her bedroom window at one A.M., trying to get inside?”

  Holden shrugged. “I’ll grant you some of the details seem a little weird. She was convinced there was more than one person out there—probably Woody ‘n a couple of his friends. I took her complaint as your run-of-the-mill prowler.”

  Parkman shook his head as he rubbed his hands together. “Problem is, Thornton isn’t the kind of town that usually has prowlers. I’ll grant you Woody can be a little wild at times, but I don’t think he’s about to pull a Romeo and Juliet stunt, climbing the trellis to her window.” He wrinkled his brow in concentration. “’N with all the trouble he’s got with the Portland cops, I don’t think he needs any from us. Tell Clark to run by the LaBlanc’s house a couple of times when he’s patrolling tonight. That should take care of any problems.”

  “You know who I thought it might be?” Holden said. When Parkman didn’t answer right away, he went on, “Maybe that fuckin’ Indian, Watson, had something to do with this.”

  Parkman couldn’t disguise his amusement at the suggestion, and he looked up at his patrolman with a twinkling smile. “You got some inside information I don’t have?”

  Holden shrugged. “Not really. Just a hunch,” he said.

  Parkman snorted. “I think it’s even less likely that someone like Watson would be snooping outside the LaBlanc’s house in the wee hours of the morn.”

  “Yeah, but think about it for a minute,” Holden said. “When we had him in here a couple of days ago, remember how weird he was actin’?”

  “No. I remember how weird you were acting,” Parkman said as he picked up a copy of Time from his littered desktop and eased back to a comfortable reading position with his feet up on the desk. He began idly leafing pages. “Can’t say as I noticed anything unusual about Watson.”

  “Yeah, but you weren’t here all of the time.” Holden didn’t want to sound defensive, and he certainly didn’t want to mention where he suspected Parkman had been that afternoon. What a man did on his own time was his own business...even if he was married.

  “Watson’s Watson. Leave him be,” Parkman said, feigning interest in an article on the Middle East. “You get a little more experience under your belt, ‘n you’ll start being able to sense when someone needs checking out.”

  “I think Watson needs checking out,” Holden said flatly. “Pretty much the whole time he was in the lock-up, at least once he was conscious, he was muttering to himself, going on about how he couldn’t stay in the jail, that he had to get home before they came.”

  One of Parkman’s eyebrows shot up, but he kept reading while Holden talked.

  “He was acting so weird it was almost scary,” Holden

  said. “He ‘bout had me scared, he was going on so. Good thing Howard stopped by. Gave me something else to do.”

  Parkman flapped the magazine shut with his forefinger marking his place and looked at the patrolman. “Know what? I think you’re fulla shit,” he said evenly. “And I’m sick and tired of you blowing smoke up Watson’s ass every chance you get. Suzie LaBlanc is pulling shit like this for the attention. I more than half-suspect she’s douching Woody with this assault charge. If a guy breaks up with a girl, sometimes the girl will pull stunts like this...you know, tryin’ to get attention. Mark my words, a week from now she’ll be threatening suicide or some damned shit.”

  “I’m not talking about her,” Holden said, his voice low and level. “I’m talking about that rumpot Watson.”

  “And I’m telling you to get off his case and stay off it,” Parkman snapped. “I don’t know why you’ve got it in for him so bad, but you’ve got to stop it.” He re-opened his magazine and read, silently moving his lips.

  “I just think he bears careful watching, is all,” Holden said.

  Parkman shrugged and reached blindly for the can of Diet Pepsi on his desk. He took a sip, wrinkling his nose as the warm liquid slid down his throat.

  “If you think he needs watchin’, you watch him,” Parkman said, sounding almost sleepy. “I sure as hell’ve got better things to do.”

  He focused on the magazine until Holden turned and left the office. When the door clicked shut behind Holden, he let the magazine fall to the floor.

  You can do whatever you want tonight, he thought, cupping the back of his head with his hands and staring up at the ceiling. His own immediate concern was what excuse he would use with Lois tonight so he could get out to see Elaine. But he had all afternoon. He’d think of something.

  2

  “Unt—what?” Kip said. He was sitting on the ground beside Watson, his legs stretched in front of him. Both of them were leaning against the rotten tree trunk. The twisted water cup glistened in the sun, but as he looked at it, Kip no longer saw it as a symbol of his foiled escape plans. Those seemed almost as far away now as...as things he had finally started to remember after five years ago.

  “Untcigahunk,” Watson said softly. Along with the slight tremor in his voice, there was a trace of genuine awe. The old man was fairly sober now, after a trip down to the stream on his own power to stick his head into the cool, swift water. “That’s the name my people gave them thousands of years ago. It means younger or little bro
thers.” He regarded Kip steadily for a moment and then said, “They’re what killed your mother.”

  “How...how do you know that?” Kip stared into Watson’s eyes, trying to resist the shiver that was rippling up his back. Within the past hour or so, he had begun to feel as though there was no one—not even his father—he could trust more than Watson.

  Watson lowered his head and shook it savagely. Beads of water sprayed in a wide arc. “Trust me. I know,” he said, his face darkening. “I know because I know the times of the untcigahunk. Your mother died during one of those times. After I heard about what had happened, I went out there and looked around. I saw signs that they had been there, and I found something.”

  “What?” Kip asked, but Watson remained silent as his eyes darted back and forth without fixing on anything.

  Kip put the heel of his thumb to his mouth and gnawed down hard on it, thinking if this was some crazy dream he was having, some self-inflicted pain would snap him out of it. But Watson’s face and the surrounding woods didn’t even waver. No, this was all too real.

  “You said my mom—” His throat tightened, and his voice caught. He looked longingly at the bent metal cup, wishing it still held a sip of water. “You said my mom died during one of the times of the little brothers. Are there other times?”

  A tight smile split Watson’s face. “You listen, but you don’t hear, do you?” he said. “Yes, there are other times. This is one of those times. Right now. Last week, that day in the woods, that’s what I was trying to tell you and your father.”

  Kip cast a nervous glance around. Evening was still several hours away, but already the shadows were beginning to thicken and lengthen.

  Watson chuckled softly and then suddenly said, “Look over there.” He pointed up the sloping hill, his forefinger aimed unwaveringly at a clump of brush. “You see that?”

  Kip’s eyes began to water as he stared intently at the clump of brush. The longer he looked at it, the more intense the interplay of light and shadow became until, after a while, he could almost imagine he saw something—a shadowy thing, hiding in the leaves.

  Are those really eyes, glaring down at us?

  He chanced a quick glance at Watson, then looked back at the brush, expecting to see something move.

  “Untcigahunk are creatures of the forest,” Watson said evenly, “They can hide so cleverly even a trained eye like mine can’t always make ‘em out. That bush there—or that stump over there—or that pile of rocks down by the stream...untcigahunk could be hiding behind any of ‘em, ‘n you’d never know it. You’d never see ‘em.”

  “What do they look like?” Kip asked.

  “My people—the Ul’noo—called them little brothers because they looked a lot like human beings. Supposedly the Great Spirit created them before he created Man, but they were ugly and vicious. That was a time when the sun had disappeared. Once the Great Spirit saw what he had created in the darkness, the untcigahunk were forced to live under ground. Darkness is more to their liking, though over the centuries, they’ve adjusted to low levels of light. They prefer moonless nights, but there are stories of them comin’ out on cloudy days, too.”

  Kip shivered as he shifted his gaze once more up the slope. Had the brush up there moved? It sure looked as though something was different—

  “To tell yah the truth,” Watson continued, “I’ve never seen one. Anyone who does, doesn’t live long enough to describe what they look like. But my grandfather always said they look a bit like a small person with kind of a ratlike, pointed face. They’re slim ‘n dark brown. Their skin is supposed to be real rough, like tree bark. Maybe like someone with a bad case of shingles. And they have a very bad disposition. And very sharp teeth and claws...for eating flesh. They developed a taste for human flesh as kind of a revenge for being sent under ground.”

  Suddenly it struck Kip how silly all of this was, and he snorted with repressed laughter. “Come on,” he said, his shoulders shaking as his laughter built. “You’re kidding me, right? You’re making all of this up.”

  Watson closed his eyes and leaned his head back, taking a noisy inhalation through his nose. “You can believe or disbelieve,” he said, “but that won’t stop them from comin’. When it’s their time, they come.”

  “Come on,” Kip said, shaking his hands in frustration. “How do you expect me to believe something like this. You expect me to believe there are these...these creatures living in the woods?”

  “Not in the woods,” Watson said. “They live underground. They come out every five years or so. Have you ever heard of—what do they call those things...those insects that only come out every ten years or so?”

  “The cicada? We learned about them in science class last year.”

  “Yeah, those insects that are worms all the time ‘cept for every ten or twelve years they come above ground in a different form, with wings and all. That’s what the untcigahunk are like. My ancestors knew of them, and there are enough stories about ‘em to prove they exist.”

  “There are thousands of stories about ghosts, but that doesn’t mean they’re real,” Kip said. His mind tossed between believing and feeling this was all some strange kind of put-on.

  Watson stared at him intensely. “Oh, they’re real, all right,” he said, his voice iron-hard. “You saw ‘em five years ago.”

  Kip shivered as the memory stirred deep in his mind.

  “But how can something like these ‘little brothers’ exist and nobody knows about them? For all I know, they just some crazy story you made up. You’re the only one who knows anything about them.”

  Watson sighed and rubbed both sides of his face with the flats of his hands. “If you took the time to check things out, you’d know I was tellin’ you the truth. The town history all the way back reports several incidents that, at least at first, don’t seem related. Five years ago—” He paused and swallowed deeply. “It was your mother. But five years before that, you’re probably too young to remember, but three kids got lost in the woods. They was never found.”

  “I don’t remember when that happened, but my dad mentioned it to me a lot of times ‘cause my friends and I played in the woods all the time,” Kip said.

  “After weeks of searching, nobody found nothing. I knew, but I never told anyone. The untcigahunk got ‘em. Five years before that, a bunch of farmers’ cows were found, mutilated. Bellies ripped right out from under ‘em. Pretty gruesome. Plenty of people had ideas as to what caused that, believe me. All the way back, at five year intervals, you find cases of people or pets disappearing or being killed, and most of the time, it’s the untcigahunk that did it.”

  “Why?” Kip asked. Thinking about what had happened to his mother sent waves of panic and sorrow through him. He blinked his eyes rapidly to stop tears from forming, and he had to fight the impulse to get up and start running; but the pressure kept building up inside of him, and he was afraid he was going to start screaming or something.

  “Why what?” Watson asked.

  “Why didn’t you tell someone?” Kip said. “You must’ve read the papers and stuff when my mother—” His voice choked off, but he forced himself to keep talking. “When she was killed. Why didn’t you go to the police then and say something?”

  A low laugh sounded deep in Watson’s chest, but before it found its way out, it changed into a rumbling cough. Bending over and clutching his stomach, he coughed until he managed to get control. Finally, he hawked up a wad of spit and sent it sailing off into the woods. Kip heard it land with a dull plop and was grateful—at least—that Watson hadn’t thrown up again.

  “I didn’t say anything to anyone,” Watson said, “for a bunch of reasons. Mostly I didn’t ‘cause I’m an Indian, and you’re all pale faces. When I was young ‘n my grandfather’d tell me stories about the untcigahunk, I always felt in some way like they were a small bit of revenge for what your people did to mine.”

  He paused and leaned back, looking up at the sky.

  “A
nother reason is ‘cause nobody’d ever believe me. Do you? Or are you like everyone else in this damned town who thinks I’m nothin’ more’an a stewed-to-the-gills Indian?”

  Kip ran his teeth over his lower lip as he considered everything he’d heard and thought about Watson...until today. Looking down at the ground, he noticed he’d dug a deep divot with his heels. The shadow in the hole was dark, like it was filled with India ink.

  “I believe you,” he said faintly.

  And in some crazy way, he did believe Watson. It all made sense, but then again, he knew from talking with Dr. Fielding that crazy people could do stuff like that—set up some elaborate...what did she call it? Paranoid fantasies...delusional.

  Maybe that’s what this was all about, and if he knew what was best for him, he’d get the hell away from Watson as fast as he could.

  “I...I don’t know what I think,” he said. As much as he knew he should be afraid of Watson, he also couldn’t deny that he felt some kind of bond growing between them. “It’s just—” He paused and took a deep breath to try to calm himself down. “I can’t figure out why you’re telling me all of this now?”

  Watson’s face was set with a grim expression, but Kip could tell he was weighing his answer. Finally, without a word, the old man shifted around and slowly stood up. When he brushed the seat of his pants clean, Kip was reminded once again of a huge bear. He scrambled to his feet, ready to help support Watson if he needed it, but although the old man was a little unsteady on his feet, he was better than before. Kip could see that the man’s eyes were a bit brighter. He seemed more in touch with what was going on around him.

  “Like most people, I suppose you want proof,” Watson said.

  Kip shrugged, honestly not knowing what he wanted. It was only when he surveyed the shattered remains of his campsite that he was ready to burst into tears.